The Best American Poetry

Breasts [poem by James Cummins]

William Bailey "N" (Female Nude) c. 1965

Breasts

He never thought breasts antagonistic.
Unreachable, perhaps; unknowable, either
in the Biblical or secular sense. Mythic.
But the glorious revelations that exceeded
what he once would have optimistically

called expectations, more than made up
for the years of staring out windows.
Then to be admitted to the secret mysteries:
girls wanted him to look at their breasts,
to touch their nipples with his trembling

fingers, lips, rough palms—they even
displayed them sometimes, impatiently,
waiting for him to get it, at least a little.
Then comes the good stretch of life—
still tense, but with relaxed outings,

to movies, canoes, campfires. Quilt shows,
as the young couple searches for a flag
they can purchase together that stands
for the small country they’ve become,
& snugly covers their connubial bliss.

Ah, Sunday afternoons in Amish country ...
Smell of hay & manure, roast beef & potatoes,
the tang of fall making way for winter ...
Quilts cover sleep, the metaphor for death.
Quilts proclaim to the world this man,

this knight, is no longer on the quest—
for the Grail Castle, immortality, boobies ...
He just wants to rest in her arms as his wife
watches the gray window for them both;
and to know this place for the first time.

James Cummins' most recent book is Everyday Knowledge. 

On Angela Ball's "Hares" [by Jim Cummins]

photo © Steffi Wacker

To talk about Angela Ball's brilliant poem, "Hares," which appeared in the Paris Review last winter, I really have to begin with a look at the voice of the speaker in the first six lines. It's a very cunning sleight-of-hand that sets up the poem top to bottom. The very first words "Not mine—" imagine a world the speaker is outside of, a world the speaker approaches almost apologetically, reassuring the gatekeeper of that world—whoever he is or they are—that although she's going to take "some" of it, she promises she won't take much, just a "part."  And "not the best part," she claims.  Those words end line three.  

But then, in line four she completely upends this "hat in hand" assurance: "it could be the best, though."  There is "no way of knowing," the implication being that the assessment of value in that world might be askew.  She might bargain for a smaller part, but what's made available to her might include the best part because the ones who've got it might not know what they've got.  By mildly speculating on the ultimate value of what's at stake, she's undermines the authority of those who guard that world.  There's social humility at work here ("knowing one's place"), and social humility is an agreed-upon mask; but true humility recognizes the worth of the self.  The custodian of the world the speaker will take "a part" of is, finally, a gatekeeper to the wider philosophical world the lyric is going to traverse.  

After the initial obeisance is paid—almost like a fare or an admission charge—the speaker lists a catalogue of "specific abstractions" (my term) of what she will "take" a part of, the whole of which amounts to what I'll call life itself, or on the individual's part, the reclaiming of a life.  Synecdoche is an age-old rhetorical device loved by poets.  Here, Angela's magic has turned it into another effective tool that makes our footing a little bit shakier than when we started.  Synecdoche, of course, substitutes part for whole, or vice versa.  Angela doubles its effect in the following way.  Take the first example.  The "blue part" is a "whole" that is itself broken into blue things (and the blue thing selected to be "taken" by the speaker from this category is a cantilever bridge).  But this blue "whole" is "part" of a larger whole that I'm calling "life" or "world."  So the cantilever bridge is part to the larger blue whole; but the blue whole is part to the whole of life, the smorgasbord, carnival, boxing match, of life.  The longest part of "Hares" is a catalogue of these synecdoches.

Synecdoches that are parts of greater wholes include colors (of experience--subdued colors, I might add, which speaks to personality type and character), roughness of life (teeth marks, halter), deliquescence and dis-integration (failure, death), unflinching art, attempt at prophylaxis (vaccination), people who understand things, people who don't, ecstasy (endorphins—if swimming, it might be 'endolphins'), rebirth, reincarnation, Nature, Beauty—and much else.  Then the last six lines envelope the poem and focus in on the particulars of the part she takes that IS the larger whole: life, lived with another "part," who "rests close against me" and watches the boxing hares with her. These last six lines come back to the micro, zero in on particulars ("parts") that make up a whole personality, being, who watches with her the spectacular presentation of dawn. I would say the boxing hares are the last part-to-whole, but they're not.  The image of the mysterious presence resting close to the speaker is the last synecdoche of the poem.

Whitman's catalogues, often part of an ecstatic whole, can't be ignored here. Angela is an American poet working in an American vein: you can't produce a new catalogue without calling to mind the Cataloguer of catalogues--not if you're "part" of a tradition. Whitman moves from the micro to the macro and back in 'Song of Myself'—in a more modest way, Angela does the same.  We return to "Not mine—" --the words that begin the poem. Why isn't "it" hers?  Why does Whitman proclaim "Myself" while Angela says "Not mine"?  I'm not going to make an argument about "male ego" vs. a woman's "place" (especially since that place is usually defined by men); or about the idea that no one of sensibility would want to identify with America these days; but the puns surrounding that Manifest Destiny century--the 19th--are a lot of (dark) fun.  Originally, "manifest" meant "caught by hand," or even "seized."  The sense of entitlement that Whitman took for granted is not just shied away from in Angela's "Not mine"--but is in fact debunked. Whitman, Emerson, the whole 19^th Century, was about power, American 'exceptionalism,' identity through strength; and it produced great work. Angela's poem is a much more modest 21st Century acceptance, even quiet celebration, of a more human-sized part-for-whole.  "Hares," I would offer, is a sturdy, tough-minded expression of what affirmation we're capable of these days: an acceptance of our "part" in the scheme of things, and the resting close to our "part"-ners as we watch the amazing spectacle of it all.  

 

Angela Ball is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of five previous poetry collections: Kneeling Between Parked Cars, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. Angela curates the "New York School Diaspora" for this blog. Find her selections here. 

 

James Cummins is the author of Still Some Cake (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2012); Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005), with David Lehman; Portrain in a Spoon:Poems (The James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series) and Then & Now (Swallow Press, 2004), among others. His honors include an Ingram Merrill grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. 

Letter to Cummins from the Island of Idyllwild [by David Lehman and David St. John]

Letter to Cummins from the Island of Idyllwild

Dear Jim, forgive the long delay in writing
But the feasts go on from dawn to dawn
And the natives insist on feeding us by hand, slices
        of papaya
And mango with orange beer. Last night
We stood beneath a sky of white and green silk sea
Anemones pulsing like parachutes above an amphitheater
         as wide
As a valley, and a single child walked out to sing to
        the crows
Rasping above us in nearby pines. You may not remember
        this, but
That child, circumcised and blond, outshouted the sea
That summer when amnesia invaded our sleeping bags
Like bugs transmitting the intimacy of an illness.
You had sex with a friendly neighbor and woke up without
A hangover or any memory of how she seduced you.
The island was full of enchantments, and still is.
There are lotus flowers, young goddesses with liquid bodies
In loose summer frocks, craters of quicksand and
       rushing rapids.
On this island no news is fair weather, and the women
      write poems.
And so whatever you might have feared for us, don’t
      worry now.
The six points of the pirate’s compass will guide us
As the six breezes from the seven continents return like
A sestina’s consolation and the envoy’s delight. Here, on our
Perpetually new isle, we can imagine you imagining us, idle
      as the natives
Of Idyllwild, yearning to be as wise, and as wild. David
      & David.

-- David Lehman & David St. John

from the archive; first posted September 30, 2009. Pictured: Jim Cummins

The Winning Entry: "When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" [by Angela Ball, with judge Jim Cummins's comments]

Charles Bukowski in One Corner; in the Other, Bob Dylan

If anyone should take eighteen-shot Dylan Thomas’s name,
it’s me. I challenge you to a duel
with two bottles of Four Roses.

--Chuck, that may be you, but
me, I crossed the green mountain
I slept by the sea.
you’re walkin’ in dreams
where black is the color
and nothing the number.

Bob, I got to tell you
I’m sorry for my wife
I’m sorry for anyone’s wife.
If you want me, find me clinging to a freight car,
Find me underground.
But you’ll never find me
vagrant in the rain, nabbed by a rookie cop,
a skirt, no less,
in Long Branch, New Jersey.

-- Angela Ball

James Cummins writes:

As with most of David's prompts, this one resulted in some terrific entries.  I went with Angela Ball's poem for the first prize, but there was a good pool to pick from (I counted eight entries as possibles).  For me, it came down to some great lines.  Angela wrote (in Buk's voice) "I'm sorry for my wife / I'm sorry for anyone's wife" which seemed to me to combine the compassion B. tried to keep hidden with the world-weariness we love about the guy.  And the ending, referring to Dylan's run-in with the police in 2009, who thought he was a homeless vagrant, was perfect; the word "skirt" was inspired.  George Schaefer's prose-poem "scene" takes second; it combines the grittiness of many of the entries with a lyric grace I love.  "The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour" and "Poetry only happens when nothing else can" are two examples.  And again, the ending is perfect.  Finally, Adam Baron's poem gets honorable mention for the use of the word "dumb," the moon sitting on Bukowski's solipsistic rim, and the friendly atmosphere of two schmucks having a moment together.  The difference between these three and at least four or five other entries is as thin as the bill Buk slides into his favorite pinball machine.  Thanks to all. 

"Recovered Memories" [by Jim Cummins]

Recovered Memories

 

Don't forget

Lew Burdette

or Frank Malzone

or David Cone

or Herbert Score

or Lenny Moore

or Doc Gooden

or John Wooden

or Earl the Pearl

or Laverne & Shirl

or Alan Ameche

or prima facie

or Stanley Fish

or Cal McLish

or Cash McCall

but most of all

don't forget

Lew Burdette.

"Feeling a Snack Coming On" [by Jim Cummins]

Feeling a Snack Coming On

Maybe the best thing to compare it to
Would be the old cowboy-and-Indian movies
We used to endure on Friday night TV
Or Saturday matinees, before Psycho hit.
Indians whooping and chasing stagecoaches;
A strong-but-vulnerable woman holding a rifle,
Her face streaked with dirt, a white sleeve torn;
Or a lone half-naked buck sneaking up
Behind a blue-clad soldier to slit his throat—
Until the soldier proves the better athlete,
Wrestling the knife away and giving the Injun
What-for, before bayonetting the poor bastard
And rolling his painted body into the canyon.
A 16-ounce Pepsi could last a double feature.

So you’re riding through a desert, a third-rate
Monument Valley—this is no A-lister—
And the silence is starting to surround you.
Forty miles to the next pony-express station,
Where there’s water and human interaction
(Though you’re very appreciative of your horse!);
And the vast emptiness of endless desert
Is beginning to seem a metaphor for your life.
That’s the first sign your blood sugar levels
Are starting to fall.  Maybe it was the coffee
After dinner—never a good idea, that, but
You wanted to be alert crossing this terrain;
Now you’re starting to feel a little hollowed out.
That’s when the first cookie shows up.

It stands on a ridge, a sentinel silhouetted
Against sun.  You try to make out its markings.
Chocolate chip?  Member of the Oatmeals?
There’s icing, but what does the icing mean?
Then, to the left, two or three more cookies
Appear, their frosting glinting in the sun.
This is getting serious.  It’s as if they can see
The gnawing in the pit of your stomach.
Suddenly, up ahead, many cookies, a whole tribe
Of cookies, as if they’ve been waiting in ambush:
Butterscotch cookies, pecan candies, cookies
With chocolate swirls across their faces, jellies.
You eat until your throat is dry as the desert,
Hoping you’ll soon hear the bugles of milk.

4/12 /20

from the archives; first published April 14, 2020.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Pantheon [by Jim Cummins]

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert thumb a ride in the 1934 rom-com "It Happened One Night"

A while back I posted a piece about how “immortality” had nothing to do with the future, but was rather a necessary requirement for the daily production of a writer. Now I think I’ve come up with an idea that will satisfy all those among us who daydream about being immortalized for the ages like Shakespeare or Chidioch Tichborne. I call it “the hitchhiker’s guide to the pantheon,” and it goes like this.

We start where all humanity started, with the opposable thumb. The thumb is a remarkable appendage. Think about all the practical wisdom evolution has poured into the thumb: prodding it to meet the index finger so as to reassure tribal colleagues all is okay; providing it to infants (and select adults) as a replacement for the maternal teat; establishing it as a weapon to stick in an enemy’s eye (only for home defense, of course); and as a means for stealing away with something after you’ve grasped it (no judgment). 

A thumb’s usages are almost endless. You can tell a bub to “take a hike.” You can have someone executed in an amphitheater. You can indicate a loner over by the window to a detective. And I believe my generation of Boomers has contributed greatly to the evolution of the thumb by spending the greater part of the ‘60s and early ‘70s hitchhiking all over the U.S. and Europe. It was magical. We’d just hang a thumb out on the freeway, and away we’d go. Since we often, or usually, had little sense of where we were going, our evolutionary thumbs began to take on the problem of “destination” for us. It was kind of like “dowsing”--or better, like the wand stuff in Harry Potter. Something like “the destination chooses the thumb.”

Unfortunately, the proliferation of serial killers in the ‘80s and ‘90s pretty much destroyed the Golden Age of Hitchhiking for the rest of us. (I’ve always suspected Greyhound and Trailways of bankrolling those bastards, but I have no proof. We didn’t have “talk radio” back then.) Anyway, let’s cut to the chase, so to speak. Here’s how we all end up immortal.

First of all, when I die I leave one of my thumbs to a cryogenic firm. The rest of me gets cremated (it’s more responsible ecologically); then when science refines the ability to reconstruct me from my frozen thumb cells, a la Jurassic Park, I’ll return—as a critic! I’ll “rediscover” my own work of years past, and proclaim myself the new Chaucer or, what the heck, Shakespeare! Having established myself in the pantheon, I can expand the business: David Ignatow, Amy Clampett, any number of British poets named “Peter”-- anonymous poets with heirs who can pay. 

I know what you’re thinking: why not let the usual literary processes prevail and get rediscovered “naturally” in a hundred years? But have you thought this through? Can you imagine how many hundreds of thousands of MFA graduates will be hoping to be rediscovered in a hundred years? No critical apparatus can possibly cope with those numbers. But my program can get you in on the ground floor.  What’s that worth to you? (Besides your thumb, of course; I’ll need your thumb.) 

"Two Bottles of Glenlivet" [by James Cummins]

                                                   

Two Bottles of Glenlivet

To dinner you bring the Scotch matching
the beautiful friends who are hatching
this glorious meal
and the glorious feel
of the moments from Time you are snatching.

There once was a man come to dinner
whose outer life stood in for his inner;
he ate with great gusto,
till his waistline did thrust-o,
and he left most decidedly not thinner.

There once were two gents from Glenlivet
who agreed great Scotch could greatly rivet
your attention and command
to the great task at hand:
life, and the friends who help you live it!

    for David

from the archive; first posted April 25, 2014

"Hot Dogs" [by Jim Cummins]

Hot Dogs

1

Noses, lips, intestines, anuses—
With relish I bite into the hot dog
Slathered in mustard, ketchup,
And, well, relish …

                                If every hot dog
Takes five minutes off your life,
I figure I’ll die a week early.
I can live with that.
                                The crack
of the bat!  Oh shit, mustard
All over my shirt.  I can live with
That.

2

They call him a hot dog,
This shortstop who flips his bat,
Pounding his chest
After a home run,
Even the wind-blown cheapie
Someone in the stands
Throws back onto the field,
Unimpressed.
                              His self-
Regard almost echoes
In the vast space
Before the sparse crowd.

3

There aren’t many fields left.
Outside the stadium,
Parking lots & bars,
Where you can watch the game on TV.

4

It’s the 4^th of July.
After the parade, the dads put on
Witty aprons & fire up the grills.
Somehow, it’s not the same.

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

Three Clerihews [by Jim Cummins] (& 3 by someone else)

Sporting Life

Wilt Chamberlain
discovered sin
required a log
to log them in.

*

Pete Rose, brother,
by any other
moniker would stink,
is what I think.

*

Joe DiMag
ruled like the Raj.
But when he passed,
they capped his ass.

“Stiff” [by Barnyard Kipling]

Stiff

If you can keep revising when all around you

are bringing polystyrene cups into 

those windowless rooms with the long tables;

if you can keep on journaling while all

around you mask feelings and ideas

in words that don't say what they think they say;

if you can 'kill your babies,' and also 

adopted children, siblings, spouses, friends,

then send out miscalculated packets 

of what's left to journals called Femaelstrom, 

Foetid (English), Quisling (Norwegian)), Gland;

if you can welcome onslaughts of SASE's

with curses, yet Christ-like humility;

then you'll be a poet, my friend.

A Great Larkin Story (Not Mine) [by Jim Cummins]

David Yezzi's post and David Lehman's comment following bring up the basic issues all Larkin lovers (I don't think there ARE any Larkin haters, except maybe Czeslaw Milosz) mull over frequently.  When you read Andrew Motion's biography you see what a controlling, often obnoxious personality he was; the compartmentalizing of his love/emotional life is particularly repellant.  My favorite index to this side of his character is the spanking; he found spanking young girls very titillating and belonged to at least one circle of fellow spanking-lovers, the members (!) of which traded spanking magazines among themselves.  Thus assuring a spanking good time was had by all!  (I love the word 'spanking.'  Perhaps I'm a closet spanker.  Wanker, more likely.)  And of course, as both Davids imply, this control-freak aspect permeates his work and career, along with his great erudition, love of jazz, amazing intelligence, and all the other qualities that blend to give us these fabulous poems which I personally have loved since I was fortunate enough to discover them.

But my story is only indirectly about this stuff; and it comes to me from Phil Levine, another great admirer of Larkin, who was visiting England with his wife, Franny--this would be sometime in the late 60s or early 70s--and who wangled an extraordinarily rare and precious appointment with Larkin for dinner.  I don't have the details as to how this came about, but I know Phil relates it as an event that was so rare--a visiting American poet granted an audience with the Bath librarian--that he regarded it with awe and gratitude.  He and Franny were tremendously excited and felt greatly privileged; they showed up at the restaurant and eagerly awaited the poet.  Phil was particularly keen on talking to him about jazz: Artie Shaw, Coltrane.  Phil was friends with guitarist Kenny Burrell in Detroit.  Larkin was about a half hour late, or more; and when he showed up he was exceedingly shy.  Conversation was imposingly difficult; and about 15 minutes into it, Larkin contrived to spill a pitcher--not a glass, a pitcher--of water all over his stomach and lap.  He jumped up, made apologies about going to get towel--and never came back!  Phil and Franny never saw him again.

I love this story for many reasons, not least of which is Levine's ingenuousness and enthusiasm, though the joke is on him: as he tells it, he's completely on Larkin's side.  And of course it's a quick look into the personality of maybe the best British poet of the last half-century; certainly one of them.

from the archive; first posted April 18, 2009. See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/04/larkin-in-the-tls-by-david-yezzi.html

But my story is only indirectly about this stuff; and it comes to me from Phil Levine, another great admirer of Larkin, who was visiting England with his wife, Franny--this would be sometime in the late 60s or early 70s--and who wangled an extraordinarily rare and precious appointment with Larkin for dinner.  I don't have the details as to how this came about, but I know Phil relates it as an event that was so rare--a visiting American poet granted an audience with the Bath librarian--that he regarded it with awe and gratitude.  He and Franny were tremendously excited and felt greatly privileged; they showed up at the restaurant and eagerly awaited the poet.  Phil was particularly keen on talking to him about jazz: Artie Shaw, Coltrane.  Phil was friends with guitarist Kenny Burrell in Detroit.  Larkin was about a half hour late, or more; and when he showed up he was exceedingly shy.  Conversation was imposingly difficult; and about 15 minutes into it, Larkin contrived to spill a pitcher--not a glass, a pitcher--of water all over his stomach and lap.  He jumped up, made apologies about going to get towel--and never came back!  Phil and Franny never saw him again.

I love this story for many reasons, not least of which is Levine's ingenuousness and enthusiasm, though the joke is on him: as he tells it, he's completely on Larkin's side.  And of course it's a quick look into the personality of maybe the best British poet of the last half-century; certainly one of them.

from the archive; first posted April 18, 2009. See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/04/larkin-in-the-tls-by-david-yezzi.html

The Lower Depps [by James Cummins]

The Lower Depps

 

Amber is HOT

but Johnny is NOT.

Yes, I've Heard

she dropped a turd

in Johnny's bed

to get in his head.

Okay, that's fraught--

I kid you not.

To think the slippage

from her equipage

has soiled the sheets

and both his feets,

I cannot countenance.

It's enough to renouncenance

a normal kid:

you don't want skid-

marks in your bed.

But, all that said,

I still want to clamber

all over Amber.

"Male Stargazing" [by Jim Cummins]

Male Stargazing

After the prostate is removed,
The male gaze, straight from the savannah,
Turns inward, toward the clinical.
The perusal of breasts is no longer
The perusal of breasts, but the aesthetics
Of proportion: how the breasts
Relate to the shoulders, the neck, the waist,
The chest—the male gaze without desire
Is curatorial at best.

After the prostate is removed,
The male gaze turns inward, toward the past.
“Ass” becomes memories of individuals,
The “legs for days” measure the dregs
Of the heart, not the organ warming up
For the show, with its cathedral tunes.
The penis still removes toxins,
But gone is the illusion of the great lover:
Those days whizzed by too fast.

After the prostate is removed,
The male gaze turns inward;
For some women that’s a win-win,
Though the new order panics the men.
The mind still “gets” the appeal,
But the body finds it harder to feel;
And no fantasy life can spin
The predicament one finds oneself in:
The male gaze confronting the real.

for D.L.

"Cats" [by James Cummins]

When Eliot wrote his thesis at Harvard,
He said philosophers doing philosophy was “ridiculous”—
That two thousand years of this insanity had gone on
Because they tried to explain existence
From the point-of-view of a platform outside it,
Which didn’t, and couldn’t, exist.  One has only
One's sightlines; and wherever you find yourself,
You're in the middle; and your sightlines
Are better or worse depending on the intelligence
You bring to whatever it is you’re looking at.
Avuncular language-riddles infuriated him,
And he made his disgust quite clear in his thesis.
Harvard offered him a chair on the basis of these ruminations;
And after he said no, Bertrand Russell screwed his wife.

From Recalcitrant Actors by James Cummins (2021). Published by Dos Madres (www.dosmadres.com). T. S. Eliot is pictured above. 

Ils ont entendu le vent dans les arbres . . .

Thanks to Jim Cummins for sending this along. Believed to be the only time Johnny Carson sang in public:

Thanks, Jim!   -- sdh

Memories of Richard Howard [by Jim Cummins]

I had a funny "causerie" moment with Richard.  Sheila Guckenberger brought her daughter, Kristin, to the event and then left her with me in the office; Kristin was six.  That was okay until Kristin had to go to the bathroom.  So she and I sneaked out the back door and she went to the bathroom.  Now this was in the days before voicemail, so I had an answering machine hooked up to the Elliston line.  Dan Barth called about softball in the middle of R's talk, and though Dan NEVER DID THIS BEFORE OR AFTER, he thought it would be funny to leave a message in the voice of "Benny," the mentally-challenged mail clerk on LA LAW.  So Dan does this grossly "retarded" voice on the machine, goes on and on with it, and his voice resounds throughout the whole Elliston Room.  t some point -- Kristin and I are still in the hall -- Richard gets up, never stops talking, walks over to the ER office and slams the door shut.  People said he really slammed it, too.  Anyway, Kristin and I try to sneak back in, only to find the ER door locked when I turn the handle, so I bump up against the door and Kristin bumps up against me.  I have this six-year-old in tow who's talking in a normal voice while I'm fumbling with the keys to unlock the door and whispering "Sh-h" to her.  Richard never stops talking while everyone is giggling and he's glaring at my back trying to poke holes in it with that laser vision he used when he held up his monocle.  Great story, starting the next day.

 

**

 

Richard never got mad at me; he knew I was a doofus who meant well.  Once, I was over at his place near the old Clifton post office and he was sitting on the couch across from me.  His little pug dog, Maude, got up on the back of the couch and began licking every inch of Richard's bald head.  Richard never moved except to incline his head occasionally so Maude could reach an unlicked part.  It went on for at least ten minutes.  Richard had started his new Proust translation and was 70 pages into it, so the NY Times mag did a feature story on it.  The story featured a two-page full-color picture of Richard reclining on a couch with Maude.  As Maude was finishing up his scalp, Richard asked what did I think of the picture of him and Maude in the Times.  I said it looked like a still for a new movie, "Howard and Maude."  He just said, "Not funny, dear," and we moved on. 

 

So many stories.  What can I say?  He was a big deal in my life.  -- JC

 

Photo  credit: Bill Hayward.

"Elegy for Archie Ammons" [by Jim Cummins]

Last night I read “Part Ten”
Of Archie Ammons’s Garbage
Out loud, twice, in an empty room.
Then stopped in embarrassment
To hear if anyone was listening.

I’d bought the book so many years ago
And carried it with me to New York
The only time I’d ever meet him.
I’m not one for book signings, autographs;
I always thought if what I had left

At the end of life is a bunch
Of signatures, I’d be very sad,
So rely on my imperfect memory
That doesn’t kick in often enough
To recover what is lost;

Like what is lost from that evening:
Me, standing, sweating coldly, empty,
Waiting to read, the rictus grin
What those around me fled from,
Including Archie; and then he couldn’t

Stay after because his wife was ill,
So was gone before I could get up
Enough nerve to ask him
To sign my Garbage.  At the late
Dinner, I sat between two women

Who were interested in me
Up to a point, and then that point
Was reached; and I sat for a while longer,
Listening to some lunatic who later
Became a professional poker player,

Or perhaps already was one;
And then it was time to go.
I went back to the hotel alone—
I always do, the rictus, you know—
Thinking death is an interesting display,

And maybe I’m caught up in the grip
Of a final illusion—that the light
Reaching me on a given day is truly
The light of that day—and maybe
I still exist for now in an infinity

That will be revealed as an illusion
When the countdown to death begins,
When hope is reduced to a number,
The number of days.  So I walk out
Each morning under many different suns,

Some causing my shirt to stick
To my skin, some covering the park
In an antebellum light I often feel
In certain parts of Kentucky.  First,
Archie died, then that good man’s love,

Phyllis, and I was never known to him,
Nor he to me, except in “Part Ten”
Of Garbage; and in his face as he stood
On the stage and introduced me,
And I got up and pretended my poems

Were a reality as real as morning light,
Or the willfulness of dinner-speak,
Or the light a true poet’s face can have
As he stands in a spotlight looking
At his watch, wondering at the illusion

He has set in motion, but only
With a sidelong glance, as it were,
Because he’s gazing beyond it, helpless,
To the numbered days, and feels
The need to get home quickly, quickly.

Ed. note: Archie Ammons (1926-2001) was born on February 18. He is pictured above in his office at Cornell University..

To Myself [by James Cummins]

          “Look for me under your boot-soles” – Whitman, “Song of Myself”

I don't have to rage;
I don't have to cry;
but I'm at that age
I'll be passing by.

I'll wave as I go;
I'll smile if I can.
Don't let your tears flow--
I'll give you a hand--

I just won't have speech,
except in your head.
Which will be a reach,
considering I'm dead.

"Stick" [by James Cummins]

It was intra-squad, not a real game,
But teenage boys don’t know the difference;
And to the pitcher who’d just thrown
An adrenaline-powered fastball at my head,
I was a pretender he could intimidate.
When the next pitch nearly took off
The top of my left knee, I knew,
With all the force of a mystical vision,
This talented boy, this ace of the staff,
A senior expected to bloom after showing
Such promise last year, such grit, such
Competitive fire, would fail.  I saw it
In his eyes when I got back up; I saw
The momentary hesitation, the confusion.
I knew the next pitch would be right
Down the middle of the plate, and as fast
As all the pride in his body could muster.
And he knew I knew; that was the key.
He didn’t know how, but he knew;
And it scared him, this giant of a boy,
That a stick of a kid he could break
In half in study hall, or a parking lot,
Would stare back at him as I stared back.
You never know who’ll relish the arena;
Who won’t care what he looks like,
As he approaches the game from his side,
Watching you watching him as he steps up.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
But it depended on my believing what
Had transpired between us the last two.
His arrogance became my coldness;
I’d done this before, and he hadn’t.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
And a few seconds later it hit a limb
Of a sycamore behind the left field fence.
“You’re going to have a bad year,” I yelled
As I trotted down the first base line,
Even then disliking myself for shouting it;
But something will rip out of you
In those moments, both you and not you;
It's not just triumph.  Bullies, sociopaths,
Narcissists—you have to demarcate—
You have to spell out a moment’s meaning
For them, in words they can’t mistake,
Because to them others have no outlines—
Other people are just blurry shapes
At the edges of their self-absorption.
And facts aren’t facts; you have to replace
The voice in their heads with a new voice:
I glued that home run to a voice
That jeered like the voice of his father,
Perhaps, or his mother, or a brother;
A voice that said this is your stupid soul
Flying over the fence after being struck
By the oldest weapon in the world,
A wooden stick.

From Recalcitrant Actors (2021, Dos Madres Press) by James Cummins,