The Best American Poetry

On Fats Waller's Birthday: A Poem [by David Lehman]

Fats Waller Live in 1935

You and I both know why
“all my blondes and brunettes”
become
“all my Harlem coquettes”
when Fats Waller sings
“Lulu’s Back in Town”
after playing it on the piano
in 1935.

Think of that: in 1935
when everyone was supposed
to be miserable, here was Fats Waller
with his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grin
playing and singing for the sheer joy of it.

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

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 the following 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

"Black, Brown, and Beige": Happy birthday, Duke Ellington

1.
The horns say yes proceed
And the sea delivers
Nine waves of applause
Black, brown, and beige
Or red, white, and blue
At Carnegie Hall in World War II

2.
A couple of winds
Sing back and forth like birds
As the sky darkens and clouds
Release their energy
The horns have their say
And even the violins agree
So the answer is yes,
A cymbal crash,
Before the trumpet takes up
The wail and the season changes
From black to brown to orange
In the wah-wah woods

3. You could have one instrument
And the music would continue
Mute the horns
And the music will continue
The notes like masks on the subway
And the streets are empty
Except for the music
Take a walk with me on Broadway
And let the games resume 

4/ 29/ 20

BLESSED AS WE ARE: Happy 95th Birthday, Gerald Stern! (II) [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

                                    What other poet
                                     is on his knees in the frozen clay with a spade
                                    and a silver fork, fighting the old maples,
                                    scattering handfuls of gypsum and moss, still worshipping?

                                                            Gerald Stern --“Making the Light Come”

Listen to Stern read “Torn Coat,” form his new collections: Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020):

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/152229/torn-coat

 We continue the celebration of Gerald Stern’s 95^th birthday (February 22), with a few poems inspired by—and dedicated to — him.

Toi Derricotte

Thoughts on Jerry Stern’s 95^th birthday

I’m reading the
poem by Jerry in the new

New Yorker & right as I
read the last lines about the dead

warbler singing—

“and he sang from time to time, dead or not,
a ‘rising trill,’ as the book says,
in the upper levels where the worms are.”

the noon bells of the cathedral
bong out in agreement!  As if they want

it banged into my head:
The poems are always

with you. Lines like that
visit every day—comforting—

your wise, funny,
loving truths. But when they

put on their coats
to leave,

I hold tight & weep.

Jeff Friedman
The Long Heat Wave

                        for Gerald Stern                    

Give me back the long heat wave, the sweat dripping
from eyelashes, the stained blouses, the black windows,
the spiders dangling from their silver bridges,
the wasps lighting on the branches of the cedar bushes
as they waited for me to make a dash for the screen door.
Give me back Herman Meltzer, our upstairs neighbor,
who forged his last check with a flourish before the police
took him away in his checked pajamas, handcuffed.
Give me back Hanna Gorelick in her red satin robe,
her hair in rollers; and Cathy Cowser naked in front of the window;
and “A Day in the Life” with its scratches and pops,
John Lennon singing “I read the news today, oh boy…”;
and my thick brown hair—every morning
I brushed it down so hard my scalp stung, but the curls
sprung up before I left the bathroom mirror;
and my father warning the butcher at Sherman’s Deli
not to trim off too much fat from the corned beef.
And give me back Barbie Silverman’s long smooth legs
in her black short shorts, the Santa Maria rising from
the bottom of the river, the goddess undressing in the eye of the Arch
as the rabbis chanted to the brown muddy water.
Give me back the blue butterflies streaming
through the emptiness above the tall white sycamores,
the speckled blackbirds shitting on the Handshears’
new Oldsmobile, no matter where they parked.
Give me back my mother balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table—
“Everyone in Israel is beautiful,” she says; and
my father in his shorts, thumbing through
a thumb-size version of The New Testament and
marking in red the passages he would use to make his sales pitch to the goyim,
raising his fist to the TV tube every time he hears
another special report—“But is it good for the Jews?”—
and my sister with her thick black hair,
waiting by the silent phone for a date to call.
Give me back the burning red coils in the sky, the plague of locusts,
God railing into the wind, the dark news that floats through the windows,
the spark of light at the beginning of our world.

Kimiko Hahn: Birthday ode to Jerry
Ode to the Line "oh God of mercy, oh wild God"

You, capping some kind of unhinged sonnet (shops/pots, Philco/Bolero,
tie/automatic eye/1945); after list upon list (in fact, like a ship's listing);
you from a tiny room with knives flashing and red with laughter;
you from the scribbled ballpoint of a deity--I don't believe in God
but you I believe in, what with your 1945 ungodly
farting, screaming, dancing immigrant knowledge that
prompts me to ask of myself what could possibly
be my raging I have never seen X the way I did Y--?

(Note: the line is from "The Dancing" by Gerald Stern)

Jonas Holdeman
Stern Sonnet

                                for Jerry

I’ll bet you didn’t know Gerald Stern was born
on February 22, 1925, that his father’s real
last name was Dohlgypyat and if you did, I’d say
you need to get out more, and I’m sure you didn’t know
when Gerald Stern was 14 years old he rushed into
a burning tenement building, rescued a family of
Ukranian immigrants from certain death by conflagration—
and though that didn’t really happen,
I don’t think Jerry would mind if I told you that
or about when, at breakfast, he tapped the back
of my hand with an index finger, asked, Did you know
I ran the mile in high school? went on to tell how, every day
after classes, he hiked up Overlook Drive to Schenley Oval,
the abandoned horse track in south Pittsburgh to make two circuits
of the mile and a quarter, run until Harry, his father, came to get him
and I can see him now setting down his books,
walking the packed dirt freckled with chickweed and clover and violets
toward the grandstand, breaking into a slow trot,
rounding the first turn, churning into a canter, legs pumping
now into a gallop, surging the curves, plunging
headlong down the homestretch, hair flying wildly behind
as he tossed his head, screaming with pain or joy--
then he told me about a boy, an eight year old messenger,
blue wool jacket, red satin tie, funny grown man hat,
delivering messages, packages all over downtown
and how he had to go into the Asbury Hotel, how there was
a sign in the lobby, “No Jews and no dogs,”
that’s the way it was in those days,
asked could I imagine walking into that place every day,
every day seeing that sign and wondering,
What could they possibly have against dogs?

David Rigsbee
At Last a Meadow

                for Gerald Stern at 95

I drove down with Linda
to meet you in 1977, that tough year.
On the way back, careening through the Poconos,
we nearly soared off a cliff, when I launched 
into an inspired and definitive analysis 
of “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which she thought,
tossing her blonde mane, ridiculous.
It was the wild beginning of love,
two desperados, an ancient Mercedes,
and an underlined book by that old Nazi, 
Heidegger, tossed in the back.

You opened the door and greeted us, 
I remember, horn-rimmed and blinking.
That was the beginning.  When I visited again
years later with a different girl in tow, 
a picture of you with Paul McCartney
caught my eye.  It was a party, you said.
When he asked you what you did,
you replied, “I’m a poet.”  Then added,
“And what do you do?”  This led to a duet:
“Try a Little Tenderness,” which you correctly
 tied to Jimmy Durante, not Otis Redding.

There was an evening in San Francisco
when we went around the table:  Kizer,
Hirsch, Levine, Diane Johnson, Alice Adams, 
Schevill and the scholar fromage, Leon Edel.  
We were each to recite a poem from memory
and to keep going until we ran out of poems
or drink.  By the end of the evening, only you
endured, reciting with gusto any poem 
we mentioned. Even the most obscure.
I managed only one, the poem that ends,
“time will throw a dart at thee.”  

After I had returned from a summer in Rome,
you showed up at a reading I gave in New York
and cheerfully recalled how you had taken a piss
at the Arch of Titus, the original anti-Semite.
“I guess you could say it was an arch-piss,”
was how you put it, complete with a pause
to allow that to sink in.  Running into you
later at the Met, you recounted, underlining
your cleverness, how you had landed 
a two-week assignment, free of obligation,
at a balmy southern university for $35K.

But there was also the dog, the schnitzel,
opossums and Jack, whose first fame 
puzzled you, Jesus and Nietzsche, Galileo,
1945 and the world “at last a meadow,”
the pigeons and Sylvia, the shaking and sadness
but also the dancing, always the dancing,
and the atrocious singing, and the stories
of Stieglitz and Orwell, of saints forgotten,
of Pittsburgh and Paris, soot and snow,
love affairs, assignations, Poland and Germany
with the dead nearby, brilliant, and beloved.   

Karen Subach: From a postcard sent to Jerry from Rhodes in October, 1995:

Dear Jerry,

You would be walking around
with a sprig of thyme in your hand
and an olive wreath on your head.

You would be waving to Turkey from Rhodes Harbor
and wondering why there was so much bloodshed
when there was Homer
— and Cavafy,
and every lemon picker could recite a little Sappho.

Hurry up and buy your house on Samos!
Find a little door to paint teal—
and a patio with a mosaic
where you can write your poems.

Alicia Ostriker:

Into the Street

                    for Jerry Stern

Here comes the sun again
reminding everyone to rise and shine
so we pour the coffee and hear the news

we pick up the paper and sigh like arthritic dogs,
and we might like to blow our exasperated
brains out, when we think about the world 

then again we might laugh ourselves silly 
figure out how to profit by it
or wonder how to love it anyway

This is what freedom and consciousness are for
as if we are standing on the roof
of a very tall tower

looking at the complicated view
then taking the elevator
going out into the street

Lucky us

Michael Waters
Letter to Stern from Suceava

J:

           The waitress upon whom I’ve bestowed
A vulgar sobriquet, Titsecu,
If only to vex my faux-jealous wife
Who asks if I’d flirted enough to learn
Her name (I’d hunkered down to write a poem),
Would prod you to sing some ’40s standard
Or apt “Romania, Romania,”
Not because she doesn’t know how sorry
Her future in this town will be. She does.
She unbuttons her soiled, unisex smock,
Café Tzara sewn in cursive above
One sentry-stiff breast, just as her girlfriend
Skids the Ducati curbside. And she’s off.
I imagine you here among street kids
Who’d trail you, your rabbinical piping,
From train station and dump and sewer nerves
To the only crêpe stall that serves Gypsies.
Almost ninety, you’d boom out brotherhood—
That worn word—as your lice-ridden parade
Revved past pyramids of rat-gray rubble,
The lunar ruins of this post-comm muddle.
The waitress might hear you and, if she knew,
Almost forgive me. Titsecu, I tease
As my wife struggles not to unfrown.
Tough Titsecu.
                         Ever yr bad boy,
                                                    M                             

We are blessed to live in what your friend Philip Levine named “The City of Gerald,” a city-poem in which we can learn how “to see the universe in an acorn & hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can,” and “where the imagination is king & the honey locust its bride.”

Happy Birthday from all of us poets, readers, students, friends, warbles and red maples!

For essays on Gerald Stern, see Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (edited by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Trinity University Press, 2016)

BLESSED AS WE ARE: Happy 95th Birthday, Gerald Stern! (I) [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

  
                                                                        “….but show me two hands concealing

                                                                            love and you have the whole history of the human race there”

                                                                               -Gerald Stern, “Love,” In Beauty Bright

Jerry,

I open my eyes under the mosquito net and one mother is so close I can see my blood pulsing in her engorged abdomen. She can’t fly yet because she’s too heavy and still working on pumping out the unnecessary water; that’s how fresh our encounter is. I know my blood provides the protein she needs to nourish her eggs. I took what didn’t belong to me to nourish mine. Proof of it: my son is still asleep, serene, under his mosquito net. But I’m itching like hell. And my neighbor almost died of dengue. The mother senses my murderous intentions. I sense that.

It’s February 20, two days before your 95^th birthday. When given a choice of weeks to blog, I chose this one so I may say here, on Best American Poetry, “Happy Birthday” to you, our Best.

Jerry, I will not tell you how mother-mosquito and I settled it, but I can tell you that geckos have been proliferating insanely in this ocean-fronting apartment in Las Terrenas (Dominican Republic), and each day I pretend I have not given roaches an ultimatum, and have been working on my rages (sharpening them, yes) and complicities, and on the trickiest one, mercy.

I have been reading your newest gift to us all, Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020) and your voice reading “Frutta da Looma,” “Adonis,” “Knucklebones,” and “Blessed as We Were” feels as close as it felt when I listened to them in December, in your apartment. I’m reading and re-reading you (you and the poems, you as your own poem) so I may love the world (its peaches and rain and goats and beetles and hollyhocks and cracks and sweet necks and green gracehoppers and live and dead warbles, the baby rat with empty eye sockets, and even every single human, at least for a bit) and love it despite its absurdities and murderous bent, and sometimes I repeat after you, “enough of pain, and down with / 666—I’ll take kindness, most of all / kindness, for love is the murdered thing,” and sometimes “the humming that is called poetry” is enough and sometimes not, and then too I return to your poems, so I may stroke the cicatrix over the dead bullet that’s made a home in your flesh.  

This week I tried to draft a poem for you. It turned into a poem about hot flashes, how they return me to my mothers, how they burn with love. You were in it, a matriarch. You showed me how to save a frog trapped in NYC traffic. Street vendors had run out of boiled chestnuts. You said Don’t ever stop. Walk backwards and forwards. Follow the smell of burned pretzels.

It was a bad draft. It will never be a poem, but you were so outrageously beautiful in it.

Beloved Jerry, here are a few poets sending wishes in anticipation of your birthday—with more celebratory thoughts and a garland of poems inspired by you, for you, tomorrow:

Chase Berggrun: Dearest Jerrele, your smile and song brighten my every day. Here's to 96, 97, 98, and 99. Love always, Chase.(Mihaela’s note: Read also Chase’s “Jerrele: On Being the Personal Assistant to Gerald Stern”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/12/jerrele-on-being-the-personal-assistant-to-gerald-stern)

Jill Bialosky: From the esoteric of “Blind Nothingness” to the mundane of a “Plaster Pig” anything can trigger a magisterial Stern poem that transforms as it evolves.  From our days when I was your student at the Iowa Workshop where one of my nascent poems, “Oh Giant Flowers,” was inspired by your passionate impulse, to championing your later work at Norton, I have been blessed by your loving spirit and your big embracing poetic voice. You are the youngest ninety-five year old I’ve ever known with more brilliance to come. Blessed as We Were is a triumph. 

Kate Daniels: I first fell in love with the poetry of Gerald Stern in 1978 or ’79 shortly after he had published Lucky Life.  I was in the MFA program at Columbia University, and I recall that poets all over the city were talking about an unusual book which had won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was nominated for a National Book Award. It was a somewhat late-in-life second book. Jerry was 52 when it came out: a late bloomer, we younger poets mused. When I read it, I understood why it was the topic of so much conversation. From my first acquaintance with them, Jerry’s poems swept me away with their eclectic voice, magnanimous, even operatic vision, their boldly expressed intensities.  They made me rage and weep. I wanted to write poems like his – big poems capable of carrying big emotions, addressing big, important subject matter. There it all was in the pages of Lucky Life.

It was my infatuation with that book that would have taken me to hear him read at the old Donnell Library on 53rd Street.  While I deeply admired poets like Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren, I was sometimes intimidated by the personae in their poems.  Jerry’s poems seemed to be speaking right in my ear, just to me, conversant with all my secrets and insecurities, giving me permission to be imperfect and unsure. All those years ago, when he stepped to the podium, unbuckled his watch and then tore off his jacket and threw it on the floor, and began reading and talking all in a sort of sweaty jumble, I just fell in love with the messy humanity of the poet himself which so closely replicated what I felt in the poems themselves. 

Since then, I am fortunate to say that I have known Jerry as both poet and friend for more than thirty years. He remains one of the enduring masters for me – of poetry, of course, but also of a certain way of being human that provokes both heartbreak and a warlike rebelliousness.  I am grateful for his longevity, and for the way his work continues.  His parlance – even as he approaches one hundred years old – still delights and staggers me.   Happy birthday, Jerry – you darling, you rascal, you brilliant and subversive old heartbreaker, you poet for the ages.                                                                                                                  

Lynn Emanuel and Jeff Schwartz: As blessed as we are to have you and your poetry. Much love and happy birthday.

Alicia Ostriker:

Dear Jerry, your way of lifting your chin and your voice in glorious praise and blame of our world, in raucous laughter and deep grief for our absurdities, has been an undying model and influence on me.  Yes, you single-handedly changed to course of the river of American poetry.  It needed changing!  Hurrah!  Happy birthday now and forever.

Jeff Friedman:

We’re whirling and singing, our faces red with laughter,
our bones shaky, our trumpets blasting,
Colleen’s hair streaming, my dome with its single crater shining—
whirling and singing, doing the dance of freezing cold New Hampshire,
the furnace on the blink, icicles inside the windows,
the oven on for heat, Ruby barking your name,
the three of us chanting your poems into white clouds,
O glorious 95th, O beautiful Jerry,
With love from Colleen, Ruby and Jeff
And wishes for 5 more Jerry Stern books by your 100th birthday

Ilya Kaminsky: What a lucky life to have met the poet who knows, finally, the power of maples. To know the man who loves cows best when they are a few feet away--and he opens the dining room window, so cows reach in to kiss! What a lucky life! To be blest with everlasting music. Thank you for opening these windows for us, thank you, Gerald Stern.

Richard Katrovas: In the 80s, Jerry visited my first wife Betty and me in New Orleans numerous times. Betty, her mother Lynn, Jerry and I on a couple of occasions fell into one of the Greek bars on Decatur, I think it was the Delphi. The tinny Greek music, cranked up, as always, too loud, made it impossible to communicate without shouting. At one point, a thoroughly shit-faced sailor from one of the Greek merchant ships docked on the river tore off his shirt, jumped on a table, and danced, his face contorted with something part joy, part excruciating pain. Perhaps it was excruciating joy. I thumped my chest and shouted, though the music was so loud only Jerry could hear me, "My people!" Jerry leaned toward my ear and simply said, "That dance is thousands of years old," which was his way of telling me to show a little respect not for the drunk sailor, but for the ancient spirit that inhabited him and mandated that he dance. 

Joan Larkin: Thank you for all the songs––at supper tables, in taxis, in elevators––in all the rooms and on all the pages your voice brings alive. And for the way you wear your hat…  Love on your day and always.

Tony Leuzzi: Dear Gerald, one of the happiest days of my life was meeting you in Lambertville for an interview, followed by a lunch, and then an impromptu search for hats. I learned so much from you that day, not only about your own work, not only about your memories of Stanley Kunitz, and not only about your thoughts regarding Whitman's connection to the Jewish prophets, but also what it means to be immersed in a profession you love. You showed me the manuscript of your then book-in-progress, In Beauty Bright, which happens to contain one of my favorite poems of yours, "The Two Graces." But as I sign off, I must thank you for all of your work and, in particular, a poem that moves me more than all the rest: "Bela"--your tribute to Bela Bartok. As my favorite classical composer, he is perennially undersung by most. But your poem, filled with biographical information, is somehow intensely personal and moving in ways that have given me great joy. I salute you on your 95th!

Phillis Levin: Forever new, dear Jerry, in your ancient faith in the word, you remind us of why we are here and what we are here to do. Thank you for showing us a way to turn and tune one’s being into an instrument of praise. 

Lia Purpura: Happy day, Jerry! We share the same birthday — remember singing to me in the halls of EPB? From Baltimore, I’m singing to you. And with love.

Barbara Ras:    Dearest Jerry,

 If I could I would list 95 reasons why I love, admire, and cherish you. But space prevents that, so I will list 10-- one per decade, rounding up.

1. When your work appeared on the poetry scene, a ripple went through the Force, and poetry was changed forever by your exuberance and originality.
2. Your praise of the world makes me a better person.
3. Your laments urge the world to improve.
4. Your praise and your laments equal each other in beauty, subtlety, ferocity, and righteousness. I would miss them if they didn't exist.
5. Your voice is a song of prophets, Gypsies, cellists, philosophers, the stiff dog, the blind rat, and a universe of the living and the dead, many trees, and roses, just to mention a few.
6. Your music lifts my spirits to places I've never been before.
7. You are funny and wise.
8. Your memory exceeds the length of the Old Testament, which means you know a lot and share your knowledge generously.
9. Our long talks on the phone have been better than sex, though you would probably disagree. It’s okay--even when you disagree I love you.
10. Your friendship has been a miracle in my life.

David Rigsbee: You and your work have been on my mind for nearly 50 years, and I come back to your poems every year.  You have been one of the handful of poets who replenish my own imagination.  Thank you for that and for your kindnesses to me over the years and for your incomparably good company!  

Ira Sadoff: Sending love to my adopted Jewish uncle and dear friend for forty years, who's been so generous, who's inspired me (and countless others) and my work, and whose humor, whose passion for justice, his respect for history and nature has made him not only a great poet but the great person he is. Stay healthy, Jerry. We need you and love you.

Philip Schultz: At JFK waiting for a flight to Rome, remembering seeing you in the 70’s, you on Van Adam, welcoming me to the big city. Always so excited, bursting with joy and love of poetry, life. Such a dear friend, human, our walk in the park a month ago, the same twinkle in your eye. Much love, boychick!

Karen Subach: Blessings, Jerry, on the occasion of your 95th birthday! The times in the backyard of Governor with its tangle of green, you singing, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” turmeric “sunflowers” across your white shirt during curry feasts— and other times during my sorting through your piles of letters on onion skin papers in the house full of quilts, you making your morning phone calls in your wool cap— “Phil! Phil!”— you telling Diane’s son Jason to stop killing mosquitos because each one has a soul—and you shouting from my truck at the homophobic Topekan Christian protestors of arts events: “F*ck all of you! I love sodomy!”— among so many moments of deep awareness, good counsel, father-daughtering, poet-to-poet listening, shared appreciation of absurdity, outrage at injustice, grief at parallel losses—come to mind as I recall you. I love your beautiful wildness— your fearlessness in love and in life. Thank you for your poems. Thank you for your teaching. Health! Peace! Joy! Much love—

Judith Vollmer: Happy Birthday, dearest Jerry, who showed me how to read a city, how to love mine/ours—Pittsburgh—unconditionally, and how to sing the strange music. Blaze on, beloved teacher, beloved friend.

Michael Waters: Your generosity, your poems, and your presence, Jerry, teach me how to be a poet. Your humor and rage given language and shape prod me toward better work. I read your new poems and hear you singing them and suddenly I'm inside your voice. It's a great place to be, a space like no other, distinctive, American, making and remaking itself word by word. Happy 95th, Jerry, and thank you for each of your remarkable gifts.

Ellen Doré Watson: Jerry! O thou of most ravenous & fertile mind—and a heart the size of Greenland!  Trickster, lover, singer, laugher, you have enriched us all with your words and self.  Thank you, in every language.

Afaa 尉雅風: Jerry, so how is it that you are both time traveler and carrier of a magic wand of tradition, crossing genres and generations? You and August Wilson in the same neighborhood? Amazing, my friend, and more amazing that you electrify the language now for nearly a century, a sign of certain immanence or shamanistic bond made in the breath of the three rivers’ air.

Dean Young: Gerald Stern has been a fundamental source of poetic vitality for as long as I have been reading poems.  Over the years, his gait may have changed, but his poems always leap and bolt with ageless energy and verve.  Obviously, Gerald Stern is one of our greatest renewable resources!

Photo of Gerald Stern at The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, September 2010. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald. 

Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald of The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, with Thomas Ellis at the lectern and, in the front row, David Lehman, Amy Gerstler, Amy Glynn, Gerald Stern, David Shapiro. 

Photo of Gerald Stern, Sharon Olds, and David Lehman at launch reading. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.

"Come Rain or Come Shine" with Eileen Farrell & Leonard Bernstein

For Valentine’s Day tomorrow
I recommend Come Rain or Come Shine
with born-today Eileen Farrell
proving an opera singer
can sing great jazz and
Leonard Bernstein proving
he could have been a contender
in the jazz piano arena

Eileen Farrell (1920-2002), one of the great sopranos of the twentieth century, had a radio show in the 1940s, launched a sensational recital career in the 1950s (culminating in Carnegie Hall), sang with the Metropolitan Opera in the 1960s, and on one occasion pinch-hit for Louis Armstrong at a jazz concert. Her first theatrical role was as Little Buttercup in "H. M. S. Pianofore," though little she was not. She was married to a distinguished officer of the New York Police Department. This post is dedicated to another daughter of February 13, Stephanie Paterik. And let's not forget the heroine of Vertigo, Kim Novak, born on the thirteenth day of the second month.-- DL

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/02/come-rain-or-come-shine-a-perfect-division-of-labor.html

Happy Birthday, Mr 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

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

Happy 90th Birthday, Richard Howard [by David Lehman]

Happy Birthday, Richard Howard

If you’re 84 today that means you were 47 when we met
You came to read poems and give two lectures
One on “The Art of Digression” the other on “The Art
Of  Hesitation” I think but could be wrong and when
A man in the audience quoted Eliot on James (“too fine a mind
For any idea to violate it”) you observed that this was not
A problem from which Eliot suffered. Baudelaire, Gide,
Camus, Barthes, Stendahl, and how many others plus de Gaulle
Were translated by a boy who learned French from an aunt
When he was five years old in a car from Cleveland to Florida.
And today is your birthday and I made you laugh on the phone.
Once when I rented your flat I was talking to Louise Gluck when,
Thanks to “call waiting,” then a novelty, Galway Kinnell called
For you, and from that moment on, dear sir, I felt justified
Answering the phone, “poetry headquarters.”

10 / 13 / 13

Elaine Equi equals everyday euphoria [by David Lehman]

For Elaine Equi on July 24, 2017

I know it's your birthday
on the fifth floor of the building
where both of us work
although we're not there now
we were there when
you told me the twenty-fourth
of July was the day I said no
kidding that's also the day my 
son Joe was born and now I'm
here (Ithaca) and you're there
(the city) and I hope your sublet
is nice remember we have 
Belmont to look forward to
(even in Boston they 
call New York the city)

--  Click here and here for more about this all-star.

My Mayakovsky (on His Birthday 7/19/19) [by David Lehman]

On my birthday, June 11, I write this
to salute the Russian poet born on this day,
this now future day commemorating the one
in 1893 when our hero sprang into life.

A statue of the poet stands in the square
facing the Moscow hotel where we stayed
which was once KGB headquarters
but now doubles as a casino
and offers the services of a brothel. 

"You see," the Russian professor said,
"We build statues of our poets." 
"But not before you kill them," I said.

For you, Vlaidimir, handsome, forever to be twenty-four years old,
who makes a bowtie, cigarette, and cap seem the ultimate in chic accessories,
I lift my glass of Russian Standard vodka. Nostrovia!
(Or as they say in Russian, Na Zdrovie.)

From The Cloud in Trousers (trans. David Lehman)

Maria, I want you
to ignore whatever they say about me.
I may have kissed a thousand girls
but you’re this madman’s favorite,
for I’ll gladly admit I’m a mad man,
mad about you.

Maria, I’d love it if you
and I took off all our clothes
and lie, naked and shameless,
or scared, if you prefer,
in bed.

Let me kiss you on the mouth.
On this May day come live with me
in the April of my heart.

Maria!
Poets write sonnets
to the souls of their lovers,
but I am every inch a man
and I want your body as much as
a devout Christian beseeches the Lord
to “give us this day our daily bread.”

Maria,
I confess I’m afraid I’ll forget your name
as a poet is afraid he’ll forget le mot juste
which he has looked for all his life,
the word born in a night to perish in a night,
while the soul glowed in rays of light.

Maria,
I promise you I will love your body
as much as a wounded veteran loves
his one remaining leg.

No? Why no?

But you say no.
Damn.

So once again I’ll have to carry my heart away
as a dog nurses the paw that was crushed by a train.

For more of the translation, go to LIT

For The Southern Revew, I recorded an excerpt:

https://soundcloud.com/lsupress_and_tsr/a-cloud-in-trousers-by

 

 

"Shanked on the Red Bed" [by Susan Wheeler]

<<<
The perch was on the roof, and the puck was in the air.
The diffident were driving, and the daunted didn't care.
When I came out to search for you the lauded hit the breeze
On detonated packages the bard had built to please.

The century was breaking and the blame was on default,
The smallest mammal redolent of what was in the vault,
The screeches shrill, the ink-lines full of interbred regret—
When I walked out to look for you the toad had left his net.

The discourse flamed, the jurors sang, the lapdog strained its leash—
When I went forth to have you found the tenured took the beach
With dolloped hair and jangled nerves, without a jacking clue,
While all around the clacking sound of polished woodblocks blew.

When I went out to look for you the reductions had begun.
A demento took a shopgirl to a raisin dance for fun,
And for you, for me, for our quests ridiculous and chaste
The lead sky leered in every cloud its consummate distaste.

The mayors queued for mug shots while the banner rolled in wind
That beat at bolted windows and bore down upon the thin,
And everywhere warped deliverers got bellicose and brave,
When I walked out to find you in the reconstructed rave.

The envelopes were in the slots and paperweights were flung.
When I came down to seek you out the torrents had begun
To rip the pan from handle and horizons from their shore,
To rip around your heady heart looking there for more.
>>>

from Smokes by Susan Wheeler (1998). (It's Susan's birthday.) -- DL

Happy birthday, Judy Garland (June 10!)

Happy birthday, Judy Garland. Our love affair never grows old. It's you for me, dear, and you for me.
Moreover,

I like New York in June. How about you?
I like a Gershwin tune. How about you?
I love a fireside when a storm is due.
I like potato chips, moonlight, and motor trips. How about you?
I'm mad about good books, can't get my fill.
And Franklin Roosevelt's looks give me a thrill.
Holding hands in the movie show
When all the lights are low may not be new
But I like it, how about you?

I'd like to dream of fame. Maybe I'll shine.
I'd like to see your name right beside mine.
I can see we're in harmony, looks like we both agree, on what to do,
and I like it. How about you?

 

Happy birthday, Cole Porter (June 9!)

I get a kick out of you, Cole Porter. It's de-lovely. . .to hear your songs sung.

Your lyrics remain as young and "easy to love" as ever. So here's "looking at you," chum.

Furthermore, you know how to "do it":

Some Argentines without means do it
People say in Boston even beans do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

 

Romantic sponges, they say, do it
Oysters down in oyster bay do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

 

Cold cape cod clams 'gainst their wish do it
Even lazy jellyfish do it

Let's do it

 

Let's fall in love. . .

\

Marilyn Monroe as Chanteuse [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday it is) sang -- and sang well. 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. (They shouldn't have dubbed Ava Gardner in Show Boat but that's another story.) See Marilyn as the very embodiment of curvaceous sexuality in Niagara, or making the most of a minor role in The Asphalt Jungle, or fighting with her beau in Bus Stop, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Ethel Merman 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. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. You can't keep your eyes off her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice.

Listen to her sing "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 her version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" 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 forbids Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to "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

Walt Whitman at 200: Brian Clements's "Every Atom"

It's been a great
two hundred years since you joined the race
and you're still out in front
by a length or more,
Walt Whitman,
whom I still see in the supermarket.

-- Alien Ginsberg

See the celebration of Whitman organized and edited by Brian Clements  in association with North American Review. Brian calls the project "Every Atom" and every day for the next 200 days he will be posting a refelction and annotation of Whitman's lines starting with this one from Martin Espada. Brian writes, " Over the next 200 days you will see contributions from Rosanne Cash, Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams, Billy Collins, Julia Alvarez, Colum McCann, Bill McKibben, Gary Schmidgall, Ed Folsom, Robert Hass, Erica Jong, and many, many other poets, writers, historians, songwriters, critics, postal workers, nurses, leaders, and neighbors. Please follow along, enjoy some excellent writing, and refresh your knowledge of the complex legacy of Walt Whitman, which is the complexity, as Whitman says, 'of these United States.'"

On Fats Waller's Birthday: I'm gonna sit right down and write [by David Lehman]

May 21
Black Jack I beat the dealer
and no use complaining
even though one or another souvenir
of my bout with cancer may act up
throwing a left hook that I didn't evade
and the embarrassment of a knockdown
will be mine 

I will get up at the count of eight and

On May 21 
Fats Waller's birthday
I'll be living in a great big way and I will play
"Honeysuckle Rose" and "Your Feet's Too Big"
yes, "your pedal extremities are colossal"

As I write this
It is November 10 of the previous year 
but I can do it I can sit right down
and write myself a letter
and make believe
it came from you

 

"The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter" [by Mark Strand] (on his birthday, April 11)

 

It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.

 

---

See https://www.npr.org/2012/01/02/144445061/poetic-perfection-three-favorite-poems-of-2011

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