The Best American Poetry

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Seven): Dylan Loring [by Angela Ball]

Pardon My French

I couldn’t decide between
French bread and French fries,
sipping French roast
I made in my French press,
preparing to cook either breakfast or lunch
for the woman who began the previous evening
in a brown French braid
before we started French undressing
and spent the night French-kissing.

If French bread, why not
French toast, my mind rotated,
biking from Normandy to Paris.

Instead I chose to retreat
through the French doors
to the yard so I could get
some dirty air, chain-smoking
and coffee-sipping, smelling
like someone’s Grandma’s house
until a cartoon-looking skunk walked by.

Inside, she was eating French
vanilla ice cream, thinking about how
she had to take her bulldog
to the vet before showing up
to work for the day
--she’s an au-pair for the CEO
of French’s, the mustard company,
and was supposed to make little Stephanie
onion soup for lunch.
But first she suggested we hop in the pool
and take a French dip.

24 hours of thinking
I was le man later,
we met over cans of LaCroix at the coffee shop,
and I told her the one about the guy who mistook
a bidet for a drinking fountain, after which she stuffed her phone
into her brown, star-covered Louis Vuitton purse
and turned to me all serious,
saying she only liked me
for my American accent, that I spent
most of my time making jokes that weren’t funny.
So I told her I was just trying to show her
my level of commitment
and teach her about American culture,
and she said she didn’t have time
for a relationship anyway and that she would learn plenty
about American culture on her own
since she was going to be in a community
theatre performance where she’d get to wear
a pink jacket and pretend
to be a beauty school dropout.

                                                  -Dylan Loring

Dylan Loring is a poet from Des Moines, Iowa and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire – Barron County. His poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, jubilat, Ninth Letter, The Laurel Review, and Forklift, Ohio. Along with his friends Kate MacLam and Jordan Deveraux, he edits Lost Pilots. Dylan’s first book of poems This Smile is Starting to Hurt (SEMO Press) will arrive March 2024.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 67): Dylan Loring

Dylan Loring’s “Pardon My French” deadpans us through a series of idioms that function both as a challenge for the poet (à la Oulipian obstructions) and a humorously obsessive send-up of our commodified culture.

The poem may remind us of Gregory Corso’s “Marriage” with its oppositional invocations of matrimony; and even more of Kenneth Koch’s brilliant “You Were Wearing,” in which young love is abetted by clothing including an “Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse” and “George Washington, Father of his Country, shoes”—a prophetic example of product placement. All three poems end with a drastic and inspired change of tone.

“Pardon My French” begins with breakfast ideas and a skillfully engineered flashback to the night before:

     I couldn’t decide between French bread and French fries, sipping French roast

     I made in my French press,

     preparing to cook either breakfast or lunch

     for the woman who began the previous evening

     in a brown French braid

     before we started French un-dressing

     and spent the night French kissing.

From the start, the poem mainlines its artifice. That is, it acts as if its Gallicisms are the most natural thing in the world. Rather than tipping its hand, it displays it.

As in life, the real and the ersatz change places. Is the French au-pair’s “bulldog” related to John Ashbery’s “bouldogue,” a real breed that sounds like a humorous affectation?

Loring’s characters’ Gallicism is no matter of mere appearance—it defines them. The speaker may not be able to join the Tour de France, but his mind can. He chain-smokes while sipping coffee and “. . .smelling / like someone’s Grandma’s house”—the latter detail not so much "French" as simply an inspired description. We get a cameo from the much-missed cartoon character, Pepe le Pew. Soon after, the French girlfriend punningly suggests a “French dip” in the pool.

Loring’s poem reminds us of the apparently universal predilection for exoticizing or villifying things or phenomena by assigning them to a foreign country.

Take for example Algernon Charles Swinburne’s choice for the most beautiful word in the English language: “syphilis.”  The English, the Germans, and the Italians termed it "the French disease,” while the French referred to it as the "Neapolitan disease,” and the Dutch as the "Spanish/Castilian disease.”

Such labels may function as distancers of something undesirable; but also, of course, as vectors of glamor. Our speaker has begun to regard himself as “le man”—an affectation whose downfall begins as the two share a fizzy water named “LaCroix.” The name is explained at the website “thrillest” by Meredith Heil, who says, “The fake Frenchy name is actually a cross between the St. Croix, a river that runs along Wisconsin's western border, and LaCrosse, the beverage's Wisconsin hometown.”

     and I told her the one about the guy who mistook

     a bidet for a drinking fountain, after which she stuffed her phone

     into her brown, star-covered Louis Vuitton purse

     and turned to me all serious, saying she only liked me

     for my American accent, that I spent

     most of my time making jokes that weren’t funny.

At least two things of note happen in the poem’s final stanza: the girlfriend defies the poem’s apparatusto become three-dimensional, and the poem’s tone fails to shift into one of transcendence—a shift that happens in both “Marriage” and “You Were Wearing.” It ends by comically exposing the woman’s chauvinistic and superficial notions of “Americanness.” Then she takes her French leave:

     So I told her I was just trying to show her

     my level of commitment

     and teach her about American culture,

     and she said she didn’t have time

     for a relationship anyway and would learn plenty

     about American culture on her own

     since she was going to be in a community

     theater performance where she’d get to wear

     a pink jacket and pretend

     to be a beauty school dropout.

The “genuine” French woman has more specious ideas of America than our speaker does of France. America is a country populated by airheads, and she is going to “learn plenty” from impersonating a “beauty school dropout.”

Dylan Loring’s very funny “Pardon My French” reminds us not only that when we think of other countries we largely think in cliché, but also that we surround ourselves with words and objects that connote glamor and desirability: with “Frenchness.” At every turn, language connives with self-deception. As when watching a play by Molière, we learn that it’s fun to witness the foibles of others—this time by way of a poem that is both a tissue of false attributions and an agent of truth.

-- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Six): Jerome Sala [by Angela Ball]

A Man and a Woman

The woman in green
hates the man in the mist
but the woman inside
the man from hell's edge
loves a woman in flames.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
is like a woman who is a woman
or a man, a woman, and a bank
if that woman's name was Moses.

A man-made monster
chases a woman who willed a miracle
and became woman times seven
destroying the man called "Rage."

The woman of the year
teams up with the woman in red
to watch the man from deep river
undress in front of the woman in brown.

The man from Music Mountain
likes to think of himself as woman bait
but to any woman under the influence
he's just another man in a raincoat.

Man Friday
is like a woman possessed
but the woman from the lake of scented souls
is like a man in an attic.

The woman in the dunes
met the man from left field
no longer was he just a man alone
no longer was she just the woman next door.
Now the woman could leave Cell Block #7.
Now the man could leave his glass booth.
He could become a woman of affairs, desire, or distinction.
She could be a man from Cheyenne, Colorado, Cairo,
or Atlantis.
And he from Paris, from Rome, from a prehistoric planet,
in the shadows, in gray, with a past,
with a name like Jackie or Golda.

                                                          - Jerome Sala

Jerome Sala’s latest book is How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). Other books include cult classics such as Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull). Widely published, his work appears in Pathetic Literature (Grove Atlantic) and two editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners). He lives in New York city with his spouse, poet Elaine Equi. His blog is espresso bongo (https://espressobongo.typepad.com/).

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Five): Jerome Sala

In his brilliant “A Man and a Woman,” Jerome Sala doesn’t just deconstruct a popular set of idioms, but goes inside them to reveal their workings. The impulse behind the poem, I think, is both satirical and celebratory—a mixture of tones also evident in many of John Ashbery’s poems--I think, for example, of how making the banal fifties’ word “breezeway” a title transforms it into a thing of beauty. It’s as though we finally hear the word as it was meant.

Sala's poem begins by creating a rich confusion of terms:

     The woman in green

     hates the man in the mist

     but the woman inside

     the man from Hell’s edge

     loves a woman in flames

The humor here depends on syntactical betrayal. We are very used to seeing phrases such as “The woman in green” as isolators. That is, they set their subject apart, make it special. Here, there’s no time or room for such specialness. Already, in his first stanza, Sala challenges a notion central to all such designations: that the sexes are discrete, proudly separate from one another. Heavens, there’s a “woman inside / the man from Hell’s edge”—how can we revere an entity so confused?

Rather than unravel these complications, the poem increases them, to hilarious effect.

     The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

     Is like a woman who is a woman

     or a man, a woman or a bank

     if that woman’s name was Moses.

Sala chooses a TV show that depends on the pseudo-gravity of its title and hilariously compares it to a dizzying series of identities, ending with a biblical figure who washes up anonymously on a bank among some rushes—that here could be camera footage.  More accurately, the personage IS a bank. Humor leaps from the language, Groucho-Marxian style.

I think that the poem enjoys both confounding formerly rigid sex roles and satirizing the contemporary penchant for denying said roles. That we’re never sure what we’re laughing at keeps us laughing.

We enjoy the poem’s cultural mash-up (paralleling its sexual mash-up) of movies, novels, TV shows, and songs.

We perhaps think of other stories whose creators sought to supply them with deep portent through the magic of “The Man Who” construction—of course much more popular than “The Woman Who.” Here’s my own short list:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: Successful

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing: Unsuccessful

The Man Who Fell from Grace with the Sea: Spectacularly Unsuccessful

A Man Called Horse: Ditto

The Man Who Fell to Earth: Successful

One need only pair the construction with something banal to see what it is attempting:

The Man Who Stole Nasal Spray

The Woman Who Forgot to Remove the Clothes from the Washing Machine

The impulse to mythologize is ubiquitous in entertainment—at least it seems so after reading Sala’s poem. This impulse, when applied to material that fails to live up to it, generates hilarity.

This premise is more than enough to create a successful poem—but Sala adds yet more.

“The Man Who” and “The Woman Who,” in an apparent longing for real lives, mysteriously begin rebelling against their pseudo-mythological roles.

     The woman in the dunes

     met the man from left field

     no longer was he just a man alone

     no longer was she just the woman next door.

     Now the woman could leave Cell Block #7

     Now the man could leave his glass booth.

The poem’s last stanza details a dazzling pile-up of possibilities:

But wait, it seems the only way to escape from mythology is into more of it!

The sex assignments and the tags that go with them can’t be thrown off entirely, can only be exchanged for one another. As at the end of any fine comedy, the characters’ roles are cemented in foolishness for perpetuity. For me, “with a name like Jackie or Golda” takes us back to the beginning of the process, to two women heavily mythologized: one as queen of Camelot, the other as mother to a nation.

The nakedness of the poem’s final names underscores its sense of the perpetual.

Our impulse to mythologize personalities strips real people of themselves and makes them what we need them to be. The poem’s comic send-up of a foible of syntax delivers insight into the language and the people who speak it.

Jerome Sala’s genius “A Man and a Woman," a series of enlightening surprises, ends in wisdom.

It could be that laughter leads us to truth, which is destroyed again by laughter. There are worse ways to live. -- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Five): Jonathan Riccio [by Angela Ball]

Anne Sexton’s Death, 45 Years Ago Today

I don’t smoke but would’ve at your behest.
Truth hasn’t the same domesticity mingling
a throat. I have a doll theory that explains

the orbiters to whom you were malleable:
James Wright, Azel Mack, Mary Gray.
What’s confession but pull-string?

Outlook has downturns in Mississippi,
my umbrella sun guard, halo Kelly green.
The photo of Kayo carving a pumpkin—

Middlebrook’s biography has you archived
from holiday to halogen—his handsome
the kind that scoops seeds. My last meal

wouldn’t be a downtown proofread. Glue
from your out-of-print books flakes my floor.
The ′74 jacket-shot, dress plural floral,

your drink on brick, collarbone a doorstop
of someone who treated suicide like saloon.
No one writes of your shoes on October 4th.

Was it farewell and barefoot?
The tulip of betterment means one day
my father broke down at the ironing board.

We hugged, bayonet to monsoon. My sickness,
his steam. Don’t know how to light a match,
am incapable of cigarette. I quit turpentining

myself into corners. Maybe there’s a suitor.
I’ve out-delta’d disorder. Still, the engine
took you from diamond to coal.

— 10/4/2019

Jon Riccio received his PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers. He is the author of two chapbooks and a full-length collection, Agoreography (3: A Taos Press). He teaches literature and creative writing at Western Michigan University and the University of West Alabama.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Five): Jonathan Riccio

Jonathan Riccio’s “Anne Sexton’s Death, 45 Years Ago Today,” combines energy and tenderness in a form reminiscent of ultratalk (Mark Halliday’s term)—the rapid-fire multi-sequiter colloquialism of David Kirby, Denise Duhamel, the much-missed Dean Young, and other poets who have appeared in this column--and also of one-time pianist Frank O’Hara’s pleasure in feting Rachmaninoff on his birthday while entwining him in details of his (O’Hara’s) life.  Here are some lines from his tribute of 1954:

     . . . presence is

     better than absence, if you love excess.

           Oh now it is that all this music tumbles

     round me which was once considered muddy

           and today surrounds this ambiguity of

     our tables and our typewriter paper, more

     nostalgic than a disease . . . .

Riccio is also a musician, with an MA from Oberlin to show for it. He almost conducts the language—commands it, rather, rallying words into phrasing that is both dense and lilting: “I don’t smoke but would have at your behest. / Truth hasn’t the same domesticity mingling / a throat.”

What a funny and lovely confession—the poet’s willingness to adopt his idol’s habit. Perhaps true fandom consists of wanting your paragon to rub off on you, like a fan magazine’s ink on a teenager’s sleeping face.

Indeed, we’re told, Sexton was, in Auden’s memorable phrase, “silly like us”—susceptible to Wright, Mack, and Gray—“What’s confession but pull-string?”  It would take paragraphs to unpack this dense statement, its palpable correctness.

We see the poet in a hot country--“my umbrella sunguard, halo kelly green”—this entwined with a photo from Diane Middlebrook’s biography of Sexton which depicts her young husband “carving a pumpkin”: “his handsome the kind that scoops seeds.” Here a subtle echo of Sexton’s powerful “Her Kind.” And this master precis of Middlebrook: “has you archived from holiday to halogen”—the halogen, presumably, of the coroner’s slab.

Where O’Hara’s tribute is directly addressed to us, his readers, Riccio’s is addressed to Sexton herself (and, of course, also to us, his hearers). What he confides is at first surprising—“Glue /  from your out-of-print books flakes my floor”—then more predictably, her outfit “plural flora,” then surprising again—in fact, amazing: “collarbone a doorstop / of someone who treated suicide like saloon.” To pause and unpack this would take more paragraphs. Suddenly we move to Sexton’s shoes, undescribed in accounts of her death: 

     Was it farewell and barefoot?

     The tulip of betterment means one day

     my father broke down at the ironing board.

What is this “tulip of betterment”? It successfully eludes my understanding, but not my sense of rightness, a rightness that wraps Sexton’s death with the decline of the poet’s father. How heartbreaking, his breakdown before that flimsiest of furnishings!

The father in his gauntness becomes “bayonet”; his son, “monsoon”—could there be a more unlikely pairing? “My sickness, / his steam.” Once again, we hear of Sexton’s cigarettes and the the poet’s inability to adopt them; learn that his own sickness has to do with obsession, eloquently described as “turpentining /  myself into corners.” It’s an obsession conquered: “I’ve out-deltaed disorder.” We find that the poet has turned the disease’s convergences to his own purposes.

Then, the gift of the poem’s final lines: “Still, the engine / took you from diamond to coal.”

Sexton is a poet interested in metamorphoses—those of fairy tales, in particular. Jonathan Riccio portrays the car—running in place and generating her suicide’s poison—as an agent of transformation. By hugging Sexton close to his own life, Riccio brings her close to us. Turning “from diamond to coal”—a different expression of the carbon atom—Sexton becomes the darkness she has written. Perhaps she can be glimpsed as the glow at the tip of someone’s cigarette, its halo a brief expression of breath.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Four): Joel Stein [by Angela Ball]

Through a Country

 

You, on the one hand, see a land

Green and rolling

With chalky marble

And stretches of yellowed sandstone

Patched here and there into the hills,

Coming up for air after eons of sleep.

While I on the other hand say

Here collisions occurred

A hundred million moons ago

With valleys heavy and damp

And sea islands becoming rock above the clouds.

But now all of this

Comes to bear upon

Exit 49, a place

Of rest,

Of a chosen view of the Taconics and the Catskills on the horizon

The geometric fields left half fallow, half

In hope of an early spring,

A pause on our way home.

The time continues

One stop past this moment.

Clairvoyant for a mortal hour

We finish what is in our cup

Then climb back into our debate

As to where the best place is

To eat, to die, or

Start anew.

The land moves down to the sea

And the sea relents

It is getting ready

To begin again.

                                Joel Stein

                                Highland Park, NJ 2010

Joel Stein was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up in the Hampton Roads area of Southeastern Virginia.  He attended college at the University of Cincinnati, and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  He lived in New York City for several years and then commuted to, and worked in, New York City for many years more.  He was a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  He has been published in The New York Quarterly, The Kansas Quarterly, Glassworks, Icarus, The Vanderbilt Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. He currently lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Four): Joel Stein

Joel Stein’s compelling meditation on the landscape of the interstate, addressed to a partnered “you,” dramatizes the temporary clarity—“clairvoyance” of highway travel, which, as we progress, provides illusory panoramas of future, present, and past. Of the “big four” poets of the New York School, its tone shares most with James Schuyler’s wry sense of the limitations of human experience. But where Schuyler’s decision in “June 30, 1974” to “have another piece of toast” suggests contentment, even coziness, Stein emphasizes our apartness from geological processes that take place in a distant and alien time frame. Where Schuyler is domestic and personal, Stein is objective. A “Rest Area,” that oxymoron, provides an anonymous beverage: “We finish what is in our cup.” There is a coolness appropriate to the experience described—but that also extends itself to a characterization of the human. A poet mindful of quantum physics, Stein reminds us that choice is sparse, even illusory.

The poem’s contrary “you” sees an up-to-date landscape, viewing it as a painter might:

     You, on the one hand, see a land

     Green and rolling

     With chalky marble

     And stretches of yellowed sandstone

     Patched here and there into the hills,

     Coming up for air after eons of sleep.

What an excellent image, that “coming up for air.” In it, road cuts become agents of awakening. 

But our poet/speaker penetrates further, reaching underneath to the drama of collisions as perceived by science—possessed, after all, of its own lore—as suggested by the language of “a hundred million moons ago.” Where the “you” sees a quiescent landscape woken after “eons of sleep,” the speaker is most interest in origins, in orogeny—the violence of change.

     While I on the other hand say

     Here collisions occurred

     A hundred million moons ago

     With valleys heavy and damp

     And sea islands becoming rock above the clouds.

That all this is visible or imaginable to the traveler is the work of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the federal interstate system built in the fifties that redesigned travel—in a way somewhat analogous to Haussmann's redesign of Paris in the nineteenth century-- exchanging, for the dark vagaries of Medieval alleys, wide boulevards and their prospects.

Super-highways colonize, neutralize. We must see the marked miles as they have been arranged, an organized text with exits as chapters, a primer we skim in powerful machines. All has been thought out by engineers: grade and degree of turn, depth of road cut, opportunities for drainage, possible wind shear.

A town near me once owned a throwback hairpin curve in its interstate—the source of much excitement and inconvenience. Known as the last such crimp allowed in any major highway, it was, in its time, a thrilling deviation.

It can be said that highways form an enduring metaphor for how we too often live: following a bland prescribed route, observing signs. But, as Stein’s poem brilliantly points out, they also provide moments of clarity:

     The time continues

     One stop past this moment.

     Clairvoyant for a mortal hour

     We finish what is in our cup

     Then climb back into our debate

     As to where the best place is

     To eat, to die, or

     Start anew.

When they deepen into seriousness, free-verse poems tend to wax iambic, and Stein’s “Through a Country,” with its provocatively bland title, is no exception. “As to where the best place is” wisely roughs up the rhythm for a moment, mirroring the difficulty and/or impossibility of choice. So does the line break at “or”—not to mention the wild incongruity of the list itself. Is this what choice comes down to? The list is chilling yet inspiring, ending as it does with (a somewhat ironic) “Start anew.”

“Then climb back into our debate” provides more than an eloquent metaphor for re-starting a discussion. The vehicle itself, powered by the destruction of nature, is the debate. It keeps the dialogue going, for the poem’s couple and for us, who emerge from it with both a clearer and more vexed sense of possibility and destiny. Stein’s masterful “Through a Country” incites us to look beyond ourselves, to question speed’s smooth illusions, and to cast a cold eye on the resurgent sea. -Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Three): Rebecca Morgan Frank [by Angela Ball]

The Grande Dame

And I thought, clarity.
I thought mark and force,
I thought the green canopy.

I thought you, out there
pushing against the door-
knobs as if that could
make them turn, slamming
your body against walls
as if they would give in

to your body, the one giving
like the new playground material,
durable, sinking under
our feet even as it looks
like pavement. And I thought

maybe there is something
to be made of this, the ways
my own persistence plays
like a funny video on repeat–
the persistence of a pet
too innocent to know the move
still won’t work. Or like a ball

bouncing over and over again
slowing down, lowering
into a roll out into the brush,
disappearing. I was told this
is what happens. This is what will
happen to you when, but
I thought, I thought, I thought
maybe it would be different,
maybe it could be, for me.
                                         -Rebecca Morgan Frank

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, most recently, Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021), and her poems have appeared such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Three): Rebecca Morgan Frank

“The Grande Dame,” Rebecca Morgan Frank’s lucid and forceful poem of persistence, presents as a persona poem. Like all such poems, it magnifies a component of the poet’s self not always on display—as Browning is, in part, the tyrant of “My Last Duchess” and Pound “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” We think also of Flaubert: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” But here the theatrical bows to the subjective.

Of the poets of The New York School, John Ashbery comes to mind most, for his continual suggestion that real life, whatever that may be, drives onward mentally, the world’s fleet/garage/menagerie/Toonerville Trolley of metaphors for vehicle.

This poem’s first engine is thought—often believed to be passive. Here, it’s anything but.

     And I thought, clarity.

     I thought mark and force,

     I thought the green canopy.

These lines somehow combine sureness and doubt—as if the speaker is summoning ammunition, naming values. Then the “you” appears, as the fourth object of the forceful anaphora “I thought.”

     thought you, out there

     pushing against the door-

     knobs as if that could

     make them turn, slamming

     your body against walls

     as if they would give in

The “you” is both us, I think, and someone beloved. Love is frightening in part because its object shares the dangerous, frustrating surroundings everywhere to be seen. This is particularly scarifying for a mother envisioning her child’s stubborn contacts with the immovable.

     And I thought

     maybe there is something

     to be made of this, the ways

     my own persistence plays

     like a funny video on repeat–

     the persistence of a pet

     too innocent to know the move

     still won’t work. . .

The poem surprises by openly implicating its speaker in the persistence she describes—a persistence the repeated “I thought” has already demonstrated. We are ambushed by truth. A less complex poem would keep the speaker beyond the process that the “you” is undergoing—the speaker wised-up, positioned to advise. Instead, she has “the persistence of a pet / too innocent to know the move / still won’t work. . . .”

The poem’s last stanza darkens further, at the same time growing more beautiful:

     Or like a ball

     bouncing over and over again

     slowing down, lowering

     into a roll out into the brush,

     disappearing.

We hear the action of the ball as its persistence flattens to a “roll out.”

     I was told this

     is what happens. This is what will

     happen to you when, but

     I thought, I thought, I thought

     maybe it would be different,

     maybe it could be, for me.

The fatalism here is akin to the sun’s announcement near the close of Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” that “they” are calling him away:  “ ‘Who are they?’ / Rising he said ‘Some / day you'll know.  They're calling to you / too.’”

Like O’Hara’s poem, Rebecca Morgan Frank’s “The Grande Dame” possesses the all-too-rare quality of unbroken dream. Or a dream broken just at the end, with the words “for me” that unexpectedly twist the poem back to its speaker and her consciousness of the failure of her own persistence, a failure mirrored in each generation. Those two short syllables deliver a poignant falling off after the climactic repetition of “I thought, I thought, I thought / maybe it would be different, / maybe it could be, for me.” Imagine the poem with one less “I thought,” or without the movement from “would” to “could,” or—horrors!—without its final two words—what a lesser thing it would be. “The Grande Dame” enacts the saving grace of art. In life, our drives so often dead-end unsatisfied. This poem is a triumphant paragon of the very persistence it despairs of. The feeling of those two attributes co-existing is indeed sublime. -- Angela Ball

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Two): Ron Horning [by Angela Ball]

Layaway

After offices are flushed, we workers go home or
to a nearby bar, museum, or movie house that fills
the blanks left decades ago, last year, or yesterday.
A wind kicks up again, displacing our own weight,
edging purple between red and gold on a small pad.
She draws a man who looks down to bewilder herself,
turns stern if she isn’t altogether curable, her legs air
when the wave comes in, and how swiftly clouds travel
before fading away, information worth having after all

to serve a double purpose, the grip always equal to bulk
rounded upward unless held by young sailors who learn
to agree with her or not, admitting the impossibility of
a water line, tiers of promenades, a tangle of ventilators
that finish off the appearance, given a smile at the door
of solid green water, knocked senseless against pieces
better suited to an emergency than a fence around it that
prevents accidental falling but gives jumpers an advantage
until she’s sick of the tears he’ll have to sort out himself,

great patches of wet paintwork and the stages and ladders
of a headache she’s endured a hundred times before, the
stranger says, and now it’s too late, they can’t agree more
up and down walls instead of the floor, a sudden ceiling—
space wrong to start with and getting worse with the tact
of a diplomat, part of the canopy cleared, harbor grime
thick, they like to tell themselves, or that’s what she said
about the river’s street, narrow, then widening to the sea
and a period between flashes, either named, numbered, or

just small and tumbling for days of tossing waves before
they stay afloat again, the Cape Cod lighter, some paint
rubbed off, clear plastic turning yellow, as serviceable
as the first day he gave it to her, back when they both
smoked Luckies and none of their friends had cancer yet,
though Jim F hangs himself by mistake in a drinking barn
as the pictures fade and Ghoulardi steps into another flick
about today, front seat that night, yesterday a rowboat
from which they climbed, how far out the shifting flaw

they ignore as if casually in a torn stillness verging on
impatience most of the time, for the tale should unfold
like a summer tablecloth, white linen, from a chest they
hadn’t noticed, calling him to the woman on his arm,
done with land a while but not the steamed and chilled
Dungeness crab it took them two hours and a bottle of
Chardonnay to eat at That Place on Bellflower, right after
the Chardin exhibit, suddenly dark with light described
as death on the highway day or night, fog, broken rules,

and a wave of the hand half the time, just before lunch
on days spent waiting for letters to answer themselves.
He bets on a horse, buys a spread in the football pool:
what was once a major adventure is now an everyday
road atlas with a dozen alternative routes neatly marked
during light hours that won’t bother her as much as the
varnished circulating boy whose compositions break off,
in effect outlawed, a racket disliked by the orthodox, but
slowly, reverently, as the minister makes love to his wife.

Recognition’s simple for members who know the virtues,
faults, and diversity of free fall, with its manifold appear-
ance, the long graceful curves vanishing straight up, and
the sun, behind indexed figures, that gives them an idea
and successfully, much as mourners look back at a video
and realize that they’ve witnessed a raw wound of death,
not their own this time, but close enough to make the care-
fully chosen words cut deeply, in all directions, as friends
appear to listen and attention wanders during the sermon.

They come and go or stay more important than a standard
answer, the sea of discriminating faces, he tells his wife
after hours of activity imperiled by weather, an accidental
contact with every good looking girl who wants promotion,
and he thinks she’s not looking, so he balls up the empty
cigarette pack, misses a wastebasket five feet away, and
leaves it where it bounced to the carpet. Wait, she’ll check
the wall, no ceiling in sight, but the proportions haven’t
changed, she concentrates on the gigantic friction between

as ever, but aware as she hadn’t been, all those years ago,
added to, subtracted from, and generally complicated by
the improvements, developments actually, they have to be
away for anything like abstract to her, or so she’d like to
believe for as long as it takes her to get from where she’s
going to where she’d been, he’s there too, he’s here now,
and gravity’s pull on clear water, thanks to moon and sun,
the same floating a single chip of wood or the new QE2,
his mother searching for her lost wedding ring, worn thin,

as the great ship enters New York harbor in digital color,
not black and white and leaving for Callao, the Santa Rosa
fifty years before, platinum shiny and snug on her finger
and three minutes of film the height of a lighthouse seen
once in Olinda, Márcio must have had enough of Rio then,
half do, half don’t, their democracies enforced by poverty
even if they have jobs, wear nice clothes, and go clubbing
at night, the figures small in vast Cubatão those moments
they show at all, the dance music reverb makes everyone

hard to see, that’s the point, as it is of the naked concrete
hole in the bottom traveling downward, the tone of voice
always visible, even when close enough to swerve a bridge
from city to suburb, she says, fixed herself, even prevailing,
and Pete’s wife still at the register upstairs, crying softly
as she reads a widow’s memoir, invisible to clerks who
watch, at least those who haven’t turned away in respect,
routine on the afternoon shift, a relic of days and systems
likely to hang around the wreck until another comes along

but quiet now that he has misunderstood and confused
everything she told him, having heard it before, clearly,
then settled back to wait for the help he hopes is coming.
She puts her hand on the side of his waist, she’s novice
enough, and the change from the library is exhilarating,
when sudden intricacies of cotton, moist flesh, hair, spit
come first, last longest, her age the same as the number
of her apartment, so he’ll never know whether she told
the truth or not, about how old she is, she had no reason

for the work clothes drying on a wooden rack in a tub that
pushes him sideways then ahead, he expects light bruises
and a smile for breakfast, her eyes the shimmering gold
statues and uneven steps of rooftops standing against a sky
that opens clean bitter aromas. Grass drenched with dew
flows into the rippling sound of a fountain, great carp wait
beneath the pond’s surface under the pines, he’s forgotten
the Top of the Mark, and San Francisco, spread out below,
a bed of embers, São Paulo at night from the circling DC7.

-Ron Horning

Ron Horning lives in Beacon, New York. "Layaway" was published in the online version of the September 2023 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. 

Portrait, “Columbus, Ohio 2012,” by Anna West      

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Two): Ron Horning

Ron Horning’s “Layaway” is both a welter of memory and desire and a stretch of concentrated experience, starting with its image of offices “flushed” that evokes both scurrying quail and purification. The balance between expectation and surprise that strong poems create tilts toward surprise, and we find ourselves part of a mystery the more compelling for its insolubility. I read it as a poem of love and the memory of love, with a partial likeness to Kenneth Koch’s beguiling “The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951,” also a poem made of several stanzas whose numbers of lines are uniform (predictable)—in Horning’s case, nine; in Koch’s, two—lines with a suspicion of blank verse, a ghost of the iamb. In “Layaway,” the text has a comforting visual uniformity that belies its vertiginous changes of scene.

Koch’s mysteries clash playfully with the obvious: “She is dancing and I / Think she is pretty.  That’s one part of it” and “It is satisfying to have a nose / Right in the middle of my face.” Horning mixes mystery with geography, with the maritime, and with the landmarks of particular cities and their quotidian associations. The poem’s poles are Ohio and Brazil, areas with no obvious connection but lots of non-obvious ones.

I have always been captivated by Cleveland. When I was growing up, it was King of Ohio, with Cincinnati the Queen. By contrast, I grew up in southeastern Ohio, Appalachia. Cleveland was the height of sophistication. My father, long before the concept of TMI,  loved to recount his treatment at its famous clinic. The poem’s Cleveland includes its now-defunct but still-famous restaurant, That Place on Bellflower, and a former perennial of its late-night TV scene, a gonzo movie host named “Ghoulardi.”

As its title suggests, “Layaway” is in part a poem about what to do before something else can happen, the kind of time-filling that masquerades as unimportant but is really the center of who we are, as “we workers go home or / to a nearby bar, museum, or movie house that fills / the blanks left decades ago, last year, or yesterday.”

In stanza one we meet a woman, apparently an artist: “She draws a man. . . .”  The man is our “he,” “who looks down to bewilder herself,” a bewildering that seems to apply to both parties, and to us. It is not about to stop. There is a hint of majesty in the voice reminiscent of John Ashbery in his meditative mode, and also a stern practicality—“a tangle of ventilators

that finish off the appearance”—seen at moments, as in Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”:

     . . .the avatars
     Of our conforming to the rules and living
     Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,   
     Brushing the teeth and all that

Lost in the poem’s dizzying kinesthetic, we cling to the recognizable: an anti-suicide fence, “yesterday / a rowboat from which they climbed”—what a great definition of “yesterday”—part of the rich lore the poem gives us seemingly in passing, as are “days spent waiting for letters to answer themselves” and “much as mourners look back at a video / and realize that they’ve witnessed a raw wound of death. . . .”

The poem gives us the tips of icebergs and their bluish depths, but no view of a whole berg.

A mother appears, “searching for her lost wedding ring, worn thin”—a poignant image:

     as the great ship enters New York harbor in digital color,
     not black and white and leaving for Callao, the Santa Rosa
     fifty years before, platinum shiny and snug on her finger
     and three minutes of film the height of a lighthouse seen
     once in Olinda, Márcio must have had enough of Rio then,
     half do, half don’t, their democracies enforced by poverty
     even if they have jobs, wear nice clothes, and go clubbing
     at night, the figures small in vast Cubatão those moments
     they show at all, the dance music reverb makes everyone

We are reminded that the role of media in memory, how screens rub off on sight, and how past and present never disentangle. We glimpse dancing in a Brazilian city. Further aggregation ensues, becoming itself a method, a mode, like “dance music reverb,” developing in long periodic sentences that climb over themselves in their haste. How excellent and true the phrase “their democracies enforced by poverty.”

     Consummation, real and/or imaged, seems to happen here:
     She puts her hand on the side of his waist, she’s novice
     enough, and the change from the library is exhilarating,
     when sudden intricacies of cotton, moist flesh, hair, spit
     come first, last longest, her age the same as the number
     of her apartment, so he’ll never know whether she told
     the truth or not, about how old she is, she had no reason
     for the work clothes drying on a wooden rack in a tub that
     pushes him sideways then ahead, he expects light bruises
     and a smile for breakfast,

The woman, though known in “sudden intricacies,” remains mysterious. Koch’s “The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951,” which like Horning’s poem contains a parent and boating, doesn’t solve itself either. Its fifth section, “A Critical Point,” says, “I went up to her and started to speak. / I felt shy but I had to confront the beautiful.”

Horning’s poem ends with this wonderfully-phrased climactic sentence:

     Grass drenched with dew
     flows into the rippling sound of a fountain, great carp wait
     beneath the pond’s surface under the pines, he’s forgotten
     the Top of the Mark, and San Francisco, spread out below,
     a bed of embers, São Paulo at night from the circling DC7.

North and South America mate as “a bed of embers,” as we circle in our DC7, the last commercial prop plane before the advent of jets, vehicle that holds us in a past we’ve forgotten, a bar at SF’s highest point, watering place in existence for eight decades, looking downward, as the artist’s subject looks downward at the poem’s start. There are worse places to be. Our encounter is at an end, unresolved. Why have we read? “I felt shy but I had to confront the beautiful.” --Angela Ball

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

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-One): Anselm Berrigan [by Angela Ball]

What the Streets Look Like

Mom: the sweet rotted
summer stench still
taps the nasal cavity
inside breezes several
times per block. I have
a greater empathy for
pigeons after two months
at work in the unnatural
country, & find it
instinctively nerve-
wracking to remove my
wallet from its pocket
here in town despite
the general lack of threat.
The streets look grey
nonplussed, post-
pubescent relative to
ancient times but
nonetheless grid-wizened
in the face of an ever-
changing lineup of
banks, bars, and specialty
shops with their weak
signs and distant tones
(lighting). Second Ave
is giving up, slowly
its cheap depth store-
front by storefront.
One feels less than
nostalgic for the like-
lihood of being mugged
but likelihood itself
feels less than evident
unless one is being
unstable and unspoken
coming to dreaming
while pushing a stroller
over the variously cracked
slabs of concrete each
block yet greets the
wheels with. The right
part of the y heading
west on tenth between
2nd and 3rd is still
tree-lined and aristocratic
as feint, though its
sidewalk looks like
late Auden's smoked
cheeks. I loathe it,
amiably, when Sylvie
is asleep.
                -Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan is the author of several books of poetry, including Pregrets (Black Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody (Wave Books, 2018), Come in Alone (Wave Books, 2016), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). With Alice Notley and his brother Edmund Berrigan, he coedited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2011).

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-One): Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan's "What the Streets Look Like"—perhaps a letter to “Mom,” also a poet—employs a somatic/psychological Rimbaud-like intoxication—the speaker, immersed in the city, entrains us. A special feature is New York City’s “summer stench,” inseparable from the perception of it, as it “taps the nasal cavity / inside breezes.” Like most raptures “coming to dreaming,” this one is both personal and impersonal (“one feels less than / nostalgic”), both full-throated and guarded. The poet’s time “working in the unnatural country” has not only affected his “empathy for pigeons” but renders it “instinctively nerve-wracking” to take out his wallet “here in town despite / the general lack of threat.” The poem’s compact lineation and hard enjambment make the city’s press more than palpable, audible. We receive a vivid précis of the neighborhood's commercial background and prospects, its tired variety show:

     The streets look grey
     nonplussed, post-
     pubescent relative to
     ancient times but
     nonetheless grid-wizened
     in the face of an ever-
     changing lineup of
     banks, bars, and specialty
     shops with their weak
     signs and distant tones
     (lighting).

The oddly-wonderful "grid-wizened" captures so much of the American city street, its "line-up" of putative entertainment also suggestive of crime's usual suspects.

Two-thirds of the way through our walk, we discover that the poet pushes a stroller. This poem, part of a genre Ron Padgett usefully terms “The Walk,” is—because it happens in a city—also a flaneur poem. Who has heard of a flaneur with a baby? A lobster on a string, maybe, but not progeny. And why not? In its twisty, inward/outward progress, this walk rehearses and refreshes tradition.

The poem’s “variously cracked / slabs of concrete each / block yet greets the / wheels with” are the clunky opposite of free association, are planes for walking forced by weather into a union of fissures that brokenly leads, following the course of “right” as opposed to sinister, of letters (“y”), and Arabic numerals (“2^nd and 3^rd is still / tree-lined and aristocratic / as feint”), this latter an accurate and surprising characterization that comically frustrates our expectation for another “f” word and supplies one that suggests half-hearted pretense. The city is a place of artifice. A reason to love it; a reason to be wary.

The Y’s “aristocratic” arm is a sidewalk surprisingly resembling a great poet’s face: one who once flaneured the same streets; once advised, I’m told, that “the secret of walking in New York is jaywalking.” How killingly accurate, those “smoked cheeks”—the mask of tobacco combined with age, a look both preserved and ravaged.

A languorous, pleasurable word for dislike appears: “loathe,” surprisingly followed by “amiably”—and this walk has received its full and rightful depiction.

But wait,  in the quietus of her sleep, the baby must be named. Because “Sylvie” means “woodsy,” she is angel of the city and of the poem. In “What the Streets Look like," Anselm Berrigan masters the improvisational essential, which is to say, the right kind.

-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-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