The Best American Poetry

Kiss: Archie Rand collaborates with David Shapiro (2017)

"Kiss” consists of six units with David Shapiro's text written in his hand with his drawn additions. 

"Hotel" [by Guillaume Apollinaire; trans. David Lehman]

My room’s the shape of a cage

The sun crooks his arm through the bars

But I, who smoke to make a mirage,

Let the flame of day light my cigar

I don’t want to work I want to smoke

 

 

far left: Apollinaire; left: portrait of Apollinaire by Giorgio de Chirico (1917)

Graham Greene Goes to Havana [by David Lehman]

Here's to William H. Pritchard, an old-line English professor who takes his reading seriously and writes about it for the Sewanee Review.

In the Winter 2010 issue of the venerable journal, Pritchard reviews an edition of Graham Greene's letters (Graham Greene:A  Life in Letters, ed. Richard Greene; Norton). It's an exemplary review -- well-written, enjoyably opinionated, tactful. 

I love it that Pritchard thinks more highly of The Ministry of Fear (1943) than of The Power and the Glory (1940), though this reverses Greene's own valuation. What Greene called his "entertainments," such as The Ministry of Fear or This Gun fir Hire, are generally superior to his journeys into high despair, such as The Power and The Glory or The Heart of the Matter.

But the best things in the review are the quotations from Greene. The writer said that he traveled as much as he did -- to Cuba, Panama, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Vietnam -- not "to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity" to which the London blitzes had addicted him. I believe it.

Here's Greene's take on Havana, capital of luxury and vice, in the days before Castro seized control: "Havana has been a fascinating city, quite the most vicious I have ever been in. I had hardly left my hotel door before I was offered cocaine, marijuana, and various varieties of two girls and a boy, two boys and a girl, etc." According to Pritchard, the book's editor Richard Greene (no relation) seems to like his namesake, a refreshing change from Greene biographer Norman Sherry, who, in a display of "prurient absurdity," gave "a list of the novelist's forty-seven favorite prostitutes -- surely a new kind of labor of love on a biographer's part."

Now I will read the book.

-- DL  [from the archives; first posted on April 24, 2010]

In the Winter 2010 issue of the venerable journal, Pritchard reviews an edition of Graham Greene's letters (Graham Greene:A  Life in Letters, ed. Richard Greene; Norton). It's an exemplary review -- well-written, enjoyably opinionated, tactful. 

I love it that Pritchard thinks more highly of The Ministry of Fear (1943) than of The Power and the Glory (1940), though this reverses Greene's own valuation. What Greene called his "entertainments," such as The Ministry of Fear or This Gun fir Hire, are generally superior to his journeys into high despair, such as The Power and The Glory or The Heart of the Matter.

But the best things in the review are the quotations from Greene. The writer said that he traveled as much as he did -- to Cuba, Panama, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Vietnam -- not "to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity" to which the London blitzes had addicted him. I believe it.

Here's Greene's take on Havana, capital of luxury and vice, in the days before Castro seized control: "Havana has been a fascinating city, quite the most vicious I have ever been in. I had hardly left my hotel door before I was offered cocaine, marijuana, and various varieties of two girls and a boy, two boys and a girl, etc." According to Pritchard, the book's editor Richard Greene (no relation) seems to like his namesake, a refreshing change from Greene biographer Norman Sherry, who, in a display of "prurient absurdity," gave "a list of the novelist's forty-seven favorite prostitutes -- surely a new kind of labor of love on a biographer's part."

Now I will read the book.

-- DL  [from the archives; first posted on April 24, 2010]

Columbia College 1967, #19 [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Columbia College 1967, #19
Michael Ganzer, Professor

If you want to write a love poem don’t say
Your girlfriend smells like a new car but
Maybe you could say, ‘I love you like I love
‘The smell of a new car that foretells many
‘Pleasurable and interesting possibilities
‘Whether it’s a long drive to Arizona or just
‘A quick spin to the seashore on a Sunday
‘I will always keep your top down because
‘You are my beautiful convertible, Julia,
‘Built for comfort and also built for speed.’
I used the name Julia because Robert Herrick
In the 17th Century was a master of this stuff
And he wrote a poem called ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’
Ha! Upon Julia’s Clothes! That’s so terrific!

Ace Boggess Reviews “Playlist”

Playlist by David Lehman

Top of Form

Ace Boggess's review

Apr 07, 2019

I read this book in one sitting, interrupted only by a brief smoke break, and probably will read it again today. I enjoyed it that much. While Playlist purports to be “a poem,” each segment a meditation on the music of a day, I found it more a collection and, most importantly, a return to form for poet David Lehman, recapturing the magic of the daily poems from his books The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun. These pieces thrum and muse. They dance. They mourn. The poems (or segments) are kinetic and playful. They carry the reader along at full speed but nonetheless with full stops in between. I've often said that one of the best aspects a poet can have is the ability to show reverence and irreverence for the same subject at the same time. Lehman is a master of this. In “12/21/17” amidst the sadness of nostalgia for deceased friends A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery, Lehman writes:

“and later that day I wrote
a poem for John Ashbery
let's have it, he said.
okay I said here goes
and John said he liked it
particularly the third line
(the poem was two lines long)”

This book is filled with remembrances of these poets, but also the joys of music and old movies. Playlist is such a wonderful book to read. I only wish it were a hundred pages longer.

by Ace Boggess 

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2763087182  

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2763087182?fbclid=IwAR1vF5w9gPP2bAkcxjK1ajLV-6xTVBTo8GK3v7zPceyjgPVHp9fJrmuKDDU

http://www.gyroscopereview.com/2017/07/843/

 

Welcome Aboard, Archie Rand [by David Lehman]

The painter Archie Rand has agreed to file occasional columns for us. On January 2nd, for example, we shall post six images from a collaboration Archie did with David Shapiro, "Kiss" (2017). Welcome aboard, Archie, whose birthday inspired Byron to dash off this poem:  

The thirteenth of August 
is way better than
"the Twelfth of Never"
as sung by Johnny Mathis
in the suburban cellar
where young people
made out in the twelfth grade
according to friends
who are into astrology
and argue that a man born 
on the thirteenth of August
is leonine in nature, with an
expert eye and hand to match
(and I own one of his paintings).

Photo by Barney Kulok.

Met Percent: Week Thirteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Ancient Anatomies

“Abstract” rendering of an Assyrian leg, gallery 401.                     “Conceptual” 3D digital lower leg.

The Assyrians are often critiqued for their artistic expressions of violence. I see only strength and beauty in the style. I love the anatomical languages of the Near East, regardless of interpretation. 

“The anatomical landmarks and contours of the leg muscles are prominently depicted in an exaggerated manner (just like a bodybuilder’s), to convey the powerful nature of the creature. The skin folds on the right patella and the hypertrophied calf are well expressed (had the sculptor studied anatomy?). There is (or what appears to be) a prominent superficial vein “beneath” the skin of the lower right leg.” - Osama S. M. Amin, http://etc.ancient.eu/?s=Anatomy&submit=Search

“Fools that you are; you do not recognize that the limbs of your ancestors are still present therein.” - Montaigne

Detail: Statue of Montaigne by Paul Landowski, Square Paul Painlevé, Paris, France.

“ON THE POLYSEMY OF THE FIST”

Left: Copper Object in the form of clenched fist, ca. Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (Turkmenistan), late 3rd–early 2nd millennium B.C., gallery 403.
Center: Abecedario - https://phmuseum.com/francesca_seravalle/story/the-fist-photos-on-the-polysemy-of-the-fist-d883b7a49
Right: “The tiny hands measure 1-1/4" long (right fisted hand) and 1-1/2" long (left hand open palm) with a forearm circumference of 1-7/8" and diameter opening of 1/2". If you have a project requiring (lots of) little hands, this is a wonderful find!” - Etsy

There is no understanding of this ancient clenched fist - not its use or any related information. My speculative fist research led me to contradictory semantics, including black power and white supremacy, to the Masonic fist of capitalism to the communist fist of the Spanish Revolution. 

Babies clench their fists for the first few months of life. A surprisingly similar number of explanations are available, from the palmar grasp reflex to the immaturity of the nervous system to “evolution” (primates hanging from their mothers in the trees).

I had a collection of plastic baby hands. In those days the avant-garde considered any found object art. More contradictory semantics. 

 

Cylinder Seals: Identity Theft & Immortality

Top: Cylinder seal and impression: winged horse with claws and horns, Middle Assyrian, ca. 14th–13th B.C., gallery 403.

Left: Cancelled check stub J. Paul Getty. 

Center: J. Paul Getty’s French Driving Permit, 1930. J. Paul Getty Family Collected Papers, The Getty Research Institute.

Right: A cancelled check for three million dollars from J.P. Morgan to the Northern Pacific Syndicate, 1896

“Some seals depicted one's occupation but others . . . revealed one's personal identity, even one's name. The seal was used to certify important transactions. It is no wonder that people worried over the loss of their seal: it would have been as serious to an ancient Mesopotamian as the loss of one's personal identification is today and the threat of "identity theft" just as great then as it is now.” - Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://www.ancient.eu/article/846/cylinder-seals-in-ancient-mesopotamia---their-hist/

There are complete cuneiform protocols for the process of reporting and replacing a lost seal. The bureaucracy is phenomenally similar to replacing a driver’s license at the DMV.

These seals are the first tools and documents of commerce and individual traders. Both JPs, Getty and Morgan, personally collected ancient cylinders. Morgan’s collection has 1,157 Near Eastern seals (within a total cuneiform tablet collection of 3,000 pieces). 

Both collectors have been described as “art addicts”. Getty’s philosophy of collecting, for example, “inextricably linked art to business and business to immortality.” These seals must have resonated well with our famous traders. . . “PAID IN FULL”

 

 

Hair-Loom

“Rayyane Tabet's great-grandfather left behind a goat-hair rug given to him by the Bedouin of Tell Halaf in 1929. It was his wish that the sixty-five-foot-long rug be divided equally among his five children, with the request that they in turn divide it among their children, and so on, until the rug eventually disappeared. As of today, the rug has been divided into twenty-three pieces across five generations.” MetText, gallery 400.

 

 

Storage Jars and Fainting Goats

Storage jar with mountain goats, ca. 4,000-3,600 B.C., gallery 403.

The myotonic goat, otherwise known as the fainting goat, falling goat, stiff-legged goat, and nervous goat is a goat that temporarily seizes when it feels panic. The fainting episodes are known as "bizarre attacks of stiffness and rigidity" upon locomotion. See https://faintinggoat.com. Despite fainting, they have been bred continually, going back to the earliest goat herding days, for their generally superior qualities: they are alert, good-natured, and heavily muscled.

Twenty years ago, I had a fainting episode. No seizing, no panic. This happened to be during a dispute over brush clearance methods in our California neighborhood. “Can grazing goats prevent wildfires?” “Or are they inefficient?” I was given the “tilt-test”, strapped vertically on a board to induce fainting. Very inefficient diagnostic. Some art is admired as memory. 

from "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" [by John Donne, 1572-1631]

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

 

 

Ed. Note: Mr. Donne didn't write this specifically for the BAP blog. He wrote it to commemorate the winter solstice (December 12 in the Julian calendar) For the rest of his gorgeous poem, click here.

Susan Spotless [by Denise Duhamel]

An Indian canoes a river, the industrial skyline behind him puffing toxic smoke. He kneels, his hands changing paddles, and spots a floating piece of newsprint as accusatory music speeds up. The fringe sways on his jacket’s sleeves as he keeps moving at a slow, steady pace. Once on shore, he steps over litter-strewn rocks. Just a few more paces and a freeway forces him to stop. A close-up of his profile—braids, a thick silver necklace. A voiceover telling us he has a “deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country.” A car whizzes by, a hand throwing fast food garbage out of the passenger window that lands at his feet, bouncing up to splatter his pants. French fries, a bite of burger someone was too full to eat. The Indian turns to the camera, a tear passing two under-eye wrinkles on the way to his cheek.

In 1971, I was ten. I soaked up the PSA that haunts me to this day. I never litter and if a trashcan is full, I crumple up my rubbish into my pocket or purse to dispose of later. In 1974, I wrote an impassioned letter to President Nixon, founder of the Environmental Protection Agency, begging the U.S. to ban aerosol cans—and they did! I thought anything was possible. In fact, I thought my letter postmarked from Woonsocket, RI, led the charge. Cultural appropriation—the “Indian” in the commercial was Italian—and Watergate aside, I had a sense that the powers-that-be would do the right thing when it came to the environment. I had a sense that everyone loved America, even that descendent of slaughtered Indians.

In 1971, I had no idea of indigenous activism, of the occupying of Alcatraz, of Indians wanting their lands back. I had no idea Pepsi and Dixie cup manufacturers subsidized the Keep America Beautiful campaign which worked against the failed “bottle bill” demanding beverages be sold in reusable containers.  I had no idea Keep America Beautiful wanted to guilt-trip the public into thinking pollution was an individual’s responsibility after environmentalists drove a pickup truck full of used bottles and cans to Coca-Cola headquarters. So there I was—and here I am almost fifty years later—with my righteous guilt, a brimming recycle bin, and cloth grocery tote. The mills in my hometown have all moved to China, leaving widespread unemployment and the foul Blackstone River, which the EPA cites as "the most polluted river in the country with respect to toxic sediments.” No crying Indians canoe there now, though in the 1600’s three tribes—the Nipmucs, Wampanoags, and Narragansetts—made it their home.

In 2015, Purge 3: Election Year was filmed in Woonsocket’s depressed downtown. The dystopian movie imagines a US government granting one night a year in which all crime is legal—not just for corporations but for the rest of us too. Domino’s Pizza and New York Lunch, who had to send their employees home, lost a lot of business the two weeks Main Street was shut down. Timeless Antiques and Collectibles, Brook’s Uniforms, and Kiwi Mart fared better as the crew wanted to rent their storefronts. Variety called Purge 3“a squalid B-movie political horror film that plays to our most reptile-brained basic instincts, and also to our cartoon-noble ideals, and by the end you can’t separate the two…”

In the year I was born, in another Keep America Beautiful PSA, a little white girl Susan Spotless sings “Please, please don’t be a litter bug because every ‘litter’ bit hurts.” What a false sense of power she and I possessed. I didn’t realize the jingle’s cloying flattery—that sincere children could save the world by simply asking our parents to keep a trash bag hanging from the radio knob in the car. After all, Smokey the Bear reminded us “only you can prevent forest fires.” And so we thought we did. We sang the “please, please don’t be a litter bug” as we jumped double-dutch, unaware of corporations and their love of plastic.  Surely our hearts were pure, spotless as Susan’s white headband and dress. Even now I can’t always articulate the duplicity—the forces against the likes of earnest Susan Spotless and me.

“Reader, Why I Married Him” [by Molly Arden]

Because he lies on the couch and hollers at the TV set.
I believe in America, the underfaker said (stet).

And he throws beer cans at the TV set.
Do I have to tell you about every offer I get?

He buys the SI swimsuit issue and keeps them all.
How did things ever get this far? It's all

Because of what we did in the car.
No shame, no games, just a late-model used car.

Also, because he doesn't look like a scared rabbit
And we don't discuss business with George Babbitt. 

I went to "the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art,"
And got the part. He gave me a new smart

Phone, and sang "I'm not that clever, I just adore you,"
To me, and to me alone! (It's true, too.)

 

 

"The Clock," a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire [trans. David Lehman]

The Clock

– for a lady

How do the Chinese tell time? By looking at the eyes of their
cats. Here’s how.

A lost missionary, afoot in a sleepy suburb of Nankin, had
forgotten his watch and asked a little boy what time it was.

After a moment’s hesitation, this street urchin of the celestial
Empire said: ‘‘Wait, I will tell you.’’ A few seconds later, he
reappeared with a very fat cat in his arms, looked into the whites of her eyes, and said, ‘‘It is almost but not quite noon.’’ Which was the case.

As for me, if I favor my beautiful Feline, so felicitously named –
the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart, and the perfume of my spirit, day and night, rain or shine – in the depths of her adorable eyes I can always tell what time it is, and it is always the same time, an hour vast, solemn, limitless as space undivided into minutes and seconds – a lingering hour no clock observes, soft as a sigh, swift as a glance.

And if an intruder came to disturb my study of this enchanting dial, if some malevolent genie, some demon of ill fortune, were to address me as a vain and idle mortal and say: ‘‘What are you staring at? What are you looking for in the eyes of that creature? Is time told there, and can you tell it?’’ I would reply without hesitation. ‘‘I know what time it is; it is Eternity.’’

Madame, is not this a most meritorious bagatelle, and as full of vain self-regard as your high and mighty self? Frankly, my dear, it has given me so much pleasure embroidering this pretentious piece of puffery that I ask nothing of you in return.

-- "L'Horloge" by Charles Baudelaire [trans. David Lehman]

from the Summer 2019 issue of The Yale Review, in which four other prose poems by Charles Baudelaire appear. 

https://yalereview.yale.edu/sites/default/files/baudelairecharles.poems_.yr107.3july_2019.final_.web_.pdf

"Job Interview" [by William Matthews]

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?
DON JUAN, III, 63-4

“Where do you see yourself five years from now?”
the eldest male member (or is “male member”
a redundancy?) of the committee
asked me. “Not here,” I thought. A good thing I

speak fluent Fog. I craved that job like some
unappeasable, taunting woman.
What did Byron’s friend Hobhouse say after
the wedding? “I felt as if I had buried

a friend.” Each day I had that job I felt
the slack leash at my throat and thought what was
its other trick. Better to scorn the job than ask
what I had ever seen in it or think

what pious muck I’d ladled over
the committee. If they believed me, they
deserved me. As luck would have it, the job
lasted me almost but not quite five years.

-- William Matthews

Ed. note: You still need to "speak fluent fog" to get anywhere in a university literature department.

Born Today: Fletcher Henderson [by Archie Rand]

Fletcher Henderson pioneered in the transformation of Dixieland to a highly sophisticated “big band” music. Hiring great soloists, like Louis Armstrong, had him direct Don Redman to write complex orchestral arrangements. Recognition of the skill required to produce this music helped erase racial stereotypes about jazz artists, who attained cross-cultural status. The influence of these almost 100 year old arrangements continues this day! (Eighty years ago Henderson hired Sun Ra as an arranger(!) Benny Goodman used many Henderson arrangements and hired him as composer and pianist, further subverting racist norms. One of the most important musical figures of the twentieth century, Fletcher Henderson was born on December 18th. HAPPY BIRTHDAY FLETCHER HENDERSON!!!!! -- Archie Rand

Ed. note: Jazz and big bands integrated a decade before major league baseball and the US Army.

Happy birthday, Ludwig Van!

My father, Joseph Lehman, shared his birthday-- December 17 -- with the greatest of all composers (who was baptised on December 17). Here is Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" (opus 133). -- DL

 

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump

[A Book Recommendation by Dante Di Stefano]

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
Ed. Martín Espada
Curbstone Books, 2019

In his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad: Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump,” published in the November issue of Poetry magazine, three time Best American Poetry contributor Martín Espada argues that in “the bicentennial of democracy’s bard,” Whitman’s democratic vision might provide Americans of the twenty-first century with a means to navigate the murk of a demagogic presidency and a twenty-four hour news cycle. Espada underscores that Whitman’s vision of democracy involved radical openness (“Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs”), empathy (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and polyvocality (“Through me many long dumb voices”). “Filthy Presidentiad” also juxtaposes Leaves of Grass against the current border crisis and examines Whitman’s legacy in Latin America and the Caribbean from José Martí to the aftermath of Hurricane María. Espada ends with a discussion of his own poem “Letter to My Father,” itself a reminder to “resist much / obey little,” a sentiment that would have resonated with the poem’s subject, Frank Espada, noted community activist, photographer, and creator of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project. In short, “Filthy Presidentiad” is required reading for anyone who loves poetry, justice, courage, and freedom.

“Filthy Presidentiad” provides a clarifying lens through which to view Espada’s recent projects as poet and anthologist. Like “Letter to My Father,” Espada’s recent poem, “Floaters,” (published in the November issue of Poetry magazine) owes something to Whitman in its formal structure; more importantly, “Floaters” enacts Whitman’s injunction to poets of the future “to dauntlessly confront…injustice” and to “counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America.” “Floaters” reflects on the deaths of twenty-five-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, and his twenty-three-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos, Salvadoran migrants whose corpses were found and photographed face down after drowning in the Río Grande. The poem also examines the callous rhetoric of the “I’m10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group in response to the viral images of the tragedy. A few days ago, a far-right white supremacist website published an essay attacking Espada’s poem, “Floaters” and his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad.” At first glance, it might seem odd that such an attack would even happen, but, on further consideration, Espada’s poem, and his essay, represent an existential threat any group whose continuance depends on foisting indignities and silence onto those it deems its enemies. As with Whitman, the threads that connect the stars in Espada’s “Floaters” (and in “Filthy Presidentiad”) are the moral filaments of a great unbridled wildly diffuse imaginative sympathy.

Every poem in Martín Espada’s new anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press), expresses and embodies a similar form of imaginative sympathy. As Espada notes in his preface: “This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. To be sure, there are poems about Trump and his pathological demagoguery, or that rose in the throat of the poet the day after his election, some in mourning, some organizing the next protest.” However, the poems in these pages are not mere screeds, they are not solely jeremiads, they are more than the timebound marginalia of a miasmatic political era; surely, these are poems of witness in the sense that Carolyn Forché—a contributor to Espada’s volume—famously articulated in her introduction to her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting. This poetry of witness—poetry that is political but not broadly polemical, poetry that is evidentiary and resilient—is the kind of poetry Espada has been writing and anthologizing for his entire career in letters; this kind of political poetry flourishes now, perhaps, more than ever before in the history of American poetry. Espada’s long apprenticeship to Whitman, and to witnessing, ensures a critical rigor in the selection of poems included in the new anthology’s pages. Each poem in What Saves Us is what Julia Alvarez—another contributor—calls “an abacus of conscience” in her poem “Refugee Women.”

The range of poets and poems in What Saves Us astounds even as it fortifies; reading this collection from cover to cover, one walks away feeling more empathetic than outraged. At the heart of this anthology, the magnanimous golden splinter of a hard earned duende directs the reader’s gaze toward a hopeful future. This unexpected hopefulness arises perhaps because even the poems that predate the Trump regime in this volume—Elizabeth Alexander’s “Smile,” Donald Hall’s “A Prophecy of Amos,” Marilyn Nelson’s “Honor Guard,” Robert Pinsky’s “Serpent Knowledge,” and Daisy Zamora’s “Death Abroad,” to name a notable few—“assert,” as Espada puts it in his preface, “our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.” torrin a. greathouse’s “On Confinement” exemplifies the assertion of a common humanity in the face of state-sanctioned brutality as it explores the subjectivity of a trans woman forced to do time in a men’s jail, “where to fail at death / would be a breach // of my probation.” Kamilah Aisha Moon’s poem, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” similarly stands out as it details a university professor’s interactions with a privileged conservative student; this student “doesn’t know who / Fannie Lou Hamer is / and never has to.” Moon reframes the political, social, economic, and racial divides in contemporary America within the context of national and personal histories, as when the speaker of the poem moves from discussing her parents to wondering about her ancestors:

    How did they survive
    so much worse, the millions
    with all of their scars!
    What would these rivers be
    without their weeping,
    these streets without
    their faith & sweat?

Like “Fannie Lou Hamer” John Murillo’s poem, selected by Natasha Tretheway for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2017, “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” hinges on an invocation of the speaker’s parents, which leads to a deeper investigation of what Espada phrases, in his preface, as “the indoctrination of violence that must be uprooted within us.”

Many poems in What Saves Us signal a comparable kind of uprooting. Leslie McGrath’s “Rage Bracelet” uproots the deeply ingrained nightmare logic of patriarchy: “every landscape wants a shadow / every abbatoir a drain.” Luivette Resto’s two poems uproot the fears connected with motherhood in a misogynistic and racist culture.  Maria Nazos’s two poems uproot xenophobia and domestic violence with an admirable formal dexterity. Richard Michelson’s “Fake News” uproots anti-Semitism and alternative facts from Chaucer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Chen Chen’s “The School of Logic” uproots homophobia. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s “The Social Worker’s Advice” uproots the hardheartedness of institutionalized mercy, arguing for an empathy that bears neck to fang. The most Whitmanesque of poems anthologized in this book, Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love,” uproots the very notion of inauguration on Inauguration Day 2017. Girmay’s poem contains multitudes, and its varied carols end:

    You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting,
    in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking
    out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here,
    witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage,
    which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love           You are
    who I love           You and you and you are who

Read What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump if only to celebrate “the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all,” so full of tenderness, fury, and love.

---

Note: Below I’ve included four poems from the anthology: Richard Blanco’s “Dreaming a Wall,” Danielle Legros Georges’s “Shithole,” Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s “Daddy, We Called You,” and the title poem, Bruce Weigl’s “What Saves Us.” The anthology also includes poems by Patricia Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, Ocean Vuong, Tim Seibles, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alicia Ostriker, Dorianne Laux, Jan Beatty, Afaa Michael Weaver, Danez Smith, Kwame Dawes, Chase Twichell, Paul Mariani, Rafael Campo, Jane Hirshfield, Jim Daniels, Brian Clements, and many more. See the full list of contributors here. I am grateful and humbled to have two of my own poems included in such estimable company. ~Dante Di Stefano

    Richard Blanco

    Dreaming a Wall

    I would build a great wall, and nobody    
    builds walls better than me, believe me…
                                        —Donald Trump

    He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims his
    are redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believes
    his bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker.
    He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, taller
    and fuller, too, but not enough to screen out
    the nameless faces next door that he calls
    liars, thieves who’d steal his juicier fruit, kill
    for his wetter rain and brighter sun. He keeps
    a steely eye on them, mocks the too cheery
    colors of their homes, too small and too close
    to his own, painted white, with room to spare.
    He curses the giggles of their children always
    barefoot in the yard, chasing their yappy dogs.
    He wishes them dead. Closes his blinds. Refuses
    to let light from their windows pollute his eyes
    with their lives. Denies their silhouettes dining
    at the kitchen table, laughing in the living room,
    the goodnight kisses through every bedroom.
    Slouched in his couch, grumbling over the news
    he dismisses as fake, he changes the channel
    to an old cowboy Western. Amid the clamor
    of gunshots he dozes off thinking of his dream
    where he stakes a line between him and all
    his neighbors, stabs the ground as he would
    their chests. Forms a footing cast in blood-red
    earth, bends steel bars as he would their bones
    with his bare fists and buries them in concrete.
    Mortar mixed thick with anger, each brick laid
    heavy with revenge, he smiles as he finishes
    the last course high enough to imagine them
    more miserable and lonely than him alone
    inside his wall, sitting on his greener lawn,
    breathing his fresher air, under his bluer sky.

 

    Danielle Legros Georges

    Shithole

    eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

    I am the interrupter, hijacking your train
    of thoughts. call me maldito, cabrón,

    La Bestía. Get on top of me and I’ll throw
    you off after you beg. I’ll ride you like

    a borrowed mule. Drive you across the river
    and sell you up it. Call me coyote. Call me

    wolf. Call me whatever the fuck animal
    you like. Missionary. Priest. Call me

    Mr. President. I’m all green. A blue gasp.
    I’m the womb sterilizer, syringe and suction.

    I’ll drown you in a teaspoon of potassium
    chloride. I was born an abomination

    At the age of one I crawled out of the Congo
    dragging my sack full of hands.

    At the age of two I mechanized my scythe.
    At the age of three I wove myself a cape of flies.

    At the age of four I blow the noses off
    Sphinxes and studied the hieroglyphs

    of your tomb. At the age of five I became
    an angel, cunning, big-eared. at the age

    of six I shot down the moon then I shot down
    the sun. I am a nuclear bomb set for noon,

    the paratext of your nightmare,
    the translator of your tribulation.

    I am a constipation. The worm nestled
    in your colon. The parasite entering

    your left ear. The sweetest liar. The drone
    of your inner war. The architect of your gas

    chamber. The poisoner of your water.
    The multiplier. I am the radioactive

    sphincter. the unthinkable, intolerable
    bleached ass.

 

    Maria Mazziotti Gillan

    Daddy, We Called You

    “Daddy” we called you, “Daddy”
    when we talked to each other in the street,
    pulling on our American faces,
    shaping our lives in Paterson slang.

    Inside our house, we spoke
    a Southern Italian dialect
    mixed with English
    and we called you “Papa”

    but outside again, you became Daddy
    and we spoke of you to our friends
    as “my father”
    imagining we were speaking
    of that “Father Knows Best”
    T.V. character
    in his dark business suit,
    carrying his briefcase into his house,
    retreating to his paneled den,
    his big living room and dining room,
    his frilly-aproned wife
    who greeted him at the door
    with a kiss. Such space

    and silence in that house.
    We lived in one big room-
    living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom,
    all in one, dominated by the gray oak dining table
    around which we sat, talking and laughing,
    listening to your stories,
    your political arguments with your friends,

    Papa, how you glowed in company light,
    happy when the other immigrants
    came to you for help with their taxes
    or legal papers.

    It was only outside that glowing circle
    that I denied you, denied your long hours
    as night watchman in Royal Machine Shop.
    One night, riding home from a date,
    my middle class, American boyfriend
    kissed me at the light; I looked up
    and met your eyes as you stood at the corner

    near Royal Machine. It was nearly midnight.
    January. Cold and Windy. You were waiting
    for the bus, the streetlight illuminating
    your face. I pretended I did not see you,
    let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you
    on the empty corner waiting for the bus
    to take you home. You never mentioned it,
    never said that you knew
    how often I lied about what you did for a living
    or that I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,
    find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

    Today, remembering that moment,
    still illuminated in my mind
    by the streetlamp's gray light,
    I think of my own son
    and the distance between us,
    greater than miles.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    I honor the years you spent in menial work
    slipping down the ladder
    as your body failed you

    while your mind, so quick and sharp,
    longed to escape,
    honor the times you got out of bed
    after sleeping only an hour,
    to take me to school or pick me up;
    the warm bakery rolls you bought for me
    on the way home from the night shift.

    the letter
    you wrote
    to the editors
    of local newspapers.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    better than any "Father Knows Best" father,
    bland as white rice,
    with your wine press in the cellar,
    with the newspapers you collected
    out of garbage piles to turn into money
    you banked for us,
    with your mouse traps,
    with your cracked and calloused hands,
    with your yellowed teeth.

    Papa,
    dragging your dead leg
    through the factories of Paterson,
    I am outside the house now,
    shouting your name.

 

    Bruce Weigl

    What Saves Us

    We are wrapped around each other in
    the back of my father's car parked
    in the empty lot of the high school
    of our failures, the sweat on her neck
    like oil. The next morning, I would leave
    for the war and I thought I had something
    coming for that, I thought to myself
    that I would not die never having
    been inside her long body. I pulled
    her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
    inside out by the storm. I pulled
    her cotton panties up as high as
    she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
    was in sight. We were drowning on our
    tongues and I tried to tear my pants off
    when she stopped so suddenly
    we were surrounded only by my shuddering
    and by the school bells grinding in the
    empty halls. She reached to find something,
    a silver crucifix on a silver
    chain, the tiny savior's head hanging
    and stakes through his hands and his feet.
    She put it around my neck and held
    me so long the black wings of my heart
    were calmed. We are not always right
    about what we think will save us.
    I thought that dragging the angel down would
    save me, but instead I carried the crucifix
    in my pocket and rubbed it on my
    face and lips nights the rockets roared in.

    People die sometimes so near you
    you feel them struggling to cross over,
    the deep untangling, of one body from another.

---

Homage to Walt: "I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You" [by David Lehman]

For Brian Clements's inspired project of annotating the two hundred years since Walt Whitman was born, two hundred poets and writers have contributed poems or reflections, which Brian -- in conjunction with North American Review -- has posted daily since Walt's birthday (May 31). I got to be #198 in a distinguished list that Martín Espada kicked off.

Convinced as I am that the last line of "Song of Myself" would make an excellent first line, I wrote a poem that begins and ends with "I stop somewhere waiting for you." Click here and you'll read it. And be sure to check out Brian's introduction to the project and the entries by such as Julia Alvarez, Ellen Bass, Maxine Chernoff, Richard Deming, the aforementioned Señor Espada, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Todd Gitlin, and Robert Hass, to limit myself to names beginning with the first eight letters of the alphabet. -- DL

https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/every-atom-no-198?fbclid=IwAR2PIRymF2sEEwFHHjr7zgYA9IGk56oyT_pQjPs8J1SyvQx8MoMe77VdrFs

Johnny Angel, How We Love Him and "If Feeling Isn't In It" [prose by Stacey Lehman, poem by John Brehm]

For the past four weeks, we’ve been under the rule of Johnny, a twelve-year-old twenty-eight pound Schipperke. David and I have never had a dog together and I haven’t had a dog since childhood. My family always had German shepherds and though I remember each of them-–-Noah, Cito, Yoffey, Regan–-I can’t remember lifting a finger to care for them. For a brief period in the late 1970s I took in a puppy that I rescued when I caught him trying to cross the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I gave him to my mother, who was between dogs at the time.

Since Johnny has been with us in Ithaca, I’ve learned that dogs force you to reorder your life. You may be able to put them on a schedule, but face it, when they have to “go” you have to jump. Johnny wakes me at around 6:00 am. He’s on a strict diet. And even though he no longer has the energy of a puppy, he’s quite good at getting into trouble. He’s figured out how to open the garbage to get at any scraps. When he wants something, he lets us know thought we can’t always figure out what it is that he’s after. A walk? A treat? A massage?

We’ve grown quite fond of Johnny, especially David, who likes to take him for long walks and whom I’ve overheard saying sweetly, “I love you, Johnny,” and it is with mixed feelings that we look forward to returning him to my sister and brother-in-law on Monday. Will he miss us? Will he ask to visit? If he does, how will they, or we, know? 

One day about three weeks ago Johnny burst into a paroxysm of growling and barking. Someone was approaching our front door to deliver a package. I realized that he was both warning us of what he sensed was approaching danger and threatening what could be the source of that danger. I was deeply moved. He was protecting his home.

So much has been written about dogs and how they make us human. My favorite dog memoir is “My Dog Tulip,” by J. R. Ackerley. I also love this poem by John Brehm.

If Feeling Isn't In It 
        by John Brehm

You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . .  
                                                                                   Howard Moss

Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.

Their bodies will shiver with happiness.

A simple walk in the park is just about

the height of contentment for them, followed

by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,

a place to curl up and sleep. Someone

to scratch them where they can't reach

and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.

Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen

and other bringers of bad news and will

bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell

fear and also love with perfect accuracy.

There is no use pretending with them.

Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy

or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed

or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.

They make no secret of themselves.

You can even tell what they're dreaming about

by the way their legs jerk and try to run

on the slippery ground of sleep.

Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.

They don't try to impress you with how serious

or sensitive they are. They just feel everything

full blast. Everything is off the charts

with them. More than once I've seen a dog

waiting for its owner outside a café

practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,

what if she doesn't come back this time?

What will I do? Who will take care of me?

I loved her so much and now she's gone

and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people

who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.”

And when she does come, what a flurry

of commotion, what a chorus of yelping

and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!

It's almost unbearable, this sudden

fullness after such total loss, to see

the world made whole again by a hand

on the shoulder and a voice like no other.

 

        from Sea of Faith by John Brehm

Jocelyn Dax (1954-2019) by Stacey Lehman

My friend Jocelyn Dax died on Monday. Her funeral is today.

We met decades ago when a mutual friend suggested that she offer me her extra ticket to the New York City Ballet at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. We discovered we had a lot in common and quickly became close friends.

Jocelyn was funny, smart, sophisticated, and beautiful. She was tall, with long legs and unruly hair. She graduated from college at 19. She spoke perfect French! She loved music (Bob Dylan), poetry (Allen Ginsberg), mystery novels, and great food. I would say that the through line of our friendship was cooking, talking about food and cooking, and eating great food. Among my most dog-eared recipes are “Jocelyn’s Caponata,” “Jocelyn’s caviar pie,” “Jocelyn’s marinated pork loin and curried leeks,” “Jocelyn’s Shrimp with tomatoes and feta cheese.” You could drop in on Jocelyn and count on being fed a perfect egg or tuna-salad sandwich. If you planned a Passover Seder for twelve, Jocelyn would show up with chicken soup and 60 matzoh balls (“will that be enough?”). She baked my favorite kind of chocolate chip cookies. Her freezer was always filled with ice-cream, her pantry with snacks.

Jocelyn was sexy and lusty. I remember sitting in a movie theater when the male star of whatever French movie we were seeing took off his shirt. “Oh. my. god,” she said, just under her breath.

We did a lot of growing up together. Those were the years when, in the words of Alice Munro, "you realize that what you're living is your life." Marriages. Divorces. Love affairs. Career changes. And for her, a child.

Of course her proudest and most lasting achievement is her son Michael, an accomplished writer and environmentalist. Today he's a tall, handsome, confident man but I can't help but see him as a boy, sitting on the stairs of Jocelyn's lovely home to eavesdrop on the "grownups" in the dining room. 

The photo above was taken in Paris in the 1980s. I was on the last leg of my vacation; Jocelyn was starting hers. We met for an afternoon of walking around the city and catching up. I was awed by the way she managed every transaction with her beautiful French. Our first stop was a patisserie, where she selected two perfect pains au chocolate, which we ate on our way to dinner. “Don’t you just love eating and walking?” she said.

-- sdl

Met Percent: Week Twelve [by Alec Bernstein]

“mow tall, mow often.” 

Met floor plan: Yellow highlighted galleries have been viewed, 11/22/19

I have visited 43 times and viewed all galleries up to 399 (~300 out of ~900) - one-third complete.

“The one-third rule means that when you mow, you want to cut off the top one-third of your grass blades . . . Mowing more than a third of the total height of your grass can stress the plant and make it more susceptible to common turf problems.” - https://lawnpride.com/one-third-rule/

The remaining two-thirds will find their own rules.

 

The Letter (an indivisible sound)

Top: Babylonian translation of “Met Percent” into the Cuneiform Alphabet
Bottom: Cuneiform tablet: Sumerian dedicatory inscription from Ekur, the temple of the god Enlil, Mesopotamia, ca.16th–15th c. B.C, not on view.

These writings are some of the earliest found. The “origin of writing” documents both the origins of the world and the first symbolic capture of emotions and thoughts “on paper”. Cuneiform is by far my favorite alphabet. 

The seven Sumerian debate poems (below) are world origin myths. When something was recognized as important, its origin became important, and it was given a myth. “The earth first appeared barren, without grain, sheep, or goats. People went naked” (Debate between Grain and Sheep).

Debate between bird and fish

Debate between sheep and grain 

Debate between the millstone and the gulgul-stone

Debate between the pickaxe and the plough

Debate between silver and mighty copper

Debate between Summer and Winter

Debate between tree and the reed

These myths are not universal and have significant variations throughout the regions and eras. No continuity, no Biblical standard, no problem.

“It becomes evident that he (Ring Lardner) was deeply concerned that the vast majority of mankind had no idea, earthly or otherwise, where it was going or for what reason”.  - Buford Donald Fisher, Ring Lardner as Dadaist, 1970.

“How can you write if you can't cry?”
- Ring Lardner

 

“An Archeologist of Morning”

Cuneiform tablet: a-she-er gi-ta, balag to Innin/Ishtar, ca. 2nd–1st c. B.C., Seleucid or Parthian, not on view.

“This tablet contains a lament by Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of fertility, over the destruction of her cities and shrines, and contrasts her present humiliation with her previous power.” - MetText

Left: A page from Melville’s “Marginalia”. His constant annotations were studied in depth by Charles Olson. Right: summary counts of the words marked by Melville in his Set of Shakespeare. Decoder rings come in many forms. 

Charles Olson described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."

Assyrian Beards

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.
Cover photograph of Melville on Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson, City Lights, 1966.

Detail, “The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life.” - Gustave Courbet, Musée d'Orsay, 1854-55. “Myself painting, showing the Assyrian profile of my head.” - Courbet.

Speaking of Olson: “Not since Gustave Courbet grew an Assyrian beard has any Western artist attempted such a sweeping rejection of the roots of Western civilization and identified with the Ancient Near East ‘beyond Homer’ and ‘beyond’ the Bible. For him the Sumerians were crucial to the attempt.” - John R. Maier, Charles Olson and the Poetic Uses of Mesopotamian Scholarship, Journal of the American Oriental Society.

“You're too much influenced by Greek and Latin already. Go beyond that, to the Sumerians, and before. Break the hold time has on you; get outside it . . since Western civilization has gone awry, we had better work with what we have from before the degradation.” - Olson quoted by Ralph Maud in his Charles Olson’s archaic postmodern. 

Trotsky, Custer, Zappa and Baraka

Rebellious generations often look forward but go back in time for hair styles. I know great beards when I see them.

 

Rock and Clay (Emergent Figures)

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.

If I free associate, as Montaigne did, I must include my forbearers of influence. I cannot see these ancient bas reliefs without a ghost of the magnificent emergent prisoners by Michelangelo . . . or the Rock Men and the Clay People from Flash Gordon who appeared and disappeared into earth. I connect them, by their nature, their symbiotic relationships with the mineral world. 

 

 

Quote of the Day: Prima Ballerina Tanaquil "Tanny" Let Clercq

“Souffles fall and so do dancers, and both survive: The main thing is to forget it.” 

                    from The Ballet Cook Book by Tanaquil “Tanny” Le Clercq

-- sdl