The Best American Poetry

Perfection Wasted [by John Updike]

 

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archive; first posted January 29, 2009. John Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was dying when he wrote the poem. 

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archive; first posted January 29, 2009. John Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was dying when he wrote the poem. 

"Letter to Eve" [by Ruth Homberg]

Letter to Eve

I wanted to make you a
Thesaurus. Feed you words
He defined, and make synonyms
fall from your mouth.

and be options. Remember,
Queen Anne’s Lace was royalty
but now are weeds. On walks
through Eden you would grasp
handfuls and place them in your hair;
as though already you knew
what it was like to be dethroned.

-- Ruth Homberg

 

painting by Masaccio

from the archive; first posted February 10, 2010

An Autobiography in Cookbooks: The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook © 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

My mother received this cookbook as a wedding gift and passed it on to me many years ago. It remains one of my favorites, not because of the recipes though there are some good ones, but because this book is responsible for kindling my love of cooking and poetry, especially poetry that rhymes.

The recipes are punctuated with light verse to serve as mnemonics for proper technique. For example, the captions to a series of photos illustrating loaves of bread read:

This is the well-made bread about which we’ve all read;
It’s so easy to make, so come, on, let’s bake.

See what results if the oven’s too hot;
decreased volume and over-brown top.

If the oven’s too slow, the crust will be pale,
the texture’ll be porous; it’s sure to fail.

In homemade bread, especially rye,
you know there’s more than meets the eye.

and on and on through yeasted breads and rolls, specialty loaves, quick breads and muffins.

My mother was a competent cook though not an enthusiastic one. She fully embraced the post-WWII convenience foods such as frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and canned soup. It seemed that for years everything was made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, with its sponge-like brown bits suspended in a gelatinous goo. I loved those meals.

They were children of immigrants, my parents, who left the Bronx in the 1950s, first to New Jersey, then to Rockland County, New York, where my mother found work as a school teacher while my dad worked a salesman ("plastics"). From the outside, our's was a typical suburban development home. Not so inside.

My mother was a long-time subscriber to both Women’s Day and Family Circle magazines, with their projects for the thrifty homemaker (“Feed a Family of Four on Fifty Dollars a Week!” “Transform Your Home with Color in One Weekend!” and “Bring the Outdoors In with Rustic Cedar Shingles!” The latter project transformed a wall in my parents’ bedroom with hours of furious hammering.).

My father was a scavenger who often arrived home with odds and ends he’d picked up while making his sales calls in and around New York City. The combination of mom's and dad's talents was on full display in our kitchen where one wall was covered with silver metallic wallpaper illustrated with scenes from the Folies Bergere, done up in pink and black; the floor was covered with carpet tiles in every color; and the cabinet pulls were ringed with the colored plastic inserts to 45 RPM records. My mother made new curtains for every season, some quite beautiful. 

The crowning glory of the kitchen was the table--a wood slab that my dad refinished with pockmarks to make it appear aged--suspended from the ceiling with picture wire. One day I arrived home from school and Noah, our large white German shepherd, was reclining on the table as it swung gently to and fro. Meals at that table were an adventure as one had to take care to avoid the wires while passing dishes. You could lose an arm. At my mother's insistence, my dad eventually anchored the table to the floor with more wire.

Years of preparing meals for our family of six, on top of full-time work, took their toll. When I was in my early teens, my mother declared a moratorium on cooking. My two sisters and I would have to take over responsibility for dinners several times a week. She delivered this news as if it were a punishment and my sisters took it as such but I thought it a grand opportunity to experiment. We were told we could cook whatever we liked; my mother would shop though she refused to buy exotic ingredients, like ground black pepper, or nutmeg. “You don’t need that,” she said, crossing off those items on our shopping lists.

I remember my attempt at Moussaka, the Greek casserole of eggplant and ground beef baked under a layer of béchamel. Is there a sound more dreaded to the cook than that of diners' forks silently pushing a poorly executed entrée around a dinner plate? Finally, my father put his fork down and looked across the table at my mother. “Renee,” he said, mouthing his words, “I don’t like it.” The leftovers were fed to Noah, who devoured them without complaint and in short order deposited them on the carpet-tiled kitchen floor.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 13, 2016 at 03:4

My mother received this cookbook as a wedding gift and passed it on to me many years ago. It remains one of my favorites, not because of the recipes though there are some good ones, but because this book is responsible for kindling my love of cooking and poetry, especially poetry that rhymes.

The recipes are punctuated with light verse to serve as mnemonics for proper technique. For example, the captions to a series of photos illustrating loaves of bread read:

This is the well-made bread about which we’ve all read;
It’s so easy to make, so come, on, let’s bake.

See what results if the oven’s too hot;
decreased volume and over-brown top.

If the oven’s too slow, the crust will be pale,
the texture’ll be porous; it’s sure to fail.

In homemade bread, especially rye,
you know there’s more than meets the eye.

and on and on through yeasted breads and rolls, specialty loaves, quick breads and muffins.

My mother was a competent cook though not an enthusiastic one. She fully embraced the post-WWII convenience foods such as frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and canned soup. It seemed that for years everything was made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, with its sponge-like brown bits suspended in a gelatinous goo. I loved those meals.

They were children of immigrants, my parents, who left the Bronx in the 1950s, first to New Jersey, then to Rockland County, New York, where my mother found work as a school teacher while my dad worked a salesman ("plastics"). From the outside, our's was a typical suburban development home. Not so inside.

My mother was a long-time subscriber to both Women’s Day and Family Circle magazines, with their projects for the thrifty homemaker (“Feed a Family of Four on Fifty Dollars a Week!” “Transform Your Home with Color in One Weekend!” and “Bring the Outdoors In with Rustic Cedar Shingles!” The latter project transformed a wall in my parents’ bedroom with hours of furious hammering.).

My father was a scavenger who often arrived home with odds and ends he’d picked up while making his sales calls in and around New York City. The combination of mom's and dad's talents was on full display in our kitchen where one wall was covered with silver metallic wallpaper illustrated with scenes from the Folies Bergere, done up in pink and black; the floor was covered with carpet tiles in every color; and the cabinet pulls were ringed with the colored plastic inserts to 45 RPM records. My mother made new curtains for every season, some quite beautiful. 

The crowning glory of the kitchen was the table--a wood slab that my dad refinished with pockmarks to make it appear aged--suspended from the ceiling with picture wire. One day I arrived home from school and Noah, our large white German shepherd, was reclining on the table as it swung gently to and fro. Meals at that table were an adventure as one had to take care to avoid the wires while passing dishes. You could lose an arm. At my mother's insistence, my dad eventually anchored the table to the floor with more wire.

Years of preparing meals for our family of six, on top of full-time work, took their toll. When I was in my early teens, my mother declared a moratorium on cooking. My two sisters and I would have to take over responsibility for dinners several times a week. She delivered this news as if it were a punishment and my sisters took it as such but I thought it a grand opportunity to experiment. We were told we could cook whatever we liked; my mother would shop though she refused to buy exotic ingredients, like ground black pepper, or nutmeg. “You don’t need that,” she said, crossing off those items on our shopping lists.

I remember my attempt at Moussaka, the Greek casserole of eggplant and ground beef baked under a layer of béchamel. Is there a sound more dreaded to the cook than that of diners' forks silently pushing a poorly executed entrée around a dinner plate? Finally, my father put his fork down and looked across the table at my mother. “Renee,” he said, mouthing his words, “I don’t like it.” The leftovers were fed to Noah, who devoured them without complaint and in short order deposited them on the carpet-tiled kitchen floor.

The Last Shall Be First [by David Lehman]

Next Line, Please

By David Lehman | November 25, 2014

We love last lines. The endings of favorite novels enter the mind and lodge there. Scott Fitzgerald’s majestic conclusion of The Great Gatsby is a favorite: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Hemingway concludes The Sun Also Rises with a bitterly ironic line of dialogue enlivened by an unusual choice of adjective: “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” The terseness at the end of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is no less memorable: “For there she was.”

For their full impact, the great endings depend on the narratives that precede them. But a surprising number will be seen to have a meaning and a charm even when removed from their context. This is true of several of the lines I’ve quoted, and others spring to mind. When Dostoevsky brings Crime and Punishment to its finish, he leaves the door open for subsequent developments. He dangles the possibility of his hero’s redemption, then says matter-of-factly: “That might be the subject of a new story—our present story is ended.” Herman Melville airs a similar sentiment but with an effect that is both eerie and menacing at the close of The Confidence Man: “Something further may follow from this Masquerade.”

The last line of Sholom Aleichem’s story “A Yom Kippur Scandal”—“Gone forever”—concludes its narrative beautifully while making this reader believe it could perform the same function admirably for a half dozen others.

Your task for next week is to write the last sentence of a nonexistent story—either a story that we can imagine or one that we would yearn to read strictly on the basis of your sentence. The winning entry may imply a specific narrative—or it may be so suggestive that readers will be inspired to supply the writing that culminates in the sentence.

It doesn’t have to be long—just unforgettable.

For the entries generated back in November 2014, click here.

It Even Has an Image File, I Am a Real Blogger [by Lindsay Daigle]

I am not a blogger, I am a poet. This week though, I was both. And it was thrilling—scary and vulnerable, fun and really pleasing. In determining the direction this fifth and final blog might take, some favorite go-to poems came to mind. Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” is one that I constantly return to. Oranges are pretty great. So is the color orange. Sardines aren’t so bad either. What I really love it for is its ability to say so much without saying anything at all, what it says about the composing process, about what it is to be an artist and a notice-er. It’s the sort of poem that asks for noticing— It’s plainly spoken, but honest and exposed in its plainness. (The speaker says, “Oh.” That’s all he needs to say.) I’m now going to read it again. You should too:

Why I Am Not a Painter [by Frank O’Hara]

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

We need so many words to express a word, twelve full poems to get at orange without ever using the word itself. This is why I spend so much time close-reading with my composition students. We spent an hour yesterday coming up with and interpreting over 50 definitions for “critical inquiry.” We could have continued the conversation well into the afternoon, asking things like— Do we inquire into issues that trouble us, or is it more of an uncertainty? Is it uncertainty or a crisis of belief? Are we destabilizing those beliefs or questioning their validity? Do we mean validity or is it a matter of global stakes? Are personal stakes a part of global stakes, or is it the other way around? If we have a personal investment in what’s being researched, is it more difficult to be critical? Is it important to be critical of our own input as much as others’? What do we really mean by critical? Not taking texts at face value? Pushing texts beyond summary into the realm of further understanding? Does further understanding, the journey of discovery, ever really have an end? Is discovery the process or the product? …

And now I’ve written twelve lines sparked from O’Hara’s poem (and therefore oranges?) in which the poem isn’t mentioned at all. Part of me says, “Whoops!” The other part says, “Well, yeah. That’s how it works.”

“There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by.” These are my favorite lines. Words (and therefore oranges?) are exalted here. There are not enough of them. But they’re also terrible in the ways that life is both terrible and wonderful. Poetry attempts to expand the limits language places on our ability to share human experience. Days go by, more life happens, more words are needed to fully experience it.

One of my dearest friends is moving from Milwaukee to New York City in a few weeks, something I did six years ago. Even now I can’t adequately explain what that experience was like – how I felt necessarily pulled to the city, tethered to it as though my left arm rented a studio apartment in Gramercy while the rest of me went for daily runs along Lake Michigan. My friend’s experience is similar, it seems, but there’s no telling which part of her exists where. She might not know until she receives her first piece of mail addressed to her Astoria zip code. And even then, there should be so much more.

 

"SARDINES" by Mike Goldberg

It’s troubling to always be attempting this sort of explanation of human experience. Being a poet is actually quite masochistic. Even O’Hara says, “I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.” This is not to say that visual artistic methods are “easier” or less limiting than verbal/textual. I really don’t know because I am not a painter either. What I do know is that Mike Goldberg’s painting called “SARDINES” has no sardines in it, the same way that the poem called “ORANGES” has no oranges (or orange) in it. But the painting is actually full of sardines – the thought process following sardines, their implications, their many versions and colors and patterns, shapes and non-shapes, and the remnants of the word itself scrawled and painted over. We do what we can to represent the days that go by. We try to understand our lives and convey that understanding so that others might better understand theirs too. It’s a cyclical process, both terrible and wonderful.

first posted July 25, 2014

Why I Am Not a Painter [by Frank O’Hara]

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

We need so many words to express a word, twelve full poems to get at orange without ever using the word itself. This is why I spend so much time close-reading with my composition students. We spent an hour yesterday coming up with and interpreting over 50 definitions for “critical inquiry.” We could have continued the conversation well into the afternoon, asking things like— Do we inquire into issues that trouble us, or is it more of an uncertainty? Is it uncertainty or a crisis of belief? Are we destabilizing those beliefs or questioning their validity? Do we mean validity or is it a matter of global stakes? Are personal stakes a part of global stakes, or is it the other way around? If we have a personal investment in what’s being researched, is it more difficult to be critical? Is it important to be critical of our own input as much as others’? What do we really mean by critical? Not taking texts at face value? Pushing texts beyond summary into the realm of further understanding? Does further understanding, the journey of discovery, ever really have an end? Is discovery the process or the product? …

And now I’ve written twelve lines sparked from O’Hara’s poem (and therefore oranges?) in which the poem isn’t mentioned at all. Part of me says, “Whoops!” The other part says, “Well, yeah. That’s how it works.”

“There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by.” These are my favorite lines. Words (and therefore oranges?) are exalted here. There are not enough of them. But they’re also terrible in the ways that life is both terrible and wonderful. Poetry attempts to expand the limits language places on our ability to share human experience. Days go by, more life happens, more words are needed to fully experience it.

One of my dearest friends is moving from Milwaukee to New York City in a few weeks, something I did six years ago. Even now I can’t adequately explain what that experience was like – how I felt necessarily pulled to the city, tethered to it as though my left arm rented a studio apartment in Gramercy while the rest of me went for daily runs along Lake Michigan. My friend’s experience is similar, it seems, but there’s no telling which part of her exists where. She might not know until she receives her first piece of mail addressed to her Astoria zip code. And even then, there should be so much more.

 

"SARDINES" by Mike Goldberg

It’s troubling to always be attempting this sort of explanation of human experience. Being a poet is actually quite masochistic. Even O’Hara says, “I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.” This is not to say that visual artistic methods are “easier” or less limiting than verbal/textual. I really don’t know because I am not a painter either. What I do know is that Mike Goldberg’s painting called “SARDINES” has no sardines in it, the same way that the poem called “ORANGES” has no oranges (or orange) in it. But the painting is actually full of sardines – the thought process following sardines, their implications, their many versions and colors and patterns, shapes and non-shapes, and the remnants of the word itself scrawled and painted over. We do what we can to represent the days that go by. We try to understand our lives and convey that understanding so that others might better understand theirs too. It’s a cyclical process, both terrible and wonderful.

first posted July 25, 2014

Why I Am Not a Painter [by Frank O’Hara]

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

We need so many words to express a word, twelve full poems to get at orange without ever using the word itself. This is why I spend so much time close-reading with my composition students. We spent an hour yesterday coming up with and interpreting over 50 definitions for “critical inquiry.” We could have continued the conversation well into the afternoon, asking things like— Do we inquire into issues that trouble us, or is it more of an uncertainty? Is it uncertainty or a crisis of belief? Are we destabilizing those beliefs or questioning their validity? Do we mean validity or is it a matter of global stakes? Are personal stakes a part of global stakes, or is it the other way around? If we have a personal investment in what’s being researched, is it more difficult to be critical? Is it important to be critical of our own input as much as others’? What do we really mean by critical? Not taking texts at face value? Pushing texts beyond summary into the realm of further understanding? Does further understanding, the journey of discovery, ever really have an end? Is discovery the process or the product? …

And now I’ve written twelve lines sparked from O’Hara’s poem (and therefore oranges?) in which the poem isn’t mentioned at all. Part of me says, “Whoops!” The other part says, “Well, yeah. That’s how it works.”

“There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by.” These are my favorite lines. Words (and therefore oranges?) are exalted here. There are not enough of them. But they’re also terrible in the ways that life is both terrible and wonderful. Poetry attempts to expand the limits language places on our ability to share human experience. Days go by, more life happens, more words are needed to fully experience it.

One of my dearest friends is moving from Milwaukee to New York City in a few weeks, something I did six years ago. Even now I can’t adequately explain what that experience was like – how I felt necessarily pulled to the city, tethered to it as though my left arm rented a studio apartment in Gramercy while the rest of me went for daily runs along Lake Michigan. My friend’s experience is similar, it seems, but there’s no telling which part of her exists where. She might not know until she receives her first piece of mail addressed to her Astoria zip code. And even then, there should be so much more.

 

"SARDINES" by Mike Goldberg

It’s troubling to always be attempting this sort of explanation of human experience. Being a poet is actually quite masochistic. Even O’Hara says, “I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.” This is not to say that visual artistic methods are “easier” or less limiting than verbal/textual. I really don’t know because I am not a painter either. What I do know is that Mike Goldberg’s painting called “SARDINES” has no sardines in it, the same way that the poem called “ORANGES” has no oranges (or orange) in it. But the painting is actually full of sardines – the thought process following sardines, their implications, their many versions and colors and patterns, shapes and non-shapes, and the remnants of the word itself scrawled and painted over. We do what we can to represent the days that go by. We try to understand our lives and convey that understanding so that others might better understand theirs too. It’s a cyclical process, both terrible and wonderful.

first posted July 25, 2014

Vin Scully (1927-2022) Laureate of Play-by-Play Poetry [by David Lehman]

When Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history – when, hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one pitch away from losing the game, and with one swing Gibson reversed the team’s fortunes – play-by-play man Jack Buck said “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Beautiful: a totally colloquial line of iambic tetrameter. Vin Scully, describing the same at-bat, let a few seconds of silence pass before saying, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."

I am going from memory and I may have a word or two wrong there, but the point of this piece is an appreciation of play-by-play announcers and the memorable things they say. This (2016) is Vin Scully’s last year as the voice of the Dodgers, and I dedicate these musings to him, the red-headed gentleman who invites viewers to pull up a chair and join him in Dodger Stadium.

On Labor Day [2016], I watched the Dodgers trounce the Diamondbacks, 10-2, for the pleasure of watching the action under the guidance of Scully. The TV execs are smart enough to show us a lot of Dodger games called by Scully this year. Unlike most announcers, he does the whole game unassisted, unaccompanied by what used to be called a color man -- usually an ex-star who is articulate, amiable, and knowledgeable (e.g. Don Sutton with the Braves, Rick Monday on the Dodgers' radio broadcasts, Bill White with the Yankees in the 1970s, the late Ralph Kiner with the Mets). To go solo is quite a feat. Even experienced play-by-play men consider it a challenge. But Vinny, who has had excellent partners over the years, doesn't need one.

On Monday evening, Arizona's Socrates Brito stepped to the plate. Scully explained -- "for the kids, really" -- who Socrates was. Vinny had done his homework. We learned  "what Labor Day is all about."  It was in June 1894 that the first Monday in September was designated Labor Day. In 1916 the eight-hour working day became the norm and the obscenity of child labor was put to rest. Canada is said to have originated the idea of a holiday to celebrate the labor force. I didn't know these facts. But I did appreciate it when, after the history lesson, Vinny described Zack Greinke at the plate. Greinke, not an easy out, obliged the pitcher to make a lot of pitches.  "And after all that laboring," Scully said, "Greinke goes down for the second out." Possibly my favorite moment of the evening came when: a wicked curve ball -- can't remember whose -- caused the batter to fall down like a knocked-down boxer "for a mandatory eight-count." It was "a genuflection for a great breaking ball."

Many anecdotes about Scully made the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

Sometimes the humor of play-by-play announcers is wonderful if unintentional. Michael Kay, the Yankees’ TV announcer, remarked that some pitcher had a zaftig ERA.” The color man, I forget who it was, a former player, David Cone maybe, looked blank. “What,” Kay said. “You don’t know zaftig?” The other guy said sheepishly that he may heard the word “in English class.”

The Mets at the moment have an outstanding trio calling their games on television: Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling. The versatile Howie Rose and Josh Lewin handle the radio. Columbia graduate Cohen (a government major) is like a one-man encyclopedia of Mets’ history. Here is his description of one of the greatest catches in Mets’ history, the catch made by Endy Chavez in the National League Championship Series in 2006, which the Mets ultimately lost to St. Louis:

 “Edmonds at first and one out, and Pérez deals. Fastball hit in the air to left field, that's deep, back goes Chávez, back near the wall, leaping, and....he made the catch!!  He took a home run away from Rolen! Trying to get back to first is Edmonds... he's doubled off! And the inning is over! Endy Chávez saves the day! He reached up high over the left field wall, right in front of the visitors' bullpen, and pulled back a two run homer! He went to the apex of his leap, and caught it in the webbing of his glove, with his elbow up above the fence. A miraculous play by Endy Chávez, and then Edmonds is doubled off first, and Oliver Perez escapes the 6th inning. The play of the year, the play maybe of the franchise history, for Endy Chávez. The inning is over.”

I savor "He went to the apex of his leap" followed by a sterling example of iambic pentameter: "and caught it in the webbing of his glove,"

All announcers have their signature phrases. When the Mets’ win, Howie Rose says, “Put it in the books.” The late Bob Murphy -- who could radiate enthusiasm when, in the September of a last-place season, the Mets turned an ordinary 6-4-3 double play -- would say, after every Mets’ victory, that he’d be back “with the happy recap” after the commercial break. At game’s end, Cohen says “and the ballgame is over,” accenting the “o” in “over.” Cohen’s home run call is “it’s outta here!”John Sterling, the Yankees' voice on the radio, stretches the phrase "the Yankees win!" -- and then repeats it -- with a kind of euphoria implying that God is in heaven and all is right with the world. Joe Nuxhall would sign off his Cincinnati Reds' broadcast by saying goodbye from the "old leftander, rounding third and heading for home." Nuxhall, who did Reds' games for forty years, was the youngest player ever to appear in a major league baseball game.

The classic home run call is Mel Allen’s when with a straw hat and a smile he covered the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Berra, and Ford. When Mickey launched one, Mel would follow the course of the ball and conclude “it’s going. . going. . .gone.” I cannot leave unmentioned Russ Hodges’ immortal call of Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca in the 1951 playoffs. “The Giants win the pennant!” he exclaimed and repeated the sentence four times.

What prompted this post was my dissatisfaction with the national announcers on TV and the whole strategy of continual chatter interrupted by graphs, statistics, interviews, close-ups of fans in the stands. I hate such current catch phrases as "are you kidding me!" or "do you believe it!" I hate statcast and "redemption" and other artificial sweeteners. I hate the phrase "If the season ended today.  ." and all the hypotheticals that follow. But I admit to a soft spot for this common play-by-play sentence: "And the Mets are down to their final out." I used that phrase with a big grin when I told my wife about the tenth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Mets and the Boston Red Sox. Roger Angell headed his brilliant New Yorker piece on that unforgettable post-season with a palindrome: "Not So, Boston." In danger of wandering off message I think of the greatest cover phrase in the history of Sports Illustrated. It was when Pete Rose, after playing for Philadelphia and Montreal, returned to Cincinnati. "Rose is a Red." Gertrude Stein couldn't beat that.

A heartfelt apology: There are so many great play-by-play men whom I haven't named. . .but only because time is finite. Red Barber, a longtime Dodger announcer, joined Mel Allen and Phil Rizzuto in the Yankee booth in 1957. I always liked Red’s way of describing a failed pickoff attempt. "Nothing doing.” Barber, who was Vin Scully’s mentor, advised him not to root openly for the home team and to keep to facts. Radio announcers have no choice but to concentrate on each play rather than on marginal elements. Often I turn off the sound and listen to a radio feed of the visiting team's play-by-play guys.

from the archive; first posted October 15, 2018, revised after the death of Vin Scully

Many anecdotes about Scully made the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

It's Magic: Doris Day on her Birthday (April 3)

 

The great Doris Day, who died the other day [May 2019], was celebrated for her work in romantic comedies of the 1960s. She was box office gold with James Garner, Cary Grant, and Rock Hudson. But her real achievement was as a singer. In musical movies she gave outstanding performances as Ruth Etting (in Love Me or Leave Me in 1955) and as Mrs. Gus Kahn (in I'll See You in My Dreams in 1953). One of the finest of all Big Band vocalists, whose version of "Sentimental Journey" is a madeleine that can transport you to 1945, she sang with the Les Brown Orchestra when swing was king.

Maybe her biggest single hit was the Academy Award-winning song of 1956 in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in which she played opposite James Stewart. In honor of Doris Day, "Che Sera, Sera" was sung at sing-alongs in smart clubs all over the nation yesterday.

Doris gets her own day in my Playlist:

from Playlist (12 / 17 / 17)

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   -- DL

At Princeton [by John Hennessy]

I DATED MY FAVORITE POET’S DAUGHTER, AND OTHER BUM TRIPS [by John Hennessy, July 25, 2012]

I wasn’t planning to make it to Princeton for my 25^th reunion this year. It looked like no friends were going, but all the usual preppy suspects had registered early. Did I really want to pay two thousand dollars to lodge my family for a weekend among the hordes of Reagan Youth, especially now they’d gone smug with middle age? At the last minute I got an invite to crash at a big house in town with a few of my old buddies, one of whom has never left. “You don’t even have to officially register or go to the tents,” Ted said, “just hang out at Terrace.”

At Princeton, they don’t like to feed you in the dining halls after sophomore year, so most students join an “eating club.” My club was Terrace, a run-down Tudor mansion originally built for president Woodrow Wilson, literally and figuratively around the corner from all of the other clubs. It was the first to do away with “bicker,” a selection process similar to fraternity rush, the first to open its doors to everyone—Catholics, Jews, women, gays, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, scholarship kids. I was led there by a tall, skinny, blue-haired guy with a chain in his nose at the end of an otherwise miserable Freshman Week, and for the next four years I left only to go to classes, the library, and occasionally to sleep; in our day it was a refuge for the few punks, hippies, out-GLBT community members, and anyone else who didn’t belong on campus. 

The plan to spend reunions at Terrace had just one catch: Dead Head Night. Terrace was going to be jammed on Saturday. Phil Lesh, the band’s bass player, was playing a concert of Grateful Dead songs there with his touring group, which included two of his sons, one of whom was a graduating Terrace Club member.  No offense to those folks, but talk about bringing up a slew of bad memories:

Jerry Garcia

        The last time I saw the Dead—as a tourist among my more dedicated Terrace brethren—I had a bum trip. Of course. My style was club music, the earliest days of acid house. After stuffing myself full of a variety of groceries I’ve subsequently cut from my diet, all I could think was, “Whoa, this is a religious cult. And like my own religious cult, Roman Catholicism, this one is focused on a living man. Jerry Garcia. How bizarre.” At the exit signs, backlit people danced in that herky-jerky, wrist-flapping Dead Head way. Steal your face. The hirsute guy in front of me was picking splinters from his beard. His hands left angry little dove-trails. I tried closing my eyes. But as I was peaking (troughing), all I could think was, “These people worship Jerry Garcia. Unlike Jesus, Jerry can’t bank on rising again. What the hell are they going to do when he dies?” The whole concert was ruined for me: these poor misguided Dead Heads, worshipping a mortal. Who would console them in the future?

          For that matter, who was going to console me? I needed to be talked down. After the show I went looking for my girlfriend, Maud Kinnell, whose father, Galway, had until that day been my favorite living poet, my

poetry hero. For years his Book of Nightmares, a powerful exploration of family life, had been the first collection on my golden shelf. Visits home with Maud were like entering Galway’s book.  And how I identified with him. Enough to pick Princeton, his alma mater, when I had other choices. Like him, I was urban working class, a scholarship kid at Princeton. He was even—and this I hadn’t known until a few weeks before, when Maud and I went on a spring break retreat with him to his cabin in Vermont—a fellow alumnus of Terrace Club. As for his daughter, I was even more taken with her.

         The women I’d grown up with—on the Jersey side of the Arthur Kill, near the Merck plant in Rahway, and later a block from the boardwalk in Belmar—with their tough acts, dropped R’s, and tight clothes, were all about volume: big hair, big nails, big mouths, even big hearts sometimes. Much of a muchness. I was entirely unprepared for Maud Kinnell. She was like an Athena sprung fully formed from the brain of Baudelaire. Heathcliff transgendered.  A TB-clinic refugee. Very Gothic chic. An unlikely physics student, she wore black Agnes B dresses, Victorian boots, black eye shadow, and cultivated her resemblance to Louise Brooks by bobbing her straight black hair. Sure, her father was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, but her mother was dating Joseph Brodsky, a future Nobel-laureate. As a kid, she’d even watched Sesame Street with Amiri Baraka, her dad’s friend. But those living writers didn’t intimidate her. She read Proust for a laugh, Nietzsche for social hygiene, Jens Peter Jacobsen for aperitif lyricism, and Rilke for advice on love.

 God, was she obsessed with Rilke. She did her best to impress his modes upon me, especially his penchant for solitude. I was only nineteen, but still she opined that I’d never have any success as a poet until I’d learned to embrace solitude, to put my art before all other things, including—and especially—people. Even her.

(Not that she particularly like her own solitude: Within weeks of our first conversation, which lasted all night, she insisted I move into her dorm room because she hated to be apart from me. She aborted every trip home to see her folks. She’d turn around at Penn Station and come straight back to me at Princeton. Eventually we adopted an expedient policy: I agreed to go with her whenever she wanted to visit her family or friends. Enmeshed, they’d call it now.  It doesn’t take a psychologist to see it made her feel better to criticize my abstract commitment to writing.)

I wasn’t ambivalent: I hated solitude. I’d grown up with an enormous Irish and Italian family—even lived in a tiny house with my grandparents, parents, and eight of my mother’s nine brothers and sisters for a couple of years before my siblings were born. While I appreciated a daily walk in the woods, a quiet morning at the typewriter, I liked a bit of noise, family and friends around me, at the end of the day. Still do. After the bummer at the Dead concert, I wasn’t having any of it. Rilke. What did he know? Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? Where was Maud? 

After the Dead show, Maud wasn’t around: not at Terrace, not in the dorm room we bunked in together, not in the library, lab, nowhere. Then I remembered why she hadn’t gone to the concert in the first place: Galway took her to a dinner party in town. The whole dinner party had been engineered in order to introduce Maud to X (not his real name), another undergraduate, someone Galway and the other oldsters wanted to fix her up with. Before we started dating, Maud had expressed interest in X, but now we’d been together for six months, an eternity in college. Why was Galway trying to introduce them now?

X was a descendent of Chinese feudal lords on one side, one of the twentieth century’s greatest European violinists on the other. He was beautiful, impeccably dressed, elegantly mannered, and dumb as a brick. “He’s perfect for you,” Galway told her. So Maud reported, once we finally caught up with each other. I was devastated. Completely betrayed. The fact that Maud hadn’t actually gone home with X—or even made any plans to see him again—didn’t mitigate things much. How could she have agreed to go to that dinner? How could Galway have planned it? What kind of asshole names a collection of poems about his wife and children The Book of Nightmares?

I broke up with Maud, left her room, and went to Terrace Club, where I spent the night under a table, still twitching..

*

**

Well, the worst has happened, of course. Jerry Garcia died in 1995, less than ten years later. But it looks like the Dead, and all those Dead Heads, are still going strong—they’ll still turn out by the hundreds, thousands, even at Princeton, to hear the children of the Dead, grown now, playing the standards that were already oldies when I was young. Certainly they were still powerhousing the night of my 25^th reunion at Terrace Club. The place was jammed to full capacity, people were on the roof, the terraces, the lawn, even hanging out of windows from all three stories of the building. People who couldn’t fit inside the club’s property were crowded up beyond the fences, around the circular driveway, and behind the outdoor stage. The band played a host of those old songs, even the ones this amateur knew: Uncle John’s Band, Sugar Magnolia, Casey Jones, and Phil Lesh’s kids sounded even sweeter than Bob Weir or Jerry. Strangest of all, they were joined by jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, another Terrace alum, who was there to celebrate his thirtieth.

We studied Stanley Jordan’s moves, fingers pounding the neck piano-style. “It’s straight out of Robert Johnson’s playbook,” said my buddy Rob Brink, who’s presently making a feature film about the great blues guitarist. Rob and half a dozen other friends and I danced to the Dead (that’s not dancing, that’s butt-dipping, my eldest son Nicholas, an expert hip hop dancer scoffs), mostly sober, really enjoying it. Between sets we broke out our phones, showed each other pictures of our families.

“I’m so glad you married a beautiful woman,” my friend Kate said, oddly. “I always hoped for that for you.” What a strange remark for Kate, especially since I’d just been saying that Sabina Murray, my wife, grew up in Western Australia before joining her mother’s family in Manila, and she puts up with zero whinging, no self-pity. Merely a flesh wound, and I’m going to tease you if you ask for a band-aid. The fact that she’s the funniest person I’ve ever met, as well as one of the best writers in my generation, the youngest winner of the PEN/Faulkner-Award for fiction ten years ago, didn’t exactly put me off her, either.

But then I realized that Kate was one of the people who helped me through my final break-up with Maud Kinnell, almost a year after that first one the night Galway tried to fix her up with X. The exact details of that lasting argument are lost to me now, but in the run up to it I remember a deep critique of my poetry, Maud concluding, “If I don’t love your poetry, how can I love you?”

I’ve come up with several answers to that question in the years since, but they’ve long ago become moot. (Luckily I’ve gotten a little better as a poet since I left my teens, and, having generated my own company as a parent, my relationship to solitude is more easy-going these days). Those answers were even less relevant once the band began playing again. They weren’t the Grateful Dead, but then again I wasn’t that young man anymore, either. In fact, I enjoyed the band—and myself—much more than our earlier incarnations.

What a privilege it was to have them there. And I was left with that, an appreciation for that deep privilege, surrounded by Rob, the best actor I’ve ever seen on a stage, Kate, whose art installations I deeply admire, and half a dozen other old friends, some more, some less conventionally successful now, but all very intelligent, all serious thinkers, vivid, mercurial conversationalists. What an excess of privilege it had been to live there with them for four years, at Terrace, at Princeton. And as very young writers—I didn’t forget where I came from, in my old neighborhood you were taunted for reading, could get your ass kicked for writing poetry—we had access to Robert Stone, Joyce Carol Oates, JD McClatchy, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Paul Auster, Stephen Wright, Edmund Keeley, James Richardson, Julian Jaynes, even, indirectly, Joseph Brodsky. What an excess of access we had there.

As Phil Lesh and friends were wrapping it up, I even found it possible to begin thinking about forgiving Galway after all those years. Here’s a first step, ending this with a devastating poem of his:

SHELLEY

When I was twenty the one true
free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,
Shelley who wrote tracts advocating
atheism, free love, the emancipation
of women, the abolition of wealth and class,
and poems on the bliss of romantic love,
Shelley, who I learned later, perhaps
almost too late, remarried Harriet,
then pregnant with their second child,
and a few months later ran off with Mary,
already pregnant herself, bringing
with them Mary’s stepsister Claire,
who very likely also became his lover,

and in this malaise a trios, which Shelley
had imagined would be “a paradise of exiles,”
they lived, along with the spectre of Harriet,
who drowned herself in the Serpentine,
and of Mary’s half sister Fanny,
who killed herself, maybe for unrequited
love of Shelley, and with the spirits
of adored but often neglected
children conceived incidentally
in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s
Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley
and consigned to foster parents; Mary’s
Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse,
Shelley’s favorite, dead at three; Elena,
the baby in Naples, almost surely
Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted”
and then left behind, dead at one and a half;
Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron,
whom Byron sent off to the convent
at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—

and in those days, before I knew
any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,
who thought he was following radiant desire.

--GALWAY KINNELL

Who wrote "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers"?

Who wrote "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers" (and if you haven't read it, here's a link)?

a) Andrew Marvell
b) John Ashbery
c) Marvelous Marv Throneberry
d) Andrew Jackson
3) Percy Bysshe Shelley
e) The Merry Widow
f) Barbara Stanwyck

Follow the links for the right answer. Bonus: Someone on this list who did not write the poem in question wrote a poem with a very similar title! The first person to name the poet and give the correct title of the poem will be absolutely right. -- DL

first posted September 23, 2012

a) Andrew Marvell
b) John Ashbery
c) Marvelous Marv Throneberry
d) Andrew Jackson
3) Percy Bysshe Shelley
e) The Merry Widow
f) Barbara Stanwyck

Follow the links for the right answer. Bonus: Someone on this list who did not write the poem in question wrote a poem with a very similar title! The first person to name the poet and give the correct title of the poem will be absolutely right. -- DL

first posted September 23, 2012

Two Poems by Dante Di Stefano

Dante Di Stefano's "Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen" was chosen by Dana Gioia for The Best American Poetry 2018. "Exodus," the second poem here, is of the same vintage. -- DL

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished and I wanted
only to love in that insane tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
[of the moon] will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

Exodus

             It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.

                        —Cid Corman

My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life.  I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca cola can.  There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.  Like Moses stuttering to the stones and scrub brush, his dictates turned me into a desperate Aaron, bewildered, dutifully translating the fire raging in a reed thicket into the voice of God.  He slept for days on end, dreaming apple orchards. He believed the smell of college elevator steel was sacred.  Once he pronounced the stars memory-less pickpockets. He decried windows.  He expounded upon the intractability of silverware. I fought him twice and both times he had the strength of the archangel ascending into heaven, swooping down the mountain. Birds were not his emissaries. Canaan, he would have us all know, was a broken dinner plate and asparagus-spattered walls. From the edge of his hospital bed, I finally saw him unfolding in time and I could almost see him. Last night, as he nodded in his recliner, weak from the new medicine he’s taking, I knew no staff would split this rock.

from the archives; first posted December 18, 2020

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished and I wanted
only to love in that insane tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
[of the moon] will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

Exodus

             It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.

                        —Cid Corman

My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life.  I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca cola can.  There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.  Like Moses stuttering to the stones and scrub brush, his dictates turned me into a desperate Aaron, bewildered, dutifully translating the fire raging in a reed thicket into the voice of God.  He slept for days on end, dreaming apple orchards. He believed the smell of college elevator steel was sacred.  Once he pronounced the stars memory-less pickpockets. He decried windows.  He expounded upon the intractability of silverware. I fought him twice and both times he had the strength of the archangel ascending into heaven, swooping down the mountain. Birds were not his emissaries. Canaan, he would have us all know, was a broken dinner plate and asparagus-spattered walls. From the edge of his hospital bed, I finally saw him unfolding in time and I could almost see him. Last night, as he nodded in his recliner, weak from the new medicine he’s taking, I knew no staff would split this rock.

from the archives; first posted December 18, 2020

The Real Hero (Xanadu versus Khartoum)

(1) Who is the real hero of "Citizen Kane"?

a) Barry Kane
b) Marshall Will Kane
c) Charles Foster Kane
d) Xanadu
e) Captain Queeg

Name the three other relevant movie titles implied by the choices.

2) St. Patrick's Day special: When the hero played by Victor McLaglen (left) shouts "Frankie, your mother forgives me," he is referring to

a) Frankie Machine
b) Frankie 5 Angels
c) Frankie McPhillip
d) Fred Derry
e) General Frank Savage

Name the novel on which the movie is based.

3) Which of these characters does not figure in "Les Enfants du paradis"?

a) Garance
b) Baptiste
c) Pepe Le Moko
d) Jericho
3) Frederic Lemaitre

Who directed the movie?

4) Who says it? "I'm a businessman. Blood is a big expense."

a) Moe Green
b) Khartoum
c) Johnny Fontaine
d) Solozzo
e) Barzini

Did he also say, "You don't buy me out. I buy you out."

5) Which of these personages survives the bloody finale of "The Wild Bunch"?

a) Pike Bishop
b) Deke Thornton
c) Phyllis Dietrichson
d) Robert E. Lee Prewitt
e) Joel Cairo

True or false: "Pike Bishop" was Sam Peckinpah's sneaky way of predicting the disappearance of Bishop Pike in the summer of 1969.

a) Barry Kane
b) Marshall Will Kane
c) Charles Foster Kane
d) Xanadu
e) Captain Queeg

Name the three other relevant movie titles implied by the choices.

2) St. Patrick's Day special: When the hero played by Victor McLaglen (left) shouts "Frankie, your mother forgives me," he is referring to

a) Frankie Machine
b) Frankie 5 Angels
c) Frankie McPhillip
d) Fred Derry
e) General Frank Savage

Name the novel on which the movie is based.

3) Which of these characters does not figure in "Les Enfants du paradis"?

a) Garance
b) Baptiste
c) Pepe Le Moko
d) Jericho
3) Frederic Lemaitre

Who directed the movie?

4) Who says it? "I'm a businessman. Blood is a big expense."

a) Moe Green
b) Khartoum
c) Johnny Fontaine
d) Solozzo
e) Barzini

Did he also say, "You don't buy me out. I buy you out."

5) Which of these personages survives the bloody finale of "The Wild Bunch"?

a) Pike Bishop
b) Deke Thornton
c) Phyllis Dietrichson
d) Robert E. Lee Prewitt
e) Joel Cairo

True or false: "Pike Bishop" was Sam Peckinpah's sneaky way of predicting the disappearance of Bishop Pike in the summer of 1969.

THE MOODY TEMPLE and A HUM-DRUM NOT KNOWING [by John Hennessy]

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

Psalm on Sifnos

By Stephen Yenser

One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.

One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.

    Like this poem by Stephen Yenser, a straight-razor-witted fellow Hellenophile I got to know on a visit here several years ago, the island is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. From the ferry, Sifnos looks denuded, its smooth volcanic peaks all sun firing across a yellow skull. Disembark, though, and you begin to see that flora here is cunning, vines shifting along every available crack in stone, tamarisks lining the beach, olive trees low and orderly up on the terraces digging their roots deep.

    The people living here are pretty clever too; over the last five thousand years they’ve developed an architecture and agriculture to survive in style. Their houses are all clean lines and square angles, a series of unfolding cubes, thick-walled to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and painted uniformly white, shutters a limited variety of blue, green, brown, and pink. The blue and white domes of churches—one for every day of the year, one for every sixth Sifnian—speckle each inhabited hillside. Shrubs, vines, and fruit trees surround the buildings: lemons, limes, oranges, figs, pomegranates, mimosas, almonds, cascading bougainvillea, shady grape arbors, banks of flowering capers and night-blooming jasmine, enormous geraniums, and on and on. Beyond the limits of each town there are farmers’ fields, orchards, and pastures, chickens pecking, goats grazing, the odd cow, pig, or sheep poking, donkeys, horses and mules performing their tasks or stalling in attitudes of sublime passive aggression.

    And of course there is the sea. Visible from virtually every inch of this island. It’s kind of blue.

    Our arrival on Sifnos was a happy accident. In the summer of 2000, we found ourselves between apartments—Sabina Murray, Nicholas, our first child, two years old at the time, and I. In September we were to move into free housing on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover, where Sabina would serve as writer-in-residence for three years, but until then we had nowhere to go. We looked into summer sublets and seasonal rentals in Boston, Maine, southern New Hampshire, the Jersey Shore, all places near friends or family, but found nothing we could afford. It was actually cheaper, in the last years of the drachma, to go to Greece for a couple of months, than to stay in any of those local places. We moved around the Aegean that summer, but Sifnos was our favorite spot and we continue to return there when we can.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

    Our apartment on Sifnos abuts the grounds of the chapel of Panagia Ouranofora, once a temple to Apollo, the god from whom our town, Apollonia, the island’s capital, takes its name. Lengths of marble column and fragments from the walls of the temple have been integrated into the more modestly designed church, and ancient marble blocks still provide a few of the long steps up from the steno, the path that cuts between a block of terraced white Cycladic houses and Mamma Mia, the popular Italian restaurant next door.

    I feel deeply moved by this site; I’m at home here.

    But why?

My wife likes to call New Jersey the old country. Peterstown, Elizabeth, Price Street and Seminary Ave. in Rahway—that’s it for you, she says. The old country.

    She’s more than half serious. I grew up there with my mother’s family from Sicily. Cusumanos, Catalanos, Frangiamores and Federicos. As it is with other émigrés, my old country, my New Jersey, is gone, colonized by time and change, made unrecognizable by a tyrant present. I wasn’t around to see it happen. To observe without noticing. I go back as often as I can, but I’m a shade there, almost as out of place as I am in Sicily, even though I visit family in both places. Before Elizabeth and Rahway, we’re from Agrigento, Akragas, an ancient Greek colony. According to my grandfather, our family house of worship began as an altar for Phoenician traders, sailors from the Eastern Mediterranean, some of the earliest visitors to the island. Later the Greeks raised a temple around that altar, offered their own sacrifices there. The temple was rededicated by the Romans when they colonized us, consecrated as a church after Constantine Christianized the empire, converted to a mosque in the time of Arab rule, and re-transmogrified into a Roman Catholic church under the Normans. Even if it is in the old old country, I pass many days feeling very much like that building.

***

    I prefer going to Greece because Sicily is fraught for me: I’m more of an outsider there even though I look like everyone in town. In Greece I’m an outsider, sure, but a kind of distant cousin. There’s a certain level of acceptance, even welcome, offered to me, attended by very low expectations. You’re here? Great, just don’t get in the way and we’ll all do fine.

    The same courtesy extends to my family. Sabina, who is half Filipina (Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese) and half Irish, is a chameleon: she looks Asian in Asia, South American in South America, Mediterranean here. Our sons also have friends of their own in Greece. Although our command of the language is limited to the most basic transactions, that seems to satisfy us. Until we open our mouths, we even pass for Greek.

    I don’t mind not understanding what people are saying. It reminds me of childhood—and I don’t just mean the English words and constructions that flew over my head. Between my family and neighbors there was always some unintelligible language being spoken: various Southern Italian dialects, Spanish from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the DR, Armenian, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and whatever the hell my buddy Paul’s grandfather McCarthy from Cork was firing from the side of his mouth. It was just a given that you couldn’t understand everything being said in your presence—even if you were the one being addressed. You moved from Dennis Rivera’s apartment to the Keossians’ to the Smiths’, you ate the food, played the games, took the physical and multilingual abuse from the older siblings, and you tried to keep your head down, avoid attention. There was nothing profound about this—it was the Negative Capability of the quotidian. A humdrum not-knowing.

(For a brief discussion of the Greek economy and links to articles on the Greek political situation, please see yesterday’s post.)

From the archive; first posted July 23, 2012.

Boys, Beware of the Bad Girl! [by Mitch Sisskind]

How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.

Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.

When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!

If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc.  He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.

There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp"  from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.

The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!

from the archive; first posted December 5, 2014

How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.

Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.

When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!

If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc.  He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.

There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp"  from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.

The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!

from the archive; first posted December 5, 2014

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

<< There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime. >>

I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.

On Auden's Birthday: What the Stars Say [by Jill Baron]

Why Auden is an Aquarius [by Jill  Baron]

Wystan Hugh Auden, born February 21, 1905

When I read "Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times" (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem Auden read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that our Truth-Sayer, Revolutionary, and Exile all wrapped into one was not technically an Aquarius but a Pisces! The sun rests in Aquarius from January 20 to February 18, throwing Auden in deep water with the other fish. And yet despite the plain facts of the case, I have decided - in true Aquarian spirit - to hold fast to my own personal truth. That’s right. No one could ever confuse Auden for a Pisces, the sign of dreamers and mysticism. In fact, didn’t Auden deplore Yeats for the elder poet’s interest in the magic and the occult? “The deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.” This was a man – and a poet – who told it like it was, in plain talk, or (in Marianne Moore's phrase) “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

Or – did he? Was Auden as clear as air, or rather, a poet who made much use of irony, a rather more murky enterprise that achieves its means, according to Fowler, through – gasp! – mystification! Oh dear. I’m afraid that my aim – to prove that Auden is an Aquarius – has come undone. Perhaps my reliance on sun signs is flawed. [Right: Auden with his collaborator and fellow traveler Christopher Isherwood.]

Not many essayists disprove their thesis in the middle of an essay and continue writing in an attempt to make amends, but I suppose not many essayists write the words “Aquarius” and “Auden” in the same title line. Maybe it’s just this: I admire the Aquarian traits, and I admire Auden, and I wouldn’t mind having some more of the former, and being more like the latter, and I would foolishly like to think of Auden not as a human being, complex in his beliefs and counterbeliefs and charms and foibles, but as the fulfillment of the archetype of the Trailblazing Poet and Ideas Man. Which he was, undoubtedly - though he was also a devout Christian, raised on Norse mythology, whose “first religious memories [were] of exciting magical rites.”

The problem with archetypes is their one-dimensionality, which I suppose is why we really shouldn’t use the sun sign to define an individual’s personality. If Auden were here today, reading my defense of astrological reasoning, I suspect he would turn that superb one-liner on me: “Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!”

-- JB      from the archive, first posted Febriuary 21, 2010                                                              

When I read "Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times" (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem Auden read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that our Truth-Sayer, Revolutionary, and Exile all wrapped into one was not technically an Aquarius but a Pisces! The sun rests in Aquarius from January 20 to February 18, throwing Auden in deep water with the other fish. And yet despite the plain facts of the case, I have decided - in true Aquarian spirit - to hold fast to my own personal truth. That’s right. No one could ever confuse Auden for a Pisces, the sign of dreamers and mysticism. In fact, didn’t Auden deplore Yeats for the elder poet’s interest in the magic and the occult? “The deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.” This was a man – and a poet – who told it like it was, in plain talk, or (in Marianne Moore's phrase) “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

Or – did he? Was Auden as clear as air, or rather, a poet who made much use of irony, a rather more murky enterprise that achieves its means, according to Fowler, through – gasp! – mystification! Oh dear. I’m afraid that my aim – to prove that Auden is an Aquarius – has come undone. Perhaps my reliance on sun signs is flawed. [Right: Auden with his collaborator and fellow traveler Christopher Isherwood.]

Not many essayists disprove their thesis in the middle of an essay and continue writing in an attempt to make amends, but I suppose not many essayists write the words “Aquarius” and “Auden” in the same title line. Maybe it’s just this: I admire the Aquarian traits, and I admire Auden, and I wouldn’t mind having some more of the former, and being more like the latter, and I would foolishly like to think of Auden not as a human being, complex in his beliefs and counterbeliefs and charms and foibles, but as the fulfillment of the archetype of the Trailblazing Poet and Ideas Man. Which he was, undoubtedly - though he was also a devout Christian, raised on Norse mythology, whose “first religious memories [were] of exciting magical rites.”

The problem with archetypes is their one-dimensionality, which I suppose is why we really shouldn’t use the sun sign to define an individual’s personality. If Auden were here today, reading my defense of astrological reasoning, I suspect he would turn that superb one-liner on me: “Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!”

-- JB      from the archive, first posted Febriuary 21, 2010                                                              

Major Jackson: "On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me . . . "

(Ed note: Every volume of The Best American Poetry includes contributors' notes for which the poets share something about the inspiration for the poem chosen for the book. Here's what Major Jackson writes about "Why I Write Poetry," which Denise Duhamel selected for The Best American Poetry 2013. -- sdh)

Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative pleasure and contentment. Other people’s poems afford me the greatest pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up here, in this life? I’ve talents in other areas: why not a career as an orthopedic surgeon or a foreign service diplomat or a partner in some firm? Yet, my life could not have been scripted and nor would I change it. Attempting to identify the significant decisions that have led me here is mostly futile. Over the precious years, the person returning my gaze in the mirror has become increasingly familiar, an old friend and interrogator. But occasionally, I need to write poems that point to the mysteries and attempt to explain the unexplainable.

You can read Major Jackson's poem "Why I Write Poetry" in The Best American Poetry 2013.

Join Major Jackson and David Lehman at the New School (66 W. 12th Street, NYC) on Wednesday, December 11, at 6:30 pm for the final poetry forum of the season. After reading from his work, Major will join David Lehman in conversation and take questions from the audience. FREE More information here.

Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative pleasure and contentment. Other people’s poems afford me the greatest pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up here, in this life? I’ve talents in other areas: why not a career as an orthopedic surgeon or a foreign service diplomat or a partner in some firm? Yet, my life could not have been scripted and nor would I change it. Attempting to identify the significant decisions that have led me here is mostly futile. Over the precious years, the person returning my gaze in the mirror has become increasingly familiar, an old friend and interrogator. But occasionally, I need to write poems that point to the mysteries and attempt to explain the unexplainable.

You can read Major Jackson's poem "Why I Write Poetry" in The Best American Poetry 2013.

Join Major Jackson and David Lehman at the New School (66 W. 12th Street, NYC) on Wednesday, December 11, at 6:30 pm for the final poetry forum of the season. After reading from his work, Major will join David Lehman in conversation and take questions from the audience. FREE More information here.

Matt Hart's heartfelt Review of Paul Violi

From Matt Hart’s review of Paul Violi’s Overnight in ColdFrontMag:

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out. 
from the archive; first posted February 10, 2015. Violi is pictured above with Star Black at the KGB Bar.

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out. 
from the archive; first posted February 10, 2015. Violi is pictured above with Star Black at the KGB Bar.

"Days of 1896" [by C. P. Cavafy]

Days of 1896

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]
first posted January 26, 2021

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]
first posted January 26, 2021

A Note on the Simile [by David Lehman]

Similes are as underrated in contemporary writing as Longfellow is underrated among his nineteenth century confreres. Well, maybe all rhetorical figures are underrated. The neglect of rhetorical devices, verse forms, rhyme, and other “adjuncts or ornaments” (as Milton would have it) is lamentable, but it does create a compelling opportunity for contemporary poets eager to embrace change and renew a past tradition. You can distinguish yourself from your peers just by making good use of similes.

 A great simile opens a poem or narrative in a vertical way—it doesn’t advance the argument or plot so much as it heightens or deepens it. Whether introduced by “like” or “as” or through some other means (“the size of a grapefruit,”"the length of a football field"), the simile adds a complicating element even as it appears to clarify matters. It can resemble a detour—or a shortcut. It should surprise and should not repeat expressions already in use. Paradoxically, the simile can work to illustrate a thought or image—which is, after all, its stated function—yet it can overshadow the thought or image to which it was supposedly a subordinate element. Like the bridge in a jazz standard, it can surpass in beauty or inventiveness the primary melody, as happens in “Body and Soul” and “Skylark.”

For brilliant similes, albeit in prose, I would recommend Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps—in which she tells us, for instance, that her heroine was the victim of a certain man’s “conscience, as Isaac very nearly was of Abraham’s.” The religious and philosophical concerns of this author are front and center in a sentence that very surprisingly uses scientific means to explain a moral proposition: “To know God and yet do evil, this was the very essence of the Romantic life, a kind of electrolytical process in which the cathode and the anode act and react upon one another to ionize the soul.” An enterprising professor could build half a college course around that sentence.

Nearly every page of A. J. Liebling’s great book on boxing, The Sweet Science, can boast a refreshing, inventive simile or two. Example: “But Attell, who looks at you with cold eyes around his huge beak that is like a toucan’s with a twisted septum, is not a sentimental man.”

from the archive; first posted May 12, 2015.

Love Sonnet by John Updike [by Moira Egan]

Love Sonnet

In Love's rubber armor I come to you;

                                                       b

                                                  oo

                                                        b.

                                                c,

                                                   d

                                                   c

                                                   d:

                                                e

                                               f--

                                                  e

                                                    f.

                                                       g

                                                    g.

[R.I.P.]

 

from the archive; first posted January 27, 2009

Love Sonnet

In Love's rubber armor I come to you;

                                                       b

                                                  oo

                                                        b.

                                                c,

                                                   d

                                                   c

                                                   d:

                                                e

                                               f--

                                                  e

                                                    f.

                                                       g

                                                    g.

[R.I.P.]

 

from the archive; first posted January 27, 2009

Perfection Wasted [by John Updike]

Perfection Wasted [by John Updike]

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archives; first posted January 27, 2009. The originaal post continues to provoke many comments: 

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archives; first posted January 27, 2009. The originaal post continues to provoke many comments: