The Best American Poetry

Elizabeth A. I. Powell, Guest Author August 5-9

This week we welcome Elizabeth A.I. Powell as our guest author. Elizabeth's forthcoming poetry book "Atomizer" is due out in Fall of 2020 from Louisiana State University Press. She is also the author of Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, and The Republic of Self. She teaches at Northern Vermont University, where she also edits Green Mountains Review. 

Welcome, Elizabeth

-- sdl

 

Don't "Keep This to Yourself": Dispatches from Vermont [by Elizabeth Powell]

The Poetry of Kerrin McCadden and the Opioid Crisis

This week I will be reporting from my beloved home state of Vermont. Summertime is short here, but it is filled with literary and music festivals, readings, conferences, workshops, art shows, ballet on the farm. Vermont Studio Center, Brattleboro Literary Festival, Bookstock, Bread and Puppet, The Painted Word reading series, Feast and Field in Barnard, Monday night poetry readings at the Lamp Shop in Burlington, Bread Loaf. Poems are singing themselves into existence. We have a large population of writers and artists. Here, even the Burlington Chief of Police is a writer with a book contract. 

But lately what troubles sleep, whatever sleep it is, (to reference our state’s inaugural Poet Laureate, Robert Frost) is not a bumper crop of apples and the hard work of harvesting. Lately Vermont has been harvesting bodies. 

The nationwide heroin epidemic hides here behind bucolic vistas of Holsteins, quaint white clapboard houses, craft breweries serving farm to table gluten free pizza, and old-timey country inns. Even here many suffer poverty of pocket and soul. “Men die miserably everyday,” William Carlos Williams once said, “for lack of what is found” in poetry.

So what is it about poetry that can heal us? For starters it bears witness in dark times. There is much despair in the air. Many feel what is unseen in the zeitgeist of our troubled and troubling times. On top of that mountain oftentimes opioids are cheaper and have “more bang for the buck” than a suitcase of Bud. 

How can poetry help? It gives sustenance to the human soul with the lyric enactment of narrative. Sharing stories is an ancient human way to ease the suffering of another, to develop empathy and understanding, to share solutions or ways to stay alive. The psychiatrists of the confessional poets surely understood this: Poet heal thyself. 

If one can speak the truth through narrative, it will heal shame and trauma, roots of addiction. My dear friend, Dr. Anne Johnston, recently passed away, she was a world-renowned neonatologist in the area of mother/infant opioid addiction. In an interview with the Times Argus newspaper before her death she said: “I would say that all have shame and the shame is particularly bad when you are pregnant and you are using. I think that fear dominates in terms of coming forward. Most women who get pregnant and who are using opioids and are dependent upon opioids say ‘OK, now I’m pregnant. I’m going to be able to get myself off.’ The reasoning of it doesn’t follow through to the actual disease of addiction and you can’t reason yourself out of an addiction.”

Vermont poet Kerrin McCadden understands this intuitively, poetically, and gives us the perspective from the poet’s eye in her forthcoming chapbook, winner of the Button Poetry prize (March 24, 2020), Keep This to Yourself. On the loss of her brother to this crisis, McCadden says “poems are our secular prayers. They are the way we name and understand the world. Increasingly, the general public is hungry for poems. Poems are a primary engine for storytelling. The lyric poem seems to be “pre-story” in its adherence to the moment, but a series of lyric poems can tell a story, can help readers live in those moments. I think it’s important to invite those who have not lived with addiction in their families to live in the moments of poems about such families. I want to break silence about the opioid epidemic. I want poems—hopefully some of mine—to help people build compassion.”

Keep This to Yourself asks readers to reflect on the old fashioned values of family secret keeping and the damaging effects the practice has on the greater society. The chapbook’s title is, then, a dare. We can’t keep any of this to ourselves any longer; not to mention the book itself discloses the secret that is making large swathes of our society sick. Secrets force us to evaluate the nature of truth. And truth is in short supply in much of public discourse these days. 

The speaker in these tightly hewn and achingly beautiful poems is/was a sister, and these poems follow the speaker from childhood into adulthood. In the first poem of the collection, “When My Brother Dies,“ the speaker muses on the fact that even when her brother was living he was of the walking dead. In life as in death, the river carries much of the narrative. The lineation, like the river, meanders and cuts into what is solid. The speaker fights for her core, she will not go to the other side:

It happened already. It has happened five times

    and will happen again. My brother is dead.  

        We try to recover what he stole and start 

            by making a list we can’t finish.

I’ve been living up and down the same riverbank

    since I started having families. I stay on my 

        side of the river, which makes our list full 

            of half-truths. I will not cross the river.

McCadden’s expert use of repetition and dazzling, take your breath away syntax help to weave the complexity of the subject of addiction, its life and death consequences where none of us, even us readers, are spared what it means to be a witness. The lithe juxtaposition of images through most of the poems in the collection lets the reader live in the liminal space between past and present, the place of shadows, as a means to stand on the precipice of truth and survey possibility.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Goes Boating [by David Lehman]

Shelley was a classic Leo with Taurus rising. Born on this day (4 August) in 1792, he was the middle man in the greatest double-play combination of all time, Keats to Shelley to Byron. He had the vision of a prophet and the confidence of a madman and he was idealistic, with Saturn, Neptune, and Venus dominant among his planets and Libra, Leo, and Taurus among his signs. He shares his birthday with Barack Obama and Louis Armstrong, which gives you some idea of how he presaged the future of music, that art to which all others aspire, and the illusion of political change based on hopes that spring eternal in the human breast.

The symmetry in his natal chart is fearless. He is a man of heroic temper --  without Byron's lusty humor or Keats's morbid sensuality but with a power of breath equal to the wind. He died, fittingly, in a squall, at sea. The fire and earth in his chart were vanquished by the elements of water and air. His moon was in Pisces, his Venus in Leo.

Shelley made love to women sincerely, with attentive care, and wrote poems to her, whatever her name was, Jane or Mary or the third one. He didn't "hold" with monogamy. He went to University College in Oxford and got sent down for writing "The Necessity of Atheism." He was a strong swimmer, though this ability availed him naught in the end. His heterodox views made Shelley the hero of wannabe poets for a century after his death. To get a flavor of that old romantic aura, read Andre Maurois's wonderful bio, Ariel. Alas, Shelley's literary reputation took a hit from Arnold, an even more wounding thrust from Eliot, and then came the backlash in full intensity.

Everyone at the campfire had to tell a spooky story. Byron and Shelley had good ones, but Mary Shelley [right] won with "Frankenstein." They were in Switzerland. Who was Jane? He serenaded her with a guitar.The lyrics were lovely. She kept his picture in a locket along with a lock of his hair, and everything that he touched acquired posthumous value. Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" centers on the archive of a poet modeled after Shelley and what a single-minded professor will do to get at it. History has been kinder to Keats's reputation than to Shelley's, but it used to be that if you mentioned one you had to mention the other or you would have bad luck all day, the same as with James and Edith Wharton.

If Dante had been reborn as an Englishman, it would have been in the person of Shelley, who venerated Rousseau. Plato's parable of the cave could have been dreamed with Shelley in mind. He was probably the most complicated of the major romantic poets. Coleridge was his superior intellectually; Keats, always better loved, was Milton's true heir, able to pack as much sensual pleasure in a line of verse as pentameter allowed; Blake was crazier; Byron funnier; and Wordsworth captured, all in all, the spirit of the age more successfully than any of his contemporaries. But Shelley was the closest thing to a visionary in the lot.

When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" sees a woman on the beach and composes a villanelle about her image, it is in the manner of Shelley. For a great poet Shelley wrote some really bad lines, in which he stumbles and falls and bleeds in his efforts to shed his corporeal self and merge his romantic soul with the wind that is the creative breath of God. His skylark sings to us less melodiously than Keats's nightingale, but that's paradox for you -- that Shelley, who was given to seeing things in retrospect, would oddly favor the bird of early morn.

On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams went out boating in Italy and drowned. Could Shelley swim? Perhaps not. But would he have survived the squall? Doubtfully. They were going to burn the bodies, but Shelley's heart defied the flames, refused to burn, and was rescued by Edward Trelawny. Byron said that his much misunderstood friend was the greatest man he had ever known. -- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

The symmetry in his natal chart is fearless. He is a man of heroic temper --  without Byron's lusty humor or Keats's morbid sensuality but with a power of breath equal to the wind. He died, fittingly, in a squall, at sea. The fire and earth in his chart were vanquished by the elements of water and air. His moon was in Pisces, his Venus in Leo.

Shelley made love to women sincerely, with attentive care, and wrote poems to her, whatever her name was, Jane or Mary or the third one. He didn't "hold" with monogamy. He went to University College in Oxford and got sent down for writing "The Necessity of Atheism." He was a strong swimmer, though this ability availed him naught in the end. His heterodox views made Shelley the hero of wannabe poets for a century after his death. To get a flavor of that old romantic aura, read Andre Maurois's wonderful bio, Ariel. Alas, Shelley's literary reputation took a hit from Arnold, an even more wounding thrust from Eliot, and then came the backlash in full intensity.

Everyone at the campfire had to tell a spooky story. Byron and Shelley had good ones, but Mary Shelley [right] won with "Frankenstein." They were in Switzerland. Who was Jane? He serenaded her with a guitar.The lyrics were lovely. She kept his picture in a locket along with a lock of his hair, and everything that he touched acquired posthumous value. Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" centers on the archive of a poet modeled after Shelley and what a single-minded professor will do to get at it. History has been kinder to Keats's reputation than to Shelley's, but it used to be that if you mentioned one you had to mention the other or you would have bad luck all day, the same as with James and Edith Wharton.

If Dante had been reborn as an Englishman, it would have been in the person of Shelley, who venerated Rousseau. Plato's parable of the cave could have been dreamed with Shelley in mind. He was probably the most complicated of the major romantic poets. Coleridge was his superior intellectually; Keats, always better loved, was Milton's true heir, able to pack as much sensual pleasure in a line of verse as pentameter allowed; Blake was crazier; Byron funnier; and Wordsworth captured, all in all, the spirit of the age more successfully than any of his contemporaries. But Shelley was the closest thing to a visionary in the lot.

When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" sees a woman on the beach and composes a villanelle about her image, it is in the manner of Shelley. For a great poet Shelley wrote some really bad lines, in which he stumbles and falls and bleeds in his efforts to shed his corporeal self and merge his romantic soul with the wind that is the creative breath of God. His skylark sings to us less melodiously than Keats's nightingale, but that's paradox for you -- that Shelley, who was given to seeing things in retrospect, would oddly favor the bird of early morn.

On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams went out boating in Italy and drowned. Could Shelley swim? Perhaps not. But would he have survived the squall? Doubtfully. They were going to burn the bodies, but Shelley's heart defied the flames, refused to burn, and was rescued by Edward Trelawny. Byron said that his much misunderstood friend was the greatest man he had ever known. -- DL

Met Percent: Week Three [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost Gods

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” - Montaigne

Entering the galleries of Greece and Rome was startling, coming as I did from Egyptian art. Jackal heads in profile on frontal torsos had become familiar, normal. 

But a new normal arrived: geometry, anatomical form, and gods “like us”. “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none / more wonderful than man . . .”      - Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Divine Proportion”

500-400 BCE. Big Math. Discovered, lost, and rediscovered . . . “Things which coincide with one another are equal one to another.” - Euclid

The original Met logo was based on a woodcut by Friar Luca Pacioli (1445–1517). He taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci, and Leonardo illustrated his “On the Divine Proportion”.

You get an actual measure of golden ratio proportion and “beauty” using the golden ratio face calculator that is included in PhiMatrix golden ratio design software (2012).

3G

“The Three Graces, so popular in their time . . . that they appear on mosaics, frescoes, sarcophagi, silver tableware, terra-cotta oil lamps, personal objects such as engraved gems, and even coins.” Roman art, gallery 169, MetText

Greece and Rome continue: Versace’s Medusa; Super Bowl Roman numerals (I - LIII); the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials; and of course the precedent for txting: the abbreviation. 

a.k.a., a.m., p.m., i.e., e.g., p.s., (sic), vs., etc.

Laws of the Folds

Veils in stone. Glorious in execution. Whenever I feel that the artistry in representing the fold is underrated, I look to George Bridgman. I used to give copies of Drawing the Draped Figure: The Seven Laws of the Folds to many design colleagues.

Although “not on view”, the annotation of the folds of an evening dress in the Met refers to Oscar Wilde’s principles of dress: "I am not proposing any antiquarian revival of ancient costume, but trying merely to point out the right laws of dress, laws which are dictated by art and not by archaeology, by science and not by fashion; and just as the best work of art in our days is that which combines classic grace with absolute reality, from continuation of the Greek principles of beauty . . .  will come, I feel certain, the costumes of the future." 

 

Figure/Ground

Q: What is it about Greek figure that makes me crazy?

A: It grounds what will become neoclassic - the “master drawing” tradition I love.

 

Why Poets Love Noir #5 [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis in dialogue]

What is the relationship between a Hitchcock movie and the noir genre?

Suzanne Lummis:

These days, for certain complicated historical reasons, the noir scholars maintain that film noir is not a genre— that most of these movies didn’t know they were “films noir” when there were being made. They thought they were “crime thrillers.”  On the other hand, Hitchcock movies are part of a genre. And that genre is called. . . Hitchcock. He’s one of a handful of directors with a subject area and style so consistent and distinctive that they became their own genre. (The way no one says, ‘I’m going to see a Swedish movie about suffering people searching for the meaning of their lives.’ They’re going to see a Bergman movie.)  In terms of similarity, both types of movies have crime at their center. However, Hitchcock was engaged in an almost clinical exploration of how the sense of suspense is created in the audience then exploded on the screen. The Psycho shower scene—78 camera set ups, 52 edits. Film noir isn’t as good in that area. Most were made quickly on a budget. Who had that kind of time?   

David Lehman:

The quick answer is that Hitchcock is in a category all his own. That said, some of his films are as noir as you get: Vertigo, where the hero loses his lover twice – and possibly his sanity; Psycho, where the terminal revelations, the solution to the case, are far from reassuring; The Birds, where nature erupts as if in a vicious rebuke of mankind; and the lesser Suspicion, where Cary Grant carries a glass of possibly poisoned milk up the stairs to Joan Fontaine, his timid wife quaking in bed. Others, too, have pronounced noir elements notwithstanding the feeling of relief, at movie’s end, once the culprit has been captured. The murderer dies in Shadow of a Doubt, but Teresa Wright does lose her uncle; Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train is now free to marry his true love, but the violent death of his wife was not the way he wanted it to happen; the jig is up for Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder, but how happy can Grace Kelly be, knowing her husband has tried to kill her? There are noir elements in Notorious, Spellbound, and Rear Window, but the very mention of these reminds me that Hitchcock is in a category of his own.

I’ve written an essay titled “Hitchcock’s America” that appeared in American Heritage. Maybe I should include a link. Or this poem from my new book Playlist, where I get to sneak in a mention of five Hitchcock titles in two of the lines.

I live in Hitchcock’s America
What does that mean
It means the ride always ends in an amusement park
and a girl and her uncle can have the same first name
Cary Grant is suave Jimmy Stewart has a broken leg
or a bruised psyche Doris Day’s voice fills the house
Even the Jews and the blacks are white
Even the brunettes are blonde
I confess I’m at the end of my rope,
spellbound by the notorious master of suspicion
maybe Janet shouldn’t have taken that dough or had that tryst
Joel McCrea tells America that all Europe’s lights are out
and Priscilla Lane recites Emma Lazarus’s lines
atop the Statue of Liberty

Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series. 

"Sometimes the cow puts her foot in the bucket" [David Lehman interviews A. R. Ammons (Part III)]

Self Portrait (c) A. R. Ammons 1977

David Lehman A. R. Ammons Interview Part III

Find Part II here.

Find Part I here. 

Self Portrait (c) A. R. Ammons 1977

David Lehman A. R. Ammons Interview Part III

Find Part II here.

Find Part I here. 

Self Portrait (c) A. R. Ammons 1977

David Lehman A. R. Ammons Interview Part III

Find Part II here.

Find Part I here. 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Angela Narciso Torres [by Emma Trelles]

flamingo hammock palm, 24 x 24 in. oil on canvas, eleanor blair

Harvesting the Heart
by Angela Narciso Torres

                                    In Florida, I shall eat a palm seed and see if that’ll grow a new heart for me.

                                                                                                                                    -D.H. Lawrence
Indeed, swallowing a seed seems the better option.
For stealing a palm’s heart from its solitary stem
is back-breaking work and spells certain death
for the tree. The part you can eat, otherwise known
as swamp cabbage, lobster of vegetables, or
burglar’s thigh, lies deep in the green trunk between
woody bark and where the fronds begin. You’ll need
a machete to work down the trunk, cutting away
fibrous layers one at a time, each about the weight
of a small child. You’ll want to give up after the third
or fourth layer. Don’t stop. Nearer the core it’s denser,
sap-drenched, and very tender. You’d be surprised,
despite how much you’ve uncovered—arms sore,
fingers splintered—the sheer size of that heart.

 

Angela Narciso Torres  is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Book Literature Award/Poetry. Recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly. Her chapbook, To the Bone, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications and her second full length collection, What Happens Is Neither, from Four Way Books.  A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She resides in South Florida where she joins the 2020 Palm Beach Poetry Festival faculty as a manuscript consultant.

"To Summer" [by David Lehman]

Shall I compare a season to a day, 
a woman to a body like a violin?
Summer is the reason for my grin,
and on that violin I would play.

In the nave of her church I would pray.
Though summer’s lease hath all too short a date,
I shall fall into winter and spring to my fate,
and while you wait I’ll be frank and sing “My Way.”

But just as a whole is greater than the sum
of its parts, or `twere a bummer, rank indeed,
so a garden outlives its fiercest weed
to blossom under my green thumb.
On her I shall gaze from head to bum.
Where summer follows I shall lead.

Stacey posted this poem here on July 30, 2009. In a comment she said there was an interesting back story and Laura Orem asked me to spill it. The Moira in the anecdote, Moira Egan, was editing, together with Clarinda Harriss, an anthology of sizzling hot poems, Hot Sonnets, published by Entasis Press in 2011.

<<< OK -- I'll quote from the e-mail I sent to Moira [Egan] in answer to her question about the poem's publishing history. "To Summer" was written back in 1999 or 2000 when Nerve.com was a hot and heavy web site, a pioneer in the lit-clit cyber-sphere. Ross Martin, an editor at Nerve, who got me to write the parody of a personal ad in "When a Woman Loves a Man," was coordinating a contest for HBO, which was then promoting a series devoted to happy hookers. It was about how they were real people and what they did was consistent with feminist ideals of self-actualization and taking control of their lives. Contestants were shown photos of the lovelies and invited to choose one and write a sonnet to her. I chose the woman named "Summer," because of the season, and because summer and sonnets go together in my mind like summer and smoke in Hart Crane's. The line I lift from Shakespeare's sonnet 18 ("And summer's lease hath all too short a date") is among the most poignant I know. I feel it intensely now as we approach what I think of as high summer: hot and humid, good swimming weather unto it rains, and then the beauty of dark green trees in a haze, with the refreshment of white-flesh nectarines, and the crimson geraniums ready to sparkle when the sun returns. Anyway that's the secret of the sonnet. If summer is her name, you can't tell the tenor from the vehicle as they used to say before the New Criticism got old. The contest winner was going to get a dinner date with the lady. They decided I was ineligible. And, alas, the show wasn't a hit. But I had fun. -- DL >>>

Summer studio shots with Mary Ann Strandell... [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

This month, I am locked in the shimmery construction sites of Mary Ann Strandell. I snapped these process shots in her studio, and then we planted a geranium border in her garden. Her husband Michael Rees also creates fantasies: giant AR-enabled inflatables into which you can project your dreams or nightmares.

I like her paintings at this stage, when it looks like they could collapse. The light is gnawing at the western edge of the scaffolding; the light is smashed into the sixth floor balcony. It is drippy with life juices. At this moment, the painting still believes it can grow up to be an astronaut. (Is the painting female? Will there will be a space suit in its size?)

Mary Ann Strandell
Image 1: Tower/construction/Tribeca, Image 2: Tower/cell

Why Poets Love Noir # 4 [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

The soundtrack in noir movies, and the popular songs incorporated in them, whether in whole or in part, contribute significantly to the effect of the film. Which example(s) would you single out?  

Suzanne Lummis:

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), has Dix Steele and Laurel Gray—Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame [see image on left] —sitting at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks, I was a lonely one, till you. I used to lie awake and wonder, if there was someone in this wide, wide world made for me…  He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture. He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that's what happiness felt like.’  And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song.  That’s noir. 

David Lehman

Like the cigarettes, the drinks, and the clothes -- the fedoras and trench-coats, the women's hats and hose -- the music is a critical part of the noir charm. You have composers on the order of Bernard Herrmann [pictured right] doing the soundtracks for Hitchcock's most noir films, Vertigo and Psycho. You have jazz soundtracks from Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) and Miles Davis (Elevator to the Gallows). You have songs like “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda that seem to sum up an entire aspect of the noir attitude. (Click here for an enjoyable detour.) You have David Raksin’s “Laura,” without which that Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney classic would be a lesser work. You have these great American standards that show up almost as facilitators of the plot: “Tangerine” when Stanwyck and MacMurrary realize the jig is up in Double Indemnity; the same song on the car radio when Stanwyck is a spoiled heiress in Sorry, Wrong Number; “Too Marvelous for Words” when Bogart holes up in Bacall’s place in Dark Passage. (What else do these three songs , "Laura," "Tangerine," and "Too Marvelous for Words," have in common? Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for all three.) You have unforgettable scenes. Sam Jaffe, mastermind of the jewel heist in The Asphalt Jungle, is caught because he can’t take his eyes off the teenage girl and boy dancing the lindy, enjoying themselves with the nickels he provided for the jukebox.

Note: Professor Frank Tomasulo recommends this essay, "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir." http://www.f.waseda.jp/norm/filmnoir/visualmotifs.pdf

On JA's Birthday, Four Introductions to His Poetry

From Jacket here are introductions made by Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, and Susan Schultz to poetry readings given by John Ashbery. Kenneth's is from 1963; Richard's from 1967; Susan's from 1996, and Lehman's from 2008.

"Modern Love": XVII [by George Meredith]

At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
Hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name.
Such play as this the devils might appal!
But here's the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamoured of an acting nought can tire,
Each other, like true hypocrites, admire;
Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemerioe,
Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.

-- George Meredith

Meredith posed for Henry Wallis's painting "The Death of Chatterton" (1856), above.

Next Line, Please: Get Hurt—or Go Back to Work [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week we wrote poems culminating in one of following lines:

“No one was supposed to get hurt.”

“And then he [or she/ I] went back to work as if nothing had happened.”

The first line is a household phrase from crime dramas; the second was taken from Franz Kafka as a familiar sentence “from any number of old stories—though it might not have appeared in any of them.” 

Michael C. Rush chose the first of these to conclude his poem “In the Beginning”:

Everyone was supposed to die.
There was a plan.
Some people were going to propagate.
Some were intended to languish.
But there was deviation from the plan.
People stole focus from the gestalt.
Shouting “Look at me!”
they looked at themselves.
Screaming “Watch this!”
they did this and that.
The plan was abandoned.
The plan was rejected.
The gnostic became toxic.
People exceeded their purview.
People superseded their program.
Or believed they did.
Crying “We have usurped our destiny!”
they thought they had.
Postulating suffering as the coin
with which fate could be bought,
they spent themselves
to acquire a rougher path
to the eternal poverty.
O, unhappy knaves!
Everyone was meant to die.
No one was supposed to get hurt.

Not a bad way of twisting our expectations for a well-deserved "ohhh!" at the end.

In “You Just Went Back to Work,” Elizabeth Solsburg makes use of both lines in a narrative about a patient in a psych ward who had hoped for a spousal rescue, but... :

When they told you I had to stay
in the psych ward, I thought you’d rescue me,
and take me away somewhere safe;
I counted on you to stand up and say
I was not a danger to myself
or anyone—that this was just my way
of getting you to pay attention to me,
to shift your focus back to my life, away
from all the petty miscellany that eats your time,
that you shouldn’t be bothered with anyway.
You were supposed to tell them I’d go home with you,
that you would make sure I was OK,
you should have told them it was all a big mistake—
that no one was supposed to get hurt, especially me,
but instead you left me here and went away,
drove back to work like nothing had happened,
like it was any other day

Pamela Joyce S’s “The Cleaving” reflects the power of punctuation which can drastically alter the meaning of a sentence:

Given the years of feigned happiness
before deceit and calamity,
he asked, can there be equanimity—
a mutual parting of ways—
cerebral, free of regret and
fester? He turned the knife to test her
as she struggled for an answer.

No. One was supposed to get hurt.

Angela Ball offers up a prose poem, “The Golden Age of Piracy”:

I hadn’t meant to deceive my colleagues, at least not at first, when I said I was spending the weekend with my friend, not adding that the friend was a fourteen-year-old Labrapointer.

When I left the house, Grace O’Malley climbed to the second floor to gaze down from her window seat, chin resting on the sill, gaze following my gray sedan as it pulled onto the street.

Entering the restroom at work, I heard a conversation between stalls. “Don’t mention it to ____. They might want to come along.” I turned and left. Probably they were going to a bar, the kind where people “hooked up,” a thing inciting terror, not interest. What did interest me was the secret of how people talked to each other, always knowing what to say. What did was pirates and their strict rules. Perhaps their lore held, like buried treasure, the secret of human behavior. I knew not to expect answers for why the grayness of Grace O’Malley’s muzzle was expanding, and the skin inside her lower lip, once black, had turned a jagged pink. The bathroom conversation went on. “Is she ‘on the spectrum’? —I don’t know, but that would explain a lot.” As Hugh Rawson says in his pirate’s dictionary,

1. The meanings of words change considerably, according to who says them, to whom, and in what circumstances.

2. The meanings of words change over time.

3. The way a word is spoken or said also is important in determining its meaning.

4. The power of a word as well as its meaning depends greatly on the setting in which it is used.

If I were on a “spectrum,” I would not be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet. I would be a Jolly Roger, saying My Prisoners Will Survive. I am an observer. This made me good at writing report after report defending our unit’s utility to the institution, good at studying pirates, and good at taking care of my dog.

One day when I had taken Grace O’Malley to the clinic, Brandy called with the dreadful report. “Come around five,” she said. “We’ll light a candle.” Blackbeard drank rum laced with gunpowder. Where to find some? I knew that my setting and circumstances were about to change.

I flung open my door, shouted into the hall, “After today I’m leaving. Let the pirates come and fire our cannon.”

Then I went back to work as though nothing had happened.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the entire post, and tune in next week for a new prompt!

On Frank O'Hara's Death [by David Lehman]

The critic says FOH was smart to die at forty
because “Death is often a good career move in poetry”

as if he committed suicide
when all he did watch the tide

drunk as in a Sung Dynasty tune
trying to embrace the moon

Summer of 1969 and the Mets [by Greg Pattenaude}

1969.  A year filled with rich history. This morning I watched a replay, in real time, of Apollo 11 lifting off for the moon at 9:32 am Eastern Daylight Time.  Fifty years ago, I watched on a black and white Zenith television set in my family's den.  Several days later, we watched on that Sunday night as two Americans set foot on the moon's surface.  This was the stuff that captivated kids growing up in the space age of the 1960s. 

But for this 11 year old, the moon landing, while historic as it was, was sandwiched between an even bigger story: the incredible journey of the 1969 Amazin' Mets.  After seven seasons of playing lovable losers, the Mets had found a magic formula of young, strong pitching, superb defense, timely hitting, the use of a platoon system making an average player seem like a superstar and, perhaps, a bit of divine intervention. 

After a poor start like all of their other seasons, including losing on opening day to the expansion Montreal Expos, the Mets started to string together wins.  For the first time in their history, going into July,  they actually had won more games than they had lost and were in pursuit of the first place Chicago Cubs, who also were having an unexpectedly good season after years of ineptitude.  There was a three game series in New York starting July 8, two afternoon games with a night game sandwiched in the middle.  The Mets won on the 8th, setting up the night of July 9th.  This was the night of the Mets' Bar Mitzvah, Confirmation, and Quinceañera wrapped up into one.  On that night, 59,000 thousand fans, 3,000 over seating capacity, packed Shea Stadium to see the Mets play a game that really mattered.  Some fans that couldn't get in on this hot July night were seen climbing trees to get a look from beyond the left field fence.  On this night, we watched a young Tom Seaver record out after out.  I called my friend Jimmy to say "are you watching this?"  For course he was watching.  This family even had a color set.  After the phone call, no one dare move from our den as my mother, father, grandmother and sister were glued to the Zenith.  The crowd's cheers kept getting louder and louder as the game progressed.  The game entered the 9th inning, with the Mets having the lead and Seaver was still perfect -  no hits allow, no walks, no errors, and no Cub baserunners.  He got the first out in the top of the 9th, and then stepped in a Cub named Jimmy Qualls.  The left handed batter lined a Seaver pitch to left center field to break up the perfect game.  The fever-pitch crowd was stunned, a few booed, but then was followed by a chorus of applause reserved for the finest symphony conductor.  Seaver got the final two outs in a game known as his "Impefect Game".  But it was clear that the Mets had team that was actually capable of winning and the lovable losers moniker was shed.

The Cubs bounced back to win the next afternoon and for the next month, it seemed like the Mets had plateaued.  The Cubs kept winning, and by mid August the Mets were 9 1/2 game behind the Cubs.  That timeframe coincided with two events.  One of those was in the Town of Bethel, New York, where a music festival was happening, Woodstock. Three days of peace, love and music. Heck, the New York State Thruway was closed.  Luckily for us living on the east side of Hudson River, our Sunday August 17 trip to see the Mets against the expansion San Diego Padres didn't close the Taconic Parkway. That date on the Mets calendar happened to be Banner Day, a tradition which started when the Mets occupied the Polo Grounds. Fans got to make signs and parade them around the field, and the best one got a prize.  On Saturday around the same time as the Grateful Dead and CCR were playing at Yasgur's Farm, I called up Jimmy and said let's make a banner.  We got an old white bed sheet out of my hall closet, took pictures out of the 1969 Mets yearbook, and stuck them on the four corners.  For the text....well, let me state that it did say something, but 50 years later, I'm still embarrassed by our corny and grammatically challenged poem.  But it did get us on the field. 

Around the 8th inning of the first game of the double header, Jack Lightcap, the Public Address announcer at Shea, instructed all Banner Day participants to line up outside the stadium.  So Jimmy and I, with banner in tow, went. Other Banner Day participants who were lined up near us were amused by the sight of two preteens with message that had a lot of heart but made absolutely no sense. We didn't care.  Bravely, we slowly moved forward around the fenced off area behind the stadium and got closer to the left hand turn we would make to reenter Shea. Finally we approached the back of the green center field fence. Above us was the batter's eye where loudspeakers amplified Jane Jarvis' organ medley.  And then we were in, looking up at 40,000 people as we crossed the dirt warning track and approached the lush green grass. I recall that it actually smelled like grass, just like anyone's backyard. Suddenly, we were walking on the same grass where Tommie Agee plays. Heck, Willie Mays has stood here.This is a dream. We carried our signed towards the infield, passed by the pitcher's mound where the judges sat to view the banners, continued by home plate, then took a left turn in front of the Mets' dugout. Rod Gaspar, number 17, had come out to watch. We finished our fantasy walk along dirt separating the grass from the yellow field level seats, and exited through the Mets' bullpen. Did all this just happen?  As for the Mets, they won both games of the doubleheader 3-2, and never looked back from that point. I think it was the banner or maybe that the Cubs self-destructed for the remainder of the season.

The miracle year continued, with the Mets defeating the Cubs at Shea in early September, aided by the curse of a black cat running in front of the Cubs dugout.  The Mets moved into first place about a week later. This all lead to the night of September 24, 1969, clinching the National League east against the Cardinals at 9:07pm.  While July 9 was their coming out party, I view September 24 as a Holy Day, a day to be revered and annually celebrate that evening of pure joy when fans rushed the field and players found out that champagne stings the eyes.  The Mets would conclude the miracle by defeating the Braves in three game straight in the first ever National League Championship series and then defeating the highly favored Baltimore Orioles to make the Mets champions of baseball.

Last month at Citi Field, the Mets honored the 1969 team.  There was Jerry Koosman and Jerry Grote, Ron Swoboda and Art Shamsky, Cleon Jones and Buddy Harrelson.  Wayne Garrett,  J.C. Martin, Bobby Pfeil, Jim McAndew, Jack DiLauro,  Duffy Dyer, Rod Gaspar, Dr Ron Taylor and Ed Kranepool also were there.  Ed, who recently had a kidney transplant, was chosen to speak to the crowd on behalf of the team, followed by an extremely well done video compilation of season and historical highlights from 1969 meshed into huge flashback. Sadly, Tom Seaver, who had earned his nickname as "The Franchise" on that July 9 night 50 years ago, could not attend as the pains of dementia have removed him from public life. Likewise, several other players could not attend for various health and personal reasons.  And even more sadly, five players are no longer with us: Don Clendenon, Tommie Agee, Ed Charles, Don Cardwell and Tug McGraw.  And neither was their manager Gil Hodges, their strong but quiet leader, who has passed away prior to the start of the 1972 season.  His wife Joan was their in his honor, and it's my hope Gil finally gets his long overdue spot in baseball's Hall of Fame next year while Joan is still around to see it.

With the remaining living players in their 70s and 80s, this was likely the last mass gathering of this team, who brought so much joy to so many people.  That was a melancholy and sobering thought.  We are all getting older and my baseball heroes are in their twilight of life.  But at least for one day, it was nice to be 11 again and relive these wonderful memories of the 1969 Mets, New York's greatest sports story.

Elaine Equi equals everyday euphoria [by David Lehman]

For Elaine Equi on July 24, 2017

I know it's your birthday
on the fifth floor of the building
where both of us work
although we're not there now
we were there when
you told me the twenty-fourth
of July was the day I said no
kidding that's also the day my 
son Joe was born and now I'm
here (Ithaca) and you're there
(the city) and I hope your sublet
is nice remember we have 
Belmont to look forward to
(even in Boston they 
call New York the city)

--  Click here and here for more about this all-star.

The Met Percent: Week Two [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost a Face

Faces are distant, a bit melancholy, with a youthful, somewhat automatic beauty”. Egyptian art, gallery 121, MetText 

This is the beginning of semi-circular eyes. Semi is sufficient, more than sufficient in these halls of faces.

Some faces are more distant than others . . .

 

Ruin Lust

Wooden boats to sail to the afterlife. Fragments of jewelry. Wondrous arrangements of shards. Marred lotus blossoms. Photographs when sepia reigned. 

Ruins, real or confected, embody "the triumph of time over strength, a melancholy but not unpleasant thought". - Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 1762.

‘But the closer I came to the ruins . . . the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.” - W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995.

“I see a day in the future when the world as we know it has ended and the only reason I am able to survive is the experience I have gained playing these [post apocalyptic role playing] games. Crazy, I know but a man is allowed to dream right?” - Bill Wilson, [PARPG Review], Appauls, 2019. See Frostpunk, Horizon Zero Dawn, Neverdark, Wasteland 2.

 

Not Documented

“With time and custom a man doth acquaint and enure himself to all strangeness; but the more I frequent and know myself, the more my deformitie astonieth and the less I understand myself.” - Montaigne

 

On Entering the “Afterwork“

From the galleries 100-138 covering the Kingdoms of Egypt emerge the first learnings. The slow non-directed viewings of these relics allow memory to inform the present. What will my “function” be in the afterwork? I start at 65 this intuitive tracing . . . my Papyrus of Alec.

 

4.5% Met*

*At this writing, rooms 139-149 seem to be missing. So far, not one of the entry staff can explain the missing rooms or room numbers. These will be investigated.

Why Poets Love Noir #3 [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

This is part three of a dialogue between two poets who are hooked on film noir.

Do you believe "The Maltese Falcon" should be categorized as "noir"?

Suzanne Lummis:
It's a terrific movie but ultimately not as dark as others -- Noir Gris. But regardless of the quality of darkness, I'd feel funny about any poet of my generation, or the one following, who hadn't seen John Huston’s classic with the great Warner Brothers cast (Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha J. Cook). I'd wonder what else they hadn't seen, or read. Had they seen On the Waterfront? Had they read Orwell's 1984, or only read about it?  Et cetera. But re. Noir or Not, there's an undercurrent of pessimism that we usually feel from film noir and don't in The Maltese Falcon. However, it has many noir elements, the dialogue certainly, especially in the final scene where Bogart tells Mary Astor,  "I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it. If you're lucky you'll get life and be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."   

David Lehman

The Maltese Falcon, one of my all-time favorites, is similar to a noir movie but not the same thing, mainly because the male protagonist does not succumb to the wiles of the femme fatale.  Compare Bogart in The Maltese Falcon to Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. The former belongs to a different genre, the detective story, in which justice, however much compromised, does prevail in the end.  Sam Spade refuses to “play the sap” for his femme fatale; that is alas exactly what Mitchum does with Jane Greer in Out of the Past. The division is epitomized in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The detective stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” stand on the one side, and the gothic horrors (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) on the other.  The detective story affirms the possibility of justice, of the restoration of order. The noir movie suggests the opposite and introduces the figure of a femme fatale to ensure that failure or death is the likely end of any criminal or questionable enterprise.

Beyond its antithetical relation to Out of the Past, there are plenty of reasons to consider this, John Huston’s first movie, in the context of noir.  Sam Spade is not unambiguously a servant of law, order, and ethical kashruth.  The brilliant Warner Brothers cast – Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mary Astor join Bogart – arouses noir expectations, and the status of the sculpted bird,  a fake responsible for at least three deaths, elevates the tale to the level of a parable about fortune, value, and desire.

There are a lot of other movies that I like to consider in relation to noir: Le Jour se leve [Daybreak] (Marcel Carne), if only because of the number of cigarettes that Jean Gabin smokes, and A Bout de soufflé [Breathless] (Jean-Luc Godard), primarily because of Belmondo’s imitation of Bogart. Neither is noir, but the former is like it, and the latter is an homage to it that testifies to the genre’s success. 

Click here for last week's exchange in which Night and the City and The Asphalt Jungle are discussed.

A Poem for Paul Violi, born today, 20 July

Romulus and Remus (for Paul Violi) [by David Lehman]

Look for Remus in the index of a book
And you are bound to get “See Romulus”
Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonder
About indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the former
As the plural except in a financial context, and how
An index to a book that may not exist may imply
A whole biography, as my friend Paul Violi
Showed in his poem “Index.” My late friend
Paul Violi, whom I still see in the street
Sometimes, walking along at an unhurried pace
So if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the corner
Before the light turns green.

IM Paul Viioli, 20 July 1944 -- 2 April 2011

Look for Remus in the index of a book
And you are bound to get “See Romulus”
Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonder
About indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the former
As the plural except in a financial context, and how
An index to a book that may not exist may imply
A whole biography, as my friend Paul Violi
Showed in his poem “Index.” My late friend
Paul Violi, whom I still see in the street
Sometimes, walking along at an unhurried pace
So if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the corner
Before the light turns green.

IM Paul Viioli, 20 July 1944 -- 2 April 2011

Half-Life (after Friedrich Hölderlin) [by David Lehman]

After Hölderlin

Yellow pears
wild roses
the lake
your swans
and kisses
your head
in water.

But where,
when winter,
is sunshine
and shadow?
The walls,
silent and
cold, clatter.

[from The Atlantic, October 2018]