The Best American Poetry

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 

 

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

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. 

Archie Rand: The Motets (after Eugenio Montale) & collaborations with David Shapiro

Archie Rand, Motet #1, 2013, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic, enamel and fabric on canvas.

BravinLee is very pleased to exhibit the Motets, a series of 20 paintings by Archie Rand, after the poems of Eugenio Montale.  Schedule: October 28-31 and November 4-7, 12-5pm.  Appointments encouraged.  For further information or to make an appointment please email us at info@bravinlee.com   

“What you see is not what you see” – Philip Guston

Rand had previously responded to the work of Nobel Prize winning author, Eugenio Montale in a series of paintings (“Men Who Turn Back”) and then in 2013 Rand again engaged Montale’s formidable “Motets”, a group of 20 love poems that Montale seems to be mouthing into the air as they are addressed to a departed lover.  In these poems a bombardment of imagery attempts to fill the negative space around an unhealed pain, the avenue to which Montale needed to, in futility, keep open. Rand’s pictorial armature derives from Giorgio De Chirico’s parallel entropy, which shares a spirit of the unfulfilled. Long recognized as a masterful artist, Rand brings the full force of his invention and lyricism to these works.

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The Archie Rand collaboration with the poet David Shapiro has its roots in their shared experience of growing up in New York City and being maverick teen prodigies. In his mid-teens Rand played piano professionally with artists who were to become major stars and, at the age of 17, was showing at the legendary Tibor de Nagy Gallery - and Shapiro, in high school performed as a violin soloist under Leopold Stokowski and at the age of 16 had published a major book of poetry that received praise from John Ashbery and Jack Kerouac.

Nancy Vieira Couto's "Carlota Wears Her Sister's Life Like Skin"

Carlota wears her sister’s life like skin,
a snug imprisonment. She wanted less

surety, wanted not to be
moonservant to a planet on its boisterous

orbit. But Maria Conceição’s
children were easy, their faces

bowls to be filled. And so
once the dispensation had been granted

she married him, her sister’s widower,
brother by affinity but not

by consanguinity. He was, at least,
good-looking. She was young, she did her job,

she made the soup. When the babies came
she fed them. He was always off

driving his mules or singing in those silly
contests. She was the one they circled

holding up fingers to be bandaged,
confiding fears and dreams. She scrubbed the purple

stains of fear, but dreams make a soft shimmy,
blank as milk. So she curdled milk,

ladled it into molds and drained the whey
and waited. In the morning

they had fresh cheese with their breakfast bread.
These are your dreams, she said.

If you eat your dreams, you will live
your dreams. What did they know? They thought

she was the earth because she was the mother.
That was when she knew her sister’s life

had flaked and peeled away. Her arms were tanned
and strong, and she was hungry. She sprinkled

sea salt on the surface of her piece
of cheese and she ate it with a knife.

Ed. Note: This is from the Lusosphere feature at The Common. What does Lusosphere signify? The term encompasses the diverse people, 270 million of them, who share one thing: Portuguese as a principal language.  Nancy Couto is one three Luso-American poets in the feature.

"Arthur Rimbaud" [a prose poem by Robert Fernandez]

A poet sobers up. A seer sits up. Sees a literary establishment. A mother. An order seamless as glass. Sees his enemy and says: let’s be honest. Says to the child: let’s be honest. Let’s act like adults. The poem reveals a word. A hole punched in glass, foreign matter quaking forth a rash. Sees the world’s immune system attack. A boy becomes a master of illusions. A seer seeks truth. Sprays acid on his illusions. Wilts the world to its essentials. Pain comes to terms with a lyre. A lyre lives to retire. A poet asks the question: On whom can we depend? The one who knows the self is other depends on himself. Is hobbled and becomes dependent. The sky breaks open with my light. My love feeds the world. A word becomes the emblem of the victory of the world, a man with money. A poet becomes a man with money, truth in one body and soul. I want a wife, a son I can teach.

from the excellent new issue of Bennington Review, which includes poems by Troy Jollimore, David Kirby, David Lehman, Erika Meitner, Emily Pettit, Sean Singer, Elizabeth Willis, many o/thers, and nonfiction by Kelle Groom and Craig Morgan Teicher.

https://www.benningtonreview.org/current-issue-8

Asian American Writers Workshop Celebrates BAP 2020

This #PoetryTuesday we're partnering with @TheAALR and @SmithsonianAPA to share ten poems from BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2020, edited by @PaisleyRekdal.

From 10 AM until 7 PM, we'll be sharing a poem every hour. Stay tuned & follow this thread! pic.twitter.com/DTTH53bktG

— Asian American Writers' Workshop (@aaww) October 27, 2020

--sdl

Marsh Hawk Press Announces Its 2021 Book Contest

October 2020

David Lehman to Judge the 2021 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prizes Read about him here.

Available Now:   Where Did Poetry Come From   by Geoffrey O'Brien "A remarkable book: nothing has brought me so close to poetry in years. Made for rereading and re-encouraging." –Michael Heller, author of Telescope: Selected Poems   "Where Did Poetry Come From is no conventional memoir... [O'Brien] trains his sensitive, meticulous instruments of attention and his eloquent prose style upon his own poetic origins...Poetry is a dream without end, and O'Brien is our witness to its continuity." –Norman Finkelstein, author of The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New and Selected Poems

Kudos to Nobel Laureate Louise Glück

Kudos to the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück, a wonderful poet whose work has appeared in many editions of The Best American Poetry. She was the guest editor of the 1993 edition and it  was a pleasure working with her -- and something of an education as well. She is as astute a close reader of poems as I know.

I remember, too, being the subject and addressee of one of her poems. This was the result of a bet as to who would win a certain book award that year. The loser of the bet had to write a poem and dedicate it to the winner.

From 1992 to 1994 a grant from the Lila Wallace -- Reader's Digest Fund enabled me, in conjunction with the Community School of Music and Art, to bring these poets to Ithaca: Mark Strand, Donald Hall, Charles Simic, Jorie Graham, A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Each gave a public reading and did a session with Ithaca schoolkids. Louise accompanied me to the Montessori School on King Road where my son Joe was a student. 

The Best American Poetry 1993 was a highlight in our series. There were poems by Ammons (a huge chunk of "Garbage" that had appeared in APR), Ashbery, Bukowski ("Three Oranges"), Merwin "The Stranger"), Rich, Snyder, Stone, Strand, Tate, and  the greatly underrated John Updike ("To a Former Mistress, Now Dead").

There's Billy Collins, when his work was still a secret, and Denise Duhamel, then a new name. A magnificent poem by the late Tim Dlugos, "Healing the World from Battery Park," which saw the light of day because of the archival work of David Trinidad and the judgment of the editors of Hanging Loose. "I loved 'litany,'" the first published poem, a knockout, by the unknown Carolyn Creedon. Susan Mitchell's "Rapture"; Jane Kenyon's "Having It Out with Melancholy." Ron Padgett. Michael Palmer.

And Louise has an excellent introduction.

If copies of The Best American Poetry 1993 are available, you will be impressed and then some with the quality of the work Louise chose.  

In the University of Michigan Press's Under Discussion series, we published an excellent collection of critical essays devoted to Louise's work. Joanne Feit Diehl edited On Louise Glück. I still remember some of the catalogue copy, particularly "her searing honesty and compelling first-person personae." -- DL

Mark Bibbins and Nicole Santalucia at the New School, Sept. 30

Poetry Forum: Mark Bibbins and Nicole Santalucia Zoom:  Wednesday, September 30, 6:00PM (EDT)   Mark Bibbins (MFA in Poetry 1998), a member of the faculty in Creative Writing, is the author of the 2019 poetry collection 13th Balloon. He received a Lambda Literary Award for his first collection of poems, Sky Lounge (Graywolf Press, 2003). The Dance of No Hard Feelings and They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full were published by Copper Canyon Press, and the latter was named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by Publishers Weekly. He co-founded LIT, the journal of The New School’s graduate writing program, and received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Boston Review, and four volumes of The Best American Poetry. From 2009 to 2018 he edited the poetry section of The Awl. Nicole Santalucia (MFA in poetry 2008), is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press) and Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, TINGE, The Florida Review, The Seventh Wave, Gertrude, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Santalucia teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and has taught poetry workshops in the Cumberland County Prison, Shippensburg Public Library, Boys & Girls Clubs, and nursing homes. Moderated by Laura Cronk Presented by the Creative Writing Program at the Schools of Public Engagement.