The Best American Poetry: Current Affairs

Current Affairs

Ishmael Reed on Tokenism

July 15, 2021

<<<
On Tokens and Tokenism

From George Washington to Jill Biden, Black literature has long been plagued by ignorant white patrons, who arbitrarily anoint a few writers as symbols of the Black experience

ISHMAEL REED

JULY 07, 2021

Tokens are the bane of Black literature, and for that matter, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American literature. They are often selected arbitrarily as symbols by those who know little about Black literary traditions or literature in general, and their work overshadows the production of writers who might write as well or better.

From George Washington, who anointed the poet Phillis Wheatley back in the day, to Jill Biden, who gave Amanda Gorman the nod earlier this year, a powerful white patron can offer a Black writer huge sales and exposure. In return, these writers become the go-to sources about the Black experience for readers as well as academics who are spared the trouble of viewing Black writing as a tradition that extends at least to the 1700s. This includes Black writer-slaves who wrote in Arabic. Instead, we are limited to renaissances, each generation canceling the previous ones.

Both John A. Williams and John Oliver Killens, who wrote as well as any of the tokens, agreed that once a powerful white literary trend-maker or institution selects a token, segments of the Black cognoscenti line up to ratify the choice no matter their politics. Before the decline of the Black newspapers, those writers who were neglected by the outsiders, who control the patronage networks, could get some space. Langston Hughes, John A. Williams, and Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote for newspapers. Dunbar’s newspaper, The Dayton Tattler, was supported by his classmate Orville Wright. Black writers had influence over which of the younger writers would receive support.

Then came the ascendancy of critics who are housed in universities and paid by foundations. These critics decide which writers will receive grants that might provide them the time to complete creative projects. Critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. controls the patronage of at least three foundations. He often provides grants to his Harvard colleagues instead of awarding them to creative writers. Contrast this with the generosity that Richard Wright extended to a struggling James Baldwin. In 1948, Wright used his influence to provide Baldwin with a Eugene Saxton Memorial Trust fellowship from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

For my part, after the publication of my novel Reckless Eyeballing I was left as literary roadkill because I took aim at some of the dizziest ideas of bourgeois feminists, among them women who regarded Valerie Solanas as a hero, viewed male ejaculation as “an act of war,” or argued that Emmett Till, who allegedly whistled at a Southern white woman—who confessed on her deathbed that she lied—was just as guilty as his murderers. Luckily, I received a cash award from the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks that helped to sustain me, financially.

Who are some of the writers that have been neglected by these guardians of patronage more likely to extend grants to fellow professors than to struggling artists? One of today’s most important Black female writers is homeless. Fortunately, her classic novel is in the midst of a revival as a result of a boost from The Paris Review. She could use a grant.

So could Louise Merriweather. Ninety-five-year-old Merriweather had to raise $36,000 through GoFundMe for round-the-clock care after she contracted COVID-19. Her 1970 Harlem novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, was as good as any Harlem novel including Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. But those who curated Black culture at the time might have found some of her characterizations uncomfortable. For example, her novel reports that Harlem girls had to submit to fondling by lecherous shop owners in exchange for food (a practice that still goes on in my Oakland inner-city neighborhood, except the predators might be Muslim immigrants who have a traditional family in the suburbs and a “baby momma” in the ghetto.) Merriweather might have also been obscured because of her role in halting the film production of William Styron’s 1967 Confessions of Nat Turner, in which the Black hero was subjected to trendy pop psychoanalysis by the author—to which she took objection.

Mrs. Merriweather is a writer who doesn’t hold back. She could have used the backing of Karen Durbin, the white feminist former editor at The Village Voice who takes credit for Gates’ rise as a public intellectual. A Black writer who worked there told me that the white women who had editorial positions were always encouraging her to attack Black men.

Durbin and her ilk are part of a tradition of token creators that reaches back to George Washington. So flattered was Washington by Phillis Wheatley’s 1775 tribute to him that he offered to publish her poem, a panegyric to his achievements, but decided that it would be vain and instead sought to have the poem published by another publisher. Washington sold a slave for rum, raffled off slave children to pay his debts, and was a dedicated fugitive slave hunter. Maybe Ms. Wheatley was not aware of Washington’s treatment of slaves who lived in miserable conditions, according to a visitor to Mount Vernon as he worked to have her poem published. Regardless, Phillis Wheatley became the most famous Black person of her time, and the first Black American literary token. I’m sure that some other poets and storytellers of her time were just as good.

I often get into arguments with liberals, Black and white, when I direct them to writers who write as well as the tokens. They are invested in the belief that because they’ve read Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) they have Black literature covered. Very few of the tokens had as much support from powerful sources as did Baldwin, whose champions were the members of the New York literary elite—literary modernists like William Phillips of The Partisan Review, and Philip Rahv, who was responsible for Baldwin’s receiving a contract for Giovanni’s Room. One of the reasons that Phillips published Baldwin’s Everybody’s Protest Novel, a fierce critique of notable Black protest novels like Richard Wright’s Native Son (albeit with an ironic title, since protest also runs through Baldwin’s novels), was because Phillips regarded Wright as lacking patriotism.

Phillips was the chairman of a literary organization of which I was a member. Without having read their work, Phillips deemed two of my nominations to the board to be unqualified. They were the late Toni Cade Bambara and Leslie Marmon Silko, both of whom are now part of the canon. Silko was just elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If the champions of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which promised to redeem white liberals instead of harming them, had read works other than The Fire Next Time, they would have discovered that by the time he wrote Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, a roman à clef, in 1968, Baldwin had given up on redeeming liberals. In this novel, he gave his sponsors on the white left the finger in such a scathing manner that Mario Puzo was hired to do a hatchet job on the book in The New York Times Book Review on behalf of The Family, the New York literary establishment, which has been laying tokens on Black writers for over 100 years.

After that rebuke of those who brought him fame, according to Truman Capote, who was interviewed by Cecil Brown, and published in Quilt magazine by the late Al Young and me, the New York establishment then treated him like “shit.” Baldwin was replaced by Eldridge Cleaver, who, according to Ralph Ellison, another token with powerful white sponsors, was also “publicity sustained.” The same issue of Quilt carries a story by Mona Simpson, then a student. She is now the publisher of The Paris Review.

Presently, there are more Baldwin imitators than Elvis impersonators. Every token and his brother are writing letters to their nephews. But Baldwin was shrewd. He was writing to the “Chorus of Innocents” who was looking over his shoulder. His was a variation of the old indulgences game that was promoted by the Catholic church in the late Middle Ages. Buy my product and you’ll only have to spend one year in purgatory instead of two. Of course, the Baldwin cult neglects to mention the Black writers that he stepped on during his ascendancy.

The newest star creator is Jill Biden, who heard Amanda Gorman read poetry and chose her as an inaugural poet. Predictably, the Black cultural elite swooned all over this choice, and powerful whites with media power who know little about Black literature chimed in. A chorus of academics and intellectuals, who display their militancy at every opportunity, endorsed Ms. Gorman’s trite, platitudinous high school patriotism, the poetic equivalent of the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Chinese American poet Genny Lim was called a “racist” for pointing out the flaws in the poem.
>>>
from Tablet (July 7, 2021)
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/tokens-tokenism-black-literature

Posted by The Best American Poetry on July 15, 2021 at 06:00 PM in Current Affairs, Feature | Permalink | Comments (4)

September 04, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 14, 2021 on

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

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

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

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

Posted by The Best American Poetry on September 04, 2021 at 10:20 AM in Beyond Words, Collaborations, Current Affairs, Feature, Overheard | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 25, 2021

Chaucer Gets Canceled (part III)

Two excerpts from Calls to cancel Chaucer ignore his defense of women and the innocent – and assume all his characters’ opinions are his [plus a link to TheConversation.com

July 19, 2021 8.12am EDT

Spying is a risky profession. For the 14th-century English undercover agent-turned-poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the dangers – at least to his reputation – continue to surface centuries after his death.

In his July 2021 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, A.S.G. Edwards, professor of medieval manuscripts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, laments the removal of Geoffrey Chaucer from university curricula. Edwards says he believes this disappearance may be propelled by a vocal cohort of scholars who see the “father of English poetry” as a rapist, racist and antisemite.

The predicament would have amused Chaucer himself. Jewish and feminist scholars, among others, are shooting down one of their earliest and wisest allies. This is happening when new research reveals a Chaucer altogether different from what many current readers have come to accept. My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture but a daring and ingenious defender of women and the innocent.

***

As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem “The House of Fame.” He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.

Chaucer’s own words demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that when his much underestimated Prioress tells her antisemitic blood libel tale, Chaucer is not endorsing it. Through her own words and actions, and a cascade of reactions from those who hear her, he is exposing such guilty and dangerous actors as they deploy such lies.

And was he a rapist or an abductor? It’s unlikely. The case suggests he might well have been targeted, perhaps even because of his work. Few authors have ever been more outspoken about man’s inhumanity to women.

It is bizarre that one of the strongest and earliest writers in English literature to speak out against rape and support women and the downtrodden should be pilloried and threatened with cancellation.

But Chaucer knew the complexity of his art put him at risk. As his character the Squire dryly observed, people all too often “demen gladly to the badder ende” – “They are happy to assume the worst.”

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 25, 2021 at 02:43 PM in Announcements, Current Affairs, England, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 23, 2021

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part II)

These "Letters to the Editor" appear in the TLS of July 23, 2021

It is indisputable that Chaucer was charged with “raptus” and that one of the meanings of the term (but not its only one) is “rape”. The question of his guilt is far less clear. The body of scholarship, both inculpatory and exculpatory, is extensive. But ultimately the issue remains unresolvable in any conclusive way. More widely, does the charge itself mean that the possibility, and only the possibility, that a writer had, or might have had, an unpleasant personal life mean that his works should not be studied?

Should “me too” become “you too”? The writers in the Chaucer Review ask “whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by moral insufficiency.” The grounds of “moral insufficiency” are never defined and are not demonstrated. These “feminist scholars” are not trying “to deal with Chaucer in new and important and – yes – difficult ways”, as Tom Bailey asserts. (He never explains what these “ways” are.) Their explicit aim is to expunge him from both canon and curriculum. Just like the University of Leicester. Different forms of political correctness create improbable bedfellows

A. S. G. Edwards
Enfield

I am the medievalist who resigned from the editorial board of the Chaucer Review in protest against the prefatory statements made by the two guest editors of Issue no 54.3 (2019), on “new feminist approaches to Chaucer”. I have as good a claim to the title of feminist as these two editors, as is shown not only by my published works but also by the fact that the permanent editors of the Review dedicated a subsequent issue in this feminist series (55.4, in 2020) to me and Carolyn P. Collette, as “feminist scholars who ave done so much to shape the study of Chaucer and direct its future”.

The issue here is not feminism; it is literary criticism. The guest editors declare flatly that “Chaucer does not share our beliefs, we know. His historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence”. This is not “quiet questioning”, as Tom Bailey puts it, but self-righteous assertion, which dictates to the reader what she is supposed to find in Chaucer before she turns the first page. And of course she will not so much find it as bring it there. To approach Chaucer with this mind-set is to substitute a grotesque caricature for the humane values that distinguish him from many other writers of his time, and that students, in my experience, are quite capable of appreciating.

One wonders whether the guest editors (or Tom Bailey) have actually read Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, in which he opens his retelling of the rape of Philomel with passionate questioning of God – why did he allow the birth of the rapist Tereus, whose mere existence pollutes the world and the minds of all who read his story, even the mind of God himself? As for Chaucer’s alleged rape (about which there cannot be absolute certainty), his sensitivity to the paramount need for female consent, as well as the wide range of meanings covered by the word “raptus”, are evident, for example, when Troilus refuses Pandarus’s urging that he should “ravysshe” Criseyde, because, says Troilus, “ravysshyng of women” caused the present sufferings of Troy; so he insists he will not “ravysshe hire” – that is, elope with her – unless she wishes him to (but of course she prefers her own plan). I also cannot refrain from quoting Hector’s superbly dignified response to the Greek envoys who request the exchange of Criseyde for the Trojan captive Antenor: “‘Syres, she nys no prisonere,’ he seyde; / ‘I not [do not know] on yow who that this charge leyde, / But, on my part, ye may eftsone hem telle, / We usen here no wommen for to selle’”.

Of course, these matters deserve fuller discussion, which my published work on Chaucer has tried to provide. But the final issue with the guest editors’ manifesto is that they wish to close down discussion, to “move past Chaucer”, and “demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency”. To those of us who deeply admire and love Chaucer, the charge of “moral insufficiency” rebounds on its makers.

Jill Mann
Cambridge

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 23, 2021 at 02:38 PM in Announcements, Current Affairs, England, Feature | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 21, 2021

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part I)

Two excerpts from "Gladly wolde he lerne? Why Chaucer is disappearing from the university curriculum"
By A. S. G. Edwards

Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 2021

It was announced in January that the University of Leicester was to remove Chaucer from the English curriculum. Along with the rest of medieval literature, and some from later periods, he was to be replaced with courses on “race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity”. The announcement prompted widespread and ineffectual protests. Several medievalists at Leicester have now lost their jobs, and incoming students will henceforward be denied the opportunity to study the father of English poetry (among much else).

The reason initially given by the University for this decision was economic: these courses were not popular with undergraduates. This assertion has been questioned and the University has not presented evidence to substantiate its claim. It has been frequently asserted in the media that the real motive is a desire to “decolonize” the curriculum, a suggestion that the University has denied.

***

This is a passage from a recent essay by Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu in the Chaucer Review, a scholarly journal:

<<<
[Chaucer’s] historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence. Many feminist scholars now ask … whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency. And perhaps that will be the conversation of future years, of future incarnations of medievalist feminism.
>>>

This is critical thinking in the age of Donald Trump. (I know of one eminent Chaucer scholar who resigned from the Editorial Board of the Chaucer Review over these words.) It is also another form of the impulse felt by Leicester’s administrators: the desire to remove Chaucer from the university curriculum and find “a new object of study”. But here the motives are based on pseudo-ideological grounds that seem close to personal loathing. It is easy to respond with simple arguments that refute the simplistic assumptions of these academics: to point out that the depiction of character and event by a writer is not an invariable or necessary reflection of the author’s own assumptions. But to have to do so is a stark demonstration of the ways in which thought has been replaced by kinds of unreflective dogma in some parts of academe.

The actions of radical feminists and of the University of Leicester are different forms of political correctness, one striving for “relevance”, the other seeking to suppress literary history by the invention of grounds for seeing it as offensive. Both seek a simpler academic world shaped by the doctrinaire. The proper study of Chaucer involves the appreciation of difficulty, of complexity, as, of course, does the literary and historical analysis of any significant literary figure or work. This ought not to need to be said. But difficulty and complexity have become danger words in academe. They impose on both teacher and student the pressure of effort. In the case of Chaucer, the extent of that effort is compounded by the extent of the linguistic and cultural distance that separates us from his writings. It is attractive in various quarters to find reasons not to make such effort, to assume that students are afraid of difficulty and that teachers should not challenge them. A scholarly world where we seek not to disturb or be disturbing is one in which Chaucer will not be welcome as a subject for study

A. S. G. Edwards is General Editor (with Julia Boffey) of a new edition of The Works of Chaucer, which is forthcoming.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 21, 2021 at 02:37 PM in Announcements, Current Affairs, England, Feature | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 30, 2021

Olympic Musings [by Walter Carey]

"You know what expression I hate the most?"
"What?"
"When they say she, quote, settled for silver."
"That's why I say fuck 'em."

-- in support of which I refer you to today's New York Post reporting that Lilly King won silver, and Annie Lazor bronze, in the 200-meter breastroke in Tokyo and noting that King "pushed back against the media and American public, who, in her view, often downplay a silver or bronze finish."

"Pardon my French but the fact that we're not able to celebrate silver and bronze is bullshit," King observed.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on July 30, 2021 at 03:45 PM in Current Affairs, Sports, Walter Carey | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 19, 2021

Mycology [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

photos 2021 (c) Jessica Kerns

This summer we have had so much rain here in the Finger Lakes that mushrooms, both edible and toxic, are popping up everywhere and the hunters are out. Better be careful! Over on Facebook, where friends are posting photos of their fungus finds, polymath Jessica Kerns responded with an emphatic "NO!" when I asked if I could serve up a spectacular mushroom I'd spotted while walking the dog. Elsewhere she notes that "[t]he forests are magical right now. Hunting mushrooms for harvest is therapy." Scroll through her photos, above, and you'll see what she means. "Not all of these are edible," says Jessica, "but two of them are and they are delicious!" Extra credit if you can guess which to saute with butter and garlic and a splash of wine and which belong in an Agatha Christie novel.

I'm reminded of this poem:

Mushrooms

by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
>>>

And this passage from The Debt to Pleasure, a favorite contemporary novel by John Lanchester, also comes to mind:

On the seat beside me were my wicker basket, my Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass (hardly ever used or needed), and my copy of Champignons du nos pays by Henri Romagnesi (ditto, though I also keep all six volumes of Champignons du Nord et du Midi by Andre Marchand back at the house).

In the following account, the alert reader will notice that I am being a little bit coy about the geographical specifics. Forgive me, but we amateur mycologists, especially amateur mycologists of a culinary bent, passionately guard our favored patches of land--a promising batch of cèpes-yielding beeches here, a cropped roadside thronging with ink-caps there, a yonder patch of nettles known to feature spectacular examples of Langermannia gigantea, or the giant puffball, and somewhere else a field with a healthy quantity of cow excrement conducive to the fructation of the nasty tasting but currently popular halucinogen Psilocybe semilanceata, appropriately known in English as the Liberty Cap. (This, by the way, is not as it is sometimes taken to be, the hallucinogen used by the notorious shamans of the Koryk tribe in far Siberia, the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, ingestible via reindeer or indeed human urine, most often popularly reproduced in the image of a re-capped white-dotted toadstool, providing a convenient seat for any momentarily resting elf or fairy. The shamans call that mushroom the Wapag, after a body of magical beings who inhabit the fungi with a view to passing on secrets from the realm of the spirits.) We mushroom hunters are a secretive and wary breed, and it is through ingrained force of habit that I confine my account of the site of my labors to the description: a patch of land somewhere in the south of France. . .

Bon Appetit!

Posted by The Best American Poetry on July 19, 2021 at 11:35 AM in Current Affairs, Feature, Food and Drink, Poems, Stacey Lehman | Permalink | Comments (2)

July 13, 2021

The Poets House Controversy: The Protest and Monica Youn's Response

from Poets & Writers

<<<
The letter protesting the temporary closing of Poets' House during the pademic, because the institution is saddled with debt] recognized the work and commitment of the board, [executive director Lee Ellen] Briccetti, and [pmanaging director Jane] Preston to sustain Poets House, but described being “saddened and deeply unsettled that, through whatever combination of financial and intra-staff/management crises, the organization has fired its entire staff in an abrupt, unkind, and otherwise questionable manner.” Belladonna* added that the board’s press release did not “assuage the appearance of anti-union, anti-whistleblower retaliation around the timing of this extraordinary move.”

The letter went on to ask the board of directors why they did not opt to furlough staff if they intend to reopen the organization, and why they did not organize a “community-wide fund-raising campaign.” (The iconic San Francisco bookstore City Lights, for example, launched a GoFundMe in April after the pandemic forced it to close; it has since raised nearly $500,000.)

“Without pretending to be versed in the full specifics of institutional culture at Poets House,” the letter continued, “the grievances we are reading about are familiar to us: a personality-driven system of management; exploitative wage labor structures that use the poverty of poetry to take advantage of committed workers, who are often young; desired donors actively being protected from having to reckon with or curb their racist and transmisogynist habits. These are dishonorable and corrosive practices that your staff was correct to call out—for their own workplace environment and for the larger causes at hand.”

The letter concluded by urging the board to reverse their decision to fire staff and to let them unionize. “We want other organizations to learn by your example (take note) because they are no different. There is no poetry in exploiting workers and protecting power. We ask you for an honest engagement with your community. We ask you to commit resources not to lawyers and stonewalling but to positive change. We ask you to accept the need to change and respond ethically, with care for all concerned.”

On December 9, board member and poet Monica Youn responded to several of the questions raised in the Belladonna* letter, and reinforced that the organization temporarily closed because it was operating at a $200,000 deficit and running out of operating funds. She noted that, unlike many literary nonprofits, Poets House faced the challenge of financing and fund-raising for its main service—operating a free, physical library and event space—that was now closed due to the pandemic.

Youn went on to address the charge of union busting: “I am a member of the UAW. I spoke at a UAW rally during which I pulled my child out of school rather than cross the picket line in October. I also work on antiracism and gender equity issues both as part of my job and in my nonprofit involvements. If I thought for one second that that the closing of Poets House was in some way a pretext for either union busting or retaliation for complaints about DEI issues, I would resign from the board immediately.” She added: “Along with other board members, I reviewed financial and other documents as well as the plan to address DEI issues. I didn’t just take management’s word for it. My fiduciary duty is to the institution and to its continuing mission to the public. Although we were focused on the financial crisis rather than on the unionization issue, I and what seemed to be a majority of the board felt that a union rep could serve as a useful liaison, as it has for other arts nonprofits.”

As for the timing of the decision to suspend operations, Youn pointed out that the staff filed the union petition when the organization was nine months into the pandemic and “basically teetering on the edge of the cliff.” She added: “That was just when we were running out of money.” She repeated that the board made the decision when they did so they could pay severance and back vacation pay.

As to why the organization did not opt to launch a public fund-raiser, Youn said it wasn’t seriously considered by the time it became clear that their emergency fund-raising campaign—which they had launched to a smaller group of donors and members of the board itself, raising $189,938, of which the board gave $125,632—was not going to cover payroll for much longer; Youn says payroll expenses amounted to $17,000 per week. Youn also noted that the board did not furlough staff because they are not positive what form Poets House will take in the future. “We did not want our staff to not be seriously looking for jobs and to think that this existential crisis was only short-term—this was a long-term crisis for our revenue model, and Poets House was likely to change its structure and functions in order to survive in this new reality,” she said.

Youn also noted that “the pandemic created challenges for more informal workplace conversation,” and that it was exacerbated by Briccetti being on bereavement leave from late February to mid March, and then on personal leave from June through October.

When asked about the depiction of the workplace shared in Di Liscia’s November 20 piece for Hyperallergic, Youn acknowledged that staff had raised issues about the workplace, but added: “We are taking these issues seriously and we are taking the steps to address them. Yes, there are communication problems. I think a lot of organizations are going through similar periods of self-assessment at this point. We have heard about incidents that made staff uncomfortable and that we plan to address as part of our DEI efforts going forward, including DEI training for the staff and board. Our last communication with staff about specific candidates for DEI facilitators was on November 2, and we had applied for and received funding for this training, which will take place when we resume operations.”
>>>

See "Former Poets House Workers and Board Dispute Reasons for Suspension" (by staff; December 11, 2020). Pictured: Monica Youn.

https://www.pw.org/content/former_poets_house_workers_and_board_dispute_reasons_for_suspension

Posted by The Best American Poetry on July 13, 2021 at 11:24 AM in Current Affairs, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 10, 2021

In Defense of Ange Mlinko [by David Lehman]

Ange Mlinko is one of our most astute and courageous critics. She is unafraid to speak her mind; she has a subtle intelligence, does her homework, arrives at an opinion and states it with precision and without worry about crossing the boundaries of conventional wisdom. It is this rare quallity of critical intelligence brought to bear on poetry, something she cares deply about, that would make her valuable even if the times were not as inimical to free spech as they are. Herself a poet, she has a vigorous and lucid prose style.

Here are two brief sections of her characteristically engaging review of two books, Adrienne Rich's Of Women Born and Hilary Holladay's biography, Ther Power of Adrienne Rich (Doubleday, 2020). The review appeared in the London Review of Books (15 July 2021) under the heading "Waiting for the Poetry." I have a feeling the piece is causing a ruckus in some circles, but it should be read -- the whole piece, not just excerpts -- because of its heartfelt, mindful engagement with an important poet, whatever your politics or your affection (or lack of same) for Adrienne Rich. -- DL

<<<

The collections that mapped Rich’s personal and ideological trajectory during the tumultuous aftermath of [her late husband] Conrad’s suicide include The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978). Stylistically Rich broke no new ground: when she abandoned formalism, she found her footing in the confessionalism of Lowell’s Life Studies and Plath’s Ariel – which, as Holladay points out, ‘had driven a stake in the heart of New Criticism’. But her work was now getting exhilarated responses, such as Margaret Atwood’s review of Diving into the Wreck, with its twist on Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry:

‘When I first heard the author read from it, I felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer. The predominant emotions seemed to be anger and hatred, and these are certainly present; but when I read the poems later, they evoked a far more subtle reaction. Diving into the Wreck is one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it; but what you think about yourself.’

Atwood wasn’t alone. Elaine Showalter, Catharine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan and Susan Griffin were among her admirers. Reporting on the crowd that descended on a women’s bookstore when Rich gave a reading in New York, Holladay says that she ‘was welcomed as a sort of messiah’.

Overall, however, the verdict was mixed and would remain so throughout her career. Holladay refers to an ‘enigmatic’ review by Rosemary Tonks, but there’s nothing enigmatic about it: it is the frank confrontation of a poet of the Nerves with a poet of the Will:

‘In Miss Rich’s work, the moral proportions are valid, the protagonists are sane, responsible persons, and the themes are moving on their courses. Why is it then that we are still waiting for the poetry?’ Reading the poems, Tonks suggests, we are given ‘the illusion, at moments, of having gained an objective picture of events, even of our own thoughts’:

'This is well done, so that we really believe while we are reading it that it is how thoughts behave. In this instance the idiom has justified its impersonal quality by an ability to produce convincing objective effects. It is the clean diction used by all good reporters (the method of Tolstoy when he is reporting), and it is insidious because of its invisibility.'

But what really puzzles Tonks is Rich’s fixation on secondhand suffering. She describes the milieu of the poems as ‘living a life very close to the life of newspapers; Manhattan is a living newspaper’ – a brilliant observation – and marvels at the mind’s ‘intellectual toil of taking on emotions not its own ... Tears of rage can come to our eyes in the street, but usually, if we are scrupulously truthful, from less abstract causes.’ She’s right: Rich’s poetry is overwhelmingly one of sirens heard in the night, cataclysm streamed from the radio. ‘I find myself in tears,’ she writes in ‘Merced’. And then:

I think of Norman Morrison
the Buddhists of Saigon
the black teacher last week
who put himself to death
to waken guilt in hearts
too numb to get the message
in a world masculinity made.

It’s this that makes her so relevant today – when otherwise comfortable people live in thrall to newsfeeds and phone alerts. Rich’s Collected Poems is a century’s compendium of emergencies, telegraphed in proper nouns:

Mississippi, Harpers Ferry, Jaurez, Catalonia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Central America, Lebanon; ‘Appomattox/Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma’; ‘Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.’

Helen Vendler wrote dismayed reviews of Rich’s work, excoriating the stereotypes, the bombast: ‘One longs, reading Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, for the poem to take an unexpected byway, to reverse itself, to mock itself, to question its own premise, to allow itself, in short, some aesthetic independence. In Rich, the moral will is given a dominating role that squeezes the lifeblood out of the imagination.’ But one doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort – unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal. Yet Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics: diagnosed in her early twenties with rheumatoid arthritis, she struggled with bouts of debilitating pain and underwent successive surgeries, including one to screw a metal ‘halo’ to her skull to relieve pressure on the spinal cord. She suggests that Plath’s unkind description of Rich in her twenties – ‘little, round & stumpy’ might be explained by the steroids Rich took for her condition.

. . . . .

Is there a moral here about the futility of self-willed ‘identity’? Or is it a cautionary tale about the religion of achievement? Was Rich afraid that her deepest identity, that of a poet, would vanish without endless revolution? (Remember she was only six when her father published her first poems.) Whatever the case, a stable identity eluded her. That didn’t deter her from creating a poetic record that amounts to more than a thousand printed pages. Her admirers see a woman who stood up to authority, lived by her principles and modelled resistance to racism, misogyny, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, militarism, antisemitism, and class privilege – they won’t be deterred by Holladay’s revelations of interpersonal difficulties. When Lowell died, she wrote to Carruth that ‘his death left me feeling virtually nothing at all’ – though they had been lovers only ten years earlier. Even her relationship with Cliff was fraught with power struggles and substance abuse. They endured until Rich’s death from complications of rheumatoid arthritis in 2012, aged 82. Cliff followed in 2016, aged 69: ‘Alcoholic hepatitis and chronic alcohol abuse were identified as conditions leading to the cause of her death.’

Animus was Rich’s muse. While many were struck by her courage in rejecting the National Medal for the Arts in 1997, it was the culmination of a series of highhanded refusals: in 1977 when Loyola College of Maryland offered her an honorary doctorate, she copied her letter of refusal to the Baltimore Sun. Honorary degrees, she claimed, were a ‘ritual of tokenism’. The same year, she refused to write letters of recommendation for the Guggenheim, and instead wrote to the foundation condemning its discriminatory criteria. As she had been a recipient not once but twice, this repudiation was aimed partly at her own earlier self, the driven ingénue and Harvard wife, who used the ‘St Gugg’ largesse to fund her Oxford education and then to go to the Netherlands (a rejuvenating sojourn part funded by a concomitant spousal award to Conrad). ‘She had made a Talmud out of her life,’ Holladay suggests, ‘the multiple meanings of which demanded endless study, debate, and interpretation.’ But the image that sticks with me is of Adrienne Rich at home in Santa Cruz, recently liberated from the metal halo, tending to a collection of cacti.>>>>

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/ange-mlinko/waiting-for-the-poetry

Photograph of Ange Mlinko from University of Florida (Department of English); caricature from The New Yorker.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on July 10, 2021 at 01:00 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Current Affairs, Feature | Permalink | Comments (1)

Against Censorship [from Len Gutkin in The Chronicle of Higher Ed]

We note the efforts of Len Gutkin, in The Chronicle Review, to push back against the worrisome censorship, self-censorship, and shaming on social media that have made it difficult for writers of all kinds, in all genres, from speaking out and expressing ideas that may go against the grain of contemporary orthodoxy. Here's a sample from his post dated July 12:

<<<

You Can’t Say That

Last month, the New York Post reported that Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center had published an “Oppressive Language List,” enumerating terms that one should strive to avoid. The list is real, and many of the suggestions seem quite reasonable, if rather obvious (ethnic slurs and so on). But others raised eyebrows. For instance, is the word “picnic” really associated with lynching? (No, as Reuters explains, and the word was eventually removed from the list.)

And what about phrases like “take a stab at,” “killing it,” and “take a shot at” — all rejected as “Violent Language” by Brandeis? Such prohibitions might seem to have less to do with ethics than with the metaphysical dream of a language free of all figuration. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, is a “mobile army of metaphors.” But “mobile army” sounds awfully violent. I suggest instead: “Truth is a roving ad hoc committee of administrators.”

“I’m almost 60, and in these many decades I’ve seen people — some of them good friends — taken down by all kinds of things. Alcohol and drugs, mostly … You know what finally took me down? F—ing Twitter.” In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan on trying to shake an addiction. For more Twitter-skepticism, check out two Review articles: Justin E.H. Smith’s “How Social Media Imperils Scholarship” and Gordon Fraser’s “The Twitterization of the Academic Mind.”

At Critical Inquiry, Frances Ferguson reviews The Teaching Archive, by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: “It is a history of literary study pitched against the accounts of literary professionalism that have given us the sense that we should guide our thinking about literature by doctrinal statements.” In the Review, Buurma and Heffernan previewed a portion of their argument .

At the London Review of Books, Ange Mlinko writes, not entirely admiringly, about the poet Adrienne Rich: “You have to be accustomed to winning prizes, and quite certain of your place in the pecking order, to grandstand like this … One doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort — unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal.”

Write to me at: opinion@chronicle.com or len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/chronicle-review/2021-07-12

>>>

Len Gutkin

Len Gutkin is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review. His first book, Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present, was published in February 2020 by the University of Virginia Press

Posted by The Best American Poetry on July 10, 2021 at 12:27 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 03, 2021

The Final Season [by Greg Pattenaude]

RALPH FASANELLA (1914 - 1997) | Sandlot Game

Thursday was the most glorious day on the calendar, one filled with childlike dreams and unmatched optimism. No, I’m not referring to April Fool’s Day, but Major League Baseball’s Opening Day. Never mind that there was wet snow falling most of the day at my house. The sun would be shining somewhere. What I did not count on was a Covid outbreak among Washington Nationals ballplayers cancelling the Mets first game of the season, and as I write this, it was just announced that the entire weekend series is cancelled. So on Thursday, I settled for a few innings of the Blue Jays – Yankees game which lasted three hours and thirty minutes, tied 2-2 after nine innings. The 10^th inning then showcased Major League Baseball’s latest game “enhancement” – putting a runner at 2^nd base to encourage scoring and forcing a quicker ending. The Blue Jays scored in the top of the 10^th; the Yankees did not in the bottom frame. This enhancement might be nice in youth sports where parents can get home earlier, but it has no place in professional sports. But I digress and this leads me to my main topic.

Since its establishment in 1876, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs has had nine players in the lineup. In one half of an inning, nine players are in the field. In the other half, those nine players take a turn batting. This repeats for nine innings, or if tied after nine, to extra innings. In the 1950s and 60s, the National League was seen as more exciting than its junior counterpart, the American League, formed in 1901. With sagging attendance in the late 1960s, American League owners sought a way to boost fan appeal. Ideas like yellow baseballs were ruled out. The Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley introduced bright colored uniforms for pizazz. But his biggest proposal, one that other American League owners agreed with, was the idea that pitchers, not being the best hitters, should be replaced in the lineup with someone else. That tenth person would be known as the Designated Hitter, or DH. In 1973, the Yankees’ Ron Bloomberg had the distinction of being the first major league player to bat multiple times in a game while never having to put on a glove. Since then, the two leagues played by different rules and whether you love or loathe the DH still is as heated as any political discussion.

Much has happened in the nearly 50 years since the DH’s introduction. In 1976, players were granted the right to free agency, boosting salaries by exponential proportions. The leagues added teams several times, to the current 15 teams in both leagues. In 1994, playoffs were expanded to allow more teams to participate in the post season. Interleague baseball was introduced in 1997. And in 2000, the National and American Leagues, as legal entities, were dissolved. And during this past winter, Major League Baseball exercised its muscle to take control of minor league baseball, and in the process left forty communities around the country without a team. But through it all, pitchers hit in the National League, despite the DH being used in the minor leagues and colleges. I like to think of it as a badge of honor connecting the 19^th century to future generations – nine gloves and the same nine batters.

Baseball, by nature, is bucolic; it’s played on a field. Sure, there may be 50,000 seats surrounding that field, and, pre-Covid, fans are screaming. But there also are moments of parents and children or groups of friends sitting there watching the action, second-guessing managerial moves, cheering and clapping. The best applause is saved for a starting pitcher coming to bat for the fourth time in a game.

With the current collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players ending this year, it’s nearly certain that the DH will be adopted in the National League. From the players’ standpoint, it means a roster spot where a one-dimensional player can earn a lot of money or an aging player who can’t field his position anymore but can still hit can still earn big bucks at the end of a career. For the owners, its protection for a high-priced pitcher having to do anything other than throw a baseball and encourage the opportunity for more runs in a game. There is this notion that fans, particularly younger ones of the video game era, want more runs at any cost.

The fan base who enjoys a more cerebral experience of talking to your neighbor, second guessing managers, bunting a runner over to 2^nd and double-switches--I’ll call this strategy--will come to an end. During the Covid-shortened season of 2020, the DH was used in the National League, under a “health and safety” protocol to protect pitchers from overly exerting themselves. It was pretty clear that this was a trial run, like the silly runner on 2^nd to start extra innings rule.

So this is it. My Mets, welcomed into the National League in 1962, appear to have a very strong team this year, and just paid 27 year-old Francisco Lindor $340 million to play shortstop for the next 10 years. And they have new ownership for only the third time in their history. As far as the National League, it had a good run. With the inevitable ahead, I’ve branded this as The Final Season. Let it begin.

Posted by Greg Pattenaude on April 03, 2021 at 11:16 AM in Current Affairs, Feature, Sports | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 01, 2021

New Trilling Essay the Talk of the Town

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung campuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considered coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Public Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be caricatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" (or variants, including celebrations of poetry as the antithesis of sociological claptrap, have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Ashbery Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

from the archive; March 31, 2011.

Professor Trilling, asked to comment for the record, replied with this link but said he was of "mixed minds, because of the implicit inaccuracy in the record of any correspondence between two persons, neither of whom is alive." The court decided in favor of the plaintiff, who affirmed his belief in the "irony of circumstance," as he termed it, and a distrust of any idea that, if stated flat out, could be construed as signifying both itself and its opposite. "You know, Fitzgerald was right about consciousness," he said to me one afternoon, sneaking a cigarette. -- DL

Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 01, 2021 at 08:00 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Current Affairs, Feature, From the Archive | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 20, 2021

From the archive: 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.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 20, 2021 at 10:23 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Current Affairs, From the Archive, The Plague | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 03, 2020

Stay Thirsty: the new issue, with articles on Cary Grant, American popular song, Bascove and more

The new issue of Stay Thirsty, edited by Dusty Sang, is here, with articles on Cary Grant, Bascove's bridges, April Gornik, Stephanie Chase, much more.

https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/

https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/fine-romance-lehman.html

https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/nicca-ray-nicholas-ray.html
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/april-gornik-paintings.html
https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/eyman-cary-grant.html

https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/bascove-kiosk-bridges.html

STAY THIRSTY: How do you feel about French cinema and its embrace of your father's [Nicholas Ray's] work?

NICCA RAY: I’m not as well-versed in the French cinema as I ought to be. But! The Cahiers du Cinema writers/filmmakers of the 1950s held Nick in the highest regard. When I interviewed the film historian and writer, David Thomson, he said, “In the 1950s the Cahiers du Cinema had started a policy of recovering American films, saying, ‘Oh look, these commercial films are great. Maybe they’re the greatest!’” My father felt misunderstood within Hollywood. His movies weren’t the critical box office hits that, say, Elia Kazan’s were. Nick, who had met Kazan in the 1930s New York theater and stayed friends with throughout his life, measured himself against Kazan. In France in the 1950s, when Nick was making On Dangerous Ground and Johnny Guitar (both box office flops) the Cahiers du Cinema, whose writers became the directors of the French New Wave, started championing Nick’s films, calling him an auteur. He was sort of a poster boy for their Auteur Theory. When I asked the Cahiers writer, Charles Bitsch, how the auteur theory came about he said, “The need came mostly because of the weight of the screenplay. Two or three screenwriters wrote the script and the director was just the technician making images to tell what the script was saying.” The Cahiers' folk said, Woah, hold on there. They saw that directors like Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang were more than technicians. They were the authors, not the screenwriters. Bitsch said to me, “You see further beyond the scene.” Nick used to say, “If it’s all in the script why make the movie?” Seriously, why? If you look at the body of Nick’s work (including his paycheck films) you will see his mark in the same way you notice an artist’s brushstroke. He had a painter’s eye and used light and camera movement to build a subtext that informed the scene. The French New Wave directors of the Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, gave Nick authorship and were, I believe, the first to give him critical acclaim. In the 1960s, Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinemateque Francaise, screened Nick’s films and the younger generation of filmmakers were introduced to and influenced by his work. I am forever grateful to the French for defining the auteur theory. I set out to find my father in his films. It was a place for me to start.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 03, 2020 at 09:08 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Current Affairs, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 17, 2020

"Psalm and Lament for Los Angeles" [by Dana Gioia]

On the streets of Hawthorne I sat down and wept.
Yes, wept as I remembered it.

I came to the asphalt country of my childhood,
To revisit the precincts of memory.

I walked the old boulevard, where the shops
Had been condemned and demolished.

I passed the bankrupt mall, defaced and boarded.
And all was vacancy and squalor.

Where was the drugstore where my parents met?
And the neighborhood park with its Indian palms?

Where was the Plaza Theater with its neon beacon
Taller than a church spire?

I wandered the silent ruins of my city.
What was there to sing in a strange and empty land?

If I forget you, Los Angeles, let my eyes burn
In the smoggy crimson of your sunsets.

If I prefer not the Queen of the Angels to other cities,
Then close my ears to the beat of your tides.

Let me stand on the piers of Malibu, blind
To the dances of the surfers and the dolphins.

But, O Los Angeles, you dash your children against the stones.
You devour your natives and your immigrants.

You destroy your father’s house. You sell your daughters to strangers.
You sprawl in the carnage and count the spoils.

You stretch naked in the sunlight, beautiful and obscene—
So enormous, hungry, and impossible to pardon.

Ed. note: From the Summer 2020 issue of Hudson Review. Gioia was the guest editor of the 2018 edition of The Best American Poetry.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 17, 2020 at 10:31 AM in Current Affairs, Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 08, 2020

Kudos to Nobel Laureate Louise Glück

Kudos to the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück, a wonderful poet whose work has appeared in many editions of The Best American Poetry. She was the guest editor of the 1993 edition and it was a pleasure working with her -- and something of an education as well. She is as astute a close reader of poems as I know.

I remember, too, being the subject and addressee of one of her poems. This was the result of a bet as to who would win a certain book award that year. The loser of the bet had to write a poem and dedicate it to the winner.

From 1992 to 1994 a grant from the Lila Wallace -- Reader's Digest Fund enabled me, in conjunction with the Community School of Music and Art, to bring these poets to Ithaca: Mark Strand, Donald Hall, Charles Simic, Jorie Graham, A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Each gave a public reading and did a session with Ithaca schoolkids. Louise accompanied me to the Montessori School on King Road where my son Joe was a student.

The Best American Poetry 1993 was a highlight in our series. There were poems by Ammons (a huge chunk of "Garbage" that had appeared in APR), Ashbery, Bukowski ("Three Oranges"), Merwin "The Stranger"), Rich, Snyder, Stone, Strand, Tate, and the greatly underrated John Updike ("To a Former Mistress, Now Dead").

There's Billy Collins, when his work was still a secret, and Denise Duhamel, then a new name. A magnificent poem by the late Tim Dlugos, "Healing the World from Battery Park," which saw the light of day because of the archival work of David Trinidad and the judgment of the editors of Hanging Loose. "I loved 'litany,'" the first published poem, a knockout, by the unknown Carolyn Creedon. Susan Mitchell's "Rapture"; Jane Kenyon's "Having It Out with Melancholy." Ron Padgett. Michael Palmer.

And Louise has an excellent introduction.

If copies of The Best American Poetry 1993 are available, you will be impressed and then some with the quality of the work Louise chose.

In the University of Michigan Press's Under Discussion series, we published an excellent collection of critical essays devoted to Louise's work. Joanne Feit Diehl edited On Louise Glück. I still remember some of the catalogue copy, particularly "her searing honesty and compelling first-person personae." -- DL

Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 08, 2020 at 01:31 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Announcements, Current Affairs, Feature | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 17, 2020

Just In Time For Rosh Hashana: The Jewish Food Society Podcast [by Stacey Lehman]

One of the highlights of 2017 was the opportunity to participate in Schmaltzy, a Jewish Food Society live storytelling event where celebrity chefs, grandmas, tech entrepreneurs and culinary mavens tell personal stories about when food, family and tradition converged in their lives.Before what seemed like an audience of hundreds, I told my tale of learning to cook for my husband following his cancer treatment and diagnosis of celiac disease. If you want to read about and listen to the event, which took place on November 6 in Greenwich Village, New York, you can do so here. It was fun!

Naturally the Jewish Food Society has figured out how to flourish in this time of hardship. You can find lots of fantastic recipes on its website and now you can listen to its podcast, which launched this week. The podcast revisits live stories from past Schmaltzy events, and dives deeper into the storyteller’s experience of family, identity, and of course… food. I can’t wait to listen to the first episode featuring baker Zoe Kanan in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. And I'm looking forward to episodes from Adam Richman and Jake Dell, and more!

L'Shana Tova!

--sdl

Posted by The Best American Poetry on September 17, 2020 at 11:42 AM in Announcements, Current Affairs, Feature, Food and Drink, Stacey Lehman | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 28, 2020

Two Dozen Reasons to Make Dinner [by Adrienne Su]

Twelve Ways Cooking Is Empowering:

When you look into the refrigerator at what used to elicit a wail of “there’s nothing to eat,” you see the makings of a frittata, pizza, or fried rice.
After making and eating the frittata, pizza, or fried rice, you can gloat about not having wasted the scraps in the refrigerator.
Scraps in the refrigerator start to look less like clutter and more like material for a creative project.
If you’re working on a creative project unlikely to generate income, such as a book of poems, you can turn humble ingredients into excellent food.
What’s in your food is under your control.
You can’t always control how a dish will turn out, but you can learn from disappointments.
Even with occasional disappointments, your house smells terrific and feels like a home.
After cooking, you’re forced to clean your house, or at least the kitchen, thus supporting another round of cooking.
You can directly support people who are sick, mourning, occupied with a new baby, protesting, or simply living their lives.
If you live in a place where restaurants don’t serve what you long for, you can still have many of the dishes you crave.
You have fewer cravings for sweets and snacks because you don’t feel, after a meal, that something is missing.
Fewer things are missing.

Twelve Usable Cookbooks:

America’s Test Kitchen, Bowls
Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking
Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook
Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Peter Meehan et al, Lucky Peach Presents 100 Easy Asian Recipes
Urvashi Pitre, Indian Instant Pot Cookbook
Susan Purdy, The Family Baker
Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking
Lorna Sass, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way
Ellen Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food
Online archives of Fine Cooking magazine (technically not a cookbook, but as trustworthy as #1-11)

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 5, 2020)

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 28, 2020 at 03:00 AM in Current Affairs, Feature, Food and Drink, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 27, 2020

The Two Kinds of Poets [by Adrienne Su]

I have an informal, untested theory that when it comes to sustenance while writing, there are two kinds of poets: coffee poets and food poets. Coffee poets (who in some cases could be considered tea poets) can go half the day or longer without solid food; their focus is sustainable without the distraction and mess of eating. Coffee poets who are also capable of writing in public spaces are doubly blessed, as they can log many hours in a cafe without having to incur the expense of meals with their beverages, or the interruption of leaving for lunch. Bringing a thermos, they can bide their time in libraries, getting lost in the books they’re reading and writing, enjoying a communal version of a solitary activity.

As a food poet, one whose energy levels are better maintained by six small meals a day versus three large, I envy coffee poets their long stretches of concentration. They aren’t constantly reminded by hunger of their profane, alimentary existence as human animals. When they write at home, their kitchen sinks don’t fill with dishes within the first three hours. Their keyboards don’t get sticky or greasy. They don’t end a day of writing only to realize that, bit by bit, they have eaten all of last night’s leftovers and there is nothing for dinner.

The inimitable Kazim Ali is a coffee poet: “Early morning is my writing time-- and coffee is the key to my experience. I buy beans from local roasters, preferably organic. My favorite is Mexican coffee, the darker the roast the better. I used to hand grind the beans (more for the meditation quality of doing the work, rather than any notion of coffee purity) but now I just have a little grinder for them. In the past I swore by the french press or a pour-over if I was only drinking a cup, but these days I make drip coffee in a coffee-maker because it’s easier to make a lot and keep it hot. If I don't drink it black, I'll drink it with stevia and almond or oat milk. Mahmoud Darwish (in that rapturous extended passage near the beginning of his memoir of the Beirut bombing of 1982) says ‘Coffee is the sister of time,’ and I believe it. I hover over sentences with that warm company.”

Kazim, who in addition to poetry has written memoir, criticism, novels, and translations, while also building a distinguished record of editing and teaching, is clearly driven by more than coffee. Yet knowing this detail about his process suggests that we food poets might do well to streamline the way we work, to be more like coffee poets, only with food. We can’t cut food-preparation time down to that of brewing coffee, but we can aspire to limit it on certain days.

Generally, when cooking, I find that I have to be all in, mindfully trimming fat, fishing out lemon seeds with a tiny measuring spoon, intuiting the springiness of dough. Otherwise, I cut or burn myself, or over- or undercook things. Most “quick and easy” recipes don’t work for me; they spur an inattention that ends in disappointment. Yet on the rare occasion that I find myself free to write for a day or the better part of a day, I don’t want to dwell in cooking. I also don’t want to resort to a giant pot of stew that has to be eaten so many times that you never want to see it again, the way dogs resign themselves to their kibble after begging for what you’re having.

Here are a few ways to hang back from the kingdom of cooking while trying to sidestep taste fatigue:

* Embrace the powers of the microwave, which generates less dishwashing than conventional cooking and in summer keeps the kitchen cool. I’ve been making the Szechuan Green Beans in Barbara Kafka’s Microwave Gourmet for decades; it cooks in the dish it’s served in. (Barbara Kafka started out as a poet.) Marie T. Smith’s memorably titled Microwave Cooking for One helped me finish my last book; the chili and the fish chowder are as simple and good as promised, and the recipes multiply for when you’re not isolating. Julie Sahni’s Moghul Microwave contains miracles, too, among them Parsi Chicken and Savory Keema Cake.

* Cook extra of whatever you’re making the day before, but make sure it includes two or more of these elements: spicy, sour, bitter, fermented, or contrasting textures. Having to eat the same dish over and over is more tolerable when it has complexity; it takes me a long time to tire of Chinese spicy noodles, in vegetarian or carnivorous versions, hot or cold, inflected with some or all of these: sesame paste, peanut butter, black vinegar, chili oil, a touch of sweetness.

* Cook extra dinner before your writing day, but with specific plans to transform the leftovers into something different. Two books that can help with this are Leftovers by Kathy Gunst and Green Plate Special by Christine Rudalevige.

* Do what my parents did when raising teenagers and working: order rice-based takeout meals, then extend them with your own rice and vegetables, keeping the vegetables easy: sliced Napa cabbage simmered in chicken broth, stir-fried broccoli or asparagus.

* Team up with a local “food poet” friend whose eating preferences are compatible with yours, even if lockdown forbids eating together. Each of you cooks a dish, then gives half to the other.

Chances are, you will still spend more time in the kitchen than a coffee poet will. But channel Kazim’s observation about the “meditation quality of doing the work,” and adapt the wisdom of Mahmoud Darwish to your own temperament. Spicy noodles, too, can be the sister of time.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 4, 2020

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 27, 2020 at 03:00 AM in Current Affairs, Feature, Food and Drink, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 26, 2020

Everything in Its Place [by Adrienne Su]

Poet and memoirist Sandra Beasley cooks differently depending on whether she’s writing poetry or prose: “I’m a tremendous fan of mise en place; one of my favorite wedding gifts was a stack of glass nesting bowls that I use. I’m methodical which, to be honest, is something that I pride myself on as a poet as well… For prose, I’m a mess—indulgent snacking, weird sleep and meal hours, hoping my husband does most of the cooking! I get overwhelmed with the scale of prose projects. I cook better as a poet.”

I can’t help but connect this to Sandra’s facility with forms. Writing a sonnet or sestina is an overt act of ordering raw material, taking the chaos of human existence and working it into a recognizable shape, with strict rules governing what can appear at the end of each line, how many lines there will be, and sometimes how many stresses each line should contain. Many good formal poems break some of the rules, within the bounds of what I call, in the classroom, not looking like a mistake. One could argue that free-verse poems do the same - give shape to the shapelessness of experience - and the best free verse does exactly that. But something about mise en place mirrors the compulsive neatness of rhymed quatrains, the symmetry of a pantoum returning to its first and third lines as it completes its mission of saying every line twice, without ever quite repeating itself.

Here is a curry in progress, in Sandra’s kitchen:

A fellow devotee of forms, I’ve made similar efforts to create order in the kitchen. I share Sandra’s enthusiasm for mise en place, which is essential for the speed of Chinese cooking (the actual cooking, not the prep, being speedy). I also do - or did, pre-Covid - methodical lunch preparation. Ideally, I’d start the work week with four of something like this in the fridge (not five because some weeks included a lunch out or at home):

This was a makeshift sardine banh mi - the carrots and radishes quick-pickled, the baguette not pictured; that’s mayo in the sauce container - and a side of fruit. Other favorites include calamari and white bean salad, with mesclun or farro in the other compartment, or a bowl. It isn’t quick, but making four at once cuts down the time spent per lunch. Seeing the containers stacked in the fridge erases a daily problem from the week and pre-empts the junky snacking that follows a hastily purchased, not-really-what-you-wanted sandwich. Most of all, thinking about lunch is over until the weekend.

Some advance-lunch guidelines: Once you have your stash, don’t give in to the temptation to eat one for dinner midweek; not only will you lose a day, you’ll also get tired of it. Don’t repeat a lunch for two consecutive weeks; you’ll get tired of it. Sauce or dressing should travel in its own container, to be mixed just before you eat. If the lunch involves good bread, slice and freeze the bread for the week, thawing what you need for the next day overnight, or let it thaw in your lunch bag during the morning. Some ingredients have to be added the day you eat, such as avocado; use a reminder app to carry the mental load of remembering to add them. Keep salt and pepper at work. If you have the space where you work and it’s allowed, having a small toaster oven there can be life-changing.

It’s hard to fend off the notion that poetry writing is an irrational, struck-by-lightning activity that doesn’t respond to ongoing effort. For sure, there are days when it seems to resist. But writing of any kind works better when you keep trying, and it’s less intimidating if you view writing as a form of organizing. Sandra reports about her photo: “I use that cooking time for planning writing projects; in this case, I was working toward delivering a commissioned poem on deadline.” I find this reassuring evidence that poems are made, not granted by deities. And on those days when kitchen organization seems impossible and you keep reaching for the chips, maybe that’s a good time to muck around in a larger, more sprawling project, dare I say prose?

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 3, 2020)

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 26, 2020 at 03:00 AM in Current Affairs, Feature, Food and Drink, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 25, 2020

Without Restaurants [by Adrienne Su]

Poet Faith Shearin reports from sheltering-in-place in Massachusetts: “We are cooking a ton because even the carry out in Amherst and Northampton has shut down. I miss restaurants more than I can say. I love a lot of food I don't know how to cook: Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese… Our Covid diet consists largely of the things I was raised on. Several generations of my ancestors drank iced tea and fried chicken in eastern North Carolina; I made my first batch of cornbread with my great grandmother before I learned to read. My great grandparents were farmers and corn was their most prolific crop. I was served grits with one soppy egg for breakfast, and cornbread with most soups; both sides of my family were devoted to Brunswick Stew. Nobody could completely agree about the ingredients in this dish so a lot was left to interpretation and imagination. I like to pull the chicken off a freshly cooked bird, dice some onions and garlic, chop basil, then add corn, red potatoes, and lima beans to a broth that is half tomato sauce half chicken broth. One grandmother liked to add green beans; another favored several meats, including pork. Some folks make it thin, with tomato juice, and some make it thicker with tomato paste. I make cornbread like this: 2 and 1/2 cups of coarse ground cornmeal, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1 and 1/3 cup buttermilk, 2 tablespoons of butter. Cook at 375 for 25 minutes. I sometimes serve the stew with a spinach salad or make a fruit cobbler to go with it, or I throw a sweet potato in the oven and serve it with a little bit of butter and brown sugar. I like to cook when I am in the mood and rapidly tire of it when I'm doing it three times a day. I know a lot of people feel like this. The food I can cook well is the food I learned to make from my grandparents; it tastes like childhood.”

Faith and I are old friends. We both call the American South home - Kitty Hawk, NC for Faith, Atlanta, GA for me - but both live now in places where cornbread and Brunswick stew are more novelties than staples. Although my family arrived in the South much later than Faith’s did and our fried chicken was more likely to come from a restaurant than a cast-iron skillet on the stove, I share her connection to fruit cobbler and grits, and felt the estrangement when I first moved North. My Thanksgiving stuffing is cornbread-based. Like Faith, I cherish Indian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants. My grandmothers cooked Chinese food, but I didn’t grow up cooking with my grandmothers, as the link had been broken by World War II and the Chinese Communist revolution; I never met my paternal grandmother. My mother, driven with her family from their home in Shanghai when she was a child, had to teach herself how to cook Chinese food in 1960s Atlanta, which meant the ingredients were Southern-inflected, the techniques explained in English by Joyce Chen and Grace Zia Chu. But because she knew how the dishes were supposed to look and taste, my mother was well-prepared to use (and adapt) the instructions. By the mid-1980s, Atlanta’s Chinese restaurants had multiplied approximately one hundredfold since my father’s arrival in 1948; many catered to a Chinese clientele. Our lives had reached the point where time was scarcer than money, so we often lived on good-quality takeout plus home-cooked rice and vegetables.

Faith’s lockdown-narrowed diet reminds me that the foods we associate with comfort and home are not necessarily made in the home. Restaurants build meaningful family memory, too. Without restaurants, her longing for, say, tofu with bok choy is no less a part of who she is than her skill in turning out a Brunswick stew; it only joined the family later. This spell of eating what we can is an opportunity to expand self-knowledge. What do we miss the most, and what is different about us without it? What skills from previous generations - even if we have to imagine them, as I imagine Faith’s great grandparents in a bad year for corn, or each of my parents as a foreign student in Georgia, faced with the mystery of buttermilk or white gravy - are we calling on now? What do we know how to cook that, out of forgetfulness or the excitement of the new, we haven’t cooked in a decade and are bringing back because the pantry, or a pandemic-driven sense of continuity with lost forebears, points to it? It’s worth recording, occasionally if not regularly, what we’re eating these days, as well as what we aren’t. One day we’ll be able to look at the list, understand what it reveals, and possibly even write again, with new perspective on who we’ve become.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 2, 2020)

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 25, 2020 at 03:00 AM in Current Affairs, Feature, Food and Drink, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (1)

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