The Best American Poetry

Perfection Wasted [by John Updike]

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archive; first posted January 29, 2009. John Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was dying when he wrote the poem.  (Happy birthday, John.)

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archive; first posted January 29, 2009. John Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was dying when he wrote the poem.  (Happy birthday, John.)

from "The Complete History of the Boy" [for Joe Lehman on 7/24/24]

from "The Complete History of the Boy"

The boy was mad at his mother who didn’t hang up
the phone right away when he fell and hurt his head.
He was indignant. “Hurts are more important than inventions.”

He dreamed his father died. “Mama told me in the car.”
When he woke up he climbed into bed with his father, happy.

He wanted to discuss the floor plan of the house:
“Is my room over the dining room?”

He wanted to know which was more important,
the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
The former is a symbol of liberty, the latter a symbol
of industry, his mother explained. That clinched things
for the boy. He unhesitatingly chose liberty.

“Which is more important, religion or God?”

He was still five years old.
They found a special school for him.
He took classes in Magical Thinking and excelled
in the making of weird predictions and dire threats
that scared you even though you knew
they wouldn’t come true.

He also learned how to walk and talk in his sleep.

Two years later he saw Hans Hofmann’s “Mirage”
only this time on the cover of a book
with his father’s name on it.
“Awesome,” the boy said.

The world was still a dance not a duel, with invisible swords.
And at the museum the Hofmann hadn’t changed a bit.

Joy in the house, laughter in the halls, the boy in pajamas:
There were still a few good boyhood years left.

-- David Lehman

A Quick Meditation on Gustave Mahler (born July 7)

Wittgenstein dismissed Mahler’s music, but he conceded
that "very rare talents [were needed] to produce this bad music.”
Leonard Bernstein as conductor of the New York Philharmonic
sparked the Mahler boom of the 1960s. In Visconti's Death in Venice,
you can hear the slow fourth movement of Mahler's fifth in C Sharp minor,
which Mahler conducted in Cologne in 1904. In the movie,
a heavily made-up Dirk Bogarde played himself as a repressed homosexual
with a death wish. Visconti cast Bogarde for the role because he had done so well
as a Nazi in a black shirt with a smirk and an SS symbol on his collar
in The Damned. So I, on a day dominated by Mahler’s Fifth,
thought of the composer who spoke Yiddish as a boy,
"a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans,
and a Jew all over," on his birthday, July 7, 1860.

--  David Lehman

"Lana Turner has collapsed!" [by Frank O'Hara]

Poem

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

-- Frank O'Hara

In Praise of Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021)

Mysticism for Beginners

 

The day was mild, the light was generous.

The German on the café terrace

held a small book on his lap.

I caught sight of the title:

Mysticism for Beginners.

Suddenly I understood that the swallows

patrolling the streets of Montepulciano

with their shrill whistles,

and the hushed talk of timid travelers

from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,

and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—

like nuns in fields of rice,

and the dusk, slow and systematic,

erasing the outlines of medieval houses,

and olive trees on little hills,

abandoned to the wind and heat,

and the head of the Unknown Princess

that I saw and admired in the Louvre,

and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings

sprinkled with pollen,

and the little nightingale practicing

its speech beside the highway,

and any journey, any kind of trip,

are only mysticism for beginners,

the elementary course, prelude

to a test that's been

postponed.

 

-- Adam Zagajewski (born June 21, 1945)

trans. CLARE CAVANAGH

photo by Star Black. Copyright (c) 2008 by Star Black.

Happy birthday, Ron Padgett

In 1968 I didn't really know you though
Dick Gallup, who sat next to me
in Kenneth Koch's "Modern Poetry"
class, invited me to a party and
there you were and I went to hear
you read and went through old
copies of Columbia Review to read
your poems (including the one
signed "the sloth sloth") and why
am I telling you this? Because it's
your day of the year, and you're a gem
as well as a Gemini twin, and I
would tip my fedora to you if
I were wearing one as men used
to say when men wore fedoras.

-- David Lehman (June 17, 2013)

Dean Martin on His Birthday: Volare, On an Evening in Roma

“I can't stand an actor or actress who tells me acting is hard work. It's easy work. Anyone who says it isn't never had to stand on his feet all day dealing blackjack.”

Volare o o
cantare o o o o,
nel blu dipinto di blu
felice di stare lassù,
e volavo volavo
felice più in alto del sole
ed ancora più sù,
mentre il mondo
pian piano spariva laggiù,
una musica dolce suonava
soltanto per me. . .

 

"In 1976, When She Was Born" [by Molly Arden]

In 1976, When She Was Born

Life was dull in 1976.
Dad had to read "Ivanhoe" and write a report.
Sex was not yet Mom’s favorite sport.
The only rhyme that came to mind was "dicks."

Mom was somewhere north
of the Mass / NH border.
She was just following an order,
not calculating its moral worth.

She was on vacation
feeling unclever
and not happily after ever.

He promised to wait
for her return to the state
of eternal temptation.

-- Molly Arden. Painting by Duncan Hannah ("Honey Trap").  Poem published in Coconut.

Happy birthday, Artie Shaw [May 23, 1910]

Born May 23, 1910. Band leader and clarinetist whose versions of "Stardust," "Frenesi," "Begin the Beguine" "Moonglow," "Can't Get Started," "A Foggy Day," and others are sublime. He was a Gemini with huge sex appeal and a host of wives including Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Jerome Kern's daughter Betty. He had chutzpah. “Presumption is the mother of all fuck-ups,” he explained. He was also a sharpshooter with a rifle. He and Benny Goodman disagreed, Goodman saying ""We both play clarinet." Shaw said, "You play clarinet. I play music." He also said, "Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijuana, and will expire on cocaine." He was a good looking stud but it was the music that enchanted the fillies. "“You have no idea of the women I didn’t marry,” he said. He lived to be ninety.

And here are Helen Forrest's songs with the Artie Shaw band:

Artie: “Somebody asked me once, ‘Do you think that swing will ever come back?’ And I said, ‘Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?’"

"Come to Baby, Do": happy birthday, Doris Day (w/ Les Brown & "his band of renown")

Also born today (April 3): Marlon Brando.

So We'll Go No More a Roving [on Lord Byron's birthday, Jan. 22nd]

So, we'll go no more a roving
   So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
   And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
   And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
   And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
   And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
   By the light of the moon.

Brevity and simplicity contribute to this poem's power. It seems also somehow to summarize the Byronic state: Wanderlust and Weltschmertz in equal measures. The poem makes me think of this tuneful ballad. DL 

In Plymouth town there lived a maid
Bless you fair maidens
In Plymouth town there lived a maid
Mind what I say
In Plymouth town there lived a maid
And she was mistress of her trade
I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you fair maid

A-rovin’, a-rovin’, since rovin’s been my ruin
I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you fair maid.

"Last Song" [by Terence Winch]

Last Song

 

Mother! Where have you been? Your
children are drinking beer and playing
the piano. Every single thing you ever
owned has long ago disappeared. We’re
not even sure when exactly you were born
or what ship you came here on.

Sweet hope, show me the way
out of this mess. I keep talking to people
who can’t remember who they are.

And then there’s this feeling of every
thing being just out of reach or not quite
audible. I couldn’t remember John Prine’s
name this morning on the way to the Safeway
listening to him in the car singing
“Remember Me When the Candlelights 
Are Gleaming” with Kathy Mattea.

His last song, “I Remember Everything”—
so frail and beautiful, it moves you to tears.

I remember now where
all of you have gone.
Floating in the air
from song to song.

—Terence Winch

from Glimpse (#56, Spring 2023)

Drawing of Terence Winch by Joe Giordano in Baltimore, 20 Sept 2023.

Born Today: Keats -- as well as this master of light

Born today was he who painted this portrait of a young woman with a water jug.

The blue is rich, the geometry superb, and light flowing in from the window a miracle of air and sky.

The painting hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

As for the other fellow born on this day, consider this "Next Line, Please" prompt from 2017:

I would like readers to write a line—or a four-line stanza—in the manner of the Keats who gave us such touchstones as “With beaded bubble winking on the brim” (to describe wine) and “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” in “Ode to a Nightingale.”  The finale of “Ode on Melancholy” may be the finest single stanza in English poetry since “Lycidas”:

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

I know, I know: it would be madness to expect to be able to duplicate such sensual intelligence and mastery of sound, meter, and rhyme. But take lines 1-2, 3-4 or 7-8 and see what you can do in translating these observations about Beauty, Pleasure, and Melancholy into your own idiom.

Deadline: Saturday, April 29, 2017, midnight any time zone.
https://theamericanscholar.org/building-on-byron-and-keats/

"Flesh 78" [by Herbert Engelhardt, 1925-2021]

Brancusi hinted it
Giacometti stinted it

Miró laughed at it
Degas choreographed it

Bosch hated it
Bruegel skated it

Watteau crêpe de chine covered it
Manet gape to dine uncovered it

Botticelli virgin Spring emerged
Titian love-in fling resurged

Kandinsky ignored it
Gaugin adored it

Renoir bathed his coquette in pink
Bellows slathed hot sweat in stink

Ingres slipped in two vertebrae
Maillol worshipped her in clay

Seurat biked it to the park
Tintoretto liked it for St Mark

Gorky mangled it
Pollock tangled it

Picasso pranced in Avignon
Matisse danced in primary tone

Michelangelo mixed genders
Fragonard transfixed splendors

Cézanne preferred yellow lemons
Van Gogh preferred star-glow demons

Lachaise inflated it
Schiele conflated it

Beckmann painted bloody stumps
Hals sainted ruddy rumps

Warhol silk-screened it
Chagall flute-dreamed it

Giotto enrobed it in gesso
Géricault unrobed it al fresco

Daumier mocked it
Wood defrocked it

Rodin raptured eroticized it
Braque fractured analyzed it

De Chirico enigmatically stylized it
El Greco astigmatically exorcized it

Velásquez grew a mischievous chin
Da Vinci drew a mysterious grin

Rothko dazzled with colors bold
Klimt razzled with showers gold

Lautrec wrapped Braunt’s neck in red
Stieglitz snapped O’Keeffe’s pec in bed

Duchamp sighted it descending
Caravaggio whited it offending

Rubens sketched it out
Modigliani stretched it out

Artists obsess on flesh
From Marrakesh to Uttar Pradesh

Published in HARVARD REVIEW ONLINE on February 25, 2016 with this contributor's note:

Herbert Engelhardt was born in New Jersey in 1925. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II from 1943 to 1946 and was awarded the Purple Heart in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. He received his BA and MBA from Harvard in 1949 and 1951, respectively. In his late seventies, he began to write poems. He has lived in New York City since the early 1950s.

Ed. note: Herb, whom I met twelve or thirteen years ago, had a passion for poetry and a zest for life that continually inspired me. We met sixteen years ago, when he was eighty, and worked together on his poems. His book, Ordinary Soldiers, which he published under the title World War II Poetry: Memories of an Ordinary Soldier, deserves to be far better known and celebrated. One reader commented that the book is "Intimate. Visceral. Honest. First rate. Fine poetry and also a valuable as a historic record of a soldier's life, much of it in Okinawa and the Philippines, during WW II."  Herb and I lunched together often and talked about all manner of thing -- his travels, his years in the service, his time at Harvard (where he housed with Henry Kissinger), and his own successful business career. For years he taught a course at NYU's Business School, with a reading list that included Julius Caesar and other works in which management made costly decisions to their detriment. Herb is quoted in my book One Hundred Autobiographies. We were comparing medical experiences and he said with his customary salty wit, “No matter what the longhaired Buddhist full of shit poets write about flowers and rocks and clouds, you don’t really understand life until you’ve had a Foley catheter stuck in you for six days." He was right about that and so much else. We miss you and honor you, Herb, and we mark your 98th birthday with this post! -- DL

On George Gershwin's Birthday [by David Lehman]

On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture,  the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t "they" (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying, “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

-- DL

Froim the archive; posted by The Best American Poetry on September 26, 2020 at 03:59 AM 

On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture,  the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t "they" (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying, “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

-- DL

On Apollinaire's Birthday [by David Lehman]

In the heady days leading up to and including the catastrophe of World War I, when Paris was the capital of modern art, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) stood at the vital center of a gang of writers and artists who embraced the future with such tremendous energy that avant-garde became an adjective of glamour and prestige. Apollinaire—whose circle included painters (Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck) and composers (Satie, Poulenc) as well as poets (Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy)—was a superb activist and agitator. He championed Cubism and gave Surrealism its name. In 1917, his edition of Charles Baudelaire’s poems linked the two men as kindred spirits, city poets who doubled as art critics; Baudelaire prefigured Apollinaire as the latter prefigures Frank O’Hara. Also in 1917, Apollinaire issued his manifesto, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” making the case for innovation as a transcendent value. Poetry had to keep up with the technological advances of the day—the cinema, the radio, the motorcar, the flying machine. Driving with a friend from Deauville to Paris in “La Petite Auto,” Apollinaire writes that “the little car had driven us into a New epoch / and though both of us were grown men / it was as if we had just been born.”

Apollinaire experimented with audacious techniques for generating verse. On occasion he would sit in a café and weave overheard phrases into the composition. For his book Calligrammes, he made shaped poems—poems that looked like a mirror, a heart, the rainfall, a pocket-watch. In his most ambitious discursive poems, he wins over the reader by modifying his self-pity with his wit and ebullience. There is a rare combination of enthusiasm and melancholy in Apollinaire’s self-presentation. A line from his poem “Les Collines” (“The Hills”) is etched into his tombstone at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris: “Je peux mourir en souriant”—“I can die with a smile on my face.” 

“Zone,” the central poem in Apollinaire’s career, prefaces his collection Alcools, the title of which translates literally as “Spirits” in the alcoholic sense though I would argue for “Cocktails.” Alcools is in any case an apt title for one who likes to boast that he has “drunk the universe” and chanted “songs of universal drunkenness.” Published in 1913, the year Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had its Paris premiere, “Zone” is chronologically the last poem in the collection to have been written. The poet was thirty-three years old, the age of Dante embarking on his tour of the afterlife. The poem doesn’t so much praise its objects of futurist desire—the Eiffel Tower, airplanes, a railway terminal—as treat them like pastoral motifs. The heart of the poem is not in the future at all but in a past recollected in anxiety and sadness.

“Zone” heralds a striking new direction in Apollinaire’s work. He discards punctuation to good effect. He refers to himself sometimes as I, sometimes as you (both tu and vous in French), a habit that held a special appeal for O’Hara and other New York poets. The poem’s title embraces (or blends) the meanings of neighborhood, frontier, slum (and slumming), and the female erogenous zone, all of which come into play. (“And I smoke ZONE tobacco,” Apollinaire wrote in a later poem.) Organized around a walk in Paris from one sunrise to another—and from one time zone to another—“Zone” is in loosely rhymed couplets, which presents a difficulty that translators tend to evade. A notable exception is Samuel Beckett in perhaps the most impressive parts of his translation. For example, Beckett renders “C’est le beau lys que tous nous cultivons / C’est la torch aux cheveux roux que n’eteint pas le vent” as “It is the fair lily that we all revere / It is the torch burning in the wind its auburn hair.” In addition to the near-rhyme, Beckett gives us the echo of “burn” in “auburn,” a move that Apollinaire would have appreciated. Kenneth Koch appropriates Apollinaire’s rambling couplets in a nostalgic poem whose title is itself a nod to his influence: “A Time Zone.”

“Zone” has been translated many times, a testament to how well-loved it is among Anglo-Saxon Francophiles. It begins, “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien.” Roger Shattuck translates the line as “You are tired at last of this old world”; Ron Padgett improves on this with “You’re tired of this old world at last.” I cast my vote with Beckett, Charlotte Mandell, and William Meredith, in opting for “In the end” as the poem’s first words, not only because this is the literal sense of the French “A la fin,” but because it lays proper stress on Apollinaire’s audacity in starting with “the end.” It also gives a hint of the poem’s ultimate circularity. Given the iterations of ancien that immediately follow—antiquité, anciennes, and antique all appear in the next six lines—I felt that “the ancient world” came nearer to Apollinaire’s meaning than “this old world.”

A line about refugee families gathered at a train station can stand for many others in the challenge they present to the translator. For “Ils espèrent gagner de l’argent dans l’Argentine,” Oliver Bernard offers the prosaic “They hope to make money in the Argentine.” Anne Hyde Greet goes for the more idiomatic “Hoping to strike it rich in Argentina.” But I wanted to preserve the repeated sound of argent (the French word for money rooted in the word for silver), so I chose the alliterative “They’re hoping to gain some argent in the Argentine.”

The celebrated last line of “Zone,” “soleil cou coupé,” contains a brilliant piece of wordplay that resists the translator’s craft. It’s as if cou (meaning “neck”) is an abbreviated form of coupé (meaning “cut”). The relation between the two words can be said to suggest the action of the sun rising at dawn and appearing as if beheaded by the horizon. The verse has been variously translated as “Decapitated sun—” (William Meredith), “The sun a severed neck” (Roger Shattuck), “Sun corseless head” (Samuel Beckett), “Sun     slit throat” (Anne Hyde Greet), “Sun neck cut” (Charlotte Mandell). Ron Padgett’s “Sun cut throat” cleverly divides the word cutthroat in two. I have opted for “Let the sun beheaded be,” mainly because of the repetition of sounds in the last words. I felt that the relation of “be” to “beheaded” approximated the action in “côu coupé.” 

I discovered “Zone” in my junior year of college and studied it closely when, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, I attended Douglas Parmée’s lectures on French literature and spent a few seasons in Paris. This was in 1971 and 1972. In Paris I lived with this peripatetic poem on such intimate terms that I felt I could hear it in my own voice as I walked from Notre Dame to the Luxembourg Gardens and from there to the cafés of Montparnasse. I made a special trip to the Gare St. Lazare with Apollinaire’s stanza about “ces pauvres émigrants” in my brain. Nevertheless I did not type up a complete draft of my translation until January 1978 when I taught a course at Hamilton College that called for it. After presenting it at a public reading, I let it lie fallow. I worked on the poem often and carefully, if at long intervals, until three years ago when, as a professor at the New School’s graduate writing program, I supervised MFA candidate Ashleigh Allen’s thesis, which focused on Apollinaire and “Zone.” This happy task spurred me to revise my translation yet again. Encouraged by friends, I worked on it some more in summer 2011 and fall 2012. These things take time. The love of the work sustains the effort. 

Apollinaire had too little time. Within a few years of publishing “Zone,” he suffered head wounds at the front in World War I and died of Spanish flu on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice that ended the war. 

Click here for David Lehman's translation of "Zone" in Virginia Quarterly Review.

Theme Music: The Candide Overture [by Leonard Bernstein, on LB's birthday]

from "A Good Week for a Birthday" (in The Morning Line by David Lehman)

What would I choose as my theme music
if I were the classical music disc jockey
maybe Bernstein’s overture to Candide
or Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Cakewalk”
or Schubert’s overture to “Rosamunde”
in honor of John Scheuer
I have my Tolstoy to look forward to
and if music can stand for peace (the food of love)
today’s poem is a little tribute to the novel
summarized TV-Guide style:
Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.

 

Happy birthday, Dorothy Parker (and Stacey Lehman! -- on August 18)

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Parker & Your "quondam dreams"

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I pond on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men . . .
I'm due to fall in love again.

--Dorothy Parker

 

Poem in the Manner of Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker,
who wrote witty stories,
did not foresee
that spectacles would be-
come fashion accessories.
“Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.”

Today, for a lark,
I sat in Washington Square Park
I thought of Miss Parker,
and what she might say
assessing the spectacles of our day:
“Even the nicest lasses
Have tattoos on their asses.”

-- David Lehman

Bukowski's "Laughing Heart" (with commentary from various hands) on Buk's birthday

Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 06, 2008 at 11:14 AM in Poems | Permalink

Comments

This is one of my favorite poems and it doesn't seem like Bukowski to me. Thanks.
Posted by: Noah Burke | November 06, 2008 at 04:04 PM

I agree - Bukowski usually isn't this hopeful. A lovely poem.
Posted by: Laura Orem | November 07, 2008 at 07:41 PM

One of my favorite poems. Very provocative and inspiring.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000058706234 | September 19, 2009 at 02:09 PM

Love this poem, but you've got one of the lines wrong (every site I look at does, though). I have the original printing of this. The line "there is a light somewhere," should be "there is light somewhere."
Posted by: Tonymoore99 | October 08, 2012 at 09:25 AM

I have a friend who’s really good in writing a poem, too. She writes inspiring poem just like you and I admire you both.
Posted by: Ruggieri Sharkey | January 27, 2013 at 12:34 PM

Good poem. However, I would have cut the last three lines, making it a perfect poem.
Posted by: HDRBodegaPhoto | January 05, 2018 at 06:04 PM

Life is LIFE
Posted by: Obélix | June 19, 2019 at 07:38 PM

Said like a true alcoholic; I know, I am.
Posted by: Michael | October 21, 2019 at 03:33 AM

Light means hope, then we need to do meaningful things in our life, before death coming.
Posted by: Eric | April 14, 2020 at 09:06 PM

Always has a way of making the misery escapable as long as the mind and heart are set on the horizon of a fading light.
Posted by: Joaquin Nava | October 10, 2020 at 08:02 PM

I cant find this poem on https://bukowski.net/manuscripts/
Is this really Bukowski?
Posted by: The Wandering Earth | November 12, 2020 at 05:30 AM

When I first heard this recited, I thought it was one of the lectures by Joseph Campbell, whom I love. Was surprised it was Bukowski. The last three lines are absolutely the best. Without them, the poem would be just good. With them, it’s great! Here’s to the Old Gods!❤️
Posted by: Teuta Ilyriana | April 13, 2021 at 01:05 AM

The numb nut who said he would have cut the last 3 lines therefore making it a perfect poem... Well yes indeed I suppose it would be. You know the perfect poem. Poetry that is...Perfect. 99.9 percent of all poetry is written by people trying to write the perfect poem. And guess what? Most of them succeed at writing poetry, perfectly. And that's why hardly anyone will ever read it. Except maybe there mother , themselves and the person there sleeping with. Thank God for Bukowski. He wasn't aiming at perfection but as he said" getting down the word the line." Poetry books are sadly full of the perfect poem and or poems. That's why you can line your bird cage with most of it's pages.
Posted by: Steve Hammek | November 15, 2021 at 10:16 PM

Perhaps the most powerful words I've ever heard. Coming from Charles Bukowski, maybe the biggest nihilist to ever live. I am still in awe of its beauty.
P.S THE LAST THREE LINES ARE THE BEST PART OF THIS POEM
Posted by: Alex | March 16, 2022 at 06:27 PM

alchoholism is "dank"
Posted by: john smith | April 25, 2022 at 11:46 AM

I am in the camp that the last three lines are the best part of the poem. Why does this one person hate the last three lines? It is possible that they are just trolling, but I usually take people at face value so let's assume that they really do hate the last three lines. Why? My very first thought was that maybe they hate the idea of gods, but I don't think that is their problem since then they would just hate the last two lines. What the last three lines all have in common is an assurance that the reader is at a fundamental level very good and valuable. The person who complained may see this as unsupported hope. They may say that you can't just assert that a person is valuable. Why should we just say that a person is marvelous, maybe people are really all garbage. Why should we assume that the gods would ever delight in us, maybe they are completely disgusted by us. The debate is whether the gods fundamentally see humanity as worthy or worthless. The idea of the gods waiting is the much debated concept of free will. We have the innate capacity for being marvelous and delightful, but we must choose whether we are going to express that or not. But what if we don't know how to do that? If we sincerely look, we can find people who will teach us how to be marvelous and delightful.
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:07 AM

Parts of this poem were set to music and posted to Youtube. It's worth checking out (22 million views). This link really will take you to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRXn2NRiWI

Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:29 AM

Life has its ups &downs 4 sure.when da persona is in a rosy mood,da world seems 2 be his/her oyster,if in a lousy mood,demons seem 2 be swarming on da horizon.life has never been a bowl o strawberries w cream&sugar on top,not has death deprived da planet o a priceless jewel by taking us.live&let live.
Posted by: halfeyed bro | October 21, 2022 at 07:07 AM

My two cents ...
Whenever I read poetry, I view it two ways: 1) What the author intended; 2) What it means to me. Sometimes, they are in alignment. Sometimes, they aren't. Take T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men". I view it differently than T.S. Eliot intended.

Here are how I take Bukowski's poem.

Every individual deserves his/her life. It's a gift. Live it as you will. However, we have built a society that demands that you conform. Some people struggle with that conformity more than others. Those that struggle, really..Really...REALLY struggle.

Bukowski is speaking to them. He's saying "Be you. You are marvelous." If you do choose to be you, the Gods will delight in you. In fact, they are waiting patiently so they can delight in you.

Again, this is how I read the poem. Right or wrong.
Posted by: Michael Felli | October 22, 2022 at 07:51 PM

The gods will delight but yoy will not be happy or successgul in the world's term,at least most. Don't tirn the Buk into new age pap.
Posted by: Chuck Taylor | May 31, 2023 at 08:18 AM

I think the chap that talked of cutting the last 3 lines.. you're all wondering why he hated those 3 lines. And maybe he did. But if you don't wonder about the 3 lines he asked to cut, and instead look at the line where the poem would have ended with said lines cut.. I think it would make more sense.

The poem begins with the line... Your life is your life. and if the last 3 were cut.. it would end with the line... Your life is your life.
Posted by: Zack | July 08, 2023 at 04:45 AM

Response to the consideration of the poem’s value with or without the last three lines:
One way I thought about it is this:

Without the last three lines, the tone of the message feels confrontational, empowering the reader to push back, to push against in order to pursue being true to one’s self.
And poetically/structurally, this provides no resolve.

Including the last three lines, the tone shifts to hopeful, and suggests an exchange of one kind of submission (against the expected cultural norms) for a different kind of submission (being delighted in)
And poetically/structurally, this provides a satisfying resolve

Either way, Bukowski invites the reader to personalize the message.

Posted by: Virginia | July 24, 2023 at 12:04 PM

Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

"Video Blues" [by Mary Jo Salter]

Video Blues

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,
and likes to rent her movies, for a treat.
It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

The list of actresses who might employ
him as their slave is too long to repeat.
(My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,

Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy
Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat ...)
It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

Does he confess all this just to annoy
a loyal spouse? I know I can't compete.
My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy.

And can't a woman have her dreamboats? Boy,
I wouldn't say my life is incomplete,
but some evening I could certainly enjoy

two hours with Cary Grant as my own toy.
I guess, though, we were destined not to meet.
My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,
which makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

Mary Jo Salter

"It's a Wonderful Life" [by Paul Violi]

It's a Wonderful Life

          After the national fanfare died down, the quintuplets grew up protected from further exploitation in the safety and privacy that state funds and public donations ensured.  But, inevitably, they had to enter the real world.  On their eighteenth birthday they went to work as tellers in the same bank, my bank, the National Bank of Westchester. The first time I walked in and saw them behind the counter my heart skipped a beat:  Veronica, Vanessa, Vivian, Next Teller Please, Valerie, Vicki.  With their dark complexions, ruffled white blouses and full red lips -- like petals from a mythical flower, like the tens they plucked from their tills, they were identical down to the last curlicue.  All I could think was that it would take a lifetime to explain this moment, an eternity to explain a lifetime.  All I could say was, "Marvelous, incombustibly marvelous!"  Words that echoed down the line as people from all walks of life couldn't help but agree.  Behind his desk smiled B. Yourgrau, Manager, assured that another customer had found the answer to all his banking needs.

-- Paul Violi [photographed above with Star Black at KGB Bar 1998]
Happy birthday, Paul.

Comments

This is one of my favorite poems and it doesn't seem like Bukowski to me. Thanks.
Posted by: Noah Burke | November 06, 2008 at 04:04 PM

I agree - Bukowski usually isn't this hopeful. A lovely poem.
Posted by: Laura Orem | November 07, 2008 at 07:41 PM

One of my favorite poems. Very provocative and inspiring.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000058706234 | September 19, 2009 at 02:09 PM

Love this poem, but you've got one of the lines wrong (every site I look at does, though). I have the original printing of this. The line "there is a light somewhere," should be "there is light somewhere."
Posted by: Tonymoore99 | October 08, 2012 at 09:25 AM

I have a friend who’s really good in writing a poem, too. She writes inspiring poem just like you and I admire you both.
Posted by: Ruggieri Sharkey | January 27, 2013 at 12:34 PM

Good poem. However, I would have cut the last three lines, making it a perfect poem.
Posted by: HDRBodegaPhoto | January 05, 2018 at 06:04 PM

Life is LIFE
Posted by: Obélix | June 19, 2019 at 07:38 PM

Said like a true alcoholic; I know, I am.
Posted by: Michael | October 21, 2019 at 03:33 AM

Light means hope, then we need to do meaningful things in our life, before death coming.
Posted by: Eric | April 14, 2020 at 09:06 PM

Always has a way of making the misery escapable as long as the mind and heart are set on the horizon of a fading light.
Posted by: Joaquin Nava | October 10, 2020 at 08:02 PM

I cant find this poem on https://bukowski.net/manuscripts/
Is this really Bukowski?
Posted by: The Wandering Earth | November 12, 2020 at 05:30 AM

When I first heard this recited, I thought it was one of the lectures by Joseph Campbell, whom I love. Was surprised it was Bukowski. The last three lines are absolutely the best. Without them, the poem would be just good. With them, it’s great! Here’s to the Old Gods!❤️
Posted by: Teuta Ilyriana | April 13, 2021 at 01:05 AM

The numb nut who said he would have cut the last 3 lines therefore making it a perfect poem... Well yes indeed I suppose it would be. You know the perfect poem. Poetry that is...Perfect. 99.9 percent of all poetry is written by people trying to write the perfect poem. And guess what? Most of them succeed at writing poetry, perfectly. And that's why hardly anyone will ever read it. Except maybe there mother , themselves and the person there sleeping with. Thank God for Bukowski. He wasn't aiming at perfection but as he said" getting down the word the line." Poetry books are sadly full of the perfect poem and or poems. That's why you can line your bird cage with most of it's pages.
Posted by: Steve Hammek | November 15, 2021 at 10:16 PM

Perhaps the most powerful words I've ever heard. Coming from Charles Bukowski, maybe the biggest nihilist to ever live. I am still in awe of its beauty.
P.S THE LAST THREE LINES ARE THE BEST PART OF THIS POEM
Posted by: Alex | March 16, 2022 at 06:27 PM

alchoholism is "dank"
Posted by: john smith | April 25, 2022 at 11:46 AM

I am in the camp that the last three lines are the best part of the poem. Why does this one person hate the last three lines? It is possible that they are just trolling, but I usually take people at face value so let's assume that they really do hate the last three lines. Why? My very first thought was that maybe they hate the idea of gods, but I don't think that is their problem since then they would just hate the last two lines. What the last three lines all have in common is an assurance that the reader is at a fundamental level very good and valuable. The person who complained may see this as unsupported hope. They may say that you can't just assert that a person is valuable. Why should we just say that a person is marvelous, maybe people are really all garbage. Why should we assume that the gods would ever delight in us, maybe they are completely disgusted by us. The debate is whether the gods fundamentally see humanity as worthy or worthless. The idea of the gods waiting is the much debated concept of free will. We have the innate capacity for being marvelous and delightful, but we must choose whether we are going to express that or not. But what if we don't know how to do that? If we sincerely look, we can find people who will teach us how to be marvelous and delightful.
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:07 AM

Parts of this poem were set to music and posted to Youtube. It's worth checking out (22 million views). This link really will take you to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRXn2NRiWI

Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:29 AM

Life has its ups &downs 4 sure.when da persona is in a rosy mood,da world seems 2 be his/her oyster,if in a lousy mood,demons seem 2 be swarming on da horizon.life has never been a bowl o strawberries w cream&sugar on top,not has death deprived da planet o a priceless jewel by taking us.live&let live.
Posted by: halfeyed bro | October 21, 2022 at 07:07 AM

My two cents ...
Whenever I read poetry, I view it two ways: 1) What the author intended; 2) What it means to me. Sometimes, they are in alignment. Sometimes, they aren't. Take T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men". I view it differently than T.S. Eliot intended.

Here are how I take Bukowski's poem.

Every individual deserves his/her life. It's a gift. Live it as you will. However, we have built a society that demands that you conform. Some people struggle with that conformity more than others. Those that struggle, really..Really...REALLY struggle.

Bukowski is speaking to them. He's saying "Be you. You are marvelous." If you do choose to be you, the Gods will delight in you. In fact, they are waiting patiently so they can delight in you.

Again, this is how I read the poem. Right or wrong.
Posted by: Michael Felli | October 22, 2022 at 07:51 PM

The gods will delight but yoy will not be happy or successgul in the world's term,at least most. Don't tirn the Buk into new age pap.
Posted by: Chuck Taylor | May 31, 2023 at 08:18 AM

I think the chap that talked of cutting the last 3 lines.. you're all wondering why he hated those 3 lines. And maybe he did. But if you don't wonder about the 3 lines he asked to cut, and instead look at the line where the poem would have ended with said lines cut.. I think it would make more sense.

The poem begins with the line... Your life is your life. and if the last 3 were cut.. it would end with the line... Your life is your life.
Posted by: Zack | July 08, 2023 at 04:45 AM

Response to the consideration of the poem’s value with or without the last three lines:
One way I thought about it is this:

Without the last three lines, the tone of the message feels confrontational, empowering the reader to push back, to push against in order to pursue being true to one’s self.
And poetically/structurally, this provides no resolve.

Including the last three lines, the tone shifts to hopeful, and suggests an exchange of one kind of submission (against the expected cultural norms) for a different kind of submission (being delighted in)
And poetically/structurally, this provides a satisfying resolve

Either way, Bukowski invites the reader to personalize the message.

Posted by: Virginia | July 24, 2023 at 12:04 PM