The Best American Poetry

Heidi Seaborn, Guest Author May 31-June 4

This week we welcome back Heidi Seaborn as our guest author. Heidi  is the author of [PANK] Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), the acclaimed Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019) and the 2020 Comstock Review Chapbook Award-winning, Bite Marks. Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Financial Times, The Greensboro Review, The Offing, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox and elsewhere. She’s Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal  and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Find out more about Heidi at her website: heidiseabornpoet.com

Welcome back, Heidi.

-- sdl

John Hennessy, Guest Author June 14-19

This week we welcome John Hennessy as our guest author. John is the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books )and Coney Island Pilgrim (Ashland Poetry Press) He is the co-translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and the forthcoming anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and serves as poetry editor for The Common. Find out more about John here. 

Welcome, John. 

-- sdl

Congratulations Emma Trelles, Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA

Ed note: Emma Trelles has been generously contributing here since the early days of this blog. We are thrilled to share the news that she has recently been made Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA. You can read all about it in the profile below. Congratulations Emma!

SHAPING CHAOS: Trelles views her work as an attempt to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of life. | Credit: Erick Madrid

The position of poet laureate of Santa Barbara, initiated in 2005 and first held by the late Barry Spacks, offers an opportunity and a challenge. Granted, this city is an unlimited source of inspiration, but how do you improve on paradise? What can a poet give to the city that has everything?

When Emma Trelles became the ninth person to hold the laureateship this spring, the city found an answer. The daughter of Cuban immigrants and a native of Miami, Trelles has been a journalist in South Florida and a professor at Santa Barbara City College. Her book Tropicalia, which received the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize in 2010, overflows with the emotional intelligence and rhetorical clout of a lifelong poet.

In describing how her writing reflects her background, Trelles uses the Cuban Spanish metaphorical verb resolver, which means “to make things work despite obstacles.” In a recent email, she said that her poems “document the bright green fly at the center of a succulent or the experience of walking home at dusk with a bag of street tacos.” Writing about the world she sees and her responses to it gives her a “way of understanding it or at least giving its chaos a recognizable shape.”

“Writing poems is my way of trying to make things work, if only for a little while,” she explains. “My people are hopeful realists, and I think I am too.”

While Trelles initially developed this clear-eyed yet extravagant vision amid the lush landscapes and plural contradictions of Miami, her style suits the nuances of Santa Barbara’s ravishing Spanish-themed dreamscape equally well. Supremely attentive to the natural environment as it bumps into or brushes up against the artifice of urban life, she has found much to admire and even more to consider in the seven-plus years she and her husband have lived in Santa Barbara. From dive bars and noise bands to Tennyson and García Lorca, and from Afro-Cuban Santería to the Brazilian counterculture of Tropicália, Trelles brings an extraordinary range of contexts to bear in her work. In ways both overt and subtle, her voice is one that Santa Barbara needs to hear.

Continue reading here. 

-- sdl

Angela Ball, Guest Author

Today we welcome Angela Ball as a guest author. Angela teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. The author of six volumes of poetry, most recently Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press), she splits her time between Hattiesburg, MS and Covington, LA with her two dogs, Miss Bishop and Scarlet. Welcome, Angela.  --sdl

 

Angela will be writing about what she terms "the New York School Diaspora": poets who, though they may live in Florida or California, Chicago or Boston, have absorbed the influence of New York School poets (Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, and Schuyler) and done noteworthy things with it. Welcome, Angela. -- DL 

Introducing Thomas Moody, Australian Bureau Chief

This week we welcome Thomas Moody as chief of our bureau in Australia. Thomas's poetry and prose have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Hanging Loose, Lindsay Magazine and elsewhere. He is rarely caught with his pants down.

Welcome, Thomas. 

-- sdl

Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Contests: Deadline April 30

https://marshhawkpress.org/marsh-hawk-press-poetry-prize-awards/

MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE AWARDS

The 2021 MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE

CONTEST JUDGE: DAVID LEHMAN

($1,000.00 Cash Prize and Publication of the Book. Additionally the winner receives a $100.00 Duotrope Gift Certificate)

The ROBERT CREELEY MEMORIAL AWARD

($250.00 Cash Prize)

The ROCHELLE RATNER MEMORIAL AWARD

($250.00 Cash Prize)

Prize Competition Opens December 1, 2020

For online submissions (open until 11:59 PM EST on April 30, 2021) click here.

Beginning December 1, 2020, Marsh Hawk Press is accepting submissions of poetry manuscripts to the annual Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prizes. Deadline is April 30, 2021. We welcomes submissions from emerging as well as established poets.

The winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize receives $1,000.00, book publication and promotion. Winners of the Robert Creeley and Rochelle Ratner prizes, selected from finalists, receive $250.00 each.

Guidelines for Manuscript Submission:

• We accept electronic submissions only.
• Screening for the Marsh Hawk Press prizes is blind. Because of this, no contact information is allowed within your manuscript, including within the filename. Electronic submissions will have contact information collected via Submittable, which is hidden from our screeners. 
• Do not include any preambles, or bios within your submitted manuscript.
• Manuscripts must have a table of contents.
• Please query first before submitting manuscripts with illustrations, photographs or images.
• Manuscripts must be typed in a no less than 12 point font, paginated, and 48 – 84 pages in length (single spaced). 
• Individual poems from the manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, anthologies, or chapbooks of less than 25 pages, but the collection, as a whole, must be unpublished.
• Translations and self-published books are not eligible.
• Send your manuscript via Submittable only with a cover page that lists the title of your manuscript. No personal/contact information is allowed to be included within your manuscript file.
• Winners will be announced in the summer, following the close of contest.
• Entry fee for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize is $25.00 for each submission. Payment is through Submittable. 
• To submit (open until 11:59 PM EST on April 30, 2021) click here.

About Marsh Hawk Press’ Screening Process
Manuscripts submitted to the Marsh Hawk Press prize contests are screened anonymously. During the screening process, every manuscript is read by a minimum of two Marsh Hawk Press editors. Submissions are winnowed to a group of finalists from which the Contest Judge chooses the winners. 

CLMP Contest Code of Ethics. CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believe that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Nabokov's Superman Poem [by Vladimir Nabokov, June 1942]

Vladimir Nabokov's poem about "Superman of the Funnies," written in June 1942, has surfaced and been published in London's Times Literary Supplement. Nabokov sent the poem to The New Yorker, whose poetry editor, Charles Pearce, rejected it, saying "Most of us [at the magazine] appear to feel that many of our readers wouldn't quite get it. And then, too, there is the problem you foresaw about the lines in the middleof the poem."
Nabokov had conceded that the poem, about the man of steel's explosive wedding night, might be "too risqué." -- DL

The Man of To-morrow’s Lament

I have to wear these glasses – otherwise,
when I caress her with my super-eyes,
her lungs and liver are too plainly seen
throbbing, like deep-sea creatures, in between
dim bones. Oh, I am sick of loitering here,
a banished trunk (like my namesake in “Lear”),
but when I switch to tights, still less I prize
my splendid torso, my tremendous thighs,
the dark-blue forelock on my narrow brow,
the heavy jaw; for I shall tell you now
my fatal limitation … not the pact
between the worlds of Fantasy and Fact
which makes me shun such an attractive spot
as Berchtesgaden, say; and also not
that little business of my draft; but worse:
a tragic misadjustment and a curse.

I’m young and bursting with prodigious sap,
and I’m in love like any healthy chap –
and I must throttle my dynamic heart
for marriage would be murder on my part,
an earthquake, wrecking on the night of nights
a woman’s life, some palmtrees, all the lights,
the big hotel, a smaller one next door
and half a dozen army trucks – or more.

But even if that blast of love should spare
her fragile frame – what children would she bear?
What monstrous babe, knocking the surgeon down,
would waddle out into the awestruck town?
When two years old he’d break the strongest chairs,
fall through the floor and terrorize the stairs;
at four, he’d dive into a well; at five,
explore a roaring furnace – and survive;
at eight, he’d ruin the longest railway line
by playing trains with real ones; and at nine,
release all my old enemies from jail,
and then I’d try to break his head – and fail.

So this is why, no matter where I fly,
red-cloaked, blue-hosed, across the yellow sky,
I feel no thrill in chasing thugs and thieves –
and gloomily broad-shouldered Kent retrieves
his coat and trousers from the garbage can
and tucks away the cloak of Superman;
and when she sighs – somewhere in Central Park
where my immense bronze statue looms – “Oh, Clark …
Isn’t he wonderful!?!”, I stare ahead
and long to be a normal guy instead.

Vladimir Nabokov
June 1942

Times Literary Supplement (March 2021)

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/superman-returns-poem-vladimir-nabokov-andrei-babikov/

see also the write-up in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/04/vladimir-nabokovs-superman-poem-published-for-the-first-time 

"my namesake in Lear": Kent

Amy Gerstler in Conversation about "Index of Woman" [Sunday, April 18, 2021]

Chevalier bookstore:
L.A.'S Oldest Independent Bookstore, Est. 1940 

Virtual Event

Monday, April 19, 2021 at 7:00PM

INDEX OF WOMEN
by AMY GERSTLER

the author in conversation with LOUISE STEINMAN

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO JOIN: 

https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/amy-gerstler

 

From a maestra of invention (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

AMY GERSTLER

Author

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play. She is also collaborating with comics artist, author and scholar Trina Robbins on a comic about women comic book artists from the 1940s. 

LOUISE STEINMAN

in conversation

Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history, and reconciliation. Her three books include: The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation; The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.  Steinman founded-- and was for twenty-five years the curator—of the celebrated ALOUD literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Her essays have been published widely, most recently in Los Angeles Review of Books.   She is the editor of the 2018 anthology: Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump. Her installation, “Welcome the Stranger: An Urban Installation for Social Engagement” (with Dorit Cypis), was featured at the 2019 Lublin (Poland) Open City Festival. She is co-director of  The Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California.  Her lead essay, “The Questions We Ask,” appears in the forthcoming volume A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art 1979-2000. www.louisesteinman.com

Join us here | 04/19 at 7PM PT on Zoom

David Lehman, Denise Duhamel & Nin Andrews: Reading at the KGB Tonight 4/12/21

 

<<
I am so excited to be reading with David Lehman and Denise Duhamel tonight for the KGB series, I can barely breathe. I am thinking of this as my ten minutes in the presence of fame—as well as in the presence of two of my all-time favorite poets.  I can’t wait to hear Denise read from her new collection, Second Story, which includes a long poem in the form of Terza rima about her terrifying experience with hurricane Irma, as well as her equally terrifying poems about the last few years, under the influence of Donald Trump. And I am so excited to hear from David Lehman whom I expect to surprise us by reading from his forthcoming collection, The Morning Line, due out in the fall of 2021 from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  I owe so much to both of these poets. David was my first real poetry professor. I would never have pursued poetry if it were not for him. And it was Denise who taught me how to read an orgasm poem aloud.  -- Nin Andrews >>

 

The reading starts at 7 pm.

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86561522512?pwd=UW1BRXU0dVZHZ2ZWM0xHWUtjWWNkQT09

 

Meeting ID: 865 6152 2512 Passcode: 799004

<<
I'm grateful to David Lehman for giving me the chance to say a few words about his April 12 KGB Bar reading with Nin Andrews and Denise Duhamel, because it was David who introduced me to their work. Back when the reading series was new, in the late 1990s, with Star Black and David in charge, he gave me a copy of "The Book of Orgasms" by Nin Andrews, and I was blown away by the sheer happy lusty sexiness of the concept and the individual poems illustrating the poet's orgasmic "quest," which is a never-ending one inasmuch as the "last" in any series is the first in a new series. I also recall a night at the bar when, drinking Tanqueray martinis, Lehman insisted that feminism and fun were not incompatible, and won the bet with Duhamel's Barbie poems in her book "Kinky." As for Lehman himself, will he read daily poems, poems "in the manner of" his favorite dead poets, or a Baudelaire translation? What this virtuoso trio has in common is authenticity, humor, wit, daring, and sensibility, which is just about everything. >>  -- Fred Chervil 

 

RIP Walter LaFeber, the distinguished historian & Cornell professor

Walter LaFeber, the legendary Cornell professor of history, with many devoted students included who went on to hold oimportant posts in the US government, died yesterday in Ithaca at the age of 87. The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (1997) won the Bancroft Prize in American History. LaFeber’s book on Michael Jordan makes brilliant use of a central metaphor, arguing that the marketing and promotion techniques of the National Basketball Association are exemplary of globalization. He was a neighbor of man and a great gentleman. I posted this quote of his in our "Spontaneous Aphorisms" series on November 2, 2012.

<<<< 

Anyone can have a bad century.

-- Walter LaFeber

>>> 

The eminent historian Walter LaFeber -- author of The American Age: U. S. Foreign Policy At Home and Abroad, from 1750 to the Present, as well as the more recent Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (Norton) -- turns out to be a diehard Cubs' fan, the experience of which has to have a chastening effect on the mind and heart.

The line reminded me of a remark made by Marv Levy, coach of the Buffalo Bills, the team that was always the bridesmaid, never the bride, to use that most curious of all sportscaster's cliches. The Bills would get to the Super Bowl and lose it -- not a bad fate, all in all, when you consider the history of teams that have been to the Super Bowl once in forty-three years. One week Levy was asked whether the following Sunday's game was "do or die." No, Levy said firmly, putting things in perspective. "D-Day was do or die," he said. Sunday against the Packers or Giants was just another game.

--- DL

A Fashion Line Based on Joe Brainard's Work

Ron Padgett sent out this announcement:

1/25/21

The Madrid-based fashion house of Loewe has a young designer named Jonathan Anderson who is so crazy about Joe's work that he has based an entire line on Joe's work—a profusion of shirts, tee shirts, pants, dresses, coats, sneakers, tote bags, handbags, throw pillows, etc.—with advance publicity in the form of a luxurious book and four videos (one by Anderson himself, one with Paul Auster and Jim Jarmusch, one with Constance Lewallen and Anne Waldman, and one with Joe's brother John and me). The clothing line will be in Loewe's stores in June.

 

If you want to plunge into this extravaganza, here are some links:

 

https://www.wallpaper.com/fashion/loewe-joe-brainard-menswear-aw21

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/Loewe1846

 

https://www.loewe.com/usa/en/stories-collection/fw21-men-runway.html?ione_extid=D-01744603&j=10133210&jb=482&l=926_HTML&mid=100008228&sfmc_sub=434346089&u=239233257&utm_campaign=W03_ShowInABook_F_usa-en_NO%20SHOPPING_Prospect_Webform&utm_content=Hero_image&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=SFMC&utm_term=10133210

 

https://www.vogue.com/article/loewe-show-in-a-book-mens-fall-2021

 

---

Twice -- in 1988 and 2015 -- a Joe Brainard graced the cover of a volume in the "Best American Poetry" series.

 

Jane Freilicher, "Parts of a World" at Kasmin (Jan 21-Feb 27, 2021)

 

 

Rudy Burckhardt's Photos at Tibor de Nagy (part two) [by Vincent Katz]

How Rudy Burckhardt photographed on the move is something of mystery. He did it, so we know it’s possible, but try to put yourself in his position. He must have moved with a dancer’s speed and precision, or, cat-like, lain in wait before pouncing on his unsuspecting prey. He regularly captures head-on in close proximity the precise moment at which or just before someone looks at him and says, “Hey!”

In addition to tableaux frozen from the city’s gyre, Burckhardt could compose images that seem snatched from a Renaissance picture-making textbook. Such a one is V-Back, from about 1985. There are two versions of this moment. In the first, Rudy has come up close behind a beautiful woman, her hair carefully styled and held back by a clip, a slender chain around her neck, a purse hanging from her left shoulder, her sweater turned backward, so that its V reveals her upper back. We can see the spinal cleft as it travels down, widening to a darkness in between her delicately flaring shoulder blades. We see a man in a suit in front of her, waiting to cross the street. We catch a glimpse of the traffic as it rushes past.

In the second photo of this moment, Burckhardt has quickly and adroitly turned his camera from a vertical to a horizontal format. He takes advantage of a moment of urban serendipity. A large white delivery truck is passing. In Burckhardt’s horizontal frame, we now see, in addition to the man in the suit on the left, a man in a long-sleeved striped shirt on the right. These two men frame this remarkable woman, each one turned slightly toward her, without actually looking at her, in two different gestures, diffidence and deference. And in that split-second, the woman has suddenly become aware of something behind her, some heat of energy, some thinking, something stretching back to the galleries of European museums, kindled on the stages of New York’s ballet. She turns, looking at Burckhardt, and now at us in the photograph, her beautiful face caught in that glance, the whole picture given a timeless quality by the pure background of the white truck passing, such that, for a split-second, Burckhardt has taken the city completely away, and we are enveloped in this moment of observation, two people seeing each other for the first time.

The exhibition of these and other chance encounters of New York City residents immortalized by Burckhardt’s eye and body is punctuated by a sequence of three films shown on a wall-mounted monitor. In these three films — Default Averted  (1975), Cerveza Bud (1981), and Ostensibly (1989) — Burckhardt takes three different approaches, all showing his complex approach to cinema. Default Averted refers to the moment when New York City almost went bankrupt; Burckhardt takes a typically wry approach to the topic, choosing to show a building being demolished over time. This is a favorite motif of his in his films; he loved the way New York was built, and also knocked down, sporadically, without municipal oversight. Cerveza Bud focuses on one of New York’s great pleasures — public joy, in this case in the form of outdoor dancing, music playing, and roller skating. As usual, Burckhardt is drawn to the city’s black and Latinx populations. Ostensibly uses a poem by that title by John Ashbery, and in fact Ashbery appears in the film, in red suspenders, recording the poem. So many events and images fly by in these films, balanced by moments of calm, that I like to try to document them as they pass. I’ll end with my notes from the films.

Default Averted (1975, 20 minutes, black and white, music by Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varèse)

Architectural emblems, details, demolition, smoke and fire
Fireman grins
Boards dropped from roof
T Monk big band sound to sped up b/w city traffic
Shakespeare-like head all that remains: preserved relic in antic sweep of wreckage-remake (the New York mantra)
Earl Hines reflections in wet pavement
Walls fall, classic Burckhardtism

Cerveza Bud (1981, 30 minutes, color)

Endless bodies of color, dancing, roller skating
Public displays of love: bodies, gay couples dance Hustle to Kool & The Gang
Reclining in summer grass à la La Grand Jatte but more relaxed, more openly sexual
Open embrace of Twin Towers, part of that cityscape with street light suspended in front
Seagull soars against dirtied blue

Ostensibly (1989, 16 minutes, color, poem by John Ashbery,)

piano music by Alvin Curran)
JA reading poem
Kia Heath nude poses in front of Rudy’s De Kooning then dresses, walks in snow
Nice family hops backward up steps
Maine log-throwing competition
A woman (Rochelle Kraut?) reads same poem
Shots of pond details of trees
Man jogs shirtless on Maine road
NY intersection (23rd & Broadway?) in rain reflection
Dancers at party (Skowhegan?)
RB pushing garbage to gutter (NY) and trees to ground (Maine)
Lichen details
NY walkers, skylines, water towers, sped up clouds

Ed. Note:  for part one of Vincent Katz's piece on the new Rudy Burckhardt show, click here. 

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 11 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com
The show is up from December 21, 2020 until January 23, 2021.
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 10-6pm

Rudy Burckhardt’s “New York Hello!” (part one) [by Vincent Katz]

Rudy Burckhardt : “New York Hello!” Photographs and Films from the 1970s and ‘80s

At Tibor de Nagy Gallery, December 11, 2020 through January 23, 2021

https://www.tibordenagy.com

https://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/rudy-burckhardt4

Through January 23, run over to Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 11 Rivington Street to see a glorious selection of the later New York City street photographs of famed downtown denizen Rudy Burckhardt. You can also see the images online, but Burckhardt’s prints, small and unassuming as they are, repay close observation in person.

I guess the only art form that survives intact online is poetry. Poetry was something Burckhardt had a lot of, and I often find myself making the Freudian slip of referring to a photo of his as a “poem.” Partially, that has to do with the wide spaciousness Burckhardt was able to include in his photographs. They have a space in them that reminds one of the space in the city poems of his friends Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara.

When he first came to New York from his native Basel, in 1935, at the age of 21, excited though he was by the city’s gigantic scale, he was unable to photograph it, focusing instead on a prescient series of fragments — pedestrians rushing past him in midtown against slivers of storefronts and sidewalks. The effect was almost hermetic, as though Rudy was a consciousness that the urban swirl buffeted but never disturbed.

That still consciousness was something he brought to his well-known photographs of the 1940s, iconic views of Times Square and the Flatiron Building. After a few years in New York, Burckhardt had figured out a way to bring the tallest buildings and pedestrians into the same frame. He worked quickly, never wasting film, preferring to wait for the right season and light, rather than to force an unwilling moment into a picture.

Concomitant to his photographic practice, Burckhardt made over one hundred 16-millimeter films, some in collaboration with other artists, musicians and poets, others on his own as a form of diary or collage film he would assemble over time from footage shot in New York, Maine, and other locations. The collaborative films were one way Burckhardt kept up to date, choosing to invite into them succeeding generations of New York’s brightest stars, from Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland, through Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, to Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Rackstraw Downes, Taylor Mead and Yoshiko Chuma, Douglas Dunn, Grazia Della Terza, Dana Reitz, David Shapiro, Christopher Sweet, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Jacob Burckhardt and Tom Burckhardt, among others.

Like his lifelong friend and collaborator, poet and critic Edwin Denby, Burckhardt made it a habit to keep up on the latest developments in poetry, music, theater, dance, and visual art. Denby and Burckhardt were inveterate culture vultures, inspiring generations of New Yorkers after them. Part of that urbane desire involved being attuned to the look of people and things, as they changed through New York’s mid-century.

Burckhardt photographed on New York’s streets from the late 1930s through the 1990s. His later work shows him experimenting, evolving, using familiar themes in different ways, with subtly different emphases. The photographs currently on view at Tibor de Nagy are striking in their immediacy, their sophisticated informality, and their ability to project certain types or looks of people. Burckhardt was remarkable in his ability to find the beauty in many kinds of people.

Three photos of couples walking are emblematic of the power of youth, of animated promenade. In one from the mid 1980s, a black couple presents ultimate contemporary style — he in t-shirt, athletic shorts, and Pumas without socks, she elegantly coiffed, in designed low-V t-shirt, carefully ironed and cuffed jeans, white sandals. They fit together in style perfectly. But to make a great photograph, he needed more than the main subject. Intimately steeped in classic European painting, he had no trouble forging balanced photographic figure-and-ground compositions on the fly. He also was immersed in modern Abstract painting, learning from it never to leave any area without interest. Here, Burckhardt catches memorable figures between and around the two mythic beauties who dominate the scene.

Ed. note: Part two of Vincent Katz's review will appear tomorrow or the day after.

Thomas Moody's "Construction Magnet"

Here are the opening line of Thomas Moody's new poem “Construction Magnet.” The poem has a remarkable epigraph "(For who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? -- Ecclesiastes 3:22). Please click here for the full poem as posted by the Journal of American Poetry.

<<<<
I try walking for profit…

Certainly progress follows me

Across oceans, through time zones, down dark alleys
Construction workers wait for me
Ready to form a guard-of-honor
On the boulevards facades drool over my aura of resurrection
Friday’s forgotten basilica is Sunday’s throbbing fitness centre
Into the squares and municipal buildings, history is not immune to my
          magnetism!
Statues of great men launch themselves from bridges as I approach city
          rivers
So I make my way down the Passage of the Comforters of the Sick
Past the Prince Lover’s Lane, onto the Keizersgracht and the famed canal          
          houses—
The centuries shed from their walls!
Amsterdam’s Golden Age is not safe
Even in Manhattan, the salivating murder of developers can’t keep pace
Billboards on the BQE project my face
“Having Trouble Getting Your Project Off the Ground?”
For six easy payments I’ll move in across the street. Call Now.
>>>

Announcing "101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium" [eds. Matthew E. Silverman and Nancy Naomi Carlson]

101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium edited by Matthew E. Silverman and Nancy Naomi Carlson (Ashland Poetry Press) is here.

The editors write:

<<< In the face of rising antisemitism, we feel this anthology is necessary now more than ever.

We have selected one poem from 101 contemporary poets, both Jewish and not Jewish, writing with a Jewish sensibility. Our contributors include both the next generation of Jewish voices, as well as established voices, including such notables as Ellen Bass, Bruce Bond, Sharon Dolin, Marilyn Hacker, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ilya Kaminsky, Joy Ladin, David Lehman, Matthew Lippman, Jean Nordhaus, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan and Marge Piercy. We have tried to cover a wide variety of themes, with only one or two poems devoted to the same topic, including inter-marriage, the Holocaust, Jewish rituals (including burial customs), Sabbath and holiday traditions, Torah, Midrash, traditional Jewish foods, Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino, and anti-Semitism, among many other themes.

What makes this anthology unique is that there is no definitive anthology of contemporary Jewish poetry that represents over 100 poets writing from the year 2000 and on, as well as the fact that the majority of these poems have never before appeared in print. >>>

"Traditional and radical, secular and holy, the poems in 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium come to us just as we need them. The poets here celebrate a culture and caution against hatred, all the while making incredible art. Silverman and Carlson have gathered a stellar and diverse group of poets and poetic visions. "

 —Denise Duhamel

About the Editors:

Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor.An Infusion of Violets, her second full-length poetry collection, was published by Seagull Books (2019), and named a “New & Noteworthy” title by the New York Times Book Review. 

Matthew E. Silverman teaches at Gordon State College and he is editor of Blue Lyra Press. He is co-editor, with Deborah Ager, of Bloomsbury’s Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. 

from the book:

Gennady Katsov
An Invective

Do not build cities where cemeteries once stood:
In their infrastructures, their pipes and foundations,
Horror still grows that oozes out of the corpses,
And the storehouse of faith and infidelity clogs up.
Do not build cities over places of execution,
Nor over sanctuaries, and never over a battlefield,
For no desire will be so fulfilled, for what’s to come,
Its outcome will be made only more atrocious.
Nor should cities be established in times of confusion
Or during periods of crisis, or havoc, or epidemic:
They will emerge like phantoms out of nightmares
In the form of bats that come to one in bad dreams.
And this someone who will eventually awaken among
Necropoli, places of execution, barracks, Place d’Armes,
That are everywhere and always, deeded to the future,
Will not stumble over streets paved with grave stones.

Translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale

"The Complete History of the Boy" [by David Lehman]

"The Complete History of the Boy" is the poetry feature of the month on the The Common  
out of Amherst, Mass.,
ably edited by the poet John Hennessy

Here is part one of the poem:

 

1.
The baby giggled in his crib.
His father walked in. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because,” the baby said, “we all have our joy.”
It was his first sentence.

When the baby had his own bed,
he said children are luckier than grownups
because they get to sleep in their own bed
while grownups have to share.

At four he was asked what he wanted
to be when he grew up. “Santa Claus,” he said.

That was Thanksgiving. By January he thought better of it.
“I never want to be a grown-up because
that would be the end of me.”

It was the age of the aphorism:
“Candles are statues that burn for the ceremony.”
“Saliva is the maid of your mouth.” (It cleanses it.

Science explained everything,
the workings of windshield wipers, for example:
“The darkness causes the rain 
and comes from the rain, which goes up
to the sky and falls down again
on the windshield and the windows,
and you have to wipe the darkness off.”

For the rest of the poem, click here. 
The photo of the author and Bruno (above) is from 1983.
https://www.thecommononline.org/november-2020-poetry-feature-david-lehman/

Saturday, December 12: Celebrate the Best American Poetry 2020

We're not going gentle into the end of 2020! Join us this Saturday for a celebration of Unamuno Author @PaisleyRekdal's selection for @BestAmPo 2020 Anthology! RSVP: https://t.co/tZfNxlOScl 🥳🤠🤗@DesperateLit #Unamuno53 pic.twitter.com/f1dWMdbBtQ

— Unamuno Authors Series (@UnamunoAuthors) 

Jennifer Clarvoe, Guest Author December 7-11

This week we welcome Jennifer Clarvoe as our guest author. Jennifer is the author of two books of poems, Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She is the recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Rome Prize, and a James Merrill House residency. Recent work appears in Zocalo, Memorious, and Literary Matters, and is forthcoming in Great River Review. Retired after nearly thirty years teaching literature and creative writing at Kenyon College, in Ohio, she lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Welcome, Jennifer. 

-- sdl

"No Alphabet" [by Joanne Dominique Dwyer]

If not for the lust of women, there would be no alphabet.
Save for the breaking of traffic rules, there would be
no Cubism; no fractured light scrutinized from subways
or kaleidoscopes in the tool belts of surveyors.
Save for the white shoes the busgirl wore
there would be no cloud-colored shoe polish hardening
under the sink cabinet; no wet-chalk streaking
the sidewalk during the summer monsoons.
Save for the ravishing bruise stenciled across the man’s cheek
there would be no hand-to-hand combat.
No 7-Eleven thieves with nylon stockings over their heads.
No trail marked with the shells of sunflower seeds
from the church steeple to the strip bar.
If not for the tiny, expensively coiffed gray-haired wife
the judge would never get out of bed.
Save for the lead saucepan of water in the dry grass
there would be no means to quench our thirst.
If not for the napoleons and éclairs the busgirl pilfered
from the walk-in cooler at the country club
she might not have been bulimic.
Save for the hearth rugs made from the skins of bears
placed in front of fireplaces lit with gas
falsifying every sighting of fallen stars seen
since the inception of love, there may never have
been application of kohl around women’s eyes.
If not for the avarice for heated seats and more legroom
the average new car might not be weighing-in
at four-thousand and nine pounds.
And the stranger’s car might have weighed just enough less
that my son’s black and white wolf-dog Santo
might not be dead and my son would not have the dog
lying on snow in the back of his pickup, bringing it home to bury.
Save for a hollowed-out tree trunk, there would be
no place for the dead to reassemble their limbs.
Save for a shovel, there might not be a heaven.
No flowers thrown into prehistoric graves.
Save for the aura of light before a seizure
there would be no steel girders
to keep the sublime monsters
from entering the atmosphere of earth.

Ed. note: From the new, highly recommended issue of The Common (October 2020).

My Love Is a Mirror Neuron [by Elizabeth Willis]

Come in, you say
while I’m alive, you say
my hankering love
my hunkered down love
in the headlights of the future
my love of the garbled soliloquy
in the wary fever of my love
with all its modernist ardor
offering to drive
the leaf from the pedicel
the pedicel from the smallest branch
the branch from the trunk
the trunk from the ground
my love growling
like a machine in the yard
my love a yard
of fabric on the line
accepting the clumsiness
of a pulley, my love touching
everything as water
suspected in the summer air
my love coming and going
through the same door
my love killing it in the kitchen
then losing it at the mall
my love diagnosing the room
the very tip of my love
arguing with itself for hours
my love refusing to hide
its suspicious past, my love
staking out the street for days
my love in fear of the doctor
which is really the fear of death
my love relentlessly in the third case
my phatic love in a Canadian bar
my irreligious, abstemious love
mishearing the song of my failed love
my love losing its wallet
and refusing to answer the phone
my love voting its heart out
for this disaster of a country
my unfenceable Augustinian love
my passerine love
heavy in my rough hand
my love with no room in its mailbox
my love loving the texture
of a rented thing
my love refusing the symbolism
of a corporate heart
my love’s malingering dislike
of a stranger’s Impala
my love undone by my heartless
actuarial, my derelict love
dropped like a suitcase at the door
like a needle, like a bridge
my love eclipsed
by the smallest cloud
or lovingly distracted by a bird
the starving love of my unarmored
heart, my love bound with grass
my uniformed carrier
of love on the traceable arc
of its retrograde planet
my hovering love
my local vegetable love
my imitative genius of love
my handwritten, rotting
compostable love, my dying
everyday love, my un
punctuated love, my love sentenced
to this one imperfection
that it forgets my love
my love tapped out on the roof
my unforgiveable
inhospitably leatherette love
my incomprehensibly
woolen love, my densest
cabinet of a many-shelved love
my odiferous cartoon love
out on a limb with a chainsaw
my love thrown from a horse
my love sweeping the floor
of my love and refusing
to go home, my most
indicative, untimely
irreparable love

From the excellent new issue of Bennington Review (# 8), which also has poems by Troy Jollimore, David Kirby, David Lehman, Erika Meitner, Emily Petitt, many others.