The Best American Poetry

"Night Mail" [poem by W. H. Auden]

 

from Night Mail (1936), directed and produced by Harry Watt and Basil Wright

-- sdl

"Night Mail" [poem by W. H. Auden]

 

from Night Mail (1936), directed and produced by Harry Watt and Basil Wright

-- sdl

In China, in 2008: after the quake, before the Olympiad [by David Lehman]

Eleven years have gone by since Stacey and I traveled in China and Mongolia. Here's a blog post from then:

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In Jinan, as previously in Dalian, despite the economic disparity between the two places, the audiences for my lectures exhibited the same degree of enthusiasm despite their limited knowledge of English. In Dalian, the group consisted of adults, well-dressed, formal, taciturn, for whom I had prepared a lecture. After reading one paragraph and staring at faces blank with incomprehension, I ditched my text and resorted to an old favorite in such a situation: poems consisting of two lines or fewer, and the haiku stanza.  It worked. The blackboard helped, and luckily I knew a bunch of these short poems by heart.

On Monday the 19th, lecturing on American poetry to a room of over 100 college juniors majoring in foreign languages, I read my fifty-line "Oxford Cento," all lines culled from "The Oxford Book of America Poetry." I asked the students to write down their favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. Near the end of the lecture a student stood up and told us her name in Chinese, then added that her "Western name" is Daisy. (The Chinese choose their own Western forenames, which need have no relation to their Chinese names.) Daisy, who announced that Rabindranath Tagore has influenced her, recited the poem she had just written beginning with Poe's line from "Annabel Lee": "and the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes." The poem was about the Sichuan earthquake. "If you shed tears for the stars, you won't see the sun," she wrote. Her poem concluded, "and the sun also rises."

At this point a young man challenged me to write a one-line prose poem on the spot about my visit to the university. Luckily I had been reading Whitman. I said, "At your university I see a sea of faces and in the sea of faces I see the face of God."  Appreciation was expressed with a collective murmuring sigh. The students liked two-line poems I read by Pound, Charles Reznikoff ("The Old Man"), J.V. Cunningham ("An Epitaph for Anyone"), Dryden, Dorothy Parker ("News Item"), A. R. Ammons ("Their Sex Life"), and Ogden Nash.

Someone asked for my opinion of Edgar Allan Poe. Just as at West Point, I encountered a strong, genuine, populist love of Poe that countered the received negative judgment that has dogged the writer from the start. The fact that Poe's name is identical with the first three letters of "poetry" seemed to clinch the case.
>>>

(May 20, 2008)
[from the archive; re-posted November 20, 2014]

Is Your Roof Next? [by Katie Peyton]

 

This is a shark on a house.

 

It follows the time honored tradition of shark art, and art on top of houses.

 

It’s a statement against dropping shit from the sky.

 

What else do we need to know? 

 

According to the Oxford City Council: a lot. Should it be removed? Maintained? Landmarked forever? More importantly, if we allow one person to have shark on their house, does that mean we have to let everyone have a shark on their house? What about a dolphin? A turtle? A giant Pokémon? In other words, is the Headington Shark a gateway drug?

 

I've thought about it, and I’m pretty sure I personally don’t have much cause for concern. My building (a 1928 walkup at the edge of Greenpoint BK) is an unlikely target for guerrilla shark action. First, the shark would have to access the roof, which is not going to happen. The super is definitely not going to answer the phone. The shark can send an email to the management company, which will be received never. Someone’s cousin may come and look at the shark’s apartment and say it’s an old building, and also, no to the roof.

 

In fact, I have seen no sharks on any roofs in my neighborhood, in the time since this shark was installed in 1986. The only thing I’ve seen on top of buildings are other buildings: new construction condominiums, which literally snake over, in an L fashion, to hover on top of prewar walkups.

 

So, even if a shark does land on the roof, a condominium will probably land on top of it in three years. 

 

+++

 

I cannot believe The New Yorker was also working on a piece about this, but if you want actual reporting, you can read the whole thing here.

Brexit Envy [by Leon Elson]

Our correspondent in London reports on the mood over there now that Theresa May's plan for Brexit has suffered a second defeat in Parliament --  a defeat that has been characterized as "significant," "crushing," "major," and "catastrophic." Here's Leon's dispach. DL

Dear David
The Oxbridge elite can talk of little else than Brexit -- how to manage it. The country is more politically divided than ever I can remember it to be. If the vote to leave the EU was a harbinger of the Trump election, what in the States could mirror the chaos now prevailing here as the House of Commons rejects every proposal brought to it by PM May?

Are people fed up with Theresa May [pictured left]? Hard to say. She inherited this mess from her predecessor, who called for a referendum on exiting the European Union, thought for sure the move would be defeated, was stunned when it wasn't, and promptly resigned. There is something very sympathetic about Ms May and how she has conducted herself, remained calm and carried on. She has shuttled back and forth between London and Brussels with proposals and modifications of proposals -- it's like H. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy but his worked better. 

Of course what May has in her favour is that Labour is led by Corbyn, whose anti-Semitism is so blatant that some members of his own party have abandoned it. The wonder is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the longtime leaders of Labour, tolerated Corbyn, but that may be explained by the fact that he was an obscure backbencher who posed no threat to them or to Labour.

Poor Theresa lost her voice yesterday and there you had the perfect metaphor for her. No doubt she will continue her Sisyphean struggle to figure out how the UK can sever its European ties in a reasonable way. A "hard" Brexit with an abrupt cancellation of all existing compacts and trade agreements -- and with the probability of a "hard" border between Northern Ireland (which is part of Britain) and Ireland (which is part of the EU) -- would be unconscionable. But we could be heading that way. 

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and New York have benefited from the uncertainty surrounding financial institutions centered in London. The blow to London's banking preeminence in Europe is real though probably not fatal.

At high table at Balliol the other night one wit commented that he had heard there was "Brexit envy" in the United States. This was greeted with laughter, for I wager that there is absolutely no one anywhere who envies us this sad spectacle. But now, dear David, I am anxious to know how this whole debacle is getting discussed in America. -- Leon 
>>>
<<<
Dear Leon,

I wish I could say that Americans are discussing Brexit options with great passion or with at least the sort of intense and amused curiosity that I recall in London, where I was, during the Anita Hill hearings. The general indifference to the rest of the world does us little credit. Some people I know, who like spending summers in France, may suspend this practice given what they hear of sporadic acts of violence and terrorism there. But nobody's canceling their Wimbledon tickets if they're lucky enough to have them. 

If it's any consolation we have a Congress as dysfunctional as your Parliament.

You have my sympathy and my hope that common sense will prevail as it used to do in Britain. We've got a lot of idiocy here, of course, but it's more fun talking about Byron and Shelley with you as we used to do. Do you still have that tawny port that I liked so much?

David

There is No Final Word [by Vincent Katz]

For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.

First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:

In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.

Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.

She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:

Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.

Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”

The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.

Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:

yes! radiant lyre speak to me

become a voice

Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.

Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:

To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…

Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:

Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.

In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.

We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:

When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…

Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:

It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.

Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!

I Like Moll Flanders [by Molly Arden]

I like the book by DeFoe.
The movie is only so so.
But I should put that more positively.
The movie is not ungood.
My favorite left-handed compliment
is what this guy I dated
said when he saw me naked.
He said my tits were underrated

-- Molly Arden

Take a look: "Decals of Desire" New Online Magazine of Art and Poetry

Concert (2015) collage (c) John Ashbery

We're excited to announce the first issue of a new online magazine of art and poetry: Decals of Desire. The founding editor is British artist and poet Rupert Mallin, and the poetry editor is British poet Martin Stannard, who lives and works in China (and who has been a guest here).

Martin Stannard used to edit joe soap’s canoe, a UK magazine that was the first in the UK to draw heavily upon the New York School, publishing among others Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Paul Violi, Charles North, and Tony Towle. One can expect a similar taste to show up in Decals of Desire.

The first issue demonstrates its commitment to both the visual and the written, and kicks off in stunning fashion by featuring 8 collages by John Ashbery, as well as a poem, and extracts from Ashbery’s 1968 essay on the avant-garde. Among other writers featured in the issue are Ron Padgett, Sharon Mesmer and Mark Halliday from the U.S., Ian Seed and Alan Baker from the UK, and Mairéad Byrne, who was born in Ireland, emigrated to the U.S., and now appears to be travelling…. But it’s not all “poetry”. There’s even a short play in there. Variety is almost all.

In terms of the visual arts, Decals of Desire will look back but also across to traditional, experimental and off-the-wall art forms today.

Featured in the first issue is the work of contemporary landscape painter Martin Laurance. Laurance’s work captures the crumbling English coastline through dramatic, captivating studies. The magazine also reviews The British Art Show touring exhibition – a show that claims to represent the “most dynamic” art produced in Britain today, but which probably doesn’t. There is sculpture, too: sculpture of the 20^th century is often viewed in terms of form and mass. Decals of Desire outlines how sculptor Alberto Giacometti dealt primarily in scale and human distance.

Other articles include a sideways look at the Turner Prize 2016. Back in 1999 Tracy Emin turned the prize into prime time TV viewing but didn’t win. Will a female artist win this year? And whither the Avant-Garde? In this piece evidence of its existence and withering is found in contemporary dance and the ‘NO Manifesto.’ And in each issue an unusual artistic technique will be explored and the side streets of modern art history revisited.

Decals of Desire can be found at http://decalsofdesire.blogspot.com.

We're already looking forward to Issue 2,  which will include a review of the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy, an exploration of Catalan Contemporary Art, the Anglo-French Art Centre 1945-51 plus an abundance of poetry and regular columns – featured artists, Decals DIY and more.

Decals of Desire does not accept unsolicited manuscripts or poetry submissions.

-- sdh

 

Letter from London: Life in the Referendum #3

"Now, what was it I had to do today?"

 Now, I haven't been out yet - kept awake half the night by last night's epic thunderstorm, which has incidentally flooded half of London and the Southeast - but when I got up my social media was full of people talking about their voting experiences, and I've taken, as fast as possible which isn't that fast,a little sampling of the more interesting ones. 

This may look one-sided. Very unfortunately, that is because I am not happy to relay the messages of the Leave side. Most of them just look like, if the person was talking to you, they'd be shouting in your face, turning red and spitting when they talk. And they just reel off these insane, incorrect 'facts'. Someone posted up an absurd leaflet that UKIP was circulating in Hemel Hempstead (a prosperous north London suburb):

So most of this is going to be more positive, like this:

 

Don't abstain
Despite the rain
Grab your brolly
And #VoteRemain

"Train conductor leans down. "I'll say this quietly" he says "but I like your badge" #Remain"

"I am off to vote for the first time in my life. Having been raised to believe in equality for all and helping my fellow man, woman and child, it seems my apathy has been overtaken by a desire not to let the LEAVE campaign win."

"I got a bit tearful in the voting booth. Feels so monumentally important."

"Voted and almost shaking as I posted the ballot paper through the ballot box. I voted Remain."

The poet Sean O'Brien on his trip to vote: 

"A polling station in a community centre in North Tyneside at about 8.15 am. Bright sunshine. The usual slow-but-steady traffick, mainly of older people who always vote.The usual atmosphere of helpful, slightly embarrassed good humour among the officials, as if the whole business of democracy is slightly implausible. The sort of scene Orwell might have included in his catalogue of English moments. And next to all the electoral documents, a copy of The Daily Mail. This is presumably entirely accidental and coincidental. On the way back I meet a couple of neighbours alarmed at the possibility of a vote to leave. One of them says despairingly of her friends, 'I never knew so many of them were just so...so STUPID.' Let's hope she's wrong."

George Monbiot, the green journalist:

"I went over my cross several times just to make sure. I've never done that before." 

A teacher: "The children at school all hugely energised by today's referendum and making cogent arguments for both sides - but the most compelling one of all was this:

Spain is in the EU.
Spain produces lots of strawberries.

Everyone loves strawberries.
Vote Remain."

 

 

"I voted at 7am. There was a stream of people as I left the estate where the polling place was. With 3-or-so-yards (sorry, metres) between them.
I then went shopping. I encouraged a woman worker in Sainsbury's to vote, even though she was going to vote Leave...
Mulling it all on the way back (the rain had almost stopped) I decided it the act of voting was more important than what you vote for. I think that should be sold big-time."

"After the gym I am going to try to help Labour campaign and redeem myself for having been so pathetic over the past months.
A first toe in the water."

An unnamed poet: "Off to vote LEAVE. No longer will this Proud Brit be shackled to the corpse of a tyrant bent on stealing our worglesnurfs." (Then: "Just breaking up the monotony of my newsfeed.") 

"I have heartburn." 

"[Hipster] Clapton is full of middle-class folks swanning about like they've taken the day off to vote."

"A friend's mother-in-law was leaning Leave but decided to poll her teenage grand-children and vote their wishes, as 'it's their world I'm voting on, I won't be living in it'."

A cartoon by Stephen Collins, not new but apt, illustrates the character of Michael Gove years before he made his now--famous remark last week that, "I think people in this country have had enough of experts." Used with permission; click for full size. 

 

 Editing in with two more stories:

"Conversation with Muslim owner behind the counter in the local shop: 'I'm voting leave,' he said.' You'll think a stupid reason. I don't like Turkey. I don't like Pakistan either. If Turkey joins they'll bomb England and and England throw out all the Muslims. And Pakistan, I don't like her, whatever her name is ... Wasi something?'

"I did say I didn't think Pakistan would be joining the EU anytime soon. I also said we shared intelligence about terrorists with the rest of Europe - which has prevented attacks - and it is almost impossible that the UK would decide to banish all our Muslims even after an attack. I said I was an immigrant and he said his father was an immigrant. He then announced very quickly that he'd changed his mind and he promised to vote Remain. But maybe he was just humouring me."

And a other friend says on the phone that as he left the polling station this morning, in leafy south London, he saw an elderly lady hobbling slowly along, shaking her head. As he went past her he could hear her, muttering over and over to herself: 'I still don't know if I've done the right thing...

Off out. More later. (And Sean O'Brien adds, just now: "I'm trying to spend the day working in order to stay calm, but I can feel another observation coming on.")

 

 

 

Letters from London: Life in the Referendum #1

The Day Before the Referendum

Today is the day before the UK goes out to vote in a (thankfully) once-in-a-lifetime referendum on whether to leave the EU, or to remain in it. The atmosphere of the past few weeks has been toxic and growing more so, and it builds on certain types of toxicity that have been implanted in the national rhetoric throughout the tenure of the current government. The drift to the far right is not just America's problem; it's global. After a coalition government and then a brutal election campaign in 2010, in which the Conservative party tried to portray itself as caring, the rhetoric has drifted further and further to the right. The much-vaunted 'austerity' needed to get us over the crash of 2008 is still in place even though seemingly every economist in the world has said it won't work, can't work. But somehow, though people have even been dying as a result of its policies, the rich are getting richer and richer. And in the meantime, the rhetoric against immigrants has become somehow  actually mainstream.

The idea of leaving the EU (the so-called 'Euro-sceptic' movement) has been around for decades. Certainly it has been the fond fantasy of many a conservative politician, though they are always vague on what they would do after. The economists are more of less united in saying that even though we are the world's fifth-largest economy, this is largely because of the EU and the City of London, and that if e left we would be plunged into a new, ten-year recession. 

The country is becoming polarised in a way no one can remember since the darkest days of Margaret Thatcher: the Falklands War, the year-long miners' strike, the poll tax riots. 

I'll be talking a little about that over the next few days, but for now here is a little meditation on the idea of Europe as an entity in the modern world, seen through the medium of an unassuming little typewriter. The European Union was  begun after the Second World War as a way to keep European countries talking to each other, to create a shared purpose, enable cultural understanding, and prevent another war. Notwithstanding the wars that have admittedly raged round its edges in the Balkans, and the continuing heavy breathing of Russia, the bulk of the continent has had its first 70 consecutive years of peace since Ancient Rome. To that extent 'Europe' is a huge success. This first post can celebrate that. 

The plucky little pan-European typewriter I've typed this post on was made not in 1955, as I write below (I then checked), but in 1950 when the memory of the War was still raw. England still had rationing in 1950 (and we're now in our sixth year of 'austerity' once again). And I'll leave it there. Now, for its soothing, imprinted, fixed-space characters... 

Reporting from London: Katy Evans-Bush on the upcoming BREXIT vote!

We're focused on the upcoming BREXIT vote in the UK and are grateful that poet, teacher, all-around smart terrific writer Katy Evans-Bush will be reporting on the run-up and outcome.

Katy Evans-Bush is a New York-born poet and blogger who has spent most of her life in London. Author of two collections with Salt Publishing, her latest book is Forgive the Language, a collection of essays published by Penned in the Margins. Find her at baroqueinhackney.com

Thank you, Katy.

-- sdh

“Oh that was a voice and that was a band” Remembering Al Bowlly [by Michael Palma]

On the night of April 16-17, 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted a raid over London. Several hours after midnight, two bombs fell into Jermyn Street, causing extensive damage and killing 23 people. One of the victims, a well-known professional entertainer named Al Bowlly, had declined the offer of overnight lodgings in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, after having performed there the previous evening, preferring to catch the last train home. He was in bed reading when the parachute bomb went off outside his apartment building. His bedroom door, blown off its hinges by the force of the explosion, was propelled across the room, hitting him in the face and killing him instantly. He was 42 years old.

        

Al Bowlly, January 7, 1898 – April 17, 1941

Though he is still well remembered in Britain, Al Bowlly’s name is not widely known here. Many know it only as a reference in the title and lyrics of Richard Thompson’s song “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven” (from which my title is taken), on his 1986 album Daring Adventures. Yet, for every American who knows his name, there are scores who have heard Al Bowlly’s music. His recording of Noël Coward’s “Twentieth Century Blues” was used over the main titles of the 1968 BBC miniseries (shown here on PBS in 1972) made from Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Stanley Kubrick used Bowlly’s “Midnight, the Stars and You” and “It’s All Forgotten Now” in The Shining (1980), and Steven Spielberg featured his “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” in Empire of the Sun (1987). Al Bowlly songs have been used in films as recent as The King’s Speech (2010) and Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight (2014). Everything Is Copy, Jacob Bernstein’s documentary film about his mother, Nora Ephron, which premiered on HBO premiere only four weeks ago, concludes with Bowlly’s “Love Is the Sweetest Thing” playing over the closing credits.

         But beyond all doubt, the one person most responsible for keeping the name and music of Al Bowlly alive was the late Dennis Potter, whose enthusiasm for the singer bordered on the obsessive. In fact, Potter’s 1969 teleplay Moonlight on the Highway (the title of a 1938 Bowlly recording) starred Ian Holm as a sexual abuse victim whose own obsession with Bowlly becomes a psychological coping mechanism. Potter made use of Bowlly’s music in several other television dramas and serials, including his last major work, The Singing Detective (1986), but it is Pennies from Heaven (1978), the six-part series that is universally acknowledged to be Potter’s masterpiece, that makes the most prominent use of Al Bowlly’s records, fourteen songs in all. Long before we knew one another, my wife, Vicky, watched it when it was broadcast on PBS and was overwhelmed by both the drama and the music—so much so that she flew from New York to London shortly thereafter, partly to visit her then-favorite city, but principally to find, in those pre-Amazonian days, the otherwise unobtainable soundtrack LP. Years later, it was through her insistence that I watch the series that I discovered Al Bowlly.

Jermyn Street looking towards St. James's Street, where Al Bowlly lived in 1941.
(photo © Westminster City Archives)

         A shilling life—there have been several[1]—will give you all the facts, and so, nowadays, will a number of Internet sources. Born to Lebanese and Greek parents in Mozambique, Albert Alick Bowlly grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Though trained as a barber, he spent his middle twenties touring various Asian countries as a singer with several bands. In 1927 he made his way to Germany, of all places, and in Berlin on August 18 of that year he made the first of what would be more than one thousand recordings, a performance of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” (which, like a good deal of his work, is available on YouTube). The start of the 1930s brought his breakthrough, when he began recording with the superb Ray Noble Orchestra and singing live with the band at the Monseigneur Restaurant, led first by Roy Fox, later—and brilliantly—by Lew Stone. The first half of that decade saw more than half of his entire recorded output. At the time, singers tended to be anonymous members of the bands with which they performed, but he became so popular that his name began to be featured on show posters and record labels. His wave crested in mid-decade, and after two years in the United States and recurring vocal problems, he wound up touring throughout Britain and recording when he could with a variety of orchestras. But, complicating the inevitable speculation about what would have happened if he had not been killed, the quality of his work remained undiminished. Among his most striking records are jazz settings of two Shakespeare songs, “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind” and “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” which he cut with Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and His West Indian Orchestra a year before his death.

         The best treatment of Bowlly’s art that I know of is the long entry in Will Friedwald’s Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (2010), a vast, opinionated, astonishingly informed, and frequently hilarious compendium. Friedwald calls Bowlly “one of the finest swinging jazz singers of any era, and like Django Reinhardt, one of the first Europeans to understand the blues…. He also was, like Armstrong and Crosby, a clear predecessor of Sinatra’s Swingin’ Lover style.” Needless to say, in a catalogue of a thousand recordings[2], there are many that are not worth listening to a second time—or, in rare instances, even a first time. Bowlly recorded his share of throwaway ditties and banal ballads, and outside of his work with Noble and Stone and the sides he cut with his longtime piano accompanist Monia Liter, many otherwise fine performances are hampered by off-the-rack arrangements. Yet from the beginning to the end of his recording career, Bowlly’s singing is consistently excellent. His clear phrasing, unerring rhythm, and warm yet flinty voice are unmistakable on every number. Friedwald concludes: “Bowlly is simply one of the finest spirits ever captured on record. With his slightly husky timbre that anticipates Tony Bennett as much as it echoes Crosby, he is a genuine, three-dimensional personality that speaks to us across the generations on shellac surfaces that spin at 78 rpm. Journalists at the time tended to use the term ‘crooner’ and ‘jazz singer’ as if they were interchangeable. In later years, this was proven not to be apt, but, in Bowlly’s work, the two roles are one and the same.”

         If you don’t know Al Bowlly’s music but your curiosity has now been piqued, I advise you to take this simple test. Go to YouTube and listen to the following: “All I Do Is Dream of You,” “Love Is the Sweetest Thing,” “Over the Rainbow,” and the stunning “My Woman.” It will take about ten minutes, and, in all likelihood, one of two things will happen. Either you will decide that you simply don’t carry the gene for Al Bowlly or else you will be instantly hooked, a lifelong fan. My money is on the second one.

 

[1] Sid Colin and Tony Staveacre, Al Bowlly (London: Elm Tree Books, 1979); Ray Pallett, Goodnight Sweetheart: Life and Times of Al Bowlly (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount Ltd, 1986); Ray Pallett: They Called Him Al: The Musical Life of Al Bowlly (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2010; this volume contains a complete discography).

[2] Several two-disc Bowlly sets are available on CD. The one in AVC’s Essential Collection series (2007) is the most comprehensive, and also has the highest proportion of top-drawer material. For those who want more, there is The Al Bowlly Collection (2013; four discs, 100 tracks).

Reflections on the Paris Massacre, 12/15/15 [by Sally Ball]

"The city of light will never fall into darkness." Washington Square Park, NYC December 8, 2015 (c) Stacey Harwood-Lehman

Tuesday morning, December 2, I flew back to Phoenix after six weeks in France. For most of that time, I was in Marnay-sur-Seine, a village an hour southeast of Paris, but I had early on reserved a room in the city for my last night, which as it happens was about a block and a half from the Bataclan. Monday evening, walking back to the hotel from dinner, we saw a crowd of reporters and many many police vans parked in front of the concert hall, and moments later, Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, in town for the opening of the UN Climate Talks, arrived in a small motorcade. He stepped out, made a sort of awkward silent survey of the crowd, and placed a single white rose on the pile of flowers and notes and candles that continues to grow. (Continues: I was also in Paris one week earlier, and had to walk from the Gare de l’Est to the Gare de Lyon, a route that permitted me to visit the Place de la République, and to follow the Rue Voltaire, and to pass the Bataclan—sites where (and very near where) murder had happened and where memorial was happening: it had rained, the candles were mostly out, people were putting their signs and letters in plastic report covers to preserve them (“Long live life!” “We are all the same!” “Everyone against hate!” “Solidarity with refugees!”); the flowers were limp and damp, and between November 21, that first visit, and November 30, my second, the offerings kept growing and spreading higher and deeper.) Tsipras seemed uncomfortable, he looked around helplessly, he got back in the car. Maybe it all took 90 seconds.

Just before I saw him, I’d walked up the alley that I’d seen in a video the day after the attacks: you may’ve seen it too: a Le Monde reporter across the street films the side wall of the Bataclan, where for a while a woman is hanging by her fingertips above the street. One watches it thinking she is going to fall two stories onto bodies lying beneath her in the road. Then someone pulls her back up inside, but you can still hear shots in there. It’s awful. Two weeks later, there was a cardboard sign below the window where that woman had held on with just her hands, a sign reminding passers-by that the French values of liberty, equality, and fraternity had been fought for and forged with acts of terrorism. A small crowd had gathered to read it. The sign was not removed or damaged, as I think it would’ve been in the States. People read, they looked at the flowers, they walked on.

The response to the attacks most everywhere I went over the last weeks was both somber and bracingly, defiantly life-affirming. Also, people seem sure that such attacks will continue. In the posters and letters left at the memorials and in all my conversations, I saw much less anger and xenophobia than I expected. I was struck by the French sense that the only way to reject—or refuse the rejection, the annihilation enacted by the killers—is not by negative but positive means: let’s go out, let’s live, let’s love each other (and ‘each other’ struck me as very broadly defined—I know that the far right has tried to make divisive use of the attacks, and yet what I almost exclusively saw was a resolute and passionate commitment to multicultural—vibrantly cultural—France, reinforced now by the national electoral rejection of the National Front). In Marnay, a tiny town whose residents completely seduced me in their sidestepping of American-style consumerism, in their deliberate collaborations on happiness—embracing the arts, taking care of the community, cooking together, hatching business plans for endeavors that will keep the parties afloat and (also, especially) contribute some loveliness to Marnay itself—they are making their lives with all the emphasis on quality of relationship not quantity of consumption.

On the morning of France’s national memorial, November 27, Marnay’s mayor, Nicole Domec, had invited everyone in town to come to city hall to watch the proceedings together. Just over twenty people came. Nicole wore a sash in the colors of the Republic, as did her vice-mayor, and there was much kissing and handshaking and warmth in the greetings as we (both visitors and long-time town residents) assembled in a semi-circle around a flat-screen television. Nicole welcomed us, explained her belief that in watching the memorial together, we were reaffirming the crucial values of the nation. About ten minutes into the televised ceremony, the door burst open and a black cat pranced in, jumped up on the windowsill, and began to preen. A girl of 10 or 11 looked at her mom, looked at the cat, and went to carry it outside.

The cat spent the rest of the hour trying to return to us, pressure at the door, scratching at the wall. As the ceremony concluded, the crowd at Invalides in Paris began to sing the Marseillaise on tv. A few lines in, someone in our little room began to sing too, and then we all did, together, not resoundingly but in quiet, shaken, mournful voices. I learned that song probably in junior high, always found it a little scary, actually—and stirring—and as we sang in the stone council room I thought of a line from the speech Hollande had just delivered: that we would be faithful to the very idea of France, which he then defined as an “art de vivre” and a fierce desire to be together. After we sang, we kissed each other again, and confirmed plans or embraced friends or thanked the officiants (probably all of the above)—See you later. See you soon.

Alicia in Wonderland: What it is like to be the only American and only woman in the contentious Oxford Professor of Poetry election [by A. E. Stallings]

Talbot Hall and gardens Lady Margaret Hall Oxford

It began as quickly and unexpectedly as falling down a rabbit hole, or passing through a mirror—an e-mail arrived, out of the blue, from one of the previous holders of the position, the critic Christopher Ricks. The subject line was “An Inquiry,” and it was characteristically brief:

“It came to me that you would be an excellent professor of poetry at Oxford. (Geoffrey Hill has not long to go.) Would this possibility interest you?”

An American poet day-dreams of course about certain prizes, recognition, or positions, however implausible, but the Oxford Professor of Poetry simply is not one of them—it seems such the exclusive purview of British and Irish men. In its 300 years, it has never gone to a woman or indeed as far as I am aware, to anyone outside of the British Isles. It had never crossed my mind.

But I said yes I’d give it a go, and we were off.

All at once, I found myself in a sort of Wonderland, and in a horse race (I would say a caucus-race, but not everyone will be able to demand prizes), as well as a literary-political game of chess. I was standing in a unique election, a mixture of that rarest of things, direct democracy, and one of the most rarefied: only Oxford graduates (and other members of Convocation) may vote. The position was established in 1708 by Henry Birkhead, who founded it on the notion that “the reading of the ancient poets gave keenness and polish to the minds of young men.” It was originally only open to clergymen from Merton.

According to The Guardian, “Soyinka’s backers have been keen to stress that they consider the post more like an honour to be bestowed than a job to be applied for.” I want to say the exact opposite—yet that’s too facile. Maybe instead the office could be described as an honor to be applied for, a job to be bestowed. For all its grandeur and prestige, the post is, in essence, the oldest and first Poet in Residence in education. Certainly I have been applying very hard since the middle of March. 

Numerous rules have been changed since the scandal-ridden election of 2009. To get on the ballot used to require only a dozen nominators with Oxford degrees; now it takes fifty. We hunted after the requisite nominators for a couple of weeks (among them Tobias Wolff, Christopher Ricks of course, Adrian McKinty, Chlo Aridjis), followed up on their filling out and mailing of the nominator form (which could not be scanned or faxed), and collated before sending them to the Election office. In an abundance of caution, we ended up with 73. 

Perhaps the most significant change to the process, however, is that in the last election on-line voting was introduced. (The use of paper ballots was costly, and one had to vote in person.) Overseas voters were a factor last time, but this time will be, I think, more so. It remains to be seen how social media and the internet will change the nature of the election. I suspect surprises lie in store.

It’s been an intense roller coaster too: reaching out to the press, reading virulent blog posts (note to self—do not read the comments), asking major academics and writers for support. But also exciting, even moving--generous endorsements from publications such as the TLS, and highly-regarded and popular critics such as Mary Beard and Amanda Foreman. You learn who your friends are (and foes) in the literary community. You might tower over the treetops, or find yourself at the bottom of a treacle well, three or four times a day. My immensely supportive husband, John Psaropoulos, who is a Greek journalist (though UK citizen) already run off his feet with the “crisis,” has had to do a lot more cooking than usual and more supervising of long division at homework time. I have been living for months on a diet of jittery adrenaline and arcane Oxford gossip.

The principal job requirement is a lecture a term, though the professor should also do something else—a reading, workshop, meeting with students.  But the qualifications (the candidate “must be of sufficient distinction to be able to fulfill the duties of the post”) and job description (“to participate in the wider intellectual life of the English faculty to encourage the production and appreciation of poetry”) are vague; the job is yours to define. Being a poet is not a requirement, and indeed some of the best professors have been critics. The current holder, Geoffrey Hill, a vigorous octogenarian, has been delivering rousing old-testament jeremiads to standing ovations. As a matter of policy, however, he does not meet with students. Seamus Heaney, who was professor when I was in residence, delivered compelling and humane talks; it turns out you could book an appointment to meet with him and discuss your poems, but either I didn’t know it at the time, or I couldn’t work up the nerve. Other professors, Robert Graves and W. H. Auden for instance, would meet students at cafes or pubs.  I would aim to be a Professor in that approachable mold. And I would hope that, as the first woman, and maybe almost as important, the first American apart from the naturalized citizen W. H. Auden (Rober Lowell lost to Edmund Blunden in 1966), I would also serve as an encouragement to others. 

Most of all I kept thinking, as I wandered through Oxford this past week (I was there to give a reading at Rhodes House), what a curious and curiouser turn of events the whole matter was.  As a young and insecure American graduate student twenty years ago, Oxford intimidated me:  I felt awkward, that I didn’t belong, I was out of my element.  Now I seemed to be collegially accepted, claimed even, staying at the Lodgings of the Principal of my old college, collaborating in the campaign with my former tutor, having a strategic coffee in the Senior Common Room in Christ Church, meeting with students at the Eagle and Child (watering hole of the Inklings—C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, etc.), attending a dinner at high table.  Had I made it somehow, a pale anonymous pawn, to the far end of the chessboard? 

Walking through the gorgeous gardens of Lady Margaret Hall, in their full glory at the beginning of June, by the banks of the Cherwell fringed with doilies of Queen Anne’s lace, I was ambushed by a bewildering mixture of melancholy and joy, gratitude and wonder. I would sometimes take a turn on the path and feel a stab of—not of nostalgia, since surely a place of brief sojourn in my youth could not be called home—but chronalgia, as if the soul of the young woman aspiring to be a poet, and the soul of the poet I had become, passed right through each other, coming and going.

It’s been disappointing to see that one major English newspaper in particular has made a narrative out of a two-man race—which I suppose is true in the sense that the two front-runners are men.  But it is also an exciting and historic time for women in Oxford.  The university recently appointed its first female Vice Chancellor (nothing Vice about it—this is the head of the university), in the Oxford’s eight-hundred some-odd years.  And St. Benet’s Hall, the last all-male college, just voted to admit female students for the first time.  Maybe good things come in threes.

It’s been a wild ride, full of thrills and confusion, bemusement and vexations, anxiety and hope.  But anything is possible as we run round and round towards the finish line.  With only days to go before the end of voter registration, and only three weeks until the end of the election, right now my odds at Ladbrokes are five to one.

A. E. Stallings, Athens

(ed note: Find out how to register and vote for A. E. Stallings here.)

Why Language Matters [by Bob Holman]

Language Matters with Bob Holman is now available to stream on PBS Video. 

There’s a new Language Movement in town. 

I remember when Charles and Bruce began publishing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, how their writing made me think of language in a new way. Whether I’m in Australia, or on a reservation in South Dakota, when people say they are talking “in Language,” what I know is that they’re talking in their Mother Tongue. To these folks, English is not Language, English is the way you get along. Language is who you are, words that have been passed down through generations. 

“Language Matters” is the first nationwide media recognition of the Language Crisis, which is not just about languages, but cultural diversity. It’s about global homogenization, the Pringleization of society, about cultures being steamrollered under globalization. The growing call to action for language preservation is a drive to see the cultures of the world through a lens of understanding and respect, of seeing the world through a cultural lens, not just a political one. The problem is that in this era of the consciousness of literacy, in this world of hard science, endangered languages and cultures are disadvantaged; if you don’t have the quantification, the metrics, you don’t really have something to say. Quantifying languages is complex (I’d like to say impossible, but I can’t). This is where the poets come in. 

Four years ago, when we started “Language Matters,” people were saying there were 7,000 languages in the world. Now there are 6,000, not because we’ve lost that many languages, but because now that these numbers are really starting to count for something on the political table, linguists are beginning to hedge. It’s hard to know exactly how many languages there are, and harder to enumerate speakers. It’s not like counting the number of pandas. In the prologue to the motion poem “Khonsay,” where each line from a different endangered/minority language, we split the difference, say there are 6,500. And the reason I used the “endangered/minority” construct is because linguists also disagree on the at-risk level of many many languages. 

When I was in Wales asking people if they spoke Welsh, there were people with a junior high level of vocabulary who were quite proud that they could speak Welsh. Others, who were absolutely fluent, said they couldn’t really speak it. They were hanging out with people who were born into the language, who knew more slang. 

The only thing everyone agrees with is that huge numbers of languages, languages that have been around, usually, for millennia, are dying out right now. 

When I tell people we’re losing half the languages on the planet by the end of this century, unless we do something about it, they never ask “how many languages is that, exactly?” Instead, their reactions are always “yes, let’s do something about it.” And again, this is why I think that participating in the Language Movement, helping to protect all languages, is part of the job of the poet in 2015. It’s a movement to protect the diversity of languages in the world. A movement to give respect to all languages. A movement to appreciate that each language has its own poetry, and is an important part of an Ecology of Consciousness.

Digital Consciousness connects us all. But are we listening to each other? Are we respecting each other’s traditions? It’s great to have “Language Matters” find its way out into the world, four years after David Grubin and I had that lunch. When I was working on “The United States of Poetry” with Mark Pellington and Joshua Blum, Josh, who gave me a dictum about TV that I’ll never forget. “The first rule of making a television program, is to get it on television.” The national broadcast of “Language Matters on PBS is the end of that quest, of that story.

Which means it’s the beginning of the journey. Now that people have seen the show, what about the call to activism inherent in it? So I ask all you poets out there to live like Natalie Diaz, and help your own Language find its way into the world. And if that Language happens to be English, well then you don’t understand the part about what Language is. Help me get this program into places where languages are struggling to survive and a screening of the film will give cred to the work. Find languages around you and learn from them. Take seriously the role of the poet as a protector of language, not just a user. 

There’s nothing like writing a poem, to take words, each one with its own history, multiple meanings, and build a sculpture of meaning. It’s a gift, the words that come to us. People have sparked these sounds, people have laid down their lives for their continuation—language is the essence of humanity, and poetry is the essence of language. 

Working with linguists has allowed me to see language from the other side. The collaboration of science and art is good for everybody. If you never could understand the people who come up to you and say they can’t understand poetry, I recommend your going to a linguistics conference and try to understand what those people are talking about! 

But to me that’s what the future holds. Sit through a lecture in a language you don’t understand, listen to the poetry of a language you’re trying to learn, place yourself in a situation where English is useless, learn what Language really is. This is the clarion call of our time. This is why Language Matters. 

To learn more about endangered languages, check out the Language Matters educational resources, visit the Endangered Language Alliance, and write info@elalliance.org

Charlie Listens [by Bob Holman]

Language Matters with Bob Holman is now available to stream on PBS Video. 

 

Charlie Listens

 

Put earbud in west ear

Put other earbud in east ear

Charlie listens

 

Clapsticks, didj, now your voice

Recorded yesterday, Mt Borredale, 

In Amardak, you’re the Last Speaker

Hear? Your voice doesn’t sound so good

You sang good, but the recording was no good

Could you sing now, Charlie, please?

Charlie nods. Charlie listens

 

Clapsticks, didj, now your voice,  please - Now

Charlie listens

Now Charlie listens

OK Charlie, we need you to sing Now

Charlie nods and listens

Now Charlie listens

Cue Charlie – listens

 

Get Jamesy

Jamesy tells Charlie

Charlie listens

 

Get headphone splitter

Jamesy puts on headphones

Charlie and Jamesy listen

Clapsticks, didj. Charlie’s voice

Jamesy sings a little

Jamesy looks at Charlie

Charlie looks at Jamesy 

OK? Charlie listens

 

OK, Jamesy now speak Iwaidja with Charlie

OK, Charlie listens, Charlie nods

OK Jamesy looks at Charlie

OK clapsticks in fingers

OK Charlie listens, didj

OK now. Now Charlie sings

Ma barang!

 

Asking Charlie Mangulda, the Last Speaker of Amurdak, to overdub his performance from the sacred site of Mt. Borradale, was one of the most complex and unnerving directorial moves—to me, not to him—I’ve ever had to do. John Tranter, our local sound guy, is  just a dynamite practitioner. But recording Charlie’s voice, two, cracking clapstick players, and a bulbous didgeridoo on a cave’s platform under an ancient painting of a Rainbow Serpent, proved to be too much for our top-of-the-line digital equipment. This poem tells the story. I won’t repeat it. I won’t even tell you what Ma barang! means, I’m sure you already know. And if you don’t know, then you really do already know. 

What I do want to talk about, briefly, is the opening lines. In Amurdak, Charlie’s language, is one of the very few instances where you can actually see a difference in consciousnesses between languages. The idea that some languages are more primitive than others is simply cultural prejudice: you can say anything in any language, and every language has a full syntax and grammatology. But in Amurdak, Charlie doesn’t know his left from his right. This concept, which until the 1960s was thought to be universal, actually doesn’t exist in a few languages. The way Charlie designates direction is simply and solely through cardinal directions. And it’s been shown that it doesn’t matter where speakers of these languages are placed, they are automatically oriented to the compass points, so that they can say of the choices, “I’ll take the one on the southwest.” 

Now, you could infer from this that Amurdak people don’t see themselves, each one, as the center of the universe, where left and right is always and only consistent to the person speaking. Instead, the Amurdak people—or in this case, Charlie, the Last Speaker—is simply a point standing somewhere on Earth. But that’s just an inference. Or maybe a poem. 

One more thing before we close. When Charlie was translating the creation myth of Warramurrungunji, he listed the dozen or so languages that the Goddess dropped, thus bringing humans to the place she had created. Somehow, under the disturbing lights of the camera, with the intrusion of the microphone, Charlie remembered three words of a language that linguist Nick Evans, an expert on cultures of Northern Australia, didn’t know he could speak. And when Charlie mentioned Wurdirrk and gave Nick some words,  it was the first time that this language has ever been recorded. That’s correct. I think this was The Apotheosis of the whole shoot of “Language Matters.” I could see the headline in the Times: Documentary Crew Discovers Lost Language. 

The words Charlie spoke translate to: “I want to listen to you,” “yam-digging tool,” and “give me fire.” The first thing that was apparent to Nick from these three words is that they are unlike any other language, which means Wurdirrk is not a dialect—without these words, we never would have known that. 

As a poet, I’d like to say one more thing about the words. If you triangulate from them, what you have is a whole culture. “I want to listen to you,” the essence of the community. “Yam-digging tool,” the basis of the community’s relationship with the earth and it also means “digging deeply into the meaning of something.” And “give me fire,” the essence of light, of heat, a great song title, and the best joke in the book. 

For “gimme fire,” I envisioned Charlie as a little boy, these strange people coming out of the darkness late at night, shivering and cold, needing some of this precious fire for light and heat. Later, Charlie would give me the deeper meaning of this idiom. Hey buddy, you got a match? 

A Bardd Americanaidd in Wales [by Bob Holman]

Language Matters with Bob Holman is now available to stream on PBS Video. 

“Foneddigion a Boneddigesau! Fy llinell gyntaf o gynghanedd!” The Welsh is slow and halting, pried off the page, the performance knowing and with flair. If I do say so myself.

I am saying it myself.

It’s me. On stage. Stomp, 2012, Vale of Glamorgan, Cymru (Welsh for “Wales”).

The Stomp (Y Stomp, in Welsh), is the National Poetry Slam of Wales. It is part of the annual Eisteddfod, the national cultural festival of all things Welsh. As I say in “Language Matters,” “It’s a lot like the state fairs in the US, except that instead of prizes for pies or pigs, the prizes are for poetry.” 

The first Eisteddfod was in 1176, when Lord Rhys invited poets and musicians from all over the country to compete for a seat at his table. You could sing for your supper, and then get fed. Winning was an entree into the house of the Lords, and a golden meal ticket for the winning poet. The chair you pulled up to the table was a special Bard’s Chair, and to this day, the prize for the winning poet in the Formal Category is a Chair. Hand-carved by an artisan, the winner gets to take the Chair home, sit in it, and write more poems. In Welsh.  

For me, as usual, the whole thing started at the Bowery Poetry Club, when we hosted readings by Welsh poets as part of the Peoples Poetry Gatherings, 2002-03. That’s where I began to feel the intensity around this ancient Celtic language. Whenever I bring up Welsh in New York, the response is invariably, “Well, what about Irish?” While the Irish fought and gained political independence, they did so in English. The Irish language is now much more endangered than Welsh. The Welsh never fought for independence, but rather cultural parity, and today Welsh is considered the only endangered language to have come off the endangered language list. It’s a success story by any metric, which is why it got its place in “Language Matters.”

One of the poets I met at the Club is Grahame Davies, who writes in both Welsh and English, and whose work and being was crucial in my decision to study Welsh. Grahame lives the fire and rigor needed to keep this ancient language alive. The fire is contagious, and to prepare for the film, I flew to Wales and began my own formal and informal study of the language. 

Grahame picked me up at the Caerdydd (Cardiff) Airport, and we headed for breakfast with Elinor Robson of the Welsh Language Society. I confessed my dream to them, and we all laughed over a full Welsh. What? I, who didn’t even know enough to fly to Manchion (Manchester) to get to Gog Gymru (North Wales), who couldn’t say Blaenau Ffestiniog (the slate-mining town where I live in Wales), let alone spell it, who hadn’t even met Dewi Prysor! was proposing that I participate in next year’s Stomp! I, who didn’t know from “hwyl” (aloha), was going to write and perform a poem in Welsh -- all for this documentary I was making for PBS.

And as you now can see on the front page of the live-stream at PBS.org, the fantasy came real, all duded up in lucky Tibetan cap and Mexican guayabera, taking on all comers at Stomp 2012. “Ladies and Gentlemen! My first line of cynghanedd!” I am saying, to translate the first words of this post. And it really was the first cynghanedd I ever wrote. 

In the film, the line is followed by a raucous audience response, Stomp cards held high—unlike the U.S. Slam, at the Stomp the audience is the judge, and they judge by holding up different colored cards to indicate their favorite poet. Watch as I collect a brotherly hug from Dewi, my mentor, friend and Stomp opponent, also an award-winning novelist and Stomp-winning poet, whose current job is translating episodes of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” into Welsh.  

The cynghanedd is what separates formal Welsh poetry from free verse; in fact, it is what separates Welsh poetry from any other poetry in the world. There are six different forms of cynghanedd, and to win the Chair, you must write a poem that includes sections written in each. Each form has its own rules, here’s a general description the poetic device Marerid Hopwood, in her handbook Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse, describes as “consonant chime :” to create a cynghanedd , a line is divided into three sections, a double caesura. The middle section is thrown out. The two sections left, must have all their consonants (except the last) match up. In other words, the vowels, and of course in Welsh, Y and W are always vowels, are immaterial. The sounds we use to make rhymes don’t count.  

Now from here things get a little complex. Sometimes there is internal rhyme, sometimes rhyme line-to-line, sometimes both—but let’s just leave it at that. The extraordinary thing is that a Welsh audience can hear the cynghanedd, applauding an especially good one, and be quite aware of a poet trying to slide something by. As an American poet writing in Welsh, even in the Stomp, to come up with a cynghanedd was quite a feat.  

(Hopwood’s title is of course a line from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. The irony is that while we think of Thomas as the Welsh poet, in Wales he’s often not even considered to be in the top tier. Why? Because he didn’t write in Welsh. In fact, many people think that a lot of Thomas’s power comes from his having heard and digested the sounds and rhythms of Welsh poetry as a youth, and then using these Welsh cynghanedd forms in English.  For your further elucidation, another poet who used Welsh forms and sounds was that old Jesuit and inventor of sprung rhythm, Gerard Manley Hopkins)  

Quick cut back to breakfast—Grahame and Elinor waving goodbye, I’m training/bussing it to Nant Gwrtheyrn, the Welsh Cultural Center, where I will begin my formal study of Welsh. Flashback to Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, six months before, where another Welsh poet, Sian Melangell Dafydd, replies to my comment that I want to learn Welsh by saying “there’s this magical place in Llyn…” Flash forward to Grahame Davies’ brillant Everything Must Change, a novel that is a mash-up of the Welsh language protests of the 60s with the bio of Simone Weill. Flash further forward to my two weeks’ immersion at Nant where my Welsh teacher Llinos Griffin is prodding the Cymraeg (Welsh language) out of me, saying “You, know, you really should meet Dewi Prysor…”

…And what was your first line of cynghanedd, Bob? you’ve probably been wondering. “Yn ysgwd yn fy esgyrn.” Which, as you can see in “Language Matters,” I learn how to pronounce as I drive our van (my full title: host/driver) through scenic Wales, and which the show’s storyteller/line producer, Sian Taifi, also tries to instill in me by having me sing the words.

 Besides Sian, Dewi and Grahame, the film also shows me learning with David Crystal, Europe’s most famous linguist, and Ivor ap Glyn, poet and TV host/producer. The line translates, “I am shaking my bones,” and as you can tell by my rendering, I really was.

The Stomp is a variant of the US Poety Slams, and I’ve done enough Slams to know that grabbing attention at the top is crucial.  So I asked Dewi to teach me something that would bust through in case anyone at the Stomp should heckle my mispronunciation or lack of mutations, (Mutations! The bete noir of the Welsh language. Did you notice back a-ways how cynghanedd mutated to gynghanedd? Not a typo! In English and French we often elide one word into another by dropping the last letter: singing to singin’, eg. In Welsh, you “mutate” the first letter of the incoming word, so that, for example, if you are going to Bangor, you would say im Mangor, the B of Bangor mutating to an M. Which of course makes driving in Wales even more fun.) So the title I came up with for my Stomp masterpiece is: Ffwciwch Oma! Dwin Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg!  which, lovingly translates to “Fuck Off! I’m a Fuckin’ Welsh Fuckin’ Learner!” 

Not only would I be trying to turn my lack of Welsh into an advantage by begging for the sympathy vote, but I’d also be paying homage to the colorful language the Stomp is known for, especially as used so expressively by my mate Prysor and the training camp he established in Blaenau (The Queen), with occasional side trips to Llan (Y Pengwyrn) and Tanygrisiau (Y Tap) -- three major pubs in three parts of town. It’s also worth noting that there are no indigenous curse words in Welsh; like Ffwcin, they’re all borrowings from bully English. 

Playing between orality and literacy is one of my favorite areas of poetic exploration. In fact, it was how I got involved with Endangered Languages in the first place. Of the 6000 languages in the world (I just love saying that!), only 700 are written down. The Welsh oral traditions, from the Celitc storytellers and Druid poemmakers all he way to today’s Stomp, has been crucial to the language’s survival. And it was through my investigations into the roots of hiphop poetry (hiphop IS poetry!), that I first came across the Language Crisis.

Having established myself as an appropriately iconoclastic bardd Cymreig in the poem’s title, I felt it was important that the first line of the poem reverse field and show my respect for Welsh culture: “Rwy'n teimlo fel y ddraig goch yng nghanol y frwydr,” imparts to me a mythic status, as I identify with the deepest image of Welsh mythology: “I feel like the Red Dragon entering into battle.” You may have noticed that Wales is the only country with a Red Dragon on its flag: the symbol of Wales, sleeping underground next to the White Dragon (England), waiting only for the Apocalypse to disinter, and then emerge victorious in the ensuing battle royale. Wow. 

I straighten out this lie in the next line: “Bardd Americanaidd tumffat yng nghanol y Stomp.” “Actually, I’m just a stupid American poet trying to hold me own in the Stomp.” Another secret of Slam success: flip the script! Set up a high image, and then undercut it with your own vulnerability.  

The next lines reference my aforementioned debt to hiphop. Hiphop is part of my lineage, too—for a while there in the 80s my tag was the Plain White Rapper. To write this section took painstaking work at the Blaenau llyfrgell (library) with a correlating a rhyming dictionary and a Welsh-English dictionary—why oh why is there no rhyming Welsh-English Dictionary?

 

Eisiau ymddiheuriad? dim posibiliad...

Eisiau nghyfeiriad? Dyna ddiffiniad o wrthddywediad

A distrywio’r diffiniad!

 

My address? The definition of randomness 

The contradiction of definition!

Definition Demolition!

 

This also gives a nod to the course I’ve developed at Columbia, “Exploding Text: Poetry Performance,” using extra-literary means to add even more meanings to a poem via collaborations with film, dance, theater, et al.

After this jangly, dirty, provocative opening, I felt it was time for some “real” poetry, and being a “real” poet myself I knew just what lines to use: steal them, from a couple of great poets.

 

Hen Gychwr Afon Angau, // mae o’n gwbod

Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd

Ond swp o esgyrn mewn gwisg o gnawd

 

Old River Boatman Death (Rwilliams Parry), he knows it

What art thou and I, brother
               But in a uniform batch of bones of flesh

 

I was truly hoping someone in the audience would out me here (I should have had a plant!), so that my next barrage, taking personal blame not only for my plagerism but also for every crime ever committed during the horrific triumph of Capitalism known as US Imperialism would have more resonance:

 

Dygwyd y llinellau uchod ar eich cyfer oddi ar

R Williams Parry a TH Parry Williams yn enw

Imperialaeth Americanaidd....!

 

The lines above stolen on your behalf from R Williams Parry & TH Parry     Williams in the name of American Imperialism!

 

This is followed by the lines from “Language Matters.”  

Cynghanedd, defended from the orality of the skalds, has been an integral part of Welsh has survived. Hopwood confesses at one point that she believes you can only truly write cynghanedd in the language that evolved in tandem with the poetic form: Cymraeg (Welsh). In essence, her whole lovely how-to is actually nothing but a piece of propaganda for the perpetuation of Welsh. 

Cymru, the Welsh word for Wales, means Us, The People. “Wales” is a Saxon word, what the Saxons, the first conquering invaders of Wales, called the Celts there—“The others,” “Those guys over there.” Isn’t it time for the world’s nations to be known by the name that their people call themselves? 

And now, the Grand Finale:

 

Baby baby yr unig ffordd o atal y gerdd hon – yw cusanu cusanu
Lle mae pob cusan yn dod yn air Cymraeg

Yn fy mhen a’i lond o freuddwydion

 

Baby baby the only way to stop this poem is to kiss kiss

Where each kiss becomes a word in Welsh

in My Big Head of Dreams

It’s true that my relationship with Welsh is a lot like having a lover—you have to give everything and there’s always more and thank goodness it’s never enough. But my head of dreams – in English I wanted this to be my big head, big enough to hold all these languages and the idea that somehow or other that this piece of theater, sacrificing myself on the pyre that is the Stomp, would show my love and respect for Welsh, that I would go to his extreme in order to bring my own personal touch to a documentary that is all about the essence of humanity, which I believe language is, but which can also be talked about in theories and data where it’s possible human contact may be lost.

Of the 12 poets who made it to the National Poetry Slam, Dewi and I were the first two names out of the hat. We went up against each other, splitting our supporters’ votes, and giving the first round to some brilliant whippersnapper poet who had somehow made cynghanedd a mode of conversation—brilliant! As if Byron were crossed with Frank O’Hara, say. 

Because we were knocked out in the first round, the crew was able to shoot a wrap-up, right then and there, full of loss that meant nothing, and surrounded by a language that had taught me important truths that would infuse the whole film. And my life. 

After the wrap, the crew really wanted to hit the road. I felt bad—for the poet to leave a reading early is bad form, in any language. But it was already late, and our flight back to the States was at 8:00 the next morning, and we had to drive to Llundain, and the Welsh sky was already ablaze. And my big head was full of big dreams but no way sleeping. 

The poem and translation below are published in my most recent collection,Sing This One Back to Me  (2013, Coffee House).

 

Ffwciwch Oma! Dwin Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg! 

 ((Dyna’r teitl)

 

Rwy'n teimlo fel y ddraig goch yng nghanol y frwydr

Bardd Americanaidd tumffat yng nghanol y Stomp

Eisiau ymddiheuriad? dim posibiliad...

Eisiau nghyfeiriad? Dyna ddiffiniad o wrthddywediad

A distrywio’r diffiniad!

 

A dach chi’n gwybod pam?
Mi dduda’i thach chi pam!

Achos -- mod i'n Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg, 

Dyna ffwcin pam!!!!!

 

Hen Gychwr Afon Angau, // mae o’n gwbod 

Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd

Ond swp o esgyrn mewn gwisg o gnawd

 

Dygwyd y llinellau uchod ar eich cyfer oddi ar

R Williams Parry a TH Parry Williams yn enw 

Imperialaeth Americanaidd....!

 

Foneddigion a Boneddigesau! 

Fy llinell gyntaf o gynghanedd:

“Yn ysgwyd yn fy esgyrn”

Mae’n wir wyddoch chi – 

Dwi YN “ysgwyd yn fy esgyrn”!

A dach chi’n gwbod pam?

Achos  fy mod i'n Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg, 

Dyna ffwcin pam!!!

 

Baby baby yr unig ffordd o atal y gerdd hon – yw cusanu 

cusanu
Lle mae pob cusan yn dod yn air Cymraeg

Yn fy mhen a’i lond o freuddwydion

 

 

Fuck Off, I’m a Fuckin Welsh Fuckin Learner!

(That’s the Title)

 

I feel like The Red Dragon In the Middle of Battle

stupid American poet in the middle of the Stomp

Want an apology? No possibility!

My address? The definition of randomness (The contradiction of definition)

Definition Demolition

 

And you know why?

I'll tell you why! 

Cause I’m a Fuckin Welsh Fuckin Learner, that's why

 

Old River Boatman Death (Rwilliams Parry), he knows it

What art thou and I, brother
But in a uniform batch of bones of flesh

(TH Parry-Williams)

 

The lines above stolen on your behalf from R Williams Parry & TH arry Williams in the name of American Imperialism!

 

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

My first line of cynghanedd!

“Shaking in my bones”

It’s true you know

I AM “shaking in my bones”!

And do you know why?

Because I’m a fuckin Welsh fuckin learner that’s fuckinwhy!

 

Baby baby the only way to stop this poem is to kiss kiss

Where each kiss becomes a word in Welsh

In My Big Head of Dreams

The Knights of the Round Table (Part One) [by David Lehman]

 

How Sir Launcelot Was Known by Dame Elaine

by Aubrey Beardsley. Illustration for a 1894 edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur.

*

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Part One)

 

 

            The story of King Arthur is Britain's foundation myth as the story of wandering Aeneas accounts for Rome's origins in The Aeneid. The real King Arthur was probably a sixth-century tribal chieftain, whose exploits were magnified into legend and codified by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain (1136). Geoffrey depicts Arthur as a powerful king who resists invading barbarians and Imperial Romans alike. We first hear of the Round Table in a late twelfth-century poem.

 

            In discussions of the English national culture, it is wise to keep the Arthurian virtues in mind. Knights were brave, generous, loyal, stoical, eager for adventure, and always prepared to save a lady’s honor. And at the same time, that paragon of knighthood, Sir Lancelot, always seems to be cheating on his lady, Dame Elaine, with no less a personage than Guinevere, the wife of the King.

 

            There is but one emphatically Christian episode in the Arthurian tales, and that’s the quest for the Holy Grail, the sacred vessel with magical properties from which the savior drank at the Last Supper. Galahad, son of Lancelot, is of such purity that he alone among the questing knights beholds the Holy Grail. But Arthur himself has Savior-like powers. Though death in the persons of three gracious ladies shall take him away in a barge, he will return to rule after recovering from his wounds in the mystic Isle of Avalon.

 

            The adulterous liaison between Lancelot and Guinevere is the central episode of the Arthurian saga in either of its most eloquent versions. Sir Thomas Malory told the story in prose in the waning days of the Middle Ages; Le Morte d’Arthur was published in 1485. Alfred, Lord Tennyson rendered the tale in the fluid blank verse of Idylls of the King, which he wrote in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Malory can still be read with pleasure. Tennyson is intermittently sublime.

 

            In both, Sir Lancelot is the epitome of chivalry, the warrior Arthur loves and honors most, who would be flawless were it not for his adulterous love of his liege lord’s lady. But that is a grievous fault in a community based on male fellowship and the ideals of courtly love, and it leads ultimately to a civil war and the doom of Camelot.

 

            The story of how Arthur alone can pull the great sword Excalilbur out of the rock is as crucial in Malory as the contest between Odysseus and the suitors at the end of The Odyssey. The feat establishes Arthur's kingship and confirms the power of Merlin's wizardry. In Tennyson, the magic is palpable: Arthur is crowned by the sword itself, rising from the “bosom of the lake.” On one side of the sword is written “Take me,” on the other “Cast me away!”

King Arthur draws the sword from the stone.
Source: Charles H. Sylvester, Journeys Through Bookland (Chicago: Bellows-Reeve Company, 1909)

 

--DL

The craziest sentence of all, by John Foy

I was in 10^th grade when I read “A Refusal to Mourn,” by Dylan Thomas. Perhaps like many boys my age, I was stymied by the opening sentence. It wasn’t until years later that I came to understand. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to be a guest-blogger for Ideasmyth, a creative consultancy where Victoria Rowan presides as the fabulous Creatrix-in-Chief. It was in one of my entries for the Ideasmyth blog that I put down some preliminary thoughts on how this Dylan Thomas poem, and that sentence, worked. I then developed those ideas into a short paper I delivered earlier this month at the West Chester Poetry Conference, in a critical seminar on Dylan Thomas led by the excellent and estimable poet R. S. Gwynn, or Sam to those who know him (you can visit his Facebook page here).

My blog entry for today includes a few excerpts from that paper. But please bear with me. I love grammar. 

“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” is Dylan Thomas’s monument to an anonymous girl who perished in the firebombing of London during WWII. If you accept the poem’s denotational gloss, Thomas says that he will never cry or pontificate over the death of this girl. Such is his “mighty vaunt,” as Seamus Heaney called it, but as mighty as it may be, the music of the language is in counterpoint to the title and is clearly the orchestration of a monumental sadness. The sorrow is in the syntax. It is the tortured, hyper-dramatic utterance of a poet keening operatically. I’d like to look at how the orchestration works.

The poem is divided into four six-line stanzas, each rhyming ABCABC. Working across these four stanzas are four grammatical sentences, the first of which may be the strangest, most tortured sentence in twentieth-century poetry:

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.

The round Zion of the water bead! (My friends and I in 10^th grade went around repeating this phrase, for no other reason than its odd, emotional conviction.) In basic terms, the sentence says that he will never until the apocalyptic end of time mourn the girl’s death. On the page, however, it’s not that simple. The sentence is 83 words long and top-heavy with a massive adverbial clause (in the excerpt below, it is set off in brackets). The adverbial clause contains 52 words, including a 10-word adjectival modifier nested inside. The grammatical subject of the sentence, “I” occurs in line 10 (highlighted in yellow below), more than half way through, followed by its two main verbs, “let pray” and “sow” (underscored below). This opening torrent concludes with another multi-word adverbial modifier (set off in parentheses below), at the end of which is the word that signals the key idea of the poem, “death.”

Never [until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn]
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth (to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death).

In its contortion, the syntax conveys the tumult of anger and sadness the speaker feels facing the girl’s obliteration, even as he claims that he will never cry for her. The energy pent up in this crazy syntax reflects, to some degree, the horror that generated the expression.  Let’s look at how this mega-sentence draws to a close. Here is the schematized subject-predicate phase of the sentence:

[I] shall [never] let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth (to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.)

The phrase “to mourn / The majesty and burning of the child's death” is an infinitive verbal phrase functioning as an adverb, modifying the two main verbs, “let pray” and “sow.”  We see, therefore, that this massive opening sentence of the poem begins with an adverbial construction, and it closes with the same kind of construction, albeit shorter, at the end of which is lodged the central phrase of the poem, “the child’s death.” The positioning is significant. This phrase is located in a grammatically less powerful syntactic unit, an adverbial phrase, which limits its rhetorical punch. Thomas showcases the phrase but subtly limits its power.  Secondly, that phrase “the child’s death” is grammatically buried at the bottom of a vast sentence that is heaped upon it. The syntax, we might say, sets up a linguistic equivalence for the child buried under the rubble.

For all its teetering at the cliff, the meaning of this psychotic sentence is, in fact, construable, and the sentence is grammatically correct. It is a masterful demonstration of control over grammar and meaning. Thomas acknowledges, in the poem, that flesh and bone are subject to disintegration, but he simultaneously demonstrates how the poet, taking a stand against mayhem, can integrate his material into a life-affirming verbal structure that coheres. The determination to write something this complex and the effort involved in getting all the parts to settle and putting all the right words in the right places to rhyme is an act of love and a gesture of survival, maybe even triumph, which puts this poem on the side of life.

 

Here’s an audio clip of Dylan Thomas reading “A Refusal to Mourn.”

My thanks again to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for having me back as a guest-blogger this week.

Best,
John

 

More words that marked me, by John Foy

Earlier this year I was put to thinking about lines of poetry that meant a lot to me. This began when the poet Gerry Cambridge, who edits a fine, international literary journal in Scotland called The Dark Horse, asked me and several other poets to write brief essays on particular lines that had shaped us. So I wrote a short piece, published now in the current issue of The Dark Horse, about this line from Thomas Wyatt:

    Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind

The line had an effect upon me during my adolescence when I was just starting to see how language could light you up and open the doors of the heart and mind. Of course, all poetry seeks to hold the wind, a thought that imparts beauty to this line. So I wrote my appreciation for The Dark Horse. But in doing so I realized it was impossible to zero in on just one line of poetry. I decided, therefore, to go back and select more lines from other poems that have, in one way or another, put me on the path.

 

… Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thy self against thy fall.
(George Herbert)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
(T.S. Eliot)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
(Robert Frost)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
(W. B. Yeats)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nights come bringing the snow, and the dead howl
Under headlands in their windy dwelling
Because the Adversary put too easy questions
On lonely roads.
(W.H. Auden)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
(Elizabeth Bishop)

 

 

 

 

 

 

It pleases me to stand in silence here.
(Philip Larkin)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
(Seamus Heaney)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are more, but that's for another time.

Best,
John