The Best American Poetry

Mary Jo Bang and David Lehman Read Their Poems at DIA

Happy birthday, Mary Jo Bang. . .

Harold Bloom: Every Inch a Genius [by David Lehman]

Harold Bloom, the Yale University eminence who died last week at age 89, was the most famous, most prolific, and—to use the apt word—most influential literary critic in America from the time he published The Anxiety of Influence in 1973. The title of that book has entered our critical vocabulary, as has Bloom’s thesis that a “strong” poet must overcome the influence of a powerful precursor. To become himself, Wordsworth had to contend with Milton, for example, while John Ashbery had to endure a wrestling match with Wallace Stevens.

In the books he wrote in the aftermath of The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom employed an esoteric critical vocabulary—askesis, clinamen, agon—that didn’t catch on, but what succeeded spectacularly in such books as A Map of Misreading (1975) was his ingenious effort to integrate Freud usefully into the interpretation of texts. Bloom also distinguished himself by the force of his assertions and the excellence of his judgment. With great fervor, he saluted the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and championed such contemporary poets as Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, and James Merrill way ahead of nearly everyone else.

When, during the culture wars of the 1980s and since, the literary canon came under attack, Bloom was among the most voluble defenders of great books and the related ideas of genius and originality, which academics were doing their best to deconstruct, a shifty word that in this context means “to destroy.” The Western Canon (1994) was a best seller, with chapters on Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Jane Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and other truly great authors. Bloom’s assertions were sometimes controversial and almost always compellingly worded. I just pulled my copy from the shelf, and at random plucked these three remarkable quotes:

—“All literature is plagiaristic” (inasmuch as all writing feeds on the “communal”).
—Henry James, reviewing Drum Taps, dismissed Whitman as “only, as it were, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day.”
—“Strangeness … is one of the prime requirements for entrance into the canon.”

The use of “strangeness” or “the uncanny” as a criterion for evaluating poetry was just one of Bloom’s original insights. Keep reading by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Mr Pinsky [by David Lehman]

As one who believes
in the poetics of the big tent,
I say we make this an annual event
in the season of changing leaves.
And this year, as you turn seventy-seven,
whom do I see
in heaven
but Igor Stravinsky
speaking for all
In celebrating, as a rite of fall,
your birthday, Mr. Pinsky.

David Lehman

10 / 17 / 17

As one who believes
in the poetics of the big tent,
I say we make this an annual event
in the season of changing leaves.
And this year, as you turn seventy-seven,
whom do I see
in heaven
but Igor Stravinsky
speaking for all
In celebrating, as a rite of fall,
your birthday, Mr. Pinsky.

David Lehman

10 / 17 / 17

Harold Bloom: Born to Teach [by David Lehman]

Word of Harold Bloom's forthcoming book -- on the King James Version, 500 years old in 2011 and still the best of Bibles  -- excites this reader as a volume from no other contemporary critic can do. Bloom's passion for literature, his love of it, is infectious and informs every page he writes. One feels, reading Bloom on great books, that if he couldn't write, he wouldn't live; that writing for Bloom is an extension of reading, and reading comes as close to living itself as any purely intellectual activity can do. Edmund Wilson wrote that Lenin identified himself with history but also identified history with himself, a very different thing. Substitute Bloom for Lenin and Literature for History in that formulation and it works as well. Bloom resembes the characters he likes the most: he has a Falstaffian appetite, a gargantuan grasp of literature, a prodigious memory worthy of "Funes the Memorious" in the story by Jorge Lus Borges; and he enjoys tilting quixotically at windmills, which he does with the requisite zeal and the gift for a memorable phrase. 

I'll have more to say on The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, which Yale Universty Press will bring out in September. For the moment just a few thoughts about the title, both halves. The principal title is unusual because it echoes T. S. Eliot as much as Eliot's scriptual sources, an association one doesn't expect Bloom to pursue. But it's the subtitle that I especially like, for "appreciations" in the sense intended by Bloom as by Walter Pater before him is precisely what we need and do not get from the literary critics of our time. More power to him: the very word is anathema in academic circles.

I thought I'd take one of Harold's books off the shelf in the sun this afternoon, and it's How to Read and Why (1999), which contains commentary on stories, poems, novels, and plays -- enough to fuel the reading list for at least two seminars, though the book is meant to reflect, Bloom says, "reading as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational ernterprise." The aim is the "restoration of reading," taking it back from the academics. The book begins with a credo in five principles, three derived from Emerson, one from Samuel Johnson, and one representing Bloom's own contribution. They are:

-- Clear your mind of cant (Samuel Johnson)
-- Do not attemt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. (Emerson)
-- A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. (Emerson and Wallace Stevens)
-- One must be an inventor to read well (Emerson)
-- The "recovery of the ironic" -- and here Bloom is at his most expansive. One senses that he hasn't said this before. Consider this short but rhetorically powerful clarifying passage and its unusually personal coloration:

<< Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says. But with this principle I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what has been civilized in our natures. >>

The introduction of Hamlet as the supreme exemplar of a man of irony gives us a working definition of irony and implicitly conveys the professor's abilty to understand Hamlet as a version of himself. There follows the unabashed note of the personal: "despair" -- and the surprise of a simile that obliges us to consider the "ironic" and the "solitary" as related states of mind and being. And then comes the twist ("and yet") that precedes the final blunt universal assertion, which manages to sound plausible and slightly outrageous at the same time. "The loss of irony is the death of reading." The syntax is that of Wallace Stevens, an old Bloom favorite, and the thought is an adaptation of a Stevens aphorism. But Bloom makes it his own. Here he is, two pages later, summing up:

<< Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise. Find now what comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering,and it very likely will be irony, even if many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found. Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you blaze forth as the scholar of one candle. >>

Bravo. -- DL

from the archives; first publoished August 20, 2011

I'll have more to say on The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, which Yale Universty Press will bring out in September. For the moment just a few thoughts about the title, both halves. The principal title is unusual because it echoes T. S. Eliot as much as Eliot's scriptual sources, an association one doesn't expect Bloom to pursue. But it's the subtitle that I especially like, for "appreciations" in the sense intended by Bloom as by Walter Pater before him is precisely what we need and do not get from the literary critics of our time. More power to him: the very word is anathema in academic circles.

I thought I'd take one of Harold's books off the shelf in the sun this afternoon, and it's How to Read and Why (1999), which contains commentary on stories, poems, novels, and plays -- enough to fuel the reading list for at least two seminars, though the book is meant to reflect, Bloom says, "reading as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational ernterprise." The aim is the "restoration of reading," taking it back from the academics. The book begins with a credo in five principles, three derived from Emerson, one from Samuel Johnson, and one representing Bloom's own contribution. They are:

-- Clear your mind of cant (Samuel Johnson)
-- Do not attemt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. (Emerson)
-- A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. (Emerson and Wallace Stevens)
-- One must be an inventor to read well (Emerson)
-- The "recovery of the ironic" -- and here Bloom is at his most expansive. One senses that he hasn't said this before. Consider this short but rhetorically powerful clarifying passage and its unusually personal coloration:

<< Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says. But with this principle I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what has been civilized in our natures. >>

The introduction of Hamlet as the supreme exemplar of a man of irony gives us a working definition of irony and implicitly conveys the professor's abilty to understand Hamlet as a version of himself. There follows the unabashed note of the personal: "despair" -- and the surprise of a simile that obliges us to consider the "ironic" and the "solitary" as related states of mind and being. And then comes the twist ("and yet") that precedes the final blunt universal assertion, which manages to sound plausible and slightly outrageous at the same time. "The loss of irony is the death of reading." The syntax is that of Wallace Stevens, an old Bloom favorite, and the thought is an adaptation of a Stevens aphorism. But Bloom makes it his own. Here he is, two pages later, summing up:

<< Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise. Find now what comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering,and it very likely will be irony, even if many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found. Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you blaze forth as the scholar of one candle. >>

Bravo. -- DL

from the archives; first publoished August 20, 2011

Death and Noir: Lummis Asks Lehman

Suzanne Lummis:

David, in your book forthcoming from Cornell University Press, A Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, you confront mortality, not just death in the abstract but --with your cancer diagnosis -- death as a more immediate threat.  This got me thinking of how many times in my life I thought I might die -- not eventually, but, like, Right Now. First time I was 18. I was over-reacting, sure. But it was an awful lot of blood. Out in the open air where it was not supposed to be. I don't think this is unrelated to my attraction to noir. How about you?  Did your immersion in film noir come into play when you got your diagnosis and had to think about the ultimate Noir? 

David Lehman: I am superstitious person and have had recurring nightmares in which I die because I misjudged my ability to cross the street and am struck by a car. Sometimes I fall down a steep flight of stairs because I forgot to hold the bannister. My superego is too strong for me to get into any real trouble, so I like going to noir valley for my dose of vicarious vice. When I was sick and didn’t have enough energy to get off the couch, I watched old movies – including a bunch of noirs with Dana Andrews. Laura, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, While the City Sleeps, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Fallen Angel.

In 1956 and ’57, when I was eight, my idea of the grown-up American male was Dana Andrews, whom I saw in such pictures as Zero Hour! and Comanche. Years later I saw his most successful pictures, Laura and The Best Years of Our Lives. I identified with his plight in the latter:  a returning war veteran who can’t get a job and is trapped in a bad marriage.

In the Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger noirs, he always communicates a certain nervousness – like a man who has suffered a nervous breakdown, a man who needs to play with a pocket pinball game to help control himself. There is a suppressed anger and energy, and at the same time he is capable, confident, handsome, and at ease in his body whether cast as a detective, a cop, or a newspaperman. Dana Andrews had the best poker face in noir. I read his obituary in 1992. He was an alcoholic.  Drunk or sober he never missed a word. And I thought: it figures.

This is the sixteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

Happy hour at the Lehman Bar: Here's looking at you, kid

Bloom at "His Most Aloof and His Most Electrifying" [by Jason Guriel]

Harold Bloom, who died at 89 this week, has naturally been the subject of many elegies and obituaries.

In 1998, Bloom kicked off a major controversy with his introduction to "The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997." Harold picked poems from nine of the first ten volumes in the BAP series, omitting Adrienne Rich's book (1996). This was by design, not accident. Bloom's vehement essay propounded his criteria for greatness and angrily denounced what he considered inferior work done under a multicultural umbrella. The reaction against him was swift and equal in vehemence. The controversy made a strong impression that lingers still, as Jason Guriel points out in Slate (October 17). Guriel's piece is entitled "Harold Bloom’s Best of the Best American Poetry Shows Him at His Most Aloof and His Most Electrifying." Read it here.

I hope to have my say on this extraordinary personage in the next few days. -- DL

 

Oscar Levant Nails It Again: "A politician is a man who. . ." [by DL]

Oscar Levant, who "knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," defined a politician as a man who will "double-cross that bridge when he gets to it." Has anyone read his book Memoirs of an Amnesiac?. It's the sort of book I must have read, but I can't remember doing so. I have a feeling that I would have liked it. I am sure of it in fact. Putnam published it in 1965. Three years later came The Unimportance of Being Oscar, another bravura performance -- not too wild, not too earnest, but full of self-deprecatory wit and wisdom. "I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients," he confided. He was very fast, very smart and knowing, a good guest on a talk show, a mordant foil to Gene Kelly's native optimism in "An American in Paris." He wrote these lines that he says in the movie: "It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character." He also wrote "Blame it on My Youth" and other songs and was a buddy of George Gershwin. The jokes were spontaneous and delivered deadpan. When he said that he knew Doris Day "before she was a virgin," it was a valuable reminder of the band singer's brilliance -- with the Les Brown Orchestra in the 1940s, as Ruth Etting in "Love Me or Leave Me," in duets with Sinatra in "Young at Heart" -- which preceded the virginal image projected in the sugary pillow-talk movies of the 1960s. After Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism, Oscar said, "now that Marilyn Monroe's kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her." -- DL

 

One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir by David Lehman [Review by Diane Cameron]

There are many personal stories of cancer. Many self-help stories and many memoirs. And yes, there are even cancer poems.

 

But now we have a book that is both a cancer story and a work of literature that happens to be a memoir by a poet. We would not wish cancer on anyone, not even—as we say—our worst enemy, but now some gratitude because cancer has given us a gift in the new book:

 

“One Hundred Autobiographies” by poet and scholar, David Lehman.

It is true that for a writer everything is material, and that for a writer everything is examined through the lens of language, so of course from his first suspicions Lehman began to craft a story—the real and awful story --of his bladder cancer.

Continue reading over at Love in the Time of Cancer

 

Diane Cameron is a writer, speaker, teacher, coach, and spiritual director. She is the author of "Looking for Signs", "Out of the Woods--A guide to Long-term Recovery" and "Never Leave Your Dead." 

 

International Poetry Festival: Sunday, Oct 20, 7 PM, School of Visual Arts (NYC)

International Poetry Festival

Sunday, October 20, 7 pm
SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS MFA SOCDOC
136 West 21st Street, Manhattan

 

Readers to include Vladimir Gandelman, Andrey Gritsman (pictured), Anna Halberstadt, Helga Landauer, David Lehman, Basil Lyoff, George Tenev, and other Russian and American poets

 

Theme: Accents of New York

 

 

 

Happy 90th Birthday, Richard Howard [by David Lehman]

Happy Birthday, Richard Howard

If you’re 84 today that means you were 47 when we met
You came to read poems and give two lectures
One on “The Art of Digression” the other on “The Art
Of  Hesitation” I think but could be wrong and when
A man in the audience quoted Eliot on James (“too fine a mind
For any idea to violate it”) you observed that this was not
A problem from which Eliot suffered. Baudelaire, Gide,
Camus, Barthes, Stendahl, and how many others plus de Gaulle
Were translated by a boy who learned French from an aunt
When he was five years old in a car from Cleveland to Florida.
And today is your birthday and I made you laugh on the phone.
Once when I rented your flat I was talking to Louise Gluck when,
Thanks to “call waiting,” then a novelty, Galway Kinnell called
For you, and from that moment on, dear sir, I felt justified
Answering the phone, “poetry headquarters.”

10 / 13 / 13

Available Now: "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir" by David Lehman

One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir by David Lehman.
Cornell Univ, $22.95(248p)ISBN 978-1-5017-4645-1

Poet and critic Lehman (Poems in the Manner of...), who was treated for bladder cancer in 2014, brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Likening his ordeal to the plot of a novel, he declares, “the road connecting memory and desire is not linear... one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite.” He muses on why he writes: “I write to assert my will to live. To prove I exist.” Throughout, he reflects on literature and pop culture figures to tell his story: arriving at the hospital for treatment wearing his fedora, Lehman recalls the movie Some Came Running and Dean Martin’s hat, “which he wears even in bed, even in a hospital bed.” After reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lehman ponders the concept of evil: “the real question is not whether you believe in god as such but whether you believe there is such a thing as evil.” In his final reflection, being in excellent health—though, like many cancer patients, he acknowledges that this might just be a reprieve—he advises that “even on bad days, there are pleasant hours,” and “it is amazing how much pain the body can withstand.” Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. (Publishers Weekly starred review)
>>>

--sdl

Noir and You: David Lehman Asks Suzanne Lummis About The Studio System

David Lehman:

Do you believe that true noir as a genre -- leaving out neo-noirs, parodies, and ingenious movies on the order of The Getaway, The Usual Suspects, and Memento -- owes its existence to the studio system, where you had the value of a generic formula, the availability of contract players to round out a cast, and excellent writers of dialogue?

Suzanne Lummis:

Film noir probably owes its origins to the studio system but not necessarily its flourishing. I’ve come upon alternative views that say the abrupt weakening of the studio system in the aftermath of some legal battles allowed more independent producers to enter the field, producers who then hired independent directors with their own visions and signature styles. I think it would’ve been hard to get a movie as weird and anarchistic as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly made under the strictures of the earlier studio system.  

Maybe the question has no definitive answer, because there always was a type of formula B-movie cranked out within the profit-making machine. Get yourself a Man, a Woman, and a Gun, maybe a second woman, maybe a couple more guns, and, somewhere, Money—that can be gotten by cheating, thievery, or murder.  Oh, and you’ll need law enforcement, which could be a squad car filled with anonymous cops or one guy who’s made it his life’s work to crack this case or dog these fugitives. They could roll those elements around each other and come up with a working script to film fast and cheap.

On the other hand, we have examples of brilliant moviemaking. Double Indemnity, for instance -- no one pitched that as a B-movie. It was top-tier all the way: Billy Wilder directing and writing, Raymond Chandler co-writing, the source material a book by a seminal writer of hard-boiled crime, James M. Cain.  Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson. All of them, great talents at the top of their game. 

I just read a quote by Robert Aldrich about the paradox of the studio system, the good and the bad of it. This makes me laugh — file it under You Can’t Win for Losing. “We'd had twenty years of petty dictators running the industry, during which time everybody worked and everybody got paid, maybe not enough, but they weren't on relief. Seventeen years later you wonder if the industry is really more healthy in terms of creativity. Are we making more or better pictures without that central control? But when everybody worked under those guys, they hated them.”      

This is the fifteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

Robert Hass on John Ashbery (1998)

This is from Robert Hass's "poet's choice" column in The Washington Post, October 11, 1998:

<<<
One of the new fall books is John Ashbery's Wakefulness. There is also a new and very readable book about Ashbery and some of the poets associated with him, like Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, poets who went from Harvard to Manhattan after World War II and began to write during the bright years of abstract expressionist painting. The book is called The Last Avant-garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, and the author, David Lehman, writes to be understood. It's a lively book about art and poetry at a formative moment in the development of postwar American culture. And it might help those who find Ashbery, often regarded as the most original poet of this half-century, difficult, hard to understand. He can be maddening. The typical sound of his poems is that of a man mumbling to himself, so he disconcerts our idea of music. His expressions -- like "we may never realize about our lives" -- sometimes have the vagueness of the way we actually speak to ourselves, and the poems seem not so much to develop an idea as to veer all over the place the way our untended thought processes do. This is his style, and it takes some getting used to. The stance is of someone who never quite gets used to anything in the way that part of all of us never does. He seems strange, and it's only after a while that you sense his aim, to be profoundly ordinary, which is opposite from the aim of most poets. That is his strangeness. Well, not all of his strangeness. Like Wallace Stevens, whom he resembles in certain ways, a poet of the mind's unhinged dailiness, a philosophical comedian, he is also a contriver of metaphors you can't quite get your head around. In this poem, for example, what does he mean by "the friend who came at midnight and wanted to replace us with a song"? Ashbery has many imitators among the young. Every time I print one of their poems, I get a number of outraged letters from my always interesting readers that say in effect, "You think that's poetry? No wonder no one reads it." My response, I guess, is always something like this: You do not have to like it. That's why at any one moment there are different kinds of art. But if you are going to read a writer or look at a painter, what you owe them is looking long enough to see what they're doing. And, especially if at first you don't like what they're doing, the moment when you actually get it -- which always comes as an intuition, a slipping into the other's skin, rather than as a clear thought -- you've learned something. Try this one. I think it's a rather amazing poem. It begins where Ashbery often begins. Mumbling to himself, thinking against the grain. A valedictory speaker seems to be droning on. The restless auditor is starting to have fantasies of the pointlessness of life, of how it ends in some surreal and stupid way. The vague form this thought takes is of "a man with a dog" who "comes to shoot us." The listener, though, discovers he has his own set of formulas: "everything has its own reward," for example, which he records with a not entirely, or not only, self-mocking irony. Then we come to the friend. But I don't want to explain the poem to death. That's what the "valedictorian" in all of us wants to do.
>>>

For Hass's comment on Ashbery's poem "The Friend at Midnight" (in which the "valedictorian" utters bromides), click here.

"The Friend at Midnight" is a great title -- whether or not you connect it to the parable in Luke (11:5-13).

Acting Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Who’s Your Favorite Noir Actor?

Suzanne Lummis:

I can’t choose between Richard Widmark [left] and Dan Duryea, both consummate artists, absolute originals who enlivened every scene of every movie they appeared in with their idiosyncratic expressions of evil, villainy or rascally mischief—lowlifes but so alive.  

Dan Duryea’s the only actor I can think of who could inhabit characters who were not only bad, not only murderous, but downright smarmy, and still seem weirdly attractive.  Often his characters slap women around, in Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, Too Late for Tears… One of the women noir scholars contributing to the commentary on a DVD said, “I find Dan Duryea sexy, which is really disturbing.” That made me laugh. - Problem is, confidence and energy combined with focus is sexy, and nothing can be done about that.  In life, though, I’d loath that type of abusive person, but in the movies…  In the movies, what you’re looking at is talent.

Widmark played strong, good guys, too, especially in Westerns, but in Noir, oh anything from the hapless grifter in Night and the City, a loser forever a step away from the Big Break, to the maniac in Kiss of Death. It’s said he’s the only actor ever to become famous for his first scene in his first movie. And it haunted him; he got so freaking sick of people asking him to giggle like Tommy Udo. It went on for years. I adored Richard Widmark, who was commanding in all his roles, and I sympathize with his disappointment that the public tended to reduce him to one role, one scene. Stupid public.

I especially love that Duryea [right] and Widmark lived lives that dramatically contrasted their screen images. It’s not simply that they were nice—nothing surprising about that. These guys were absolute sweethearts, known as a couple of the kindest, most honorable men in Hollywood, both with happy lifelong marriages to high school or college girlfriends, not a trace of scandal. When asked why he didn’t flirt around Widmark said, “I happen to like my wife—a lot.” When she got Alzheimer’s, he gave up acting to nurse her for seven years till her death. 

They were smart as hell, both of them. Before Widmark came to Hollywood he taught acting at the college level. At Cornell, Duryea was elected to the most prestigious honor society.  They read, these guys.  The sleazeball hustler in Scarlet Street majored in English.  The Psycho in Kiss of Death lived in a home packed with books. I love that both were able to capture that raw, streetwise (or street-dumb) darkness and wildness but knew not to live it.   It’s called acting.   

David Lehman:

Edward G. Robinson gets my vote because of his amazing versatility. He can be the indomitable investigator (Double Indemnity),the relentless G-man and Nazi hunter (The Stranger), the nasty villain (Key Largo), the poor sucker who loses everything and ends up on a park bench (Scarlet Street), or the genial clubman who kills a man in his sleep (The Woman in the Window). In each case he knocks it out of the park.

May I also cast a ballot in favor of Ida Lupino the director. I love her movies, “The Hitchhiker” and “The Bigamist.” Very daring. She is a wonderful actress, too -- for example in 'The Bigamist," about which I wrote this poem:

The Bigamist

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
          and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas are Joan
          Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

This is the fourteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here. 

Fred and Peggy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

Dana Andrews, left, and Teresa Wright, steering the wheel, in The Best Years of Our Lives.

And he's thinking: if only I could get a good job. 

And she's thinking: when I think that he's married, I sob. 

And he's thinking: I married a stranger.

And she's thinking: a divorce would be a game-changer.

And he's thinking: wait till my friend gets married and I'm the best man, Okay?

And she's thinking: Okay.

Well, it's been a long war. . .

"Visitation" [by Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)]

Now when I visit Ellen’s body in my memory,
it is like visiting a cemetery. I look
at the chiseled, muscular belly
and at the perfect thirty-year old breasts
and the fine blond purse of her pussy
and I kneel and weep a little there.
I am not the first person to locate god
in erectile tissue and the lubricating gland
but when I kiss her breast and feel
the tough button of her nipple
rise and stiffen to my tongue
like the dome of a small mosque
in an ancient, politically-incorrect city,
I feel holy, I begin to understand religion.
I circle around to see the basilica
of her high, Irish-American butt,
and I look at her demure little asshole
and am sorry I didn’t spend more time with it.
And her mouth and her eyes and white white teeth.
It’s beauty beauty beauty which in a way Ellen
herself the person distracted me from. It’s
beauty which has been redistributed now
by the justice of chance and the temporal economy.
Now I’m like a sad astronaut living
deep in space, breathing the oxygen of memory
out of a silver can. Now I’m like an angel
drifting over the surface of the earth,
brushing its meadows and forests
with the tips of my wings,
with wonder and regret and affection.

for The Best American Erotic Poems, I asked Tony to name his favorite erotic book or author, and he replied:

<<
Some of the most exciting erotic writing I know is  Rilke’s famous “Ninth” of the Duino Elegies,
in which the poet queries,  demands, praises, promises and then swooningly yields to be entered completely by earth—“Earth, isn’t this what you want? An invisible re-arising in us? …What is your urgent command, if not transformation?” (translation Spender / Leishman)

The extended passage is unmistakably the address of an ardent lover to  beloved, and Rilke’s athletic, tremulous syntax, in its urging, falling back, swooping climaxes and surrenders, is thrillingly sexy in its brilliant performance of both masculine and feminine roles.  Rilke reminds us how dramatically, heroically, erotic spiritual life can be, and his enactment of inner life sweeps through categories in glorious encounter and catharsis. It’s hot stuff, and it always makes me want to pray harder.
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Elizabeth Turk, Sculptor Extraordinaire [by David Lehman]

Do you know the work

Of Elizabeth Turk?

You should!

It's awfully good.

http://www.elizabethturkstudios.com/

"We'll catch up some other time. . ." [by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green]

Just listen. 

Haven't done half the things we wanted -- 

There's so much more embracing
still to be done, but time is racing

O well --

Never have seen you do the dishes --

Seeing you there without your make up --

O well, we'll catch up / some other time

Just when the fun is starting / Comes the time for parting --
But let's be glad / for what we've had / and what's to come -- 

O well --
we'll catch up
some
other
time

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gDYVwtEp_Y

Poem for Rosh Hashanah: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

 

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl