The Best American Poetry

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

"Affirmation" [by Donald Hall]

The late Donald Hall pictured here with his wife, Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall was born on this day in 1928. As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989 -- the second volume in the series -- he taught me much about the making of an anthology. As a man of letters, who felt as comfortable writing a profile of Henry Moore or a sports story about the Boston Celtics as a romantic poem for Jane or an essay in literary appreciation, he proved that the life of a poet and the career of a professional writer could coincide. He worked in a variety of genres and wrote for periodicals as different from one another as The Paris Review and Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe and Yankee, and showed by his example that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do, and all the styles and forms of writing are valid: the interview, the children's story or poem, the textbook, the diatribe, the anecdote, the blessedly unself-centered memoir in which the emphasis is on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Join me in saluting this masterly poet, teacher, editor, writer. -- DL

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-- Donald Hall

Ben Jonson Proposes a Toast to Stacey Lehman on Her Birthday

 

Song: To Celia

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
        And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
         And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
         Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
         I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

         Not so much honouring thee

As giving it a hope, that there

         It could not withered be.

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

         And sent’st it back to me;

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

         Not of itself, but thee.

 

-- Ben Jonson

 

Note: Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572 --  birthday, too, of other stars from Vince Lombardi and Joe Montana to Barnabe Googe and William Styron --  which makes him a prototypical workaholic manic-depressive Gemini poet who refused to limit himself to one genre and who fathered the "tribe of Ben" -- the Cavalier poets who were, in effect, the children of his right hand, Benjamin meaning "child of my right hand" in Hebrew. 

Bukowski on His Birthday (August 16)

Many artists and writers gather their strength by opposing the established order, but sooner or later the successful ones are assimilated into the culture (Allen Ginsberg, the Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco). Usually it happens belatedly but with hyperbolic claims as if to compensate for years of indifference or inattention. There are even times when the lag between rejection and celebration vanishes to nothing, as Gertrude Stein wrote in her brilliant lecture "Composition as Explanation." When the culture swallows the fashionable anti-establishment poetry of the moment, the result may be a mild case of indigestion. A good example is anti-war poetry of the 1960s, which was immediately accepted and glorified and is of absolutely no interest today.

The poet who has resisted assimilation longest and most strenuously is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is the real thing, like Mexican Coke, a simile he would not have embraced, being a man who sets store by bourbon, whores with good legs, and the twenty-dollar window at the track. His poetry resists the mainstream as, say, even the radical Ginsberg of the 1950s doesn't.  Bukowski is as enamored of himself as anyone else but he takes himself less seriously as a literatus. He keeps his brain in the post office where he labors as one of the proles. This humility is one reason he appeals to readers, and he has genuine and ardent readers. Bukowski has long led the league in one important category: more of his books are stolen than those of any other author, an enviable distinction.

Read The Continual Condition, the most recent of Bukowski's posthumous collections, and you will see how he manages to make the reader feel that what he is saying really happened and in just the way described. He uses his artistry to conceal his artistry. He depicts himself, in such poems as "Rejected" and "The Theory," as emphatically ugly -- and at the same time he insists upon his virility. In the former, an editor rejects a story on the grounds that "to infer that an ugly man your age / had sex with four women in one day / is simply infantile day-dreaming." So what does Buk do? He spends the rest of the poem fleshing out this very situation.

About poetry Marianne Moore wrote, "I, too, dislike it." Bukowski would revise that to read "I, too, shit on it." He had an outstanding bullshit detector, and his poems in scorn of the Beats and other celebrated authors ("Ginsberg was / brought in / petted and / dismissed. / Burroughs was / still o.k. / but hardly / interesting / anymore. / Mailer, well hell, / that's big publishing, and / Olson, you know, well, / those breath pauses were / out of date / but meeting him / was nice") are funny and, well, nice.

Bukowski's power lies in the fact that he acknowledges he is no better than anyone else and yet he remains the hero of his own life. His poems seem raw but are tightly controlled and secretly much more in the know than you might think. (Li Po and Catullus make sneak appearances in "as Buddha smiles"). I intend to write more about this fascinating, politically incorrect but irresistible personage soaked in alcohol but for now will leave you with these lines, the opening lines of a poem, which will arrest your attention and won't let it go: "the god-damned ants have come marching here / and are climbing into my wine, / I drink them down." 

It wasn't deliberate, but Stacey and I were married on Charles Bukowski's birthday.

DL

From the archive; first posted on the BAP blog on September 23, 2011

"Appeal to the Grammarians" [by Paul Violi]

Paul Violi (1944 -2011) would have been 78 today. So let's read one of Paul's poems.

Appeal to the Grammarians

We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we're capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we're ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,
The flat tire at journey's outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, "See, that's why
I don't like to eat outside."

Paul Violi is pictured here with David Shapiro and George Green at the "Best American Poetry 2009" launch celebration in September 2009.

From "Sincerity and Authenticity" on July 4th, Lionel Trilling's Birthday

Here is the magnificent final paragraph of "The Authentic Unconscious," the final chapter of Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), his last book, which originated as the Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1970.

<<< Yet the doctrine that madness is health, and that madness is liberation, receives a happy welcome from a consequential part of the educated public. And when we have given due weight to the likelihood that those who respond positively to the doctrine don’t have it in mind to go mad, let alone insane—it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that, in radical psychology as in radical politics, it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence—we must yet take it to be significant of our circumstances that many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency. Perhaps exactly because the thought is assented to so facilely, so without what used to be called seriousness, it might seem that no expression of disaffection from the social existence was ever so desperate as this eagerness to say that authenticity of personal being is achieved through an ultimate isolateness and through the power that this is presumed to bring—the falsities of an alienated social reality rejected in favor of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ but with none of the inconveniences of interceding, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished. >>>

Notice the last phrase and how eloquently it concludes the allegorical identification of "each one of us" as "a Christ." Written to counter the idea that madness is a necessary component of genius, the graf concludes with a summary statement followed by a dash, not a typical Trilling ploy. What follows the dash reiterates the main point with a twist achieved by the strategic use of "psychopathic" to alter the common meaning of "upward mobility" -- as if a term usually associated with matters of money and social class could well apply to the case of madness as an ideal. And then follows the remarkable metaphor, with its understanding of what divinity entails, its definition of what it means to be "a Christ." In the Gospel According to St. John, Christ's last words on the cross are  "It is finished." These are the book's last words.-- DL

 

97 Reasons to Celebrate Stanley Moss on June 21

Because you stand still long enough to gather the finest moss.

Because you stand.

​Because you roll.

Because you rolled 197 topping​ all competitors at Neptune Lanes.

Because you're Stan the Man.
Because we had lunch at Lupa on Thompson just off Houston.

Because you know Irwin Shaw and forgot to tell him.

Because you are a bronze satyr.

Because of Wystan.

Because of César Vallejo

Because one Stanley deserves another

Because if you're Stanley I'm a living stone

Because of Kunitz and Moss

Because the angel was wrong but angelic 

Because it's better to be angelic than right

Because when you were 82 it was fifteen years ago. Just think of it.

Because of European painting.

Because of Rome and Barcelona.

Because there are ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall.

Because I'm just getting started.

Because God breaketh not all men's hearts alike.

Because I believe in God.

Because 81% of Americans believe in god.

Because of what happens if you put "only" before "81%": in that sentence.

Because I capitalize the God I believe in.

Because of the history of color.

Because of the intelligence of clouds.

Because you speaketh the truth.

Because of your stance, Stan.

Because of Yale and the Navy.

Because very few poets were born during the summer solstice.

Because your ideal age is 32.

Because I could devote 65 more lines to celebrate your birthday.

"Superbly Situated" [by Bob Hershon, May 28,1936 - March 20, 2021]

Superbly Situated

you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things

i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed

 

and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed

how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you

part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses

just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them

but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat

we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve

From How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express (1985). Photo below, left to right: David Lehman. Bob Hershon, Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally

Denise Duhamel’s "Kinky" turns 25! [by Stacey Lehman]

Barbie and Ken,1960

And Limp Wrist magazine is celebrating with a special two-part issue. I'm on board! I love Denise's Barbie inspired book of poems and if you haven't read it, you owe yourself that pleasure. For a taste, I give you these lines, from Sensational Barbie:

        When Barbie was under
anesthesia, her whole body
replaced with smooth plastic,
she swore she heard her doctors
telling smutty jokes.
When the surgeons sliced off her nipples
to put in the silicone implants
they decided to leave the milk-outlets off
because, after this, the nerve endings
would be dead and Barbie
wouldn't be able to feel
anything anyway....

            from Sensational Barbie, by Denise Duhamel

Here's an excerpt from Dustin Brookshire's editor's letter to Limp Wrist's readers along with two poems from this landmark issue, selected by Kinky's author Denise Duhamel:

Anyone that knows me knows I’m the super fan of two Ds—Dolly and Denise.  I discovered and fell in love with poetry through the work of Anne Sexton, but it is the poetry of Denise Duhamel that showed me I could write the type of poems that I wanted to write. While a few high school teachers encouraged me to write poems, they taught that pop culture references don’t have a place in poetry. Denise, a queen of pop culture references, taught me otherwise. . . 
Kinky is the book I recommend that shows poetry can be about anything.  It’s the book I pull from when people tell me that they don't like poetry. It’s the book that (actually!) taught me something about the “Dolly rumor mill”—thanks “Barbie in Therapy, Part II” for enlightening me about the rumor that Dolly is a lesbian.  It’s a book that I keep a backup copy of in case my original is damaged beyond use. Kinky is a book that I turn to again and again, and it never ceases to entertain and inspire me. . .
Kinky turns 25 today, and this milestone birthday has inspired this special issue of Limp Wrist.  When I realized that the publication date of Kinky and Barbie’s birthday are only separated by eight days, I knew the universe was signaling that this special issue had to be created.  I’ll be forever appreciative that Denise immediately agreed when I asked if she would co-edit this issue.

Here are two poems from the Limp Wrist Kinky issue, chosen by Denise Duhamel:

In Defense of My Mother Who Never Bought Me a Barbie Dreamhouse

            by Caridad Moro-Gronlier 

I was too young to understand
just how young my mother was
when she worked the nightshift
at TRW, building spacecrafts
with her hands, too young to know
how it felt to hand over the whole
of her check to my father
who gave her an allowance—
ten dollars after 40 hours,
ten dollars he’d drop into her palm
every pay day.

I understood Barbie called the shots.
That Dreamhouse was hers, Ken,
an accessory sans the authority
to tell her what to do.

I wrote thirty-one letters
to Santa that year,
but he wasn’t in charge.

My father was.

I thought I stood a chance
because Mami loved Barbie’s
mid-century mod A frame too,
how the chalet gleamed up at us
from the slick pages of the Sears catalog,
the wonder of real jalousie windows
and wall-to-wall carpets unfurled
on the kitchen table where she calculated
just how long she’d have
to lay that chalet away,
just how much she’d have to beg
to convince my father to pay.
I watched her turn the page,
no dogear to save her place.

I’d like to say I was happy
with the Barbie Dream Plane
she placed under the tree, but I blamed her.
It would take years to understand
she didn’t want me to dream of staying put,
she wanted me to dream of flying away.

Abused Barbie
            by Dorianne Laux

Always wears long sleeves, scarves
to disguise her long neck, leggings
even in summer.  She flinches
when anyone raises a posable arm,
shoves an opposable thumb
at the door and tells her
to get out.  She drives
to the ocean’s ragged edge
with the top down, parks
near the pilings, a seagull
perched on each, the chains
between them swinging,
singing in the sea breeze. 
Here she can breathe, bring
the clean salt-scrubbed air
into her hollow body, one
of the first ever made
before they went to solid
plastic to make the legs
and arms more bendable
so she could throw them up
to cover her face. 

You can read all of Limp Wrist's Kinky issue here.
Find out more about Denise Duhamel here. 
Read Denise's blog posts here. 

-- sdl

"Yellow Wild Flower" [by Laura Cronk]

Yellow Wild Flower

I can eat as much as a big man. Wiry stems scarf up
sunlight, roots muscle through dirt getting at water.
If I could walk, I would run. Instead I shoot up
starburst buds and pinwheels of thick yellow.
Behind each bloom that’s going white at the edges,
about to look nibbled or crumpled or done,
there’s another spikey ball, ready. If I could walk,
I would never sit down. I stand straight, pixie cut
ruffled in the wind. There’s no swaying, there’s no
lolling a lush peony head toward all I want, hinting
hard. If I’m hungry, I say it. I eat and grow. I dare you
to scan this meadow and tell me you’re not thinking
yellow, yellow, yellow.

--Laura Cronk

Happy birthday, Laura (pictured above with a friend and colleague).

 

"That Too" [by Lawrence Joseph]

“That Too”

A long walk up West Street along the piers.
The sky—right now the sun,
the clouds, a few seconds of light yellow.

The deepest being being a longing
to satisfy the longing for a solitude of two.

Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation,” that too.

Surely the blacks and golds
are the depth of a late October afternoon. Surely
the blues and greens fired by crimson are the sea.

from A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems by Lawrence Joseph

Ed. note: Happy birthday, Larry.

On Richard Wilbur's Birthday: "Mind"

Mind

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.

-- Richard Wilbur

Ed. note: Richard Wilbur, who died in 2017, would have been 101 today.

Mind

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.

-- Richard Wilbur

Ed. note: Richard Wilbur, who died in 2017, would have been 101 today.

Koufax: Hurricane Sandy Strikes Out the Side [by David Lehman]

The first Major League baseball game I ever saw took place in May 1957 at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The Dodgers, my team, were taking on the New York Giants, and my father took me on the long subway ride from Washington Heights, where we lived, to deep Flatbush, where Duke Snider patrolled center field, Carl Furillo played the caroms off the right field wall and nailed the runner trying to stretch a double, Pee Wee Reese gobbled up grounders with Gil Hodges completing the putout, and Roy Campanella won three MVP awards.

And who should be pitching for the Dodgers that day? A local boy, who played first base at Lafayette High and basketball at the U of Cincinnati: a Jewish "bonus baby" with a fantastic fastball, a lot of potential but somewhat erratic results thus far in his Major League career: Sandy Koufax, born on this day in 1935.

Auspicious. Also, of course, heartbreaking to fall in love with a team that would move to California at the end of that very season, taking the Giants along with them. The Dodgers settled in Chavez Ravine, and Dodger Stadium, erected in 1962, remains the most elegant baseball park in the nation. It is also, amazingly, the third oldest. The Giants have given strutting San Franciscans something extra to cheer about in the last couple of years, but I like the Dodgers' chances with their astute new management this season.

On that May day in 1957 Duke Snider stroked his 1,500th major league hit. He also homered and made a graceful running shoestring catch of the line drive that ended the game. Koufax pitched into the eighth inning when Clem Labine relieved him. The final score: Brooklyn 5 -- New York 3. Ray Jablonski homered for the Jints (the authenticating detail!). I was eight years old and still remember Gil Hodges's smile when, before the game, he turned in our direction and acknowledged the greeting of a devoted fan.To this day I have never had a better seat at a ballpark than that one some ten rows back from first base at little Ebbets Field.

I have known a number of Sandys -- such as Sanford ("Sandy") Friedman, my classmate at Clare College, Cambridge, who quarterbacked our occasional touch football games and knew more than most of us about pipe tobacco, English cheeses, Renaissance poetry, and Wittgenstein.

But I am told that Sandy (like Leslie) is now assumed to be a girl's name -- as you could tell from the coverage of Hurricane Sandy back in 2012. That tempest did terrible damage, and was altogether lamentable, but it did suggest a nickname and an image for the greatest pitcher, who totally owned home plate for a stretch of six years in the early half of the 1960s. Hurricane Sandy. He had the most beautiful curve ball -- it bent like the semicircle that forms the top of a question mark -- but he could beat you even when that pitch deserted him. A steady flow of fastballs mastered the fearsome Minnesota Twins sluggers (Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison) in game seven of the 1965 World Series, won by the Dodgers 2-0.

Now what brought on that memory?

Desire for spring as the winter of our discontent refuses to go gentle into the past?

All of that, plus the chance to praise my Dad, who took me to that game in May 1957 as he had taken me to the United Nations years earlier when it seemed like a significant entity; who gave up a Wednesday afternoon at the office years later for a pair of choice orchestra seats at "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," that perfect musical for the period; and who drove me to Yale (1965) and Harvard (1969) for memorable visits?

Nice to praise the greatness of Sandy Koufax and your own father in the same column, I must say.

--- DL

Originally posted on Sandy Koufax's birthday, December 31, 2015.

"That Ship Has Sailed" [by Terence Winch]

That Ship Has Sailed

In our old life, we ate ice cream and bread
pudding. We drank glass after glass of
Grand Marnier until it made us sick.
Our libido was as big as a billboard.
Our libido was larger than a drive-in
theater screen in the middle of nowhere
playing endless adolescent pornographic
classics. We had an appetite for appetite.
We poured melted lard all over our
popcorn which we then covered
with a snowstorm of salt. We smoked,
we snorted, we cavorted with people
who were best left alone. We talked
all fucking night on the phone. We read
Keats and Yeats and all the greats
day and night. We got into fights
in pubs. We drank sixteen cups
of coffee every day. We called in sick
and spent the day in mysteries, doubts,
uncertainties. We shirked our
responsibilities without a second
thought. We ate Chinese food
and pizza for breakfast. We rode
the bus to visit friends wherever
they might be. We stole books.
We cheated, we lied, we cried.
We danced all night in the living
room around the Christmas tree.

In our new life, we try to remember
the names of the people we think
we might have slept with. We haul
the bags of frozen broccoli out
of the freezer. We light a candle
to commemorate crossing
the great divide between
the green island of the young
and the songs in our bones
that have come unsung.

https://acrossthemargin.com/three-poems-by-terence-winch/

Happy birthday, Dorothy Parker

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, author
of witty poems and 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
and thought of Miss Parker,
and what she might say,
assessing the spectacle of our day:
“Even the nicest lasses
Have tattoos on their asses.”

-- David Lehman

Street Musicians [by birthday boy John Ashbery]

One died, and the soul was wrenched out   
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets   
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on   
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows   
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever   
Called, through increasingly suburban airs   
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:   
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels   
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached   
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows   
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself   
In November, with the spaces among the days   
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.   
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left   
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared   
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

John Ashbery, “Street Musicians” from Houseboat Days. 
Copyright © 1987, 1979 by John Ashbery.

Astrological fact: Ashbery, a  July Leo with Virgo rising, and a lot of Virgo in his chart, outraged the astrological community by ending his poem “The Skaters” with these lines:

The constellations are rising
In perfect order:
Taurus, Leo, Gemini

From John Ashbery as Icon by Jonathan Walker:  <<< “By placing Leo ahead of Gemini, as if the world went from May to August and then back to June, Ashbery either (a) deliberately  subverted the natural “order,” (b) questioned the concept of “perfection” when related to the heavens (or any force outside of human agency),  or (c) exhibited an aloof indifference to fact, thus showing that (a) ignorance of esoteric matters is not a liability, or (2) one was entitled to disregard the Vietnam War as a subject even if good citizenship requires that one “brush the teeth” and all that. >>

Asked to comment, Ashbery recommended the Kirby cocktail at Trestle on Tenth, on 10th Ave and 24th St. The recipe consisted of “gin (Plymouth, I think), sweet vermouth (I think), cucumber juice (I think) made from kirby cucumbers, which are now in season--they're the small, pickle-like ones, Cynar aperitif (it's an Italian brand, made from artichokes), and orange bitters, which proved very difficult to find.  Maybe you could have one at the bar there to (a) see if you like it, and (b) coax the recipe out of the bartender (though they didn't seem very secretive about it).”

Our Birthday (June 11)

Dear Beth, Leo, Pauline, Allan,
Joshua, LaWanda, Deborah, Sabrina, and Jordan:
Born today, like us, were the poets
Ben Jonson and Barnabe Googe.
Also Vanzetti (of Sacco and Vanzetti)
and Loeb (of Leopold and Loeb)
and Green Bay’s coach Vince Lombardi,
who said winning is the only thing;
Joe Montana, who won;
Gene Wilder, funny man;
Erving Goffman, author of
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life;
Irving Howe, whose name asks
a question of the universe,
and William Styron, who suffered.
And so I write to praise the day
on which, in 1966, Tiffany Cohen
was born, who won gold medals
swimming the 400 and 800 meter freestyle
in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

--  David Lehman 

"June 11" by David Lehman -- in English & Portuguese (trans. Francisco Carvalho)

11 de Junho

Faço anos tenho a barriga vazia Posts
desejo preguiçar na rede
ir talvez nadar num dia quente
com o trombone de "I've Got You
Under My Skin" do Sinatra
metido na cabeça depois parar
para o almoço uma sanduíche
de carne de vaca enlatada e uma Pepsi
com muitos cubos de gelo ao contrário de França
onde põem um mísero cubo de gelo
na nossa Coca cara e quando
pedimos mais discutem connosco
desta maneira dizem pelo preço
fica com mais Coca mostrando não
perceberem nada da essência dos
refrigerantes Americanos que são uma
desculpa para os cubos de gelo contudo
não me importaria de uns dias por
lá ocorre-me a atitude do Philip Larkin
em relação à China quando lhe perguntaram
se gostaria de lá ir respondeu sim
se pudesse voltar no mesmo dia

-- trans. Francisco Carvalho; 6 / 26 / 19 

June 11

It's my birthday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
with the trombone in Sinatra's
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
in my head and then to break for
lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi
with plenty of ice cubes unlike France
where they put one measly ice cube
in your expensive Coke and when
you ask for more they argue with
you they say this way you get more
Coke for the money showing they 
completely misunderstand the nature of
American soft drinks which are an
excuse for ice cubes still I wouldn't
mind being there for a couple of
days Philip Larkin's attitude
toward China comes to mind when
asked if he'd like to go there he said
yes if he could return the same day

—David Lehman (from The Daily Mirror)

Selfie with Marilyn Monroe: Writing in the Persona of Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

She was a just postcard at the MOMA, a stamp of pink and lemon yellow. Her mouth, a red smear, slightly open. Is that a word forming, wanting to slip from tongue to lip to air. Trapped in an Andy Warhol silk screen.

I bought the postcard, propped it on my desk. We gazed at each other.

What did I know about Marilyn Monroe—nothing really—blonde bombshell, actress, married to Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, something about the Kennedys, died young, suicide?  She was just a very famous face. But arguably the first female celebrity known by a single name. And still the most enduring. Even 60 years after her death, she’s still here, on YouTube, all over the Internet, and at the moment, in the form of a controversial statue in Palm Springs.

Why is that?

Turns out Marilyn pioneered multiplication—And I don’t mean math, but the concept of blanketing the world with her image, before the Internet made it easy— she was the first instant celebrity, it gave her power. She created the Marilyn Monroe image then projected and performed it over and over.

Think about yourself. How do you appear on Instagram, Hinge or Twitter? Isn’t social a form of  multiplication? Aren’t we all projecting and performing? Every selfie is posed and a pose. Even in real life, we perform some version of our self. I am now. So are you.

T.S. Eliot wrote about putting on a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” The daily act of assuming a persona. As a poet, to really explore our performance culture, I assumed someone else’s persona—Marilyn’s.

For two years, I became Marilyn in poetry. It began in Paris in July 2018. A place where I had first come as a student, even then assuming a role—dipping my tongue into the language to spend long nights in cafés and bars, drinking Pernod, smoking Gauloises and imagining myself Hemingway. But now, decades later, I had greater ambitions. I was going to become Marilyn Monroe.  Or maybe it had started earlier, in 1994 when I moved to Los Angeles and fell under the spell of faces plastered on billboards and ran into stars in the supermarket. The glitter of LA shaking onto my skin and sticking as I went about my life, working, raising my family. But all the time, perhaps it was there lurking—the desire to be someone else, to be the world’s most famous woman, to be Marilyn Monroe.

As I wrote, I came to know her many faces, the layers of her performance. I stripped away the façade, pushed against stereotype to try to find her truth. I found it. Sort’ve. It was fairly easy for me to capture her voice, to tell her story in poetry. She has a lot to say and poetry works for Marilyn. But as I’ve came closer to Marilyn’s truths, I’ve came face to face with my self—Maybe I used her as a foil. By becoming Marilyn, had I been avoiding my own lies?

In the end, the collection I wrote, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, is a poetic insomnia-inspired conversation between Marilyn and the speaker that confronts the truths that many women experience: abuse, addiction, careers, love, marriage and divorce, children and childlessness, mental health and death. In becoming Marilyn, I became closer to understanding myself.

At the Ritz: Plath, Sexton & Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

1958: Eisenhower’s in the White House, Explorer 1 satellite launched, The US. Supreme Court rules for school integration, Elvis joins the Army, the Yankees win the World Series, the microchip is invented, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is published, Marilyn Monroe films Some Like it Hot, Sylvia Plath moves to Boston and joins Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s writing seminars.


It’s also the year I was born. But that is not why I’m here conjuring 1958. Or maybe it is, inserting myself into this story about an imagined cultural intersection of poetry and pop. In my mind, Plath and Sexton are having martinis at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. They’ve come from a Lowell seminar, their minds buzzing. At the next table is Monroe. She’d driven up from Connecticut where she lives with husband Arthur Miller. She’s newly pregnant, her body hormonally adjusting. She’s nervous that she’ll lose this one too, especially as she must fly to LA next month to start filming. As she sips her cup of tea, she thinks about Arthur, his struggles with writer’s block, her need to get away for a few days. Marilyn pulls her journal out of her handbag to write. Truman Capote’s book tumbles out. As she reaches down under the table to retrieve it, she notices the two women at the next table. All other eyes in the dining room are on her, but not theirs. They are deep in conversation. There is something about them that intrigues Marilyn. Does she know them from somewhere? Plath and Sexton are playing it cool. Of course, they know that Marilyn Monroe is sitting next to them. It is only as she looks directly at them, that they turn to meet her gaze.

From everything that I have learned in the research I undertook to write poems in the persona of Marilyn for my newest collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, neither Anne Sexton nor Sylvia Plath never met Marilyn. Plath wanted to, or her subconscious wanted to meet Marilyn according to a 1959 diary entry: “Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. I spoke almost in tears of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us (her husband and herself) although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me a manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.” Discovering this diary entry prompted me to write a poetic response from Marilyn to Plath:

Dear Sylvia,

Give me your bitten hand.

I will paint each moon sliver—

Amaryllis red.

If you are a girl

swirled in the thick of a dream,

I am a play

of red-tongued wolves and barn owl howls.

Let me curl into your hair, crawl beneath

your winter. Scrawl me in lines.

Let me mean everything to you.

I promise lavender and honey cakes

and the taste of Christmas roses.[1]

In fact, as I drafted poems for An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, I had Sexton and Plath on my brain. That all three women suffered mental health issues and would die early by their hand was an obvious connection. But they also were living and making art and pushing against the constraints of being a creative, working woman at a time when women were expected to be homemakers. Sexton, Plath and Monroe began connecting into a single powerful force in my writing. I drafted a cento constructed of lines from poems all three women wrote in 1958. While that poem did not make it into my final collection, remnants of Sexton and Plath’s imagery linger in several of the poems, and specifically the bee imagery from Sexton’s “Said the Poet to the Analyst” and “Ringing the Bells” and Plath’s bee poems particularly “Wintering,” echo in my persona poem, “Hello it’s Me, Marilyn” where Marilyn is dying. Even now, beneath the lilt of Marilyn’s voice, I hear the lower pitched ones of Sexton and Plath in my ear—like a brilliant, feminist chorus and suddenly, there they are in the Ritz hotel, across from the Boston Public Garden, together and it’s 1958.

 

[1] An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn (PANK Books, 2021)

Poets Love Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marilyn Monroe not only loved poetry and poets, poets have reciprocated in writing Marilyn into poetry. While I may be the first to write an entire collection centered around Marilyn, in doing so I have entered into a long tradition of poets who have written poems devoted to or referencing the famous actress.

Marilyn appears in passing in Frank O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis” published in 1957, while Marilyn was still living, as “Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls” and more recently in Alex Dmitrov’s “LOVE” from his new collection LOVE and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over

the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in

champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, “I

cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way

she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will

say au revoir.”

 

In fact, it is Marilyn’s tragic death that poets have explored over and over. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” from 1968, with her death as metaphor for America:

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

        By Edwin Morgan

What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?

Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,

white hearse, Los Angeles,

DiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!

That Death should seem the only protector –

That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights

become an inquisition and a torment –

That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the

inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become

a blur of incomprehension and pain –

That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with

bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie

down and in her anguish

call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could

only dissolve her! A method

of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!

Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die

and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it, America.

Let no one say communication is a cantword.

They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.

But what she had not been able to say

perhaps she had said. ‘All I had was my life.

I have no regrets, because if I made

any mistakes, I was responsible.

There is now – and there is the future.

What has happened is behind. So

it follows you around? So what?’ – This

to a friend, ten days before.

And so she was responsible.

And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?

Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow

white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

 

Then in 1984, Sharon Olds writes a poem with the same title that appears in her collection from that year The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984).

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

By Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close
the mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the side, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

Their lives took
a turn-one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him-a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Marilyn’s death forever transforming the men, and the reader in Old’s poem. We cannot look away. In Frank Bidart’s 1996 poem, “Marilyn Monroe” that ran in The New Yorker, Marilyn becomes a vehicle for the idea and perhaps the impossibility of transformation.

 

Marilyn Monroe

by Frank Bidart

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it.

Your father’s name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind.

You are bitter all that releases

transformation in us is illusion.

Poor, you thought being rich

is utterly corrosive; and watched with envy.

Posing in the garden,

squinting into the sun.

 

Even nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn continues to serve as poetic muse, metaphor and mirror. And there’s no end in sight. Brava Marilyn!