The Best American Poetry

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.

Sometimes the humor of play-by-play announcers is wonderful if unintentional. Michael Kay, the Yankees’ TV announcer, remarked that some pitcher had a zaftig ERA.” The color man, I forget who it was, a former player, David Cone maybe, looked blank. “What,” Kay said. “You don’t know zaftig?” The other guy said sheepishly that he may heard the word “in English class.”

The Mets at the moment have an outstanding trio calling their games on television: Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling. The versatile Howie Rose and Josh Lewin handle the radio. Columbia graduate Cohen (a government major) is like a one-man encyclopedia of Mets’ history. Here is his description of one of the greatest catches in Mets’ history, the catch made by Endy Chavez in the National League Championship Series in 2006, which the Mets ultimately lost to St. Louis:

 “Edmonds at first and one out, and Pérez deals. Fastball hit in the air to left field, that's deep, back goes Chávez, back near the wall, leaping, and....he made the catch!!  He took a home run away from Rolen! Trying to get back to first is Edmonds... he's doubled off! And the inning is over! Endy Chávez saves the day! He reached up high over the left field wall, right in front of the visitors' bullpen, and pulled back a two run homer! He went to the apex of his leap, and caught it in the webbing of his glove, with his elbow up above the fence. A miraculous play by Endy Chávez, and then Edmonds is doubled off first, and Oliver Perez escapes the 6th inning. The play of the year, the play maybe of the franchise history, for Endy Chávez. The inning is over.”

I savor "He went to the apex of his leap" followed by a sterling example of iambic pentameter: "and caught it in the webbing of his glove,"

All announcers have their signature phrases. When the Mets’ win, Howie Rose says, “Put it in the books.” The late Bob Murphy -- who could radiate enthusiasm when, in the September of a last-place season, the Mets turned an ordinary 6-4-3 double play -- would say, after every Mets’ victory, that he’d be back “with the happy recap” after the commercial break. At game’s end, Cohen says “and the ballgame is over,” accenting the “o” in “over.” Cohen’s home run call is “it’s outta here!”

The classic home run call is Mel Allen’s when with a straw hat and a smile he covered the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Berra, and Ford. When Mickey launched one, Mel would follow the course of the ball and conclude “it’s going. . going. . .gone.” I cannot leave unmentioned Russ Hodges’ immortal call of Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca in the 1951 playoffs. “The Giants win the pennant!” he exclaimed and repeated the sentence four times.

What prompted this post was my dissatisfaction with the national announcers on TV and the whole strategy of continual chatter interrupted by graphs, statistics, interviews, close-ups of fans in the stands. I hate such current catch phrases as "are you kidding me!" or "do you believe it!" I hate statcast and "redemption" and other artificial sweeteners. Red Barber, who was Vin Scully’s mentor, advised him not to root openly for the home team and to keep to facts. Radio announcers have no choice but to concentrate on each play rather than on marginal elements. Often I turn off the sound and listen to a radio feed of the visiting team's play-by-play guys.

from the archive; first posted October 15, 2018

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 Peter Ferry": Lake Forest High School Pays Tribute to a Beloved Teacher and Author

<<<
“Remembering Peter Ferry: Author, teacher created lifelong relationships”
Kallista Schneiderman, Lake Forest High School Editor
September 26, 2024

                                                                                       photo: Peter Mundell Ferry, courtesy of Dignity Memorial

Mr. Peter Ferry, award-winning author of the novels "Travel Writing" and Old Heart," a beloved former English teacher of 27 years, passed away on Sept. 17. Colleagues, students, and friends remember his inspiring spirit and his abstract approach to teaching and living in the LFHS community that meant so much to him. 

Ferry died after a 16-month battle with Merkel Cell cancer. He survived by his wife, Carolyn, and his children, Lizzie and Griffin.

In his years at LFHS, Ferry impacted many lives, including best selling author and LFHS alumnus Dave Eggers, who had a close relationship with Ferry. Eggers is known for his many books, including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Circle; he also founded McSweeny’s, a popular comedic literary website. 

During his time at LFHS, Eggers says he was greatly influenced by Ferry’s teaching, in part because Ferry understood Eggers. Read more here
>>>

Click here for Peter Ferry's account of how he and David Lehman struck up an enduring friendship in 1968.

RIP Stanley Moss (1925-2024)

On his 97th birthday, I wrote "97 Reasons to Celebrate Stanley Moss on June 21, 2022"

Because you stand still long enough to gather the finest moss.
Because you stand.
​Because you roll.
Because you rolled 197 topping​ all competitors at Neptune Lanes.
Because you're Stan the Man.
Because we had lunch at Lupa on Thompson just off Houston.
Because you know Irwin Shaw and forgot to tell him.
Because you are a bronze satyr.
Because of Wystan.
Because of César Vallejo
Because one Stanley deserves another
Because if you're Stanley I'm a living stone
Because of Kunitz and Moss
Because the angel was wrong but angelic
Because it's better to be angelic than right
Because when you were 82 it was fifteen years ago. Just think of it.
Because of European painting.
Because of Rome and Barcelona.
Because there are ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall.
Because I'm just getting started.
Because God breaketh not all men's hearts alike.
Because I believe in God.
Because 81% of Americans believe in god.
Because of what happens if you put "only" before "81%" in that sentence.
Because I capitalize the God I believe in.
Because of the history of color.
Because of the intelligence of clouds.
Because you speaketh the truth.
Because of your stance, Stan.
Because of Yale and the Navy.
Because very few poets were born during the summer solstice.
Because your ideal age is 32.
Because I could devote 65 more lines to celebrate your birthday.

The Germini collection: born today, May 27, Henry Kissinger (1923-2023)

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1973/kissinger/facts/

I wonder who's Kissinger now. . .

Herman Wouk was born today: another great Gemini (May 27, 1915)

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/17/468790231/herman-wouk-the-jackie-robinson-of-jewish-american-fiction-dies-at-103

https://navylog.navymemorial.org/wouk-herman

Tracing Dreams [by Lera Auerbach]

Last night, we said goodbye to my father. It felt unnatural to see him in the coffin, he who was always so full of vitality, humor, and brilliance. To honor my mother's wishes, the casket was opened so she could see him for the last time. To protect her fragile state, only the closest members of the family were present. The silence hung in the dimly lit room. Groomed and dressed in all white, my father looked like a stranger, someone I never knew—a wax figure instead of a real man. The strangeness permeated the room, turning everyone attending into shadows. I was an observer, and some part of me was still observing that observer and on and on through a mirror labyrinth of reflections, removing me even further from reality until I doubted whether any of it was real. I caught myself wishing to call my father on his phone and tell him what a strange joke he played on us by dying, only to realize that my call would remain unanswered.

During the last year, my father went from 210 pounds to a mere 110 pounds. He lost all his fat and muscles, becoming a living skeleton. He had many friends but avoided seeing them towards the end of his life—he did not want them to remember him like this. Lev was a proud and stubborn man. He was strong, courageous, and independent, and that's how he wished to remain in the memories of those who knew him.

Last week, I went for a solitary walk in Glasgow. It was drizzling, and the city looked gloomy and ghostly, with its streets covered in mist. I took a photo of the winding, empty road devoid of colors. It resonated with how I felt: a lonely path stretching into the unknown, full of reflections and shadows – abandonedly sad but also, somehow, hauntingly beautiful. I was thinking about my future senza Papa.

A few nights before he died, I had a nightmare. I was angry at my father in my dream because I knew he had let go of his attachments and was ready to depart. "You might be ready for this, but I am not," I screamed in despair, and my screaming woke me up. I fought the urge to call him right away. I was in Germany; he was in New York. I did not want to wake him up. I called him later that day. To my relief, he sounded cheerful. He had just returned home from the hospital. He asked me in detail about my upcoming concerts. He did not sound like a person who was ready to let go of life. I felt comforted and reassured, forgetting that even in my dream, it was I who was not ready for what was inevitably coming, while he had already accepted it and was awaiting this new adventure.

How he loved adventures! His favorite time was traveling. He felt best driving to some unknown, exciting destination. And now his greatest adventure was very near, and he no longer wished to resist its pull. I already knew he was terminally ill, but I was still harboring some stubborn hopes for a miracle. I knew it was selfish of me, but I couldn't help it. Just last month, he jokingly promised me to make it to his birthday. I was upset when he said it—since his birthday was only a few weeks away. We were making plans for the summer. I wanted him to think long-term, to believe he had a future, and to look forward to something. I still believed in the power of "we."

And now I was alone, walking on the empty road in Glasgow while my father was dead in New York. I could do nothing to change it. I knew—beyond any doubt—that he was in a good place, no longer suffering, that it was only his emaciated body, nothing more than a shell, what was left in New York, and that he was everywhere and in everything, partaking in the eternal dance of life everlasting. I felt joy for him and from him. Yet I also realized that he had been a constant in my life, a resounding tone of love and reassurance. As long as I had a father, I was still a little girl, a child discovering the world's wonders, knowing there was always someone to catch me if I fell.

My father taught me to be courageous. He said courage is not the absence of fear but the resolve not to let fear stop you from doing the right thing. He taught me to swim in cold rivers, ski down mountains, and jump from ski ramps. When I was four, he enrolled me in ice skating school. An hour later, I complained that they had only taught us how to fall. He told me, "To learn how to fall is an art in itself. Who knows, maybe it was your most important lesson. If you learn how to fall, nothing can harm you. If you learn how to fall, you can be fearless."

My father, a child of the war, born in the horrific year of 1937 when his own father (my grandfather Isaac) was sent to the Gulag, was a kind man who deeply believed in the goodness of people. He always chose to see the best in them, even when they failed him. Papa instilled in his children the importance of generosity, not through words but by being generous in his actions. Lev never complained, even in the harshest times. He was a natural leader, leading not by force but with kindness and by example. He was stubborn and, at times, impossible.

My father was the first reader of all my writings in Russian, both poetry and prose. His knowledge of the language was impeccable. He loved literature and was talented at drawing, blending analytical and artistic perspectives. We spent two and a half years living together in Florida during the pandemic. For the first time since I left Russia at 17, I spent much time with my parents, rediscovering them as people. I wrote a book about that strange time when I experienced their aging closely while reliving memories of my childhood with them. This book is "200 Glances Towards Sunset." I knew the sunset was just around the corner and treasured every moment of its fragile beauty. I did not want to publish it while my father was alive, but perhaps the time for that is nearing.

My father was a quiet anchor in my life, with his never-ending confidence in me. He taught me to play chess and helped me solve math problems. He believed in me even when I did not believe in myself. He encouraged me to fly high and take risks.

How much of my strength was just his projection? Was I strong because he believed me to be strong? Was I strong because I wanted him to see me strong? Was I ever strong? I don't know.

My father was not a saint, but I think he was at peace with his choices and did not have too many regrets. He was proud of his professional accomplishments, his children, and his grandchildren. He loved dogs and nature and traveled a lot. He had a remarkably interesting life.

I left Russia at the age of 17, and it took me ten years to bring my parents to New York. They missed much of my life from ages 17 to 27. That's why it was incredibly meaningful to have them in the audience whenever I performed. Four weeks before his death, my father attended the last performance he would ever see—despite significant health challenges, he traveled to Boston to see me conduct the world premiere of my String Symphony No.2 “Tenebrae lucis.” Was the title of the symphony, translated as The Darkness of Light (referring to the approaching night), a mere coincidence? Before the performance, I dedicated this concert to my parents. The audience gave them a long applause, and my father was deeply moved. I knew it would be the last concert he would attend, but I did not expect his final days to arrive so soon.

"Old age is such a strange thing to happen to a little boy." The little boy was still in him until the end. He would joke about his illness as if it were happening to someone else. His body was failing him, but not his sense of humor or his love. Those who love us never leave us, at least not entirely. At least, it is what I choose to believe. After all, where does the love go when the body is gone? It is energy, and energy can't just disappear.

The road is turning, and I do not know what awaits me. Whatever it is, I accept it. After all, fighting the change only makes it more difficult. You can't fight an ocean's wave, but you can ride it, trusting it will lead you where you need to go and trusting your strength to get there intact.

In many ways, my father remains a mystery. I will keep tracing his contours through my memories. At some point, I made a long list of uneasy questions I wished to ask my parents. But even as I was preparing this list, I realized that I could never ask many of these questions because I would hurt my parents by doing so. Questions are more important than answers; not all questions need to be answered. To understand someone’s life would take another whole life. True understanding requires compassion, and compassion means some things should never be asked. I will never fully know my father. But I will keep finding and rediscovering him, and by doing so, I will keep rediscovering myself.

 

The Map of His Dreams

My father never asks for directions.
Even when he’s lost – he looks quite confident.
He spends long hours drawing maps.
(If it’s not on the map – its existence is doubtful.)

My mother asks everyone for directions,
even when she knows where she is going,
even when she is near her home.
She is like a child waiting to be found.

My father likes the smell of his old car,
its obedient noises, familiar caprices.
He feels that only in the driver’s seat
he’s still in control, while all else is slipping.

My mother goes to sleep early,
she’ll sleep soundly until the morning.
He comes in quietly, fixes her blanket,
sits in the armchair, a book on his lap,
thinking of driving to an unknown sight
he is dozing off, his mouth open,
his nose sharpened as if growing into a shadow.

(In his sleep, he’s drawing the map of his dreams.)

The Day Doris Day Said Good Night [by David Lehman]

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

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

Doris gets her own day in my Playlist:

1 / 4 / 18

Doris Day is a great screen name because
of Oscar Levant’s witticism  (he knew Doris Day
“before she was a virgin”) but mostly because
of the voice of Doris at break of day or when
driving on Rte 17 and listening to  her sing
“Sentimental Journey” with Les Brown (“and
his band of renown”) and “Dream a Little Dream
of Me” or “Someone Like You,” “A Hundred Years
from Today,” or “Love Me or Leave Me,”
the face cherubic, the flip side of Sinatra’s
brooding in Young at Heart, blonde
and relentlessly upbeat, but there is sex in that voice

from the archive; first posted May 15, 2019

from "Happy New Year, Dave" [by David Shapiro, 1947-2024]

from "Happy New Year"

Freud ate kosher, yes
and loved the soaring Shema of
Jewish unseen god

you and I two Jews
with two heads for “them” to lop
I hate being sliced

Decapitation
conturbat [?] me I'd rather
be shot in face, friend

Pearl’s father goes round
with Islamic scholars to
make peace! that's extreme

if God can't include
Kafka and Proust—I’m out, but
he does include them

I am looking for
a book on writing Agnon
is said to have done

I only partly
think it exists like shining
wisdom in days, awe

oranges don't rhyme
but I love Agnon saying oranges
eat just oranges

there's a country one
that lives only on fruit, sweet
gratuitous fruit

Kenneth told me his
analyst told him get the
pleasures out! beware!

gratuitous plea-
sures! what are they i asked?
oh breasts, oranges!

I thought of you Dave
as a young kid from Brooklyn
which you weren't---ah

I felt so old crazed
full of sexual tensions
and you seemed shy, sweet!

when your father died
you said to me; he was holy
was a holy man

I was frightened for
you and later too scared, scared
like a child's darkness

my wife took a plane
with you and she said that you
knew my poems by heart

she was impressed
to get her attention I
made poem- pictures                                                            

she was visual
I taped them to the mirrors,
hoping she'd read, see

now I'm very old
go to very few parties
throw my sins away

but only forgive
forgiveness comes from you, you
God even can't do!

Happy new year, Dave
happiness beyond; poems
and never be sad!

-- David Shapiro
September 13, 2007

RIP David Shapiro (1947-2024): "One Plus One": Haiku by David Shapiro

It's been a terrible week for alumni of the legendary
Columbia Review. First, Paul Auster died
against his protest that this would be the wrong end
to the narrative. Then, last night, the 4th of May,
David Shapiro left us. We met in fall 1966
when I was 18, naive, studious, and he,
two classes ahead of mine, took me under
hIs wing and made lists of poets I had to read
and composers to whom I had to listen.
He had already published a book,
and an amazing book it was, January,
month of his birth. Here's a haiku chain
he wrote back in 2008. He and I used to
correspond by haiku and other forms. -- DL

One Plus One

   it may be too hard
to think of me as silence
    like thirsty flowers

    in the Luxembourg
    I paused to cry for hours
    beside patient friends

    I read Thus Spake Z
    in a minute or two and
    saw my life in clouds

    and inside last clouds
 I saw my sister hiding
    behind the grillework

    snakes danced up curtains
 and a miserable pink
    of which Michaux spoke

    Half a century
   later I look at tulips
    try to see glory

    not Lawrence's kind
 but the modest buds in Bronx
    where diners pop up

    thirteen synagogues
    and some are shuls the way Saul
    Bellow preferred them

    Unlike a true Jew
    I like to go alone, weep
    (kills community)

    Today someone writes
    as if anyone around
    Frank froze him with lies

    Generosity
    is not a word for critics
    but Frank hated pricks

    haha the theory
    is he was a dead man and
    this is false theory

    But let's go back to
   say l962 or
 let's pay attention

    involuntary
    memory as in Proust is
|   more than I can bear

    in England I smelled
   my mother's glitzy perfume
    and I also heard

    inside myself the
    tune of her blue jewel-box
    I still remember   

    Too tired to forget
    too rebellious to count
 lonely syllables

    well father would say
    what's so lonely about them
    the one equals one

    I want to build that\
    with long Icelandic "menhirs"
    one plus one is one

    for the madness of
    my old friend the architect
    One monument one

    You pushed me into
    talking today but really
    the best rest is two

    but I want to build
    one day like white white Legos
    one plus one is one

    -– David Shapiro
    September 8, 2008

from the archive; photo of DS with violin by Chris Felver

Reminiscences of Paul Auster (1947-2024) [by Mitch Sisskind]

Reminiscences of Paul Auster

Tom’s Restaurant
The waitress brought some hamburgers to our booth. Paul said, “What if the food suddenly started eating us? That would be amazing.” A few years later I wrote a story based on Paul’s speculation. It was called “A Day I’ll Never Forget,” Paul showed it to Maxine Groffsky, the fiction editor of The Paris Review, and she published it in that esteemed periodical. George Plimpton was furious.

The College Inn
The College Inn was a restaurant down the street from Tom’s. A day or so after the big police bust in 1968 Paul and I had lunch there with one of the most radical students, an intense guy who could really inspire a crowd. He had made his bones in the Progressive Labor Party. He had been a track star in high school. He had a tic that caused him to keep bouncing up and down on his chair. But now he seemed concerned. He said, “Well, I liked how the Barnard girls were chanting the cops eat shit, but we need to get the cops back on campus. Get more kids hit over the head. As many as possible.”

Living Hand
In Paris we started a literary mag called Living Hand. The title was from a fragment Keats wrote in the margin of a poem he was working on. Paul got some French heavyweights – poets, not boxers – to contribute their work. Best of all, Joan Mitchell gave us a pen and ink drawing for the cover.

Joan Mitchell
Paul and I took a train to meet with Joan Mitchell. She was in a town outside Paris, in a house where Monet had lived. Joan Mitchell was an artist proprement dit. At about eleven o’clock in the morning we met her in a bar, drinking with some truck drivers. One of the drivers walked back with us to the Monet house. He never spoke during the light lunch served by a servant girl. Some dogs were lying around. Paul mentioned that a movie producer in Paris had hired him to go to Mexico to help his wife write a play. Joan seemed skeptical that writing a play was what this was all about. But Paul disagreed: “He just wants her to be happy.” Paul said the producer also wanted to put him in the new “Three Musketeers’ movie but he’d have to learn to sword fight.

The Cockroach
We were at an expensive restaurant in Los Angeles with Ricky Jay, his wife Chrissann Verges, and the novelist Mona Simpson. Suddenly a cockroach jumped down from the ceiling onto Chrissann’s plate. Or was it a startling illusion by Ricky Jay? No, it was the real thing. The staff was very apologetic. But they didn’t comp us for the dinner and maybe added the cost of the roach.

Envoi
A few years ago I asked Paul what he was working on and he mentioned a new book called 4321. He said it was very long. “Don’t drop it on your foot.”

The truth is, until a few weeks ago I had not read any of Paul’s books, but when I saw a review of Baumgartner I got it immediately. The book describes a lonely older man, a retired academic, whose wife Anna was killed years ago in an accident at the seashore.

Baumgartner is still intensely mourning Anna. He’s kept her writings and photographs as a kind of shrine. Later he’s contacted by a female grad student from Michigan who’s eager to meet him, and is even driving halfway across the country to do so. But by the book’s end they haven’t met and maybe never will.

Well, Anna was taken by the ocean, and the new young woman may never reach Baumgartner. But what comes across in the novel is a man’s inexorable disconnecting from a woman’s touch and his mourning for that specific loss.

I sensed that in my last phone conversation with Paul about two weeks before he died. He talked about his illness and the treatment and even seemed mildly optimistic. But then he spoke about Siri and his love for her, about what she’s meant to him, how he treasures every minute he’s ever been with her.

It was so moving to hear this. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a man express himself in quite this way before. Whatever else I may remember about Paul, I’ll never forget this. Farewell.

4321
Paul

Note: All posts by Mitch Sisskind are copyright (c) 2024 by Mitch Sisskind. All rights reserved

Who Remembers Les Keiter? [by David Lehman]

Les Keiter recreated West Coast baseball games for heartsick New Yorkers bereft of the Dodger and Giants after they moved to LA and SF at the end of the 1957 season. It's the same job Ronald Reagan performed in the 1940s.

How well I remember lying in bed listening to my black Zenith radio with the lights out as the clock moved toward midnight on a September night in 1959. The Giants and Dodgers were battling for first place. In the opening inning, Don Drysdale walked the first three Giants to face him. Then he proceeded to strike out the next three. The Dodgers won, ended the season tied for first with the defending champion Braves, then of Milwaukee. The ex-Brooks prevailed in a two-game playoff, copping the NL pennant. Then they beat the Chisox in six. It was the last hurrah of Messrs. Snider, Hodges, and Carl Furillo, my father's favorite. I was eleven.

Alone in the radio studio, or maybe he had an engineer, Les Keiter would get the teletype, make an appropriate sound with a rudimentary noisemaker, and call the play. The teletype would say: Gilliam singles. Keiter would say: Antonelli goes into his windup . . .the pitch. . . a fastball down the middle . . .Gilliam swings. . .and hits a scorching line drive. . . just out of McCovey's reach. . .into right field. . .Gilliam makes the turn. . .and. . .  holds at first with a single." The next day you'd learn that Gilliam had actually beaten out a lazy roller to the left side.

Les Keiter was at his best on a close play at the plate. A sacrifice fly became a big dramatic moment. The tap of a drum stick indicated the meeting of bat and ball: Ron Fairly or Don Demeter lifted a shallow fly to center field, which Willie Mays patrolled with the efficiency of DiMaggio. Maury Wills, tagging up on third base, broke for the plate when Mays made the catch. Then: "Here comes Wills. . .Mays throws . ..and. . .and. . .he beat the ball, he beat the ball!" The crowd noise always sounded the same but that was radio for you.

Les Keiter died on Tuesday in Hawaii at the age of 89.

from the archive; first posted April 16, 2009.

Lyn Hejinian, 1941-2024

From Brian Kim Stefans, Boston Review, December 1, 2001:

<<< Hejinian's writing is principally concerned with knowledge, and when this knowledge is not of the "self" it is of the world as filtered and perceived, proprioceptively, through the self. To this extent she is a psychological writer, though she seems, for the most part, to have skipped over Freud, and to rely instead on an earlier confidence that self-examination is a trustworthy path to a knowledge. "Someone refers to 'the courage of her convictions,'" Hejinian writes. "The difficulty lies not so much in adhering to one's beliefs as in determining their object—what it is one is having beliefs about. This is particularly problematic in a world that is both overexposed and, at the same time, through the invasive sentimentalization of the private realm, concealed behind the titillating surfaces of public display." Some of her paragraphs seem like notes to the self, as in the movie Memento, in which the protagonist, lacking any ability to create new memories, has to tattoo his body with messages in order to maintain any sense of life's continuity. Hejinian seems to find pleasure, if not an untapped resource, in the ability to lose one's direction, as the objects of her thought—"my car," "my convictions," "my style"—do not easily persist through time, but are willed forward by artful decisions. These decisions put the individual at the center of one's own world; they constitute the struggle to maintain engagement with the "everyday," to understand every second as moments of judgment: chance leading to choice. The persistence of matter may be untroubled in Hejinian, but the persistence of mind about matter is always an issue.

There is also something spiritual—in the tradition of Buddhist poetics as explored by many West Coast writers, most notably Philip Whalen—in Hejinian's ideas, as when she writes in her introduction to Language of Inquiry: "Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience." These sorts of doubling of words—"If Written is Writing," is the title of another essay—suggest a deep retreat behind one's mind in order to get perspective on how knowing actually works. Skepticism, the elite perspective of a hard-earned Western rationality, is matched with bodily discipline and thus questions all absolutes, including the authority of the skeptical mind itself, only finding satisfaction or assurance—further calls for discipline—when observing the mind in action. Consequently, this self-reflection takes on a social dimension—the heart of all of Hejinian's thinking—as one is, deep in the mind, a step further away from the socialization implicit in the "titillating public display" of hyper-mediating capitalist culture. Hence, this practice of thinkingthrough one's singularity, not in fear of it, is both aesthetic and ethical in nature.

Even Hejinian's essays that seem to be about the "social"—political ideas, relations of poetic form to social meanings, or feminist concerns—all hinge on the fact of the mind. In her 1995 essay "Barbarism" she re-reads Adorno's famous statement: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism." The standard interpretation is that Adorno was declaring culture impossible in a world whose history had proven disastrous—guided by acts of the collective will in which such forms as the "lyric," now fallen from its "folk" status, cut off the individual from society. Hejinian suggests that his statement "can be interpreted in another sense, not as a condemnation of the attempt 'after Auschwitz' to write poetry, but…as a challenge and behest to do so." The poet, however, endeavors "not to speak the same language as Auschwitz" but instead to speak a language that is doubled, as incoherent babbling to the masters, poetry to the rest. >>>
We mourn the passing of Lyn Hejinian, celebrated poet, author of My Life, and editor of The Best American Poetry 2004. 

https://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/editors/?id=2004
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2013/03/23/review-my-life-and-my-life-in-the-nineties-by-lyn-hejinian-2/

Joseph Harrison, 1957-2024 [by Mary Jo Salter]

On Tuesday, February 13, 2024, the poet Joseph Harrison died at home in Baltimore, not quite five months after a diagnosis of brain cancer.  He was 66 years old. Just days before the end, he had received an advance copy of his Collected Poems from Waywiser Press, and although he could no longer read, he was delighted to hold it in his hands.

He was a dear friend of mine, and in January I posted five of his poems and my short commentaries on them on the Best American Poetry blog .  You can see them at the links below, or here:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/01/liberties-of-the-imagination-5-poems-by-joseph-harrison-with-commentary-by-mary-jo-salter.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/01/libnerties-of-the-imagination-poems-by-joseph-harrison-commentary-by-mary-jo-salter-part-2-of-5.html

Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and earned his B.A. in English at Yale—studying with Harold Bloom, who became one of the major admirers of his poetry.  Joe became a Baltimorean when he went to Johns Hopkins for graduate work in English. He was the Senior American Editor of Waywiser Press and had directed its annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, ongoing since 2006.  He published four volumes of poetry: Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare’s Horse (2015) and Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020).

Joe was the oldest of five children: all of his devoted siblings were with him at the end. He was a famous raconteur.  He loved to tell long, elaborate stories, and often found the turns in his own plots so funny that he was incapacitated by laughter, and would have to start over. He was a statistics-equipped expert not only in literature but in baseball, football, film, and American politics.  He was a marvelous, multitasking host, and grilled some of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten.  That mid-twentieth-century taste in food extended, unapologetically, to his writing style. He wrote in rhyme, mostly, and meter, always, and when he was told his work had elements in common with Anthony Hecht or Richard Wilbur (true), he was delighted. That said, he loved helping to discover and nurture younger poets who wrote nothing like him.  Joe had a nearly photographic memory and an awe-inspiring aural memory: he could quote passages at will by all of his favorite poets, who ranged from Horace to Shakespeare to Dickinson.  When he gave his own poetry readings, he barely glanced at the page: he declaimed his lines by heart in a unique Southern accent—an amalgam of Virginia, Alabama, and I don’t know where else—while training his eyes directly on his audience.

When he received his shocking prognosis—twelve to eighteen months, which turned out to be far too optimistic—he made a point of telling people what he loved and admired about them.  And he wanted, too, to spare us too much grief.  Around the time he turned fifty, probably thinking he had three or even four more decades ahead, he wrote the following poem, “To My Friends.” I want to pass it on now, not only to memorialize Joe but to offer comfort to you, reader, the next time you experience a major loss.   

                 TO MY FRIENDS

My good friends, when you’re under the illusion

That the common end of things has ended me,

Whether that end was sudden or wretchedly slow,

Peaceful or violent, untimely or, finally, wished for,

Don’t spend too much time grieving, as if I were gone

To some murky underground region of swampy water

And cavernous absence, metallic and silent and cold,

Or some plush resort in the stratosphere of our dreams

Pillowed with cumuli, graced by ethereal muzak,

Or some massive confusing impersonal processing center

With lines and obscure snafus and numbers not names,

Away from the sun and the sound of the wind in the trees,

But after a short ceremony, public or private,

Listen for the wings of the birds, and ask where we’re going,

Alabama or Delaware, Canada, Yucatan,

And wish me luck in the next life, who now have wings.

Mick Imlah, 1956-2009

On January 12, 2009, the English poet and editor Mick Imlah died at age 52. He was the author of two books, Birthmarks (1988) and The Lost Leader (2008). After graduating from Oxford with a first (top grade) in 1979, Imlah helped revive Oxford Poetry. He became poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1993. As Mark Ford notes in his Guardian obituary, "Imlah was in fact blessed not only with astonishing literary talent, but with the looks of a movie star. He was, in addition, a formidable amateur rugby and cricket player; both sports feature often in his poems."  

<<< He was born Michael Ogilvie Imlah, with a twin sister, Fiona, in Aberdeen. His first 10 years were spent in Milngavie, near Glasgow. In 1966 the Imlah family moved south, to Beckenham, Kent. Mick attended Dulwich college, and in 1976 was awarded a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. There he met, as his tutor, the poet who would be the most significant influence on his own development, John Fuller. In due course they would collaborate on a wonderful series of six-line poems on the counties of England, published in Poetry Review in 1986.

Imlah was fortunate in the other literary friends he made during his time at Oxford; his circle included the novelists Alan Hollinghurst, John Lanchester and Isabel Fonseca, and the poet Bernard O'Donoghue. He graduated with a first in 1979, and embarked on a DPhil on Arthurian legends in Victorian poetry. This was never submitted, but his research into the work of Tennyson and Browning is easily discernible in his early poems, which make clever use of the dramatic monologue. The title poem of his first pamphlet, The Zoologist's Bath, published in 1982, mingles fantasy and fact in a manner that would become a hallmark of Imlah's poetry: it recreates the life of an eccentric Victorian evolutionary theorist, who is convinced mankind will soon return to its original element, the sea; he therefore refuses to get out of the bath, imagining he is developing a fin.

In 1983 Imlah, along with the Auden scholar Nicholas Jenkins and the poets Peter McDonald and Elise Paschen, set about reviving the long dormant magazine Oxford Poetry. So began a 25-year career in editing and literary journalism. That autumn he was appointed, with Tracy Warr, co-editor of Poetry Review, succeeding Andrew Motion. In 1989 he took over from Motion again, this time as poetry editor at Chatto & Windus, a post he held for four years. From 1993 he was poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement; it was characteristic of his absolute devotion to the business of editing and publishing the poetry of others that he insisted on vetting contributions and judging the TLS poetry competition even in the final stages of his illness. >>>

from the archive; first posted 5/18/09

In Memory of Kent Johnson, poet and crazy activist of the imagination (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 August 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.” >>>

Bill Moore: <<< Kent, a brilliant fabricator, channeled resentment into intellectual provocation. Foir some reason he was obsessed with being chosen for The Best American Poetry, a distinction that eluded him although the story of his Yasusada hoax gets covered in one of Lehman's forewords. What can I say? I'm sorry he's dead. He was full of shit but extremely entertaining. I dropped him because of a thoughtless remark he made, but as a hoax-maker he will be remembered, or not as the case may be."

Bill Freind: Another appraisal for your comment: in a long essay in The Notre Dame Review, the former Yale Younger Poet award winner David Wojahn claims that Araki Yasusada is a much better poet than Kent Johnson or than the late English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. He also claims, referring to you, that it is difficult to understand how someone who comes across as "a windy and slightly paranoiac jerk" in his published commentaries on the matter, could ever be the author of writing like Yasusada's, which he feels is brilliant, heart-breaking, and historically significant.

KJ: Well, I agree with everything Wojahn says. It's what I've been saying to smug, deaf ears all along. I am not Yasusada.

Louise Glück in 1968

LOUISE GLUCK SMILES AS SHE READS HER WORK TO AN AUDIENCE IN THE HOME OF NORMAN MAILER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, MAY 24, 1968. PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED W. MCDARRAH/MUUS COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGES.)

Earle Hitchner kindly alerts me to Fred McDarrah's great photo of Louise, 25, reading her poems chez Norman Mailer. Earle also quotes from Elisa Gonzalez''s "Against Remembrance" posted by The Paris Review (October 18, 2023):

<<<
When I learned she had died, I was sitting on my bed, a red notebook in my lap. In that dazed rebellion that’s grief’s first incarnation, I wrote, You wrote my life, and then I corrected, You wrote all over my life, and then I corrected that correction: You wrote all through my life, and now I correct with a line I know I’ll correct again till I’m dead, too: You wrote me into my life. 

“Sentimental,” I can hear her saying, with a grimace.

***

In the years since I met Louise as a person, not only as a poet, I’ve felt as if we were bound by an affinity that did not always emerge from the best parts of either of our souls. That we both casually use the word soul is one piece of that affinity. But there was also a sharpness, a darkness, an ironic eye turned on the self and the world—these tied us together as much as the appreciation of absurdity, the frustration with language, the fear of silence, the devotion to art, the passion for sensory experience and for passion itself, in its manifold forms. Manifold, a word that I associate with her, because its most perfect use may be in the first poem by her that I read, “The Drowned Children”—who are forever lifted in the pond’s “manifold dark arms.” 

Louise had so many friends, so many students, and I suspect that many feel an analogous sense of affinity. Her perceptiveness made her, I think, unusually capable of forming intense connections. It could also (here, Louise, I offer a counterpoint, a harmony) make her unkindness especially devastating. 

When I look back, I trace what feels like her love for me. She read. She listened. She critiqued. She encouraged. She nagged. Her faith in me exceeded my faith in myself. She supported me during a psychiatric hospitalization, and after my brother’s death. In turn I tried to love her, to understand her, to live, and to write.  

After I heard she was sick, and before I heard she died, I copied down a passage from Camera Lucida, in which Roland Barthes rebels against the application of any category to his specific grief over the absence of his specific maman: “what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.” My first, flailing, childish thought when she told me that she was ill: I can’t do this without you. I still am not sure what I meant by this (poetry? life?) but I know what I meant by you. You, Louise, who would hate this whole thing. 

I last saw her—how can “last” really mean “last”?—at the end of August, when I spent a few days visiting her in Vermont. For much of that time we talked as I drove her through a landscape of a solid green fortified by the wild rains that had flooded Montpelier, and spoiled her garden. In a labyrinthine antique store, we sat for a couple hours in a matched pair of damasked armchairs, discussing the history of our relationships with beauty (in people, in objects, in the world). In Plainfield, I inched the car forward slowly enough for her to point out every place of past significance, and outside the house where she wrote The Wild Iris, we talked about our terror of how love works on the lover, how pathetic it makes you. When I began the long drive back to New York, we were in the middle of many conversations, which we said we’d pick up soon, next time we saw each other, and the next time, when we would finish our conversations, then I would buy her dinner, for a change, a really excellent dinner, appropriate to her gourmand taste. As I write this, the intervening time disappears. We are sitting across from each other at a dining table. Sunset behind her, which means night is already behind me. The silence that follows a bout of laughter has settled on us. The wine she chose is almost gone. She asks, “Do you think anyone would expect us to laugh as much as we do?” And because I am again answering, I know that she was right, in “Lament,” to conclude that “this, this, is the meaning of / ‘a fortunate life’: it means / to exist in the present.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/18/against-remembrance-on-louise-gluck/

>>>

Louise Glück, 1943-2023 [by David Lehman]

Last week, on Friday the 13^th, Nobel laureate Louise Glück, wonderful poet and friend, died at the age of 80. Louise edited The Best American Poetry 1993, and the experience of working closely with her— primarily by old-fashioned mail and the occasional phone call – was unforgettable. She took on the job despite a natural inclination to remain “on the sidelines, preferably the very front of the sidelines.” In a moment of moral clarity characteristic of Louise, she recognized that “continuous refusal to expose my judgment to public scrutiny seemed vanity and self-protection.” When the year began, Louise clamored for literary magazines, “like a person in a restaurant banging the table for service,” in her words. They came, so many you could fill a small office with them.

Louise proved herself to be a peerless close reader of poems, and when I said this to her, she, usually distrustful of compliments, seemed genuinely touched. She chose the contents of the volume with “the generosity on which exacting criticism depends.” And she paid me the compliment of treating me like a partner in the enterprise; her decisions were final, but she welcomed discussion, and it was fun exchanging views. The book contains great poems: A. R. Ammons’s “Garbage,” John Ashbery’s “Baked Alaska.” W. S. Merwin’s “The Stranger,” the excerpt from Mark Strand’s Dark Harbor that appeared in The New Republic. The book was daring: there were outstanding poems by a truly diverse group of poets, if by “diverse” we mean a variety of means, tones, metaphors, forms, voices, and visions. We had Charles Bukowski, Adrienne Rich, and John Updike at their best; Billy Collins and Denise Duhamel before readers were familiar with their names; exceptional work from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jane Kenyon, Ron Padgett, James Tate; marvelous posthumous poems by Tim Dlugos and Laura Riding.

In a biographical note written for the Nobel Prize committee, Louise wrote that growing up she was good at school, not so good at “the social world,” and that during adolescence she felt “ostracized” everywhere but summer camp. As a student at Columbia she came under the influence of Stanley Kunitz, who championed her work. His “endorsement of high ambition” continued to inspire her, though there was a “there was a deep fissure” with her erstwhile mentor when she strove to banish figurative language from the poems in her 1990 book Ararat.  It signaled a new direction for her, and it was precisely the poems in Ararat and in the volume that succeeded it, The Wild Iris, that made me feel Louise was writing the best poems of her life and that we would be lucky if she agreed to take the helm of the 1993 edition of The Best American Poetry.

I want to honor her memory by posting her poem “Vespers,” which Charles Simic chose for the 1992 volume in the series:

Vespers

In your extended absence, you permit me

use of earth, anticipating

some return on investment. I must report

failure in my assignment, principally

regarding the tomato plants.

I think I should not be encouraged to grow

tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold

the heavy rains, the cold nights that come

so often here, while other regions get

twelve weeks of summer. All this

belongs to you: on the other hand,

I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots

like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart

broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly

multiplying in the rows. I doubt

you have a heart, in our understanding of

that term. You who do not discriminate

between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,

immune to foreshadowing, you may not know

how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,

the red leaves of the maple falling

even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible

for these vines.

from The Wild Iris (1992)

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