The Best American Poetry

Ray Gonzalez: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________

One El Paso, Two El Paso

 

Awake in the desert to the sound of calling.

Must be the mountain, I thought.

 

The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary

line between the living and the dead was erased years ago.

 

Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with

razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks.

 

Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside,

Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose.

 

Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside

American walls, river drownings counted as they cross,

 

Maria Salinas' body dragged out, her mud costume

pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans,

 

black water flowing to bless her in her sleep.

Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided,

 

a way out of the current, though satellite maps never

show the brown veins of the concrete channel.

 

Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke,

1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind,

 

the end of one war mutating the border into another

that also requires fatal skills of young men because few

 

dream the atomic bomb gave birth in the Jornado,

historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut

 

off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed

wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels,

 

massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes

and neighborhood soccer games that always score.

 

Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral

in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way.

 

Make the sign of the cross, open your eyes to one town,

two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ray Gonzalez is the author of 16 books of poetry, including Suggest Paradise (University of New Mexico Press). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

   Judithe Hernández (U.S., b. 1948), La Santa Desconocida de la serie Juárez / The Unknown Saint from the Juarez series, 2017. Pastel on paper 

The Ideal Final

 

from "Urban Renewal" [by Major Jackson]

from Urban Renewal

XVI.

What of my fourth grade teacher at Reynolds Elementary,
who weary after failed attempts to set to memory
names strange and meaningless as grains of dirt around
the mouthless, mountain caves at Bahrain Karai:
Tarik, Shanequa, Amari, Aisha, nicknamed the entire class
after French painters whether boy or girl. Behold
the beginning of sentient formless life. And so,
my best friend Darnell became Marcel, and Tee_tee
was Braque, and Stacy James was Fragonard,
and I, Eduard Charlemont. The time has come to look
at these signs from another point of view. Days passed
in inactivity before I corrected her, for Eduard was
Austrian and painted the black chief in a palace in 1878
to the question whether intelligence exists. All of Europe
swooned to Venus of Willendorf. Outside her tongue,
yet of it, in textbooks Herodotus tells us of the legend
of Sewosret (Seosteris I, II, or III), the colonizer of Greece,
founder of Athens. What's in a name? Sagas rise and
fall in the orbs of jumpropes, Hannibal grasps a Roman
monkeybar on history's rung, and the mighty heroes at recess
lay dead in woe on the imagined battlefields of Halo.

from The Best American Poetry 1994
guest editor Lyn Hejinian

Donald Keene moves (back) to Japan [from the archive; December 14, 2011]

Pictured left: Jamie Katz followed by this cipher 9 8 44 72 280

Click here to read Jamie Katz's brilliant feature on Donald Keene, the Western world's leading interpreter of Japanese literature, a Columbia professor for more than seventy years. On a visit to Japan in 1990, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Professor Keene, who, in addition to discussing everything from Basho and linked-verse to the merits of a traditional Japanese breakfast, taught me the two key rules of pronouncing Japanese and made my two-week stay go a lot more smoothly than would otherwise have been the case. With his books and anthologies, Keene taught an appreciation of Japanese culture to generations of students, not only at Columbia, his home base, but the world over.

In April 2003 Keene was awarded a medal of honor from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At his request I wrote the inscription, appropriating the tanka as an appropriate form:

To Donald Keene we
owe much of what we know of
Japan's verse and prose.

In shadow of rising sun
stood the lean tree unobserved.

Then Keene could be heard:
in accents lucid and keen
he rendered the scene.

And the bare branch of winter
burst into cherry blossom.

Here's an excerpt from Katz's feature in the current Columbia College Today. -- DL

<<<
Keene’s approach to teaching and writing bears the imprint of his freshman Humanities instructor, Mark Van Doren ’21 GSAS. “He was a scholar and poet and above all some­one who understood literature and could make us understand it with him,” Keene writes in Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. “Van Doren had little use for commentaries or specialized literary criticism. Rather, the essential thing, he taught us, was to read the texts, think about them, and discover for our­selves why they were ranked as classics.”

The experience of taking the College’s general education cours­es was “incredible,” Keene says, and he fondly remembers the great teachers he encountered as an undergraduate. Among them were the “learned and gentle” classicist, Moses Hadas ’30 GSAS; Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38 GSAS and Jacques Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS, who led Keene’s Senior Colloquium; and Pierre Clamens, a French instructor “who was very stern, but gave everything to his stu­dents,” Keene says.

His chief mentor, however, was cul­tural historian Ryusaku Tsunoda, a pio­neer of Japanese studies at Columbia whom Keene often refers to, simply, as Sensei. “He was a man I admired com­pletely,” Keene says, “a man who had more influence on me than anyone else I can think of.”

As a senior, Keene enrolled in Tsu­noda’s course in the history of Japa­nese thought. Fifty years later, in a CCT interview (Winter 1991) with David Lehman ’70, ’78 GSAS, Keene remem­bered: “The first class, it turned out I was the only student — in 1941 there was not much pro-Japanese feeling. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of your time to give a class for one student?’ He said, ‘One is enough."

The Alta California Chapbook Prize is Open through Oct. 1! [by Emma Trelles]

The Alta California Chapbook Prize is now open & accepting submissions from Latina/e/o/x poets of all levels residing in the U.S. Please send 8-12 pages of poetry, written in English or Spanish, to Gunpowder Press via Submittable by October 1. Two manuscripts will be selected and published in the spring in bilingual editions. Poets will receive $500 each, 10 copies of the chapbook, and an invitation to read at the Mission Poetry Series.

Past winners of the prize are Grief Logic, by Crystal AC Salas; Levitations, by Nicholas Reiner; Sor Juana, by Florencia Milito; and On Display, by Gabriel Ibarra.This year's judge is award-winning author, editor, & translator Alexandra Lytton Regalado (Relinquenda, Beacon Press, 2022/National Poetry Series) & Matria (Black Lawrence Press, 2017/St. Lawrence Book Award).  The series editor is Emma Trelles.

For complete details, please visit Submittable.

BAP 2023 ed. Elaine Equi: Happy pub date (double-time)

Here's an excerpt from Elaine Equi's superb intoduction:
https://lithub.com/elaine-equi-on-poetry-as-a-spiritual-practice-and-a-universal-language/

What is "Cancel Culture" (and "Coward Culture")? [by Bret Stephens in "Sapir"]

Bret Stephens in Sapir (Autumn 2022):
<<<
What exactly do we mean by “cancel culture”? It’s obviously not a matter of being fired for cause. Harvey Weinstein wasn’t a victim of cancel culture: He’s someone whose serial abuses were moral, professional, legal, and criminal. Nor is it cancel culture simply when private companies, universities, or other institutions discipline employees or students for violating long-established and widely agreed standards of professional and personal conduct. When actress Roseanne Barr tweeted in 2018 that Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama-administration aide, was the baby of the “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes,” ABC had a legitimate reputational interest in giving her the boot.

A better way to understand cancel culture is to break it down into five component parts: an action, a method, a capitulation, a mentality, and a culture.

The action is cancellation. But cancellation doesn’t simply mean losing a job, a book contract, a TV show, a speaking gig, and so on. It’s more like erasure. A canceled person will lose not only his job but also his career. He will lose not only his career but also his reputation. He will lose not only his reputation but also many of the people he once considered friends. He will lose not only his friends but also, in some cases, his will to live. David Bucci was a 50-year-old professor at Dartmouth and a married father of three when he became entangled in allegations that, as a department head, he had looked the other way at a campus culture of sexual harassment. Though he was never accused of personal misconduct, the school’s failure to declare his innocence sent him into a spiral. He committed suicide in October 2019.

The method is usually the social-pressure campaign — with the aim to not only destroy the intended target but advertise the destruction far and wide as a means of intimidation. Person X is deemed a malefactor for a statement or action that an exceptionally vocal minority of people consider immoral or that causes “harm” and makes people “feel unsafe.” Sometimes these campaigns begin with an accusation that turns into a workplace whisper campaign; at other times with a social-media post that quickly gains wide attention and descends on the designated target like a Himalayan avalanche. Employers, allergic to public controversy, seek to make the problem go away as quickly as possible, usually by extracting an apology from the targeted employee. That apology, often given under acute emotional distress, is seen as an admission of guilt. Termination swiftly follows.

Capitulation is an underappreciated but integral aspect of cancel culture. After David Sabatini, a renowned cancer biologist, was pushed out of his job at MIT on account of a non-disclosed consensual relationship with a younger colleague that went sour, friends of his who thought the charges against him were nonsense sought to bring him to New York University. When word got out of his potential hire, it led to public protests, to which the NYU administration, including university president Andrew Hamilton, promptly caved. Sabatini, once touted as a future Nobel laureate, is now unhirable in American academia. Cancel culture flourishes because coward culture allows it.

Then there is mentality. The best term I know of for practitioners of cancel culture is “cry-bullies.” It captures the combination of self-pity and vindictiveness (the former providing limitless justification for the latter) that explains so much of the way cancel culture operates: the disdain for due process; the unlimited deference shown to the accuser; the indifference to the possibility of innocence or, at least, mitigating factors; the reputation-smearing; the foreclosure of any possibility of second chances or redemption; the demand for complete professional and personal excommunication. There’s a reason, as Lionel Shriver notes, why today’s cancel culture reminds people of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Robespierre’s Terror (minus, for now, the bloodshed). Only those fully convinced of their utter righteousness can be so completely pitiless.

So this is cancel culture: a highly effective social-pressure mechanism through which the ideological fixations of the aggrieved and truculent few are imposed on the fearful or compliant many by means of the social annihilation of a handful of unfortunate individuals.

Finally, culture. Cancellation is awful, but it befalls relatively few. The broader impact is on a wider circle of people who fear that they, too, can be canceled at a moment’s notice for saying or doing the wrong thing. It’s what leads to increasingly widespread habits of self-censorship, speaking in euphemisms, professing views one doesn’t really hold, pulling intellectual punches, or restricting candid conversations to a close circle of like-minded and trusted friends. It is why more than 60 percent of Americans admitted in 2020 that they have views they are afraid to share in public, and another 32 percent fear that their job prospects could be harmed by speaking their mind. It’s also why young undergraduates such as Olivia Eve Gross, a third-year student at the University of Chicago who is publishing her debut essay in this issue, thinks twice before raising her hand in class.  
>>>

from https://sapirjournal.org/cancellation/2022/10/jews-and-cancel-culture/

Quantum foam washes over Théâtre de la Bastille: waiting on g-2 results [by Tracy Danison]

Betty Tchmonga, “Mascarades”. Photo © Queila Fernandez

Our way to measure or perceive things changes from day to day, so naturally things change even if we can’t, don’t want to, or have senses and capacities inadequate to talk about what is happening:

 Muon g-2 experiment reinforces surprise result, setting up physics ‘showdown’ The difference of g from 2 — or g minus 2 — can be attributed to the muon’s interactions with particles in a quantum foam that surrounds it. These particles blink in and out of existence and, like subatomic “dance partners,” grab the muon’s “hand”, changing the way the muon interacts with the magnetic field. The Standard Model incorporates all known “dance partner” particles and predicts how the quantum foam changes g. But there might be more. Physicists are excited about the possible existence of as-yet-undiscovered particles that contribute to the value of g-2 and would open the window to exploring new physics. - uchicagonews, 11 August 2023

Muons and measures and the cosmic randomness of dance partners is at least part of what was behind my post, Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal. For me, Nathalie Béasse’s theater represents a shift away from narrative theater towards performance theater: like visual art, pointing towards sense rather than story.

The shift may have come about as a result of Béasse’s beginnings as a visual artist combined with a remarkable native insight into the physical mechanics of psychology.

However it may actually be for Béasse, sense, or Imagination, is what I think Dance, capital D, is all about, so I think the public success of her work is Sign and Portent of a developing un-narrative or performance way to do what we usually call theater.

The fascination with the un-narrative is the quantum foam shaping my optics on the noteworthy change of management at the Théâtre de la Bastille. Claire Dupont, 42, recognized as founder and director of Prémisses, especially for her work in developing performing arts through inclusion, has replaced Jean-Marie Hordé, 75, known for rescuing and then developing theater (live performance) culture, after better than 30 years of more than good theater and dance. With Dupont’s accession, Théâtre de la Bastille has also become publicly operated, part city of Paris and the region, part ministry of culture. Le Monde calls the appointment of Dupont “audacious”, but the 40-something’s professional career objectives and the government’s policy ends seem to me to dovetail famously. The ministry certainly saw that and saw, too, that her success thus far signals she’s serious about the future.

Nach, “Cellule”, Photo © Dainius Putinas

The change is noteworthy for me because of the g-2 element of it, as I say, but also because of a personal element. When I first came to France, I made it my business to see all the classic plays and all the then current ones I could. My aim was to get a handle on the society I was living in – that seemed to be one good way to go forward. My main but not only theaters of action were Comédie française, Théâtre de la Colline and Théâtre de la Bastille. After a performance of The Master & Margarita, I decided I’d had enough of theater, and of words words words in general; I’d got all the handle that was possible for me to get. I can say now that my life accomplishments so far include sitting through Racine’s oeuvre, seeing the Great Wall of China and realizing that Gorbatchev had really read Crime & Punishment. All that is no mean feat. And what comes next is of interest.

In addition to the personal, the management change at Bastille is significant in a couple of public and social ways. First, because generational; this Claire Dupont could be my own daughter; I might have been at school with Hordé; this change is happening everywhere and increasingly. Too, it’s significant as politics and public policy. In a country where culture is seen as the basis for social cohesion and not its result, it’s value in terms of inclusion and intégration will weigh more, maybe than its public esthetic success. And that esthetic success is what concerns me most.

So, what stands out to me from what I know this far is how clear and coherently Claire Dupont has been about her task of creating a framework for intelligent, popular, inclusive living performance. Her terms of art on paper just seem to make so much logical sense. Her plans for going forward, at least as I can make them out in her project description and season program, strike me as sensibly modest and well-paced.

First off, in the declarative, Dupont writes that her theater will use contemporary spoken French. This suggests two things: that she realizes that language as spoken by today’s creators is an accessory to performance and she’s serious about developing writing today.  Second, she’s declares that she’s introducing what she calls “parliamentary” artistic management. And so it is that her announced way of going about it shows she actually knows what “parliamentary” means: her MPs among them represent enough serious “lobbies”, skills, competences, experiences and general artistic sérieux to set up and staff an all-genre dance performance theater. Which is, I suppose, is the idea.

 

Cie De Hoe, “Le Nouvel Homme”. Photo © Koen Broos

From my reading between the lines, Dupont, among other things, has a particular care for people who know how to work with others and who learn the ropes of a project through experience of it.

Gurshad Shaheman, who arrived in France as a 12 year old refugee from Iran, trained as a Persian-French translator at Paris VIII, as well as an actor in a public-university associated regional acting school in Marseille. Shaheman has been working since 2004 in every conceivable aspect of live performance: performer, director, caberetist playwright; he has apparent intellectual and emotional heft on migrant and LGBTQ issues.

Agnés Mateus and Quim Tarrida come from Catalonia and are currently working together on the performance Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota (“Bounce, bounce: in your face”), themed around ordinary violence. Mateus trained as an actor and journalist and now calls herself a multidisciplinary artist. To begin her performance career, she joined Collectiu General Elèctrica at its founding in 1996. The mission of the Barcelona performance collective was to break the barriers between performance, theater and dance. Throughout her career, as she is now with Quim Tarrida, Agnès Mateus has worked in co-work and/or co-contribution projects. Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota is a second collaboration. Tarrida is a materials and visual artist who now defines himself as a performance artist.

Betty Tchomanga, whose constituency is Dance performance, was born in the west of France in 1989. Educated and trained in Bordeaux and Angers, Tchomanga has lately been having good success with public and critics alike. She seems at the beginning of an interesting maturity as a choreographer and performer after working with the exceptional choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas since 2014. Tchmonga strikes me as a creator whose concern is, on the model of the dance performer Dorothée Munyaneza, sensibility, creating atmosphere, reaching toward the sacred and spiritual in the material.

Bastille’s MPs will be on campaign in season 2023-2024, so spectators will get a sense of how they do creation as well as sit through performances the same artists have had a hand in choosing. In addition to the wide variety of performance habitually offered, spectators can savor Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Fortresses, featuring members of his own family; Agnés Mateus’ and Quim Tarrida’s Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota, which explores the same ambient violence that Barbie reported during a recent visit to reality; Betty Tchomanga’s Mascarades, incarnating the energies of Mami Wata, voodoo earth mother.

In succeeding years, Dupont’s plan is, each artist will develop individual thematics or performance lines to follow.

In addition to Tchmonga’s Mascarades, the 2023-2024 season’s dance offer will figure dancer and choreographer  Laura Bachman, born 1994, veteran of the Paris Opéra and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cie Rosas, doing Ne me touchez pas(“Don’t touch me”) a feminine duo. Mohamed Toukabri, born in Tunis in 1990, a street breaker from Belgium in the 2020s come to contemporary dance performance through Academie Internationale de danse in Paris and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S. program, performs The Power of the fragile, with his mother ; Nach (Anne-Marie Van), who came to dance in her 20s through Krump, the psychotherapeutic variant of break dance, on-the-hoof apprenticeship and just plain creative intelligence, has created her own take on contemporary dance (La Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne 2023 #2: I got that hip hop feeling [By Tracy Danison]. Her solo contribution is from 2017, the first of her work I saw : Cellule, around freedom in the body self.

The energy and the g-stuff are in place. Switch on the collider.

Click for complete Théâtre de la Bastille Performance Calendar 2023-2024

Click for Cie Nathalie Béasse Performance Calendar in France & Belgium 2023-2024

For Adolf Eichman [by Primo Levi]

The wind runs free across our plains,
The live sea beats forever at our beaches.
Man makes earth fertile, earth gives him flowers and fruits.
He lives in toil and joy, he hopes, fears, begets sweet offspring.

… And you have come, our precious enemy,
Forsaken creature, man ringed by death.
What can you say now, before our assembly?
Will you swear by a god? What god?
Will you leap happily into the grave?
Or will you at the end, like the industrious man
Whose life was too brief for his long art,
Lament your sorry work unfinished,
The thirteen million still alive?

Oh son of death, we do not wish you death.
May you live longer than anyone ever lived.
May you live sleepless five million nights,
And may you be visited each night by the suffering of everyone who saw,
Shutting behind him, the door that blocked the way back,
Saw it grow dark around him, the air fill with death.        

        — translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann

from The Paris Review

In Memory of Ed Ochester, Poet & Editor, RIP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have asked Ed Ochester (above) to edit our Sunday poetry pages for the next few months. Here is one of Ed's poems:

March of the Penguins

       The editor of National Review urged [Young Republicans]
       to see the movie because it promoted monogamy.  A widely
       circulated Christian magazine said it made a strong case for
       intelligent design --The New York Times, 9/13/05

What the hell are they going to do now
with the libidinous bluebird, who lines up
a couple of extra girlfriends every summer,
not to mention the evil house wrens--
don¹t be fooled by their cheery little calls,
they have up to five mates at a time!
I won¹t even mention the gay rabbits
we had once, in love with one another’s ears,
etc., and even now my old friend Walter may be
declaiming how God planted dinosaur bones
to test the faith of Christians with the appearance
of evolution, thereby demonstrating once again
we are the first country to pass from barbarism
to decadence without an interlude, and as for
“intelligent design,” even Britney Spears
wouldn’t drop her eggs
at 70 below.

from UNRECONSTRUCTED: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW
(Autumn House Press, 2007)

Under Ed Ochester's leadership, the Pitt Poetry Series has maintained a reputation for feisty independence -- so much so that "the pit bull poetry series" is an inevitable pun. He writes:

<< I've been the editor of the Pitt Poetry Series for thirty years. Some of our best-known poets are Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson, Bob Hicok, Etheridge Knight, Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Malena Morling, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Afaa Weaver, David Wojahn and Dean Young.  Most of these were not very well known when they started to publish with Pitt, and many of our younger poets who aren't well known yet are terrific and deserve (and will get) wider readership.  That's one of the pleasures of the business –- to "discover" new poets and watch their reputations grow.  Another pleasure, for me, is making eclectic choices.  American poetry is bigger than one or two schools, one or two ways of doing things.  I like to think I irritate or, even better, outrage certain academic critics and poetry gangs with the eclecticism of the Pitt list. I do think we've helped increase the readership for poetry: many of our books have sold more than 10,000 copies, and a couple have even reached 100,000. We're also one of the few poetry publishers – maybe the only one? – that doesn't require subsidies. For the next few months on this site I've chosen poems from recent books of ours, mainly.  I hope that you enjoy them, of course, and that the enjoyment will motivate you to buy some. We need to remember Kenneth Patchen's gentle observation: "People who say they love poetry and never buy any are a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches. >>

Ed Ochester's most recent books are  UNRECONSTRUCTED: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW (Autumn House Press,  2007), THE REPUBLIC OF LIES (chapbook, Adastra Press, 2007), THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE (Story Line Press, 2001), and AMERICAN POETRY NOW (University of Pittsburgh Press,  2007), an anthology of contemporary American poetry. In addition to editing the Pitt Poetry Series, he is the general editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction (University of Pittsburgh Press). From 1978 to 1998 he was director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and was twice elected president of Associated Writing Programs. He is co-editor of the poetry magazine 5 AM and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College MFA program.

from the archive; first posted January 4, 2009.

"Intimacy" by Dominic Symes [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Dominic Symes’ “Intimacy” was first published in the bi-annual journal Meniscus in 2021, an issue of the magazine in which the specter of Australia’s covid-lockdowns understandably hangs over many of the poems and short-stories included. It is difficult not to read Symes’ poem in this context: for many of us, the lockdowns transformed intimacy into a state of near claustrophobia. But Symes instantly turns this association on its head: the intimacy he is speaking of is gained in solitude, finding the quietude offered by reading and the small gestures of the natural world. The impersonal torpor of the lockdowns is brought back to us in the brilliantly depressing couplet “how we both sleep better after sex / but we’re both too tired to initiate”. The poem then shifts again to that liminal space we are taken to whilst reading, at once a lonely and intensely sociable act, in which we often develop a deep intimacy with the writers we read, noticing the most subtle shifts in their style, like a borrowed reference, as clearly as “ the haircut changes the shape of your face”.

Dominic Symes’ first book, I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation, was published by Recent Works Press in 2022. 

 

 

Intimacy

sometimes you get it reading Rilke

 

the small glimmer of sunlight

from the window

which rests

between your neck and the pillow

 

how our fault-ridden bodies

are supposed to shed, regrow and forget

 

how we both sleep better after sex

but we’re both too tired to initiate

 

you can tell when a reference is second hand

in a personal essay

I read it when I was reading such & such

 

like the haircut changes the shape of your face

the humidity the quality of your skin

 

now soft to touch

but strong, firm, young

 

some letters he wrote just to say

sorry for not writing sooner

there was this war I got held up in

 

 

A. R. Ammons's Last Poem (Twenty-five Years Ago)

“When the bubbles of nothingness rise”

 

When the bubbles of nothingness rise

out of nothing –

a fine and brittle crust like

blown glass, cooled motion, forms

and in the rough spots

chinks of someday

we have our lives

build wars, consider

prophets, and

carefully seek to know

what robe or crown to wear

-- A. R. Ammons

1 April 1998

See A. R. Ammons, Selected Poems in the Library of America's American Poets Project (2006).

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 6, 2023

In May of this year, Press 53 published The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990–2022 by award-winning author Michael Hettich. The “new” section, “The Shape of Moving” is a generous 34 pages. This volume is a must-have for readers who may not have all of Hettich’s earlier work. Handsomely presented, the book presents selections of his previous books and chapbooks, more than two dozen. Campbell McGrath writes, “Michael Hettich’s poems resemble half-remembered fables or lyrical dreams, animistic dramas played out in moonlit meadows, domestic interiors that shimmer like velvet jewelry boxes. Wisdom and enchantment are his calling cards, and he strews them about with purpose, like Hansel and Gretel marking the path home through the forest.”

Congratulations, Michael!

 

"Two Bottles of Glenlivet" [by James Cummins]

                                                   

Two Bottles of Glenlivet

To dinner you bring the Scotch matching
the beautiful friends who are hatching
this glorious meal
and the glorious feel
of the moments from Time you are snatching.

There once was a man come to dinner
whose outer life stood in for his inner;
he ate with great gusto,
till his waistline did thrust-o,
and he left most decidedly not thinner.

There once were two gents from Glenlivet
who agreed great Scotch could greatly rivet
your attention and command
to the great task at hand:
life, and the friends who help you live it!

    for David

from the archive; first posted April 25, 2014

Beethoven's Letters [by Lewis Saul]

 

 

Beethoven's letters give us an unvarnished canvas upon which we can try to decipher his contradictions:

 

Deafness

 

To Dr. F. Wegeler, Bonn

June 29, 1800

 

"The humming in my ears continues day and night without ceasing. I may truly say that my life is a wretched one. For the last two years I have avoided all society, for it is impossible for me to say to people, 'I am deaf.' Were my profession any other, it would not so much matter, but in my profession it is a terrible thing; and my enemies of whom there are not a few, what would they say to this? ... Often I can scarcely hear any one speaking to me; the tones yes, but not the actual words; yet as soon as any one shouts, it is unbearable ..."

To the same
November 16, 1801

"My life is again somewhat pleasanter, for I mix in society. You can scarcely imagine what a dreary, sad life I have led during the past two years. My weak hearing seemed always to be haunting me, and I ran away from people, was forced to appear a misanthrope, thought not at all in my character. This change has been brought about by an enchanting maiden, who loves me, and whom I love. Once again, after two years I have had some happy moments, and for the first time I feel that marriage can bring happiness. Unfortunately she is not of my station in life, and now -- for the moment I certainly could not marry -- I must bravely bustle about ..."

Bach

 

To the music publishers Breitkopf and Haertel, Leipzig
April 22, 1801

 

"When I recently visited a good friend of mine, and he showed me the amount which had been collected for the daughter of the immortal god of harmony [Regina Johanna Bach, living alone and in poverty], I was astonished at the small sum which Germany had thought sufficient for the person worthy to me of honour on account of her father ... answer quickly how this can best be brought about so that it may be done before this daughter of Bach dies, before this brook dries up, and we can no longer supply it with water" [Bach means "brook" in German].

It would be several more decades until Mendelssohn succeeded in bringing "Old Bach" to the attention of the world in the middle of the century.

 

The Immortal Beloved ?

To Countess Giulietta Guicciardi
July 6, 1801

 

"My angel, my all, my very self,

Oh! gaze at nature in all its beauty, and calmly accept the inevitable -- love demands everything, and rightly so. Thus is it for me with thee, for thee with me, only thou so easily forgettest, that I must live for myself and for thee -- were we wholly united thou wouldst feel this painful fact as little as I should ..."

To the same
July 7, 1801

"Waiting to see whether fate will take pity on us. Either I must live wholly with thee or not at all. Yes, I have resolved to wander in distant lands, until I can fly to thy arms, and feel that with thee I have a real home; with thee encircling me about, I can send my soul into the kingdom of spirits ..."

 

His trouble with women; the increasing severity of his deafness; his constant battle with the publishers; impresarios, etc. all played a role in the creation of this suicidal-sounding Last Will and Testament written shortly before Beethoven's 32nd birthday ...

The Heiligenstadt Testament
October 6, 1802

"O ye men who regard or declare me to be malignant, stubborn or cynical, how unjust are ye towards me. You do not know the secret cause of my seeming so. From childhood onward, my heart and mind prompted me to be kind and tender, and I was ever inclined to accomplish great deeds. But only think that during the last six years, I have been in a wretched condition, rendered worse by unintelligent physicians. Deceived from year to year with hopes of improvement, and then finally forced to the prospect of lasting infirmity (which may last for years, or even be totally incurable). Born with a fiery, active temperament, even susceptive of the diversions of society, I had soon to retire from the world, to live a solitary life. At times, even, I endeavored to forget all this, but how harshly was I driven back by the redoubled experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was not possible for me to say to men: Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf. Alas! how could I declare the weakness of a sense which in me ought to be more acute than in others -- a sense which formerly I possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy, or ever have enjoyed; no I cannot do it. Forgive, therefore, if you see me withdraw, when I would willingly mix with you. My misfortune pains me doubly, in that I am certain to be misunderstood. For me there can be no recreation in the society of my fellow creatures, no refined conversations, no interchange of thought. Almost alone, and only mixing in society when absolutely necessary, I am compelled to live as an exile. If I approach near to people, a feeling of hot anxiety comes over me lest my condition should be noticed ... my prayer is that your life may be better, less troubled by cares than mine. Recommend to your children virtue; it alone can bring happiness, not money ..."

 

Finally, from the late period, a letter to Schindler -- his unreliable biographer. Beethoven suspected that he'd been swindled:

1824 (?)

"I do not accuse you of anything wrong as regards the concert, but many things have been spoilt through your imprudence and arbitrary conduct. But anyhow, I have a certain fear that some great misfortune will befall me through you ... I should not like to trust my welfare to you, as you lack judgment ..."

They later made up.

 

What is History? Multiple Choice [by David Lehman]

The multiple-choice exam as an ad hoc poetic form has always attracted me. John Ashbery did clever and funny things with it. Our Freud Quiz is as much an homage to the multiple choice form as to the bearded inventor of psychoanalysis in his little Berggasse flat in Vienna. I like the structure not only because of its familiarity but because of my love of alternative possibilities.

Last night I was reading the May 2012 issue of Harper's and I came across an essay entitled "Ignorance of Things Past" by editor emeritus Lewis Lapham. The essay is full of recollected pith, some of which is surprisingly bland: "a morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable" (Thomas Jefferson). But it was when I reached a new graf headed "History is a work in progreess" that the imp of the perverse reared its head and I created "History, a Multiple-Choice Exam," draft one, which follows:

History is
(1) A 'work in progress" (Lewis Lapham, Harper's, May 2012)
(2) "A waste of time" (Hilda Cortez, who sat next to me in Art History 76 sophomore year)
(3) A sphinx that "to the defeated may say 'Alas!' but cannot help or pardon" (W. H. Auden, "Spain 1937")
(4) What happens when thesis meets antithesis or when Newton's second law of mechanics meets "Hegel's Vacation"
(5) "A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken" (Ireland's Icarus)
(6) "Now and England" (T. S. Eliot)
(7) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein)
(8) "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'' (Elizabeth Bishop)
(9) A "hail Mary" pass (Doug Flutie)
(10) What FDR said was "the only thing we have to fear." 
(11) Something that occurred prior to
    a) Auschwitz
    b) Hiroshima
    c) Watergate
    d) the fall of the Berlin Wall
    e) your birth, dear reader. Nine months prior, give or take a few days.
    f) all of the above conjoined by ampersands

from the archive; first posted April 28, 2012

History is
(1) A 'work in progress" (Lewis Lapham, Harper's, May 2012)
(2) "A waste of time" (Hilda Cortez, who sat next to me in Art History 76 sophomore year)
(3) A sphinx that "to the defeated may say 'Alas!' but cannot help or pardon" (W. H. Auden, "Spain 1937")
(4) What happens when thesis meets antithesis or when Newton's second law of mechanics meets "Hegel's Vacation"
(5) "A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken" (Ireland's Icarus)
(6) "Now and England" (T. S. Eliot)
(7) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein)
(8) "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'' (Elizabeth Bishop)
(9) A "hail Mary" pass (Doug Flutie)
(10) What FDR said was "the only thing we have to fear." 
(11) Something that occurred prior to
    a) Auschwitz
    b) Hiroshima
    c) Watergate
    d) the fall of the Berlin Wall
    e) your birth, dear reader. Nine months prior, give or take a few days.
    f) all of the above conjoined by ampersands

from the archive; first posted April 28, 2012

Cindy Hochman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

Inner Life (With Sabotage)

 

This poem will be intentionally vague.

Candlewicks flicker. Chemicals misfire. Crossed wires refuse to untangle.

Sometimes I slip into something less comfortable.

Carousel horses and streetlights make me weep deeply.

My handsome father’s death has turned into stilted breath.

My benevolent brother’s death is still caught in my throat.

Everyone gives me flowers to fill the fissure between limbs and loss.

And I bury them under layers of, what? Nothing but my own undoing.

A startled and startling voice tells me to go even deeper than this.

Onyx and obsidian wrestle it out with a chest full of white diamonds.

Frankly, my dear, I’ve had enough of dancing through the murk with my not-so-better angels.

Excuse me while I remove this battering ram from my solar plexus.

Let me open my palms to the hazy sunshine. I promise I will stop shaking soon.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cindy Hochman is the president of “100 Proof” Copyediting Services and the editor-in-chief of the online poetry journal First Literary Review-East. She has been on the book review staff of Pedestal Magazine, and has written reviews for American Book Review, Clockwise Cat, Home Planet News, great weather for MEDIA, and others. (And she reviewed the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry for Coldfront Magazine eons ago.) Her previous chapbooks are Wednesday’s Child (Bear House Press), The Carcinogenic Bride (Thin Air Media), Habeas Corpus (Glass Lyre Press), and The Number 5 Is Always Suspect (Presa Press), a collaborative chapbook with poet/collagist Bob Heman. Her latest chapbook is Telling You Everything (Unleash Press). Cindy lives, loves, reads, writes, edits, meditates, learns tai chi, studies Russian, and agonizes over politics in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

   Reginald Marsh, George Tilyou's Steeplechase, 1932, oil and egg tempera on linen mounted on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

"Kyiv" [by Howard Altmann]

Kyiv

I don’t believe in poetry
the poet said to the plant
trying to be a tree
in the rubble of the city.

I believe in your assembly
the poet said to the sticks of wood
holding up the fragile seedling
like an art piece.

Your form is the future
the poet offered the construction
unaware what that was
saying about it all.

Then the testing of the midnight breeze
and the leaves passed
all that they could
to the poet.

Leaning is a kind of stand
the plant revealed
over and over to the poet
buried in the sidewalk exchange.

A fire hydrant is a kind of fire hydrant
the plant broke down to the poet
trying to be a poem
in the rubble of the city.

from Commonweal September 2023

W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"

Here it is again: September 1, 1939, eighty-four years later. Can you picture Auden at The Dizzy Club, that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked the earth? One of the best stanzas is a metaphorical description of that bar and others like it.

Click here for the poem and here for the program that Michael Braziller and I did in fall 2008 on this and other of Auden's poems written after Wystan moved to New York City from England in 1939. 

Quiz of the day:
WHA disliked the last line of the penultimate stanza because he felt it was "dishonest," by which I think he meant "untrue."

He changed it to
(1) We must love one another and die
(2) We must love one another or die
(3) We must love one another or diet
(4) One must love mother nature or die
(5) If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Light up a Winston and think of dear Wystan. Bragging rights go to the winner!

-- DL

Byron Rushes to Astrology's Defense

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires 'tis to be forgiven
That in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from afar,
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 

See the astrological profile of John Keats here