The Best American Poetry

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

1

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?
 

2

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.

 

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

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

Two Dozen Reasons to Make Dinner [by Adrienne Su]

Twelve Ways Cooking Is Empowering:

1. 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.
2. After making and eating the frittata, pizza, or fried rice, you can gloat about not having wasted the scraps in the refrigerator.
3. Scraps in the refrigerator start to look less like clutter and more like material for a creative project.
4. 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.
5. What’s in your food is under your control.
6. You can’t always control how a dish will turn out, but you can learn from disappointments.
7. Even with occasional disappointments, your house smells terrific and feels like a home.
8. After cooking, you’re forced to clean your house, or at least the kitchen, thus supporting another round of cooking.
9. You can directly support people who are sick, mourning, occupied with a new baby, protesting, or simply living their lives.
10. 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.
11. You have fewer cravings for sweets and snacks because you don’t feel, after a meal, that something is missing.
12. Fewer things are missing.

Twelve Usable Cookbooks:

1. America’s Test Kitchen, Bowls
2. Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking
3. Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook
4. Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
5. Peter Meehan et al, Lucky Peach Presents 100 Easy Asian Recipes
6. Urvashi Pitre, Indian Instant Pot Cookbook
7. Susan Purdy, The Family Baker
8. Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking
9. Lorna Sass, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way
10. Ellen Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
11. Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food
12. 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)

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

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)

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)

Quote of the Day: Bright Blue Mailboxes [by John Updike]

"The place where my personal hopes and dreams and the intentions and provisions of the state intersected was the postal system. Its workers, whom in my small town I knew all by name, brought to the house the printed journals--the newspapers and magazines--that represented to me a world where I wished to locate my future. In those days when a postage stamp cost three cents, I sent letters to great and distant men, cartoonists and writers, some of whom deigned, to my eternal gratitude, to respond. Each day's mail brought potential treasure. This is still true for me. I send manuscripts away, I sometimes get praise and money in return. It is the United States mails, with the myriad routes and mechanisms that the service implies, not to mention the basic honesty and efficiency and non-interference of its thousands of employees, that enable me to live as I do, and to do what I do. I never see a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit." - from John Updike's contribution to a panel, "How does the State Imagine?," conducted on January 13, 1986, as part of the 48th International Pen Congress, held in New York City with the overall theme of "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." 

-- sdl

Bascove's Bridges on the Streets of New York City

The Best American Poetry 2020: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Paisley Rekdal

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

In Monet's Dining Room: Remembering Milton Glaser (1929-2020) [by Rozanne Gold]

 

"Milton’s designs were sumptuous, color-drenched, vivid, expressive and…mouthwatering."

The art world, to be sure, is mourning the loss of one its greatest graphic designers and typography innovators of all time. Milton Glaser’s evocative images are emblazoned in our collective conscience as a narrative that accompanied more than sixty years of American culture. Milton touched the lives of millions of art and pop-culture lovers, but more specifically, as a teacher-of-eminent-status at the School of Visual Arts, where he inspired generations of young designers.

 Less known are the remarkable contributions Milton made to the culinary landscape – in fact, he was an amuse-bouche of the meal that would become America’s first food revolution in the 1970s.  From restaurants to products to supermarkets and cookbooks, Milton’s designs were sumptuous, color-drenched, vivid, expressive and…mouthwatering.  Whereas Milton’s brushstrokes stoked so many worlds – music, poetry, book design, fashion, to name a few -- it is the world of food, supermarkets, packaged goods, and restaurants that brought us together.

Rozanne (left) and Nicky in the Gracie Mansion kitchen. The fern wallpaper was chosen by Mary Beame, wife of Abe, the 104th mayor of NYC.

When I was 24 and the chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch, Milton asked me to help him rebrand the Grand Union supermarket chain. The prototype was their flagship store on the Upper East Side near  Gracie Mansion where I was living. I had just returned from Italy where I studied with cookbook author Giuliano Bugialli. Milton was keenly interested in freshly-made pasta, pesto and mozzarella di bufala, all-things Italian, but also obscure in the late 1970s. We tasted jarred goods, canned foods, and everything from the deli cases and hatched a plan to not only redesign the stores but everything edible, too. What a stunning education to be in his orbit, and to watch his beautiful hand translate ideas into design.  

The Gold and Glaser design for the Grand Union supermarket chain. "We hatched a plan to not only redesign the stores but everything edible, too."

Milton wrote “The Underground Gourmet” (for the New York Herald Tribune and later for New York Magazine), but his sophistication about food and dining spread widely above ground as well. In addition to our mutual reverence for Italian food, we celebrated our ancestral roots with a love of Hungarian cooking, and were suckers for the cabbage strudel from Mrs. Herbst, whose bakery was not far from Grand Union. By the early 1980s, nouvelle cuisine was emerging and the focus of our city’s gastronomes shifted to everything French. Milton introduced me to the decidedly non-nouvelle work of Mireille Johnston, the author of “Cuisine of the Sun” (classical dishes from Nice and France, 1976) and “Cuisine of the Rose” (the food of Burgundy), whose wonderful cookbooks he designed.  

For the next many decades we worked together on other projects: We created American Spoon Foods (a company specializing in regional food products), and collaborated on all the menus for Aurora, the Rainbow Room, and Windows on the World (above, all three-star restaurants) when I was chef/director of Baum +Whiteman, the consulting group responsible for the creation and operation of all these places.

But the project closest to our hearts never got built: Monet’s Dining Room, to be located in the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street in Manhattan. Monet was Milton’s muse (I’m certain he had many), and the restaurant’s interiors were designed to look like Monet’s house in Giverny, France – complete with its daffodil yellow dining room and powder blue kitchen. Milton hired me to be the Director of Restaurants and sent me on a two-week trip to France to eat in dozens of two- and three-star restaurants with master chef Richard Burns who was to become the restaurant’s executive chef. It was a joy of a lifetime – to dine and meet the world’s most important chefs – Paul Bocuse, Alain Senderens, the Troigros brothers, Alain Chapel – and to walk around the lush gardens of Monet’s home in Giverny. 

Claude Monet's La salle a manger, an inspiration for "Monet’s Dining Room" to be designed by Glaser and located in the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street in Manhattan."After a year the project was halted and simply remained a dream." photo © The Claude Monet foundation.

Today, sitting at my dining room table, I longingly flip through the pages of a paper I wrote after that remarkable research trip.  “A Gastronomic Trip to France: A Critical Evaluation/September 1982” – which included dozens of restaurant critiques and an interview with Claire and Jean-Marie Toulgonat, nephew of Claude Monet (and a distant relative of then VP, George Bush). I learned that Monet loved cepes more than anything in the world; that he adored duck wings grilled with nutmeg; that Monet’s cook was a woman; and that a typical formal dinner at his home would include a soup of truffles (from Perigord only), foie gras, a fish course, game course (another favorite was woodcock), and a roasted meat (such as roasted turkey with marrow).  Milton was, of course, delighted with such details and very happy to hear that the Troisgros’ chefs requested an invitation to the opening of “Monet’s Dining Room.”  It had been nothing short of a thrill to see Milton’s concept spring to visual life in his inimitable drawings. But after a year, the project was halted and simply remained a dream.  

Milton had big appetites and understood at his core that both art and food induce hunger, longing and desire, and that by sharpening and stimulating our senses – through the manipulation of materials, design, ingredients – we were all performers in life’s huge canvas.  I was consumed with his teachings. 


Rozanne Gold, is one of the most prominent women in the food world. As an award-winning chef, author, journalist and restaurant consultant she helped shape America’s culinary landscape as a pioneer in the food revolution that began in the 1970’s. A four-time winner of the James Beard Award and recipient of the Julia Child/IACP award, she began her remarkable career at the age of 23 as first chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch and later became the youngest female executive chef in the country for Lord & Taylor’s thirty-eight restaurants. As Chef-Director of the renowned hospitality group, Baum + Whiteman, Ms. Gold helped create New York’s magical Rainbow atop Rockefeller Center (where she was co-owner and consulting chef for 15 years), Windows on the World, and three of New York’s three-star restaurants, including the Hudson River Club in 1987 where she helped launch today’s locavore movement.
Rozanne is a graduate of the New School with an MFA in poetry, where she teaches "The Language of Food," exploring the intersection of cuisine and commerce, poetry and prose. Ms. Gold hosts and curates a series of literary events at the Garrison Institute, and was recently named a Board Director of "Brooklyn Poets." Her new podcast, "One Woman Kitchen" (produced by MouthMedia Network), features the inspiring stories of the food world's most remarkable women.

Reading Poetry to Ward off the Covid Blues [by Nin Andrews]

It’s another day and soon it will be another month in this miserable COVID summer. The sunlight is streaming through my window, and outside, the goldfinches are swooping through the meadow that is so thick with black-eyed susans, it looks like an Impressionist painting. In the distance, I can see the cows in the pasture, calves running behind them, a newborn trying to stand up on wobbly legs. Most years I’d feel a sense of joy at all this pastoral beauty. But this year, I wake each day to a strange ache in my heart, almost as if I have lost a loved one. I try to write but usually find myself just staring at the page. Maybe poetry is the loved one I have lost, I think. A friend tells me I am suffering from the COVID blues. She says lots of folks are, including herself. She’s been riding her motorcycle after dark to escape the loneliness. “You need something powerful between your legs,” she jokes. Like me, she says writing poetry usually gives her a thrill, a sense of romance and escape from the humdrum of daily life.  

I am reminded of the Bruce Bond’s first paragraph of the preface for the most recent PLUME anthology, Plume 8:

“All good poems are love poems. They have something to lose. No less so in the aftermath of loss, or the thick of peril, in the crisis of the here and now that summons language as public and private, all at once. Relational, historical, psychological, poems recover, in light and in spite of human difficulty, a sense of their vocation. They ask us, as they ask themselves, why now. Why a poem. And more challenging still, why beauty.”   

Bond goes on to talk about the many beautiful poems in the anthology, and he’s right. Plume Poetry 8 is a stunning collection, featuring  many of my favorite poets including Lynn Emanuel,  Major Jackson, Albert Rios, Lisa Russ Spaar, Jeffrey Friedman, and Elizabeth A.I. Powell. Reading it does alleviate some of the misery of this peculiar time.  While it would be impossible to pick just one poem to admire, there is a poem by Cynthia Cruz that synchronizes with my current mood:  

The Music

Constellations of evening,

Sweet, the smell of fire
and filth of pines.

Racing through the woods
on silver shining

motorcycle.
What is the sound

of driving back
through black

magnetic fields of night.
Play the record back.

Unpack the accident
down to its haunting.

Its smaller rooms,
its trash and crackle.

This morning
the good voice
spoke to me.

A ghost
entering the body.

Then the sound
of a violin playing.

What I was
is gone.

Now just the din
of smaller sounds

of wayward and crawl.

And then, there is this oddly timely poem by Stephanie Burt, with an epigraph in ancient Greek (which I can’t type out on my ancient IBM Thinkpad, alas). Reading the poem I am reminded of the Molly Arden, whose work and translations of Catullus have appeared here as well as in various literary reviews.

After Callimachus (Hecale, 298)

The gods who made us made us such
          that whenever you or anybody laughs,
someone is probably crying; someone got hurt.
          If the foreground is joy, the background is always sad.
I admit it’s not much
          but it’s something to say, on that poor god’s behalf:
look what he had
          to work with. Look what we came from: water and dirt.

Another anthology that I’ve enjoyed reading in this time of COVID blues is Best Microfiction 2020, edited by Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke and Michael Martone. I turn to microfiction when I want to be surprised, and this anthology doesn’t disappoint. While I don’t know many of the names of the authors represented, I am delighted to discover them. And to remember how sometimes a very simple piece of prose delights for reasons I cannot and do not want to explain, though a falling club, as described in the following story by Trent England, might be just what I need these days.  

A Quick Word about My Life

Ever since they opened up a falling club in our town, there’s little else that Theresa will do. After her daily shift at the ball bearing plant, she drives to the large, lime-stained building that used to be a Toys “R” Us, where she falls into foam pits, backwards, as though she’s a concertgoer in a mosh pit or a toppled statue of a despot. Like a gym, it has its members and regulars and Theresa remembers everyone’s names. Over dinner, she tells me about Dan who falls because he has a stressful job as a 911 operator or Janet who has three children to feed and thinks that any day her husband will get fired. I hear about Becki who sleeps with night terrors and Greg who can’t sleep at all. And while she’s telling me that if she falls enough she will one day earn a spot in the platinum level, which is the old stock room, and get to step off backwards from an even greater height, I wonder what she tells Dan and Janet and Becki and Greg about her own life or about me, or why, for example, when she leaves for work to drive to the falling club, she passes our house without stopping, without looking up at the window to see her husband standing there.

And now that I am mentioning examples of prose and poetry that have uplifted me, I’d like to close with a link to Dante di Stefano’s stunning COVID poem from last spring, and to the wonderful essays on becoming a poet on the Marsh Hawk Press Website, including essays by Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, Stephanie Strickland, and Amy Gerstler. The most recent essay, by Julie Marie Wade, begins: Since I first began writing as a child, a small door inside my head has been propped open, perpetually. In the beginning, I didn’t know it was there, but now I’m sure I couldn’t close it, even if I tried—that essential parenthesis—that necessary gap between the frame and the wall where the first light and the last light stream through.

A Night on the Town, 2018 [by Stacey Lehman]

There were six of us and it was late. We had fallen in together in search of a restaurant or bar, following an event at Poets House to celebrate 30 years of the annual poetry anthology that my husband edits. The atmosphere among us was one of good-natured bonhomie. Our four companions were a former US Poet Laureate; a poet and MacArthur Fellow; the poetry editor of a celebrated magazine and the director of a prestigious New York City research library; and a history professor.  Each of the three poets had worked closely with my husband at one time or another.

Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Terrance Hayes, and Brett Gadsden.

Our first stop was the Odeon on West Broadway, where we ordered a round, just moments before the bartender gave the last call. After paying our bill, we headed out into the nearly deserted SoHo streets and wandered for a few blocks, talking and laughing, grouping in twos and threes and rearranging ourselves every block or so. We cast long shadows as we passed under street lights. I could imagine being in one of the nearby apartments and hearing the echo of our happy voices approach and fade away.  Finally, we happened upon what could be described as a dive bar with a welcoming neon sign. We took seats in the back and ordered another round.

My husband and I were at least 15 years older than the oldest of our drinking companions and as such were unable to match their energy and stamina. My husband could still see two years of grueling cancer treatment in his rear-view mirror and the lingering side-effects included fatigue and a lower-than-usual tolerance for booze. It was time for us to go home. Our companions, who had known each other for decades and hadn’t been together in quite some time wanted to keep going. By now we had closed the dive so we once again headed into the dimly lit streets where we walked together until David hailed a cab. 

As our cab pulled away I caught a final glimpse of our four friends, walking slowly together as they hoped to extend the evening. At that moment I had the unmediated thought that despite their impressive resumes, their brilliance and many accomplishments, they could be in danger. Four young African Americans walking confidently in one of New York City’s more affluent neighborhoods. It struck me that as long as David and I were with them—two white senior citizens--they were safe. 

But I reminded myself that this was New York City in 2018, and surely there was no longer the need for such a worry.

-- sdl

"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.