The Best American Poetry

"The Magnificent Seven" [by Elaine Equi]

The Seven Sages – a time-traveling band of philosophers
appearing in ancient China, India, and Greece.

The Seven Senses from which the Self must be emancipated.

The Seven Dwarves -- domesticated and Disney-fied into cuteness.
Bashful and Dopey being perennial favorites.

The Seventh Seal opens on the dark night of a knight as he wanders
Bergman’s black and white medievalism.

The Seven Deadly Sins --- without envy, greed, and pride
there would be no capitalism.

The Seven Brides, like Snow White, must civilizE

the Seven Brothers, best known for brawling, barn-raising,
and cocky dance moves, before a group wedding can take place.

-- Elaine Equi

Ed. note: The poem is from The Intangibles by Elaine Equi (Coffee House Press, 2019). The photo below was taken by John Tranter in New York City in 1992. Elaine is at  the center, with Lyn Tranter to her right and David Trinidad puffing on a smoke.

"Mary McCarthy" [by Mary Maxwell]

To the very end of Cape Cod the refugees have arrived, shipwrecked
heroes out of Homer.  But even Helen was an exile of sorts, pointing out
her noble countrymen to Priam from the stone barricades.  Alternating

with picnics on the beach, flirtation, clam pie and pitchers of martinis,
important work remains to be done. Typing out an English translation
of Weil and Bespaloff’s essays on The Iliad, Dyers Hollow sand gets

into the inky keys just as it does between sun-burnt toes.  Survivors, not
yet human remains dearer to the vultures than to their wives as the Greek
is deftly rendered by Dwight MacDonald, though death, and victory,

feels imminent as a thunder storm.  On an otherwise beautiful August day,
the first bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. A female chorus will continue to
share footnoted recipes while performing witty blue-stockinged dances,

sporting reversible masks of lover and mother. Articulate overprotective
Thetis hovering above the waves. A visit from Hermann Broch. Nicola
Chiaromante in a blue ruffled apron on the threshold where myth steps

nto poetry sweeps sand out of his Truro cottage. Philosophic principles.
Sexual practice. The pursued and the pursuer.  Shoplifted taffy, infidelity
warranting the inflated tragic dramaturgy accorded a child’s scraped knee.

Ed. note: From Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (Longnookbooks, 2012). From a sequence of poems devoted to figures of renown who spent quality days in Cape Cod.

Uccello’s Battle in Aspic [by Clark Coolidge]

An ant has landed in the distance, as I try
to realize the swords as bumbershoots fallen
tracked around under the horses placed, and beneath
there are giant cracks in lace.  The hook cap of a cat
left into crystal of wood. Seeing a matter of
oranges raised, pole-braided into instrument of throng.
Nobody’s flag catches into pages marbled of an end.
I throw throats, howls the one in bath cap, but the
shower is raisin and he clicks on lit glass, a shard
map of pink of blood and the berry stillness. No one
looks beyond all this, and I only get to see it
tiny from away where I am.

Ed. note: Thanks to Geoffrey Young, publisher of The Figures, the press that published Coolidge’s Odes of Roba in 1991.  On top, Paolo Uccello's "Battle of San Romano" at the Uffizi gallery  in Florence.

Anonymous Poet [by Stanley Moss]

Sometimes I would see her with her lovers
walking through the Village, the wind
strapped about her ankles.
Simply being, she fought
against the enemies of love and poetry
like Achilles in wrath.
Her tongue was not a lake,
but it lifted her lovers
with the gentle strength of a lake
that lifts a cove of waterlilies—
her blue eyes, the sky above them—
till night fell and the mysteries began.
My friend I love, poet I love,
if you are not reading or writing tonight
on your Underwood typewriter,
if no one is kissing you, death is real.

(originally in The New Yorker, 2008)

Two Poems by Aaron Fagan

King and Trumpet

One night I was drunk at the Heartland,
And, apparently, I spoke to Dan, the bartender,
Because his roommate called the next night to say,
“My roommate, Dan, was your bartender last night.
I hope you don’t think I’m crazy for calling like this?”
A few hours later, after cocktails at the Green Mill,
She invited me home and screamed when she flipped
The lights on to find her chows, King and Trumpet,
Each with a dead kitten hanging from their mouth,
Which I wrapped in tin foil and buried them warm
In the backyard by moonlight smoking a Lucky.
That Sunday we met up near the Shell with the “S”
Burned out at the corner of Touhy before heading
To Leone Beach. She was so small, all that fit her
Was this worn out pink girls’ bikini she later made
A point of saying was see-through, her bobbed hair
Bobbing with baby-blue ribbons, nearly horizontal
In flip-flops and giant sunglasses, trying to hold back
Her chows. She’s a cop, a mom, and a boxer now,
Yet years before we met, when she was a stripper
In New York, she would shoot junk into the cowgirls
Riding torpedoes on her forearms, but after the beach,
She made us chicken and corn on the cob. Her hope
Was I’d write more and drink less, while she—
With the giant dogs at her tiny feet—painted
The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey over
A clown from her collection of John Wayne Gacy
Originals surrounding the bed where we made
Love and I first read The Double Dream of Spring.

 

Mise en Abyme

An erotic life
Of boredom
Enacts a fake
Movie with
Real violence,
Sincere as sun
Sparks lightning.

Looking out
Closed eyes,
Sagacity’s field
Is in arrears—
Video feedback,
Beside the point,
History a habit.

from A Better Place Is Hard To Find by Aaron Fagan (The Song Cave, 2020). Photo credit: Camilla Ha.

"Drunken Winter" [by Joseph Ceravolo]

Oak oak!     like like

it then

      cold some wild paddle

so sky then;

flea you say

“geese geese" the boy

June of winter

of again

Oak sky

From The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). The  poem initially appeared in Spring in this World of Poor Mutts, winner of the first Frank O'Hara Award in 1968, which was judged by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Books by Michael Brownstein, Tony Towle, John Koethe, and Kenward Elmslie were chosen for the series in subsequent years. Click here for more about Joe's Collected. 

A "civil engineer and regular family guy" (in Tom Clark's words), Ceravolo was born in Astoria, Queens, in 1934, went to City College, began writing poetry when serving in the US Army, and took a class with Kenneth Koch that proved decisive in his development as a poet. Many of us got our first exposure to Ceravolo's poems in the Paris Review when Tom Clark edited its poetry pages. Before dying of cancer on September 4,1988, Ceravolo wrote and published several other books with small presses, but what many readers, including ardent fans of Ceravolo's work, don't realize is that the man produced hundreds of pages of poetry in the last twelve years of his life. The poems -- some of which have dates in lieu of titles -- stand on their own and also figure as part of one long project: a chronicle of the poet's sensibility.

-- DL

"To Ford Madox Ford, Still in Heaven" [by Mary Maxwell]

Since, as you’ve said, There is room in this world for infinities
of gods, would you mind too much if I made you one of mine?

As genius loci, a sort of outsized daimon of the desk, you’d
recline beneath a throw of papers, your lower lip hanging in that

distracted meditation often mistaken for a snooze.  We’d talk
of your beloved Biala and of Béziers bereft, as well as more

recent fires you prophesied in  life.  Did we do all we could?
The March of Literature defended all books from burning.

When Provence heard the cleric cry, “Burn them all!”
empathetic grapes shriveled on the vine as precious parchments

vanished in the flames. May bowls of bouillabaisse and bottles of
Cassis replace the barbarians’ sacrificial pyres, and as you breathe

my altar’s saffron-scented air, hear this foolish pagan’s simple-
minded prayer.  My dear girl, food and wine ARE culture!

Ed. note: From Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (Longnooksbooks, 2012). The poem alludes to Ford's brilliant poem on heaven, which you can find in Pound's "Confucius to Cummings" anthology.

"Sprezzatura" [by Robert Hass]

Eugenio Montale asked me if there was an American word
for sprezzatura, particularly with respect to poetry.
In respetto di poesia, he said. And I said yes, in American
We call it ‘moose’ and mentioned several poets,
Frank O‘Hara among them, who were quite famous,
As fame goes in our sort of work, for their moose.
He wondered if there were an American expression
To convey the general concept of ‘Eugenio Montale.’
And I said, Yes, we call it ‘George Seferis.’ I also observed
—I was showing off, but how often  do you get to talk
to Eugenio Montale--that, in my view, the prose of  Seferis,
Especially his diaries from the last years of the war
And the slow waking to the depth of that devastation after,
Were even greater than his poems, though his poems 
At their best gave off pure light, like the glare
From the white walls on the cliffs above the harbor in Skios
Which could make the eyes ache. He canted his head
Politely and asked if among Americans the worship
Of the Virgin Mary was a custom. And I said that it was
And that in the cities of the Middle West and probably
The towns, it was especially intense among the mothers
Of children with grave illnesses who heaped flowers
In enormous quantities before her altar and he nodded.
And they light candles? he asked. And I said, Yes, candles.

from Summer Smoke, the brilliant new collection by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020). Hass was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of The Best American Poetry. Photo credit: Miriam Berkley.

Published Today: Nin Andrews’s "The Last Orgasm"

Nin Andrews, a regular contributor to this blog, whose poems have appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry, has brilliantly extended the conceit she introduced in her Book of Orgasms, first published in 1994, reprinted since then, and characterized often as an international cult classic. In the new book there are poems that reflects Andrews's passionate engagement with the work of such poets as Walt Whitman, Henri Michaux, Robert Hass, Lydia Davis, Denise Duhamel, Frank O'Hara, Amy Gerstler, James Tate, Mark Strand, Robert Bly, Rilke, Vallejo, and the sculptor Bernini ("Ecstasy of Saint Teresa"). There is also a splendid reflection on John Ashbery's "Instruction Manual." Andrews dares to ask questions, such as "What is the postmodernist orgasm?" Interviewing many in her indefatigable quest to resolve the issue, Andrews gives us the standard Wikipedia definition ("An orgasm of questionable identity or origin") as well as the far more convincing definition provided by the new American feminist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who says it is "a part of the all that women can't have."

The press release from Etruscan Press in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., begins with these paragraphs:

<<< 

Nin Andrews’s poetry collection, The Last Orgasm, a collection of wry and fantastical, spiritual, feminist meditations on sexuality, love, desire, and the end of desire, was released by Etruscan Press today.

The Last Orgasm continues the journey of Nin Andrew’s first collection, The Book of Orgasms, which became a cult classic that has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and has readers around the globe. In both books the orgasm is an ethereal presence, puzzled by humanity in general and the author in particular.  

Jan Beatty, (Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) says, “Of course, I would praise The Last Orgasm. And the first, second, middle, next, next to last. For the sake of everything true and holy (although Andrews would say there is nothing holy) please read this outrageous book! In these smart, raucous poems of one orgasm after another, Andrews climaxes at the pinnacle of social commentary—the G-spot of social change: the change being, give us more orgasms/the orgasm is dead. Indicting the writer, the book, the poetry mafia, and, of course, the orgasm, Andrews writes: ‘When I was sixteen, I woke one night and saw Our Lady of the Orgasm singing.’ Read this book if you want to sing again.”
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"A Manly Response to Disease": Susan Gubar on "One Hundred Autobiographies"

photo © Stacey Lehman

<<<
While learning this spring that the coronavirus was taking a disproportionate toll on men, I was reading David Lehman’s account of his bladder cancer, a disease that also disproportionately afflicts men. His brilliantly circumspect 2019 memoir, “One Hundred Autobiographies,” reminded me that a conventional model of masculinity inhibits some men from expressing their emotional responses to assaults on the body.

© Cornell University Press

An accomplished poet, editor and scholar, Mr. Lehman exhibits grace under the pressure exerted by disabling treatments. He thereby provides insight into the benefits and liabilities of masculine reticence about disease. Like him, quite a few men may judge it unmanly to discuss medical procedures that can unman them. Is this stoicism empowering or disabling?

*

In “One Hundred Autobiographies,” Mr. Lehman informs us that he is telling and not telling his cancer story. After he discovered blood in his urine, he produced 100 vignettes to recount his life. The brief sketches were composed while he underwent several cystoscopies, a succession of transurethral resections of bladder tumors (TURBTs), eight weeks of an immunotherapy regimen, four months of chemotherapy for metastatic disease and a five-hour surgery, “in which they remove your bladder, some lymph nodes, and choice other parts of you and reorganize your insides,” along with a slew of side effects: a “heart stop,” neuropathy, infection, weight loss, digestive complaints. “And mostly I kept my cool. Mostly.”

Mr. Lehman explains in the book that he does not want to “make cancer the sun around which the rest of the planets revolve”: “I don’t want to talk about it, think about it, do anything about it except show up on time for every last appointment and try not to complain.”

While the downside of this approach means we don’t learn much about bladder cancer, the upside means we learn a good deal about Mr. Lehman: about his immigrant parents, who met in New York City after fleeing the Nazis; his observant upbringing in the Inwood section of Manhattan; his education at Columbia University; his famous mentors and friends — Lionel Trilling, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said — as well as his favorite travels, songs, jokes, movies, authors and sports teams. It is intriguing to get acquainted with an artist-critic who has shaped the contemporary poetry scene since 1988 as the founder and series editor of the annual anthology The Best American Poetry.

from "A Manly Response to Disease" by Susan Gubar in The New York Times, September 24, 2020. 
For the full article, click here.

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2020

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

"There she is, the woman. . ." [by Jill Bialosky]

There she is, the woman who once inhabited
these rooms, drank tea from this cup,
her shape in the cushion, isn’t that hers?
Those shelves filled with books from the bookshops
of her youth—Rilke, Plath Akhmatova, Stevens, Strand,
afternoons spent in worn leather chairs beneath
the dim yellow lamplight by the window, slow-motion
of curling leaves heralding a fallen season.

Ed. note: Chosen by Major Jackson for Harvard Review (#56), "There she is, the woman.  ." is the first poem in Jill Bialosky's 102-part lyric sequence Asylum. Excerpt from ASYLUM  by Jill Bialosky. Copyright © 2020 by Jill Bialosky. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Mitch Sisskind's Collected Poems, 2005-2020

From the book, this poem, which we first posted on February 8, 2015:

Balzac Speaks of Salvation Through Sexual Intercourse

How else to keep alive the spirit
Of sans souci, the flame of youth,
But with sexual intercourse?
That sphere of glowing delight
To which, once I acceded to it,
The luminous channel has never
Closed to me – as all my work
Is wrought there, charity obliges
That I advertise its pleasures and
Fairly attribute the curious vitality
Derived there that each night
Invents names and faces for me
As if my heart were still a boy’s
And my pen were the prick of one.

You can order Mitch Sisskind's Collected Poems, 2005-2020 here.

How else to keep alive the spirit
Of sans souci, the flame of youth,
But with sexual intercourse?
That sphere of glowing delight
To which, once I acceded to it,
The luminous channel has never
Closed to me – as all my work
Is wrought there, charity obliges
That I advertise its pleasures and
Fairly attribute the curious vitality
Derived there that each night
Invents names and faces for me
As if my heart were still a boy’s
And my pen were the prick of one.

"Letter from American Airspace" [by Elizabeth Powell]

Today is the pub date for Elizabeth Powell's excellent new book Atomizer by Elizabeth Powell (Louisiana State University Press). Here is "Letter from American Airspace," a poem from the book:

The end of romance was what the teenage girl
was telling you about on a bench in the Jardin
in San Miguel de Allende, giving you T.M.I.,
but you realized she might need a Father who is not in heaven.
She gasps: Tinder is even sleazier in Mexico, how could it be
nostalgic? You listened the way your poems do when you write
them down in the cafes of Kerouac’s time here. You are Angelico
Americano with Instagram-troubled children of your own back home.
You are the only man I know who seriously loves his wife. Dios mio.
Right now this makes you the best Volta in any sonnet. Yearning
is a kind of loss, a desire that’s never filled. It is the drunk to his drink.
Never enough. Victim or victorious? Chasing yearning, I have discerned,
is like chasing a kind of poison.  The Popol Vuh says in the beginning
there were corn people here and love was a YES at every turn against
death. The end of romance knows this, no love letters, no mysteries,
holding out for another swipe, like a pull at the casino. The sun texts
its setting over the city. Back home children shoot other children
Screens in every face. Savagery in the invisible, the Holy Ghost
weeping over new desires. My young female friend told me how nuclear
her hook ups are, how they like to choke and shag. Isn’t it not romantic.
My hairdresser confirms the same story. I think I am lonelier
than lonely, for which there is no word or Proustian reference.  I drown
and swoon in Mariachi music with no relief. May tenderness deliver
us. Maybe the only recall I have is this, my other friend home safely
from Afghanistan, telling me of the surgical tents where the world is
like triage and you order the grunts to lay it down, those who are
the chorus screaming: unfuck it, unfuck this.

"Ode to Weird" [by Elaine Equi]

Emily Dickinson was weird.
Fernando Pessoa was definitely weird.

All poets are weird
even when their poems
try to appear normal.

Macbeth’s weird sisters
stirring up trouble’s
unsavory soup:

“Just be yourself
and you’ll be king.”

Weird always wins and loses in the end.

Ed note: "Ode to Weird" is from The Intangibles by Elaine Equi (Coffee House Press, 2019). The poem's conceit is fresh and witty, a wonderful "poetry idea." The stanza breaks are critical -- delete them and see what you lose. The lesson is that in her rejuvenation of minimalism as a strategy, Equi makes maximum meaning-making use of spacing and lining. -- DL

Judith Hall's Prospects

Announcing Judith Hall's new book Prospects (New from LSU Press), which includes this poem:

            Natural / Work  Hard / Ability

Done in stain-obscuring dark pants pulled on for work 
Tossing out the one last second-hand self-help book 

Help yourself to hard work is not the half of it 
Work hard will never be distinctly natural 

Natural is not a camouflage of hard work 
Not the plucked waxed dyed in private lines learned

Sensible shoes will open doors the boring doors 
Check out the body language of competitors

Jokes at you at your expense required about now
The one about your ow designer shoes ow ow 

Supposed to blend in a joke right without the laugh 
Resentment is supposed to harden you in life 

When laughing at yourself is not a living wage 
You can live on for long without a brain-dead brain 

Judith Hall is the author of four earlier poetry collections and a collaboration with David Lehman, which she also illustrated. She has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught for many years at the California Institute of Technology, and, after moving to New York, she taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. She is poetry editor of Antioch Review.

"Few poets have written so incisively of worldly ambition; few have viewed power dynamics with such whiplash intelligence. The pursuit of happiness, the tragedy of war, the exploited environment are central to this book that considers survival in all its guises. Judith Hall's unsparing poems fracture lyric desire into edgier components—including money, what it takes to earn it, the "zany can-do grovel" of job seekers. Prospects is one of the richest, smartest books I've read by anybody—I think ever. One close reading wasn't enough, and as I reread, the poems continued to open up. This infinite reach is for me one of the prime joys of poetry."

-- Alice Fulton 

"Half of an Epic Simile not found in Hesiod" [by A. E. Stallings]

As at the winter solstice, when a faded blonde
On the brink of middle age, goes to the salon
To brighten up her outlook and her spirits
(Warm water on her scalp, the rich shampoo
That breathes of almond-blossoms), to submit
To another’s expert disinterested caresses,
While outside the plate-glass window, people push
Against the dwindling year, and lean into
The wind, their foreheads pinched with doubt and debt,
And it’s afternoon, but night comes chattering down
Like the shutters of a shop in a recession,
And all she asks for is a color adjustment,
For rays of honey to eclipse the grey,
And for the light to lengthen just a little.

The poem is from A. E. Stallings's justly celebrated book of poems Like (Farrar Straus & Giroux; paperback 2019).

The Best American Poetry 2020: Guest Editor Paisley Rekdal, Series Editor David Lehman

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

Woody Allen, "Apropros of Nothing": "I'm eighty-four; my life is almost half over.. ."

Woody Allen's autobiography, Apropros of Nothing, is full of pithy bon mots, good humor, and unfailing generosity toward the actors and other professionals he has worked with.

His self-deprecating humor is natural to him, a gift that yields spontaneous one-liners on every other page.

His tips on courtship are valuable. A brilliant French meal prepared by the suitor (blanquette de veau with clafoutis for dessert) works so well that it is "an express ride to the boudoir to work off some of the calories in the sack." 

Lots of juice, lots of dish, lots of inside baseball, and the personality of the genius rises to the occasion, 

His true ambition: "If I could trade my talent for any other person's, living or dead, who would it be? No contest - Bud Powell." 

"Nothing in the The Wasteland or Pound or Auden moves me as much as Cole Porter's 'You're not worth the ransom of asparagus out of season.'"

"I'm eighty-four; my life is almost half over. Not believing in a hereafter, I really can't see any practical difference if people remember me as a film director or an amateur clarinetist or at all. All that I ask is my ashes be scattered close to a pharmacy."

On posterity: "Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public, I prefer to live on in my apartment."

-- DL

Kent Johnson on Ashbery, BAP, and Poetry Re-education Camps

From “Because of Poetry” / by  John Bradley

A sort of review in Sulfur of the irrepressible Kent Johnson’s defiant new book of poems:
Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House (Shearsman Books, $18.00) 

<<
“Say, isn’t that John Ashbery?” I asked.  “Over there, speaking with some young poet who’s trying to look like a young John Ashbery?” I told him, though I sounded just like the Kent Johnson in the “Matterhorn” poem who tells Fred Seidel that he sees John Ashbery.  “That’s ridiculous.  Everyone knows Ashbery is dead,” said Kent.  “And besides, why would the Poetry Institute put John Ashbery in a poetry re-education camp.  They love his poetry.”

More and more confused, I turned again to a poem to help me right my balance.   “’Could someone tell me why I’ve never been / selected for the yearly Best American Poetry?’” I read from “Could Someone Tell Me Why.”  Is it a crime, I wondered, to write such a thing in a poem?  I must have said this aloud, as Kent told me that he would be released from the re-education camp as soon as he wrote a poem that was chosen for Best American Poetry.  I wasn’t sure if he was joking or serious, and I nervously laughed.  “But that means you’ll be here forever!” I said, to cheer him up.  I could hear John Ashbery laughing nearby.
>>>

For the rest of the piece, click here.