The Best American Poetry

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Four: Mitch Sisskind [by Angela Ball]

 

Two Poems After Koch

1.

If you want to write a love poem don’t say
Your girlfriend smells like a new car but
Maybe you could say, ‘I love you like I love
‘The smell of a new car that portends many
‘Pleasurable and interesting possibilities
‘Whether it’s a long drive to Arizona or
‘A quick spin to the seashore on a Sunday
‘I will always keep your top down because
‘You are my beautiful convertible, Julia,
‘Built for comfort and built for speed.’
I used the name Julia because Robert Herrick
In the 17th Century was great at this stuff
And he had a poem called ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’
Ha! Upon Julia’s Clothes! That’s so terrific!

2.

If I could push a button and write
A new Kenneth Koch poem
I would push a button and write
That I could push a button and
We are hitchhiking again near
Vallauris and the sky is cloudy
But who cares since we’re young
And kind of silly and when rain falls
We keep on skylarking as they said
In the army until we knock it off
As they also said in the army and
We make love and write poems
And if we get old I push the button
Again a hundred thousand times.

                                                      -Mitch Sisskind

I was born and raised in Chicago, then attended Columbia University where I met Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, plus other aspiring writers like myself. Subsequently I had various employments including diamond appraiser, night desk clerk, and high school football coach. I've done two books of short fiction: Visitations (1984) and Dog Man Stories (1993) and have more recently concentrated on poetry in Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight (2016) and Collected Poems 2005 - 2020. I live in Los Angeles with my wife and two daughters. 

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Four: Mitch Sisskind

Mitch Sisskind’s revelatory “Two Poems After Koch” emphasizes aspects of Kenneth’s poetic character that aren’t often discussed: his unabashed love of immediate gratification combined with a kind of courtliness and a fanatic’s love of repetition. The title of his ground-breaking book on teaching poetry to children, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, is a rather good summation of Koch’s own poetry oeuvre.

The first poem of the two leaps from the gate teaching, with Koch’s own bravura elán: “If you want to write a love poem don’t say / Your girlfriend smells like a new car but. . .”  The suggestion that follows hilariously combines the literal and metaphorical: “I will always keep your top down because / You are my beautiful convertible, Julia, / Built for comfort and built for speed.” These lines both exemplify and spoof a famous male impulse: to treat women as objects, to ‘toy’ with them. They remind us of how Koch, no less than the other three preeminent poets of the New York School, was unabashedly himself. It seems to me that Frank O’Hara, flaneur, was a public poet of impulse; Koch more often privately impulsive. As examples I’ll quote O’Hara’s rallying cry to Lana Turner, “We love you, get up!” and Koch’s more reflective but still urgent, “Did you ever glance into a bottle of sparkling pop?” from his important “Fresh Air.”

Sisskind himself winks at the camera with the following lines:

     I used the name Julia because Robert Herrick

     In the 17th Century was great at this stuff

     And he had a poem called ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’

     Ha! Upon Julia’s Clothes! That’s so terrific!

Sisskind’s willingness to express unvarnished enthusiasm in a sophisticated context might be a distinguishing feature of his work. I think his ‘That’s so terrific!” accesses the childlike joy we feel at poetic surprise. It’s even better than a clown popping from a music box at a crank of its handle. And “great at this stuff”  is an expressive and radically simple evocation of poetic mastery.

Maybe above I should have said not “immediate gratification” but “immediate enthusiasm.”

We are given something we didn’t even know we wanted till we did.

Sisskind’s second homage to Kenneth Koch expresses an impulse made famous by behavioral psychology. He wittily turns a desire he has already manifested into an infinite regress:

     If I could push a button and write

     A new Kenneth Koch poem

     I would push a button and write

     That I could push a button and

Then, with a Kochian lack of preamble, he transports us to the romantic Vallauris, one-time Alpine Riviera hang-out of Pablo Picasso, and the kind of youthful devil-may-careness Koch was fond of invoking in poems like “The Circus”:

     But who cares since we’re young

     And kind of silly and when rain falls

     We keep on skylarking as they said

It’s no accident that an early meaning of the word “silly” was “pious” or “holy.” There is something saintly about the openness to experience here expressed.  I’ve always loved the moment in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” when Auden says to him, “You were silly like us.” Plus “skylarking” slyly alludes to one of Koch’s foundational influences, Percy Bysshe Shelly, author of “To a Skylark.”

     In the army until we knock it off

     As they also said in the army and

     We make love and write poems

      And if we get old I push the button

     Again a hundred thousand times.

“Knock it off,” that blunt, dismissive idiom, contrasts beautifully with “skylarking.” And anything said in the army is going to go right to the point. As does this poem, summing things up for all of us, but Koch and Sisskind in special, “We make love and write poems, / And if we get old I push the button / Again a hundred thousand times.”

I think it’s safe to say that Kenneth Koch is the only person who would title a book One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. The plays fairly burst from their slim volume. For Koch, repetition did not tarnish but magnified the beauty of experience. Advising graduate teaching assistants during a long-ago visit to the school I teach in, Koch suggested they ask students to re-start their essays, beginning with the last paragraph. The poem’s final gesture takes in both the despair of age and its inexhaustible hopefulness, present for us to enjoy in the poems of Kenneth Koch and in these two immensely celebratory poems by Mitch Sisskind.-Angela Ball

 

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Three: Joseph Richie [by Angela Ball]

Dewpoint

Hold this that has grown
It takes to your hand
As if learning in the ways of tension
Through the acolytes of water
But since the sodden beams
Can for you resume
Overwhelm them
With your fastness
In mass grounding
Of friction.
                 -Joseph Richie

Joseph Richie (b. 1990) is a freelance editor, music critic, translator, and interpreter.  His poetry and translations have appeared in Cimarron Review, La Traductière, Minetta Review, and Maximalist.  He is the author of four chapbooks, including Nothing Left Open Can Keep You from Factory Hollow Press, and Fathom from Gnosis Press, from which this poem is excerpted.  Also from Gnosis is a forthcoming full-length collection, Species of Thirst.  He lives on Long Island, NY.

Photo by Lena Zycinsky

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Three: Joseph Richie

Joseph Richie’s “Dewpoint” is supremely engaging. The poem’s brevity, its compactness, makes it our true intimate. With it at its “point”—its moment of greatest saturation--we see and hear it all at once.

It begins with a command. We are to hold something “that has grown”—that Is, arrived from nothing. We don’t take it. It “takes to” us, like a newborn to its mother or a duck to its imprint.

What is an acolyte? Someone who assists in a service.  Perhaps I’m an acolyte for this poem. Perhaps every reader is. A useful celebrant. A proponent of mysteries. The speaker is instructional, the poem’s brief duration made durable with strong stresses. It supports only two adjectives: “sodden” and “mass”—the second seeming already halfway to nounhood.

We find ourselves “acolytes of water.” Whelming is done by water—to “Overwhelm” is to do water one better.

Every day there’s the question, what are we to do? Perhaps the answer is to help in the furtherance of something.

It might be useful to revisit the poem’s occasion, the moment of change its title announces. In Kenneth Koch, the boiling point is serious for water. For William Carlos Williams, in Spring and All, spring begins when things “grip down.” What we witness and join is a crisis, an arrival.

What are the poem’s “sodden beams”?  Disintegrating architecture? Strands of light after rain? Why must we resist them? Perhaps because it’s imperative is to keep living, to resist the passive, the “sodden.”

We may think of the forces we learned in grade school—the teeter-totter lever, the planetary tether ball--thinking to leave them behind with Dick, Jane, and Spot in their world where everything has one career.

This poem is not a goodbye but a “mass grounding.”  This poem doesn’t fan out at the end. It clenches.

What is our fastness? Most often it is a thing of mountains.

Hold fast, we are sometimes told. How can a static gesture be “fast”?

Friction is the poem running counter to the usual motive of language, to provide intelligence.  The poem frustrates expectation so as to arrive at something more interesting. It is not obfuscation to resist paraphrase, the way a sky diver might resist a parachute.

We are invited to think of the elemental, how water is urgent when we die, when we give birth.

Friction seems a mechanical thing, happening when machinery needs oil. But it is first of all natural: the shrug of one tectonic plate against another.

At the end of Joseph Richie’s fascinating poem, we not only have our instructions, but feel the power to implement them. With friction as ally, who can lose?  We can be glad to have this poem as our teacher, demonstrating mystery and meaning.

At the dew point, humidity is 100%. Water in the air liquifies onto the ground, onto plant life, windows, car hoods. It becomes what an old song calls “the foggy foggy dew.” The internet tells us that “Foggy Dew" or "Foggy, Foggy Dew" is an English folk song that migrated from the South of England to the Southern United States. On all that it touches, dew leaves a silvery sheen. I think the song does, too. And this poem, dew itself. -- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora: New Series (Part Two) Maureen Bloomfield [by Angela Ball]

Anchises

It was far away, not long ago,
As if time were a concurrent series of durations.
Pick the one you want; the others will be dragged
By the cursor to the space beyond the outlined page.
It was planned, like a book design,
The templates were in order.
“Don’t mess with the boxes,” the designer said.
“I forget what I did and then I have to redo it.”
O.K., I said. I understand.

Allegory was a legitimate vehicle
For the recovery of ancient images, the art book said.
Pallas Athena, goddess as Madonna,
Encounters the centaur who recoils. Unrebuffed,
She winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair.
In the dark wood there are mists that descend and
Rise again and the creatures seen there are slow-witted
And wend among the vapors slowly
So mortals can follow the pan shots of the dream.

My father does pretty well on his Alzheimer’s test.
He gets the month but not the year.
When he has to write a sentence, it’s one of praise
Of his doctor’s delicate beauty, ethereal and gold
In the style of Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.
In the car on the way home, he tells a story
Then folds his hands, becomes animated,
And tells it, altering the emphasis, again.
They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.

From the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto
Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger
Of his High-Church-from-Plymouth pa. Home was a business:
The lower floor a restaurant; the upper floor
A bar. Hale fellow, well met, the designated greeter,
A snappy dresser promenading along Lorain street
Hailing High Pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy, all
Right-off-the-boat greenhorns whose mothers, in the winter,
Walked the streets with blankets—searching for their sons.

On the eve of Saint Nick’s Day, the Salvation Army Lady
Is peeling the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth.
Her latticed fingers are stained red on the bell.
In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme, the virgin
Holds a pomegranate, or is it the son, though cherries
Are the fruit of paradise, I’d have to tell you,
If this were a quiz. I remembered the father but not
The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father,
Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.

The land of the dead is reached by water.
They are restless, queuing on the miasmic shore.
From the kitchen window my five-year-old father
Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.
What is this life but the intersection of two texts.
“Ain’t this the biggest mix-up that ye have ever seen:
Mi father he was Orange and mi mither she was Green.”
The swamp is foul; the sky plain; the neo-Platonic verdure,
Intricate and artful, for Reason illumines and casts away,

Allowing for precision in a context that’s barbaric.
He chose the ivory gate of sleep, forsaking false shadows.
He chose to wend backward through the gate of horn.
He was singing, the father, the true vision,
The one that he made up. From Lake Erie’s poisoned banks
The flaming city, oracular and perishing,
Kept vanishing. The time had come to wander.
Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River—
The hero’s task is always to find home.
                                                                --Maureen Bloomfield

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Maureen Bloomfield grew up in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Paris Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, The Nation, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her poem, "The Catholic Encyclopedia," was selected by Paul Muldoon for the Best American Poetry volume in 2005; her book Error and Angels was published by the University of South Carolina Press in the James Dickey Poetry Series.  She was for many years the editor of The Artist Magazine; her art reviews and essays have appeared in artforum, Art News, New Art Examiner, and Sculpture, among other venues.   She edited and wrote the introductory essay for Daniel E. Green Studios and Subways: An American Master His Life and Art (North Light Books, 2017).  Ms. Bloomfield has two daughters and three grandchildren; she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Maureen Bloomfield’s “Anchises” performs an audacious feat: it deftly and resonantly joins her personal origins with Western civilization’s. More crucially, it demonstrates and celebrates how ancient stories inform ordinary life, joining the exalted and the quotidian—certainly an aesthetic priority of the New York school of poets as a whole and particularly of Frank O’Hara, for whom construction workers’ silver helmets were objects of desire and a casual louse was not only worthy of a name but of its own poem.

This poem is informally formal, its blank verse a coat not buttoned but casually thrown over the shoulders; its rhymes serendipitous. Its beginning is a case in point, at first impersonating a stock story-telling set-up, but immediately confounding any such easy invocation of the primordial: “It was far away, not long ago, / As if time were a concurrent series of durations.” In our cyber world, it turns out, where we are depends on the whereabouts of a blink. Patterns are pre-determined, “templates . . .in order,” and we shouldn’t mess with them. We rely on format the way the designer relies on her boxes.

But the second stanza tells us we may still resort to ancient shaping devices, like allegory, to reconstitute experience. No less an authority than “an art book” tells us so. And gives us a deathless scene in which the cerebral Pallas Athena encounters the instinctual centaur—who, though he recoils, finds himself attached as she “winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair”—the line’s deliberateness mirroring the action as it’s performed. Stanzas enact scenes, and this stanza’s scene is completed in mists, its “slow-witted creatures” “wending slowly” so we dense mortals can follow the “pan shots of the dream.”

The poem we are inside is pan-ekphrastic, collaging painting and film, legend and family story.

The third stanza cuts to a vignette as ordinary as the second is extraordinary. A father is being tested for cognitive impairment. Neither completely in his time or out of it, he does “pretty well,” but is a genius at associating his doctor’s “delicate beauty” with that of women painted by “Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.”  In fact, the painting referred to in the preceding stanza might well be Pallas and the Centaur, painted by Sandro Botticelli in 1452 and dramatizing the eternal struggle between intellect and instinct.

Like the great Tony Bennett, who in his final years returned to his classic self when singing, the poet’s father, a true Irishman, returns to vitality by telling stories: “They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.” This line reminds us of the link between the meanings of the word “character,” variously denoting liveliness, the possession of definite qualities; and, at its root, a mark conveying meaning.

The fourth stanza tells us the father’s (the allegorical Anchises) story in everyday, demotic speech. He’s “from the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto / Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger / Of his High-Church-from Plymouth pa.” In this marriage, disparate, warring cultures collide and join. Intellect meets instinct again. The characters in this world have names that pronounce them unforgettable: “High pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy.” Though presumably tough guys, their mothers must seek them at night (possibly passed out on the streets) with blankets to keep them from freezing.

In the poem’s next vignette, a very unPersephone-like Salvation Army lady peels “the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth. She’s juxtaposed directly with “the virgin / In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme,” and the poet jokily seems to confuse the fruit with her son.  They seem engaged in a cognitive quiz: “I remembered the father but not / The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father, / Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.” The ancient tale remembered is Anchises’ rescue from the burning Troy. His rescuer is Aeneus, his son with Aphrodite.

As we know, Anchises fathered Aeneus, founder of Rome, after Aphrodite saw Anchises grazing cows on the slopes of Mount Ida; seduced him; and bore a child.

Here I’d like to mention someone who has nothing to do with the poem except that he is another Ohioan: a comedian popular in the 50’s and 60’s named Cliff Arquette. His success came with the formulation of a cornpone character, “Charlie Weaver,” who became his permanent public face, a personification of a disappearing character, the down-to-earth country bumpkin who loves telling stories. Weaver’s stories came from a mythical “Mount Idy”—perhaps named for the Mount Ida where Aphrodite and Aeneus fell in love. Whatever the case, this town produced the ideal that gave dimension to Arquette’s character, the myth he needed to contrast with his here and now. Like “Anchises,” Weaver was a story that told stories—both a satisfier and a mystifier.

The poem’s next stanza fuses the Land of the Dead with the Angle, as the poet’s “five-year-old father / Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.” Here the poem asks the rhetorical question that characterizes all experience: “What is life but the intersection of two texts.” This breathtaking statement is followed directly by dialogue showing Anchises/father as the character he is: “Mi father he was Orange and my mither she was Green.”  Orange, of course, is Protestant and British; Green, Catholic and Irish—the marriage a microcosm of the whole of Ireland. The stanza’s last two lines seem to revert, like the end of stanza two, to unsolvable mystery made of two texts in conflict: the real and the ideal.

Cleveland, with its once-burning river celebrated in a Randy Newman lyric, is an apt place for life to meet death and the underworld to meet remnants of heaven. It’s the father’s time to sing “the true vision, / the one that he made up.” But, like this poem and its story that encompasses the eternity of art and the constant vanishing of human life, the father finds himself through wandering. All waters the same: “Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River.” Maureen Bloomfield’s masterfully storied and immediate amalgam resolves itself in a simple statement that endows her father and all heroes with a straightforward, impossible purpose that transcends all others: “The hero’s task is always to find home.” -Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora: New Series [Part One] James Haug [by Angela Ball]

from Cloud Diaries

 

Each hour looked like something else. And, looking up, no one agreed on what that was, that it was fast and beautiful, or just loitered there like a rain cloud that had lumbered in from the west. Some thought of a memoir, a history, a memoir of history—life below the nimbuses. And the clouds, looking down, kept diaries too. Yet the entries bore little relation to one another—; and were they even entries, but extracts instead, so that the whole context was out of context, seriously adrift. Such a quandary, with its hairlike threads of ice, dissolved soon enough in the midday sun.

*

The town limped around town. It favored life in the old stores, and now the old stores were gone. After a while, the town began visiting other towns, running errands, little day trips, a long weekend, a ferry before sunup. It left a toothbrush and a shaving kit and a change of clothes in a bag behind the door and acquired a spare key. The town wrote it was dividing time between here and there. No one knew how it was that it made money, but it spent big-time on the road. It was spotted dolled-up cavorting in mixed company. Early one morning, a miraculous bounce to its step, the town lit out for a pack of cigarettes—: last seen upstate somewhere, mapping the interior of a cloud, specifically lenticularis, a disc-like formation often mistaken for a flying saucer.

-James Haug

 

James Haug’s most recent collections are Riverain (Oberlin College Press), Three Poems (Factory Hollow Press), and My Team Hates Friday (Press Brake). He publishes Scram Press in Northampton, Massachusetts, and drives a van for Riverside Industries.

James Haug’s immersive series of poems, “Cloud Diaries,” written in justified prose, is distinctly uncloudlike.  It stands to reason that clouds who write must steady their words. The two diaries I showcase here appear at different points in the series, the first one before the second.

At some point I believed that clouds came from outer space. This is highly untrue. The internet tells us that “Even though a cloud weighs tons, it doesn't fall on you because the rising air responsible for its formation keeps the cloud floating.” As part of our biosphere, these bodies (that might be called water-vapor boulders) come from and return to the surface and water table of land.  But while they are clouds they have a sweeping view of events: “Each hour looked like something else. And, looking up, no one agreed on what that was, that it was fast and beautiful, or just loitered there like a rain cloud that had lumbered in from the west.”  How surprising, how lovely, that “lumbered in,” vaguely reminding us of cloud elephants we may have known. If “each hour” looks like “something else,” and the same scene can be described as both “fast and beautiful” (a quasi-oxymoron) and ponderous, there’s no continuity. Only a constant vanishing, exact and ravishing: “Such a quandary, with its hairlike threads of ice, dissolved soon enough in the midday.”

Those viewing the clouds from underneath display diaristic impulses: “Some thought of a memoir, a history, a memoir of history—life below the nimbuses.”

Surely a memoir is distinct from a history—genres have their own houses, their own rules.  But do they, if they live “below the nimbuses”? What a wonderful title that would make for someone craven enough to steal from a cloud.

And the clouds, looking down, kept diaries too. Yet the entries bore little relation to one another—; and were they even entries, but extracts instead, so that the whole context was out of context, seriously adrift.

The above has captured the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It is, after all, water in spirit form. The clouds’ own memories aren’t immune to the dissolution they enact and describe. Do the words from their diaries cohere, are they really “entries”?  Or merely “extracts”—squeezed-out essences?  It is often said that without cultural consensus, we inhabit what George W. S. Trow has called "the context of no-context."

It occurs to me that this early “diary” might be the poet’s introduction—in which case, obviously, its author is what Mayakovsky called himself: “a cloud in trousers.” Be that as it may, this particular cloud has captured the zeitgeist, the spirt of the times. It is, after all, water as spirit, spirit as water.

*

Our second cloud embodies a town with the kind of playful audacity we expect from, say, Kenneth Koch, whose interest in personification may have stemmed from Shelly’s apostrophes to natural forces and who often, in the spirit of a magically continuous childhood, presents objects as though they were alive, as in “One train may hide another.” There’s a difference, though. In Koch, objects do things. In Haug, they not only do, but commit their doings to writing. Perhaps there’s a bigger affinity with Frank O’Hara, whose sun (on loan from Mayakovsky) communicates via speech in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.”

But only here have I seen such agency exhibited by an abstract collective. It seems awkward if not downright impossible. But Haug, obviously an expert at this kind of thing, simply muscles through. As one must, without listening to fussy inner objections about things not being able to turn themselves inside out:

The town limped around town. It favored life in the old stores, and now the old stores were gone. After a while, the town began visiting other towns, running errands, little day trips, a long weekend, a ferry before sunup. It left a toothbrush and a shaving kit and a change of clothes in a bag behind the door and acquired a spare key.

“The town wrote it was dividing its time between here and there” is a lovely parody of a mildly pretentious expression. Haug is a true literalist of the imagination. In other words, once the town has acquired human agency, there’s no limit to where or how it may live—a fact that astonishes onlookers—us and everyone.

The onlookers’ reaction--“No one knew how it was that it made money, but it spent big-time on the road. It was spotted dolled-up cavorting in mixed company”—exhibits enjoyment of insinuation (“no one knew how it was”), exaggeration (“but it spent big-time”), and sexual innuendo (“cavorting in mixed company”)—in other words, it has the panache of real gossip: no hard facts allowed.

The poem applies the familiar jargon of popular fiction to a situation that is anything but normal. Because denatured by context, these locutions zing with bright strangeness, like the unpromising photos in a Sebald novel. We might call this “cloud realism.” The town’s final departure from itself employs the classic trope of going out for cigarettes: “Early one morning, a miraculous bounce to its step, the town lit out for a pack of cigarettes—: last seen upstate somewhere, mapping the interior of a cloud, specifically lenticularis, a disc-like formation often mistaken for a flying saucer.”

What I’m calling realism, I think, actually resides not so much in familiar speech or situation as in vibrant detail: the toothbrush left “behind the door,” the “miraculous bounce,” and the stunning territory the town lights out for: the uncharted interior of a peculiar cloud, one shaped like a lens but “mistaken” for an alien spacecraft. The tone the poem leaves us with is scientific, rational, empirical—but this only throws its spectacular absurdity into higher relief. Our brief but sublime view of the phenomena that are James Haug’s clouds fittingly ends with an apparition of interplanetary travel—the cloud from outer space. -Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Six): Billy Collins [by Angela Ball]

In Praise of Ignorance

On a bench one afternoon
in a grassy park in Minneapolis,
I realized that what I liked best
about the dogs of Minneapolis
is they have no idea they’re in Minneapolis.

The same could be said
of the dogs of Houston or Philadelphia,
it occurred to me on the slow walk
back to my hotel, but I was
in no mood to be distracted.

I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,
I resolved as the elevator
rose to my floor, just as they stick
with their owners, the natives of Minneapolis,
most of whom know exactly where they are.

Alone in my room on the 17th floor,
I surveyed the vast prospect below me—
the slithery river and hills beyond
and the bluish hills beyond those hills—

in the manner of those English poets
who loved to regard the world from a height.
One of them even had a witty epitaph
inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.
                                                                     -Billy Collins

Billy Collins's most recent book of poems is Water, Water.  Forthcoming is Dog Show, a collection of his dog poems with accompanying canine watercolor portraits. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

Billy Collins’s arresting “In Praise of Ignorance” begins with a revelation: “I realized what I liked best about the dogs of Minneapolis/ is they have no idea they are in Minneapolis.”

Animals are often said to be devoid of self-consciousness (not true) to live only in the moment (also not true), and/or not to experience duration when we leave and do not return for many hours (currently being disproven by research). In comparison to such metaphysics, Collins’ revelation seems ridiculously inconsequential. But is it?

Collins’ aperçu perhaps gets at the source of the bounce in a young dog’s walk—they simply travel, guided by a leash, unconstrained by geography. Unlike adult people, who remain aware of longitude, latitude, and the whole awkward contraption of distances, dogs are true cosmopolitans. They are anywhere and everywhere.

John Ashbery has said that he doesn’t think his thought operations are that different from anyone else’s. This assertion shows him capable of dramatizing thought in universal ways. Perhaps Collins does the same thing, though in a more direct manner. When he says, “I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,” he celebrates and satirizes human chauvinism, the basis of all fandom. And he supports his choice by likening it to the loyalty of dogs, who are, in a way, revealed here as models for living.

Like Ashbery’s, Collins’s poems often both celebrate and parody human thought processes. Here, in characterizing an idee fixe, Collins chooses graphic simplicity.

His poem has a Romantic peripatetic impetus—its recognition takes place outdoors, in nature, and continues as he strolls back to his hotel room. He compares himself to the Lake poets, humorously satirizing his own pretensions—a joke that becomes explicit in the poem’s last two stanzas. The same humor is evident in a short biopic made on Collins several years ago, after he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. A camera is trained on him as he pilots his car—he comments later that he was “afraid of looking like a bad driver.”

Collins’s description of the view from his 17th-floor window is both lyrically evocative and subtly satirical of Romantic endlessness--“the slithery river and the hills beyond / and the bluish hills beyond those hills. . .”—and of those “English poets/who loved to regard the world from a height.” “One of them,” he says, “even had a witty epitaph inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.”

Collins’s ending is, of course, a sly reference to that most satirical of Romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron. The internet tells us that “Epitaph to a Dog” was written in 1808 in honor of Byron’s Landseer dog, Boatswain. A tribute of some twenty-six lines of heroic couplets, it is inscribed on Boatswain’s monument (grander than Byron’s own in the same park), and includes the following sentiment:

 

     . . .the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend

     The first to welcome, foremost to defend

     Whose honest heart is still his master’s own

     Who labors, fights, breathes for him alone

     Unhonor’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth

     Deny’d in Heaven the Soul he held on earth*

 

Byron is reported to have nursed Boatswain to the end of his illness—rabies—with no thought of being bitten and infected.

That the poem ends by tacitly endorsing the grandeur of dogs in no way subtracts from its humor. It simply completes, in a surprising turn to human and canine history, the poem’s “praise of ignorance”—a praise both funny and solemn, consummately human and humane.

*The website The Classical Quill gives encomiums to dogs a classical pedigree, quoting the Greek teacher Hermongenes of Tarsus (fl. AD 550) on how to write encomia of animals.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Five): David Lehman [by Angela Ball]

I Remember

     --After Joe Brainard

          1.

I remember high school and wanting people to call me Dave.

I remember a truck driver named Dave.

I remember when my older sister was sixteen and she and two

          girlfriends went on a triple date with boys named Fred, Steve,

          and Dave.

I remember when I didn’t want anyone to call me Dave.

 

          2.

I remember thinking that Communists didn’t exist.  They were

          bogeymen, invented to scare little kids, or they did exist but far

          away, in another country, or as abstract entities to be granted

          existence for the sake of an argument or the exposition of a theory.

I remember thinking no one took drugs or was a juvenile

           delinquent except in movies.

I remember getting up each morning and vomiting on the way to

          the elevated IRT stop at Dyckman Street and Nagle Avenue.

          Sometimes I could time it just right and hurl into a garbage can

          without breaking my stride.

I remember thinking that mental illness and profound sadness were

          two great romantic conditions.

I remember when there were two types of people, Jews and Catholics.

I remember when there were two types of people, those who were for

          the war in Vietnam and those who were against it, and there

          could be no connection between us.

I remember that the world was divided between Yankee fans and

          Dodger fans.

I remember thinking that to be an avant-garde artist you had to be

          rich and live in Paris, preferably near the Notre-Dame-des-

          Champs Métro stop.

I remember when the test of a true artist was whether he admitted that

          money motivated him to write.

 

          3.

I remember the first book I ever bought.  It was a book of Zen koans.

          with an orange-colored jacket and I bought it at a musty

          bookstore in the Village where Ben Hecto and I walked one

          spring afternoon in our senior year at Stuyvesant.

I remember two of the koans to this day.

I remember liking best the koan resembling the parable of wise

          Solomon except that two monks rather than two mothers are

          laying claim to a cat rather than a baby.

Nansen, the head monk, takes out a cleaver and chops the cat in two.

           When Joshu hears the story, he takes off his shoes, puts them on

            his head, and walks out of the room, and Nansen says: “Had

            Joshu been there, he could have saved the cat.”

I remember Nansen showed the three young monks a jug of water and

          challenged them to define its essence without naming it.  The first

          monk said: It is not a puddle because I can carry it.  The second

           monk said: Freezes in winter, thaws in spring, quenches the

           parched lips of summer.  The third monk kicked over the jug and

           won the competition.

(I don’t remember the prize or the purpose of the competition, but that

            after all is the nature of competitions.)

 

               4.

I remember “I Remember, I Remember,” by Thomas Hood, whose

            poems I read in the gloom of a foggy November morning in East

            Anglia.

I remember “I Remember You,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by

           Victor Schertzinger.

I remember I Remember by Joe Brainard in which every paragraph

          begins “I remember,” and the language is simple and unaffected,

          artless and innocent and charming.

I remember thinking that it took real genius to recall an early

           embarrassment or to exhibit your own naivete.

I remember discovering that I was funny.

 

                  5.

I remember the Woolworth’s on Dyckman Street where they had an

           automatic photo booth.  You put in your quarters, took a seat,

           and got four snapshots

 I remember the automat.  There was Bickford’s and there was Horn

            and Hardart.

I remember P.D.Q. Bach’s “Concerto for Horn and Hardart,” a witty

           title once.

I remember a dish of custard at the automat.

I remember watermelon, ten cents a pound, at the fruit stand.

I remember when white nectarines in upstate New York were the most

          delicious fruit.

I remember England and going into an automatic photo booth with

          Jeanne, a junior at Mount Holyoke, and both of us were blond

          and smiling and wearing trenchcoats.

I remember hitching rides with Jeanne from Oxford to Cambridge and

          spending the night in a bed-and-breakfast on Queen’s Road.

I remember the embarrassment of the maid when she knocked on the

          door and opened it and saw that we were still asleep in our twin

           beds.

I remember writing love poems even when I wasn’t in love with

           anyone.

I remember thinking that love without an object was pure.

I remember hearing an explosion and thinking it was just my

            imagination.

I remember A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I remember when I was in college and had one secret I kept from even

            my closest friends, and twenty years later I saw Bill, a newspaper

            editor just as he had always wanted to be, and he asked me

            about the secret and I couldn’t remember.

I remember that Bill and I and two other guys were going to meet at

             the Eiffel Tower on July 4, 1999.

I remember the smell of Gauloises and Gitanes sans filtre.

I remember the movie about three army buddies who meet as planned

           at a New York bar ten years after the war, and now none of them

           can stand the other two.

I remember the episode of the sitcom in which Ann Sothern and

           three old friends meet as planned after many years and all are

           fabulously successful except Ann, who is Don Porter’s executive

           secretary, but then it turns out that the other three were just

           putting on airs and Ann was the only honest one and so in an

           important way she was the most successful of them all.

I remember that the fight had something to do with a girl.

I remember the shock of finding out that girls like sex as much as

            boys did—maybe even more in some cases.

I remember buying a ring at a Woolworth’s in Dublin so she and I

            could stay together in a cheap hotel, pretending to be married.

I remember that the worst meal I have ever eaten was at a Chinese

            restaurant that summer in Dublin.

I remember expecting Chinese restaurants in New York, where spicy

            Szechuan cooking had come into style.

I remember the squawk of the gulls and the gray of the sky above the

            Irish Sea.

                               -David Lehman

from Poems in the Manner Of . . . published by Scribner Poetry, 2017

David Lehman is a great fan of Frank Sinatra, the subject of his book Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, which HarperCollins published in December 2015, the centenary of the singer’s birth. That month, Jack Daniel's released a limited edition of high-priced bourbon packaged with a thumb drive featuring a Sinatra set from Las Vegas in January 1966; Lehman got to review both the bourbon and the performance for The Wall Street Journal. His book Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991) infuriated critical theorists and accurately predicted the major crises in the humanities that have bedeviled higher education. Lehman has also written about the composers and lyricists of the American songbook; A Fine Romance won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award in 2010. Among his many other nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998) and One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell UP, 2019), which uses his four-year ordeal battling cancer as the framework for memories, desires, fantasies, dreams, and meditations. Lehman’s books of poetry include The Morning Line (Pittsburgh, 2021), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), and The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000). Lehman edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and has been the general editor of The Best American Poetry since he launched the annual anthology in 1988. (Bio by Freddy Chervil).

[Photo of John Ashbery and David Lehman by Star Black, 2011]

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Five:  David Lehman

David Lehman’s large and lifelong project has been to pay tribute to poets and the grandeur and humor of ordinary life as transformed by them. This he has done through his own stellar body of poetry, his longstanding and monumental book series, The Best American Poetry, this eponymous blog, and in countless other ways. A student of Kenneth Koch’s at Columbia, Lehman was certainly in the avant-garde of recognizing the importance of the New York School of Poets, and his perceptive and seminal The Last Avant-Garde not only makes an eloquent case for the NYS as exactly that but also provides a model of how poets can inspire each other through loving collision and a shared ethos of exploration and play. Lehman’s own work is exemplary of the values and ideas he has fostered and sustained, and no book more so than 2017’s Poems in the Manner of . . .

In his introduction, Lehman says of the project, “I had in mind the shibboleth that in writing poetry, to have a distinctive ‘voice’ is everything.” He goes on to say that “style is misunderstood; it is not the end in itself but the means to an indefinable end . . .”  What happens in this book is akin to the transformation that can arise from a supremely good costume: in impersonating someone else, the reveler happens on a deeper version of their own personality, one somehow connected with all that transcends personality and its inherent impermanence.

The locution “In the Manner of” derives from two poems in Ted Berrigan’s landmark The Sonnets: “Poem in the Traditional Manner” and “Poem in the Modern Manner.”  Lehman’s ideas about poetry and art in a sense depend on the on-going struggle between “tradition” and “modernity”: the old versus the new. In his introduction to The Last Avant-Garde, Lehman quotes Gertrude Stein: ‘For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause everybody accepts,’ Stein wrote. ‘In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.’” Then, Lehman quotes Kafka’s famous parable “Leopards in the Temple”: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink up the contents of the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated again and again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.’” [Photo on right: Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, and John Ashbery, Worcester, Massachusetts, circa 2000]

It is this knowledge, in part, that allows Lehman to play poetically fast and loose with previous poets and to also pay tribute to the “ceremony”: the mysterious continuum where all true art resides.

Lehman’s  “I Remember –after Joe Brainard” plays a signal role in this volume.  Joe Brainard, a brilliant poet, artist, and playful cartoonist, a particularly tragic casualty of AIDS epidemic, embodies the antic spirit of The New York School of Poets and, in particular, the love affair between the comic and the nostalgic so prominent in their work—Kenneth’s Koch’s in particular.

I first encountered this book in a British edition discovered in a used-and-rare shop in London circa 1983. I went directly to a pub; and, refreshed by a cold pint, read the book in its entirety. “Entirety” seems the right word, since Brainard’s remembrances, though of a boy growing up in rural Oklahoma, seem somehow all-encompassing, universal. He added more to them during his short life, amplifying that effect. Since that day, I have used “I Remember” as a prompt and inspiration for every undergraduate writing class I’ve taught; the poems inspired by it seem almost to write themselves. I remember in particular the brilliance of this line, written by an undergraduate in an honors composition class: “I remember my dog, his smell of dusty cornflakes.”

David Lehman’s “I remember” employs Brainard’s engine of anaphora to propel an urban boy’s memories. This may be a city kid, but no less bewildered than Brainard; and, like Brainard, he seeks to resolve his uncertainties through formulaic categories: “I remember thinking that mental illness and sadness were two great romantic conditions. / I remember when there were two types of people, Jews and Catholics.” This oversimplification is disarmingly ironic: we see the huge shortfall of understanding driven by a young person’s need to make sense of the world’s proliferating complications. We are reminded of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and his flyleaf inscription: Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe.

It is impossible in a small space to detail all of the celebrations and transformations of Brainard in this expansive poem. It does seem important to point out how Section 2 recognizes and develops “I Remember”’s affinity with the Zen koan:

     I remember Nansen showed the three young monks a jug of water

          and challenged them to define its essence without naming it.  The first

          monk said: It is not a puddle because I can carry it. The second

          monk said: Freezes in winter, thaws in spring, quenches the

          parched lips of summer.  The third monk kicked over the jug and

          won the competition.

This particular koan, remembered in homage to “I Remember,” resonates throughout Lehman’s oeuvre as poet and scholar. One example occurs in the next section of the poem:

         I remember “I Remember” by Joe Brainard in which every paragraph

              begins “I remember,” and the language is simple and unaffected,

              artless and innocent and charming.

         I remember thinking that it took real genius to recall an early

              embarrassment or to admit your own naivete.

         I remember discovering that I was funny.

 

The last line of this section not only makes Lehman’s poem “meta”--a temple within a temple, it also kicks its own jug.  And it would be difficult to find a more direct and accurate characterization of Brainard’s work than “the language is simple and unaffected, artless and innocent and charming.”

Section 5 remembers, among many other things, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and that “the worst meal I have ever eaten was at a Chinese restaurant that summer in Dublin.”

And there is this final, ravishing compound image: “the squawk of the gulls and the gray of the sky above the Irish Sea.”

In a way, this poem and all the poems from Poems in the Manner Of …  reflect John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror; with the poem encompassing not just the poet, but a welter of sensibility, emotion, and recognition: part of what Wallace Stevens called “the long conversation between poets.” And it may be true that every poem—no matter when in life it is created or read--is a bildungsroman, like A Portrait of the Artist, reintroducing the world, making us new.

-Angela Ball

Questions and Other Answers: An Imaginary Q & A [by Allison Campbell]

The Moorman Symposium [organized by Angela Ball] starts tomorrow [May 2, 2014]  To prepare for the panel discussion on New York School poetry, I thought it would be good to sit our visiting poets -- Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, David Kirby and Barbara Hamby -- down with New York School poets -- John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler -- for an informal Q & A.

In this mock-panel, questions found in New York School poets' work are answered with lines from contemporary poets. This conversation is so seamless you wouldn't know that decades, wars, and multiple presidents all existed between the questions and replies!

*special thanks to my New York School studying peers Nicholas Benca, Jennifer Jacob, and Tracie Dawson for help "facilitating" this Q&A 

O'Hara: "Am I looking handsome?"

Kirby: “if not handsome, beau-laid, / as the French say, or handsome-ugly, as we all are / in our way.” 

Schuyler: “‘What are the questions you wish to ask?’”

Duhamel: “When James Taylor and Carly Simon / broke up, I was shocked. Taylor’s drug use or not, / couldn’t they work it out? [...] How could they part having written all those love songs? And how could they go on / singing those love songs after the divorce?”

Ashbery: "What can we achieve, aspiring? And what, aspiring can we achieve?"

Hamby: "Well, we're in hell, and like Persephone fighting dark Hades, it's a waste of time." 

Koch: "How many people I have drunk tea or coffee with / And thought about the boiling water hardly at all, just / waiting for it to boil / So there could be coffee or chocolate or tea. And then / what?"

Lehman: “The dog walked in and peed on the carpet and the chaplain’s wife / Said, ‘Oh, Rosebud, you’re being boring.’ / Boring meant something other than boring.” 

O'Hara: "Dear god, I think that iron gate I put up as a weather vane is creaking. An angel must be arriving. Who do you suppose it could be?"

Collins: "I am the dog you put to sleep / as you like to call the needle of oblivion / come back to tell you this one simple thing: / I never liked you - not one bit." 

Schuyler: "What am I supposed to be the poem doctor?" (Ron Padgett quoted by Schuyler)

Padgett: "I don’t know anything about hemorrhoids / Such as if it hurts to sit when you have them / If so I must not have them / Because it doesn’t hurt me to sit/ I probably sit about 8/15 of my life"

 

Ashbery: "Meanwhile what am I going to do?"

Hamby: “Pass me the beer and the goddamned pool cue, /  Romeo.”

Koch: "Haven't I Lost that sweet easy knack I had last week, Last month, last year, last decade, which pleased everyone And especially pleased me?"

Lehman: “...do you recall/ when I visited Cambridge/ I left you a note// with the Clare porter./ The world is charged (I wrote) with / the grandeur of you!” 

Schuyler: “Are you a larch?”

Collins: “It might interest you to know, / speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. // I also happen to be the shooting star, / the evening paper blowing down an alley, and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.”

O'Hara: "Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?"

Duhamel: “To tell you the truth, / it’s easier to be blonde because the gray blends in, / just the way I’ve always wanted to blend in and not.”

Schuyler: “What’s with art anyway, that / we give it such precedence?”

Hamby: “...testosterone run amok, / or so I’m thinking here from my present perch

Ashbery: "Then what unholy bridegroom / did the Aquarian foretell? / Or was such lively intelligence / only the breath of hell?"

Kirby: “Holy moly-- / the Antichrist!”

 

Koch: "The connection here is how serious / is it for the tree / To have its arms wave (its branches)? How did it ever get such flexibility / In the first place?"

Collins: "The leafless branches against the sky / will not save anyone from the void ahead,”

Koch: "Almost any amount of time suffices to be a 'minor poet' / Once you have mastered a certain amount of the craft / For writing a poem, but I do not see the good of minor poetry, / Like going to the Tour d'Argent to get dinner for your / dog, / Or 'almost' being friends with someone, or hanging / around but not attending a school, / Or being a nurse's aid for the rest of your life after / getting a degree in medicine, / What is the point of it?"

Kirby: “My psychodynamic electrohelmet / would have explained everything, but I never got / to use it.”

first posted May 1 2014 pior to the Moorman  Symposium at the University of Southern Mississippi

The Moorman Symposium [organized by Angela Ball] starts tomorrow [May 2, 2014]  To prepare for the panel discussion on New York School poetry, I thought it would be good to sit our visiting poets -- Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, David Kirby and Barbara Hamby -- down with New York School poets -- John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler -- for an informal Q & A.

In this mock-panel, questions found in New York School poets' work are answered with lines from contemporary poets. This conversation is so seamless you wouldn't know that decades, wars, and multiple presidents all existed between the questions and replies!

*special thanks to my New York School studying peers Nicholas Benca, Jennifer Jacob, and Tracie Dawson for help "facilitating" this Q&A 

O'Hara: "Am I looking handsome?"

Kirby: “if not handsome, beau-laid, / as the French say, or handsome-ugly, as we all are / in our way.” 

Schuyler: “‘What are the questions you wish to ask?’”

Duhamel: “When James Taylor and Carly Simon / broke up, I was shocked. Taylor’s drug use or not, / couldn’t they work it out? [...] How could they part having written all those love songs? And how could they go on / singing those love songs after the divorce?”

Ashbery: "What can we achieve, aspiring? And what, aspiring can we achieve?"

Hamby: "Well, we're in hell, and like Persephone fighting dark Hades, it's a waste of time." 

Koch: "How many people I have drunk tea or coffee with / And thought about the boiling water hardly at all, just / waiting for it to boil / So there could be coffee or chocolate or tea. And then / what?"

Lehman: “The dog walked in and peed on the carpet and the chaplain’s wife / Said, ‘Oh, Rosebud, you’re being boring.’ / Boring meant something other than boring.” 

O'Hara: "Dear god, I think that iron gate I put up as a weather vane is creaking. An angel must be arriving. Who do you suppose it could be?"

Collins: "I am the dog you put to sleep / as you like to call the needle of oblivion / come back to tell you this one simple thing: / I never liked you - not one bit." 

Schuyler: "What am I supposed to be the poem doctor?" (Ron Padgett quoted by Schuyler)

Padgett: "I don’t know anything about hemorrhoids / Such as if it hurts to sit when you have them / If so I must not have them / Because it doesn’t hurt me to sit/ I probably sit about 8/15 of my life"

 

Ashbery: "Meanwhile what am I going to do?"

Hamby: “Pass me the beer and the goddamned pool cue, /  Romeo.”

Koch: "Haven't I Lost that sweet easy knack I had last week, Last month, last year, last decade, which pleased everyone And especially pleased me?"

Lehman: “...do you recall/ when I visited Cambridge/ I left you a note// with the Clare porter./ The world is charged (I wrote) with / the grandeur of you!” 

Schuyler: “Are you a larch?”

Collins: “It might interest you to know, / speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. // I also happen to be the shooting star, / the evening paper blowing down an alley, and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.”

O'Hara: "Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?"

Duhamel: “To tell you the truth, / it’s easier to be blonde because the gray blends in, / just the way I’ve always wanted to blend in and not.”

Schuyler: “What’s with art anyway, that / we give it such precedence?”

Hamby: “...testosterone run amok, / or so I’m thinking here from my present perch

Ashbery: "Then what unholy bridegroom / did the Aquarian foretell? / Or was such lively intelligence / only the breath of hell?"

Kirby: “Holy moly-- / the Antichrist!”

 

Koch: "The connection here is how serious / is it for the tree / To have its arms wave (its branches)? How did it ever get such flexibility / In the first place?"

Collins: "The leafless branches against the sky / will not save anyone from the void ahead,”

Koch: "Almost any amount of time suffices to be a 'minor poet' / Once you have mastered a certain amount of the craft / For writing a poem, but I do not see the good of minor poetry, / Like going to the Tour d'Argent to get dinner for your / dog, / Or 'almost' being friends with someone, or hanging / around but not attending a school, / Or being a nurse's aid for the rest of your life after / getting a degree in medicine, / What is the point of it?"

Kirby: “My psychodynamic electrohelmet / would have explained everything, but I never got / to use it.”

first posted May 1 2014 pior to the Moorman  Symposium at the University of Southern Mississippi

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Four): David Shapiro [by Angela Ball]

AFTER RYOKAN

In my bowl

In the thin snow

In front of my window
In the window sky
In the blue distance
In the scattered door

In every quarter of the
evening land
In the pool near your room
In the shadow on the highway—
In the staves of the sky

I seem to hear your voice

                                           --David Shapiro

As a child, David Shapiro, a widely renowned, much-loved poet, teacher and art historian, was a violin and literary prodigy.  At 10, he decided to be poet, and within a few years, met Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and the movement now known as the New York School—of which he would, with time, be considered a leading poet, proponent and scribe. He studied with Koch and Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, publishing January, the first of his 11 books of poetry, as an 18-year-old undergraduate. Awarded a Kellett fellowship, he earned an MA at Clare College, Cambridge before returning to Columbia for his PhD. Shapiro also produced numerous works of prose, including seminal monographs on John Ashbery, Jasper Johns and Piet Mondrian. He taught literature at Columbia and Princeton, was a tenured art historian at William Paterson University, and created an interdisciplinary course in aesthetics which he taught for many years at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union.

 

                                                                        Portrait of David Shapiro by Chris Felver

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Four) David Shapiro

Ekphrasis, broadly defined, is the heart of the New York School of Poets. The impulse to speak to, from, and into pre-existing art drove the creativity of the “big four.” John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler were gratefully enthralled and competitively motivated by each other’s work, by poets brought to English (sometimes by them), and by artists of all stripes.

So it is not surprising that David Shapiro chose to respond to a Japanese poet who, as a young man, was a disciple of a Zen master, Kokusen, and after his death embarked on a long pilgrimage. Then Ryōkan became a hermit. It is reported that he never took himself too seriously. He sneaked into the midsummer festivals though monks were enjoined not to attend. Late in life he was cared for by a young nun, and the two grew close, exchanging a series of tender haiku.

David Shapiro’s poem hinges on a notoriously ungainly part of speech: the preposition. It explores inness. As the short poem progresses, we learn it, the sensation of being in. The poem begins in familiarity with “in my bowl”—likely the one piece of crockery owned by the Zen poet—and “In the thin snow”—we are accustomed to speaking of ourselves as “in” weather. “In front of the window” is also normal usage.  But the poem’s purview swells till “in” includes the widest of expanses: “In every corner of the / evening land.”  We feel ourselves somehow thinned with distance, denatured. And what is “the scattered door”? The poem has abolished the difference between outside and in, between near and far, with “in” so broadly defined that it becomes stunningly impersonal. But wait—

     In the pool near your room
     In the shadow on the highway—
     In the staves of the sky

“In” suddenly connects, as prepositions do, with an all-consuming “you” that in these three lines--the first intimate, the second estranged, the third almost cosmic—pertaining to the harsh structure of the infinite, those mysterious “staves.”

Then David Shapiro’s illuminating, mute poem suddenly throws us into emptiness--but wait—an aural connection appears, compounded of doubt and hope: “I seem to hear your voice.” The ekphrasis the poem achieves is of an entity most complex and most essential, the founder of all festivals. - Angela Ball

On Angela Ball's "Hares" [by Jim Cummins]

photo © Steffi Wacker

To talk about Angela Ball's brilliant poem, "Hares," which appeared in the Paris Review last winter, I really have to begin with a look at the voice of the speaker in the first six lines. It's a very cunning sleight-of-hand that sets up the poem top to bottom. The very first words "Not mine—" imagine a world the speaker is outside of, a world the speaker approaches almost apologetically, reassuring the gatekeeper of that world—whoever he is or they are—that although she's going to take "some" of it, she promises she won't take much, just a "part."  And "not the best part," she claims.  Those words end line three.  

But then, in line four she completely upends this "hat in hand" assurance: "it could be the best, though."  There is "no way of knowing," the implication being that the assessment of value in that world might be askew.  She might bargain for a smaller part, but what's made available to her might include the best part because the ones who've got it might not know what they've got.  By mildly speculating on the ultimate value of what's at stake, she's undermines the authority of those who guard that world.  There's social humility at work here ("knowing one's place"), and social humility is an agreed-upon mask; but true humility recognizes the worth of the self.  The custodian of the world the speaker will take "a part" of is, finally, a gatekeeper to the wider philosophical world the lyric is going to traverse.  

After the initial obeisance is paid—almost like a fare or an admission charge—the speaker lists a catalogue of "specific abstractions" (my term) of what she will "take" a part of, the whole of which amounts to what I'll call life itself, or on the individual's part, the reclaiming of a life.  Synecdoche is an age-old rhetorical device loved by poets.  Here, Angela's magic has turned it into another effective tool that makes our footing a little bit shakier than when we started.  Synecdoche, of course, substitutes part for whole, or vice versa.  Angela doubles its effect in the following way.  Take the first example.  The "blue part" is a "whole" that is itself broken into blue things (and the blue thing selected to be "taken" by the speaker from this category is a cantilever bridge).  But this blue "whole" is "part" of a larger whole that I'm calling "life" or "world."  So the cantilever bridge is part to the larger blue whole; but the blue whole is part to the whole of life, the smorgasbord, carnival, boxing match, of life.  The longest part of "Hares" is a catalogue of these synecdoches.

Synecdoches that are parts of greater wholes include colors (of experience--subdued colors, I might add, which speaks to personality type and character), roughness of life (teeth marks, halter), deliquescence and dis-integration (failure, death), unflinching art, attempt at prophylaxis (vaccination), people who understand things, people who don't, ecstasy (endorphins—if swimming, it might be 'endolphins'), rebirth, reincarnation, Nature, Beauty—and much else.  Then the last six lines envelope the poem and focus in on the particulars of the part she takes that IS the larger whole: life, lived with another "part," who "rests close against me" and watches the boxing hares with her. These last six lines come back to the micro, zero in on particulars ("parts") that make up a whole personality, being, who watches with her the spectacular presentation of dawn. I would say the boxing hares are the last part-to-whole, but they're not.  The image of the mysterious presence resting close to the speaker is the last synecdoche of the poem.

Whitman's catalogues, often part of an ecstatic whole, can't be ignored here. Angela is an American poet working in an American vein: you can't produce a new catalogue without calling to mind the Cataloguer of catalogues--not if you're "part" of a tradition. Whitman moves from the micro to the macro and back in 'Song of Myself'—in a more modest way, Angela does the same.  We return to "Not mine—" --the words that begin the poem. Why isn't "it" hers?  Why does Whitman proclaim "Myself" while Angela says "Not mine"?  I'm not going to make an argument about "male ego" vs. a woman's "place" (especially since that place is usually defined by men); or about the idea that no one of sensibility would want to identify with America these days; but the puns surrounding that Manifest Destiny century--the 19th--are a lot of (dark) fun.  Originally, "manifest" meant "caught by hand," or even "seized."  The sense of entitlement that Whitman took for granted is not just shied away from in Angela's "Not mine"--but is in fact debunked. Whitman, Emerson, the whole 19^th Century, was about power, American 'exceptionalism,' identity through strength; and it produced great work. Angela's poem is a much more modest 21st Century acceptance, even quiet celebration, of a more human-sized part-for-whole.  "Hares," I would offer, is a sturdy, tough-minded expression of what affirmation we're capable of these days: an acceptance of our "part" in the scheme of things, and the resting close to our "part"-ners as we watch the amazing spectacle of it all.  

 

Angela Ball is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of five previous poetry collections: Kneeling Between Parked Cars, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. Angela curates the "New York School Diaspora" for this blog. Find her selections here. 

 

James Cummins is the author of Still Some Cake (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2012); Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005), with David Lehman; Portrain in a Spoon:Poems (The James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series) and Then & Now (Swallow Press, 2004), among others. His honors include an Ingram Merrill grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One): Paul Violi [by Angela Ball]

EXTENDED SHORTAGES

I must remind you how serious I’ve become,
Almost grave (though still immensely likeable).

Love threatens to carry me off
Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.

Counterweight! I need a counterweight.
I read history late into the night,
A scavenger, loading up
On high deeds and disillusionment,
Treachery and hope, until I am unable
To hop over a footnote.

An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon,
A scotch and soda atop the King James,
Eventually a whiff of pity comes my way,
Not for me but for that sad Titan,
The dim-witted one who has to bear
The weight of heaven and earth*
Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.
Then I can snooze, snicker at my own
Grief and shortcomings and snooze.

When I wake and rise and slowly dress
With dust motes whirling madly around me
In that lovely solemn light, I do not risk
Even thinking about you until I feel
The weight of all I recall sink to my feet
And then in a bow to Philetus,**
I reach for my shoes.

                                   -Paul Violi   (First published in Mississippi Review's Poets of the New York School issue, 2003)

*Thirteen trillion trillion tons.

**Philetus of Cos, poet, teacher, famed for his love lyrics, admired by Ovid and Propertius, tutor to Ptolemy of Philadelphus, so small he had to wear lead shoes lest in the desert wind he be blown away.

 

Paul Violi

1944—2011

Paul Violi was an avant-garde poet. Waterworks, a short selection of his early poems, appeared in 1972, and In Baltic Circles was published the following year. He authored eleven books of poetry, including Harmatan (1977), Splurge (1982), Likewise (1988), The Curious Builder (1993), and Fracas (1999). After receiving a Grants to Artists award in 1999, Violi released Breakers (2000), a selection of his longer poems, and Overnight (2007).

The expanded text of Violi's first collaboration with printmaker Dale Devereux Barker, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes (2002), is a collection of non-fiction prose. Violi and Barker's art books, including Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting (2006), have been acquired by many libraries and museums.

Subsequent to his 1999 Grants to Artists award, Violi was given The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001) and a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).

Prior to his 1999 FCPA grant, Violi had received grants from the Ingram Merrrill Foundation (1979), The New York Foundation for the Arts (1987), and The Fund for Poetry (1988, 1992). He was also the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships (1980, 1986).

Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972 to 1974 and worked on freelance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions, researching correspondence of poets and artists and assisting Buckminster Fuller while he wrote the text to Tetrascroll (1982). As chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, Violi organized a series of readings at The Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, a poetry magazine called New York Times, and Broadway: A Poets And Painters Anthology (1979), edited by James Schuyler and Charles North.

Violi graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English and a minor in Art History. At the time of his death he was teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at The New School. He also taught at New York University, The Dalton School, Sing-Sing, Stevens Institute of Technology, Bloomfield College, State University of New York at Purchase, and Scarsdale Teachers Institute.  (The Foundation for Contemporary Arts)

I am indebted to Ann Violi, the poet’s widow, for the biography above, for this photo, and for permission to republish the poem, which first appeared in Mississippi Review’s Poets of the New York School in 2003.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One):  Paul Violi

Paul Violi’s gregarious and self-effacing “Extended Shortages,” shares James Schuyler’s poetic domesticity, creating landscapes of the indoor, the close at hand.  He greets us with a humorous disclaimer of humor: “I must remind you how serious I’ve become, / Almost grave (Though still immensely likeable).

But suddenly he warns of impending danger: “Love threatens to carry me off / Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.”  We are reminded of contemporary dance’s fervent moments of extreme buoyancy, when flying costumes seem almost to mate.

Then comes a welcome solution: “A counterweight!”  The one that chooses him is history, that weighty discipline, that he reads “late into the night / A scavenger, loading up on high deeds and disillusionment, / Treachery and hope.” The reading lasts until the buzzardized speaker can no longer “hop over a footnote.” How many times have current events made us think ‘Who am I in the face of all this’? How much more so the past.

We next see the items that furnish the poet’s home: “An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon, / A scotch and soda atop the King James”—the poem plays with heft as trivial objects top massively important tomes: The Decline and Fall, the King James Bible—their permanence dominated by temporary pleasures.  Our enthralled speaker seems released by the “whiff of pity” that arrives,

     Not for me but for that sad Titan,

     The dim-witted one who has to bear

     The weight of heaven and earth

     Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.

     Then I can snooze, snicker at my own

     Grief and shortcomings and snooze.

His empathy for a mythical lifter of “thirteen trillion trillion tons” saves the speaker/poet from sinking under history’s heft—in the same way, I think, that savoring the name, “Korean Mums,” saves James Schuyler from anonymous despair.

The rest of Violi’s poem, instead of dispensing with the past, invokes it with serio-comic lightness:

     Even thinking about you until I feel

     The weight of all I recall sink to my feet

     And then in a bow to Philetus,

     I reach for my shoes.

All at once, we realize that the “you” in the poem is the source of the wilding inflicted by love in the second stanza. We feel poundage countered by the uplift of poetry and love. Paul Violi’s transformative “Extended Shortages” is really a consortium of abundances  ending with a physically slight but mentally immense poet, Philetus—a poet named for love, who must wear “lead shoes” to keep from being blown away, who paradoxically cues the abundance inherent in history and poetry and also the moment of ordinary life when we prepare ourselves for the outside world as love and words and world gloriously take each other’s weight. -- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One) James Appleby [by Angela Ball]

I lived once beside a slaughterhouse

Mornings were a thing of gears.
They were regulation-compliant machinery.
The trucks, mounted with cylinders, broke their necks
on the switchbacks of local roads. They drained.
These are the problems of living by a slaughterhouse:
excess life. I remember the thermaling birds,
flies on the screen doors and fruit bowl,
and when the wind hitched and tumbled
like a freighted truck on a bad turn,
a living smell came into my room.
The conversation of a pig with a knife
you see, lasts a long time.

                                            -James Appleby

James Appleby (b. 1993) is editor of Interpret, Scotland's magazine of international writing. His original poetry is published in The London Magazine, his translations in Asymptote, and his upcoming debut pamphlet, Spurious Language, was commended in the 2024 International Book & Pamphlet Competition. He was born in Manchester and lives in Edinburgh.

www.jamesapplebywriting.co.uk

www.interpretmagazine.com

James Appleby’s deft and concentrated poem, “I lived once beside a slaughterhouse,” is antithetical to Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,” in which the urban scene is one of brisk interactions and physical, mental, and artistic nourishment.  Consider Appleby’s first line: “Mornings were a thing of gears.”  What a terse and true embodiment of industrial strain—the heritage of Dickens’ Gradgrind. A new day brings no bustlings of possibility, only new ratchetings decreed by a glum bureaucracy, “regulation-compliant.” No flaneurs swan along the streets—instead, a violence of trucks “broke their necks on the switchbacks of local roads,” the climb a kind of flagellation, a perpetual penance. 

In its fifth line, the poem confides: “These are the problems of living by a slaughterhouse: / excess life.” Through a perverse synergy, life embraces its omnipresent opposite. Instead of construction workers happily chowing down lunch, we have “thermaling birds”—black, jagged-winged scavengers; we have “flies on the screen doors and fruit bowl.” Any spontaneity here involves dark lives hastening to feed on death and/or lay their eggs in it. The wind, far from a romantic bearer of infinite tidings, is but another vehicle in death’s fleet: “like a freighted truck on a bad turn,” an image that surprises us with ironic humor. The poem’s reversals are not yet finished: “a living smell came into my room. . . “ The conversation that Frank O’Hara has with the cityscape, that as poetry joins what Wallace Stevens calls “the long conversation between poets,” finds its scarifying opposite: “The conversation of a pig with a knife / you see, lasts a long time.” The routine slaughter that for Charles Simic, in his poem “Butcher Shop,” becomes, on the butcher’s apron, “the great continents of blood”--a saturation mysterious, even grand—is here an overweening and insidious stink.  How telling that Appleby’s poem takes the word “conversation”—for O’Hara, a thing that happens between two people when one of them writes a poem and the other reads it—and makes of it a deadly encounter of blade and artery that reverberates in air, a blow that no plague posey can deflect—one that the poem delivers with mock gentleness— “you see.” Alas, we do see, with our entire mortal bodies. If everyone lived “beside a slaughterhouse,” all this might change—but this is not the poem’s business. James Appleby’s fluent, exact “Once I Lived Beside a Slaughterhouse” makes us witnesses. Then it steps away, leaving us among its eloquent fumes. -Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty): Michael Robins [by Angela Ball]

Called Back

Before she crossed the quarter mile between the homestead & town

cemetery, Emily Dickinson helped plan her own funeral. “Everything

was white,” one biography reports: white ribbons & textile handles,

flannel for the lining (“five-sixths of a yard of Russian white”) plus the

robe that Susan, her sister-in-law, designed & in which the poet would

be buried. According to further description, we should add the

circumference of the flower garden to the distance traveled by the

funeral party, then a single pass through the great barn that kept the

family’s horses. I’ve visited Emily’s grave more than any other & while

spring becomes summer in a snap, it was the beginning of the latter

when, late one night & a dozen sheets to the wind, I hoped to marry

past & present by launching my empty bottle toward what might’ve

been a field of buttercup, where some bystander surely caught sight of

six Irishmen (per Emily’s instruction) carrying the poet’s white casket.

                                                                                                                      - Michael Robins
                                                                                                                      [from The Bright Invisible (Saturnalia, 2022)]

 

Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Bright Invisible (2022) and People You May Know (2020), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and serves as editor of The McNeese Review.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty): Michael Robins

Michael Robins’ eloquent and haunting tribute to Emily Dickinson hovers somewhere between poetry and prose, unjustified on the right in a way reminiscent of James Tate, whose poems seem to enjoy confounding the two. Its shape may suggest “postage stamp,” then “letter,” then “the poet’s room,” then “grave”—then, perhaps most aptly, “flower garden.” Robins’ poem begins in objectivity as he presents Dickinson’s funeral procession as a “crossing” detailed in advance by the poet herself:

 

     . . .white ribbons & textile handles,

     flannel for the lining [‘five-sixths of a yard of Russian white’] plus the

     robe that Susan, her sister-in-law, designed. . .

 

How fitting that Emily’s color was and is white, an apparent absence embracing the spectrum.

A cheerful guidebook voice (“we should add”) reveals that the journey to the grave was not straightforward, but circled Dickinson’s flower garden and made “a single pass” through the barn holding the family horses, the procession a warmer, domesticated version of “I could not stop for Death” (poem 479). Notify the flowers, the horses, the barn flies that their Emily has turned toward eternity—this like the old custom of telling the bees, a charm of reconciliation between death and life.

Then things turn personal in the long rush of a single, passionate sentence:

 

     . . . I’ve visited Emily’s grave more than any other & while

     spring becomes summer in a snap, it was the beginning of the latter

     when, late one night & a dozen sheets to the wind, I hoped to marry

     past & present by launching my empty bottle toward what might’ve

     been a field of buttercup . . .

 

The poem’s whiteness has become a hoped-for marriage of “past & present,” the warm snap between spring and summer the snap of taut sails as the poet, “sheets to the wind” (that metaphor that makes each drunk a boat) launches his messageless bottle “toward what might’ve / been a field of buttercup.” It is as if we are with the poet with Dickinson, when, in the cosmic expansiveness of her “wild nights,” she dreams of a “thee” to “moor in.”

As austere and intense as Emily herself, “Called Back” summons us, too, as Robins joins past and present in the sovereign apparition of her eccentrically ordained pallbearers: “six Irishmen.” *  With them, we are privileged bystanders as time and eternity cross a small space into each other via the rectangle of a poem and the trim envelope of a casket.

– Angela Ball

*According to IrishCentral.com, Dickinson “shared her kitchen with an Irish maid [Margaret Maher] the last seventeen years of her life.” Scholar Aífe Murray is quoted as saying that Dickinson stored her poems in Maher’s trunk—'a trunk that had crossed the Atlantic’; and that after Dickinson died, Maher kept them safe.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Nine): Cate Marvin [by Angela Ball]

BLACK UMBRELLA

What to do stationed beneath an awning curtained
falling with rainwater but read books on dinosaurs?

Better to peel open tins of tuna for the stray cats
nestled wet beneath porches of the neighborhood.

No one wants them in their hunger, nor for piteous
cries to interfere with the sounds of the televisions.

If the town had one huge umbrella, we might all join
to carry it above us together. But there is no together.

Unless you can call a collection of structures together,
when all we’ve really got is a shambles of inhabitance.

Nothing throbs warmth near midnight, no clock can
admit its choking, and sheets have never had license

to speak. They hate us lying atop them, hate turning
in the washer, the dryer, over and over, as I am come

to despise someone I never saw in the rain. Someone
who has lain on my sheets. (I’ve not been discreet.)

One who rarely or never, you choose, gave me license
to speak. As the liquor store clerk demanded tonight,

Are you in a bad mood, or are you tired? I said I was
neither. He assumed that meant I meant I was both.

I assured him I was none. See? Your expression, your
tone! I told him he must be projecting, that I was sorry

he felt worn and alone. This is the price you pay in this
town when you neglect to hand your smile to no one.

But the cats would froth at your doorstep should you
attempt to feed them. You’d have to bat them back!

It’s best to remain still in rainwater and read your best
dinosaur book, read it aloud loudly. For instance, you

might think they’ll never come back. But I myself fear
I’m becoming one right now. That I’ll roam this town

beneath a giant black umbrella I’ve fashioned for my
enormous frame. That I’ll gnash my placid neighbors

in my jaws should they attempt to suggest once again
I ought to water my flowers more often. That’s what

rain’s for, friends! Just think of it as the sky’s watering
can. I’ve bought the deed to this plot. I’m so American

I’ll bury myself alive right here beneath this fatigued
rosebush, and my bone-mulch will push out petulant

blossoms pinker than ever. Because I stocked up. I got
supplies. The cats have my back. Because I’m trying to

explain myself while swilling water off my window sill.
Ill-humored clouds from distant smoke-stacks please me.

Because that crisp smell you call fall I don’t care about.
                                                                                         -Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine. Event Horizon, her fourth collection, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2022.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Nine): Cate Marvin

Whereas John Ashbery’s poems, when in search of a past, may gravitate to the fervid realities of early cartoon characters, in her intense, magnetic “Black Umbrella” Cate Marvin takes refuge with archaic animals: “What to do stationed beneath an awning curtained / falling with rainwater but read books on dinosaurs?”  Yet Marvin, restless, revises this notion: “Better to peel open tins of tuna for the stray cats /nestled wet beneath porches of the neighborhood.” They are pariahs, despised for their “piteous cries” that “interfere with the sounds of the televisions.”

Were we to sum up Frank O’Hara’s New York in one word it might be “togetherness.” The characters and objects of his poems--construction workers, Miss Stillwagon at the bank, a copy of the journal NEW WORLD WRITING, even the louse cohabiting his office at the Museum of Modern Art—all somehow belong, contributing to the ongoing personality of the city. Marvin’s city is somewhat different:

 

     If the town had one huge umbrella, we might all join

     to carry it above us together. But there is no together.

     Unless you can call a collection of structures together,

     when all we’ve really got is a shambles of inhabitance.

 

What devastating phrase, that “shambles of inhabitance.”

Here, the “black umbrella,” with its tetradactyl struts, connotes a city of divisions and misunderstandings. In Kenneth Koch, personification is an opportunity for play, even when he addresses World War II.  Here, things personified express neuroses and grudges:

 

     Nothing throbs warmth near midnight, no clock can

     admit its choking, and sheets have never had license

     to speak. They hate us lying atop them, hate turning

     in the washer, the dryer, over and over, as I am come

     to despise someone I never saw in the rain. Someone

     who has lain on my sheets. (I’ve not been discreet.)

 

Marvin’s dark approach is a welcome surprise--especially when, as above, it is spiked with dark imagination—those poor sheets!—and sardonic rhyme. Her persona, no pussycat, threatens to “gnash” her neighbors should they “attempt to request again” that she water her flowers. Here a comedy of personality emerges, another surprise! There is playfulness here after all, albeit the comedy of a curmudgeon who delights in raining on any available parade. One need not be optimistic to be American:

 

     I’ll bury myself alive right here beneath this fatigued

     rosebush, and my bone-mulch will push out petulant

     blossoms pinker than ever. Because I stocked up. I got

     supplies. The cats have my back. Because I’m trying to

     explain myself while swilling water off my window sill.

     Ill-humored clouds from distant smoke-stacks please me

 

Everything is coming up roses--tired, funereal blooms when seen from beneath Marvin’s self-fabricated black umbrella, a place to shelter from a world of fall-bibbers and leaf-peekers.  The season bids togetherness; Marvin’s tart persona supports isolation and eccentricity: “Because that crisp smell you call fall I don’t care about.” This  bold stroke is reminiscent of “Marriage,” Gregory Corso’s most bravura poem, where he briefly  imagines himself “the scourge of marriage, the saint of divorce.”  Gripped by Cate Marvin’s eloquence, we are reminded that fall is as dark as it is bright, and we revel in the corrective of her speaker’s bitter comic voice. We remember that opposition is individuality, and that for art nothing is more exigent, more precious than that very quality. - Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Eight): Lee Upton [by Angela Ball]

THE GREAT ADVENTURE

The woman hailing a taxi in the rain
who is almost crushed by another taxi
and next by a third taxi
and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi
she is nearly run over again—
I think about this stranger often and feel something like
uncorrupted love for her
and I think about how
the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered
and I thought then: that is the way to live,
to be like the last taxi driver
knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet
but stopping anyway
and yes she’s in the back seat puddling away
and she is laughing
and I thought that is the way to live—
to keep trying to catch what speeds past
despite even the street lifting up to insult you
and aren’t you like all those taxis, the way
your heart keeps skidding around?
And let there be someone waiting
anxious to see the taxi driver and
the woman riding,
someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it,
we’re all going to get somewhere.

                                                      -Lee Upton       Published in Triquarterly July 15 2024

Lee Upton's comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, was launched in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her most recent book of poetry is her seventh collection, The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize (2023). Another novel, a literary mystery, Wrongful, is due out from Sagging Meniscus in 2025, and a third novel,The Withers, set in a near-future world where organ trafficking threatens families, will appear in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. A sequel to Tabitha, Get Up, is forthcoming in 2026: Tabitha, Stay Up. Her New & Selected Poems will appear in 2027. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southern Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry.

 

Lee Upton’s frenetic and enlightening “The Great Adventure” shares its breathlessness with Frank O’Hara’s famous “Poem [Lana Turner] has Collapsed” in which chaos is general over Manhattan as “it started raining and snowing” and “the traffic / was acting exactly like the sky,” and a final clarity leaps from chaos: “Lana Turner we love you get up.”  But the woman in Upton’s poem is not a headline, but someone directly observed, caught in the rapids of traffic:

 

     The woman hailing a taxi in the rain

     who is almost crushed by another taxi

     and next by a third taxi

     and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi

     she is nearly run over again—

 

This woman is behaving foolishly and dangerously, we think. She is lucky to be alive.

The poem’s next lines recall an O’Hara title, “Meditations in an Emergency”:

 

     I think about this stranger often and feel something like

     uncorrupted love for her

     and I think about how

     the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered

     and I thought then: that is the way to live,

     to be like the last taxi driver

     knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet

     but stopping anyway

 

So much is happening: the “uncorrupted love” that makes us think of all the forms of love that don’t qualify for that description, that demonstrates it’s possible to love a stranger on the strength of ordinary actions; the run-on line that hits us with serial misfortune halted with the small verb “veered,” the astonishing conclusion, “that is the way to live,” which we think applies to the woman but instead to the beneficent driver “knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet / but stopping anyway.” Upton’s phrasing is as direct and practical as the driver’s thoughts must be, but then comes what we have given up on, praise for the woman, “and yes she is in the back seat puddling away /and she is laughing”:

 

     and I thought that is the way to live—

     to keep trying to catch what speeds past

     despite even the street lifting up to insult you

 

This sentiment recalls William Blake’s “He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in Eternity’s sunrise”; the    multivalent “insult” like W.H. Auden’s “nights of insult,” both injurious and unkind.

Then, in a turn sudden as a careening cab’s, the speaker asks herself “aren’t you like all those taxis, the way / your heart keeps skidding around? Upton has, we find, O’Hara’s skill at bringing life to the inanimate city, joining it to herself and our selves.

A final surprise is the valedictory “Let there be someone,” asking that there be a human destination to bless the confusion and its aftermath and provide a simple, reassuring comment on the human condition:

 

     And let there be someone waiting

     anxious to see the taxi driver and

     the woman riding,

     someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it,

     we’re all going to get somewhere.

Upton modestly makes way for another “someone”—a voice that can soothe her, too, with the promise that frustration will give way not to happiness, but something more bland, capacious and possible: getting “somewhere.” At the beginning of Lee Upton’s generous and generative poem, we may patronizingly think the woman lucky to be alive. At its end, we think the same—not in complaint but in mutual affirmation. – Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part 77): David Hernandez [by Angela Ball]

Hello I Must Be Going

Really nice meeting you sorry
I have to hurry off there’s this thing
happening this thing I must do
you too yes dying is the thing
everyone is not talking about it
why ruin karaoke night why discolor
the air between you and the bartender
hello what can I get for you
it’s miraculous we’re here and then
the world is yanked from us and then
time dismantles our bodies to dust
okay um can I help the next customer
see it would be awkward
let’s not bring it up mum’s the word
come on now we’ve still got
some living to do pick up that trumpet
I’ve got mine already never mind
we can’t play any instruments
the point is to make a sound
any sound in this endless parade
shimmering toward silence

                                             - David Hernandez

David Hernandez's most recent collection of poems, Hello I Must Be Going (Pitt Poetry Series, 2022), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include Dear, Sincerely (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016); Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Always Danger (SIU Press, 2006), winner of the Crab Orchard Series; and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press, 2003). David has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares and Southern Review. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 77): David Hernandez

David Hernandez’s “I Really Must be Going” is in a terrific hurry but never blurs.  Its title (and that of the book it lives in) originally belongs, of course to Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers, performing what is possibly the funniest comic production number in movie history. Groucho twits the assembly of adoring guests (including the hostess, the redoubtable actress Margaret Dumont) by singing his true desire while performing the role of pith-helmeted “African Explorer” perfectly in every other way, proving that once a gestalt is established, it can withstand almost any amount of silliness, so long as the pretentions of onlookers keep it afloat.

In Hernandez’s poem, a tacit understanding avoids morbidity while it invokes “I,” “you,” and “we” in a way that surrounds us with a universal problem: death, when it comes, breaks off every interaction--even having a drink in a bar (some victims at Pompeii were surely lavaed in a bôite).  It’s a delicate subject, one that must be stumbled into:

     . . .there’s this thing

     happening this thing I must do

     you too yes dying is the thing

     everyone is not talking about it

     why ruin karaoke night why discolor

     the air between you and the bartender

     hello what can I get for you

Just as Groucho’s song accelerates, so does the poem, without sleeping policemen of punctuation. It’s clear that what Philip Larkin calls “unresting death” is everywhere precisely because “everyone is not talking about it”—why “discolor / the air”?  We agree, for the most part, to keep things light, preserve appearances—it’s why we say of someone dead that they’ve “passed.” Kenneth Koch’s brilliant late poem, “Proverb,” literalizes that speedy passing: “Les morts vont vite” while “We living stand at the gate / and life goes on.” Hernandez’ poem, more comic but just as scarifying, x-rays the social. It resembles a jazz funeral’s second line, that aims to replace sadness with celebration—at the same time poking fun at itself, knowing it must fail.

We are reminded of Frank O’Hara’s posthumously discovered (by Kenneth Koch) “Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” when at the end of the poem the sun says, “. . .go I must, they’re calling / me.” Frank wants to know who “they” are. “Some / day you’ll know,” says the sun. Somehow, the exuberance of O’Hara’s poem survives the darkening at its close—but also depends on it. The exuberance in Hernandez’s, forced by custom, must obey strict rules:

     let’s not bring it up mum’s the word 

     come on now we’ve still got

     some living to do pick up that trumpet

     I’ve got mine already never mind

     we can’t play any instruments

     the point is to make a sound

The sound that “Hello I Must be Going” makes is urgently, supremely dramatic. Simply put, it surrounds us with what matters. Hollis Summers, a fine poet who taught at Ohio University, used to say that any good poem should be worthy of being “carved in stone.” Hernandez’s poem—as colloquial and broken-off as it is—somehow achieves this state. We participate in its monologue, resort to trumped-up gaiety replaced in the end by eloquent despair: “make a sound /any sound in this endless parade/shimmering toward silence”  - Angela Ball

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

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).  For me, 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. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Six): Melinda Wilson [by Angela Ball]

Scene Under

Two beetles hammock on the thin algae skin / of the lake’s edge.
Two lake chars lounge in the black nether depths,
fat and content to be trout together.
A couple reclines on the city park’s lawn,
overgrown as it is. Deer ticks tingle at the proximity of warm blood.
The woman turns from her back to her stomach,
and feels the pulse of the underground train through the soft skin / of her belly.
It feels like a baby swimming
                                                                        in her wanting underwater.

                                                                                                                    -Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson is a poet and educator living in the Bronx, NYC. Her first full-length poetry collection, What it Was Like to Be a Woman, is available for pre-order from Indolent Books. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Six): Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s compact and compelling “Scene Under” is a contretemps between surface and depth reminiscent of Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them “:

     First, down the sidewalk

     where laborers feed their dirty

     glistening torsos 

O’Hara gives us the urban surface and makes the laborers centaurs—the human halves feeding the ugly-beautiful “dirty / glistening torsos” that contain the stygian distances of digestion.

Wilson begins with animals in physical repose, an interplay of pairs. The “two beetles” companion the lake edge, “hammock” on its bright green lid. The lake chars—large, loguey creatures, are equally at ease in its lower depths. The poem’s satisfaction seems to escalate; the couple “reclines” serenely, uncaring that it’s overgrown. The poem becomes granular, giving us minute ticks that can’t believe their luck “at the proximity of warm blood.” We are reminded that what is ominous from a human viewpoint—possible Lyme-disease inflicting bites—is pure pleasure for the tiny vampires, multiple instead of paired. The scene bristles with life, over and “under.”

Then, suddenly, there’s a lone being, “the woman,” “the” endowing importance. It seems, at first, that she’s simply employing an ordinary sunbathing move, turning “from her back to her stomach” but then she is umbilicaled to the thrum of an underground train, “through the soft skin / of her belly”—the expressed caesura of the back slash reiterating the lake edge of line one, but also emphasizing the delicacy of what occurs, which is this astonishing image: “It feels like a baby swimming.”   Somehow, the woman is being discovered from below by her missing other. The poem provides a wide space in which to draw breath before delivering its close: “in her wanting underwater.” Like O’Hara’s poem, Wilson’s ends “down the dark stairs.” Implications glimmer; the woman’s perhaps-suppressed “wanting,” her watery, generative depths—capable, on their own, of longing: a reverberation orgasmic in its portmanteau of fulfillment and dawning sorrow. – Angela Ball

Late News from Poland (on O'Hara, Koch, and the NY School) [by Angela Ball]

 

I had imagined discussing the big four New York School poets in an orderly fashion, one by one.  But since their work percolates from shared springs, it seems to me better to talk back and forth among them. 

As I have said, my class and I are collaborating on understanding the ongoing collaborations of the New York School poets.  Here is one example: wonderfully, Kenneth Koch found Frank O’Hara’s previously unknown “Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” after his death (and read it at O’Hara’s funeral).  That Kenneth Koch wrote of the circus is very apropos—so much of what he did (for one thing, the tremendous range of his teaching of poetry, including even children at the M.D. Anderson clinic, where he himself was being treated) was death defying.

Here’s graduate student and fiction writer Jennifer Brewington discussing him in her reading journal.  (We’re using the American Poets Project Selected Poems, edited by Ron Padgett.) 

Kenneth Koch is my favorite New York School poet so far, and I am very surprised. I thought it would be O’Hara. Though I’d never read him before, I wasn’t expecting to be so taken in by his work. It’s no wonder to me that O’Hara writes often about him in his poetry. He uses a lot of the same techniques that I’m now realizing are a part of the school. The naming of friends and places and events in poems puts all of them in conversation with one another in a way that feels inclusive. I noticed that before but did not realize it was a common technique among them. Still, there is something about Koch’s ability to turn a phrase, to contradict himself within the same line, to conjure just the right image that makes him stand out for me among all of these brilliant writers. In “Days and Nights,” he writes, “It came to me that all this time/ There had been no real poetry and that it needed to be/ invented” (96).  Going into this book, I felt like I knew something about poetry. I had almost the opposite feeling. Now, though, I feel he’s done just that. He’s invented poetry, or reimagined it, in a way that is haunting, daring, and incredibly effective.

The images in his poetry are so clever and lovely. My favorite poem in this collection is “Alive for an Instant.” The title itself draws me in and the first line keeps me present. “I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach/ and a flower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals/ and a lion in my genitals and I am after you but I have a song in my heart” (45). How perfect is that! The repetition of genitals somehow perfectly captures how it feels to be both physically and chemically attracted to someone and how it feels to also love them.

Speaking of love, in class, graduate fiction writer Nick Benca talked about the build-up of feeling in Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.”--about how, paradoxically, all the present-tense distractions of Frank’s loud bright day are advance embodiments of the memory—triggered by the newspaper face—of the intimate dark Five-Spot, where Lady whispered “along the keyboard” and “everyone and I stopped breathing.”  All along, the present has been preparing us to be ravished by the past. 

This poem, along with many of O’Hara’s, lacks a final period—indicating that experience stops for no one, that we must continue to be “present.”

Recently, graduate poet Annette Boehm alerted me to the presence in Poland of a group called the “O’Harists.” They are described by Joanna Niżyńska in an article entitled, “The Impossibility of Shrugging One’s Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Hara, and Post-1989 Polish poetry.” (Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, Fall, 2007, pp. 463-483.)

Niżyńska asserts that the O’Harists’ brief prominence beginning in 1989 was a side effect of the arrival of freedom—in response, certain poets felt the need to throw off solemnity and transcendent meanings, and concentrate on the present moment.  It all started with the July 1986 issue of a literary journal, a slim volume bound in blue (O’Hara’s favorite color!), its cover showing a ticket stub for admission to the Museum of Modern Art.  Inside were seventeen poems translated to Polish—enough, apparently to start a movement! 

But, Niżyńska tells us, “even those Polish poems that exhibit the characteristic linguistic traits of O’Hara’s poetic mode leave the reader with a sense of a literary project different from that of the charismatic New York Poet.”  Here are some lines from “Olyztyn.Shopping,” by Jacek Podsiadlo:

Two heads of cabbage.  Four refills for a “Zenith” pen.

The Cumming volume, Steinbeck’s “Tortilla Flat.”

“Encounters with Utopia” by Szacki and “New Ways

in Psychoanalysis” by Karen Horney.

A thick, ruled notepad.  Thirteen packs of cigarettes.

“Jacobs.”  Granulated, instant coffee.

Vodka “Polonaise.”  A ruler and a triangle

with a multiplication table and three-dimensional picture.

Twenty stamps.  A few magazines.

Done.  Time to go get some beer at Santos

by the station.  Drink two mugs.  Leave.

 

Sit on a bench.  Light a cigarette.

A commonly pretty girl passes pointing at me with her breasts.

…………………..

In the parking lot before the hotel Cormorant

Among the shiny limousines stands a small Fiat, red

From exhaustion, a tiny phallus of communism.

A different literary project indeed!  There is something pugnaciously casual about this shopping trip, something militantly trivial—triviality with an iron fist.

Because O’Hara was lifted from his context (transplanted without soil) to fill a temporary need, his influence didn’t “take” permanently.  (All the same, Niżyńska says, John Ashbery has many fans in Poland.) Who knows, perhaps the times are propitious again, perhaps already a poet in Poland, woken by the sun’s words, is making her own day.

from the archive; first posted by Angela Ball on March 04, 2014 at 11:02 AM 

See also this post on Kenneth Koch by Angela Ball: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2014/03/giving-up-solemnity-for-lent-angela-ball.html

this one on John Ashbery https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2014/03/ashes-ashes-all-fall-down-angela-ball.html

this one on James Schuyler https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2014/03/a-blue-towel-angela-ball.html

I had imagined discussing the big four New York School poets in an orderly fashion, one by one.  But since their work percolates from shared springs, it seems to me better to talk back and forth among them. 

As I have said, my class and I are collaborating on understanding the ongoing collaborations of the New York School poets.  Here is one example: wonderfully, Kenneth Koch found Frank O’Hara’s previously unknown “Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” after his death (and read it at O’Hara’s funeral).  That Kenneth Koch wrote of the circus is very apropos—so much of what he did (for one thing, the tremendous range of his teaching of poetry, including even children at the M.D. Anderson clinic, where he himself was being treated) was death defying.

Here’s graduate student and fiction writer Jennifer Brewington discussing him in her reading journal.  (We’re using the American Poets Project Selected Poems, edited by Ron Padgett.) 

Kenneth Koch is my favorite New York School poet so far, and I am very surprised. I thought it would be O’Hara. Though I’d never read him before, I wasn’t expecting to be so taken in by his work. It’s no wonder to me that O’Hara writes often about him in his poetry. He uses a lot of the same techniques that I’m now realizing are a part of the school. The naming of friends and places and events in poems puts all of them in conversation with one another in a way that feels inclusive. I noticed that before but did not realize it was a common technique among them. Still, there is something about Koch’s ability to turn a phrase, to contradict himself within the same line, to conjure just the right image that makes him stand out for me among all of these brilliant writers. In “Days and Nights,” he writes, “It came to me that all this time/ There had been no real poetry and that it needed to be/ invented” (96).  Going into this book, I felt like I knew something about poetry. I had almost the opposite feeling. Now, though, I feel he’s done just that. He’s invented poetry, or reimagined it, in a way that is haunting, daring, and incredibly effective.

The images in his poetry are so clever and lovely. My favorite poem in this collection is “Alive for an Instant.” The title itself draws me in and the first line keeps me present. “I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach/ and a flower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals/ and a lion in my genitals and I am after you but I have a song in my heart” (45). How perfect is that! The repetition of genitals somehow perfectly captures how it feels to be both physically and chemically attracted to someone and how it feels to also love them.

Speaking of love, in class, graduate fiction writer Nick Benca talked about the build-up of feeling in Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.”--about how, paradoxically, all the present-tense distractions of Frank’s loud bright day are advance embodiments of the memory—triggered by the newspaper face—of the intimate dark Five-Spot, where Lady whispered “along the keyboard” and “everyone and I stopped breathing.”  All along, the present has been preparing us to be ravished by the past. 

This poem, along with many of O’Hara’s, lacks a final period—indicating that experience stops for no one, that we must continue to be “present.”

Recently, graduate poet Annette Boehm alerted me to the presence in Poland of a group called the “O’Harists.” They are described by Joanna Niżyńska in an article entitled, “The Impossibility of Shrugging One’s Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Hara, and Post-1989 Polish poetry.” (Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, Fall, 2007, pp. 463-483.)

Niżyńska asserts that the O’Harists’ brief prominence beginning in 1989 was a side effect of the arrival of freedom—in response, certain poets felt the need to throw off solemnity and transcendent meanings, and concentrate on the present moment.  It all started with the July 1986 issue of a literary journal, a slim volume bound in blue (O’Hara’s favorite color!), its cover showing a ticket stub for admission to the Museum of Modern Art.  Inside were seventeen poems translated to Polish—enough, apparently to start a movement! 

But, Niżyńska tells us, “even those Polish poems that exhibit the characteristic linguistic traits of O’Hara’s poetic mode leave the reader with a sense of a literary project different from that of the charismatic New York Poet.”  Here are some lines from “Olyztyn.Shopping,” by Jacek Podsiadlo:

Two heads of cabbage.  Four refills for a “Zenith” pen.

The Cumming volume, Steinbeck’s “Tortilla Flat.”

“Encounters with Utopia” by Szacki and “New Ways

in Psychoanalysis” by Karen Horney.

A thick, ruled notepad.  Thirteen packs of cigarettes.

“Jacobs.”  Granulated, instant coffee.

Vodka “Polonaise.”  A ruler and a triangle

with a multiplication table and three-dimensional picture.

Twenty stamps.  A few magazines.

Done.  Time to go get some beer at Santos

by the station.  Drink two mugs.  Leave.

 

Sit on a bench.  Light a cigarette.

A commonly pretty girl passes pointing at me with her breasts.

…………………..

In the parking lot before the hotel Cormorant

Among the shiny limousines stands a small Fiat, red

From exhaustion, a tiny phallus of communism.

A different literary project indeed!  There is something pugnaciously casual about this shopping trip, something militantly trivial—triviality with an iron fist.

Because O’Hara was lifted from his context (transplanted without soil) to fill a temporary need, his influence didn’t “take” permanently.  (All the same, Niżyńska says, John Ashbery has many fans in Poland.) Who knows, perhaps the times are propitious again, perhaps already a poet in Poland, woken by the sun’s words, is making her own day.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Five): Pam Rehm [by Angela Ball]

This Tender Riot of Chaos

The undeniable pull
of passion
is impossible
to let go of

Quite in love|
with
the comfort
of walking

the weather,
having attuned to the light
that grows deeper
into the day's fading,

this empty awareness 
is beneficent

A pulsing of pulses

Listen
to the place

Embrace
a weathered loneliness

Outdoorsy through the moss
and quietness

of colors
before Spring's beginnings

                                             - Pam Rehm

Pam Rehm is the author of Time Will Show (Shearsman Books, 2018), The Larger Nature (Flood Editions, 2011), Small Works (Flood Editions, 2005), Gone to Earth (Flood Editions, 2001), To Give It Up (Sun & Moon Press, 1994), and The Garment in which No One Had Slept (Burning Deck Press, 1993). She lives in Manhattan.

                                                                        Photo by Angie Rehm

The New York School Diaspora (Part 75): Pam Rehm

Pam Rehm’s  “This Tender Riot of Chaos,” from her forthcoming collection, Inner Verses, mysteriously resets the balance between outer and inner weather, the abstract and the concrete. Her poetry saints may include both the William Carlos Williams of Spring and All and Robert Creeley, whose off-kilter lines keep us surprised. In her matter-of-fact meditativeness she has something in common with James Schuyler.

The poem’s title—one of the best descriptions of romantic love I’ve ever heard—and first stanza prepare us for a tortured affair—as does the first line of the second—but no, the comfort on offer is, literally, pedestrian.  We are invited into the surround of a place. Somehow, against known rules, we enter it via abstraction:

     the weather,

     having attuned to the light

     that grows deeper

     into the day’s fading,

 

The poem takes on a radical intuitiveness, saying that the weather has tuned itself to the light, while both grow “deeper” into “day’s” departure.  How is it possible to grow into a disappearance?  Does meditation presuppose oneness?  Maybe so.  A series of vivid abstractions shows how:

    This empty awareness
     is beneficent

     A pulsing of pulses

     Listen
     to the place

      Embrace
      a weathered loneliness

Maybe the key here is our participation. We can’t but listen. The poem is as open as a ruin; it admits everything. By the time it becomes a series of commands—to the poet and to us—we are receptive.  To the “awareness,” “empty” as it is, completely friendly.  To “A pulsing of pulses” that suggests a welter of images: animal life, including our own; the stir of “passion,”; the stir of air; the moment-by-moment changes of atmosphere. Listening is accepting; it leads to “embrace.” We don’t ask how it’s possible to do that to “a weathered loneliness.” The poem has released us from ordinary doing.

How lovely, the fresh surprise of the casual “outdoorsy”—that applies, with stunning generality, to all. “Moss” and “quietness” are natural companions—but the quietness finds itself leaping a stanza break to apply, also, to “colors”—too many, perhaps, to name? The last line, with its gentle leap, brings us a broad sense of cycling into newness. Not the fierce corporeality at the end of William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All [By the Road to the Contagious Hospital], where “objects” “grip down and begin to awaken,” but an accommodating openness, an unspecified array of new starts.

Poets are often asked, “What are your poems about?” But poems aren’t “about” anything. They are in it. The best ones, like Pam Rehm’s “This Tender Chaos,” transform and erase time and all its “aboutness.”--   Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Six): Matthew Rohrer [by Angela Ball]

PRISONERS

A distant beat comes
from the melting snow.
A delivery truck slowly
backing up. I have been
inside our apartment for centuries!
Trapped on a small blue-
and-green planet, spinning
through space, a prisoner.
But there is no jailor.
Just a cloud that appears
overhead in the shape
of a sword, severing
afternoon from evening.

                                      -Matthew Rohrer

MATTHEW ROHRER  is the author of Army of Giants (Wave Books, forthcoming 2024), The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, 2020), The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which was the winner of the 2017 Believer Book Award, and many others. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Six): Matthew Rohrer

Though his work shows affinities with all the original poets of the New York school, Matthew Rohrer’s deft “Prisoners” combines the existential with the metaphysical in a way reminiscent of Charles Simic. I am thinking of the poem, “The Partial Explanation, “in which the speaker seems trapped forever in a café with only a smudged water glass for company,  Simic, though often comic in his invocations of another world, courts its mystery—unlike, for the most part, the poets of the New York school, who have a cooler metaphysic, saving their wonder for the artistic process itself. The magic, in other words, is in the making.  Arriving in the United States at sixteen, in New York somewhat later, Simic saw the city through a peculiar lens: the Slavic folktales that he tracked though the shelves of the New York public library and kept alive as saints for his poems. A devote of Latin American poetry and fiction, he winningly contrasts magic with realism, intensifying each.

Rohrer’s poem immerses us in a realm neither magical nor actual, but somehow caught in between.

The fascinating image that begins the poem, the “distant beat” that “comes from the melting snow,” places us in a world realistic but indefinite. “Comes from” leaves things open—refuses to call the sound anything so precise as “dripping”—and indeed, such a situation seems to produce an infinitesimal creaking and/or incipient drips and/or drips upon drips.  It’s a complex articulation packed into “a beat”—that modest word that encloses drama and drums.

The delivery truck, in its slowness, the rhythm of its [unheard] warning beeps, prompts a sudden exclamation: “. . . I have been / inside our apartment for centuries!” The choice of “our” rather than “this” brings us into the poem as roommate, lover, and/or distant co-sufferer of an isolation that might be occasioned by COVID 19—but, if so, that’s merely circumstantial. The speaker’s focus abruptly goes long: “Trapped on a small blue- / and-green planet, spinning / through space, a prisoner.” Here Rohrer does what folklore does—he takes the cosmic literally. And why not? But the poem backs away from the magical with “But there is no jailor.”

A wonderful thing happens with “Just a cloud”—our foreboding sense of the metaphysical transfers to the sky:

     Just a cloud that appears
     overhead in the shape
     of a sword . . .

Here, the natural points toward the mystical, the more powerfully for the poem’s restraint. That word “Just”!

In “of a sword, severing” is embedded the story of Eden and the cherub Jophiel waving a fiery blade that divides Adam and Eve from immortality and innocence. In place of timeless days and nights, they receive a world cut with sorrow.

In the astonishing understatement that follows, “severing / afternoon from evening,” we are set down again, rather roughly, in reality—a reality forever changed by meaning summoned and dismissed. But not entirely. That afternoon becomes evening is as big a mystery as ever. And because the mystery lives in us, no matter how confined, we are stunned each time by its appearance, and so remain child-like, perhaps hopeful—inhabiting a planet both impoverished and impossibly rich. -Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Five): Charles North [by Angela Ball]

CREPUSCULE WITH PAULA

 

Does realism get your vote? It gets mine.

The plants with their insatiable thirst for appearances,

the heart-stopping 7:00 p.m. air moonlighting as a pressed-

cardboard Korean ashtray

(server, modest coaster) decorated with a single blondish branch

holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit (pear,

plum, ripe peach)

slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind

flecked with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying

size

from pinpricks to ashes, pencil (it looks like) to brush.

The romance of the window panes (I'm squinting a little) has

nothing

to do with the misguided view, the one with the Fates schmoozing

under the maroon awning of the high-rise (schmoos is more like

it)

and the embarrassed-looking sycamores revealing for all they're

worth

in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way,

which contributes to the overall tone

without detracting from the realistic participation,

a motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst

that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it,

which could be the key signature if not for a free-standing

radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.

                                                                                                    -Charles North

                                                                                                   (EVERYTHING and Other Poems, 2019)

Charles North’s first, self-published, poetry collection, Lineups, was featured in two New York Post sports columns. He has published 20 books of poems, essays, and collaborations with artists, reviewed for Art in America, and served as Poet-in-Residence at Pace University NYC. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet-painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight (2001) was a finalist for the inaugural Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award, What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and Everything and Other Poems (2020) was a New York Times New and Noteworthy Book. Among his awards are two NEA Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, a Poets Foundation Award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Five): Charles North

Charles North’s lyric of controversy, “Crepuscule with Paula,” explodes the romanticism of its title in its first line: “Does realism get your vote?  It gets mine.” The poem is named for—and thus is ekphrastic of—a composition by Thelonious Monk in which the contenders are beauty and cacophony, the off-handed and the sublime.

This poem is out for blood: to let two worlds duke it out via whatever is at hand, which is in this case “the heart-stopping 7:00 p.m. air moonlighting as a pressed- / cardboard Korean ashtray.” Among other things, this statement reminds us that everything we see is a collaboration between materials and the light that hits them. (A curious idiom, that.)

The plants’ “insatiable thirst for appearances” references both their need for water and their need to present to the sun.  It’s why wildflowers arrange themselves in bouquets--each flower head gets exposure. The ashtray can be multi-purposed “(server, modest coaster)”—the “modest” slyly humorous—can there be an “immodest” coaster?

North’s description of the object—humorously thorough—takes on the careful, hesitant rhythm of artistic creation:

     decorated with a single blondish branch

     holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit (pear,

     plum, ripe peach)

     slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind

     flecked with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying

     size

     from pinpricks to ashes, pencil (it looks like) to brush.

The careful approximation of North’s description, supplying alternative “rose-colored” fruits and including even a suggestion of relief (“slightly raised as if applied”) ; his verb, “flecked,” embodying quick strokes, his color designations both accurate and modest—especially “brown marks of varying / size / from pinpricks to ashes” resemble and reenact the artist’s care with his own ashtray creation. The insertion of the tentative “(it looks like)” reminds us, again modestly, that the poem is guessing. This ‘guessingness’ is essential. It allows the lines to float free of what they describe, giving room for doubt, as in James Schuyler’s masterful “Korean Mums,” which ends with his one certainty, their name—a certainty that will “one day” vanish.

   . . . what

   is there I have not forgot?

  Or one day will forget:

  this garden, the breeze

  in stillness, even

  the words, Korean mums.

Without preamble, North’s poem moves outward—to “the romance of the window panes” undercut by “squinting” and irrelevance: “has // nothing // to do with the misguided view” (is not every city a concatenation of these?).

With an incongruity worthy of Monty Python, the fates appear, comically “smoozing” / under the maroon awning of the high-rise (schmoos is more like // it //)  and the poem’s archness, its high-handedness, its Monkian clatter intensifies:

     and the embarrassed-looking sycamores revealing for all they're

     worth

     in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way,

     which contributes to the overall tone

     without detracting from the realistic participation,

The orphaned words—the ones that hang like ledges—not only emphasize a tentativeness but also a brittleness that spreads from the depiction to the thing depicted. The poem seems to scramble here, with willed awkwardness, to piece together its romanticism and realism, through a process of digging and filling: “slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate,” “without detracting from the realistic participation” that includes

     a motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst

     that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it,

     which could be the key signature if not for a free-standing

     radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.

The poem’s final movement is given over to the chaotic, phenomenal urban world, with the luck of a savvy cat we can hope to emulate as a “key signature”—a locus of meaning, a codification of tone—“if not for a free-standing / radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.” How terrific that “radiance” is not a ledge word, that it washes over the words that follow, that denote closeness and freedom and nuance but are secured in place, tentatively, by the felt accuracy of “hint of plum or Anjou pear.” Charles North’s entrancing and enlivening poem leaves us a in a realm of romantic realism and/or realistic romance. Not only is it unnecessary to choose, but each choice gives way in the face of new ones. We are left in uncertainty, where we belong. It is, after all, the home of luck. – Angela Ball