The Best American Poetry

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young [by Angela Ball]

Chaos Magic for Beginners

Don’t we all love when the announcer
gets choked up? When the roller coaster
gets stuck, that an octopus can eat
one of its own hearts when stressed enough
and aren’t we all? Don’t you like to know stuff?
Sperm leaves the penis at 28mph,
in many countries being bird-pooped-on
is considered lucky, Goya’s skull is still missing
although the last thing my mother said
no one understood and I’m okay with that.
Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory
heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever
the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate
the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,
the detective who’s yet to realize
he’s stalking himself. It’s okay
to be a demon, to be a thrown angel
on the spectrum. Maybe you just feel
too much, too much serotonin so
even swans make you crazy, anyone
talking on their phone in the elevator.
Nothing needs a reason to happen,
the cause of all this has yet to occur
if it ever will. Often it’s like being fed
to raptor hatchlings or trying to get
information from a corpse, possibly
your own. Almost everything doesn’t work.
I like when the lovers can somehow
stay together. I like when the tower
collapses, that sense at the end
that it’s never over

--Dean Young

I think one of the most important lessons and permissions I have tried to absorb from the originals of the New York School is the sense that anything language can do can be in a poem, be it cri de coeur or blunt information, if the poem and the poet's receptivity is open and playful enough. –Dean Young

Dean Young's most recent book is Solar Perplexus.  His poems have appeared a dozen times in Best American Poetry.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young

The title of Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners,” is a welter of contradictions—“magic,” as a skill, depends on utmost precision—what is “Chaos Magic” and how begin to impart its principles? Perhaps the way is demonstration, and “Chaos Magic for Beginners” is wonderfully demonstrative.

The poem’s outer subject is expressed in its title, its inner one in the pattern of its imagery: things being blocked or unblocked, expressed. Bird poop turned awkwardly proverbial, a famous skull on the loose. Extractions, ingestions. Its method is not so much “ultra talk” as ultra thought—expression so swift as to almost precede formulation.

The poem begins with schadenfreude prompted by a broadcaster’s fallibility. The late Jon Anderson once said, “The secret of poetry is cruelty.” It may also be the case that chaos is its secret. Who can explain the wonder of reading Young’s list of comic frustrations and striking oddities—the stuck rollercoaster, the heart-eating octopi (that we resemble), the speed of sperm, the great artist’s cranium, ending with the scalding mystery of a mother’s last words--lines that might also be read, as I did at first, as the mother saying, “No one understood. And I’m OK with that.”

With “Let’s try to take pleasure,” the poem turns to its teaching mission:

     Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory

     heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever

     the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate

     the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,

     the detective who’s yet to realize   

     he’s stalking himself. It’s okay

     to be a demon, to be a thrown angel 

     on the spectrum.

Chaos is magic, is both question and explanation, and must be appreciated—celebrated, in fact—because it is what we have. Disorientation orders the day. We are reminded, perhaps, of T.S. Eliot’s overly-friendly April hound; and of Oedipus, old swollen-foot, the classic “detective yet to realize.” In a pop-psychology gesture, we learn that it’s ok to be expelled from heaven, afflicted by a malady that allies us with every color. Most of all, we learn the wonders of disorientation—a state celebrated by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Kenneth Koch, struck smart by a meaningful sign: “One Train May Hide Another.”

Our guide through a series of unpredictable occurrences, the poem primes us to enjoy how contemporary physics interprets the cosmos: the unknown unknown surrounds us. The unseen cat in the box is simultaneously dead and alive. The lines “Nothing needs a reason to happen, / the cause of all this is yet to occur / if it ever will” posit a retrograde world of reversals in which we are neophyte interpreters, and the corpse we interrogate may be our own.

The poem ends with two vastly different enjoyments, both owned by an “I”: The first, homely in its generality, “I like when the lovers can somehow stay together,” invokes pleasure at seeing cinematic and/or real-life romance grow durable. The second springs at us, its generality giving way to the nightmare of the World Trade Center attack, to schadenfreude recombinant with sorrow, its magic a startling kinesthetic image, specific and encompassing: “that sense at the end / that it’s never over” (period omitted).  Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners” schools us not just in chaos, but in the tragicomedy and comic tragedy of our unbreakable fall.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Nine): Matt Hart [by Angela Ball]

DEAR BERSERKER

The light came into my dream
from the right, so I opened my eyes
to a mulberry bicycle that Sam stole
heavenward in a poem of many errors.
Then I was puffed rice or a poisonous
enjambment. I ate a bowl of scrambled eggs.
I could’ve sworn I was drowning in the engines
of an airport. Patiently, I contrived
to replace the painted target
with a small silver policeman,
redacted from the force. But
all of that was earlier, before I drove
Agnes and Juliet to their final exams
in Algebra and Chemistry, and also
before I went back to blitzing in the denim
and dimming—sitting for my portrait
in the juice of a lemon. Sometimes
more than one of them puckers
a Venus Flytrap or rattles a contingent
of cloches that stream from the Exits to enter
the drag-strip, the testicle, the syrup
of The Muses. Why The Fates
and The Hours often fail to intervene
is a question. Why The Sirens often fail
to alert me to their presence is another.
I’m already dead when I notice the petunia.
This particular occasion is whatever/wherever
you want it to be, or merely the time I have left
before I go to meet Dean and drink more
of the oracular in the future where I’m shards
in the maw of the racehorse Conundrum. To start
or not to start? To stop or not to go? One thing
I can recommend is Andrei Voznesensky
via Anselm Hollo, where I, too, am hollow
and translated into a speakeasy, though
nothing’s ever easy that involves language,
and just to be clear, this is not
“channel surfing,” so don’t believe
the one-trick readers of ponies.
I have never been a pony, and this isn’t
some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle.
If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered
geraniums of saints, then you have problems
that I can’t even begin to address.
Let’s just say we agree to split the baby birds
into teams—your failure of imagination
versus my deliberate distortions.
The long bombs get longer in the teeth
with every wallop. I’ve never met a shadow
in the light I didn’t like. The score
is a touchdown on an alien planet.
I am the alien at home in my amazement,
and you’re what comes in waves to destroy me.

--Matt Hart

 I hope, if nothing else, you can tell that I enjoy tremendously the process of writing poems and that I am in all of them trying to discover something about, and/or be surprised by, language and life. Writing is always, for me, a celebratory occasion. Even when the shadows rise up and the darkness falls, there may be some possibility that the soul will be shattered or moved or redirected, and through that we might connect in some way to the self, other people, and the world. A poem is a call for a response, and any response is itself a new call. 

--Matt Hart

Matt Hart is the author of nine books of poems, including most recently Everything Breaking/for Good and The Obliterations. A new book, Familiar, is forthcoming in 2022 from Pickpocket Books. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, POETRY, and Waxwing, among others. He was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety from 1993-2019. Currently, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band NEVERNEW: www.nevernew.net. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Nine): Matt Hart

Matt  Hart’s surprising and provoking  “Dear Berserker” is a story and an essay. So it is a real poem. I borrow that formula, of course, from Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter,” in which he says, "One day I am thinking of / a color: orange." He begins to write: "Pretty soon it is a / whole page of words, not lines," and O'Hara is transported: "There should be so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by. It is even in / prose, I am a real poet."

Here, as in O’Hara’s poem, a self is under discovery, defined with and against the names that surround it: Agnes, Juliet; Anselm Hollo and the poet he translates, Andrei Voznesensky, “where I, too, am hollow / and translated into a speakeasy, though nothing’s ever easy that involves language.” Maybe not, but in Hart it is playful and punning, with an Ashberian enjoyment of cliché’s syntax.  And is a kind of whistling in the dark, a counter to “how terrible orange is / and life.”  According to Oxford Languages, a “Berserker” is “an ancient Norse warrior who fought in a wild frenzy.”

As ally against these warriors, Hart enlists the angel of surprise. The poem starts with the filmy line, “The light came into my dream,” but instead of something equally filmy, we get something exact: “from the right,” then the commonsensical “so I opened my eyes,” followed by the beautiful and puzzling “mulberry bicycle that Sam stole” (a mulberry-colored bike, a bike made from mulberry? Sam a miscreant neighbor?), then, “heavenward in a poem of many errors.” Perhaps Sam is S.T. Coleridge, levitating language in response to dejection. He is, after all, a poet known for error, at least in the case of the star he inserts between the horns of the crescent moon in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” when in fact the dark moon is between those horns, and a star is impossible, dammit. (It should be noted that an older meaning of “error” is “wandering,” as in Milton’s streams of Eden in Paradise Lost, that flow “With mazy error, under pendant shades.” I would like to call Coleridge a “poet errant.”)

Poems that rely on animation of voice, on what has been called "ultra-talk," can sometimes look like a series of stunts. Not this one. The transformations the voice reports in its straightforward way aren’t arbitrary, but make nonsensical sense. For example, “Algebra and Chemistry” are well known scholastic berserkers. And the collisions the poem reports are comic in their absurdity—absurdity that nails something about the thing described. This section, for me the funniest in the poem, begins with writing frustrations and moves to academic ones:

     . . . Why The Fates

     and The Hours often fail to intervene

     is a question. Why The Sirens often fail

     to alert me to their presence is another.

     I’m already dead when I notice the petunia.

     This particular occasion is whatever/wherever

     you want it to be, or merely the time I have left

     before I go to meet Dean and drink more

     of the oracular in the future where I’m shards

     in the maw of the racehorse Conundrum.

“I’m already dead when I notice the petunia” is apt. In fact, were I of a tattoo persuasion, this might be my pick. (The problem with tattoos is that they trust the future. In this they are romantic.) Deans and other university administrators sometimes seem to dwell in a grandeur-filled future that will exist if we only implement this or that cut; survive on a pittance; serve a galloping purpose, outcome unknown.

From “nothing’s ever easy” onward, the poem challenges the unconvinced, advocating its own method while practicing it (the latter something that, to a certain degree, all the founding poets of the New York School do and that “Why I Am Not a Painter” does in spades).

     and just to be clear, this is not

     “channel surfing,” so don’t believe

     the one-trick readers of ponies.

     I have never been a pony, and this isn’t

     some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle.

     If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered

     geraniums of saints, then you have problems

     that I can’t even begin to address.

“I have never been a pony, and this isn’t /some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle,” attacks the opposition with the winning vehemence of wordplay, a Groucho Marxian chicanery. “If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered / geraniums of saints,” a gonzo version of William Blake’s “heaven in a wildflower,” dizzily shifts to logic and sanity: “you have problems / that I can’t even begin to address.” The close of Matt Hart’s “Dear Berserker” relies on a pledge he exacts from us to “see the ineffable” and make a home in “amazement”; though in so doing we choose a terrible vulnerability, as holy and foolish as Saint Francis eschewing bodily drapery for the sake of his home-hewn church. In this case, of course, the sanctuary is art, visible only to those who are civilized: uncertain, open to breaking.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Eight): Claudia Keelan [by Angela Ball]

Life-Sentence(s)

 

One full-grown woman

A recently born child

A gleam of sunshine

& Pointed hill

One saint in a silent movie

Agee in a cab

Martin King on a Memphis balcony

Clouds when examined under glass

Salt water on solid rock

Jesus on the cross

Father in the guest room

4 to 6 feet

Now

Stupid Fucking White Man

Then

A pebble and a clod

The Future

Mr. William Blake

The stars of the southern hemisphere

Moisture

The climbing up

Doris Lanard

The climbing down

Robert Creeley

Overhanging ferns and lilies

A level and brilliantly white sea

A little haystack

Port Desire

The first landing

Flaccid Overlook

Entropy’s missed triumph

Your luminous body

Mine

--Claudia Keelan

 

Claudia Keelan's most recent books are We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems (Barrow Street) and Ecstatic Emigre: An Ethics of Practice (University of Michigan Press).  She is the editor of Interim and the Test Site Poetry Series.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Eight): Claudia Keelan

Claudia Keelan’s enthralling “Life-Sentence(s)” is thirty-three end-stops. Thirty-three doors. Lives and deaths our experience may elaborate. Is abundance and disappearance, both playful and solemn, like Frank O’Hara’s in such poems as “Talking the Sun at Fire Island." The first line, “One full-grown woman,” suggests a catalogue. But instead we taxi thirty-three runways for imagination. Their directions different for each reader. But not runways, because that suggests that the context, the universe inhabited, is consistent. The mortalities of the first twelve lines alone encompass quotidian fact (in the woman and “recently born” child), the fevered world of a silent movie, geography, literary history, chemistry, martyrdom, and familial grief. The poem’s cross-sections interrogate time’s givens:

     Now

     Stupid Fucking White Man

     Then

     A pebble and a clod

     The Future

     Mr. William Blake

     The stars of the southern hemisphere

Throughout the poem, contextual shifts jolt, disrupt memory. The snatch of invective, “Stupid Fucking White Man” prompts many sad examples. Pebbles and clods endure in their lowly ubiquity—here, two paragons of the indistinguishable. To think of William Blake with the honorific accorded a living man, moving about the world, makes him again an agent of eternity that we leap from into stars.

The quotation above reveals a signal part of the poem’s method: diverse entities alternate with familiar markers: “Now”. . .”Then”. . . “The Future” . . . that suddenly seem to us insubstantial. We live a world not of progress, but of disordered parallels.

For me, looking up “Doris Lanard” yielded a jumble of similar names, but also the heading “We have found Doris,” a poignant assertion. Here, in finding “Robert Creeley,” we dwell on a great poet entrained by a litany of small and large beauties:

     Overhanging ferns and lilies

     A level and brilliantly white sea

     A little haystack

     Port Desire

 

A tumble, a plane, a cone of sustenance, an inlet of longing.

Claudia Keelan’s vivid and unsettling “Life-Sentence(s)” contains no period, no confining mark of closure. Ending, it gives us “The first landing,” that may remind us of John Ashbery’s paradoxical “The Mooring of Starting Out,” then the comical “Flaccid Overlook,” and, finally, a vision of two beings—overlooked by the universe’s all-powerful spin-out of energy, the agent of bodies’ parting—joined in ecstatic possession: “Your luminous body / Mine”

Rejecting anchors, we reach Port Desire.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Seven): Major Jackson [by Angela Ball]

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

All through my days, elaborate silken rays
coming through screens carrying
its own occult. I am in the habit of questioning love
which is a storm of rare light
silvering spider webs in a sacred forest,
the silent clock in the town square,
the heavy footprints of the homeless,
the museum we do not enter.

So when I say I’ve subdued
the stallions raging in my blood,
know that I travel here only to watch
the sparrow hawk flying low over marl prairie,
to take in the sedge wren’s flits and jukes
like teenagers learning a new dance.
I’m here guarding my freedom,
rubbing my hands over yesterday fires.

--Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and Zyzzva. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Photo Credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Seven): Major Jackson

Major Jackson’s intricate “Nothing to See Here, Move Along,”  begins by conflating biography (“All through my days”) with car accident; readers with gawkers. The title, appropriated from law enforcement, suggests not just smashups, but more sinister scenarios involving abuse of power and denial of freedom. We see none of these things, but think of them while witnessing a series of complex relations.

An aura of enforcement, of necessity, surrounds the poem. Jackson’s work resembles John Ashbery’s in its ability to establish a metaphysical place. For Ashbery, his early poem ,“The Instruction Manual,” is foundational—providing an imagined version of a real Guadalajara—later poems travel further, producing mind-dwelling places, “lacustrine cities,” definite in detail. This is the realm we inhabit here, but with a freshness and vitality of image that is Jackson’s own.

Jackson’s first stanza lives in the metaphysical, its “screens” of “silken rays”—light’s waves “coming through screens” (of molecules?) “carrying its own occult.” Its serial definitions of love, the results of “questioning,” are ethereal—

     which is a storm of rare light

     silvering spider webs in a sacred forest,

     the silent clock in the town square,

--until “the heavy footsteps of the homeless” lead us to the ominous museum “we do not enter”—repelled, perhaps, by the pain exhibited inside.

The best poems balance clarity and mystery. Throughout this one, the two get equal play. The stanzas themselves balance each other; the first emphasizing the hidden; the second, the revealed.

The second stanza begins with “So,” making all within it the result of the first and magnifying the white space between them. The speaker, “moving along,” has been caused to renounce the violence of “stallions raging in my blood.” And that violence is considerable. A stallion will crash fences or gates to get at a mare in heat.

Yet beauty arrives, transcending all necessity. Who can fathom the refreshment offered by these lines, that embody two of nature's strongest pursuits, feeding and mating? And a third: watching.

     know that I travel here only to watch

     the sparrow hawk flying low over marl prairie,

     to take in the sedge wren’s flits and jukes

     like teenagers learning a new dance.

We last see the poet “rubbing” his hands, as though himself homeless, over “yesterday fires”—distinct from “yesterday’s fires,” or memories. “Yesterday fires” are continuations, energies passed on to others—as Major Jackson’s “Nothing to See Here, Move Along,” warms us with its creative rub, its friction between what is and ought to be, guarding not just the poet’s freedom, but our own.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret [by Angela Ball]

We May Never Get Back Here

That soft yellow two-story place
in the Spanish style was a movie
       house, remember? Marilyn who
       pitied horses danced the desert

conscious while Clark watched.
       They don’t open doors in Niagara:
       too many bodies in the bell tower.
At the movie house, they exclusively
served expired snack cakes. Everyone

       should have to see a horse experience
a storm for the first time much like the way
it is a sin not to sneak into a movie house.
       When sad birds sleep, certain moths

       salivate, eat from eyes like a record
needle, music carving circles in a mirror,
like when you hear a sound or phrase so
       right you have to hum. Every once
       in a while, you notice you’re the only
animal at home & no one is waiting
to remember you & no, there’s not
       a person with a different perfume

in each individual eyelash waiting
to be squeezed like honeysuckle,
       someone you can turn to & say,
       I think you’re the talking I’ve
been with all day, someone

       to help you miss a movie house
       & a dog that lives to bite the air,
the right there. Again, I climbed
into a taxi with all your time.
       The dog you don’t even own
       yet hears your disc slip. Our

home is a lilac dropped at the feet
       like cigars or the afternoon, all those
       fortresses at the mercy of my breathing.
Driving by the movie house can turn you

       confident enough to make a noise, regret
       small things like owning one too many
clocks, the trouble of objects that give
you no trouble. One day, all at once,
       your neighbors realize they’re old
       & in the wrong room & I’ll just
wish I had been there the night

       you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t
       want their whole life to be a funeral
for a movie house, & who can afford
to live in a house with a person no one

       bothered to name? The mind is a generous
butcher. You’ve forgotten me like a child
spending his entire life in a water tower.
       At least I was always a laugh. Just one
       more film before they feed us vacation
footage. Perhaps it’s not a sad idea to stay

       children, a home without money, laughed
       human. What I mean is many families
moved, were moved in this house.
That’s all. What kind of families? Who cares.
       I was going underground until I touched you.
       Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m
in is not what I meant. When I watch movies,

       I often think about the time my teacher hugged
       his daughter like a haunted rocking chair. Had
I stepped into a play by Pinter? Was I a bird

       crying on pictures of more beautiful birds?
       I think of how the angel left Mary in Luke,
like my grandpa left Nilda with hell on her
hands, shrinking in some coffee shop. Stay

       for the morning, I’d say, my wings a torn
movie ticket. You’ll like getting born.

--Chad Foret

This began as a writing exercise after reading and watching Pinter's play The Homecoming. Around the same time, my wife and I drove past a building out in the country and she told me how it used to be a small movie theater. Each time we were in the area and I tried to point out the building, it was the wrong one, or it was in a different place than I remembered. It was like it was never there to begin with, or like all the buildings were a theater once. I drafted and revised with this experience in mind, and the allusions and mutations of memory and place all fused into this poem. --Chad Foret

Chad Foret is a freelance writer and editor from southeast Louisiana. His first book of poems, Scenes from a Rain Country, will be published with Lavender Ink in New Orleans. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, CutBank, Electric Literature, Prime Number Magazine, Bayou Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Flock, Barely South Review, New Rivers Press, and other journals and anthologies. More info can be found at chadforet.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret

Chad Foret’s fugue on a lost movie house begins with references to two films featuring Marilyn Monroe: The Misfits, her last completed film; and Niagara, her first film with star billing. A  movie exposes us as we watch,  sets us in juxtaposition. For Frank O’Hara of the New York School of Poets, the movies were education, with eager gunfire banging from horseback cowboys as hands, fingers slid toward new places; sexual discoveries juxtaposing the Little Tramp as he strolls his cockeyed sailor’s stroll away from  a scorned circus poster, a naked field. For Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits it was her being in a movie that her now-unloving husband had written when he loved her, so that the character she portrayed no longer existed, only her own boundless anxiety; for Clark Gable it was life beyond life, being a photogenic husk, concerned and leathery. The poem’s second movie, Niagara, carried this tagline:

“Marilyn Monroe and Niagara—a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control”

Here, Monroe and a waterfall are one: amalgam of fluvial and sexual potency, their combined power overmastering the forces that produced them.

Foret’s poem displays a related power: the uniting of statement with a compelling impulse to search. Surrealism had film as an ally almost from its start, gathering vigor when movies were just beginning to talk, when Spain and South America were talking to North America through Federico Garcia Lorca, through Pablo Neruda. Its dream method, opposing the sober, fed the young New York School of Poets, especially Kenneth Koch. In an interview with David Kennedy recorded in 1993, Koch says:

I wrote poem when I was just eighteen, maybe on my birthday, called 'For My Eighteenth Birthday' or 'Poem For My Birthday' and it was influenced by French surrealism in so far as I understood it. I understood it mainly from a surrealist magazine called View. It was edited by Charles Henry Ford and André Breton had something to do with it too. Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things and I wrote this poem when I was eighteen beginning, I can only remember part of, "At eighteen I walk on the surface of things, I tread in my stocking feet in houses of soft love..." [Laughs] and other sort of surrealist lines.

Foret’s poem, I believe, walks in “stocking feet in houses of soft love”: “I’ll just / wish I had been there the night / / you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t / want their whole life to be a funeral / for a movie house . . . .”  In this declaration, soft love meets extravagance. A possible dictum of surrealism: Going too far is not enough.

Wherever they run, movies make night, though in them the sun may blister the plank sidewalks of a western town, challenge the lonely nubs of cacti; a fluid night where all is new and possible, nothing held back by usual identities or connections. “Had I stepped into a play by Pinter?” the poem asks. Though Harold Pinter was no surrealist, his plays remove conventional social cushioning to establish an associational atavism that captivates and disturbs. He was a writer of terrific screenplays, like the one he wrote for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, in which Julie Christie in a gauzy dress becomes a scissoring butterfly in flagrante with Alan Bates.

Every house a movie—either in one, or containing one, or both. In home movies, we are most real and most illusory, always doing things that look like fun. In non-movie life, fun is hard to identify, our place in it elusive: “Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m / in is not what I meant.”

In Chad Foret’s vivid, cinematic poem, “We May Never Get Back Here,” we live in film’s sacred craziness, we fly—our wings “a torn movie ticket.” We absorb his lens’s feverish optimism, rewarded in the poem’s vivid close: “Stay for the morning,” it invites. “You’ll like getting born.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Five): Mary Ruefle [by Angela Ball]

Müller and Me

Wilhelm Müller, 1794-1827

I am an ordinary fauna, one
who can’t remember if a fife
is a rifle or a flute.
After all, there’s strife
and fight in it,
but on the other hand
it’s a short sweet word
that rhymes with life.
The way the cemetery looks made of books
and the library is a graveyard.
When love frees itself from pain
the angels cut off their wings
and throw them down to earth
(throw in your scarf
to cover my eyes
so your shadow won’t wake me).
I’d like to teach
a young starling to speak,
but clearly and distinctly
so his words wouldn’t be
like human ones.
I really believed my pain
was not that small,
but how heavy is my happiness
that no sound on earth
can encompass it?
I’m on a fifer’s ride
My steed is black and steady
I say goodnight to everyone
To everyone goodmorn

--Mary Ruefle

"Müller and Me" from Trances of the Blast. Copyright 2013. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate.

Photo credit: Libby Lewis Photography

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Five): Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle’s “Müller and Me” is an imagined collaboration with William Müller, the great German poet whose best-known works are Die shöne Müllerin and Winterreise, transformed by Franz Shubert into song cycles.

It begins with the surprise announcement, “I am an ordinary fauna. . .”—word coined in 1771, normally plural in usage—and moves to the word “fife,” embedding it in childlike, jokey play:

     After all, there’s strife

     and fight in it,

     but on the other hand

     it’s a short sweet word

     that rhymes with life.

We think, perhaps, of the well-known Archibald Willard painting, The Spirit of 1776, featuring three musicians marching into battle, one of them a bandaged fife player. The fife is most often found in the fife and drum corps of an army—as anomalous, in its ornamental lightness, as a lyric poem in a world of wars. Müller fought against Napoleon as part of the Prussian army.

“The way” provides a short-stemmed transition to a graveyard, perhaps an 18^th or 19^th-century one, in which stones are upright, leaning books; their titles, lives. In characteristic reversal, the metaphor turns on its heel: “and the library is a graveyard.”

Transitions in Ruefle’s poems follow a logic whose mainspring is play—the opposite of that referred to in Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto”: “Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.” Müller’s poems, as Shubert translates them to song, are pain-drenched, Winterreise in particular. As sung by Thomas Quastoff, a German bass-baritone whose artistry belies severe thalidomide-induced deformities, its winter journey is surpassingly sad. Müller worked on Winterreise as he was dying of syphilis.

“Müller and Me” daydreams a war with pain—pain that in these three lines recalls William Blake’s Tyger, beast so fierce he makes the stars “throw down their spears”

     When love frees itself from pain

     the angels cut off their wings

     and throw them down to earth

and we are invited to discrete participation in art’s mission, with the light weapon of word-music, to overthrow pain:

     (throw in your scarf

     to cover my eyes

     so your shadow won’t wake me).

The poem’s “I” would “like to teach / a young starling to speak, / but clearly and distinctly /so his words wouldn’t be / like human ones.” “I really believed,” she says, “my pain was not that small.” These two attempts at articulation—one projected, one owned—dramatize the difficulty of uniting words with experience, difficulty that can convert to paradoxical joy:

     but how heavy is my happiness

     that no sound on earth

     can encompass it?

Mary Ruefle’s ludic and majestic collaboration with Müller ends with an expression of poetic mission not unlike Kenneth Koch’s first childhood poem: “I have a little pony / I ride him up and down . . . .”  Her pocket artist’s statement formally and tonally echoes both the cosmic reach of William Blake and the wholesale friendliness of Frank O’Hara:

     I’m on a fifer’s ride

     My steed is black and steady

     I say goodnight to everyone

    To everyone goodmorn

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan [by Angela Ball]

Deerfield Crossing

Sheet lightning pulses like blood
vessels in the sky above the post office.

It is Sunday empty. I caress the edges
of failed delivery in my pocket

and continue on the acid-
rain pocked sidewalk to the station.

Down the block, a dog fights his leash
toward the smell of angel hair

and meatballs
escaping from a kitchen window.

Television sets and crickets coalesce
with the steady hum of residential air

conditioning units. The syncopated eyes
of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

Families fold together
their fingers in prayer.

When the thunder claps

like an infomercial
the streetlamps come on

all at once.

                                               (originally published in Blue Earth Review)

--Collin Callahan                              

In the poem before this one in Thunderbird Inn, “Horizontal Tuxedo,” a woman left her address in wet hair on the shower wall. –Collin Callahan

Collin Callahan was born in Illinois. His first collection of poetry, Thunderbird Inn, is forthcoming with Conduit Books & Ephemera. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, SLICE, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors’ Prize in poetry. You can find his work at collincallahanwrites.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan

A poem of blended messages, beginning with lightning that strobes itself somatic, “Deerfield Crossing” intersects what Robert Frost called “inner and outer weather”: the limited scope of its interplay a despoiled landscape, a “Deerfield” without deer or fields, only crossings, a Levittown diaspora community far from the animation of Frank O’Hara’s NYC, but nonetheless a place with things to say, and with a poet willing to listen.

The first half line of stanza two, “It is Sunday empty,” may be the most economical, on-the-nose description ever provided for a day of the week. We see the speaker for the first and only time, automatically caressing a returned letter he has received, headed for “the station”—a still place, sieve for travel. We glimpse the ghost of T.S. Eliot, towering figure that the New York School of Poets dismissed, but that John Ashbery received via W.H. Auden.

Ashbery once characterized New York City as a large empty space perfect for poetry, and Deerfield Crossing possesses some of the same emptiness, one that enjoys defying itself, as in  

     Down the block, a dog fights his leash

     toward the smell of angel hair

     and meatballs

     escaping from a kitchen window.

Throughout, this poem is a model of what Paul Fussell calls “vigorous enjambment”: its line breaks faking closure, supplying surprise. In the lines above, we are half prepared for something celestial--and get, instead, “meatballs”—the dog’s eagerness vivid against flatness. Then, the stark loveliness of the post-natural,

     Television sets and crickets coalesce

     with the steady hum of residential air

     conditioning units. The syncopated eyes

     of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

in which nature is unnaturally included in the amalgam of  “Television sets and crickets” and the wind turbine’s robotic “syncopated eyes” that “blink red,” composing a kind of heartbeat “in the distance.”

There’s something prefab about the church services in which “Families fold together/their fingers in prayer.” The thunder near the close could not less resemble that of The Waste Land. Yet the response, as “streetlamps come on / all at once,” surely the result of automatic eyes, contains in its simultaneity an impulse of rightness, even joy. Then Collin Callahan’s abrupt and intriguing “Deerfield Crossing” leaves us to caress, alone, the whiteness of Sunday.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Three): Donald Revell [by Angela Ball]

SENESCO SED AMO

         “Starlight is almost flesh.”—Basil Bunting

One life, not one among
A thousand others of quail
Like tipsy mandarins crowding
The cold of a low wall
Along a line of trees, the angel
Promised me and nothing
More, nothing to weigh.

Menippus and Lucian
Be with me now as I
Feel my way among
Misted pillars and ghosts
Of breath on upper Broadway.
A quick kiss in the crosswalk is
More to me than mankind.

There is no middle ground.
There is our empty bench.
There is the stoop of pigeons.
Either I have been alone
Every hour of my life or
Never once, not even
One moment, and the mist rising.

Angel, how stern you have become.
Stricken, almost as strange as Uruguay
Against traffic in the middle distance,
You stride, and there is bread in your step
And sunlight ground into fine powder.
All the same, I feel comforted.
The sharper the mist, the sweeter the hour.

For good reason, enormous windows
Gape the walls of our museums.
Brancusi’s woman asleep awakes to see
Riotous sunlight feeding the air
Because air is what becomes of light
When no one is looking. Only myself,
And I have never been alone until now.

The stern angel gives me bread and the courage
Of satire. Crossing the street towards me
Menippus and Lucian extend their arms,
And birds alight upon their arms, shitting,
Cooing. What is mankind to me
When I have remembered a kiss in the night sweats
Against the traffic, without a breath of air?

The word “steadfast” comes to mind, a word
Like “dusk”, awaiting its formal elegy
In abandoned train-yards. Little fires
In bins are all that remains of English.
I step into the crook of the wing of my
Steadfast angel. I catch the scent
Of newly washed hair, and she says to me

“Shelter here.” Satire is shelter in extremis.
Christ has the dispatch of it, having
Inscribed bitter verses upon human eyes
For angels’ delight and the increase
Of crooked human sleep. Let mankind sleep
Forever. Christ has suffered enough,
And my angel is clean enough to kiss. We kiss.

--Donald Revell

Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently of White Campion (2021) and The English Boat (2018), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine's Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Sudden Eden: Essays;  Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, Donald Revell is currently a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

About the poem ....it's my beginning adventure into old age, an adventure I've always imagined would lead to one of those benches on the medians in upper Broadway. And there I'd be joined by other embittered curmudgeons, such as Menippus, such as Lucian. Still, I would hope for bitterness to be eased somehow by love--love remembered as a first kiss on upper Broadway, or an elder love as beautifully avowed by Bunting in "Briggflatts,” or love as the angel who appeared to me on the morning of the day I wrote the poem. --Donald Revell

The New York School Diaspora, Part Twenty-Three: Donald Revell

Donald Revell’s “Senesco Sed Amo,” a walk on workaday “upper Broadway,” both celebrates and enacts mystery and its sotto voce operations. As we follow this poem, a parallel life is with us; a body we know but from reports; a spirit that traces our outlines. Like dark matter, otherness outweighs the familiar, its unknown gravity tugging at our sleeves. Birdlife around us, we “feel our way” in the mixed company of an angel and (at the poet’s request) two ancient cynics, Menippus and his acolyte, Lucian, that arrive in a crosswalk, arms extended, “And birds alight upon their arms, shitting, / Cooing.”

The seven lines of the poem’s rooms are the seven twists of wire holding champagne’s cage; the seven heavens that progress and abide; the seven leagues of our loneliness, its injuries and salves.

“There is no middle ground,” says the poem.

     Either I have been alone

     Every hour of my life or

     Never once, not even

     One moment, and the mist rising.

The poem’s title (in English, “I Age but I Love”) is from Ezra Pound’s great Pisan Cantos, written in implausible circumstances, alone in the bare grace of a prison yard under stars. This context is part of “Senesco Sed Amo”’s alternation between harshness and benediction, its vision of “a kiss in the night sweats / Against the traffic, without a breath of air.”

In our mixed state, words are called forth as companions, are mourned:

    The word “steadfast” comes to mind, a word

     Like “dusk,” awaiting its formal elegy

     In abandoned train-yards. Little fires

     In bins are all that remains of English.

In a poem this ineffable, kin to the most lucent John Ashbery joined with Rainier Maria Rilke; joined with Brancusi’s women ovally asleep on the sides of their glowing faces; joined with Basil Bunting’s (in his great Briggflats) young lovers under rain, old lovers indoors breakfasting on scones laved with bacon fat; repetition steadies us. The word “steadfast” reappears as the “steadfast angel” offers her wing and “the scent / Of newly washed hair.”

Donald Revell’s calm, generous, and exhilarating “Senesco Sed Amo” leaves us with a vision of shelter, with satire (like cynicism) as hedge against circumstance, and with the swift logic of love’s union: “And my angel is clean enough to kiss. We kiss.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng [by Angela Ball]

Birds of Passage

We roll out of bed before sunrise, put the two pull bags in the trunk, crank up the engine, and back the car out of the driveway; we have a two-hour drive to the airport in Memphis to catch the flight to Japan. We cross the Yazoo River Bridge, pass Baptist Town where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison, turn left onto Route 7. We cross another bridge in a few minutes, pass the cypress bayou that looks eerie with thin mist floating above the water, and then pass Avalon where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds. Now a thin line of dawnlight is shimmering in the low sky, and I start to speed up, but right after a curve I must slow down to catch this gorgeous flight:

crack of dawn
thousands of snow geese
honk off the fields

--Jianqing Zheng

We were afraid we would be late for our flight to Japan so I began to speed after I drove out of Greenwood, but seeing the snow geese really was a sign to slow down. Upon returning, I wrote several haibun about Japan, and when I wrote "Birds of Passage," I thought of borrowing O'Hara's way of telling about doing small things before approaching the end for the death of Holiday. I published 'Moonlight'--my first haibun—in 2003 and returned to haibun writing in 2010. A big challenge as the prose part and haiku have to complement each other or juxtapose each other. Now I seem to write more of it than free verse.
--Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and Enforced Rustication, editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia and four other scholarly books, and recipient of grants from the NEH, Fulbright Programs, and Mississippi Arts Commission. His forthcoming book of poetry is The Dog Years of Reeducation from Madville Publishing, 2023.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” is a masterful example of haibun: a form invented by seventeen-century haiku master Basho that pairs the levelness of prose with the levitation of haiku.

The poem’s drive toward Memphis calls out places sacred to the blues and encompasses a succession of flights: the poet’s flight from his home to Memphis Airport, his imminent flight to Japan (home of Basho), the bluesmen’s flight into legend, and the snow geese’s (sonically linked to the car’s horn) timely but timeless migration, that becomes, in the closing haiku, the flight which the poet must “slow down to catch.”

Zheng’s polyvalent treatment of space in “Birds of Passage” recalls Frank O’Hara’s navigation of NYC streets in “The Day Lady Died,” in which landmarks (“the bank,” “PARK LANE liquor store,” “Ziegfeld Theatre”) compose a poetic map. “Birds of Passage” travels faster, by car, (“rolling out of bed” prefiguring its wheels); crosses “Yazoo River Bridge”; passes Baptist Town “where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison”; crosses another bridge; passes the “cypress bayou” “eerie with thin mist floating”; passes “Avalon [in legend, the “earthly paradise” King Arthur was carried to after death] where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds.” Zheng’s “thin line of dawnlight” “shimmering in the low sky” recalls the charged horizontality in O’Hara’s poem as Lady Day “whispers a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron.”

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Snow Geese are possibly the noisiest of all waterfowl. Their main call, made by both males and females, is a nasal, one-syllable honk given at any hour of the day or night, at any time of year, in the air or on the ground. Distant calling flocks are reminiscent of a pack of baying hounds.”

The cacophony of geese both drowns the car’s hurry and “honks off” the tragic history witnessed by land that produced that earthiest art form, the blues—music that consumes its own impetus, as Lachey Doley avers in his song, “The Only Cure for the Blues is the Blues.” Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” ends in bluesy glory and stunning uplift as, through opening daylight, a flock of geese sounds.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-One): Jennifer Grotz [by Angela Ball]

The Crows

There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them,

but now she only remembers
the goodbyes, the countless times

they stood together speechless
under a starry meal of snow,

crows congregating above them
in bare winter branches, all through

the desperate sadness at the end,
one of them still madly in love

while the other admitted defeat,
taking turns as if exchanging

a heavy suitcase. And they were after all
always traveling. Somehow never at home.

He loved her in libraries and parking lots,
in cemeteries and cafes. She loved him

in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells
and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also

in the dark. She loved him most at the end
of the day, telling a story at dinner

while waving his fork and knife. He was her
never husband and she his never wife.

There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them.

All along, though they couldn’t hear it,
before they had stopped being lovers,

before they had even started,
back when they were two people leaving

a restaurant in summer’s dusk,
the crows were growing busy, numerous,

there was one coming to land
on every branch of every tree, once

the thumbless black hands of their wings
had finished stroking the malleable sky,

all along, though they couldn’t hear it,
the birds had been winging

their silent applause
for the love that was going to be, then was.

--Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open, and translator of three books from the French and Polish, most recently Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated with Piotr Sommer. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. Still Falling, her fourth book of poems, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2023.

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-One): Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer’s Grotz’s mysterious, generous poem, “The Crows,” is parable—but more; the crows, its totems, but more. Reading it, we are pulled in two directions. There is much to say, there is nothing to say—the direction of the ordinary, the direction of the holy. The poem’s almost-refrain, “There must have been greetings / that rhymed with each of them” suggests a Blakean song of innocence in which the world is right, is true; but also suggests the calls of crows announcing something dead and ready to eat; and Ted Hughes’s landmark book, Crow, the dark parable he made of marriage.

The poem dramatizes Robert Frost’s useful dictum, which applies so well to the New York School of Poets and their diaspora: poetry must possess either outer humor and inner seriousness or outer seriousness and inner humor. Dead seriousness is powerless to move us. That’s why the late Stephen Sondheim, in his wrenching (though often over-acted: Judi Dench sings it best) song of lost love, calls for clowns.

The poem’s two characters are isolated, as in parables and fairy tales:

     they stood together speechless

     under a starry meal of snow,

     crows congregating above them

     in bare winter branches, all through

     the desperate sadness at the end,

     one of them still madly in love

     while the other admitted defeat,

     taking turns as if exchanging

     a heavy suitcase.

Dark humor informs the mechanical exchanging of roles, the absurd simile of the suitcase.

The poem partakes, also, of Wallace Stevens’ “mind of winter,” in which silence has the most say.

Yet at its heart there’s a beautiful fairy tale in which each lover’s action is answered variously but exactly by the other’s:

     He loved her in libraries and parking lots,

     in cemeteries and cafes.  She loved him

     in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells

     and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also

     in the dark. She loved him most at the end

     of the day, telling a story at dinner

     while waving his fork and knife. He was her

     never husband and she his never wife.

How exact, that “held breath of elevators.” The last sentence of the interlude, with its nursery-style clinching rhyme, pronounces both the perfection of the moment and the disaster hovering over the couple from and, indeed, before their beginning. Arrive it does, with a suggestion of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:

     the crows were growing busy, numerous,

     there was one coming to land

     on every branch of every tree

     that introduces the poem’s final trajectory with this most lovely, most chilling couplet: “once / / the thumbless black hands of their wings / had finished stroking the malleable sky,” finally declaring the ascendency of fate, the force that ever and always operates in silence:

     all along, though they couldn’t hear it,

     the birds had been winging

     their silent applause

     for the love that was going to be, then was.

It is the last small phrase of Jennifer Grotz’s The Crows that pronounces victory not just for fate, but for love. Love “was”—existed, held sway. The small word, a weak verb’s past tense, declares both loss and possession, two forces that equally hold us—until, at last, they fade.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty): William Stobb [by Angela Ball]

Beep Boop

Once like oxygen these people—
you drove all night across Utah to sob
peel puke-hair celebrate
weddings supervise divorces in everyone’s best interest.

Relationships shriveled in the relentless
attack-phone-election-virus
-five-star-economy-doom-delivery-system.

Against the white glare
of right now sky behind
the surplus auto yard you walk alone
the creek-side trail toward the closed-down
ice cream stand falling
over in long grass along the highway.

You’re only out here because an attractive
television doctor said
active legs fuel immunity.
Something about being a machine
prompted you to shift

from in- to exterior seclusion—some current
of possible nobility triggered by a vision
of a lost appliance wandering in the world.

A can opener seeks its garbanzos.
A dishwasher a nozzle. A father
a son. A Roomba.

Where the creek widens and meets the river
through branches over the bluff line
you notice the moon
setting in afternoon correction
of an idea as basic as night or day.

You are still alive.
Your thinking is not accurate.

The trail drops off where waves lap
at a graffiti rock and a fire pit
littered with empty White Claws.
The sounds of birds and small animals
scrabbling among the twigs.
Something bobs to the surface
and vanishes back in current.

Across the river, people you loved.
A person named Francis
who danced at underground sex clubs
met Tina, got sober, and now goes by Frank.

People. Off in the squirrely distance.

--William Stobb

About "Beep Boop"

I was a little freaked out about having the COVID-19 virus in my body in March of 2020. I was over-dramatic, probably, thinking about "my life." I mean... the whole idea of being alive doesn't compute for me, sometimes. Some things are "alive?" and others aren't? I'm not trying to be cavalier or ungrateful or undermine the value of anything. And I'm not trying to die. I'm thinking that'll take care of itself. Look at Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty saying "I want more life, fucker," and then crying so poetically in that monologue: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.... All these things will be lost in time, like tears in rain." What a beautiful robot. I wish my poem were as awesome as that. Mainly, I'm saying I don't understand what I am.

--William Stobb

William Stobb's most recent poetry collection is You Are Still Alive (42 Miles Press 2019). His five previous collections include the National Poetry Series selection, Nervous Systems (Penguin 2007) and a chapbook of desert fragments focusing on the work of artist Michael Heizer, entitled Artifact Eleven (Black Rock Press 2011). Stobb works on the editorial staff of Conduit and its book publishing arm, Conduit Books and Ephemera, and as Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty): William Stobb

“Beep Boop” is a walk poem, a bop whose lightness is belied by a host of losses. Most crucially, it is a lament for friendship, that entity so central to the New York School of Poets. In William Stobb's nature, the depredations of industry and the strains of global malaise confront and confound inner and outer worlds.

The poem begins in deft overdrive, with a montage of bacchanalia, loss, and recovery. In pandemic isolation, the speaker is far enough—several months, a river—from friendship to limn its devolution:  “attack phone election virus / -five-star economy-doom-delivery-system.” The landscape is not the gently modulating elevations of peripatetic William Wordsworth’s Lake Country, but “the surplus auto yard,” . . . “the Creekside trail toward the closed-down / ice cream stand falling / over in long grass along the highway”—a description whose cadence seems to presage a James Wright-style epiphany never reached. We and the speaker (the “you” that includes us ) have insular reasons (“attractive TV doctor,” “immunity”) for moving. The poem zig-zags between perception and half-perceived possible transcendence:

     Where the creek widens and meets the river

     through branches over the bluff line

     you notice the moon

     setting in afternoon correction

     of an idea as basic as night or day.

The daylight moon is recognized; vision “correction” is still possible. An idea can modify, and false separations disappear.

The two lines that follow: “You are still alive. / Your thinking is not accurate” assert and deny possibility. (The first could have been written by James Wright, the second, never.)

The transformation, near the poem’s end, of the “person named Francis” functions to further distance them. We think of another person named Francis, who went by Frank, having a Coke with Vincent Warren and us or walking around at lunchtime in “Personal Poem.” But here, in lieu of construction workers in their lovely silver hats, we have the absent homeless, their quenched fire strewn with empties of their drink of choice, “White Claw”—this so distant from Frank O’Hara’s hopeful urban scene, in which lunch is both favorite meal and poem opportunity, and demolition an entrée to the new. In O’Hara’s city, people prosper; their work and breaks from work are brisk; a louse who shows up on Frank while he is at work in his MoMA office gets a name, “Louise,” and immortality in a poem. In this poem’s purview, relationships shrivel; animals struggle, “scrabbling among twigs,” and we contemplate “—some current / of possible nobility triggered by a vision / of a lost appliance wandering in the world.”

The penultimate word, “squirrely,” both locates that ubiquitous animal and comically epitomizes the tenor of thought that rules the poem. William Stobb’s “Beep Boop,” strongly addresses time’s distempers. Its adroit wanderings—haunted by a ghost appliance, machined appendage—subside to isolation, “the white glare of right now.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler [by Angela Ball]

Night Life

How can this equal rest or peace, this garble of gasps, snuffles,
and horse-like snorts? His lips flutter as though he’s blowing
bubbles, his moans so choked he must be drowning…or are
his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant
critic sucks the bones of her osso buco? In my overheated,
night-gowned silence I watch him flinch in a puddle of bedside
light. A range of ages and plights wash over his face. Who is
this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this
leaky ship of divinity? I stare across the chasm which divides
each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched
each other or not. He’s a magician who made an orchard
disappear, an unhinged shooter from St. Louis, a plum
colored shadow, a handful of chameleon teeth, one of god’s
toboggans, a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.

--Amy Gerstler (from Index of Women)

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her previous books include Scattered at Sea and Dearest Creature. She is currently working on a musical play with composer/arranger/actor Steve Gunderson.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biograpia Literaria of 1817, draws a signal distinction, declaring that “the objects of fancy are fixed and dead”; whereas the objects of imagination are imbued with “esemplastic power.” In Amy Gerstler’s humorous and revelatory poem, “Night Life,” the object of her imagination, her sleeping partner, is anything but “fixed and dead.” In fact, the poem embodies a rare quality I’ll call “logo-plasticity,” in which a poem’s images, made of words, rise from the page to model a sculptural and kinesthetic likeness. The poem’s speaker watches in “overheated, nightgowned silence” as whole swathes of human and animal peril are enacted to appalling dramatic effect: “. . . or are / his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant critic / sucks the bones of her osso buco?” With the speaker, we grow transfixed as “a range of ages and plights wash across his face,” and wonder “Who is / this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this / leaky ship of divinity?” Coming after what may be the poem’s most hilarious comparison, “this slab of snoring meat,” “this / leaky ship of divinity” announces a turn in Gerstler’s free-wheeling sonnet. The partner’s disordered repose becomes an entrée into mystery, “the chasm that divides / each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched / each other or not.” What a direct, modest, and thus effective way to describe the isolation in which we move. Observer turned sculptor, the speaker cycles the dreaming man through deeds and identities, including the astonishing, tragi-comic “God’s toboggan,” shifting him to shapes that contain us all: murderous, yet powerless; decaying, yet primordial in beauty: “a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.” Amy Gerstler’s “Night Life” is the work of a poetic magus.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighteen): Jennifer Michael Hecht [by Angela Ball]

September

Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.

The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.

Tonight there are people getting just what they need.

The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree,
standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

Tonight, there are people who are so happy
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.

Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.

--Jennifer Michael Hecht

You know Whitman’s “ample hills of Brooklyn”? I’ll tell you a secret that has been hidden by ample hills of ice cream. And the two kids. What can I tell you?, you swell. So the point is, the secret is inside my wedding ring, which no longer comes off. Though, is my husband’s ring equally stuck? Just checked and Yes! So it’s a quite secret message that I’m sneak-peeking you. Inside our wedding rings we had engraved G.F.U.G.W.W.W. Can you guess? It’s Good For Us, Getting What We Want. The poem of mine we took it from, "September," came out in The Best American Poetry in 1999 and we were married in 2001. Just had our twenty-year anniversary — and we’ve got two teenagers. On Getting What We Want I’d say it’s not great to want anything specific, but apparently, as the Stones taught, if you try, and practice a ruthless patience with yourself, you get can what you need. I wouldn’t say that even now I’ve exactly got my oars in the water, but the four of us manage to keep afloat under the weird glowing skies of recent times.
--Jennifer Michael Hecht

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, historian, and commentator. She is the author of seven books including Who Said (Copper Canyon), Doubt: A History (Harper), and Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It (Yale). Hecht holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and is finishing a book on poetry and post-religious ritual for FSG. She blogged with great fun on BAP for years and is delighted to visit in this form. Thanks Angela, for thinking of me.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighteen): Jennifer Michael Hecht [by Angela Ball]

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s “September” is a living paradox: it works through allegory, but is absolute in its immediacy. It is an “I do this I do that” poem—not of exuberance, but of despair.

     Like Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—”

     The Feet, mechanical, go round

     Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—

     A Wooden way, regardless grown,

     A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

Hecht’s poem seems enunciated from afar; yet, unlike “After great pain,” and like Frank O’Hara’s action/observation poems, we are with the speaker in the moment. A time freeze analogous to the invocation of held breath at the end of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” galvanizes the poem’s center:

     The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.

     I remember you in a black and white photograph

     taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree,

     standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

 

     When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

“The Day Lady Died” ends in a tumble of syntax without a period—“and everyone and I stopped breathing”—in ecstatic tribute to Billie Holiday’s passing. The syntax of Hecht’s poem is crystalline and correct—“A Wooden way”—declarative, accurate, end-stopped—so much so that it invites life’s vital disorder—the welter that includes people “getting just what they need”—to its edges, killing it on contact: “I remember you in a black and white photograph / taken this time of some year.” The figure stands in lost leaves, hardly distinguished from grayness, but with the power to produce an endlessness the opposite of bliss: “When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.”

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s masterful “September” has so numbed us with sadness that when the speaker “trails her hand” in the water and produces a mild exclamation, “Such a soft wind,” the change is electric. From wooden despair, the speaker wakes to recollect nature. Yes, the oars are gone. But the lone skipper obeys the ironclad law of maritime advice: Stay with the boat.
--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

Another Summer Without Classical Music

I haven’t lived in Southern California
very long but every summer that I do
it occurs to me
only after the summer has ended
that I should go see “Mozart
Under the Stars” or some other
classical music concert at the Hollywood Bowl
because I should get out more
I should get more culture
at least that is what my lover tells me
and it occurs to me that culture
is not a bowl of spaghetti
or anything that can be twirled on a fork
and wiped up with a hunk of bread
then abandoned for days in the fridge
like most of the new plans I make—
cancelled, because—as the actor
in my poetry workshop used to say:
we have a new realization every one to two seconds
and I’ll believe just about anything
if it sounds interesting enough
which is why the only ghost I believe in
is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress
who jumped from the sign’s H
and is sometimes seen wandering
below and maybe I believe this
because H is the letter I would choose
or because I don’t believe the explanation
given for her death (learning
that her role in her first film
had been cut to four minutes)
because Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating
women into killing themselves or one another
and I believe this too-easy coincidence
this culture I cannot digest
is proof that men have always wanted women
to hate one another and ourselves
so we will love them more

--Hannah Dow

Hannah Dow is the author of ROSARIUM (Acre Books, 2018). Her poems have recently appeared in Shenandoah, Image, and The Southern Review, among others. She received the Cream City Review Summer Prize in Poetry, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and has received awards and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Bread Loaf Orion. Hannah is the editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal and an Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

In its casual self-criticism, Hannah Dow’s “Another Summer Without Classical Music” has something in common with James Schuyler’s rueful attitude toward the self; in its fascination with Hollywood, something in common with Frank O’Hara. Dow engages with “Hollywood” culture via the 1932 horror film Thirteen Women and its cast member, brand-new film actress Peg Entwistle, who jumped from the famous sign’s letter “H,” possibly in response to her supporting role being edited down to a bit part. Entwistle divorces herself from “Hollywood” both actually and symbolically in the most graphic way possible. Entanglement between art and life is at the heart of this deft poem.

The tissue-thin plot of the hour-long Thirteen Women involves a “half-caste” mesmerist played by Myrna Loy who plots revenge on the alumnae of a fancy finishing school who excluded her from their sorority. She has the unwitting participation of her associate, a “swami” who has promised to send horoscopes to all the women of the group. Loy’s character forges replacement horoscopes predicting death and mayhem. The film begins with a statement (endorsed by two prominent professors of psychology) that the human mind is vulnerable to suggestion. Indeed, the scenario consists of one instance after another of suggestion inciting action and/or accident to produce death, each marked by a ‘special effect’ that resembles an exploding star as drawn by a novice artist. In a sense, Entwistle’s suicide functions to extend or complete the movie as it simultaneously culminates her life. On one level, her death is pathetic. But on another, it is tragic. Her suicide note pleads cowardice. There was certainly plenty to fear in Hollywood—not from “half-caste women” but from men--priapic studio execs, rapacious agents, and actors skilled in date rape (a concept yet unknown). The penalty for non-participation was often exclusion. Suicide pre-emptively excludes the world, and its invocation marks an increase in the poem’s complexity:

     as the actor

     in my poetry workshop used to say:

     we have a new realization every one to two seconds

     and I’ll believe just about anything

     if it sounds interesting enough

     which is why the only ghost I believe in

     is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress

     who jumped from the sign’s H

     and is sometimes seen wandering below . . .

Hannah Dow’s engaging and disturbing “Another Summer Without Classical Music” is a poem about the difficulty of making sense of culture, Hollywood or otherwise, and of finding a coherent place within it—more particularly, the continuing difficulty for women who want to “digest” culture rather than be digested by it. In other words, a problem of agency. The explanation proposed at the end of the poem,

     . . . Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating

     women into killing themselves or one another

     and I believe this too-easy coincidence 

     this culture I cannot digest

     is proof that men have always wanted women

     to hate one another and ourselves

     so we will love them more

is provisional at best, asserted as belief by a speaker who earlier says, “I’ll believe just about anything / if it sounds interesting enough.” The poem’s missing period indicates that the speaker’s stabs at belief, along with our own, will continue, as unquiet as the ghost who frequents the sign, shadowed by its thirteen fifty-foot high letters.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

FOR YEARS, I SUFFERED FROM A STRANGE MELODY

I couldn’t knit thistles into sweaters for swans,
nor spin straw into gold records.

I didn’t have a gingersnap or bluebird to my name.

The oven overheard me tell my story and called it
rumpled, stilted, and half-baked.

Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.

But the moment I kissed its slobbering mist,
it turned into a handsome prince who dropped
the glass slipper he’d been carrying onto the floor

where it shattered into a million princes,
each more handsome than the last,

and everyone shouted, “L’chaim!”

--Elaine Equi

Elaine Equi’s most recent book is The Intangibles from Coffee House Press. Her other books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and in many editions of the Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

Its title, "For Years, I Suffered From a Strange Melody," suggests the piece was prompted by a spoonerism— a goofy felicity. The poem goes on to conquer all frustrations in its path with deliberate and delicious mistakes. One of its ancestors may be a cartoon show called Fractured Fairy Tales (1959-64), also based on the notion that the way to fix things—make them more fun—is to break them.

The speaker starts out feeling bereft, unable to “spin straw into gold records.” No “gingersnaps,” no “bluebirds” (of happiness or anything else). But the mysterious conjunction of confection and flight is a fine thing in itself; as is the oven talking smack: a slumgullion of anagram and idiom.

In this liquid atmosphere, tales survive as waking dreams that shelter the childlike: “Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.” Words like “stinky” and “slobbering” are notably absent from traditional fairytales, with their low threshold for effluvia. At the speaker’s spontaneous kiss, the “slobbering mist” becomes the “handsome prince” of “Cinderella” fame, who drops the glass slipper of the foot test, and it becomes mother of many princes, “each more handsome than the last.” Elaine Equi’s “For Years, I Suffered from a Strange Melody” is word alchemy: a fertile muddle in which pieces become princes; and breakage, celebration; a climactic union in which “everyone” arrives from nowhere to deliver a final, life-affirming shout.

--Angela Ball

The Winning Entry: "When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" [by Angela Ball] with judge Jim Cummins's comments & runners up

Charles Bukowski in One Corner; in the Other, Bob Dylan

If anyone should take eighteen-shot Dylan Thomas’s name,
it’s me. I challenge you to a duel
with two bottles of Four Roses.

--Chuck, that may be you, but
me, I crossed the green mountain
I slept by the sea.
you’re walkin’ in dreams
where black is the color
and nothing the number.

Bob, I got to tell you
I’m sorry for my wife
I’m sorry for anyone’s wife.
If you want me, find me clinging to a freight car,
Find me underground.
But you’ll never find me
vagrant in the rain, nabbed by a rookie cop,
a skirt, no less,
in Long Branch, New Jersey.

-- Angela Ball

James Cummins writes:

As with most of David's prompts, this one resulted in some terrific entries.  I went with Angela Ball's poem for the first prize, but there was a good pool to pick from (I counted eight entries as possibles).  It came down to some great lines.  Angela wrote (in Buk's voice) "I'm sorry for my wife / I'm sorry for anyone's wife" which seemed to me to combine the compassion B. tried to keep hidden with the world-weariness we love about the guy.  And the ending, referring to Dylan's run-in with the police in 2009, who thought he was a homeless vagrant, was perfect; the word "skirt" was inspired.  George Schaefer's prose-poem "scene" takes second; it combines the grittiness of many of the entries with a lyric grace I love.  "The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour" and "Poetry only happens when nothing else can" are two examples.  And again, the ending is perfect.  Finally, Adam Baron's poem gets honorable mention for the use of the word "dumb," the moon sitting on Bukowski's solipsistic rim, and the friendly atmosphere of two schmucks having a moment together.  The difference between these three and at least four or five other entries is as thin as the bill Buk slides into his favorite pinball machine.  Thanks to all.  

George Schafer's prose poem (second place):

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

A jaded old bard pounds a shot of J.D. and mocks an idealistic young troubadour. “So just how many beers must one man drink before he’s allowed to pass out?” The bartender chuckles at the joke. The young troubadour debates if Jesus will ever forgive these sins. Loose leaf papers holding his poems gets blown away in the wind. With a soul deader than a dead Christmas tree, the jaded old bard orders another beer and another shot. The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour. After all, poetry only happens when nothing else can. The sooner this kid learns the ways of the world the better. The young troubadour claims everyone gets stoned so he can abide. He pulls up a stool and throws down the shot. Old poet says “Don’t try.”

Adam Baron's poem (third place)

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

Night fell, broke.
One day they'll reward you old man.
Chuck laughed. Me? Not me, but I'll tell you
this: if I knew guitar I'd strum the
moon out of the dumb sky. I'd make it sit on
the edge of my glass - and stare
at me for a change.
But you don't, Bob said
and Chuck laughed. Then I'll leave it
where it is, which he did, and
though Bob tries now and then, he
can't shift it.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifteen): Ron Padgett [by Angela Ball]

Over There

I have always assumed that my body would provide
reliable transportation to carry me through the day
and no I will not extend that metaphor
and if you know what that means
you’ll know what I mean.

John Ashbery once said
“I never get up before the crack of noon.”
Pope Francis said
“I am Argentinian. You know
how an Argentinian commits suicide?
He climbs up on top of his ego and jumps off.”
“That’s all, Bruno,”
Fairfield Porter said to his dog.
Does it help to know that Bruno was a golden retriever?
And that Fairfield was invisible?

--Ron Padgett

Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. Padgett’s most recent collection is Big Cabin (Coffee House Press). Forthcoming is Dot (Coffee House Press). New York City has been his home base since 1960.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifteen): Ron Padgett [by Angela Ball]

Carved from silence, Ron Padgett’s “Over There,” refuses to “extend” its opening metaphor. Yet it is expansive. As in Frank O’Hara’s poems, all people known in fact or reputation, living or dead, are free to enter, to be heard. “I never get up before the crack of noon,” says John Ashbery, at once sardonic and cheerful, invoking both “crack of dawn” and “crack of doom.” The pope, God’s arm on earth, imagines his own suicide in a joke—though in it, his ego remains, a vertical ghost.

As in Kenneth Koch’s late poem, “Proverb,” “Les morts vont vite.” Though we may prefer to regard mortality as “over there,” world vanishes for all: poet, pope, dog, even painter—maestro of the visible (of course, he names his dog a color, a color the dog isn’t). Reading Fairfield Porter’s succinct send-off to Bruno, we hear Mel Blanc’s Porky Pig sputter “Th-that’s all, folks”—the phrase Blanc chose as epitaph.

The office Fairfield Porter performs for his dog, Ron Padgett’s “Over There” performs for us. In surrounding mortality with play, he looses its darkness. Art’s scarifying knowledge confers power. Yes, it helps.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fourteen): Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

ODE AT THE HOSPITAL

My father’s moustache aced geometry.
My father’s moustache makes cowboys blush
with its hard line. My father’s moustache
has two spots, one light in one dark,
like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v.
shutting off. My father’s moustache talks
like Ricky Ricardo, tells fortunes, chants
Our Fathers in its sleep—it dreams blue seas.
My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy.
My father’s moustache goes by Antonio
if you’re family. If not, try a cup of water
under your bed—it cures everything.

--Jessica Guzman

I had been writing poems about my father’s illness when I read an essay in which Stanley Plumly describes odes as rendering their subjects into art objects. Something similar to but not quite ekphrasis. My father had a commanding moustache, and I imagined it on display in a museum next to a little plaque. ‘Ode at the Hospital’ began with that image before anaphora morphed it into something more intimate and dynamic.

--Jessica Guzman

Jessica Guzman is the author of Adelante (Switchback Books, 2020), selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, jubilat, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She teaches at Widener University and lives in Philadelphia.

The New York School Diaspora, Part Fourteen: Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

“My Father’s Moustache” is an expression of disdain from 1930’s Brooklyn, a raucous song by Woody Herman & His Herd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8X0wXZOhY) , and a likely name for 60’s/70’s soda shops and used-clothing emporiums. It had, by then, an aura of gentle nostalgia—the “my father” referenced a sprightly older gentleman likely a member of a barbershop quartet. In Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital,” these associations ground active description, as the moustache “aced geometry” and “makes cowboys blush.” When the ‘stache shows its spots, “one light in one dark, / like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v. / shutting off,” it takes on quasi-religious powers, chanting “Our Fathers in its sleep.” With “My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy” it draws us up short with the reality of illness and invokes the protective exclusivity of family, a magic circle. This is, after all “My father’s mustache,” not yours. Like its subject, Guzman’s poem refuses despair, ending with mock advice tinged with mysterious truth: “try a cup of water / under your bed—it cures everything.” In its terse twelve lines, the poem plays life’s essences against one another—virility and age, cultural and personal memory, humor and sadness, exile and belonging, personality and the loss thereof, the body and the loss thereof.  Set in God’s hostel, Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital” makes permanent not just its potent moustache, but the particularity of praise.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirteen): James Cummins [by Angela Ball]

Ode to Sycamores

Not helplessness;
But a sort of timelessness,
The understanding
That will can only take you so far.
You leave behind lust
That caused you to deceive each other
With whispers of mutuality
When need was only singular;
Now the cores of your beings
Aren't reaching for something
But for each other.

You begin to say, oh, god,
Which are the words we use
To express our humility
In these moments, our compassion;
Perhaps her lips are on your neck,
Perhaps your lips are on her neck—
The idea there are necks at all
In this lifting up, or that you thought
There were two of them
When you began,
Is astonishing, and delightful,
And one of the myriad lovely things
About you the brain—
Not only not slowing down,
But speeding up, along for the ride
Now, like a dog in a car window—
Has noted in passing.

And the scent of ambrosia—
You thought it would be
Some kind of clear fine
Wine that made the brain
A metaphor for the body—
So you are surprised
At its muskiness, its wetness,
Like a stand of sycamores in spring;
And you are gods now,
But gods under the moon,
Not someone’s idea of the moon.

--James Cummins

When my wife, Maureen, and I first got married, we made love one night alongside the Iowa River. It was romantic in conception, a little less so in execution. Between us and the lovely full moon were a lot of mosquitoes; and the "rich black fertile Iowa soil" turned out to be rather unyielding, though I took the bottom to gallantly cushion my willing-to-go-along-with-this-up-to-a-point bride. (And, okay, from preference.) But the poem itself didn't take shape for decades until one time I was driving along on a sunny day while our apricot standard poodle, Bella, who, after Maureen and our two daughters, I loved more than any sentient being in the universe, was enjoying the sun and the wind with her head resting out the back window. She turned and looked at me with such happiness that the two moments fused as one, like Vardaman's mother and the fish. I then found an old notebook with some early attempts and finished the poem.
--James Cummins

Jim Cummins was raised in a canebrake by an old mama lion. No, he's just a midwestern boy through-and-through, who's become a cray-cray old man who never leaves his house except to get booster shots. Recently, he purchased a lot of stock in Ivermectin.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirteen): James Cummins [by Angela Ball]

A standard-issue ode devotes itself single-mindedly to its announced subject. Not this one. We find ourselves inside a poem of “compassion”: passion compounded; a concentration lacking the expansiveness we associate with the ode; the result, perhaps, of long togetherness, a shared “you,” broken to emphasize its unity: “Perhaps her lips are on your neck, / Perhaps your lips are on her neck”; broken again in order to praise: “one of the myriad lovely things / About you your brain— / Not only not slowing down, / But speeding up, along for the ride / Now, like a dog in a car window—. . .”

Suddenly, near the close, the sycamores rise from the poem’s concentration as a surprising simile for “the scent of ambrosia,” a bodily redolence, not cerebral or soul-like. Sycamores’ chief beauty may be that they are open in how they accommodate to growth, their bark visibly breaking. James Cummins’s “Ode to Sycamores” opens at its close, addressing what might be the widest problem of postmodernism, as analyzed by Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” and Roland Barthes’s “Operation Margarine”: the replacement of originals with simulacra, the real with easy nostalgia:

“But you are gods now / But gods under the moon, / Not someone’s idea of the moon.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)

I look up from lunch and see a guy dozing back in his chair
and I imagine my dead father that way, perpetual sleeping passenger,
his head full of roads. “And who cares,” he says in his dream,
“that since you’ll never wake, that you’re not inscribing memories?”
Describing a hallucination means you’re describing it
to someone, so who’s to say this isn’t part of the hallucination?
My odometer hit 123456 today and I had a minor celebration
and took a picture. They say as much about the idea of time
as they do the idea of reality, most recently in the mechanism
through which birds see the earth’s magnetic field. It’s a kind
of blue. I like that. Everyone you know is suddenly an art student.
Or how families have a recurring theme, generation to generation.
Measure the shoulders. Measure a taste for parsley. Hand tremors.
As in the Enquists vs the Gormans. The Enquists want the baby,
the child, as he’s three now, spring 1968, to be adopted out
through their side of the family to the Gallahers, and the Gormans
want to keep it in Portland, maybe cut a deal
over where it is and when. The Enquists sign the papers, though,
and the child is off on a Continental jet with a golden tail
to Kansas. (The painting keeps folding that we’re working on,
fretting along the edges of the frame.) A few weeks later,
the Gormans are still not taking it well. For them, it was
a kidnapping, and one, the mother, goes off somewhere,
and the father, the Enquist, goes looking for her
with some friends. One, driving, July 8, falls asleep,
and they cross the median, down the hillside, into the trees.
You fall asleep over this life, and you wake
in a doll playground in a doll town surrounded by a doll
forest. You’re planning some sort of festival.
The Enquists and the Gormans understand each other,
as a desert understands rain. As now, 50 years later,
they’ve all gone but for the mother and the child,
and he finds her one day in late fall, and she asks him
if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.

--John Gallaher                                       first published in LIPS, as "Golden (23)"

Though I’ve always known he died in a car wreck, I didn’t know until recently that my birth-father died in his sleep. Likewise, I’ve always known I was adopted (at age three), but the circumstances, as well as my birth-mother’s name, were a mystery, until I found her recently. I’ve been trying, since my book, In a Landscape (BOA 2014), to find a way to write as I’m thinking, to try to write the thinking itself, the imagination, but in a non-fiction landscape. From Lyn Hejinian, I think of it as thought transference, or articulating the inarticulate. Ashbery talks about this as well, describing it as a project reflecting how the mind works, the play of thought. I like these ideas, keeping in mind O’Hara’s directness (“I did this I did that”) and Miles Davis playing what the day presents. I’m not sure if any of this makes much sense to anyone but me, which is why I hesitate to put too fine a point on it.
--John Gallaher

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

John Gallaher’s tribute to origins, “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” shares the breathless energy of Frank O’Hara’s elegy, “The Day Lady Died,” and its trajectory from the circumstantial to the transcendent. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” . . . “I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun / and have a hamburger and a malted. . ,” while the poet-speaker of “Garden of Mirrors” looks “up from lunch. . .” and imagines his dead father, “perpetual passenger, his head full of roads.” O’Hara records his lunch-hour movements; Gallaher celebrates his car’s 123456th mile. O’Hara’s bank teller’s name, “Miss Stillwagon,” is part of his day’s momentousness, along with “NEW WORLD WRITING,” “Verlaine,” “Bonnard,” “Strega,” and “Gauloises.” (Lady, not pinned to her daylight name, enters the poem via photograph.) Gallaher describes the navigation of birds, their precise jazz of vision, “a kind of blue”; linking it to a family’s serial mirroring: a set of shoulders, “a taste for parsley.” Then we hear, in third person, the story of his divided parentage, related as Enquists vs. Gormans—recalling Faulkner’s Snopes and Compsons, discordant tribes. Suddenly, the poem mirrors itself, registers the strain exacted by the telling, the difficulty of keeping the story within bounds: “(The painting keeps folding that we’re working on, / fretting along the edges of the frame.)” The father goes looking for the mother “with some friends.” He drives, then sleeps, and all disappear “down the hillside, into the trees,” dispatched in two phrases with the killing loveliness of a Hemingway title. At poem’s end the son has found the mother, “in late fall,” is with her in the way that Frank is with Lady Day at the 5-Spot: “while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”(no end-stop). Art pre-empts time. John Gallaher’s “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” collapses fifty years as the mother asks her son “if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.”
--Angela Ball

(The New York School Diaspora will be on sabbatical till Tuesday, 31 August, when it will return as a biweekly feature.)

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eleven): Paul Hoover [by Angela Ball]

Written (after Szymborska)

The written stone rests
in the unwritten river;
unwritten rain is falling
over the written town.

Nothing written today,
but tomorrow you’ll be written
as you sit in your room not writing.

Lo, it is written.
Pollen writes on the stamen.
The man writes a child
in the body of the woman.
Your eyes write the view
into the window,
but it doesn’t stay forever.
It returns with you into the unwritten.

All that means is written.
Lo, a tiger of a word
has escaped its cage.

Our quiet words
wait beneath the stair
for a reason to speak,
an edge or fold or cause
to remark. Oh, we say,
no way and no how.

This is how the world begins,
dark branches written
against a white sky.

The written stone rests
in the written river;
written rain falls
over the written town.

--Paul Hoover

Written (after Szymborska)

In teaching the work of Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, I came across her lines about “a written deer running through a written forest.”  The phrase is magical and generative, reminding us of the central issue of writing, the encounter of the real and the imaginary.  Speaking the word “deer” brings them to mind, as we have individually experienced deer.  This form of magic was known by ancient Greeks as ekphrasis.  I’m drawn to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, because, in bringing us closer to the real, we discover the Real.  

--Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover's book, O, and Green:  New and Selected Poems will be published in August by MadHat Press / Plume Editions.  It includes selections from all his books since 2001.  With Maria Baranda he edited and translated The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz, published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year.  He also edited, and in part translated, The New World Written:  Selected Poems of Maria Baranda (Yale University Press, 2021).  He is editor of the annual literary magazine, New American Writing, and two editions of Postmodern American Poetry:  A Norton Anthology (1994 / 2013).  His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, is available from University of Michigan Press.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eleven): Paul Hoover [by Angela Ball]

For me, an important question is whether a poem’s language seems to originate from outside the poet or from within. The first case allows for selection and collage, for serious play. Paul Hoover’s “Written” (after Szymborska) belongs in this camp, finding voice from a line of Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “The Joy of Writing.” What results is a poem with these striking lines: “The man writes a child / in the body of the woman.” The article used for both participants, “the,” is impersonal. The preposition, “in,” with its stern accuracy, has the same coolness. These choices tell us we are in the realm of the primordial:

     This is how the world begins,
     dark branches written
     against a white sky.

The poem’s repetition of “written” hones the word, sharpens its force and the force of all words: “Lo [look!], a tiger of a word / has escaped its cage.”

The poem’s “written stone” is cousin to the stone in W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, “Easter, 1916,” where it lies unchanged “in the midst of all,” holding the “terrible beauty” of those martyred for Ireland in the Easter rising. Amid violent change, an abiding coolness. This is the temperature of Paul Hoover’s “Written,” in which words are marks, and primal remarks express surprise or disbelief: “Oh, we say, / no way and no how.” Why is the poem’s river “unwritten” at the beginning and “written” at the end? The answer is this poem, tiger of language and the permanence of meaning.

--Angela Ball