The Best American Poetry

Independence! Gimme some skin!

Sinatra and Steve McQueen agree to toast Independence. Moonshine becomes you! Keep it going, fellows!

I like to be in America. . .

I like the island Manhattan / Take out your pipe and put that in

 

It's nice to go traveling. . .

 

Expect, suppose or avoid: the novel's universal gambit? [By Sean Ashton]

Cover, "Massive Massive Oil Slick". Courtesy Sean Ashton

To anyone who has never tried to write one, novels might seem like they are conceived whole: a glittering prize that the author just had to reach out and grasp. In reality, it’s more like starting fire with a flint.

A novel can be sparked by a tiny detail: a remark overheard on a train, the wording of a public announcement.

Massive Massive Oil Slick is the second of what will eventually be a trilogy of novels written to constraints. The first was Living in a Land (2017), a fictional memoir written in sentences constructed only in the negative.

Massive Massive Oil Slick consists entirely of sentences that begin with the verbs “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”. It first took shape when I was coming down the motorway and saw this electronic sign:

EXPECT DELAYS

Something I’d seen a hundred times suddenly glowed with literary potential. I pictured a string of scenarios, all conveyed in the same imperative mood:

EXPECT DELAYS

Expect major delays and minor delays: three-mile tailbacks, slow-moving traffic,

temporary lights on the outskirts of Norwich.

Expect an accident,

an accident approaching Welwyn Garden City,

a chemical spillage over all three lanes, speed restrictions between junctions seven and twelve.

In theory, you could programme that electronic sign to say anything.

I imagined what might happen if a fiction writer was at the helm, spewing out thoughts to passing motorists:

Expect anger.

Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger,

anger with joy,

anger and joy in equal proportions,

 till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy.

Expect decline.

Expect steady and sudden decline,

in fortune and wellbeing,

a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness,

London, Manchester, and Yorkshire.

I found I’d segued directly from traffic to human emotion, as though they were part of the same spectrum.

I continued, broaching social unrest, love, relationships, weather, all in a generic, automated voice that had now become unaccountably human. To accentuate the voice’s authority, I moved the ‘action’ to an institutional setting, a seminar room called ‘411B’, addressing my audience in a continuous monologue that was beginning to sound like a prophecy.

How the audience got there, why they came, is a mystery. All I know is that the reader of Massive Massive Oil Slick is one among them.

At some point, the voice became less generic. I started hearing the words in a Liverpool accent. A female voice, tangy, strident, like disinfectant cutting through grease.

It was Josie Jones’s voice.

Josie Jones was one half of the band Big Hard Excellent Fish, best known for their 1990 song Imperfect List, in which she narrates a litany of her and bandmate Pete Wylie’s most hated things:

Fucking bastard Thatcher…the Poll Tax…the sending off of Len Shackleton…

Scouse impersonator…massive, massive oil slick ...

“Massive, massive oil slick” seemed to describe the torrent of mind fluid that my “expect" constraint had let loose, so I chose it as a title for whatever it was I was doing.

 

Oil slicks on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. The image’s water and land components were processed and stretched separately then “stitched” back together into one image. On land, the red colour indicates vegetated areas, the bluish areas show paved surfaces and the browns are bare land. Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory

Josie Jones’s voice would cut in only now and then, like an intercepted transmission. I heard it when I got angry and welcomed it as a counterpoint to my own somewhat guarded delivery. That voice must have lain buried in my subconscious for 30 years, dormant until I embarked on a project that had a paratactic affinity with Imperfect List.

When the verb “expect” got too monotonous, I introduced “suppose”, a milder imperative that was perfect for smuggling in non sequiturs:

Suppose

there is no more snow.

Suppose

there is no snow at all

but a substantial increase in misogyny…or

a decrease in misogyny

and an increase in violence.

“Avoid” came later.

Avoid

cider

was the first injunction.

Avoid

artichokes

was another.

Why “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”?

I wonder if it’s because these three verbs comprise the basic overture that all novels make to the reader?

A novel raises our expectations by setting a scene. But suppose these expectations aren’t met? Why has the author avoided them? Probably in order to tell a different story from the one that first seemed to be unfolding.

Massive Massive Oil Slick has no plot. Not in the sense of a sequence of events that happen to people.

But things do happen – just not to any characters.

In the absence of characters, the reader becomes the protagonist, invited to participate in various imagined scenarios, thought experiments that encompass themes both profound and mundane: homelessness, drug trials, extra-terrestrial intelligence, Brazil nuts, carveries, social exclusion…

As with Living in a Land, the first novel in the trilogy, the intention of Massive Massive Oil Slick is to portray how a mind gets from one thing to another. The more idiosyncratic the moves, the more tenacious the logic.

This second novel’s tropes are borrowed from stand-up: call-backs, repetition, the rule of three, and – above all – the observational comic’s tendency to appoint themselves official investigators of social phenomena.

But Massive Massive Oil Slick is only intermittently funny. Much of the time it is menacing.

And the entity doing the monologue – part-official, part absurd; part-automated, part-human – doesn’t know when it is being funny and when it is being menacing. It cannot read the crowd. It barely looks up at them.

Except when someone arrives late to 411B.

_________

“Massive Massive Oil Slick” (ISBN 978-1-7385079-5-5) is the second in poet and novelist Sean Ashton’s projected trilogy of novels "written to constraints”. Published by Ma Bibliothèque, it is now available on-line. An official launch of the book will held at South London Gallery on 23 July 2025. Other recent works by Ashton include “The Way to Work” (2023) and “Sampler” (2020).

Earlier “The Best American Poetry” essays on literary creation by Sean Ashton include “Performance art meets literary étrangeté: Lina Lapelytè’s “The Mutes” makes my uncanny familiar” and “On the ideal novel: Latent in every sentence is an alternative”. Sean Ashton lives in London.

Make Believe [by Frederica von Stade & Jerry Hadley]

 

You're too spectacular / to be in my vernacular

You're too spectacular / to be in my vernacular 

 

Happy birthday, Dino (June 7)

 

Amapola & Besame Mucho, Cielito Lindo & Granada [sung by Juan Diego Florez] & Benny Goodman's "Amapola"

Great singer. . .and also listen to Benny Goodman on the clarinet

 

Is this Bernstein's greatest song?

 

  as sung by the songwriters (Betty Comden and Adoph Green) and Nancy Walker

Twenty four hours can go so fast
You look around, the day has passed
When you're in love, time is precious stuff
Even a lifetime isn't enough

Where has the time all gone to?
Haven't done half the things we want to
Oh well, we'll catch up some other time

This day was just a token
Too many words are still unspoken
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come

There's so much more embracing
Still to be done, but time is racing
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Didn't get half my wishes
Never have seen you dry the dishes
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

 

Can't satisfy my  craving

Never have watched you while you're shaving
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

[OZZIE]
Haven't had time to wake up
Seeing you there without your makeup
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting. . .

Just when the fun's beginning
Comes the final inning
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come

[CLAIRE, HILDY, CHIP & OZZIE]
There's so much more embracing
Still to be done, but time is racing
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Can't argue with Mozart

Why is Jerome Kern's picture here?

Because he and Mozart shared a birthday!

 

Mahler's 1st

 

I like to be in America [from "West Side Story")

 

But I'm gonna love you come rain or come shine. . .

 

Gershwin's first hit (1919)

Great lyrics: Frank Loesser, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old"

<< This sheet music is for the song “They're Either Too Young or Too Old,” from the film Thank Your Lucky Stars. The music was written by Frank Loesser and composed by Arthur Schwartz, and the sheet music was published by M. Witmark and Sons of New York, New York in 1943. The cover features a blue and white striped inset that reads “Thank Your Lucky Stars” with portrait photographs of stars like Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland.  >>

sung by Bette Davis in Thank Your Lucky Stars.

One of the greatest World War II songs. -- DL

They're either too young, or too old,
They're either too gray or too grassy green,
The pickings are poor and the crop is lean.
What's good is in the army,
What's left will never harm me.

They're either too old or too young,
So, darling, you'll never get stung.
Tomorrow I'll go hiking with that Eagle Scout unless,
I get a call from grandpa for a snappy game of chess.

I'll never, never fail ya,
While you are in Australia,
Or otu in the Aleutians
Or off among the Rooshians,
And flying over Egypt.
Your heart will never be gypped,
And when you get to India,
I'll still be what I've been to ya.
I've looked the field over
And lo and behold!
They're either too young or too old!

They're either too bald or too bold,
I'm down to the wheelchair and bassinet,
My heart just refuses to get upset.
I simply can't compel it to,
With no Marine to tell it to.

I'm either their first breath of spring,
Or else, I'm their last little fling.
I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup,
I either have to hold him off,
Or have to hold him up.
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold,
They're either too young or too old.

PS There are many additional stanzas as you will hear if you listen to Bette Davis sing it.

Jimmy Dorsey's band, with Kitty Kallen's vocal .https://youtu.be/ai71VRXz48Q 

Shostakovich's "Tahiti Trot" [by Lewis Saul]

SHOSTAKOVICH, Dmitri (1906-1975)

Tahiti Trot (1928)
Staatsoper Berlin
Daniel Barenboim, cond.
(4:08)

Vincent Youmans composed Tea for Two for his musical No, No, Nanette in 1927.

 

Shostakovich and his friend, the conductor Nicolai Malko, recalled hearing the tune in '27 at the Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow in a play called Roar, China. In one of the scenes some Americans on a ship are dancing to the tune, which Malko recalled as being named Tahiti Trot. (It was -- of course -- Tea for Two.)

At some point before October, Malko jokingly suggested to Shostakovich that he should orchestrate Tea for Two and proposed a bet:

"If you, Mitenka, are as brilliant as they all say, then please go into the next room, write that song down from memory, orchestrate it, and I will play it. I will give you an hour to do this."

 

It only took Dmitri 45 minutes, and he dedicated the score to Malko as a "token of his best feelings."

The premiere at the Moscow Conservatory was on November 25, 1928. Then came the problems.

The Central Committee of the CPSU, People's Commissar of Education Anatol Lunacharsky said that no task was more urgent for Soviet culture than to rebuke the "aggressive, jazzy syncopations of the foxtrot."

 

"The bourgeoisie would like man to live not so much by his head as by his sexual organs. The fundamental element of the foxtrot derives from mechanization, suppressed eroticism, and a desire to deaden feeling through drugs. We do not need that kind of music."

Just-Say-No Anatol

 

By 1930, Shostakovich was furiously spinning his wheels repudiating the stupid thing. Letting Malko perform it had been a "political mistake." He had meant it as a movement for The Golden Age (1930, not likely) -- a satirical take on such music (it was censored anyways), and he kinda blamed Malko for the fiasco. [Nobody ever said Dmitri was perfect!]

The score was withdrawn and quickly forgotten until Gennady Rozhdestvensky  reconstructed it in 1984.

I Cried for You: Harry James & Helen Forrest

 

It's Magic: Doris Day on her Birthday (April 3)

 

The great Doris Day, who died the other day [May 2019], was celebrated for her work in romantic comedies of the 1960s. She was box office gold with James Garner, Cary Grant, and Rock Hudson. But her real achievement was as a singer. In musical movies she gave outstanding performances as Ruth Etting (in Love Me or Leave Me in 1955) and as Mrs. Gus Kahn (in I'll See You in My Dreams in 1953). One of the finest of all Big Band vocalists, whose version of "Sentimental Journey" is a madeleine that can transport you to 1945, she sang with the Les Brown Orchestra when swing was king.

Maybe her biggest single hit was the Academy Award-winning song of 1956 in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in which she played opposite James Stewart. In honor of Doris Day, "Che Sera, Sera" was sung at sing-alongs in smart clubs all over the nation yesterday.

Doris gets her own day in my Playlist:

from Playlist (12 / 17 / 17)

I live in Hitchcock’s America
What does that mean
It means the ride always ends in an amusement park
and a girl and her uncle can have the same first name
Cary Grant is suave Jimmy Stewart has a broken leg
or a bruised psyche Doris Day’s voice fills the house
Even the Jews and the blacks are white
Even the brunettes are blonde
I confess I’m at the end of my rope,
spellbound by the notorious master of suspicion
maybe Janet shouldn’t have taken that dough or had that tryst
Joel McCrea tells America that all Europe’s lights are out
and Priscilla Lane recites Emma Lazarus’s lines
atop the Statue of Liberty   -- DL

Must listening: Schubert's Rosamunde Overture

Heard on the Street

Schubert’s string quartet number 13
in A minor
also known as the Rosamunde Quartet
rose two pointson the quartet exchange today,

which differs from most markets
inasmuch as each point occurs in fourths
like a song with two choruses,
a bridge and a final chorus,

or like a football game,
two halves, two quarters per half.
The andante movement itself gained
an extra point in after-hours trading.

-- David Lehman

The quartet is from 1824; the overture from 1823.

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. . .

The Last Cigarette — Cinema’s most seductive prop — By David Lehman

Every cigarette is the last cigarette.

In the black-and-white world of noir, cigarettes are everywhere. But then, they are ubiquitous in all movies, as in life, in the first half of the 20th century. Among great smokers I think of FDR with his holder tilted rakishly upward, as if to reinforce his smile, and Ike, who smoked four packs of unfiltered smokes a day before and after D-Day in 1944. Gregory Peck smokes fiercely as he types up his exposé of anti-Semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement, as if to say that smoking is an aspect of the writer’s job, a sine qua non, and that an ashtray full of butts is evidence that a writer has done his work. When New York replaced Paris as the world’s art capital, the art critics fell into two rival camps: Pall Malls for Harold Rosenberg, Camels for Clement Greenberg. Audrey Hepburn smokes stylishly in Charade. Marlene Dietrich smoked brilliantly, sometimes with a cigarette holder and furs. Bette Davis is in the smoker’s hall of fame, and not solely because of the end of Now, Voyager, when Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes, one for her and one for him, sealing their intimacy, and Bette has her famous line about settling for the stars if you can’t have the moon.

She’s got a cigarette between her fingers in All About Eve when she says “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Chesterfield ads of the 1940s and ’50s featured Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth. Camels were advocated by Teresa Wright, Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and a neon sign in Times Square that blew out smoke.

Some of the great jingles of the 1960s advertised mediocre cigarettes. Winston “tastes good like [sic] a cigarette should” (which gets spoofed by the scary Chinese villain of the original Manchurian Candidate), L & M has got the filter that unlocks the flavor. You can take Salem out of the country, but. To a smoker, it’s a Kent. The most famous of all Marlboro commercials used Elmer Bernstein’s music from The Magnificent Seven, and Yul Brynner, who played the leader of the pack, was a dedicated smoker (and made a public service announcement after he learned he didn’t have long to live). Nat King Cole credited the quality of his singing voice to cigarettes. Leonard Bernstein couldn’t live without them.

Addictive? A hardened criminal would rat on his best friend for a cigarette, even a bad one (Lark, Parliament, Viceroy) if he needed it. Reason not the need. Hell, the guy in solitary would smoke the butts off the floor if he needed a smoke.]. Read the opening chapter of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. It is titled “The Last Cigarette” and narrates the hero’s efforts to give up cigarettes and the lengths the addict will go to satisfy his or her craving. In Dead Again (1991), Kenneth Branagh’s ode to the noirs of the 1940s, the intrepid reporter played by Andy Garcia smokes and smokes, and when we see him as an old man, decades in the future, he has a tracheotomy tube in his neck. What does he ask for—what does he crave—in return for sharing information with the detective played by Branagh? A cigarette.

There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities, and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”

https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-day-the-last-cigarette-by-david-lehman/

On Schubert's Birthday (January 31, 2025)

On Schubert’s Birthday 

Even the dog is asleep
on the last day of January,
Franz Schubert’s birthday.
The classical station
will surely play his string quartets
and songs, and if I have to drive,
the electrons of my mind can
escape into the orbit of Franz Schubert.
The effect of sun on snow
is bright yellow light, but then
the white stuff comes down
with the grace of butterflies
on my windshield, and Schubert’s
Octet in F major on satellite radio.

-- David Lehman

Or even better: the Rosamunde Overture

also listen to Schubert's second Piano Trio in E-flat major