The Best American Poetry

Mystery Guest

.

Clues:
I was a quiz kid, took a trip by train to Chicago.
Went to prep school, Harvard. Did not play tennis.
Lived in what had been Norman Mailer's rooms (Dunster House).
Who am I?

The Cliff Robertson Quiz

What was Cliff Robertson's most memorable role?

-- as JFK in "PT 109"

-- as the Nixon-like Cantwell in "The Best Man"

-- as the guy who loses Kim Novak to William Holden in "Picnic"

-- as the fellow who falls in love with the same woman twice in "Obsession"

-- as the mentally-impaired bigamist whose wives are Joan Crawford and Vera Miles in "Autumn Leaves"

-- as the clueless CIA guy in "Three Days of the Condor"

For extra credit,

(1) Would you have voted for Henry Fonda or his opponent in "The Best Man"?

(2) Who wrote the American lyrics for "Autumn Leaves"?

(3) Compare Genevieve Bujold, New Orleans and Florence in "Obsession" with Kim Novak and San Francisco in "Vertigo."

From the archive; first posted March 23, 2018

The year: 1955. Can you identify the people -- and the locale?

"Mairzy Doats" (a lyric & a challenge)

Back in 1989, when Allan Bloom's indictment of what has come to be called "Woke" was current ("The Closing of the American Mind"), Bloom and a professor named Gerald Graff appeared on an afternoon talk show. Maybe it was Sally Jesse Raphael's. It was meant to be a debate. Bloom was adamant on the distinction between high and low culture; he was an absolutist.  Graff, whose contribution to the pedagogy of the time was the feckless advice to "teach the conflicts," must have thought that  Bloom had a soft spot for the popular culture of the 1940s. Graff cited "Mairzy Doates," a big hit in that decade, as an example of the ridiculous. "You make my point," Bloom said. He won the exchange. What neither of them acknowledged was that "Mairzy Doates," the lyrics of which follow, hammers home a truth about the ultimate arbitrariness of language. If you, dear reader, are a cunning linguist, perhaps you can analyze "Mairzy Does" and explain its significance.

 

I know a ditty nutty as a fruitcake
Goofy as a goon and silly as a loon
Some call it pretty, others call it crazy
But they all sing this tune:

 

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?
Yes! Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?

 

If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey
Sing "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy"

 

Oh! Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you-oo?
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?

Who painted it, and why does it surprise you?

Clues:

1)  "Lady with Striped Dress"
2)  National Gallery
3)  On paper, 1933/34   
4)  Untitled / 1969-70
 

 

Name the Painter [in honor of Peter Frank]

Name the painter who built this stairway to paradise. As Claus DeRuyter said, his "rhythm was fascinaitng." The rhapsodic blue marked an advance that preceded the push-and-pull practice of Hans Hoffmann. 

Tuesday Limerick Quiz

<<<

There was a young sultan of Kabir,

a precocious lad who lacked a career,

for though he was stuck-up

he used all his skill to suck up

and stick his rod in a rear.

>>>

Does anyone know the author of this limerick? There is no evidence that Byron translated it from an Albanian epigone of Catullus

from the archive; first posted September 8, 2013

.

<<<

There was a young sultan of Kabir,

a precocious lad who lacked a career,

for though he was stuck-up

he used all his skill to suck up

and stick his rod in a rear.

>>>

Does anyone know the author of this limerick? There is no evidence that Byron translated it from an Albanian epigone of Catullus

from the archive; first posted September 8, 2013

.

What is History? Multiple Choice [by David Lehman]

The multiple-choice exam as an ad hoc poetic form has always attracted me. John Ashbery did clever and funny things with it. Our Freud Quiz is as much an homage to the multiple choice form as to the bearded inventor of psychoanalysis in his little Berggasse flat in Vienna. I like the structure not only because of its familiarity but because of my love of alternative possibilities.

Last night I was reading the May 2012 issue of Harper's and I came across an essay entitled "Ignorance of Things Past" by editor emeritus Lewis Lapham. The essay is full of recollected pith, some of which is surprisingly bland: "a morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable" (Thomas Jefferson). But it was when I reached a new graf headed "History is a work in progreess" that the imp of the perverse reared its head and I created "History, a Multiple-Choice Exam," draft one, which follows:

History is
(1) A 'work in progress" (Lewis Lapham, Harper's, May 2012)
(2) "A waste of time" (Hilda Cortez, who sat next to me in Art History 76 sophomore year)
(3) A sphinx that "to the defeated may say 'Alas!' but cannot help or pardon" (W. H. Auden, "Spain 1937")
(4) What happens when thesis meets antithesis or when Newton's second law of mechanics meets "Hegel's Vacation"
(5) "A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken" (Ireland's Icarus)
(6) "Now and England" (T. S. Eliot)
(7) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein)
(8) "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'' (Elizabeth Bishop)
(9) A "hail Mary" pass (Doug Flutie)
(10) What FDR said was "the only thing we have to fear." 
(11) Something that occurred prior to
    a) Auschwitz
    b) Hiroshima
    c) Watergate
    d) the fall of the Berlin Wall
    e) your birth, dear reader. Nine months prior, give or take a few days.
    f) all of the above conjoined by ampersands

from the archive; first posted April 28, 2012

History is
(1) A 'work in progress" (Lewis Lapham, Harper's, May 2012)
(2) "A waste of time" (Hilda Cortez, who sat next to me in Art History 76 sophomore year)
(3) A sphinx that "to the defeated may say 'Alas!' but cannot help or pardon" (W. H. Auden, "Spain 1937")
(4) What happens when thesis meets antithesis or when Newton's second law of mechanics meets "Hegel's Vacation"
(5) "A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken" (Ireland's Icarus)
(6) "Now and England" (T. S. Eliot)
(7) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein)
(8) "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'' (Elizabeth Bishop)
(9) A "hail Mary" pass (Doug Flutie)
(10) What FDR said was "the only thing we have to fear." 
(11) Something that occurred prior to
    a) Auschwitz
    b) Hiroshima
    c) Watergate
    d) the fall of the Berlin Wall
    e) your birth, dear reader. Nine months prior, give or take a few days.
    f) all of the above conjoined by ampersands

from the archive; first posted April 28, 2012

Paul Violi Picks the Contest Winners!

In December 2007, the late Paul Violi (left) read the entries for our BEST AMERICAN POETRY challenge # 2. We repost the results today, Paul's birthday.

THE CHALLENGE (devised by David Lehman):

When deciphered, this anagram

HIT THE LUMP OF RICH SEAL

represents the title of a book of poems by a past guest editor of The Best American Poetry. Solve the puzzle, then write a two-stanza acrostic poem in which the first letters of the lines spell out the name of that poet. Deadline: Midnight, December 31, 2007.

Our judge, Paul Violi, has chosen a first-place winner and two runners up.

All entries were judged blind; the names of the authors were not revealed until after the verdicts were rendered.

First Place: Penelope’s Shield by Frank Osen

PENELOPE’S  SHIELD

Laughing Boy returns, and the dog drops dead.
Odysseus, did you think I wouldn’t know?
Under this shroud
I’ve borne more absences than yours.
So what, if summer shared our golden bed?
Every winter wears the same disguise.

Growth and loss
loom longer with me, now—
urging weaves both ways,
casting my work in the sun’s or fire’s light—
knit with disciplined undoing.

-- Frank Osen

Runners Up: “As the Underworld Turns” by Sally Cook and “Lo Mein Palace: Here I Come” by Michael Quattrone

AS THE UNDERWORLD TURNS

Like her sis, Persephone 
On fair Adonis set her sights.          
Underworld talk had it that she    
Interfered with sister’s rights.  
So, old Zeus ruled there’d be seasons!             
Earth’s year went, two-thirds, to ladies.

Goodness knows, Zeus had his reasons  -- 
Life stayed sweet in the Cyclades.
Under, next to Hades’ furies            
Cabbage and anemones,
Kissed to life, were blessed by Ceres

-- Sally Cook

Lo Mein Palace, Here I Come!

Lo Mein Palace, here I come!
Out the door I spot Louise, who smiles
until I glance at her clavicle, etc.—
into the elevator, through the lobby,
sex never tasted as sweet & sour as the
egg roll dreams I'm hatching in the cab

grinding down, down a Second Avenue stand still,
licking my lips like some addled scavenger,
until the neon serenade: Wonton!  Tsingtao!
Chopstick! It's a wonder I get anything in my mouth.
Kate orders Kung Pao extra spicy, and I nearly faint.

-- Michael Quattrone

Honorable mention: Angela Ball, Barbara G.S. Hagerty, Andrea Selch, Terence Winch, David Yezzi.

Riddle for June 8th

What do they have in common:

Robert Schumann

Frank Lloyd Wright

Barbara Bush

Nancy Sinatra

& Julianna Margulies?

In Praise of Non-Conformism

In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson urged resistance to the conformism implicit in thought-control. It is possible that independence of mind, resistance to the mentality of a mob, is something that cannot be taught

To the extent that the poet is a public figure, Emerson’s belief in “the independence of solitude” retains its pertinence. “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Assignment: what would Emerson say about Twitter and "the twitter mob"?

Two Songs, Different Eras: Discuss. [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

"More Mush from the Wimp"

6) The least read (most ignored) “important” poet in English is

(a) Dryden

(b) Spenser

(c)  Pope John Paul II

(d) John Lennon in his “Rubber Soul” period

(e) Sara Teasdale

 

(7) Who said it: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

(a) Queen Victoria

(b) Gertrude Stein

(c) Harold Acton

(d) Herald Square

(e) Aaron Burr

 

(8) Describe Emily Dickinson’s reaction when informed that her initials now stand for “erectile dysfunction.”

 

(9) In Genesis, after Cain kills Abel, what does he say to God:

(a) “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

(b) “Luca Brazzi swims with the fishes.”

(c) “Lead us not into Penn Station.”

(d) “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”

(e) “You talking to me?”

 

(10) “In the beginning was the Word.” This is the opening sentence of

(a) Moby Dick

(b) Hansel and Gretel

(c) The Autobiography of Malcolm X

(d) Existentialism for Dummies

(e) either The Oresteia or one of the four Gospels

Bad Line Contest [by David Lehman]

In honor of Susan Sontag, who introduced the logic of camp (something so bad that it's good) into the cultural discourse, may I propose a bad line contest? It is remarkable how many bad lines one encounters. Usually I let myself be guided by Frank O'Hara's advice: ignore it, and let it slip into oblivion, rather than call attention to a bad poem.

But sometimes a bad line is bad in a particularly exemplary, even beautiful way, and if this is the case, the author of the bad line should not feel insulted, should feel even honored, to have produced something worthy of analysis dripped not with contempt but with.  . . curiosity. To such an author we might award the mauvais vers prize.

For an example, let me offer a stanza from a sonnet in the Italian by Louise Labe (trans. Richard Sieburth] that appeared in a recent New York Review of Books (2014). Sieburth, an experienced and reliable translator, whose fidelity to the original can scarcely be doubted, renders the sonnet's second quatrain as follows:

Love, your eyes drove through me like a blade,
Piercing my startled heart in one fell deed,
And there you settle down, there you feed,
But you alone can heal the wound you made.

To "Piercing my startled heart in one fell deed" goes the prize for mauvais vers de la semaine. Why? It is a poignant instance of the genuine fake. It doth sound like poetry, does it not? Yet once you remove the bogus words from the line, what are you are left with  but a broken heart? The real words in the line are "my heart." (There is a splendid poem by Frank O'Hara entitled "My Heart," which I recommend.) Piercing, startled, one fell deed: Petrarch marries the oratory of Julius Caesar. The language and imagery are tired, any subtlety or other layer of value compromised for the sake of preserving the A-B-B-A rhyme scheme. "Sonnet" concludes with the clause "I might as well be dead," and you can hear the cry of anguish as the poem asks to be put out of its misery.

Can you beat that? – DL

From the archive; first posted April 7, 2014

"I look like I paint. Who am I?" [by David Lehman]

Rhapsodic blues. . taciturn Cal Coolidge. . ."you lose"
as the market reaches record highs, speculators buy on margin,
Babe Ruth makes more money than the president, having had a better year,
Lucky Lindy to Paris, Showboat on Broadway, Al Jolson on screen,
Bernice bobs her hair and wears the diamond bigger than the Ritz,
Flappers flirt, philosophers drink bootleg gin,
And this singular fellow may be looking out the window
Of a hotel room with luggage beside the bed
A woman, maybe his wife, puts on her lipstick,
There's neon at night in the city, but where he is
The people turn their back and look at the sea.

Clues:

1) Dennis
2) William
3) Edward
4) Hedda

Saturday Surprise [by David Lehman]

Here are five sentences that I didn't write. I proffer them not only because of the formidable intellect behind them but also because of the insights into our culture and into human nature. Some, if we consider when they were written, are of prophetic power.

To play, identify the author (and name the specific source or publication) in the comments field. Or don't. Just think about these observations. I will identify the auithor before the weekend ends. The art illustrating this piece is a red herring with a red cape.

"Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it. "

"Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth."

“It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.”

"We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us."

“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.”

To Burn or Not to Burn: The Heir's Ultimate Dilemma

<<< Nothing, but nothing, causes more posthumous difficulties for a writer’s heirs and friends than a request to burn a manuscript after death. It is a crystalline case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The interested public wants one thing, and the departed loved one has demanded another. Adding to the complexity of the question is the hard-to-dispel thought that if the writer had, in the deepest recesses of her being, wanted to burn the manuscript, she would have done it herself. So the choice is between different kinds of betrayal, of the writer’s wishes or of the readers who are, now, that writer’s last chance of life. To burn the manuscript is to help the writer to die. But is that what she wanted…?

This profoundly unenviable dilemma has been faced by the friends and family of Franz Kafka, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and, perhaps apocryphally, Virgil. When an heir succumbs to the temptation to burn something—as Ted Hughes did with some of Sylvia Plath’s papers, on the not unreasonable grounds that there were things there he did not want her children to read—the burner is inevitably excoriated. It is a subject that gets people, and the literary imagination, going, from Henry James in The Aspern Papers to Hermann Broch in The Death of Virgil (a strong candidate for least readable alleged masterpiece in the European canon). >>>

from "Flashes of Flora" by John Lanchester, New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009.

What Would Kafka Do? [by Stacey Harwood]

On October 21, 1985, The New Yorker published this poem by Raymond Carver:
 
Kafka’s Watch

I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns, and
an infinite eight to nine hours of work.
I devour the time outside of the office like a wild beast.
Someday I hope to sit in a chair in another
country, looking out the window at fields of sugarcane
or Mohammedan cemeteries.
I don’t complain about the work so much as about
the sluggishness of swampy time.  The office hours
cannot be divided up!  I feel the pressure
of the full eight or nine hours even in the last
half hour of the day.  It’s like a train ride
lasting night and day.  In the end you’re totally
crushed.  You no longer think about the straining
of the engine, or about the hills or
flat country, but ascribe all that’s happening
to your watch alone.  The watch which you continually hold
in the palm of your hand.  Then shake.  And bring slowly
to your ear in disbelief. 

            To a devoted Carver fan, the poem seemed uncharacteristic: more lush than the spare style that tagged Carver as “minimalist.”  I loved the poem, clipped it, and committed it to memory.

            Ten years later while reading Kafka’s letters, I came across this passage, written in October 1907, when Kafka was 24 and had begun work for the Italian insurance company Assicuraziono Generali:           

My life is completely chaotic now.  At any rate, I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns and an immense eight to nine hours of work; but I devour the hours outside the office like a wild beast.  Since I was not previously accustomed to limiting my private life to six hours, and since I am also studying Italian and want to spend the evenings of these lovely days out of doors, I emerge from the crowdedness of my leisure hours scarcely rested . . .

            I am in the Assicurazioni Generali and have some hopes of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries; and the whole world of insurance itself interests me greatly, but my present work is dreary.

            I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time.The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first.Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm . . .

My immediate reaction was dismay. Although I know all about collage and "sampling," I wondered about the propriety of what RC had done. Did he take too many liberties? Does the title indicate that this is a “found” poem? When Carver later published Kafka’s Watch in a collection, he added the epigraph “from a letter.” Does that addition make it right? Or is it plagiarism pure and simple?

Would Kafka approve?  Do you? -- sdh

from the archive; first posted November 29, 2014

Sweet Chariot [a riddle from Donald Justice]

<<<
Mine to give, mine to offer
No resistance. Mine
To receive you, mine to keep
The shape of our nights."

-- Donald Justice
>>>

What is it? Take a Valium, do the canine-inspired Yoga move. And then rest your head in the designated destination if poetic justice makes sense apart from the ex-Oxford brethren (David of the Braves, for instance, and Chief of SCOTUS) in parables. The first to get it right will thrill spill and chill.  And rest their heads in the Doris Day of her voice.

Poetry and Dance: Quiz of the Week [by Mindy Aloff and David Lehman]

In 1893, the Symbolist poet and occasional dance critic Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in an essay on the American modern dancer Loïe Fuller that her programs using many yards of silk and complicated lighting constituted “the theatrical form of poetry par excellence.” However, a poem by Mallarmé himself became the wellspring for a much more renowned dance artist, by way of the composer Claude Debussy. Name the ballet and its choreographer.

Answer: 

(1) "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky is based on Mallarmé’s most experimental poem, "Un Coup de des.  . . " The ratio of accident to chance or mistake is the sub-subject -- secondary to the rage of primitivism (les Fauves, Picasso) vanquishing the  vulnerable statuary of the superceded era.

(2) Debussy’s 1894 symphonic poem for orchestra, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a musical response to Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune (“Afternoon of a Faun”), served as the score for Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet, L’après-midi d’un faune, made for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In Nijinsky’s rendering, the Faun (performed originally by the choreographer) appears to pleasure himself on a scarf dropped by a nymph who evades his advances.

 (3) Balanchine choreographed "Stars and Stripes" (Sousa) as an explicit rejection of Mallarmé's belief that “Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre.”

(4) Jerome Robbins based the choreography of the opening number of West Side Story on a Mallarmé aphorism: “I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.”