The Best American Poetry

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

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"?

"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.”

On Hitchcock's birthday, His Jokes, Heroes, Villains, and More: Multiple Choice [by David Lehman]

 

 

When August 13 falls on a Friday, as it does this year, let us honor Alfred Hitchcock, born on this August day. In the spirit of macabre and bemused jollity, I recommend that you listen to Shoistakovich's amazing Symphony no. 5 and ponder these multiple choice questions if you like the form, as I do. -- DL

Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

-- Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
-- Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
-- Grace Kelly offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
-- Grace Kelly finds the scissors on the desk and with a desperate lunge wards off the intruder and kills him
-- Jospeh Cotten deprecates the ordinary people of Santa Rosa, where the Hitchcock family lived (his house is pictured right), as if he were Orson Welles atop the Ferris Wheel in The Third Man

The better the villain, the better the film." Acknowledging that "better" is an elastic term, which of the following is the best villain? Discuss at least three.

(a) James Mason in "North by Northwest"
(b) The birds in "The Birds"
(c) Robert Walker in "Strangers on a Train"
(d) Claude Rains and his mother in "Notorious"
(e) Anthony Perkins and his mother in "Psycho"
(f) Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder"
(g) Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt"

What conclusions can we come to?
(a) some bad guys tend to be guys with mother complexes or enraged beasts
(b) "the more deranged, the better"
(c) the "suave index" (Ray Milland, James Mason) makes the movies less threatening
(d) murder like sex can be considered either as an art, a sport, a battle, a competition, or an act of passion

 Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock joke?

-- to cuff his hero and heroine, leave the room and lock the door
-- to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
-- to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
-- to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
-- to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

In the auction scene in North ny Northwest, Cary Grant makes contradictory and ludicrous bids in order to

-- attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
-- attract attention and get ejected because the cops are preferable to the killers awaiting his exit
-- fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
-- warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message, and what better way to do that than to to be caught holding the knife that killed the US Ambassador to the UN when that instiution was not yet immoral, irrelevant or fattening (to slightly misquote Irene Dunne on life's pleasures)
-- arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Good luck! -- DL

Name the Artist

Name the artist, the painting, and the year!

Who said it? [A Challenge]

Remember when the Sunday Times Book Review, frankly middlebrow and proud of it, used to run author's queries ("for a biography of Maxwell Anderson I would be grateful . . .") and legitimate questions from college grads who wanted to track down a favorite quotation (was it Scott Fitzgerald who said "live fast, die young, and have a handsome corpse?") In that spirit I offer you this cocktail party line that would have beguiled Flo Bear.

"If the Kennedy White House was decadent; the Clinton White House was sordid." Who said it? I have asked a lot of smart people, to no avail, and would be grateful for any leads. Meanwhile, my friend Burt Hooton proposes this multiple choice list of possible candidates:

1) Jane Fonda
2) Arthur Schlesinger
3) Diana Trilling
4) Senator Susan Collins
5) Jacques Barzun
6) Lawrence P. Berra

I'm not convinced by any of Burt's suggestions, though the terms of the distinction do sound as though they could have come from #3 or #5, and I appreciate the convention observed in #6.

You get extra points if you can say what Ava Gardner is doing in this post or if you can make a convincing case in favor of Oliver Stone's theory of JFK's assassination. -- DL

Can You Name This Dude?

Your Assignments for Next Week [by Mindy Aloff]

In Ezra Pound’s 1934 ABC of Reading, Pound cautions: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” In a posting on Twitter, analyze why the poet didn’t take his own advice when it came to The Cantos.

When George Balanchine was the company choreographer for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in the mid-1940s, he told Frederic Franklin—the dancer on whom Mr. B. built the part of The Poet in his Ballet Russe work The Night Shadow—that Franklin should do two things: “Read War and Peace and The Sermon on the Mount.” In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, explain why this advice might come in handy for the Secretary of the Treasury, a disgraced ex-journalist, the manager of the New York Mets, and Susan Stroman.

The phrase “Black Swan” has been applied to:

a) the character Odile, the evil enchanter’s daughter in the ballet Swan Lake;

b) the pas de deux that Odile dances with clueless Siegfried in Swan Lake’s third act;

or used as

c) a commonly implied element in philosophical discussions on the fallibility of inductive inferences, as in the comparison of the statements “All ravens are black” with “All swans are white”;

d) the metaphor in “the black swan theory,” advanced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, to explain why the largest, most unpredictable, and most powerful events in history, economics, and just about everything else always wing in from left field just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water;

e) the exquisite and mysterious title poem in an early collection by James Merrill;

f) a much-lauded and Oscar-nominated 2010 feature film, by Darren Aronofsky, about a ballerina going berserk, which will be remembered by ballerinas not only for the special effect that put the head of the actress Natalie Portman onto the dancing body of American Ballet Theatre soloist Sarah Lane but also, even more so, for the fact that the director didn’t mention the effect or Lane’s name in public until after the Oscars were decided;

g) the Cygnus Atratus, native to Australia, and, prior to the 17^th century, believed by Europeans to be imaginary. Write a Ghazal that incorporates all these references for a readership who, to understand the poem, requires no more than a sixth-grade education and will be reading it while texting the Molly Bloom chapter of Ulysses.

from the archive; first posted on June 2, 2014.

The Great B-Sides [by David Lehman]

I just heard Bobby Darin sing "Beyond the Sea" -- wonderful song translated from the French of Charles Trenet -- followed by Sinatra's "Summer Wind." It seems worth pointing out that neither song was on the "A side" of its 45 rpm record. For 200 Monopoly dollars and the pleasure that goes with being absolutely right, identify the songs on the A sides of "Beyond the Sea" and "Summer Wind":

1) "Love Me Tender" and "Witchcraft"
2) "Splish-Splash" and "Hey Jealous Lover"
3) "Mack the Knife" and "Strangers in the Night"
4)  "Dream Lover" and "High Hopes"

from the archive; when first posted, on May 12, 2015, the correct answer was 3) "Mack the Knife" and "Strangers in the Night"

"A Woe of Ecstasy" [by Emily Dickinson]

 

 

"A woe of ecstasy" -- Emily Dickinson's phrase. Run with it. 

 

Frost and "the nothing that is" [by David Lehman]

I have long discerned connections between "The Snow Man" and the work of Robert Frost [pictured left receiving a medal of honor from President John F. Kennedy in 1962], an association that Frost's surname handily suggests. It is incontrovertible that the teaching of Wallace Stevens's great poem "The Snow Man" benefits by concurrent analysis of two of Frost's poems, "Stopping By Woods on a Snow Evening" and "Desert Places." 

We associate "the nothing that is" with Stevens; it is the final phrase in "The Snow Man." Here is a line from Frost's long poem "New Hampshire":  "Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred." Is the "nothing" here a word that requires the definite article? Consider the double negative.  The line paraphrased is "Nothing [with exceptions] is sacred." As "nothing is sacred" is itself a well-worn expression that Frost would not use without a degree of irony, I wonder whether the "Nothing" that opens the line does not denote the absence of everything.

Comments and suggestions from readers are most welcome.-- DL

Who Wrote It? [A multiple-choice quiz]

I am not of those miserable males
Who sniff at vice, and, daring not to snap,
Do therefore hope for heaven. I take the hap
Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails,
Propels; but I am helmsman. Am I wrecked,
I know the devil has sufficient weight
To bear: I lay it not on him, or fate.
Besides, he's damned. That man I do suspect
A coward, who would burden the poor deuce
With what ensues from his own slipperiness.
I have just found a wanton-scented tress
In an old desk, dusty for lack of use.
Of days and nights it is demonstrative,
That, like some aged star, gleam luridly.
If for those times I must ask charity,
Have I not any charity to give?

This poem was written by
1) Robert Lowell on the subject of Lyndon B. Johnson
2) George Meredith in Modern Love
3) Meredith Wilson in The Music Man
4) Meredith Vieira in Thoroughly Modern Millie
5) George Sherbet during World War I

The picture on top, "The Death of Chatteron," is a big clue, but not because of the poet named in the title.

The French and the British Vie for the Yankee Dollar

Who said it:

<<<
The French try to deal with us by making us feel foolish, to prove to us that we didn’t have the brain power to follow them; the British dealt with us by making us feel guilty that we had let them down. 
>>

a) Julia Louis-Dreyfus
b) Art Buchwald
c) Henry Kissinger
d) Walter Lippmann
e) Walter Neff

Hint: “There were differences at the beginning of the relationship," he said about himself and Marilyn, or Byron and Castlereagh, or the US and China, or the Dodgers and Yankees. "Nevertheless, we’ve learned to live with each other for many decades." Red herrings: “There is still a tiny Seventh-day Adventist inside of me screaming to get out every time I make a pass at a tuna fish sandwich.”"When all men think alike, no one thinks very much."  "Elaine is just in pain." "How could I know that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?" 

 

Poetry Challenge: A Prompt [by David Lehman]

Prompt: Write a poem sparked by the deliberately unidentified portrait above. Imagine that it is the portrait of either (a) a celebrated modern poet or (b) a wounded World War I veteran war or (c) a dashing art critic, champion of Cubism or (d) an avatar of Frank O'Hara in Paris.

Quiz: Name the subject and identify the painter, who denounced anti-Semitism ("not only a phenomenon of sadistic evil, but also one of great cowardice") in the controversial conclusion of his memoirs. He feels that Jews have been too eager to assimilate and be accepted and that they therefore "place themselves in a state of inferiority before the non-Jews." In his view, "Anti-Semitism will end only when the Jews stop hiding and assuming the attitudes of whipped dogs and will say in a loud voice and to everyone's face: 'I am a Jew and I am proud of it!'"