The Best American Poetry

"Tea for Two" & other duets with Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Bing Crosby et al

Happy Thanksgiving!

"Jack Benny's Violin" [by James Cummins and David Lehman]

Jack Benny’s Violin

I have always wanted to write a poem called Jack Benny’s violin.
How often have I begun a poem with that title.
At a key moment a mugger intercepts our man in sin
with a gun. “Your money or your life?”
There follows the longest pause in the history
of stand-up comedy.  “I’m thinking!  I’m thinking!”

Jack Benny’s violin was the thinking
man’s violin,
as if a scratchy sound symbolized Jack’s whole history,
metonymic for the man who wore the title
“King of Comedy” for most of his working life.
No, he couldn’t play it like Henry Mancini;

he played it straight.  Yet in his mind he was a man seen
hurling the javelin in the glory of his youth, not thinking
of his job, his boss, his wife, or of what life
after sixty has to offer.  At night he plays the violin
badly (Brahms’s concerto), but Y. A. Tittle
passes to Del Shofner when he dreams his story

is metonymic for the whole Giants’ story,
even as he might say Del was his main man in sin:
their opponents thought it a sin, to rob them of a title.
Could the mugger have been thinking
it was a sin to rob Jack of his violin?
Or was he just giving Jack the straight line of his life?

“Jack Benny was my role model,” John said.  Life
has been good to the deadpan master of the double-take.  History
to him was like a theme for solo violin:
playing it he proved that the love of god and the need to sin
can coexist.  It defied reason, but thinking, real thinking,
was like that—like a poem abandoned without a title.

We were listening to a new rapper, Li’l N Title,
when John said, apropos nothing and everything, “Life
was a joint, and the Firesign Theater, and poems that did their thinking
at warp speed, and on vinyl.  But I guess all that’s history
now.  Jack Benny shuffled off the stage as Charlie Manson
shuffled on — we should’ve listened better to Jack’s violin.”

And you, dear reader, are entitled to hear this violin
duet and imagine it is a hymn to life, to man and woman in sin,
because it wears its thinking on its sleeve and calls it history.

-- James Cummins and David Lehman (2012)

"A desire to capture events": Nick Courtright & Cynthia Good in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts.  Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.  

Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light and Punchline, and he serves as the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, Nick lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel.

 

Cynthia Good: Why were you moved to focus on place, and what places in particular, since it is a bit mysterious in some of your beautiful poems?

Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.

"Intellect, anxiety, philosophy, history, art": Rachel Abramowitz and Tina Cane in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens:  Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz.  In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.  

Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York. 

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College.  She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island.  Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary  Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day.  Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, ​Poetry is Bread.  Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.

Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out  to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?

"The real movement is through ideas": Beth McDermott & Maya Sonenberg in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry.  In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories:  Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art.  As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal.  

Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington.  Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places.

Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.  Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press. 

Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”? 

Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist, and I wanted to see this struggle from the outside, through her spouse’s eyes but without the potential solipsism of the first person point of view. I hope the reader can see that he doesn’t think she’s a bad artist or a bad mother; she has internalized those judgments. However, while he’s extremely sympathetic towards her plight, and in fact tries to do whatever he can to help, he’s ultimately completely clueless about what she’s going through and also sort of jealous of her connection to the children. I carefully chose to present the male characters in this story and in “Hunters and Gatherers” in as sympathetic a light as I could muster to highlight the fact that misogyny, sexism, and expectations around motherhood are systemic rather than the actions or beliefs of isolated “bad” men.

For Memorial Day: Charles Laughton reads Walt Whitman, with music by Bernard Herrmann

In 1944, composer Bernard Herrmann, known for his film scores, collaborated with the producer Norman Corwin on “Whitman,” a half-hour dramatic presentation invoking America’s iconic poet to rally the home front during World War II. It was heard by millions of listeners. It’s a classic exemplar of a forgotten creative genre: the radio drama. 

You may read more about this collaboration and listen to a excerpts from a contemporary recording here. 

--sdl

Part II: A Conversation with Poet and the Editor of Etruscan Press, Philip Brady [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: As an Etruscan poet, I have been asked many times: What are the markings of an Etruscan poet? Do you think I should submit to Etruscan? How should I answer?  In other words, people want to know what Philip Brady looks for in a manuscript.

I'm grateful for and humbled by the number and quality of the manuscripts I see. While I may not be able to publish them, I still profit from having a birds-eye view of the literary landscape.
I've learned a lot from the experience. I've learned for instance, that I don't belong to a school. I respond to neo-formalist and post-structuralist poetry, non-narrative and plot-driven prose.   Something indefinable in the diction, syntax, voice, structure, authority or tone of a work gets my attention. The response is visceral. I'm drawn in, and soon I've shifted from the posture of editor, pencil twitching in the corner of my mouth, to reader, delighting in the next surprise. You can feel it in the first lines or sentences. It's a pulse, an electric charge—an awareness of form and dimension, perhaps; an awareness of play. No matter how serious and dark the subject matter, certain works emit light: "gaiety" in the old sense of the word. As Yeats has it, "All things fall and are built again/ And those that build them again are gay."

We want to provide a platform for that kind of writing across traditional genres, writing with heart and seasoning.   We feature work which emerges out of a sense that genre isn’t bound by a set of conventions but is instead a manifestation of a human impulse. There is an impulse to sing, an impulse to regale, an impulse to explain. Yes, genre solidifies into tradition. But the best work—the most new and most ancient—still thrums with that primal impulse. "Form in dread of power," as Emerson puts it. We look for work that carries the tradition but emerges from the source.

So, as the conductor says tapping his baton, "More brilliance, please."

AR: What is your favorite part of the editing process?   

Making the phone call to tell a new author we’ve accepted their manuscript.  

AR: And the best part of being an editor?

I just got off the phone with Laurie Jean, author of Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul, and Laurie told me she had accepted a position as Dean of Studies at Susquehanna University. Her book (along with her experience, charisma, and leadership) was part of what made that possible. I want to receive more phone calls like that.

AR: What are the most inspiring, interesting, or remarkable situations you've experienced since starting Etruscan? 

 When Bob Mooney and I conceived Etruscan, we thought we would begin with a small book of poems and grow as we learned. Then 9/11 happened. Bill Heyen, eminent poet and towering anthologist, proposed a book called “September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond.” He wanted to capture America’s first reaction to the tragedy. But Etruscan didn’t, so to speak, exist. We had no distributor or designer or marketers or deal-cutters or editors. We knew about publishing the way foodies know about restaurants: we knew what we liked. But we told Bill OK and he buttonholed 127 writers including John Updike and Erica Jong and Lucille Clifton and Robert Pinsky and he even made up a few writers like Edwina Seaver and Rose Carmine Smith with a wink to Joyce Carol Oates.

            Then we contacted a pro named Tom Woll who had made his bones at Vanguard with Dr. Seuss back in the days of three martini lunches, and I met Tom halfway between Yonkers and Providence at a bagel shop on Rte 17 and Tom hooked us up with Mortimer Mint, a Dickensian refugee who made his fortune distributing the Guinness Book of World Records, and Morty sold ten thousand copies and we thought publishing was a cinch and then 8000 copies came back—we didn’t know about returns. That was our baptism into publishing.

NA: Lately you have been publishing books that are triptychs, or three poets under one cover. Could you talk about that?

The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. 

Aesthetically, Etruscan is committed to a dialogue among genres, and Tribus has given us a chance to see poetry in a new, dialogic, light. In Tribus, authorship is shared; we are reminded of the communal origins of poetry; and we are given a new lens through which to see the connectedness of verse. Readers approach the text in a new way — it’s not just a beginning and ending, but three connected narratives. Readers are invited to browse, compare and contrast.

As for logistics — as years pass, Etruscan has acquired more and more authors, but we continue to publish only six titles a year, of which only three to four are volumes of poetry.

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus, boosting sales and increasing circulation.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along Robert Miltner, a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. Fortunately, all three authors enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the chronic problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, fashioning “centos” from one another’s work to weave between the volumes, and doing a post-Trio interview included in the book.

So, the next step was to actually solicit a tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, an up-and-coming Etruscan, Dante Di Stefano, recently submitted a book to Etruscan. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought. Heyen is 81 years old; Hix is 60, and Dante is 42: so, Etruscan Generations.

The latest is a collection including one Etruscan poet and two poets who aren’t previously published by Etruscan, but whose work seems to be connected in some way. Ann Pedone’s Medea, Katherine Soniat’s Starfish Wash-up, and D.M Spitzer’s Overflow of An Unknown Self  all came to us, with very different modalities—yet each renews the connection between contemporary and antiquity. 

"What's Happening": David Shapiro in memory of Kenneth Koch

What’s Happening

(“Write 19 lines under that heading and I’ll post it” – DL to DS)

1. Mostly decathected as they say in analysis: forget forget!
2.  I pause don’t dance don’t leap. "I rarely dance."
3.  I don't own the four volumes of Herzen just a sliced bio like his bio.
4. "Bankers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse"
5. What's better? Alain Delon and Monica Vitti loiter at stock exchange.
6. Someone dies, a minute of silence grows, then the beasts roar back.
7. I love stringing beads in a bead store in New Orleans. Beads in trees.
8. I wanted a random necklace to give to a random friend.
9. I was attacked for randomness. It was indeed too expected.
10. The critic's glasses are flying, and also a Mondrian flower torn apart.
11. "I am afraid of nothing. I have BEEN to Mexico."
12. Spinoza the lovable philosopher fried spiders and watched: what?
13. Don't overcome obstacles, find easiness. KK's motto from VL
14. What's happening? What am I thinking? "Do you actually think?"
15. Ron Padgett: you don't actually think I will read all this, do you?
16. Don't ever use the past tense in discussing physical beauty.
17. My friend said he was sinking into the white spaces between letters.
18. Whitman said "Leave the best unsaid----------------------------------
19. How do you end a poem? With the proper sense of endlessness.

in memory of KK

-- David Shapiro [March 31, 2009]

from the archive

"Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters" [new poems by Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung]

"At the start of the pandemic, I wrote nine lines (three tercets) and asked Laren to write a response in three tercets. This back and forth correspondence has continued as an improvisation throughout this strange time and perhaps the poetic dialogue has been led by the sway of language, the movement of two minds at play, and the nature of this unfolding moment. The excerpt here begins with my nine lines, and then Laren's, and so forth."   —Yusef Komunyakaa 

from Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters

I met Greg from north Louisiana, both of us
graduate students in Colorado, & one night
he said, I got something weird to show you.

We went to his small, spic & span apartment,
& he pulled from the closet iron shackles,
& said, This ugly thing’s from back home

at my plantation I’m turning into a tree farm.
He handed the shackles to me & said, Please
hold ‘em. It took me a night to get out of ‘em.

There’s irony in a man who drags shackles
around to remind him of sins of the past—
the ghost of Jacob Marley hauling chains,

condemned to eternally roam as penance.
Maybe shackles are a form of redemption
for one with a conscience who might think

a way to undo karma is to keep going back
in time, unearth a grave, & lock yourself
in the box, then strike ‘til the shackle drops.

When Robert Johnson went to Hazlehurst
he sought out an old guitarist named Ike
Zimmerman, & they’d go out at midnight

into the graveyard & play for long hours,
singing verses etched on stone by acid rain,
going inside, & coming out the backdoor,

smelling of moonshine. A lusty knot
tied when a hoodoo woman dared him
to clench his guitar with a seventh string.

Sometimes a hellhound on the trail can set
you back, or a woman’s dare dream you
two steps forward when you’re caught up

in syzygy of a great exchange. Sometimes
one occults while the third makes transit.
But, man, think of Johnson’s large hands

gliding on the neck of his Gibson, the devil
in the right fingerpicking with all digits & thumb.
Yeah, he slayed beauty ‘til it sung like two.

Brother John says, Good trouble. I hear you.
Yeah, another black Southerner who stood up,
squared his shoulders, & faced off scalawags,

die-hards, & a den of humbug, today,
we lay you to rest in Trueblood’s Atlanta.
Yes, springtime’s cut an unruly pathway.

Ah, life, I danced you up & down a windy road,
& wore out nine pairs of work boots, almost
there, my heart prodded up high stone steps.

Be cool,’Sef, & take high steps slow. Sarsens
at Stonehenge align with the Sun, like Temple
of Kukulcán. See, even three snowy pyramids

in the polar desert were mistaken for mountains.
We all yearn to build toward heaven or design
worlds that rise from a distance into clouds.

Colossal heads unearthed on Easter Island
reveal torsos, & below tombs. Or in the Sphinx
head, a labyrinth. Alien codes are writ in DNA.

Well, I’m not ready to see a crazy doctor’s jitterbug
behind the podium, talking about alien sperm, hoax,
& black magic. Just come back down slowly

to Earth. We have been in lockdown for over four
months, but you nor I have changed into a starry-eyed
siren, alien, or deadly hag-maiden in the fiery mirror.

Nor are we now Donne, Mary Shelley, & Percy,
creating ghosts & monsters, the sun hidden behind
volcanic ash, each day a candle-flicker all summer.

Flaming ash, & three hours of ground shaking
bones of the dead, sea turned stone in eighteen hundred
& froze to death, or Year of the Beggar

as Germans called it. Here locals lived on rats,
boiled nettles, raccoon & pigeon, or by sucking red clay.
But we’re lucky—skies so clear we study star

for clues, even in the halo of city lights, no smog
blows in this shutdown. We’ve grown fat here,
yet there’s phantom taste of hunger in plumes of ash.

I doubt it, yet there are children fending off hunger
in overfed America, while parents drink & gamble
in high rises & basement hovels with barb-tail devils,

sitting in director chairs, behind their Saks Fifth
skeleton masks. Yes, our phantoms are twelve feet,
& each has mastered the freeway’s chase scene.

But Shelley’s Frankenstein was pieced together
slow as a Gees Bend quilt, saying, Please love me,
or you’re responsible for the bad I think, say, & do.

Seamstresses wove tenderness into fine scraps
of kaleidoscopic praise, freedom quilts
reviving a world from pain, birthed by divine

Shakti in women’s hands, not by obsession
of a doctor who comes tragically aware, saying:
I tortured a living animal to animate lifeless clay.

My first loves were monsters, shadowy figures
hocussing in doorways, vampires stalking halls
of sleep, but before the fateful bite, I’d beg, Wait.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Emperor of Water Clocks, and Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (FSG). His most recent honors in 2021 include the Griffin Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. His plays, performance art and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Wakonda’s Dream, Testimony, and Gilgamesh. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003.

 

Laren McClung is the author of a collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press), and editor of the anthology Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W.W. Norton). Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She has held fellowships and residencies from Teachers & Writers Collaborative; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. She served as the 40th Poet Laureate of Bucks County and currently teaches at New York University.

from "Oracle" [by Loren Goodman and Aspen Matis]

 

Loren Goodman and Aspen Matis have embarked on a collaboration in verse which they have titled "Oracle." It is a singularly fruitful encounter, often taking the form of a question-and-answer session. Sometimes, watching a dance number in a movie musical, you can tell that the players are having a wonderful time -- knowledge that enhances your own appreciation of the proceedings. Such is the case here  --

DL

 

 

"Oracle" (part II)

May I ask where you’re from?
My mother will not tell me.
May I ask your address?
Please do, go right ahead
Can you make out my accent?
My suspicion is you’re not French. 

Are you a scientist?
I’m not a scientologist
Are you a magician?
Well, I have a Magic 8-Ball.
Would you describe your eyes?
Full of laughter, abyss-like
What are your plans?
To paint my apartment lilac.

Do you have an ambition?
I wish to be painted
Could you recommend an artist?
My stranger is a great one.
What color are you after?
The one I could never chase down

What’s good for sore legs?
Pressure, but not too pointed. 
What’s given you soreness?
That fact that I’m double-jointed.
Do you believe in acupuncture?
My roommate is a believer, but I’m afraid of needles. 
Are you by chance a doctor?
Mostly by chance, with a little hard work

What should I do when I feel afraid?
Move closer to the border
Between sleep and hallucination, but gently. 
How do you recognize love?
Close up or from afar, with patient intensity
Can you advise on this further?
I am no expert in these matters, but I think
Crevasses and faith and blindness all relate,
Or so goes the conventional mythology.

Are you still in Paris?
No, I’m on the horizon
Do you have any travel plans?
I want to touch the ocean floor, but not in darkness.
How do I get to the horizon? 
Horizontally speaking, I think you’re already there.

Are you familiar with Jacques Cousteau?
Only with his red beanie and his smile.
Tell me something truer?
I’ll tell you the truth, if you give me the dare
What question will you ask next?
The most important one of all, the one inside
Every other: do you know Cal Trask? 

I believe he is related to Adam & Eve
Did he go to Cal Tech?
No, he wasn’t a college boy. 
Think I should trust him?
Thou mayest.

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.”

A Panoply of Poetic Brevity [by Dickinson, Thoreau, Crane, Ammons, Hass, Pinsky, Nemerov, Kawin, and Ossip]

Haiku

  Napped half the day;
no one   
    punished me!

-- Issa (trans. Robert Hass)

   All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
      killing mosquitoes.

-- Issa (trans. Robert Hass)

 

My Life Has Been the Poem I Would Have Writ

My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.

Henry David Thoreau

*

We lose — because we win —
Gamblers — recollecting which
Toss their dice again!

-- Emily Dickinson

I Walked in a Desert

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
"Ah, God, take me from this place!"
A voice said, "It is no desert."
I cried, "Well, But --
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon."
A voice said, "It is no desert."

-- Stephen Crane

 

The Span of Life

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

-- Robert Frost

 

A Life

 Innocence?
In a sense.
In no sense!

Was that it? 
Was that it?
Was that it?

That was it.

-- Howard Nemerov

 

Their Sex Life

One Failure on
Top of another.

-- A. R. Ammons

Coward

Bravery runs in my family.

-- A. R. Ammons

 

I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well

But I was mistaken.

-- John Ashbery

 

ABC

Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,

Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.

Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:

X=your zenith.

— Robert Pinsky

 

Function

You say I but
you’re a function
of your body.
It stops, you do.

--Bruce Kawin

 

Marriage

So much for the fighting
                                             and the sex,
I want to be alone
with you in the next room.

-- Kathleen Ossip

Haiku Exchange, Sept. 9, 2007 [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Sunday September 9, 2007

David Shapiro to David Lehman

Subject: I had vertigo? Lins says hello to you Why we gone from JA (events kana)

Now I even read
the poor translations
of the wonderful haiku

I even like lines  / like this all stretched out condensed / oh ugly haiku

when I was fifteen
my friend now dead said David
too much in your head

He enjoyed Moby
Dick and said first he read parts
then fell into space

the real space between
the letters – he slapped his sister
with a Tagore book

in jail for stopping
at a green light– He said in
jail he thought up deaths

Varieties of
suicide – he had talent
now dead in a cave

Krishna consciousness
you may find it funny, but
it’s real as his hair

I had lots of friends
become priests – they wrote
lots of poor haiku

Jack Kerouac wrote
his American car strophes
now I'm the old man

they say common joy
is only in rock, sports, sex
But friends say: Haiku!

Oh it’s national
but more like the family
Haiku won't hurt you

My friend's father was
in a group where the copy
was always better

Better than what? Think
better than the original
little objects

I'm against rhyming
haiku because it’s too ruled
I like split insights!

I never could write
the perfect haiku sestina
even a pantoum!

I failed everything
like Du Fu in his exams
or even his tears

What's a haiku? sonnet
condensed to even smaller
nuns than Wordsworth

I don't know if you
don't know what makes a haiku
Spurt up like moon sex

Love Buson, Issa
one has good eyes for music
one loves bugs so much

Kenneth saddened me once
by saying flowers and fish
in haiku are false!

all those cherry trees
were often just poetic
Horrifying, yes?

I find Basho real
So maybe his trees, roads, fields
are true in real ways

Just because Borges
had dream tigers don't think that
those tigers don't bite!

You were a dream once
and you were a dream tiger
Imitate and die

That sounds too extreme
but the death haiku are that
haiku for doctors

– David Shapiro

September 9, 2007

Extending the exchange plus an excursus

From dclehman 
To dajoshap

An exchange with you
of haiku by haiku in
honor of life, death.

Friendship is two old
talkative monks sitting
on top of a mountain.

Two old monks atop
a mountain discuss the gold
standard in Koch’s play.

Is there no room for
cherry blossoms and the white
eye of a brown owl?

Your definition
of haiku (sonnet condensed)
is sweet though untrue.

I, too, love moon sex,
dream tigers, split insights, and
spiritual puns.

Spiritual puns
are coincidences, said
G. K. Chesterton.

Can haiku do the work
of a spiritual pun?
Strangers meet on train.

One kills the other’s
wife and wants his own father
killed by the other.

Or the survivor
sleeps with the victim’s widow
after killing him.

Both Alfred Hitchcock
and Sophocles believe in
spiritual puns.

Rhyme in haiku seems
contrary to the spirit
of the Eastern mind.

That must be why I
do it though of course you’re right
I shouldn’t. And so night

falls as it must on
us all, and to bed must I
go, to sleep, to dream,

and not to die. O
friend it pleases me to write
these haiku with you.

-- David Lehman

 

Haiku Heaven: an exchange [by David Lehman and David Shapiro]

Haiku: Autumn 2007

(1) From: DaJoShap
To: DCLehman

Subject: preface Shapiro / for our haiku.  I'll think / Now why not write yrs

yes you may publish
our haiku but I think
preface needs finish!

for example our
haiku might seem dour:
no seasons, flowers

well, maybe a bug
it landed on us while snug
we counted haiku

Even thinking haiku
I miss writing the haiku
even in haiku

inside the haiku
a bug, a host, a guest, more--
all fits --even you!

We hardly ever meet
we hardly ever greet, yet
poets love the beat

but that's too dry, I
know – the first haiku should fly
like Keene's sharp short dry

in English ice creams
might be important as dreams --
as Kyoto stones

As we joke, we say
don't write every day, write
all day and don't stop

at morning, haiku
in the afternoon, haiku
sleep, baby haiku

how I would like to
write the color of the voice
of the haiku bird!

or disappear like
a prince executed fast
Must it be today?"

Yes it must, Haiku
We must let you end, today
Though you've more to say!

KANA PILLOW
-- David Shapiro

(2) September 8, 2007: 8:25 pm

from: DCLehman
To: DaJoShap

I think we should start
a new series of haiku
before the leaves drift

before the leaves fall
in that one moment when all
of nature stands tall.

"You are the poet,"
C. said to J. "I , the scribe."
Birds build but not I.

Eye of hurricane,
or all-seeing bug on top
of lean apple tree,

look at me and think,
this is life this wait this day
in haiku heaven

with my friend you: why
miss writing the haiku when
we can write new ones

and live within them
as the guest hosts of a late
night talk show you hear

from the room next door
to yours in no-sleep motels
full of books, the books

we want to write, you
and I, alone together
for the first time since

the night of sharp knives
the November night and dawn
on Riverside Drive.

– David Lehman

Letters and Comments from All Over: an End of Summer Special

<<< On August 10, 2021, Barbara Lemon said: I was very interested and studied "New Trilling Essay the Talk of the Town" at my leisure. To be honest, I really liked it. In fact it displays a high level of professionalism. I recommend my own blogsite in addition to "The Liberal Imagination," which is boss, also "The Opposing Self," although I didn't get all the references, and "Beyond Culture," which really points the way forward by looking back over the other's shoulder and seeing something as grim as what Lot's wife may have witnessed, although reports of that event disagree. >>>

<<<Martha Ullman West said: This is a wonderful interview with [Suzanne] Farrell, questions and answers, both. Farrell, in describing the specifics of working with Balanchine, says many of the same things Todd Bolender told me and and many others about working with him in the studio (which he did from 1940 to 1960, originating roles in Four Temperaments, Ivesiana, and Agon, to name a few). I interviewed Bolender extensively for my book, Todd Bolender, Janet Reed and the Making of American Ballet; Bolender, who was arguably Balanchine's first choreographic apprentice, was particularly interesting about analyzing roles, which Balanchine left up to the dancers, never in fact seems to have mentioned. And Emily [Fragos], my copy of the Everyman anthology of dance poetry was given me by Ursula Le Guin. I value your work.>>

<<< Bruno Anthony said:
I totally agree with Ms. [Lilly] King and hate the idea of "going for gold" and "settling for silver" as if the latter were a consolation prize. Another thing the announcers can do to improve their presentation is to shut up -- to allow some silence rather than talking all the time. Also, to honor the athletes who finished two seconds slower than the top three. >>>

Howard Bass wrote regarding Gardner McFall's "First Kiss", our pick of the week, on July 4, 2012):

<<<This terrific poem brought back a vivid memory from my own elementary school years. In 4th grade (or thereabouts) we were taught to make candles by dipping our wicks (ok, there's a vulgar image for you) into a big vat of melted wax. We'd file into the school kitchen, dip, and go out, circling in and out of the kitchen as the wax hardened and our candles thickened. So some students were in the kitchen, others outside waiting to go back in. A couple of the boys kissed Lynn Kaiser and they dared me to do it, too. So I did, kissing her on her forehead, just at the moment when the teacher looked out at us from the kitchen (no doubt we caused something of a commotion). So while Larry and Mark got away with it, I had to stay after school and receive a stern lecture from said teacher. I was not, she declared, a gentleman! I took my punishment like a gentleman and did not implicate the other kissers. Poetry can have a powerful effect on memory--this one really worked for me! Many thanks for posting it, T >>>

On June 13, 2021, Dr. Earle Hitchner said, re a "pick of the week" selection by Terence Winch:
<<< Among the questions simmering in Mary Jo Salter’s skillfully constructed poem is this: What gets erased in the formation of character by inculcating and then enforcing acquiescence in adolescents? Salter shakes off the dusty notion of rote compliance and imposed silence as conducive to learning. The noisy boys turn affliction into fun, thus temporarily thwarting their martinet nun’s discipline by speaking and behaving as the boys they are. Brava to Salter for this bravura verse lending voice to these “unrecorded voices,” including her father’s. >>>

 

On May 14, Ken Deifik said, responding to Lera Auerbach's "Viennese Traffic Lights":

 

<< I'm sure you know the German saying that the Austrians want us to think Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. I got to visit with my mother in '75. She was born and raised there, and sent to America at 16. She showed me the concrete tool shed on the Ringstrasse where she was imprisoned overnight for the crime of sitting on a bench while Jewish. It was still there 36 years later, probably still holding tools. Her parents got her out of the country ASAP after that. They were not so lucky, themselves.>>

May 14, 2021 on Viennese Traffic Li…

 

On January 31, Don Berger wrote appreciatively of Ron Padgett, whose poem "Morning" was chosen by Terence Winch as his "pick of the week." << This fable is characteristically fabulous work from Ron Padgett, whose poems I've loved since first learning of him from James Tate in the late seventies. His translation of Cendrars is my Bible and will always be (I own two copies, just in case!). In this poem "Morning," myth marries history--imagination's in its highest gear, clarity and direct speech form the great groundwork, fun wins! >>> Posted by: Don Berger | January 31, 2021 at 12:30 PM

On May 7, 2021, Emily Fragos responded to Mindy Aloff's piece on Jacques D'Amboise: <<< I well remember seeing Jacques d'Amboise partnering the great Suzanne Farrell in Balanchine's late masterpiece, Davidsbundlertanze, music by Schumann. It was at the end of his glorious career. When he carried Farrell offstage, the audience gasped. It was one of Balanchine's most breathtakingly beautiful and haunted moments. What genius! What divine dancers! I am so grateful that I got to see it. >>>

On May 6, 2021 in resonse to "On Freud's Birthday: The Definitive What Do Women Want?", Jill Newnham wrote:
<<<
Peace Corpse is typo or error for Peace Corps.
>>>

<<< Emily Lloyd said, regarding this post by Jenny Factor on the subject of Sappho:

"Transgressive love has to unmake the world a little before it gets on with loving. All other love only has to knock over the Self. So Sappho (who existed in the day when Hera could still order Zeus around) was the first non-transgressive lesbian erotic poet because there's not an iota of shame in her. Take a look at this fragmentary sample..." Yes, but--for whom was Sappho writing? Herself, her lover/beloved? In which case, the idea of apology or shame or identity consciousness or politics wouldn't really enter (or be near as likely to enter) into it, would it? How often are we writing in such deliriously pure circumstances? Good post. Thanks. >>>

 

<<<

Timothy Swain said, re "An Interview with A. E. Stalling by Aspen Matis":

A.E. Stallings is one of our greatest poets today. I've been following her for years--her translations, too; everything is superb!

May 29, 2021 >>>

 

 

<<< Molly Arden said, in response to "Larkin, Uncensored":

Bill Lawgen und Mary Syer

Wurden letzten Mittwoch Mann und Frau.

Hoch sollen sie leben, hoch, hoch, hoch!

Als sie drin standen vor dem Standesamt,

Wusste er nicht, woher ihr Brautkleid stammt,

Aber sie wusste seinen Namen nicht genau.

Hoch!

Wissen Sie, was Ihre Frau treibt? Nein!

Lassen Sie Ihr Lasterleben sein? Nein!

Hoch sollen sie leben, hoch, hoch, hoch!

Billy Lawgen sagte neulich mir:

Mir genügt ein kleiner Teil von ihr!

Das Schwein.

Hoch!

-- Brecht und Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper

 

 

 

Richard Kirschenbaum said re Lawrence J. Epstein's post "The Little-Known Film That Changed History" (Pimpernel Smith, 1941), a post that went up on July 12, 2013:
<<< All true with the possible exception of the Churchill inspired mission to keep Spain out of the war. By June 1943 there was little danger of Spain joining the Axis. Franco was far too savvy for that. Hitler had pressured Franco to join him in October 1940 when nobody could give you a reasonable scenario by which the Nazis could lose. Even then Franco said no, causing Hitler to state that he would rather have three or four teeth yanked out than have to deal with Franco again. Still a great film with no small amount of humor from that "Finest Hour" of British history when they held the line for civilization and all looked bleakest. The author of this post is sooooooo correct about the significance of the time line.  May 21, 2021 >>>

 

Alan Ziegler writes, re this post of May 14, 2021 ("Poets, Law and Order, and Criminal Intent")

<<< And there's this dialogue from [Dick Wolf's] Law and Order the Original:

Librarian: Verlaine was the real talent, you know. Rimbaud just latched onto his coattails and wouldn’t let go.
Briscoe: We were just saying that on the way over here.
Librarian: He shot him.
Briscoe: Who shot who?
Librarian: Verlaine popped Rimbaud. Paul loved Arthur. Paul also loved Matilda. It was a whole mess. The French—what do you expect?
Briscoe: So can you tell us if you sold any copies recently?
Librarian: If you really want decadent, I’d stick with Baudelaire.
May 19, 2021 at 09:04 AM  >>>

Alan Ziegler writes, re this post on The Asphalt Jungle:

<<< My father told me it was essential that I see The Asphalt Jungle in order to understand his father, a bank robber, jewel thief, and frequent convict. My grandfather always worked with a crew of specialists (he was the one who could crack the safe).>>> April 20, 2021 at 05:22 PM

On "Remembering Bob Hershon" by Terence Winch, Justin Jamail writes on March 24, 2021.
<<<<
Bob published my first book. He and Charles North invited me to read with them at Zinc Bar. Just two of countless generosities large and small. I used to bring beers and my children to his house for talks. When we would leave, he would say "goodbye sweetheart" to my then two year old daughter in his gruff voice and she would shout in a tiny voice "goodbye sweetheart!" in return, and Donna would wonder what was going on downstairs. He was a good hugger and a good neighbor.

I think I never left a conversation with Bob without learning the names of writers or other interesting people who had been part of his life in one way or another. >>>

[Pictured left to right: David Lehman, Bob Hershon, Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally]

Also re "Remembering Bob Hershon" by Terence Winch, Maureen Owen writes on March 25, 2021 09:19 AM:

<< One of my greatest joys has been hanging out with Bob and Donna [Brook] in their kitchen, talking poetry and perfect avocados. Whenever I visited NY, after I moved to Denver, Bob and Donna would insist I stay with them and even set up museum visits and readings we must go to. In the evenings we would walk over to one of their favorite Brooklyn restaurants, having invited others to join us, and have amazing delicious rollicking dinners. Pure fun to be in the presence of Donna, who could tell all wonderful stories about Hanging Loose authors, and Bob, a rigorous, generous, co-editor of one of the most important small presses ever and all his incredible, passionate energy transforming the space around him. That energy and zen-of-the-moment presence flooded his poetry and gave us all a bigger than life poem that was totally a poem about everyday life and all of its sense and nonsense. A poet of his beloved Brooklyn, of place and all place, his voice spoke to and for us all. He will be sorely missed, but never missing. >>>

Joanie Mackowski wrote, in response to "Most Popular Funeral Songs" (March 6, 2021):

<<< Great post. Songs to go out to, to be gone by. I second or third Denise's nomination for "Is That all There is"-- such a weird & wonderful song. My own nomination is "Words of Love," as sung by Mama Cass Elliot: a song for going to new places-- https://youtu.be/2b6rm5yTx44 >

Hey, that’s not Mama Cass, that’s Helen Forrest!

 

 

 

Mark C Minton said, re "The Haiku Masters of Japan Drop in For a Visit" by David Lehman (Feb 15, 2021)

Thanks, David. This might be a bit more Japanese:

Pond
Splash
Frog

The reason I worried this small point is that the second half of the haiku is very ambiguous in Japanese. The first item in the sequence referring to the "old pond" is followed by the "cutting phrase" "ya," which separates it as an object from the remainder of the haiku. The second half is meant to be read as one flowing unit -- frog jumping and water sounding. Basho chose to express this grammatically in a way so that the leaping frog modifies the water sound. So, it is literally something like "frog-leaping water sound." So, in English word order this would conventionally lead to putting the frog last in the sequence, such as "the sound of water made by a frog leaping into it" But this is pedestrian, awkward and not mysterious in any way. The manner in which Basho did this, however,creates a "which came first, chicken or egg?" feeling, fusing the splash and the leaping frog into a single phenomenon. This is reinforced because Basho places no cutting phrase "ya" between the mention of the leaping frog and the water sound. Thus, he enacts what haiku is made for: like a koan, a bit of cognitive confusion provoking thoughts about the true nature of perception. Seems to me the sequence I suggested -- Pond,Splash, Frog-- best recreates this authorial intention in English. Best, Mark
February 22, 2021
>>>

Ron writes, in response to "The Master of Gamblers" (January 17, 2021)

"Do not, beloved, regret that you yielded to me so quickly:
I entertain no base, insolent thoughts about you.
Arrows of Cupid work divers effects. Some do but scratch us:
Slow and insidious these poison our hearts over years.
Yet with a head freshly honed and cunningly fledged, certain

     others
Pierce to the marrow, inflame rapidly there our blood.
When gods and goddesses in days of heroes made love, then
Lust followed look and desire, with no delay, was indulged.
Surely you don't think the goddess of love lost a moment

    reflecting
When, in Idean grove, Anchises caught her eye.
Nor did Luna delay about kissing that beautiful dreamer—
Jealous Aurora had else hastily wakened the lad.
At the loud banquet Hero regarded Leander—then promptly
Into dark waters he plunged, ardently swam toward his love.
When Rhea Silvia, princess and virgin, came down to the Tiber
Just to fetch water, a god seized her and that is the way
Mars begat himself sons, a pair of twins whom a she wolf
Suckled. Today a proud Rome claims to be queen of the

    world..."

 

 

On April 10, 2021,Suzanne said in response to "Who Said It?"

<<< What is Ava Gardner doing in this post? Answer: Ava Gardner knows who said "If the Kennedy White House was decadent, the Clinton White House was sordid." But -- as we can tell by the expression on her face -- she's not talkin'. Where can I redeem my points? >>>

 

 

 

 

<<< On August 21, 2012, Derrida invoked his concept of the Pharmakon in relation to this New York Post cover of 8/21/21:

“(the pharmakon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, neither penis nor vagina; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference; the clitoris is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc., but hidden as if by common tribal consent; the left tit is neither a signifier nor a signified, the right tit is neither a sign nor a thing, neither a right wing presence nor a left wing absence, neither a position nor a nightgown, etc.; spacing is neither space nor time; nyet; et la langue Doc (Papa); neither you nor he nor any of my envious enemies can define what you can’t define and that includes deconstruction, the big-time bug spray at the border of Plato and solider Aristotle; the incision is either the circumcised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, and the orgone-box lather as prescribed by Wilhelm Reich, no longer in favor, but tested only in theory; that is, simultaneously either or, but also, and not even; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc., and not just the victim of a hoax.”) >>>

On August 30, 2021 at 08:33 AM David Beaudouin responded to Chaucer Gets Canceled 
<<< Sadly, this critical attitude, couched in current correctness, is strangely blind to the fact that folks in the 14th century simply did not behave or think the way we do today. It's thus a specious argument to expect them retrospectively to do so or else be censored. And may I add that Chaucer authored what's considered to be one of the first feminist narratives in the English Language, the Wife of Bath's Tale. >>>

An Interview with Loren Goodman [by Aspen Matis]

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

I corresponded with Mr. Goodman via email about the ephemeral nature of insight, old poets who are powerful alarm clocks, the dreamtime origin of responsibility, poetry “as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party,” the unique capacity of thematic minds to unearth truth, and the inspiring optimism of a particular young Japanese boxer. We also discussed the definition of greatness “as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.”

photo credit: Mike Figgis

In your poem entitled “Poem,” you define a poem as “a face as empty / As the full page is blank.” What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Is poetry a part of me, or am I a part of poetry? What is my greatest role in the inner life of poetry? Why have certain poems chosen to write themselves through me? I’d like to thank poetry for collaborating with me.

This is a question we ask — or set out to answer — every time we write one: What can a poem be?

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

I like the idea of poetry as a compass: a compass that gets you lost, when getting lost is the only way to find a way. Which is the greater being/force — the more inclusive, all-encompassing — poetry or society? The radicals “god” + “soil” + “to throw a party” comprise the Chinese characters for society (社会) while “language” + “temple” make up poetry (詩). Combine the two and we have poetry as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Hang ten.

Your most recent book of poems, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems, was published in February of 2020. Poet and songwriter Michael Rothenberg calls the collection “Irreverent…a Dadaistic self-portrait of twins in an existential playground, where everyone and no one gets hurt too badly. …Truth slips between meanings, some words become other words, a conceptual kind of magician’s poetry that skips through a minefield of radioactive icons and self-detonating idols, each itinerant reflection, each telegraphic puzzle, expiring in zany isolation and nostalgia. We have come to this. Bankrupt and rejoicing. This twitchy book of poetry is history and hope.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Pirooz Kalayeh and I co-wrote this book together. It was a wonderful experience. We wrote it line by line, back and forth over the years, on Google Hangouts. It was fun goofing around with language, not intending to write a book, just having a good time, corresponding in and outside the parameters of ordinary language. Then at some point we looked back at our chats and said, “hey, we have some poems!” The Google Hangout poetry process is one I’ve used with students from many years before, which continues to inspire. My “ambition” is to keep on doing it. Please contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

Your first collection, Famous Americans, was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin as the winner of the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets and subsequently published by Yale University Press. Described by the publisher as “a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture,” the poems in Famous Americans question our definition and understanding of the concept of icon. Merwin compared you to the Dadaists and commended your poetry’s “plain ridicule.” In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

The back cover. Between that and the final page, I hope that readers will be left with the first page of their own new poem or book.

Explorations: how to make a book, and to make the most of my own mistakes.

You live in Seoul, Korea, where you serve as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director at Yonsei University/Underwood International College. As a Kansas-born American living in Seoul, what unexpected delights have you come across? What difficulties and disappointments? Have you experienced culture shock; or have you discovered that, to a great extent, students are students and English departments are insular and familiar? 

It is my first time being the Chair, and let me tell you, it is not easy. It requires a certain amount of readiness and stability, and over time, one learns to accept the pleasures of being sat upon. I’m working on becoming a table.

The students are great. Each unique, a brilliant, lively and considerate bunch — beyond comparison. Primarily third-culture kids.

So it’s really not that far from the heartland to Seoul. One thing I’ve learned in Seoul is that groove is in the heart.

I experience culture shock on a regular basis, and moonlight as a cultural shock therapist.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

I use 17th century and 18th century poets as internal alarm clocks.

The works of Blake, Coleridge, and Bashō have awakened in me dreams. As Tukaram writes:

I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
“Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time,” Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
“Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility.”

In dreams begin responsibilities!

What have you learned from your practice of Japanese boxing? Are you now competing? 

I learned many things, and forgot many things — do you find life is like that, a process of learning and forgetting?

Of the many things I learned, I’d like to share three: 1) While training with Japanese boxers, I enjoyed talking with them, interviewing them, recording, transcribing, and reflecting on their life stories. One of my standard interview questions was “What is the best thing that happened to you in boxing?” The answer that stays with me most came from a young pro boxer. He paused, looked up for a second, and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” What a wonderful optimism with which to approach the world: the best is always yet to come. 2) Don’t get hit. 3) Use your legs.

I’m still in the game. See you on August 14th, from Tulsa, on ESPN.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Thematic minds sometimes find out what inquiring ones don’t want to know.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Yes. But sometimes there are books that are better than the best. And the greatest works are the mortar that holds everything together — without them — and the books that go beyond greatness—the cracks themselves — our world would be little more than a heap of bricks. 

It feels good to be asked about greatness.

Didn’t Thomas Nashe say the best art is the most obscure?

One of my favorite stories on this subject involves Stanley Kunitz’ selection of Michael Casey.

It’s nice to find the greatness in everything.

I like the definition of greatness as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

I only share wisdom and guidance with old poets. Never let anyone convince you out of your youth.

All big things are made of little things. Bon Courage! Everything is practice for everything else. Do one thing at a time. Sleep.

I have plenty of ignorance to share with young poets, and a lot of wisdom and guidance I’d like young poets to share with me!

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

The trivial ones! The trivium.

Working on: a shijo workshop in Newfoundland, dreams, boxing, translations of Humberto Ak’abal, a Sci-Fi musical without the letter “I,” a Kung Fu sestina, and a series of dark chocolate-covered poems. Also collaborating with a Korean cosmetics company on poems that cleanse pores, and with Puma International on a line of shoes composed of recycled verses from the 17th/18th century.

Thank you for asking so many insightful and inspiring questions. Now for the question behind the questions: the answer is green.

Selfie with Marilyn Monroe: Writing in the Persona of Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

She was a just postcard at the MOMA, a stamp of pink and lemon yellow. Her mouth, a red smear, slightly open. Is that a word forming, wanting to slip from tongue to lip to air. Trapped in an Andy Warhol silk screen.

I bought the postcard, propped it on my desk. We gazed at each other.

What did I know about Marilyn Monroe—nothing really—blonde bombshell, actress, married to Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, something about the Kennedys, died young, suicide?  She was just a very famous face. But arguably the first female celebrity known by a single name. And still the most enduring. Even 60 years after her death, she’s still here, on YouTube, all over the Internet, and at the moment, in the form of a controversial statue in Palm Springs.

Why is that?

Turns out Marilyn pioneered multiplication—And I don’t mean math, but the concept of blanketing the world with her image, before the Internet made it easy— she was the first instant celebrity, it gave her power. She created the Marilyn Monroe image then projected and performed it over and over.

Think about yourself. How do you appear on Instagram, Hinge or Twitter? Isn’t social a form of  multiplication? Aren’t we all projecting and performing? Every selfie is posed and a pose. Even in real life, we perform some version of our self. I am now. So are you.

T.S. Eliot wrote about putting on a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” The daily act of assuming a persona. As a poet, to really explore our performance culture, I assumed someone else’s persona—Marilyn’s.

For two years, I became Marilyn in poetry. It began in Paris in July 2018. A place where I had first come as a student, even then assuming a role—dipping my tongue into the language to spend long nights in cafés and bars, drinking Pernod, smoking Gauloises and imagining myself Hemingway. But now, decades later, I had greater ambitions. I was going to become Marilyn Monroe.  Or maybe it had started earlier, in 1994 when I moved to Los Angeles and fell under the spell of faces plastered on billboards and ran into stars in the supermarket. The glitter of LA shaking onto my skin and sticking as I went about my life, working, raising my family. But all the time, perhaps it was there lurking—the desire to be someone else, to be the world’s most famous woman, to be Marilyn Monroe.

As I wrote, I came to know her many faces, the layers of her performance. I stripped away the façade, pushed against stereotype to try to find her truth. I found it. Sort’ve. It was fairly easy for me to capture her voice, to tell her story in poetry. She has a lot to say and poetry works for Marilyn. But as I’ve came closer to Marilyn’s truths, I’ve came face to face with my self—Maybe I used her as a foil. By becoming Marilyn, had I been avoiding my own lies?

In the end, the collection I wrote, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, is a poetic insomnia-inspired conversation between Marilyn and the speaker that confronts the truths that many women experience: abuse, addiction, careers, love, marriage and divorce, children and childlessness, mental health and death. In becoming Marilyn, I became closer to understanding myself.

At the Ritz: Plath, Sexton & Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

1958: Eisenhower’s in the White House, Explorer 1 satellite launched, The US. Supreme Court rules for school integration, Elvis joins the Army, the Yankees win the World Series, the microchip is invented, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is published, Marilyn Monroe films Some Like it Hot, Sylvia Plath moves to Boston and joins Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s writing seminars.


It’s also the year I was born. But that is not why I’m here conjuring 1958. Or maybe it is, inserting myself into this story about an imagined cultural intersection of poetry and pop. In my mind, Plath and Sexton are having martinis at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. They’ve come from a Lowell seminar, their minds buzzing. At the next table is Monroe. She’d driven up from Connecticut where she lives with husband Arthur Miller. She’s newly pregnant, her body hormonally adjusting. She’s nervous that she’ll lose this one too, especially as she must fly to LA next month to start filming. As she sips her cup of tea, she thinks about Arthur, his struggles with writer’s block, her need to get away for a few days. Marilyn pulls her journal out of her handbag to write. Truman Capote’s book tumbles out. As she reaches down under the table to retrieve it, she notices the two women at the next table. All other eyes in the dining room are on her, but not theirs. They are deep in conversation. There is something about them that intrigues Marilyn. Does she know them from somewhere? Plath and Sexton are playing it cool. Of course, they know that Marilyn Monroe is sitting next to them. It is only as she looks directly at them, that they turn to meet her gaze.

From everything that I have learned in the research I undertook to write poems in the persona of Marilyn for my newest collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, neither Anne Sexton nor Sylvia Plath never met Marilyn. Plath wanted to, or her subconscious wanted to meet Marilyn according to a 1959 diary entry: “Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. I spoke almost in tears of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us (her husband and herself) although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me a manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.” Discovering this diary entry prompted me to write a poetic response from Marilyn to Plath:

Dear Sylvia,

Give me your bitten hand.

I will paint each moon sliver—

Amaryllis red.

If you are a girl

swirled in the thick of a dream,

I am a play

of red-tongued wolves and barn owl howls.

Let me curl into your hair, crawl beneath

your winter. Scrawl me in lines.

Let me mean everything to you.

I promise lavender and honey cakes

and the taste of Christmas roses.[1]

In fact, as I drafted poems for An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, I had Sexton and Plath on my brain. That all three women suffered mental health issues and would die early by their hand was an obvious connection. But they also were living and making art and pushing against the constraints of being a creative, working woman at a time when women were expected to be homemakers. Sexton, Plath and Monroe began connecting into a single powerful force in my writing. I drafted a cento constructed of lines from poems all three women wrote in 1958. While that poem did not make it into my final collection, remnants of Sexton and Plath’s imagery linger in several of the poems, and specifically the bee imagery from Sexton’s “Said the Poet to the Analyst” and “Ringing the Bells” and Plath’s bee poems particularly “Wintering,” echo in my persona poem, “Hello it’s Me, Marilyn” where Marilyn is dying. Even now, beneath the lilt of Marilyn’s voice, I hear the lower pitched ones of Sexton and Plath in my ear—like a brilliant, feminist chorus and suddenly, there they are in the Ritz hotel, across from the Boston Public Garden, together and it’s 1958.

 

[1] An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn (PANK Books, 2021)

Poets Love Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marilyn Monroe not only loved poetry and poets, poets have reciprocated in writing Marilyn into poetry. While I may be the first to write an entire collection centered around Marilyn, in doing so I have entered into a long tradition of poets who have written poems devoted to or referencing the famous actress.

Marilyn appears in passing in Frank O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis” published in 1957, while Marilyn was still living, as “Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls” and more recently in Alex Dmitrov’s “LOVE” from his new collection LOVE and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over

the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in

champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, “I

cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way

she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will

say au revoir.”

 

In fact, it is Marilyn’s tragic death that poets have explored over and over. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” from 1968, with her death as metaphor for America:

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

        By Edwin Morgan

What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?

Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,

white hearse, Los Angeles,

DiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!

That Death should seem the only protector –

That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights

become an inquisition and a torment –

That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the

inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become

a blur of incomprehension and pain –

That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with

bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie

down and in her anguish

call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could

only dissolve her! A method

of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!

Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die

and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it, America.

Let no one say communication is a cantword.

They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.

But what she had not been able to say

perhaps she had said. ‘All I had was my life.

I have no regrets, because if I made

any mistakes, I was responsible.

There is now – and there is the future.

What has happened is behind. So

it follows you around? So what?’ – This

to a friend, ten days before.

And so she was responsible.

And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?

Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow

white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

 

Then in 1984, Sharon Olds writes a poem with the same title that appears in her collection from that year The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984).

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

By Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close
the mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the side, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

Their lives took
a turn-one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him-a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Marilyn’s death forever transforming the men, and the reader in Old’s poem. We cannot look away. In Frank Bidart’s 1996 poem, “Marilyn Monroe” that ran in The New Yorker, Marilyn becomes a vehicle for the idea and perhaps the impossibility of transformation.

 

Marilyn Monroe

by Frank Bidart

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it.

Your father’s name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind.

You are bitter all that releases

transformation in us is illusion.

Poor, you thought being rich

is utterly corrosive; and watched with envy.

Posing in the garden,

squinting into the sun.

 

Even nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn continues to serve as poetic muse, metaphor and mirror. And there’s no end in sight. Brava Marilyn!

An Interview with Amy Gerstler [by Aspen Matis]

Amy Gerstler is a critically acclaimed writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review and The Best American Poetry. Her 1990 book Bitter Angel won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her newest collection of poems, Index of Women, is forthcoming from Penguin in April of 2021. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Gerstler via email about her newest book of poetry, her perspective on poetry’s role in our present society, the themes that most fascinate and inspire her, her current work, and her experience of and feelings about editing The Best American Poetry 2010.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Joan Didion, in her essay, “Why I Write,” said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” That sums it up! I also write poems to have an excuse to wallow in subjects I’m compelled by, to attempt to get inside other characters / minds (in order to better understand them), to speak to about the dead and the vanished, and to commune with and stretch my imagination.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

Great list! All those things and more! Poetry can delight and comfort. Unsettle and expand consciousness. Help us comprehend/contend with being human. Allow us to pay little visits to each other’s wild minds. Keep us alert to the possibilities of language and how it differentiates and binds us together.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

She can devote herself to following her own course, as writer, thinker, and emotional animal—whatever that may mean at different times in her life. She can cultivate and explore her own obsessions without letting anything or anybody stop her.

Your forthcoming poetry collection, Index of Women (Penguin, April 2021), showcases exclusively female speakers in poems that wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and the nature of humanity. What inspired this new collection on womanhood and the magic, meaning, humor, sorrow, and struggles of our days that create the hidden meaning of our lives?

Dramatic monologues thrill me. Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology stunned me when I was young. All those vivid voices spouting dark truth from the grave! I love the poet Ai’s dramatic monologues. My interest in women’s voices, spoken or sung, and their stories and experiences was also generative. Coming across the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s book Catalogue of Women was a fortunate and influential accident. Such an odd, compelling idea to compile a catalogue of women! I wondered why one would do that and what it would be like if a female attempted such a project.

Your book of poems Scattered at Sea explores hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, imagination, drug highs, memory loss, bereavement, spirituality, and the nature of prayer—many distinct arenas and inquiries! What unifies the pieces in this collection? How did Scattered at Sea find its form?

Since the book invokes scattering via its title and poems, I felt released from pressure to make the book “unified.” Instead, I tried to pursue the opposite: making it scattery, dispersed, a bit all over the place (which is reflective of the way my brain works, anyway).

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Having very little formal education in poetry makes me a dubious source of intel about 17th and 18th century poets, sadly. Among the few I know I love Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, each for different reasons that I fear there is not nearly enough space to enumerate here.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his/her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

This is a fascinating notion, the idea of a “reliable” critic. I suppose it would depend on what you wish to rely on a critic for. Sharp, inventive writing? Humor? Interesting opinions? Erudition? Open-mindedness? Fairness? Ability to appreciate and describe the letter and spirit of a work? Historical context? Links to other works? Analysis? In other words, I think the idea of a “reliable” critic involves very individual judgements on the part of each reader, who determines for herself what she’s seeking when reading literary criticism, what she needs from it at that moment, and whether she gets that or not.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Emotion is key for me. Sex, gender, love, mortality, animals, science, pseudo-science, spiritual longing, loss, and the occult are all abiding fascinations.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I’m collaborating on a musical play with composer/actor Steve Gunderson. There’s a possible comix project on the horizon that’s in the earliest stage of discussion. I really hope that will work out as I find graphic novels and comix an amazing medium.

You edited the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that experience like for you? How, if all, did editing the anthology affect you? Are you proud of the book? How do you feel about the process—and the product of your labor—in retrospect?

Editing that anthology taught me tons and was profoundly inspiring. I will always be so grateful to the series editor, David Lehman, for trusting me and gifting me with that opportunity. The process brought home to me what a thriving, vital, various field American poetry is. Narrowing the book down to the requisite 75 poems was the hardest part.

As January Bites the Dust of Snow [Lehman & Shapiro haiku exchange, 2003]

 

An Old Dispute; I agree (and disagree)
Date:    1/27/2003 8:25:35 PM Eastern Standard Time   
   
Well, David Lehman,
it's an old dispute between
Li Po -- Tu Fu--  Scene:

O Tu Fu says Li
you're suffering poetry--
My kind just flies high--

Ben Jonson wanted Bard
to blot more. Now you know I'm
not hair on his beard--

Dave, I'm just playing...
Some think it close to praying.
It's all just saying...

No one hates typos
More than I do, but we'll clean
Them later (and schmooze).

--  [DS, 1 / 27 / 03]

 

I muse and am dis
-abused but now I'm back from
Detroit, Michigan.

Detroit's a riot --
or was in '67.
What were you doing?

I was waking at
six and carrying mail in
Harlem and the Heights.

Days of ‘67.
What changed was the rate of change.
You said: read Rimbaud.

I joined the Poem
Team. You were on it, as were
Mitch, Les, Chuck, Hilton.

We gave readings at
women's colleges such as
Sadie Lou and Vassar.

Mitch Sisskind read "A
Mean Teacher" and re-met his
wife of the future.

Enough of those days.
I wish not for the snows of
yesterday but now.

The snow is coming
fast and white, covering the
balsams and cedars.  

-- DL, 1 / 27 / 03

and furthermore I muse and ignore the news but can’t elude the weather

Maybe all teachers
are mean, I thought, but now you
know I snow so slow.

Just one thing is real.
Snow. The sooner you know this,
The easier life.

And by snow I mean
snow. So much pain in your mind
or mine: we need snow.

Ah, my friend, may this
day bring you an hour of clear
vision and no thought. 

–- DL, 1 / 29 / 03

    Each month a fatal new form? Thanks, etc. Thanks

DS to DL
Date:    1/29/2003 5:20:44 PM Eastern Standard Time

My best lecture was
"Snow in Art and Litera-
ture" post real snow-storm!

Maybe we should write
each month in new forms: couplets
for Feb in droplets!

ahorisms: March
villanelle for long April
May is all prose (lit)

June for happy songs;
letters during summer's wrongs;
and for spoon and tongs?

all Fall prose Rimbauds;
while some desire more "Sri Lankas"*          *new form where you ferment nouns in names
we’d return from maps                                   

of three continents
with tankas (haiku plus two
seven-syllables lines.)

Christmas ices streams –
(sweet permissive month of dreams--)
we'll do ANYTHING!    

-- DS, 1 / 29 / 03

Comments

On August 30, 2021 at 08:33 AM David Beaudouin responded to Chaucer Gets Canceled 
<<< Sadly, this critical attitude, couched in current correctness, is strangely blind to the fact that folks in the 14th century simply did not behave or think the way we do today. It's thus a specious argument to expect them retrospectively to do so or else be censored. And may I add that Chaucer authored what's considered to be one of the first feminist narratives in the English Language, the Wife of Bath's Tale. >>>