The Best American Poetry

Victoria Kennefick: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________

Deposition

 

I love you the way waves love cliffs.

They fling lace skirts against rock,

can-can kicks rush the top,

fall back down; froth clings—a kiss.

Sometimes they wash worn things to shore;

sometimes, they roll silent, say nothing,

tunnel under, hide in echo-dark—

wait until there’s a horizon.

 

I love you in this way because

you are a planet in space that orbits

the sun coolly, allows for oceans.

I love you in this way because

you let me moon about as a pond,

or thrash and flail over piers.

You scoop me up, stone and soil,

sand I’ve made for you. 

 

I love you, don’t mind if I whip in your eye,

erode a piece, I’ll make up for it –

silt and foam, my wedding dress;

spray and salt, my veil, bouquet of blue nets.

I love you because without you there is just sea;

a body all at sea, waving surrender to sky,

kicking and screaming against the line—

water, not going anywhere.

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Victoria Kennefick's debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. A UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-23, Victoria is now Cork County Council Writer-in-Residence 2024. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a PBS Choice for Spring 2024 and BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March.

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                                Claude Monet, Rough Sea at Étretat, 1883. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

More Unpublished Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets in February 2003. Here are some previously unpublished exanmples. And here is a conversation with David Shapiro conducted by Kent Johnson http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml

Subj:    Kenneth said: We always make our own mayonnaise          
Date:   2/12/2003 11:22:50 AM Eastern Standard Time       

From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Good couplets make their point almost at once.
Like kicking a habit or calling your children runts.

The evil is done, and you are flawed forever.
But the couplet keeps returning, like Shelley's river.

An off‑rhyme doesn't daunt it, not the couplet.
We know whose dog we are, we rise and shit.

We could have said "we urinate" but we didn't.
The couplet seems to end with "Good riddance."

Oh Kenneth loved the couplet in Al Pope.
He said my taste at fifteen gave him hope.

Oh Janice, he said once, make mayonnaise.
This genius likes his Pope‑‑what higher praise.

I was fifteen‑‑had never downed such stuff.
His home‑made mayonnaise was strange enough.  DS, 2 / 12 /03

 

Re: The consistency of the couplet: each couplet consists
2/14/03
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap

[Sometimes six suffice]

Each couplet consists of an adult and a child.
I shall bring my lunch pail and dine in the wild.

Each couplet consists of a woman and a man,
But which is which? Who’s the European, who the American?

From the time we are teens we attempt to link
With others who exist because they think.

So I walk to the edge and I walk back alone
Except for the chirp of a cell phone.

Each couplet composes a contradiction
And resolves it like an uncanny prediction.>> DL, 2 / 14 / 03

 

My wife's mother is dying, innocent And who scapes whipping in this Tenement  

Date:   2/13/2003 9:01:09 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

<< A couplet comes down on you like death's storm.
Afterwards, Dave, you're never quite so warm.

A couplet edges downwards like black snow.
But so dramatic! like snow in a Noh.

My mother's wife is dying‑‑innocent.
But who ‘scapes whipping in this Tenement?

You were a couplet, Lady, all day long.
At evening, you're a chorus for no song.

Then you were born, or was it just red clay?
Where are you? is the question of our day.

My wife's sweet Mother lay there without mind.
Was it a home, a hospice? Were we blind?

We want our beds to change, but our disease?
My wife could drive us home, like a white rose.    >> DS, 2 / 14 / 03

 

Re: Like a white rose, or like red clay

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

I speak of my mother who called to console
Me when Sinatra died at 82. She said he wasn’t old.

In May ‘98 my mother was eighty three
Though she liked to tell people she was eighty, only.

After the female moon departed, leaving blood
In the snow, we left our nostalgia for the mud.

I have a new song, and it’s not a blues song,
You wake up, it’s spring, and you can’t go wrong.

What happened to that song? Where did it go,
That dream in a shabby dress I used to know?

We’ve got a right to sing the blues, to sign
The picture we can’t finish, to dash off the line.

Youth is the place where you greet the day with lust
And pledge your trust, but thence in the end comes disgust.  DL, 2 / 15 / 03

 

Re: away, so I claim "eight" expansively: Protest and Fiona Shaw  
Date:   2/15/2003 6:17:18 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I forgive you David Lehman for being away.
Now write a couplet or I'll protest, pray.

I forgive you Lehman deep in jet lag or leg.
I saw the protests early and disagree to beg.

Billionaires for Bush was witty: a few others.
Susan Sarandon, Poitier, a few mothers.

I tried to get my young son arrested.
But his mother took him to Medea‑‑busted.

Medea spritzed big droplets on her Jason.
I bowed my head to the Irish‑Greco version.

I wouldn't want the part of bloodied child!
Psychoanalytically, I think it wild.

I want the part of the princess, off stage.
Pretty, burnt to death, welded to Dad in old age.

What a death! Have you heard of anything like it?
Or is it just napalm, our old friend Ike that.  – DS, 2 / 15 / 03

photo by Chris Felver; copyright (c) 1999 by Chris Felver.

Poetry Comic [by Nin Andrews]

 

I went out to eat this week with several friends, and I couldn't believe how complicated it was to complete our order. One friend has celiac; another is lactose intolerant; another is on a low fiber diet; yet another is allergic to peanuts. And then I have a friend with alpha gal syndrome. In these parts, someone always has alpha gal. 

But ordering was the easy part. We had all promised not discuss politics. So we decided to talk about food instead--the foods we love and can eat. They asked me what my favorite food poem was.  Of course, there are too many delicious food poems to choose from, but my first thought was of this one by Diane Ackerman. 

THE CONSOLATION OF APRICOTS
by Diane Ackerman

Especially in early spring,
when the sun offers a thin treacle of warmth,
I love to sit outdoors
and eat sense-ravishing apricots.

Born on sun-drenched trees in Morocco,
the apricots have flown the Atlantic
like small comets, and I can taste
broiling North Africa in their flesh.

Somewhere between a peach and a prayer,
they taste of well water
and butterscotch and dried apples
and desert simooms and lust.

Sweet with a twang of spice,
a ripe apricot is small enough to devour
as two hemispheres.
Ambiguity is its hallmark.

How to eat an apricot:
first warm its continuous curve
in cupped hands, holding it
as you might a brandy snifter,

then caress the velvety sheen
with one thumb, and run your fingertips
over its nap, which is shorter
than peach fuzz, closer to chamois.

Tawny gold with a blush on its cheeks,
an apricot is the color of shame and dawn.
One should not expect to drink wine
at mid-winter, Boethius warned.

What could be more thrilling
than ripe apricots out of season,
a gush of taboo sweetness
to offset the savage wistfulness of early spring?

Always eat apricots at twilight,
preferably while sitting in a sunset park,
with valley lights starting to flicker on
and the lake spangled like a shield.

Then, while a trail of bright ink tattoos the sky,
notice how the sun washes the earth
like a woman pouring her gaze
along her lover’s naked body,

each cell receiving the tattoo of her glance.
Wait for that moment
of arousal and revelation,
then sink your teeth into the flesh of an apricot.

"Grande Mess" & "Le Sacre du Sucre" harness history to sense and beauty in Guadeloupe’s past and present [By Tracy Danison]

“Grande Mess” by Clémence Baubant. Photo © Service communication Artchipel Scène Nationale de la Guadeloupe

The dance performance Grande Mess by Clémence Baubant starts with three young woman dance performers of color from Guadeloupe standing front of stage, left. Grande Mess, local French for “high mass”, the choreographers say, does not reference the Christian ritual. The performers wear black molding leotards, are in among two unequally-high white pedestals, like high steps; they stand on the blocks, stretch and gesture elegantly, drape themselves in the air, show themselves off, fun each other; there’s drum music in the distance. When they move off, I notice there are long, braided cords slung over their athletic shoulders.

Sugar island, dark skin, auction blocks, braided cords, showing themselves off. Why, that must be. Slave sale, with bullwhip.

Of course!

However, when the women have sashayed to the center stage and segued into costumes of white panties over black leotard with banana leaf halters and the far off music has become whole-stage present, the slave market story doesn’t make much sense.

With my casual racism out of the way as well as taken into consideration in terms of my reflections, in my experience of Clémence Baubant’s (and Lenablou’s) pieces, I think I’ve discovered something I had never thought about. It never occurred to me to imagine a body schema not centered around itself but rather from a point of contact in movement space. It seems to me that in Grande Mess, the three women’s dance begins at the soles of their feet, at the contact point with the ground, not, or at least it has seems to me, from the first or, root, chakra – as for instance you see in Martha Graham’s dance technique. As they progress through Grande Mess, the performers, Clémence Baubant, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin, do not so much balance their bodies as shape them in the air, as if dancing a reflexology foot chart.

 

“Grande Mess” by Clémence Baubant. Photo © Artchipel

 

In experience, though, Grande Mess makes a unique demonstration of dance feeling. There is no mention of a particular technique or of dance feeling in the Grande Mess notes. However, the notes do declare the intention to explore the intimate relation of the body to walking while recalling (chthonic) figures such as  such Ladjablès (“La Diablesse”) a Wild Woman, who re-balances the man-woman relationship gone to whack, or Mûlatresse Solitude(“Mulatta Solitude”), a real-life “mixed-race” anti-slavery leader turned Guadeloupe origin myth.

All this of suggests to me “point of contact” and fusion, rather than “center” as technical approach. Indeed, Baubant’s choreography fuses different movements into a body’s natural rhythm. As I watch, I see shades of traditional dancing from Africa with maybe even a jig from Europe with break attitude with Rock&Roll exuberance with line-dance execution with ballroom kaleidoscoping with personal expressionism with … I don’t know what-all! This is not to say, Grande Mess is potpourri de danse bouncing here and there: Grande Mess is all vertical motion, ether-wards, rippling up out of the Earth and pulsing through the air.

 

“Le Sacre du Sucre” by Lenablou. Photo © Ernesto S. Mandap

 

I felt the “point of contact/soles of the feet/vertical motion” theme as equally present in the second piece of the evening’s double bill, Le Sacre du Sucre (“The Rite of Sugar”), featuring the celebrated Guadeloupe dance performer and choreographer, Lenablou (or Léna Blou). Again, the notes make no mention of a particular approach, but explain that Le Sacre du Sucre is in the tradition of GwoKa, a dance practice that uses call and response and Ka-drum rhythms to initiate then shape a “spontaneous” dance. It strikes me that the premise is “The waters are not divided, so make the world”.

Le Sacre du Sucre, the notes declare, means to bring spectators into a story that is rooted, on the one hand, in the de-humanization of the body that historical slavery requires, on the other hand, in the unexpected, the unlikely and the unforeseeable in that same history.

As experience, Le Sacre du Sucre works out as an origin story. The question is: how does music exist? The answer is: contact with the world around and its rhythms.

The piece opens with what I think of as a dance floor in a poor, hot, country café.  Two men, one woman. Drum sound in the wind, but no music. Too poor a place, I reckon, for a Victrola record player; must be a ménage à trois in the vein of Porgy & Bess, maybe Frankie & Johnny. Lenablou and her two men begin rough, awkward, slow. I think, like a couple dealing with an interloper who is by no means a third wheel.

 

“Le Sacre du Sucre” by Lenablou. Photo © Alexandre Boissot

 

And here is where it turns from a chronology to an ontology: all three are such practiced performers, their awkwardness also hints of them as guests at a party thrown by people who are new to them. This is not after all a story of what happens but of taking shape.

The drum sound takes on rhythm as the three continue together, are there, become practiced, letting in the sound of the world around through contact with their little space and with each other, by creating…  The performers, Lenablou, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou don’t just pick up the sound, they find it in the world around.

The men begin to rhythm the poor tables as if they were drums, bringing in effect what is distant near… With feet on the ground and hands searching the air, Lenablou makes their rhythm into dance, into a place where she can be together … They put on “sound shoes” (designed by performer Félix Flauzin). These transform the point of contact with the earth to music with their movement.  

By the time the performers are taking their bows, they have defined themselves as individuals synching and falling out of synch, that is, they have gone from movement to rhythm, to dance to music …

Lenablou shows creation: it is a dance we all do.

_________

I saw “Grande Mess” and “Le Sacre du Sucre” at Carreau du Temple 10 October 2024.

“Grande Mess” is a creation of Clémence Baubant, with performance by her, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin; dramaturgy by Mathilde Rance; scenographic creation by Anais Verspan; sound by Yannick Berbié; light by Marion Jouhanneau. Click for more on Clémence Baubant.

“Le Sacre du Sucre” is a creation of Lenablou (also written Léna Blou) with performance by her, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou, assisted by James Carles; with music directed by Daniel Trépy; sound by Steeve Lancastre; and sound accessories by Félix Flauzin; light by Roger Olivier. Click for more on Lenablou.

"Terence on the Terrace" [by David Lehman]

Terence on the Terrace

Sipping a dry martini, with a garlic-stuffed olive,
I am thinking how happy I am to be 
clinking glasses with you, my friend,
in this virtual universe where virtue is rare
and you've got it. “The valiant never taste 
of death but once,” may not be true but is
magnificent rhetoric, defined broadly
as an argument with everyone, which
the valorous will inevitably lose, though,
as in a chess game, one can always resign
rather than face the music if checkmate.
is inevitable. Writing a happy hour sonnet,
you aim at levity, but the levitation
cannot defeat the earth's gravitational pull.

David Lehman 11 / 1 / 24   [Happy birthday, TPW]

Vincent Price reads "The Raven"

Bitchin' with Nin and Whitman [by Nicole Santalucia]

Bitchin' with Nin and Whitman [by Nicole Santalucia]

I've been bitchin’ with Nin Andrews about what it’s like to live like a gypsy, about how being a poet has led to a vagabond life.

I got a degree (hurray!), made a move for a job (at least I am lucky to get a job), and now I can’t help but think of how a lot of poets live out of a suitcase. And, it’s a little scary.

As I was in the last stretch before my move—I had till Monday, July 14th to finish packing—the sea of boxes and clutter and exhaustion consumed me. I was already worried: will I have to do this again and again?   

I always feel vulnerable in the process of upheaval... I know it's normal to get nervous before starting something new. But it's all new: the job, the school, the town, the people, etc.—and for me that brings up self-doubt. I have this fear, what if I can never write again?  Sorry to be dramatic. Moving brings out the drama in me, too. I wonder how many poets are out there, thinking these thoughts as they, too, move to another college town. 

To calm myself, I started bitching to myself, and then I started bitching to Nin, and then to Whitman as if he were my friend on Facebook. And that perked me up. Just the idea of Whitman on social media made me laugh. I am jealous of Whitman because he didn't have to worry about a classroom of freshman staring at him.  And I am jealous of Emily Dickinson, too. She just stayed in one room as long as she liked.  

As I was preparing to make my big move, it was a late afternoon, a Sunday, and Walt had just updated his Facebook status, There is no loss of time in the mountains! I sing on this day: happy birthday to you, Fanny Fern. On the off-chance that Walt had his iPhone while he was riding the ferry back to the main island, I sent him an instant message because I worried that no one would ever read my first book. I wanted him to promote me, loud and gregarious man that he is.  But I evaded the topic; instead, I started questioning him about what all of this means.

NS: But Walt, what about the loss of identity? I fear that I am really no longer here, in the flesh. If I exist at all, how is it that I no longer know how to splay myself on a grassy knoll and look out at the emptiness?

WW:  Answer.

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world (“Continuities”).

NS: But Walt, every time I am on Facebook I feel lost in space and time. It’s as if my senses have been removed—carved out of my being by a motherboard manufactured in some foreign country.

WW:  Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity; 
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. (“O Me! O Life!”)

NS: But Walt, I am faithless and foolish and full of myself—there is nothing but emptiness in front of me, behind me, between my fingers, between my ears, my breath.

But then the conversation stopped. Later Walt mentioned how he almost dropped his phone overboard, just as the ferry was approaching the port at the tip of Manhattan. He was on his way to pay back Fanny Fern the five bucks he borrowed from her over a year ago. I think he was telling me how his debts never go unpaid as a way to enlighten me. He also said it’s not good to burn people with a high profile. 

High profile. Is that what we're all looking to become?

from the archive; first posted October 30, 2014

Att 7 pm October 30: a celebration of Joe Brainard's Selected Letters

Joe Brainard is the only painter whose work adorns the cover of two volumes of "The Best American Poetry"

For Joe Brainard

The road sign said snow
‘Well, I never said it was spring’
in 1968 in whose loft downtown
under a cobweb of windshield

a butterfly beneath a branch within
a border of blue 1953 Easter Seals
the sun surrounded by streaks
of blue and white in a frame

and a wave crashing against it
the logic a rhyme of college and collage
the logic a rebus the message simple
Nancy a blueprint bingo cherries

and two fragments of letters
handwritten big block letters neat
I looked and the three hairs
in the sink spelled out Joe

David Lehman, 12/ 20 / 2000 

On October 30, 2024, at 7 pm at St Mark's Church in NYC there will be a reception in honor of Joe Brainard's Love, Joe: Selected Letters (edited by Daniel Kane; Columbia UP). .The evening will include readings by Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Anne Waldman, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, and Ann Lauterbach.

Paul Auster and others remember Joe Brainard here.
https://youtu.be/I2Znn0oGrfE?t=304

See, too, this "Homage to Joe Brainard."

Nin Andrews: How to Write the MFA Poem

For Nin Andrews's must-read "Learning to Write the MFA Poem," click here. We printed the poem in its entirety on February 22, 2010, as you'll see if you use this link, but I can't resist offering this excerpt:

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write
when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree
from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess
I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,
though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well
(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),
but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,
which I despise, not because the poems are bad
but because I was taught how to write them
by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)
who was abusive to women, mostly,
fucked with their heads if not their bodies,
you know the type.  Back then
the women took whatever he dished out
because he was famous I guess.
I hated that, and how he would write poems
about being an asshole, which he was and is,
and about everything and anything else
because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,
so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,
that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems
though nothing is ever really happening
because the poems are usually in some static place

The next stanza takes the poem to that particular place and does amazing things with the set-up. It's a tour de force -- the truth, the poetry, and the parody are one. Mega kludos, Nin.

I remember writing a poem called "The Guggenheim Poem," aping the kind of poems people used to write on their fellowship year funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The poems uusally took place in Italy -- in Venice, often, but sometimes Florence or Rome, with side trips to Siena, and maybe Arezzo, and certainly Rapollo, and once in a while Naples. The poet had gone to a museum in a flimsy skirt in the fierce heat and the eyes of the men were upon her as she walked on the hot brick or cobblestone streets and she wore sunglasses and imagined she was Audrey Hepburn but all pretense and fantasy fell away when she came face to face with the Titian of Venus and Adonis or the David of Donatello in Florence or Piero's Madonna and baby Jesus in Urbino or a Giorgione self-portrait in Venice, which she saw as a vision of her father or her husband, she's not sure which, though she has spent many hours analyzing the possibilities, but this she knows this: it was a sudden flash, an epiphany even, like seeing a broken statue and realizing you had to change your life. -- DL

from the archive; first posted May 30, 2012

For Nin Andrews's must-read "Learning to Write the MFA Poem," click here. We printed the poem in its entirety on February 22, 2010, as you'll see if you use this link, but I can't resist offering this excerpt:

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write
when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree
from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess
I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,
though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well
(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),
but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,
which I despise, not because the poems are bad
but because I was taught how to write them
by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)
who was abusive to women, mostly,
fucked with their heads if not their bodies,
you know the type.  Back then
the women took whatever he dished out
because he was famous I guess.
I hated that, and how he would write poems
about being an asshole, which he was and is,
and about everything and anything else
because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,
so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,
that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems
though nothing is ever really happening
because the poems are usually in some static place

The next stanza takes the poem to that particular place and does amazing things with the set-up. It's a tour de force -- the truth, the poetry, and the parody are one. Mega kludos, Nin.

I remember writing a poem called "The Guggenheim Poem," aping the kind of poems people used to write on their fellowship year funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The poems uusally took place in Italy -- in Venice, often, but sometimes Florence or Rome, with side trips to Siena, and maybe Arezzo, and certainly Rapollo, and once in a while Naples. The poet had gone to a museum in a flimsy skirt in the fierce heat and the eyes of the men were upon her as she walked on the hot brick or cobblestone streets and she wore sunglasses and imagined she was Audrey Hepburn but all pretense and fantasy fell away when she came face to face with the Titian of Venus and Adonis or the David of Donatello in Florence or Piero's Madonna and baby Jesus in Urbino or a Giorgione self-portrait in Venice, which she saw as a vision of her father or her husband, she's not sure which, though she has spent many hours analyzing the possibilities, but this she knows this: it was a sudden flash, an epiphany even, like seeing a broken statue and realizing you had to change your life. -- DL

from the archive; first posted May 30, 2012

A "Next Line, Please" Reprise: Name that Line!

 

 

From 2014 to 2019, David Lehman helmed one of our most popular columns: “Next Line, Please,” which resulted in a finished, crowdsourced poem every week. Lehman’s prompts attracted professional writers and amateurs alike, who contributed sonnets, haiku, sestinas, centos, and other formal poems. Eventually these pieces were published together in an anthology, “Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers.” Five years have elapsed since Lehman’s “valediction forbidding mourning,” but fans of the column have held out hope that it would return. Today, Lehman finally brings it back—with a twist. 

https://theamericanscholar.org/in-reprise-next-line-please/

Click here to take part!

 

Joe Kloc: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984

 

Um, I don’t know what to say. I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be, but I guess it

only hurts for a little while. I sat in my cell many days wondering what my last words would be.

I’m not going to shout, use profanity, or make idle threats. I am not going to play a part in my

own murder, no one should have to do that. Can you hear me? This here is a tragedy. They are

fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won’t even

allow to be used on dogs. I should not have to be here. I’m not a killer. I know how it look but I

didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my wife. I did not kill those drug dealers. I did not murder your loved one.

I am sure he died unjustly, just like I am. I have done everything to prove my innocence.

If I am paying my debt to society, I am due a rebate and a refund. Everybody has problems.

I allowed the devil to rule my life. I was a kid in a grown man’s world. I was sick, afraid, and l

looking for love in all the wrong ways. I messed up, made poor choices. But I am not guilty of

this crime. I don’t think the world will be a better or safer place without me. I hereby protest

my pending execution. There are a lot of things that are not right in this world, I have had to

overcome them myself. You know this ain’t right. I don’t know why all of this happened. I just

played the hand that life dealt me. I understand that you wanted this day to come, you got

what you wanted. I’m sure you think this is wonderful in your eyes. If this takes the pain away,

so be it. Whatever makes y’all happy. I know you believe that you’re going to have closure.

The truth is that you are going to feel empty after tonight. A revenge death won’t get you anything.

Sooner or later every one of y’all will be along behind me. You will answer to your Maker when

God has found out that you executed an innocent man. I wouldn’t wish this on you. I forgive all y’all.

It is all part of life, like a big full plate of food for the soul. Tell everyone I got full on

chicken and pork chops. I am going to miss those pancakes and those old-time black-and-white shows.

Sometimes it works out like this. I would like to tell my wife that I love her and thank her

for all the years of happiness. I don’t want to leave you baby, see you when you get there.

To my kids, stand tall and continue to make me proud. Don’t fight with each other. I know this is

hard for y’all, but we are going to have to go through it. Don’t cry, it’s my situation. I’ll be fine.

I won’t have to wake up in prison anymore. Don’t be angry at what is happening to me. Enjoy

life’s moments because we never get them back. Yesterday was my birthday. Ain’t life a bitch?

Where’s my stunt double when you need one? Oh, Lord. I am going home. I might have lost the

fight but I’m still a soldier. I am taking it like a man, like a warrior. Preparest a table before

me in the presence of my enemies. Tell them I finished strong. Death before dishonor. With this let

all debts be paid that I owed, real or imagined. Lord, send me a chariot. Hallelujah, holy, holy,

holy. I guess that’s it. It’s my hour. Only the sky and the green grass goes on forever. I’m done.

I have come here today to die, not make speeches. Warden, if you are going to murder

someone, go ahead and do it, pull the trigger. Let’s give them what they want. I’m ready when

y’all are. Are they already doing it? I can feel it, taste it. My left arm is killing me, it hurts bad.

Let me know that I will be in Heaven tonight, please let me know, I don’t want to be in Hell

with Satan or anyone else, please, that is something I need to know. I am starting to go. I am going

to sleep now. Begins singing: Amazing Grace.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Kloc is a Senior Editor at Harper’s Magazine. His first book, Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America, will be published in April.  ["82 Sentences, Each Taken from the 'Last Statement' of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984" originally appeared in the Sept. 19^th, 2024, issue of the New York Review of Books.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                   Death row inmate Kevin Cooper's painting, It’s a Generation Thing in America.

 

 

The Golden Age of Paranoia, part II [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea.

Francis Wheen begins his history of the reputedly paranoid 1970s with his questioning of what main event signified the end of the idealistic 1960s. I’ve read other authors pondering that same question. The certain events that Wheen served up are the usual suspects. He points to August 9, 1969, when Charles Manson’s cult followers hacked to death Sharon Tate and four others in L.A. Joan Dideon apparently saw that as the death of the ‘60s. Or, Wheen writes, “the public burial of peace, love and flower power” was the tragic Altamont concert later in 1969, when Hells Angels hired as security guards killed a young attendee, Meredith Hunter. Or else, the ‘60s ended on May 4, 1970, when the national guardsmen gunned down four antiwar protestors. This could make for a keen game to play on long road trips: coming up with the exact event that ended the ‘60s. There are two events that Wheen doesn’t mention, like, for a lot of people it was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in June, 1968, after winning the California primary. 

Personally, I am partial to the idea that the real death of the ‘60s was on December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman. After all, the ex-Beatle was the last remaining symbol of idealism for the Left, and Chapman was plenty disillusioned after John’s religiously blasphemous “we’re bigger than Jesus” comment. Maybe I see it as the best analogy because I wasn’t born until the early 1980s, and yet my musical tastes are frozen in the 1960s. I have been a beatlemaniac since childhood. I have a distinct memory of feeling a sense of terrible alienation coming of age in the mid-1990s and absolutely hating the crap music everyone else was into. Lousy lonesome childhood indeed. 

More tomorrow

Poem Beginning with a Line after Yehuda Amichai [by Didi Jackson]

Past the window in the room where we make love
waves follow one another like lines of laundry
as the cliffs unfold, spilling like bolts of cloth into the bay,
and it is the anise, they say, the snails
are after, defining the roads of Serifos
like small-change coins, curled and climbing fierce
as soldiers up each stalk in numbers so thick
they could be plucked like white berries ripe
with June, and they too would taste of licorice
succulent in a time of honey and nettles.

from Moon Jar by Didi Jackson. Red Hen Press, 2020.

from the archive; first published July 29, 2020

The Golden Age of Paranoia [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea. 

More to come soon!...

-- Friday, October 25, 2024

Alexandra Lacroix’s “Entre nous, les saisons”: How to perform climate catastrophe [By Tracy Danison]

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

I was Googling an equivalent for du lard du cochon and ran across the factoid that, before the 18th century, there were two seasons.

From about 4000 BC until then, annual events worth remarking bore holy names such as Saint Répétition or quaint ones such as Awakening of the Groundhog in the different dead languages.

Great, mysterious things then began to happen. Going on into the 18th century, believing firmly that making stuff was understanding it, and sure that anyhow it could all be reconciled to Biblical accounts, people started hairsplitting scientifically. Thus encouraged, taxonomy (phylum, order, genus, species) and industry began to proliferate.

Antonio Vivaldi was in 1723 thereby enabled to add Spring and Fall to our calendar and compose his celebrated Four Seasons concerti. Scrapping the wordy “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” his wonderful Seasons formalize a compact and gorgeous “natural world”, which, pretty much, exists to provide the lake and lightning that will henceforth inspire all aspiring Mary Shelleys and their shitty little boyfriends to write their own Frankensteins.

The inconvenience of another take on the world was documented in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in late Summer, 2019: Sweltering in Paris: Going to ground with Michel Onfray, Greta Thunberg & the death of Descartes.The “natural world” is as difficult to intellectually and morally shake off as its wordier predecessor. And, so much the worse for humanity, it is increasingly more difficult to maintain Nature at anything like service-optimal levels.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

Alexandra Lacroix’s dance performance, Entre nous, les saisons (“Between you and me, the seasons”), imagines “the fragility of [human] being” (in the environment) not as an alternative to the beguiling notion of a world all our own but as a more perceptive and sensible way of looking at it: Fragility is U. As a description of material peril and of the human role, “fragility” does a better job of highlighting humanity’s situation in the natural world than “(inter)dependent” and a far better job than “should be responsible”, that’s for sure.

The brilliant part of Alexandra Lacroix’s show is that she knows fragility is about showing and talk always gets to “should”: more do, less words.

The theater is a big hall, a concrete floor, bleacher-bucket seating; the stage is the space between the first row and the wall. To churn up a fragile ambiance, she uses musicians riffing on the Four Seasons with electronic and traditional instruments, amateur rock climbers, and scaffolding. The set is complemented with familiar images of the leafy and green and spectacular natural world projected through the scaffolding and on the back wall and sometimes accompanied by little NPR-tone talking.

The rest is metaphor, symbol, allegory, analogy, what have you.

The climbers clamber and fall and grunt and sweat up around and over scaffolds that give the impression of being stocked on, rather than part of, the set. A couple of the musicians, loosely centered among the scaffold struts and beams try out riffs and phrases and variations on the Seasons concerti. The climbers, singular and together, are absorbed in talk of choices, defeats and successes.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

In terms of the rhythm and pace of movement and interaction, sometimes the climbers seem to lead the musicians, sometimes to follow them, sometimes musicians or climbers use the set environment as a sound board or an instrument or a challenge. Seasons is an actor: the concerti have shared History but also personal intimacy – I have stared out the window at the frozen Earth to the rattle of steam heat and Spring. The riffs and phrases and variations bounce against my expectations of Vivaldi, not those I have for the musicians.

In sum, as fragility-awareness training, Lacroix’s piece works really well. I was absorbed into its gentle (very subtly organized) chaos – trying to identify riffs on Vivaldi and mostly failing, for instance; the gentle chaos gently unsettles me, makes me feel my vulnerability, without scaring me. Fear’s an important factor. Low dramatic tension means low resistance to what’s happening. Maybe  

my sense of vulnerability implies that the world around can and does act on and without me; it has agency.

Fragility of being, Entre nous les saisons’ gentle chaos suggests, is about me, not about the meanness of the hard hard world. And, when it’s all said and done, what’s about me is about you.

_______

I saw “Entre nous, les saisons” at Théatre de l’Aquarium, 18 September 2024, directed by Alexandra Lacroix assisted by Raphaëlle Blin, with musicians from l’Ensemble Le Printans et climber/performers
Oscar Villamizar Rueda, Sarah Rochereau, Aymeric Schultze. Sound by Jérôme Baillet, video by Jérémie Bernaert
and set by Fanny Laplane
with assistance from Laura Bauchet.

"Poem in the Manner of the 1950s" [by David Lehman]

a prose poem from Michigan Quarterly Review

Top of Form

Volume XLII, Issue 2: Mainly on the 1950s, Spring 2003

Poem in the Manner of the 1950s

Lehman, David

                         For Larry Goldstein

Meet Doak Walker, the last of the all-American glamour boys. Say a prayer for Gil Hodges, who went 0 for the World Series. There was one big secret that separated the men from the boys, and that was what a woman looked like without her clothes on. A naked girl in 1959 was not the same as a naked girl in 1939 or 1919, wasn't that true? It was indubitably true, but how would we get the girls to prove it? If one had pretty breasts we'd say she was "stacked" or had big "knobs." Of such remarks were many Friday night conversations composed. Rosemary Clooney cut a record with Bing Crosby covering "Brazil." Sinatra at the piano smoking a cigarette pointed out that it was great to "know your fate is / where the Empire State is." As nice as it may be to travel on the camel route to Iraq, it's a whole lot nicer to wander back. That was the consensus. The center fielder with the crewcut got the girl, Grace Kelly got the prince, and the heavyweight champ retired undefeated. Bill Holden blew up the bridge but died in the doing. There were no homosexuals yet one of them was expelled and no heroin addicts except jazz musicians and no card-carrying Communists except nondescript men in suits carrying briefcases with film canisters in them. The British meant well, poor suckers, but Europe was an old syphilitic with yellow teeth who smelled bad. We were the land of Captain Midnight and we took a correspondence course and we bought forty-eight commemoratives for twenty-five cents on a matchbook cover and the senators were Republicans, and Washington was first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. The old general played golf and there were bungalow colonies in the summer and drive-ins with Deborah Kerr and Dugan's blueberry muffins and chicken chow mein at the Hi Ho or the Min Ju on Dyckman Street, and a red Coke machine dispensed green eight-ounce glass bottles, and Archie liked Betty but liked Veronica better, and there was a jukebox and there were hamburgers and chocolate malteds, all the things that made America great.

George Bilgere's Poetry Town, Elissa Gabbert's "The Essay As Realm," and Grace Cavalieri's Artwork

These days I don’t want to read the news. I don’t want to turn on NPR. I don’t want to check my phone and read all those annoying political texts.

Instead, I want to turn to my favorite things. Poetry, of course, is number one.

Every morning my inbox is full of those poem-a-day emails.  My favorite, Poetry Town, is sent out by George Bilgere whose choice of poems, commentary, and accompanying photographs are always a delight.

Here's a poem and commentary from Poetry Town that was posted on October 15th. 

Myrtle
by John Ashbery

How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.

 From Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, Ecco, 2007.

Why I Chose This Poem

Over the years I’ve learned the hard way not to fall into the trap of trying to explain what a John Ashbery poem “means.” Many a student of mine has dozed off while I stood floundering around at the lectern in a vain attempt to make sense of that canny old wizard. And while his poems can and often do drive me crazy, there is also something wonderful about the teasing way they almost always almost make sense, the same way Mae West almost always almost let you see it all.

A second favorite thing that helps me through times like this: essays. This week, my favorite is an essay from The Georgia Review called “The Essay as Realm” by Elissa Gabbert in which Gabbert describes the architectural qualities of her writing as well as her love of books on architecture.

 She writes:

“I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.”

 “Architecture books are full of good writing, and they’re also full of good writing advice. Venturi writes that he likes buildings that are 'boring as well as ‘interesting.’  He puts interesting in quotes, but not boring—interesting is the more suspicious category. I feel the same about books—I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring.” 

“I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm.”

As the daughter of an architect, I am particularly taken with Gabbert’s  insights. I have always loved blueprints, and I love the very idea of designing a poem, an essay, a story as a house that you will build, enter and live inside for a period of time.

Reading this essay, I was reminded of the family house that my father added onto, designing bathrooms with tubs that curved into the walls and secret passageways and unreachable cupboards—one you had to climb up a ladder and reach into it with a pole to knock things out—that was the hiding place for Santa’s gifts. The walls of many of the rooms featured built-in bookcases. In fact, the entire house felt like a giant library with books on every wall and table and sometimes spilling onto the floors.

After my mother died, the University of Virginia bought and remodeled our house and took out all the bookcases and weird bathrooms and secret passageways and unreachable cupboards. Now, the house is like so many any other houses—generic and unmemorable.  Not a unique moment in it.  If I were to compare the house to a poem, I'd say someone took it to an MFA workshop and took everyone's advice--editing out all it's interesting features. 

I love thinking of poetry in relation to other arts--which brings me to a third favorite thing: Grace Cavalieri—I don't know whether I like her writing or her artwork best. Lately I've been spending some time checking out her paintings. 

"Society Must Be Defended" [by Jerome Sala]

Society Must Be Defended

from this poem. Its inconsequence is a problem.
A problem Society doesn’t know about.
Problems known, as we all know (don’t we?)
can be harvested, like souls in need of repentance.
But the uncounted are worse than the uncooperative.
They are likely to increase or disorganize
the way of all flesh if allowed to bask
on their undiscovered beaches. Many unknowns
are out there. They are, in fact, known as “the many.”
The only traces they leave are something like black holes.
You know you see something, but on closer inspection,
you’re just gazing at absence. No one blames you
for looking away. After a while, all social space
seems more and more empty. That it goes on
like this for infinity. Scary. But not to worry.
Authorities assure us this too must end.

Jerome Sala's latest book is How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). Forthcoming is Double Feature (Insurance Editions) a collaborative chapbook with his spouse, poet Elaine Equi. Other books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull). His work also appears in two editions of Best American Poetry (Scribners).

Two poems by joanne burns [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Another prose poem this week by another virtuoso of the form. joanne burns (who has previously been featured on the BAP blog here) has published fourteen collections of poetry since her debut Snatch appeared in 1972. For the next half-century, she has pushed the boundaries of genre, with her work often taking place in those indefinite spaces between poetry and prose—not only with prose-poems but also parables and microfictions. For decades she has renounced capitalization, preferring the egalitarian quality of exclusively lower-case words, which according to burns “levels the playing field.” 

“how to sneeze in peace” was first published in the Australian journal, Heat, in 2001 and showcases burns's imaginative faculty which allows her to so acutely locate the absurd in the quotidian. I also wanted to share “she had more friends,” a poem I have always loved. Ingeniously laconic, the shift in the poem’s direction is as sharp as the poet’s wit. The title in particular takes on a new and gloriously more sinister interpretation after the poem is read. Enjoy.

joanne burns lives in Sydney and is currently assembling a new manuscript of recent works: rummage.

how to sneeze in peace

the burden of dreaming, the bed a huge net dragging the monster octopus of story that lunges through the head at night: the corpulence of the drowning psyche. who, what, are these people, these shades, these feelings, places, likenesses, that tangle one up like a bad load of washing. this shamozzle of the long night.

tentacles shoot out new episodes, plots and subplots in the hours before dawn. who is the octopus – the dreamer or the dream. grubby stories, leviathan lore, cheap little anecdotes. you turn in the bed, and its creak documents another story. the glare, the smirks of strangers, familiar places, rearranged by the psyche’s cruel interior designer. you know the loci by name but they look different. as if you are awakening from an anaesthetic.

in dreams irony does not exist, even suspicion, perspicuity is a struggle, you suffer physical pain if you try to break out of the dream. the dream and its fleshy, multifarious burdens insists you remain naïve, compliant, committed.

but for those who have been blessed with dust allergies there is a way out. if you find yourself near dusty spots in one of your dreamings try to get as close as you can to these sprinklings or mites. within breaths you will feel it coming. a huge sequence of sneezing that will blast you from your deepest slumbering, with a shower of clear ink, writing invisible gratitudes across the lightness of air.

 

she had more friends

 

she had more friends 

than you could fit 

into the back of a truck

 

that's why she didn't mind 

leaving them parked 

on a cliff edge

 

while she went 

for a stroll

with the brake in her pocket

Charles Bukowski -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 13, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

 

 

from "Some comments on my last book of poesy"
     -- Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

why do you drink?
I saw you at the racetrack but I didn't bother you.
I'd like to renew our relationship.
do you really stay up all night?
I can out-drink you.
you stole it from Sherwood Anderson.
did you ever meet Ezra?
I am alone and I think of you every night.
who the hell do you think you're fooling?
my tits aren't much but I've got great legs.
fuck you, man.
my wife hates you.
will you please read the enclosed poems and comment?
I am going to publish all those letters you wrote me.
you jack-off motherfucker, you're not fooling anybody.

And the Moon and the Stars and the World

Long walks at night --
that's what's good for the soul:
peeking into windows 
watching tired housewives
trying to fight off
their beer-maddened husbands.

Me Against the World

when I was a kid
one of the questions asked was,
would you rather eat a bucket of shit
or drink a bucket of piss?
I thought that was easy.
"that's easy," I said, "I'll take the
piss."
"maybe we'll make you do both,"
they told me.
I was the new kid in the
neighborhood.
"oh yeah," I said.
"yeah!" they said.
there were 4 of them.
"yeah," I said, "you and whose
army?"
"we won't need no army," the
biggest one said.
I slammed my fist into his
stomach.
then all 5 of us were down on
the ground fighting.
they got in each other's way
but there were still too many
of them.
I broke free and started
running.
"sissy! sissy!" they yelled.
"going home to mama?"
I kept running.
they were right.
I ran all the way to my house,
up the driveway and onto the
porch and into the
house
where my father was beating
my mother.
she was screaming.
things were broken on the floor.
I charged my father and started swinging.
I reached up but he was too tall,
all I could hit were his
legs.
then there was a flash of red and
purple and green
and I was on the floor.
"you little prick!" my father said,
"you stay out of this!"
"don't you hit my boy!" my mother
screamed.
but I felt good because my father
was no longer hitting my
mother.
to make sure, I got up and charged
him again, swinging.
there was another flash of colors
and I was on the floor
again.
when I got up again
my father was sitting in one chair
and my mother was sitting in
another chair
and they both just sat there
looking at me.
I walked down the hall and into
my bedroom and sat on the
bed.
I listened to make sure there
weren't any more sounds of
beating or screaming
out there.
there weren't.
then I didn't know what to
do.
it wasn't any good outside
and it wasn't any good
inside.
so I just sat there.
then I saw a spider making a web
in the window.
I found a match, walked over,
lit it and burned the spider.
then I felt better.
much better.


Poem in the Manner of Charles Bukowski
   -- David Lehman

You do what you want,
I’ll do what I want,
and we’ll see which one of us
gets to the twenty-dollar window
in time for the fourth race at Del Mar.

On the goddamn radio
that’s always playing
in my bitch’s kitchen,
I heard some East Coast big-shot author
say he needs to jerk off before he can write.
All is I can say is fuck that shit.

I hate poets who beg you
to like them because you feel sorry for them.
Do not feel sorry for me.
I won on Bitches’ Brew in the fourth
and went home and drank
 a fifth of bourbon
and got laid.

After Bukowski
   -- Mitch Sisskind

summer nights after work 
bill and I played tom and john
in basketball in the park by
ford city and then we'd go
to the old gripe and groan. 

bill and I were okay at
basketball while john 
was terrible but they 
usually won on account
of how tom was great. 

in fact in two rivers wisconsin
where tom went to high school
tom is in their high school sports
hall of fame in all three sports
in two rivers wisconsin.

well one night bill and I won
in basketball but the next
night they won again and
then we went over to
the old gripe and groan

and tom said i really wanted
to win tonight on account
of you won last night so |
i didn't have a drink
last night not even a

beer and i didn't 
fuck my wife
last night and not
this morning
I didn't
fuck her
neither one.