The Best American Poetry

"The New York School of Beauty" [by Mary Maxwell]

The New York School of Beauty

The man who cut James Schuyler’s hair also cuts my hair.
I once heard Schuyler read at the Ninety Second Street Y.

A large man, he sat at a wooden table positioned center stage
and took highly dramatic gulps of water between the reading
of his dead-pan poems.

                                           Carrying my postpartum weight,
I trudge behind my child’s stroller up Hudson Street past
Saint Luke’s and then over to the White Horse Tavern.

I find myself thinking of him, identifying sequentially with
the poet’s size, his last-ditch Episcopalianism, his thirst.

from Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (LongNookBooks, 2012). James Schuyler is pictured above.
From the archive; first posted December 4, 2020.

The New York School of Beauty

The man who cut James Schuyler’s hair also cuts my hair.
I once heard Schuyler read at the Ninety Second Street Y.

A large man, he sat at a wooden table positioned center stage
and took highly dramatic gulps of water between the reading
of his dead-pan poems.

                                           Carrying my postpartum weight,
I trudge behind my child’s stroller up Hudson Street past
Saint Luke’s and then over to the White Horse Tavern.

I find myself thinking of him, identifying sequentially with
the poet’s size, his last-ditch Episcopalianism, his thirst.

from Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (LongNookBooks, 2012). James Schuyler is pictured above.
From the archive; first posted December 4, 2020.

"Knight's Gambit" [by David Lehman]

The black knights were symmetrically placed

Same rank, opposite file

Which is where the phrase comes from

Rank and file, I mean

Now I know what you're thinking

You're thinking I'm going to say

Chess is like war or like politics

or like a road map for succeeding

in your future endeavors

but it is none of those things it is just

a game though a most ingenious one

with the underrated pawns leading the attack

and the white knights prepared to move

in two directions at once -- DL

from the archive; first posted September 3, 2012.

"Midnight Shift" [by Paul Violi]

Midnight Shift

I listen to the crickets and hear
the machinery at the bottom of the night.

They are all made in Hong Kong
out of interchangeable parts.

They all rise and fall on the same wave,
the creaking, changeless sea
they made out of sound and the night air.

               I don't surprise myself anymore:
a sense of motion but no advance, no shore
in sight other than sleep; and the usual
lines scribbled on the way, the notes
an alchemist hears adrift in the ordinary
with no symbol for the element of surprise.

-- But then to feel your hand instead, palm up
on the bed like a little boat in the dark,

with everything calm for an instant
before out of nowhere all of you lands
on me with a great laugh, a splash of hair.

– Paul Violi

from the archive; first posted October 7, 2008. Photo credit: David Kelley.

Wild Afternoons (15 years on] [by Angela Patrinos]

Yesterday afternoon David Lehman presented “Wild Nights! The Poetry of Eros” in the New School’s Lang Auditorium.  The event was the first of the “Fridays at One” series hosted by the IRP, the Institute of Retired Persons.  But there weren’t a lot of people who appeared to be in a retired state of mind.  Or body. The woman at the reception table had sleek hair and a full, brilliant smile, and while I was giving her my name, a tall, fit man cruised into the auditorium wearing black Lycra leggings and bicycle cleats.

“Wild Nights!” was a perfect title for an afternoon talk because as everyone knows, you can have a wilder night at one in the afternoon than you might have at one at night.   

David began by talking about and reading some 17th century seduction poetry, the seize-the-day, gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may poetry. This “sweet style” of poetry, though it can be hot, is a safe style, said David smiling sweetly.  Say goodbye to all that.  (Under his jacket, David wore a shirt the same deceptive beige as his tie.) 

Emily Dickinson wrote poems on scraps of paper that she stuffed in the pockets of her apron, but she was a radical poet, David said. Nothing sweet or safe about her.  (“Danger disintegrates Satiety”!)  To her, a successful poem was “one that tears off the top of your head.” We heard #249, the “Wild Nights poem.”   

We heard “Episode of Hands” by Hart Crane and then “Life Story” by Tennessee Williams, a writer who had loved Crane’s poetry.  We heard a sonnet by Edna Millay and a poem by Moira Egan who’d used Millay’s “What lips my lips have kissed” as her first line.  We heard Jill Alexander Essbaum’s very funny poem “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica” and Deborah Landau’s sexy “August in West Hollywood.”  (In fact, David had started the talk by saying that his idea for an anthology of American erotic poetry came to him in part because so much great erotic poetry is coming from younger female poets these days.)

David read two sonnets by H. Phelps Putnam, “Sonnets to Some Sexual Organs” — Sonnet I, Female and Sonnet II, Male.  The last two lines of Male are:

      You lead us, master, sniffing to the hunt,
      In quest forever of the perfect….

David looked up at the audience.  That last word, he said, seems to be missing.   

David also read his own poem “When a Woman Loves a Man” from his collection of poetry with the same title.  Afterward a woman in the audience said that she thought the poem was more of a love poem than an erotic poem.  Maybe the romance poem needs its own category.  Compare two lines from George and Ira Gershwin’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” with lines in “When a Woman Loves a Man:

“You like tomato and I like tomahto”

“When she says quixotic she mean mercurial”

“So we better call the calling off off  / Oh, let’s call the whole thing off!”

“One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it / another nine times.”

Earlier in the afternoon, David had told us that some erotic poems are “seeming to talk about one thing and sneakingly talking about something else.”  Later we found out that Charles Bukowski’s “Hunk of Rock” is not this kind of erotic poem.  Here are two lines:

give me that bottle, you
fucking whore!

and

“just do
whatever the fuck
you feel like doing,”
said Nina
her big ass
blazing
in the
lamplight.

Isn’t it interesting how that word in the H. Phelps Putnam poem went missing but a fucking whore’s big ass is blazing right where it’s supposed to be?   

– Angela Patrinos 

from the archive, first posted October 4, 2008.

Tom Disch's "Letters to Dead Editors"

On July 1, 2008, at 11:16AM, Tom Disch revealed God's "other" Big Idea of the day. He called it "Letters to Dead Editors."

<<<
Another were-there-but-world-enough theme anthology. It was to have been a whole collection by yours truly, and the first letter would have been sent to Mrs. Gaskell, who inmho should be included with the great Victorian novelists, along with the woman she wrote the biography of, Charlotte Bronte. Recently the BBC has given Mrs. G. some of the attention she merits. So much so that she doesn't really need me beating the drum for her, tho my letter would have been written in response to her great novel about the urban underclass, Mary Barton. What she brought to bear was a humorless (but perceptive) Moral Earnestness and a patient trompe l'oeil realism about the daily life of the miserable-most poor. By comparison Dickens comes across as lazy and/or sneeringly cruel.

I've tried writing such letters to real-life good writers, but they are too busy trying to grab the brass ring or otherwise advance up the ladder, or else simply think me pushy or wicked or dumb and don't write back or just say thank you, goodbye. Maybe it would be different now in the era of blogs and email, but back then my epistolary charms had no effect on the likes of Louise Erdrich, et al. As indeed, they shouldn't have. There are too many possible venal reasons why we don't write to our favorite celebrities. But to those safely dead and in their vaults--why not? The idea would be to address them as though they were real people, not statues swathed in marble togas and bronze crinolines, and as though they'd been keeping up with the things they had usually been interested in.

If anyone wants to give it a try, you could post a specimen letter here, but this should not be the usual Anything Goes comment. Mere japery on the order of "Shit happens" as one's whole letter to Dale Carnegie would rate a quick dele from God's red pencil. But I do think, and so does God, that it might be a nice book. Indeed, He often writes such letters Himself and sends them poste restante to the big post office on high.

-- Tom Disch (February 2, 1940 -- July 4, 2008)
>>>

from the archive; first posted November 1, 2008

"Flesh 78" [by Herbert Engelhardt, 1925-2021]

Brancusi hinted it
Giacometti stinted it

Miró laughed at it
Degas choreographed it

Bosch hated it
Bruegel skated it

Watteau crêpe de chine covered it
Manet gape to dine uncovered it

Botticelli virgin Spring emerged
Titian love-in fling resurged

Kandinsky ignored it
Gaugin adored it

Renoir bathed his coquette in pink
Bellows slathed hot sweat in stink

Ingres slipped in two vertebrae
Maillol worshipped her in clay

Seurat biked it to the park
Tintoretto liked it for St Mark

Gorky mangled it
Pollock tangled it

Picasso pranced in Avignon
Matisse danced in primary tone

Michelangelo mixed genders
Fragonard transfixed splendors

Cézanne preferred yellow lemons
Van Gogh preferred star-glow demons

Lachaise inflated it
Schiele conflated it

Beckmann painted bloody stumps
Hals sainted ruddy rumps

Warhol silk-screened it
Chagall flute-dreamed it

Giotto enrobed it in gesso
Géricault unrobed it al fresco

Daumier mocked it
Wood defrocked it

Rodin raptured eroticized it
Braque fractured analyzed it

De Chirico enigmatically stylized it
El Greco astigmatically exorcized it

Velásquez grew a mischievous chin
Da Vinci drew a mysterious grin

Rothko dazzled with colors bold
Klimt razzled with showers gold

Lautrec wrapped Braunt’s neck in red
Stieglitz snapped O’Keeffe’s pec in bed

Duchamp sighted it descending
Caravaggio whited it offending

Rubens sketched it out
Modigliani stretched it out

Artists obsess on flesh
From Marrakesh to Uttar Pradesh

Published in HARVARD REVIEW ONLINE on February 25, 2016 with this contributor's note:

Herbert Engelhardt was born in New Jersey in 1925. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II from 1943 to 1946 and was awarded the Purple Heart in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. He received his BA and MBA from Harvard in 1949 and 1951, respectively. In his late seventies, he began to write poems. He has lived in New York City since the early 1950s.

Ed. note: Herb, whom I met twelve or thirteen years ago, had a passion for poetry and a zest for life that continually inspired me. We met sixteen years ago, when he was eighty, and worked together on his poems. His book, Ordinary Soldiers, which he published under the title World War II Poetry: Memories of an Ordinary Soldier, deserves to be far better known and celebrated. One reader commented that the book is "Intimate. Visceral. Honest. First rate. Fine poetry and also a valuable as a historic record of a soldier's life, much of it in Okinawa and the Philippines, during WW II."  Herb and I lunched together often and talked about all manner of thing -- his travels, his years in the service, his time at Harvard (where he housed with Henry Kissinger), and his own successful business career. For years he taught a course at NYU's Business School, with a reading list that included Julius Caesar and other works in which management made costly decisions to their detriment. Herb is quoted in my book One Hundred Autobiographies. We were comparing medical experiences and he said with his customary salty wit, “No matter what the longhaired Buddhist full of shit poets write about flowers and rocks and clouds, you don’t really understand life until you’ve had a Foley catheter stuck in you for six days." He was right about that and so much else. We miss you and honor you, Herb, and we mark your 98th birthday with this post! -- DL

Star Black's Portraits of Poets: from the BAP Gala, 9/25/08

Meghan O'Rourke

Richard Howard

Lee Upton

Laura Cronk and David Lehman

John Ashbery and Adam Zagajewski

All photos by Star Black. Copyright (c) 2008 by Star Black.  Adam Zagajewski was reading at NYU that evening, but he and his party joined the BAP / New School crowd at Cafe Loup, where this picture was taken, after the BAP 2008 launch reading at the New School.

On Nin Andrews's "The Last Orgasm" (three years ago)

Nin Andrews, a regular contributor to this blog, whose poems have appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry, has brilliantly extended the conceit she introduced in her Book of Orgasms, first published in 1994, reprinted since then, and characterized often as an international cult classic. In the new book there are poems that reflects Andrews's passionate engagement with the work of such poets as Walt Whitman, Henri Michaux, Robert Hass, Lydia Davis, Denise Duhamel, Frank O'Hara, Amy Gerstler, James Tate, Mark Strand, Robert Bly, Rilke, Vallejo, and the sculptor Bernini ("Ecstasy of Saint Teresa"). There is also a splendid reflection on John Ashbery's "Instruction Manual." Andrews dares to ask questions, such as "What is the postmodernist orgasm?" Interviewing many in her indefatigable quest to resolve the issue, Andrews gives us the standard Wikipedia definition ("An orgasm of questionable identity or origin") as well as the far more convincing definition provided by the new American feminist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who says it is "a part of the all that women can't have."

The press release from Etruscan Press in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., begins with these paragraphs:

<<< Nin Andrews’s poetry collection, The Last Orgasm, a collection of wry and fantastical, spiritual, feminist meditations on sexuality, love, desire, and the end of desire, was released by Etruscan Press today.

The Last Orgasm continues the journey of Nin Andrew’s first collection, The Book of Orgasms, which became a cult classic that has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and has readers around the globe. In both books the orgasm is an ethereal presence, puzzled by humanity in general and the author in particular.  

Jan Beatty, (Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) says, “Of course, I would praise The Last Orgasm. And the first, second, middle, next, next to last. For the sake of everything true and holy (although Andrews would say there is nothing holy) please read this outrageous book! In these smart, raucous poems of one orgasm after another, Andrews climaxes at the pinnacle of social commentary—the G-spot of social change: the change being, give us more orgasms/the orgasm is dead. Indicting the writer, the book, the poetry mafia, and, of course, the orgasm, Andrews writes: ‘When I was sixteen, I woke one night and saw Our Lady of the Orgasm singing.’ Read this book if you want to sing again.”
>>> 

"Sprezzatura" [by Robert Hass]

Sprezzatura

Eugenio Montale asked me if there was an American word
for sprezzatura, particularly with respect to poetry.
In respetto di poesia, he said. And I said yes, in American
We call it ‘moose’ and mentioned several poets,
Frank O‘Hara among them, who were quite famous,
As fame goes in our sort of work, for their moose.
He wondered if there were an American expression
To convey the general concept of ‘Eugenio Montale.’
And I said, Yes, we call it ‘George Seferis.’ I also observed
—I was showing off, but how often  do you get to talk
to Eugenio Montale--that, in my view, the prose of  Seferis,
Especially his diaries from the last years of the war
And the slow waking to the depth of that devastation after,
Were even greater than his poems, though his poems 
At their best gave off pure light, like the glare
From the white walls on the cliffs above the harbor in Skios
Which could make the eyes ache. He canted his head
Politely and asked if among Americans the worship
Of the Virgin Mary was a custom. And I said that it was
And that in the cities of the Middle West and probably
The towns, it was especially intense among the mothers
Of children with grave illnesses who heaped flowers
In enormous quantities before her altar and he nodded.
And they light candles? he asked. And I said, Yes, candles.

from Summer Smoke, the brilliant new collection by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020). Hass was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of The Best American Poetry. Photo credit: Miriam Berkley.

From the archive; first posted September 25, 2020

Epigraph of the Month: Poe

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

Wordsmith's A.Word.A.Day: The Cento

The Cento

PRONUNCIATION:

(SEN-to) 

MEANING:

noun: A literary work, especially a poem, composed of parts taken from works of other authors.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin cento (patchwork). Earliest documented use: 1605.

NOTES:

Nobel-prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot’s observation is relevant to centos: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

Examples of centos:
The Oxford Cento by David Lehman
The Dong With the Luminous Nose by John Ashbery

USAGE:

“Louis Zukofsky continued to write ... a play, a novella, a book of criticism, a 500-page cento of philosophy in homage to Shakespeare ...”
Bob Perelman; Finding His Voice; Tikkun (Berkeley, California); May/Jun 2007.

THE CENTO AS A PROMPT:

https://theamericanscholar.org/lets-assemble-a-cento/

https://theamericanscholar.org/our-crowd-sourced-cento-stanza-one/

Visit Wordsmith.org for more on poetic forms.  And https://pachofaunfinished.wordpress.com/tag/david-lehman/ 

From the archive; first posted March 14, 2015.

PRONUNCIATION:

(SEN-to) 

MEANING:

noun: A literary work, especially a poem, composed of parts taken from works of other authors.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin cento (patchwork). Earliest documented use: 1605.

NOTES:

Nobel-prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot’s observation is relevant to centos: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

Examples of centos:
The Oxford Cento by David Lehman
The Dong With the Luminous Nose by John Ashbery

USAGE:

“Louis Zukofsky continued to write ... a play, a novella, a book of criticism, a 500-page cento of philosophy in homage to Shakespeare ...”
Bob Perelman; Finding His Voice; Tikkun (Berkeley, California); May/Jun 2007.

THE CENTO AS A PROMPT:

https://theamericanscholar.org/lets-assemble-a-cento/

https://theamericanscholar.org/our-crowd-sourced-cento-stanza-one/

Visit Wordsmith.org for more on poetic forms.  And https://pachofaunfinished.wordpress.com/tag/david-lehman/ 

From the archive; first posted March 14, 2015.

Let Us Now Praise People We Want to Have Sex With [by Janice Erlbaum]

The praise poem was all the rage in certain circles in 1993. Kathy from Pussy Poets started it; she wrote a praise poem for Bobby Miller, and one for me, called “Mary Jane Girl.” “Mary Jane Girl” was all about how I would get her high and listen to her relationship problems with DC, and how awesome of me that was. I loved Kathy, too, but I never wrote a praise poem for her.

I never wrote a praise poem for anyone. The closest I came was a poem I wrote for Eliza, which wasn’t written so much for her as it was written to impress her. The poem was named for my old friend Melissa, and it implied that Melissa and I had slept together; in fact, we had not. But I wanted Eliza to think I had some credibility as a lesbian so that she would like me, and isn’t wanting someone to like you one of the highest forms of praise?

Eliza didn’t have any praise poems, though she had a response poem, which was kind of the same thing; just another way of flirting. Maggie Estep had a poem called “Fuck Me,” so Eliza wrote a response poem called “No, Fuck Me,” and of course Maggie heard about it and was flattered, but she didn’t swing that way, so Eliza read it to me, dancing ahead of me on the sidewalk on Allen Street, really performing the hell out of it. I was dying to swing Eliza’s way, and I almost did, for a few weeks there, after which she dumped me in the middle of Tompkins Square Park. Then I wrote a poem with Eliza’s name in it, but it wasn’t a praise poem.

I started dating Paul, who put me in just about every single one of his poems, which was his way of paying me back for letting him live with me and supporting him while he smoked all of my weed. He read one on stage at the Nuyorican one night – “And Janice will fill you up! And Janice will set you free!” – and I cringed, ashamed. Everyone knew how cheap I was, that I could be bought for the price of a few lines of not very good poetry.

In the meantime, DC wrote a praise poem for me. It was called “For J.E.,” and the word “genius” was used. This caused me to think about dumping Paul for DC, who had his own apartment, and a job, and was also a much better poet than Paul was. So I wrote a poem dedicated to DC. This caused Kathy to retire her praise poem for me, and to change one of the characters in the screenplay she was writing from a wonderful best friend type to an inane slut.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that no poem will get you laid faster than a praise poem, but if you use one to sleep with another poet, you’re either going to wind up supporting them while they smoke all your weed, getting dumped in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, or alienating your best friends. Probably safer to stick to limericks.

from the archive, first posted April 2, 2008.

Tuesday Limerick Quiz

<<<

There was a young sultan of Kabir,

a precocious lad who lacked a career,

for though he was stuck-up

he used all his skill to suck up

and stick his rod in a rear.

>>>

Does anyone know the author of this limerick? There is no evidence that Byron translated it from an Albanian epigone of Catullus

from the archive; first posted September 8, 2013

.

<<<

There was a young sultan of Kabir,

a precocious lad who lacked a career,

for though he was stuck-up

he used all his skill to suck up

and stick his rod in a rear.

>>>

Does anyone know the author of this limerick? There is no evidence that Byron translated it from an Albanian epigone of Catullus

from the archive; first posted September 8, 2013

.

from "Urban Renewal" [by Major Jackson]

from Urban Renewal

XVI.

What of my fourth grade teacher at Reynolds Elementary,
who weary after failed attempts to set to memory
names strange and meaningless as grains of dirt around
the mouthless, mountain caves at Bahrain Karai:
Tarik, Shanequa, Amari, Aisha, nicknamed the entire class
after French painters whether boy or girl. Behold
the beginning of sentient formless life. And so,
my best friend Darnell became Marcel, and Tee_tee
was Braque, and Stacy James was Fragonard,
and I, Eduard Charlemont. The time has come to look
at these signs from another point of view. Days passed
in inactivity before I corrected her, for Eduard was
Austrian and painted the black chief in a palace in 1878
to the question whether intelligence exists. All of Europe
swooned to Venus of Willendorf. Outside her tongue,
yet of it, in textbooks Herodotus tells us of the legend
of Sewosret (Seosteris I, II, or III), the colonizer of Greece,
founder of Athens. What's in a name? Sagas rise and
fall in the orbs of jumpropes, Hannibal grasps a Roman
monkeybar on history's rung, and the mighty heroes at recess
lay dead in woe on the imagined battlefields of Halo.

from The Best American Poetry 1994
guest editor Lyn Hejinian

Donald Keene moves (back) to Japan [from the archive; December 14, 2011]

Pictured left: Jamie Katz followed by this cipher 9 8 44 72 280

Click here to read Jamie Katz's brilliant feature on Donald Keene, the Western world's leading interpreter of Japanese literature, a Columbia professor for more than seventy years. On a visit to Japan in 1990, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Professor Keene, who, in addition to discussing everything from Basho and linked-verse to the merits of a traditional Japanese breakfast, taught me the two key rules of pronouncing Japanese and made my two-week stay go a lot more smoothly than would otherwise have been the case. With his books and anthologies, Keene taught an appreciation of Japanese culture to generations of students, not only at Columbia, his home base, but the world over.

In April 2003 Keene was awarded a medal of honor from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At his request I wrote the inscription, appropriating the tanka as an appropriate form:

To Donald Keene we
owe much of what we know of
Japan's verse and prose.

In shadow of rising sun
stood the lean tree unobserved.

Then Keene could be heard:
in accents lucid and keen
he rendered the scene.

And the bare branch of winter
burst into cherry blossom.

Here's an excerpt from Katz's feature in the current Columbia College Today. -- DL

<<<
Keene’s approach to teaching and writing bears the imprint of his freshman Humanities instructor, Mark Van Doren ’21 GSAS. “He was a scholar and poet and above all some­one who understood literature and could make us understand it with him,” Keene writes in Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. “Van Doren had little use for commentaries or specialized literary criticism. Rather, the essential thing, he taught us, was to read the texts, think about them, and discover for our­selves why they were ranked as classics.”

The experience of taking the College’s general education cours­es was “incredible,” Keene says, and he fondly remembers the great teachers he encountered as an undergraduate. Among them were the “learned and gentle” classicist, Moses Hadas ’30 GSAS; Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38 GSAS and Jacques Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS, who led Keene’s Senior Colloquium; and Pierre Clamens, a French instructor “who was very stern, but gave everything to his stu­dents,” Keene says.

His chief mentor, however, was cul­tural historian Ryusaku Tsunoda, a pio­neer of Japanese studies at Columbia whom Keene often refers to, simply, as Sensei. “He was a man I admired com­pletely,” Keene says, “a man who had more influence on me than anyone else I can think of.”

As a senior, Keene enrolled in Tsu­noda’s course in the history of Japa­nese thought. Fifty years later, in a CCT interview (Winter 1991) with David Lehman ’70, ’78 GSAS, Keene remem­bered: “The first class, it turned out I was the only student — in 1941 there was not much pro-Japanese feeling. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of your time to give a class for one student?’ He said, ‘One is enough."

In Memory of Ed Ochester, Poet & Editor, RIP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have asked Ed Ochester (above) to edit our Sunday poetry pages for the next few months. Here is one of Ed's poems:

March of the Penguins

       The editor of National Review urged [Young Republicans]
       to see the movie because it promoted monogamy.  A widely
       circulated Christian magazine said it made a strong case for
       intelligent design --The New York Times, 9/13/05

What the hell are they going to do now
with the libidinous bluebird, who lines up
a couple of extra girlfriends every summer,
not to mention the evil house wrens--
don¹t be fooled by their cheery little calls,
they have up to five mates at a time!
I won¹t even mention the gay rabbits
we had once, in love with one another’s ears,
etc., and even now my old friend Walter may be
declaiming how God planted dinosaur bones
to test the faith of Christians with the appearance
of evolution, thereby demonstrating once again
we are the first country to pass from barbarism
to decadence without an interlude, and as for
“intelligent design,” even Britney Spears
wouldn’t drop her eggs
at 70 below.

from UNRECONSTRUCTED: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW
(Autumn House Press, 2007)

Under Ed Ochester's leadership, the Pitt Poetry Series has maintained a reputation for feisty independence -- so much so that "the pit bull poetry series" is an inevitable pun. He writes:

<< I've been the editor of the Pitt Poetry Series for thirty years. Some of our best-known poets are Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson, Bob Hicok, Etheridge Knight, Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Malena Morling, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Afaa Weaver, David Wojahn and Dean Young.  Most of these were not very well known when they started to publish with Pitt, and many of our younger poets who aren't well known yet are terrific and deserve (and will get) wider readership.  That's one of the pleasures of the business –- to "discover" new poets and watch their reputations grow.  Another pleasure, for me, is making eclectic choices.  American poetry is bigger than one or two schools, one or two ways of doing things.  I like to think I irritate or, even better, outrage certain academic critics and poetry gangs with the eclecticism of the Pitt list. I do think we've helped increase the readership for poetry: many of our books have sold more than 10,000 copies, and a couple have even reached 100,000. We're also one of the few poetry publishers – maybe the only one? – that doesn't require subsidies. For the next few months on this site I've chosen poems from recent books of ours, mainly.  I hope that you enjoy them, of course, and that the enjoyment will motivate you to buy some. We need to remember Kenneth Patchen's gentle observation: "People who say they love poetry and never buy any are a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches. >>

Ed Ochester's most recent books are  UNRECONSTRUCTED: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW (Autumn House Press,  2007), THE REPUBLIC OF LIES (chapbook, Adastra Press, 2007), THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE (Story Line Press, 2001), and AMERICAN POETRY NOW (University of Pittsburgh Press,  2007), an anthology of contemporary American poetry. In addition to editing the Pitt Poetry Series, he is the general editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction (University of Pittsburgh Press). From 1978 to 1998 he was director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and was twice elected president of Associated Writing Programs. He is co-editor of the poetry magazine 5 AM and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College MFA program.

from the archive; first posted January 4, 2009.

What is History? Multiple Choice [by David Lehman]

The multiple-choice exam as an ad hoc poetic form has always attracted me. John Ashbery did clever and funny things with it. Our Freud Quiz is as much an homage to the multiple choice form as to the bearded inventor of psychoanalysis in his little Berggasse flat in Vienna. I like the structure not only because of its familiarity but because of my love of alternative possibilities.

Last night I was reading the May 2012 issue of Harper's and I came across an essay entitled "Ignorance of Things Past" by editor emeritus Lewis Lapham. The essay is full of recollected pith, some of which is surprisingly bland: "a morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable" (Thomas Jefferson). But it was when I reached a new graf headed "History is a work in progreess" that the imp of the perverse reared its head and I created "History, a Multiple-Choice Exam," draft one, which follows:

History is
(1) A 'work in progress" (Lewis Lapham, Harper's, May 2012)
(2) "A waste of time" (Hilda Cortez, who sat next to me in Art History 76 sophomore year)
(3) A sphinx that "to the defeated may say 'Alas!' but cannot help or pardon" (W. H. Auden, "Spain 1937")
(4) What happens when thesis meets antithesis or when Newton's second law of mechanics meets "Hegel's Vacation"
(5) "A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken" (Ireland's Icarus)
(6) "Now and England" (T. S. Eliot)
(7) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein)
(8) "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'' (Elizabeth Bishop)
(9) A "hail Mary" pass (Doug Flutie)
(10) What FDR said was "the only thing we have to fear." 
(11) Something that occurred prior to
    a) Auschwitz
    b) Hiroshima
    c) Watergate
    d) the fall of the Berlin Wall
    e) your birth, dear reader. Nine months prior, give or take a few days.
    f) all of the above conjoined by ampersands

from the archive; first posted April 28, 2012

History is
(1) A 'work in progress" (Lewis Lapham, Harper's, May 2012)
(2) "A waste of time" (Hilda Cortez, who sat next to me in Art History 76 sophomore year)
(3) A sphinx that "to the defeated may say 'Alas!' but cannot help or pardon" (W. H. Auden, "Spain 1937")
(4) What happens when thesis meets antithesis or when Newton's second law of mechanics meets "Hegel's Vacation"
(5) "A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken" (Ireland's Icarus)
(6) "Now and England" (T. S. Eliot)
(7) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein)
(8) "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'' (Elizabeth Bishop)
(9) A "hail Mary" pass (Doug Flutie)
(10) What FDR said was "the only thing we have to fear." 
(11) Something that occurred prior to
    a) Auschwitz
    b) Hiroshima
    c) Watergate
    d) the fall of the Berlin Wall
    e) your birth, dear reader. Nine months prior, give or take a few days.
    f) all of the above conjoined by ampersands

from the archive; first posted April 28, 2012

The Boy from the Garden: Review of "Timothy Green" [by Joe Lehman]

 

Lin Manuel-Miranda in The Odd Life of Timothy Green

Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green deserves credit where credit is due, yet leaves its viewer with a feeling of incompleteness in that it doesn’t achieve all that it could. The viewer is presented with the story of a childless couple, Jim and Cindy Green (Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Garner) who one night find that a boy of about ten years old has appeared from out of the soil in their garden—and he has leaves growing out of his legs (leaves, which cannot be removed) and he immediately addresses the befuddled Jim and Cindy as “Mom” and “Dad.”

        The movie wisely does not to go into a long explanation of how this miraculous event came to be, leaving this to the viewer’s imagination. The Greens don’t ask questions, they accept this gift from God or Mother Nature without hesitation and agree to raise the child as their own, all the while keeping his legs covered in long socks so as not to reveal his telltale leaves. Two things are made clear:  he is a composite of all the traits the parents had wished for in a son and he seems to be of a species of botanical origin. This is apparent by his consistent show of basking in the glare of the sun throughout the movie. The kid — the Timothy of the title — of course, is perfect. So well-behaved it is almost too good to be true. The kind every parent longs to have. He goes to school, is oblivious to the jokes and pranks that bullies make at his expense, tries out for the soccer team, proves to draw expertly with a pencil, and even shows talent with a drumbeat.

            Watching Timothy Green evokes the memories of similarly themed films as 1985’s superb D.A.R.Y.L. and 2001’s moodier A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like the preteen-aged boys of those movies, Timothy is not quite human, and it shows in his quirky, offbeat behavior. Unlike the earlier films, Timothy Green fails to explore the full depths of this behavior, preferring to focus more on the parents and their observations of and reactions to this miracle child of theirs. This is a mistake on the movie’s part, as Jim and Cindy, despite the complexities of their characters and their obvious insecurities with being thrust full-time into parenthood (Jim is determined to become an improvement over his own less-than-supportive father Jim Sr., played by David Morse) do not sustain as much interest as the fantastical Timothy.

            Consider the early scene where Timothy is bullied in school for his noticeable differences — he is brand new to this world and needs to be told how things work and what they mean. This theme was visited in D.A.R.Y.L when the boy-robot of the title is winked at by a girl and responds by blinking with both eyes, not knowing the meaning of the gesture. Only in Timothy Green, Timothy’s relationships with other kids are not adequately explored. His friendship with an alienated girl Joni (Odeya Rush) is presented without much dialogue at all. Joni figures out early on Timothy’s secret physical characteristics, i.e. his leaves and origins. But the interplay between the two does not go much further. Joni’s presence does not lead Timothy’s character development in any new directions. This is in direct contrast to the much more dynamic relationship between Daryl and his young friend “Turtle” in D.A.R.Y.L., where Turtle teaches Daryl that, because parents don’t want their children to be too perfect, he needs to display a mischievous side once in a while. Timothy Green does not offer Timothy such opportunities for exploration.

        Timothy spends the most screen time interacting with the adults. These include Jim’s father, Cindy’s sister (Rosemarie DeWitt), who can always be counted on to brag of her own children’s many talents, Cindy’s elderly aunt and uncle (Lois Smith and M. Emmett Walsh), her unhappy boss, the town matriarch, played by Dianne Wiest, and the frustrated soccer coach, played by rapper Common. The supporting cast is impressive, and each actor has something to contribute. What is consistent about these characters and their relationship to Timothy is that he manages to bring out the positive side in each of them. This is nice, but could be more interesting if their responses were more varied. They, in turn, bring out Timothy’s vast talents, although he is not quite perfect in all of them — his performance at the pivotal soccer game speaks to that — another wise decision on the movie’s part. The problem is that once the viewer is introduced to Timothy’s many talents, they are left unexplored. Timothy displays his gifts at music and drawing and then does not do much with them.

        Looming in the background is a subplot about the town’s primary base of industry, the beloved pencil factory that is in danger of shutting down, leaving Jim and most of the townsfolk out of work. Timothy’s cheerfully optimistic personality encourages Jim and Cindy to take a step to save the factory, which turns out to be an inspired idea, best not to be revealed in this review. There is of course the obligatory threat from the factory bosses to take credit for this step and the conflict between them and the parents. Such elements are standard movie fare, but effective in this case.

        Ultimately, Timothy Green is a respectable film that deals with its themes with grace and maturity. It is certainly appropriate for the whole family to enjoy. It is charming in many ways. It just does not go the entire distance. There are too many missed opportunities, times when the film left the door open to explore certain elements and ideas and then abandoned them before going any further. It is a pretty good movie that could have been great.

from the archive; first posted September 12, 2012.

Lin Manuel-Miranda in The Odd Life of Timothy Green

Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green deserves credit where credit is due, yet leaves its viewer with a feeling of incompleteness in that it doesn’t achieve all that it could. The viewer is presented with the story of a childless couple, Jim and Cindy Green (Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Garner) who one night find that a boy of about ten years old has appeared from out of the soil in their garden—and he has leaves growing out of his legs (leaves, which cannot be removed) and he immediately addresses the befuddled Jim and Cindy as “Mom” and “Dad.”

        The movie wisely does not to go into a long explanation of how this miraculous event came to be, leaving this to the viewer’s imagination. The Greens don’t ask questions, they accept this gift from God or Mother Nature without hesitation and agree to raise the child as their own, all the while keeping his legs covered in long socks so as not to reveal his telltale leaves. Two things are made clear:  he is a composite of all the traits the parents had wished for in a son and he seems to be of a species of botanical origin. This is apparent by his consistent show of basking in the glare of the sun throughout the movie. The kid — the Timothy of the title — of course, is perfect. So well-behaved it is almost too good to be true. The kind every parent longs to have. He goes to school, is oblivious to the jokes and pranks that bullies make at his expense, tries out for the soccer team, proves to draw expertly with a pencil, and even shows talent with a drumbeat.

            Watching Timothy Green evokes the memories of similarly themed films as 1985’s superb D.A.R.Y.L. and 2001’s moodier A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like the preteen-aged boys of those movies, Timothy is not quite human, and it shows in his quirky, offbeat behavior. Unlike the earlier films, Timothy Green fails to explore the full depths of this behavior, preferring to focus more on the parents and their observations of and reactions to this miracle child of theirs. This is a mistake on the movie’s part, as Jim and Cindy, despite the complexities of their characters and their obvious insecurities with being thrust full-time into parenthood (Jim is determined to become an improvement over his own less-than-supportive father Jim Sr., played by David Morse) do not sustain as much interest as the fantastical Timothy.

            Consider the early scene where Timothy is bullied in school for his noticeable differences — he is brand new to this world and needs to be told how things work and what they mean. This theme was visited in D.A.R.Y.L when the boy-robot of the title is winked at by a girl and responds by blinking with both eyes, not knowing the meaning of the gesture. Only in Timothy Green, Timothy’s relationships with other kids are not adequately explored. His friendship with an alienated girl Joni (Odeya Rush) is presented without much dialogue at all. Joni figures out early on Timothy’s secret physical characteristics, i.e. his leaves and origins. But the interplay between the two does not go much further. Joni’s presence does not lead Timothy’s character development in any new directions. This is in direct contrast to the much more dynamic relationship between Daryl and his young friend “Turtle” in D.A.R.Y.L., where Turtle teaches Daryl that, because parents don’t want their children to be too perfect, he needs to display a mischievous side once in a while. Timothy Green does not offer Timothy such opportunities for exploration.

        Timothy spends the most screen time interacting with the adults. These include Jim’s father, Cindy’s sister (Rosemarie DeWitt), who can always be counted on to brag of her own children’s many talents, Cindy’s elderly aunt and uncle (Lois Smith and M. Emmett Walsh), her unhappy boss, the town matriarch, played by Dianne Wiest, and the frustrated soccer coach, played by rapper Common. The supporting cast is impressive, and each actor has something to contribute. What is consistent about these characters and their relationship to Timothy is that he manages to bring out the positive side in each of them. This is nice, but could be more interesting if their responses were more varied. They, in turn, bring out Timothy’s vast talents, although he is not quite perfect in all of them — his performance at the pivotal soccer game speaks to that — another wise decision on the movie’s part. The problem is that once the viewer is introduced to Timothy’s many talents, they are left unexplored. Timothy displays his gifts at music and drawing and then does not do much with them.

        Looming in the background is a subplot about the town’s primary base of industry, the beloved pencil factory that is in danger of shutting down, leaving Jim and most of the townsfolk out of work. Timothy’s cheerfully optimistic personality encourages Jim and Cindy to take a step to save the factory, which turns out to be an inspired idea, best not to be revealed in this review. There is of course the obligatory threat from the factory bosses to take credit for this step and the conflict between them and the parents. Such elements are standard movie fare, but effective in this case.

        Ultimately, Timothy Green is a respectable film that deals with its themes with grace and maturity. It is certainly appropriate for the whole family to enjoy. It is charming in many ways. It just does not go the entire distance. There are too many missed opportunities, times when the film left the door open to explore certain elements and ideas and then abandoned them before going any further. It is a pretty good movie that could have been great.

from the archive; first posted September 12, 2012.

Happy birthday, Dorothy Parker (and Stacey Lehman! -- on August 18)

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Parker & Your "quondam dreams"

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I pond on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men . . .
I'm due to fall in love again.

--Dorothy Parker

 

Poem in the Manner of Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker,
who wrote witty stories,
did not foresee
that spectacles would be-
come fashion accessories.
“Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.”

Today, for a lark,
I sat in Washington Square Park
I thought of Miss Parker,
and what she might say
assessing the spectacles of our day:
“Even the nicest lasses
Have tattoos on their asses.”

-- David Lehman

Bukowski's "Laughing Heart" (with commentary from various hands) on Buk's birthday

Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 06, 2008 at 11:14 AM in Poems | Permalink

Comments

This is one of my favorite poems and it doesn't seem like Bukowski to me. Thanks.
Posted by: Noah Burke | November 06, 2008 at 04:04 PM

I agree - Bukowski usually isn't this hopeful. A lovely poem.
Posted by: Laura Orem | November 07, 2008 at 07:41 PM

One of my favorite poems. Very provocative and inspiring.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000058706234 | September 19, 2009 at 02:09 PM

Love this poem, but you've got one of the lines wrong (every site I look at does, though). I have the original printing of this. The line "there is a light somewhere," should be "there is light somewhere."
Posted by: Tonymoore99 | October 08, 2012 at 09:25 AM

I have a friend who’s really good in writing a poem, too. She writes inspiring poem just like you and I admire you both.
Posted by: Ruggieri Sharkey | January 27, 2013 at 12:34 PM

Good poem. However, I would have cut the last three lines, making it a perfect poem.
Posted by: HDRBodegaPhoto | January 05, 2018 at 06:04 PM

Life is LIFE
Posted by: Obélix | June 19, 2019 at 07:38 PM

Said like a true alcoholic; I know, I am.
Posted by: Michael | October 21, 2019 at 03:33 AM

Light means hope, then we need to do meaningful things in our life, before death coming.
Posted by: Eric | April 14, 2020 at 09:06 PM

Always has a way of making the misery escapable as long as the mind and heart are set on the horizon of a fading light.
Posted by: Joaquin Nava | October 10, 2020 at 08:02 PM

I cant find this poem on https://bukowski.net/manuscripts/
Is this really Bukowski?
Posted by: The Wandering Earth | November 12, 2020 at 05:30 AM

When I first heard this recited, I thought it was one of the lectures by Joseph Campbell, whom I love. Was surprised it was Bukowski. The last three lines are absolutely the best. Without them, the poem would be just good. With them, it’s great! Here’s to the Old Gods!❤️
Posted by: Teuta Ilyriana | April 13, 2021 at 01:05 AM

The numb nut who said he would have cut the last 3 lines therefore making it a perfect poem... Well yes indeed I suppose it would be. You know the perfect poem. Poetry that is...Perfect. 99.9 percent of all poetry is written by people trying to write the perfect poem. And guess what? Most of them succeed at writing poetry, perfectly. And that's why hardly anyone will ever read it. Except maybe there mother , themselves and the person there sleeping with. Thank God for Bukowski. He wasn't aiming at perfection but as he said" getting down the word the line." Poetry books are sadly full of the perfect poem and or poems. That's why you can line your bird cage with most of it's pages.
Posted by: Steve Hammek | November 15, 2021 at 10:16 PM

Perhaps the most powerful words I've ever heard. Coming from Charles Bukowski, maybe the biggest nihilist to ever live. I am still in awe of its beauty.
P.S THE LAST THREE LINES ARE THE BEST PART OF THIS POEM
Posted by: Alex | March 16, 2022 at 06:27 PM

alchoholism is "dank"
Posted by: john smith | April 25, 2022 at 11:46 AM

I am in the camp that the last three lines are the best part of the poem. Why does this one person hate the last three lines? It is possible that they are just trolling, but I usually take people at face value so let's assume that they really do hate the last three lines. Why? My very first thought was that maybe they hate the idea of gods, but I don't think that is their problem since then they would just hate the last two lines. What the last three lines all have in common is an assurance that the reader is at a fundamental level very good and valuable. The person who complained may see this as unsupported hope. They may say that you can't just assert that a person is valuable. Why should we just say that a person is marvelous, maybe people are really all garbage. Why should we assume that the gods would ever delight in us, maybe they are completely disgusted by us. The debate is whether the gods fundamentally see humanity as worthy or worthless. The idea of the gods waiting is the much debated concept of free will. We have the innate capacity for being marvelous and delightful, but we must choose whether we are going to express that or not. But what if we don't know how to do that? If we sincerely look, we can find people who will teach us how to be marvelous and delightful.
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:07 AM

Parts of this poem were set to music and posted to Youtube. It's worth checking out (22 million views). This link really will take you to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRXn2NRiWI

Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:29 AM

Life has its ups &downs 4 sure.when da persona is in a rosy mood,da world seems 2 be his/her oyster,if in a lousy mood,demons seem 2 be swarming on da horizon.life has never been a bowl o strawberries w cream&sugar on top,not has death deprived da planet o a priceless jewel by taking us.live&let live.
Posted by: halfeyed bro | October 21, 2022 at 07:07 AM

My two cents ...
Whenever I read poetry, I view it two ways: 1) What the author intended; 2) What it means to me. Sometimes, they are in alignment. Sometimes, they aren't. Take T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men". I view it differently than T.S. Eliot intended.

Here are how I take Bukowski's poem.

Every individual deserves his/her life. It's a gift. Live it as you will. However, we have built a society that demands that you conform. Some people struggle with that conformity more than others. Those that struggle, really..Really...REALLY struggle.

Bukowski is speaking to them. He's saying "Be you. You are marvelous." If you do choose to be you, the Gods will delight in you. In fact, they are waiting patiently so they can delight in you.

Again, this is how I read the poem. Right or wrong.
Posted by: Michael Felli | October 22, 2022 at 07:51 PM

The gods will delight but yoy will not be happy or successgul in the world's term,at least most. Don't tirn the Buk into new age pap.
Posted by: Chuck Taylor | May 31, 2023 at 08:18 AM

I think the chap that talked of cutting the last 3 lines.. you're all wondering why he hated those 3 lines. And maybe he did. But if you don't wonder about the 3 lines he asked to cut, and instead look at the line where the poem would have ended with said lines cut.. I think it would make more sense.

The poem begins with the line... Your life is your life. and if the last 3 were cut.. it would end with the line... Your life is your life.
Posted by: Zack | July 08, 2023 at 04:45 AM

Response to the consideration of the poem’s value with or without the last three lines:
One way I thought about it is this:

Without the last three lines, the tone of the message feels confrontational, empowering the reader to push back, to push against in order to pursue being true to one’s self.
And poetically/structurally, this provides no resolve.

Including the last three lines, the tone shifts to hopeful, and suggests an exchange of one kind of submission (against the expected cultural norms) for a different kind of submission (being delighted in)
And poetically/structurally, this provides a satisfying resolve

Either way, Bukowski invites the reader to personalize the message.

Posted by: Virginia | July 24, 2023 at 12:04 PM

Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

"Shouldn't the Sonnet?" [by Sandra Simonds]

Picture: Steve McCaffery, the structure of the sonnet

I.                    Is the Sonnet a Fascist Form?

 Somewhere, supposedly, William Carlos Williams calls the sonnet “a Fascist form.” Can someone tell me if this is true? I asked a number of poet friends, looked and looked, but couldn’t find the quote ANYWHERE. Even if he didn’t write it, the phrase has an irresistible ring to it and lots and lots of poets agree that writing in any form is like being told what to do by an authoritarian jerk. But…wait a second…I’ve read poems by Fascists and the poems don’t look anything like sonnets. Not even close.  All that those poems do is praise guns and airplanes in long, messy lines.  So, what’s the deal? I guess even Fascists don’t write in Fascist forms.

II.                  Sonnets and Power

 Now, it’s easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I’m in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons. Maybe it’s a poet’s disease. Last summer my partner and I had a whole bunch of problems that eventually led to a seven month separation. During that time, I thought that I had fallen in love with a few men at the same time (all poets, of course, since they suffer from the same disease) which culminated in my buying a plane ticket (never used) to meet a man on the internet I’d never met who kept saying nice things to me (and my poetry) on Facebook. I know, I know—it’s pathetic and embarrassing but here’s the thing, at the same time as all of this messy stuff was happening, I was writing sonnet after sonnet so I couldn’t stop myself from getting involved deeper and deeper in all of these pretend romances because I swear to god it was totally helping my poetry.

Auden talks about how Shakespeare‘s Dark Lady sonnets are all about the humiliation that comes with what he calls the “Vision of Eros.”  Basically, what he says is that when the Dark Lady becomes a real person, and not an object that he can control, he gets frustrated because he never really liked her in the first place. He’s just trapped in his own sexual obsession and frustration. Exactly! I was never really in love with these men, but I did want them to want me, like it was a game, a game perfect for TRANSLATION into the sonnet form. In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it’s the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins.  As Sina Queyras asks in an essay on the sonnet for the Harriet Blog: “Are you writing the “writing the sonnet or is the sonnet writing you?”

 III.                How Do We Define the Contemporary Sonnet?

There’s no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love?  Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you’ll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn’t really make it a sonnet.

I decided that I would call my sonnets “sonnets” when they become worthy of passing through the gates of Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, a quasi-mystical anthology of sonnets that I have compiled and that is housed in a three ring binder in my desk. My teacher in PhD school, David Kirby, taught me how to do this. Whenever I come across a sonnet that is fit to enter Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, I type it out, print it and add it to the book. I try to memorize the extra-special ones.

One of the poems I have recently added is from Great Balls of Fire (Coffee House Press, 1990) by Ron Padgett:

                    Nothing in That Drawer

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

I love Padgett’s simultaneous reverence and irreverence towards the sonnet expressed through the play between content and form. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics write in the introduction to The Art of the Sonnet, the sonnet is a form of, “rapturous praise, bitter exclamation, and step-by-step reasoning” but this example turns all of these notions upside-down. Even as the poem takes on the quality of a joke, the joke isn’t shallow or without a deep understanding of the sonnet’s history of posing a problem that it seeks to, if not solve, explore. I love that the empty drawers, line by line, come together to build a chest of emptiness. The take home message here seems to be that every time you write a really good sonnet, it’s kind of creepy like building a piece of furniture with the ghosts of history. One day someone is going to open one of Padgett’s drawers and some monster is going to pop out and scare the crap out of the reader.

 IV.                Bernadette Mayer

 Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets are captivating for all of the wrong reasons. Most of her sonnets aren’t even sonnets. In an essay posted on Jacket, Juliana Spahr writes that “one of Mayer's sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. Lines are split, are jammed; they spill over. Metaphors mix. The book as whole serves almost as an encyclopedia of the sonnet's possible violations while still remaining a sonnet.” Despite all of the formal deviations in Mayer’s book that Spahr notes, the poems seem to come together to point back to some imaginary Ur-sonnet. Someone tell me what makes up the Ur-sonnet!

Last fall, while staying with the poet Nada Gordon, I finally got to read a copy of Mayer’s book, simply titled Sonnets. In an email, I asked Nada to tell me what she thought about Mayer’s sonnets and she responded by saying, “What I love is how they are at once formally disciplined and also fabulously casual. This was the beauty, I think of much of first generation New York School writing as well, and she inherited that touch. I think that sonnets in general are powerful because they speak to our (Western, at least) expectations about how ideas should unfold and convince.” Here’s one of my favorites from the book:

 You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

* * *

To make love, turn to Page 32.

To die, turn to Page 110.

 
V.                  Failure!

 My first attempts at writing the sonnet were as a nineteen-year-old undergrad. I wrote a sonnet about the fjords of Denmark. I wrote one about the mongoose. I wrote one or two about drinking on Sunset Boulevard. They were all awful. My friend, Rebecca Hazelton told me that her first attempt at writing sonnets was also as an undergrad. “My professor handed it back with one line circled, and said, "This line works." The rest was pretty dismal, but I was crushed. Didn't try to write another sonnet for years, but I did learn that sometimes you take one line from a poem and scrap the rest, so that was important.” My friend Justin Marks told me that he doesn’t think the sonnet is a “complete form.” He says, “I’ve done drafts where the poem is basically fourteen lines that feel like they go together but somehow don’t add up to anything. They have no movement to them, or don’t wind up anywhere.”  All of this gets me wondering whether or not the form is a “mature one,” more suited for an experienced poet. After all, Shakespeare was pushing thirty when he wrote his sonnets. So was Sidney and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was almost forty when she started writing the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Kasey Mohammad, a Renaissance scholar, has written a book of sonnets called Sonnograms some of which are included in my GREAT BOOK. The poems are postmodern, Flarfy, anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When I taught Shakespeare last year, I had my students read them alongside Shakespeare’s and most of my students were horrified, arguing that Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love and truth and those great eternal things and that Mohammad’s sonnets were “trashy” and “made no sense.” “Shakespeare was a genius!” they cried. Most of them thought Kasey’s poems were failures. But one or two of students LOVED his poetry, defending it on the basis of its novel use of formal constraints, humor, and contemporary “feel,” arguing that the poems are like Shakespeare but for their generation. What I enjoy is how the poet feeds Shakespeare’s language into a technologically-mediated landscape, uses his own “subjectivity” to rearrange the words and lines and ends up with an entirely new language that cannot escape carrying around the heavy burden of the forms of history. I leave you, finally, with the poet’s take on Sonnet 47 (“Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took”):

The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:

Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.

I write that yummy shit to get me rich:

My iambs got more drive than Preston Tucker.

I also got that English rhyme shit straight,

That alternating shit the verses do.

Word: every foxy mama that I date

Feels how my goddam prosody is true.

And I don’t mess with no Italian shit;

I only blow your mind the one way, ho.

I line it up four-four-four-two, that’s it:

That’s how I do my sonnet bidness, yo.

My mad Shakespearean moves are “phat,” or “def”:

They weave my pet eel Lenny—what the eff?

from the archive; first posted August 15, 2012

Comments

This is one of my favorite poems and it doesn't seem like Bukowski to me. Thanks.
Posted by: Noah Burke | November 06, 2008 at 04:04 PM

I agree - Bukowski usually isn't this hopeful. A lovely poem.
Posted by: Laura Orem | November 07, 2008 at 07:41 PM

One of my favorite poems. Very provocative and inspiring.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000058706234 | September 19, 2009 at 02:09 PM

Love this poem, but you've got one of the lines wrong (every site I look at does, though). I have the original printing of this. The line "there is a light somewhere," should be "there is light somewhere."
Posted by: Tonymoore99 | October 08, 2012 at 09:25 AM

I have a friend who’s really good in writing a poem, too. She writes inspiring poem just like you and I admire you both.
Posted by: Ruggieri Sharkey | January 27, 2013 at 12:34 PM

Good poem. However, I would have cut the last three lines, making it a perfect poem.
Posted by: HDRBodegaPhoto | January 05, 2018 at 06:04 PM

Life is LIFE
Posted by: Obélix | June 19, 2019 at 07:38 PM

Said like a true alcoholic; I know, I am.
Posted by: Michael | October 21, 2019 at 03:33 AM

Light means hope, then we need to do meaningful things in our life, before death coming.
Posted by: Eric | April 14, 2020 at 09:06 PM

Always has a way of making the misery escapable as long as the mind and heart are set on the horizon of a fading light.
Posted by: Joaquin Nava | October 10, 2020 at 08:02 PM

I cant find this poem on https://bukowski.net/manuscripts/
Is this really Bukowski?
Posted by: The Wandering Earth | November 12, 2020 at 05:30 AM

When I first heard this recited, I thought it was one of the lectures by Joseph Campbell, whom I love. Was surprised it was Bukowski. The last three lines are absolutely the best. Without them, the poem would be just good. With them, it’s great! Here’s to the Old Gods!❤️
Posted by: Teuta Ilyriana | April 13, 2021 at 01:05 AM

The numb nut who said he would have cut the last 3 lines therefore making it a perfect poem... Well yes indeed I suppose it would be. You know the perfect poem. Poetry that is...Perfect. 99.9 percent of all poetry is written by people trying to write the perfect poem. And guess what? Most of them succeed at writing poetry, perfectly. And that's why hardly anyone will ever read it. Except maybe there mother , themselves and the person there sleeping with. Thank God for Bukowski. He wasn't aiming at perfection but as he said" getting down the word the line." Poetry books are sadly full of the perfect poem and or poems. That's why you can line your bird cage with most of it's pages.
Posted by: Steve Hammek | November 15, 2021 at 10:16 PM

Perhaps the most powerful words I've ever heard. Coming from Charles Bukowski, maybe the biggest nihilist to ever live. I am still in awe of its beauty.
P.S THE LAST THREE LINES ARE THE BEST PART OF THIS POEM
Posted by: Alex | March 16, 2022 at 06:27 PM

alchoholism is "dank"
Posted by: john smith | April 25, 2022 at 11:46 AM

I am in the camp that the last three lines are the best part of the poem. Why does this one person hate the last three lines? It is possible that they are just trolling, but I usually take people at face value so let's assume that they really do hate the last three lines. Why? My very first thought was that maybe they hate the idea of gods, but I don't think that is their problem since then they would just hate the last two lines. What the last three lines all have in common is an assurance that the reader is at a fundamental level very good and valuable. The person who complained may see this as unsupported hope. They may say that you can't just assert that a person is valuable. Why should we just say that a person is marvelous, maybe people are really all garbage. Why should we assume that the gods would ever delight in us, maybe they are completely disgusted by us. The debate is whether the gods fundamentally see humanity as worthy or worthless. The idea of the gods waiting is the much debated concept of free will. We have the innate capacity for being marvelous and delightful, but we must choose whether we are going to express that or not. But what if we don't know how to do that? If we sincerely look, we can find people who will teach us how to be marvelous and delightful.
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:07 AM

Parts of this poem were set to music and posted to Youtube. It's worth checking out (22 million views). This link really will take you to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRXn2NRiWI

Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:29 AM

Life has its ups &downs 4 sure.when da persona is in a rosy mood,da world seems 2 be his/her oyster,if in a lousy mood,demons seem 2 be swarming on da horizon.life has never been a bowl o strawberries w cream&sugar on top,not has death deprived da planet o a priceless jewel by taking us.live&let live.
Posted by: halfeyed bro | October 21, 2022 at 07:07 AM

My two cents ...
Whenever I read poetry, I view it two ways: 1) What the author intended; 2) What it means to me. Sometimes, they are in alignment. Sometimes, they aren't. Take T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men". I view it differently than T.S. Eliot intended.

Here are how I take Bukowski's poem.

Every individual deserves his/her life. It's a gift. Live it as you will. However, we have built a society that demands that you conform. Some people struggle with that conformity more than others. Those that struggle, really..Really...REALLY struggle.

Bukowski is speaking to them. He's saying "Be you. You are marvelous." If you do choose to be you, the Gods will delight in you. In fact, they are waiting patiently so they can delight in you.

Again, this is how I read the poem. Right or wrong.
Posted by: Michael Felli | October 22, 2022 at 07:51 PM

The gods will delight but yoy will not be happy or successgul in the world's term,at least most. Don't tirn the Buk into new age pap.
Posted by: Chuck Taylor | May 31, 2023 at 08:18 AM

I think the chap that talked of cutting the last 3 lines.. you're all wondering why he hated those 3 lines. And maybe he did. But if you don't wonder about the 3 lines he asked to cut, and instead look at the line where the poem would have ended with said lines cut.. I think it would make more sense.

The poem begins with the line... Your life is your life. and if the last 3 were cut.. it would end with the line... Your life is your life.
Posted by: Zack | July 08, 2023 at 04:45 AM

Response to the consideration of the poem’s value with or without the last three lines:
One way I thought about it is this:

Without the last three lines, the tone of the message feels confrontational, empowering the reader to push back, to push against in order to pursue being true to one’s self.
And poetically/structurally, this provides no resolve.

Including the last three lines, the tone shifts to hopeful, and suggests an exchange of one kind of submission (against the expected cultural norms) for a different kind of submission (being delighted in)
And poetically/structurally, this provides a satisfying resolve

Either way, Bukowski invites the reader to personalize the message.

Posted by: Virginia | July 24, 2023 at 12:04 PM