The Best American Poetry

"Pink Dust" by Ron Padgett [reviewed by Martin Stannard]

Ron Padgett, Pink Dust (New York Review Books, £14.99)

          Every time I approach a blank page
          the poems in it shout, “Oh no!
          Here he comes again! Run!”
          I grab at them as they flee
          like terrified little bugs.

Received wisdom: it is not a good idea to read a book of poems from cover to cover in one sitting. A poem is a work of art, it deserves your undivided attention, it deserves your time. It might be a good idea to analyse it. Reading a book of poems is not the same as putting a record –  e.g. The Monkees “The Definitive Monkees” – on the turntable while you do the washing up.

The last time I read a book of poems from cover to cover in one sitting was this afternoon. I’d ordered Ron Padgett’s “Pink Dust” from our local book emporium a couple of weeks ago, but had to wait for it because the publisher had originally been out of stock. I hope this was because the book is selling faster than the proverbial hotcakes. Somehow I doubt it. The world isn’t like that.

I don’t think this is a review. Not really. I mean, if you (the ‘you’ reading this) don’t know that Ron Padgett is a great, inventive, readable, entertaining, wise, often startling poet, we might be living in different worlds. It wouldn’t be the first time. And I’m not going to churn out a quick recap of his career. That’d be boring, even though it’s full of brilliant stuff. I mean it’d be boring to do. I’m so happy he’s still going strong.

This is not a review. Whatever it is, it’s because the book reminds me, though I should not need to be reminded, but the occasional wake-up call is not to be sniffed at, what was I saying? Oh yes, the book reminds me that poetry can get pretty complicated at times, that poets can easily lose sight of simple truths as they spend too long thinking about their place among their peers, or concentrate on saying what’s fashionable in a currently fashionable way, or (amazingly cleverly) look, for example, to interrogate language in a search for new ways of raging against the machine or, and this perhaps is more likely, try to get published. Someone I vaguely know recently tied themselves in knots trying to create their own school of poetry, as if anyone would care. I suppose they can’t be blamed: one longs, sometimes, to make a mark, and lose sight of some basic truths. And it’s not unusual to forget that writing a poem that says something so simply that the complexity of the poem and the something it says goes unnoticed is no mean achievement. It’s refreshing when one comes across it.

         It’s something of a relief
         to fritter away a few hours
         doing not much of anything
         other than walking around
         and looking at things
         that aren’t in any way remarkable,
         and to know
         that, of the diminishing hours
         left in your life,
         you are frittering some away,
         something you can’t remember
         ever doing before,

         relaxing into nothing in particular.

No, I am not reviewing this book. Those who know that poetry is simultaneously the most important thing in the world and the least important thing in the world, those who know that it’s possible to be playful, readable, and serious all at the same time, those who know that poetry is about human truths, truths that are big and small and all of equal importance, and that itching to turn the page to read the next poem is a good thing will probably already know what the poetry of Ron Padgett is, and what it does. They will know its delights, its pleasures.

When was the last time you read a book of poems by someone you would undoubtedly want to spend time with? On the back cover, Ann Waldman says “We want to stay with the person in these poems all day long.” She isn’t wrong.

NB: Padgett read from “Pink Dust” at The Poetry Project a few weeks back, and it’s watchable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05l-c0ems-0

Copyright © Martin Stannard, 2025

Self-Doubt with poems by Diane Raptosh, David Tucker, and Peter Johnson [by Nin Andrews]

My book, Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems, was just released from Etruscan Press. I   am very excited. I am also enormously grateful to Etruscan Press, which is one of my all-time favorite presses. Not only do they publish many of my favorite authors including Tim Seibles, Dante di Stefano, Diane Raptosh, Claire Bateman, Colum McCann, but also, they are easy and enjoyable to work with. And the editorial assistance they offer is spot-on.

As thrilled as I am by this book making its way into the world, I am also filled with the familiar nauseating feeling of dread that I always experience when a book is published. The minute I hold a new book in my hand, I question everything I’ve written. No matter if I’ve receive a nice review, like this one, Southern Review of Books: Hidden Farm Life in “Son of a Bird”, or if I have enjoyed writing up an interview, Mackinaw Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry, or an essay, Eden Lost: Nin Andrews on the Pains and Rewards of Writing a Memoir About Her Father, I still feel overwhelmed with doubt.

I am especially doubtful now that I’ve waded into the genre of memoir. I find poetry much safer because it doesn’t claim to be the self in any literal way. How can any piece of writing really represent oneself? As Diane Raptosh puts it, “the self is a thousand localities.”  

[The self is a thousand localities]    

The self is a thousand localities
            like a small nation—assembly required: borders and roads;               

armies; farms; small and large pieces of parchment. I stand by
            all the territories I have ever been, even as I can’t

remember them. I am a locum—ear to the emperor penguin, a banner ad
            blinking to the hoi polloi. Since I’ve become John Doe, I swear

I can feel most objects with sixty digits
            instead of five. This makes me think

of my wife. Makes me miss her left collar bone. Her hips’ wingtips.
            A train moans from a far hummock.

Which reminds me that everyone I have to live without
            I must help to find a place within. Which is an act

of granite will. A strain. A ditty.
            An exercise in utmost beautility.

I often wonder: do other poets feel overwhelmed by doubt as I do? In this era of social media, it appears not. But then social media is an illusion, right?

I remember when my first book, The Book of Orgasms, was published by Asylum Arts. A large box of books arrived in the mail. I ripped open the box, picked up one book, read a poem, and then quickly put the book back, sealed the box back up, and carried it to the basement. I told no one about the book in my basement. Shortly after, the basement flooded. All the books had to be taken to the dump, along with the carpet and an array of boxes filled with childhood memorabilia. I was so relieved to get rid of those books. I thought, now that’s the end of that book.

This was back in 1996, before social media, before all the pressure was placed on writers to promote themselves. I miss those years! Somehow, in spite of myself, the book made its way into the world. I gave only one reading from the first edition of The Book of Orgasms, and it was to an audience of fifteen people.  

So why, after all these years and many books, do I still feel so unsure of myself?  I don’t know, but I think it might have something to do with the difference between writing and promoting your work. Or maybe it's just stage fright, as portrayed in this poem by Wislawa Szymborska.

 For me, writing poetry is a private act. Writing poetry is like dancing alone in an unlit room to music only I can hear. Because no one is watching, I can transform into the prima ballerina. I am so graceful, the air becomes my friend—it lifts me up and up. I orbit the ceiling a few times then, fly out of the window and into the heavens and beyond before I come back again and land noiselessly on the page. I have so much fun, I think, this should be illegal.  Then, someone turns on the light. I realize I am in a room with a one-way mirror, that everything I’ve done has been recorded. People can see in, but I can’t see out. It’s like a nightmare written by Sartre.  

The dance metaphor I used (and I do think writing poetry is like practicing ballet) reminds me of this beautiful poem by David Tucker. And, in a very different way, of a surreal poem fragment by Peter Johnson, master prose poet, whose humor and gift keeps me afloat in times like these.  

The Dancer by David Tucker

Class is over, the teacher
and the pianist gone,
but one dancer
in a pale blue
leotard stays
to practice alone without music,
turning grand jetes
through the haze of late afternoon.
Her eyes are focused
on the balancing point
no one else sees
as she spins in this quiet
made of mirrors and light—
a blue rose on a nail—
then stops and lifts
her arms in an oval pause
and leans out
a little more, a little more,
there, in slow motion
upon the air.

From Observations at the Edge of the Abyss by Peter Johnson

The dancing instructor who swears he is my brother. Who pretends to have read my translations of Catullus and walked my pug in a rainstorm that was so violent it forced the words “cyclone” and “bomb” to be used together. The guy who could argue about the length of Freud’s beard, and who once said, “What choices would you make if you lived your life hovering above the earth in a hot air balloon?” The dancing instructor who right now hands me a pair of shiny winged toe shoes and a coin guaranteed to grant me only half of what I might wish for.

Free download of Observations at the Edge of the Abyss is available here:  “Observations from the Edge of the Abyss” by Peter Johnson (bepress.com)

Dear David: : "What do you plan to do once you become a time millionaire?"

 

The cat's out of the bag.

I'm retiring.

The Best American Poetry 2025, edited by Terence Winch, will be the last book in the BAP series under my supervision. That's thirty-eight annual volumes since 1988 plus two "best of the best" retrospectives, for a grand total of forty BAP books. Scribner has also published two anthologies I edited (Great American Prose Poems and The Best American Erotic Poems) and seven individual collections of my poems, including Valentine Place, The Daily Mirror, and When a Woman Loves a Man. It's been a great run.

People ask: "What do you plan to do once you become a time millionaire?"

Hard to answer that hypothetical, but I can affirm with some confidence that my staff and I will continue our BAP web site, our archive, our blog, and our weekly newsletter. An editor's job is never done. Besides which, I will continue to write poems and to play shuffleboard in warm weather. -- DL

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

<< There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime. >>

I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.

John Taylor's Brilliant Essay on the Prose Poem

Here is an excerpt. from "Two Cultures of the Prose Poem" by John Taylor

Ponge's strategy for destroying concepts provides a telling parallel to T. S. Eliot's notion of "forcing . . . language into its meaning." [In "Great American Prose Poems," David] Lehman includes Eliot's strange and initially quite violent prose poem "Hysteria," dated 1917, about the narrator being so "involved" in a woman's laughter that he is "lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat.") These acts of linguistic and per ceptual violence—"destruction was my Béatrice," claimed Mallarmé—belong to the modern poet's and prose-poet's role. Proverbial French "abstractions" in poetry often represent a paradoxical desire to break through them and, by this act, to catch sight of unusual slices or levels of reality..

Elsewhere I have suggested that American poets tend to begin with a fact and work toward an idea, while their French counterparts begin with an idea and work toward a fact. In the French prose poem, one of these initial ideas may indeed entail smashing through ideas, as the poet—rather like Edson's taxi—would smash through a brick wall keeping him or her from an ardently desired reality. In other words, for a prose poet like Ponge, the objectifying poetic process, aiming at grasping the "thing-in-itself," must necessarily take into account the ab-original idea, the inconvertible starting point, which is often the Cartesian cogito ergo sum as well as its logical consequence: "Because I am, the outside world also exists." Because Ponge's poems are not so much about things as about how he endeavors to break through conceptual obstacles (beginning with the solipsistic Cartesian departure point) and thus about how he envisions writing about the things in question, the paradox of his ideally self-effacing strategy is that he emerges, as a narrator, all the more imposingly. Yet his point about concepts is well made, and his language is exceedingly well crafted. In The Garden of Languages, Macé similarly identifies a "cancer of sense," as he declares in one prose poem, that can hatch "its black eggs beneath a thousand metaphors of love." Could it be that somewhere in this neighborhood exists a meeting point for French and American writers, where the French aspiration to break through concepts and attain a kind of "reality" encounters the demotic proclivities that Lehman discerns in American prose poetry?

In any event, Lehman rightly underscores the French contribution to the prose poem. Like most commentators, he attributes its birth to Aloysius Bertrand's collection Gaspard de la Nuit, posthumously published in 1842. Such an attribution seconds remarks made by Baudelaire [pictured above], who paid homage to Bertrand as a mentor when he began composing his own prose poems in 1857. Baudelaire's efforts were eventually gathered in the now-famous volume Petits poèmes en prose, which was first entitled Le Spleen de Paris when an initial sampling of it appeared in 1864. Soon thereafter, Rimbaud arrived on the scene. He boldly added new dimensions to the genre with A Season in Hell and Illuminations. As Lehman aptly remarks,the prose poems in Illuminations are like dream landscapes and journeys, visionary fragments, brilliant but discontinuous. They represent a considerable advance in abstraction and compression, and they are revolutionary, too, in recommending a breakdown in order, 'a willful derangement of the senses,' as a necessary regimen.

Finally, Mallarmé, Max Jacob (1876-1944), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), René Char (1907-88), and the aforementioned Ponge, "made Paris the indisputable capital of the prose poem," as Lehman points out.

Add to that list Jean Follain (1903-71), a selection of whose mysterious, subtly crafted prose poems have now once again been made available in English, in the White Pine Press volume. (Some versions included in this important volume were originally published, long ago, in small press editions.) Follain strikes the perfect balance between stylistic grace and semantic enigma. He employs not the slightest formal trick. He does not need to: his gaze over the surface of the world actually (and discretely) probes very deep. Besides bringing out the "chant [that] goes up from every object"—with so much more naturalness than Ponge—and creating touching, melancholy atmospheres, Follain ponders time and again the significance of an everyday world that seemingly possesses no more coherence than a myriad of simultaneous disparate occurrences. He juxtaposes the occurrences in a way depicting life as a hodge-podge, at best a motley tapestry, of vanishing moments:

A boy is troubled on a day petals pour down and dogs are stolid. Girls get straight up out of bed, sun falls on their torsos, a wasp buzzes in the fold of a curtain; the calendar on the wall grows warm. Men are drinking in the blind alley where some feeble plants poke up. A conference searches for peace without finding it. In a bedroom, a turn-of-the-century breastplate gleams, well polished. When French regiments wore ones like it, Maurice Maindron wrote cloak-and-dagger novels; he loved armor, a love inspired by his taste for coleoptera. Now a May beetle the color of dead leaves proceeds across the glittering breastplate at this moment—possible as all things are possible—this moment which will never return.

(translation: Mary Feeney and William Matthews)

As precursors of the English-language prose poem, Lehman cites the King James Bible, Shakespeare's prose (in Hamlet), John Donne's sermons, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and other pertinent examples. Let me add that similar prose-poem antecedents in French literature can be identified as far back as Aucassin et Nicolette (late twelfth or early thirteenth century), a love story alternating verse and poetic prose, and perhaps even in the metrically cadenced prose sermons of Saint Bernard (1091-1153). As to more recent (pre-Baudelairean) periods, prototypes of the prose poem emerge in certain prose passages of the plays of Molière (1622-73), in various "pensées" by Pascal (1623-62), in sermons by Bossuet (1627-1704), in Télémaque by Fénelon (1651-1715), in sundry descriptions of nature by Rousseau (1712-78) or Chateaubriand (1768-1848), not to forget in some of Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721).

Click here for the entire essay as pubnlished in Michigan Quartery Review, Spring 2005.
See, too, https://poets.org/poet/john-taylor

Ron Charles on "BAP 2024" in the "Washington Post"

Some of you tell me this newsletter’s weekly poetry feature has got you reading poetry for the first time in years. But you wonder where to go next. 

I have an easy recommendation: “The Best American Poetry 2024.” This anthology, edited by Mary Jo Salter, includes work by 75 poets — some you probably know (Billy Collins, Ada Limón) and some you may not yet (Gabriella Fee, Richie Hofmann). 

The poems were selected from the usual places like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, little journals like Smartish Pace and Matter, and even recently deceased ones like Gettysburg Review and Freeman’s. In her words, this is a dinner party that includes enough familiar faces to make you feel comfortable and enough intriguing strangers to keep you mingling. 

Best of all, every poem in this collection has been selected by an extraordinarily fine and thoughtful poet. In her introduction, Salter writes, “I still find it almost impossible to come up with Universally Useful Criteria for evaluating a poem,” but reading the work she’s assembled here is a terrific way of broadening and understanding your own criteria.

Here’s a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, a writer new to me:

Sentimental Evening

The pewter moon’s eyebrowed guise
circles a picture of my son. A Windex tear

falls to my son’s cheek, and I know
we will never fully know one another.

Message after message asking:
How is the breastfeeding going?

Let me tell you: Not great. Not great at all.
Everywhere advice to make the milk come:

plums, fenugreek, blessed thistle.
This morning each stream of water falling

from my showerhead was a knife ready
to gut me. The pewter moon’s smile

wants to eat me whole. Online strangers
tell me to love my postpartum body.

They say: You are tiger. You are zebra.
I am desperate to return to the numb feeling

of the surgical theater, the sound
of the doctor mispronouncing my full name.

In the mail a medical bill worth more
than a pickup truck arrives. It arrives before

the state gives my son a social security number,
a birth certificate, a sign of arrival.

Even at my most animal I am the price
of my bearded belly, the price of my crying

breasts, the price of being split,
excavated, vacuumed, and stapled shut.

This poem was first published in the New Republic. In the contributors’ notes and comments, Natalie Scenters-Zapico writes, “Much of ‘Sentimental Evening’ was drafted at a tray table on the back of hospital paperwork after I had an emergency C-section to deliver my son. I then revised it while struggling to breast feed and submitted it for publication still deep in my postpartum depression. I wrote this poem despite my own internalized misogyny telling me it was too sentimental.”

Excerpted from “The Best American Poetry 2024.” Mary Jo Salter, editor. David Lehman, series editor. Published by Scribner Poetry. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. ❖

"The Banquet Years" (in 1998) [by David Lehman]

from "The Bennington Five-Day Diary" (January 1998) by David Lehman

Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years, is here [at Bennington College] giving lectures on Montaigne, Chekhov, and Proust. Shattuck, 72, in white turtleneck under a mint-green V-neck pullover, looks trim and fit, like a genial Jack Palance in mustache and goatee. Shattuck speaks naturally in maxims. I like it when he says that “It’s impossible to paraphrase any successful poem or story, and therefore we must do it.” Our assignment is to write fifty-word summaries of two Chekhov stories. Nashvillean Anne Doolittle summarized “Mire” in fourteen words: “A woman of wit and intelligence makes a living the only way she can.” Competitive as ever, I come up with a twenty-word reduction of Ulysses -- “Every man goes out on an odyssey every day, but not every man has a faithful wife to return to” -- but keep it to myself because Chekhov didn’t write Ulysses.

At lunch Shattuck and I talk about how much we abhor the displacement of literature by critical theory. I must have made some crack or pun, because Shattuck turned to me and said, “Has anyone ever told you you resemble Woody Allen?” “No,” I lied. “You’re the first.” This prompted two other people to compare me to Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, adding, once they saw the stricken look on my face, that they meant it as a compliment.

Inspired by Shattuck, who would outlaw “text” as a term for poem or story, George Packer thinks we ought to make up an index of forbidden words. He would ban “place” (as in “I’m coming from a different place”) and “voice” (“she has found her authentic voice”) in workshops. Tom Ellis despises “issues” (“there are issues of homophobia here”). As for me, the words I most hate hearing at a poetry reading include the verbs “cupped” and “cradled,” the noun “scrim,” and the three-poem-warning: “I’ll just read three more poems.” Tonight is my turn to read. I’ll be reading a bunch of short poems. I relish the moment when I can say, “Just thirty-three more.”

Last night I had to introduce the readers. This is always an odd assignment, since the persons to be “introduced” are already well-known to us. I like doing it in verse. “If I were a consonant looking for a vowel, / or Allen Ginsberg on the day he wrote `Howl,’ / or an employee of Bell & Howell, / tempted by the spoonerism Hell and Bowel, / I’d have exhausted nearly all the rhymes for Robert McDowell. / But I’ll not throw in the towel.”

Had meetings with two of the students I’m going to work with over the next six months. Very excited about some ideas for poems that Sloane Miller and I came up with together: a poem about forks; a prose poem called “Aida,” narrating the plot of the opera as imagined by a teenager watching a performance without preconception, preparation, or Italian; a poem beginning with the line, “This is the most serious poem I have ever written.”

For the time I’m here I’m using an office belonging to a faculty member on leave, who fearlessly annotates his books. About Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler”: “very weak book.” Much of “Ulysses” he considers confused, but at one point he interrupted his reading of “Dubliners” to exclaim with evident surprise, “three good stories in a row!”

PS The picture chosen to illustrate this piece has no evident relationship to the text. What does this prove? 

-- David Lehman (January 1998; first published by Slate)

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/10/the-slate-diary-4-bennington-college-jan-14-1998-by-david-lehman.html

and https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/the-benington-diary-1-january-1998-by-david-lehman-.html

"In Which" by Denise Duhamel [by Nin Andrews]

I hate Christmas. Every December, the seasonal blues hit as soon as Thanksgiving ends. I wish I could fall asleep on the last weekend in November and wake up on January 2.  A friend of mine, who is in AA, suggested that I should try faking it until I make it. So, I have been dressing in a red sweater and green leggings and wearing a little red cap. I look like an aging Christmas elf. (I despise Xmas outfits, so I am going all-out.)  I even have a holly berry pin in my white hair and a blinky tree brooch on my sweater. If anyone looks at me funny, I smile and say, 'Tis the season. And if they ask how I am, I say, “Jolly, very jolly, thank you so much. Are you jolly, too?”  

Well, are you?

Right now, how could I (or anyone) not be jolly when listening to Maria Carey sing “All I Want for Christmas." Or Bobby Helms sing “Jingle Bell Rock” or Andy Williams croon “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Or Michael Bublé,  “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.” Who can resist singing along with them?  

And by golly I do feel almost jolly imagining a world in which I am someone else, someone who loves all the music and manic shopping and traffic and decorating and cooking and office-partying and fruit cakes and eggnog (I think fruit cake and eggnog should be outlawed) . . .   If I were someone else, I might even write poems about this other life/world in which I can become someone else. 

Which is exactly what Denise Duhamel does in her hilarious and brilliant new chapbook, In Which. Reading her poems, I feel less like a grinch and more like I am in the company of a kindred spirit. Oh, Denise, I think to myself as I read, your poems are a gift to the world. 

POEM IN WHICH I PURSUED MY DREAM OF DOING STAND-UP

by Denise Duhamel

When articles I read in 1980 demanded

a woman comic make fun of her appearance,

I went for it. I embraced my fat because John Waters

thought fat was hilarious. In fact, I ate so much

I doubled my size and wore small, unflattering

T-shirts to highlight my stomach rolls. I wasn’t afraid

to be raunchy or gross. I even farted

on stage, becoming a caricature of everything ugly

I dreaded inside me. I teased my frizzy hair to make it

even frizzier. I took my cues from Joan Rivers

and Phyllis Diller—On my honeymoon I put on

a peekaboo blouse. My husband peeked and booed.

I tried to repel men as much as possible

with my awesome, non-conforming physicality.

I didn’t care if I embarrassed my family.

I didn’t care anymore about diets or dates.

I ate whole cakes and didn’t even think

about throwing them up. I went to late night

open mics, wisecracking through the jeers and booing

until audiences got used to me. I took their abuse,

gave it right back. I wore down the drunks and soon

they were laughing, even snorting sometimes.

Though still controversial, I was on the cover

of Paper and Ms. while The Golden Girls

made its TV debut. By the time Roseanne Barr

came around, I’d already taken all up the space

in that roly-poly lane. I let her open for me anyway.

At the end of each of my Comedy Central specials,

I would invite her back into the spotlight

and we’d bump our humongous bellies.

Roseanne grew bored. She was a deep thinker,

growing more profound with each gig.

When Jane Austen came back in vogue

with the movies Clueless and Sense and Sensibility,

I started my own production company

and hired so many women—even skinny

pretty comics, ones I never imagined

could break through. My wide ass opened wide

doors for everyone. Finally I had boyfriends,

handsome and loyal and attracted to my big fat

bank account. But by the time Beyoncé reunited

with Destiny’s Child for the Super Bowl halftime,

my overeating and slovenly ways caught up

with me. When I had bypass surgery and lost

two hundred pounds, I knew my career in comedy

was over. Fans called me a traitor and my latest

boyfriend lost interest too—no more drunken parties

and freezers stocked with Haagen-Dazs

and Tombstone pizzas. I had to pivot so I straightened

my hair and changed my name to give myself

a second act. Roseanne had just won the Pulitzer

for her verse. I put my efforts into becoming a minor poet.

—from In Which
2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

Gift Giving, Ithaca Edition [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

I'll be shopping locally this season but before I feature my favorite vendors, I hope your lists will include poetry books. I can recommend without reservation these titles:

Here are a few of my favorite Ithaca area small businesses. Each of these artisans will ship to you. 

Heirloom quality gifts:

John Truex, co-owner with Liz Seru, of Borough Furnace, braves the cold at a recent farmers market pop-up.

Each one-of-a-kind hat is custom-designed, blocked, sewn, and trimmed in-house by Kimberly Hutsal, owner of Two Foxes Studio.

Many years ago I wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Borough Furnace (above left), maker of hard-working and beautiful cast-iron cookware crafted in Syracuse, NY.  An added benefit? Borough Furnace has Climate Neutral Certification.To receive such certification, brands must empirically measure their cradle-to-customer greenhouse gas emissions and create quantifiable plans to reduce that footprint year over year.

One of my favorite shops in New York City is the tiny storefront of East Village Hats on 80 East 7th Street in Manhattan. It is a wonderland of beautiful hats, some of which are made by Kimberly Hutsai, owner of Two Foxes Studio. Now you can find Kimberly and her hats at the Ithaca Farmers Market, where she maintains a small booth loaded with--you guessed it--hats, and a mirror where you can admire yourself while trying to decide which hat to buy, for yourself or as a gift. I have a terrific straw hat that I wear in summer to protect my punim from the sun. I love it. Visit Kimberly's instagram feed  to see the full range of her millinery or visit her website to place an order or arrange for a custom lid for a loved one. 

When our beloved Johnny of blessed memory was still with us, I arranged with Katherine Solomon to have his portrait taken, in situ. She and her partner arrived with everything needed to take photos of our sweet boy and a few days later, her proofs landed in my in-box. Deciding which to enlarge and frame was tough! In the end, I picked the photo of the three of us to frame and made a calendar with the others. See two examples below. Wasn't he a noble beast?  You may not be able to arrange an in-person photo session with Katherine but you can still buy one of her gorgeous photographs of farm animals. Take Tallulah, for example, one of the Shetland Sheep at Miller Creek Farm. So many portraits to choose from! 

 

Gifts for hosts and hostesses:

When I have a visitor, I like to send them home with a gift bag of locally made artisinal food products. My favorites include Ithaca Dukkah from IthacaDelish seasonal honey from The Honeybee Embassy, wrapped up in a tea towel or basket. A great ambassador for Finger Lakes wineries is Hillick and Hobbs, a relative newcomer on Seneca Lake. The winery, on a beautiful spot with an unobstructed view of Seneca Lake, makes only Rieslings. A dry Estate Riesling makes a great gift. 

 

If you have a local vendor who ships, please drop the details in the comments.

 

Happy Holidays!

-- sdl

A. E. Stallings on BAP 2024

Echolocations: Reflections on Poems by A.E Stallings (Issue 3)

'The Best American Poetry 2024', edited by Mary Jo Salter and David Lehman (series editor).

13 December 2025

 

In this new series, A.E. Stallings, Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, will explore a contemporary poem from a new book or anthology or journal and explain what she admires about it. You can subscribe to the newsletter to receive each issue in your inbox. This issue explores The Best American Poetry 2024. 

Begun in 1988 with a volume guest-edited by John Ashbery, The Best American Poetry (BAP) series has been running for a startling 36 years and counting, including intercalary volumes such as a Best of The Best of American Poetry (edited by Harold Bloom in 1997), and a 25^th anniversary edition (edited by Robert Pinsky). The list of editors is a who’s who of US poetry elites. And behind it all, the poet David Lehman, the series editor, has labored quietly and diligently ensuring its continuity and continued relevance.

As with any annual publication, not to mention one where the volume editor changes each year, the series is inevitably uneven, although the guiding hand of Lehman ensures a certain base-level of quality. Every year will have its new-discovered gems, its duds, its stars, and, often enough, its brief but vitriolic controversies played out across social media. You might think such a long-running series would have played out its initial energies, but I think I can say with some confidence that Mary Jo Salter’s 2024 volume is the best volume in a decade, and arguably the best BAP volume ever produced. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out I am also included in this volume; I have been lucky enough to have appeared in BAP many times over the years, beginning with the class of 1994.)

Salter’s volume fizzes with the potential of debut poets, the sprezzatura of journeyman accomplishment, and the depth of old masters. Intriguingly, Salter singles out a number of longer poems for inclusion, I think putting her finger on a recent trend. As the series initially intended, we get a generous survey of what is happening in American poetry today, and a sense of whence (journals) and by whom (poets) the best work is coming. Unlike some prominent American poetry magazines, we also have a sense of the editor’s (Salter’s) idiosyncratic taste and aesthetic, which is wide ranging, but focused on craft rather than, say, identity or political orthodoxy.

OK, I’m not entirely sure what qualifies a poem as being “American” as far as the series is concerned—a couple of the entries are by Canadian poets (the terrific Karen Solie, for instance) and at least one featured publication is UK-based (Bad Lilies). US Poets Laureate are represented (including the current one, Ada Limón), but so is a former UK Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. A couple of the poets here—Mark Strand and Louise Glück—already lie buried on the slopes of Parnassus. But the book is all the stronger for its broad church. Behind its variety and scope lie Salter’s crackling intelligence and contagious enthusiasm. (I nearly burst out into audible agreement when I read, “It has always felt like Christmas to me when Gjertrud Schnackenberg, for instance, has new work to show.” Indeed!)

I could pick almost any poem at random here to admire—and I might come back to look at more poems from this volume over the next months—but I am going to pick one of its excellent sonnets, Ange Mlinko’s “The Open C”:

The Open C

You stare into it for days, all your life
as if waiting for a curtain to rise. As if
were pending in the ocean’s void,
the amphitheater of the asteroid.
There’s only shocked quartz below.
Where sky and sea never parted—
there the mass extinction started.

Now resurface, to the serene
compact of our opening scene:
one blue mirror reflects a poreless face,
dazzling evening’s investigators.
The other, darker, on the case
shows, in close-up, the craters.

One of the pleasures of the series is that it includes brief write-ups of the poems by the poets themselves, and before I say anything about “The Open C,” it is worth seeing whether Mlinko’s hasn’t already beat me to it. (Mlinko is not only one of her generation’s best poets, she is one of its smartest critics.) Of the poem, which appeared in the excellent on-line journal Bad Lilies, Mlinko writes, with typical succinctness:

The Open C was written on St. George Island, on the Florida Gulf Coast. It’s impossible not to gaze at the horizon of the sea without thinking of the Chicxulub Crater. The sonnet plays on the letter C, sea, and what you can and can’t see, including your own face. ‘Compact’ may mean agreement, density, or the little compact with two mirrors. The extinction that awaits may be someone else’s, or may be your own.

Now, if I did not have this information, would I be thinking of the Chicxulub Crater, with its clicking of c’s as well as crashing of seas? Possibly not right away, although “the amphitheater of the asteroid” offers it up, confirmed by the line “There the mass extinction started.” My image was initially of looking at the sea under a moon, with its face, reflections, and craters, a moon that also might sometimes look like a C as it hangs over the sea. “The Open C” intrigues as a title, since it brings the multivalent pun very much to our attention. A cross-section of a crater might, I suppose, look like a C, there is the bowl of the sea, and just maybe there is a C-is-for-cookie-with-a-bite-out-of-it moon.

For the rest of this essay, pleaase click here.

Adam Bellow on his dad's "Mr. Sammler's Planet"

Adam Bellow [in SAPIR]
His Barbed Behind:  Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Its Critics
What my father’s 1970 novel tells us about today

“I am not a revolutionary. I have little respect for American revolutionaries as I know them, and I have known them quite well.”
                                                                             — Saul Bellow: Letters, p. 290

In 1970 my father, Saul Bellow [left], published Mr. Sammler’s Planet. His seventh novel, it came on the heels of major works that had long since established him as the preeminent American writer of his generation.

The book was immediately hailed as a triumph, reviewed and praised in every significant outlet. Here again, readers were told, were the signature marks of his method — gritty urban realism, a flawed and introspective intellectual protagonist, a gallery of eccentric characters based on real people in his life, a no-holds-barred exposure of Jewish family comedy, and (for the first time) direct engagement with the Holocaust, a theme he had previously treated only glancingly.

But it was also controversial — intensely so, and clearly by design. A direct intervention in the social and political debates of the time, it was seen as taking up conservative themes, particularly the bad effects of the sexual revolution and “black power” protest on American society and culture. Consequently, it was called “the first neoconservative novel” and lamented in liberal circles as a sign of the author’s deplorable “turn to the right.”

“Nowadays we tend to forget what a bombshell it was,” wrote the neoconservative art critic Hilton Kramer 25 years later. “In its refusal to conform to the left-wing pieties that had already swamped the academy, the media, and the whole cultural scene, it mocked what had swiftly become the conventional wisdom. Which, of course, was why the Left decried it.”

And decry it they did. Consider some of the adjectives applied to it: “harsh,” “aloof,” “judgmental,” “cold,” “contemptuous,” “didactic to a fault,” “rank and embittered,” “an austere, dismissive jeremiad,” “a howl of rage.” Saul’s ex-friend Alfred Kazin, once a major booster of his work, panned it as an expression of “punitive moral outrage.”

In short, the reaction was seismic, challenging readers on a deep level — especially members of the New York cultural elite who saw themselves reflected in its scathing critique of liberal hypocrisy. The critic Joseph Epstein was on to something when he remarked that the book seemed calculated “to offend whole categories of the reading public as well as most of the people who write about books.”

Why would the author’s son enter this literary minefield more than 50 years after the fact? Certainly it is daunting for one who is neither a writer or a critic, but a publisher, which is a very different animal. That said, I have a distinct advantage in being intimately acquainted with my father’s private thoughts. As much as anyone alive, I knew his mind. I have also in my career as an editor published many polarizing books — books that liberals considered “bad” and “dangerous.”

You can tell a lot about the state of ideological flux in this country from how people react to such a book, and Sammler, while not a political treatise, does make a political argument. To reappraise it today is therefore necessarily to ask, in a way we do not ask of other novels, not just whether it holds up as a work of fiction (which it obviously does), but whether its argument was right.

*

[Saul Bellow] remained a mainstream liberal, appalled by McCarthy, firmly committed to civil rights, and publicly opposed to the Vietnam War — even as he accepted an invitation from LBJ to attend a dinner at the White House for “leaders in the arts,” a choice for which he was severely criticized by literary friends such as Robert Lowell. At the same time he was uncomfortable with the more extreme antinomian aspects of the student revolt against the so-called white power structure and bourgeois morality.

Critics who prefer not to address the substantive reasons for this movement away from the Left tend to fall back on psychoanalysis. The argument here is that Saul became more “patriarchal” as he aged, shifting from the archetype of the son to that of the father who seeks, as his virility declines, to assert his authority in the face of a noisy, disrespectful challenge from the young. In this connection, much is made of an episode that occurred in May 1968 at San Francisco State, where Saul’s speech on the place of writers in the university was disrupted by an angry young man who called him an “effete old shit” with “dried up balls.” This incident, incorporated practically verbatim into Sammler, is cited in various biographies and memoirs to suggest that Sammler is “an old man’s book” and that Saul and his hero are one and the same. The scene takes up less than a page:

“Hey!” . . . A man in Levi’s, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion, was standing shouting at him.

“Hey! Old Man!”

There is a brief exchange about something George Orwell had said:

“Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good that he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit.”

A commotion breaks out and Sammler is helped to withdraw by a sympathetic female student. Out on the street, the narration resumes:

[But] he was not so much personally offended by the event as struck by the will to offend. What a passion to be real. But real was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard? How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary-ape howling.

Saul was undoubtedly upset by this experience. But he had already voiced his jaundiced view of the student movement in the New York Times, writing that he was “wholly opposed to civil disobedience” and disliked “unreasonable rebelliousness and pointless defiance of authority.” Jews of his generation remembered how German universities in the ’30s had collapsed into fascism and plausibly feared it could happen again, here in the tolerant USA, amid the violent rejection of all civilized tradition and restraint. So there was clearly more involved for him than personal affront.

for the rest of this article, click here
from SAPIR
https://sapirjournal.org/university/2024/11/his-barbed-behind-mr-sammlers-planet-and-its-critics/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=newsletter

ADAM BELLOW is the publisher of Wicked Son Books and the executive editor at Bombardier Books, imprints of Post Hill Press. He is the co-founder of the Jewish Literary Fund.

On The New York School [by Michael Tyrell]

<<<
O’Hara’s famous poem "Why I Am Not a Painter" begins with the poet yearning to be a painter. O’Hara reports the process of Mike Goldberg applying the word "sardines" to a canvas as O’Hara crafts his poem "Oranges." Eventually, Goldberg’s painting is "just letters" hanging in a gallery, but O’Hara’s poem has not "mentioned orange yet"; twelve poems are the result, but "there should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life." The poem cleverly inverts the materials of the painter and poet (Goldberg works with the word as a physical object, O’Hara with a color), and demonstrates how the final products of both differ from their original, ostensible subjects. Though O’Hara "would rather be / a painter," he honors the close, productive bond between the visual and the verbal, while celebrating himself as that enigmatic, generative figure, the "real poet."

David Lehman proposes that this collaborative, prolific period lasted from 1948 to 1966, when O’Hara died. Of his subjects, O’Hara is often regarded as the undisputed star of the group; commanding and flamboyant, he was as un-self-conscious dashing off a poem during his lunch break from the Museum of Modern Art as he was posing nude for Fairfield Porter and Nell Blaine. . . .

Lehman illustrates the poet’s nearly selfless concern for his peers, pointing out that dozens of people emerged after the poet’s death, each claiming to be his closest friend. Lehman closes his discussion of O’Hara with a provocative reading of "The Day Lady Died," the stunning elegy for Billie Holliday, convincingly placing the poem in the company of the great elegies of the English language:

As the detractors of "Lycidas" were wrong, so the critics of "The Day Lady Died" misjudged the poet’s conversational ease and seemingly self-centered stance…. [It] is a moving elegy not in spite of the poem’s preoccupation with the poet’s self but because of it; the death of the great singer at the age of forty-four occurs as an interruption, a shock that the reader is invited to share…. To the charge that O’Hara is too ironic to be sincere, I would borrow the distinction Lionel Trilling made between sincerity and authenticity: O’Hara’s suspicion of sincerity as a rhetorical mode is paradoxically what makes his work more authentic…. [I]f all that survived of 1959 was "The Day Lady Died," then historians a century hence could piece together the New York of that moment in the same way that archaeologists can reconstruct a whole extinct species of dinosaur from a single fossile bone.

• • •

Each of the remaining three poets receives equally extensive and relevant biographical and critical treatment. Lehman fills us in on Ashbery’s childhood as both a lonely boy growing up on an upstate New York farm and a precocious contestant on a radio program, his friends’ reaction to his early poems ("like falling in love with some thrilling young person from Mars," according to Koch), the impact of his decade in Paris on his life’s work, his contributions as an art critic, and his present position as the most frequently imitated and parodied poet in America. Few seem to remember that his place in the firmament was secured precariously over decades, beginning with Auden’s grudging selection of Some Trees for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

The price of comic ingenuity, Lehman observes, has somewhat affected the literary success of Kenneth Koch. As both an admirer of Koch’s brilliant catalogues and innovative one-line poems, Lehman is perhaps the most enamored of this poet. Koch is a lauded teacher (his antic assignments have become something of a legend in academic circles) yet is presented here as an under-appreciated writer in an era when the lyric was considered alpha and omega. Perhaps more ignored in the poetry world, in spite of a Pulitzer, is James Schuyler, whose life and deceptively transparent, scrupulously particular poems are thoroughly investigated here. In terms of both its form and neglected status, his work stands apart from the others. Often making use of the literal rather than the symbolic, he creates in his "Hymn to Life" a kind of "laundry list" that, as Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan discovers, has the power to make life worthwhile. We learn about his complicated, influential friendship with Auden, as well as why he was the last of the four to publish a book. He was renowned as the best editor of the group, and his poems attracted notable admirers such as Elizabeth Bishop, yet he did not give a public reading until 1988, three years before his death. Dazed at times by heavy dosages of antipsychotic medications, he spent a great deal of his later years in squalid hotel rooms.
>>>

From Michael Tyrell's review of The Last Avant-Garde in Boston Review, December 1, 1999.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michael-tyrell-review-last-avant-garde/

An Interview with Grace Cavalieri [by Nin Andrews]

NA: As you know, I’m a huge fan of your work—your poems, paintings, interviews, memoir, plays. Sometimes, when I can’t remember how to write or what to ask in an interview, I will google your name. Or if I am just feeling blue—moseying along like a lost soul on a dark street. Your poems are like lit houses I can look inside, their glow spilling into the night.  Like "Reversal" from your collection, Owning the Not So Distant World.  
 

Reversal

This poem can do whatever it wants—
It can change the past and make it new—
It can make hollyhocks bloom again
in my mother’s yard,
pink and white against the wall where I sit
in the safety of summer mornings.
These words can take away the scarlet stab of blood
that entered my mother’s brain
as she slept.                               Here,
take this porcelain cup, blue and white,
And stir some memories for faces no longer seen,
then wander with me to pines that never grew,
to the cottage that was not there because this poem can
leap over any cold moon rising, over any landscape looming
to make this the happiest day of our lives. 

The book, like this poem, is mystical and instructive.  I am wondering if you could say a few words about it. 

GC:  You know Nin, as you are a poet, that the imagination is a safe back yard. No stress lives there—no shame— We can go into memory or make believe and create such safety. We are magicians, poets are magicians, who can make flowers grow in the snow just by making the  image. We can bring people back to life!! What power. Aren’t we lucky.

NA: You have written many poetry books over the years, and from beginning until now, your poems are consistently lyrical, smart, narrative, heart-felt, and, like your name, full of grace. When I don’t have your books on hand, I will sometimes google and reread your three poems on the Poetry Foundation website. Those poems take me back to my girlhood and an era of great optimism and promise. Of course, it’s easy to idealize the past. But I noticed in your poem, “The Shakedown,” from your book, The Not So Distant World, you are not romanticizing about those days.

The Shakedown

With
this silver spoon
I tell the truth
I came
from a land
where love
was spare
parent better
off not paired
affection
stripped 
to its essentials
a film I run
and can turn off
because
from a sea
of pure abundance
comes the trumpet 
of happiness
sweeping me
into this place
more golden
than birth.

Could you talk about that poem? About the “sea of pure abundance”? 

GC: Well, there was discord in my home, A beautiful mother who was not well, a father who had just love enough for my sister. But the invisible world held everything I needed…‘the sea of abundance.’ I could envision other worlds, enter other books, become characters on stage. Everything I needed was in consciousness. All I had to do (have to do even now) is pull it through me. It is all out there. Everything we need to be happy, to create a state of Being. Some people call it God. Some energy. Some light.  I know we walk in it, and it animates us, and we can pull it through us.

NA: Now, I understand the tentative opening to your older poem, “Angelo,” which is a lovely homage to your father. You begin, “If I were to ask what you’d like, it might be to say something/kind about you.” And so, you do. I can relate! Having had a difficult father myself, I have often felt his ghost looking over my shoulder, asking me to write only nice things about him, which became complicated when I was writing my forthcoming memoir. Did you write more poems about your family dynamics? 

GC: Yes in every book. I carry on the struggle. I teach my students that they cannot write poetry that matters until they find the wound. Then we will write that story again and again

NA: Tell me how it all began! Who first encouraged you? Who were your role models were?  

GC: My college professor approved of my bad poetry and that gave me the space to write long enough to find who I was. I started copying FROST, then I realized I was not a farmer from New England but an Italian (then)-Catholic from Trenton, so maybe I should go with that.

I was writing in the 50’s and the only published women of consequence were Kumin, Sexton, very few...

When I was sitting on the little chairs at the Hermitage Library , the only poetry on the shelf was by Kipling, or the romantics, all men. white. English.

I guess my first love was Edna St Vincent Millay (much under-appreciated). I have all her first editions.

NA: And then there was Ken, your husband, whom I adore, not only because he was the love of your life and a sculptor and a Navy pilot, but also because he encouraged/supported you and your writing career. You say that he told you to write plays? And to write a memoir? 

GC: Ken was my muse. He said, “YOU CAN WRITE A PLAY.” So I did–then 10 more–in one decade (terrible plays by today’s standards but this was the cultural revolution and we had stages in lofts and above dentists’ offices…) Ellen Stewart ( NYC’s CAFE LA MAMA) came to Baltimore and opened The Corner Theater Cafe which allowed the new and experimental. I premiered all one-acts there.

NA: I so love your plays! It’s as if you were able to enter the souls of your characters! They are plays and poetry and magic all in one.  I especially enjoyed Hyena Play about Mary Wollstonecraft, whom you describe as the mother of feminism. She reminds me of you—an unstoppable force and someone who emerges from a world that might have held others back. How do these plays occur to you? And how does writing and performing a play compare to writing/giving readings of poetry? 

GC: Writing a play takes a long time and dedicated focus. I can only write in a pink cotton nightgown in Key West. So with Ken gone, I doubt I’ll write another– I collect images for a long long time before writing. I collect sayings and thoughts like finding a piece of string and adding to it till I have a whole ball, then I write. Every play I write has once been a book of poems . . .  so I have the characters already hanging around the house.

Watching  a play on stage is very magical. It is never quite the one I wrote. It is always better or worse. And teaches me the art of surrender.

NA: Another of my favorite Grace poems is “Work Is My Secret Lover,” in which you describe work as “the friend who will never leave.” I suppose it’s no secret that to do all that you have done, you must work tirelessly. Can you give me a glimpse of a day in the life of Grace Cavalieri? 

I always have to set the alarm as I have an event each day, even SUNDAY- (SUNDAY IS SANGHA, Mindfulness meditation)

I write something every morning.

Mondays and Tuesdays and Fridays are group meditations till noon on zoom

All week, I meet with one of 5 groups: 1) “The Song In The Room Women;” 2)Students I had from ANTIOCH where I taught 1970-75 -still with me– once 20years  now in their 70’s, studying the canon;  3) Haiku; 4) Play reading; 5)  Creative Writing with Antioch poets.

I host a monthly SATURDAY series at St John's College so managing that

I schedule poets for my radio /podcast/youtube show 

3x a month I record/ broadcast, sometimes in LOC studio, sometimes zoom, then distribute on e-serv, apple podcasts and public radio.

I have a small poetry press that produces one book every 2 months so that takes attention, editing, production etc

I am always writing grants for St Johns College, and radio…I am not an item on anyone’s budget so it is a constant process.

I check in with my kids every day

Several of my groups I cook for -when we meet- as that is my hobby

I try to swim every day but the wheel of time has me doing 3x a week lately

At 6pm I SHUT THE SHUTTERS and go to bed with books, papers and TV and watch MSNBC and CNN, reading during commercials

Tuesday night is MARRIED AT FIRST SIGHT on TV and SUNDAY night is 90 DAY FIANCE

I gave up LOVE AFTER LOCKUP.

Today I went to Baltimore to work with my composer of 40 years, she has dementia but can still write music. We have just finished “Ken’s Song” about how he healed himself from Viet Nam by sculpting. And she is working on REVERSAL, the poem on the back of DISTANT WORLD book.

NA: Okay, so you do more in a week than I do in a year. And we poets have you to thank for your tireless work on our behalf!! 

Maybe we can end with one a haiku from your latest book?

Here’s the first Haiku in I HAIKU TOO

                                                           on the autumn branch
                                                           one leaf hanging
                                                           dances anyway

The Golden Age of Paranoia, part II [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea.

Francis Wheen begins his history of the reputedly paranoid 1970s with his questioning of what main event signified the end of the idealistic 1960s. I’ve read other authors pondering that same question. The certain events that Wheen served up are the usual suspects. He points to August 9, 1969, when Charles Manson’s cult followers hacked to death Sharon Tate and four others in L.A. Joan Dideon apparently saw that as the death of the ‘60s. Or, Wheen writes, “the public burial of peace, love and flower power” was the tragic Altamont concert later in 1969, when Hells Angels hired as security guards killed a young attendee, Meredith Hunter. Or else, the ‘60s ended on May 4, 1970, when the national guardsmen gunned down four antiwar protestors. This could make for a keen game to play on long road trips: coming up with the exact event that ended the ‘60s. There are two events that Wheen doesn’t mention, like, for a lot of people it was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in June, 1968, after winning the California primary. 

Personally, I am partial to the idea that the real death of the ‘60s was on December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman. After all, the ex-Beatle was the last remaining symbol of idealism for the Left, and Chapman was plenty disillusioned after John’s religiously blasphemous “we’re bigger than Jesus” comment. Maybe I see it as the best analogy because I wasn’t born until the early 1980s, and yet my musical tastes are frozen in the 1960s. I have been a beatlemaniac since childhood. I have a distinct memory of feeling a sense of terrible alienation coming of age in the mid-1990s and absolutely hating the crap music everyone else was into. Lousy lonesome childhood indeed. 

More tomorrow

The Golden Age of Paranoia [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea. 

More to come soon!...

-- Friday, October 25, 2024

R.I.P. Robert Coover (1932-October 5, 2024) [by Stacey Lehman]

Ed. note: I just learned that Robert Coover died on October 5, 2024. I read and loved several of his books. I had a terrific chapbook of his short-short stories "In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters". One of the "encounters" describes a rolicking night in a convention hotel that makes me wonder if he was describing an experience at the MLA or AWP. Unfortunately, the chapbook went the way of books that are loaned to friends: I no longer have it. Here's a post I wrote way back in 2009. Don't forget to read the comments:

 

A Tale (Tail) of Two Covers [by Stacey Harwood]

 

David Yezzi’s post a few days ago about Philip Larkin prompted this post by Jim Cummins, which prompted a comment string about Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid, a book I read and loved when it was published in 1982 (Grove). I was living in Albany, NY at the time and Coover came through to promote another book. When I asked him about Spanking, he told me that the book was really about “language.”  I was confused, felt dumb.  The book I read was about the S&M relationship between a man and his maid. Oh well.

Anyway, Jim Cummins hasn’t read the book, though he would like to, so I did a quick search to see if it is still in print.  It most certainly is, yet with a different cover than the Coover I read and loved.  Check this out.  On the left is the book I read in '82; on the right is the cover as it appears today.

 

Which cover would you like, Jim? 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 16, 2024

Kwame Dawes’ Sturge Town was recently published by Norton. The book takes its title from a village in Jamaica—and uses it as an overriding metaphor for poems that travel from Ghana to the United States, stopping in one of the first free villages in post-emancipation Jamaica. Dawe’s poems sing with urgency—about crimes against black bodies, loss, addiction of a loved one, and the difficulties of religion. This is a book of mature wonderment and contemplation. All through these interior and exterior travels, Dawes poems are infused with light—wisdom, hope, and the actual sun.

https://poems.com/poem/light-home/

Congratulations, Kwame!

On Ten Years of “Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets” [by Andrew Epstein]

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal. Even at the time, I knew it was swimming a bit upstream to launch a blog just at the very moment that the blogging era seemed to be crashing to a close. But I did so because I’d long felt the need for a place to find commentary, news, reviews, and links related to a movement that I found endlessly fascinating and that others seemed to as well. As I noted on the fifth anniversary of Locus Solus, back in 2018, I didn’t have a clear picture of what this site might become or what kind of audience it might find – and had no idea that I might write about 350 posts over the next decade! — but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was both fun and rewarding to do and that others seemed to find it useful and interesting too.

To mark the occasion of this anniversary, the Flow Chart Foundation (the wonderful organization devoted to the legacy of John Ashbery) and the critic Mandana Chaffa have generously invited me to have a conversation about the blog, its mission and history, and the New York School more broadly, which will be held virtually next Wednesday, 6/15. You can find more information about the event and how to register here. Please join us for the conversation!

Over the past five years, I’ve continued to chronicle the New York School’s ongoing influence on poetry and its legacy in contemporary culture, track the rich critical conversation it continues to provoke, and comment here and there on poems, books, podcasts, and performances. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all things New York School-related – from new art exhibits and books, sightings in the broader culture and surprising cameos in music and television, and the sad news about deaths and losses and the passing of a generation or two.

Over the past five years, I’ve posted on everything from O’Hara’s unexpected influence on fashion, on Jennifer Lawrence’s accessory choices, and on contemporary fiction to mourning the loss of jazz musicians with ties to the New York School; from how the study of mathematics is related to John Ashbery’s embrace of indeterminacy to Ted Berrigan’s influence on indie rock; from Ben Lerner’s oblique elegy to Ashbery to the time O’Hara met Marlene Dietrich.

If you’re curious about the range of topics and types of things I’ve posted about here over the past decade, click on the “Categories” and “Archives” drop-down menus on the right side of the screen and browse around.  (And to keep up with new stuff, some of which doesn’t make it on to this blog, be sure to follow the “Locus Solus” Facebook page and my own Twitter account, as well as this site, to get timely updates and information and links about the poets and artists of the New York School).

I have been consistently surprised and heartened by the broad and vibrant community of readers and writers that the New York School continues to inspire. It’s been wonderful to hear from so many fans, fellow scholars, poets, and interested readers, and I appreciate all the tips, suggestions, questions, and enthusiastic responses that have come my way — please keep them coming.

Thanks, as always, for reading and for visiting this site. As Ashbery writes at the end of “The System,” “The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future.” Onward! 

by Andrew Epstein

https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2023/06/09/on-ten-years-of-locus-solus-the-new-york-school-of-poets/

 

"The Best American Poetry" 2024": Pub Date Today (Sept 3, 2024)

Mary Jo Salter will be the guest of Tom Hall's renowned  "Midday Show" today probably between 12:40 PM and 1 PM East Coast Time .https://www.wypr.org/show/midday

<<<See https://lithub.com/lit-hub-daily-september-3-2024/ for a sneak peak at Mary Jo's amazing intro as published in Literary Hub:

We Are All Nobody: Mary Jo Salter on Finding Beauty and Community in Poetry

“Let’s try to put our own vanities aside when we write poems, and let’s read the poems by other people that make us feel most alive.”

By Mary Jo Salter

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” asked Emily Dickinson. It’s clear to many of us who she was and is—one of the greatest poets ever—and certain poems of hers suggest she knew it herself. Still, she had a sense of humor about swelled heads, and we love the zinger that concludes her eight-line Nobody poem:

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

Readers delight in these lines because we recognize the empty pomposity that too often afflicts people (that is, other people). We also suspect that the hermetic Dickinson (who eschewed publication, dismissing it as “the Auction / Of the Mind of Man”) seems specifically to be skewering that subset of people called writers: the people who may have little to tell us other than their bylines, but who look to the admiring “bog” to confirm their brilliance. And among the general class of writers, which includes bestselling novelists and blockbuster screenwriters, we poets risk being the most deluded about our prospect of fame in that bog, now or ever.

The greatest poems may even, in exemplifying beauty, just marginally re-define it.

The business of poets, I would argue, includes at least some of these aspirations: to witness the world, including the layered, shifting moods of their own minds’ interiors; to feel deeply and also to think through their feelings; to experience life with all of the senses, which sometimes get profitably jumbled; to express some aspect of the human comedy and the human tragedy by exploiting the unique resources of a particular language or languages; to suggest with figures like simile or metaphor the surprising congruity of seemingly unlike things; to speak to their contemporaries about contemporary matters; to place themselves also within the history of humankind, including the history of literature, and to add something to it; to channel our universal musical instincts, our childlike but never merely childish love of song; to dare to remain uncertain and paradoxical and inconclusive as life itself, while also making a finished “thing,” a poem, of beauty. The greatest poems may even, in exemplifying beauty, just marginally re-define it, sometimes without the awareness of the reader.

>>>

and furthermore, https://www.theivybookshop.com/event/the-best-american-poetry-2024-with-guest-editor-mary-jo-salter/

Here at last: "New American Writing" no. 42

This special issue edited by Paul Hoover has been eagerly anbicipated for months by the Cognoscentis, one of the five families that meet at the cafe in Little Italy where fortunes are bet, lost, and recovered, from a corner table. Among the poets included are such all-stars as Elaine Equi, Donald Revell,  Vincent Katz, Maxine Chernoff, and Jerome Sala. The new issue of New American Writing is now available from MadHat Press online or by mail, PO Box 01225, Cheshire, MA 01225. $15.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 21, 2024

Joan Larkin’s Old Stranger was published yesterday by Alice James Books.  I first became a fan of Larkin’s after reading her exquisitely painful “Blackout Sonnets” from A Long Sound (1986).  It’s fascinating to me how the themes displayed in this early sonnet crown—alcoholism, recovery, rape, abortion—are revisited in Old Stranger, urgently, beautifully, almost forty years later. Her sonnets have loosened in terms of rhyme but not in terms of their power. Decidedly feminist, these poems are what readers need in these regressive times. Larkin also deals with mortality—hoarding, pain, canes—with aplomb and candor while remembering the indignities of youth.  Here is the sonnet that opens the book:

Girls Department

I stared at my shameful flesh in the three-way mirror.

Mother, my guide, my witness, pinched me between

her fingers, thinking aloud: could she work

with the skimpy seam allowance? Get it to fit?

My model-thin cousin Nancy sent me a box

of hand-me-downs: soft wool skirts, an orchid

sweater-set a size too small –– another girl’s raiment.

My sister meant well, Mother instructed,

then took me to Brigham’s for a treat: hot fudge

melted breast-like pyramids of peppermint-stick

ice cream, and I crunched the small clear candies.

I sang in a talent contest once, “Indian Love Call”

in a green tulle gown Mother grabbed from a bin.

She had an eye for a bargain. She took up the hem.

Congratulations, Joan!

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