The Best American Poetry

In Memory of Kent Johnson, poet and activist of the imnagination (1955- Oct. 25, 2022)

8 / 29 / 20

From “Because of Poetry” / by  John Bradley

A review in Sulfur of Kent Johnson’s rambunctious and defiant new book,

Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House (Shearsman Books, $18.00) 

“Say, isn’t that John Ashbery?” I asked.  “Over there, speaking with some young poet who’s trying to look like a young John Ashbery?” I told him, though I sounded just like the Kent Johnson in the “Matterhorn” poem who tells Fred Seidel that he sees John Ashbery.  “That’s ridiculous.  Everyone knows Ashbery is dead,” said Kent.  “And besides, why would the Poetry Institute put John Ashbery in a poetry re-education camp.  They love his poetry.”

More and more confused, I turned again to a poem to help me right my balance.   “’Could someone tell me why I’ve never been / selected for the yearly Best American Poetry?’” I read from “Could Someone Tell Me Why.”  Is it a crime, I wondered, to write such a thing in a poem?  I must have said this aloud, as Kent told me that he would be released from the re-education camp as soon as he wrote a poem that was chosen for Best American Poetry.  I wasn’t sure if he was joking or serious, and I nervously laughed.  “But that means you’ll be here forever!” I said, to cheer him up.  I could hear John Ashbery laughing nearby.

from the archive; first posted Auigust 29, 2020

Thank you, David, for posting this delightful review by the inimitable John Bradley, who has long carried forward the surrealist tradition in marvelous ways. Just wanted to clarify that the magazine is not related in any way to Clayton Eshleman's legendary and long-retired Sulfur. The magazine, in fact, is somewhat new and based in Egypt. Other singular U.S. poets of surrealist bent present here are George Kalamaras and Garrett Caples.

Posted by: Kent L Johnson | August 29, 2020 at 06:22 PM

See, too, Eric Powell, "The Big House of Poetry": 

<<< I once—and only once, (un)fortunately—met Kent Johnson. Chicago Review brought him to the University of Chicago to give a reading in 2013 (I think), at the Taft House. He read in a sort of mock-Poundian, oracular voice, which was funny. The poems were funny too; but the humor had thorns. He wore Ray-Bans (at night, like Corey Hart) because he could, and looked both cool-cat and crazy as a wombat. In the middle of the reading he stood up and vomited on the floor. He sat down and started reading again, oracularly, as if nothing had happened. Everyone but me left the room (a half-basement, poorly ventilated) eventually. After a while, he looked up from his crumpled sheets of poems and said to me: “Alright, enough, let’s get outta here.” >>>

In Honor of Caroline Seebohm, 1940-2023

The vivacious Caroline Seebohm at Oxford, circa 1961. Photo credit: Peter Espe

In January of this year she wrote to me, "I'm sitting at the right hand of God. As I am left-handed you can imagine I am rather uncomfortable.

I come down (or up) to NYC twice a month. . . . Do you ever come down? You are rather close to snowy Buffalo where wonderful Damar plays. I watched that whole horrifying, uncanny, haunting, unforgettable scene unfold as I happened to be watching the game.

Quelle vie! I have about two years. How about you?

XoxMessi fan"

A Man of Many Words, and Every One Mattered: Robert A. Gottlieb (1931-2023) [by Mindy Aloff]

Note: This is part two of a two-part essay on the late Robert Gottlieb (pictured left with his auithor Robert Caro). Part one appeared last Saturday July 1.

Bob could read a booklength manuscript overnight and get back to the author with useful observations about it the next day. He felt that making writers wait for a response to a book just finished was cruel.  As a cosmopolitan thinker who did not, under any conditions, want to be considered an intellectual, he would often exclaim in my hearing that the first rule of writing is to “Get it done!!” As an example, he would offer not George Balanchine choreographing on union time (“Don’t think, just do!”) but rather the lyricists of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, who, under commercial pressures, would turn out yet another classic song—or two, or three in an afternoon between the matinee and the evening show.  

In his autobiography, Avid Reader, Bob writes that he arrived at popular lyrics via the movies and dance. With this particular enthusiasm came a remarkable co-editor, the musical theater historian Robert Kimball, who shares the editorial byline with Bob on their unique anthology Reading Lyrics, a compendium of 1,000 U.S. and English entries from across the Twentieth Century. To me, Bob rarely spoke of literary poetry, yet he seemed to have memorized countless song lyrics. In his review of Wilfred Sheed’s The House That Gershwin Built, Bob suggests that “for many aficionados, the best of them all” is Johnny Mercer, and he carried that suggestion to me when I was editing the Library of American anthology of dance writing, proposing I include Mercer’s comic lyric to the Betty Hutton song “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry” (“I had a week to spare / He showed me the ground work, / The walkin’ around work / And told me to take it from there. . . .”) Bob’s generosity, including with his time, was remarkable when he believed in a project. (The poet David Lehman, who edits this web site with Stacey Harwood-Lehman, notes that Bob himself fact-checked his [David’s] volume about a segment of the American Songbook, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.)

In Avid Reader, Bob noted that one of the two best memoirs by dancers he knew of was by Paul Taylor, whose Private Domain Bob had edited (ballerina Allegra Kent, the other “best,” also enjoyed his beneficial scrutiny). Bob was, in his words, “an immense admirer” of Taylor’s choreography and of his dancing (which Bob first saw when Taylor was performing with Martha Graham, back in the 1950s), and that Taylor was the favorite choreographer of Bob’s wife Maria. “I loved Private Domain and I loved the man who wrote it,” Bob’s memoir reads. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Bob had helped Taylor build the scores for a couple of Taylor’s jukebox ballets—Funny Papers and Black Tuesday, whose recordings include unusual covers that, by the end of the last century, only a fan would know.  For Funny Papers, there is the anchoring number, a comic rendition, by classically trained Darlene Edwards, Jo Stafford’s alter ego in the 1970s Helen Reddy song “I Am Woman,” sung in an off-pitch imitation of Darlene Edwards; and, for Black Tuesday, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” the 1931 anthem of the Great Depression, with lyrics by Yip Harburg and music

 by Jay Gorney (a minor-key tune based on a Russian-Jewish lullaby), in the famous ‘30s performance by Bing Crosby, with its pristine diction and altar-boy purity. Bob’s participation in these scores for Taylor’s dances is only my guess, although it’s a guess educated by Bob.

Here are the best afternoons I enjoyed in the company of Bob Gottlieb:

---The first probably won’t sound like fun to most readers, but I was in heaven. Bob had some time on his hands and offered to help me proofread the entire galley of the Library of America anthology on dance that I edited, nearly 700 pages. We accomplished the mission in the silent, light-flooded, book-lined LOA offices. The managing editor, Trish Hoard, set up two copies of the galley side by side at a library table, with pencils and water and coffee: One copy had already been proofed and one was clean of proofreading marks.

At 10 a.m., we began to go over the pages together, checking the proofed ones against the clean ones, with the occasional discussion of spelling and semi-colons, of discrepancies between original and subsequent publications, and of the fantastical prose of George Washington Cable, the eloquence of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s phrasing, the exactitude of Robert Greskovic’s perceptions, the charm and glittering humor in Nancy Dalva. Around 12:30 p.m., sandwiches were sent up, and we continued working and exchanging views on dance writing and writing in general while munching. (In Avid Reader, Bob gives a cameo of proofreading in the Knopf offices with John Le Carré: The two lie down on the office rug and eat their sandwiches there.) Bob and I put down our pencils around 3 p.m.; the entire process took a couple of days. Trish said that not many of the LOA’s anthology editors ask to proofread their volumes in the LOA offices; yet (Bob hated the use of “but” as a conjunction), since we wanted to proofread together, side by side, this location made the most sense. Bob and I are both lovers of orthography and of the history of how English has been presented on the page. As such we were made for this exacting mission, and we had a wonderful, even ebullient time (as ebullient as one can be in sotto voce). Since, in contrast to Bob, I’m one of the slowest readers ever, I was happy to share at least some editorial skill with him. And what a pleasure to read and re-read those marvelous writings, to discuss them and to exclaim together over how much we admired them.

--The second experience occurred in the later 1990s. I was taking my daughter, Ariel, then eight years old, on the train to Stamford, Connecticut, to see the Balanchine ballerina Allegra Kent perform as the mother in a production of Balanchine’s Nutcracker.  By chance, we met Bob and Nicky, his and Maria’s son, then about fifteen, on the train to Stamford, Connecticut, to see the Balanchine ballerina Allegra Kent perform as the mother in a production of Balanchine’s Nutcracker.  We all sat together, saw the show together and took the train back to Manhattan together. At the station, we delighted in an elaborate exhibit of model trains,

In the spirit of that afternoon, I’ll draw this comment to a close with a bit of enthusiasm of my own for my favorite piece of writing by Bob: “A Lost Child,” about Minot Drouet, a French prodigy of a poet who, illegitimate and adopted, was nearly blind for the first three years of her life, heard a Bach organ composition on the radio and kind of woke up, and went on to put words together with taste, musicality, and passion. From then on, she composed fantastically haunting poems and letters, for which she was exploited by her adoptive mother and the complicit press. A forty-eight-page collection of poetry she composed at the age of seven or eight, in the mid-1950s, was heralded so vociferously that she was brought to meet (and be praised by) Jean Cocteau and Pope Pius XII. Life magazine tested her by putting her in a room with paper and pencil and giving her two topics to compose a poem on, with a deadline, as she was monitored to be sure that she received no secret help. She passed with flying colors.

Bob, who visited Paris annually for decades and spoke fluent French, was taken by Minot’s poems and by her story. He called her, now an adult, for an interview, but she turned him down; she had chosen to live in anonymity. And yet, he couldn’t abandon his effort to get to know her. He went to the small town where she lived and walked around it, asking denizens about her. He interviewed other writers about her. He couldn’t seem to accept that she was born with an almost freakish gift for writing, then chose to suppress that gift after being paraded in public by her mother and others, losing her marriage, and publishing a little memoir that read like an afterthought. What gets to me about this essay is that it is Bob’s possibly unique venture into terrain verging on fiction. It goes beyond reading about the poet to an attempt to find the subject himself, physically as well as psychically, refusing to take no for an answer, unable to free himself from obsession by writing. “That she survived at all is a testament to her strength,” he concludes. “That she lost Minou on her way to becoming Mme Le Canu is the price she was willing to pay.” 

Bob knew less about this mysterious genius than he did about the characters created by Dickens or Balzac or Tolstoy. Unlike their creations, the living poet would remain  analyzable though unfinished. It was her very elusiveness that prompted him to leave his reading chair and walk the streets in Jamesian pursuit of traces of her presence on her neighbors. In paying a great price for a calm existence, she became a pearl of great price in Bob’s personal cabinet of curiosities, a puzzle with just one more page to the solution—until Nature at last intervened to close and seal the book of life. 

--Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff's most recent book, Why Dance Matters, was published in January by Yale University Press. She was hired by Robert Gottlieb to write the Dance column of Goings On About Town at The New Yorker, in late 1988, and, with two exceptions, contributed that weekly, without a byline, until mid 1993. In addition, she published 45 Talk Stories and Comments on a great variety of nondance subjects, also without a byline, as well as a long, bylined book lead on Sarah Bernhardt. Everything she published at the magazine was meticulously edited and fact-checked by up to eight individuals, including Robert Gottlieb. He treated all the copy, featured and departmental, with exquisite, personal care.

A Man of Many Words, and Every One Mattered: Robert A. Gottlieb (1931-2023) [by Mindy Aloff]

Bob Gottlieb, a New Yorker who edited The New Yorker, died the other day, just a fortnight after he had turned 92. He made his name as a book editor, first at Simon & Schuster,  then at Knopf, where he was editor-in-chief. He was also an author, a dance and book critic, a father, a grandfather, and an all-around godfather to avid readers who were willing to present their work-to the world as a trade or a craft while tacitly demonstrating in the reasonableness of their ideas, the command of absurdity in their humor, and the music of their sentences that they know the arrangement and distribution of words is an art. Famous for his speed reading (though not for his even more astonishing gift of speed comprehension), he knew what made writing more than important: He knew what made it interesting.

 A man of principle and generosity, Bob could be an understated Barnum, drawing in readers with the promise of a little puzzle or dilemma to solve and guiding us over this river and through those trees until, suddenly, one finds that one has arrived at a resolution concerning an improbable subject about which one had never intended to acquire a point of view.

Bob was an only child whose prodigious reading was a huge part of his identity. He also commanded the social skill of making the person he was speaking with feel significant, even unique. In a conversation he would make an investment of himself rather than of his résumé. His glamour was that, by choice, he was beyond conventional glamour: he  could rarely be either forced or lured into wearing a tie, much less a suit. He owned several far-flung homes and he never packed so much as a toothbrush when traveling among them; he simply kept an identical wardrobe at each, the clothing heavy on tones of gray, and carried his copious reading on an e-reader.

I was one of a small group of lucky New Yorkers whom he’d ask to accompany him to the dance performances he reviewed for the Observer when his wife, the warm-hearted and esteemed actor Maria Tucci, wasn’t available. Occasionally in the evening Bob phoned me to discuss matters of cultural significance, such as what had happened to his preferred Chelsea neighborhood diner at 23^rd and Ninth. (Bob wasn’t what you’d call a foodie; however, he was a connoisseur of New York City diners.) Along the way, the topics we addressed would change momentarily from, say, the extinction of a diner to the extinction of the Oxford comma. In the way of conversations that go on for some time, we would excavate our mutual levels of anxiety down to bedrock. Bob liked walking in the city, although that was as far as he'd go into Nature. He knew the Earth’s climate was irreversibly changing. Rather than dwell on the predicament, he found it more rewarding to reread the novels of Theodore Dreiser and the reports of what people who almost died had experienced. Humanity engrossed him, including humanity in extremis.

In the half year or so before he died, Bob spoke rather a lot about an essay he intended to write that concerned the English translations of novels and essays by the Soviet-era Jewish author Vasily Grossman—“the Tolstoy of the USSR,” Martin Amis called him. Bob often said to me of Grossman, whose most famous novel is the sobering Life and Fate, that, as great a storyteller and stylist as the author was, he was an even greater human being. I became very curious about this paragon and rooted around the Internet for more information about him as I waited for delivery of my copy of The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays by Vasily Grossman. That was how I managed, on the ‘Net, to discover the 2011 “Ukraine without Jews,” the first translation of the essay into English since its original 1943 version in Russian, whose publication was firmly squashed by the Soviet journal where Grossman submitted it. (Later, excerpts were published in Yiddish, a language comparatively so little read that publication in it, in mid-century world literature, was just a half step from not publishing.) In the words of Polly Zavadivker, the essay’s English translator, it is “one of the earliest public statements about the murder of the Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine.” She adds, “it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls ‘the greatest crime ever committed in history.’”

By the time he headed up Alfred A. Knopf, Bob had edited the memoirs of prominent Hollywood stars and figures. One of them, Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of Louis B. Mayer and ex-wife of writer and producer David Selznick, he considered among his dearest friends. Still, Bob’s Garbo is not exactly a conventional celebrity book; rather, it provides a compendium—constructed with consummate taste—of how to look at a celebrity in a way that brings the reader pleasure, education, fantastical imagery, context, and fact.  It had been inspired by an extraordinary essay on Garbo’s films by an historian of cinema, James Harvey, that had knocked Bob’s socks off and that he wanted to answer and—by republishing Harvey’s essay in the back of Garbo—to offer as an object for admiration by others. When Bob Gottlieb was enthusiastic about something, he didn’t simply grab you by the lapels and gush. Like Lincoln Kirstein, one of his heroes, he moved mountains to showcase excellence in a way that would outlast him. Like Kirstein, Bob saw that writers and others in the arts who contributed work he admired were quietly helped in a variety of ways.

Enthusiasm was integral to Bob’s literary energy. A critic he certainly was. He could slice and dice what he disliked or found detrimental to the health of America as eagerly as anyone. Over the thirty-six years I knew him as a colleague at the theater, as someone he edited, and as a friend, every so often I landed on the business end of his vexation, and it wasn’t fun; it was, however, always instructive. And when he let himself plunge into what he treasured, it could be a positively Wordsworthian experience. Bob’s enthusiasm for Garbo’s screen performances produced a book that hangs a velvet rope between one’s passion for a star’s Beauty in the cinema and the beauty—or lack thereof--in the star’s life. (He cautioned me several times on the phone that Garbo’s luster on film turns to paste off camera—that life and art do not necessarily have causal connection.) By his last year, he was saying that he had no more professional obligations to perform anything other than what he wanted to do—and that what he wanted to do, really, was just to read as he waited for Robert Caro to deliver the manuscript of the last big Lyndon Johnson volume to be edited.

The editing of Caro’s final volume will be done by someone else, and Bob’s Grossman essay seems never to have made the leap from his thoughts into his computer. Having read a little Grossman and knowing a bit about how Bob thought, I believe he was attracted to Grossman’s ability to find pop-up moments of amusement during 24/7 horror-even when he had to report, with clarity and consummate pictorial economy, scenes of torment that make Dante’s Inferno seem like a trip in the fun house in Coney Island.

This is part one of a two-part essay. The next section will apppear on July 8.

Mindy Aloff's most recent book, Why Dance Matters, was published in January by Yale University Press. She was hired by Robert Gottlieb to write the Dance column of Goings On About Town at The New Yorker, in late 1988, and, with two exceptions, contributed that weekly, without a byline, until mid 1993. In addition, she published 45 Talk Stories and Comments on a great variety of nondance subjects, also without a byline, as well as a long, bylined book lead on Sarah Bernhardt. Everything she published at the magazine was meticulously edited and fact-checked by up to eight individuals, including Robert Gottlieb. He treated all the copy, featured and departmental, with exquisite, personal care.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB (1931–2023)

I'm sad to report the death of Robert Gottlieb, a brilliant editor (at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker) with amazingly eclectic tastes and profound knowledge. His books on song lyrics and ballet are must-haves for anyone interested in the dance, jazz standards, show tunes et al. I was lucky enough to have him as a final reader and fact-checker (!) for my book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. He was a wonderful felllow. Below are some comments from writers he edited from a Paris Review feature.  -- DL

CYNTHIA OZICK:

I will tell you two stories, one about somebody else and one about myself. The somebody else is a close friend, also edited by Bob, who when writing a novel tends to find herself writing episodes or short stories. He said to her, Maybe that’s just how you write a novel: you have to write short stories, and then you put them together and that’s the novel. I, on the other hand, have begun novels and then abandoned them and they have become short stories. He said to me just the opposite: Maybe this is how you write short stories. You have to think you’re doing a novel, and then it turns out to be a short story.

CHARLES MCGRATH:

Bob has an uncanny knack for putting his finger on that one sentence, or that one paragraph, that somewhere in the back of your mind you knew wasn’t quite right but was close enough so that you decided to worry about it later. Then you forgot about it, or you convinced yourself that it was okay, because it was too much trouble to change. He always goes right to those places. It’s an instinct. He and I share a belief that if you take care of all the tiny problems in a piece, all that small attention will somehow make a big difference. Sometimes I think that’s just a touching faith of ours, and that, in fact, nobody ever notices whether, say, you use the same word twice in a paragraph. At other times, I’m convinced that the details are all that matter.

BOB GOTTLIEB:

Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That’s why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It’s the number one qualification. Because you could have all the editorial tools, but if you’re not a responsive reader you won’t sense where the problems lie. I am a reader. My life is reading. In fact, I was about forty years old when I had an amazing revelation—this is going to sound dumb—it suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life. I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t even known that I had thought it, it was so basic to me.

Oddly enough, I find that reading noneditorially is a very different experience for me. When I’m reading for pleasure I don’t tend to think as an editor, even with books I’ve edited. I remember, for instance, that when the finished book of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy came into the office I decided to reread it although it had only been three or four months since I’d read it in galleys. It was as if I were reading something I had never read before, because I was reading it simply for fun. Very rarely have I had the impulse to make changes in a book I’m just reading for pleasure or instruction. It’s only bad translations that drive me to madness and make me reach for a pencil.

CHARLES MCGRATH:

Bob is the best-read person I’ve ever met. I used to have a somewhat inflated notion of how well-read I was, but Bob makes me look like someone who’s just got his first library card. It’s because his ear is so well trained that he never falters in questions of tone.

BOB GOTTLIEB:

When you’re dealing with nonprofessional writers, you have to give them a tremendous amount of encouragement simply to convince them that they can write at all. Lauren Bacall is a perfect example. I knew she could write her own book, and I knew that she would never be satisfied if she had a ghostwriter, but she didn’t know how to do it, so finally we set up a system. She would come into the office every day and write in longhand on yellow pads, and every night little elves would type up what she had written during the day. She kept saying, Is it all right? and I would say, Yes, yes, it’s fine. You write it, I’ll edit it. And it was fine. Of course, it needed standard editorial work, but it was her book, it came right out of her. Betty Bacall is a bright Jewish girl from New York—she wasn’t going to write a bad book.

BOB GOTTLIEB:

The first thing writers want—and this sounds so basic, but you’d be surprised how unbasic it is in the publishing world—is a quick response. Once they’ve finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation until they hear from their editor, and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting. I’m lucky, because I happen to be a very quick reader, so I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight. Besides, when I receive a manuscript from a writer I’ve been working with I’m consumed by curiosity to know what he or she has written. But easy or not, one’s first job is a swift and honest response—tempered, of course, by tact.

It took me some time, when I was a very young man, to grasp that a writer—even a mature, experienced one—could have made an emotional transference to me. But of course it makes sense: the editor gives or withholds approval, and even to a certain extent controls the purse strings. It’s a relationship fraught with difficulty, because it can lead to infantilizing and then to resentment. Somehow, to be helpful, an editor has to embody authority yet not become possessive or controlling.

from The Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1760/the-art-of-editing-no-1-robert-gottlieb

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-door-opens

In Honor of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

John Tranter, one of the foremost figures in Australian poetry over the last half-century, died earlier this week aged 79. Perhaps no one has done more than Tranter, as poet, editor, anthologist, publisher, critic and radio broadcaster, to place Australian poetry’s response to modernism (and postmodernism) into an international context. From his early interests in the the poetry of Rimbaud and the American avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s -- whose formal experimentation became a rich source of inspiration in his own writing -- to his revolutionary online magazine Jacket, Tranter seemed set to blow apart the provincial, Anglo-centric character of Australian poetry and open direct lines of communication to the rest of the world.

Described by the publisher and poet Michael Brennan as the “established agent provocateur of Australian poetry”,Tranter achieved a status in his home country similar to that of his good friend John Ashbery in the US: that of being a major poet accepted and acclaimed by both the avant-garde and the establishment. With his 22 collections, Tranter won nearly every major poetry prize in Australia. His poetry was relentlessly inventive. He seemed to live and die by the motto found in the early poem “Red Movie” (1972) that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious,” and maintained the urge to reinvent his poetry into to his later works through his embrace of technology, including a series of mistranslations of poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallamre using speech-to-text software. Tranter’s love of experimentation was matched by his mastery of form and a detached, ironic voice, distinctly Australian, that Tranter himself referred to as the “Laconic Mode.”

Born in the small country town of Cooma, Tranter grew up on a farm on the south-coast of New South Wales (in an interview with Toby Fitch, Tranter, tongue in cheek, draws a line between Rimbaud, Ashbery and himself as poets who all grew up on remote farms). Moving to Sydney in the early 60s, he studied intermittently for a decade, traveling across Europe and Asia before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Literature in 1970, the same year he was to publish his first full-length collection Parallax. Disappointed with the state of Australian poetry, and the country writ large, which he described as “suffocatingly dull and hideously authoritarian in those days”, he took a role as a publisher’s editor in Singapore after completing his degree.

On his return to his homeland  in1973, Tranter became a vitalising force in Australian poetry as an editor, anthologist and radio broadcaster. He edited the two major anthologies of modern Australian poetry: The New Australian Poetry (1979) which confirmed the status of the “Generation of 68”, who, in Tranter’s own words, “rose to public notice on the crest of a wave of poetry readings, ‘underground’ magazines, and a generally expressed antagonism to the established mainstream of poetry at that time, which they saw as too conservative,” and were to change the course of Australian poetry; and The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) co-edited with Philip Mead, which includes the entire oeuvre of the hoax-poet Ern Malley alongside works by indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty. Tranter also resurrected his journal Transit as a publishing company, publishing collections by friends including Gig Ryan, Martin Johnston and John Forbes. In 1975 he co-developed the first iteration of Books & Writing on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio. He would later take charge of a weekly, two-hour arts program, Radio Helicon on ABC Radio National from 1987-88  on which he interviewed a range of Australian and international poets including notable interviews with John Ashbery and John Forbes.

Tranter was early to recognise the power of publishing through the internet, and in 1997 began the international online poetry journal Jacket. His championing of Australian poets alongside internationally recognized names was instrumental in establishing contemporary Australian poetry throughout the world as a distinguished and distinguishable poetics. In 2004, Tranter established the online Australian Poetry Library which presented biographical and bibliographical information on over seventy Australian poets, as well as poems, book reviews and interviews.

Tranter’s own poetry, meanwhile, became renowned for its innovative style in which heightened disjunction and the use of surprising and irregular metaphor appeared to respond to the postmodern condition, in which we daily encounter a confluence of incoherent phenomena. 1976’s ambitious long poem “The Alphabet Murders”, in which each new stanza opens with the proceeding letter of the alphabet, begins:

“After all we have left behind

this complex of thought begins

a new movement into musical form, much as

logic turns into mathematics and automatics

turn into moonlit driveways — ‘form at the edge

of hearing’

Tranter’s increasing formal experimentation, including audacious pastiches, mistranslations and reimaginings of other poetic works, seemed to dislocate the poet almost entirely from the “I” of the poem. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald upon the occasion of the publication of 2010’s Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter compared his poetry in the light of Buneul’s quote about the ideal film having no names in it, and for the screenwriter and director to be anonymous. “In the same way medieval cathedrals give you this intense emotional experience yet you have no idea who designed them or built them, films and poems could be like that too, in a way.” The opening lines to Tranter’s poem “Having Completed My Fortieth Year” seems to confirm this outlook “Although art is, in the end, anonymous, / turning into history once it’s left the body.”

In my favorite poems of Tranter’s, however, the “I” is very much located, grounded in both a temporal and geographical space, and more often than not that space is the city of Sydney. In his verse novel The Floor of Heaven, Sydney appears almost as a character, while in “In Praise of Sandstone,” which takes the end words of Auden’s famous poem “In Praise of Limestone” and places them in a Sydney landscape, we get a portrait of the city’s topography, a short history of it’s convict past and a study of a typical workday.  “Ode to Col Joye” takes its setting as a shower in Sydney, with the speaker trying to pin down which poet the day he has woken to most represents. Is it a John Forbes day? a Ken Bolton day? a John Ashbery day?

                                         it’s the kind of day

where I notice that my Renault—

      a beat-up Renault; how

          Sydney, and how French!—

has the name RENAULT on its side in chrome letters—

how metonymic

                             that the name of the object is seen as

being part of the object to which it refers

This is the Sydney I grew up in—cosmopolitan, sardonic, colorful, confident, playful— the same features that we most often encounter in Tranter’s poetry, which, like “Ode to Col Joye”, begins in Sydney and spirals across Australia and the world, continually delighting those who happen upon it.

-- Thomas Moody

See also this obit: https://jacket2.org/commentary/remembering-john-tranter

An inspired editor, John was always able to get me to write something for Jacket -- or to find a place for something wonderful that came my way. A wonderful writer, he was, until the day of his death, Australia's leading poet.-- DL

Laurence Goldstein, Editor and Poet, 1/5/1943 - 4/16/2023, Ann Arbor

On April 16th we lost Larry Goldstein, longtime editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review (32 years!), an inspired anthologist, editor, poet, and professor at the University of Michigan. I have often said that the editors of literary magazines, underpaid and overworked, are among the unsung heroes of literature. Larry was certainly in that category.  He would have an idea -- for a special issue of the magazine, or for a book -- and he had the knack of getting a writer to drop all else and get to work on it. I speak from experience. Larry's interests were many; his knowledge of poetry was matched only by his devotion to Los Angeles and classic Hollywood movies. Richard Howard selected Larry's poem "Permissive Entry: A Sermon on Fame" for The Best American Poetry 1995.

When Larry contemplated stepping down from MQR, the university established a Laurence Goldstein Prize for the best poem published ion the magazine that year. Asked about the editor for whom the prize was named, one winner, said, "what makes it great is that Larry's just about the best there is." 

Here is my favorite sentence from the official obit: <<< An essay on the mystery word "Rosebud" in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and another on poets' fascination with Marilyn Monroe, both published recently, testify to Larry's abiding interest in films.
-- DL

from the Ann Arbor News

<<<
Laurence Alan Goldstein died on Sunday, April 16, in Ann Arbor with his loving wife Nancy and sons Andrew and Jonathan at his side. The cause of death was an overwhelming bacterial infection. Born in Los Angeles Larry graduated from UCLA, later earning a PhD from Brown University. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan's department of English Language and Literature in 1970 and retired as Professor Emeritus in 2016.

Beginning his career at Michigan as a specialist in the field of British Romanticism, Larry moved on to offer such courses as Modern Poetry and Contemporary Poetry, and undergraduate and graduate seminars in a variety of specialized topics such as William Faulkner's fiction, the literature of Detroit, the literature of Los Angeles, Hollywood and Visual Culture, and the literature of the city. Graduate students whom he mentored--as well as undergraduates--kept in touch over the years from their careers and lives around the world, writing to let him know that they remembered his generous gifts of teaching.

As a poet and literary critic and historian, he wrote, edited or co-edited sixteen books and published dozens of essays and book and film reviews. At UCLA, Larry was arts editor for the Daily Bruin, seeking out interviews with local movie industry notables such as director Billy Wilder and Stan Laurel (Laurel and Hardy). As an undergraduate, and later in his career, he wrote several book reviews and op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times, and later for The New York Times.

At Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, he founded a poetry magazine and wrote book and film reviews for The Providence Journal. In addition to teaching and writing at the University of Michigan, Larry delighted in his secondary position: "My 32 years as editor of the University's flagship scholarly and creative arts journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, is arguably the defining accomplishment of my tenure at the University of Michigan. I changed it from a literary magazine to an interdisciplinary journal reflecting the diversity of subjects studied at the university. . . . attracting notable U of M talent as well as Nobel Prize winners and renowned writers such as Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe and others. I am especially pleased to have introduced many now-eminent authors to the reading public."

Larry especially loved baseball but also was a Go Blue football fan, always wearing his lucky MICHIGAN shirt to watch the games on TV, thrusting a fist in the air to the cheers from the Big House, quite audible in his comfy OWS home.

Memorial tributes may be made to Hospice of Lenawee www.hospiceoflenawee.org, Alzheimer's Association, or to the Michigan Quarterly Review. Muehlig Funeral Chapel, Ann Arbor muehligannarbor.com
>>>

Published by Ann Arbor News from Apr. 19 to Apr. 23, 2023.

In Praise of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

Word has just reached us that John Tranter, the brilliant poet and editor, died on April 21, just eight days shy of his 80th birthday. We will be running a tribute to John Tranter and posting some of his poems in the coming days. For now, let us let Thomas Moody introduce American readers to Australia's leading poet and literary editor. Part one of Moody's essay is below; click here for part II, which we posted on  September 1, 2021
 -- David Lehman

An Introduction to John Tranter [April 29, 1943 – April 21, 2023] (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

The difficulty in introducing John Tranter is knowing where to begin. Surely any attempts to elucidate his poetry would be reductive, and any measure of its influence fall embarrassingly short. Tranter is a major poet and in my estimate the major Australian poet of the second-half of the twentieth-century (though John Forbes might have something to say about that). His renown stretches far beyond our antipodal boundaries. As his good friend John Ashbery wrote in the introduction to Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter is an "international phenomenon".

In the course of his more than twenty collections, Tranter has seemed to live and die by the motto found in one of his most ambitious and accomplished poems, "Red Movie," that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious." Tranter's poetry always surprises and refuses to rest on its laurels—just as you think he's hit on a winning formula in one collection, he upends it in the next. Through his fifty years of writing he's employed a multitude of styles and techniques, but always present are his keen ear for the Australian vernacular, a frighteningly sharp intelligence, and a "larrikinism" that never lets his poetry take itself too seriously. 

 The poem I'd like to share today is not particularly representative of Tranter's oeuvre, though it does exhibit several qualities that we can find in many of his poems: his wit, a love of the movies, and his extraordinary ability to absorb the essence of another poet and transmute it into a contemporary Australian landscape (both geographical and emotional) to offer us something at once uncannily familiar and entirely original. "After Hölderlin" is a favorite of mine, and I suspect it may be a favorite of Tranter's too, as it serves as the opening poem to his new & selected, Urban Myths. I plan on sharing much more of Tranter's poetry over the coming months, so stay tuned.

After Hölderlin

When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
or the office routine. I dreamed
in the mottled shade of many a beer garden
among a kindness of bees and breezes
my lunch hour lengthening.

As the flowers plucked and set in the little bottle
on the table still seem to hanker for the sun,
nodding in the slightest draft, so I 
longed for a library loose with rare volumes
or a movie theatre's satisfying gloom
where a little moon followed the usherette
up and down the blue carpeted stairs.

You characters caught up in your emotions 
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.

I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn't let you live;
I felt for you when you were thrown from the car
again and again; when the pilot
thought he was lost and alone, 
I was speaking the language of the stars
above his tiny plane,
murmuring in the sleepy garden, growing up
among the complicated stories.
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and the shadow
in the arms of the gods.

Posted by Thomas Moody on August 04, 2021 at 10:45 AM in Australia | Permalink

Comments

Thank you, TM, for this column on the "international phenomenon" that is John Tranter. I love the poem -- perhaps the more so because, for me as for the two Johns referenced (Ashbery and Tranter), Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry is and has long been an inspiration. Looking forward, I am, to more Tranter -- and more Moody.

Posted by: David Lehman | August 05, 2021 at 12:24 AM

How good to be reminded of Tranter’s excellent poetry which doesn’t get seen much here in the US.

Posted by: Mark Pawlak | August 21, 2021 at 08:59 AM

From the archive; first posted  August 4, 2021

See also

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/an-introduction-to-john-tranter-part-1-by-thomas-moody-1.html

Willis Reed, Legendary Center of the World Champion N. Y. Knicks, RIP [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Basketball great Willis Reed spoke about his literacy project. David was eager to get his predictions for the upcoming Knicks season.

In 2003, then chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, invited David to join him in Washington for the annual Washington Book Festival, hosted by Laura Bush. It was a great event. Dana had even arranged for David's mom Anne to come along and for all of us to join him at the White House for the breakfast ceremony preceding the Festival. 

Just as the guests were taking their seats for Bush's opening remarks, David saw former Knicks great Willis Reed enter the room. He was impossible to miss, of course; at 6'10" he towered over just about everyone in the room, with the exception of former Detroit Pistons center Bob Lanier (6'11"), also in attendance. 

Reed was on hand to talk about his literacy project. 

I watched David from across the room (he was seated among the day's speakers; I was elsewhere, with Anne). He lit up when Reed took the podium. When the proceedings adjourned and guests made their way to the exits, David practically lept over seats with the finesse of a point-guard making a layup shot with two seconds on the clock. I've seen him focus on an objective, but this was masterly. 

He reached Reed and I snapped the photo, above. 

As it so happened, my office in New York City was at One Penn Plaza, across the street from Madison Square Garden. On a whim, I phoned the Knick's publicity department with the request that Reed sign the photo, which he graciously agreed to do. I've given David many gifts over the years, but I think this signed photo of the basketball great ranks among his favorites.

-- sdl

The moment no Knicks fan will ever forget: when Willis Reed hobbled onto the court in the deciding game of the 1970 championship series with the LA Lakers. When Reed came out, the crowd roared. Reed, injured, played well. The great unselfish Knicks of Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBuschere, Bill Bradley, and Dick Barnett, coached by Red Holtzman, won the game, the series, and the hearts of New Yorkers.

-- DL

Columbia To Host Richard Howard Tribute March 31st

<<< Columbia University will be holding a memorial for Richard Howard, the greatly beloved poet, teacher, editor, and mentor, and  on March 31, 2023, at Miller Theatre.  For those of you not familiar with the campus, the entrance to the auditorium is to the left of the gate to the university on Broadway at 116th St in New York City.  Colleagues and former students will read from Richard's writings.  The event starts at 7 pm, with a reception afterwards in Pulitzer Hall across College Walk from Dodge Hall.  I hope you can come.

David Alexander >>>

 

Note: Miller Theatre is asking that people who want to attend make a reservation.  Here is the official announcement with a link for reserving:

 

https://www.millertheatre.com/events/a-tribute-to-richard-howard

 

Richard picked the poems for The Best American Poetry1995.

 

It was wonderful to work with him.  -- DL

Charles Simic (1938-2023) [by David Lehman]

The saddest moments in my life as an editor occur when word reaches me that a guest editor in The Best American Poetry series has passed away. Charlie died some five months shy of what would have been his 85th birthday. Born in Belgrade in 1938, he had dreams and memories that he could draw upon from his early boyhood in battle-torn, Nazi-occupied Yugloslavia. In A Fly in the Soup, his absorbing memoir, Simic tells of growing up: “My family, like so many others, got to see the world for free, thanks to Hitler’s wars and Stalin’s takeover of East Europe.” Simic and his little friends played soldiers as the war went on: “A boy a little older than I had disappeared. It turned out that he had slipped out to watch the bombs fall. When the men brought him back, his mother started slapping him hard and yelling she’s going to kill him if he ever does that again. I was more frightened of her slaps than of the sound of the bombs.” When the Americans arrived in Belgrade, they took the Simic family to the barracks and gave them chewing gum, chocolate, bacon and eggs. 

Maybe the happiest moment in Charlie's life came when he and his family arrived in America in 1954.  Charlie and his brother watched a Dodgers-Giants game on television, ate burgers and fries, and ended in a jazz club (the Metropole): “I was all absorbed in the music. This was definitely better than any radio. It was heaven.” He has also written, “Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”

Charlie loved jazz and jazz clubs and barroom philosophy. He wrote brilliant, often brief poems that critics characterized as surreal and did highly innovative work with the prose poem as a form. When he won the Pulitzer Prize for a book of his prose poems, it marked a signal event in the history of that genre that Baudelaire invented and that the French (Rimbaud, Jacob, Michaux, Ponge, Char) established into a tradition.

When I worked with Charlie on The Best American Poetry, I remember the poems that knocked us out -- we were crazy about "Nostalgia" by Billy Collins, then a new voice, and we had poems by Lawrence Raab, Carolyn Kizer, Elizabeth Spires, Alice Fulton, Galway Kinnell, Charles Bernstein. After that year of close reading, when we got together for lunch or dinner, with Charlie's wife Helene joining us, we talked as much about jazz and popular songs as about poetry. Charlie loved the girl singers of the 1920s and he made me tapes of Lillian Roth ("Tell Me, Why Am I So Romantic?") and Bee Palmer ("Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone") and of great piano music that he recorded in bars. In the background you could hear someone shouting "hey Paulie" -- people at the bar holding their conversations, music or no; Charlie got a kick out of that. Wine, he knew his wines, and one of his favorite New York restaurants was Provence on MacDougal Street near where I lived. -- DLAt the launch reading of Best American Poetry 1992, organized by William Wadsworth for the Academy of American Poets. As I recall Jonathan Aaron, Agha Shahid Ali,  Lynda Hull, and Rosanna Warren read their poems from the anthology after I initiated the evening and Charlie introduced the book.

 

Above, left to right: Charles Simic, David Lehman, Rosanna Warren, Lloyd Schwartz (Boston, April 2013)

See also:

BAP 1992 launch reading
https://poets.org/text/archive-charles-simic-and-david-lehman

Photo Gallery, Lannan Foundation, March 14 2007
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lannan/albums/72157621824004165/

Podcast March 14, 2007
https://podcast.lannan.org/2007/03/19/charles-simic-with-david-lehman/

Yeats & Paul Violi

<< Last evening, when listening to Paul Violi's friends and colleagues and students and admirers read his poems, I thought of the last two lines of Yeats's "The Municipal Gallery Revisited,"  and recited them in my capacity as MC of the memorial. Here are the culminating lines of Yeats's multi-part poem. DL

You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends. 

William Butler Yeats >>

From the archive; first posted December 2, 2011

Doug Lang, 1941-2022 [by Terence Winch]

My very dear friend Doug Lang, brilliant poet and beloved teacher, passed away at around 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 22 Nov. 2022, in his apartment at Springvale Terrace, the assisted living building in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, where he had been a resident for the last five-plus years. His health had taken a turn for the worse in the past month or so, and his legendary resilience failed him this time around.

Doug Lang was born in the town of Swansea in Wales, part of the United Kingdom, on 11 April 1941. His first years on the planet were thus spent as WWII was raging. He had one sibling, his sister Synde, who was about four years younger than Doug. The two were very close, and Synde’s death in 2013 in England affected Doug deeply. The two were raised by their mother under the harshest and most difficult of circumstances. There was often little to eat and, during one particularly rough time, Doug had to miss school for several weeks for want of a pair of shoes.

Doug received a basic education in England, but one of the most remarkable aspects of his biography is the extent to which he educated himself. He was known for his voracious appetite for learning and for his nimble and penetrating intellect. He fell in love with books, movies, and music when he was a boy, and wound up becoming incredibly knowledgeable in these areas and others.

After marrying an American poet Andrea Wyatt in London, Doug settled in the U.S. in 1973. His appealing personality and genial temperament gained him a wide circle of friends, most of whom were deeply impressed by the extent of his knowledge of fiction, poetry, film, music (especially jazz and rock ‘n’ roll), and the visual arts. He had an encyclopedic mind and photographic memory.

When the Corcoran College of Art in DC was looking for a new writing teacher in 1976, Doug was a natural choice. He had taught at an art school on a Greek island in the late ‘60s and had a natural gift for teaching. The Corcoran was also looking for a practicing artist, and Doug had already published two novels by the early ’70s. He was known as a catalyst on the Washington poetry scene.
An accomplished poet himself, he also ran a nationally celebrated poetry reading series in DC at Folio Books in Dupont Circle, attracting many of the leading poets of the day, who were usually paired with a local poet.

The Corcoran hired him, and Doug stayed for the next 37 years, becoming the most loved and respected member of the Corcoran faculty. His colleagues and his thousands of former students felt a tremendous debt to Professor Lang for his prodigious ability as a teacher and his generosity of spirit in all his interactions. In the literary world, he was known as a poet of fierce linguistic energy and technical skill. To his friends, he is an irreplaceable man of wondrous talent. A new selected poems of Doug Lang’s, called In the Works, is slated for imminent publication by DC’s Edge Books.

Doug Lang is survived by his close personal friend Sandra Rottmann, several nieces, nephews, and grand nieces and nephews in the UK, and by his many devoted friends and fellow writers.

A memorial event, in conjunction with the publication of Doug’s new book, is planned for early in 2023.

I talked with Doug every day on the phone & visited him once a week. Even while struggling with short-term memory loss, he remained the best of company---wise, funny, deeply knowledgeable, unpretentious, and charismatic. It's a much more barren world with him not in it.

 

"Abecedary" [by Tom Disch]

Abecedary

A is an Apple, as everyone knows.
But B is a …. What do you suppose?
A Bible? A Barber? A Banquet? A Bank?
No, B is this Boat, the night that it sank.
C is its Captain, and D is its Dory,
While E – But first let me tell you a story.
There once was an Eagle exceedingly proud
Who thought it would fly, in the Form of a cloud —
Yes, E is for Eagle, and F is for Form,
And G is the Grass that got wet in the storm
When the cloud that the Egale unwisely became
Sprinkled our hero and all of his fame
Over ten acres of upland plateau.
So much for that story. Now H. Do you know?
H is the Hay that was made from the Grass,
And I’s the Idea of going to Mass,
Which is something that only a Catholic would do.
Jews go to Synagogue. J is a Jew.
K is for Kitchen as well as for Kiss,
While L is for all of the black Licorice
You can eat in an hour without feeling ill.
M is for Millipede, Millet, and Mill.
The first is an insect, the second a grain,
The third grinds the second: it’s hard to explain
Such a process to children who never have seen it —
So let’s go to the country right now! YEs, I mean it.
We’re leaving already, and N is the Night
We race through to reach it, while P is the Plight
Of the people (Remember?) who sailed in that Boat
That is still, by a miracle, somehow afloat!
(Oh dear, I’ve just nocied I’ve overlooked O:
O’s an Omission and really should go
In that hole – do you see it? – between N and P.
No? It’s not there now? Dear O, pardon me.)
Q is the Question of how far away
A person can travel in one single day,
And whether it’s worth it, or might it be better
To just stay at home and write someone a letter?
R’s are Relations, a regular swarm.
Now get out of the car – we’ve arrived at their farm!
S is the Sight of a Thanksgiving feast,
And T is the Turkey, which must weight at least
Thirty pounds. U is Utopia. V …
V simply Vanishes – where, we can’t see –
While W Waves from its Westernmost isle
And X lies exhausted, attempting to smile.
There are no letters left now but Y and then Z.
Y is for You, dear, and Z is for me.

from "Remembering Tom Disch" by Scott Edelman:

<<<
[In New York City, the editor] Alice K. Turner graciously hosted a memorial last night [October 18, 2008]  for the late Thomas M. Disch so that friends and family could gather to collectively remember him. The night of the 18th had been chosen because that was when the Disch clan, including his younger brothers Jeffrey and Gregory (twins five year's Tom's junior) and younger sister Nancy (ten year's Tom's junior) could arrange to be there, and I want to thank them and the rest of the family for allowing us in so that we could grieve and celebrate him as a group.

There were many familiar faces from science fiction there, such as Sheila Williams, John Crowley, Chip Delany, Ellen Datlow, Gregory Feeley, Jacob Weisman and others, but there were also people I had previously known only as names, and their presence was evidence that Tom's work mattered far outside the SF field.

So also there last night were people such as Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and David Lehman, editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Writer and translator Christopher Ecker, who is busy translating Tom's poetry into German, flew to the U.S. purely so he could honor Tom last night.
>>>

On John Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) [by Geoffrey Young]

It’s four a.m. on Labor Day 2017 and a voice on the BBC radio says as I lay in bed awake that John Ashbery died yesterday in Hudson, NY.  He turned ninety a month ago. A dreaded moment had finally come.  John’s career was  long and exemplary.  We’ll be pondering his works and admiring his diction for years to come.  As the darkness faded, I got dressed, made a cup of tea, fed the cats, and decided to drive over to Hudson to leave a scarlet dahlia on his front porch, along with a note for his mate, David Kermani.

No one was on the road, but a few golfers in South Egremont were just teeing up.  Nightmarish news dominated the radio.  Flooding in Houston, sabre-rattling in North Korea, the Sox losing to the Yankees. 

When I got to the house, there was a lone blue car parked in front, with New York state plates.  I walked up on the front porch of the large stone house, and found a place to the right of the front door for the old milk bottle filled with water and the one dahlia, and for the envelope with a note to David.  I stood back, and took a photograph of it.  Tiny, sitting there on the portal step, near the brown of the strong old doors, the flower was alone.  Perhaps David was as well, asleep upstairs? 

John, the times I was in his company, had always been friendly.  Sometimes it was after or before one of his readings, other times it was at a gallery or restaurant with friends.  He liked to throw back the first martini in two sips, or one, then smile a funny smile.  Asked once where his poetry came from, he answered, “Well, it’s just like television, there’s always something on.”  In 1987, invited to select the best poems found in magazines that year, John picked one of mine.  It was even in prose. Another time, at Bard College where he taught, I asked him what percentage of the time he starts a poem with a dream fragment, and he got nervous, didn’t answer, and said something to put me off the trail.

Decades ago, in Berkeley, John had agreed to do an afternoon reading at the studio of Helene Aylon.  Prior to the reading there were drinks, and John’s glass I noticed was straight Scotch.  When Robert Duncan and Michael Palmer and other poets came into the space in the middle of the afternoon, a half-drunk Ashbery, greeting Duncan, tried to put his tongue in Robert’s ear!  Eventually, we all got seated on rugs on the floor, and John read a poem or two, slurring badly.  A woman he knew was sitting next to him, and after those first few poems he handed the woman his book, and asked her to read the poems, then he lay his head down on the woman’s lap.  As she struggled to read, smiling some and stumbling some, John reached up and felt for a nipple! 

A “New Your School” occasion, I wrote to Bill Berkson in Bolinas the next day.  Bill had been in the audience that Berkeley afternoon, had witnessed the nuttiness.

Bad boy John liked to debauch from time to time, usually when David Kermani was out of town for a few days.  John would invite a friend to join him in Hudson for an extended drinking session.  Michael Gizzi, an hour away in Lenox, Mass, might get a call from John at any hour, asking if he’d be so kind as to buy some booze for the revelers, and to bring it over to Hudson.  Already drunk, Ashbery couldn’t risk going out shopping, or driving.   And Michael, no doubt fresh that very evening from an AA meeting, would say yes, though I’m sure he felt the twisted pang of the enabler.  When Michael got there with the Scotch and vodka and gin, John and his friend would still be in their pajamas, but very happy to see Michael.

At a luncheon in Boston once, John told the story of the time David had a psychotic breakdown in the Hudson house, and that John had had to call a hospital to have someone come solve the problem.  Two big guys arrived from a hospital, suppressed David, got him into a straight-jacket, and were about to haul him away, when John, struck by the good looks of one of the men--a handsome black man about thirty--started flirting with the man.  Suddenly, John didn’t want them to take David away!

The best reading I ever heard John give was after the publication of Planisphere in 2006.  Held at St Marks Church on the Bouwerie, in the sanctuary, the room was filled with fans and friends and ex-students and peers, and John, more animated than normal, read poems from the new book.  I turned to Eileen Myles, seated next to me, and said, as the warm applause died down at the end, “He’s still bonkers!”  And Eileen said, “No kidding!”

But the best thing I ever heard John say aloud, was the opening sentence of his introduction at the Dia Center for the Arts in Soho when he introduced James Schuyler.  Much anticipated (because Jimmy was known not to read), the reading was in winter, it was dark and cold on the street, but the line to get in went around the block.  Darragh Park and Jimmy arrived by cab and were ushered in.  Eventually we all trickled in, and found seats.  I sat with Ron Silliman, who just happened to be in town that night.   And John’s opening line, as he introduced the evening’s poet, was “I can’t remember a time that Jimmy Schuyler wasn’t my friend.”

Kenward Elmslie, 1929-2022 --- Poet, Lyricist, Publisher

What I want to know is:
When I'm dead and gone.
Who'll prop me up in the dawn? -- Kenward Elmslie

Born on April 27, 1929, in New York City into a distinguished family—his grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer—Kenward Gray Elmslie grew up in Colorado Springs, CO, attended St. Mark’s preparatory school, and then Harvard, receiving a BA in English in 1950.

In 1952 his passion for musical theater led to a romantic relationship with Broadway librettist John Latouche, who wrote “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Lazy Afternoon,” and a number of Broadway shows and operas. Latouche's vibrant New York City artistic salon was frequented by Truman Capote, Lena Horne, Jack Kerouac, Gore Vidal, Marlene Dietrich, Frank O’Hara, Lotte Lenya, and Duke Ellington.

Shortly after arriving in New York, Elmslie wrote a song (“Love-wise”) that Nat King Cole recorded.. Over the years Elmslie wrote librettos for musicals and operas with composers Ned Rorem, Jack Beeson, Thomas Pasatieri, Steven Taylor, and Claibe Richardson, which were performed by the NYC Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, Glimmerglass, York Theatre Co., on PBS, and at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre. 

In 1953 Elmslie and Latouche bought an 1840s farmhouse and surrounding property in Calais, VT. The two divided their time between New York City and Calais until Latouche’s death in 1956. Elmslie retained the property, spending increasing amounts of time there and finally becoming a resident of Vermont. Although for many years Elmslie maintained a low profile in the community, he opened his home to his many writer, actor, and artist friends, such as John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Richard Thomas, Ruth Ford, Harry Mathews, and Joe Brainard. In 1963 Brainard and Elmslie became not only romantic partners but also artistic collaborators. Brainard spent months every year with Elmslie in Calais, painting and writing. It was there that he wrote his classic, I Remember, while Elmslie and Richardson worked on what has become a cult favorite Broadway show, The Grass Harp.

It was also in Vermont that Elmslie founded Z Press, a nonprofit literary publishing company whose authors included Ashbery, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, and others associated with the New York School of Poetry. When the Calais post office was in danger of being closed due to a low cash flow, Elmslie rescued it by funneling all Z Press business through it. Elmslie also organized a series of local poetry, film, and musical events. Early on in Calais he had become friends with culinary expert and writer Louise Andrews Kent, perhaps better known as Mrs. Appleyard, but he was also very close to local people who worked for him, notably the loyal handymen Ralph Weeks and Harold Clough, who in turn found him to be a remarkably cordial, entertaining, and slightly eccentric fellow. In the 1970s, the Town of Calais surprised him by renaming the dirt road he lived on: Elmslie Road.

Elmslie published ten books of poetry, including Motor Disturbance (Frank O’Hara Award, Columbia University Press) and Routine Disruptions: Selected Poems and Lyrics 1960-1998, and gave numerous poetry readings and performances around the country. Those who saw his funny and moving performance—he had a very fine singing voice—at the St. Johnsbury Atheneaum have never forgotten it. He also published a novel, The Orchid Stories (Doubleday/Paris Review) and saw his play City Junket performed by New York’s Eye and Ear Theatre, with sets by Red Grooms. Two of Elmslie's most memorable lyrics are "They" and "Change Your Name to Woolworth," which he performed for an admiring audience at Hamilton College in Fall 1978.

As a Pulitzer heir, Elmslie was able to make many charitable gifts to needy writers, poetry organizations, and civil rights groups, as well as to the Town of Calais and the Vermont Land Trust. In doing so, he always maintained a strict anonymity. He was a shy man. He owned a house in Greenwich Village and thre great parties there in the 1970s and 80s.

In his later years Elmslie’s health declined, due to dementia, and on June 29, 2022, he died peacefully of natural causes. He is survived by his half-sister Alexandra Whitelock of Calais, VT, nephew William Weir of Marathon, FL, nephew Gordon Weir of Cambridge MA, and niece Vivien Russe, of South Portland, ME. His ashes will be scattered in Vermont, as he wished.

Adapted from VTDigger . See, too, W. C. Bamberger's moving obituary in Rain Taxi. From gunslinger Neil Genzlinger's obit in the New York Times:

<<< In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, [Elmslioe] mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with [Andy] Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.

The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.

In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. >>>

IM Vin Scully (1927-2022) Laureate of Play-by-Play Poetry [by David Lehman]

When Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history – when, hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one pitch away from losing the game, and with one swing Gibson reversed the team’s fortunes – play-by-play man Jack Buck said “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Beautiful: a totally colloquial line of iambic tetrameter. Vin Scully, describing the same at-bat, let a few seconds of silence pass before saying, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."

I am going from memory and I may have a word or two wrong there, but the point of this piece is an appreciation of play-by-play announcers and the memorable things they say. This (2016) is Vin Scully’s last year as the voice of the Dodgers, and I dedicate these musings to him, the red-headed gentleman who invites viewers to pull up a chair and join him in Dodger Stadium.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

Remembering Tom Disch, February 2, 1940 – July 4, 2008 [by Dana Gioia]

Tom Disch, who died on this day in 2008, is pictured here with his terrific computer game "Amnesia," a participatory novel in which the player awakes naked in a hotel room without any clues as to who he or she is. From the Wikipedia entry on Tom Disch: << David Lehman singled out "Amnesia" for praise in his essay "You Are What You Read" in Newsweek (January 12, 1987). In an interview published in the Southwest Review (edited by Willard Spiegelman), Lehman asked Disch about the origin of "Amnesia." "Please don't say 'I forget'," Lehman said. "It's true," Disch replied. "I forget my own life all the time, so amnesia was a natural subject for me." >> Here is Dana Gioia's remembrance of Tom:

<<<
Tom Disch was one of the few people I’ve ever met whom I considered a genius. Not that genius did him much good. He had a superabundance of invention, an often startling clarity of perception, and a preternaturally quick mastery of literary technique. At the same time he had little ability to handle the ordinary challenges of daily life. If he possessed the fertile imagination of a brilliant child, he also had a child’s social awkwardness and vulnerability. A connoisseur of self-loathing, he never understood how much his friends adored him. He was enormously good company—endlessly funny, intelligent, and genuinely sweet—except when he fell into a rage or depression. He could be difficult but he was never, never dull.

Their weird turns of invention, darkness of vision, and rough humor go far beyond the conventions of the genres in which he worked.The originality of his novels beggars description. While each book shares a common sensibility, these bizarre and compelling volumes not only differ from one another; they are unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Their weird turns of invention, darkness of vision, and rough humor go far beyond the conventions of the genres in which he worked. Disch loved to outrage respectable opinion—not just middle-class opinion, the easy target of most writers. He also mocked proper liberal opinion and habitually violated even the most flexible limits of good taste. This eagerness to outrage would have been tiresome if he had not been so consistently funny and insightful.

Disch was never popular among science fiction, fantasy or horror readers. His admirers were mostly fellow writers. And despite Disch’s remarkable literary achievements, the fans were right. They knew he wasn’t writing for them. The literary mode of genre fiction is romance—the narrative tradition of wish-fulfillment featuring exciting adventure, idealized characters, and satisfactory closure. Disch upended the conventions of fantasy and science fiction by creating narratives that stubbornly refused to proceed in the proper directions. His heroes almost inevitably lose, mostly after humiliating defeats. Love ends in betrayal and abandonment. Villainy or mere incompetence triumphs. Moral authority proves useless or hypocritical. Disch’s mode was not romance but bitter satire. He liked to amuse his audience, but he took even greater pleasure in frustrating them.

Disch’s central importance in science fiction and fantasy was his determination to transform the imaginative possibilities of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Each of his novels pushed the boundaries of the field in a new way. (Had he constantly pushed the boundaries in the same way, as Philip K. Dick did, Disch might have eventually developed a cult following.) His best novels—On Wings of Song, 334, The Businessman: A Tale of Terror, and Camp Concentration—occupy a unique place in the canons of American science fiction and fantasy as disturbing and unruly counter-classics. The best of his short stories are perhaps finer still, though they await a judicious editor. The Brave Little Toaster is an utter joy—unlike the awful Disney adaptation. There was also another side of Disch’s prodigious talents—his poetry. He wrote so prolifically that his verse also awaits a skilled editor, but his best poems are not merely good but truly distinguished. Had he never written a page of science fiction, he would have a claim to posterity on his poetry alone.

I hope that in some alternative universe, a slimmer, happier Tom Disch sits in his beach house with walls lined by awards and a stack of royalty checks on his desk. It seems entirely possible. Tom had enough talent to fill several dimensions.
>>>

from https://danagioia.com/essays/reviews-and-authors-notes/remembering-tom-disch/

See, too, https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/04/the-businessman-the-statesman-and-the-poet.html

Angell of the Basepaths Fondly Remembered [by David Lehman]

From an encyclopedia article on Roger Angell: << In a Newsweek article titled "Angell of the Base Paths," David Lehman made note of what he called Angell's "poetic resonance" and quoted Angell: "If I was influenced by anyone, I guess it was by my stepfather, E. B. White…. He suffered writing but made it look easy. >>

What prompted the question that provoked the quote? It was January 1988 and Roger had a new book coming . The Newsweek editors much preferred a fetaure article to a regular book review, and I pitched the idea of  going to Arizona and spending time with Roger (and some friends of his) during Spring Training. We watched a couple of games and dined with Roger and former Giants manager Bill Rigney who remembered every pitch of the ninth inning of the third game of the 1951 playoffs between the Giants of New York and the Dodgers of Brooklyn. "It was my life," he explained.

I asked Roger whether he thought anyone would surpass another Roger's record of 61 home runs. "If anyone can do it," he said in Scottsdale, "it's Mark McGwire with that short sweet swing of his." Roger introduced me to Bart Giamatti, then president of the National League. Of the barrel-chested former president of Yale, Roger told me "Bart will be our next commissioner. . .if he doesn't drop dead of a heart attack." Bart became commissioner and, alas, his fate was as Roger forecasted. The piece in Newsweek ran under the heading "Angell of the Basepaths."

In a  2017 piece on Red Smith, I asked readers to "consider these sentences from his piece about the 1947 World Series game in which the Dodgers' Cookie Lavagetto ruined the Yankees' Floyd Bevens's no-hit bid with a bottom-of-the-ninth game-winning two-out double. 'In the third [inning] Johnny Lindell caught Jackie Robinson's foul fly like Doc Blanchard hitting the Notre Dame line and came to his feet unbruised. In the fourth Joe DiMaggio caught Gene Hermanski's monstrous drive like a well-fed banquet guest picking his teeth.' In the same game, Tommy Henrich of the Yankees took a hit away from Hermanski: 'Henrich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen feet into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker. When he came down he had the ball.'"

Roger wrote me a letter -- always a big event -- saying that Red Smith "was a hero of mine, long ago, because he always made it clear that it was OK for sports fans be smart and educated enough to own an extended vocabulary. and also to appreciate and, above all, enjoy sports. To be like him, that is.  He was serious about this but never took himself seriously.  He was also (by the way) a heavy drinker and often filed copy with seriously shaking hands.

"My only beef about your review is that you omitted Red's weird ending in that column about that Bevans-Lavagetto near no-hitter: a line saying  that the unhappiest man in North America when the tilt ended was a sportswriter there with a broken "v" on his typewriter, which made it it impossible for him to write either of those names.  This was Red himself---he told me later that the "v" snapped off along about the fifth inning and flew like an escaping sparrow out of his Smith-Corona and out of sight over the lip of the pressbox.

"Thanks for bringing this all back.  I've got the Okrent collection and now I'll actually read it."

Alexey Tsvetkov: In Memoriam [by Andrey Gritsman]

“I am here together with myself and alone”

The great Russian poet Alexey Tsvetkov just passed away (February 1947- May 12, 2022).

He is a world-class poet, a world poet who happened to write in Russian.

Tsvetkov created his own poetic language, unrepeatable, addictive. Once started, a poem or a book could not be put down. One read to the end possessed by its magic. His incredible play, not of words, but of thoughts and images, bewitched the reader, as did his humor.

Alexey told us: whenever I write, I always write about death. The poet puts what’s created along with what is unsayable into metaphorical form. That is the power of poetry by Tsvetkov: he always writes about what is most important, what is deepest and darkest, presented metaphorically with an amazing mastery of words and meanings. His style of recital  I would characterize as toreutic, precise, cadential, and, on the other hand, paradoxically close to a natural speech, personal verbal communication.

Born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, formerly the Austro-Hungarian empire, Tsvetkov was educated in Odessa and Moscow. In Moscow together with other famous poets (Soprovsky, Gandlevsky, Kenzheev) he founded legendary underground poetry group Moscow Time. He emigrated to USA in 1975 after his arrest in Moscow and forced move to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya. He was awarded PhD degree in Slavic Studies from University of Michigan. 

Tsvetkov spent many years in Europe working as a journalist for the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (Munich and Prague, 1989-2004). He anchored the RFE/RL Russian Service programs The Seventh Continent and The Atlantic Diary.  He lived his last years in New York City among his poet friends. Supporting himself as a freelance journalist and essayist, he produced a large body of original, unique and very popular poetry. He read his poems at the Cornelia Street Café, Russian Samovar, Columbia University and other venues. In 2018 he moved to Israel, where he died.

Tsvetkov was an individual of very broad erudition, rough on the surface, very kind, with stunning sharp sense of humor. His poems in English are most unusual:  cadential, almost syllabo-tonic, very tight. But it looked very natural - the same poet, writing in a different language.

He was the author of ten books of poetry and translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His heritage will be studied and it will take a long time to look into layers of Tsvetkov’s art and thought.

Alexey Tsvetkov

the quiet ones

in a recurring dream i find myself
stuck in a tiny town a green and neat
affair the locals scarce and studiously silent
for the most part avoid me and stay indoors
although i dwell among them i assume
myself to be a thing apart the town
is strangely shorn of outskirts there's a river
flowing from north to south and the main street
cutting across with a bridge in the middle
yet both are terminated in oblivion

beset by this conundrum i've come up
with a hypothesis perhaps the locals
are candidates to be born on earth that never
made up their minds about the matter shaped
in human form already but afraid
to take the plunge hedging their bets and this
is what the actual limbo is like the river
forever runs on the road likewise but both
resolve themselves into the void the locals
would find it pointless to wake up their green
and tidy town remains the same no matter
whichever side of the retina it's on
the quiet ones within their silent walls
what do they want of us they share no subject
with us to serve them as a starting point
for striking up a palaver

it looks
like a half-way house perhaps a railway station
but with the waiting crowd resigned to the tracks
having been dismantled so that no train will ever
stop here they look alive but never having
been actually exiled to our vale of grief
there is no way for them to share our joy
the only thing they envy us in earnest
is death denied to the unborn it is
a mystery for them and a temptation
and i remaining stubbornly asleep
fall into a confusion like a rabbit
teasing a python on the eve of being
consumed by the above and peeking under
death's skirts then part of me awakens i
recall the other's name but hush it up

 

Andrey Gritsman

In Memory of Alexey Tsvetkov

What can be said about unsayable?
Poet departs with all his belongings.
To say nothing: it is unbearable.
On tree of life - invisible markings.

His airborne light verbs, evasive,
Escapable, straight and relentless.
Who knows what one is capable
Of, while alive and restless.

What is left now: only new language
Speaking in tongues, and no sound.
He rests in peace, his last message
Only by those can be found

Only by those, who departed
Crossing the line into darkness
Keeping belongings in heart and
Calling him: the answer is silence.

"B-Flat Elegy" [by Stanley Moss]

Stanley tells us he wrote this poem as an elegy for Richard Howard. "The poem is not a home run, it's a bunt, and I'm running as fast as I can to first base."

B-Flat Elegy

Three cheers and chairs for Richard who died,
the cause was complications of dementia,
Finders keepers, losers weepers,
along the Seine, the Thames, the Sligo and Hudson.
God knows why it makes a poet friend recall
a kind, contrary Irish lady, Bridget Boland, 
film writer, novelist, and gardener,
my close, close, close friend
I never slept with,
my devout Roman Catholic friend
lost her faith, couldn’t bear to hear music
for some reason hidden from her.

Incidentally I cheer
for a graduate student librarian,
Willa, whose mother is a horticulturist.
Her daughter can’t stand or abide flowers, 
ugly roses, tulips, or violets.
I bet God loves Mr. Auden
who received a letter from his mother
after she died, he could not read,
it would have broken his heart forever.

Listening to Mozart and Bach, I think about
a lady who lost her father, husband, and children
at Dachau. She made out okay, but fell down,
got torn apart when she heard music.
I refuse to defend myself.
Bridget, my Irish lady born in London,
and the death camp lady
were somehow sisters. It’s strange.
Cheer if it pleases you, cheer
for the joy of not remembering your name.
Notre-Dame is on fire, in Madrid the Gran Via
snakes to the Palace Hotel.

Unkempt hair
almost rhymes with dementia.
In the Ukraine a loudspeaker tells the static news:
a boy, six years old, watched his mother raped
for two days by Russian troops.
The six year old son’s hair turned gray.
I hide feelings from myself
my inappropriate, demented preoccupations,
I mourn for a dozen eggs,  Richard, and Bridget.

-- Stanley Moss. Photo credit: Bill Hayward.