The Best American Poetry

Preview: David Lehman, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jackson Taylor, Joseph Quintela and Friends at Dumbo Sky, 10 Jay Street, Suite 903, October 17th, 7-10 PM [by Nora Robertson]

In its inaugural exhibition, Dumbo Sky presents artist and poet Joseph A. W. Quintela’s sculptural series, Portrait of the Artist as the Cast of You in Eye. Molded from shredded dictionaries on Quintela’s own body, this collection of self-portraits engages questions of self-definition, blurred identity, multiple personas, and building an understanding of others via de-formation of self.  The closing reading this Thursday will feature such poets as Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jackson Taylor, Maya Pindyck, Ronnie Norpel, and Joseph A.W. Quintela.  The poets will read in pairs with short intermissions following a closing celebration.

Lehman received considerable attention for his daily poems in The Daily Mirror, which he characterized as “bulletins from within,” and he will be reading on this occasion from the forthcoming New & Selected Poems that collects his work to date, “a retrospective hall of mirrors.” Named an emerging poet to watch by O Magazine, Griffiths is known for her literary portraits and is at work on Poets on Poetry, an interview project on individual human experience and culture in poetry. Director of P.E.N.’s Prison Writing Program and a founder of the MFA program at The New School, Jackson Taylor is the author of The Blue Orchard, a novel that won acclaim for its portrayal of a scandal in the life of the author’s own grandmother. He is currently directing the writing program at St Joseph's College.

Dumbo Sky is a new literary and visual art space located at Dumbo’s waterfront, launching this fall with literary events, art exhibitions and theatrical performances. Thursday night October 17, 2013, the closing reception is at 7 PM, reading at 8 PM, open wine / beer bar, FREE. -- Nora Robertson

"The Big Heat" [by John Harbourne]

The most dramatic moment in The Big Heat, a memorable Fritz Lang noir for the early 1950s, is when Gloria Grahame turns the tables on her tormentor, Lee Marvin, by emptying a pot of boiling coffee on his face. 

Jan Steen, "The Drawing Lesson," circa 1665.

Jan Steen, The Drawing Lesson, ca. 1665, Oil on panel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 

Titian's "Venus of Urbino" on New Year's Eve [by David Lehman]

New Year’s Eve  

Champagne and a ribeye, that’s the ticket,
Beethoven’s string quartet in C# minor,
and good riddance to the plague year.
The mind can provide, provide,
and theories will continue to propose
themselves in politically incorrect seminars
in which ardent young men declare
the whole study of aesthetics may be
divided between Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”
and the fashion industry.  Nor is it just
a luxury, this taste for delicacies, this
indulgence in beauty for its own sake,
these academic escapades and linguistic
adventures that may eventuate in
a poem of delight, desired and deserved.

-- David Lehman (from Commonweal)

Above: Titian's "Venus of Urbino" at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay in Kubrick's "The Killing" [by John Harbourne]

For more  of John Harbourne's pioctures, visit this site:
johnharbourneartist.com
copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne

Epitaph for a Genre: On Kubrick's "The Killing" [by David Lehman]

Adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson from the pulp novel by Lionel White, The Killing is classic noir. The plot is about an expertly planned racetrack heist that goes spectacularly wrong because the weak link in the chain of confederates is married to a two-timing frail. A cast of noir stalwarts under Kubrick’s direction brings this story to life. Later Kubrick movies such as 2001 and A Clockwork Orange are more ambitious undertakings, but many of us with noir in our bones have a special affection for The Killing, a taut, black-and-white depiction of futility and failure.

Just out of prison, Johnny Clay is tall, tough, taciturn, and as decent a guy as you could want in a thief—a role Sterling Hayden was born to play. He has planned the robbery with a chess player’s precision. An inside job, it requires the contributions of a pay-window cashier named George (Elisha Cook Jr.) and a track bartender. Johnny has also recruited Randy (Ted de Corsia), a crooked cop, who drives solo in his prowl car; Nikki, a sharpshooter (played with great nastiness by Timothy Carey); and Maurice, a muscle man (Kola Kwariani, a Georgian wrestler with whom Kubrick played chess).

Nikki must shoot Black Lightning, the favorite in the high-stakes race of the day, just before the colt reaches the backstretch of the track. At the same time, Maurice will pick a fight at the bar. You need 10 men to hold Maurice down, and so, amid the chaos, no one notices the cashier when he unlocks the door marked “NO ADMITTANCE,” behind which men count and stash the day’s take. The diversions give Johnny time enough to walk in, don a mask, brandish a submachine gun, and collect the dough in a duffel bag, which he then tosses out the window … for Randy to pick up and drive away in his cop car. A perfect crime.

Kubrick starts and restarts the story, shifting points of view, reverting each time to the track announcer’s call of the $100,000-added Lansdowne Stakes. The marksman’s story features a chilling scene between Nikki and a black racetrack employee played by James Edwards. The narrative throughout is advanced by voiceover, a matter-of-fact male voice of authority, accentuating the suspense.

The criteria of masculinity are presented and questioned in the movie. Elisha Cook, Jr., so memorable as the humiliated gunsel in The Maltese Falcon and as brave, lovesick Harry Jones in The Big Sleep, is outstanding as George the cashier, a man who, in Lionel White’s novel, is said to be “crazy about his wife” but “not completely blind to her character.” He knows, too, that “he himself had failed as a husband and failed as a man.”

In short, he is the archetypal noir loser, married to Sherry (Marie Windsor), who is discontented, fickle, frustrated, and doomed. A true chingona as perhaps only Marie Windsor could render her! When George confides that in the next few days he will have a lot of money, she says, with practiced cruelty, “Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?” Sherry gets George to reveal the gang’s plan.

Everything goes right until the guys gather to split the proceeds. Sherry has spilled the beans to her handsome boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards). Val and a henchman barge in to steal the dough, and in the ensuing shootout all are killed except George, who is badly wounded but has enough vitality left to stumble home and shoot Sherry before he expires. “It isn’t fair,” she says, making the cinematic most of the moment. “I never had anyone but you, not a real husband, not even a man.”

Having transferred the loot to the biggest suitcase he could buy, Johnny Clay arrives at the scene 15 minutes too late. Seeing George stumble down the front stairs, Johnny puts two and two together and drives away with the sound of sirens in his ears. He and girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) hightail it to the airport.

The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny and Fay are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.

Johnny Clay does not survive in the novel on which The Killing is based, Lionel White’s Clean Break. On the last page, two bullets from George’s gun make a “peculiar, plopping sound” as they enter Johnny’s stomach. Under his elbow is a folded newspaper, headlined “Race Track Bandit / Makes Clean Break / With Two Million.”

The movie’s ending is even better. Two million bucks in small bills go up in a whirlwind, and the bandit has not only lost the cash but has also unmasked himself as the culprit. Dazed, helpless, Johnny and Fay retreat and try to hail a taxi. They are standing by the airport’s front doors as two armed plainclothes cops walk menacingly toward them. The look on Sterling Hayden’s face is unforgettable.

Fay: “Johnny, you’ve got to run.”

Johnny: “Ah … what’s the difference?”

This exchange, which ends the movie, could stand as an epitaph for all of noir.

Written for and posted by The American Scholar, April 1, 2020.

Homage to "Laura" [by John Harbourne]

Diptych by John Harbourne. Copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne. All rights reserved.
John Harbourne has made similar drawings of many other noir figures. www.johnharbourneartist.com

Laura

Then the doorbell rang.
Time for one more cigarette.
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
He is not in love with a corpse

Time for one more cigarette.
The venomous drama critic insinuates
He is in love with a corpse.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.

The venomous drama critic knows
He is sane.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.
He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is rude.

Is he sane?
Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
He thinks she is a ghost and she thinks he is rude
When the picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman.

Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
It hasn’t stopped raining.
The picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman:
Gene Tierney in Laura.

It hasn’t stopped raining.
“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,”
"Dana Andrews says in Laura.
There was something he was forgetting.

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you.”
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
There was something he was forgetting.
Then the doorbell rang.

-- David Lehman

"Laura" is taken from David Lehman's book The Mysterious Romance of Murder, pubished by Cornell University Press in 2022. Copyright (c) 2022 by David Lehman.

Remembering My Dad on Veterans Day [by Stacey Lehman]

My dad landed on Utah beach, not as part of the first wave, thank god, or I probably wouldn't be here, but later, to clean up. He was a soldier in the 94th Infantry Division that fought in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated a concentration camp. It was in Nennig, Germany, that the Germans gave his division its nickname "Roosevelt's Butchers" for stacking the dead in houses and along roads and refusing prisoners, lacking the means to guard and transport them. Like so many others, he enlisted, a tough street kid from the Bronx, the child of immigrants from Poland and Ukraine.  During boot camp, he was court-martialed for striking an officer who called him a dirty kike. Though he was acquitted, he got shipped out soon after without having completed his training.
    I don't know much about his service, not because he was particularly reticent but because he died suddenly at 50, before I was mature enough to imagine my parents had lives worth learning about. How I regret that I never asked him about those years. Anyone who has tried to get WWII military records knows that a fire destroyed many of them. Thus, all I have are the things he carried: his dog-tags, a French-English dictionary, a guide to Europe, and, oddly, a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish.  Several years ago, I gathered these mementos together and along with a few photographs asked Star Black, the brilliant poet, photographer, and collage artist to make something of them.  A few weeks later she presented me with three collages, one of which is shown here. That's my dad in the middle, looking handsome, and so young! In the upper left is a page from his guidebook in which he wrote a list of the places he fought his way through, ending with "and a funeral in some god-forsaken place."

One of the more moving accounts of life as an infantryman during WWII can be found in Roll Me Over, by Raymond Gantter.  Ganttner was a teacher who decided to turn down his third deferment.  He was unfit for officer status so he joined the infantry as a private.  His service was almost identical to that of my father's.  Here's a passage: 

It is the slow piling up of fear that is so intolerable. Fear moves swiftly in battle, strikes hard with each shell, each new danger, and as long as there's action, you don't have time to be frightened.  But this is a slow fear, heavy and stomach filling.  Slow, slow . . all your movements are careful and slow, and pain is slow and fear is slow and the beat of your heart is the only rapid rhythm of the night . . . a muttering drum easily punctured and stilled.

    Upon completion of his service and return to the US, my dad had difficulty finding work. I recently discovered among my mother's things, a cache of the letters he wrote to potential employers along with a pile of rejections. Over time, my dad's letters became increasingly imaginative (some might say desperate). At around the same time, he and his brothers agreed to change their names from Horowitz to Harwood, the surname of a minor British royal. It was the name I grew up with and that made it possible for me to witness anti-Semitism by those who had no idea that I'm Jewish. I thought of myself as an undercover Jew.

-- sdl

Vermeer at the Met (on His Birthday)

What Picasso Saw (1940)

after fifty-nine years
he saw
the woman
with two faces

there was no such thing
as an ex-Catholic
or an ex-Spaniard
living in France
first Paris with Max
then back to Madrid
an old guitarist

what can you do
with blue, blindness
and the female nude
with two faces

Ma Jolie Fernande
Eva, Gaby, Pacquerette,
Irene Lagut, Olga,
Marie-Therese,
Francoise, Jacqueline

I the harlequin and the minotaur
you the women in the mirror

10 / 25 / 19 (Picasso's birthday)

after fifty-nine years
he saw
the woman
with two faces

there was no such thing
as an ex-Catholic
or an ex-Spaniard
living in France
first Paris with Max
then back to Madrid
an old guitarist

what can you do
with blue, blindness
and the female nude
with two faces

Ma Jolie Fernande
Eva, Gaby, Pacquerette,
Irene Lagut, Olga,
Marie-Therese,
Francoise, Jacqueline

I the harlequin and the minotaur
you the women in the mirror

10 / 25 / 19 (Picasso's birthday)

from "Modern Love": XVII by George Meredith (1828-1909)

At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
‘Hiding the skeleton,’ shall be its name.
Such play as this, the devils might appal!
But here’s the greater wonder; in that we
Enamoured of an acting naught can tire,
Each other, like true hypocrites, admire; 
Warm-lighted looks, Love’s ephemoerioe,
Shoot gaily o’er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love’s corpse-light shine.

-- George Meredith. (The poet andf novelist posed for Henry Wallis's painting "The Death of Chatterton" above). 

The Expulsion from Eden [by Masaccio]

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Lear is Real: "Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are. . ."

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

--- King Lear, act III, scene 4

Larry Rivers, August 17, 1923 - August 14, 2002: A Master of Rhythm and Hues [by David Lehman]

Happy birthday, Larry Rivers. You'd have been 99 today.

Yitzchoch Grossberg, your given name, translates as Isaac Big Mountain

(on the model of Giussepe Verdi equals Joe Green)

and I love you and your saxophone on 14th Street, and how

you sang "Don't Worry 'Bout Me" in the green room

with Ashbery, Koch, and Jane Freilicher

for an event at the New School that I organized

and moderated, and I hope they taped it.

When was that? 1998? 1999?

You sat to my left and whispered in my ear

and people in the audience thoght it must be something important

when in reality you complained about the length of the program,

and Jane had a cold, and Kenneth was mad at John for reading longer than he had.

Koch read himself and O'Hara; Ashbery, himself and Schuyler,

and you showed slides and talked.

At the Knickerbocker, Larry Rivers and the Climax Band played

and you sang:  "I'm afraid the masquerade

is over, and so is love," but our love is here to stay,

and I wish you were here to hear me say it.

Read about this wonderful painter here - it's the review of Larry's autobiography I wrote for the Washington Post in December 1992. I've been told that it should be read first, and the birthday wishes above after.  It is reproduced below the picture, which is a detail of a larger photo from the late 1950s, in which, facing Larry, is Frank O'Hara. They were collaborating on Stones, the poems and drawings that were released in an edition of twenty-five (described as a "portfolio of 12 lithograph[s] and title page on linen rag paper") that would set you back $45,000 were you to try to buy a copy today. On the table between the artistic collaborators are cans of Rheingold, the dry beer.

"A Master of Rhythm and Hues"
by David Lehman
Washington Post, December 27, 1992

LARRY RIVERS's life is as colorful as the spectacularly original canvases that have firmly established his place among the major avant-garde artists of our time. Born Yitzroch Grossberg in the Bronx, Rivers was an uninhibited, grass-smoking, sex-obsessed jazz saxophonist in his early twenties when he picked up a paintbrush for the first time. The year was 1945; the war was about to end, and New York City was on the cusp of becoming the art capital of the world.

Encouraged by such estimable painters as Jane Freilicher and Nell Blaine, Rivers soon "began thinking that art was an activity on a 'higher level' than jazz," because music is "abstract" and can't be done alone whereas painting is a solo performance that allows the artist to "make nameable things." Rivers took drawing classes with the great Hans Hofmann, but he always retained the improvisatory ideal of jazz, and the make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach has served him well. Even his most monumental constructions, such as "The History of the Russian Revolution" (1965) in Washington's Hirshhorn Museum, have a fresh air of spontaneity about them, as if they had just been assembled a few minutes ago.

Rivers had a meteoric rise. A Pierre Bonnard exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1948 proved to have a decisive influence on his sense of color and composition. No less an eminence than Clement Greenberg, then the nation's foremost art critic, declared in 1949 that Rivers was already "a better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himself in many instances" -- and this on the basis of Rivers's first one-man show. Though Greenberg would later modify his praise and then withdraw it altogether, he had launched the career of "this amazing beginner."

If one condition of avant-garde art is that it is ahead of its time, and another is that it proceeds from a maverick impulse and a contrary disposition, Rivers's vanguard status was assured from the moment when, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, he audaciously made representational paintings, glorifying nostalgia and sentiment while undercutting them with metropolitan irony. His pastiches of famous paintings of the past -- such as his irreverent rendition of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1953) -- seemed to define the playfully ironic attitudes of post-modernism years before anyone had thought up that term. And his paintings of brand labels, found objects, and pop icons -- Camel cigarettes, Dutch Masters cigars, the menu at the Cedar Bar in 1959, a French 100-franc note -- demonstrate what is vital about Pop Art while escaping the limitations of that movement.

Rivers has his own style of painting: He relies on "charcoal drawing and rag wiping." Also distinctive is his prankish sense of humor. In 1964 he painted a spoof of Jacques-Louis David's famous "Napoleon in His Study," the portrait of the emperor in the classic hand-in-jacket pose. Rivers's version, full of smudges and erasures, manages to be iconoclastic and idolatrous at once. The finishing touch is the painting's title: Rivers called it "The Greatest Homosexual."

“What Did I Do?,” Rivers's autobiographical ramble, conveys the excitement, the nervous energy, and the sublime agitation of life in New York City at a time when rents were cheap, Lester Young was president of the republic of jazz, and painters of the caliber of Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline hung out at the Cedar Bar, which thus became, in Rivers's phrase, "the G-spot of the art scene." Obsessed with "art and the quest for sex," Rivers left his wife for the floating Bohemia of Manhattan, where he shot up heroin, was openly bisexual, and lived with his two sons and his mother-in-law, Berdie, whom he painted -- sometimes in the nude.

Rivers had (and has) an adventuresome spirit, an appetite for notoriety, and a nose for publicity. He won a lot of money on "The $64,000 Challenge," one of the fixed television game shows of the 1950s, until he met his Waterloo when he was asked to identify the maiden name of Renoir's wife. Later, Rivers made the most of his opportunity to testify at a grand jury investigation of the program, acting as if the courtroom were an extension of show biz by other means. One of the show's producers, Rivers tells us, was his friend Shirley Bernstein, "sister of Lenny." When Rivers denied that she had fed him the answers, the assistant district attorney fired back, "Why are you protecting her, Mr. Rivers?" In response, Rivers writes, he "rose from the witness chair and said dramatically, 'Because I love her -- and I don't care if the whole world knows it!'"

Long on anecdote, short on analysis, "What Did I Do?" is full of juicy stories about Rivers's friends and associates, and he seems to have been chums with aesthetic experimentalists of all stripes, from the Living Theatre's Julian Beck and Judith Malina ("violent pacifists," Rivers calls them) to John Cage (whose music "was like a sermon by Spike Jones"), Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, not to mention the poets of the New York School, with whom Rivers became fast friends: Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Harry Mathews. He and O'Hara ("a charming madman") were intermittently lovers. They collaborated on several inspired projects, such as a hilarious send-up of an art manifesto, "How to Proceed in the Arts": "How can we paint the elephants and the hippopotamuses? How are we to fill the large empty canvas at the end of the large empty loft? You do have a loft, don't you, man?"

Rivers is a world-class talker, and reading “What Did I Do?” is like listening to a candid, manic monologue. It is an experiment in discontinuous narrative, with frequent flashbacks and flash-forwards, and it is an awful lot of fun. It isn't always easy to piece together the chronology -- Rivers places his trust in memory, that least reliable of fact-checkers -- but that isn't the point. The real subject of this book -- and its greatest pleasure -- is the personality of the artist: mercurial, profane, madcap, somewhat exhibitionistic, sometimes puerile: a wiseguy who gets a kick out of shocking the censor.

In the book's preface, Rivers introduces us to his collaborator on this project, the writer Arnold Weinstein: "I knew the three women he married, he probably slept with both my wives. What can I say? He's an old pal." That is the authentic Rivers tone, and it spices up every page. Some of his riffs are extraordinary. One of his sons is "deranged but normal in every other way." Rivers and his second wife, Clarice, "parted in 1967 and have been married ever since." Or consider this echo of the book's title: "For someone who has always had fantasies of living in a whorehouse like my heroes Pascin, Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Utamaro, what am I doing with five children, adding up to 252 pairs of shoes, 1,008 boxes of cereal, hot and cold, 8,660 quarts of milk, etc., plus 23 analysts, including mine?"

David Lehman's recent books include "Operation Memory," a collection of poems, and "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man."

A review of

“WHAT DID I DO? The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers”
By Larry Rivers with Arnold Weinstein
Aaron Asher/HarperCollins
498 pp. $30

When Life followed Art, which returned the compliment

Life magazine, August 8, 1949. "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The artIcle that changed the art world. Merely by asking the question, Life made it a self-fulfilling prophecy, demonstrating the power of the media and the tendency of journalistic questions (like "Is God Dead?" on the cover of a 1966 issue of Life's sister magazine, Time) to slide into declarations. "Life -- consider the alternative" is attributed to Marshall McLuhan. I had erroneously thought the phrase served as an ad campaign for Life, the alternative to which was either Look or death. -- DL

 On the cover: Deborah Reynolds.

"The real movement is through ideas": Beth McDermott & Maya Sonenberg in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry.  In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories:  Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art.  As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal.  

Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington.  Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places.

Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.  Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press. 

Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”? 

Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist, and I wanted to see this struggle from the outside, through her spouse’s eyes but without the potential solipsism of the first person point of view. I hope the reader can see that he doesn’t think she’s a bad artist or a bad mother; she has internalized those judgments. However, while he’s extremely sympathetic towards her plight, and in fact tries to do whatever he can to help, he’s ultimately completely clueless about what she’s going through and also sort of jealous of her connection to the children. I carefully chose to present the male characters in this story and in “Hunters and Gatherers” in as sympathetic a light as I could muster to highlight the fact that misogyny, sexism, and expectations around motherhood are systemic rather than the actions or beliefs of isolated “bad” men.

"I look like I paint. Who am I?" [by David Lehman]

Rhapsodic blues. . taciturn Cal Coolidge. . ."you lose"
as the market reaches record highs, speculators buy on margin,
Babe Ruth makes more money than the president, having had a better year,
Lucky Lindy to Paris, Showboat on Broadway, Al Jolson on screen,
Bernice bobs her hair and wears the diamond bigger than the Ritz,
Flappers flirt, philosophers drink bootleg gin,
And this singular fellow may be looking out the window
Of a hotel room with luggage beside the bed
A woman, maybe his wife, puts on her lipstick,
There's neon at night in the city, but where he is
The people turn their back and look at the sea.

Clues:

1) Dennis
2) William
3) Edward
4) Hedda

You, who ask me for a prompt, please consider "Reclining Nude" by Isaac Israel (1865-1934)

Darragh Park's Cover for "Two Journals" by James Schuyler

In 1985 James Schuyler and Darragh park commenced on the project of "accompanying journals," in Park's phrase, Schuyler's in prose and Park's in drawings. The journals were not "mutually descriptive," but did reflect conversations the two men had and thus constitute "not only in some way an account of our relationship but also evidence of some of the things which nourished our relationship."

Of Park's cover for Two Diaries (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995), Douglas Crase writes:

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This is the view out Jimmy Schuyler's window onto 23rd Street--"a street that doesn't have much going for it," if I remember Jimmy's description aright. The building with the egg-shaped medallion, directly across, is the old Eastman Kodak building, designed by McKim, Meade, and White (they also did Eastman's house in Rochester).The street front has been brutally remodeled but you can detect their classicizing in the upper stories. Not too much, though; Eastman insisted on the economy version. Darragh gave me this drawing and I have it in my studio here in Pennsylvania so I can always share Jimmy's view -- this much at least.
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from the archive; first posted April 21, 2009

Donald Shambroom's "Forsythia" at Mercury Gallery (Rockport)

Forsythia, oil on canvas, 42 x 46 in.

Donald Shambroom is a visual artist and writer whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1973, after graduating from Yale University where he studied philosophy and painting, Shambroom moved to Boston to pursue his career as a painter. His work has been shown at Francis Naumann gallery and Half Gallery in New York, and at Mercury Gallery and Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston.   For the past decade, he has lived and worked on the banks of the Millers River in north central Massachusetts. Shambroom’s book “Duchamp’s Last Day” was published by Zwirner Books in 2018. He is currently working on his next book “Mirror Image: Leonardo da Vinci and Marcel Duchamp.”

"The Judgment of Paris" [by Peter Paul Rubens]

Peter Paul Rubens's Judgment of Paris hangs in
1) The Louvre in Paris
2) The National Gallery in London
3) Nuremburg
4) Le Bateau ivre

The painting refers to 
1) The origin of the Trojan War
2) A competition among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite
3) Hector's brother
4) The golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon

Peter Paul Rubens's paintings are taught not only in art histoiry classes but in
1) Classes on body shape
2) The Waning of the Middle AGes (Huizinga)
3) Modern dance
4) Greek mythology