The Best American Poetry

Elvis and Frank

 

 

The Audience [by Lera Auerbach]

 

If I were dead, I wouldn’t want to stay around. I would fly to some other realm where I would no longer be myself but everything else at the same time. A happy, joyful radiance of a realm. 

But I wouldn’t be able to jump there if my heart was too heavy with worry for my loved ones who are still living in this world. I would have to stay around to see how they are coping. The living become the responsibility of the dead. Maybe, if I stayed around, I could still help them somehow. 

My dead grandparents and their parents and the parents of their parents und so weiter slightly move their invisible bodies making room for the new arrivals. They watch how I write these lines in English – the language they never spoke and slightly shake their heads.

 

A Woman's Laughter [by Charles Coe]

On a recording of the Bill Evans trio,
Live at the Village Vanguard,
late June '61, during a slow, haunting version
of "I Loves You Porgy," at the quietest moment,
in the background, soft but clear, 

a woman's laughter.

At first the sound seems jarring, even sacrilegious.
But then again a jazz club's not a concert hall,
listeners in polite rows, knees together,
waiting to cough in the space between movements.
Jazz is cash registers and clinking glasses
and chairs scraping the floor.

And besides it's a pleasant laugh, full of promise.
Easy to see her hand reach out to rest on her
companion's arm. Easy to catch the whiff of lilac or lavender . . . 
Always, so many worlds within worlds.

In one world,
A man who follows Evans from gig to gig
sits at the bar alone, transfixed,
ice melting in the forgotten drink.

In one world,
The bartender counts his cash
while dreaming of the waitress's embrace.

In one world,
A woman's laughter.

In one world,
Evan's leans over the keys, oblivious to all
but the slow heartbeat bass,
the splash of brushes on cymbal and snare,
fingers poised for what seems like forever
before they settle gently over the final chord. 

                               -- from Memento Mori: Poems by Charles Coe

In addition to Memento Mori: poems, Charles Coe is the author of two previous volumes of poetry, both with Leapfrog Press: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents (2013) and Picnic on the Moon (1999). He's also the author of Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media. Charles is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a "Boston Literary Light in 2014." He teaches poetry in the MFA programs at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, and Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Coe is a jazz vocalist who has performed and recorded with musicians throughout New England. 

Theme Music: Schubert's Rosamunde Overture

from "A Good Week for a Birthday" (in The Morning Line by David Lehman):

What would I choose as my theme music
if I were the classical music disc jockey
maybe Bernstein’s overture to Candide
or Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Cakewalk”
or Schubert’s overture to “Rosamunde”
in honor of John Scheuer
I have my Tolstoy to look forward to
and if music can stand for peace (the food of love)
today’s poem is a little tribute to the novel
summarized TV-Guide style:
Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.

 

The Cat of Montserrat [by Lera Auerbach]

My memory: meeting a Montserrat cat –
she is sitting beneath Pablo Casals’ sculpture –
the true owner of his bronze cello
with whiskers sniffing mountain air.
It is Fall. It’s sunny, but the air is already
keeping a promise of the storms ahead.
I am now worried about this cat –
the cat that guards Casals and his cello.

Who will feed her during the winter?
Who will brush her tricolored coat?
Who will make her feel safe in the mountains?

I beckon the cat to follow, promising
to take good care of her if she lets me.
But the cat sniffs Casals’ dusty shoes,
raises her tail, and turns away.
I feel abandoned. I pray to the Black Virgin
to protect this proud feline. I ask Casals
to keep watch and play sometimes
for the cat’s hunting pleasures
El cant del ocells (The Song of the Birds.)

The air shimmers with hidden music.
The cat catches overtones – and the horizon shifts.

 

 

Sonnet [by Alexander Lazarus Wolff]

The sun hangs among tatters of clouds;
amber light slides through the interwoven boughs
of the tree beside my window. The day decays,
and a darkness pours into the room like a pool
of black liqueur. Who holds me in mind at this hour?
The question echoes like a knell hung from a tower.
Birds dart toward the darkening sky. The cool
touch of night is all this moment gives.
Lamps drop their light on streets stripped of life,
a quietude replaces the former bustle.
A passerby, laughing on her phone
and walking her dog, wades through the night,
oblivious to this speck of light. She carries on,
leaving me with this quiet room.

Alexander Lazarus Wolff, a student at the College of William & Mary, was born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1998. He lives in Williamsburg, VA. His work has been published or is forthcoming in  South Florida Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag, Serotonin, The Citron Review, The Plentitudes, and Remington Review. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/wolffalex108/ and on Instagram @wolffalex108

Silent Notes [by Lera Auerbach]

Silent Notes. Photo by Lera Auerbah

 

When pianos are not played,
they become very sad,
they collect silent notes.
Unplayed music floats –
invisible dust of overtones.
The dead are waiting expectantly:
so many keys – 88 – all untouched. 
The day of silent music
sheds the signature of uncaptured Time.

(“What are you practicing now?”
my mother asks me quietly.
Her eyebrows raised. I shrug.)

 

Louis Armstrong in 1934 & in Australia c. 1956 & on the Edsel Show

"I Cover the Waterfront" .  .

Now you has jazz. . .

with Crosby  & Sinatra & Rosemary Clooney: On the Sunny Side of the Street

Berlioz & the music in "The Shining"

From Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," the music in "The Shining" by Stanley Kubrick:

On Gene Kelly [by David Lehman]

Here's an excerpt from "To Dance an Exclamation Point," a "talking pictures" column in The American Scholar:

<<<
The best stanza of Carl Sandburg’s “Lines Written for Gene Kelly to Dance To” proposes a parallel between the languages of dance and speech: “Can you dance a question mark? / Can you dance an exclamation point? / Can you dance a couple of commas? / And bring it to a finish with a period?” Fred Astaire, my other favorite dancer, can climb the wall and dance on the ceiling, but if anyone can dance an exclamation point, it’s Gene Kelly.

Of Kelly’s four outstanding midcentury movie musicals, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the best-loved. In Hollywood history, the title number is second in popularity only to “Over the Rainbow,” and for sheer joy it’s hard to top “Good Mornin’” with Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor. In Singin’ in the Rain, the late Clive James felt he encountered “the absolute concentration of an entire popular culture at its most powerful.” As for Kelly, James said, “it took the whole of America, including all its modern history, to create one of him.

In It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the most underrated of the quartet, Kelly dances down the street in roller skates, Dan Dailey does a nifty tipsy song and dance, and the two of them and Michael Kidd—Army buddies who reunite 10 years after the end of World War II—dance on trash can lids in one number, and, later on, sing of their plight (as civilians of different classes and backgrounds, who don’t like one another) to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz. Add a Dolores Grey showstopper (“Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks”) and the dancing feet of Cyd Charisse, plus lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and well, if it’s a lesser masterpiece, it’s a masterpiece nevertheless.

John Updike believes that On the Town (1949) was the freshest and had the most energy of the group. Kelly himself felt that “we”—the unit assembled by MGM genius producer (and lyricist) Arthur Freed—may have “made better movies,” but On the Town “was the apex of our talent.” Purists may register reservations if only because some of Leonard Bernstein’s sublime songs (“Some Other Time,” “Lucky to Be Me”) were dropped from the Broadway version and replaced with lesser, albeit still good, tunes by Roger Edens. Still, the film is giddy with infectious delight from the moment Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin, playing three sailors on 24-hour shore leave, get off their ship, take in the sights of New York City, and pair off with Vera-Ellen, Betty Garrett, and Ann Miller, respectively. In the exhilarating opening sequence, shot on location in or near Chinatown, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty and other such landmarks, the fellows sing their hymn of praise to “New York, New York, a wonderful town.”[1]

While I love all four movies, I would press the case for An American in Paris (1951) as Kelly’s best. He plays a painter named Jerry Mulligan, a GI who stayed in Paris after the war because, he says, if you can’t paint in Paris, brother, you might as well go home and marry the boss’s daughter. Jerry is pursued by Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), a wealthy American expat, who looks smashing in a dress she is “almost wearing” and in a brown suit with elegant earrings. She wants to sponsor Jerry; she rents him a studio and arranges a one-man show. But Jerry’s heart belongs to Lise (Leslie Caron), who is engaged to acclaimed music-hall singer Henri Burel (George Guettary).

Like Victor Lazlo in Casablanca, Burel may have the greater claim on the lady, because he protected her during the war after her parents, active in the Resistance, were deported by the Nazis. But being a man of honor, and not having a world war to fight, he lets true love take its course. The movie ends with a masquerade party, which segues into a full-scale ballet presentation of An American in Paris, arguably George Gershwin’s second greatest work for piano and orchestra. Vincente Minnelli directed the film, which won the Academy Award for best picture. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the Oscar-winning script.

Why do I defy the consensus in casting my ballot for An American in Paris?
>>>

for the answer & for the rest of this article, click here

https://theamericanscholar.org/to-dance-an-exclamation-point/

"More Than You Know" [by Helen Morgan, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald et al]

Cole Porter in "Red, Hot, and Blue":

<< I don't like Schubert's music or Schumann's,
I'm one of those humans
Who only goes in for Berlin and Vincent Youmans. >>

So here's to You, Mr. Youmans, composer of "Without a Song" and "Tea for Two," his most famous song, which he wrote at the last-minute for the show No, No, Nanette.

Bobby Darin sings Beyond the Sea (studio version & in performance)

Here's the extended version from 1973, all ten minutes of it:

the studio version:

1959:

Homage to Irving Berlin

with thanks to Rick Winston

And if you can, listen to Bruce Adolphe and Fred Child on NPR's "Great Performances": they may just take a Berlin standard ("Cheek to Chek," say) and have it performed as if it were a Mendelssohn piano concerto.

Sway with Me (Michael Buble) / Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps & Do Do Do (Doris Day)

Amiri Baraka Catching Up With Himself [by Vincent Katz]

One day, a year or so ago, Oliver said to me, in passing, “I need to read some Baraka.” When someone, especially someone close to me, says something like that, I leap into action. I leapt to my keyboard and ordered him The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris with input from the author. Published in 2009 by Basic Books, the Reader does not cover the last fifteen years of Baraka’s production, but, at close to 600 pages, it certainly covers the early years, from the late 1950s through 1999.

To supplement this, I recommend SOS: Poems 1961-2013, published by Grove Press in 2014. This volume, edited by Paul Vangelisti, shows the scope of Baraka’s poetic achievement and is especially surprising in its final section, titled “Fashion This,” which covers the years 1996-2013. Here, we see the poet at his most unguarded. Many of these poems have not been previously collected in book form. They maintain the same senses of urgency and outrage that animate Baraka’s poetry throughout, but they are tempered with a lightness, a delicacy at times, that can be shocking and disarming.

I’ve shied away from Readers as they focus on a consensus of what an author’s best work is, or someone’s assessment of that, leaving out much interesting peripheral work — but the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reader feels essential. Partially that has to do with Baraka’s participation in the selection, but mainly it’s because the man was so prolific, something the Reader makes clear. He published poetry, music criticism, fiction, and was a successful playwright from his early days on. He was also a significant editor of literary journals — first of Yugen, with Hettie Jones, and then, with Diane di Prima, of The Floating Bear. Baraka always had a voice.

I’ve often wondered what it is that catapults a poet into a wider consciousness, and I believe much of it has to do with prose writing. While poetry remains a particular province, prose, if it is well-written and timely, can reach a much larger audience. In Baraka’s case, his two books on music, Blues People, published in 1963, and Black Music (1968) did precisely that. The first was composed as a study of the origins of jazz and has the subtitle The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It. The second book was composed of articles and reviews previously published in DownBeat, Kulchur, and as liner notes for such artists as John Coltrane and Sonny Murray.

Selections from these seminal studies are included in the Reader, along with a fantastic, often hilarious account of a trip to Cuba in 1960, originally published in Home: Social Essays (1966). There is much more in the Reader, including a selection of at-the-time unpublished works. One of these returns to Malcolm X, a seminal figure in Baraka’s movement from downtown bohemian to uptown Black Nationalist in the late 1960s. In the ‘70s, Baraka adopted an explicitly Marxist ideology, elaborating and expanding his views on race. In the Reader, this is referred to as his Third World Marxist Period. In one of the last pieces in the reader, “Malcolm as Ideology” (1995), Baraka critiques Spike Lee’s interpretation in his 1992 biopic.

I am powering through the Reader, and it has been a supreme education for me about a lot of things, mainly about Baraka himself. His framing of stories and his furious outbursts, the rage and neurosis he lays bare on the page, stem directly from the condition he eloquently describes, in many different genres and styles, throughout his life. He made the decision as an artist to leave all that visible on the page.

He didn’t sugar-coat, and he didn’t try to cover up the nastiness of some of his feelings. Ultimately, though, in his poetry especially, he comes to moments of pure bliss, when he seems to feel at home, to have located himself finally in his culture, and there he has written some of the most tender verse of our time. Much of it can be found in the final 130 pages of Vangelisti’s book, poems mostly unpublished during Baraka’s lifetime.

Here’s one:

“Note to AB”

I became a poet

Because every thing

Beautiful seemed

“poetic” to me.

I thought there were things

I didn’t understand

that wd make the world

poetry. I felt I knew

who I was but had to

Struggle, to catch up

w/ my self.

Now I do see me

sometimes, a few worlds

ahead, & I speed up, then,

put my head down,

Stretch my stride out

& dig

There me go, I scat &

sing, there me go.

"Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" [with Dean Martin and friends, on an evening in Roma]

Andrea Bocelli sings "Granada" in 2017 (plus an encore)

Bocelli in 2017:

Pavarotti gave it his best in 1995:

and, not to be outdone, Juan Diego Florez:

But let's let Lady Marlene have the last note tonight:

 

Teri Ellen Cross Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Mignonette Dooley

___________________________________________________________________

Bad Girls Album Cover

 

By the time I was seven, I knew I would like sex, knew

I would be good at it. I practiced lying on my back,

 

knees bent, hairless prepubescent folds angled up to the air.

I knew nothing of actual sex. The only penis I had ever seen

 

was by accident—opening the bathroom door on my father’s

friend. But this was the time of Donna Summer. Under a

 

streetlamp’s maraschino cherry glow, she posed—wet black

ringlets framed her light brown-sugared face, pouting lips

 

slick in shiny scarlet gloss, high heel perched on the lamp’s base

plunging the slit of her dress back to reveal a black lace stocking

 

a garter as garnish—so naughty, so beautiful. Why wouldn’t I

want to be like her—up front about being wanted?    

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union (The 2019  Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize) and Haint (2017 Ohioana Poetry Award). She is the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize winner and the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

An Interview with Lawrence Joseph [by Aspen Matis]

Lawrence Joseph is the author of seven books of poems, most recently A Certain Clarity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). His other books of poems include So Where Are We? (FSG, 2017), Into It (FSG, 2005) and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973 – 1993 (FSG, 2005). He is also the author of Lawyerland (FSG, 1997), a nonfiction novel. He is Tinnelly Professor of Law (emeritus) at St. John’s University School of Law and lives with his wife in New York City.

I corresponded with Mr. Joseph via email about poetry as an access to viewing and comprehending “the inner lives of a culture,” the language of law, and the power of musicality to jolt us into new worlds. We also discussed the writing of poems as a “prayer for illumination and perfection.”

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

I write poems because I need to. Making poems is an integral part of my sensibility, of who I am. Poetry, for me, is human language in its most charged, distilled form, deeply infused with emotion and feeling, intellect and sensuality. A poem is an aesthetically composed object, an expression of the poet’s interior and exterior worlds. Robert Hayden described “the writing of poems as one way of coming to grips with inner and outer realities,” as “a spiritual act, really, a sort of prayer for illumination and perfection.” I wholeheartedly agree.  

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?

Poetry helps us make sense of, and see, the realities of the worlds that we individually and collectively live in. It shows us the inner lives of a culture. At any given time it is the common voice with in us.  

Your most recent book of poems, A Certain Clarity, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March of 2020. Described by the publisher as “passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable,” the work presents selections from your six prior books of poetry. The New York Times calls the book “a major work of American art.” In your perception, is there an inquiry or exploration that unifies this newest collection? An underlying intention? And what do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

Each of my books has been written as a book, not as a collection of poems. My intention was that A Certain Clarity also be read as a book in itself. From the beginning — my first book, Shouting at No One, was published in 1983, and included poems written back to the mid-70s — my poems have addressed the power structures of American imperial war-making, finance capital, racism, misogyny, and ecological destruction, revealing the vicious hatred in America of the poor and weak. But, also from the beginning, I’ve set against these worlds of cruelty, violence and subjugation deeper truths — for me, the most human truths — of beauty and love — truths which, first of all, I believe in, and are, ultimately, what in my work I wish to leave my reader with.

You are the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law in New York City, and — writing as an attorney — you have published on the subjects of employment, tort and compensation law, labor, jurisprudence, and legal theory. John Ashbery once called your work “poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness.” Is there a place in your vision where your legal and poetic fascinations meld, like tin-lead alloy wires becoming solder? Or are these professional threads necessarily distinct — two independent filaments of your mind’s tapestry?

In the United States the language of law covers every social, economic and political issue. During my forty-five years professionally as lawyer, I’ve practiced and taught this language, written critically about it, know it well, and have used it in my poetry. When Wallace Stevens, a career-long practicing lawyer, was asked about writing poetry and being a lawyer, he replied: “I don’t have a separate mind for legal work and another for writing poetry. I do each with my whole mind.” I feel the same way.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I’m writing my next book of poems, which will pick up where my last book, So Where Are We? left off, in early 2016, before Trump’s presidency and the pandemic. I’m also working on several prose projects, in various forms and genres.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

I’m always learning my language, the American language, which, of course, is constantly changing, as America itself is constantly changing. Over time, I’ve created my own tradition. I look for poets and poems that jolt me into their worlds. I take apart poems that I love on every level of form and content that I can imagine and try to write poems that will have the same effect on a reader that these poems have had on me. And music, sound — poetry is, above all, sound. Be as attentive to the sounds of your words as you are to what your words say.

Ennio Morricone's Soundtrack for "Once Upon a Time in America"

 

 

As soundtracks go, it's hard to beat Ennio Morricone's for Once Upon a Time in America:which incorporates the immportal song "Amapola":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaZFLkR6fVU

Belting: Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland, a Perfect Duet in 1963 [Happy Days Are Here Again, Get Happy]

https://youtu.be/UxFvQEanqbQ

and this bonus track: Ella and Frank sing "The Lady is a Tramp"

and why stop there?

One more for the road, "Frenesi" and "Perfidia," by special request of the disc jockey of Valentine Place, whose theme is Johnny Mercer's "Summer Wind":