The Best American Poetry

In Praise of Bruno (1983)

Two redheads having a much-needed snooze in Ludlowville (July 1983).

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

A HORSE REMEMBERS

A horse remembers none of its ancestors

heels ascending to splint bones

        and knows not its namesake in the sea

It cannot see itself through history

as I cannot me for my unknowns

        sunsets pulled down by their long gold wires

my highest calling from way below hearing

        It knows back a few days to an apple

and stands satisfied under a moon under a live oak

        that stands amid histories

cypress cut to stumps magnolias by lightning

        The horse sees the man who would ride her

coming down from the heretofore

with his wherewithal

-Allan Peterson             (first published in Innisfree, 2023)

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

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

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

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

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

     as I cannot me for my unknowns

              sunsets pulled down by their long gold wires

     my highest calling from way below hearing

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

Then the poem turns to what the horse does know:

     . . .back a few days to an apple

     and stands satisfied under a moon under a live oak

                that stands amid histories

     cypress cut to stumps magnolias by lightning

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

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

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

--Angela Ball

The Cat of Montserrat [by Lera Auerbach]

My memory: meeting a Montserrat cat –
she is sitting beneath Pablo Casals’ sculpture –
the true owner of his bronze cello
with whiskers sniffing mountain air.
It is Fall. It’s sunny, but the air is already
keeping a promise of the storms ahead.
I am now worried about this cat –
the cat that guards Casals and his cello.

Who will feed her during the winter?
Who will brush her tricolored coat?
Who will make her feel safe in the mountains?

I beckon the cat to follow, promising
to take good care of her if she lets me.
But the cat sniffs Casals’ dusty shoes,
raises her tail, and turns away.
I feel abandoned. I pray to the Black Virgin
to protect this proud feline. I ask Casals
to keep watch and play sometimes
for the cat’s hunting pleasures
El cant del ocells (The Song of the Birds.)

The air shimmers with hidden music.
The cat catches overtones – and the horizon shifts.

 

 

McClure Kick Blues [by Vincent Katz]

Tomorrow, at the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda, California, there will be a memorial to poet, playwright and thinker Michael McClure, who passed away in May of 2020. Along with Diane di Prima, of all the great poets we have lost in the past few years, Michael for me defines an era. It’s funny to think of it now, but it’s McClure and di Prima who somehow stand for a whole experiment in poetry and living that remains vital to me, and I imagine always will. I think it is partially the integration of their poetry with a way of thinking about living that is the key to their vitality.

In his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, published by City Lights in 1964, McClure wrote:

I WAS HERE AND I LIKED IT!

It was all O.K.

I suffered.

There were scents, and flowers, and textures, beautiful women.

I was a handsome man. I invented love.

I radiated genius for those who saw me with loving eyes.

I was happy — I laughed and cried. Constantly new

sights and sounds. I trembled and sweated

at the sight of beauty. I laughed at strong

things because I loved them — wanting to kick them in

and make freedom. When I go I’M GONE.

Don’t resurrect me

or the duplicates of my atoms.

It was perfect !

I am sheer spirit.

Tomorrow, poets, musicians, publishers, friends will celebrate this poet who some link to Shelley and Lawrence, and who I see as a human being able to intuit his living on earth in relation to all other living beings, and simultaneously to flesh that out in relation to the beauty, and sometimes terror, he sensed in the arts of painting, music, dance, theater. He wanted to reach most of all, to reach out, to resist, to feel the softness of the couch beneath his lover and himself, the dissolving of inside and out, the hummingbird, the bombs falling on Cambodia, consciousness creating and destroying itself each instant.

                     

As a kind of parting gift, Michael left us Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, published this year by City Lights. Editor Garrett Caples’ account of how the book was put together makes clear both McClure’s fastidiousness when it came to form and his openness to such questions as sequencing and grouping poems. A sequence of four “Death Poems” in a section called “MORTALITIES” evinces one of the most joyful attitudes toward death I’ve seen in poetry, something perhaps not surprising to readers of McClure, but still a fantastic thing to have:

                                                            TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.

                                                                            Death is a dark chocolate cake,

                                                                      sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.

Remember Michael tomorrow, remember joy, remember poetry.

Creation According to the Cat [by Lera Auerbach]

 

 

Oil on Metal Roof Tile [by Lera Auerbach]

When God created animals, He first asked each animal for their permission. But He never received the Cat’s blessing. The Cat just didn’t answer, and God took the Cat’s silence as “yes.” But the Cat simply needed some time to think whether to enter into existence. It needed to look through the open doors of creation and then decide if it wanted to be in or out, but God was in a rush and didn’t pay enough attention to subtleties. So, He created the Cat along with all other animals. Later, the Cat reprimanded God. The Cat said that it was going to answer “no,” that God created it against its will, and that God needed to compensate it for all the pain and suffering since the creation of the world.

It is why God bestowed the Cat with nine lives. This way, it could have additional time to decide whether to stay alive or not. That’s why the Cat, unlike others, can move through time – it understands its porous nature and knows how to slip through. The Cat doesn’t like closed doors. According to the Cat, a good door is a door half-opened (or half-closed depending on the perspective.) According to the Cat, one should always see both sides and be free to change one’s mind at any time. According to the Cat, things only pretend to be solid, but in truth, they are mostly empty spaces, and one needs to learn to see through their illusory solidity.

According to the Cat, one needs to learn how to disappear and, even more importantly, when.

 

A Lie [by Lera Auerbach]

Finek

My dog
whimpered
quietly
in his sleep.
His legs
were twitching –
he had a nightmare.

I woke him up
gently
with a lie:
“It’s all right,
I will never
leave you
alone.”

 

 

Dislocated in Time [by Lera Auerbach]

Photo by Lera Auerbach

 

(1)

The problem with the future is that it is unforeseeable –
the great unknown is full of opportunities for dreadful disasters.

Their multitudes are inexhaustible.

The stars are the pores of our reality.
They shine because that’s how we see the light of another world. 

The Arctic fox dances its foxy dance, pretending to be a woman,
pretending to be a nurse. 

The seal waits underwater. It knows it is being hunted. 

The stars are not the pores; they are pills,
round white pills the woman-fox is giving me.

Pills for pain, pills for sleep, pills for blood pressure,
pills for muscle aches, pills for adrenal gland function,
pills for inflammation or rather against inflammation,
pills for/against nausea. And steroids.

And more pills for pain. Killers of pain. 

(How many universes did I swallow today?)

 

(2)

Everyone is very kind to me. So kind, it breaks my heart.

Everyone is doing their best. Or his or her best. 

I feel generous with the pronouns. I think pronouns are so yesterday. 

So are all nationalities, religions, sexes, and any other boxes of definitions, including self-definitions.

If everyone were so kind, there would be no need for any of these limiting concepts. 

I understand how beautiful it would be, how connective, how whole and wholesome,
and it breaks my heart that it is not yet universally so.

I cry from the unbearable weight of my love that I cannot express. 

My husband, concerned, asks if I’m in pain. 

“No, on the contrary,” I try to explain what I feel. “I understand what it means to be ‘we.’ 

I am the seal; I am the fish it ate; I’m the polar bear waiting for the seal to breathe; 

I’m the polar bear hunter, waiting for the polar bear to strike the seal. 

I’m the polar bear hunter’s mother, wishing to feed the polar bear 
so that the bear could feed her son one day; I am the polar bear hunter’s girlfriend,
enjoying the safety of the aroma of the Lancôme perfume.

I am the surgeon searching for the patient who has his initials drawn on her belly. 

I am the patient praying to be her surgeon’s masterpiece.”

(“You are on drugs. It’s the painkillers,” says my husband.)

 

(3)

Where do all lost things go? 

Perhaps, lost things are dislocated not in space but in time.

It is why something may disappear and then later appear right in front of your eyes –
where you have already looked for it and more than once.

Instead of moving in space, they fall into the holes in the fabric of time.

Because time is made of porous material and things may fall through. 

Sometimes things reappear, moved back by some internal tides; 

at other times, they disappear without a trace, 

and new strange things appear instead. 

It is hard to hold on to your belongings when they keep falling 
through the porous realities of time and space.

It’s quite difficult, especially lately, to hold on to myself 
with all these electrons, protons, and neutrons misbehaving as particles 
and waves the moment you try to observe what they’re doing. 

Just think of all the effort my poor self needs to put together 
in order to hold some kind of a recognizable shape of a body 
instead of just becoming a soundwave or melting into a puddle. 

(No wonder I feel exhausted all the time.) 

 

(4)

Yesterday I learned there is such a thing as repulsive gravity.

By repulsive, I don’t mean ugly or unpleasant. 

Apparently, gravity can be not only attractive, 

thus attracting things ever closer the way earth 

doesn’t let us float away and fall into space, 

but also repulsive, meaning always repelling things 

further and further away. 

In all likelihood, this universe was made by such repulsive impulse, 

resulting in the Big Bang and all its consequences. 

It is why we are still expanding, universally speaking. 

(Just think of it: all we are is a hiccup of some repulsive shudder.)

 

(5)

Time in the hospital – sleepless nights, leg compressors, IV drips, 

blood-pressure measurements, vital signs checks every hour, medications. 

You wish to sleep, but your sleep is continuously interrupted by machines, nurses, 

and your own body. You melt one drop at a time and float restlessly in the night. 

And you still need to repeat your name and date of birth 

each time you are given the meds. You swallow a bunch of stars 

and start feeling that the repulsive gravity which made the Big Bang 

is just around the corner, and the reversal could happen at any moment.

You are internally running extremely fast while not moving at all. 

(And you’re still naked under the hospital robe.)

 

 

Making of an Opening [by Lera Auerbach]

"Opening" by Lera Auerbach

 

1. The Absence of Trees

You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.

At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing. 
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.

By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.

(After a while, there is no way back.)

 

2. Unborn Music

In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.

Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.

A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.

(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.) 

 

3. An Opening to Breath

I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening? 

Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal. 

A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear

who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.

They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”

(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
 

4. Quiet Chuckle

A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.

Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?

Why?

I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.

"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."

(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)

  

5. Trail of Breadcrumbs

If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful. 
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still. 

Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.

(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)

 

6. What’s Not Allowed in Svalbard

The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.

Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.

If you die, you will be fined, 
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard. 

(Dying and bringing cats.) 

Silent Music [by Lera Auerbach]

Leitmotifs Photo by Lera Auerbach

 

 

At the Marlboro Music Festival, returning home at night –
my door was covered by moths. I opened the door quickly
as not to let them in, but at least twenty managed to fly in –
into the light of the dining room's lamp.

 

Today I found them dead all around the entrance,

dried angels, almost transparent in their fragile death

with the powder – angel's dust – still on their wings.

 

I think of them while listening to Chopin's mazurkas –

so fragile, so transparent, immortal in their captured beauty.

I gently lift the dead bodies of white&gray moths
from the floor – sliding them into an old glass jar.

 

There they shall rest. They look alive.

Most have their wings open, as if in flight.

My fingers are covered with the powder from the wings.

Their silence is music too.

 

When I wake up tomorrow morning

– they shall still be here, under the glass,

frozen in their death, as in a dream

hearing the music only they can hear.

A protective blanket of words [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Arctic Dreams - Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

I learned that a friend of mine was going through a tough time. His mother died, and he had debilitating neck pain. He needed to write the obituary and arrange for the funeral. His mother had dementia. Was he able to say goodbye? I did not ask. 

I don't know which scale would measure grief. Such a scale doesn't exist. 

Physical pain is easier to manage. If it is yours. Because at some point, the pain stops defining you. 
Grief buried deeper, so deep it can't be torn away, it becomes you.

In the Arctic, old babushkas, when they become unable to take care of themselves, hope to be killed by a polar bear. When they become too ill and weak, they look for the bear to eat them. I asked why. Being devoured by a wild animal didn't seem to me like an attractive way to finish life. 

"The bear will be nourished by eating me," explained an old Inuit woman. "The bear will become strong and fat. Then one day, my son will kill that bear. My son and his family will eat the bear's meat, make healing mixes from its fat, and make trousers from its fur. Thus, through the polar bear, I will nourish my son and keep him warm, even past my life, even past my death."

Post mortem motherly care.

(2)

A few years ago, I travelled to Greenland and stayed in Nuuk in the apartment of a polar bear hunter. A polar bear hunter's home looked like an IKEA house made by children constructors of adult sizing. Everything was modern, functional and perfectly unremarkable. 

A photograph on the wall showed a polar bear (or rather its fur) covered in blood, soaking in a bathtub. I realized it was the same bathtub in which I had showered that morning. It had rubber ducklings as lucky ornaments. Perfectly, chillingly, unremarkable bathtub.

(3)

"I wish I could make a blanket of protective words to shield you," I wrote to my friend, whose mother died after suffering dementia for several years. 

“A protective blanket of words” could be a definition of poetry. 
“Could be” because, like everything else, it rejects any definitions. 

Poetry is no different than spell-making or alchemy.

As if words could make a difference. 
As if anything could still make any difference.

In the world gone mad with apocalyptic craziness and fear, can words remain protective talismans? 

(4)

Bears in the Arctic are suffering from global warming. They're skinny and weak; they couldn't kill even old babushkas on their suicide mission. 

If I could stitch a protective blanket of words, I would make one for the polar bears, another one for the suicidal babushkas on their mission to feed the polar bears, and the third one for the polar bear hunters. I would then make a gigantic frozen quilt for the Arctic to protect it from climate change and even a bigger blanket for the entire world to save it from madness. 

Every stitch would be a word of love, a talisman against impending disaster. 

But I never learned how to make blankets or quilts. I can mend sounds and strings but not threads. The thoughts made of words are unravelling, and I can't weave them together. 

 

Traces [by Lera Auerbach]

^{Untitled - Ink on Handmade Paper by Lera Auerbach} 

 1.

When I think of my Great Aunt Rosa, I hear her laughter – deep chuckles rising from the belly of the Earth and exploding like an uncontrollable volcano. My earliest recollection of Great Aunt Rosa goes back to the time in my life when crawling seemed easier than walking, and every situation had a fantastic array of discoveries. Aunt Rosa was a gigantic mountain that captivated my mom's attention entirely. I was free to crawl around on my own to my total satisfaction. I had a small, plastic red fox. From time to time, I heard volcanic explosions of Aunt Rosa's laughter and thought that a tiny fox may not fully comprehend these sounds and feel scared. Remembering from one of the fairytales that foxes liked hiding in dark spaces (or in pretty wooden huts they would steal from the less intelligent animals), I looked around for a hiding place for my fox. I found it in Aunt Rosa's shoe, which was perfectly designed to be a home for a small plastic fox, combining the best qualities of a foxhole and fox-hut.

I must have fallen asleep somewhere next to the shoe rack. My parents carried me to the apartment of my mother's sister, Natasha, where we stayed during our Moscow visits. The little red fox spent that long night alone in Great Aunt Rosa's shoe, probably wondering if she would ever see the daylight again or if I had abandoned her forever.

2.

Nothing lasts forever. Perhaps, only the Great Nothing lasts forever until Something appears. Of course, it could not have been "forever," but perhaps it was – if Time (as we understand it) did not exist then. No space, no Time – nothing. Or, rather, everything so condensed and indivisible that it all had to fit into Nowhere. Then – Big Bang – everything explodes, divides, and we hear singing – the Word – God's name. Or His laughter. Or Her laughter. Or Great Aunt Rosa's laughter, which explodes and spills over as I wake up.

My mom, who is holding the telephone receiver away from her ear (so as not to be deafened by thunder), is also laughing. I can't help it and start laughing too, even though I have no idea why we are all laughing. And Natasha, my mom's sister, walks into the room and starts laughing too. And from the receiver booms Great Aunt Rosa's laugh, filling the room, spilling through the windows into the sky and breaking into snowflakes, dancing in the wind.

3.

My tiny red plastic fox had bitten my Great Aunt Rosa when she (Aunt Rosa) tried to put on her shoe. It did not surprise me. After the long night, the fox must have assumed that this shoe was her home. I wondered if small plastic animals have the same concept of time as we do. I decided that no, a night spent in a shoe could seem to last an eternity to an abandoned fox. So, of course, she bit Aunt Rosa's massive toe, which threatened to squish her inside the shoe. Aunt Rosa promised me she would keep the fox safe until our return. She did.

4.

When grownups talk, I prefer to hide under the table. I imagine them growing heads of animals: this man is a bear, and this woman is a sheep (just listen to how she bleats to every word the bear-man says.) This one is a wolf, and he always contradicts the bear. They have different strengths, the bear-man, and the wolf-man. The bear-man might be stronger, but the wolf-man is faster and more aggressive. It is why they argue; they challenge each other. In the corner, there is a woodpecker – he repeats the same point over and over again, proving everyone else wrong. He wins every discussion because others become too bored and lose any interest in him and his point of view.

5.

But who is Great Aunt Rosa?
I think and think but can't picture her as an animal. Maybe a bird?
I think of the stories involving birds but can't imagine Aunt Rosa flying. At least not now – maybe when she was young?
Was Great Aunt Rosa ever young?
Perhaps, she is a Dodo, that mythical bird, timeless and strange, so familiar, yet completely incomprehensible.
Aunt Rosa is flapping her wings, erasing colors, fading into a less and less traceable outline, until nothing remains except her shoes.

 

Unscalable [by Lera Auerbach]

Ivan Shishkin's Morning in a Pine Forest & Russian Chocolates

On the grand scale of things, it's not always clear what keeps the balance. 

But things are not scalable. Memories hide in the smallest details and surfaces like a shy relative of long-forgotten relations:
in the color of the window-curtains from childhood,
in the taste of sgushchyonka (sweet condensed milk of my childhood),
in the sound of unwrapping a chocolate candy – the favorite one with three brown bears-cubs and their mother-bear on the cover.

The picture of four bears was from a well-known painting by Shishkin, a famous Russian painter. 

Come to think of it; I'm not sure why Shishkin was so famous if the work he was mostly known for was this painting of four bears playing in the forest. Later it was discovered that Shishkin did not paint this painting, or rather he painted the forest but not the bears, because painting animals was not his forte, and he asked a friend to do it.

'Shishka' in Russian means a pinecone, but it also means a bump, as when you hit your head. It also can mean, in a slangy way, a big shot – a person in a position of power. 

The painter Shishkin clearly loved Russian nature with its pinecones, but he also hit his head hard with the bears' fake authorship. He did manage to remain a big shot in the annals of Russian art. 

I stopped liking these chocolates at the age of five when I discovered wriggling white worms in one. It was 'war chocolate' from the boxes of food my nanny kept in case of a new war. She had some of these boxes since WWII, some 40 years earlier. 

Time was eaten by worms, leaving only crumbs behind; crumbs dressed in the picture of the cute bears painted by a man who didn't get proper credit for painting them and whose name escapes my memory right now, unlike Shishkin. 

 

Smelling Beyond Words [by Lera Auerbach]

На птичьих правах - Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

 

There is a phrase in Russian, ‘na ptich'ikh pravakh’,  having birds' rights. 

To live ‘na ptich'ikh pravakh’ means not having proper rights to occupy space (i.e., no correct documents or inability to pay rent) but being temporarily tolerated and allowed to remain. 

What rights do birds have? 

And why birds? 

Why not say opossums' rights? 

The flattery of wings? Geography? Lack of stability? 

Can the lack of stability be something stable, constant?

If you're constantly absent, does this make you reliably absent? 

The bird can sing and leave. 

I do the same, but behind me snakes a trail of debt and obligations, a chain to keep me within its reach, stones available for throwers. Personalized gravitational pull.

* * *

In the world of confusion, only a dog knows the truth. 

But we rarely listen to dogs. We forgot how to listen.

A dog knows what would make us happy. Because it's precisely that which would make a dog happy: a walk in the woods, smelling the fresh air, that sense of well-being which only comes when you can commune with nature and feel fully present. 

A dog is not interested in words. 

Words are the mythological woods in which humans get lost instead of visiting the real woods and taking long walks with their dogs.

A dog knows the danger of words. That's why it can understand all human languages. 

It knows to smell beyond words. Because words are only shells. What's essential lies within, beyond the shell. And the shell may be misleading, a disfiguring perception of the shape it contains within. 

A cat also knows it all but doesn't have the patience to deal with human stupidity and stubbornness. A cat knows – it is futile to change us. 

Dogs are more hopeful.   

* * *

Living life in dogs' years. 

How many dogs will still adopt me? 

My childhood's big Sheila, then Toto and Daisy (all three were still alive when I left Russia for New York at the age of 17.) 

Then came school years without a dog, living on ptich'ikh pravakh here and there. For a while, I managed to keep a lizard at the Juilliard dorms, but it was difficult to shop for live worms and keep them all hidden. 

The moment when I rented my first apartment – little Sheila joined my life. I named little Sheila after big Sheila who died peacefully in my father's arms in Russia after I left for New York. Little Sheila also died in my father's arms, but in Boston, many years later. She was aging, she was ill, and I knew my father would take better care of her than I, in my birdy ways, fluttering from one city to the next.

And for the last two years of Sheila's life, there was Finek, whom Sheila hated as only an old cranky dog may hate a young puppy, who stole her human's attention and love. Finek didn't steal my love, for I still loved Sheila. Sheila was Sheila, and Finek was Finek. 

But I knew she did not forgive my betrayal with another dog. 

The moment Finek appeared, Sheila realized she was no longer the only one. 

Even today, many years later, I still feel guilty about it. Never sorry for getting Finek, but sorry for hurting Sheila in doing so. 

Dogs are supposed to be forgiving? Not so sure. 

But for my father, Sheila was still the only one. She's buried in Boston next to my aunt's house.

* * *

My life in dog-lives…

At night I protect Finek's dreams. 

He snores. His legs jerk – he is dreaming. 

His dreams often turn into nightmares, and he cries. 

I gently wake him up. He falls asleep again, breathes quietly. 

Does he ever dream about me? 

Am I the cause of his nightmares? 

 

Sheila and Finek

With Sheila in Siberia

Johnny grinning on an afternoon in August

Dispatch From A Distance - Roads And Seeds, A Trace [by Cara Benson]

“There is a rhetoric to walking.” - Michel de Certeau

Most everyone I know right now is alternating between sheer terror over politics (I’ll leave it at that) and a desperate search for respite in order to manage the panic. Same here. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s read any of my previous Dispatches that I take to walking when trouble is afoot (sorry). It gets me out of my interior, both my four walls and my mind, and into the body and the outer world. As I am physically capable, which I try not to take for granted, I can just go. I don’t need to have a thing sorted out but eventually how to get home.

Of course walking is ripe for metaphor, that time-honored mechanism for making sense of the world, especially if one is writing about it. As I am walking to interrupt myself, to disrupt the mind’s search, seize, categorize, repeat, I will leave it to the reader’s imagination to make of this string of sentences what she will. In fact, I’m in a mood to write a series of digressions and left turns, similar, at times, to how I walk (this grove, that path, over a hill, why not). Again, so long as I make it back.

I’ll start off with a confession: I trespass. Beyond being of European descent in the US, what I mean here is that I sheepishly tiptoe past POSTED signs all the time. In my defense, I’m not traipsing across someone’s back yard. There are thousands of wooded acres around me that host no dwellings. I do not hunt, rip it up on ATVs, nor leave detritus behind (these are often the concerns) – quite the opposite. I typically pick up any litter I come across (Mylar balloons know no borders) or pull dead branches from squashing new growth. I am very careful where I tread so as not to tear moss, for example, from a rock. Not to create mud, to cause erosion. I pay close attention when I am walking through what I will call raw woods, when I am not traveling a previous path that has shown over time that the forest will be just fine with this trail boring through it. Whether on private or public terrain, I am acutely pained to tramp down green, to step on an unsuspecting red eft, to leave a trace. Sometimes it’s just easier to walk a road.

One of the draws for moving up on the hill where I live was that even the paved routes stretching out in the vicinity of my home hold a boundary with much wildness. This area is one of NY State’s largest contiguous forests. Seasonal waterfalls, rampant wildflowers, long stretches of wooded land or meadows fill as much of the lengths along these roads as do homes, though those are here and I am curious about them, too. As I wander roadside, these walks can lend themselves to notions of rural flâneusery. I am out of step with utilitarian travel, as the urban flâneuse is by strolling city sidewalks as she does. What is it I am browsing if not shop windows?

Dogs. I know where all the dogs are on these walks. Or should I say that they make themselves known. Some are more aggressive in their pronouncements than others and I make guesses about their people based on this behavior, like we do with parents and their offspring. I could be wrong, of course, but sometimes the humans are outside or yell from an open window and one in particular seems hellbent on confirming my suspicions. (For the record, I adore puppies and love to nuzzle the noses of dogs, but not all canines have been raised as snugglers. Just saying.)

Other creatures that are plentiful out here: chickens. They seem to be fearless in foraging right at the edge of passing cars or trucks. Roadside gullies must have the best pickings. I am proud to say I have become a pretty good clucker.

Site of the heron sighting

And once, a Great Blue Heron! Less than 20 feet from me I spotted his stately, curved-neck repose atop leggy stalks, raptly focused on a swampish watering hole for a catch for dinner. So sleekly upright. I caught his blended colors (not as starkly blue as one might expect) and slim-limbed silhouette among the young trees and stopped on a dime, just behind a larger trunk. Slowly, I moved back into sightline. Holy, the biodiverse world is a glory. I stood with him forever (3 minutes) until he powered off.

Then there’s Duck Duck and Buzz, two white fowl with orange bills, best buds, that have their own homemade pond in front of a neighbor’s house down the road in the north direction. Buzz is much bigger than Duck Duck. Or is it the other way around? The bigger one (let’s agree on Buzz) had come to my neighbor with a sibling. They were deeply bonded, I’m told, and when Buzz’s sib died, he was inconsolable. My neighbor (I can’t remember her name even to get it switched. No! It’s Laurie! Or is that the woman who lives down the side road?). Whatever her name, she, too, became distraught, caring as she did about her despondent Buzz, until one day driving along a county route down off the hill with traffic speeding by was young, soon-to-be-named Duck Duck on the side of the road. She turned her car around and pulled up beside him. Legend has it that she opened the door and Duck Duck hopped in. Now the two of them, the ducks, are inseparable, and LaurieLisaLiz has a superb set up for them. Lilypads in the pond, room to roam, nighttime digs for sleeping in the slightly abandoned barn along a path in the trees beside her house. Duck Duck and Buzz are a high point on my walks when I head this direction. I don’t always see them right away as they might be squatting down in the grassy banks of the pond. I crest a hill and crane my head to see if the stark white bodies are hunkered in or floating. They rise up when I see them! I always call out in the happy goofy voice I use with my cats. Duck Duck! Buzz! There you are. Such cuties. They quack quack, lowly, little duck noises. I only ever saw Elizabeth once, to learn the lore and to get their names. I’m grateful that I can use the syllables they’re used to hearing and that I’m hoping signal me as friend. My clucking is better than my quacking, so far. 

Occasionally as I walk I wonder, does anyone notice my peculiar patterns? My mutterings, farmer’s blows (clearing the nostrils sans tissues), conversing with birds and self and god as I go? My boisterous swishing of a stick? Deer flies and mosquitoes don't give a shit about spray repellent, so in bug season I whip around a piece of downed maple with chunks of acorns still clinging to the mast to ward them off. It’s my version of a handheld accordion fan and I use it to the fullest. The faster I walk, the faster I wave and chatter. I might as well be doing Python's Silly Walks. Though sometimes I “pull it together” if I hear a car coming, I am often caught in the act of exhibiting my private self in public.

It is a particular vulnerability to be the walking body roadside as a motorized vehicle approaches, then passes. I ready myself to leap, if necessary, and every so often find myself staring down the drivers. Same as with my imagined dog owners, I make guesses or have visceral responses to the sounds of the oncoming cars or trucks or motorcycles. The louder the machine, the more obnoxious the person, especially if it's an intentionally aggravated volume. Then the upending of my tiny narratives – what if it’s a beater, the driver too broke to fix it, limping along as best he can in a hostile economy (systemic thinking is never far). Then my sympathy is evoked. I hear you, sister. I get it, guy. A moment of solidarity whizzes by.

Something there’s more of on roadsides: trash. I feel like such a nellie, but I hate it. Sometimes, my better self works very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt that the scandalous crap at my feet blew out of their hands or backseat unknowingly. Or I labor to see it as part of the mosaic, to puncture romantic notions about purity, about humanless nature. I’m reminded of something I read on eco-regional studies, that nature ain’t just out there. Humans, after all, are creatures of the planet. It’s how we live on it, with it, with creatures and dirt and each other, cars and machines – all technology – included, that is at issue. This same article reported that crows were struggling in the initial pandemic lockdown because less people were driving, and their main dietary staple of roadkill had severely decreased as a result. It’s an interactive scape – everything. Planet. Where and how we walk. What it means to be wild. I love this expansion of how to consider the world and my small part in it. 

And then I think the person who dumped his truck ashtray out the window is an asshole. (Keep walking, Cara.)

Speaking of technology, sometimes I bring my phone with me to track time or to take pictures. A recent shot of Cardinal flowers, the scarlet-robed beauties lining a wet run as if they are marching up water greens to their blue source, was such a catch. But that’s deep woods. What do I photograph roadside? This is the season of color in the leaves: flaming reds, tangerine dreams, delicious yellows. The understory is marvelous, too. Goldenrod, Snake Root, and Joe Pye Weed, so designated after the English name of Mohican sachem Shauquethqueat who used the flower as remedy, fill fields and edges at eyelevel. I have been watching them bud, flower, sustain pollinators, and turn to seed, which I am now collecting from the public right-of-way. I carry scissors and paper bags to clip and transport fluorescences for seeding the land behind the church where I live. Back home, I store the bags where their contents can properly dry until it’s close to the first frost. That’s when I’ll cast them, then lightly walk the area to ensure good seed to ground contact. Seems I do want to make something of my wanderings, after all.  

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, and Whose Woods.

Billy Collins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________

 

Afternoon with Irish Cows

 

There were a few dozen who occupied the field

across the road from where we lived,

stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

their big heads down in the soft grass,

though I would sometimes pass a window

and look out to see the field suddenly empty

as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

 

Then later, I would open the blue front door,

and again the field would be full of their munching

or they would be lying down

on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

 

But every once in a while, one of them

would let out a sound so phenomenal

that I would put down the paper

or the knife I was cutting an apple with

and walk across the road to the stone wall

to see which one of them was being torched

or pierced through the side with a long spear.

 

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

laboring upward as she gave voice

to the rising, full-bodied cry

that began in the darkness of her belly

and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

 

Then I knew that she was only announcing

the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

while she regarded my head and shoulders

above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Billy Collins is a former US Poet Laureate. His latest collection is Whale Day (Random House, 2020.)

___________________________________________________________________________________

 Cows in county Cork, Ireland. Sept. 2020. Photo by Jennifer O'Riordan.

 

 

Today is National Dog Day: "Good Dogs" by Charles Baudelaire

5th Ave & 9th St., October 22, 2014 (photo by Stacey Lehman)

Away with the academic muse! I have no business with that old prude. I invoke the familiar muse, the citizen, the boon companion, to aid me to sing to the good dogs, the poor dogs, the dirty dogs, those whom every one drives away, pestiferous and lousy, except the poor, whose associates they are, and the poet, who sees them with fraternal eye.

Fie upon the foppish dog, upon the coxcomb quadruped, Dane, King Charles, pugdog or lapdog, so enamoured of himself that he darts inconsiderately between the legs or on the knees of the visitor, as if he were certain of pleasing, wild as a youngster, foolish as a flirt, often surly and insolent as a servant! Fie especially upon those four-pawed serpents, idle and shivering, that are called greyhounds, and that do not harbor in their pointed muzzle enough scent to follow the track of a friend, nor in their flattened head enough intelligence to play at dominoes!

To the kennel with all these plaguey parasites!

Let them slink to the kennel stuffed and sulky! I sing the dirty dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the stroller dog, the dog buffoon, the dog whose instinct, like that of the poor, the gypsy and the mountebank, is marvelously sharpened by necessity, that excellent mother, that true patron of intelligence !

I sing the distressful dogs, be they those that wander, alone, in the winding gullies of the great cities or those who have said to the forsaken man, with blinking spiritual eyes: "Take me with you, and of two miseries we shall make a sort of joy!"

"Whither go the dogs?" Nestor Roquepelan once said in an immortal leaflet which he has doubtless forgotten, and which I alone, and perhaps Saint-Beuve, recall today.

Where do the dogs go, you ask, heedless men? They go about their business.

Business engagements, affairs of love. Through the fog, through the snow, through the mire, under the biting dogstar, under the streaming rain, they come, they go, they hurry, they move along under carriages, excited by fleas, by passion, by duty or by need. Like us, they have risen bright and early, and they seek their livelihood or run to their pleasure.

There are some who sleep in a ruin in the suburbs and who come every day at a stated hour, to beg alms at the door of a Palais-Royal cook; others who run in troops, for more than five leagues, to partake of the repast which has been prepared for them through the charity of certain sexagenarian maids, whose unoccupied hearts are given over to beasts, since imbecile man wants them no more; others who,. . ., frantic with love, leave their province on certain days, to come to the city and romp for an hour with a handsome bitch, a little careless in her toilet, but proud and thankful. 

(excerpt from Good Dogs by Charles Baudelaire, tr. Joseph T. Shipley)

David Lehman and Johnny, February 2020. Photo © Stacey Lehman

Two Dogs [by Stacey Lehman]

Left: Johnny © Stacey Lehman 2020 R: Whippoorwill © 1974 by Joe Brainard

Why me?

Syntax, Sound, and Sensation: Terrance Hayes in Conversation with Alan Michael Parker

In June, 2016, Terrance Hayes visited Florida to read and teach in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. In the course of his presentation, he made a comment about syntax and sound that struck me as important, and worth exploring. Despite our both being distracted by the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals later that evening—a game to ruin any Davidson College professor’s mood—we agreed to correspond via email, and this conversation ensued.

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015. His honors include a 2010 National Book Award, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His website is terrancehayes.com.

 

 

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

The Comics of Lydia Conklin [introduced by Alan Michael Parker]

The comics of novelist and cartoonist Lydia Conklin bristle with wondrous unfillable silences, à la Samuel Beckett, and wacky pointedness worthy of Roz Chast. Conklin’s especially terrific at the stare-down. But it’s her timing most of all that I love, how funny she is... wait for it... and funnier yet.

Here is a comic from her Lesbian Cattle Dogs series, expressly commissioned for this blog. 

 

Lydia Conklin is the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. She has received a Pushcart Prize, work-study scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others, and grants and awards from the Astraea Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Alliance of Artists Communities, and the Council for Wisconsin Writers. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, New Letters, The New Orleans Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She has drawn graphic fiction for Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Florida Review, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.