The Best American Poetry

Happy birthday, Robert Pinsky [by David Lehman]

As one who believes 
in the poetics of the big tent,
I say we make this an annual event
in the season of changing leaves.
And this year, as you turn seventy-seven,
whom do I see
in heaven
but Igor Stravinsky
speaking for all
In celebrating, as a rite of fall,
your birthday, Mr. Pinsky.

David Lehman

10 / 17 / 17

On Sonny Rollins's Birthday [by David Lehman]

                                        for Jamie Katz

Speaking of the devil
you know and the tenor
saxophonist your father
played with, today is
Sonny Rollins's birthday 
(September 7, 1930) how's
that for good luck his
rendering of “I've Got You
Under My Skin” is on Blue  
Note Plays Sinatra (1995)
I knew they called him Newk
because he looked like Don
Newcombe of the Brooklyn
Dodgers and for a while he
practiced daily on the
Williamsburg Bridge 
but not until I talked to you
today, dear friend, did I learn
he said it was a good place
to practice because no
one complains about the noise

9 / 7 / 17            5 PM

Happy birthday, Leonard Bernstein, 100 years old today

 

It Happens Once a Year: Elaine Equi wins the Daily Double

Invocation

Come Inspiration,

sweet as two beautiful hookers
in a dream.
Don't go girls --

even if you don't know a thing
about poetry,

at least help me decide
what to wear

-- Elaine Equi (whose birthday is today, July 24). Click here for more about this all-star.

In Favor of Barbara Stanwyck [by David Lehman]

I cast my ballot in favor of Barbara Stanwyck.

Born in Brooklyn Heights on July 16, 1907, Barbara Stanwyck was an atypical Cancer, with both her moon and her rising sign in Virgo. Gemini, the sign of the twins, rules her midheaven. A talented actress (Mercury in Leo), she was able to project a wide variety of women -- a paranoid hypochondriac, a confidence artist, a calculating femme fatale, an unflappable witness to a murder -- in modes tragic or comic.

According to Isaac Babylon in The Charts of the Stars, his classic study of six Hollywood starlets from the 1940s (Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford), Stanwyck's Virgoesque self-restraint combined with the gush of watery emotion that comes from having not only her sun but her Venus, Jupiter, and Neptune in Cancer. She was a good businesswoman (Mars in Capricorn) but prone to morbidity (Saturn in Pisces). 

The actresses of the 1940s – we can add Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell to Babylon’s list -- belie the notion that women born before the age of female enlightenment lacked strong models who could either keep their families together despite the stresses of war or be psychiatrists, reporters, con artists; they could solve murders or commit them, could go crazy, could run a restaurant, pack a gun, slap her daughter, commit adultery, or risk her life as an American agent in South America during World War II.

Barbara Stanwyck came from a working class background. She went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Thanks to shrewd investments (Mars in Capricorn) she grew rich. It figures that she never won an Oscar though she was nominated four times. Her real name was Ruby Stevens. She was hilarious in The Lady Eve and superb in Golden Boy. She helped William Holden get the title part and became Holden's lucky star. He was crazy about her as photos taken on the set of “Executive Suite attest. In 1939 she married Robert Taylor. Whisperers said it was a sham designed to get gullible people to believe the two stars were heterosexual. Taylor was four years younger than Stanny. "The boy's got a lot to learn and I've got a lot to teach," she said. She kept the ranch and horses when they divorced in 1951. Robert Wagner said he had a four-year affair with her. Could be.

Stanwyck had a sharp tongue. She defined "egotism" as "usually just a case of mistaken nonentity." She had a proud notion of her true worth. "Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don't care what happened before. I don't even care if I was IN the rest of the damned thing. I'll take it in those fifteen minutes." During the filming of Double Indemnity, the Billy Wilder masterpiece, she says that her co-star, Fred MacMurray, would look at the rushes every day. Babs would say, "How was I?" And Fred, perhaps in keeping with their dialogue in the movie, would reply, "I don't know about you, but I was wonderful!" Actors look only at themselves.

On the day we visited, Stanwyck, a self-described "tough old broad from Brooklyn," took one look at the script and started laughing. What's the matter? "Be a good lad and re-fill my glass. Scotch, rocks, no water. You know what my biggest problem is? My biggest problem is trying to figure out how to play my fortieth fallen female different from my thirty-ninth."

-- DL  Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration

On your birthday, Willie Mays, we tip our caps to you [by Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Duke Snider]

 

We got together in secret the other day
and discussed the center field position
We decided among ourselves
you are the greatest in New York,
which means everywhere.

Sincerely,

Joe DiMaggio,
Mickey Mantle
Duke Snider

On the Sixth of May, Freud's birthday (and that of Willie Mays) [by David Lehman]

Freud visited the United States in December 1929

(1) To investigate the spate of suicides following the stock market crash in October

(2) To meet with his American editor, Maxwell Perkins.

(3) To give the celebrated Kramden lectures at Princeton.

(4) Freud never visited the United States

(5) Do you mean Lucien Freud

This one didn't make it into the published version of "Freud Quiz." But this one did -- and triggered a response from Kathleen Heil in 2008:

 

February 23, 2008

Freud Quiz #5

What is the "compulsion to repeat"?

(a) the impulse to keep doing the thing that scares you -- in an effort to master the fear

(b) the wish to make the same mistake twice, and be forgiven 

(c) the reason why Hitler copied Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia

(d) the need to repeat the same futile action and the madness of expecting a different result

(e) the rhetorical strategy of using the same word (or an anagram of it) in every sentence of a paragraph

-- DL

The Compulsion to Repeat

(after reading David Lehman's Freud Quiz #5)

I'm going to begin by repeating a phrase
oft repeated
and despised by those like me who dislike
repetition for impression
a friend of mine
a poet
made a quiz about Freud:
what is the compulsion to repeat
to do the thing that scares you
over again and be
forgiven
or should we ask Hitler about Napoleon
and Russians about the madness of repeating the same futile action in hopes of expecting a different
result repeat it
in repeating your quiz, David
I pretend to make a poem
because
pretender
in Spanish is a lovely way to say
you tried, didn't you
implied, the failure being the outcome of your compulsion,
also to woo, court,
pretender
try it is better than our word to be
repeated repeat try
in a rhetorical strategy
to be better than pretending
to repeat what almost was
yet another attempt
to try and get
that Spaniard to pretend.

Kathleen Ignatius [i.e. Kathleen Heil]
Madrid, Spain
5 marzo

 

 

Happy birthday, Jimmy, the people's cherce

 

Jimmy teaches Sinatra how to sing. . .'

"It doesn't have to be witty or smart / just along as it comes from the heart"' 

 

Happy birthday, Frank (East of the Sun & Fools Rush In 1940)

 

 

Happy birthday, John Ashbery: 90 years of greatness

Happy birthday

to John Ashbery

born July 28, 1927

Great American Poet

a Leo with Virgo rising

who shares a birthday with Gerard Maney Hopkins, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Marcel Duchamp, and Malcolm Lowry 

On the left below: JA by Larry Rivers; on the right below JA with Jim Cummins chez Lehman (2009). Center: "Birthday Whoopee," a 2016 collage by John Ashbery

Happy Birthday, Marilyn Monroe

 

 click here for a discussion of Marilyn's virtues as a singer

"The Birthday of the World" [by David Shapiro]

The Birthday of the World  
               for David Lehman's birthday

In Jewish theology, there are reasons why certain holidays are two days and some are one.
Why, do you think, David Lehman?
You might say because one is more important than the other.
This seems on the famous surface to be correct.
Or you might say it gives people in strange lands time to celebrate.
And that is valid as a Sukkah has holes.
But we say:
Just as your birthday should be beautiful
beauty itself means you should want to prolong it
as in Stay, birthday. Stay, little Valentine, stay. Each day is David's birthday.
So here is the rub: Prolonging the beautiful means that I am sending you
a late card it seems, but only late to those who don't stay up with their martinis
and prolong and prolong and when we are so pro-life that we don’t know the difference
between David and David, between good and evil, Mordechai and David,
then we know we are celebrating something secular sacred and beautiful.
How often can I use that wretched word? As many times as will prolong this birthday.
My wife asks: Are you MUCH younger than me?
Every year we take our breath and hold our breath to prolong our breath
   the birthday    best of all. 

– David Shapiro
June 12, 2009

from Jacket

Happy birthday, Marilyn Monroe, Queen of June Geminis (Reprise) [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday is today), sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (In another column I will salute the wonderful voices that emerge from Mesdames Hayworth, Novak, Kerr, Wood, and Hepburn in those flicks. Say, does anyone say "flicks" anymore?)  See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. The way she pronounces the "z" in Berlin's "Lazy," for example, or the electricity when she strolls among the nightclub plutocrats and sagely notes that "after you get what you want you don't want it. / I could give you the moon, / you'd be tired of it soon. / You're like a baby, / that wants what it wants when it wants it, / ah, but when you are presented / with what you want you're discontented." (Irving Berlin never fails to amaze me.) This lyric was made to order for Miss Monroe. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. There's a heat wave coming in from the south and you can't keep your eyes of the north of her body even as your brain wanders to the tropics. "The way that she moves / the thermometer proves / that she certainly can can-can."  No, you can't keep your eyes off her, all of her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. Listen to her do "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare MM's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and commands Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to cease and desist; don't "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses. -- DL

On Marianne Moore's Birthday [by David Lehman]

Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by Marianne Moore.

The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book of American Poetry. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web. What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncrasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem –– and it is certainly not as good a poem.

The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."

The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase “I was goaded into doing by XY” implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what  “This man” (or “the teacher”) said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks “a sort of heightened consciousness.” The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word “occasion” in line four, obliging us to understand how the epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.

From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.

The Past is the Present

 If external action is effete
   and rhyme is outmoded,
        I shall revert to you,
   Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
       into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed
                      Verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
    his identical words:
       “Hebrew poetry is
    prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy
                    affords
       the occasion and expediency determines the form." 

– Marianne Moore

corrupt / alternative version found on the web:

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

Happy Birthday, Ron Padgett [by David Lehman]

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)

On Debussy's Birthday [by David Lehman]

08 / 22 / 08

Today in 1862
Claude Debussy was born.
I remember where I was and what I was doing
one hundred years and two months later:
elementary algebra, trombone practice,
Julius Caesar on the record player
with Brando as Antony, simple
buttonhook patterns in football,
the French subjunctive, and the use
of "quarantine" rather than "blockade"
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was considered the less belligerent word.
Much was made of it in 1962,
centenary of Debussy’s birth.
And if today I play his Rhapsody
for Saxophone and Orchestra
for the ten minutes it requires of
my undivided attention, who will attack me for
living in Paris in 1908 instead of now?
Let them. I'll take my stand,
my music stand, with the composer
of my favorite Danse Tarantelle.

-- David Lehman

"Happy Birthday, Rae Armantrout!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

RAE ARMANTROUT (4/13)

Armantrout! Armantrout!
RAH RAH RAH
We’re takin’ all the garbage out
And AH HA HA

With a hatch-an-egg, hatch-an-egg
Howdja like me now:—
I want ’em both to hibernate
And have ’em show me how

With a troubadour, troubadour
Truman on the air:—
Like a Cuban toucan so that you can
Tell he doesn’t care

Just like a tuna leg and Armantrout
And RAH RAH RAH
We are learning how to talk about
The AH HA HA

•

"Happy Birthday, Kathleen Rooney!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

KATHLEEN ROONEY (3/2)

Birthday love to the Countess Kathleen!
End over end on the trampoline!
Purple and orange and yellow and green!
With BIRTHDAY LOVE to the Countess Kathleen!

•

"Happy 40, Chris Crawford!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

CHRIS CRAWFORD (2/13)

Crawford! Crawford!
Ya kick it in the head
Ya take it if it’s offered
And smoke it in the bed

Ya smoke it in the bed
Ya smoke it in the pasture
Crawford! Crawford!
You never shoulda asked her

Crampoline and Trampoline
And Trapper got a pelt:
We trying out the Benzedrine
And seeing how it felt

With a Bric-a-brac and Awkward
Backing up the loo
Crawford! Crawford!
A-whatcha gonna do

Crawford! Crawford!
Ya kick it in the head!
Ya take it if it’s offered
And then ya go to bed

And then ya go to bed!
And then ya go to bed!!
Crawford! Crawford!
And then ya go to bed

•

"Happy 38, Emily Kendal Frey!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

EMILY KENDAL FREY (1/20)

A piece of chocolate cake.
A wedge of lemon pie.
This birthday poem is written to
Emily Kendal Frey.

I dunno what I can do.
I never refuse to comply.
This birthday poem is written to
Emily Kendal Frey.

Potter and Otter and you.
And Dickens and Pickens and I.
This birthday poem is written to
Emily Kendal Frey.

I bet I know somebody who
Adores you and now you know why
This birthday poem is written to
Emily Kendal Frey.

☎

Miss Emily Kendal Frey!
Impossible! don’t even try!
These lions and tigers, oh my!
Are for Emily Kendal Frey!

Miss Emily Kendal Frey!

•

SATELLITE QUATRAIN CALLED “EVERYBODY LUZZ YOU”

Gwendolyn’s bent upon you.
Like Wendell and Mendel and I.
This birthday poem is written to
Emily Kendal Frey.

•