The Best American Poetry

"Rabbi Frankenstein" [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

That anyone could be named Rabbi Frankenstein
Seemed impossible but Rabbi Frankenstein was
Rabbi Frankenstein. That he had a glass eye also
seemed impossible but there it definitely was.

In the old days around1957 Rabbi Frankenstein used
to suddenly appear and I always wondered why but
Looking back on it I now understand that he wanted
A donation from my Pa to the temple and he never
Failed to get one either but I never knew how much.

To start the ball rolling Rabbi Frankenstein would
Always give me a gift like a small ceramic elephant
As Pa smilingly looked on and then they went
Into the library and talked for about 30 minutes
Although Pa just wanted to write the check already.

But he never spoke ill of of Rabbi Frankenstein,
He would just say "oy" or "oy vey" to himself
When Rabbi Frankenstein was finally gone!

from The Bonus Round, a new Substack featuring Mitch Sisskind.

Mahler's 1st

 

I like to be in America [from "West Side Story")

 

2025 Yetzirah Jewish poetry conference: June 24-27, 2025

 2025 Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference with Sharon Dolin, Edward Hirsch, Dana Levin, and Victoria Redel:

 If you’d like to join us online: This year, we’re trying something new for our online events. We’ll have ONE Zoom link for all events, with suggested donation amounts based on how many events you think you’d like to attend. As the conference is our single biggest programming expense of the year, we appreciate your support at the highest level that feels right to you and, if you’re so moved, with a little extra to help support our choice to make these events accessible to those who cannot afford to donate anything.
You can register to join us online here.

If you’d like to join us in-person: Similar to our online events, if you’d like to get your tickets in advance, for all events we’ll have suggested donation amounts based on how many events you think you’d like to attend. As the conference is our single biggest programming expense of the year, we appreciate your support at the highest level that feels right to you and, if you’re so moved, with a little extra to help support our choice to make these events accessible to those who cannot afford to donate anything. 
You can register to join us in-person here. (all events will take place in the Highsmith Student Union, Blue Ridge South: HIG203)

PUBLIC EVENTS:
Tuesday, June 24
1:30-2:45 ET, A Conversation & Reading with our Keynote Speaker: Edward Hirsch, in conversation with Danny Kraft 

8-9:30 ET, Tuesday Fellows & Faculty Reading: Alicia Ostriker, Elizabeth Jacobson, Judith Chalmer, Jared Harél, & Victoria Redel

Wednesday, June 25
1:30-2:45 ET, Favorite Poets: A Lineage of Jewish Poetry: Hadara Bar-Nadav, Owen Lewis, Patty Seyburn, & Jared Harél 

3:15-4:30 ET, On Writing Trauma: Joanna Chen, Judith Chalmer, Dina Elenbogen, & Hadara Bar-Nadav 

5-6:30 ET, Scholars & Offsite Faculty Reading: Ayelet Amittay, Hannah Butcher-Stell, Robin Rosen Chang, Olga Livshin, Lonnie Monka, Hila Ratzabi, Kathy Schorr, Donna Spruijt-Metz,  Betsy Fogelman Tighe, & Yehoshua November

Thursday, June 26
1:30-2:45 ET, Writing Contemporary Midrash: On Poetry Inspired by Sacred Texts: Alicia Ostriker, David Ebenbach, Eve Grubin, & Elizabeth Jacobson 

3:15-4:30 ET, Translation as a Jewish Act: Phil Terman, Joanna Chen, & Dan Alter 

8-9:30 ET, Thursday Fellows & Faculty Reading: Eve Grubin, Owen Lewis, Dina Elenbogen, David Ebenbach, Hadara Bar-Nadav, & Sharon Dolin

Friday, June 27
1:30-2:45 ET, Contributors Reading: Pearl Abraham, Rachel Davies, Leah Falk, Laurel Kallen, Kyra Lisse, Shir Lovett Graff, Lior Maayan, Robert Manaster, Melissa Rosen, Carly Sachs Jane, Saginaw Lerer, Ma’ayan Seligsohn, Rona Shaffran, Elisabeth Weiss, & Laura Hodes Zacks 

5:30-7 ET, Friday Fellows & Faculty Reading: Dan Alter, Patty Seyburn, Philip Terman, Joanna Chen, Rodger Kamenetz, & Dana Levin

We could not do any of this without your support. Thank you.

But I'm gonna love you come rain or come shine. . .

 

Gershwin's first hit (1919)

"On the Beautiful and Sublime" [by DL]

Immanuel Kant's essay on this subject is nowhere near as famous and influential as those of Longinus and Edmund Burke, but it is a splendid piece of writing, showing an aptitude for dividing the world and everything in it in two  -- a dichotomous impulse unrivaled by anyone until Auden took the reins and found the fork in every road.

Here is the "donnee" (as H. James would call it), the gift or the given, the material you have to work with, lifted from Kant's book (available in a slender paperback from Yale UP) : "Knowledge is beautiful, understanding is sublime."

I took off from there, and this is what I came up with:

On the Beautiful and Sublime

                      Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime. – Kant

Radio is a hot medium;
Television, a cool one.

A train ride in Russia is a novel.
A train ride to Chicago is a movie.

A flight to Miami is a disaster movie.
A yew tree is a poem.

A banyan tree is the prose
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry.
A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.

Panties (white, silk, high rise) are beautiful.
Jockstraps are sublime.

Paranoia is poetry.
Insomnia is prose.

Death by lethal injection is prose.
Death by hanging is infernal.

Death by firing squad is the noble sublime.
Homer is the tragic sublime.

Cigarettes are sublime, especially Camels and Luckies.
Cigars are sublime.

Pipes are beautiful.
The Song of Songs is beautiful,

Genesis and Job are sublime.
Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.

Ruth is beautiful and sublime.
Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.

Knowledge is beautiful,
Understanding is sublime.

Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of The Awl, posted this poem on September 6, 2012. If I find a picture of the philosopher I'll caption it, "Who says he Kant?" Well, let's see if I can. But perhaps I should close with a more heroic less wrathful Sandy than the ranting storm fiend that just wreaked havoc in our world.

That's my super storm Sandy. -- DL               from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012

Immanuel Kant's essay on this subject is nowhere near as famous and influential as those of Longinus and Edmund Burke, but it is a splendid piece of writing, showing an aptitude for dividing the world and everything in it in two  -- a dichotomous impulse unrivaled by anyone until Auden took the reins and found the fork in every road.

Here is the "donnee" (as H. James would call it), the gift or the given, the material you have to work with, lifted from Kant's book (available in a slender paperback from Yale UP) : "Knowledge is beautiful, understanding is sublime."

I took off from there, and this is what I came up with:

On the Beautiful and Sublime

                      Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime. – Kant

Radio is a hot medium;
Television, a cool one.

A train ride in Russia is a novel.
A train ride to Chicago is a movie.

A flight to Miami is a disaster movie.
A yew tree is a poem.

A banyan tree is the prose
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry.
A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.

Panties (white, silk, high rise) are beautiful.
Jockstraps are sublime.

Paranoia is poetry.
Insomnia is prose.

Death by lethal injection is prose.
Death by hanging is infernal.

Death by firing squad is the noble sublime.
Homer is the tragic sublime.

Cigarettes are sublime, especially Camels and Luckies.
Cigars are sublime.

Pipes are beautiful.
The Song of Songs is beautiful,

Genesis and Job are sublime.
Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.

Ruth is beautiful and sublime.
Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.

Knowledge is beautiful,
Understanding is sublime.

Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of The Awl, posted this poem on September 6, 2012. If I find a picture of the philosopher I'll caption it, "Who says he Kant?" Well, let's see if I can. But perhaps I should close with a more heroic less wrathful Sandy than the ranting storm fiend that just wreaked havoc in our world.

That's my super storm Sandy. -- DL               from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012

D.A. Powell: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________________

Project Apollo

 

I was the poolboy but it was billiards

I got up on the table with a feather duster 

and did a little dance like the honeybee

to get the green felt felt green again 

I felt it in my stinger. I felt it in my pockets 

the god of light shined his light on me

and all around. and later it was his scope 

because also the god of medicine also

the god who killed every boy he loved

which may have only been one. one good one.

then I appeared in ads for pools or ads 

for poolboys. I appeared in a theater

near you like The Hustler, a movie about

a fast boy who plays pool. Paul Newman 

played Fast Eddie Felson and appeared 

in a theater near me and also wet

daydreams. I used to splash myself 

with his dressing. undressing on the billiard 

table and later by the pool of a poodle 

groomer who tried to coif me he

never came up for air, he also scratched 

also the god of archery of games of hawks

of the discus and of the stray. the ricochet

_______________________________________________________________________

D. A. Powell's most recent collections are Atlas T (Rescue Press, 2020) and Low Hanging Fruit (Foundlings Press, 2022). He teaches at the University of San Francisco.

[Photo of D.A. Powell by Ben Decastro. “Project Apollo” appears in The Paris Review #251. See https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/8379/project-apollo-d-a-powell]

_______________________________________________________________________

Apollo Dancing with the Nine Muses. After Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), gilt and tempera on board. Italian, second half of 19th century. 

Stuyvesant HS: "Our Strong Band Can Ne'er Be Broken"

In a survey of the best public high schools in the country, my alma mater was ranked as the second best in the nation. When I went to Stuyvesant it was in the old massive neo-classical building sagging into the ground on Fifteenth Street and First Avenue. It's much more famous for science and engineering, but it's worth noting that alums include Jimmy Cagney Thelonious Monk, Henry Roth, Robert Alda, Ron Silver, and Robert Siegel, not to mention Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, honored for his work in chemistry, who writes wonderful poems in his spare time. Its current building, from 1993, is on Chambers Street in the near vicinity of the World Trade Center. If it had been located there when I was a lad, it would have saved me a subway change at 14th Street adding 20 minutes to the trip. -- DL

Stuyvesant High School

Stuyvesant High School, located in Manhattan, New York City, consistently ranks among the most prestigious public high schools in the United States. Founded in 1904, this specialized high school is renowned for its rigorous STEM-focused curriculum and competitive admissions process.

Students gain entry solely through the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), making it one of the most selective public schools nationwide. The school boasts exceptional academic outcomes with nearly all graduates continuing to four-year colleges, including significant numbers accepted to Ivy League institutions.

Stuyvesant offers numerous Advanced Placement courses, research opportunities, and specialized programs in mathematics, science, and engineering. The school’s modern facility in Battery Park City features specialized laboratories, a swimming pool, and theaters to support its comprehensive educational approach.  >>>

To all the white boys who love me when I’m manic [by Erica Dawson]

To all the white boys who love me when I’m manic

 

and hypersexual and drunk and, how

should I say, easy, when we share a kiss

inside the cab or when I take my shirt

off in your office, when I tell you I

don’t mind the wife, girlfriend, partner, or when

you say oh god you feel different, I thank

you. Made me think I was special. We all

need some sense of our worth even if we,

right now, believe, though we do not know God,

the Holy Spirit calls us by our name,

says, Erica means honorable ruler,

tremendous voice sounding like Angelou

or Morrison, though both, no doubt, would want

no part of this. The Spirit and I flaunt

our airs, all arrogant and well-to-do

attitude, and you soak it up. Cooler

than other girls, you say. I take the blame

when it’s over, the sun up on the quad

or in the motel window, prosody

already on my mind. You’re under all

the covers of an alibi, still blank-

faced drunk. Round two? You’re Mary Magdalene

ready to wash my feet. I don’t know why

I need Jesus. Why I need you. To hurt

is human. Or vice versa. Yes. For this

they’ll take my Black card. Stay in, k? Come. Now.

 

from the current issue of The Common (no. 29)

Kenneth Koch Centennial: Saturday, May 17, 2025

TOMORROW: Saturday, May 17, 2025 Kenneth Koch Centennial: A Gathering May 17th, 10am ET—FREE The Flow Chart Space 348 Warren Street Hudson, NY 12534 REGISTER The Flow Chart Foundation is honored to present a daylong Gathering celebrating the legacy of Kenneth Koch on the occasion of his Centennial, featuring talks, readings, screenings, and short performances. This fourth annual Flow Chart Gathering event will take place at the Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY, on Saturday, May 17, 2025 celebrating the life and work of this world-renowned poet, teacher, playwright, fiction writer, and collaborator. Guest speakers include: Andrew Epstein, Anthony Atlas, David Lehman, Dorothea Lasky, Emily Setina, Jordan Davis, Mitch Sisskind, and Susannah Hollister. Performers & playwrights include: Corinne Donly, Diane Exavier, Ry Cook, Erin Courtney, Jess Barbagallo, Karinne Keithley Syers, Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair, Lucas Baisch, Nazareth Hassan, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

The Dayenu Cohort with Yehoshua November

. . .this year Yetzirah has a new offering for you. After successfully trying our first offsite workshop at the conference last year, 2025 will mark the official introduction of our inaugural Dayenu Cohort, with offsite workshops led by award-winning poet Yehoshua November.

Open to writers of all levels of experience and all traditions, the Dayenu Cohort is a way to expand the richness of our conference community and offer the in-person conference experience more broadly. In addition to morning workshops, Dayenu participants will receive a pass to all on-campus public events and an invitation to join us for our private Shabbat dinner. Learn more here and feel free to reach out to Danny with any questions you may have ([email protected]).

The Night Sinatra Died [by David Lehman]

Sinatra, snapping out of a haze,

noticed me sitting across from him

“Who the fuck are you?”

Just another fan, I said, on the day he died

I made anagrams out of his name

satin, sin, stain, stair, train, rain, star

and figured out my last message

I mean what I would say to him now

“your goodbye left me with eyes that cry”

on the other hand you left me the history

of your voice the record of the American century

from Roosevelt to Reagan you will live on

whenever I need to hear you (it has to be you)

sing “I Get Along Without You Very Well”

(Strand’s favorite) or “I’m a Fool to Want You”

(my choice) when your lover has gone

May 15, 1998

Jorie Graham on prose poems

It’s not just content out of context that creates the character of many of the poems in An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Jorie Graham gets further into this idea in her introduction to The Best American Poetry, 1990, a book she edited that year with David Lehman. In writing about the seven prose poems that were selected for inclusion, Graham noted that

One important formal development is the recent popularity of prose poems. We might think of them as, perhaps, the frontal approach; they are certainly—in many cases—the most extreme in their attempt to use the strategies of “normal” articulate speech to reach the reader. Their number, variety and sheer quality (and the extraordinarily different uses to which the form is put) caused me to think of this volume as, in part, a subterranean exploration of the form. (Graham xxii)

While [Michel] Deville suggests to us the issue of content out of context in the form, Graham is additionally introducing, the idea that prose poems often adopt what she calls a frontal approach. She suggests that the prose poems are most extreme in their use of common speech—in grammatical orthodoxy. Graham muses on to suggest that, in some ways, that year’s volume of Best American Poems, was in part, a below-the-surface look at the burgeoning form. Time and again, the poems in An Introduction to the Prose Poem reveal this characteristic of possessing language that leans perceptibly and regularly into its content.

painting by Matisse

https://n2poetry.com/2011/12/27/a-look-at-prose-poetry-an-introduction-to-the-prose-poem-edited-by-brian-clements-and-jamey-dunham/

Belle of Amherst [by Mitch Sisskind]

1.

Put aside the twaddle about her
Forced upon us in ten thousand
Books and other tedious varieties.
Nights in green eyeshadow she
Panther-like prowled Amherst's
Back alleys her brain abuzz with
Webster's definition of VOLCANO
As a hole or slit in the surface of
A mountain from which ejects
Smoke, flames, and the hot lava;
Of the legendary demonic VAMPIRE
Fabled to suck our blood at night;
And of HELL: the place to which are
Carried all those that are CAUGHT.

 2.

Preoccupied by photography ever since
That absurd daguerreotype image of her
Appeared in 1847 she presents herself
Several times a week at the sidewalk
Booth of Amherst's tintype photographer
Always in one or another of her favorite
Disguises though she has no illusions
Mr. Deutsch is fooled. Fishwife, harlot,
Little Bo-Peep, Jane Eyre, Cleopatra,
And Joan of Arc are some of her many
Incarnations until she convinces Deutsch
To teach her the process and transforms
Her room into a secret studio for creating
Hundreds of what we now call 'selfies.'

3.

As a word-lover she loved gamahuche,
Gamahuching, will be (was) gamahuched,
Or in a sentence: The bee gamahuched
The flowers. She marveled at the bees
Entering daffodils enveloped by sunlight
Refracted through tender golden petals:
Surely Solomon in all his glory never
Gamahuched like these and once at
Great risk she allowed herself mentally
To gamahuche Susan as when the bee
Enters the flower or wantonly imagined
Herself gamahuched by that stern Athena
Who lived just across the garden and who
Doubtless was gamahuched by Austin.

*ED resided across the back yard from
her brother Austin and his wife Susan.

"Before the revolution, man oppressed man. After, it was the other way around."

 

<<  The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names. >>

Joseph Conrad, author's note, Under Western Eyes (1911)

Sonnet XLV: Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night [by Samuel Daniel]

XLV

    Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
   Brother to Death, in silent darkness born:
   Relieve my languish, and restore the light,
   With dark forgetting of my cares, return;
   And let the day be time enough to mourn
   The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth:
   Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
   Without the torment of the night's untruth.
   Cease dreams, th' imagery of our day-desires,
  To model forth the passions of the morrow;
  Never let rising sun approve you liars,
  To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
  Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
  And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

"Negative Capability" [By David Lehman]

"Negative Capability"

from THE COMMON

 May 5, 2025  Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability” 
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey as Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which rests
     on the solidity 
of logic while “negative capability” stands for 
a destination you arrive at despite signs that say “dead end.”
A letter Keats sent to his brothers Tom and George
in 1817 is the ultimate authority, for it was there that he coined
“negative capability” for being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, 
without any irritable reaching for fact.” Consider King Lear. 
The poetry is sublime and we love it despite the ugly atrocities 
without denying they exist. And therefore “beauty is truth,”
or “ripeness is all,” which, according to Yale’s Cleanth Brooks
in The Well Wrought Urn, means pretty much the same thing.

also see https://nasjournal.org/NASJ/article/view/2093/1829

Cardinal Zen [by Beatrice Leader]

Cardinal Zen took me under his wing.
Chicago-born Leo XIV beat the odds
fourteen to one in Vegas defeating
the Italian candidate, the hot favorite,
but remember the old conclave saw
"who enters as pope exits as cardinal."

As for Leo XIV, he is against
the state of "de facto atheism";
wears a red velvet cape
and ornate stole; roots for
the White Sox,
which shows he has faith.

filed by our Rome correspondent, Beatrice Leader. May 9, 2025. Painting by El Greco with thanks to the  El Greco-Roman Foundation.

Rae Armantrout: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

______________________________________________________

The Craft Talk

 

So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine that was language

and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any point, steering only occasionally.

 

The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—not like a knight in

armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.

 

The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to where the voice she

heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.

 

Why should I want to frighten her?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Describing the poems in Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Go Figure, Library Journal says, ‘”she has honed enduring art on the ephemera that constitute a consciousness in motion through the present.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Armantrout’s 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

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                                                                                    Man in chicken suit, 1900