The Best American Poetry

Elizabeth A. I. Powell, Guest Author August 5-9

This week we welcome Elizabeth A.I. Powell as our guest author. Elizabeth's forthcoming poetry book "Atomizer" is due out in Fall of 2020 from Louisiana State University Press. She is also the author of Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, and The Republic of Self. She teaches at Northern Vermont University, where she also edits Green Mountains Review. 

Welcome, Elizabeth

-- sdl

 

Roger Gilbert speaking on A. R. Ammons's "Speaking"

From August 2-4, Cornell University professor Roger Gilbert is hosting "Archie in the Archives," a symposium devoted to the poetry of A. R. Ammons and to Ammons treasures to be found in the Cornell Library’s Rare and Manuscripts Collection. Ithacans, take note.

<<
For my last post on Ammons, I thought I’d discuss the textual history of one of his very late poems, “Speaking.” Our genial host here at The Best American Poetry blog, David Lehman, arranged for this poem to be published in The New Yorker a few months after Ammons’s death in February of 2001. He also included it in the excellent selection of Ammons’s poems that he edited in 2006 for the Library of America.  Extremely attentive readers may have noticed a small but significant textual discrepancy between the poem’s two published versions. Here is the poem as it appeared in The New Yorker:

Speaking

There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need broach the chill of for me:

when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; lone, ever,

when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense

that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.

And here is the poem as it appeared in the Library of America Selected Poems:

Speaking

There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need brook the chill of for me:

when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; love, even,

when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense

that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.

The variable phrase occurs at the end of the sixth line: “lone, ever” or “love, even.”  (The substitution of “brook” for “broach” is a more straightforward correction of a typist’s error.)  Three drafts of the poem exist: two manuscripts and one typescript with handwritten emendations.  In both manuscripts the phrase is ambiguous and could be interpreted either as “lone, ever” or “love, even,” though in one it looks more like the first and in one more like the second.  What initially tipped the balance in favor of “lone, ever” is the fact that the typescript contains that phrase.  For various reasons I won’t go into, I’m quite certain that the typescript was made not by Ammons himself but by an assistant; however, the fact that he made other changes to the typescript but allowed the phrase to stand would seem to suggest that he meant it to be part of the poem.  

This may in fact be a case of a typo establishing itself in the poet’s own mind as superior to the original phrase; the most famous instance is Yeats’s acceptance of “soldier Aristotle” in place of “solider Aristotle” in “Among School Children.” After discussing the line several times, however, David and I eventually concluded that “love, even” was in fact what Ammons must have meant when he first wrote the poem. Though “lone, ever” undeniably resonates with Ammons’s abiding sense of solitude (see my post on the hermit lark), “love, even” performs a more integral function in the poem, completing its catalogue of forces to which the dead speaker will be immune: rains, winds, fire, even love.

The poem’s last line also underwent significant change. In one manuscript it appears as “I won’t have anything to say”; in the other Ammons changed it to “I will have nothing to say”; and in the typescript he crossed that line out and substituted “I’ll say nothing.” In general his revisions moved toward greater economy, and I believe that this last version would have been his final choice. But in the absence of an authorized text, editors must make their own choices, based on the evidence at their disposal and their knowledge of the author’s work and mind. The fact that this poem foretells its author’s withdrawal into the silence of death makes more poignant the necessity of choosing his words for him.
>>

from the archives; originally posted June 21, 2008.

Philip Brady, Guest Author July 15-19

This week we welcome Philip Brady as our guest author. Philip's forthcoming book is The Elsewhere: Selected Poems and Poetics (Broadstone, 2020). His most recent book is a collection of essays, Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City (University of Tennessee Press, 2019) His most recent poetry book is To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet (Broadstone, 2015). He is the author of three previous books of poetry, a previous collection of essays, and a memoir. He has edited a critical book on James Joyce and an anthology of contemporary poetry.

Brady’s work has received the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; a ForeWord magazine Gold Medal; an Ohioana Poetry Award; the Ohio Governor’s Award and six Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council; and Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State.

Brady has taught at the National University of Zaire, University College Cork, and on Semester at Sea. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University. He is Executive Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on the low-residency MFA faculty of Wilkes University.

Welcome, Philip. 

-- sdl

PoetsArtists: Painting the Figure Now [by Didi Menendez]

 

View in Browser PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW Please join us at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art for the Opening Ceremony July 11, 2019 from 6 to 8 PM PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW   Many of the artworks you will see tonight are available from Artsy and Artnet. View pricing and availability now.     Check out the article in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. Check out the July issue of American Art Collector. The inside front over ad of the July-August issue features a painting by Sara Scribner. Check it out on Instagram.   PoetsArtists , 604 Vale Street, Bloomington, Illinois 61701, USA Unsubscribe

Introducing Guest Authors Cassandra Cleghorn and Alec Bernstein

This week we welcome Cassandra Cleghorn as our guest author for the week of July 8-12. Cassandra's Four Weathercocks was published in 2016 by Marick Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Paris Review, Yale Review, Poetry International,Colorado Review, Boston Review, Field and Tin House. She lives in Vermont, teaches at Williams College, regularly reviews poetry for Publishers Weekly and serves as poetry editor of Tupelo Press. For more about Cassandra Cleghorn see www.cassandracleghorn.com.

 

 

We also welcome Alec Bernstein, who will begin posting periodically from New York City. Alec is an independent consultant in counter-intuitive design. His previous trades were in industrial design, technology, classical and avant-garde music, performance art, and poetry. The first 20 professional years he performed as, in or under Svexner Labs, Aesthetic Research, Co-Accident, Gregg Smith, and Robert Kraft. In his teenage poetry years he co-published Buffalo Stamps (as this is a poetry blog, more later). The second 20 years, he worked for BMW Group in their Los Angeles design studio. He holds patents and has published papers on visual theory.

Welcome Cassandra and Alec. 

-- sdl

Jeffrey Levine, Guest Author June 17-21

This week we welcome Jeffrey Levine as our guest author. Jeffrey is the author of three books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize, and most recently, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, (Salmon Press, 2019). Levine’s many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize (twice), and the American Literary Review poetry prize. In addition to his own writing, he is principal translator of Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s epic work of poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, artistic director and publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, and he also serves as director of the esteemed Tupelo Press Writing Conferences. Also an accomplished musician, Levine is a concert clarinetist, jazz guitarist and pianist.

Welcome, Jeffrey.

--sdl

Symposium on the Fate of Jewish Refugees from Austria: 6/ 18 / 19

Anne Lehman at the White House, 2003. She narrowly escaped the Nazis but many of her family were murdered by them.

As this category included my mother (Anne Lehman, pictured above), her sister, and her brothers, I wish I could attend this free, one-day symposium at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. on Tuesday June 18:

<<< 
The Jewish population of Austria in 1938 totaled some 192,000, which represented almost four percent of the population. The majority lived in the capital city of Vienna and comprised about nine percent of its residents. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, finding safety abroad was no easy task, and the United States was no exception. The United States government combined the German and Austrian quotas for entry to the United States and waiting lists of desperate Jewish refugees grew as anti-Semitic persecution increased and Nazi Germany began to expand its territorial holdings in Europe. By the end of November 1939, more than 126,000 Austrian Jews had fled Austria, and of them more than 28,000 to the United States.

Join the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and partners the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance and the Austrian Embassy for a one-day symposium featuring current scholarly research on Austrian Jews’ experiences of persecution and forced emigration under the Nazis, with a focus on those who fled to the United States. ​This program is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. For more information, contact Elizabeth Anthony at eanthony@ushmm.org.
>>>

If you check it out, let us know. -- DL

Andrei Codrescu Speaks Dada

<< To celebrate Nr. 13 of Maintenant, the organ of Dada refuseniks, Peter Carlaftes, the editor of Maintenant, the organ of Dada refuseniks, asked questions I answered as follows:

Peter: With the passage of time as a gain in technology we can no longer rebel as the Dadaists once rebelled yet Dada retains an important place in the history of rebellion.

Codrescu: If Dada was history it would just be stories, another chapter in the curriculum of 20th century isms. Happily or not, it’s something else, impossible to pin down, and totally with us, especially now at the hybrid crossroads of human and robot. It is, without resorting to metaphysics, a catch in the throat. A breath of shock, surprise and horror that wells up without warning. Is that man, standing in a field of corpses, about to upchuck his Wienerschnitzel or is he aiming a spitball in four directions at once? Dada, one of the dadaists said at peak Dada in WWI, is a word more potent than God. That is still true, it’s God without metaphysics, God without godliness, without power and without rank. The gasp of Dada, the breath of surprise, is the cry uttered by a human hit by a revelation. The surprised gasp, that’s all. What follows is the effort of the surprised (if they live) to relive the gasp. And later, to figure out what the revelation was. And later yet, to narrate the pre and aftermaths of the gasp. And later yet, to pick at the fine down on the back of the gasp-beast to see if it could be translated as a style. Or translated in any which way, in whatever language, or whatever currency. Putting this in terms of the time-span we all agreed to set our time-pieces to, the first gasp of surprise was the Big Bang, then came a whole lot of still ongoing bang-bangs, birth-bang (or pang), death-bang, electro-bang, e-bang, and badaboom badabang as far as we can imagine. So, take Tzara and the Zurich dadaists, as an arbitrary point in gasping. What were he and his cohorts gasping about? What was revealed to them vividly enough to make “history”? Well, poison gas for one thing. And the bombs ripping up the empires and the people in them. Technology, which does have a history, marks its milestones with big bangs. Nobody expected the empires to blow up, least of all the people living in them. War, schmwar, thought Kafka when he put his money in the safest possible investment: Austro-Hungarian bonds. Everybody in Europe or in colony management knew that technology was capable of killing them. And everybody gasped when it advanced to kill a little more than they thought. By the time Tzara gasped, Europeans were already mostly robotic: they wore shoes, they lived in boxes, they used wires to communicate, they machined killingry. The hierarchical setup of Empire was a human-based engine engaged in advancing technology. Marinetti’s futurists got high on exhaust fumes but they too gasped when the speed they worshipped killed without any regard for their enthusiasm. Or the dadaists gasped for them. Only hermits and luddites rang the alarms, and they probably gasped too when they were pulverized. The bang is always a revelation and “Dada!” is the one word that might get out before the meat chunks into the air. Tzara might as well have said “Fuck!,” like millions of others did, but he said “Dada!” instead. For complex reasons having to do with human psychology and with the survival of art (which is the art of surviving), the translation and exchange that followed came to be known as “Dada!” not “Fuck!” But this is simply because Tzara was Romanian, and “Dada” is a double-yes of helplessness calling for Daddy (who is also busy being blown up and helplessly uttering Fuck! to his own daddy). The Dada! revolution did become the Fuck! Revolution for a minute in the 1960s. 

Peter: How can you envisage the thrust of Dada regaining momentum today through the use of technology?

Codrescu: Your first question had the interesting phrase “as we gain in technology” in it, so I’ll consider that in the context of the question above. In brief, we “gain in technology” a simulacrum of what we lose in flesh. “Flesh” is a technology, too, though a still mysterious one as of this minute. A minute ago, in let’s say 1916, we didn’t know very much. Now we know how to repurpose flesh (the human material) with CRISPR and other technologies. The replacement “simulacrum” is no longer a mystery: we transplant body parts and we 3D print limbs. If an older technology, a landmine let’s say, blows up your legs, it can be replaced by printed prosthetics. (And soon enough by something very much like flesh). There is a game on in science to locate consciousness, which is deadly serious given that we are experiencing two (seemingly) competing technologies simultaneously: one of them is the tech of evaporation of humans and eradication of life on earth, while the other is the rapidly advancing communication tech that links every brain on earth to the hive mind. If we can locate consciousness anywhere (in the Socratic sense of know thyself) we can understand what it’s up to. And then we gasp! Dada! I mean, if consciousness is matter working to know itself, does it want to keep knowing or does it want to self-annihilate? Locating consciousness is the first step. Finding out what it wants is another. Does it want to go on or to blow up? If it wants to go on, we have to invent a new technology (math and physics) to grow it big enough to make the (competing) war tech obsolete. If it wants to self-destruct, then we don’t have to do much. Both you and I and our fellow artists come up mostly on the side of going on — you because optimism is the American religion, and I because I was brainwashed by the communists before I could dream like Baudelaire. 

Peter: And of course Dada erupted from the trenches of The Great War –where 40,000 corpses sometimes piled up daily.

Codrescu: I think I already answered that one. 

Peter: What is the difference of 40,000 corpses then and 40,000 corpses buried in smart phones today?

Codrescu: I can see people wanting to be buried with their smart phones, but I have yet to see anyone buried inside their smart phone, though it’s not a bad idea. If one can be condensed post-mortem into a data chip it’s not a bad testamentary disposition. Just be sure you leave the password with someone alive.

 Peter:And finally–If you really want to upset the balance –Conformity is the new rebellion. Like stacking one side of the deck IS Rebellion. Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Codrescu: I don’t know what conformity or rebellion are. All I know is that if somebody hits you hard with a revelation or an explosive, you gasp. Dada! Fuck!
>>>

originally posted on June 2, 2019 as Dada Reading at Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street, NYC, 7 PM June 3 [by Andrei Codrescu]

Writing New York: Cornell University Press Author Panel (Tuesday, May 21, 6 PM)

At The Cornell Club-New York [Tues, May 21]
6 East 44th Street

Cornell University Press Authors:
David Lehman, Robert W. Snyder, and William J. vanden Heuvel

Moderated by:
Dean John Smith, Director of Cornell University Press

Join The Cornell Club- New York for a moderated panel discussion on their work and commonality between the authors- the New York experience as a central character. The discussion will be followed by a book signing. A rare opportunity to see the inside of that most secretive club, usually closed to the public, and to "meet the press."

David Lehman
In One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, David Lehman brings the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. 

Robert W. Snyder 
A tribute to Washington Heights, Crossing Broadway tells how disparate groups overcame their mutual suspicions to rehabilitate housing, build new schools, restore parks, and work with the police to bring safety to streets racked by crime and fear. 

Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel
In his new memoir, Hope and History: A Memoir of Tumultuous Times, the Ambassador recounts inspiring stories from his eight decades as a soldier, lawyer, political activist, and diplomat. 

 6:00 pm reception; 6:30pm panel discussion, gratis. Registration is required.

Email K.Alman@cornellclubnyc.com or click here to register.

David Lehman at the Hammer Museum, Thursday, May 9, 7:30 PM

Coffee, tea, and book signing with the author to follow the reading.

Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90024
(310) 443-7000 

ATTENDING THIS PROGRAM?

Ticketing: Free tickets are required and available at the Box Office one hour before the program. One ticket per person; first come, first served.  
Member Benefit: Members receive priority ticketing until 15 minutes before the program.
Parking: Parking is available under the museum. Rates are $7 for the first three hours with museum validation, and $3 for each additional 20 minutes, with a $20 daily maximum. There is a $7 flat rate after 6 p.m. on weekdays, and all day on weekends. Cash only. 
Restaurant: Enjoy a meal or drink before or after the program at our restaurant Audrey. Members and UCLA students receive 10% off. A late-night happy hour offers 10% off at the bar Tuesday–Saturday, 9–11 p.m.

Hammer Poetry: David Lehman at UCLA, Thursday, May 9 at 7:30 PM

Hammer Poetry: David Lehman

Thursday, May 9, 7:30 p.m.

David Lehman is a poet and writer, literary critic, editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry, and creator of the Best American Poetry series. Lee Upton praises Lehman’s new volume, Playlist, in these terms: “What a gorgeous and ambitious poem … an elegy, a calendar, an enactment of beauty, a tribute to singers and musicians and those who love them, a musical compilation, a meditation on friendship and art.” Lehman has received  fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. For his book A Fine  Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he won the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 2010.

Coffee, tea and book signing with the author to follow.

Readings at he Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles) are organized and hosted by the poet, scholar, and UCLA distinguished research professor of English Stephen Yenser. Cosponsored by the UCLA Department of English and the UCLA Department of Cultural and Recreational Affairs. Hammer.ucla.edu.

Joel Allegretti, David Lehman, and Geoffrey Nutter at Tannat (Sunday 4/28 at 3 PM)

Joel Allegretti, David Lehman, and Geoffrey Nutter

are reading their poems

in the Razor Blade reading series

at Tannat Wine & Cheese,

4736 Broadway/Thayer, 3 p.m., Sunday, April 28, 2019

Take the A train to the Dyckman Street (200th Street) subway station, and you're there. Plan on a walk in beautiful Fort Tryon Park before the reading starts.

Pictured left: Duke Ellington, whose orchestra's theme song was "Take the A Train."

 

 

Terese Svoboda, Guest Author April 8-12

This week we welcome Terese Svoboda as our guest author. Terese has published 18 books of fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, and a book of translation from the Nuer. Great American Desert, a book of stories, has just appeared. Winner of a Guggenheim, a Bobst Prize in fiction, an Iowa Prize for poetry, a NEH grant for translation, an O. Henry Award for the short story, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, 3 NYFA fellowships, a Pushcart Prize for the essay, a Bellagio residency for a libretto, and the Jerome Foundation Award in video, she also wrote the libretto for the opera WET that premiered at L.A.'s RedCat Theater. "Terese Svoboda is one of those writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre.”--Bloomsbury Review.

Welcome, Terese

-- sdl

Elizabeth Bishop to Guest-Edit "The Best American Poetry"

Elizabeth Bishop has agreed to guest-edit an upcoming volume in The Best American Poetry series.

"I've wanted to get her to do this since the series began," David Lehman, BAP's general editor, stated in a press release. "She is a shy person, who never liked the public stage, and the prospect of having to appear at a launch reading before a live audience had always been the ultimate deal-breaker. But when assured she would be spared this indignity, the final barrier was overcome, and we welcome Elizabeth into the fold."

Bishop's work has posthumously been published in three volumes of The Best American Poetry. James Merrill, who arranged communication between Lehman and Bishop via the Ouija app on the dark net, prevailed upon Miss Bishop to respond to the many text messages Lehman sent to her when he learned that a committee of heavenly scribes including Merrill, Louise Bogan, Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Howard Moss had agreed that while the goal of the BAP series is commendable, there has been a notable lack of poems written in set forms. "The well-wrought urn of yore / is now thought an awful bore," Dorothy Parker has commented. (Neither John Donne nor Cleanth Brooks could be reached for comment.) Should the deceased be eligible for inclusion in Bishop's volume? Parker thinks so. "Langston Hughes / is writing great blues," she reports in her semiannual "Celestial Report."

It is widely expected that Bishop, author of "One Art" and "A Miracle for Breakfast," will be on the lookout for beautifully written villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, and the like. "I'm very fond of John Ashbery," Elizabeth wrote in a recent communication, "and I'm happy to report he is writing poems at the clip of five a week, usually during the late afternoon after 'just walking around' Paris and sitting down to his first martini of the day." 

Lehman promised to reveal more details soon and he is working on an interview with Merrill, who was newly elected to the angelic secretariat. -- Howard Nemerov

A Kickstarter Worth Supporting: For Walt Whitman’s birthday: War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh & Robert Schultz

Our great national poet’s concerns during the Civil War apply with striking relevance in our own moment of war and dividedness. Whitman’s humane example and his central trope—the leaves of grass as sign of democracy and renewal—rebuke directly the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil.” For Whitman, American blood in American soil was not a tribal claim, and for him “the land entire” was the most fitting memorial to the war dead, “South or North, ours all”:  ". . . [T]he land entire [is] saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw . . .."

In War Memoranda, forthcoming in May in time for the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth, Binh Danh’s photographs of Civil War memorial sites, using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, evoke at once the past and present. And Robert Schultz’s chlorophyll prints offer portraits of Whitman and Civil War soldiers embodied in the flesh of leaves, physically enacting the central trope of Leaves of Grass—especially when the leaf used has been plucked from a “witness tree” known to have stood on a battlefield during the war. This book of art, poetry, and comment includes a generous selection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, 51 photographs, with essays by poets David Lehman and Stanley Plumly and by scholars Barbara Bair (Library of Congress) and Molly Rogers (author of Delia’s Tears). War Memoranda will be printed in a fine art edition limited to 500 copies and is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign that will end April 2, 2019. Signed copies and original artworks by Danh and Schultz are available as premiums. For more information use the search link http://kck.st/2DvOExn or go to Kickstarter.com and search “War Memoranda.”

-- sdl

Heidi Seaborn, Guest Author March 18-22

This week we welcome Heidi Seaborn as our guest author. Heidi is the author the award-winning debut book of poetry Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do} (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, March 2019), Poetry Editor for The Adroit Journal and a New York University MFA candidate. Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for nearly two dozen awards including the International Rita Dove Award in Poetry and published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review and Nimrod, a chapbook and a political pamphlet. She graduated from Stanford University and is on the board of Tupelo Press. Find out more about Heidi at  heidiseabornpoet.com. You can follow her on Twitter @heidiseaborn1 , Facebook and Instagram. Read her poem "What It's Like to Fall in Love" here. 

Welcome, Heidi. 

-- sdl

Farewell to George Stade, Dead at 85 [by David Lehman]

Columbia professor George Stade died of peneumonia on February 26. He was eighty-five, a mainstay of the Columbia English department for nearly forty years, blessed with good looks and athletic ability in addition to brains. Here's a link to the Washington Post obit.

George was a great guy, easy to talk to, who knew an awful lot about modern literature but never put on airs. He was also exactly right  about the fate of English departments in the US. “There are those people who see literature in traditional ways, which includes historical circumstances, and there is a school that wants to see literature as a symptom of all the evils of society.”

Beyond nostalgia and the memory of an excellent teacher, I have a special reason for remembering George with great fondness. It was he who suggested that I write my PhD dissertation on the prose poem in America and England. He made the suggestion in a casual conversation on the fourth floor of Hamilton Hall, and I grasped its rightness instinctively. I spent much of the next four years reading widely as the subject demanded --Baudelaire and Poe; Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Henri Michaux; such antecedents of the prose poem as the King James Bible, Macpherson's Ossian, and Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; theories of prose and verse as propounded by Coleridge, Shelley, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valery, Owen Barfield, and Christopher Ricks; full-length books of prose poetry by William Carlos Williams and Geoffrey Hill. My dissertation had individual chapters on four writers -- Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden ("The Orators," "Caliban to the Audience," and "Vespers"), and John Ashbery  ("Three Poems"). And I began to translate Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris. 

All that was your doing, George, and I wish I could turn back the clock and spend an afternoon with you talking about this project when it was new. You'd have made me improve it. I see all its defects, but in my own defense I was teaching full-time for three of the four years when I wrote "The Marriage of Poetry and Prose." I should have dedicated it to you. -- David Lehman

Welcome to Ashberyland!

Welcome to Ashberyland!

a digital theme park of exclamatory pedagogy

where YOU get to read the poems

and judge them and pick out the ones

you like the most 

while the ghost

of Ashbery lingers on a cloud

looking down on us

benevolently -- DL

On the Ides of Ted: A Tribute to Professor Tayler [by David Lehman]

A memorial tribute for the late Edward Tayler, Columbia's great Renaissance man (and my mentor), on March 15, 2019, a Friday, at 3 PM in the rotunda of Low Memorial Library on the Columbia campus.

Ted taught Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poetry and changed minds, if not lives, in his brilliant seminars and lectures.

He was quite a fellow, compact (5'4), agile (a varsity wrestler as an undergraduate at Amherst), witty and quick on his feet, and he believed that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everything in two and those that don't.

Read  more about him here

Happy Fasnacht Day! [by Laura Orem]

The Fight between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, oil on panel, 1559

It's Shrove Tuesday, and while New Orleans may have Mardi Gras, we here in Pennsylvania Dutch Country have Fasnacht Day.

What is a fasnacht, you ask? It is a kind of super-doughnut, made with potato flour, sugar, and lard. Don't scoff. They are terrific. They are only sold one day a year - today, the day before Ash Wednesday. Historically, they were the last gastronomic hurrah before Lent, a way to use up all the sugar and lard in the pantry before forty days of fasting began.  As you might imagine, they are not health food. No one, as far as I am aware, has ever calculated the calories in a fasnacht. Really, it's better not to know.

What distinguishes fasnachts from ordinary doughnuts is their muchness. They are heavier (potato flour and lard will do that) and usually significantly bigger. They have a wonderfully crispy outside and a decadently soft inside. They come in many varieties - glazed, powdered, filled - but my favorite are ones that are simply dusted with granulated sugar. Heaven.

Fasnachts are serious business here in the Susquehanna Valley. Advertising begins weeks ahead of time, and bakeries and supermarkets open early to handle the rush. When I went to the grocery store to pick up ours today, there were extra tables outside, piled high with fasnachts of all complexion wafting their yeasty aroma through the chilly air, enticing any reluctant buyers (not that there are many of those). And if you think you'll just pick up your dozen on the way home from work, think again: by suppertime, there is not a fasnacht left to be had for love nor money in York County.

So, while the good people of rural Pennsylvania are not ones for gaudy beads, jazz music, and excess alcohol, they do have their moments of over-indulgence. Ah, fasnachts! How we love you!