The Best American Poetry

In the New Yorker's summer "flash fiction" series: "Tales Told To Tevye"

In The New Yorker's summer "flash fiction" series, "Tales Told To Tevye" was posted yesterday. You can read

the three-art story here. Illustration by Ricardo Tomás; Source photograph by Cornell Capa / The LIFE Picture

Collection / Getty. The story is dedicated In memoriam Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin, 1953-2015.

The Best American Poetry 2020: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Paisley Rekdal

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

Richard Deming on "A Touch of Evil" as BFI Film Classics Return

BFI Film Classics – books commissioned by the British Film Institute, published by Bloomsbury in the United States -- make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed.

Set in a town near the US-Mexican border, the movie fuses sex and violence in a boiling cauldron. It begins with an explosion that interrupts an embrace and ends with two shooting deaths in an oilfield.

As Deming points out, one remarkable thing about the film is the extent to which the plot is subordinate to the technique. Welles uses cinematic means to explore questions of justice, motivation and “a complex, perpetually equivocating moral world,” in the author's phrase. If the causality and chronology of events are enshrouded in a swamp-like fog, it’s because Welles achieves his effects by cinematic rather than literary means. Deming’s analysis of the famous tracking shot that opens the movie is right on the money. 

Deming strikes a personal note in his preface by way of ushering us into the darkness of Welles’s vision. In chapter one he presents a valuable summary of noir, its meaning, its history. He argues that A Touch of Evil “is more than the apotheosis or apex of a genre or a style” – to his mind, it is the ultimate noir, and then some. The movie’s central thesis, he argues, is spoken by Charlton Heston, playing the Mexican policeman Vargas, to Welles, playing the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan, an obese bully, a bigot, and a slob: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

Janet Leigh, the blond Yankee spouse of the Mexican Vargas, is as beautiful and vulnerable as in Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate, and Marlene Dietrich as a fortune teller may have the best line in the movie. When Welles asks her to read his future, she has, “You haven't got any.” “Huh?'” “Your future's all used up.”

A Touch of Evil takes the romance out of noir, and leaves only the criminality, the hostility, the spite, and the evil that men do that lives after them. It is a deliberately ugly movie, refusing to treat sin and crime, the stuff of noir, with the romantic sheen and sensual promise that usually comes with the turf. (Think of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.) Welles, possessor of a “distinctive smoothly textured baritone with its ability to slide across tonalities with both insolence and nobility,” is willing to sacrifice even this most valuable of assets; he slurs his words, mumbles, steps on other characters’ lines.

“Who’s the boss – the cop or the law?” Vargas asks. That’s the thematic crux of A Touch of Evil. the movie. But the experience of the movie is far more unsettling than any such formulation, and Richard Deming's discussion of the film makes it an object lesson in understanding the meaning of a narrative in cinematic images rather than in literary terms.

The BFI has seized the opportunity to reissue of other books on the backlist. I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s take on The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer), for example. Marcus, who writes with swagger and is never less than interesting, regards the picture as the “most exciting movie” from Citizen Kane to The Godfather, an overstatement but an arresting one.

The Manchurian Candidate is Frankheimer's best movie To make his point about the originality and brilliance of the brainwashing sequence that opens the movie, Marcus argues that by comparison the Hitchcock / Dali dream collaboration in Spellbound is “visually florid and intellectually dead.” I maintain that Spellbound, Hitch’s most Freudian effort, is underrated, but perhaps the larger point is that Gregory Peck's dream in Spellbound has a very different function from the collective hypnosis of the American POWs in The Manchurian Candidate. To exalt the latter it is not necessary to deprecate the former. Criticism is not a zero sum game.

Again, to substantiate his feeling that Sinatra’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate is the best in his Hollywood career, with which I would concur, Marcus says that Sinatra in From Here to Eternity gave "a one-note performance" and that Ernest Borgnine's in the same film was "better." Come on. 

Agree or disagree, Marcus is a compelling writer, and he hits the nail on the head when he talks of “the Iron Maiden of repression,” which sums up Laurence Harvey's acting in The Manchurian Candidate -- and explains why Al Pacino’s work in The Godfather movies was the best of his career.

Other books in the BFI series include Camille Paglia’s characteristically provocative and engrossing study of The Birds. Paglia contends that Tippi Hedren is “the ultimate Hitchcock heroine” (not a consensus view) and analyzes her, what she says, what she wears, with the meticulousness of an exceptionally astute apostle of Freud. It is always stimulating to spend a few hours listening to Camille Paglia, though I do wish she would overcome her aversion to Doris Day, among the best of all the big band singers, and Deborah Reynolds, whose contributions to Singing in the Rain and The Tender Trap are not to be underrated.

-- DL

From Portugal: Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho's new anthology

Afagando a Face de Lorca. Uma Antologia
Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho
Selecção e tradução de Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho
Prefácio de Manuel Portela

Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho antologia 22 poetas contemporâneos (da Ucrânia à China). É um exercício que nos dá a ver em português as diferentes vozes dos poetas antologiados mas igualmente a própria voz do poeta-tradutor: Craveiro de Carvalho tem-se dedicado nos últimos anos, a par da sua produção poética, a oferecer-nos versões de grande parte dos poetas agora reunidos sob o título Afagando a Face de Lorca (paráfrase de um verso do neozelandês Mark Young).

Os poetas antologiados: Adam Zagajewski (1945, Lviv, Ucrânia), Amalia Bautista (1962, Madrid, Espanha), Aram Saroyan (1943, Nova Iorque, EUA), Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947, Lahore, Paquistão), Billy Collins (1941, Nova Iorque, EUA), Charles Simic (1938, Belgrado, Jugoslávia), David Lehman (1948, Nova Iorque, EUA), Eunice de Souza (1940, Pune, Índia. Faleceu em 2017), Howie Good (1951, Nova Iorque, EUA), J. R. Solonche (1946, Nova Iorque, EUA), Jane Hirshfield (1953, Nova Iorque. EUA), Jennifer Clement (1960, Greenwich, Connecticut, EUA), José Luis García Martín (1950, Aldeanueva del Camino, Cáceres, Espanha), Luis Alberto de Cuenca (1950, Madrid, Espanha), Mark Young (1941, Hokitika, Nova Zelândia), Michael Dylan Welch (1962, Watford, Inglaterra), Nathalie Handal (1969, Haiti), Neil Curry (1937, Newcastle on Tyne, Inglaterra), Owen Bullock (1967, Cornualha, Inglaterra), Pat Boran (1963, Portlaoise, Irlanda), Roger Wolfe (1962, Westerham, Kent, Inglaterra), Steve Klepetar (1949, Xangai, China).

Poemas originais (em inglês e castelhano) e em português.

Nas Livrarias: primeira semana de Julho de 2020.

Oferta especial de PRÉ-VENDA (de 1 a 30 de Junho): 13,60 € (desconto de 20% sobre o preço de livraria: 17 €). Portes gratuitos

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Adrienne Su, Guest Author June 1-5

photo © Guy Freeman

This week we welcome Adrienne Su as our guest author. Adrienne is Professor of Creative Writing and Poet-in-Residence at Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania. Her fifth collection of poems, Peach State, which focuses on Chinese-American food and her native Atlanta, is forthcoming from Pitt in spring 2021. Her previous books are Living Quarters (Manic D Press), Having None of It (Manic D), Sanctuary (Manic D), and Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books). Poems and prose can be found at adriennesu.ink.

Welcome, Adrienne.

 

-- sdl

Richard Deming Takes On "A Touch of Evil"

Ray Kelly, at "Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource," reports on the new book by the poet and Yale professor Richard Deming:

<<
Richard Deming’s Touch of Evil — the latest offering in Bloomsbury Publishing's relaunch of the BFI Film Classics series — looks at Orson Welles' role as screenwriter, as well as director and star of the 1958 film.

Deming, a senior lecturer in English and director of creative writing at Yale University, sees the film as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.

"Badge of Evil is a solid potboiler, but it has no grand ambitions. Welles uses the basic idea of the novel and remakes it as a meditation on cruelty, irony, and the intrinsic complexity of trying to respond justly to an unjust world. There are so many differences between the novel and the novel, it is hard to catalogue them all," Deming told Wellesnet. "Some broad differences, just to name a few, are that Welles transferred the setting of the action from San Diego to the U. S. Mexico border; the novel’s protagonist, Mitch Holt, becomes Miguel “Mike” Vargas in the movie; and Welles wholly invented the opening scene, one of the most famous in cinema, and offered it as a master class in developing suspense that arguably out does Hitchcock in its use of dramatic irony."

He added. "As ever, however, it is Welles’s deep sense of how to use the visual elements of cinema to evoke rather than explain, to gesture and suggest rather than to declaim and illustrate, that so transfigures the novel’s raw material."

Deming called Welles "one of the greatest figures in cinema."

"Whereas many directors get more and more restrained as they mature — especially if their work doesn’t always fare so well at the box office — Welles become more and more daring," Deming said. "Visually, Touch of Evil is as radical and innovative a film as any ever produced by a major studio. It is morally complicated, dark, provocative, and the more one watches it, the more one sees in every frame. I have also been so amazed with what Welles did with his own acting. It seems incredible that he wanted to make his own character so visually repulsive and would slur his lines and mumble. His voice was a precision instrument, so his willingness to take his greatest strength as an actor and do that kind of damage to it so as to make such an unforgettable character seems truly remarkable. Also, the history of the film and its multiple versions is fascinating and raises the issue of what the 'authentic' text of a film really is."

Filmed more than 60 years ago, Touch of Evil remains both relevant and radical, Deming said.
>>>

For more click here.

Book Jackets on Display

 

Some beautiful art owes its birth to commercial necessity -- the book jacket, for example. The Association of University Presses is displaying 49 of their best covers from 2019 at a virtual trade show. Here's an example: Drohan DiSanto’s design for John Brenkman’s Mood and Trope (University of Chicago Press). And here's a link to the other covers, some of them very striking, from such book designers as Edward Carson,Tim Jones, and Scott Levine on books published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Harvard University Press, and Cornell University Press, respectively.

https://design.up.hcommons.org/2020-book-jackets-and-covers-selections/

 

J. Chester Johnson, Guest Author May 4-8

This week we welcome back poet and writer J. Chester Johnson as our guest author. Chester rew up one county removed from the Elaine Race Massacre site in southeast Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta. He has written extensively on race and civil rights, composing the Litany for the national Day of Repentance (October 4, 2008) when the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement and following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Johnson returned to the town of his youth to teach in the all African-American public school before integration of the local education system. Several of his writings are part of the J. Chester Johnson Collection in the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College (NYC), the alma mater of Andrew Goodman, one of three martyrs murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. His three most recent books are St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems (2010), Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems (2017), and Auden, the Psalms, and Me (2017), the story of the retranslation of the psalms in the Book of Common Prayer for which W. H. Auden (1968-1971) and Johnson (1971-1979) were the poets on the drafting committee; published in 1979, this version has become a standard. Johnson’s latest book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, is being published this month (May, 2020) by Pegasus. He served as co-chair of the Elaine Massacre Memorial Committee. 

Find out more about Chester here.

Welcome back, Chester. 

-- sdl

"Genuine Fakes" [by Rosalind Kolnikov]

Word reaches us of a competition organized by the editors of "Rococo Theory." Contestants need to complete the following sentence using exactly fifty-nine words:

<< The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation. . . >

Remember that "Ponderousness is part of the phenomenological challenge of the text." 

The winner gets bragging rights and a genuine fake Omega (or, for a small additional fee, a genuine fake Rolex). 

The Aim: to quench your thirst while retaining it ["Stay Thirsty" #107]

The 107th edition of Stay Thirsty magazine was released yesterday, April 17. Included in the new edition are

-- A conversation with investigative journalist Gerald Posner
<<< The tale I tell inside PHARMA about Purdue Pharma and its marketing of OxyContin, its blockbuster opioid painkiller, is the ultimate x-ray into how modern drug companies blend promotion and medical research into a sales juggernaut. >>>

-- Stephanie Chase's conversation with flutist Eugenia Zuckerman, the artistic director of Clarion Concerts in Columbia County:

<<< I didn’t plan to write in poetry for Like Falling Through a Cloud – I had just returned from being assessed for cognitive decline, and when I got home, I sat at my desk, stared at the wall for some time, and then, for some reason, I picked up paper and pencil and began to write, and it all came out mostly in verse – I didn’t plan it. I was in a state of shock. >>>

 

-- Bascove's Interview with artist Nancy Nikkal (whose "Float" is on the right):

<<<From the beginning, even in my earliest paintings, I’ve been attracted to the geometric grid as a design structure. I want the shapes (in paint or paper) to press against each other and compete for space. >>>

--"Teaching Digital Humanities During a Pandemic" by Abriana Jetté:

<<< Yesterday, during my daughter’s naptime, I recorded myself reading from Claudian’s Raptu de Proserpine to guide students in my “History of Rhetoric through Writing” class with varying references and images. A handful of my students will never have heard of Proserpine before  . . . Why should they care to know about her now, amidst all of this panic? How can I get them to pay attention to this myth when their lives have been  turned upside down from a highly contagious, lung-gripping virus? Why, exactly, do I even think this matters?. . . . The textbook we have been using, The Classical Roman Reader, edited by Kenneth J. Atchity, notes that Claudian is “the last noteworthy poet” of the Classical Latin tradition, and that this “unfinished mythological epic” might have been composed as an explanation for the “corn shortage of 395-7” (Atchity 339).>>

 

 

--- "A Month in the Life of My Mind" by David Lehman (consisting of thirty short poems):

<<< Congratulations on the Appointment

You are now officially the poet laureate
of the street where you live.
In the background Vic Damone will sing
“On the Street Where You Live.” >>>

.  .and much more.

A tip of the fedora to Stay Thirsty editor Dusty Sang. -- DL

Petitioning the Poetry Foundation

A petition making the rounds urges the Poetry Foundation to allocate five million dollars to support poets, editors, "literary workers," independent bookstores, small presses and other persons and institutions that are suffering because of the economic slump caused by the Corona virus. I have signed the petition:

https://www.change.org/p/writers-ask-the-poetry-foundation-to-support-poets-and-their-allies

Trade publishers and university presses with a commitment to poetry need help. More than a few editors have lost their jobs or been asked to accept cuts in pay. The whole industry is bleeding badly at the moment and would benefit from grants and awards, call them what you will, from the Poetry Foundation.

How did the petition's drafters arrives at the figure of five million dollars? The Poetry Foundation is said to manage "about $245,000,000 in total assets according to their most recent (2018) tax filings, most of which appears to be investment capital." Thus, the request is for slightly more than 2% the Foundation's net capital.

The negative consequences of the Corona crisis will continue, in our line of work, to hurt us for years to come. This is a chance for the Poetry Foundation to demonstrate vision and imagination and make literary history, 

-- DL

Mike Fontaine, guest author April 13-17

Michael and Lola

This week we welcome Mike Fontaine as our guest author. Mike is Professor of Classics at Cornell University, in the heart of New York State's Finger Lakes wine region. He specializes in wine, swine, mind, and a good laugh. He is translator and editor of How to Drink (Princeton, April, 2020). Michael grew up in New Orleans, blogs at Psychology Today, and gets his exercise, always among friends, at Ithaca’s celebrated FLX Fitclub. How to Tell a Joke, his next book, comes out in 2021.

Welcome, Michael. 

-- sdl

 

Alan Bernheimer's "Retroscope": Focus on Robert Louis Stevenson

Turning his back on lawyering and the family business of lighthouse design, the young Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on his literary career as travel writer with An Inland Voyage, his day-dreamy canoe trip through rivers and canals in Belgium and northern France.

 

Check it out in the latest episode of Retroscope, [Alan Bernheimer's] monthly series of literary travel writing from yesteryear in Nowhere magazine! Armchair travelers can binge read the whole series so far.

https://nowheremag.com/2020/02/robert-louis-stevensons-an-inland-voyage/

Mark Scroggins on Poetic Fashion

New from "Dispatches from the Poetry Wars," this sartorially slanted column by Mark Scroggins, under the heading "La Derniere mode poetique." Scroggins reports on the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, which he characterizes as a "poetry flashpoint for thirty years." And here is a link to the column he posted on February 25, 2019 on the subject of poetic fashion as exemplified by Byron's "Albanian revolutionary togs," Marianne Moore's tricorn hat, Hart Crane's pinstripes, Mina Loy's robes.

Hats off to Scroggins for focusing on the way that sartorial choices reflect one's sense of style and literary self-presentation. One cavil. The author is under the impression that the North American poet, male of the species, wears "khakis, Oxford cloth shirts , last decade's blaze." That's a preppy 1980s look, and I'm not sure it ever caught on among campus poets. Today's standard male poet (to coin a phrase) is more likely to wear jeans and expensive fitted t-shirts and sneakers, n'est-ce pas? Scroggins is, however, right that "black is still the default color choice for many poet-types" and that more and more men are abandoning their neckties, to my mind a foolish thing to do, as it dispenses with a key element of style. -- DL

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/commentary/la-derniere-mode-poetique-numero-1/

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/la-derniere-mode-poetique/la-derniere-mode-poetique-numero-2/

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/la-derniere-mode-poetique/la-derniere-mode-poetique-numero-3/ 

CALLING ALL TATTOOED POETS!

Triptych of Vinny Valenzuela's Buddha 

Hard to believe that for 12 years we have cheered on Bill Cohen, one of our favorite bloggers, as he has assembled an array of tattooed poets for Tattoosday's annual tribute to National Poetry Month. We are once again happy to spread the word to inked poets everywhere.  Bill would like to post an image of your tattoo on Tattoosday every day during April. Tattoos need not be literary in nature to qualify. If your ink is featured, Bill hopes to give a little history of your tattoo, some background about you and your poetry, and he'll include links to your own website, books, and poems. With your permission, he'll even post a poem. 

You can see who's been cool enough to join the ranks here . 

For more details and to express your interest,please contact Bill at  tattoosday@gmail.com.

-- sdl

SAVE THE DATE ITHACA: February 27, 2020 David Lehman reads from "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir"

Thursday, February 27, 2020 5:30 pm  Reading, Q&A, and Book Signing 215 N Cayuga St, Ithaca, New York 14850 607 273 8246 info@buffalostreetbooks.com

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.

This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story. One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

"Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain." Publishers Weekly 

"Lehman’s memoir pulses with life and memory." from "Writing In The Face Of Death,"Sandee Brawarsky, New York Jewish Week

David Lehman and Johnny. photo 2020 © Stacey Lehman

Mihaela Moscaliuc, Guest Author February 17-21

photo © Valentin Moscaliuc

This week we welcome Mihaela Moscaliuc as our guest author. Mihaela was born and raised in Romania. She is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books,2010), translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) and Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019), and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016). Her scholarship explores issues of representation, appropriation, cultural identity, exophony, and empathy. She has published essays on the works of Agha Shahid Ali, Kimiko Hahn, Shara McCallum, Colum McCann, C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, and in the field of Romani Studies. The recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards (in poetry and prose, respectively) from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania. Moscaliuc is associate professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey).
You can find her most recent article, "Accessorizing (with) 'Gypsyness' in the Twenty-first Century" here.
Find out more about Mihaela at her website here and on her faculty page here. 

Welcome, Mihaela. 

-- sdl

"Trickeration" [by David Barber]

TRICKERATION

            Cab Calloway, Cotton Club (1931)

Rhythm, look what you went and done.
Rhythm, you are the guilty one.
The sneaky one, the snaky one,
The breakneck one, the hellbent one.
Rhythm, you are the guilty one.

Rhythm, you are a loaded gun.
Rhythm, you’ve left me all undone.
Rhythm, you are the slinky one,
The funky one, the freaky one,
The harum one, the scarum one.

Rhythm, I took you one on one.
Now look at what you’ve gone and done.
Rhythm, you are the righteous one,
The badass one, the brass-balls one.
Rhythm, you are the one who’s won.

Rhythm, I am the broken one,
The token done-in chosen one.
Rhythm, you are the golden one
To everyone, the only one
Who showed me how it should be done.

Rhythm, you call us and we run
To something new under the sun.
Rhythm, you are the dodgy one,
The deadly one, the guilty one.
Rhythm, look what you’ve gone and done.

from Secret History by David Barber (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Photo: Cab Calloway.

Author's note: 

The jive dance song “Trickeration” was recorded by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra in New York in October 1931, the same year Calloway’s band was hired by the Cotton Club as a replacement for the touring Duke Ellington Orchestra. In short order, the Calloway and Ellington ensembles were installed as the club’s two house bands. The poem draws on both the lyrics of “Trickeration” and Calloway’s 1938 book Hepster’s Dictionary: The Language of Jive.

Editor's note:

David Barber is a maestro of the music of poetry, as this poem and others in his new book ("Aria." for instance) demonstrate. His control of the forms and techniques of verse is exemplary and makes Secret History a delight. Barber, who has appeared twice in The Best American Poetry series, is the author of two previous books and is the poetry editor of The Atlantic. He teaches writing at Harvard University. 

The Philosopher in the Brown Shirt [Adam Kirsch on Heidegger]

<<<

Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both.

-- Adam Kirsch

>>>

Excellent piece by Adam Kirsch (in Tablet) on Heidegger's "metaphysical" anti-Semitism and on attempts to reconcile what is valuable in Heidegger's writing with the undeniable fact that he was a Nazi in thought and deed.

The piece is entitled "Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi." It was posted on September 21, 2016.

 -- DL

"Every Atom": Brian Clements' Whitman Project -- 200 Days in Honor of 200 Years

A tip of the fedora to Brian Clements, who, in conjunction with North American Review, initiated "Every Atom" on Walt Whitman's birthday, May 31. On that day and for two hundred days after, poets and lovers of poetry cited, quoted, and commented on select passages from Whitman's oeuvre to honor the bard of democracy's two hundredth birthday.

Martín Espada kicked off the project with a post celebrating the passage beginning:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshy and sensual…eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist... no stander above men and women

In Espada's words,

<< Whitman gives the “sign of democracy”—and declares himself the advocate for those excluded from democracy’s embrace. Speaking for “the rights of them the others are down upon” is the poet’s way to electrify and illuminate American democracy with his egalitarian vision, the ideal of democracy as it could be and should be.

<< In so doing, Whitman confronts a history of silence, charging himself with the responsibility to “remove the veil.” If the alternative is silence, then the “long dumb voices” of the despised and the “forbidden voices” of the indecent must speak through him.  The question, even now, is whether this country is ready for Whitman, open to his “way of being” when we need it most. >>

Kudos to Martín for choosing the 1855 edition of "Song of Myself," to my mind far superior to later editions. The lines he chose exemplify how Whitman, as he aged, tended to revise for the worse. "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos" is hands down better than "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son."

On November 20, Marie Howe responded to the challenge with a poem of her own, "The Singularity," incorporating line three of "Song of Myself." Ellen Bass (September 3) quoted lines (ending in "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from") that she read when she "was nineteen and on LSD"; Whitman gave her permission to transgress the sexual norms of the time. Richard Deming (Nov. 26) examines the impulse to "loafe" ("I loafe and invite my soul") and speculates on how sloth, one of the seven capital sins, gave rise to one of the greatest poems in the language. Ethelbert Miller (Sept. 7) considers "I am the teacher of athletes. . ." in connection with the "black bodies [of football players] touching the leaves of grass before each kickoff. On June 11, Richard Jackson brought up Whitman’s belief that he had the right to contradict himself because he “contains multitudes.” Does this assertion not amount to an anticipatory defense of personae, masks, and heteronyms? 

I chose the last line of "Song of Myself" -- "I stop somewhere waiting for you" -- arguing that it could serve as the first line of a poem. I did it in verse and have a hunch it will be the 200th in the series.

Thank you Brian Clements, for curating this extraordinary tribute to Whitman. Here is a link to the index for twenty summer days beginning with June 28.   -- DL