The Best American Poetry

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. 

Hemingway Reassures Fitzgerald on His Penis Size [by Jim Cummins]

Jim Cummins initially filed this report in 2009. It has become a classic. -- DL

<<<
Everybody my age knows about Hemingway's story about measuring F. Scott Fitzgerald's penis in A Moveable Feast, but maybe it's a good way to introduce a younger generation to Big Papa's work.  I've always wanted to write a poem about it, but nothing I ever came up with came close to matching Hemingway's account.  The story is this.  F. Scott Fitzgerald asked Hemingway to advise him about an important problem that had come up between Scott and Zelda.  (So to speak.)  So Scott and Papa go to Michaud's ("on the corner of the rue Jacob and the rue des Saints-Peres") for lunch and consultation.  Fitzgerald swore Hemingway to tell "the absolute truth" when answering.  Hemingway says, "He drank wine at the lunch but it did not affect him and he had not prepared for the lunch by drinking before it."  (This doesn't have a lot to do with the story, but the sentence knocks me out; I think it's the "did not" and "had not" constructions.)  Anyway, Zelda had told Scott his penis was too small.  Here's the Hemingway:

'Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, "You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda."

'No, I didn't.'

'I thought I'd told you.'

'No.  You told me a lot of things but not that.'

'That is what I want to ask you about.'

'Good.  Go on.'

'Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally.  [Ed. note: This conversation was held somewhat after what Hemingway describes as "what was then called her first nervous breakdown."]  She said it was a matter of measurements.  I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.'

'Come out to the office,' I said.

'Where is the office?'

'Le water" [the "WC," i.e. the men's room], I said.

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

'You're perfectly fine,' I said.  'You are O.K.  There's nothing wrong with you.  You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened.  Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'

'Those statues may not be accurate.'

'They are pretty good.  Most people would settle for them.'

'But why would she say it?'

'To put you out of business.  That's the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business.  Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this is the absolute truth and all you need.  You could have gone to a doctor.'

'I didn't want to.  I wanted you to tell me truly.'

'Now do you believe me?'

'I don't know,' he said.

'Come on over to the Louvre,' I said.  'It's just down the street and across the river.'

We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still he was doubtful about himself.

'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said.  'It is the size that it becomes.  It is also a question of angle.'

I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know.

'There is one girl,' he said, 'who has been very nice to me.  But after what Zelda said--'

'Forget what Zelda said,' I told him.  'Zelda is crazy.  There's nothing wrong with you.  Just have confidence and do what the girl wants.  Zelda just wants to destroy you.'

'You don't know anything about Zelda.'

'All right,' I said.  'Let it go at that.  But you came to lunch to ask me a question and I've tried to give you an honest answer.'

But he was still doubtful.

'Should we go and see some pictures?' I asked.  'Have you ever seen anything in here except the Mona Lisa?'

'I'm not in the mood for looking at pictures,' he said.  'I promised to meet some people at the Ritz bar.'"

****

I love so many things about this.  I love how throughout AMF Hemingway gives exact locations of the bars and cafes he frequents; I love how Scott hasn't drunk any whiskey to prepare himself for this manly lunch among manly men; I love how H. inspects Scott's, er, "junk" in the bathroom; and I really really love that they go to the Louvre to compare Scott's penis with the penises of sculptures and paintings.  Can't you just see Hemingway with a laser pointer?  And the "question of the angle" is a hoot.  So why have I been unable to write a poem about this?  Maybe from the point of view of old man Michaud, who has to take a leak and pushes open the door to the toilet, just as Hemingway is squatting down on his haunches to look at Scott's package in profile, saying, "Pull it a little, see if it does anything."

"Poem for D. L." [by James Cummins]

POEM FOR D. L. ("Then Ingmar Bergman shows up ...")

The answer to every riddle lay inside our bodies:
Life, the continuation of life ...
I wake at three a.m. with the guilt of it,
the guilt of life.  I haven't asked my body the question.

Exactly my age, but a month; and you lie
in a different city, asking yourself over and over,
Why?  The question for all of us is always When?
but instead we ask our bodies Why?

because we are afraid, and afraid to be afraid.
Why? keeps a part of us in the equation,
a part of what we are, in the face of the howling,
that we call "the wind" to frame it;

like a door to a cabin in winter in a play:
the characters take turns opening the door--
to get firewood, to check on the animals,
whatever of myriad reasons they can invent,

some Necessity they're obliged to bow to,
just to check it out, the howling, their bodies strong,
no matter their fear--the check it out, endure it,
then to stomp their way back into the warmth.

Life is a succession of rehearsals
for the closing we call "Opening Night."
We lay all evening in different cities, questioning;
then Ingmar Bergman shows up with a six-pack.

-- James Cummins

HAIKU FOR DL [by Jim Cummins]

Illness borne with grace

shames the chronic complainer.

Moon over bare trees.

"Ides of March Madness" [by James Cummins]

I help you store the “Number One”
foam fingers in their box;
and clean the grease of hot dog stands;
and check the many locks;

and help you stack the bleachers up,
douse house lights in the gym,                                                                                                                         while listening to your baleful cries,
your curses thrown at him

who turned the spheroid over,
or flubbed the easy pass,
or watched the orb go unretriev’d,
as it bounced off the glass.

You weren’t the only one to boast
his team would be the king,
only to hear instead the taunt
cheerleaders love to sing,

the lonesome sound of dreams denied
that makes the true fan cry:
“Na na nana, na na nana,
hey hey hey, good-bye …”

-- James Cummins

Ed. note: The poem, though it may or may not have been written on March 15, marks the end of March Madness this evening and subtly welcomes the baseball season, which annually proves the wisdom of Alexander Pope: "Hope springs eternal in he human breast."

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

"Shorthand" [by Jim Cummins]

At funerals you get a sense of 'team':
"He bore his burden well"--stifling a yawn;
"She wasn't someone you'd enjoy tea with,
exactly, but--"; "They kept on keeping on."

Each mask that hides a life receives tribute:
"He was adored by dogs"; "She set a tone";
"Behind her drinking lay a golden heart"--
old age become a village of its own.

I was too young; I couldn't comprehend
how deficits increase over the years--
I shunned their ledger-faces for my books,
determined not to end up in arrears.

What will they say of me?  "His load was light."
"And for all that he didn't seem too bright."

-- James Cummins

"On Experimental Poets" [by Jim Cummins]

They think they're wags,
but they're really tails.

The Wags of Fear: fantasizing
they carry nitro, but it's

really 'Nite-So' ('night soil,'
a green product developed

by the Self-Importance Movement).
Scorpions--not sorcerers or

'Scorpios'--but actual scorpions.
They're all looking for a Frog

to carry them across the river.
You can find them posing

at poetry readings, whispering,
'Monsieur?  Monsieur?'

-- James Cummins

Note: See The Wages of Fear by Henri-Georges Clouzot (with Yves Montand) and the remake, Sorcerer, by William Friedkin

"Two Bottles of Glenlivet" [by James Cummins]

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

-- James Cummins

More on de Man on Demand [by Jim Cummins]

Brooks Hits the Canvas

(Ed note: Here is one of many responses to Peter Brooks' review of Evelyn Barish's The Strange Case of Paul de Man. You can find David Lehman's letter to the NYRB here.)

If you read Brooks' reply you see immediately the man's intellectual dishonesty and bad faith.  His first sentence launches an ad hominem attack: since Lehman is "already on record as a vehement detractor" of de Man, this naturally discredits all Lehman's opinions about de Man.  This obvious ploy conveniently allows Brooks to avoid addressing any of the documented evidence that led Lehman to his (supposed) vehemence in the first place.  (By the way, is calling de Man a "scoundrel" really vehemence, or just a simple statement of fact?)  In this manner, Brooks is able to occlude and dismiss the real issue(s) at hand!  Incredible.

But this is in keeping with what Brooks does to Barish: he substitutes his own trope--in her case, "Mr. Ripley"--then attacks the trope as if it were her argument.  Again, as with Lehman, he conveniently allows himself the freedom to smear Barish with a trope that has nothing to do with Barish, Paul de Man, or the facts at issue, thereby relieving himself of the responsibility for answering any of her actual arguments.  A few flaws in her book somehow dismiss the overwhelming case she makes against de Man?  I don't think so.

There's some poison in the Charles River that has been seeping into the soil and air there since 1620 at least.  I did a study a few years ago in which I researched three books of essays on Mark Twain.  These books were from a series called generally the "Twentieth Century Views" series--each volume was a collection on one major writer--that were published in the 1960's and sold widely to undergraduate populations as basic critical support of the pantheon.  I forget the precise figures, but the essays had something like almost an 80% correlation to Harvard; that is, nearly 80% of the authors of the essays had been educated at Harvard, or taught there, or both.  One of the authors, Leo Marx, is primarily responsible for the negative reading of the last third of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that obtains even to this day for most readers.  From our perspective, Marx's reading can now be seen as a whitewashing, unconscious or not, of the smug racist (and anti-Semitic) "liberalism" that permeated the genteel WASP boys'-club culture at Harvard (not to mention the other Ivies)--a culture that Twain sought to razz and expose and demolish in HF.

Peter Brooks took his B.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard.  Throw in the disgraceful actions by Harry Levin, et al, and the entire American side of the de Man saga ends up being a Columbo episode, where the whole Harvard muck out of which Brooks surfaces becomes apparent to the viewer, if not to the villain(s).  With this tasty addition: the irony of deconstructionists and their apologists pulling in an authority-system from "outside" the "language game" is rich, very rich, indeed.

"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