The Best American Poetry

"Beautiful Chaos": Revised Obit for Hache Carillo (alias Herman Carroll) [in the Washington Post]

On the ambiguities of cultural appropriation, the powers of the imagination, and the great American tradition of springing from your Platonic conception of yourself, this article from today's Washington Post is must reading. It is a revised obituary for Hache Carillo, 59, author of Loosing My Espanish  (Pantheon, 2004), about his experiences as Cuban immigrant. Carillo (born Herman Carroll) died this spring of complications from covid-19.

Novelist H.G Carrillo, who explored themes of cultural alienation, dies after developing covid-19
Paul Duggan 

May 23, 2020 at 4:52 p.m. EDT

Editor’s note: After initial publication of this article on May 22, The Washington Post learned that key elements of H.G. Carrillo’s biography had been fabricated over many years, by Carrillo himself. The story below has been revised to include the correct background, how The Post learned of the fabrication and some reaction to it.

A few excerpts:
<<
This weekend, in his grief, [Dennis vanEngelsdorp] suddenly learned that his husband (true name Herman Glenn Carroll, it turns out) was not the childhood Cuban immigrant he claimed to be — that Hache’s personal origin story, which he shared publicly and with those close to him throughout his adult life, was an extension of his fiction, a product of imagination. . .

<<
"Hache was always a hard guy to know — and when you take it all in, it’s beautiful chaos,” [vanEngelsdorp said.]

<<<
[The Post obituary] initially said that Carrillo was 7 when his father, a physician; his mother, an educator; and their four children fled Fidel Castro’s island in 1967, arriving in Michigan by way of Spain and Florida. It said he was something of a prodigy as a classical pianist when he was growing up, and, by his late teens, was performing at venues in the United States and abroad, before he lost interest and stopped abruptly.

He had repeated that piece of biography so many times over the years to his professors and academic colleagues, to his husband and fellow writers, that “he probably believed it himself,” said his sister, Susan Carroll, 58, who lives in Michigan.

In fact, he was born in Detroit to parents who were native Michiganders, both teachers, according to Susan Carroll and her daughter, Jessica Webley. They said no one in their family is Latino. As for the piano, he was self-taught and not a widely traveled performer. “My brother was very talented,” Carroll said. “He could see something, watch something, hear something, and do it.

<<<
In Carrillo’s 2004 novel, “Loosing My Espanish,” a Chicago teacher, Óscar Delossantos, is being fired, and he tries in his final weeks to instill a love of cultural history in his middle-class, U.S.-bred Cuban American students. But the teenagers don’t care a whit about their ancestral homeland or the terrors of revolution and escape. Unlike Óscar, none ever dangled “from a little piece of twine over the Florida Straits,” with sharks circling below.

Nor are they moved by Óscar’s familial memories of Miami detention, the “concertina wire, dogs with vicious teeth and feet and yards and cubic miles of forms with thousands and thousands of blank spaces to be completed; English, and being made to feel stupid and like a hero and unwanted and saved all at the same time.”
>>>

"Check Back on May 22, 2021" [by Hilton Obenzinger]

Today is my birthday May 22, 2020
And my parents come to visit
Sitting on the couch after arriving from the dead
They whisper with each other
In Polish that I can almost understand
And they ask questions
“Are you careful to hide from the virus?”
And they tell me a story I know well
The story of the rabbi and his wife (my father’s cousins)
How they hid in a farmer’s attic
For four years to escape the Nazis
So they ask, “Do you think you can hide for four years?
For four months? Can you hide in the closet
For even four hours?”
And then they bring up my aunt’s feats of survival
“Can you slide through the sewers to flee?
The way your aunt Zosia fled the Warsaw Ghetto?
Can you even wash your hands properly?
Do you know how to wear a mask?”
It’s so wonderful to hear them, to feel their concern
How they nag me to steer clear of Death
Tell me that I need courage and luck
And how I must work for both
To hide from the virus
I thank my parents and assure them that I will do all that I can
To get to my next birthday
To live to see Trump driven from the White House
To watch my grandchildren graduate and marry
All the typical joys of home and family
To survive the planet’s growing rage
To forage for enough food to live
And to keep a simple sense of justice

Check back with me May 22, 2021
To see if luck and courage brings me here again

Book Jackets on Display

 

Some beautiful art owes its birth to commercial necessity -- the book jacket, for example. The Association of University Presses is displaying 49 of their best covers from 2019 at a virtual trade show. Here's an example: Drohan DiSanto’s design for John Brenkman’s Mood and Trope (University of Chicago Press). And here's a link to the other covers, some of them very striking, from such book designers as Edward Carson,Tim Jones, and Scott Levine on books published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Harvard University Press, and Cornell University Press, respectively.

https://design.up.hcommons.org/2020-book-jackets-and-covers-selections/

 

"Young Dancers Dancing" by Eric Fischl [from Drive-By-Art organized by Warren Neidich]

Coming May 9 & 10: "Drive by Art" in the South Fork [The Hamptons, Sag Harbor, Wainscott et al]

Drive-By-Art (Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing)

Organized by Warren Neidich

DATES:

May 9th and 10th , 2020 -- 12 - 5 pm

(Rain dates May 16th /17th )

LOCATION:

South Fork, Long Island including Southampton, Watermill, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Wainscott, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, North Haven

FEATURING: Eric Fischl, Young Dancers Dancing, 2017, Bronze [above]

Hello from a Distance [by Cara Benson]

The author encounters a chorus of clacking wood frogs in a vernal pool. Photo © Cara Benson

I already live in the middle of nowhere. I say “already” because before non-essential workers were told to stay at home, I not only already worked here but spent much of my time in its vicinity. I live on a mountain, so to go somewhere means to really go somewhere. I suppose some would call it a hill, but there is a USGS bench mark dating from 1925 embedded in a stone in my driveway. The gold-colored emblem reads 1439 feet above sea level. Not high country by most standards, but I can say that I didn’t make it home one night last winter because of the slope of the road in weather. It snows up here when it’s rain in the valley. And blooms at this elevation run about two weeks behind those even halfway down to the flat. Hill enough. Culturally, it’s the kind of region where I’d heard words like “these parts” and “stick to themselves” the few times I did cross paths with locals. Truth is, I can get in my car and drive to a market in about 20 minutes. For city dwellers or suburbanites, though, you would feel isolated at my place, and you’d be right. 

As far as I’m concerned, I am unbelievably lucky to live here. Privileged, even, and in  more ways than one (see: work from home, for starters). In terms of shelter-in-place and #stayhome #savelives in specific, I’ve got it damn good. I can leave the house every day and run into nary a human at an unsafe distance, if I see anyone else out and about, at all. And shall I tell you now that my home is a former church, replete with high ceilings and two floors at 1400 sq ft each? My shelter is nothing but wide open space with windows onto the woods and fields surrounding it. The cooped up feeling that apartment dwellers or entire families suddenly home 24-7 in small-roomed houses are suffering from isn’t an issue for me. 

Which isn’t to say that I’m unaffected by COVID-19. I miss humans terribly. I am alone in this huge home (save two cats who would be pissed if they understood what I just wrote). Like many of us, I am grieving, and outraged, and, frankly, struggling to stay above depression. This contraction of living is particularly painful, coming as it has right as rising spring began its pull on my biology. Add to that an eagerness to contribute that’s been necessarily muted. Other than donating $15 when I can or checking in on a friend, as an unessential worker my best offer to society, I’m told, is to stay home, especially because I can. So, like many, I am. 

I do, however, go for daily walks. In fact, that’s another “already.” I was already a walker. Hiking mountains, trekking in woods, or bopping even trotting along a tree-lined roadside, it’s always been crucial for my psyche, as well as my body, to get out and move (another privilege, I realize).  Sometimes existential, others material, worries lurk and surge more than I typically care to admit. But then, isn’t that what it means to be human – to be both privy to and racked by self-consciousness? Which ultimately means that we live with an awareness of our death. Even worse, though, is to feel that we’ve lived all wrong on the way to that end. Maybe that’s another “already” the virus is exacerbating: the thought that we’re wasting our lives (and also the knowledge we’re wasting others’). 

Trout lily leaf encountered during a daily walk through the forest. Photo © Cara Benson

Whatever their source, the worries, I need to walk away from them at least once every day. Or to try to. Of course my anxieties and mental tics accompany me, but putting one foot in front of the other, over and over, helps me to walk my way out of ill thinking, like shedding muddy clothes across the floor to the shower. I walk and talk, mutter and hum, swing my arms, stumble, curse at roots, then gasp at a flash of unexpectedly fluffy expanse of the upturned tails of deer dashing through the woods, my approach having flushed them out. Or a chorus of clacking wood frogs in a vernal pool calls me to the edge of the soup with its rotting logs and prickling sticks clumped in defense. At once their racket cuts out. The frogs freeze, as if they’re holding their breath – and I find that I am! My head racket has been shocked into what’s in front of me, the sensory stimulation triggering my animal impulses and curiosity. 

That’s about all I’m good for, these days: foraging on foot, nosing into pockets of forest that hold intricate evidence of life beyond the confines of my solitary imagining. Yes, that seems about right. It’s my imagination that’s tanked. At this point in the pandemic (day ???), I am able to “get my head around” exactly nothing. I have no brilliant macro take nor supposition that doesn’t feel off. I’ve been struggling to read anything other than what might be called story, and the smaller the better. Please, no overarching metaphors or symbols for what’s happening. The virus unraveling our already frayed safety net is real enough without it. (I realize that’s a metaphor. Also, that I’ve already used them. I’m allowing myself the contradictions – better that than pints of ice cream.)

Pillows and cradles in the earth of uncultivated forest. Mating pairs of Canadian geese floating on an isolated pond. Moss covered stones big enough for me to hug. Shelf lichen. Great Horned Owls hooting. Trout lily leaves poking up out of the leaf covered forest floor. Walking among them is what’s saving me. That awareness put me in a mind that maybe describing what these walks reveal could be of use – something I can contribute safely. I’m calling these my daily dispatches from a distance, though they won’t be quite that frequent. It’s the idea of dailiness that interests me. Time as our dream, a malleable recurring dream (did it again). The repetition that alters with each visitation. See you next time.  

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com  

"Pepys in the Time of Plague" (part III of III) [by Thomas Moody]

“…do lament the condition we are in, by a negligent Prince and a mad Parliament.” — Samuel Pepys

Reading these entries with the benefit of nearly four centuries of hindsight, we know that London recovers, and that Pepys’ worst fears are not warranted. He survives with his wife and family relatively unaffected, and by November of that year the number of deaths in London are beginning to fall at a rate significant enough to provide him with the hope of the worst having passed. Pepys’ thoughts then turn to speculating on the future. “It is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwiggs,” Pepys writes, “for nobody will dare to buy any haire, for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.” As trivial as this thought might first appear, it is deceivingly perceptive; what Pepys is really asking is “what will London look like after the crisis has passed?” His is a very literal interpretation of the question, regarding the fashion. But at the same time it is strikingly, if unintentionally, insightful: a periwig identified one as a member of a particular class, moneyed enough to afford the latest styles. After the periwig, how will class—that is, one’s identity—now be made visibly known? More generally, Pepys touches upon the rewriting of our shared cultural vocabulary the crisis has forced upon society, enquiring into the signs and symbols to be used to navigate this new, post-plague world. What Pepys is asking, in other words, is what will be valued?

This is a question many of us are beginning to ask ourselves, with some hoping that our current crisis will engender a revolution in personal values, national politics, international relations, even a kind of shift in global morality away from consumer driven capitalism. It is a noble thought to help palliate the torrent of catastrophic news. And so how did the world look to Pepys after the Great Plague and the Great Fire? Well, much the same as it did prior. The King and his aristocracy are debauched, the poor suffer, and the country is the worse for it. “The kingdom is an ill state through poverty; a fleete going out and no money to maintain it, or set it out; seamen yet unpaid and mutinous when pressed to go out again. So we are all poorer, and in pieces—God help us! while the peace is like to go on between Spain and France; and then the French may be apprehended able to attack us. So God help us!” Yet Pepys is still Pepys, in all his flawed brilliance. His taste for life  and love undulled, as hopefully ours will be, no matter how long we are forced to be served this horrific, TV-dinner version of the world.

For part I of Thomas Moody's report, click here. For part II, here.

"Pepys in the Time of Plague" (part II of III) [by Thomas Moody]

“In the evening home to supper; and there, to my great trouble, hear that the plague is come into the City; but where should it begin but in my good friend and neighbours’, Dr. Burnett, in Fanchurch Street: which in both points trouble me mightily.” — Samuel Pepys

When the plague does appear in London, it is again recorded by Pepys as rumor, uncertain and ominous. On April 30th, 1665, he notes that there are “great fears of the sickness here in the city, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up.” But by the start of summer, the plague unequivocally materializes: “The towne grows very sickly” he writes on June 15th, “and people to be afeard of it; there dying this last week of plague 112, from 43 the week before.”

The previous night Pepys has spent lying awake, resolving to put his estate in order “in case it should please God to call me away.” Plague houses—marked red and with the words “Lord Have Mercy Upon Us” scrawled across their doors—noticeably increase; Churches and businesses close up; Pepys witnesses “all the towne almost going out of towne”, the wealthy escaping the city for their country retreats; and by July 18th, the city is running out of space in which to bury its dead. But still, daily life persists, Pepys continues to tend to his affairs (both romantic and business), travelling to work each morning while taking the added precaution to finish before sundown, so as not to mistakenly run into the sickness, “it is much to be feared how a man can escape having a share with others in it” he writes, on July 3rd with heightened anxiety. By August 11th, a curfew had been called. “The people die so” Pepys writes, “that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by day-light, the nights not sufficient to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at nine at night all, as they say, that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.”

Specious treatments (“remedies against it; some one thing, some another”), stories of the sick coughing in the faces of the well (a recent report in Sydney similarly told of a man wanted by police for intentionally coughing in the face of a grocery store clerk), and a swelling fear and anxiety amongst the population in general, sit beside the diurnal scenes of work and home life. The plague, in one way or another, infects every entry of Pepys’ diary during this time. He sleeps poorly because of it, worrying at one point that with “the town growing so unhealthy… a man cannot depend upon living two days to an end”; breaks his lengthy sobriety as a means to self-medicate after the death of his doctor; rushes forward the wedding of his patron’s daughter upon hearing that the chaplain has been taken by plague; and begins religiously to check The Bill, the weekly mortality statistics of London, which cost about a penny and were published in large print runs. At the height of the outbreak in August, Pepys does not leave his house for days on end. When he does, his entry is chilling in its description of London’s streets: “But Lord! How everybody’s looks, and discourse in the street is of death, and nothing else, and few people going up and down that the towne is like a place distressed and forsaken.”

For Part I of Thomas Moody's report, click here.

"Pepys in the Time of Plague” (part I of III) [by Thomas Moody]

“But Lord! What a sad time it is to see no boats upon the River; and grass grows all up and down White Hall court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets!”  -- Samuel Pepys

(I)

Here in Australia, the current pandemic can be seen as the continuation of a sort of run-on couplet of crises, having arrived less than a month after the dousing of the “Red Summer” bushfires, the worst natural disaster in our nation’s history. The couplet, which includes the uncanny slant end-rhyme of coronavirus with bushfires, brought to mind another pair of disasters, if only in inverted order: London’s Great Plague of 1665 and Great Fire of 1666, and the man who chronicled them both in his diary, the indefatigable Samuel Pepys. Pepys, who had a voracious appetite for all restoration London could afford him—for society, business, fashion, theatre, billiards, poetry, public executions, music, marriage and adultery—, survived both catastrophes without fleeing his beloved city, and, perhaps more significantly, with his appetites intact.

Pepys’ diary (available in its entirety online here), particularly his documenting of The Great Plague, which is estimated to have killed up to a quarter of London’s population in less than 18 months, shows us in quotidian detail that our times, though extraordinary, are not entirely unprecedented. Pepys’ tracks the plague from rumor to devastating certitude, measures self-isolation and social distancing with the human urge to congregate and the necessity of commerce, and illustrates that one of the most devastating features of a pandemic is the sustained anxiety it causes. The manner in which both institutions and people react to the plague read eerily familiar across almost four centuries.

Much in the way the coronavirus began as a news story happening “over there” in Wuhan, China, Pepys’ first mention of the impending crisis is of the plague having “got to Amsterdam, brought by a ship from Argier…”, on October 16th, 1663, a full two years before it arrives in London. There is immediate talk of the closing of borders, with the king proposing to forbid any Dutch ship from coming up the Thames. Just over a month later, a quarantine is in fact ordered for ships coming from Amsterdam, Hamburg, “or any other infected places”, with those ships wanting to enter the capital now required to moor at Hole Haven, on Canvey Island, for a period of 30 days. The quarantine was extended to 40 days just six months later.

The plague shadows each of Pepys’ diary entries henceforth. Gossip of its progress is seemingly unavoidable. In July of 1664, at a coffee house he frequents “all the talk is of the plague being very hot still, and increases among the Dutch.” Amsterdam, which was at once London’s great trading partner and naval rival (the second Anglo-Dutch war was fought between 1665 and 1667), looms in the eyes of the English as the epicentre of the outbreak. Pepys includes in his notes a gruesome rumor of a Dutch ship of 3 or 400 tons “where all the men are dead of plague, and the ship cast ashore at Gottenburgh”,—a ghost-ship which might find its contemporary counterpart in the Diamond Princess cruise-liner.

NB: Photos of Australian bushfires; Pepys's Diary at Magdalene College, Cambridge; Pepys and plague-ravaged London, 1665.

Click here for part II of Thomas Moody's tripartite Pepys post.

Petitioning the Poetry Foundation

A petition making the rounds urges the Poetry Foundation to allocate five million dollars to support poets, editors, "literary workers," independent bookstores, small presses and other persons and institutions that are suffering because of the economic slump caused by the Corona virus. I have signed the petition:

https://www.change.org/p/writers-ask-the-poetry-foundation-to-support-poets-and-their-allies

Trade publishers and university presses with a commitment to poetry need help. More than a few editors have lost their jobs or been asked to accept cuts in pay. The whole industry is bleeding badly at the moment and would benefit from grants and awards, call them what you will, from the Poetry Foundation.

How did the petition's drafters arrives at the figure of five million dollars? The Poetry Foundation is said to manage "about $245,000,000 in total assets according to their most recent (2018) tax filings, most of which appears to be investment capital." Thus, the request is for slightly more than 2% the Foundation's net capital.

The negative consequences of the Corona crisis will continue, in our line of work, to hurt us for years to come. This is a chance for the Poetry Foundation to demonstrate vision and imagination and make literary history, 

-- DL

"More Coffee" [by Peter Ferry]

"Someone should be writing about all of this,” she said.

“I bet a lot of people are.”

“Are you?”

“Not yet.”

“Too close to the trees?”

“Something like that.  Maybe I’ll try today.”

“Coffee?”

“Is it caf or decaf?” 

“Half and half.”

“Sure,” he said.  “I’d like some.  Thanks.”

She poured the coffee.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll bite.  What should I write about?”

“Just what’s going on around us.”

“Not much is going on around us.”

“Or within us.” She sipped slowly.  “One thing that keeps jumping out at me is that this is probably the only time in all of human history that virtually everyone on the planet is thinking and feeling almost the same thing.”

“Yes, that is pretty remarkable.  I talked to Corinne in Holland, and she said that the first thing she does in the morning when she wakes up is to feel her forehead to see if she’s warm.  Test her breathing.  Clear her throat to see if she has a cough.  I told her that I do exactly the same thing.”

“I think we all do.  Everyone on the same word on the same page at the same time.  For some reason I think that there must be something positive about that.”

“Positive?”

“Maybe beneficial is the better word.  Maybe hopeful.  Finally something we can all agree on,” she said.   

“Maybe united as in that we’re-all-in-this-together,” he said.

“So you have been thinking about it.”

“I just ran across this in Gardner’s Life and Times of Geoffrey Chaucer:  the plague swept across Europe five times in the fourteenth Century and killed more than one hundred million people.  Imagine if Chaucer had been one of them.  Then think about the Chaucers it did kill.”

“Write this stuff down.”

“Maybe.  I don’t want to tempt fate.”

 “Did you hear that John Prine died?”

“Breaks my heart.”

“’So if you’re walking down the street sometime/And you spot some hollow, ancient eyes,/ Please don’t just pass ‘em by and stare,/ Say hello in there.’”

“I hope he was not alone,” he said.

“I hope not,” she said.

They were quiet for a moment. 

“A Kennedy half-dollar for your thoughts?”

“This is how people always lived before modern medicine a hundred years ago:  never knowing if the next flu was going to kill them.  Like my grandmother in 1918 leaving three little kids.”

“How old was your father?”

“Five.  And Jack was seven and Alan was three.  My father never forgot his father’s very slow footsteps on the stairs coming up to tell them that their mother had died.  And if Anthony Fauci is correct that between a hundred and two hundred thousand American are going to die…”

“He said that?”

He nodded. “I sat down with my calculator.  If he’s correct and things are proportional, which of course they never are, that means a thousand Chicagoans, maybe two.  It means between ten and twenty people here in Evanston.”

“Maybe.  But Chaucer’s plagues killed almost twenty-five percent of the population.  One in every four people.  We just think it can’t happen anymore.  We think that if we don’t get our seventy-six point four years, we’ve been cheated.”

“More coffee?”

 “One more cup. Then I think we should go for a walk.”

“A walk would be nice.  The crocuses are up.”

And so were the daffodils, the first of the season.

Mike Fontaine, guest author April 13-17

Michael and Lola

This week we welcome Mike Fontaine as our guest author. Mike is Professor of Classics at Cornell University, in the heart of New York State's Finger Lakes wine region. He specializes in wine, swine, mind, and a good laugh. He is translator and editor of How to Drink (Princeton, April, 2020). Michael grew up in New Orleans, blogs at Psychology Today, and gets his exercise, always among friends, at Ithaca’s celebrated FLX Fitclub. How to Tell a Joke, his next book, comes out in 2021.

Welcome, Michael. 

-- sdl

 

"We just do what we have to do." When tedious work is pleasurable [by Stacey Lehman]

Face masks, ready to be washed before inserting ties.

This was supposed to be the season of sewing my summer wardrobe. I'd picked the patterns and purchased the fabric to make breezy cotton dresses, linen jumpsuits, gauzy blouses. Then came you-know-what. Here in Ithaca, the head of a loose organization of home-sewists put out a call for face masks, first to be worn by health care workers in senior citizen centers, hospice, and the like, and more recently for bus drivers and the employees of the food co-op and an area soup kitchen. We shared notes on patterns, lamented the shortage of elastic, and got to work. The first batch of 167 homemade masks was delivered to Hospicecare on March 26; we're working on an order for an additional 350. 

I contributed about 15 masks to the effort before getting sidetracked by making masks for family and for  friends in "hot" zones. Now I'm working on a supply of 30 or so for the employees of the New York City building where David and I maintain a small apartment. The first 15 will be ready to go on Saturday. 

The process is simple and can be managed by anyone with a few supplies and basic sewing know-how. Once I got the hang of the pattern, I was able to streamline production by reducing it to a series of steps that move smoothly and quickly. Still, I want those who wear these masks feel good about them so I'm taking my time to make them look as professionally made as possible. Once I exhausted my supply of appropriate scraps left over from other projects, I cut into a length of high-quality lightweight denim for the outside and am using a soft white cotton for the lining, made with a pocket to hold a filter, if any can be found. I'm proud of how they're turning out. All of the effort I've put into improving my sewing skills over the past couple of years has come to fruition. When the call for masks went out, I thought, "I can do this." 

Sometimes, while sewing, I listen to classical music and enter the state of "flow," described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in his seminal work on the subject as the period when one is "completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." 

At other times, the work is downright tedious and it is then that I'm reminded of Thomas Merton's observation in The Springs of Contemplation about the value of boring work:

If I insist that my work be rewarding, that it mustn't be tedious or monotonous, I'm in trouble. . . . Time after time it fails to become so. So I get more agitated about it, I fight with people about it, I make more demands about it. . . . It's ridiculous to demand that work always be pleasurable, because work is not necessarily pleasing; sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. If we're detached and simply pick up the job we have to do and go ahead and do it, it's usually fairly satisfying. Even jobs that are repugnant or dull or tedious tend to be quite satisfying, once we get right down to doing them. . . . One of the routine jobs I get every once in a while comes from putting out a little magazine. You have to sort the pages. It's a simple, routine, mechanical sort of job. . . . I never realized that this would be one of the most satisfying parts of the whole thing, just standing there sorting pages. This happens when we just do what we have to do.

-- sdl

"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings. . ."

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

--Shakespeare, Richard II

Roman Bridge [by Donald Revell]

One image the epidemic paints
Onto the old mind: a Roman bridge,
Intact and defaced, slowing
The brown flood below it. The old mind
Had a use for water and for the gods in it.
Waterborne or airborne, epidemic
Is a god defacing gods in flow.
It’s useless, as the bridge, sprayed
With obscenities, still stands.

I lay aside the book of bridges. The air
Outside of the book is a death toll
And a brown flood gathering speed.
Peace to all the peace there ever was. The
Bridgeway is a high-wire walk through weeds.

A collaborative plague poem [by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

Equinox

Pictures of the virus are pretty -- 
like sea creatures or pin-cushioned moons 
or holograms posing in semi-witty

situations beside balls and balloons
glowing with coronas, crowns, halos.
Under microscopes, SpongeBob cartoons  

look fractal-similar, my own lungs aglow
with pink rods and blue cones. I'm silly
then scared. Neighbors hoard Purell, ammo 

against infection. I try to chill, be 
a peaceful citizen, a good locked-up 
or locked-down member of society.

I'm "Baking Bad," filling measuring cups 
to make pot brownies for frantic friends
and a wedding cake for Sam & Sonny's nup-

tials, virtual and queer and legal and 
euphoric. We'll each dance in our Zoom box
to the host's boombox, no need to pretend

we're anywhere but in our PJs and socks,
our pink boas and perky blue face masks
(lest we're contagious). It's the Equinox,

night and day perfectly split. Sam basks 
in Sonny, Sonny in Sam, a perfect fit.
Then the day goes back to quarantined tasks--

hand washing (my fingers so dry!), chit-
chatting on my Clorox Wiped iPhone,
bombarding heaven for the sad and the sick.

An English "Plague Poem" [by Martin Stannard]

NOW

My going is soft –
But it feels heavy in places –

A finch –
Perhaps a chaff –
Pops by to grace the day –

Separation is a way of life
For some people

I see a vessel approaching –
What is that flag it’s flying? –
Let me check my Everyman’s Book of Flags –
Oh, so that’s what it means –
I shall give this approaching vessel a wide berth –

Once things exceed a certain pressure
I have to conform to a formal code

This is such a time –
And so I behave myself –
I am needed to live quietly by myself –
There is a shelf I grace decoratively –

And there is sleep I need to do –

How did it fall apart so quickly?

A finch –
Perhaps a chaff –|
Pops by to grace the day –

I am locking the door: Watch me:

A Dispatch from “Journal of the Plague Year”: The Black Swan [by David Lehman]

I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.

The Corona Virus holds a press conference (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Virus: Good morning. I'll be glad to take a few questions.

Reporter #1: What are you actually trying to accomplish?

Virus: Well, there's a moment in The Possessed, the novel 
by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, when the main character --
I believe his name was Strombolini  -- says that since
he's already made a mess of his life, he'll try to make as 
big a mess of it as possible. In other words, he'll
transform destruction, or perhaps entropy is a 
better word, into creation by making it intentional. 
It's a bit like something Kenneth Koch used to say
about writing poetry: if something isn't working,
do it more.

Reporter #2: So you're an intellectual. Have you read
Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor?:  

Virus: Certainly not. But I've infected the University
of Chicago. Did you know that Leo Strauss, the
phlebotomist who for twenty years was the Robert
Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor
of political science at the University of Chicago, in private
conversations used to worry about the schvartzes 
coming across Jackson Park? Well. he did.

Reporter #2: Don't you mean phenomenologist
rather than phlebotomist?

Virus: Thank you. But rather than either phlebotomist
or phenomenologist, I meant to say podiatrist. What 
used to be called a foot doctor.

Reporter #3: Could you please be serious for 
a moment?

Virus: I'll be serious if you'll be roebuck. It
was a wonderful store at one time. People
used to be able to order a whole house 
which would arrive disassembled in a 
railroad car, and then they'd put it 
together themselves. There were 
31,000 parts. That was going on
even at the time of the 1918 epidemic. 
There simply aren't people like that
today, as Nestor says in Homer's Iliad,
as translated by W.H.D. Rouse.

Reporter #4: Can you please stop your
infernal bookishness?

Virus: All right.

Reporter #4: What do you think of Donald Trump?

Virus: (sighs) I knew someone would ask that.
Listen, Trump is neither the hero nor the 
villain of this story. What's important is not
Trump himself, but the response to Trump 
in you and you and you and you. In this
sense, Trump is like the biblical Pharaoh.
Some people hurried to leave Egypt
when Pharaoh allowed it, and some 
people actually wanted to stay. Lindsey 
Graham would be somebody like that. 
Speaking of which, has it occurred to 
anyone that the name "Lindsey Graham"
naturally suggests "Lindsey Graham Cracker,"
because Lindsey Graham would have been
a segregationist in the old days, and 
"cracker" means a bigoted white person?
You see, the universe is always sending 
coded messages like that, but you people 
need to be aware of them and understand
them. Ahem. I myself am such a message. 

Reporter #4: Oh, for Christ's sake!

Virus: Well, I'm getting a bit weary. But 
before I go, I'd like to ask you a question.
Do you think I will be Time magazine's 
Person of the Year?

Reporter #5: No, because you're not a person.

Virus: (sighs) True -- and that's my tragedy.
I'm a bit like Satan in Paradise Lost, by 
John Milton.

Reporter #6: Oh, for Christ's sake!

Virus: Yes indeed. "Those who have ears,
let them hear."

Plague Poem #2: ["The Plague" by David Lehman]

The Plague

Albert Camus wrote The Plague,
which I want to re-read this week
(now that the frogs, the lice,
and the locusts are upon us)
because his hypothesis is
that the bubonic plague
has broken out in Algeria,
in the coastal town of Oran,
in the 1940s. The plague
he has in mind is bubonic,
the Black Death of the fourteenth century,
which killed a third of Europe.
Fleas from infected rodents transmitted it.

In The Plague the bureaucrats muddy things,
it's a false alarm, says one, and let's not call it
a plague but an unusual type of fever.
Lots of plagues in history, yet each comes as a surprise.
The will -- the competitive desire to live
while others are dying -- is most intense in a calamity.
Nine months from now more babies will be born.

3 / 15 / 20

Plague Poem #1 [by Hilton Obenzinger]

Our Social Distance

Stay away and be my love
We’re so close together when we’re so far apart
I take solitary walks with multitudes
I talk to myself but mostly I hear your voice
We follow each other at a distance
Songs ring down empty dark Italian streets
Windows of all the apartments fill with harmonies
Woody Guthrie is already singing the Rambling Virus Blues
Bach has written a new version of the Corona Variations
I can hear music winding through all the avenues
But there’s no guitar and no piano in sight
We’re all alone with each other
Keep your distance and make happy sex
Dance with each other in different continents
Everyone can be magnanimous and fart
And what our neighbors don’t know won’t hurt them
Let me be kind to you by way of Internet
Swimming through our brains
All alone we can open our doors
Yet keep far away from each other
As far as any of us can spit
So keep your distance and be close
Speak splendid poems and deeper wit
Stay away and be my love

Hilton Obenzinger
March 13, 2020