The Best American Poetry

"A Dream of Archie Ammons" (whose birthday this is) [by Jim Cummins]

                        Last night I read “Part Ten”

of Archie Ammons’s Garbage

out loud, twice, in an empty room.

Then listened 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 figured 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 rarely jogs or kicks in

to recover what is lost;

 

like what is lost from that evening,

me, standing, sweating coldly, empty,

waiting to read, the fixed 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 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 replaced by 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 sometimes 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,

while he gazes beyond it, helpless,

to the numbered days, and feels

the need to get home quickly, quickly.

 

-- Jim Cummins

Jim Cummins soooo wishes he could come (to Dan Nester's poetry forum. . .)

The Incredible Ubiquitous Sestina 

“Our first poetry forum of the season
is scheduled for Tuesday.  The guest
is Dan Nester, editor of The Incredible
Sestina Anthology, and the program
will be devoted to this exotic and appealing
form, the sestina.  Please come.”

Did you know a sestina can make you come?
It’s true.  Try one of mine.  The silly season
is upon us; over there, that appealing
blonde woman  looks like a hot guest
on “My Favorite Dames,” a program
I always turn on after watching The Incredible

Mr. Limpet, with Don Knotts.  He’s incredible
himself: Sheriff Andy always waiting for him to come
around?  I could see him trying to program
a computer, if the series had lasted, oh, forty seasons
longer.  They say a TV show is like a guest:
the longer it hangs around the less appealing

are the same traits you used to find so appealing
in its heyday.  Floyd the Barber was incredible,
too, but in reruns he looks like an unwanted guest.
Forget about waiting for your turn to come—
get a better head job down the street!  Like seasons
of shows, we come and go; it’s God’s program.

(Or Boy George’s?  I never got with any program,
so what do I know?)  I’m appealing
to you, Reader!  I’m an old vet—season-
ed, ripe.  Overripe.  Have you seen The Incredibles?
Funnier than Limpet.  You’re incredulous—“Oh come
on!”—but it’s true!  Aarrgh.  Back on topic: The Guest;

Or, The Sestina.  A sestina can be an unwanted guest,
too—it drops out of its step program,
knowing it can always come
over to your house—drunk, high, appealing
to your better nature.  “You’re incredible,”
you grumble crossly.  “There is a season …”

it comes out with, trying to be appealing. “Just incredible!
… Ma!”  Your mother’s watching her programs—
Breaking Bad, fifth season.  “Ma, an unwonted guest!”

-- James Cummins

When Jim Cummins gets invited to a sestina hoe-down and can't show up, what does he do?

He sends his regrets in the form of a sestina. . .

Silly Sestina for Dan and the Sestina Masters at Poets House

"This Saturday we will have the launch reading
for The Incredible Sestina Anthology!  Spread
the word and please come if you can.
There will be lots of incredible sestinas
read and sestina masters in the house.
Would love to see you there."

Ah, it would be so great to be there --
"where all the barrel hoops are knit" -- a reading
after my own heart.  And in the House
of Poetry itself!  Some places you can spread
yourself too thin, but not there, where sestinas
flaunt their ankles like the French Can-Can.

You remember whispering, "I think I can ..."
back then, opening your notebook.  "They're
the toughest poems to write, sestinas ..."
You needed models, eagerly reading
as farm implements and rutabagas spread
like a prairie fire through your little house,

warmed by a Marvel Stove.  Like Poets House
itself--where you can sit your can
down in a comfy chair all day, spread
your mind out wide--they love it there,
the sight of anybody reading--
eating sestinas

as Mark Strand ate poetry: sestinas
running from your mouth!  You are the House
now, you've become its Reading
Monster, poking out of a garbage can
on a 'Sesame Street' by Denise Duhamel--& there
is Morgan Freeman intoning the point spread

for the Super Bowl--& Ma Barker's bedspread--
& Newt Gingrich--all inhabiting sestinas
you wish--oh how you wish!--you could be there
for.  Alas, we play by the rules of the opposite 'house'
and as Larry Joseph says, you do what you can.
So I won't be able to make the reading,

but my heart spreads wide, thinking of friends reading
their 'can-do' poems that I love, in Poets House!
I'll be there in spirit.  Go now, you silly sestina!

-- Jim Cummins

The event that Jim can't attend is at Poets House at 3 PM on Saturday February 1. Moderated by Daniel Nester, editor of the Incredible Sestina Anthology, with contributors David Lehman, Sharon Mesmer, Iam Sparrow, Jade Sylvan, Victor Infante, Marilyn Nelson, Patricia Carlin, Sharon Dolin, Scott Edward Anderson, Michael Costello, Jason Schneiderman, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Jenna Cardinale, Brendan Lorber, Ned Rust, and others TBA! Poets House is at Ten River Terrace (at Murray Street), New York, NY 10282. Subway: 1, 2, 3, A or C lines to Chambers Street Station.

November 22, 1963 [by Jim Cummins]

1

I sat in Miss Reynolds’s biology class
the day we all remember what we were doing.
I seem to recollect dissecting a fetal pig;
but perhaps, like Vardaman, I only conflated
physical and metaphysical horror
in one obliterating flash. More likely,
recalling myself as student and young man,
I sat there quietly, watching the others
poke, carve, discover. But at 1:30,
when the intercom coughed without preamble,
and we listened in growing fear to what
resembled a phone conversation broken into
by mistake (ellipses of questioning; sobs;
once, a loud shout) turn slowly into
the focused statement that went through
each of us like a bullet—that he had, in fact,
been murdered—we all sat up and still
then, the radiant pigs forgotten forever.

2

Who can explain the oracular impulse?
That day, they told us to “vacate the premises”;
no shoulder to cry on in those spare times; no counsel.
The Phys Ed teachers and the coaches, who would pull boys
from the hallway scrum, and slam their backs against
the walls to make a point, stood there sullen, sour,
as we filed past, silent, not even allowed
to use the phones—but then, who would we have called?
There was a strip mall off the high school lot;
we’d meet there at the bakery before class,
the rich kids in a restaurant nearby.
That day we wandered aimlessly along the storefronts;
what I remember most is our stunned silence.
In a television store I saw
a woman clerk who looked the way
I felt. I blurted out, “We’ll never get past this”—
I could feel the fear distort my voice,
as if I knew. She stared at me, as if I knew.

3

Miss Reynolds had good bones, as the connoisseurs
of beauty say, but wore so much make-up she seemed
a mannequin or doll. Or Lady Elaine Fairchilde,
on Fred Rogers’ TV show, or Punch’s wife, Judy—
an alabaster reach of flesh in which soft
eyes seemed trapped. I’ve often wondered since
if she were the first transsexual I’d known,
her perfect over-lipsticked lips a truth some
lonely man pined for in his own mirror.
I was fifteen: desire needed no abyss.
Even wrinkled old Mrs. Benedict—
even hoary old Mrs. B.—would writhe beneath me
in my bed at night, while I sucked her ancient
leathery nipples, and groaned aloud.
I wasn’t rich or president;
the Beatles had yet to play on Ed Sullivan;
RFK was still alive, like me.
And everywhere I looked desire fused with death.

---

"Hick and Willie Get a Catalog from the 'Atheist Collective' Gallery" [by Jim Cummins]

Hick:

"Got the mail.  Here's a list of 'Easter Fun Facts,' straight from Jesus.
Did you know He suffered from 'Dysfunction, Resurrectile,'
until His Father threw a thunderbolt projectile?
It broke the stone to pieces--"

Willie:

"--'and scared all the feces
out of Magdalen, Peter, and John the Reptile'?
No, I didn't know that.  Let me open their 'Dreck File'--
maybe there's a paparazzi shot where Mary 'V's us."

Hick:

"You're disgusting.  Did you know if you have a Resurrection
lasting longer than 'Eternity'
by Calvin Klein, you should consult an attorney?
Or that John Calvin was saved in a run-off election?"

Willie:

"Well, he had a lot of followers.  He was a Twitterer,
after all.  Is that from the 'Atheist Collective'?  Do they want money?
Okay, I'll lighten up and try to be funny--
although the guy who wrote 'Snowbound' was Whittier."

-- Jim Cummins

Leonard Koan Haiku [by Jim Cummins]

Empty bell.  Sex with
a narcissist is the sound
of one hand clapping.

-- Jim Cummins

Of "Leonard Koan Haiku," Cummins writes: "I see this poem wearing a hat."

ELLISTON POET, R.I.P. – part 3 [by Jim Cummins]

(read Part I and Part 2 of this series)

When I moved back to Cincinnati in 1975, I began collecting Cincinnati quotes—references to the city in books, magazines, the popular media, etc.  Sort of along the lines of Berryman’s reference to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in one of his Dream Songs: “I saw in my dream the great lost cities, Macchu Picchu, Cambridge, Mass., Angkor … “  Or Eliot’s, in a letter to, I believe I remember correctly, Conrad Aiken, or was it MacLeish: “Cambridge seems to me a dull nightmare now … “  Of course, Cincinnati wasn’t as bad as all that—and it was certainly prettier than Cambridge—so I was just being defensive.  I’d put off adulthood for as long as I could; it was just that starting out seemed worse here.  Staring into the dark, empty Ohio night brought to mind Nietzsche’s abyss—except, instead of staring back at you, it fell asleep. 

Hence, my Cincinnati quotebook.  A particularly good one was Wilfred Sheed’s crack, made in The NY Times Book Review, which I quoted in my last post.  There were many others; I really do have them in a notebook somewhere.  But my all-time favorite was one from a TV series I never watched an episode of, though I saw the particular excerpt not once but twice.  Serendipity, of a sort.  It was from a Columbo scene, in which the rumpled, passive-aggressive sleuth knocked on the hotel door of a high-priced hooker played by Valerie Harper.  Valerie’s character was pretty jaded, and she was expecting a customer from Ohio, a dentist, I think.  When she opened the door, instead of the condescending sonofabitch who was going to namby-pamby her ass into admitting something crucial, she saw a crumpled ball of repression from the hinterlands.  She left the door open, turning away and waving him in, as she flung back patronizingly over her shoulder, “Oh, don’t be so Cincinnati!”

“Don’t be so Cincinnati!”!  From Valerie Harper!  We were being condescended to by Rhoda, for god’s sake!  That was brutal, a new low.  But this was the hotbed of provincialism that John Ashbery, the most sophisticated poet on the planet, the Genius of the Age, flew into in the winter of 1979, to be the Elliston Poet-in-Residence for ten weeks.

I’d begun reading John’s work in 1970, introduced to it by David Schloss, starting with The Double Dream of Spring, a life-changing experience for me.  I suppose I should say I didn’t have a clue about the work, but in truth I had many clues; your life doesn’t change without clues.  But I was staggered and perplexed and in awe of those poems.  More than that, I was thrilled.  What I felt but couldn’t say then was that we’ve got it turned around:  the unconscious isn’t images we try to find language for, try to describe.  The unconscious is language, words working together below conscious restriction and ordering.  The whole word, if you will, wholly felt.  Words bond in the unconscious, creating pictures for us, or pathways of new logic.

So I didn’t look at words as flat, two-dimensional, but as many-sided, with volume, capable of combining in a multitude of possibilities.  Remember that toy from way back when, the Magic 8 Ball?  It had a many-sided ball in it (an “icosahedral die”—I looked it up!), on whose flat planes “answers” had been printed in raised metal letters, that floated in black ink.  You asked it a question, then tilted it to one side, and read the answer.  One can only see the top of the word on a printed page, but there were many more sides to it in the ink below.  I saw JA’s language as containing this power—my pathetic description of it pales in the face of its dynamism, its depth and range—yoked to surface recognitions of sentence structure, pattern, clichés, pastiche, etc.  John’s process to me seemed the essence of “negative capability,” and his work a prodigious poetic achievement that would begin to come clear to us over the next fifty years or so.  Anyway, I thought The Double Dream of Spring was a great book, the depths of which were—to me, certainly, at 22—unfathomable, inexhaustible, yet palpably glorious and overwhelming as I held it in my hands and read it.

Okay, so I’m a fan.  So sue me.  But these were some of the thoughts I had in mind when, a better part of a decade later, I entered the room where John sat, in a suit and tie, his belly churning with the aforementioned chili, his mind trying to drop down low enough to take in a confrontation with our chairperson, the aforementioned horsewoman from the Tidewater area of Virginia, and her riding crop.  She’d been determined to make damn sure John Ashbery—despite (or maybe because of) the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle prize, and a resume from Hell-On-Wheels—wasn’t some city slicker who could just waltz in here like any ol’ body and pull the wool over our eyes!  We were the “Harvard on the Ohio,” after all!  John smiled weakly as I sat down, and said, “Is she always like that?”  I laughed.  I don’t remember which of us used the term “Professor Montezuma,” but I did reassure him it was safe to drink the water here.

For years, decades, really, I counted time by Elliston residencies; but spending time with JA stays in my heart for the sheer fun we had.  John was hilarious, brilliantly witty, of course—punning at three or four levels, in a couple of languages, is fairly standard—but a Cincinnati residency in those days cut you off from your life, your friends, your routines, and the loneliness that can develop wasn’t uncommon.  So we spent a lot of time drinking and, um, “inhaling,” and hanging out.  John would bring a record over to play, and we would get zonked and listen to the Firesign Theater or Monty Python.  This is how I got to know Dame Edna Everage (“I’m just a woman, who loves other women/I’m funny, that way …”; “The Night We Burned Mother’s Things”), and her partner, Norm—stoned, and singing along, of course.  God knows what we sounded like.  One day I got free tickets to see The Deer Hunter at a preview showing.  For some reason, lost now in the sands of time, this seemed like an important thing to do.  John couldn’t go because he had to give a poetry reading at a local college.  Would I drive him over?  Of course, but I made clear, in no uncertain terms, that I had to see this movie—I was quite the serious filmgoer, I assured him.  “Andrew Sarris on the Ohio,” I was.  Naturally, we ended up getting stoned in the car outside the reading hall, and when I took him in, the most amazing succession of faces greeted us, ending, no kidding, with a scene straight out of Bunuel.  Five identical small round nuns, all under five feet tall and wearing exactly the same glasses with black plastic frames and “coke bottle” lenses, and dressed in full penguin regalia (this was 1980), filed past us.  “Hello, Mr. Ashbery, Hello, Mr. Ashbery”—five times.  Their eyes were swimming behind the lenses.  JA literally sagged against me; I believe there was actual terror in his eyes.  “Don’t leave me,” he said plaintively; and I didn’t.  How could I have possibly thought The Deer Hunter could be better than this?  John then went onstage and gave probably the greatest reading I’ve ever heard him give.

John’s humor can be very quiet, but no less devastating for that; through it all, though, shines that incredible, luminous love of words.  Once we were going to see a locally-famous restored home, on Dayton Street in the West End.  I’d left the window of my VW Bug open the night before, and water got on the back floor.  I wasn’t aware of this until JA lifted an exquisitely-polished shoe as he exited, saying, in his inimitable way, “I think your car needs a sump pump.”  I can’t tell you how funny this was, the commentary mixing with his obvious delight in speaking the phrase, “sump pump.”  It’s funny what you remember best.  We were driving along one day, and John asked about an opera that was being performed at our College Conservatory of Music.  I said, oh, well, you know, “business was punk at the opera”—quoting, I thought, a line from his poem, “Faust,” in his second book, The Tennis Court Oath.  He corrected me, in his best professorial manner (which of course cracked us both up): “Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.”  Italics his.  But if I claim a special memory with John, it would be from a couple of years later, when John visited again, and this time, somewhat in a rush before I drove him back out to the airport, I was able to arrange a lunch at the Maisonette, a five-star French restaurant downtown, now defunct, with John, myself, my wife, Maureen, and Jean Valentine, the current Elliston Poet.  Jean had never met John.  It was pouring outside, a real deluge, and we were cozy in French elegance within.  Once in a rare while, an hour can have the texture, the density, the richness of several hours.  That day the world shrank to just our table, and we had an hour like that.  John was the sweet, kind, generous man he always is, and I was my usual happy-to-be-there self.  Rowf.  But toward the end of our stolen hour, I looked at Jean, whose eyes redeemed “shining” from John’s cliché bin.  She truly, beautifully, sparkled.  Afterwards, she told Maureen and me how much it meant to her to meet John, that she was thrilled to have had that time with him.  Only an hour out of the rain, but perfect.  Jean sent us flowers the next day.  How long ago it seems.

(ed note: John Ashbery will read at the New School, Sat. Dec 8, 7:00 pm.  Details here.)

Edmund Wilson and His Wife, Elena, Have Dinner with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Husband, Eugen Boissevain, August 6, 1948. (by Jim Cummins)

Is it hot in here, or is it just me?
They both seem so much older now than I—
can this be so? Do women age like dogs,
or something out of Wilde? Seven years
for every one we live? He cuts her meat.

Good God, that inward stare! I loved her so.
The self-absorption’s thickened like her hide.
I knew all this before, of course. I knew.
And got out early like the pig I am.
She’s jowly, tense. Elderly. It’s nineteen years …

What was Elena saying as they left?
Arm in arm, as if I’d ceased to be?
They walked along the garden for an hour,
Elena kindly offering E. her laugh.
Two women, arm in arm, whose toes I’ve—

What? What’d I say? Blurted something out—
but what? It must have been unpleasant: clouds
are forming on the brow of Mt. Monadnock.
I’ve added to the burden of his days!
Good Christ, am I going through the change?

Why are they looking at me with such hate?
Why can’t I just remember what I said?
We’ve drunk too much; we always drink too much.
I hear Herself—she calls my name loudly,
a tone of bemusement hiding her rage:

“So are you going to pass him the gravy,
or must the three of us go over there,
and by God take the boat by force?” I see
Elena’s face, alarmed; I look at Gene,
his face savage, full of remorse; then down

at those gravy-less potatoes. I stare
again at E., at E.—are we all insane?
“Of course,” I mumble, “the gravy.” I look
about wildly—thank God, it’s near my plate!
Is there no window in this goddamn house?

-- by Jim Cummins
(Paris Review & Harpers)

Ed note: Read more about Millay in here.

This post originally appeared on Dec 28, 2009

ELLISTON POET R.I.P, PART 2 [by Jim Cummins]

So last night I'm in this mellow mood--autumnal, musing. Thinking about "the old days," remembering when I asked my grandmother what it had felt like to her to have lived through horses & buggies, cars, streetcars, planes, and now [1969] a man walking on the moon. She said she didn't give a rat's ass about all that, but pulled me over to the couch where she regaled me for two hours with stories about the Church in Pittsburgh, the Mob in Pittsburgh, the priest who stood up to the Mob, the mob boss and his big funeral, presided over by the priest, which might have got mixed up with the priest's funeral that all the mob bosses attended. Whatever, she was right; autumnal musing is for wimps. Not for the first time, I'm reminded funny is the only cure for the dark.

In 1976, I was 28, and had been in the curator job for about a year. The program had fallen into a little bit of slump; we didn't really take care of our guests well. When Phil Levine showed up as Elliston Poet for ten weeks in the fall, I found I could remedy this lack on our part and have a ball in the process. Phil and I, and my wife, Maureen Bloomfield, also a poet, just hit it off; in his usual outspoken way, Phil terrified most of the department, so we had plenty of time together. The ones he didn't terrify, he alienated by beating them at tennis. "He's so fucking competitive," one of them said once. "I thought he was a poet." I nodded sagely, "Yeah, I know what you mean. Poets usually aren't competitive." But talk about pushing the dark back with funny! Phil was 48, angry, edgy, passionate, warm, sentimental, full of stories and jokes, and a great poet--just being around him made you feel all things were possible. This was his first extended residency away from home, and he missed his wife, Franny, terribly. He spoke of her and his three sons constantly at first, along with stories of his family's two years in Barcelona, the Spanish Civil War, Lorca, poetry, matadors and jockeys--and of course Detroit. Ford Rouge, Lemon, the auto parts business, his twin brother, Eddie, a painter, the escape to Iowa City, the friendships with Berryman and Gunn and Justice, et al. I'd never had such an introduction to a life and work as that; tonight I feel very grateful and affectionate.

As I said, Phil was lonely--Cincinnati is a cold place in many ways, and the university was already becoming the soulless corporate entity of the present day--and all he wanted to do was hang out and talk, eat and drink. And teach. Maureen and I lived in a tiny constricted apartment, in a building since torn down, on Jefferson Avenue. We were on the first floor; you had to knock on our living room window, so we'd know to go out into the hall and open the outer door. One of us would hear a knock, and there would be Phil in his little black raincoat, and we would be off. Or we'd put big rib-eyes on the broiler--Maureen, now a vegan, cringes at this memory--and eat and drink into the night. We loved him. We became something of a surrogate family to him; he called us his kinder, and we WERE kids, so it was okay. At 28 and 26, we were a lot younger than our years. It was not all smooth sailing. Phil felt neglected by the English Department, and painful as it is to say, repelled by the values he saw it as embracing. He said it was "ruled at the top by five or six Mandarins, while the work of the place was done by the slave labor below." The Cincinnati Reds baseball team won its second straight World Series during Phil's stay; and Phil thought the Art Museum reflected the town's values in that it collected valuable "things" instead of dedicating itself to the glories of the human spirit. These two ideas came together at one of his Elliston lectures, when he declared, infamously to many, "You get the baseball team you can afford, and the art museum you deserve." Phil's digs at the Vernon Manor were no picnic, either. This was right before that grand personage underwent a sweeping, and successful, renovation, and had become, in effect, a rather sad old-age home. Phil used to keep us in stitches about the sounds he heard on the other side of the wall each night, as yet another patron gave up the ghost. He swore people were dying every night there, and it's true I did see a hearse once waiting patiently in the circular drive. But mostly, as I've indicated, the ten weeks went back too quickly and most enjoyably. One of my sweetest memories is of the poet John Ficociello inviting us to dinner, then torturing us with the slowest making of homemade fettucine noodles in modern history. The martinis were strong, the talk was great, and the food was attacked when it finally showed up. I remember we were talking about movies, and Phil was trying to get across how his generation had been formed by them. I said I knew what he meant, and quoted Fred Astaire in TOP HAT, singing, "Putting on my top hat, polishing my nails!" I knew I was being perverse, as did Fic. And of course Phil, ever the tough guy, looked aghast. "I meant Jimmy Cagney," he said.

Before he left, Phil wanted to give us a gift, so he flew us to Detroit, to see the neighborhoods of his youth and get a better understanding of that powerhouse of a city. We stayed in Royal Oak, near Eddie's house. Eddie still ran the car parts business Phil had worked in, too, along with Lemon and the other men, whom we were able to meet. What can I say? I loved Eddie, too. Can you imagine two Phil Levines? One was already improbable to me. And meeting Lemon was, apart from meeting that dignified and wise presence himself, was a bit of history, to Maureen and me. Next day the poet and lawyer, Larry Joseph, who was then attached to the Michigan State Attorney General's office, and who'd published at least one book of poems, drove Phil, Maureen, and I around Detroit. We started at 8:00 AM and finished after 5:00, with Larry, an impassioned Detroit lover, giving us an incredible history lesson as we drove. We went to all Phil's old neighborhoods, the Ford Rouge plant, old houses, old businesses, old haunts. Phil rode shotgun and looked shell-shocked, but for us it was amazing, absolutely unforgettable. Larry, a brilliant poet and a brilliant lawyer, was also a brilliant historian and tour guide. Still, the most amazing moment was yet to come. Toward the end of the day, we stopped at a particular white house; I don't know if Phil directed Larry to stop, or if Larry knew to. Anyway, Phil told a story so startling to me that I've never forgotten it. Phil said he had had a short career as a second-story man--he'd once been a thief in the night! He said he'd got caught one night on a stair landing--or maybe he'd "caught" himself doing this, and realized how stupid it was, and stopped. And maybe, of course, he only did it that one time; or maybe even he was telling a story about how he THOUGHT about doing it, and never actually followed through. Who knows. But what a story.

The next day we went out to the race track where Eddie had a part-ownership of a horse, and spent the day watching the races and hanging out with the jockeys. Eddie, not surprisingly, is an accomplished painter, who uses a formal, elegiac approach to pop subject matter, mostly beer cans and jockeys. What a duo they were. That night we went to a club to see Kenny Burrell, the great jazz guitarist, and a childhood friend of Phil's and Eddie's. The wonderfully acerbic critic Wilfred Sheed once said, of the Midwest:
"Why hulking agglomerates like Cincinnati and Detroit never developed their own culture is beyond me." Phil Levine could never get his head around Cincinnati--and I've never been able to, either, completely--but for ten weeks in the fall of 1976, that was okay.

ELLISTON POET-IN-RESIDENCE, R.I.P.: A NEW ORLEANS JAZZ FUNERAL [by Jim Cummins]

Thanks so much to BAP for inviting me back to post for a week. I warned Stacey to be ready for a nostalgia bath: it's the end of the year and I thought I'd write about the end of an era. The Elliston Poet-in-Residence, a staple on the poetry landscape for exactly 60 years, is no more. As Thomas Kuhn, also a Cincinnatian, might put it, the New Paradigm--re, the current junior faculty, in this instance of the NP--has taken over. They've found a better way to spend the money; but that's another, and downer, story. I'd like to give the residency more of a New Orleans send-off, and reminisce about my involvement in the parade of glorious poets (and their glorious poems) who've graced Cincinnati since I arrived in October of 1975. Since I'm an Old Paradigm myself--unbelievably, I turned 64 when I wasn't looking--I ask your indulgence in letting me tell these stories. I'm not namedropping. To paraphrase Whitman, "I am the Gofer; I was there." I just didn't suffer that much.

The Elliston residency began as one part of a larger poetry program established in 1951, five years after Ms. George Elliston, a local newspaper reporter, poet, and supporter of all the arts, left a huge-for-the-times endowment to the University of Cincinnati for "the study of poetry." The first Elliston Poet was supposed to be T. S. Eliot, who canceled his commitment a week before he was scheduled to arrive. Fortunately, the redoubtable R. P. Tristram Coffin, a Maine poet, was available to step into the breach, and become, ahem, our Maine man. The roster of EP's for that first decade--and really, throughout all six decades--reads like a Who's Who of American and British poetry: John Berryman, Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, Stephen Spender, Robert Lowell, et al. The EP lived here for ten weeks, during which he (alas, always "he" until the first woman, Denise Levertov, in 1973) taught a class, gave seven lectures and a poetry reading, and according to the biographies of several poets, as well as numerous eyewitnesses now mostly dead, consumed an enormous amount of alcohol. All this for the princely sum of $3000, a big haul for the times. Robert Lowell had a terrible breakdown here, as detailed in Ian Hamilton's biography, which was compounded by locals who tried to "defend" Lowell from his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his doctors. Randall Jarrell charmed the entire city; Donald Justice delivered seven amazing scholarly lectures (soon to be available in digitized format, as will most of the tapes in the Elliston audio archive); Phil Levine fell in love; Marge Piercy's cats destroyed an apartment; and on his first day John Ashbery discovered our local Empress Chili AND our department head, an abrupt woman who wore jodphurs and riding boots to work, and carried a crop. And almost all the poets stayed, over the years, in the Vernon Manor, a grand old beast of a hotel, which still, until its makeover in the late '70s, maintained a wall of old signed photos of all the "stars" who'd stayed there. My favorites were a picture of the Beatles and one of Danny Thomas.

But to begin. It was spring of 1976, and I'd been curator for some months. I was standing in the old Elliston Room in Blegen Library--yes, that Carl Blegen--staring out the back window at a magnolia tree that was in its three-week bloom. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, warm and full of airborne pathogens. A presence--that's the only way I can describe it--suddenly filled the room. Though I hadn't remotely been thinking of him, and though I had no idea when he was arriving in Cincinnati for his ten-week residency--and certainly entertained no thought of his stopping by the room before he made his presence known to the English Department--I knew in that moment with absolute clarity that when I turned around, I would greet Gary Snyder. And when I did turn around, there he was, smiling, sun-soaked and bearded and beaded, in all his there-ness: part American Indian, part Kyoto monk, part mountain man, part Beat, part myth. Probably, if you need a scientific explanation, perhaps I heard the scuff of a moccasin, and leapt ahead to the visitor I knew was coming. But I'll tell you, it didn't FEEL like that, not at all. It felt like what it was, and is: people are larger presences than their bodies.

Anyway, thus began a great ten weeks, watching GS's openness to experiencing this part of the country, this city, us. I remember tonight a comment Snyder made a few years ago in an interview about his involvement in local politics--something along the lines of, "If you're going to get involved in changing things, you have to learn how to wait." I witnessed his ability "to wait," while he was here, and what that allows you to take in. Unfortunately, Gary's son, Kai, suffered from asthma, and when he got into our humid fecund place--Snyder had remarked, looking at the landscape from the plane, how he'd "forgotten how lush the country was, east of the Mississippi"--Kai had a terrible attack and had to be hospitalized. I remember speaking on the phone to the chair of the department, John McCall, a Chaucer scholar, and telling him the Snyders had no health insurance, and that the Elliston should pay for Kai's hospitalization. McCall said to have the bill sent directly to him, which it was; and no one heard any more of it. An example of the good side of the patriarchy, if you will. More tomorrow.

Jim Cummins, Guest Blogger November 26-December 7

This week we welcome back Jim Cummins, as our guest blogger. Jim is the author of Still Some Cake (Carnegie Mellon, 2012) The Whole Truth, (North Point Press, 1986),  Portrait in a Spoon, (University of South Carolina Press,1997), Then & Now, (Ohio University Press, 2004). He is co-author, with David Lehman, of Jim & Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005). Jim's poems have been selected for The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 1995, 1998, 2005 and 2009, The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), and 180 More, edited by Billy Collins. Cummins has been curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection at the University of Cincinnati since 1975, where he is also Professor of English. Read his BAP blog posts here.  Jim's poem "Reading Hemingway" was recently featured on The Writer's Almanac.  You can listen to it here.

 Welcome back, Jim.

In other news . . .

John Ashbery to read at the New School: Saturday, December 8, 7 PM.  Details here.

Our Year in Review continues.  We're posting selections from each of this year's guest bloggers.  We're sure you will be inspired to look for more work by our contributors and to buy their books as holiday gifts.   And you can read posts by all of our guest bloggers, from the blog's beginning to the present, here. You will find remarkable work.

-- sdh

Four years ago today, Lehman took a tumble. . .

Lehman Is Shutting Loan Unit

“Lehman Is Shutting Loan Unit”
I was leafing through the Times, heading
for the sports page because I’ve become
a bit of a Yankee fan though I live in
Cincinnati, and even in Cincinnati I’m
aware of the chaos in the housing industry,
but all the exigencies and catastrophes had
eluded me until there, eye-poppingly, I read
“Lehman Is Shutting Loan Unit”!
Oh I’ve acted perfectly disgraceful when
it comes to amortization, and the date
due remains for me an approximation but
I’ve never actually defaulted on anything,
and I’m making progress, I’ve learned
debentures aren’t false teeth, oh I can’t
imagine closing an entire unit of loaning!
Lehman, we love you, keep forking over!

-- Jim Cummins

''Nell, In Her Villa" [by James Cummins]

They flee from me who sometime still had sought me;
I was for sale, and everybody bought me.
When I was young, you never could’ve caught me.

You lusted for some fancy; then you got me.
I didn’t have the heart to say it’s not me.
They flee from me who sometime still had sought me …

You were dismayed.  You’d thought I was a hot me.
Maybe you no longer knew how to slot me.
When I was young, you never could’ve caught me.

No, it’s a little bit you, but a lot me.
I’m sad I don’t match up to what you thought me.
They flee from me who sometime still had sought me.

Now I’m imprisoned by the wealth Time’s brought me.
I’m the palimpsest over which you jot me.
They flee from me who one time still had sought me.
When I was young, you never could’ve caught me.

  -- James Cummins

"Urban Sonnet" [by Jim Cummins]

When I consider how my light is spent,
I must consider how to pay the rent;
and if I compare thee to a summer's day,
I have to remember to pick up my pay
from Doll at the Not Marble Nor Gilded
Monument Bar & Grille, where I'm gelded
daily in speculations soured by sun;
I have no water, but I could use a gun.
A sudden blow, the thug's sap beating still—
walking to my second job, at Mabel's,
I'm jumped by punks under the burned-out light—
this goddamn neighborhood has gone downhill!
They also serve who only wait tables;
Baby, I'll be … your server to-niii-ii-ight.

-- Jim Cummins.

Note: I dared Jim to write an on-the-spot poem for insant posting and he obliged with the above on condition that I write and post my impromptu effort, so that will follow shortly. -- DL

". . . and turning for home it was Secretariat" by James Cummins and David Lehman

I was supposed to meet Monica, my secretary, at
Three o’clock: where was she? I felt like a ruffian,
Standing in the infield, watching the wind whirl away
Lost tickets. A policeman approached. A citation
Of some sort? No, he tipped his cap. “Sir Barton?”
He inquired, most respectfully. Yes, I affirmed—

What is it? “Just routine,” the cop affirmed.
I felt like a low-ranking diplomat at the UN Secretariat
Accused of spying for Belgium. Would the real Sir Barton
Avoid his inquisitor’s eyes as I did? No ruffian,
He, but a master of codes, ciphers, and encrypted citations
In fortune cookies. (“Autumn comes, goes, and whirls away.”)

I cleared my head … That world was world’s away
From this one. The policeman’s handshake was a firm,
Live thing. He pulled an envelope from his book of citations,
Then blushed. “Sir, I—I spoke with your secretary at—”
Scrawled across pink flowers, in Monica’s ruffian
Hand, was what the young man pointed to: ‘Sir Barton.’

“Huh,” I said thoughtfully. What was Monica doing at Sir Barton,
My estate, where I go to get away from the social whirl? Away—
I needed to whirl away. Having no choice but to play the ruffian,
I slugged the cop and ran. My masculinity thus affirmed,
I felt good. But there was still the question of my secretary. At
A loss I looked up her name in the index. Two citations

For cigar smuggling. Wait, what’s this? A third citation—
A monograph! Horrified, I read: “The Life and Times of Sir Barton”!
The scamp! The exploiter! Hastily, I cell-phoned the Secretariat.
“Adlai!” I shouted, “Adlai!”—but I watched my words whirl away,
As I realized, with a shock, Adlai was dead. I was alone, a firm-
Ament of pain my sole sky. I was, at last, one of the roughs. “Ian!”

I said, catching sight of James Bond’s creator. In the rough and
Tumble of life, the man stood erect, in an obvious state of excitation.
What the cop had intimated about Monica was true, he affirmed.
Indeed he had just spent a delightful day with her at Sir Barton.
All of them were in on the plot. It was, well, an LA way
Of doing business.Everything was for sale, even the name “Secretariat.”

After his recitation of the specials—including orange roughy and
Pepsi—the waiter whirled away.Sir Barton sighed.The rather, ah, firm
Haunches of the lad reminded him of that great warrior, Secretariat.

(from Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man by James Cummins and David Lehman.  Illustrations by Archie Rand.  Soft Scull Press, 2005)

Midwestern Conferences (Jim Cummins)

I was watching Charlie Rose one night years ago when Bill Styron called in and said he didn't "get" David Letterman.  Styron said, "Yes, he's mildly ironic, but ..."  Letterman is from Indianapolis, which is one of the towns I'm from.  I think I "get" Letterman pretty well, but that's another story.  I thought of this quote as I was prowling around the recent AWP conference in Chicago.  Are we poets too mildly ironic?  Is the Midwest too mildly ironic, and poets are chameleons, therefore become too mildly ironic when they visit?  Mulling this over as I rode the elevators, I thought maybe it would be interesting to post another poet's response to a midwestern conference many many years ago, as recorded by Richard Howard  in his great book on American poetry, Alone With America:

"Not long ago, at one of our recurrent poetry conferences which suggest with all the force of an Euclidean proof--just look at those celluloid identification badges, typed with each poet's name and (of course) his university--that we are, even in our most notoriously dissident callings, a nation not of joiners merely, but of members; at one of those chapter meetings, then, in the endless volume of our self-concern, I listened to an address by a celebrated poet, an elderly professor it was, who had rised to the Collected Poems level and who, before arriving at our conference somewhere in the midwest, had reached for the wrong speech among (I imagine) several on his desk, thereupon regaling his fellows with a description of the bare-breasted beauties of Nigeria intended surely for the National Geographic Society.  A married man, the father of daughters, it came as rather a shock to hear him extol the rare privilege of moving among a race of women proudly nude, and precisely then (though his own performance was not scheduled until much later in the program) Allen Ginsberg ... performed!  He got up from the ring of chairs where the ulterior speakers were waiting for their turns to read their own poems, to speak their own thoughts, to do their own thing, and advancing solemnly--bearded, intent, unmistakeable--toward the old eulogist of noble savagery, he stepped up onto the dais and without a word, without a smile, without a single deprecating gesture, Allen Ginsberg took off all his clothes."

Lest we forget.

Mad Men by Jim Cummins

Two men walk through the boardroom.
Each one carries a spear; each wears a mask.
Each man is afraid of his own death,
but is no less willing to strike, to rend, kill.
Each mask is a grotesque mirror of rage,
meant to inspire mortal fear;
each man hopes the other will be made
too afraid to fight when he finally
confronts him and his hideous mask. 
Each man had a father who told him
his mask represents his true nature within.
Each man had a mother who told him  
it represents what he wants other men
to believe about his true nature within.
As young men, each came to accept
his father’s version of what his mask means,
so had faith in his mask for many years. 
But as he gets older and closer to death,
each wonders if his mother’s explanation
might not be the true one, after all.
Either his mask has reflected his real self
all along, or he has turned into his mask. 
It becomes increasingly important
to know whether his mother’s story
or his father’s is the one he can believe.
Neither man betrays doubt as he glares
through the haze his cigarette makes;
doubt gives other men a license to strike. 
Yet it is only doubt, not certainty,
that allows him to hold the two versions
together in his mind, in some balance.
Two men walk into the boardroom;
they carry spears, wear fearsome masks.
Each man is afraid, but for all his confusion,
is no less willing to strike, to rend, kill;
and he thinks his father, finally, is right.
Yet when his face distorts beneath its mask,
and, cursing the other, he hurls his spear,
each man remembers the words of his mother.

---

From Still Some Cake by Jim Cummins (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012)

AWP CONFERENCE - CHICAGO - 2012 (by Jim Cummins)

Along with approximately 10,999 other registrants, I attended the recent AWP Conference in Chicago earlier this month. I also attended the first Woodstock, in August, 1969. They were similar events, minus the rock bands and the loudspeaker announcements about bad acid. On the other hand, Chicago had poetry in the elevators; a tape loop of poets reading their own poems played continuously in the elevators throughout the conference. This was obviously a social-networking device on the Hilton's part to help people break the ice, in lieu of mud, good vibes, and the aforementioned bad acid. As I understand it, a few years ago the Poetry Foundation made a number of tape loops of poets collaborating with visual artists; the one that played in the elevators at this year's AWP was also available in its entirety on the in-house channel 44, on our room TVs. I remember poems by Mark Strand, Todd Boss, our own DL, a number of others. I thought the tape loop was wonderful, sort of the equivalent of the rock groups at Woodstock--the background sounds of human contact, interaction. In the morning I'd get on an elevator crammed with poets, and Mark Strand would say, "I don't want to be an American poet anymore," or something like that. "The black flies are after me." People would shift from foot to foot, except there was no room, so we'd all bump shoulders and hips, and get to know each other. At 2 or 3 in the morning, I'd stumble into an empty elevator, and there would be Mark and those flies again, or somebody telling me about how un-hip she was in New York City. I loved those poems, those voices. Most other people didn't; instead of being grateful for the ice-breaking gift, they complained about how un-hip the whole process was. Poems in the elevators! How, I don't know, pathetic! I began to ride the elevators instead of going to the panel presentations, just so I could hear how people responded to the tape loop. I began to volunteer information about the poems, which I'd listened to about a hundred times each by then. I told them about Channel 44. I began to carry a clipboard on which I could note down personal information, such as whether they were poets, or fiction writers, non-fictioners or children's book people, that sort of thing. Several people told me this made them a little uneasy. Occasionally, I'd follow them out of the elevator to their rooms; sometimes the conversations got a little heated. "I'm a poet, too!" I'd say, as the door would close in my face. "Those are my brethren!" I began to pick out women in the lobby, follow them into the elevators. I wanted to see what they thought about the poems. One morning there was a knock on my door. I opened it and two beefy men in suits came in; they very politely asked me to stop following women into the elevators. I assured them I would, but I saw this was a rare opportunity, too. I asked them what they thought of the poems being broadcast in the elevators; they said they didn't have an opinion. By Saturday night, I was exhausted. Downstairs was a madhouse, as usual: eleven thousand people milling around with ID badges on lanyards that twisted them around so you couldn't see the names. I found a place at the bar next to a very attractive young woman; to break the ice, I said,
"So what do you think of those poems?" "Excuse me?" she said. I said, "You know, the poems--in the elevators." My voice might have had a bit of an edge. She said, "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean." I asked her straight out, "Are you a fiction writer?" "I work for Delta Airlines." "Oh--you a stewardess?" "A 'flight attendant'?" she asked. "No, I'm a pilot." She picked her purse up from the bar and began to slide off her stool. "Hey," I said, "you haven't finished your drink!" There was almost a full glass of wine left. "I have an appointment," she said, "you can have it." "I was at Woodstock," I called after her, "the real one!" She didn't turn around. I looked at her wine; there was a lipstick smudge on the rim. What the heck, I thought, and turned the glass around to the clean side and drank it down. Next day I flew back to Cincinnati. I love the AWP conferences, but it was good to get home.

Buzz about James Cummins' "Still Some Cake"

James Cummins’ Still Some Cake is filled with brilliant poems—“This Night of All Nights,” “My Father’s Hair,” “The Greatest Generation,” “The War of All Against All,” and “Moses”—to name just some of the longer ones—written in an effortless, fluent style that presents surprises in almost every line.  But the book transcends its individual poems, as its recurring obsessions—the burdens of the proximity of those closest to us, including ourselves—surface and resurface in the context of the family romance, history and war, the solitary, violent imagination, the narrative of the Bible—to create a fugue-like whole, by turns harrowing and exhilarating.  Still Some Cake is one of the most powerful books in recent memory.  —John Koethe

Better than any American poet of his generation, Cummins, in a voice fierce, simple, and matter of fact, writes nakedly of men and violence, men and their fathers, men and their friends, men and the women and children they love.  His command of formalism is still as impressive as it is unobtrusive, and with it he renders the self—that’s all of us—and our human longing to speak our truth nakedly and to be whole.  I read this book, and am astonished and graced. —Marilyn Krysl

-- sdh

This 'n That: News from Kevin Young, T. P. Winch, and Jim Cummins

Kevin Young, this year's Best American Poetry guest editor, will be criss-crossing the country over the next few months.  If you're lucky, he's planning to stop in your town.  You can find his full schedule here.  In addition to being an award winning poet, non-fiction writer, and anthologist, Kevin curates the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and is the curator of literary collections. His exhibit, Shadows of the Sun: The Crosbys, the Black Sun Press & the Lost Generation is up through March 16 and should not be missed.  David and Kevin talked about this historic exhibit last fall.  You can listen here. 

T. P. Winch writes to tell us about a wonderful project undertaken by the Crozet Library, a branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, based in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Three years ago, the library started the Poem in Your Pocket Day program as part of National Poetry Month.  You can watch a video about last year's program here.

We're over the moon with excitement about Jim Cummins new book Still Some Cake.  We've posted some of Jim's great poems (along with his prose) here.  We'll be posting more over the next few weeks but, in the meantime, get your order in by clicking on the cover image below.  Congratulations Jim! 

-- sdh