The Best American Poetry

Robert Hershon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chatter

I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and

the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I

watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers

when my friend assigned me the task of writing

a baseball poem, since right now there is no

baseball except in memory so I thought of

the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer

but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I

began to think of the teams of my boyhood, call them

the Boys of Early Spring—Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser

and Cookie Lavagetto,  Kirby Higbe and Ed Head and that perfect

baseball name, Dixie Walker, brother to Harry the Hat Walker,

and remembered more as a bigot who wouldn’t play with Jackie Robinson

than as an outfielder, but I didn’t know that when I was

ten and we had the only television set at 946 Bushwick Avenue

and  I watched the games by  myself with a bag of candy corn

the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming

the Dodgers and I would grow old together (twelve, fourteen, beyond)

and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents

and now the rich players and the even richer owners have finally

decided to play some baseball and I guess I’ll slump down and

stare at the games, by myself again, without candy corn

but maybe with a sip or two of Scotch

 

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Robert Hershon has written 15 books of poems, most recently End of the Business Day and Freeze Frame. He's won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts.  Hershon has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. [Ed. note: Bob Hershon passed away on March 20, 2021. See the Tribute Page for more information on Bob's life and work.]

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Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Sherman Alexie

This poem by Sherman Alexie appeared in Hanging Loose 56 and was reprinted in The Business of Fancydancing, his first book.

DISTANCES

I’ve watched the Children of The Third World starving on television.  I’ve heard the stand-up comic ask, “why didn’t the cameraman give that kid a fucking sandwich?” I know all the mothers of America have told their kids: “Clean up your plate.  There are people starving in India.”  When I was young, living on the reservation, eating potatoes every day of my life, my mother would tell me to “clean up your plate or your sister will get it.”

*

A woman writes to a man who used to live here.  I write back, pretending I’m the man she’s been searching her whole life for.  “Do you still love me,” she writes to ask him, and me.

*

I do not speak my native tongue.  Except that is, for the dirty words.  I can tell you what I think of you in two languages.

                                (excerpt)

“Distances” was the first poem of Sherman’s to appear in Hanging Loose, twenty years ago this spring, when he was still a student. We had the good sense to ask for more immediately and that quickly led to a request for a manuscript. The Business of Fancydancing, his first book, was published in 1992, leading The New York Times Book Review to say “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.”  Not bad for a first book from a small press, eh?

We’ve published six books of Sherman’s altogether. The newest, Face, is Small Press Distribution’s best seller of the past ten years.  Of course, he’s also published an amazing number of story collections, novels and journalism, made movies, entertained countless audiences, and won many awards.  I suppose that’s the reason for a question I began hearing a while back: “I guess Sherman has changed a lot over the years, huh?” They don’t mean “I guess Sherman doesn’t live on commodity cheese anymore.” They’re longing for me to say, “Yeah, he’s become a monster of ego, impossible to please.” When I say that’s absolutely not true, the disappointment is palpable.

The other question I hear a lot, from smirking interviewers, is “Say, how did an Indian from out West ever come to publish with a press in Brooklyn?”  I’m often tempted to say he was tied to a pony and led into the fort by John Wayne, but I usually just point out that he was a college graduate and so he knew how to put stamps on an envelope.

My favorite recent question came when Sherman made his second appearance on The Colbert Report some weeks ago. Donna Brook and I accompanied him both times. We were waiting for him to show up at the studio when one of the producers walked by. “I remember you,” she said. You’re Sherman’s parents, aren’t you?” Either we’re looking more Indian or Sherman’s looking more Brooklyn or her eyes were closed.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Penelope Jane Reid

This poem by Penelope Jane Reid appeared in Hanging Loose 41 and later provided the title for Smart Like Me: High School-Age Writing from the Sixties to Now.

SMART LIKE ME

They put me right near
the maternity ward.
I know;
they want me to see
what I’ve missed in my life but
I know.

The women in there all think they’re
so lucky;
they’re not sixteen.

The women in there
have been praying for years
for what I
just threw away.

What would he have been?
Or she?
Crazy like him.
Smart like me.

-- Penelope Jane Reid

In 1968, Dick Lourie proposed to the other Hanging Loose editors (Emmett Jarrett, Ron Schreiber, me) that we start a regular section in the magazine devoted to writing by high school students.

I thought it was a terrible idea.  I don’t want to read a lot of third-rate imitations of rock lyrics and adolescent moaning about lost love, I said.  Let them publish in their school magazines.

Luckily, I lost the argument and, right from the beginning, we began to receive amazing work from young poets all over the country (along with the expected romantic laments.)  I don’t know how they found us in those pre-Internet days when the few hundred copies we printed rarely traveled west of the Hudson, but find us they did and the poems and stories have kept coming now for forty-two years.  At a rough guess, I’d say we’ve published work by over 600 high school writers.

In the late eighties, we decided to collect a lot of the pieces in an anthology.  The news didn’t thrill everybody. A major funder sniffed: “I can’t imagine why you think we’d have any interest in supporting work by high school students.”  Hmmm: We went ahead without anybody’s support and, happily, that first collection got rave reviews.  Two others have followed and a fourth, When We Were Countries, (with Mark Pawlak as lead editor), will be published this spring.

Penelope Jane Reid’s “Smart Like Me” appeared in  HL #41, in 1981, one of three we ran.  Looking back at it now, it still seems to me a marvel of concision, all the more powerful for its tight lines and lack of embellishment.  We never saw any other poems from her.  She was a student at J.M. Atherton High School in Louisville, Kentucky when #41 came out.  The last we heard, for the anthology’s contributor notes in 1988, she’d gotten a degree in journalism from Indiana University.

The high school section has produced a few poetry lifers – Joanna Fuhrman and Rebecca Wolff come to mind – but most of the young writers wander off to other pursuits.  Penelope Reid would be in her late forties now.  I hope she’s had a sparkling journalistic career and maybe, just maybe, the occasional itch to scribble down a terrific poem.

-- Robert Hershon

Editor's note:

Poems by high school students appearing in Hanging Loose have been selected for The Best American Poetry on several occasions. Jorie Graham chose a poem by Jendi Reiter for BAP 1990; Adrienne Rich chose two poems by Natasha Le Bel and one by Deborah Stein for the 1996 volume; Marc Jaffee's "King of Repetition" was picked by Lyn Hejinian for the 2004 edition. I'm trusting my memory here, and there's a chance I'm leaving out somebody. But you get the idea: Hershon and his coeditors have a great eye for young talent. -- DL

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Jeni Olin

This poem by Jeni Olin will appear in her new collection, Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems, which will be out from Hanging Loose Press this spring.

DEPAKOTE

I felt most at home on this pill in a bucolic shire
of the Hamptons amid the piss-colored braids
of wheat on a Metamucil can, milkweed & sneeze drops,
a track The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner
never checked out in the Orangeade foam of dawn.
Glistening like a brow in an aspirin ad on the telly,
I’ve got a brain like soaked coral.
I’ve got a tongue like a baby’s penis.
I’m Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense --
I’m dead but I don’t know it.
My pen, my Eskimo blood spilled cheekily
over good & dear people.  I managed to write this
by myself With a Little Help from My Friends.
When I said, “Oh get me away I’m dying,”
I meant I wanted a cigarette & a problem child
on a peony-filled evening.  In the dry heat
of photocopy fans, making Easter cards with the, uh,
terminally ill, you hold the retinal scanner to my heart.
“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
as flames rose to her Roman nose &
her hearing aid began to melt. . . ”
And in the darkened underpass I gave
blood & now my French is shaky.

-- Jeni Olin

If I tell you that the titles of a sequence of poems in Jeni’s new book are Depakote, Abilify, Klonopin, Xanax, Paxil, Lamactil, Meridia, and Lithium, you will conclude that she has not always had an easy time of it.  And you would undoubtedly figure just what to expect: poems so lugubrious, so dismal, so unrelievedly saturated with gloom, that, upon turning the last page, you’d be feeling a need for some strong medication of your own.

But that’s not the case: Jeni Olin writes the most energetic poems about depression ever put to paper.  Every poem is a thrill-ride. When you turn a corner, you have no idea where you’ll end up and the images come speeding by you, from a can of Metamucil to Joan of Arc’s nose. Yet the poem never feels like a random collection of unconnected lines. It adds up. The sheer exuberance of the language and the surprising connections are the very opposite of what the title tells you to expect. You can feel a little guilty: How can this writer’s problems make me feel so good?

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Donna Brook

This poem by Donna Brook first appeared in Hanging Loose 42 and also appears in her collection, What Being Responsible Means to Me.

THE SCHOOL OF PAIN

No one comes here to learn
what we teach.

They all want to be better off for it,
to know its applications, to grow
from the experience, to go through
just once.

What we offer
is the fact that it hurts
and is not the same as pleasure.
We’ve found

anything else, or less, or more
is not pain.

-- Donna Brook

I started out as an admirer of Donna Brook’s poetry and then I became an admirer of Donna Brook, so, in addition to being her editor, I became her husband.  Just to make that clear.

The School of Pain appeared in Fall 1982.  In the poetry world, Big-Time Suffering still had its ardent fans: Finish eating your depression stew, dear; it will make your poems grow up big and strong.  We still got lots of Dear Sylvia and Dear Anne poems from young women longing to be miserable.  The boys had to dress up as Berryman and Lowell.

Of course the idea that agony is ennobling goes far beyond the making of poems.  It’s still with us in relentless daily news reports – the guy who thinks he’s a better person because he’s had stomach cancer, the hollow-eyed saint, the uncomplaining amputee, the positive thinker being chewed on by tiger.  If it really worked that way, there would, indeed, be a real School of Pain, and it would have a waiting list.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Tony Towle

This poem by Tony Towle first appeared in Hanging Loose 82 (Fall, 2002) and also appears in his latest collection, Winter Journey.

THE DINNER PARTY

Ah, life is a reassuring dream that is vivid but comfortably mundane,
said the shmuck aloud to himself as he sat down next to the shlemiel
and indulged in an expansive gesture of certitude that sent the latter’s soup
into the lap of the adjacent shlimazel.  The shmendrick apologized,
to no one in particular, and the shmegeggy accepted; while the shlep
shuffled off to the kitchen to get another bowl, and at the front door the shnorrer
pushed past the shlumps to talk his way in.  It was the putz, of course,
that had arranged the seating, a decorous mélange of shmoes
crowded in next to the radiator, sweating and uncomfortable
but grateful to have been invited.  I have no idea where I’m supposed to sit,
so I leave and go sit in the park, where I hear an avian voice: “Hey,
you don’t recognize me?  I’m the pigeon that craps on your windowsill.
Why are you down here on a cold bench when you could be upstairs
eating a free meal?  What are you, some kind of shnook?”

Lenny Bruce said that everybody who lives in New York is Jewish and everybody who lives outside of New York is not Jewish.

In support of that thesis, I offer you Tony Towle, a sandy-haired shagetz who long-ago fled his native Queens and established himself as one of those residents of lower Manhattan to whom anywhere north of 14^th Street is the Adirondacks.   Tony has the true New Yorker’s command of the essential Yiddish vocabulary combined with a poet’s ear and sensitivity to nuance.  The fact that he lives with a nice Jewish girl probably doesn’t hurt either.

When Tony reads this poem aloud, he keeps it flat and reportorial, a bit the way a Swedish sociologist might present it, say.  I had the pleasure of reading it at the recent 70th birthday celebration for Tony at The Poetry Project.  I didn’t go into full shtetl mode, but I could feel the spirit of my late Uncle Louis trying to assert itself.

My favorite reading of the poem took place a couple of years ago.  CLMP had invited Hanging Loose to present some recently published poems in a reading at the main New York Public Library.  We sent Marie Carter, our associate editor and one-time editor of the University of Edinburgh’s literary magazine.  One of the poems Marie chose was The Dinner Party and her Scottish accent revealed whole new layers of universality in the poem.  The bonny lass did need a little coaching on the pronunciation of “shlamazel.”

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Harvey Shapiro

This poem by Harvey Shapiro appeared in Hanging Loose 81, in Spring, 2002.

DESK

After my death, my desk,
which is now so cluttered,
will be bare wood, simple and shining,
as I wanted it to be in my life,
as I wanted my life to be.

-- Harvey Shapiro

There’s a letter from William Carlos Williams, written from Yaddo just after World War II, that mentions meeting the young Harvey Shapiro there and says nice things about his work. That was 64 years ago. A few weeks ago, in Key West, we had a party to celebrate Harvey’s 86th birthday. He likes a good party.
The voice in Harvey’s many books has been consistent over the years; the diction has grown steadily tighter, simpler, always elegant. By contrast, there is the horde of poets at this stage of the game who have produced great, baggy, long poems, often tiresome, sometimes unbearable, as the Official-Summing-Up-Capstones-to-My-Illustrious Career. Perhaps that’s a requirement in some academic contracts.

Although he has taught at Yale and Columbia, Harvey has not had a career in the classroom. Instead, he served as an editor of The New York Times for 42 years, eight of them as editor-in-chief of the Book Review.  I like to think that those decades of journalism had an influence on Harvey’s poetry: Say what you’ve got to say and get out of the way. I know there are lots of other influences, but I fancy this one.  Hell, I started out as a reporter myself.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Michael Cirelli

This poem by Michael Cirelli first appeared in Hanging Loose 92 and later became the title poem in Michael’s first poetry collection, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2008.

LOBSTER WITH OL’ DIRTY BASTARD

The broken down fishing boats on the docks rock back and forth
as if there is music in the air. Norma Jean, Captain’s Girl, Jenny,
    all hips and
bounce – shimmy shimmy ya in their slips.  Across the street,
    Randazzo’s Clam Bar,
“the pride of Sheepshead Bay,” bustles. Inside, not fisherman nor
    pirate, but rapper
Ol’ Dirty Bastard has his own seat, where he reigns with sunglasses
    and a vinyl bib.
Dirty likes it raw, so raw he fathered 13 children, and when he
    rolls up to Randazzo’s,
in his black school bus with 24-inch rims, his clan of offspring
    pour out like bass.
Mama Randazzo sighs and smiles that forced diagonal smile,
    as she drags 6 tables together
There are platters of mussels and little necks with mouths
    wide open!
Dinner rolls bounce off the walls like handballs!  Sword fights
    break out with shrimp
skewers, the toddlers wear calamari rings on their fingers like
    diamonds, and lil’ Rusty
does the fake-sneeze-trick that leaves an oyster in his open
    palm.  Ol’ Dirty is ravishing
a huge boiled lobster, drawn butter dripping down his
    chin, as he cracks open the claws
with his golden fangs.

-- Michael Cirelli

             I knew there was a second reader appearing with me at Brooklyn College’s “Day of the Poet” a couple of years ago, but I had no idea who it was. Then I found his name in the program, one Michael Cirelli. Never heard of him. That’s all right.  He was identified as “a hip hop poet.” Hmmm, that didn’t sound so all right. I braced myself for some noise, attitude, and easy rhyming.

            Michael’s half of the program started out with brief readings by three young poets who, I later learned, came out of the programs he directs at Urban Word New York, which uses hip hop to teach poetry. The kids were experienced performers and the work, as it zoomed by, was better than I expected. I began to relax my old-fogy stance a bit.

            “Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard” was the first poem Michael read. Not at all what I expected! I thought it was terrific. I loved the evocation of the Brooklyn setting (with Mama Randazzo’s phony smile speaking volumes about the degree of welcome extended to large black groups in Sheepshead Bay) and the bigger-than-life figure of Ol’ Dirty. By the end of the reading, I had become a fan and I asked Michael for poems for HL. As I got to know him and his work, I learned that, yes, his knowledge of the rap scene is encyclopedic, but he also holds an MFA from The New School and is thoroughly comfortable in both worlds. I also learned, to my surprise, that Ol’ Dirty Bastard was a real guy, but that the scene in the poem is a total invention. Michael’s book manuscript took me further into a world where place, music and family all interact vibrantly. I think it’s safe to say that the book is the only one you’ll find that has blurbs from David Lehman and from Kanye West.

            -- Robert Hershon

"I'm Not a Doctor But" [by Robert Hershon]

Robert Hershon, co-editor of Hanging Loose magazine and Hanging Loose Press, will be editing our Sunday poetry pages for the next several months. Hanging Loose magazine was begun in 1966, the name deriving from the original money-saving format of loose pages in an envelope; ninety-five issues have been published to date. Hanging Loose Press has published 175 titles including the first poetry books by Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, Dennis Nurkse, Hettie Jones, Joanna Fuhrman, and Elizabeth Swados. The press also publishes  Ha Jin, Joan Larkin, Jayne Cortez, Paul Violi, Charles North, and Tony Towle  while continuing to present the work of new writers. Robert Hershon’s co-editors are Dick Lourie and Mark Pawlak, with Donna Brook and Marie Carter as associate editors.

Hershon's own most recent book, his twelfth, is Calls from the Outside World. Here's a poem of his -- from Hanging Loose #94 -- that will introduce you to Robert Hershon's distinctive voice and brand of ironic good humor. Welcome, Bob! -- DL

I’m Not a Doctor But
                for Larry Fagin

I’m not a doctor but
I play one on
the 79th Street crosstown bus
and I’m very busy
I’ve covered all the little girls
in their school uniforms
with band-aids on their elbows
knees and noses
and I performed an appendectomy
on some old guy while
we went through the park
(no anesthesia but lots
of birdsong)
I had to amputate the driver’s ears
but he’s learned to love the quiet
My practice has doubled
between Madison and Columbus
I’m just very, very busy

-- Robert Hershon