The Best American Poetry

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 celebreties. 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 letter Himself and sends them poste restante to the big post office on high.

-- Tom Disch
>>>

from the archive; first posted November 1, 2008

Is the New SAT the Adolescent Equivalent of the Tax Code? [by Samuel Johnson]

They're reforming the SATs again, which means the columnists are duking it out about the efficacy of standardized testing, the merits of the venerable scoring sytem in which 800 aces the test, and the question of whether multiple choice questions, in which you are rewarded for guessing even if you don't know for sure, are systematicaly biased against the have-nots.

We asked Silys Tompkin Comberback of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies for his opinion, and he countered with a multiple-choice exam that would function as a rebus except that deciphering the message correctly will offer unambiguous rewards whereas surviving an IRS audit, which has been likened to going through an autopsy while still alive, assures one only of survival, a dubious merit, like being an author and getting to call your villian after the name of the single biggest asshole you know. Here, try Professor Comberback's questions for yourself and see whether you agree with the solution formed by the pattern that results:

“Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, [the idea of college for all is] now doing more harm than good.” Vocational training is better than "dumbed down college.” Who said it?

a) The former drug czar who foresees the divorce of private education from public subsidy
b) Jennifer Lawrence, who graduated high school two years early in Kentucky and collected an Academy Award for Best Actress
c) Duke Ellington, Earl Warren, or Count Fleet
d) Coleridge in Biographia Literaria as translated by a modern computer program named -- with the exuberant irreverence of Silicon Valley -- Plato
e) Hillary Clinton

2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole bullshit New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh

3) Which of the following didn't happen in the last week of May 2012:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) The Syrian giovernment attacked the village of Houla 
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, tweeted his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that

1) Campaign finance reform laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is camaigning for you is another
4) Screwing her is one thing, but doing it while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody will remember John Edwards in ten years' time.

Extra credit if you suspend your disbelief, identify the fellow in the picture on top and explain his oblique relevance to this post.

from the archive; first posted 2012, and does anyone remember John Edwards?

2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole bullshit New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh

3) Which of the following didn't happen in the last week of May 2012:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) The Syrian giovernment attacked the village of Houla 
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, tweeted his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that

1) Campaign finance reform laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is camaigning for you is another
4) Screwing her is one thing, but doing it while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody will remember John Edwards in ten years' time.

Extra credit if you suspend your disbelief, identify the fellow in the picture on top and explain his oblique relevance to this post.

from the archive; first posted 2012, and does anyone remember John Edwards?

2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole bullshit New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh

3) Which of the following didn't happen in the last week of May 2012:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) The Syrian giovernment attacked the village of Houla 
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, tweeted his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that

1) Campaign finance reform laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is camaigning for you is another
4) Screwing her is one thing, but doing it while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody will remember John Edwards in ten years' time.

Extra credit if you suspend your disbelief, identify the fellow in the picture on top and explain his oblique relevance to this post.

from the archive; first posted 2012, and does anyone remember John Edwards?

Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

The end of the semester: a farewell address [by DL]

Working with you has been a pleasure from start to finish. I’d like to leave you with a few thoughts:

-- You can do anything. When planning your future, do not limit yourself to the conventional career paths and to academic jobs dependent on advanced degrees. You can combine anything with poetry; you can be a poet and also a librarian, an advertising copy-writer, a corporate executive, a lawyer, a doctor, a computer specialist, a publisher, an arts administrator, or a journalist.

-- Keep trying new things in your poetry. And keep doing the same tried and true things. If you can, write every day, even if it is only a few sentences in a notebook. Collaborate with friends on poems and projects. If you’re in a fallow period, accept it; sometimes the brain needs time to absorb new experiences. If truly blocked, you can break it by assigning yourself a prompt that has worked for you (like a translation from a language you don’t understand, or an abecedarius, or a poem in imitation of A. R. Ammons). Sometimes a simple reversal of course is all you need to do; if you've been writing present-tense, first-person point of view poems, see what happens when you adopt a third-person POV and the past tense.

-- Read poetry. Be generous, but stick to your own lights. This may require some effort at diplomacy. But remember that you don’t have to love a person’s poetry in order to be courteous to and supportive of that person. Let posterity decide whose work will endure. We won’t be around anyway. Remember that another person’s success does nothing to diminish your own achievement. Don’t get hung up on prizes. They’re great to get; prestige is nice, money is nice; but you should spend your time on your writing, your reading, your friendships, and not on angling to get a lucrative fellowship. There will come a time when someone else will win the award you deserved, or the job you coveted, or the publication you were banking on. It might even be the person sitting next to you right now. And you will feel envy, you will feel resentment -- you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But you cannot afford to give in to these feelings, because envy and resentment, if allowed to fester, can turn easily into bitterness and even spite, and these things are poison to a writer. To ward them off, you will need to go deeper into yourself, into your heart, into the sources of your poetry.

-- Your poems don’t have to change the world. They just have to give pleasure. Don’t feel you need to make sense all the time. Nor should you shy away from sentiment and feeling.

-- Figure out what you need from the world in order to continue as a poet. Sometimes all you need is one magazine editor who believes in your work.

-- Pay no attention to hostile reviewers. Many of them are classic bullies, sadists, who need know nothing about a subject to write about it. And when it is your turn to write about others, resist the impulse to give pain – it’s not good for your soul. And you do have a soul – otherwise you would never have committed yourself to the vocation of a poet.

-- When you read your poems aloud, do so with conviction. Read slowly and clearly. Read one poem fewer than the time allowed. Rehearse so you don’t stumble over your own words, the mark of an amateur or an academic.

-- L'chaim!

-- DL   from the archive; first posted 2008

Richard Wilbur at the Y (in 2009) ([by David Yezzi]

Richard Wilbur gave a splendid reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y last night. After a knockout selection of poems new and old, he capped the evening with a bit from his forthcoming translation of Corneille's The Liar, which will be out in August in a volume that also includes his new translation of Le Cid. Dorante's long speech from Act Two absolutely killed!

I had the priviledge of introducing him, which was a bit like your little brother's garage band warming up for Radiohead. The audience was patient, and I tried to keep it short. Here is what I said:

<< Richard Wilbur makes it look so easy. His poems are as close as we are likely to come to teasing out of our contemporary speech a classical poise. But don’t be fooled. As T. S. Eliot said of the poems of Ben Jonson, their “polished veneer . . . reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity.” Which is to say his surface tensions span shadowed depths, if we have eyes to see them.

Yet so close do Wilbur’s poems come to seamless utterance, to perfect expression – in their music, argument, energy, wit, and sense (which in Wilbur’s case also means “good sense”) – that one could almost forget that they are hard-won and do not shrink from challenging their own formal elegance. The poems convince us that they have achieved their ideal form, that they could not be written any other way. But their pleasing air of inevitability is by no means inevitable.  Wilbur’s poems are the mysterious product of the poet’s lifelong mastery over the momentary: they are stays against transience. 

Here’s how the poet Philip Larkin once described the purpose of poetry. “Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt, or perceived.” “I feel,” Larkin said, that “it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation. . . . Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved.” Larkin wants to put the emphasis on language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication, because, he says, “it makes it sound harder, which it is!” As Robert Frost knew well, “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of” is the poet’s ultimate ambition. And Wilbur has lodged with us an extraordinary number of poems, indelible and unforgettable.

The teaming list of “moments” that Wilbur has preserved will be different for each reader, since all of his poems perform the function in some way: The bibulous mind-reader at the café table in Rome comparing a sun-hat wafting from a parapet to a thought being forever lost. (The mind-reader, like the poet, is a preserver of moments.) Or the bird that has flown in at a window, “humped and bloody,” making its way, finally, back out to freedom as a father and his daughter look on. Or, outside another open window, a clothes line that fills the morning air with angels, some in bed-sheets, some in smocks. Then there is the marriage of true minds that Wilbur likens to a rose window or the firmament. Indelible moments, unforgettable.  

How does he do it? It’s a mystery. Howard Nemerov once proposed an ideal for poetry based on mystery. Good poems posses three indispensable qualities, he believed. “1) a poem must be very mysterious, 2) but it must have an answer (in other words, a meaning) which is precise, literal, and total; that is, which accounts for every item in the poem, 3) it must remain very mysterious, or become even more so, when you know the answer.” Wilbur pulls off this essential bit of wizardry again and again. Take as only one example his classic poem “The Ride”: a journey on  horseback “Through shattering vacancies / On into what is not,” which becomes a dream that the poet wakes from and yet inhabits long into waking. Wilbur’s mysterious states of consciousness – in poems such as “The Ride,” “The Mind-Reader,” “A Digression,” “This Pleasing Anxious Being,” are among the clearest views we have of these shadowed depths. As Randall Jarrell once wrote of Wilbur’s work, he “obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.” Wilbur sheds light on the mysteries of experience, preserving these mysteries by finding the exact words for them for the first time. >>

from the archive; first posted May 22, 2009

"Doubting the Doubts" [by David Shapiro]

David Shapiro wishes Jasper Johns a happy birthday (May 15)!

Doubting the Doubts

A map dropped from my hands
And a voice cried, From now on
You will proceed in darkness.
Alas, he laughed, that is true.

Was it a black map?
I do not remember.

We all love clarity.
But you love darkness.
But darkness is clear.

We do not know now and we will never know.
White night, perilous night.

– David Shapiro (May 15, 2008)

"May Day" [by Nicholas Christopher]

The demented song of a woman
forty four people in this city
die of the same disease

Her voice rises and falls
between two notes
up and down the scale
two words unintelligible at first

She is unseen invisible out of sight
maybe no more out of her mind
than anyone else
except that she has taken herself

to a dark corner crying out
not for help
not for the sick and suffering
not for those who embrace or reject death

not for the healers
but for no one:
the two words — clear now —
that she's been wailing to everyone.

Nicholas Christopher is the author of nine books of poems, most recently Crossing the Equator and On Jupiter Place, seven novels, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night.  He lives in New York City.

The poem appears in TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS: AMERICA’S POETS RESPOND TO THE PANDEMIC edited by Alice Quinn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). 

Nic says he wrote this poem on a day when a woman was "wailing on a street corner I could not see from my window.  She went on for hours while I was at my desk, and at some point I pushed aside the work I was involved in and wrote the poem on a lined pad with my fountain pen." 
Photo credit: Constance Christopher.

from the archive; first posted July 17, 2020

The demented song of a woman
forty four people in this city
die of the same disease

Her voice rises and falls
between two notes
up and down the scale
two words unintelligible at first

She is unseen invisible out of sight
maybe no more out of her mind
than anyone else
except that she has taken herself

to a dark corner crying out
not for help
not for the sick and suffering
not for those who embrace or reject death

not for the healers
but for no one:
the two words — clear now —
that she's been wailing to everyone.

Nicholas Christopher is the author of nine books of poems, most recently Crossing the Equator and On Jupiter Place, seven novels, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night.  He lives in New York City.

The poem appears in TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS: AMERICA’S POETS RESPOND TO THE PANDEMIC edited by Alice Quinn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). 

Nic says he wrote this poem on a day when a woman was "wailing on a street corner I could not see from my window.  She went on for hours while I was at my desk, and at some point I pushed aside the work I was involved in and wrote the poem on a lined pad with my fountain pen." 
Photo credit: Constance Christopher.

from the archive; first posted July 17, 2020

In Praise of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

Word has just reached us that John Tranter, the brilliant poet and editor, died on April 21, just eight days shy of his 80th birthday. We will be running a tribute to John Tranter and posting some of his poems in the coming days. For now, let us let Thomas Moody introduce American readers to Australia's leading poet and literary editor. Part one of Moody's essay is below; click here for part II, which we posted on  September 1, 2021
 -- David Lehman

An Introduction to John Tranter [April 29, 1943 – April 21, 2023] (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

The difficulty in introducing John Tranter is knowing where to begin. Surely any attempts to elucidate his poetry would be reductive, and any measure of its influence fall embarrassingly short. Tranter is a major poet and in my estimate the major Australian poet of the second-half of the twentieth-century (though John Forbes might have something to say about that). His renown stretches far beyond our antipodal boundaries. As his good friend John Ashbery wrote in the introduction to Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter is an "international phenomenon".

In the course of his more than twenty collections, Tranter has seemed to live and die by the motto found in one of his most ambitious and accomplished poems, "Red Movie," that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious." Tranter's poetry always surprises and refuses to rest on its laurels—just as you think he's hit on a winning formula in one collection, he upends it in the next. Through his fifty years of writing he's employed a multitude of styles and techniques, but always present are his keen ear for the Australian vernacular, a frighteningly sharp intelligence, and a "larrikinism" that never lets his poetry take itself too seriously. 

 The poem I'd like to share today is not particularly representative of Tranter's oeuvre, though it does exhibit several qualities that we can find in many of his poems: his wit, a love of the movies, and his extraordinary ability to absorb the essence of another poet and transmute it into a contemporary Australian landscape (both geographical and emotional) to offer us something at once uncannily familiar and entirely original. "After Hölderlin" is a favorite of mine, and I suspect it may be a favorite of Tranter's too, as it serves as the opening poem to his new & selected, Urban Myths. I plan on sharing much more of Tranter's poetry over the coming months, so stay tuned.

After Hölderlin

When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
or the office routine. I dreamed
in the mottled shade of many a beer garden
among a kindness of bees and breezes
my lunch hour lengthening.

As the flowers plucked and set in the little bottle
on the table still seem to hanker for the sun,
nodding in the slightest draft, so I 
longed for a library loose with rare volumes
or a movie theatre's satisfying gloom
where a little moon followed the usherette
up and down the blue carpeted stairs.

You characters caught up in your emotions 
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.

I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn't let you live;
I felt for you when you were thrown from the car
again and again; when the pilot
thought he was lost and alone, 
I was speaking the language of the stars
above his tiny plane,
murmuring in the sleepy garden, growing up
among the complicated stories.
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and the shadow
in the arms of the gods.

Posted by Thomas Moody on August 04, 2021 at 10:45 AM in Australia | Permalink

Comments

Thank you, TM, for this column on the "international phenomenon" that is John Tranter. I love the poem -- perhaps the more so because, for me as for the two Johns referenced (Ashbery and Tranter), Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry is and has long been an inspiration. Looking forward, I am, to more Tranter -- and more Moody.

Posted by: David Lehman | August 05, 2021 at 12:24 AM

How good to be reminded of Tranter’s excellent poetry which doesn’t get seen much here in the US.

Posted by: Mark Pawlak | August 21, 2021 at 08:59 AM

From the archive; first posted  August 4, 2021

See also

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/an-introduction-to-john-tranter-part-1-by-thomas-moody-1.html

"Northern Pike" by James Wright [as presented by Jenny Factor]

Jenny Factor on James Wright

Stacey Harwood's important post earlier this week put me in mind of James Wright. A poet and exemplar of endurance. A sturdy fragile voice. Perhaps I'm looking for an antidote. Perhaps I'm just looking. In any event, I was reminded this morning of his "Northern Pike". 

This is one to read slowly to oneself, twice-in-a-row. (It's an argument with the self, I think...). It works best on a kind of rhythmic repetition...

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.                      

       --  James Wright

Mary Oliver once wrote of those poets and other artists who commit suicide, "I forgive them/their unhappiness.../...for walking out of the world./But I don't forgive them.../for taking off their veils/and dancing for death. for hurtling/toward oblivion/on the sharp blades/of their exquisite poems, saying:/this is the way/// I was, of course, all that time/coming along/behind them, and listening/for advice. She concludes "Members of the Tribe" from her 1986 Dream Work with these lines that remind me of my own high school darkness, and how, on the day after, I'd feel so light my head and shoulders just floating up without any of the ego or striving left in me:

And the man who merely
washed Michelangelo's brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,

lived to be a hundred years old.

So here's a toast...To the muskrats. To the game warden's blindness. And to life. Inventive. Fragile. Liveable.

L'chayim!

Posted by Jenny Factor on April 18, 2009 at 05:04 PM in Jenny Factor -West Coast Correspondent | Permalink

Comments

Dearest Jenny, I had a few bad months and didn't tend to things, so missed this. I too love Wright, especially The Green Wall, his first and more formal book. But I love his spirit in all of them, though he was a problematic guy, I guess. (Ask Franz.) I met him once; he and Annie danced around the room after the reading; the room was full of sunlight and the gesture was not a gesture but a feeling. I took them to the airport and the three of us spent a glorious hour giggling and reminiscing about the (his) old days. (I didn't have any old days then.) I'd spent two years trying to get him to visit; we'd talk on the phone. He didn't want to leave NY even for a visit; he said he didn't have enough courage to leave his shrink for any length of time. Also, he reiterated, many times, what we already knew: that Ohio was, for him, the Land of the Dead; and crossing the Ohio River, even in a plane, was not something he wanted to attempt. But he did finally come (we paid for Annie's ticket, too, of course); and I, at least, had one of those "times" that one remembers forever, and that becomes part of one's own old days. Thanks for the love that shows through everything you write.

Posted by: jim cummins | July 15, 2009 at 01:04 PM

Ah, Jim. So good to hear from you. Sometimes I don't even have the words (and i'm sorry about the months...)... (i know you only online but you have an online presence that is like when a kindred spirit walks into the room at a big party. Well, I look up and before I smile, I flush).

My own months have been pretty odd too. Taught a few courses last term and helped to build a large online learning module for the low-residency MFA program. A lot of work--but the good news about that arrives roughly now--there are students in the module, so I have the pleasure of those ether-voices during the distance-learning project periods which can otherwise become so...distant. I really love my Antiochians--smart, interesting, and good company. And it's nice to have a place to settle in and teach in the five months that separate each residency...if only because I can ask my scads of unanswerable poetry questions aloud.

Is it possible that I've read about that later-in-life trip to Ohio? I think I have--perhaps in the notes from some 92nd Street Y audio-recording, or perhaps I heard it in Wright's patter to the audience (which is my better guess). Or perhaps I'm thinking only of Marilyn Hacker's, "Elevens" which is about flying into Ohio, thinking about Wright flying into Ohio: "James A. Wright, my difficult older brother.../You are the lonely gathering of rivers/below the plane that left you in Ohio...."--(it's in rough sapphics, and that first line sounds best when you really let the trochee-trochee-dactyl-trochee-trochee out. The other lines have wandering dactyls, so you have to let 'em wander).

Do you know this poem of Billy Collins, "This Much I Do Remember"?
http://nexus.typepad.com/nexus/2003/12/this_much_i_do_.html

Then all of the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all of the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

Your moment reminds me of that. Do you remember--cause I don't--who wrote about how little we control the moments we get to mint--how they simply sneak up on us? How the milestones--the ones we hope to remember always get lost--but some odd inadvertant instant finds a way into forever.

Hoping you'll mint yours in the big factory where they chug out puffy clouds and happiness...on a series of long and languid summer days. Will write again soon if that's okay.

thinking of you--

Posted by: Jenny Factor | July 17, 2009 at 10:13 AM

From the archive; first posted April 18, 2009 as “Dear Life: Still Here!" [by Jenny Factor]

Remembering Darragh Park [by David Lehmam, David Grant Noble, & Others]

Cherry blossoms filled the air, swept by the May wind, and a friend said, "Oh, I thought it was snowing." That, Darragh Park said, was the effect he tried to get across in his paintings. He wanted to convey the pink cascade before it gained definition as blossoms or snowflakes --  and to convey the friend's face at the same time.

Darragh, who died Friday (April 2009) of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said he had "a vision of vision." As a motorcyclist he learned on entering a curve that he had to focus "beyond my immediate destination if I was to operate the machine smoothly and stay alive." He had to be able to divide his sight between two points and let "the rest of [his] vision" take in everything between them. The beauty of his paintings is a beauty achieved by the supremacy of vision. How cruel that of all ailments, he had to suffer the progressive deterioration of his eyesight.

Darragh did the cover of "An Alternative to Speech," my first book of poems: a wraparound black-and-white cityscape in the rain: the traffic, human and vehicular, on the corner of 25th Street and Ninth Avenue. Darragh was devoted to James Schuyler and did the covers for Schuyler's "Collected Poems" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and for "The Diary of James Schuyler" ed. by Nathan Kernan (Black Sparrow): both are portraits of the poet. Darragh must have done covers for other books, and I would be grateful for details from anyone who has them.

-- DL  (from the archive; first posted April 19, 2009)

 

<<<< Darragh Park was a roommate of mine at Yale, a fellow French major—he liked Proust, I liked Zola—and lifelong friend.

After graduation, Darragh taught English in a private school in Sierra Leone, an experience which triggered an interest, and later graduate study at Columbia, of African art and culture.

When Darragh returned to America, he came to terms with his being gay. He let his life style evolve, quit his job, and began studying painting under the tutelage of the Long Island painter, Robert Dash. Through Dash, he became part of a circle of artists and writers based in Manhattan and the Hamptons. One particular friend of his in this group was the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, James Schuyler, for whom he illustrated several book covers and eventually became his literary executor.

Darragh’s early artwork was strongly influenced by the landscape painter, Fairfield Porter, whom he knew and who, after viewing his paintings, offered him encouragement. Darragh’s focus shifted from landscapes to cityscapes, especially panoramic scenes in Miami and street scenes with pedestrians and traffic in Manhattan. One especially successful series of paintings was of the Empire State Building, which he painted at different times of day and night and in changing illuminations.

Darragh had a series of successful shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Alfred Corn, reviewing a 1994 show of his in Artnews, wrote, “There are few things more satisfying than witnessing a moment in the development of an artist when she or he takes a quantum leap into uncharted territory and surprises us with a new sense of mastery.” The leap referred to was Darragh’s new painterly attention to physical vision. He was intrigued by how the eye sees both small areas in sharp focus and blurred abstractions in sight’s periphery. Interpreting this visual phenomenon in his paintings became almost an obsession. The forms in a painting would slide from abstraction to realism and back again. His last works became so large in their dimensions as to be hard fit in standard gallery settings.

When Darragh moved from Manhattan to Bridgehampton, Long Island, another creative expression emerged: landscaping and gardening. He built a pond, put in a variety of native plantings, and developed a network of pathways through the luxuriant vegetation. Wildlife thrived in this environment. Darragh cared for every tree, bush, and flower as if it were a personal friend and kept knew all the birds that came and went through the seasons. In a letter to me one February, he wrote:

“My companions, this year, are the gold finches, now dusky gold, who have chosen to hang in here to my huge delight. Watching their loping Matissian flight pattern as they pass in front of me is a constant lift. A flicker family is in residence, most awe-inspiring. The big tree with its ghost-like great gray bones is often studded with cardinals. Visitors gasp!”

I have many memories of Darragh Park, but perhaps the most vivid was zooming through the empty streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn on the back of his motorcycle on a cold mid-winter Sunday morning en route to Coney Island.

In his last several years, Darragh’s mind and health began to fail and it became increasingly difficult for him to manage his daily life and needs. When the situation worsened, he came to what must be the most difficult and unfortunate decision some people face: to continue living or not. On April 17, 2009, he chose the latter. >>>

—by David Grant Noble, January 5, 2023

<<< Darragh also did the covers for Marc Cohen's two books with the Groundwater Press--a drawing for "On Maplewood Time," the Intuflo chapbook, for which, incidentally, Jimmy Schuyler wrote the intro (http://webpage.pace.edu/erichie/groundwater/u3.html); and a full-color cover for "Mecox Road" (http://webpage.pace.edu/erichie/groundwater/p3.html). >>> -- Rosanne Wasserman

<<< In addition to the books already mentioned, Darragh also did the covers for the following books of James Schuyler: THE HOME BOOK, Z Press, 1977; A FEW DAYS, Random House, 1985; SELECTED POEMS, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1988; TWO JOURNALS, his collaboration with Schuyler, Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995; SELECTED ART WRITINGS, Edited by Simon Pettet, Black Sparrow Press, 1998; JUST THE THING: SELECTED LETTERS OF JAMES SCHUYLER, Edited by William Corbett, Turtle Point Press, 2004; and the two New York Review Books re-issues of the novels, ALFRED AND GUINEVERE, Introduction by John Ashbery, 2001; and WHAT'S FOR DINNER, Afterword by James McCourt, 2006. >>> -- Nathan Kernan

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/04/darragh-park-continued.html

Remembering "Easter 1916" [by Terence Winch]

On Easter Monday of 1916, 150 or so Irish rebels took armed action against their British rulers, seizing the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin. After a week of fighting, they lost to the thousands of British troops arrayed against them, but the Rising ultimately led to Irish independence from the mighty British Empire. Given the musical and literary traditions of the Irish, it is no surprise that the rebellion also gave rise to poems, songs, movies, and books. (In fact, Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Rising, was himself a poet.) Probably the best-known of the poems is William Butler Yeats's "Easter 1916":  

Easter 1916

I
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

II
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

III
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

IV
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

_________________________

One of the best of the many songs that came out of the Easter Rising is "The Foggy Dew," written in 1919 by Charles O’Neill, a parish priest from County Down. This version by the great Dublin singer Frank Harte, who died a few years ago and who was once described by my friend Doug Lang as having "a voice like a tenor sax," is my favorite (listen here to "The Foggy Dew"), though Sinead O'Connor's rendition with Chieftains also gives me the chills.   

And here let me offer a BAP scoop. One of the heroes of 1916 was the socialist and labor leader James Connolly, whom the Brits executed sitting down, as his battle wounds had yet to heal. One of the most stirring songs about Connolly was composed by poet-songwriter-playwright Patrick Galvin, from County Cork. Paddy, now in his 80s, visited my brother Jesse's house outside D.C. in February of 1981 for a house party, a few days after Paddy and Celtic Thunder, the band started by me and Jesse, had performed in concert together.  We recorded him talking, reading poems, and singing. So here is Paddy himself singing his composition "James Connolly" from that magical evening ('James Connolly'). Jesse, currently Cathaorleach (chairman) of our local chapter of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (the worldwide Irish music society), accompanies Paddy on the bodhran (drum).  Ten years earlier, we got to spend some time with Brian Heron, James Connolly's grandson and the founder of  the National Association for Irish Justice, one of a number of groups that were formed back in those days to support the civil rights movement in the north of Ireland. [right: Brian Heron, 1971; © Jesse Winch]  

The Easter Rising became the starting point for modern Irish history, its echoes clearly audible throughout the recent Troubles in the north of Ireland (as this song of my own, called "The Streets of Belfast,"demonstrates). In the years immediately following the Rising, the struggle for independence from Britain continued, eventually leading to the partition of Ireland as a condition for the establishment of the Irish Free State. Partition, in turn, spurred a terrible civil war among Irish nationalists that tore the country apart. This grim and bloody period has inspired a number of searing films, including two of recent vintage: The Wind that Shakes the Barley,  Ken Loach's 2007 film starring Cillian Murphy, and Michael Collins, the 1996 Liam Neeson film written and directed by Neil Jordan. But for me the greatest of them all is the 1935 John Ford classic, The Informer, based on a Liam O'Flaherty novel and starring Victor McLaglen as Gypo Nolan, an ill-fated "gutter Judas," to use the New York Times's memorable phrase.  (Here's a clip of McLaglen at work.)

Happy Easter & Up the Republic!

from the archive; first posted April 4, 2010

"The Jailers and the Jailed" [by Tom Disch]

That will be the new two-tier social order
with pharmaceuticals the unofficial currency
distributed at the stadia and KFCs
of the unfamilied. Think of New Orleans
and multiply by n.
The jailers will own their own vans
and take vacations in the Yucatan
and Guantanamo. They'll know themselves
to be a cut above the people they piss on,
but neither the jailers nor the jailed
will ever physically encounter those
who own them, shadowy figures as invisible
as movie stars. Once a year both classes
can get stoned and cast their ballots
for best victim in a documentary. So that
is what democracy means to me.
Now, have I won the essay contest?

February 26, 2008

-- Tom Disch (1940-2008)

from the archive; first posted December 6, 2008

Happy birthday, Robert Frost

 

Who said poetry makes nothing happen? -- SDH

 

Why everything is going to be OK. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning!  I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend.  But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good.  So.  What I want to tell you is pretty important.  I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States.  What great people I met.  Ridiculously cool people.  Ridunkulous.  And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420.   If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know.  I gave 6 talks in four days!  One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired.  Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism.  There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community.  What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true.  It’s us. 

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love.  We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.  

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning.  The feelings of meaning are the meaning.  It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual.  We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another.  It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. 

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark?  Yes.  Come sit with us.  We're right here.  Turn on the light.

We must look after one another.  There is no heaven.  We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares?  Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end.  You are here.  It’s wonderful.  We made it into existence together. 

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating.  Health Care, people!  Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family!  Now is the time to lift our voices up.  We are all there is.  We don’t have it for very long.  We have it right now.  America is a lot of things.  I know.  Tea party.  I know.  Beck, and not the good kind.  But it’s okay.

We are here together.  We can keep each other company.  We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed.  You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is.  It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us.  We are getting better at this.  We are going to get even better.  That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you.  Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge.  Meanwhile we got out of our cars.  We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights.  Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump.  John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see.  So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear. 

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere.  We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it.  Then yesterday saw a report.  She’d jumped.  After we were home in bed.  She’s in critical condition.  A 41-year-old woman from Long Island.  Like so many of us, or thereabouts.  So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself.   Stay, everybody.  No more going off the deep end.  Stay.  Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake.  But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

I love you like crazy,

 Jennifer

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2010

"Saturday" [by Mark Ford]

After bursting through the allusion-barrier so dramatically, as related on Thursday [Oct. 16, 2008], there has been no stopping me, and I would like to conclude my very enjoyable stint as your guest-blogger with a poem in a genre my young self would have despised, ie. the poem about another poet –- which, come to think of it, was exactly what the poem imagining Whitman’s youthful conquests in my last post, was too. Oh well…. This one is about Hart Crane, and is in prose – to be precise it’s in the form of a letter addressed to the editor of a literary journal. The rest, I hope, explains itself. Thanks for having me, and for the many entertaining responses I’ve received; it’s been a ball…. I should perhaps say in preface to this piece that Crane was christened Harold, but shortly after deciding to become a poet adopted his mother’s maiden name of Hart.

The Death of Hart Crane

Sir / Madam,
I was intrigued by the letter from a reader in your last issue that recounted his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat made from Vera Cruz to New York in April of 1932, a voyage that the poet Hart Crane never completed. According to her Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan. This reminded me of a night in the early seventies on which I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village. I got talking to an elderly man called Harold occupying an adjacent booth, and when the conversation touched on poetry he explained, somewhat shyly, that he had himself published two collections a long time ago, one called White Buildings in 1926, and the other, The Bridge, in 1930. I asked if he’d written much since. ‘Oh plenty,’ he replied, ‘and a lot of it much better than my early effusions.’ I expressed an interest in seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment on MacDougal Street. Here the evening turns somewhat hazy. I could hear the galloping strains of Ravel’s Boléro turned up loud as Harold fumbled for his keys. Clearly some sort of party was in progress. At that moment the door was opened from within by another man in his seventies, who exclaimed happily, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come in!’ The room was full of men in their seventies, all, or so it seemed, called either Hart or Harold. The apartment’s walls were covered with Aztec artefacts, and its floors with Mexican carpets. It dawned on me then that Hart Crane had not only somehow survived his supposed death by water, but that his vision of an America of the likeminded was being fulfilled that very night, as it was perhaps every night, in this apartment on Macdougal Street. At the same instant I realized that it was I, an absurd doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who deserved to be devoured by sharks.
Yours faithfully,
Name and address withheld.

(Mark Ford)

from the archive; first posted October 18, 2008

"The Other Sestina" [by Janice Erlbaum]

Janice Erlbaum participated in the group reading we did for "The Best American Erotic Poems" at KGB Bar on March 10. 2008. She read her sestina ("The Temp") from the book, but time constraints stopped her from reading a second sestina, which she has posted on her own blog and which you will find below, along with a few prefatory sentences from Ms. Erlbaum.
-- DL

The "Other" Sestina by Janice Erlbaum

Janice Erlbaum at KGB Bar March 10, 2008

Because I am fanatical about not running over my alloted time at readings, especially when there are nine other people on the bill, I didn't read this other sestina, which I'm dying to read in public, especially after it was rejected by McSweeney's for being, and I quote, "too much." I present it to you now, for your consideration for the Best American Completely Unerotic; In Fact, Makes You Never Want to Have Sex Again anthology:

How do married people masturbate?

How do married people masturbate?
What do they picture when they come?
They think of the guy at the office, the girl
In the video, her asshole stretched, wincing;
Ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, the ones they still hate.
There’s nothing safe to think about, they fall asleep.

This is how you prepare to go to sleep,
How you wake up, how you run home and masturbate.
Everybody does it! Why can't you? You hate
Me for wanting to fuck when you just want to come –
I turn to stroke you, you turn away, wincing.
I don't care if you think about another girl.

I would want to fuck her too, that girl,
Anybody but me, laying next to you asleep,
A big fat fucking obstacle to your wincing
Nightly ritual: Pop in a tape and masturbate,
Watch that girl get drilled. Two minutes to come.
You mop up, drift off. You burned off some hate.

Not me. I walk around with mine. I hate
What I saw on that tape. I thought, poor girl,
She's in pain and she has to pretend to come.
I lay next to you that night, unable to sleep,
Therefore you were unable to masturbate.
The clock shined mean and bright in the dark. We winced.

Some nights I straddle a pillow, wincing,
Squeezing at thoughts I don't want to think, I hate
The way you come to me when I masturbate.
Face down on my belly, I look like that girl.
I writhe a while. I give up. I go to sleep.
I don't come. It's okay. I don't need to come.

I don't care what you think about when you come,
As long as it's me you're fucking, wincing,
Waiting for you to get off and slump, fall asleep.
You are faithful. I have no right to hate
You, hate myself, hate the hundreds of girls
With their assholes stretched, so you can masturbate.

I know who you are when you masturbate. I come
Into the room, kiss your forehead, your lover girl. Why are you wincing?
Your toes curl in silence. I hate you. I love you too. Let's go to sleep.

--- Janice Erlbaum

from the archive; first posted  March 20, 2008.

Wednesday [by Mark Ford]

It was announced on the radio this morning [Wednesday, October 15, 2008] that the British Library has paid half a million pounds for a collection of the manuscripts of Ted Hughes. Hughes was a great believer in the importance of writing with a pen, rather than on a keyboard, and I remember a late letter included in his Selected Letters, which I recently reviewed for the New York Review of Books (it's in the current issue), in which he attributed the decline in quality of stories submitted for a prize for teenage fiction which he judged to the fact that the stories were all written directly on to the computer. Probably every writer has his or her set of peculiar 'conditions' which have to be met for the work to get written. Hughes had a particular penchant for writing on train journeys, and in small enclosed spaces like the tiny hall where he set up his study in the flat in Chalcot Square where he lived for a couple of years with Sylvia Plath. Speaking for myself, I need loud music to get me going, and I'm not alone in this. In 1993 I took part in a poets' tour of Japan with MIck Imlah and Simon Armitage. Simon brought over cds of the latest band to emerge on the Manchester scene - I forget who it was - which he'd play at deafening volume while knocking out a poem. I find, like Hughes, I can  write almost nothing directly on to a screen with any satisfaction. Even this blog I've been writing out long hand first, and I've an idea in the blogosphere (spelling?) that this might make it unique. If you don't believe me I'll send you my handwritten drafts - for a trifling consideration, certainly for far less than what might be fetched by an equivalent page of Ted Hughes.

Hughes was published by Faber and Faber (though in fact there was only ever one Faber -it was Faber and Gwyer initially, but Gwyer dropped out, so they  doubled the Faber to make it sound better). Hughes was taken on by T.S. Eliot after The Hawk in the Rain won the Poetry Center's First Publication Prize for 1957, judged that year by W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender. In those days Faber were located at 24 Russell Square ('that magic address!' as Philip Larkin once exclaimed), and if it's raining and I get the tube into work, my walk from Russell Square tube station to University College London takes me past the old Faber offices, now a part of London University. A round brown plaque commemorates Eliot's editorial labours there, and I've often wanted to locate his precise office, which had two doors so he could slip out the back when Vivienne made one of her unwanted visits in quest of her errant husband. And it was there late in life that he found true love with his secretary Valerie ('Say hello to Valerie / Say hello to Vivienne' as the Bob Dylan song puts it). By then Eliot had come to be known as the Pope of Russell Square, and young poets approached his august presence in abject states of fear and trembling. The American poet Donald Hall recalls visiting Eliot on his first trip to London, and, after some desultory literary chat, finally asking the master for some serious advice. Eliot thought hard, and then asked Hall if he would be wintering in London. The eager ephebe replied in the affirmative. Eliot nodded, pondered again, and finally said, 'Then I advise you to purchase some long underwear.'

(Mark Ford)

from the archives; posted October 15, 2008

Cri de Coeur [by Jim Cummins]

Oy vey, my country!  I would sob if it weren't such … an American crisis: goofy, headstrong, distracted, with a bunch of old men in dark suits running around looking for their mommies.  And we're poets: what do WE know?

-- Jim Cummins

from the archive; first posted October 3, 2008

Who Will Stop the Mad Man? [by Lera Auerbach]

My mother was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. As Hitler's army marched East in 1941, my grandparents abandoned all their possessions (including their beloved library and cherished collection of musical instruments). They boarded the train – heading towards Siberia. The news of ghettos and the fate of Jews in Hitler's territories had reached them – all they could do was to flee into the unknown.

A few years earlier, my mother's grandfather, Berl Fishbein, the head of the family, was tortured to death by Stalin's secret police). His only "guilt" was being born Jewish. While my family evacuated, their train was bombed by Hitler's armies. Another tragedy occurred: the family lost my mother's grandmother Ettel Fishbein in the confusion and chaos. She was grief-stricken after the death of her beloved husband, frightened and confused over all the changes and sorrows that the war and evacuation brought. Somehow, after the bombing, she was no longer with my grandparents on the train. They never found her and never learned of her fate. 

With my one-year-old mother, my grandparents deboarded in Chelyabinsk – a closed industrial city at the gateway of Siberia. I was born there some thirty years later. They never returned to their abandoned homes in Ukraine.

In today's war, the invading army marches from the East, and more than a million Ukrainian refugees head West – to Germany in a mirror retrograde of history.

Earlier this year, I wrote a cello concerto, Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol's famous short story about Poprishchin, a government clerk who gradually descends into insanity. The concerto was premiered last month by the Munich Philharmonic, Giedrė Šlekytė, and Gautier Capuçon. Nikolai Gogol (or, more correctly, romanized from Ukrainian – Mykola Hohol) – was a genius writer, born in Ukraine, father of Russian language literature, and a visionary far beyond his time. I have been fascinated by his work all my life. Ten years ago, while composing my opera Gogol, I read and re-read everything he ever wrote. After my opera's premiere in Vienna, I received an open letter from Russia calling me "Vrag Naroda" (Enemy of the People) – the same terminology used against Shostakovich and many other artists years earlier. My website was hacked, erased, and replaced by the slogan "Death to Jews" and a skull. It felt terrible, but I was not afraid – since 1991, I lived in the West, and since 2001, I no longer had any relatives in Russia. I was responsible only for myself, my words, and my actions. 

While composing the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, I did not think of Vladimir Putin. Now, Gogol's tale carries an eerie resonance. Diary of a Madman is a story of a lowly government bureaucrat with a minimal, easily forgettable personality. In his increasingly demented diary entries, Poprishchin claims that a state cannot "be without a king." As the storyline progresses, he becomes increasingly mad, starts having delusions of grandeur, and, finally, on the "43rd of April of the year 2000" he believes himself as the King. (V. Putin was first elected president of Russia on the 7th of May of the year 2000. Gogol wrote his story in 1835!) Finally, Poprishchin ends up in an insane asylum. 

Perhaps, Gogol, the visionary and one of the greatest writers who ever lived – could see beyond the 19th and 20th century – into the heart of the 21st, where we are doomed to continue the eternal tale.

I think of my grandparents and my child-mother in Ukraine, leaving everything behind, heading into the unknown – evacuating from the onslaught of Hitler's army. Could they have imagined that eighty years later, the land of their birth would face again a very similar nightmare and that refugees would now head West to Germany to save their children?

Gogol's visions and nightmares become a reality, with the whole world turning into a lunatics' asylum as the great tragedy unfolds. Who will stop the Madman? 

from the archive; first posted by Lera Auerbach on March 04, 2022 at 06:59 PM 

My mother was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. As Hitler's army marched East in 1941, my grandparents abandoned all their possessions (including their beloved library and cherished collection of musical instruments). They boarded the train – heading towards Siberia. The news of ghettos and the fate of Jews in Hitler's territories had reached them – all they could do was to flee into the unknown.

A few years earlier, my mother's grandfather, Berl Fishbein, the head of the family, was tortured to death by Stalin's secret police). His only "guilt" was being born Jewish. While my family evacuated, their train was bombed by Hitler's armies. Another tragedy occurred: the family lost my mother's grandmother Ettel Fishbein in the confusion and chaos. She was grief-stricken after the death of her beloved husband, frightened and confused over all the changes and sorrows that the war and evacuation brought. Somehow, after the bombing, she was no longer with my grandparents on the train. They never found her and never learned of her fate. 

With my one-year-old mother, my grandparents deboarded in Chelyabinsk – a closed industrial city at the gateway of Siberia. I was born there some thirty years later. They never returned to their abandoned homes in Ukraine.

In today's war, the invading army marches from the East, and more than a million Ukrainian refugees head West – to Germany in a mirror retrograde of history.

Earlier this year, I wrote a cello concerto, Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol's famous short story about Poprishchin, a government clerk who gradually descends into insanity. The concerto was premiered last month by the Munich Philharmonic, Giedrė Šlekytė, and Gautier Capuçon. Nikolai Gogol (or, more correctly, romanized from Ukrainian – Mykola Hohol) – was a genius writer, born in Ukraine, father of Russian language literature, and a visionary far beyond his time. I have been fascinated by his work all my life. Ten years ago, while composing my opera Gogol, I read and re-read everything he ever wrote. After my opera's premiere in Vienna, I received an open letter from Russia calling me "Vrag Naroda" (Enemy of the People) – the same terminology used against Shostakovich and many other artists years earlier. My website was hacked, erased, and replaced by the slogan "Death to Jews" and a skull. It felt terrible, but I was not afraid – since 1991, I lived in the West, and since 2001, I no longer had any relatives in Russia. I was responsible only for myself, my words, and my actions. 

While composing the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, I did not think of Vladimir Putin. Now, Gogol's tale carries an eerie resonance. Diary of a Madman is a story of a lowly government bureaucrat with a minimal, easily forgettable personality. In his increasingly demented diary entries, Poprishchin claims that a state cannot "be without a king." As the storyline progresses, he becomes increasingly mad, starts having delusions of grandeur, and, finally, on the "43rd of April of the year 2000" he believes himself as the King. (V. Putin was first elected president of Russia on the 7th of May of the year 2000. Gogol wrote his story in 1835!) Finally, Poprishchin ends up in an insane asylum. 

Perhaps, Gogol, the visionary and one of the greatest writers who ever lived – could see beyond the 19th and 20th century – into the heart of the 21st, where we are doomed to continue the eternal tale.

I think of my grandparents and my child-mother in Ukraine, leaving everything behind, heading into the unknown – evacuating from the onslaught of Hitler's army. Could they have imagined that eighty years later, the land of their birth would face again a very similar nightmare and that refugees would now head West to Germany to save their children?

Gogol's visions and nightmares become a reality, with the whole world turning into a lunatics' asylum as the great tragedy unfolds. Who will stop the Madman? 

"One Plkus One" [haiku by David Shapiro]

    it may be too hard
    to think of me as silence
    like thirsty flowers

    in the Luxembourg
    I paused to cry for hours
    beside patient friends

    I read Thus Spake Z
    in a minute or two and
    saw my life in clouds

    and inside last clouds
    I saw my sister hiding
    behind the grillework

    snakes danced up curtains
    and a miserable pink
    of which Michaux spoke

    Half a century
    later I look at tulips
    try to see glory

    not Lawrence's kind
    but the modest buds in Bronx
    where diners pop up

    thirteen synagogues
    and some are shuls the way Saul
    Bellow preferred them

    Unlike a true Jew
    I like to go alone, weep
    (kills community)

    Today someone writes
    as if anyone around
    Frank froze him with lies

    Generosity
    is not a word for critics
    but Frank hated pricks

    haha the theory
    is he was a dead man and
    this is false theory

    But let's go back to
    say l962 or
    let's pay attention

    involuntary
    memory as in Proust is
    more than I can bear

    in England I smelled
    my mother's glitzy perfume
    and I also heard

    inside myself the
    tune of her blue jewel-box
    I still remember    

    Too tired to forget
    too rebellious to count
    lonely syllables

    well father would say
    what's so lonely about them
    the one equals one

    I want to build that
    with long Icelandic "menhirs"
    one plus one is one

    for the madness of
    my old friend the architect
    One monument one

    You pushed me into
    talking today but really
    the best rest is two

    but I want to build
    one day like white white Legos
    one plus one is one

    -– David Shapiro,
    September 8, 2008

Auden (an Aquarius, born Feb 21) on Psychoanalysis

<<
Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (6 November 1942)

Note: Multiply the bill by twenty for 2022 dollars. The devil count remains the same.-- DL

from the archive; first posted February 26, 2011.