The Best American Poetry

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 Sixty-One): Chris Nealon [by Angela Ball]

WAIT A MINUTE

Clear pink sky at 7 a.m.—or mostly clear—

You can’t rush spring but your body has big plans

Hey now, get back in here!

All your senses mobbing their gates like children pressing against a fence

Thin high clouds indifferent and alluring

Just the other morning they were thick and definitional—and that got you all
          excited, too

The sky—its rhetoric—it reaches and reaches and becomes poetics

To call Ontario “blue,” just the right way—it does more than state the obvious—

It gives you a channel for your excitement,

Is that what patience is?

The C&O Canal—

Me and Rob and Nico and heading down to see if we can get a glimpse of the
          painted bunting improbably wintering in Maryland

That was fun—to seek, to find—climbing boulders, chatting with birders,
          getting the gossip—

All of us arrayed below the road, at the bottom of a steep grade, when he finally
          appeared, shining out tropically from under dormant vines,

A ripple running through us all—

A bald eagle coasted low over the road above us—I mean really low—and
          everyone was like whatever

What is it about awaiting arrivals—alert at the gate with your tail wagging

Or setting the picnic table on a warm June day with Hölderlin, hoping the
          Olympian gods will show up

When they finally do it’s September and they’re Valkyries

Imagine the pulse sounding out like a terrible announcement at the beginning
          of the Modeselektor remix of “The Dull Flame of Desire,”

Actually just listen to the whole thing, I can wait

Everything in that sound says leave the car running, we are not fucking around

Which makes it all the more astonishing that when their spaceship lands
          they speak to you in the language of Sappho 16

I mean they coo to each other: I love this about you, dear, also this—but this—

Now that’s love

Metallized but porous, running fingertips over the mortal world, exhaling on the
          cheeks and foreheads of the slain

When they leave you slump exhausted in your seat, feeling vaguely swanlike and
          ungendered

Something about that extra minute or two—the club version instead of the radio edit—
          you start to notice clouds in motion,

They have big plans—this bank of feathered cirrus—it’s like they voted to say
          forget the Coriolis effect, let’s move west to east

The DJ playing “Precious Box” at the Powerhouse, a song about crushing
          loneliness and captivity to mass media with lyrics so wending they feel
         Jamesian—

Moving entirely opposite the energy of the men in those rooms

The Powerhouse was naughty

Or that moment when you realize that the club’s been throbbing to a song about
          the Fates

“So tell me how do you do? / Finally I meet you . . .”

Well you have your playlist now, what should we call it?

That part of us that feels connected, to life, to world—it’s slower to rouse—
          has further to travel—and it always steps aside for bossy dopamine—

Like some deep-sea turtle that could save us all

Oh! To be unruled by fight-or-flight—to get behind political dread and this
          terrible what is it catalepsy—

It seems like the project of a million lifetimes,

At least until you live them all at once

Why is it so humanizing to be able to wait,

And why are epithets so beautiful?

“Patience—the incinerator—

of all the torment in the heart . . .”

-Chris Nealon                               from All About You, forthcoming from Wave Books, 2023

Chris Nealon is John Dewey Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020), The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014), as well as three books of literary criticism. He lives in Washington, DC.

Photo by Rachel Roze

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-One): Chris Nealon 

Chris Nealon’s “Wait a Minute” plunges us into cognitive and bodily immediacy that combines elements of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara--Ashbery’s controlled but at the same time irrepressible meditation; O’Hara’s fidelity to the phenomenology of event and response—with a particular loose-hinged immediacy:

     Clear pink sky at 7 a.m.—or mostly clear—
     You can’t rush spring but your body has big plans
     Hey, now—Get back in here!
     All your senses mobbing their gates like children pressing against a fence

The lines are end-stopped—each a message—with leaps in between, like stride piano.  No full stops (periods). The “you” simultaneously speaker and listener.

The poem turns its excitement to “Thin high clouds indifferent and alluring,” celebrating their permutations: “Just the other morning they were thick and definitional—and that got you all excited, too.”

“The sky, its rhetoric” we’re told, “reaches and reaches and becomes poetics”—how beautiful is that! Are you listening, Cloud Society?

Even reading this poem against season, we can feel the intensity of its—we now know—Canadian blue: “It gives you a channel for your excitement, / Is that what patience is.” A quality is redefined, beautifully but provisionally—and the provisional is here a primary source of delight.

The shift to the personal--“Me and Rob and Nico”—places us among friends, no need to know who or how known. The “painted bunting”—passerina cirus—almost a cloud, is a patchwork of dazzling colors. We are watchers, we clamber over boulders “getting the gossip” till the sudden bird appears: “shining out tropically from under dormant vines, / A ripple running through us all”—a communal experience akin to Frank O’Hara and friends’ at the end of “The Day Lady Day Died,” when Billie Holiday “whispers a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron.” Then a bald eagle, that icon, shows up in a shameless bid for attention and comically fails.

We realize we’re been thinking about arrivals all along, and so we get some more: Hölderlin, possible “Olympian Gods,” “Valkyries,” a remix of “The Dull Flame of Desire” we are urged toward by the poet, who breaks stride to speak to us with art-challenging directness: “Actually just listen to the whole thing. I can wait.” While it plays, aliens arrive who magically know the magically surviving love lyric, “Sappho 16.” They are passerines, they “coo to each other"; and love, like patience, gets freshly defined—it is song, and redirects us to the clouds, now rebels against Coriolis, and we are further immersed in muchness.

Next at the “naughty” “Powerhouse,” we hear “Precious Box,” song “with lyrics so wending it’s Jamesian” and realize not for the first time that cultural categories are made to be broken and that our speaker is an ambassador of unlikeness—the Fates are at the club, where problems become art and past and present, recombinant. They renew each another, and “that part of us that feels connected, to life, to world—it’s slower to rouse— / has further to travel.” How lovely this comparison: “Like some deep-sea turtle that could save us all.”

Yet “bossy dopamine” has the power to push everything else to one side, and “. . .To be unruled by fight-or-flight—to get behind political dread and this  / terrible what is it catalepsy . . . seems like the project of a million lifetimes / At least till you live them all at once.”

Which is what we have been doing in reading Chris Nealon’s “Wait a Minute,” a paean to patience, its rush of discontinuous encounters ending with its earliest, Sappho, who can only exemplify, not answer, “Why is it so humanizing to be able to wait,  / And why are epithets so beautiful?”—Sappho, who waits from beyond the ragged edges of centuries for love and her words to reach us.

–Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty): Noelle Kocot [by Angela Ball]

CRYSTAL GAYLE

My mother picks her arm
Like a gorilla
Searching for lice

*

I am stable now,
But the world is not.

*

I go to see my trees
In the mornings—
Horace, Rothgar, Hildegaard,
Piney, Tall, Barney, Fred, Wilma,
Pebbles, George, Elroy, Astro, Frau Starr and Goethe.
They are part of my family.

*

Trump ding ding dings
On television
As I dump the wastebaskets.
Getting cold again.
Nine months of this.

*

Theology interests me.
And aliens.

I don’t know what to make
Of either.
And oh, the books about mosses. I
Wish I were in North Carolina now,
But there is no chance of that.

*

I thought a lot about how
My father tried to murder me,
How I ruined my teeth
With bulimia.

*

I lost my job
Because a consulting firm
Told them to cut my classes out.
Students said they did not
Commit suicide
Because of my classes.

*

I’m fed up with the world,
But I love it all the same.

*

I’ve had a lot of time to think.
Thinking is not dangerous.

*

I need to rest now,
As I’ve been staying up nights
For no particular reason.
Mosses gather around my legs in dreams,
And the city seems far behind.

*

The light on my skin is bright
And unforgiving.
I need a haircut,
Or maybe I don’t.
Maybe I’ll let my hair grow
Down to my knees
Like Crystal Gayle.

-Noelle Kocot

"Crystal Gayle" from Ascent of the Mothers, copyright 2023 by Noelle Kocot. Used with the permission of the author and Wave Books.

Noelle Kocot is the author of many collections of poetry, including Ascent of the Mothers (2023) God's Green Earth (2020), Phantom Pains of Madness (2016), Soul in Space (2013), The Bigger World (2011), and a book of translations of some of the poems of Tristan Corbière, Poet by Default (2011), all from Wave Books. Their previous works include the discography Damon's Room, (Wave Books Pamphlet Series, 2010), Sunny Wednesday (2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (2006). They are also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). Their poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry in 2001, 2012, and 2013. They are the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry, the American Poetry Review, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Kocot has taught at the University of Texas New Writers' Project and currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the New School. They live in New Jersey.

Photo by Ann Sleight

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty): Noelle Kocot

Noelle Kocot’s direct and disturbing “Crystal Gayle” opens with the micro detail of a mother’s nervous habit grown maddening, perhaps, by repetition; then pans out to generality: "I am stable now, / But the world is not."

We learn  from these two lines that there have been times when the speaker/poet has not been “stable”; that the world belies that stability. We’re on alert.

“Crystal Gayle” proceeds through asterisked vignettes; the third introduces pet trees with names that conjure a disorienting mélange of Roman poet, descriptive terms (“Piney, Tall”), Norse mythology, The Flintstones, German tragedy. The trees’ intact identities reassure: “They are part of my family.” Evidently, this is a family that keeps to itself, our speaker its one voice (the mother, unspeaking, appears to disappear) isolated in marked-out units. This aloneness may remind us of James Schuyler, the New York School poet Kocot most resembles. In his “Payne Whitney Poems,” the more he animates the world outside the mental hospital, the more apart from it he becomes:

     . . . After the blizzard

     cold days of shrinking snow.

     At visiting hours the cars

     below my window form up

     in a traffic jam. A fast

     moving man is in charge

     herding the big machines

     like cattle.

 

The cars, “big machines,” comically become unruly animals—lives to be observed, the way Kocot’s trees, once named, become pets at a distance, unengagable.

Next, Kocot’s poem gives us a passing physical sensation (“Getting cold again”) then a revelation: “Nine months of this.” The speaker must be pregnant, expecting. Is “this “not the beginnings of “family”? But the tone, far from expectant, is  flatness voiced in monosyllables.

What is wanted? Not “theology” or “aliens”—entities that interest and confound, or “mosses” told about in books—so much as “North Carolina,” a missing home, mourned: “But there is little chance of that.”

The poem shifts to the past tense. We are now in retrospect, that gives the poem’s disturbing frankness—so not the playful variety employed by Frank O’Hara--more room to operate.

 

     I thought a lot about how

     My father tried to murder me,

     How I ruined my teeth

     With bulimia.

 

There’s a dark ghost of humor behind these lines, that incongruously place the speaker in danger from her father and, somewhat anticlimactically, from herself. The lines nearly groan from the pressure of the unsaid.

The mournful litany continues with the speaker’s unjust and dispiriting job loss at the hands of clueless bureaucracy, leaving students bereft:

 

     Students said they did not

     Commit suicide

     Because of my classes.

 

This statement becomes comic when we realize it can be read two ways—the construction mimicking the sort of confusion that often—rather delightfully--enters student writing.

Do we believe the poem’s next statement?  "I’m fed up with the world / But I love it all the same."

Perhaps we have no choice. This statement is followed, after a break, with another: "I’ve had a lot of time to think. / Thinking is not dangerous."

Yet the act of declaring something “not dangerous” suggests that in fact it is.

Kocot’s is a quintessential poetry of ambivalence, a quality absent from less-nuanced poetry that revels in strong opinions—when more often, in life, we don’t quite know how to take things, “staying up nights” “For no particular reason.”

The poem’s deliberate phrasing resembles the steps of someone negotiating a brittle surface, its effort negative—not to fall—of a piece with the silence surrounding the pregnancy suggested by “nine months.”

The dream mosses that gather around the speaker’s legs, a marvelous embodiment of the books above, are like the mosses in Ezra Pound’s adaptation, “The River-Merchant’s Wife, A Letter”—"By the gate, now, the moss has grown, the different mosses, / Too deep to clear them away!”—the burden of an absence here never defined, only pointed toward: “And the city seems far away.”

For some reason, the world seems to believe that depressed women would feel better if they did not ‘let themselves go’—phrase that confuses freedom and ruin.

 

     The light on my skin is bright

     And unforgiving.

     I need a haircut

     Or maybe I don’t.

     Maybe I’ll let my hair grow

     Down to my knees

     Like Crystal Gayle.

The poem’s self-isolated stanzas are the opposite of William Wordsworth’s “spots of time”—instead of resonating outward, they seem small implosions. Noelle Kocot’s lucid, confounding, and rebellious “Crystal Gayle” leaves us with the image of a country-music idol whose most noticeable feature is the length of her hair. In “Crystal Gayle,” Kocot powerfully reminds us that that experience is riddled with the ordinary, the arbitrary, the anarchic, and the absurd, and that to value it we must acknowledge this or fail in our understanding. --Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Nine): Richard Stull [by Angela Ball]

COUNTRY MUSIC

There’s really nothing to see inside.
The austerity that once numbed the rooms
Died of a fever and rotted in the shadows
Of the few trees left on the lawn.
You can stare through the windows all you want,
Nothing inside will be broken, the guests
The dogs and stray cats will never appear.
But something keeps me here. Maybe it’s
The old man who whistles through his teeth.
He sways lightly on the porch swing. His rifle
Is covered with dust. Birds listen from the barns,
Wait for their big chance. Maybe it’s Upstairs
Helen, weeping in the shadows of gold.
Maybe it’s the children moaning from deep
Under the ground where they’re passing their lives.
They wait for the tale’s perfume to blow away.
They have asked me to step back and drift off
Through the suddenly softly falling snow,
Launched into the future, my hands thrown up,
So we can all disappear from my mind.

                                                                  -Richard Stull

Richard Stull was born and raised in Mount Gilead, Ohio. He lived for many years in New York City, where he worked as an editor and a freelance writer. He now lives in Newburgh, a small city on the Hudson River, about fifty miles north of New York. He has been a resident at Yaddo and was awarded an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Sal Mimeo (edited by Larry Fagin), and Blazing Stadium. He is the author of several limited editions. These include A Walk With Jane, Drugged Like Mirrors, Canal, and The Adoration of the Golden Calf.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Nine): Richard Stull

Richard Stull’s “Country Music” begins with a compelling disclaimer: “There’s really nothing to see inside” and moves on to a brilliant matter-of-fact personification: “The austerity that once numbed the rooms / Died of a fever and rotted in the shadows / Of the few trees left on the lawn.” This poverty, natural and human, is the source of country’s music’s tortured falsetto and gravelly base—anguish and comfort in one. The house has nothing to offer—even its unofficial guests, the strays, stay hidden. Then the poet/speaker says, “But something keeps me here,” and posits “it’s / The old man who whistles through his teeth”—a carnivore’s music.  The man seems more dead than alive, like a photograph of someone once living: “He sways lightly on the porch swing. His rifle / Is covered with dust.” “Birds listen from the barns, / Wait for their big chance.” What this means is mysterious, made even more so by the arrival of “Upstairs / Helen, weeping in the shadows of gold.”

Suddenly we are in the realm of myth—incongruous in this cornpone setting, but somehow right. Think of Loretta Lynn—was she not a kind of Iphigenia? In shadows of gold from the glittering costumes that surrounded her?  I am far afield, but the poem invites that, I think.

It takes us next to an underworld: “Maybe it’s the children moaning from deep / Under the ground where they’re passing their lives.” “Passing their lives” manages to suggest so much while at the same time withholding it. “They wait for the tale’s perfume to blow away.” What is the tale and why is it scented?  Because of an Attic breeze—not from under-roof storage, but ancient Greece? Like all of us, the children wish for things to be different. Maybe scentless.

The word “Maybe” in the poem keeps us at the threshold of reality, the house we don’t need to enter.

What happens next astonishes—the poet has heard from the children. The poem opens wide,suddenly, with the poem’s words addressing its maker. These are not quoted, but summarized--“They have asked me to step back and drift off”—and suddenly it’s snowing—the same prophetic snow that covers the end of James Joyce’s great story, “The Dead,” and we are carried on its drift along with the poet. The poem’s astounding ending violates and remakes the rules of personification: “So we can all disappear from my mind.” How to parse this statement? As opaque and teasing as Arthur Rimbaud’s “’I’ is another,” it says all this is fantasy—straightforward enough—but also violent. The poet’s posture is like someone shot, pushed over a cliff, powerless: “Launched into the future, my hands thrown up.” The casualties include the shotgun codger, the strays, the birds, and—most heartbreakingly--Upstairs Helen. If the poem said “so they can all disappear” we would witness a familiar poetic desertion, like the one in Keats’“Ode to a Nightingale,” when the poet must return to his “sole self.” That’s not what happens. Instead, we “all disappear,” “launched”—shades of Helen—into an unknowable future that is decidedly non-mythic. The inclusion of poet and reader in the disappearance makes magic--and in this moment, the poem, like breath, is knocked out of us. Yet something reverberates in reverse: a willed poverty, a Keatsian surmise. - Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Eight): Anthony McCann [by Angela Ball]

Deseret for John Ashbery

Out here someone else is thinking of you,
turning now towards you, to the west
and away. Your table has been set—and that’s scary, why not?
But the nominations have begun and soon you’ll substitute yourself

in doorways, and on stairs
when these hillsides burst in flames. It’s like
tearing the sky with your nipple and then walking back into the scene,
to the wound in the house, to the sink. Blue clouds

rush on through your skull, in the windows
of blood in your throat. Daylight throbs, just out of reach,
there at the lip of your stumps
while behind you, deep in the house, tools as solemn as kids

reassert themselves in the carpeted light
that sleeps beneath tables and chairs.
This house has been you all along
but soon it’s bedtime for vision and sound.

Still, as long as it’s there you will want it,
will want to be in it, to see it,
to touch the blue tub and have been.
And so, in the bath (where they’ll find you one day,

your own mouth stuffed with cool blood)
you pushed open the window and glazed off into space
filled up with blips and new lanes. The world that you see
is just so nearby; one is almost

always surrounded, so that it is almost perfectly safe
and you can open your eyes and still breathe.
Meanwhile, out here, we listen for your breath
like the bodies in songs where no one is home. It’s like

turning with your throat in that memory of the house
when already we’re inside touching the coats.
But this, you’ll never know, you say turning twice away
and then opening the car so the music all spilled out.

So that nothing, or the land, can whistle, or be said,
now the cars all went away in a blast of seeds and dust.
This excitement leads you again to the house
where you’ll find your own head, borrowed in glass,

neglected, transpired and waiting to act,
to greet you again with the holes of your face.
The light flecks on your eyes are like fingers on skin
tracing cloud shapes on backs, as they stretch out and pass.

Let this be our city, weaving the light, in the light,
on our backs, in beds, facing up.

-Anthony McCann                        from I am the dead, who, you take care of me (forthcoming in 2023 from Wave Books)

 

Anthony McCann is the author of five volumes of poetry including I am the dead, who, you take care of me and Thing Music. His non-fiction prose work, Shadowlands—on the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge—was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Reading the West Award. Anthony is the current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives with this family in the Mojave Desert. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Eight): Anthony McCann

Anthony McCann’s powerful “Deseret for John Ashbery” brings home the constant interaction between us, creatures of body, and our environs: cars, city, seeds, lights, glass, spilled music. “This house has been you all along,” the poem says, as part of its careful, scarifying trail of recognitions, the more real for their surreality.

The poem’s second-person address both underscores its urgency and sweeps us into its subject, identifying us with him. This is not like Auden saying of Yeats, “he became his admirers.” Ashbery has, in a sense, always been one with the reader. He did not imagine his thoughts and their movement as different from others’. Indeed, his work can be a seen as a rolling stream of thoughts with no specific owner, as language has no specific owner, the lack of such constituting its great beauty.

“Deseret,” conflation of “desert” and “desire,” is a Mormon term for “promised land.” Ashbery, no Mormon, was also no stranger to land with promises. He spoke of New York City as a ‘large empty space’ ideal for art. He also liked to attach beautiful, arcane words to places, as in his poem title, “These Lacustrine Cities.”

Ashbery grew up on fruitful land. Land with fruit trees. The cover of Karin Roffman’s brilliant biography of his early life, The Songs We Know Best, shows him among branches of a cherry tree, picking its fruit. The origins of the New York School of Poets were pastoral. Its poets came from elsewhere, with three of its big four harvested from Harvard. When they formed their friendships the United States was still in large part a country of small farms. The city still drew on the countryside for power and bounty.

As we know, depredations made against the natural world by large-scale commerce, including industrial farming  and human-caused climate change, have drained beauty and usefulness from the nature we control. It is beyond Ironic that America began and grew through the expulsion of aboriginal inhabitants who knew how to prosper without disemboweling nature. Our question is now, as Robert Frost put it, “what to make of a diminished thing.”

Like all human environments, the poem is a constant interchange between the natural and the manufactured. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, the original of the umbrella is the tree. And what are houses but groves? The wood of them planed and calibrated, but still of the earth.

The poem begins by creating distance. It starts outside of Ashbery, imagining him imagined—as a kind of frontier?  “Your table has been set” sounds Biblical and fatalistic, but is undercut by the folksiness of “and that’s scary—why not?” The business-as-usual tone of “But the nominations have begun” turns into a run of surreal transformations through which the poem’s Ashbery persists:

     . . . and soon you’ll substitute yourself

 

     in doorways, and on stairs

     when these hillsides burst in flames. It’s like

     tearing the sky with your nipple and then walking back into the scene,

     to the wound in the house, to the sink. Blue clouds

   

     rush on through your skull, in the windows

     of blood in your throat. Daylight throbs, just out of reach,

     there at the lip of your stumps

     while behind you, deep in the house, tools as solemn as kids

 

     reassert themselves in the carpeted light

     that sleeps beneath tables and chairs.

     This house has been you all along

     but soon it’s bedtime for vision and sound.

 

“This house has been you all along” is signal. It diverges from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “He who has no house now will never have one.” Where we live is who we are, and our deaths do not change that. Our surround sees through us in our corporeality: “Blue clouds // rush on through your skull, in the windows / of blood in your throat.”

Every poem, I believe, balances clarity and mystery. Here the balance swings toward mystery. In a mysterious way, its emphasis on touch reassures and grounds.

 

     Still, as long as it’s there you will want it,

     will want to be in it, to see it,

     to touch the blue tub and have been.

 

With “Meanwhile, out here, we listen for your breath / like the bodies in songs where no one is home,” a hungry collective enters the poem. How beautiful and ghostly, these lines.

The poem’s final exhortation, “Let this be our city,” begs franchise yet continues to a posture of—what?  Capitulation? Acceptance?  The poem ends with us “. . . weaving the light, in the light, / on our backs, in beds, facing up.” We are prostrate and open. So much feeling shimmers within the poem’s last three phrases and their brief syllables that pinion us to the house we have returned to, led by the “that memory of the house / when already we’re inside touching the coats.”

I have barely touched on the strange passion that “Ashbery,” “you,” and “we” undergo(es) in the poem. The effect it creates is highly personal, and the idea comes that perhaps our sense of the world has been dulled and distracted by impersonality, by abstraction and summary, ravenous forces that eat us out of house and home.

Anthony McCann’s ambitious, luminous poem, “Deseret for John Ashbery,” is both homage and home. It opens, harrows, and scatters our sense of belonging; and the humility it ends with feels like the beginning of wisdom. - Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Seven): Mark Ford [by Angela Ball]

                               Six Children

           ‘Though unmarried I have had six children’
                                                        Walt Whitman

The first woman I ever got with child wore calico
In Carolina. She was hoeing beans; as a languorous breeze
I caressed her loins, until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow.

The second was braving the tumultuous seas that encircle
This fish-shaped isle; by the time a sudden rip-tide tore
Her from my grasp, she had known the full power of Paumanok.

One matron I waylaid – or was it she who waylaid
Me? – on a tram that shook and rattled and
Rang from Battery Park to Washington Heights and back.

O Pocahontas! You died as Rebecca Rolfe, and are buried
In Gravesend. Your distant descendant, her swollen belly
Taut as a drum, avoids my eye, and that of other men-folk.

While my glorious diva hurls her enraptured soul to the gods,
I sit, dove-like, brooding in the stalls: what in me is vast,
Dark and abysmal, her voice illumines and makes pregnant.

Some day, all together, we will stride the open road, wheeling
In an outsized pram my sixth, this broken, mustachioed
Soldier whose wounds I bind up nightly. His mother I forget.

-Mark Ford                                      From Six Children (2011)

 

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1962, and is a professor in the English Department at University College London. His Selected Poems was published by Coffee House Press in 2014. Other publications include Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2001), Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (2016), Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry (2023), and three collections of essays, the most recent of which, This Dialogue of One, was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is the editor of London: A History in Verse and of the ongoing Library of America edition of the poems of John Ashbery. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Seven): Mark Ford

Mark Ford’s brilliantly imagined soliloquy/monologue by Walt Whitman, its catalyst a simple but scandalous statement by the erstwhile “good gray poet” (the title of a pamphlet by William Douglas O’Connor) transforms sentimental notions of Whitman’s saintliness to a more complex, fraught persona. It’s as though Ford’s preparation for writing the poem included Whitman’s poem, “Are you the new person drawn toward me?” which starts, “To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose. . . .”

“Six Children” embodies Whitman’s impulse to tally. The “29^th Bather” section of “Song of Myself,” in which a lonely woman peers out from her curtained room at 28 joyful male bathers, gets some of its power from enumeration. To count a group of people objectifies it, supplies a firmer presence. Calling the woman the “29^th Bather” renders the poem poignant. Her fantasy is given numerical actuality yet remains unreal.

Here, enumeration seeks to make the “six children” more real. But, in a wonderfully oblique move, the poem actually enumerates—till the very end—their mothers, turning Whitman’s confession into a demonstration of his prowess as seducer. Whitman’s wording in the epigraph, “have had,” rather than “have” is telling. The children are not a family. They are productions.

Of course, Whitman will be Whitman, and his descriptions of sex veer toward the mythic. Take the first stanza:

 

                        The first woman I ever got with child wore calico

                        In Carolina. She was hoeing beans; as a languorous breeze

                        I caressed her loins, until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow.

 

What a rich welter of contrasts, both jarring and enthralling. The woman is humbly dressed; lives in a state named for a great king. She is “hoeing beans”—the humblest of crops. The poet descends on her in a breeze, the effectiveness of his caress of her “loins”—descriptor fallen from fashion, but always used more for men than for women —demonstrated abruptly and wonderfully: “until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow,” “the furrow” underlining the woman’s fertility and echoing the shape of her sex.

Mother number 2 is ravished by forces much more boisterous: the rip-tides surrounding “fish-shaped” Long Island, named by its original people “Paumanok.” Whitman has, in one leap, arrogated the powers of an ocean and of an aboriginal island in support of his virility, so encompassing that it escapes even his control as “a sudden rip-tide” tore / her from his grasp.” Does she drown before ever giving birth? This doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is the impregnation, instinctively known to our W. W, his initials a wingspan.

 

                        One matron I waylaid – or was it she who waylaid

                        Me? – on a tram that shook and rattled and

                        Rang from Battery Park to Washington Heights and back.

 

Mother number 3, a more mature “matron,” perhaps waylays the waylayer—in a much more profane setting, “a tram that shook and rattled and / Rang,” as if itself enacting orgasm. We have been delightfully wrenched from the mythic to the real, complete with place names and itinerary. Ford’s poem is becoming a compendium of Whitman’s attitudes and imagination, with the mythic and the ordinary on familiar terms. (For another wonderfully comic combination of transit with intercourse see the scene in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in which the novel’s heroine and her lover, Leon, consummate their affection while being driven endlessly in a carriage. We know this only through increasingly exasperated exchanges between Leon and the driver.)

The description of Mother number 4 plunges us back into the mythic with the ejaculation, “O Pocahontas!” then back to the sad facts of the real: “You died as Rebecca Rolfe, and are buried / In Gravesend.” This solemnity segues to Rolfe’s descendent, whose  drum-like “taut belly”—presumably the result of lovemaking with our poet—connects her with indigeneity. Sadly, she seems to be ashamed—a fact our speaker comments on but does nothing to alter, as if merely witnessing a sort of tableau vivant.

Mother number 5, operatic, is Whitman’s “glorious diva,” who in an amazing turnabout, ravishes the poet with art’s unsounded obscurity:

 

                        While my glorious diva hurls her enraptured soul to the gods,

                        I sit, dove-like, brooding in the stalls: what in me is vast,

                        Dark and abysmal, her voice illumines and makes pregnant.

 

This stanza, the poem’s most formally and sonically Whitmanesque, shows us our poet at his most sublimely ridiculous: “. . .dove-like, brooding in the stalls. . . .” All along, perhaps, Whitman himself has been the mother of his children, his poems! And the female principle, wrapped in art, their father! If this sounds polymorphously perverse, it is.

We have been warned. “Six Children”’s final stanza continues to reveal dissonant elements of Whitman’s character and his art. In perhaps too-hasty optimism, our poet, having adopted the energetic future tense, declares that “Some day, all together, we will stride together the open road”—the “we” seeming to refer to the magisterial poet and his sixth child, the one child we actually see, whom he trundles in a “outsized pram’: a “broken, moustachioed soldier whose wounds I bind up nightly.” This  Beckettian vision is our Whitman’s final and most accurate version of his ideal fatherhood, an amalgam of father and lover witnessed in the poems of Drum-Taps, where Whitman ecstatically ministers to ravaged combatants of the Civil War, children he apotheosizes. (As Kurt Vonnegut has said, “Every war is a children’s crusade.”) Does “all together” include the mothers? Us? How “open” is the road? The soldier/son’s wounds seem permanent, bound “nightly,” their only treatment a continued confinement.

Was this son perhaps the father of George Whitman, eccentric and generous proprietor, for many years, of a Paris bookstore named in homage to Sylvia Beach and her legendary store; who claimed to be Walt Whitman’s illegitimate grandson? Perhaps a silly question, but I believe that this poem, like Whitman’s own poetry, encourages us to mix the poetic with the factual, that which is “under our boot soles.”

The poem’s final stroke is the blunt “His mother I forgot”—a statement that seems to swallow not just this mother, but all the mothers who have gone before her. “Six Children,” through poetry’s alchemy, gives us the poet in his most and least alluring guises, loosing, as in “Song of Myself, “the sound of the belch’d words of my voice . . .to the eddies of the wind.” Mark Ford makes it our privilege to experience Whitman’s spirit here, re-imagined in all its bedraggled majesty.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Six): Loren Goodman [by Angela Ball]

 

WHO WOULD WIN

 

Ernie Shavers vs. Ernie Hemingway — who would win???

Norman Mailer vs. Norman Bates — who would win???

Betty vs. Veronica — who would win???

Jacques Cousteau vs. Jacques Strap — who would win???

Yellow vs. Blue — who would win???

Blue vs. Gruyère — who would win???

The 60s vs. the 90s — who would win???

Those in their 60s vs. those in their 90s — who would win???

Andre Breton vs. Andre Champagne — who would win???

William Shatner vs. Gil Gerard — who would win???

World War I vs. World War II — who would win???

Ironsides vs. Columbo — who would win???

Columbo (the private detective) vs. Colombo (Sri Lanka) — who would win???

Julius Erving vs. Irving Goodman — who would win???

Dialectical Hegemony vs. Axiological Heterogeneity — who would win???

Herman Melville vs. Herman Munster — who would win???

Corbett vs. Courbet — who would win???

Merlin Olson vs. Merlin — who would win???

Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Leonard Nimoy — who would win???

Ginger vs. Marianne — who would win???

Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. Zimbabwe — who would win???

Alfredo Evangelista vs. Linda Evangelista — who would win???

Gurkhas vs. Gherkins — who would win???

Those who are concerned with who would win
vs.
Those who are not concerned with who would win — who would win???

--Loren Goodman

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of creative writing and English literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, South Korea, he serves as Creative Writing Director and enjoys teaching courses on dreams, manga, imaginative writing, kung fu, and ethnography.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Six) : Loren Goodman

You may find Loren Goodman’s poem of urgent alternatives, “Who Would Win,” very funny. Does this mean it’s less valuable as art? Some critics would say so. They would be wrong. Humor, though consistently undervalued in American poetry, is a great tool for opening the mind to new associations, new grandeurs.

Take this poem’s laser focus on winning. That’s American, n’est-ce pas? The wonderfully consistent trio of question marks at the end of each set of alternatives emphasizes the poem’s lurid preoccupation and America’s cultural obsession. It also hammers us with an unresolved question: what does “winning” mean??? and confronts us with our too-easy tendency to ignore such questions.

“Who Would Win” shares some impulses with John Ashbery’s riotous “Memories of Imperialism,” which begins

 

     Dewey took Manila

     and soon after invented the decimal system

     that keeps libraries from collapsing even unto this day.

 

The poem goes on to explore the emotional state of this hybrid “Dewey,” to hilarious effect.

Goodman’s poem doesn’t merge the identities of his name look-a-likes; he juxtaposes them, creating an unnerving cultural stereopticon.

The initial name the poem gives us is Ernie Shavers, an American boxer active between 1969 and 1995, a two-time world championship challenger known as “the hardest puncher of all time.” He is matched via first name with “Ernie” Hemingway, wordsmith known for hyper-masculinity and the veteran of several non-professional bouts, including one with Wallace Stevens that consisted of a single punch. The poem goes on to more incongruous pairings: another hyper-masculine writer, Norman Mailer, vs. a fictional character quite attached to his mother, Norman Bates. It refuses to dwell long in any one brand of juxtaposition. The change-up from the 1960’s vs. 1990’s to an age comparison is particularly diverting.  Disorientation is the order of the day. “Andre Breton vs. Andre Champagne—who would win???” is not so disparate a comparison when we think of Charles Baudelaire’s advice to “be drunk”—certainly followed by Breton, at least poetically. And Herman Melville and Herman Munster are both awkward loners prone to largesse and melancholy. We begin making connections between high and low culture, bridging gaps imaginatively. The poem becomes participatory.

Another participatory poem that may occur to us is Michael Ondaatje’s “Elimination Dance,”  in which its audience is gradually disqualified by list of experiences or traits; for example, "Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine's Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis." Reading it, we wait for ejection—a variable outcome. Goodman’s poem also provides a variable outcome, its ending placing us in one of two categories:  “Those who are concerned with who would win / / vs. / / Those who are not concerned with who would win—who would win???” Were the poem not concerned with who would win, it would end on the first “win” after “Those who are not concerned,” giving them the victory. As it is, we remain suspended, pitted against each other while the prunish disapprove.

Loren Goodman’s brilliant, teasing, and preemptory "Who Would Win" plays on our political habit of reducing difference to conflict and anticipates a time when Groucho Marxism will carry the day, the two major universities will be Darwin and Huxley, and ontology will duke it out with otolaryngology. It’s as plain as a rose on some lace. –Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Five): Justin Jamail [by Angela Ball]

Early April Subway

Again room fills up like leaf gutters
With attractive grouplets of the stubbornly
Coy and then everyone waits together
Like the pleasing skinny S-shaped
Trees that fill my enemy’s back yard,
A place of wet thoughts where forsythia
Is asked, cruelly, to be the weather
It foretells, but changes nothing:

It’s simply not the kind of yard
To turn an ordinary woman
Into the advancing giant, plunging
An arm into the lawn
And pulling out a bloody root.

Oh, parsley-flavored attitude! Comfortable
Shirt-tail atmosphere! Nice windiness!
Rare as a smart magazine and better
Than that and church coffee:

The room pulls away and I’m standing.
I’m standing and the room greets
The audience. I’m standing and newspapers
Open like folded pigeons, but I’m
Listening and I’m standing and my favorite
Citizens listen and I listen when I sit down
When the room fills with angry hip-hop,
When I’m happy as a screen door closing.

-Justin Jamail                                                               from  Exchangeable Bonds

 

Justin Jamail is the General Counsel of the New York Botanical Garden.  He is the author of Exchangeable Bonds (Hanging Loose, 2018).  He grew up in Houston, Texas, and graduated from Columbia University in New York City where he studied with Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi.   He later studied at the UMass Amherst Center for Poets and Writers, Waseda University in Tokyo, and Fordham University School of Law.  From 2009 until 2015 he practiced corporate law in Tokyo, specializing in cross-border M&A transactions.   He lives in Montclair, NJ with his wife, the playwright and community organizer Amber Reed.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Five): Justin Jamail

Justin Jamail ‘s poem, "Early April Subway," is a scintillant cocktail of utterance. Ashbery is in the mix, with his defamiliarizing of the quotidian; and French Surrealism, and maybe Latin American, and perhaps Martian, and perhaps other kinds, if they exist. The poem’s manic energy is O’Hara-like—an exuberance in which everything glimpsed or thought of seems a lucky find in need of sharing (“But I’m listening and I’m standing”). Throughout, we glimpse the famous, fabulous excitability of Kenneth Koch.

“Early April Subway” would be a good introduction to poetry, since it dances with language instead of using it to get somewhere. I love Moss Hart’s possibly obsolete dictum, “If you need to send a message, call Western Union!”

The title gives us a context. We ride a subway in a tender season, and we grasp that fact like a strap.

Reading, we recall John Ashbery’s affectionate parody of ordinary speech. The sentence that comprises stanza two parodies a familiar syntax and tone (low dudgeon?), but its nouns and verbs—particularly its plunging arm—discombobulate:

 

     It’s simply not the kind of yard

     To turn an ordinary woman

     Into the advancing giant, plunging

     An arm into the lawn

     And pulling out a bloody root.

 

It’s easy to forget, for a moment, that this is a poem about getting somewhere. By subway!

We are reading a distant descendent of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” with its “faces on a wet black bough.” Where Pound’s poem is distilled to a single metaphor, Jamail’s proliferates direct comparisons: “Rare as a smart magazine and better / Than that and church coffee.” What is “church coffee”? We don’t know, but can surely imagine, as we can imagine—even within the subway, “the pleasing skinny S-shaped / Trees that fill my enemy’s back yard.” Who is this enemy? We will never know. We enjoy the touch of noir.

The trick of making the ordinary exclamatory may, in part, descend from Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” where one of Gregor’s favorite pictures features a woman: “She sat erect, holding up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared.” (The exclamation mark is silent.)  We think of O’Hara’s habit of manic announcement, and, again, of the often-exclamatory Kenneth Koch: “Oh, parsley-flavored attitude! Comfortable / Shirt-tail atmosphere! Nice windiness! (And behind Koch, his early favorite, Percy Bysshe Shelly.)

The poem’s last stanza, entered at the invitation of a colon, gives us its strongest “subway” feeling—as opposed to thoughts or associations entertained there. How kinesthetically accurate, “The room pulls away and I’m standing.” We see the inhabitants of the car as an audience—along with us—as “. . . newspapers / Open like folded pigeons”—how surprising and perfect. And the poem enters a tailspin mélange of delight:

 

     . . .but I’m

     Listening and I’m standing and my favorite

     Citizens listen and I listen when I sit down

     When the room fills with angry hip-hop,

     When I’m happy as a screen door closing.

The last comparison suggests that the poet may be creating his own rural world in the midst of accidental music (“angry hip-hop,” an urban genre). The simile relies not just on sound, but on the sensation of closure, the sense of arrival, and/or safety, and/or nostalgia. Justin Jamail’s fascinating “Early April Subway” is an intricate, cubist impression of confined and intermittent urban travel as experienced by a broad imagination, a generosity that is our pleasure, for these moments, to join.

-Angela Ball                       

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Four): Kevin Thomason [by Angela Ball]

BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH OF A RELATIVE

Edges cut strange
shadows this time of day.
As sunlight strays,
roof shade falls short
on the porch, its doorway
a slate-black slab behind
a crouched man. Contrast
dominates the scene,
these dual grains of age
a resistance to one another.
Trees abate themselves
in ashen air, their blades
and pools of light crossed
no more in the give
and take of wind, branches
lost against the bitter
pale spates of sky
that separate them. The cabin’s
contours soften under
scrutiny till a blotted
onyx form remains.
Nightfall hesitates
at the backdrop’s wan
broadness, absence locked
in its momentous failure
to arrive, unable to fade,
unable to clarify.

                          -Kevin Thomason

Kevin Thomason is from Memphis, Tennessee and has lived and taught in Canada and South Korea. His work can be read in Narrative Magazine, Arkansas Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Last year, his poem, “Second Marriage,” was featured on Terrain.org. He currently teaches at McNeese State University and lives between Lake Charles, Louisiana and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Four): Kevin Thomason

Kevin Thomason’s  mysterious and compelling ekphastic poem, “Black-and-White Photograph of a Relative,” is a great example of a work that’s subtly influenced by The New York School of Poets. Its salient features—a somber tone and insistence on diminishment—recall both Philip Larkin and Thomas Hardy. And its crepuscularity conceals a Yeatsian grandeur.

Nonetheless, I contend that the New York School influence is present, leavening and transformative.

For good reasons too numerous to go into, a bred-in-the-bone distrust of optimism and language play has to some extent persisted in British poetry. The brilliant biographer and essayist John Lahr has used American musical theatre to articulate the difference between British and American sensibilities. "No British person," he said (to visiting American students) would write a song called, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.”

Thomason’s poem, while charged with fatalism, is subtly animated by the playful perversity, the sense that a thing is also what it is not, found in Frank O’Hara’s “Why I am Not A Painter,” in which he says, of his new poem, “it is even in / prose, I am a real poet.”

First of all, the poem’s title over-insists on its genericness, drains its color with the phrase “a relative.” And this is nothing so personal as a “portrait”—it’s a “photograph,” merely.

Exaggeration is by nature playful. And the exaggerated effacement of the photo’s subject—not mentioned until line seven, and then as a “crouched man” backed by a doorway that is a tomb-like “black slab”—renders the setting, a cabin’s porch, a combination cave and crypt. This is anything but the stock family snap, with its celebration of togetherness and possibility. In fact, the photograph’s subject is somehow absent while present. The sharply enjambed opening lines are ominous, dangerous, and packed with denial: “Edges cut strange / shadows this time of day,” and “roof shade falls short / on the porch . . . . Trees simultaneously provide and deprive:

      their blades

      and pools of light crossed

      no more in the give 

      and take of wind

Derek Walcott once characterized rhyme as “language embracing the loved world.” But here, rhymes draw language in on itself, emphasizing a grim isolation.  Surprisingly, even perversely, we see nothing more of the “relative”: only the scene that he seems to have projected psychically outward, an internal chiaroscuro in which “Trees abate themselves,” a strange, absorbing image.

The poem, in its tight pattern of self-canceling imagery, creates an aura of deprivation that also evinces art’s indomitable playfulness. The text entices the reader by depriving them of mitigation. We are left instead with something richer: the solitary mysteries of nightfall and its “pale spates of sky.”

I would call this a noir poem, one that acts on us the way films of the genre do, subsuming possibility in dread. Noir’s primary action is  the playful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring cancellation of hope. Only American optimism could have given rise to this dramatically pessimistic genre.

In Kevin Thomason’s noir/photograph/poem, we  join a film already in progress. We get only an ordinary catastrophe that can’t quite materialize:

     Nightfall hesitates 

     at the backdrop’s wan

     broadness, absence locked 

     in its momentous failure

     to arrive, unable to fade,

     unable to clarify.

“Black-and-White Photograph of a Relative”’s  idiosyncratic power lies in nightfall’s “momentous failure / to arrive.” “Arrive” and “clarify” rhyme--unite against closure. The triumph of noir, and of this poem, is failure that could easily have been avoided, were circumstances  and/or human nature otherwise. Something or someone might have altered the relative’s (a secret sharer of the poet’s?) defensive posture, his shadow domicile.  A moment here and gone, a lonely aperture.

-Angela Ball

Chateau de Lavigny [by Angela Ball]

I’ve just arrived at the Chateau de Lavigny.  It’s near Lausanne, Switzerland — the nearest train station is Morges. The house is grand and marmoreal, with an atmosphere of beautifully worn luxury.  Its terrace has white wrought-iron tables and chairs and a railing festooned with roses. Lake Geneva, about four miles away, floats in the magisterial distance, along with a blue outline of Alps. I’m one of six writers here, a mix of novelists, poets, playwrights, and translators.  Our group includes a couple from Russia, Maria Galina and Arkady Stypel; Dilys Rose, from Scotland; Andrea Smith, from Atlanta; and Draga Potocnjak, from Slovenia.

The presence behind this colony is that of Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, a German publisher who was great friends with both Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov.  The list of writers he published (and knew) includes Junichiro Tanizaki, Jorge Amado, James Baldwin, Robert Musil, John Barth, Tom Stoppard, and Ogden Nash. This year is the hundredth anniversary of his birth; he died in 1992. The foundation, which brings writers to the chateau, was founded by his (now late) wife, Jane Ledig-Rohwolt.  There are five three-week residencies every summer—the application deadline for 2009 is March 1.  For details on applying, go to the website, www.chateaudelavigny.ch   

How I got here is a long story.  It starts in 1987, when I saw a call for submissions in the back of POETS AND WRITERS from a Swiss journal (published in English) called 2PLUS2.  I submitted prose poems and received an acceptance in record time, along with an invitation to lunch at the editor’s home, in Lausanne, Switzerland.  Thus began my friendship with James Gill, who was born in Russia, moved with his family to Paris, then fled with them to the U.S.  As Charles Simic has said of his family, Hitler was the Gill's travel agent.  James was a young boy then, and the family (because of the treachery of French banks) penniless.  James’s prescience about music took him from mailroom boy to executive at Capitol Records.  After the assassinations of 1968, he moved to Switzerland, later starting 2PLUS2, a beautifully produced literary annual whose managing editor was Jamie Lehrer, daughter of PBS’s Jim Lehrer.  Because of James Gills’ continued support of my work, I took part in the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam in 1989, and after it ended we had lunch in Lausanne, the first of several between then and 1994, when James died. Through him I met the American poet, non-fiction writer, and novelist Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, who lives in Parma and is a member of the board of the Chateau. A few months ago she encouraged me to apply for a residency, and I did. Though I had an “in,” I’m quite sure that’s not necessary.  Since there are six spots for each of 6 sessions, chances of acceptance are good. 

This is the first writers’ retreat I’ve ever attended. It’s exceptionally peaceful.  There’s no one else around except a very nice young woman named Sophie, available to help us with info about the area, etc.  We are left alone during the day (breakfast and lunch are self-serve) to write. Our only “obligation” is to come to a brief cocktail hour at 7 and dinner at 7:30 each evening.  There are vineyards all around here, and we share a bottle of white wine for an aperitif and a bottle of red with dinner (I have a feeling we will be visiting the nearest vineyard soon to supplement our supply.)  I’m hoping to write new poems here.  My latest book, NIGHT CLERK AT THE HOTEL OF BOTH WORLDS, came out last fall.

The sense I have at Lavigny, to start with at any rate, is that I’ve been privileged to live and try to write among ghosts of greatness.  Downstairs there are copies of many books published by Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, along with photographs of him with Miller, Nabokov, and others.  His giant rocking horse (shades of D.H. Lawrence?) rests on the front steps. Since the Chateau is possible because of him, I don’t mind the reverence, but there’s something sad about being part of his postscript.  Is the golden age of literature finished?  I think every generation must have elegiac feelings about the ones preceding, but the world has suffered such massive changes and so much loss during my adulthood, it’s hard not to feel like the living ghost of a richer past.  All the bedrooms here are named for writers: I’m staying in “Nabokov.” Though I haven’t visited my friend James’s grave, I know that it is in a mountain churchyard near here, where there were wildflowers with snow on them the March day he was buried, just behind Vladimir Nabokov.

-- Angela Ball

from the archive; first posted June 26, 2008

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Two): Matthew Zapruder [by Angela Ball]

Poem for a Suicide

The yellow flowers on the grave
make an arch, they lie 

on a black stone that lies on the ground
like a black door that will always

remain closed down into the earth,
into it is etched the name

of a great poet who believed
he had nothing more to say,

he threw himself into literal water
and everyone has done their mourning 

and been mourned over, and we all 
went on with our shopping, 

I stare at this photograph of that grave
and think you died like him, 

like all the others,
and the yellow flowers 

seem angry, they seem to want to refuse 
to be placed anywhere but in a vase 

next to the living, someday 
all of us will have our names 

etched where we cannot read them,
she who sealed her envelopes

full of poems about doubt with flowers 
called it her “granite lip,” I want mine 

to say Lucky Life, and what would 
a perfect elegy do? place the flowers 

back in the ground? take me 
where I can watch him sit eternally 

dreaming over his typewriter? 
then, at last, will I finally unlearn 

everything? and I admit that yes, 
while I could never leave 

everyone, here at last 
I understand these yellow flowers, 

the names, the black door 
he held open 

and you walked through.

-Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of editor of the poetry column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Photo by B.A. Van Sise

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Two): Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder’s intricate and absorbing “Poem for a Suicide” dramatizes an ever-present paradox: that language is part of art’s saving grace but also forms grief’s alphabet. Helped by Zapruder’s brief comment on the poem at Poets.Org, I know that it begins ekphrastically, prompted by a picture of the great poet Paul Celan’s grave and the contrast of sun-colored flowers that “lie” over black stone. “The ‘you’ addressed,” Zapruder says, “is not one person, but several people. I want to understand them, and I want to hold onto them, but have no choice but to let them go.”

I think the phrase “have no choice” is of signal import; suicides “choose” to end their own lives, but the essence of suicide is its beyondness from choice. Or, put another way, choice has removed itself. It could be said that Celan died not by his own hand but at the hands of a language so blackened and blasphemed that he could no longer write or live inside it.

Instinctively, we feel anger toward the suicide, who has rejected a state of being that we still inhabit, an anger that the poem displaces into the yellow flowers:

     . . .and the yellow flowers
     

     seem angry, they seem to want to refuse

     to be placed anywhere but in a vase
     

     next to the living . . .

The old punishment for suicide, burial at a crossroads, was a way of keeping the suicide in proximity to life and the travels and travails that comprise it. This poem is itself a kind of crossroads, with three poets intersecting in it, or four, if we count the speaker/poet. There is Emily Dickinson, whose tombstone was her “granite lip,” and who “sealed her envelopes / / full of poems about doubt with flowers. . .” and Gerald Stern, whose every poem celebrated the great good fortune of being alive, and whose “Lucky Life” Zapruder has requested (as he says in his comment) be read at his own funeral. Celebration and doubt speak to one another, and to death.

“Poems about doubt” is a definitive description of Dickinson’s work. Doubt, the fuel of her prodigious talent, never abandoned her. The indeterminate “you” in this poem is, I think, a wonderful engine of doubt, belying the “a” in its title. It is crucial to the poem’s desire to move outward from its catalyst without entering generality—that is, to keep things in the realm of the personal, where feeling resides.

The first “you” appears just after we leave the poet’s grave:

     . . . everyone has done their mourning

     and been mourned over, and we all

     went on with our shopping . . .

This has the shock of truth, of humor—first-world people have one distraction: consumption. A damning notion. Yet what better to restrain death, at least mentally, than new supplies? This, an updated, sharpened version of Ezra Pound’s “But a tawdry cheapness / shall outlast our days,” might have ended discussion; but the “you” widens and continues it:

     I stare at this photograph of that grave

 

     and think you died like him,

     like all the others. . .

The poem wonders about death and its articulation (“someday / all of us will have our names / etched where we cannot read them”).  “. . .and what would / a perfect elegy do? place the flowers // back in the ground?” This literalism joins with the “literal” water of the poet’s death. Shouldn’t poetry, the strongest form of language, restore life, as we try to do in thinking and re-thinking a death? But poetry is here to show the gap between what is and what ought to be. It is the way of empathy:

     . . .here at last

     I understand these yellow flowers,

 

     the names, the black door

     he held open

     and you walked through.

Suicides come in waves, the first enabling the rest. Perhaps the biggest paradox of self-slaughter is that it is the choice of no choice. The walking through leaves “the black door” open, leaves us standing in a draft from the beyond.

We don’t want the poem to end, but have no choice but to let it go.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams [by Angela Ball]

Border Clashes

 

We stroll out of El Zocalo

to find a world turning white

with snow. Not more than an hour ago,

or so it seems, it was still just a neighborhood

of homemade heaps and small dark houses

huddled against the single-digit skies

of southwest Detroit.

Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,

turn on the wipers.

1-75 to the Lodge,

I pretend to follow the north star

but pull off at the Warren-Forest exit

and pull into the Third Street Saloon.

I take out a five for a Stroh’s

and take a look around

at the only other patrons,

a table of students,

one of whom I know, a poet.

She catches my eye, looks away,

carelessly laughing as I recall

*

Christmas night at the Detroit-

Windsor border. I sat alone

in the back of an Accord

being driven by Mary, Katie

beside her, two sisters,

nearsighted, brown-haired, blond.

The guard bent down, jerked his head

my way, and sneered, “You gals

bringing anything across?”

Flashing licenses and teeth—

“Is—that--all?”—

Katie, enraged, swore for hours,

but how could I, I who have always

lived between countries,

between that night and another night,

thirteen years before,

when my girlfriend and I

found ourselves detained by Customs

because I was said to resemble

a West Indian brother

twenty years my senior?

Later, back in the U.S.A.,

Katie and I danced our asses off.

Sweat flung from the sprinkler

our figures cut, twinkled like icy

stars on the stage

lit unlit by slo-mo strobes.

I could smell the sweat of a hundred

worlds, the sweet and sour stench

of cheap perfume and bargain-brand soap.

It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

teeming with bloods.

When the lights came up, we filed out,

stunned, as though the places

to which we had to return--

Plymouth and Detroit--

had been found dead

in each other’s arms:

murder-suicide.

*

Last call, and I’m just fine.

I stumble to my car, spin out

of the lot in a spray of sleet and mud

and hit the northbound Lodge at sixty.

Not a few of these vehicles are harboring drunks

like me. The world is still turning white.

The white dotted lines are useless now.

We weave our ways home,

as best we can,

in lanes of our own making.

-Tyrone Williams

About the poem: It was written during, and about, the year I returned to Detroit (1986-1987) after spending three years in Cincinnati (1983-1986). For me it evokes that year I was trying to decide if I'd stay in my hometown or return to my job in Cincinnati (which I did) .-Tyrone Williams

Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford)(Delete Press, 2021)and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is at https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams

Every border is a question, a passage from one state of being to another. Tyrone Williams’s compelling poem of passage negotiates straightforwardness and peril: the evening of a man-about-town á la Frank O’Hara, the decay of towns and their possibilities, and the danger of passing between worlds when trolls and their questions guard the bridge.

At the start, “we stroll out of El Zocalo”—a Detroit bar channeling a Mexican bandstand—“to find a world turning white / with snow.” We feel the pleasant shock of transformation that ennobles “homemade heaps and small dark houses,” but at the same time can’t avoid the ominousness of “a world turning white”—a world in which the poet-speaker’s presence is at best, questionable; at worst, dangerous—seemingly unlike the cityscape O’Hara strolls in “The Day Lady Died,” its material choices so rich that he almost falls asleep with “quandariness.” Yet mortality and injustice are at large in both poets’ worlds. As a Black performer and drug user, Lady Day has been targeted by law enforcement and forbidden to sing. She triumphs through a whispered performance so powerful that her audience stops breathing—as she herself will do, before long. The poem, steeped in this retrospect, carries both exhilaration and chill.

This poem’s “I do this, I do that” moment, “Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,” conveys massive information with a glancing touch. This is a familiar scene; the cars basic, their upbeat names ironic. The poet, after pretending “to follow the north star” finds himself diverted to another drinking spot—whose specific highway exit and name, along with “Stroh’s”  and “a five,” sink us into the scene the way O’Hara’s “New World Writing” and “Strega” do in “The Day Lady Died.”

The poet sees students, including “a poet I know,” whose laughter shades into a memory of “Christmas night at the Detroit- / Windsor border,” and an incident featuring a border guard who “jerks his head” in the speaker’s direction, asks the white women in the front seat, “You gals / bringing anything across?” His friend Katie swore for hours after this, but the poet, all too familiar with such scenarios, who “has always lived between countries,” remembers a worse incident, a time he was falsely detained on suspicion of being someone else.

The mood changes to manic festivity as, “back in the USA,” Katie and the poet dance frenetically: “Sweat flung from the sprinkler / our figures cut, twinkled like stars. . . ,” a moment eloquent with joy—human precipitation joins the poem’s snow and sleet-spray. The stanza throngs with place names—a sign, we have come to understand, that the poet is at home:

     It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

     and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

     and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

     and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

     teeming with bloods.

But the section ends with a darkly comic image of “The places to which we had to return-- / Plymouth and Detroit-- / . . . dead / in each other’s arms: / murder-suicide.” In its fatality, the poem reminds us that the border between place and people is permeable, that places determine lives, and that these are places that manufacture death.

The last section heads the poet home. “Just fine,” he stumbles to his car, spins out “in a spray of sleet and mud.” The highway’s milieu resembles the bar’s, except snow blinded: “The white dotted lines are useless now.”  Some borders are crucial to all.  We remember, perhaps, O’Hara’s statement, early in “The Day Lady Died,” that he will get off the train and go “straight to dinner / and I don’t know the people who will feed me,” this trivial uncertainty pointing toward an existential one, an uncertainty much more radical in Williams’s poem. Its “I” has become “We,” and we are left, in William Stafford’s phrase, “travelling through the dark”:

     We weave our ways home,

     as best we can,

     in lanes of our own making.

What is a free-verse poem if not “lanes of our own making”?  Tyrone Williams’s masterful poem recreates a complicated dystopia in which living while Black generates endless “Border Clashes.” Williams’s lines (or lanes) string tight, summon the tension between knowledge and mystery, safety and danger. Making of it a sort of song. -- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Nine): Dobby Gibson [by Angela Ball]

Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber

Little glass planet,
I like picking you up.
As if I’m holding my own thought,
one blown molten with a puff
of some craftsman’s breath⏤is it still inside you?
You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine
anyone hurling you into the sea,
but eventually we all have a job to do.
I think of the early mornings and storm warnings
you braved to find the village dinner.
I don’t remember carrying you
home on the plane from Seoul,
crew dozing behind the cockpit door,
autopilot engaged⏤what were they dreaming of?
I don’t even know what shore
you washed up on: Busan, Incheon, Samcheok.
Are you glad we made you a home here so far
from the sea? is a question I won’t ask in case
your answer is the one you don’t want to give.
I love how perfectly you fit in my hand,
at first cold, and the way the morning looks
through you, as green and cloudy
as an unknown we no longer fear.
But I wouldn’t want to be held up
to the sun either, not because I’m a monster,
but because I, too, am transparent and trusting,
and mistake both for the truth.
Beneath our lives there are sordid undulations
and embraces brief and sweet,
a nearly invisible line connecting us to the fleet,
with every breath worth saving,
like the sip of air inside us
full of an old sea’s grace
or the ancient word hidden in our lungs
that once released back into the wild
will finally set us free.

-Dobby Gibson

Someone told me a story, possibly apocryphal, that Robert Bly, at the height of his Bly-ness, would walk into a creative writing workshop, place a rock on the table and say: “Write a poem about this. When I’m back, we’ll share the results.” He’d then go across the street to a bar and enjoy a drink. For a while, I employed this same somatic ritual, using objects around my house. I drafted this poem quickly, beginning to end, in a few minutes. When I showed it to a friend, they said it was about fatherhood. I revised it with the belief they were right. - Dobby Gibson

Dobby Gibson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press, 2019). He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Nine) Dobby Gibson

“Poem for An Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” is an ode, a poem of praise for an object with implications beyond itself. It begins intimately, “Little glass planet, / I like picking you up.” Isn’t the pleasure of holding a small object a sine qua non for collecting?  The image move outwards from the speaker’s “own thought” to the craftsman’s creating breath perhaps still contained in the “beautiful bauble.” But this is no fancy objet d’art, but a tool “with a job to do” that has earned its praise through the hardship of “early mornings” and “storm warnings.” The speaker freely admits not remembering where he found it—“what shore / you washed up on.” We travel with object and owner in the digressive company of sleeping pilots, the long blur of the journey. In a rhetorical twist, the speaker doesn’t ask the bobber how it feels about being dry docked “far / from the sea,” but returns to the object’s tactile presence, its “thisness,” in a lover’s discourse:

I love how perfectly you fit in my hand,

at first cold, and the way the morning looks

through you, as green and cloudy

as an unknown we no longer fear.

This description becomes phenomenal, moving from physical presence—nailed by “at first cold”—to astronomy and epistemology. It makes the bobber a cosmic object, but homelike—with the mystery that home always entails: “an unknown we no longer fear.”

The next lines resemble in tone the bluff friendliness of Frank O’Hara in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun At Fire Island” ‘. . . Sorry, Sun, I stayed up late last night talking to Hal’--—no preamble necessary, just casual fellow feeling:          

     But I wouldn’t want to be held up

     to the sun either, not because I’m a monster,

     but because I, too, am transparent and trusting,

     and mistake both for the truth.

 

Like O’Hara, our speaker is vulnerable—but where O’Hara finds himself implicated in the sun’s transience (“. . . go I must, they’re calling / me,” the sun says)—the speaker here is vulnerable because “transparent and trusting.” He asserts a psychological affinity with the bobber, both mistaking transparency and trust for truth.

The speaker goes on to assert an broader affinity for the bobber and its situation, making of it a microcosm for the workings of human community: “a nearly invisible line connecting us to the fleet. . . .”  After all, we too are creatures made of breath, some of it from “an old sea”—we go back that far. The poem’s final leap, made possible by the object but reaching beyond it, attains the heart of human need:

     . . .the ancient word hidden in our lungs

     that once released back into the wild

     will finally set us free.

Dobby Gibson’s entrancing “For an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” renders us dazed and lucky travelers, fetched up at a wonder that is ours—not just to hold—but to embody: essential as the line, “nearly invisible,” that connects human ingenuity and survival, spirit and flesh.—Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Eight): Nathan Hoks [by Angela Ball]

Poem for Wendy’s Eyes

Last week as I was eating an apple pie
With my bare hands all by myself
In a small room painted lime green
And lit by a dim chandelier which
Hung from a white ceiling that sparkled
I thought about Wendy’s green eyes

Which made Wendy’s eyelashes look green
Which reminded me of the ocean
Which was spitting up so many jigsaw pieces
Sea glass empty shells old wigs
Dead fish elongated squid folded jellyfish
All the junk of friendship the bracelets and twigs

And then Wendy closed her eyes --

Nothing lasts forever, not Wendy
Not apple pie, not the crappy light bulbs
In the dusty chandelier, not the pain
As one awakens in an empty room
So cheer up --
even the nurse won’t
Ignore your screams all night --

When the battery acid bubbles out
It looks like a syrup but I resist
The urge to lick it and instead watch
The flaccid plastic bag that drifts

Like a winged creature or a leaky brain
Hyperactively dreaming of Wendy --
Look how it comforts the bulldozer
While the thunder bumbles its way
Around the arid interior

-Nathan Hoks

Nathan Hoks's most recent book is Nests in Air (Black Ocean). He teaches in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, and in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Eight): Nathan Hoks

The title of Nathan Hoks's “Poem for Wendy’s Eyes” leads us to expect a conventional love poem. We get everything but. The speaker is currently “eating an apple pie / with my bare hands all by myself”—unexpected behavior from a troubadour.  But who doesn’t sometimes eat like a mythical Goth or slightly more complex Visigoth? The speaker notes his surroundings, “a small room painted lime green / And lit by a dim chandelier”—and this fixture, and its magic effect on the ceiling, brings him to “Wendy’s green eyes”—and to their connection, not to the rest of Wendy, but to the sea, not eating, but disgorging "jigsaw pieces":

 

     Sea glass empty shells old wigs

     Dead fish elongated squid folded jellyfish

     All the junk of friendship the bracelets and twigs

 

Then we are unexpectedly again with Wendy, but only long enough to see her close her eyes. Just for a moment? In sleep? Death? Then the poem becomes memento mori and/or ubi sunt,

 

     Nothing lasts forever, not Wendy

     Not apple pie, not the crappy light bulbs

     In the dusty chandelier, not the pain

     As one awakens in an empty room

     So cheer up --

                            even the nurse won’t

     Ignore your screams all night

 

The poem’s nadir may be its fourth negation : “not the pain / As one awakens in an empty room. . . .”

From there, we are urged to “cheer up” and given the back-handed comfort that even over-taxed medical professionals will eventually respond to our “all night” screams.

This is a poetry of direct announcement, like that of Charles Simic. It speaks as Andre Breton might, were he a Zen master; or Pablo Neruda, were he to let go of the majestic.

The penultimate stanza gives us oddly appetizing battery acid—are we still on shore, watching “jigsaw pieces” appear from a puzzle that can never unite?  And gives us Wendy for the last time, as if flying like Peter Pan, on the wings of a “flaccid plastic bag” a little like the plastic bag that appears in the film, American Beauty, though without its pretentions. How wonderful that the bag “comforts the bulldozer,” also appearing out of nowhere, suddenly an animate, giant glumness. And, finally, weather arrives in the form of clumsy, bee-like thunder: “While the thunder bumbles its way / Around the arid interior.” (This last recalling John Ashbery's riotous sestina,"Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.")

This unexpected ending to Nathan Hoks's disorienting love poem confirms, in an oddly cheering way, that the conflict between what Robert Frost called “inner and outer weather” will never resolve, but continue to seduce us into new forms of thought, bonding them to our old, sanctified loves; admitting what Kenneth Koch so memorably called “Fresh Air, “ the perpetual tonic of surprise.

- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Seven): Allan Peterson [by Angela Ball]

A HORSE REMEMBERS

A horse remembers none of its ancestors

heels ascending to splint bones

        and knows not its namesake in the sea

It cannot see itself through history

as I cannot me for my unknowns

        sunsets pulled down by their long gold wires

my highest calling from way below hearing

        It knows back a few days to an apple

and stands satisfied under a moon under a live oak

        that stands amid histories

cypress cut to stumps magnolias by lightning

        The horse sees the man who would ride her

coming down from the heretofore

with his wherewithal

-Allan Peterson             (first published in Innisfree, 2023)

What a horse remembers is an open question. In the instance of this poem it is memory and expectation. We are all, like the horse, living amid our unknown histories and our emotional attachments that direct our attentions. How we piece together a coherence from our limitations is a thing of poetry which, like intuition, is arriving at a truth with insufficient information. -Allan Peterson

Poet and visual artist, Allan Peterson’s most recent book is This Luminous, New and Selected Poems, (Panhandler Books), a finalist for the 2020 Oregon Book Award.  Some other titles include Precarious (42 Miles Press); All the Lavish in Common (University of Massachusetts Press, Juniper Prize); and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has appeared in anthologies such as Poetry of the American Apocalypse, (Green Mountains), and in critical essays in Stephanie Burt’s The Poem is You, 60 Contemporary Poets and How to Read Them. He lives and write-in Ashland, Oregon. Website allanpeterson.net

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Seven): Allan Peterson

Allan Peterson’s suggestive and majestic poem, “A Horse Remembers,” moves deliberately, in floating step-backs, to invoke the vastness of that which we cannot apprehend. John Ashbery, an agent of the unknown, wrote ekphrastic poems, including the great “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” that explore the potent complexities of who, what, and where we are. Peterson, a visual as well as verbal artist, writes here what seems to me a new kind of ekphrasis—a contained mimesis and charged stasis in which the poem creates both picture and implication.

First, we enter gaps in the horse’s thought, its biological ancestry, beginning in grass: “heels ascending to splint bones,” and continuing in litany to the lovely and surprising “namesake in the sea,” enlisting a biological past, then a chronological one: “It cannot see itself through history.” Then, the turn to these three lines, so crucial:

     as I cannot me for my unknowns

              sunsets pulled down by their long gold wires

     my highest calling from way below hearing

 The speaker, instead of besting the horse in knowledge, is subject not only to the unknowns of nature, its sunsets engineered by a contrivance of “long gold wires”; but also the unknowns of his own life and its “calling”: an art not high after all, but “from way below hearing.”

Then the poem turns to what the horse does know:

     . . .back a few days to an apple

     and stands satisfied under a moon under a live oak

                that stands amid histories

     cypress cut to stumps magnolias by lightning

 and to its position “under a moon / under a live oak," widening its context in a majestic, storied, and scarified nature.

In “The horse sees the man who would ride her,” the delayed “her” delivers the stab of the personal. A new order is established: the horse,“satisfied under a moon”; the man, with his sophisticated memory—his “heretofore”—and his apples—his “wherewithal”--crude in contrast to the timelessness arrayed before our eyes.

The beginning of knowledge, as in Ashbery’s “The Mooring of Starting Out,” is humility. Allan Peterson’s “A Horse Remembers” enters the tradition of the many great poems that call out their speaker’s inadequacy, placing them not above but below, under our boot soles We arrive at this: what we know holds none of the round certainty of the original apple. There are no givens but mystery.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky [by Angela Ball]

 

The Ballet

The dancers
In a terribly bright
Light blue gauze
Retained the mystery

Skating on a lake
Blue and ice
An illusionary time
Where poetry feels inevitable

The terrific clown
Who lies inside
Every blue dress
Does he see me

Always a star
Always a root
Horrible auras
At the door

But no matter where we start
It all ends in an ocean
Hard and fast
On the approaching blue dawn

Until then
A deep low whisper
What is language anyway
An ending that never happens

-Dorothea Lasky

"The Ballet" was originally published in American Poetry Review in 2021. It is from a book called The Green Lake, which is forthcoming from Wave Books. The book is in conversation with the horrors of our time, particularly in regards to climate change and its effects. -Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Animal (Wave Books). Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry in the MFA program at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she directs the Poetry program.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky

In her luminous “The Ballet,” Dorothea Lasky both caresses the idealization art brings and exposes its divided nature. Her address to ballet reminds us of Emily Dickinson’s address to God as “burglar, banker, father.” We are also perhaps reminded of Frank O’Hara’s love of ballet as embodied by his lover, dancer and dance-historian Vincent Warren; and of O’Hara’s frequent comic alternation between idealism and realism (“we love you get up”).

The poem’s short, heavily stressed lines carry candor close to the unspeakable. In the first stanza, “terribly bright” is a first suggestion of a deformed reality that jealously retains “the mystery.”

The second stanza, moving from a specific past to a sweeping present, works a little like an old toy in which figures are slotted into a base, below which the player’s hand moves them unseen, so that that they glide from one position to the next, “Skating on a lake / Blue and ice.” By now, it’s clear that this is a poetry of constraint, of frightening concentration, of the breaking of the “illusionary time / Where poetry feels inevitable.”

“The terrific clown / Who lives inside/ Every blue dress / Does it see me? brings a coterie of associations. The circle of blue gauze  (the poem’s central color)  hides the dancer’s sex, with its horrific mysogenized lips, so like a clown’s—like Lon Chaney’s rictus in the silent film, Laugh Clown Laugh, in which Chaney’s character is terrorized by desire for his innocent, beautiful ward (Loretta Young, in her first film role).

We may think of the custom, in the 19^th-century foyer de la danse of the Paris Opera Ballet, of devoting the hours from five to seven to assignations between impoverished dancers and the aristocratic “patrons” who make of them divided creatures, ethereal and hungry, gliding and grasping.

This is a world tied to two horses who gallop in diametrical directions:

 

     Always a star

     Always a root

     Horrible auras

     At the door

 

The ocean’s blue is “hard and fast”—impersonal, impregnable, riding the “blue dawn”: a destiny, the sadness and travail of age.

The poem’s absorbing fatality, accomplished in “a deep low whisper,” is altered at its close, denying closure: "What is language anyway? / An ending that never happens."

In these lines, the feigned offhandedness of “anyway” carries an excruciating Dickinsonian “zero at the bone.” Dorothea Lasky’s sui generis “The Ballet,” a masterpiece of mixed feelings, sears and purifies with honesty and the unreasonable comfort of an apt surprise.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Five) Matthew Yeager [by Angela Ball]

The Ongoing Lamentation
of Anna Nicole Smith

“You have a beautiful face Mr. Gray. Don’t frown.”
- Wilde

….Right now, for instance, there’s my terrycloth robe,
the walls, the curtains, the carpet, my slippers,
and the sofa. Six pink things. Six pink things
I can see. There’s also the mirror I like,
with the real gold-plated frame, which, from where I sit,
multiplies some of the pink. (It must be lucky
for such a pretty mirror to get to mirror
such pretty things.) And my skin’s almost pink
(it’s peach) and underneath my pink furry slippers, unseen,
are ten pink-painted toenails.

In the corner of the mirror, a shame,
is the window, showing off some drifts of cumuli,
but even when skies are clear,
the picture’s pretty much the same:
just green trees and green hills, a few white specks
of houses, berserk-looking and all
spread out, with jutting decks and sparkling light blue pools –
houses just like mine, that manage to be different
but all alike. California
is not so great. It’d be better,
I think, if I were to replace
all the windows with mirrors to keep all this pink
inside. Then my pink would bang around, wild,
like a bird in a sealed glass box! Maybe
I could even get those mirrors
like the ones they have in the cop movies,
that can be seen through in one direction. That way,
people outside could enjoy the room,
and I’d never have to give any of it up
or look at their faces. I’d stare at the mirrors,
and the people would think I was staring at them
and would wonder how I stayed
so expressionless. Poise, they would think,
and grace. I would like that…
The world’s pinkest prettiest room.

I’m fat. I’m old. I’m a fat old woman now,
though I’m fatter than I am old.
Sitting makes it worse. My stomach
is gross; it bulges; it’s big always
as if half-sticking up
out of tub-water. But I’ve been fat before.
I was a fat little girl.
If you could pull apart my closet doors,
slide the hangers, finger the tags, you’d see.
You’d see my story; that’s all I mean.
There are so many sizes,
a department store rack’s worth of rising sizes.
I keep them anymore so I won’t have to re-buy them,
which is sad, at least to me.
Up and down I go, fatting out
and slimming down. It’s odd;
I’ve been alive thirty-eight years,
and no-one’s ever asked me what size I am
when I dream. Not even Daniel.
Well…I’m fat. Every night! I’m fat and I stomp around,
and I don’t know what to do; I look down,
and the fat pushes out the tops of my shoes.
And even when it’s gone, when I’m thin,
when even my arms are thin, it tingles.
It tingled even when I was beautiful and in magazines
because I was beautiful. It tingles
like those limbs of amputees and scares
the daylights out of me….

But there are tricks, tricks to scare the fears into holes,
sayings I can say into myself any time,
as if started up by a doll’s tugged string.
I just say, "Vickie," putting on my Texas twang,
“Vickie," which is my real name, "Shut up;
at least you were beautiful once.
How few in the world get to be.”
But then I stop; isn’t that the same as saying
that I’m beautiful no longer
and won’t be again? Still, I’m right.
For awhile, I was stunning; I stunned,
and I have framed photos to confirm it,
and remembered looks-in-mirrors to confirm it,
though I’m not always in the mood
to be consoled. Even the teenage boys are old;
they must be pushing thirty now,
with receding hair-lines,
milk-eyed dogs, mortgages, two-car garages.
Do they ever blow the dust off thoughts of me?
Can they climb back into outgrown fantasies?
I used to think of them, up late
in their little darks, gulping, diddling their little peckers,
one me each in their million boy-minds.
At times I’d even cross over, imagine I was them,
let myself play across my very own mind.
I’d see myself, or rather, see a me
patched together from that me in the magazines.
It was sick, but I liked it.
I liked them with my magazines.
I thought of them huddled behind playground dumpsters,
up on their tip-toes, excited.
I pictured them in the backs of yellow buses,
slapping shaken-out centerfolds to rear-aisle windows.
I’d giggle thinking how all this
must make those pretty, skinny, kid-girls cluck.
I am not a vengeful person,
but it wasn’t without its teardrop of revenge.
“Do you know how many people will see this?”
Hef asked, and looked carefully up into my eyes.
(Hef was capable of seeing
into peephole-eyes like mine.)
"Do you? Do you really?"
Truthfully, I didn’t. I still don’t. I tried
to wrap my head around how many,
thought of cities, big foggy numbers,
of people in yellow boxes stacked on top of one another,
but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to;
The idea of all those people
drugged me groggy with vengeance and bliss.

I was invisible once, was an invisible girl,
although I always had a pretty face.
“She has a pretty face,” I’d tell myself.
I’d chant it to myself, chant it till it started swinging,
till it had hills and valleys – a new melody each time:
“She has a pretty fay-ace, she has a pretty fay-ace.”
It was really all I had.
I had an awful yellowing room with no posters,
a ratty-robed mother in curlers,
no breasts, no boyfriends, really no friends at all.
And I wasn’t smart.
But the face was like something I could build on.
My only moon, it, or the lovely idea of it,
would circle me by night, at a perfect speed.
You couldn’t be beautiful without one
(I knew that even then), so I had a small, but real hope,
and because of it, I could dream.
Did others dream what I dreamed?
Of course they did (I wasn’t that stupid),
but because of the face, I dreamed
more and bigger and better than they could.
I dreamed scandals and sequins, red carpets and street vents,
men with rough, experienced hands,
more diamonds than I had fingers for….
There were classrooms (certain ones in particular)
in which I was the new girl at school, except
I walked to my seat not as me,
but as Marilyn Monroe, in silence and heel-steps,
and felt heads turn as if for a bride.
I mapped the bleak side too.
I imagined fame’s worst parts. In my dreams,
I wore big sunglasses, pulled baseball caps low,
tugged un-washed hair into a ponytail.
I left lovers, fell down in public, attended funerals
wracked with grief, wearing no make-up.
I punched a cameraman at a funeral….
And I loved these dreams too.
And I’d replay them, my favorites, over and over,
cycling through them, like records,
amassing new details each trip around,
and soon they became something else I had.
I could be beautiful. And famous.
– But when I’d look at myself, really look at myself,
full-length, towel at my feet,
my heart would beat fast: I was just a fat girl….

But why waste time with the misery of that?
What’s the use re-shedding old tears?
They’re lousy ones anyhow. If the tears
were themselves fat, hot droplets of fat
that dribbled off my chin in pearls
and dried in patches on the floor like candle wax,
maybe then I’d cry. Actually, I’d cry for days on end.
I’d cry till I was thin again!
I’d cry with purpose! I’d weep my tears into a little hill,
then squeeze that hill into a candle.
I’d then stuff the candle, like a conquering flag,
into my next birthday cake, and let it burn
all the way down into the icing,
like a sun going down,
watched the entire way.
Oh, it’s these slow days that get me.
When there are no appointments to be fretted over,
or shoots or interviews to be prepped for,
and the clock-hands drag like a diner waitress’s feet,
(I was a diner waitress once),
that’s when I feel gone. I watch the clock (mine tics),
and beg my dumb pink phone to ring (you fucking thing!)
and think my stupid, crazy thoughts,
which begin either I should or What if,
(I should jog; I should make a list; what if I stretched
my stomach onto a cutting board, like a lower lip,
grabbed a knife and lopped it off? What if….))
then the sky turns white and the trees turn black,
and I… I take more drugs.
It just happened so fast.
It or "I," whichever applies:
one minute sixteen, pregnant and afraid,
the next learning a register in a Wal-Mart apron,
the next whirling around a cold bronze pole
on a platform at Gigi’s Cabaret.
I was too young to serve cocktails, still too fat
(though I’d lost weight) for a night slot,
shaking my clumsy body for the lunchtime sect.
They’d come and go, go and come, letting in
cracks of awful Texas sun,
ugly, blinking, face-scratching men: a type.
But I stripped my fucking heart out.
Oh, you should’ve seen me! Their eyes
would follow like babies’ eyes, mesmerized,
or like a dog’s eyes when you grip a biscuit.
I was their favorite. They said so,
and though the other girls said, “they’re just saying that,”
they weren’t just saying that.
There was a reason they liked me best;
they could tell I needed them;
they could tell I liked what their grabby little eyes,
by taking, could give.
Naturally, I took the older girls’ advice,
changed my name, bleached my hair, got implants,
but there was no “real me” to protect….
That was my secret.
No real me. And I flaunted it; I tossed it off in handfuls,
flung it out to everyone, anyone,
fluttering, dropping, like dollar-bills let go off balconies.
And I fucked too. I fucked like a collector.
True they were sleazy, greasy, small-minded men, losers,
and Gigi’s was a dump, but still
I etched pictures of myself
on their eyelids’ insides. Still I was there, floating,
when they took their wives from behind,
and stared around their boring rooms.
And I liked that too.
Every day I stripped; every day I fucked.
Then suddenly, because it felt sudden,
I’d stripped myself thin;
I had a body pretty as my face,
was being featured outside, on promo posters,
had rubber-banded shoeboxes packed with money,
was flashing strangers out limousine sun-roofs.
Men compared me to Marilyn,
and I saved these Marilyn comparisons into a stack
and marveled at them. It was happening;
and the mirrors said so too.
(But to whom? Whom was it happening to?
Did I dare call that woman me?)

And then...and then...around when Playboy
found and flew me away,
I met Mr. J. Howard Marshall,
who was old; I’d never seen someone so old;
it was like he’d exited oldness altogether,
like when you out-drive a radio station’s reception,
and the station frays into pure fuzz. I peered
at him like a mantis, as if he couldn’t see;
Who or what was he
with his old-man nose and spotted head and wheelchair,
with his ten-gallon hat and folded ears?
Well, he was a big deal, that’s what!
He was rich, and the strippers spoke of him
like a prince. They sighed at my questions:
“Seeer-yuss Annar? Yunh dunno who JAY Howard Marshall iz?”
Then suddenly we were engaged,
this old guy and me.
He’d cock back his head like a baby bird,
wheezing, wanting kisses.
What could I do? I kissed him and kissed him,
left dutiful red smooch-prints
all over him like a napkin. I swam
lap after lap in his pool, tips of my hair wet,
till he drooled himself asleep on deck,
warm as an old tire, except breathing.
Or was he? A fear about that would crank up
and distract me more each lap,
as if my pool-laps were the units fear grew in.
I could see the headlines:
PLAYMATE SWIMS FOR HOURS
UNAWARE BILLIONAIRE HUSBAND IS DEAD,
and feel people circling, again,
as if with black magic markers, my sad parts,
my stupidity, my incompetence.
Then he’d die! I’d burst, slap my wet palms on the edge,
push myself up, run over to him,
and until I slid a confirming finger under his nose,
he actually was dead.
He was dead in my head – no, he was dead
in my whole body, all through me,
out to my shaking hands and contracting toes.
But my heart, in the steady heat, after a talking-to,
would quiet; I’d laugh.
The feeling that I was alone (stronger even
for the fact I technically wasn’t)
would spread out to his estate’s natural borders,
the house, the far-off wall of trees,
the wagging glossy leaves blazing white in the sun.
I’d feel myself perfectly unseen.
I would breathe and breathe, and feel fine again.
God was that a house.
Space! So much of it! I loved it. He loved it,
and he loved me. But that I loved him
is what no one ever believes. For me
there’s never been much difference between
being loved and loving. Is that odd?
Maybe, but I had my little Daniel to think of.
I have always had
my little Daniel to think of.

Daniel, you’ve been comfortable, isn’t that so?
I’ve been a good mother, haven’t I, in my way?
Didn’t I give you the newest toys, once I could?
You can’t be honest; you can’t with me; I know.
Daniel, my best decision and my baby always,
the hairs in my locket, the teeth
in my jewelry box, my snotty nose,
my macaroni necklace and arms-up little boy;
Daniel who is the life preserver
(I’m certain) making a blurry circle on the water’s surface
in my recurring dream, who still slips
and calls me “Mommy,” who is the reason
I smile; Daniel who is practical, Daniel who is tall,
Daniel who asks my opinion of his new goatee,
who, when I’m swaying drunk or in a mood,
tells me I don’t need to apologize,
waving me off. But I do. I need to;
I’ve been a shit mother.
I’ve spent so much time so fucked up.
I am so…so fucked up.
And I know it! Don’t lie to me! Don’t say I’m not!
Because then I can’t be sorry,
and I’m sorry for it all,
sorry for the flashbulbs and the tabloids and the men,
for the times I turned on the TV and left,
for what you saw at night when you opened my door,
(sometimes I didn’t even stop)
for telling you my own mother wanted me,
before you were you, to “take care of you,”
for squeezing your palm so hard at the courthouse,
that you couldn’t be my constant concern
(although you were the reason
I first walked along a highway shoulder to Gigi’s,
the reason I blew a limp “octogenarian”
(as he called himself) in a motorized chair.)
Or maybe I’m wrong about that too.
Maybe I’ve been wrong about it all.
Maybe what I had in mind when I made my decisions
was only my idea of you,
which might mean I confused you into me
– a fat girl with a closet of empty, chiming hangers.

It’s no use; I can’t un-do, cant un-do.
No matter how I wring my hands, my decisions
hang like clouds that won’t dry out
or move. And I’m sorry, in advance, for the future
which I stare at like a sea
because there’s still a sea between the sunset and me.
Thirty-eight is young.
Daniel, you say it’ll be fun
growing old together, that sixteen years isn’t much,
and the gap is closing fast. I agree;
I nod in agreement, but then you leave.
You go off to live.
Alone in my pink room, on my pink couch,
in my stupid pink room, on my stupid pink couch,
your cruise-ship shuffleboard courts
curl at the corners and blow away.
My mind won’t stay.
I stare at some gold-framed photo of me,
and I’m already older than I pictured I’d be,
one year older than Marilyn,
with wrinkles cob-webbing my eye corners,
wrinkles marching from my mouth corners,
wrinkles that make me fear sun, fear laughter.
Mirrors are back to being walls
which I bang my swollen head against, thinking,
trying to find a solution,
a way to twist my story toward a happy end.

But then I’m off course, fantasizing again.
I think, like one about to be fired,
I should flip my lid, go bananas, roll down the long hill
dizzily. (I’m rich enough, I think,
to be labeled “eccentric.”)
I’ll retire my breasts, mount them on a plaque,
maybe two plaques,
and have filmed conversations with them.
I’ll propose marriage to the mailman, lipstick-print
the citizens’ bills with kisses,
parade him in uniform for the paparazzi.
I’ll eat till the couch tips up on one end,
scissor my wedding dress into a bib.
I’ll dye the pool in the back pink,
and live inside it, like a fish.
Yes. That’s it. I've come to it.
A few buckets of food coloring, a coat of pink paint,
and on incoming airplanes, captains will say,
“Down below, you’ll see a pink pool,
property of Anna Nicole Smith;
she sits, all day, on the bottom of it.”
And the tourists will point and murmur,
foreheads pressed to the plastic panes,
and there my pool will be,
glaring up, unblinking,
like a badly photographed eye.
“She’s completely nuts!” they’ll agree.
“She is as nuts as we are not!”
(Just as I was pretty as you were not.)
– But who is the captain and who are “they”?
And isn’t the view from the plane mine too,
taken from that first flight into L.A.,
when I gaped at the dots of blue,
at the circles and ovals and rectangles of blue,
and imagined dying beautifully.

-Matthew Yeager - Spring 2003, Fall 2007

from Rocket Surgery, NYQ Books, forthcoming

Matthew Yeager's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, as well as in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2005 and 2010, The Strategic Poet, and Inquisitive Eater. "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment," his micro-budget short film, was an official selection at eleven film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in short prose, multiple fellowships to MacDowell and Yaddo, and inclusion in Oprah magazine’s “Top 50 Love Poems of All-Time.” The co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series since 2011, Yeager worked in the NYC catering industry for fourteen years in various capacities: truck driver, waiter, sanitation helper, sanitation captain, bartender, bar captain, lead captain, producer. His first book, Like That (Forklift Books, 2016) received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. His second book, Rocket Surgery, is forthcoming with NYQ books. He is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of Cincinnati, where he lives with the poet Chelsea Whitton and their cats Merle and Dolly.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 45) Matthew Yeager

When, as a student, I romantically, sentimentally dreamed of writing the voices of lonely women who, I imagined floated above us, departed but still yearning to be heard, I was not thinking of Anna Nicole Smith.

Any reading of this poem would do well to start with a definition of “lamentation”: “The passionate expression of grief or sorrow; weeping.” This Biblical word seems an odd fit with its speaker, a disgraced queen of pop culture; but it aptly reminds us that her griefs are age-old and continually shared.

In Matthew Yeager’s brilliant dramatic monologue, comprising a partial autobiography, Anna Nicole Smith is simply herself; her voice unforced, perfectly colloquial. She is the Lana Turner of O’Hara’s “Poem,” but she has gotten up, and is talking, her voice carrying some of Robert Creeley’s forthrightness in “I Know a Man” (that beyond-succinct portrait of cultural malaise): “John, I / /sd, which was not his / name. . . .”

“The Ongoing Lamentation of Anna Nicole Smith” carries an epigraph from Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray; and indeed, the poem is very much about the fragility of beauty:

     I stare at some gold-framed photo of me,

     and I’m already older than I pictured I’d be,

     one year older than Marilyn,

     with wrinkles cob-webbing my eye corners,

     wrinkles marching from my mouth corners, 

     wrinkles that make me fear sun, fear laughter. 

We know how the subjective “old” of thirty-eight can be oddly more convincing than the genuine “old” of seventy or eighty. “Older than I pictured I’d be” emphasizes the terrible power of the self-assessing gaze:

     Mirrors are back to being walls

     which I bang my swollen head against, thinking,

     trying to find a solution,

     a way to twist my story toward a happy end

What an astute portrayal of the our impulse, when the worst has happened, to retrace steps, somehow arrive at a benign outcome.

While giving us a woman’s identity via her pink possessions, her avid needs, the poem also gives us a portrait of fame, which is nothing if not a succession of mirrors:

     I could even get those mirrors

     like the ones they have in the cop movies, 

     that can be seen through in one direction. That way,

     people outside could enjoy the room,

     and I’d never have to give any of it up

     or look at their faces.  I’d stare at the mirrors,

     and the people would think I was staring at them

     and would wonder how I stayed

     so expressionless.  Poise, they would think,

     and grace.  I would like that…

We are far into Anna Nicole’s account of her life, with its riotously funny impersonations of her fellow strippers, and chillingly comic descriptions of second husband “J. Howard Marshall,” fresh nonagenarian, “warm as an old tire, except breathing. / Or was he?” when we discover the poem’s primary addressee: her son.

     Maybe, but I had my little Daniel to think of.

     I have always had

     my little Daniel to think of.

She offers Daniel this blunt, sad apology:

     I’ve been a shit mother.

     I’ve spent so much time so fucked up.

     I am so…so fucked up.

The poem, far from idealizing its speaker, gives us a woman buffeted by emotion, drugs, or both into serially idealizing and de-idealizing herself. She is both “fat girl with a closet of empty, chiming hangers” and beauty’s would-be apotheosis.

The story of a single mother leveraging her breasts, her face, to provide for a child is classically American; Anna Nicole (not her real name) is, in William Carlos Williams’ phrase, “a pure product of America,” the mirroring world crazing her in its glass. Not yet done for, she exuberantly imagines taking charge of the process (in lines that faintly recall Gregory Corso’s “Marriage”):

     I should flip my lid, go bananas, roll down the long hill

     dizzily.  (I’m rich enough, I think,

     to be labeled “eccentric.”) 

     I’ll retire my breasts, mount them on a plaque,

     maybe two plaques, 

     and have filmed conversations with them. 

     I’ll propose marriage to the mailman, lipstick-print

     the citizens’ bills with kisses,

     parade him in uniform for the paparazzi.   

The voice, magically ferocious and Ortonesque in its dark comedy of body parts, emerges from Matthew Yeager’s ear for speech and his mastery of what might be termed the demotic iamb—an uber-loose echo of rhymed iambic verse, both taut and springy. (I’m told that Kenneth Koch sometimes spoke to classes in improvised iambs.) If, as my brilliant, Yvor-Winters-influenced poetic forms teacher, John Williams (the posthumously famous author of Stoner), declared, Wallace Stevens wrote “parasitic” verse, Matthew Yeager’s is epiphytic, drawing sustenance from whiffs of metrical tradition.

The great astonishment of this poem, for me, is that there is no telegraphing or show-through of the poet’s own sensibility. It is not Matthew Yeager speaking for Anna Nicole Smith. It is Anna Nicole Smith, in the same way that John Berryman’s Mistress Bradstreet is Mistress Bradstreet, and Randall Jarrell’s housewife, sad among supermarket shelves of “Joy” and “Cheer,” is that housewife. In other words, the poem animates the speaker; the speaker animates the poem.

     But there are tricks, tricks to scare the fears into holes,

     sayings I can say into myself any time,

     as if started up by a doll’s tugged string. 

     I just say, "Vickie," putting on my Texas twang,

     “Vickie," which is my real name, "Shut up;

     at least you were beautiful once.

     How few in the world get to be.”

Anna Nicole Smith is, in Matthew Yeager’s expansive “The Ongoing Lamentation of Anna Nicole Smith,” the architect of her own identity, despite all. Her voice, at poem’s end, is antic and poignant, as she imagines eating “till the couch tips up on one end”; imagines a pink swimming pool, “Property of Anna Nicole Smith,” “like a badly photographed eye”; imagines being “captain” of her fate; remembers framed lozenges of blue, like face shapes: “circles and ovals and rectangles,” she saw when first descending into LA. Like her favorite “real gold-plated frame” at the poem’s start.

     And isn’t the view from the plane mine too,

     taken from that first flight into L.A.,

     when I gaped at the dots of blue,

     at the circles and ovals and rectangles of blue,

     and imagined dying beautifully.

There’s morbidity inherent in being an icon, a coldness that courts eternity. The young actor had looked forward to a romantic demise—like Harlow’s perhaps—a tenuous wasting, a doom. We are left with her foreknowledge of her sad, confused, unglamorous fate; and a thought: knowledge isn’t always power.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner [by Angela Ball]

from "The city has sex with everything"

                                                                     The city has sex with Megan

when the air shaped like the inverse of Megan
accepts Megan as she moves.

   If Megan is a system of exchange
that floats her labor and her point

  of view in vapor/liquid soup
passàging through her valves

and if her later corpse, collapsing,
  updates its inversion of the air

 even more than did the air displace
when she grew from brown-eyed baby

into strong laboring woman in blue jeans
  and heathered wool,

and if the air and earth draw from Megan’s corpse
  all the energy and minerals

  she pulled from her surrounds
to build her nails and bones and teeth—

  if the exchange doesn’t stop
but only ceases to support her consciousness,

 and if her consciousness was corpse anyway until
it found relation,

 then what demises
is the potential for the human social,

and another sociality
 will unbutton my whole shoe

and tongue hang limp,
  what sex is for but stops me

  at the barrier, a pixellated
glamor reef though very

   close and simple, smell a
flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

 energy funneled through a shape.
You filtered chemical

 information in such a pointy
fulgent scrambled way, in the city

    and outside the city in the vernal zones
   and aqua zones the city shaped, flow-charted, realist

trucked. The city caved under
    when the zones rose and lapped around the pilings,

manged foundations green,
   rotted the teeth out of the mouth of the city,

 harbor high-rises
dark and blown. The city is extremely fragile tender

human mesh and will be mush
  and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

                                          Speech by a flaneur—no a flaneuse

         On my face, D. folliculorum are relaxing
          like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks
           against the bases of my hair follicles
          which provide shelter and shade.
         These critters are peculiar to
            the ecology of the human face
             which I take around the city
             open, close it is my means
            of feeding I rely on
         changing its shape
        in response to others’ faces and postures
         to reduce my risk and increase my safety
          and my likelihood of being
           included in the group’s collective
            life. I smile a lot and hope it
           don’t look fake.

--Catherine Wagner                              (first appeared in Poetry)

 

Catherine Wagner is a Cincinnati poet originally from Baltimore. She is author of five books of poems, most recently Of Course (Fence, 2020) and Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012), and she recently co-edited a collection of environmental humanities essays, Contesting Extinctions (2021). She is professor of English at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where she is organizing a labor union with colleagues.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner’s extended poem, “The city has sex with everything,” like William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, is an epic built on the urban mundane. Instead of personifying the city (“a man in himself is a city”-W.C.W.), in this excerpt it depicts, as if from above, the city’s consumption of a person, Megan (“strong laboring woman in blue jeans / and heathered wool”) and also, I think, hers of it.

The poem is remarkable for its mating of metropolis with organic decay:

 

The city is extremely fragile tender

 human mesh and will be mush

    and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

and also for its mating of the abstract/philosophical to the immediate/physical, done in pungent language:

 

what sex is for but stops me

 at the barrier, a pixelated

glamour reef though very

   close and simple, smell a

  flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

The “pixelated / glamour reef” may call to mind comic-book illustration, while the last phrase, a ballet of p’s, lingers, dropleted, in mind and on the tongue.

The poem traffics in pulchritude and homeliness, giving both life and afterlife to its “manged foundations.”

Who is the “you”? Is it Megan? Us? It hardly matters, since matter is now  so confounded with idea and association.

Then we arrive at a kind of window in which the poet [?] announces herself as Baudelaire and/or O’Hara-like “flaneuse,” where we see, in all its teeming vitality, “the ecology of a human face” in hyper-granular detail:

1. folliculorum are relaxing

 like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks

  against the bases of my hair follicles

 which provide shelter and shade

The extended poem, in a breath-taking alteration in scale, has taken us from observation-deck telescope to microscope; from the city’s destructive and destroyed life force to the intimacy of one human’s personal biosphere, in the process taking its diction from wet and marvelous hybridity to bland scientific specificity. Cartoonist Sir John Tenniel was the organism-portmanteau illustrator for Alice in Wonderland. As these ultra-specific organisms relax, they imitate art. Catherine Wagner’s riveting and wonderful dystopian  “The City Has Sex with Megan,” after having its brilliant way with us, ends by conveying the poet’s forlorn hope of survival, fronted by a humble, demotic teeth-baring:

I smile a lot and hope it

     don’t look fake

-Angela Ball

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Three): Rebecca Holifield [by Angela Ball]

Unidentified Apple Picker

(1)
Black-and-white 3/4 length re-
print of Grover Cleveland Alexander (left)
and an unidentified man (right), apple-
picking. Both wear three-piece suits, overcoats,
[canes] and [top] hats. Posing for the camera,
each reaches up to grab an apple
gloved in a branch. Down
to bite an apple. Back to throw
an apple like a baseball. Forward
to shake hands.

(2)
Grover Cleveland Alexander and unidentified
man here called Apple Picker. Yesterday
may forget your name, Mr. Picker, but
because of you I remember the whole round
feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach
up, the snapping pull down. The sluice
from the bite. The sun in our eyes.

-Rebecca Holifield

About the poem:

“Unidentified Apple Picker” was inspired by a photograph in the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This poem is part of my master’s thesis, “Digital Pastoral,” which theorizes a few ways in which the internet and the digital archive have altered the tradition of the pastoral poem, at least in my own work. If the internet is the city in which we get lost, it is also the pasture in which we can find ourselves again. This poem begins with stuffy-sounding found text, describing the found image, and gradually redirects until it ends on a connection to the personal, the sensory. From the vague and impersonal, we make our own connections and imbue things with our own meaning. From the search engine comes the search, from the search comes the image, and from the image comes the personal connection we form with it. - Rebecca Holifield

 Rebecca Holifield is a poet with a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Rebecca Holifield

Rebecca Holifield’s brilliant and enticing poem, “Unidentified Apple Picker,” does not depend upon the photograph it speaks to. Indeed, the poem places the photo at further removes by telling us that it is “3/4-length” and a “re- / print.” Nonetheless, we are provided the positions of its two inhabitants and what they are wearing. One is a baseball player, a famous pitcher called “Grover Cleveland Alexander,” named for an even more famous person, a president, whose most notable accomplishment may have been marrying his much-younger ward.

Why the brackets around “cane” and “top”? For me, they function to emphasize the photo’s distance from us in time—and that time’s degree of formality.

Indeed, the poem’s details consistently emphasize one another, with “Grover Cleveland Alexander”’s almost too-elaborate name contrasting with “unidentified man”’s total lack of one.

Part of the poem’s quaint, Victorian formality is its highly posed nature, mimicked by the lineation of the second half of section (1). The poem is arranged as formally as the photograph, to humorous effect, as its images reference Grover Cleveland Alexander’s more famous role, as pitcher rather than “picker.”

Section (2) addresses itself to the speaker’s relationship to and with the second man, who is here somewhat more fulsomely identified as “unidentified / man here called ‘Apple Picker’.” Then, following a wonderfully deft personification of the past, “Yesterday / may forget your name,” the speaker exuberantly dubs him: “Mr. Picker,” a move all the more comic because parenthetical.

And it is “because of you,” because of the second, anonymous man, that the speaker, and we, receive the encompassing epiphany of the last four lines:

     the whole round

     feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach

     up, the snapping pull down. The sluice

     from the bite. The sun in our eyes.

Our kinesthetic, tactile experience of apple picking ends with the double climax of “The sluice / from the bite” and “The sun in our eyes”—the dazzlement of looking upward at a ripe apple—and our dazzlement by the photograph the poem develops just for us. Its darkroom, the poet’s mind; its emulsion, words.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Kirsten Kaschock [by Angela Ball]

MY STUDENTS WANT MY TENURE

They want a little bit of mothering
and a little bit of God.

They want a little bit of someone-who-admits
-mistakes from someone who never makes them.

They want a safe space built where As
are hatched into beds of cotton. They want

a teacher who knows all the things so they
need not click on needless links.

There are so many of them
and their lives, so varied. I cannot intuit

their lives. And they are more afraid
than they’ve ever been—but not of disclosure.

Not of trauma. Their own is not what they find
impossible to offer. And they secretly crave

triggering. To feel. No, what they cannot say
is how they come to think.

It’s not refusal—I think most
do not know their home computers

to be machines they should take apart
to learn. To know this is to know a mind

may be manipulated. That alien
voices from far across space/time

can alter radically perspective through old
fangled technologies

called books. Such knowledge over-
whelms and shames. And eventually obliterates

me as I teach, as is my job, instructing students
in my needful obliteration. Here, I think

is the crux of their desire: more than almost
anything they want, they want

me, someone like me, to acknowledge my
inherent uselessness while I please

please retain my position.

                                          (from Explain This Corpse)

-Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock, a 2019 Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (winner of Blue Lynx Prize from Lynx House Press). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. Recent work can be read at Conduit, The Diagram, and Los Angeles Review.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock’s “My Students Want My Tenure” astonishes in its astuteness about pedagogy, a subject so often dealt with in lofty abstraction. Like Frank O’Hara, Kaschock gives us, in dialogic, enjambed couplets, a live public, a marketplace of needs, opening with “They want a little bit of mothering and a little bit of God.” This brilliant comic statement clarifies an exchange too seldom explored. One other example occurs to me, and that is Donald Barthelme’s hilarious and affecting short story, “Me and Miss Mandible.” In Kaschock's poem, as in Barthelme’s story, what students need is vastly more murky than help with punctuation. The poem constructs an expansive empathy akin to Frank O’Hara's as he illuminates our need for Billie Holiday’s voice “whispered . . . along the keyboard” and for Lana Turner, whom we love, to “get up.”

How spot on, Kaschock’s description of students’ desire for authority minus its blunt edges: “They want a little bit of someone-who-admits / -mistakes from someone who never makes them.” And they want “A safe space built where As / are hatched into beds of cotton”—none of bewilderment’s discomfort, effort’s uncertainty. Students are haunted by the need to “make” grades—as though mere desire—or past achievement—can insure an outcome. Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” comes to mind: “If someone is chasing you down the street, you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep!'"

How accurate, Kaschock’s reproduction of the fuzzy, the approximate often so central to human desires: “They want // a teacher who knows all the things so they / need not click on useless links.” And for their own part, the teacher is locked in approximation: “There are so many of them / and their lives, so varied. I cannot intuit // their lives.” Undaunted by this impossibility, after first dispatching what the students aren’t afraid of—“disclosure,” “trauma”-- the poem moves on to touch obscure, ineradicable aversions: the inability to see beyond the structures, economic and cybernetic, that so determine their thinking; the origins of which remain, to them, obscure.

       . . .That alien

       voices from far across space/time

 

       can alter radically perspective through old

       fangled technologies

 

       called books. Such knowledge over-

       whelms and shames. And eventually obliterates

 

       me as I teach, as is my job, instructing students

       in my needful obliteration. . .

 

How apt, the word “crux,” in “This is the crux /of their desire.” The students want to see someone, a teacher/martyr, swallowed by the impossibility that presses them onward (too frequently goaded by parents’ insistence that they “make something of themselves”) so they won’t be. To take the hit of knowledge in their stead. So that confusion lessens, pain lessens. There’s nothing personal about it:

     . . . they want

     

     me, someone like me, to acknowledge my

     inherent uselessness while I please

 

     please retain my position.

 

Kaschock’s final phrase, “retain my position,” in its bureaucracy-speak, underscores the obliteration that the teacher invites. This is dark comedy indeed; and, like the best examples of that genre, it refuses to absolve us from futility—except that we know that this poem, as a bearer of insight, is itself one of the “voices from far across space/time” that “can alter radically perspective.” Kirsten Kaschock’s “My Students Want My Tenure” is a true emissary of fresh air to counter sentimental, self-serving, and otherwise perverse depictions of the classroom, that micro and macrocosm.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-One): Bob Hicok [by Angela Ball]

Civilization, as I understand it

 

To pee or not to pee

sitting or standing is never a question, sitting

whenever possible on a toilet

in the Pantheon a floor above

Marie Curie's body still alive

with the radium she endured

without knowing the harm her brilliance

was doing to her, then a baguette

and over to the Luxembourg to dream

of being home where I'd dream

of being there, our minds are water, you see,

touching the sun whenever we please

and the moon and Kahlo's paintings

despite what the do-see-docents say,

then on to London or Cairo or Boise

I hear has toilets as well, how civilized

the world can be in the spaces

we protect from our cruelty and greed,

such as the Pantheon with its oculus

suggesting the sky keeps an eye on us

at all times, indoors or out,

while juggling or writing a constitution,

praying to god or walking a dog

who pees with such sophistication

that another dog can come along

and sniff the story of her stream,

tell friend from foe, wag from woe,

and as science knows, dogs

are the only animals generally happier

when they're with us, including us

-Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok's eleventh collection of poetry, Water Look Away, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023. He has received  nine Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, and his poetry has been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of the Best American Poetry.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-One): Bob Hicok

“Civilization, as I understand it,” Bob Hicok’s inspired, inward and outward facing soliloquy, takes form from a Paris walk and raises—like all good poems—more questions than answers. Its opening, a parodic riff on Shakespeare, reminds us that peeing and bathrooms are basic to civilization—did not the Romans think so? We talk of the house of memory, but the smallest, most memorable square footage of every house, of every restaurant or public building, is its lavatory. Our heads are full of them.

This poem enacts how civilization is built from incongruity, happenstance, and physical need. Why should we be able to pee “above” Marie Curie? Because her brilliance is “still alive” along with the radium that killed her. Instead of discussing where he stands on this or that, Hicok shows us his position. It’s in Paris, where “the Pantheon with its oculus” suggests “the sky keeps an eye on us / at all times, indoors or out,/ while juggling or writing a constitution, / praying to god or walking a dog.”

What is humor but something that changes suddenly, becomes more interesting, scary, or overwhelming? Hicok’s oculus that “keeps an eye on us”—might be reassuring, as in tragedy’s notion that human life matters, but here is comically unnerving. Undiscriminating, the eye presides over the most disparate of activities, “juggling or writing a constitution,” and our minds’ fantastic ability to touch “the sun whenever we please / and the moon and Kahlo’s paintings / despite what the do-see-docents say”—as here another fabulous pun plunges us to the depths and origins of humor.

As the foundational figures of the New York School knew, incongruity is inextricably mixed with who we are and have been. Hicok’s wanderings take him from the Pantheon to the Luxembourg, from death to garden via baguette, “to dream / of being home where I’d dream / of being there, our minds are water, you see. . . .” This may remind us of Thales’s statement, “Everything is made of water,” from a time when philosophers liked to posit universal origins for nature and civilization. If this poem made such a statement, which it doesn’t, it might be “Everything is made of incongruity”—as at its center, the poem renders “our cruelty and greed” both nearly ubiquitous and decidedly incongruous.

As E.M. Forster knew when he said, “Only connect,” connections join things while emphasizing their difference. This difference comes wonderfully into play in “Civilization, as I understand it,” when “praying to God” becomes “walking a dog,” and dog civilization is revealed as peeing “with such sophistication / that another dog can come along / and sniff the story of her stream, / tell friend from foe, wag from woe,”

     and as science knows, dogs
     are the only animals generally happier
     when they're with us, including us

The poem’s final truth, stated in Groucho Marxian convolution, brings us to rest in happiness—the happiness of a truth both small and large, that both proceeds and diverges from where we have been: the paradoxical pleasure of recognizing that life is both simple and ineluctable, after all.

-Angela Ball