The Best American Poetry

Judith Hall presents a poem by James Cummins

Tiresias

You learn how to be a man from your father.
Your mother teaches you how to be a woman.
You have to fear becoming an old man
before you’ll take on the wiles of the mother—
her movements, gestures, the way her face
suddenly, at odd moments, becomes your face

Turns out that old adage about saving face
was really about saving the face of the father.
His was the look you wanted on your face
whenever you’d realize you were a woman.
Those moments shocked you—and your mother,
who’d assumed you’d turn out to be a man

But it’s not that you haven’t ended up a man:
mornings you shave, staring into a man’s face;
you have the proper attitude toward your mother.
You just don’t want to be a man like your father,
and the best way to do that is to be a woman.
The first time you saw this happen in your face,

it scared you; your hand flew up to your face.
Not only did you have the cunning of a man,
now you also had the guile of a woman.
You look into the mirror at your new face,
one begun the night it surprised your father,
humping a blanket that turned into your mother.

How could the bastard do that to your mother?
And why had you never seen this in her face?
What was it you saw next day in your father?,
A look that told you he was the better man?
And what do you think he saw in your face?
Did he know then that you were a woman?

You repressed that morning in the way a woman
might repress an impractical love for a man.
When he’s around, you can see it in her face—
her Don’t-trust-him-but-still-love-him face.
Your father never thought of you as a man.
It was natural you’d try to seduce your father.

First you showed your father your “mother” face;
but then you showed him your other face,
the sly face a man wears when he’s a woman.

-- James Cummins

from the Antioch Review, Summer 2004, v. 62, no. 3, and Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull, 2006), a collaboration with David Lehman.

-------
Note by Judith Hall:

Some poems benefit from silence, from being read alone, and Cummins’s sestina is an example.  Alone, Tiresias’ desires, his dilemmas, amuse, yes, but also resonate, nauseate, and recollect the value of a life examined.

Some readers claim that character matters little in a culture enamored of fate or, in our case, entertainment.  Alone, reading such a claim – a desire? – a reader could marvel at this latest “reality” desire mars.

Is a blog too cacophonous a context to remember silence in and solitude? Or “soliturd”, as originally typed . . . Why not print out Cummins’ sestina, turn off your computer, and read “Tiresias” among Thanksgiving memories?

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Terrance Hayes

A Small Novel

The protagonist spends the first twenty pages
crossing a bridge wearing nothing but red
swimming trunks and sneakers with no socks.

I can remember standing naked
outside my neighbor’s window at fourteen
when I read the paragraph about the placard of night

held up by pine trees.
Where ever there is a mention of solitude or desire
I think, without wanting to, of Race. Race

when the protagonist spends a page long sentence
trying to work free a knot of shoe string
in his basketball sneaker. Race

when he spends the hot seasons of his twenties
like a beggar with no mouth. Race
when he tells his wife: “There are no Open Houses

on Easter.” Late in the book he feels himself
becoming a shadow. On page 113 just as I reach
the final sentence about traffic like the sound of wind

like the sound of water, a horn yelps somewhere.
“It was all he’d ever known of rivers…”
I pencil L.H. in the margin. I think, without wanting to,

That they will find this book someday
and turn its muddy bosom all golden in the sunset.
On its blank last page I write the poem

“The Blue Langston” which begins:
“O Blood of the River songs, O songs of the River of Blood,”
and ends: “There was nothing I could do about Race.”

-- Terrance Hayes

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no.
and Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006)

_________________

Note by Judith Hall

         The poem amalgamates so elegantly the fictive and the lyric; and by “elegant,” I mean, etymologically, legible and then graceful.  It clearly, gracefully shows the act of reading as a defining act -- one capable of altering despondency into a poem about despondency.
          Hayes’ tone here is not entirely unlike Mark Strand’s comic angst in “Chekhov: A Sestina” -- another poem wherein a character contemplates what a characteristic act might be in both an unsympathetic world and a contestable form.
          Langston Hughes, though, is the key predecessor, the Hughes of The Big Sea (1940) and The Weary Blues (1926) and the Hughes who wrote, “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.”  Let a young man’s “novel” leave the hard laughs to elders, if it shines by despondency alone. Yes?

from the archive; first posted November 23, 2008

"Fallen Angel" [by Madeleine Freitag]

1.

The angelic guest wields his gun, the crowd applauds,
and no one knows where he came from or what he has done
to merit the praise of the world and the souls of men.
Nor is he wiser than the mapmaker, nor less obstinate
than a disobedient minor god who loves the fallen angels
and gathers their love in return. And still night descends
and lust arrives with it – lust and good humor, drink
and sleep, and the dreams of glory that charge the sleep
of heroes and heroines in days before the death of faith.
Nevertheless there is always tomorrow night, Saturday night,
when in cities from London to Moscow the proles get drunk,
smash glass, and forget their troubles for the few charged hours
when guns replace words, and the lovers withdraw
into the sacred intoxication of the ancient night sky.

2.

So the world is a map that yields to the eyes of skillful men,
even those without heavenly sponsors. Day comes promptly,
roosters crow, and an obstinate god has his way
with a stiff-necked tyrant. The love of a sister for her brother
is as tender as the kiss goodbye, the shutting of the eyes with kisses.
Nor is lust to be denied; night lets the couple sleep
after seeing the human form divine. The old gods grin.
The new gods are not yet ready to take their place.

Translator's note:
Madeleine Freitag was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1969. She spent a year at Oxford learning English and a year at Heidelberg studying the German romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. Married to an accomplished archer who competed in the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, she has lived in Kyoto since 1990. 

Little known as a poet, Freitag has won plaudits for her translation into Japanese of a selection of Thomas Mann’s short stories and essays. She has written fiction under a pseudonym. I met her at the Rotterdam literary festival in June 1999 and we have since corresponded by old-fashioned air mail as Madeleine refuses to use a computer or communicate by e-mail. She abhors social media and says she feels “as alienated from the digital world as from the terrifying continent of my birth.” One reason she writes poems, she says half-kiddingly (I think), is to keep up her German.

Freitag tells me she feels lucky to produce one good poem in a year. “Fallen Angel” ("Der Gefallener Engel") is among the first of her poems to be translated into English. In line eleven, Freitag uses a word more conventionally rendered as peasant; but I feel that Orwell’s “proles” comes closer to her meaning.

The painting above is Luca Giordano's "Fall of the Rebel Angels" c. 1666. -- David Lehman

from The Antioch Review, 2020

Poem for the Season: "December 25" by David Lehman

Christmas defeated Chanukah
once again last night
by a margin of three billion dollars
or so, but every time I hear
a Yiddish word like bupkes
in a movie (L.A. Confidential)
or when Oleg Cassini in that new play Jackie
calls a garment a shmatta, it's "good
for the Jews," as our parents used to say.
Meanwhile some things have
stayed the same; the drunken lout
in the street is still somebody's father.
Hey, kid, how does it feel to have a pop
that's a flop? And we had such good ideas
for changing the mental universe, if only
as a project in philosophy class, the one
I still dream about failing when I have
that dream everybody has, of being back
in college and needing this one course
to graduate, which I forgot to attend 

-- David Lehman 

from The Daily Mirror: a journal in poetry (Scribner, 2004)

 

-- sdl

Special from AWP: Nin Andrews Comic

Bob Dylan's Identity (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Imagination takes precedence over intellect for Bob Dylan. David Dalton tries to trace the career of that remarkable imagination in his book Who Is That Man?: In Search of the Real Bob Dylan (Hyperion) which is being published today. Dalton, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, originally titled his work Bob's Brain. I suppose he did this because he wanted to attempt the impossible: a provide a written MRI of the creator of what some people claim to be the best songs ever written.

Bob Dylan's identity is, to understate the point laughably, elusive, starting with his Jewishness. Karl Shapiro, in his work In Defense of Ignorance, wrote: "The European Jew was always a visitor...But in America everybody is a visitor. In the United States the Jewish writer is free to create his own consciousness." But the Jewish writer has a more complex identity than other American writers. In Ravelstein, Saul Bellow noted that "As a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are not." That was Dylan's status. He was an outsider as a Jew in America, but doubly so in Hibbing, Minnesota. As a rural Jew, he was, in Dalton's phrase, "an outsider in a community of outsiders."

This status led him to be free to invent a self while simultaneously feeling outside of any genuine self. In one sense he had no identity at all. In 1976 Allen Ginsberg said about Dylan: "I don't know him because I don't think there is any him. I don't think he's got a self."

Dylan rebelled against his birth self in every possible way. He changed his name. He changed where he lived. He believed he had been born into the wrong family. He looked for a direction to his real self and could not find it. Robert Zimmerman had a profound sense of disquiet. And so, when he got to New York, he invented stories to everyone who would listen. He was an orphan, a circus performer, a Native American. He was anybody but a small town son of a Jewish appliance dealer.

But accompanying this all--inclusive self-rejection was an intense belief in himself, a sense that Fate had cleared a path in life for him that would lead to his being the most important singer in America. For me, this juxtaposition provides an approach to Dylan's identity: to look at the rapport and the rancor between his private and public selves. To do this, I think it's useful to consider Dylan as an actor. Lies are the truth for an actor. The world has facts, but for Dylan those facts didn't explain inner turmoil, the ever-moving, ever-changing, often closely-related feelings of desire and loathing, the ways that words and sounds just came to him, often when prompted by a song that moved him. He loved those songs, and then stole them, and then made them his own, inevitably vastly improving them.

Actors are frequently alienated from themselves. (The best book I know about this is Simon Callow's Being An Actor). They often can't find a real self. That was Ginsberg's point about Dylan. To overcome these dreadful feelings, actors have to think the thoughts of others, in their cases the imaginative characters created by dramatists and screenwriters. Dylan absorbed the imaginative characters of American popular music. He was the hobo and the troubadour, the endless traveler and the misunderstood artist. As with actors, he was far more comfortable on stage than off. But unlike actors he didn't have a Shakespeare who had written for him. He tried. He had Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and the whole of American popular music. But eventually he discovered he needed to sing songs that didn't yet exist. Eventually he became his own dramatist and screenwriter and created the songs and then acted them out on stage. He was the writer, the actor, and the director. And, some say, he became his own Shakespeare.

The Gambler's Raison d'etre

Why do people gamble? "I think it's a biological necessity for certain types," said James J. Carrolll, so called "betting commissioner" of St Louis, who laid the odds for the Kentucky Derby and the World Series. "I think it is the quality that gives substance to their daydreams."

Quoted by the late Daniel Bell (1919-2011), in "Crime as an American Way of Life," originally in Antioch Review, Sumer 1953, reprinted inthe Spring 2011 issue of the magazine.

Another Side of William Matthews

It turns out that the late Bill Matthews (1942-1997), author of A Happy Childhood and other works of poetic excellence, had a side to him that not even his admirers suspected.

<< 

President William Matthews sat where American presidents have always sat -- his back to the south wall of the room, facing northward across a wide antique desk toward the classical marble fireplace that dominates the north wall. His chair, unlike that of most of his predecessors, who had favored personalized, made-to-measure seating, was a factory-made, high-backed swivel chair of the kind any senior corporate executive might have. For “Bill” Matthews, as he insisted his publicity posters call him, had always through his successive and successful election campaigns stressed his ordinary, down-home personal tastes in clothing, food, and creature comforts. The chair, therefore, which could be seen by the scores of delegates he liked to welcome personally into the Oval Office, was not luxurious. The fine antique desk, he was at pains to point out, he had inherited, and it had become part of the precious tradition of the White House. That went down well. But there Bill Matthews drew the line.

When he was in conclave with his senior advisers, the “Bill” that his humblest constituent could call him to his face became the formal “Mr. President.” He also dropped the nice-guy tone of voice and the rumpled bird-doggrin that had originally gulled the voters

Into putting the boy-next-door into the White House. He was not the boy-next-door, and his advisers knew it; he was the man at the top.

>> 

 See Frederick Forsyth, The Devil’s Alternative, for more details.

-- DL

"Eve" [by Katharine Coles]

Eve

Don’t consult the cost.
Rather, mind the body.
Course, occluded, lost

In its heedlessness
It finds itself: too heady
To consult the cost.

Balance grace and dross;
Weigh desire and duty.
Cursed, occult, lost

In my nakedness —
Mea culpa. Steady.
I can’t account the cost

Of what I’ve won. At least
I kept my word. I’d stay
Any course to lose

Everything like this,
To be every body’s
Curse. I cut my losses.
I do not mind the cost.

-- Katharine Coles
From The Antioch Review

SHAKESPEARE, WHERE WE EARNED OUR NAMES

some minx’s token

laid on our tongues, some civilization’s   content so absolute

we can row a canoe seaward into its   azured vault   vocabulary,

we can salt backwards in minutes to 

Name him,

that what he gave us was more knowledge

overwhelmed by seeing us,

a violent sorrow

and  this sorrow that I have by right

is yours,   man and woman both, which

Empowered him out of nature

in some loneliness-allure crossing the face twice,

like the cuttlefish turning over its colors,

blame due of blame,

that first lights on him,  then us, following in

our bodies’ grammar, profound language found

by our carnal stings or unbitten lusts

word over word,

the ugly part of beauty

moved from the gut  to resume the shape

of   Cordelia in his arms,

unfinished storm-flower where   the darkness folded up

and you asked yourself     Will it eat me?

like the feeding earth-  worm of conscience,  swallowed by its 

own red sound,

seas incarnadine,

Faith, half asleep   in your arms, that

What you know, you know,

inward breaks

even before it is named, even before it benchmarks who you are.

>>>>

by Elena Karina Byrne

Antioch Review, Winter 2008

forthcoming in Burnt Violin, Tupelo Press 2011

Judith Hall presents a poem by Jennifer Clarvoe

MI RITROVAI

Here I was refound by a dark self;
My self was found by a darker self, obscure.
I was not one self, but made of wood

Within this wood – not single, but multiplied
On into darkness.  No way to see for rest,
For all the trees, for all the terza rima.

A tree grows in the wood – what would you have me
Do?  They all diverge into the darkness,
Dive into darkness, urge to obscurity.

How could one do anything but fall
Into a swoon, svanire?  One cannot
Stand this, one cannot stand in the middle

Of this.  And then I was found out by an
Obscure greeting – salve – strange advice
From something dark and savage that nonetheless

Spoke of salvage, through the loss, darkly.
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.
I back myself to the edge of a dark shelf.

Man hands on misery to man, it deepens --
So much deepens that one cannot stand
Here, in the middle of this mirror trove.

-- Jennifer Clarvoe

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2009, v. 67, no. 1
_____________

Note by Judith Hall

     Dante’s pilgrim begins in a forest and ends looking at the stars. Lucky pilgrim, whose inarticulate terror is met and cleared by faith, hope, and charity! Clarvoe’s figure faces “a darker self, obscure” and speaks in the end in the tongues of stars:  Dante, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin.
    Recognition haunts but may not edify, not immediately, if “strange” or unsought:  Dante’s doubt; Moore’s despair; Larkin’s beloved selfishness. Such blessings, such lessons -- nearly a parody of succor -- are familiar and perverse: symbols Baudelaire would’ve flung at any earnest reader:  doubt, despair, selfishness.
     Blake thought Dante saw clearly but did not always comprehend his visions. Clarvoe comprehends the very postmodern terror of a “mirror trove.” Clarity, in this context, is irrelevant. Obscurity, as in Monet’s late water lilies, or Dickinson's circuits, tells a slanted truth no less enchanting for its complications.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Peter Jay Shippy

Daphnis and Chloe

To soften their mouths they practice kissing
The earth like defectors or popes
Or Raskolnikovs seeking absolutions.

Her face pales like a page
Of deleted sentences.

        “What?”

Her eyes are like wildflower seeds, perfect
For his little catapult.

        “Nothing.”

-- Peter Jay Shippy

from The Antioch Review, Summer 2008, v. 66, no. 3

______________

Note by Judith Hall

The Antioch Review publishes the best available representatives of different aesthetic strategies.  Shippy’s poem represents a minimalism that is not shorn of strangeness. Although it devolves as it proceeds and ends in “nothing,” the poem evokes more than its occasion and its titular allusion.

A minimalist poem, if dedicated to simple diction alone or surface effects, may put the reader in mind of Gertrude Stein more than anything -- the Stein who noted, “You don’t know what it is to be bored.”  Shippy’s petit love poem, au contraire, is as complicated as it is delicate.  Are the lover’s face and her eyes “perfect / [f]or” him, but more so as deletions occur?

The poem benefits from the page:  perfect for a letterpress broadside or else lit – “from within”!? – and projected on a washed museum wall.

Judith Hall presents a poem by Richard Kenney

New Year with Nipperkin

And so the world begins again
In mild disarray
Where the best laid plans of mice and men,
It’s said, "gang aft agley."

"Gang aft agley"-- that sounds just right--
Strangulated, glottal,
Where violence meets backwardness
Summarily throttled.

So merrily and merrily
The Monday doth embark
Us on another work whose week
Will leave us in the dark,

A drink in hand and Parkinson's
Or worse, maybe, to stir
The ice into its carillon               
Of Larkinsense and myrrh:

More light! More weight! More love! Less hate!
The Mass, the Seder, ah
The tools we use to disconfuse
Ourselves, etc.

And so, to bed. I draw the shade.
Should auld acquaintance croak
They’re none of mine, nor Auld Lang Syne,
Whoever he is.*

* Joke

 -- Richard Kenney

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2006, v. 64, no. 1
and The One-Strand River (Knopf, 2008)

_____________

Note by Judith Hall

            Under the metrical sparkle and behind the man in his cups, or with his little cup for nips, his nipperkin – his kin as nip? – a reader senses, counter-intuitively, more light.  For the darkness in Kenney’s poem is comparatively mild, made of lushly orchestrated cacophonies and allusions to Larkin’s “Aubade”, mit a bit o’ Goethe via Hecht.  Burns is also toasted:  “To a Mouse”, to “Auld Lang Syne”.

Surely after eight dark Bush years, we brutalized-and-izing Americans are warmed by a “joke” more readily than Burns’ “cup of kindness” “long ago”.  For those in the mood to memorize now for New Year’s Eve “New Year, with Nipperkin”, remember to add to it “a little touch” of Scotch, as Studs Terkel used to say. No ice.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Mong-Lan

BANGKOK [neon lights]

O the orchids of Bangkok!
O the luxuriant ladyboys, their devilish seductive smiles
O the decadence, the freedoms of Bangkok!
your serpentine ways
into another unawares our embrace defined night-days
one thinks in embraces

young girls from the village pretend to be go-go girls
naked from waist up
                             city girls completely naked
Go-go girls dancing like embarrassed sardines
in the lady-boy club   an effervescent pretend land . . .
                                          Miss Brazil, Miss Mexico,
Miss France, Miss Singapore, surgically amplified.

in another bar
birds breathless up cunts,
ping pong balls inserted, being thrown out
birds flying out of cunts
needles & needles being pulled out of cunts.
a whole string of sharp needles
razors being pulled out     a whole string
of razors being pulled out.

-- Mong-Lan

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2005, v. 63, no. 1 

______________

Note by Judith Hall

           The poem offers artfully, stanza by stanza, ambiguities that beguile and wound. Who dominates? Survives? If the tone were “clear,” gustative, or narrowly exhibitionistic, glee would overwhelm “pretend” and “embarrassed” erotic enticements. Glee would pun and romp from Bangkok to Bang Cock.  Has anyone traced “glee” as a predictable descendant of “rage” in poems by feminists of yore?

          The tone here, instead, harmonizes early waifish ejaculations with figures atomized, ashamed, and with the final, dominating implements of pain. If there is pleasure in surrender and survival, in aggression and assertion, then the scandal of domination is not its violence -- imagined again as omnipotent idyll -- but its affirmation of lyric enterprise.

          A reader, engrossed in the cadences and repetitions, the images pulled along a snuffing out, passes through and then survives – the poem! – the poem imagined!  Or does the reader dominate the poem by comprehending it?  Mong-Lan’s poem enacts various pleasures.  Freedom could be imagined in such a wake.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Terrance Hayes

A Small Novel

The protagonist spends the first twenty pages
crossing a bridge wearing nothing but red
swimming trunks and sneakers with no socks.

I can remember standing naked
outside my neighbor’s window at fourteen
when I read the paragraph about the placard of night

held up by pine trees.
Where ever there is a mention of solitude or desire
I think, without wanting to, of Race. Race

when the protagonist spends a page long sentence
trying to work free a knot of shoe string
in his basketball sneaker. Race

when he spends the hot seasons of his twenties
like a beggar with no mouth. Race
when he tells his wife: “There are no Open Houses

on Easter.” Late in the book he feels himself
becoming a shadow. On page 113 just as I reach
the final sentence about traffic like the sound of wind

like the sound of water, a horn yelps somewhere.
“It was all he’d ever known of rivers…”
I pencil L.H. in the margin. I think, without wanting to,

That they will find this book someday
and turn its muddy bosom all golden in the sunset.
On its blank last page I write the poem

“The Blue Langston” which begins:
“O Blood of the River songs, O songs of the River of Blood,”
and ends: “There was nothing I could do about Race.”

-- Terrance Hayes

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no.
and Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006)

_________________

Note by Judith Hall

         The poem amalgamates so elegantly the fictive and the lyric; and by “elegant,” I mean, etymologically, legible and then graceful.  It clearly, gracefully shows the act of reading as a defining act -- one capable of altering despondency into a poem about despondency.
          Hayes’ tone here is not entirely unlike Mark Strand’s comic angst in “Chekhov: A Sestina” -- another poem wherein a character contemplates what a characteristic act might be in both an unsympathetic world and a contestable form.
          Langston Hughes, though, is the key predecessor, the Hughes of The Big Sea (1940) and The Weary Blues (1926) and the Hughes who wrote, “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.”  Let a young man’s “novel” leave the hard laughs to elders, if it shines by despondency alone. Yes?

Judith Hall presents a poem by Dorothea Tanning

EVENING

He told us, with the years, you will come
To love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
And comforted them.

-- Dorothea Tanning

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no. 1
and A Table of Content (Graywolf, 2004)

_________

Notes by Judith Hall

1. A note should not be longer than a poem.

2. Tanning’s “o” sounds -- her “come,” “love,” “comforted” struck against the longer “told” and “souls” – counterpoint with sonic half-companions despair. Music, though, does not ease affect, and the poem persuades, at least this reader, by suspending resolution.

3. Modest assonance? Is assonance modest? Erotic?

4. A note should spur – inspire? – a reader to reenter the poem.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Andrew Zawacki

Agrapha

Giving up isn’t giving in, but a different kind of poverty

And if we didn’t mention them all in order, it wasn’t our fault:

Our strength gave out before the daylight tapered,

Schedules were strict, the weddings obliged to go forward

Even with strangers involved, and sisters and mothers of strangers,

Playing Russian roulette with five bullets coughed into the chamber

And swallow the razor and other old parlor games,

Keeping appointments with overcoats and nautical charts of the crime

While someone kept telling lies about factory bylaws, saying

Don’t be afraid, I have called you by name, you are mine

And almost believing it, a survivor peddling insomnia’s cure,

Calculating which bridges to burn, which heretics, which beds:

A package that never arrived from a mispronounced province

Or a lightswitch left on overnight at the back of the hall,

Rehearsing the wreckage of telegrams, padlocks, and skeleton keys

And storms on the coast with other betrayers to please.

-- Andrew Zawacki

from The Antioch Review, Winter 1999, v. 57, no. 1

Note by Judith Hall

The Antioch Review often publishes poets who are “little known,” whose poems rise on their own merits out of immense slush.  So it was with “Agrapha,” one of  Andrew Zawacki’s first publications.

When it appeared later in his by reason of breakings (Georgia, 2002), the poet included a note on the title: “Agrapha is Greek for ‘the unwritten places.’  The italicized line is from Isaiah 43:1.”  The title thus introduces a paradox in space, and the italics confirm his uncanny tone – wry, sacred, both.

Posted above is the poems as it originally appeared. All inaugural capital letters -- except the first and the Isaiah -- were removed in by reason of breakings. To me, the capitals support line autonomy, increasing tension, by additionally resisting "unwritten places." Any comment? Debate? Dear reader?

Judith Hall presents a poem by Reetika Vazirani

Ghalib Speaks of His Poet Friends

All my life I’ve been amending their verses.
Now that I’m ill they write,
“You have not replied to my letter.”  As if I
could make their couplets rhyme,
          or rhyme slightly better.
Do they think I should live only
          to correct their verses!
Shah Alam Sahib and Tufta, they’re peevish
to the end: they think my ill health
          is a poetic exaggeration.

Without me they can versify or not versify;
it’s not for me to prod grown men
          at the eleventh hour.
If I’ve lost my tact, I’ll offend them,
but all my life glad comments on loose verse
offended me.  Now in pleasing myself,
I’ve lost the pleasure.  But hell with these grudges
          of the day, these small sentiments.
Let the newspapers print that I’m near death.
I’m not up to correcting the ghazals of a Tufta.

– Reetika Vazirani (1962-2003)
from The Antioch Review, Winter 1996, v. 54, no. 1

Note by Judith Hall 

          In 1995, I entered service as poetry editor of The Antioch Review. Much to my relief, my predecessor, David St. John, had already accepted poems for issues well into 1996.  Vazirani’s is one of his I claim.

          Her “Ghalib” is surely the 19th century poet who wrote in Urdu under that name.  “Ghazal”, an intricate Arabic form, is probably familiar to BAP readers; the word also means, according to Agha Shahid Ali, “the cry of the gazelle when it is cornered in a hunt and knows it will die.”  Form follows word here, and while a romantic editor would link this image to this poet. I will not. The complaints and witty tittle-tattle of Vazirani's Ghalib charm and need no justification.

         For the next several weeks, I will be your Sunday editor, succeeding the estimable Bruce Covey in this role. I hope you will enjoy the Antioch poems coming your way.