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.
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
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.
We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday is today), sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (In another column I will salute the wonderful voices that emerge from Mesdames Hayworth, Novak, Kerr, Wood, and Hepburn in those flicks. Say, does anyone say "flicks" anymore?) See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. The way she pronounces the "z" in Berlin's "Lazy," for example, or the electricity when she strolls among the nightclub plutocrats and sagely notes that "after you get what you want you don't want it. / I could give you the moon, / you'd be tired of it soon. / You're like a baby, / that wants what it wants when it wants it, / ah, but when you are presented / with what you want you're discontented." (Irving Berlin never fails to amaze me.) This lyric was made to order for Miss Monroe.
Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. There's a heat wave coming in from the south and you can't keep your eyes of the north of her body even as your brain wanders to the tropics. "The way that she moves / the thermometer proves / that she certainly can can-can." No, you can't keep your eyes off her, all of her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. Listen to her do "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.
Compare MM's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.
Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and commands Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to cease and desist; don't "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses. -- DL
Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by Marianne Moore.
The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book of American Poetry. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web. What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncrasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem –– and it is certainly not as good a poem.
The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."
The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase “I was goaded into doing by XY” implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what “This man” (or “the teacher”) said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks “a sort of heightened consciousness.” The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word “occasion” in line four, obliging us to understand how the epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.
From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete and rhyme is outmoded, I shall revert to you, Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed Verse. This man said – I think that I repeat his identical words: “Hebrew poetry is prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determines the form."
– Marianne Moore
corrupt / alternative version found on the web:
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete and rhyme is outmoded, I shall revert to you, Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse. He said - and I think I repeat his exact words - "Hebrew poetry is prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determines the form.
In 1968 I didn't really know you though Dick Gallup, who sat next to me in Kenneth Koch's "Modern Poetry" class, invited me to a party and there you were and I went to hear you read and went through old copies of Columbia Review to read your poems (including the one signed "the sloth sloth") and why am I telling you this? Because it's your day of the year, and you're a gem as well as a Gemini twin, and I would tip my fedora to you if I were wearing one as men used to say when men wore fedoras.
Today in 1862 Claude Debussy was born. I remember where I was and what I was doing one hundred years and two months later: elementary algebra, trombone practice, Julius Caesar on the record player with Brando as Antony, simple buttonhook patterns in football, the French subjunctive, and the use of "quarantine" rather than "blockade" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was considered the less belligerent word. Much was made of it in 1962, centenary of Debussy’s birth. And if today I play his Rhapsody for Saxophone and Orchestra for the ten minutes it requires of my undivided attention, who will attack me for living in Paris in 1908 instead of now? Let them. I'll take my stand, my music stand, with the composer of my favorite Danse Tarantelle.
Birthday love to the Countess Kathleen! End over end on the trampoline! Purple and orange and yellow and green! With BIRTHDAY LOVE to the Countess Kathleen!
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
Click image to order
A creative communications, branding, and resources consultancy founded by Victoria C. Rowan
