The Best American Poetry

John Donne's Holy Sonnets #10 & #14: On Glen Hartley's Birthday

10.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

 

14.

 

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

 

-- John Donne (1571-1631)

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!

Marilyn Monroe’s Love of Poetry: Happy Birthday Marilyn! [by Heidi Seaborn]

         

“I love poetry and poets”

                      ~Marilyn Monroe, 1962

So declared Marilyn Monroe on a list of notes she had made in preparing her response to a series of interview questions. The notes were among her journals and letters discovered decades after she died and later compiled into the book, Fragments. The editors of Fragments, Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, considered these notes to be her last, and that they may have been written within days before her death on August 4, 1962.

We’ll never know the question that inspired Marilyn’s answer. But we do know that she loved both poetry and poets. I wrote yesterday about her own poetry. Today, on what would have been her 95^th birthday, I’ll shed light on the poetry that Marilyn surrounded herself with.

After she died, her personal book collection of 430 books was auctioned off with other personal possessions by Christies NY on October 28-29, 1999. The collection includes many of the classics and shows she read broadly across genres and interests. Within that, her poetry collection included the following (with some identifiers missing):

A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman
The Poetry & Prose Of Heinrich Heine by Frederich Ewen
The Poetical works Of John Milton, by H.C. Beeching
The Poetical Works Of Robert Browning (H.C. Beeching?)
Wordsworth by Richard Wilbur
The Poetical Works Of Shelley (Richard Wilbur?)
The Portable Blake, by William Blake
William Shakespeare: Sonnets, ed. Mary Jane Gorton
Poems Of Robert Burns, ed. Henry Meikle & William Beattie
The Penguin Book Of English Verse, ed. John Hayward
Aragon: Poet Of The French Resistance, by Hannah Josephson & Malcolm Cowley
Star Crossed by Margaret Tilden
Collected Sonnets by Edna St Vincent Millay (2 editions)
Robert Frost's Poems by Louis Untermeyer (Poe: Complete Poems by Richard Wilbur (a 2nd copy?)
The Life And Times Of Archy And Mehitabel by Don Marquis
The Pocketbook Of Modern Verse by Oscar Williams
Poems by John Tagliabue
Selected Poems by Rafael Alberti
Selected Poetry by Robinson Jeffers
The American Puritans: Their Prose & Poetry, by Perry Miller
Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
Poet In New York by Federico Garcia Lorca
The Vapor Trail by Ivan Lawrence Becker Love Poems & Love Letters For All The Year
100 Modern Poems, ed. Selden Rodman
The Sweeniad, by Myra Buttle
Poetry: A Magazine Of Verse, Vol.70, no. 6
Poems Of W.B. Yeats

The Poems, Prose & Plays Of Alexander Pushkin

Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson

The Poems And Fairy-Tales by Oscar Wilde

Selected Poems by DH Lawrence

 

As an actress, Marilyn had met many writers before she famously married the great playwright, Arthur Miller. But their association broadened her circle of writers, playwrights and poets. Through Miller, she befriend Louis Untermeyer. And she became especially closeto the poet, Norman Rosten. Rosten introduced her a wide range of poets and poetry and encouraged Marilyn’s own writing. At dinner parties, Marilyn would often read poetry aloud, including a memorable reading of Yeats at a gathering at Rosten's home.

After her marriage to Miller ended, Marilyn continued to foster her love of poetry and to develop friendships with poets. Most notably with Carl Sandburg, who was at the time in his early ‘80s. In the list of interview answer notes is one that must have been in response to the question, “Who do you admire, and why?” Marilyn writes “Eleanor Roosevelt—her devotion to mankind”, President Kennedy and his brother Robert and Greta Garbo, each with a reason, then lists Carl Sandburg—his poems are songs of the people by the people and for the people.”

Marilyn always considered herself of the people. It is not surprising that she gravitated toward the work of Sandburg and Walt Whitman. As someone who befriended many writers who were blacklisted by McCarthy for the communist associations and who supported Miller during his own investigation by HUAC, and who was likewise investigated by the FBI for her communist sympathies, Marilyn was outspoken in support of labor, and always aware of her own humble childhood and hard work to get recognition.

Marilyn’s love of poetry and poets was not just a publicity ploy to knock her image of being a dumb blonde. From everything I have come to understand about her, the publicity ploy was pretending to be a dumb blonde, when in reality she was forever a student of learning and literature. Happy Birthday Marilyn!

Sir Larry: an astrological profile [by David Lehman]

On this day in 1989, Sir Laurence Olivier breathed his last. The great actor was eighty-two when he shuffled off this mortal coil. He was a master of accents and disguises. As a young man he played the romantic (Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," "Hamlet," "Henry V," the dashing leading man in "Rebecca," Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice"). In middle age he brought Othello to life, played opposite Marilyn Monroe in one of moviedom's weirdest pairings, was the Roman boss in "Spartacus," embodied the seedy over-the-hill "entertainer," and had enough left in the tank to play the good guy Nazi hunter opposite Gregory Peck in "The Boys from Brazil," on the one hand, and the odious Nazi dentist in "Marathon Man," the best movie about dentistry ever made, which begins with a brilliant car chase (or race) pitting a Holocaust survivor versus an unrepentant Nazi and features a very menacing Olivier, suave Roy Scheider as a spook in Paris, and the earnest Dustin Hoffman as Scheider's younger brother running around the Central Park reservoir. [Ed.: That was quite a mouthful, DL, Split sentence in two?] Olivier and Gielgud play two important Dads in "Brideshead Revisited," which was the hottest thing in highbrow TV in 1982 and '83.

Laurence Olivier was born in Dorking on May 22, 1907, sneaking into Gemini but with as much Taurus trailing him as the clouds that trail the blessed babe in Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode." Olivier was grandiloquent. The risk of overstatement was always at hand. He had his Academy Award speech memorized and delivered it like a Roman emperor. Luckily it was not he but others who wrote the scripts of his movies. His best writers were Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Shaw. At the moment of his birth, Jupiter was approximately 180 seconds away from an exact conjunction with Neptune. The association with romantic characters of passion, melancholy, and excellent elocution  -- Hamlet, Henry V, Heathcliff, the master of Manderley, and Mr. Darcy -- is implicit.

The dialogue among the earth (Taurus, Capricorn) and air signs (Gemini) accounts not only for the temperament but also for the ability to make the practical adjustments needed as middle age succeeds youth and makes way in turn for elder statesman status. Olivier shone in all three periods of productive adulthood. There is more yin than yang in his chart and his bisexuality was well-known but no big deal. He was crazy about Danny Kaye, and look at the lascivious looks he, the imperial Roman, gives to slave Tony Curtis in "Spartacus."

The fact that Larry's Venus is in Aries (fire) while Vivien Leigh's Venus is in Libra (air) may help to explain the legendary heat and intensity of their initial attraction in 1937. Two years later, when she played Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" while he lurked in the moors in "Wuthering Heights," they were just about the most glamorous couple in Hollywood (and the competition included Clark Gable and Carole Lombard). Leigh was magnificent but her nervous disposition exacerbated by two miscarriages (1945, 1955), a diagnosis of tuberculosis in her left lung (1944) and the natural decay of the aging process led her to extremes of depression. The marriage lasted twenty years. He saw her loss of physical beauty as an accusation made by nature or the fates, and the ungallant remarks he made after her death testified to their brutal lovers' spats (see Holly Greil, "The Times") and his arrogant self-satisfaction (according to Max McGlow, "The Guardian"). The aging of Scarlett O'Hara's gorgeous face made Leigh's role in "Ship of Fools," where she plays a "mature" woman, so poignant.

After the divorce Olivier married actress Joan Plowright and spent his late eighteen years with this sensible and intelligent woman. No one remembers the name of his first wife, however. If you know to whom he was married (for ten full years) prior to Viv, you could win big. Hint: her name was Jill Esmond. But who was she?

Larry became Sir Laurence in 1948. Not until many years later did people learn that Olivier in Hollywood in the early 1940s was a foreign agent operating in behalf of the British government to try to recruit the US into the war. This could have been foreseen if one had factored in that Gemini was his rising sign -- and his moon was in Virgo! (Source: David Niven.)

Sir Laurence (later Lord Olivier) and Marlon Brando were the exact same height (5'10) but otherwise had little in common. (The same goes for Mick Jagger and Victor Hugo.) Other Geminis born on May 22 include Richard Wagner and Arthur Conan Doyle, which pretty much explains the dynamic of eccentric British empiricism and high German myth-making that encircles the Brunhilde of virginity with the three rings of masterly artistic flame over which the hero must leap in the dramatic depiction of Sir LO's life.

Sir Larry won the best actor Oscar in 1948 and founded the National Theatre in London in 1962.

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on cheekily 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.

-- DL

"On This Very Street in Belgrade" [by Charles Simic, born today]

On This Very Street in Belgrade

Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.

-- Charles Simic (born May 9, 1938). Photo of Simic, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992, holding a copy of the book, with David Lehman at a reading organized by Bill Wadsworth of the Academy of American Poets in October 1992.

"Perfume" [by James Merrill]

Ticklish no longer
With tangibility
Nor rooted, crimson, over
The worm's inching stupor

Little but a spirit
Costly and volatile
Am I, want of my touch unstoppers
Now that you suffer it.

from The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace [1959]

For Mr Pinsky on His Birthday

With "Moonlight in Vermont" on the radio (you were right:

No rhymes) I think of you, a true blue

Libra if ever I knew one,

And I am happy to know that today you're one

Day older and yet you haven't changed a bit or a byte

(Unlike J. Blackburn I have to rhyme) and it's fun to do

Just that while toasting you and the gloria mundi 

Which passeth show (I liked your poem in Salmagundi)

 

DL, 10 / 20 / 16

 

On George Gershwin's Birthday [by David Lehman]

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

-- DL

Happy Birthday, John Ashbery (with a collage and a poem from the maestro, 1927-2017)

Wet Casements

    When Edward Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. 
It was not raining much.
                       KAKFA, Wedding Preparations in the Country
	
	The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
	In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
	Their own eyes.  A digest of their correct impressions of
	Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
	Ghostly transparent face.  You in falbalas
	Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
	The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
	Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
	Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
	Never pierced through into timeless energy of a present
	Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
	Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
	That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
	Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
	Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
	For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
	And out of it.  I want that information very much today,

	Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
	I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
	Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
	Of dancing on a bridge.  I shall at last see my complete face
	Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

	I shall keep to myself.
	I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

The poem is from Houseboat Days (1977). 

"Don't Come In" [by Angela Ball]

Don’t Come In

         I prefer the sign “No Entry” to the one that says “No Exit.” - Stanislaus Lec

If for you, women are toy cars
whose wheels you strike
on the ground to make
them go; if for you, women
are tea towels at the feast; if you stand by
as women are swept from the path,
don’t approach. In our inviolate
land we fly ruddy gliders;
press oil from impossible fruit; derive power
from waves. At any moment
our silk turbans may become
volcanoes; our slippers,
submarines.

-- Angela Ball

June 11 [by David Lehman]

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 Library of Congress's Poem-a-day project. Cover art by Larry Rivers.

Judy Gemini Could Go On Singing [by David Lehman]

Judy Garland: The Road Gets Rougher

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

"Lining-Up (for Charles North)" [by David Lehman]

This poem was inspired by a dream I had in which Amy Gerstler and I were on the same softball team, with her in lead-off position playing shortstop. Charles North has written many great “line ups” – for example, an all-philosopher team as well as teams consisting exclusively of diseases, vegetables, and famous couples – so I thought I would dedicate the poem to him, a confirmed Gemini, born on June 9. Charles tells me he is happy to be in the lineup, though he has reservations about the wisdom of playing him at first base. “I’m a righty,” he points out. But so were Gil Hodges and Steve Garvey, no?

Lining Up
for Charles North

SS Amy Gerstler
2B David Lehman
3B David Shapiro (L) *
LF Paul Violi
IB Charles North**
RF Tony Towle
CF Elaine Equi
C Ted Berrigan
P Ron Padgett (L)
Relief pitcher Vincent Katz (ROY)***
PH NL / DH AL Eileen Myles ****

General manager: Harry Mathews
Front office wise men: Bob Hershon, Mitch Sisskind
Scouts: David Trinidad, Jerome Sala, Tim Dlugos, Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover

Manager: Anne Waldman
Bench coach: John Ashbery
First base Koch: Kenneth Coach
Third base coach: Frank O'Hara
Trainer: James Schuyler
Pitching coach: Joseph Ceravolo
Batting coach: Larry Fagin
Bullpen coach: Bernadette Mayer

Press Relations: Joe Brainard
TV announcers: Paul Auster (and a player to be named later)
Radio announcers: Phillip Lopate, Andrei Codrescu
Broadway adaptation: Lehman Engel

Critic: Tom Clark

* Left-hander
** To be played by Chris Noth in the TV version.
*** Winner, rookie of the year award.
*** Switch hitter; to be deployed as a pinch hitter in the National League and as a designated hitter in the American League.

"After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It" [with Marilyn Monroe]

On Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday

On Marilyn Monroe’s birthday I have
to catch my breath running
as a receiver catches a football,
shakes off tacklers, glides down
the sidelines to the end zone as
the game clock runs out or
like a fisherman angling for
trout, turning over phrases
until I feel a tug, catch a bite, that’s
what this jolt of morning joe, like “joltin’
Joe” DiMaggio, has done to me but if
I could calm down long enough to stop
hurrying and concentrate on the lawn
in front of me the wind at my back the laughter
from Alexander Pope’s dagger-like couplets
still echoing from last night’s reading
of The Dunciad – or maybe just to clear
the mind of words, all of them, including
the words that keep coming even now
-- if I could look at the trees darkening
as a cloud covers the sun, look at the grass,
the myrtle, the pine needles, the maple leaves
and the one rhododendron the deer have not devoured,
what then? After ten minutes of bliss,
I shall return to my mind, and she will be singing,
“After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.”

Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin
Video from the movie "There's No Business Like Show Business"

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