The Best American Poetry

"The Inevitable 'But'" [by David Lehman and David Shapiro]

The Inevitable "But"

But who can paint the snow?
Can you?
My nudes wear snowflake bikinis.

A Barnard grad on skis
asked: may I edit your genius?
(But who can paint the snow?)

A good fact-checker, for such am I,
can collect flaws and correct laws.
(She wore a snowflake bikini.)

You are merry because you saw
The Cherry Orchard and did not cry.
(Did you paint it blue, or did I?)

The aphorisms were decent, the sonnets obscene.
You painted from the body, I from the screen.
(My nudes wear snowflake bikinis.)

Like the grandson of a serf, I work at home

and stare at the sea on the screen.
In my nostrils, the smell of the foam.

(But who can paint the snow?)

-- David Lehman and David Shapiro (January 2009)

 

In this photograph from September 2010, from left to right inthe first row are David Lehman, Amy Gerstler, Amy Glynn, Gerald Stern, David Shapiro

Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Great Poems of the World, episode 19, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

An odd duck and a great one!

Spring and Fall
    to a young child (1880)

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Click here to see how the fellows feel about Bob Dylan's "Desolation Tow."

The End of February [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Subj:    Re: Another Homage to an Aphorism: in case I can't write one tomorrow       
Date:   2/24/2003 2:35:55 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

There is no wing like meaning, said the salesman.
There is no wing like meaninglessness, said the tail man.

There is a left wing to each bird, Durer said.
There is a wing if not a horse's head in my bed.

There is no wing like manning a bird or a swan,
Said Leda, almost a second after her breast felt wan.

There is no win like a meaningful one over warm.
There is no wind like meaning to in a storm.

Then not meaning to, when the wing feels frayed and unsteady
And under the wings, some cartiliginous stuff is bloody.

There is no wing like an homage behind an aphid
Chewing on a leaf so that the flood will come enchafed.

There is no wing and meaning is its corridor.
There is no wing and a window is the door.   ‑‑ DS, 2 / 24 / 03

 

From:  DCLEHMAN
To:DaJoShap
Re: wing and a prayer in the shadow of the dome

Hi I'm David Lehman, your caffeinated host
Talking to David Shapiro about "Paradise Lost."

Were we the last to love John Milton,
That cornerstone Romanticism was built on?

The Leaning Tower of Pisa keeps tiltin',
But does anybody still read Milton?

Lovers of cheese love their stilton,
But not even English majors read John Milton.

There's no shortage of things to base your guilt on.
Some would nominate Satan as depicted by Milton.

It'sa a heartbreaking story, the expulsion from Eden,
But one that makes compelling reading.

So that's it for now, David Lehman signing off.
I'm about to read "Lycidas," paradise enough.  ‑‑ DL, 2 / 25 / 03

 

Fight Night couplets; for the crumpets I may be going; for the Love of Milton       
Date:   2/26/2003 9:09:05 AM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I Alone Wished It Had Gone On Longer: Paradise Throw‑Away

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
The poetry of Cassius Clay impressed me

Float like an amnesiac, sting like a key
Love the poetry of Muhhamed Ali

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal knee
I was impressed by my father screaming at me

Float like Satan, sting like Raphael
I was willling to eat beans with Frank Lima in Hell

Float like a masque, and twitch your mantle blue
I was overinvested in the symmetry of you

Float like rude berries, sting like Lycidas
I thought fighting over beauty was the real razzmatazz

Round us there rolls our hideous day
But Moore praised my poetry‑‑ and Cassius Clay.    ‑‑ DS,  2/ 26 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
t:o: DaJoShap
02/26/03

Fit Audience Though Few

Yesterday I had lunch with Stanley Moss, who was excited
To learn about this collaborative project of ours. “Write it!”

The previous evening I had told Star Black about our haikus
And couplets, and she, too, was genuinely enthused.

Of course Stacey knows all about it, has even read a few,
And made positive statements about me and you.

What does Lindsay think of this our labor, or not labor, game:
Does she think it a lovely glorious nothing? A waste of shame?

Donne and Jonson wrote sonnets when sitting in the same unlit room
And Jonson grinned when he saw what his friend had done in the gloom.

The audience was invisible, yet we could tell
The ghosts would come like thirsty travelers to the well.

No wish have I greater than this desire to fly
On wings of prayer and song along the length of the sky.  DL, 2 / 26 / 03

 

Re Couplets: a meditation done in the two minutes my son permits

Date:   2/27/2003 9:42:04 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I congratulate us, David, for one heroic cup:
The cup may be broken but we tried to clean it up.

I congratulate us David for one dirty yawp:
We tried our best to stir again a permissive soup.

Of course, let's beware congratulating ourselves too much:
Kenneth thought collab was best with a conflicted touch.

Two voices have we, let no one say who's best.
All I remember of art will be some fragmentary breast.,

Eros I loved and the anarchic giggling Venus.
The Talmud I loved as a kind of Kafakesque pianist.

Eros and Psyche I dreamt about, one heroic couple.
Her arms were green,, her breasts are Keats, her neck was blue and supple.

I want to say a couplet should click like her face in one fell instant:
But I know enough to keep on going into the blue and distant.

So congratulations David on shattering the cup:
The cup may break again, but the earth will drink it up. DS, 2 / 27 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

02/ 28 / 03

On the Shattered Cup

No cup but has a crack, no saucer but with a spoon.
No diner, no coffee, no jukebox, no tune.

But we walked in and the place was full of flowers
We gave names to and in that way passed the hours.

At night I turned into Nabokov's schizophrenic hero in "Despair."
The night was chill but I was drunk on air.

Eros I loved, and Venus in her best‑of‑class swimsuit,
And Psyche in the dark, while I played my flute.

Let my yawp barbarian from yon rooftop resound!
You can score two ways, directly or on the rebound.

More men know more women today, more women men,
And I cannot blame any of them, and that was then.

Today is today, and I congratulate all who discover
The morning in bed sleeping with a lover. ‑‑ DL, 2 / 28 / 03

Re: The Party of Poets and congrats on essay in APR I LOVE PROSE      

Date:   2/28/2003 9:23:30 AM Eastern Standard Time 
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The Party of Poets

Rimbaud was there, attacked by fighter plane.
Baudelaire also felt sad, because the Presidents were inane.

Buster Keaton whimpered softly, I resign.
The stigmata on his palm was growing larger than a stop sign.

Buster Keaton clutched his 3D valentine.
But his lover had just awoken in another time zone.

Rimbaud had blue veils draped across his eyes.
He looked inside and saw that War was simple and life‑size.

James Joyce burst in with gifts and the boxes kept flying.
One red box kept on sounding and rising.

Virginia Woolf was wearing earrings of a conch.
Kenneth Koch was not dead and sang, "Let's all have some lunch."

He sang: If you don't know the difference between poetry and prose
You don't know man and woman apart, like rose from rose.  ‑‑ DS, 2 / 28 / 03

Matt Hart's heartfelt Review of Paul Violi

From Matt Hart’s review of Paul Violi’s Overnight in ColdFrontMag:

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out. 
from the archive; first posted February 10, 2015. Violi is pictured above with Star Black at the KGB Bar.

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out. 
from the archive; first posted February 10, 2015. Violi is pictured above with Star Black at the KGB Bar.

Shelley' s "Ode to the West Wind" -- Great Poems of the World, episode 18, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

Ode to the West Wind

By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

 

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

 

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

 

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

 

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

 

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

 

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

 

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

 

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,

 

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

 

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

 

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

 

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

 

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

 

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven

 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

 

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

 

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

 

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

 

Click here for the fellows' take on Bob Dylan's "Desolatiom Row."

"Like a White Blouse": Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Happy birthday, David Shapiro  (born January 2, 1947)

These poems are from February 2003, when David Shapiro and I collaborated daily in couplets. - DL

Re: Like a white blouse, or like red crowds in a face 
Date:   2/17/2003 10:28:38 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The apparition of those snowflakes in a crowd:
Petals on a wet white black bough.

The apparition of some poison in a crowd:
Petals on a white black and blackened shroud.

The apparition of those crowds inside a crowd:
Crowds of petals on a wet white black snow‑plow.

The apparition of these apparitions in a wheelbarrow.
Yellow yellow yellow on a white black bough.

The apparition of these umbrellas meeting machines:
Faces on a white wet black blue‑green.

The apparition of our couplets in a crowd:
Metal on a wet white blue‑green black bough unbowed.

The chance encounter in a beautiful crowd:
Pages reduced to a white wet black blouse.  ‑‑ DS, 2 / 17 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

The apparition of these buds in the dark:
The eyes of a teenage American Jeanne d'Arc.

The petals of a crowd of strangers in the ground:
The buds in the blouse are pink on a white mound.

The apparition of snow as a black bird circles overhead:
The cars wait. The lights don't change from yellow to red.

The chance encounter of a mustache and a tear:
The accidental beauty of a desultory cheer.

Nothing's an accident, nothing's left to chance.
One girl sits in the corner while two others dance.

A blizzard of sparks from the sky and tomorrow
The white of the snow will blot out your sorrow.

Whatever you do, don't forget your gun.
And teach your son not to fly too close to the sun.   -- DL, 2 / 17 / 03

 

Re: Heroically incorrect, David Lehman receives the melancholy Couplet award  

Date:   2/19/2003 10:38:27 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The proper study of mankind is a crowd:
Duct tape on a white wet black shroud.

The chance encounter of convulsive love and chance:
Petals on David's first evening in Paris, France..

Says surgeon: I have stitched you and you're mine.
Umbrella squeaks. Sewing faints.  5 of 9.

Says Breton: I'm ship's doctor! What a chance!
Sewing Machine to Umbrella: Oh well, let's dance!

Says Artaud: You're cruel to pull wool over a crowd:
Says petal to petal: Let's come coming through aloud.

Says Edward Lear Umbrella: I'm not proud.
I've only stopped  rain falling on your shroud.

Says Umbrella to the Snark insider the park:
Spring's got nothing but Silence, and a Boojum's not a quark.   DS, 2 / 19 / 03

The Birth of the Blues (1958 duet, Sinatra and Keely Smith)

On Frank's birthday (12/12).  .a rarity. . . with Louis Prima's trumpet as fanfare

 

More Unpublished Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets in February 2003. Here are some previously unpublished exanmples. And here is a conversation with David Shapiro conducted by Kent Johnson http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml

Subj:    Kenneth said: We always make our own mayonnaise          
Date:   2/12/2003 11:22:50 AM Eastern Standard Time       

From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Good couplets make their point almost at once.
Like kicking a habit or calling your children runts.

The evil is done, and you are flawed forever.
But the couplet keeps returning, like Shelley's river.

An off‑rhyme doesn't daunt it, not the couplet.
We know whose dog we are, we rise and shit.

We could have said "we urinate" but we didn't.
The couplet seems to end with "Good riddance."

Oh Kenneth loved the couplet in Al Pope.
He said my taste at fifteen gave him hope.

Oh Janice, he said once, make mayonnaise.
This genius likes his Pope‑‑what higher praise.

I was fifteen‑‑had never downed such stuff.
His home‑made mayonnaise was strange enough.  DS, 2 / 12 /03

 

Re: The consistency of the couplet: each couplet consists
2/14/03
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap

[Sometimes six suffice]

Each couplet consists of an adult and a child.
I shall bring my lunch pail and dine in the wild.

Each couplet consists of a woman and a man,
But which is which? Who’s the European, who the American?

From the time we are teens we attempt to link
With others who exist because they think.

So I walk to the edge and I walk back alone
Except for the chirp of a cell phone.

Each couplet composes a contradiction
And resolves it like an uncanny prediction.>> DL, 2 / 14 / 03

 

My wife's mother is dying, innocent And who scapes whipping in this Tenement  

Date:   2/13/2003 9:01:09 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

<< A couplet comes down on you like death's storm.
Afterwards, Dave, you're never quite so warm.

A couplet edges downwards like black snow.
But so dramatic! like snow in a Noh.

My mother's wife is dying‑‑innocent.
But who ‘scapes whipping in this Tenement?

You were a couplet, Lady, all day long.
At evening, you're a chorus for no song.

Then you were born, or was it just red clay?
Where are you? is the question of our day.

My wife's sweet Mother lay there without mind.
Was it a home, a hospice? Were we blind?

We want our beds to change, but our disease?
My wife could drive us home, like a white rose.    >> DS, 2 / 14 / 03

 

Re: Like a white rose, or like red clay

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

I speak of my mother who called to console
Me when Sinatra died at 82. She said he wasn’t old.

In May ‘98 my mother was eighty three
Though she liked to tell people she was eighty, only.

After the female moon departed, leaving blood
In the snow, we left our nostalgia for the mud.

I have a new song, and it’s not a blues song,
You wake up, it’s spring, and you can’t go wrong.

What happened to that song? Where did it go,
That dream in a shabby dress I used to know?

We’ve got a right to sing the blues, to sign
The picture we can’t finish, to dash off the line.

Youth is the place where you greet the day with lust
And pledge your trust, but thence in the end comes disgust.  DL, 2 / 15 / 03

 

Re: away, so I claim "eight" expansively: Protest and Fiona Shaw  
Date:   2/15/2003 6:17:18 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I forgive you David Lehman for being away.
Now write a couplet or I'll protest, pray.

I forgive you Lehman deep in jet lag or leg.
I saw the protests early and disagree to beg.

Billionaires for Bush was witty: a few others.
Susan Sarandon, Poitier, a few mothers.

I tried to get my young son arrested.
But his mother took him to Medea‑‑busted.

Medea spritzed big droplets on her Jason.
I bowed my head to the Irish‑Greco version.

I wouldn't want the part of bloodied child!
Psychoanalytically, I think it wild.

I want the part of the princess, off stage.
Pretty, burnt to death, welded to Dad in old age.

What a death! Have you heard of anything like it?
Or is it just napalm, our old friend Ike that.  – DS, 2 / 15 / 03

photo by Chris Felver; copyright (c) 1999 by Chris Felver.

Charles Bukowski -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 13, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

 

 

from "Some comments on my last book of poesy"
     -- Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

why do you drink?
I saw you at the racetrack but I didn't bother you.
I'd like to renew our relationship.
do you really stay up all night?
I can out-drink you.
you stole it from Sherwood Anderson.
did you ever meet Ezra?
I am alone and I think of you every night.
who the hell do you think you're fooling?
my tits aren't much but I've got great legs.
fuck you, man.
my wife hates you.
will you please read the enclosed poems and comment?
I am going to publish all those letters you wrote me.
you jack-off motherfucker, you're not fooling anybody.

And the Moon and the Stars and the World

Long walks at night --
that's what's good for the soul:
peeking into windows 
watching tired housewives
trying to fight off
their beer-maddened husbands.

Me Against the World

when I was a kid
one of the questions asked was,
would you rather eat a bucket of shit
or drink a bucket of piss?
I thought that was easy.
"that's easy," I said, "I'll take the
piss."
"maybe we'll make you do both,"
they told me.
I was the new kid in the
neighborhood.
"oh yeah," I said.
"yeah!" they said.
there were 4 of them.
"yeah," I said, "you and whose
army?"
"we won't need no army," the
biggest one said.
I slammed my fist into his
stomach.
then all 5 of us were down on
the ground fighting.
they got in each other's way
but there were still too many
of them.
I broke free and started
running.
"sissy! sissy!" they yelled.
"going home to mama?"
I kept running.
they were right.
I ran all the way to my house,
up the driveway and onto the
porch and into the
house
where my father was beating
my mother.
she was screaming.
things were broken on the floor.
I charged my father and started swinging.
I reached up but he was too tall,
all I could hit were his
legs.
then there was a flash of red and
purple and green
and I was on the floor.
"you little prick!" my father said,
"you stay out of this!"
"don't you hit my boy!" my mother
screamed.
but I felt good because my father
was no longer hitting my
mother.
to make sure, I got up and charged
him again, swinging.
there was another flash of colors
and I was on the floor
again.
when I got up again
my father was sitting in one chair
and my mother was sitting in
another chair
and they both just sat there
looking at me.
I walked down the hall and into
my bedroom and sat on the
bed.
I listened to make sure there
weren't any more sounds of
beating or screaming
out there.
there weren't.
then I didn't know what to
do.
it wasn't any good outside
and it wasn't any good
inside.
so I just sat there.
then I saw a spider making a web
in the window.
I found a match, walked over,
lit it and burned the spider.
then I felt better.
much better.


Poem in the Manner of Charles Bukowski
   -- David Lehman

You do what you want,
I’ll do what I want,
and we’ll see which one of us
gets to the twenty-dollar window
in time for the fourth race at Del Mar.

On the goddamn radio
that’s always playing
in my bitch’s kitchen,
I heard some East Coast big-shot author
say he needs to jerk off before he can write.
All is I can say is fuck that shit.

I hate poets who beg you
to like them because you feel sorry for them.
Do not feel sorry for me.
I won on Bitches’ Brew in the fourth
and went home and drank
 a fifth of bourbon
and got laid.

After Bukowski
   -- Mitch Sisskind

summer nights after work 
bill and I played tom and john
in basketball in the park by
ford city and then we'd go
to the old gripe and groan. 

bill and I were okay at
basketball while john 
was terrible but they 
usually won on account
of how tom was great. 

in fact in two rivers wisconsin
where tom went to high school
tom is in their high school sports
hall of fame in all three sports
in two rivers wisconsin.

well one night bill and I won
in basketball but the next
night they won again and
then we went over to
the old gripe and groan

and tom said i really wanted
to win tonight on account
of you won last night so |
i didn't have a drink
last night not even a

beer and i didn't 
fuck my wife
last night and not
this morning
I didn't
fuck her
neither one. 

Letter to Cummins from the Island of Idyllwild [by David Lehman and David St. John]

Letter to Cummins from the Island of Idyllwild

Dear Jim, forgive the long delay in writing
But the feasts go on from dawn to dawn
And the natives insist on feeding us by hand, slices
        of papaya
And mango with orange beer. Last night
We stood beneath a sky of white and green silk sea
Anemones pulsing like parachutes above an amphitheater
         as wide
As a valley, and a single child walked out to sing to
        the crows
Rasping above us in nearby pines. You may not remember
        this, but
That child, circumcised and blond, outshouted the sea
That summer when amnesia invaded our sleeping bags
Like bugs transmitting the intimacy of an illness.
You had sex with a friendly neighbor and woke up without
A hangover or any memory of how she seduced you.
The island was full of enchantments, and still is.
There are lotus flowers, young goddesses with liquid bodies
In loose summer frocks, craters of quicksand and
       rushing rapids.
On this island no news is fair weather, and the women
      write poems.
And so whatever you might have feared for us, don’t
      worry now.
The six points of the pirate’s compass will guide us
As the six breezes from the seven continents return like
A sestina’s consolation and the envoy’s delight. Here, on our
Perpetually new isle, we can imagine you imagining us, idle
      as the natives
Of Idyllwild, yearning to be as wise, and as wild. David
      & David.

-- David Lehman & David St. John

from the archive; first posted September 30, 2009. Pictured: Jim Cummins

There's no business like show business. . .

 

"When Love Is Not Love" [by David Lehman and William Wadsworth]

When Love is Not Love

Everything you do, you do in haste,
except when you make love to the one
whose mind, face, and heart at last
made you think twice and drop the phone.

A fool and his money get a slap on the wrist.
If the meaning of Capitalism is gin and vermouth.
the meaning of Bolshevism is vodka and lust.
On a tour of your assets from north to south,

I'd like to say that it starts with your mind,
but in truth the journey starts with your eyes
and their perfect view of the lay of our land.
Your lips come next, and how can I lose?

Easy. You lose what everyone else does.
Love is not love that alteration mends.
Our only future is the only all that is,
Our only hope, the tie that binds

us now. If the meaning of love is to sin
together, the meaning of lust is just a slap
on the butt.  A fool and his honey are soon
departed, and their only future is to sleep

apart, two disembodied voices on a phone.
What did you lose today? Mind, face, money?
The one you love belongs to you, not someone
else, but you better act fast, as gloria mundi

is gone tomorrow, and life makes short work
of love.  The angelic archer may shoot
his arrow, but his aim is just a shot in the dark,
and his target the foolish human, not some heartless bot.

[ipctured above: Bill Wadsworth]

Couplets, Previously Unpublished [from "The Two Davids," Shapiro and Lehman]

In February 2003, David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets. Here's a sample from our exchanges. - DL

Re: love and the stickerist redesigns his heroes,       
Date:   2/8/2003 7:46:41 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Lover

He wanted to be one of the many keys she carried.
Her face was a blow which he could never have parried.

He was not even one of the keys she carried.
He wasn't Prince Hamlet. He was already married.

He took out the garbage and let in the laundry.
He sculpted hysterical misery like a foundry.

He put green snakes on Arthur Rimbaud's blue eyes.
He launched Stealth planes out of Baudelaire's thighs.

He burst James Joyce with gifts he could not give.
He surrounded Franz Kafka's with hearts, pigs and jive.

He bit the flowers of Mondrian under quarantine.
And General Buster Keaton resigned from the Green.

His presents floated above the white birch lake.
The silk on Rimbaud's eyes began to shake . >>     DS, 2 / 8 / 03

 

Re: Agamemnon’s concubine after Achilleus left Priam’s tent
From:   DCLEHMAN    
To:       DaJoShap

She wished she could believe what he had said.
She feared the words he didn’t say in bed.

She went to bed with a flower, not with a gun.
She posed for Picasso in the evning, for Matisse in the morning sun.

She played piano.for an audience of one, Ulysses in a beard.
When he was strapped to the mast, this is what he heard.

She sang beyond the sea as the Florida fat man
Transcribed, and shone like the moon on an ash can.

She was willing to accept her role in the play
if he agreed to take her to Denmark and Norway..

She was elected. She was not rejected. She came to the game.
She mastered the rules of the game and redefined fame.

She was asked what her son would get her for Mother's Day.
"A hard time," she said. Flowers surrounded her all day.

– DL, 2 / 9 / 03

 Agamemnon's concubine after Achilleus left Priam's tent   
Date:   2/9/2003 3:11:17 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Who doesn't sulk in his tent like Mondrian.
When you sulk in Holland, it's spelled Mondriaan.

Who doesn't hope slaves be treated like tripods.
But some of them will be able to remove their kneepads.

I was embarrassed that the President undressed.
But, after all, he was brilliant to have confessed.

Agammenon shook, and all the siftings shook.
Whatever he saw he wanted, as in a book.

The old men wavered behind Helen's hook.
They said, "The war was worth it" and awoke.

Suddenly, in Egypt, Helen felt safer and slicker.
Her smooth “escape” couldn't have been more like a sticker.

The heroes sulked, and all their ankles broke.
Paris caressed the ghostly skin like a crook..   – DS, 2 / 9 / 03

 

Five Games of Blindfold Chess (Rimbaud,Fisher,Cage.Koch,duchamp)          

Date:   2/10/2003 5:52:32 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap
To:       DCLEHMAN

End Game

And someone said, Commuting is the fun part
Like Beckett's impotence, a cry of done art.

And dun art where the brown is excremental.
And I try the heroes' cloaks on‑‑in my tent lull.

The quiet stops. Hamlet walks with Pasternak.
The tiger is sheepish and the goat emits a quack.

Rimbaud and Kenneth Koch play chess at once.
Kenneth is the only one to treat Him like a dunce.

Bobby Fischer kibbitzes, says: Sacrifice queen!
Kenneth: That's near infinitude! What can you mean?!

Then sacrifice your sound, laughs old John Cage.
And Kenneth, more responsive, shouts: Oh, Act your age!

The game divorces all of them from their smirks.
They lost at chess, but we know them for their works.  – DS, 2 / 10 / 03

 

Re: The Hero's Horse and the Tyger, Mate in Three

from DCLEHMAN
to DaJoShap

Mate

What a clever fellow was our Kenny.
So sang the muses for whom he sang for pennies.

When I think of you, David Shapiro, I
Walk with ghosts on Riverside under a melting sky.

The tiger is brilliant and wiser than the didactic horse
Who stares straight ahead and never changes course.

We were wrathful young geniuses on a mission
Which ended as all movies do, with a couple kissing.

Thank you I said to him and he said thank you to me
And then we played more chess and drank more tea.  DL, 2 / 11/ 03

"Identity Card" [by David Lehman and William Wadsworth]

Identity Card

Identity may be difficult to define.
It equals itself, as a rose is a rose.
Tell me your name. I’ll tell you mine,

Though if I do, don't take that as a sign
That I am someone whom anyone knows.
Identity is not so easy to define.

Don'tt lose that card, or you may find
Another plays your hand.  Anything goes.
The name of the game is Anyone's, not mine.

Forensic science may underline
Our DNA, but family history shows
Identity ain’t so scientifically defined.

Released from history, nameless, a wine
Of no known vintage seduces my foes.
Tell me your name. I'llll tell you mine.

“I am who I am,” says the voice we've assigned
To God, but thanks to the dice he throws,
Our identity is impossible to define.
What's your name? Is it the same as mine?

-- David Lehman and William Wadsworth

 

For extra credit, what is the relation of the picture atop the page to the verse below?

"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.