The Best American Poetry

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!'" 

Great Blurbs de Nos Jours [by Mitch Sisskind]

Mitch Sisskind's candidates:

". . . an excellent blurb line is, "i put this book in my son's/daughter's suitcase when he/she went of to Harvard/Yale/Berkeley." it shows you have a family, which makes many people feel closer to you, and it also shows that you trust the book enough to put in in the hands of your kids -- in whom you have a huge financial investment.

another good line is, 'if you read only one book this year, make it this one.' Because that sort of gives them permission not to buy any more books this year. but if it's getting close to the end of the calendar year this line could look funny -- in that case make sure you say 'if you only read one book this fiscal year....' "

The Great Chins of Hollywood: A test with prize [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

Have you ever noticed that some of our most beautiful and talented actors have a certain physical trait in common? See if you can match the chin to the actor, list below (put your answers in the comments). The first person to identify correctly every chin will win an edition of the Best American Poetry. 

#1	#2	#3
#4	#5	#6
#7	#8	#9
#10	#11	#12

In alphabetical order: Sandra Bullock, George Chikiris, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Christina Hendricks, Charlton Heston, Elsa Lanchester, Sophia Loren, Robert Mitchum, Viggo Mortensen, Isaiah Washington. 

"September 1, 1939" [by W. H. Auden]

Here it is again: September 1, 1939, seventy-eight years later. Can you picture Auden at that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked the earth? One of the best stanzas is a metaphorical description of that bar and others like it.

Quiz of the day:
WHA disliked the last line of the penultimate stanza because he felt it was "dishonest," by which I think he meant "untrue."

He changed it to
(1) We must love one another and die
(2) We must love one another or die
(3) We must love one another or diet
(4) One must love mother nature or die
(5) If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Light up a Winston and think of dear Wystan. Bragging rights go to the winner!

 

Next Line, Please: The One Thing

This week, American Scholar and the writers at Next Line, Please find the answer to the question: What is the one thing that will save America? As it turns out, there were numerous answers, and thus, many wonderful poems, which editor David Lehman strings together in a spirited and intriguing post.

Not only do we get a glimpse into the world of John Ashbery's poem, "The One Thing That Can Save America," but also, we get a mini anthology of interesting ideas and some darn good lines!

   Visit the American Scholar's page to read all the entries, and to enter your candidate for next week's competition: autumn haiku. Here is my favorite "one thing":

"The one thing that can save America" posted by Maureen

is not another Walmart. You could guess
Amazon—but you’d be wrong. No,
Starbucks didn’t invent it (like those lattes
you concede to liking lately). A daily dose
of it’s always good. Children are truly terrible
at containing it. Beware: it can be contagious.
When its volume gets too high, just try
suppressing it but don’t be surprised
if tears free-flow and you feel transcendent.

-- Virginia Valenzuela

The American Scholar "Next Line, Please": So sorry you didn't win! Please try again.

The American Scholar's "Next Line, Please" contest continues apace, with David Lehman crafting a new challenge each week. Lehman's "fake apology" contest of August 23 was among the most popular in the contest's years-long history. If you didn't win, so sorry! You can still enter this week's contest. Here's what Lehman had to say about fake apologies and this week's rules, which require contestants to craft a list poem in the manner of the great list songs in the American songbook: 

This week we wrote non-apologies in the model of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say,” a kind of Post-it-note poem in which the husband apologizes to the wife for eating the plums she had saved for her breakfast.

The responses persuade me that the insincere utterance provides fertile ground for poets. Our tendency to lie, distort or revise follows from the inability of the language to discriminate between truth and falsehood: Language is not self-verifying. Fiction is based on just this discrepancy between language and the duplicitous and calculating writer. Is it a discrepancy—or a struggle? Writers often describe their writing as a kind of wrestling match with language, as T. S. Eliot does in “Four Quartets.”

My favorite fake apologies are a pair submitted by Marissa D’Espain:

Congratulations!
I saw your
new book
at a bookstore

and:

Oh no! I forgot
To have your baby. Now
it’s too late. Sorry!

For next week, let’s begin a list poem—on the model of the great list songs in the American songbook—e.g., “You’re the Top” (Cole Porter), “Thanks for the Memory” (music Ralph Rainger, lyrics Leo Robin), “Can’t Get Started” (music Vernon Duke, lyrics Ira Gershwin), “They All Laughed” (Gershwin and Gershwin), “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” (Gershwin and Gershwin), “My Favorite Things” (Rodgers and Hammerstein), “(We’ll Have) Manhattan” (Rodgers and Hart), to mention just a few. The formula requires a stanza with a refrain.

Ready, set, go! 

-- sdh

 

The Origin of "Cops" [by David Lehman]

How did the police acquire the nickname "cops"?

1) It's an acronym for the dread "Committee on Public Safety" that wreaked havoc during the French Revolution.

2) The initial shields worn by uniformed policemen in nineteenth-century New York were made of copper.

3) They got the name from David Copperfield -- the Dickens character, not the magician -- who aspired to a career in law enforcement, idealizing the day job of a decent and humane beat policeman, but who was tragically prevented from reaching his goal by the machinations of Mister Macawber and Uriah Heep.

4) In 1876, a London bobby, also known as a peeler-- both names deriving from Robert Peele -- was sipping a concoction consisting of eight parts gin and two parts vermouth. This put him in such a good mood that, when the waitperson returned with a refill, the randy fellow smacked her bottom, "copped a feel," and went home sheepishly with a black eye. His wife asked him what happened. He lamely said he had walked into a door. "Rubbish," she said. "I bet you went to the local and copped a feel." The fame of the anecdote was legendary and the man on the beat never did get credit for the modern martini, which he had accidentally invented. ND "copped" shortened to "cop" lives on.

5) The coinage is John Milton's from Paradise Lost, Book XI, as Adam gratefully accepts the knowledge that his future offspring will redeem the race. "Peace returned / Home to my breast, and to my memory, / His promise, that the cops shall bruise our Foe; /  Which then not minded in dismay, yet now / Assures me that the bitterness of death / Is past, and we shall live."

Hitchcock Quiz # 6 - 9 [by David Lehman]

(6) 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 prepare for a chicken dinner
-- With one exception, everyone watching a tennis match moves his or her head as the movement of the ball dictates
-- Doris Day belts out Che Sera,Sera at a posh party peopled by diplomats in London

(7) "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"--- Robert Walker in "Strangers on a Train"
(c) The American Nazis in "Saboteur"
(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) bad guys tend to be guys, or guys with mother complexes, or enraged beasts
(b) "the more deranged -- Perkins, Walker -- the better"
(c) the "suave index" (Ray Milland, James Mason) makes the movies less threatening

(8) 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

(9) In the auction scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant violates the hushed-room decorum by making wacky and contradictory bids in order to

-- attract attention because he is certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
-- attract attention and get ejected because the cops were 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
-- arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

-- DL

Hitchcock Quiz # 1 - 5 [by David Lehman]

(1) Which of the following did not play the male lead in a Hitchcock movie?

a) Sean Connery in Marnie
b) Cary Grant in Notorious
c) Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
d) Laurence Olivier in Rebecca
e) Robert Cummings in Saboteur

(2) The title North by Northwest is a reference to

a) The Tempest and magic
b) Hamlet and madness
c) A popular route flown by Pan American Airlines in 1959
with change of planes at O'Hare and Mt Rushmore the final destination
d) Emily Dickinson's poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes"
e) Cary Grant's use of a road map as a disguise in the dining car 

(3) Identify Ambrose Chapel.

a) Albert Hall's younger brother
b) The kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much
c) A London Church
d) The MacGuffin
e) Montgomery Clift's parish in I Confess

(4) Hitchcock favored blond actresses because of

a) A childhood crush on a sweet trick named Dietrich
b) Unresolved Oedipal issues
d) Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Doris Day,
Joan Fontaine, Priscilla Lane,and Tippi Hedren
e) The idea, which occurred to him with the force of an epiphany, that
blond-versus-brunette mirrored the American power structure
f) The belief that in movies an actor's looks are more important than
her or his talent.

5) Which of these did Hitchcock invest with uncanny significance?

a) A glass of milk
b) A shattered pair of eyeglasses
c) A giant Sequoia Redwood
d) The key to the wine cellar
e) A burning mansion

Optional essay questions:
1) In Vertigo, who is real, Judy or Madelene?
2) True or false: The age difference between James Stewart and Kim Novak
helps explain the nature of their relationship,which is passionate but not exactly
sexual -- it is more like an event in the man's psyche, which he is destined
to repeat.
3) Bernard Herrmann's music and what it contributed.    -- DL

Caged But Free ... Lehman has picked line five of the crowd-sourced sonnet. You can write line six.

David Lehman has picked line five of the crowd-sourced sonnet-in-progress over at the American Scholar. You have until November 15 to write line six. Here's the sonnet to date:

Our dreams as disparate as our days uniform,                   
We crave a lovely scandal with someone well-known;     
Midnight champagne, penthouse lit by thunderstorm,    
In this version of darkness, we are never alone.                 

If marriage is a cage, we can force the lock, but he    

And here's what David has to say about line five and his requirement for line six: 

Line five of our sonnet-in-progress is also the first line of our second stanza, a lot rides on it. The best candidate, in my view, is Christine Rhein’s “If marriage is a cage, we can force the lock, but he …”  This line introduces the subject of marriage, the metaphor of the locked cage, and the conditional construction that leaves the reader wondering what “he” will do and how that will affect our situation of dreams, scandal, penthouse, and darkness lit up by lightning. . . 

For line six–the second line of stanza two of our sonnet in the making–the requirement is that the line must end with the word “learn.”

Continue reading here. . .

Remember: You must enter at the American Scholar site. 

-- sdh