The Best American Poetry

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

On Barbara Stanwyck's Birthday: An Astrological Profile [by Walter Neff]

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, a spurned lover, a scheming sophisticate -- 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, Myrna Loy, Olivia de Havilland, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford), Stanwyck's Virgoesque self-restraint balances the gush of liquid 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, Ida Lupino 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, or con artists; they could solve murders or commit them, could go crazy, could run a restaurant, pack a gun, slap her daughter, commit adultery, speak Chinese, 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.

When they  gave her a lifetime achievement award she dedicated the Oscar to her "golden boy," the recently deceased William Holden.

Stanwyck (some close friends called her “Missy”) 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. Stanny 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. Their best repartee is in that film: “We’re both rotten.” “Only you’re a little more rotten.”

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.” 

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. . .

\

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

 

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