The Best American Poetry

Robert Harbison on Vivian Maier

An outstanding column on Vivian Maier, the little known photographer:
https://robertharbisonsblog.net/2020/11/11/vivian-maier-street-photographer/   

Making of an Opening [by Lera Auerbach]

"Opening" by Lera Auerbach

 

1. The Absence of Trees

You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.

At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing. 
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.

By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.

(After a while, there is no way back.)

 

2. Unborn Music

In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.

Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.

A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.

(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.) 

 

3. An Opening to Breath

I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening? 

Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal. 

A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear

who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.

They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”

(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
 

4. Quiet Chuckle

A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.

Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?

Why?

I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.

"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."

(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)

  

5. Trail of Breadcrumbs

If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful. 
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still. 

Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.

(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)

 

6. What’s Not Allowed in Svalbard

The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.

Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.

If you die, you will be fined, 
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard. 

(Dying and bringing cats.) 

Silent Music [by Lera Auerbach]

Leitmotifs Photo by Lera Auerbach

 

 

At the Marlboro Music Festival, returning home at night –
my door was covered by moths. I opened the door quickly
as not to let them in, but at least twenty managed to fly in –
into the light of the dining room's lamp.

 

Today I found them dead all around the entrance,

dried angels, almost transparent in their fragile death

with the powder – angel's dust – still on their wings.

 

I think of them while listening to Chopin's mazurkas –

so fragile, so transparent, immortal in their captured beauty.

I gently lift the dead bodies of white&gray moths
from the floor – sliding them into an old glass jar.

 

There they shall rest. They look alive.

Most have their wings open, as if in flight.

My fingers are covered with the powder from the wings.

Their silence is music too.

 

When I wake up tomorrow morning

– they shall still be here, under the glass,

frozen in their death, as in a dream

hearing the music only they can hear.

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly Fly TWA

The great Mad Ave mad men could not have created a better ad for TWA. --  DL

A protective blanket of words [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Arctic Dreams - Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

I learned that a friend of mine was going through a tough time. His mother died, and he had debilitating neck pain. He needed to write the obituary and arrange for the funeral. His mother had dementia. Was he able to say goodbye? I did not ask. 

I don't know which scale would measure grief. Such a scale doesn't exist. 

Physical pain is easier to manage. If it is yours. Because at some point, the pain stops defining you. 
Grief buried deeper, so deep it can't be torn away, it becomes you.

In the Arctic, old babushkas, when they become unable to take care of themselves, hope to be killed by a polar bear. When they become too ill and weak, they look for the bear to eat them. I asked why. Being devoured by a wild animal didn't seem to me like an attractive way to finish life. 

"The bear will be nourished by eating me," explained an old Inuit woman. "The bear will become strong and fat. Then one day, my son will kill that bear. My son and his family will eat the bear's meat, make healing mixes from its fat, and make trousers from its fur. Thus, through the polar bear, I will nourish my son and keep him warm, even past my life, even past my death."

Post mortem motherly care.

(2)

A few years ago, I travelled to Greenland and stayed in Nuuk in the apartment of a polar bear hunter. A polar bear hunter's home looked like an IKEA house made by children constructors of adult sizing. Everything was modern, functional and perfectly unremarkable. 

A photograph on the wall showed a polar bear (or rather its fur) covered in blood, soaking in a bathtub. I realized it was the same bathtub in which I had showered that morning. It had rubber ducklings as lucky ornaments. Perfectly, chillingly, unremarkable bathtub.

(3)

"I wish I could make a blanket of protective words to shield you," I wrote to my friend, whose mother died after suffering dementia for several years. 

“A protective blanket of words” could be a definition of poetry. 
“Could be” because, like everything else, it rejects any definitions. 

Poetry is no different than spell-making or alchemy.

As if words could make a difference. 
As if anything could still make any difference.

In the world gone mad with apocalyptic craziness and fear, can words remain protective talismans? 

(4)

Bears in the Arctic are suffering from global warming. They're skinny and weak; they couldn't kill even old babushkas on their suicide mission. 

If I could stitch a protective blanket of words, I would make one for the polar bears, another one for the suicidal babushkas on their mission to feed the polar bears, and the third one for the polar bear hunters. I would then make a gigantic frozen quilt for the Arctic to protect it from climate change and even a bigger blanket for the entire world to save it from madness. 

Every stitch would be a word of love, a talisman against impending disaster. 

But I never learned how to make blankets or quilts. I can mend sounds and strings but not threads. The thoughts made of words are unravelling, and I can't weave them together. 

 

Photographer Sarah Meunier lays bare quarantine in "le moment bizarre"

“Day 1” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu ©Sarah Meunier

Ami entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines/… C'est nous qui brisons les barreaux des prisons / …Motivés, motivés/ Il faut rester motivés!/ Motivés, motivés/ Il faut se motiver!

                                                        – “Motivé, Le Chant des partisans” - Zebda

Here is an odd fact such that one only learns when the extent of one’s activity is staring into space,  listening to shards of famous operas and wondering about the history of words floating listless in the Zeitgest. The English “quarantine” – “40 days isolated” is cognate with the French “quarantaine”,  which also means “forty-something”.

I mention this because, just to see how she’s been holding up in le moment bizarre – I mean, what with the shelter in place orders, the remote working, the masks, the absence of mountebanks, monoliths and UFOs, the eternal grinding gears of  – …. Of...what? Exactly? Love? Longing?  –  I mailed the photographer  Sarah Meunier the other day.

Sarah not too terribly long ago, graciously sent readers of the Best American Poetry a Joyeuses Fêtes! in portraits of the people of Bagnolet, the little Paris suburb where we both live. Motivée, in spite of all, maybe because of it all, too, Sarah keeps on scanning the horizon, not just the ceiling. 

“The Lightbulb” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu©Sarah Meunier

All indoor, online, hygienically confined, of course, Sarah’s horizon has lately had to be herself, which is as close to a virtuous philosophy as one can get in, in fact, some say it's as close to wisdom as one can get. She titles her series Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu.

As I say, Sarah Meunier looks in while looking out; I, on the other hand, look out while looking in. Clearly, her looking loop not only starts differently than mine but gets stretched and molded differently, too.

I’m waiting with dead hands for the theaters to reopen, for the mountebanks to peacock, waiting to rush into a crowd and see Gaëlle Bourges’ OVTR (ON VA TOUT RENDRE) and Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard’s MUTUAL INFORMATION. Both at the Atelier de Paris/CDCN. Both pieces remind me of the infinite variety of the Dance that powers the quantum wave we are. Bourge’ll do it through extravagance of movement, Santoro through precision of it.

“The package” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu ©Sarah Meunier

Sarah Meunier, in contrast, looking inward to look outward, will be spending her end-of-the-year breakout cultivating her post-Covid Expo-Choc of Comic-book style shots and reflecting on Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu, an experiment, she says, in “becoming (my)own object”, which at the same time looks at how much the objects of her life are part of her as a subject.

Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu twists 21st-century selfies into gartered-nude poses and postures, like the mouldering Playboy pin-ups my grandad kept into his fishing trailer at Burr Oak lake.

“The Laundry” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu©Sarah Meunier

While Sarah Meunier says she did her pin-ups for fun and to keep her hand in, she also says that a bout with her self-object allowed her to get more comfortable – in her 40s – with herself as a being in a sexual as well as a professional as well as ordinary posture, just like everybody else.

“Saturday clean up” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu©Sarah Meunier

Sarah’s take on Playboy philosophy discovers the now-obscure eroticism in Any-woman’s dusting, tidying and service. Sarah’s Playboy eye sees herself through a old-fashioned-become-ironic style (and persistent paradigm) and, slipping man-pleasing unmentionables among her naked world of mop handles, canned soup and empty fridge lets herself find or reveal a sassy-assed provocation in her own daily bending, reaching and lifting. 

Sarah’s fans, with time to get ruffled up, have got ruffled up by her Quarantaine series – largely because, she says, preening around naked rather than painting portraits of everybody else, forced them to let her come out of the box of their expectations. She was also pleasantly surprised, she says, to have a mostly positive response from her woman fans and friends.  

But, Sarah says, while getting out of the outside-expectations box and getting peer support were both a great relief to her, she was puzzled that her quotidian-level collaborators seemed to have already accepted her as having a life and a sex and all that jazz. She wonders why she had doubted that so long.

So, Sarah Meunier says, it turns out that the on-going effort to be a whole person rather than a packaged series of socio-culture types and roles meets less resistance, whether outside or inside, than she had expected.

In Burlington, Vermont, September 2018

When we went to Burlington, Vermont, in September 2018, as guests of Major and Didi Jackson, we discovered Barr Hill gin (sublime), sipped a drink that a local cafe owner concocted in Major's honor, went to a party, chatted with Dan Fogel, got photographed with a US senator, and drank coffee in the window on Sunday the 17th, our last day, with a newspaper in my pocket and Stacey's camera capturing the moment:Photo credit: Stacey Lehman

Lt. Pete Campanelli, NYFD [photograph by Bill Hayward]

lt. pete campanelli, nyfd

photo(c)Bill Hayward

Pictures from an Institution (The Columbia Review reunion of 2005)

from the reunion of Columbia Review editors and writers organized in spring 2005 by Les Gottesman: on top, left to right, John Hollander, Richard Howard, David Lehman; below, Rika Lesser (blurred), David Lehman, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky. The venue: Bob Holman's Bowery Poetry Club.

Our love affair was meant to be. . .

Happy anniversary to us!

Photo by B. A. Van Sise.

Archie Ammons and friends at the launch reading of BAP 1994

from left to right, A. R. Ammons, James McManus, James Cummins, A. E. Stallings, Angela Shaw. The reading was sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, William Wadsworth executive director. The Academy sponsored the BAP launch reading from 1992 through 1995. For digging up the photo, we're indebted to Jim McManus.

James Merrill's "Log" [on JM's Birthday]

James Merrill in Athens, 1971. Photo by Tom Victor.

Log

Then when the flame forked like a sudden path
I gasped and stumbled, and was less.
Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,
Dear light along the way to nothingness,
What could be made of you but light, and this?

-- James Merrill (1972)

from James Merrill, Selected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (Knopf, 2008)

from the Introduction by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser:

“When James Merrill’s first book of poems appeared in 1951, it seemed unlikely that he would emerge as one of the era’s crucial poets. He was not political, enterprising, dogmatic, addicted, or suicidal. At first his poems seemed cautious except in their implications. Later – the Sphinx always smiled – they seemed enigmatic but dazzling. His originality was a part of his respect for tradition. His wisdom came from his shrugging off any pretense to it. He was, he said, just ‘a man choosing the words he lives by.’ From those words he made some of the most ravishing, surprising, intimate, and memorable poems written in English.”

On “Log”: 

“In Merrill’s poem, the inevitable splitting of the self, the forking of the vital flame, diminishes the speaker thus reminded of his mortality. but the very bifurcation produces sudden illumination and even gaiety. (The poet can make light of the dilemma after all, and as soon as ‘upward’ suggests ‘up word,’ the word “Log” itself in retrospect breaks into two meanings, a journal entry and a piece of fuel. So it is that dark is made light – and ‘light’ becomes heavy, dense with implication.)”

Billy Collins Scores Big Time in London

OK everybody, before going to brunch, ask yourself this one question:
Who wrote the world's biggest big-ass poem?
Hint: the title of the poem is "Breakast"
Hint: this poster is located near a construction site in London.
If you guessed Billy Collins, you win.
"Post Poetry is a great new genre," Ida Noise told this reporter.
Partisans of Jennifer L. Knox's "Hot Ass Poem" may advocate magnifying it on a poster in Portland, Oregon.

OK now. . .off to brunch you go.  -- DL

Photographer Benoîte Fanton’s dance vision: Get on up, hold on! [by Tracy Danison]

"L'Arène", from Don Quichotte de Trocadéro: Choreographer: Jose Montalvo/Performers: Sandra Mercky, Patrice Thibaud/Venue:Théâtre National de Chaillot, 2013

Monsieur Loyal commente

la ballerine s’évente

et pique la piste

en vrille

rouge banderille

                                              (MC Gayffier)

– MC talktalking / ballerina / thrusting / redded blade /right through

The season of giving has come and, I expect, like hatchlings blindly looking for a behavioral model, you all’ll be needing something lovely – a little brain and eye toy – to fix on in the New Year 2020.

I’m glad to gift you with a glimpse of the work of live performance photographer Benoîte Fanton (www.facebook.com/BenoiteFantonPhotographies).

Judging from Fall 2019 retrospective shows hosted by both Mac Créteil, choreographer and activist Mourad Merzouki’s urban dance temple in suburban Paris, and the high-brow commercial Théâtre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysées, Fanton’s dramatic images speak not only to me, Karine, and my circle of esthetically circumspect performance gourmets, but to every kind of lover of the movement arts.

So it should. Fanton has specialized in capturing dance performance – photographing more than 2000 classic, modern, contemporary and urban dance shows in Paris and across France – for the last 15 years or so of her 20-year career.

The photographs offered above and below are from Fanton’s retrospective collection, entitled Sur quel pied danser. I reckon Sur quel pied danser means to be in some doubt as to how to go forward. As a collection Sur quel pied danser, Fanton writes, is dedicated to the notion of holding on (with aplomb) once you, as James Brown famously implores, Get on up.

Get on up, hold on: good advice for opening any year, but especially for this one which open out on to the last chance to do something serious about the climate emergency before it becomes so complexly exponential there is nothing we can do.

At Fanton’s shows, and in her photo book (also titled Sur quel pied danser), each photo is accompanied by a short meditation by MC Gayffier, painter and musician and, of course, poet. Gayffier’s lines admirably take on, fit to and gel with Fanton’s pictures.

I’ve interpreted rather than translated what I think of as Gayffier’s “New Parisian Loose Haiku”. In my mind, the mechanic of her writing was like that of a neo-realist painter than Zen-consciousness warrior: looking from the model to the words and back again. The interval between the focus points was where the poetry was written.

I’ve tried this same imagined mechanic in my interpretative effort of Gayffier’s work, swinging my focus from her lines to my visual sense of the photo, putting down the words that result. I hope my encounter with Gayffier’s sensibility makes her work shine through for you.

Get on up. Hold on.

from "'Meditations in an Emergency" [by Frank O'Hara]

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

-- Frank O'Hara

View of Manhattan from the Smith/9th St. subway station (photo by Stacey Harwood)

"Dusk" [by Amy Gerstler]

Dear, I can’t subsist on this diet
(really more of a fast—celery
seed and a soft word every other
month) any longer. Is that blood
on your pillowcase or another girl’s
lipstick? I want you to know
I’ve had such unalloyed joy
over the past several decades,
smelling your hair and petting
your sweat-beaded feet while
you were asleep. It was far sweeter
than I ever thought possible.
But my ancestors are welling up
in me now and keep nudging me
towards the door. Bells are rung,
harps are played: recessional music.
We both know the theater will close
in a few minutes. If you had been
more attentive or a better pretender
I could have run on fumes for a few
more years, sipping snow melt,
remaining quite high on it. Let
the record show I recited prayers
for your perpetual ascension
and good health as I laid this note
in its frozen envelope on your desk
and left, taking both dogs, the teal
parakeet and the black cat with me.
They got custody of our love.

from American Poetry Review (2008)

Facsimile Mantelpiece [poem and photo by Angela Ball]

Ed note: A few weeks ago, Angela Ball visited David and me in Ithaca, NY.  One morning over coffee, Angela showed me pictures of her lovely home in Mississippi, where she lives and teaches. I was struck by the arrangement of objects on her mantelpiece and asked for the story behind each. This poem is Angela's reply. Thank you, Angela. sdl: 

photo(c)Angela Ball

Arranging things on a mantel you have latitude
the longitude is missing just the latitude
to choose things
A series of completions or 
incompletions; in 2014, John Ashbery’s husband
said of their interior, “It’s probably the last
version” but so changed
now as is James Tate’s
the house of the strangest yard sale
that after a warm rainy breakfast
of intersections and messages
asked me
to choose

Size of course is always relative
The red scarf above the fez-capped man, the wiener
mobile, Dagwood, and R2D2
could wrap their Central Park, their Yosemite; maybe
their outer space
The mirror is an ocean
propped to the wall
As for the miniature edition of James Wright’s
The Branch Will Not Break
its largess
saved many from the wish
to give up before beginning
This ragtag display’s password
might be “generous”
since below it, in summer,
no edited forest burns

The man with the fez is some remote relative of the Shriners who swooped down the hospital hill
gripping the steering wheels of their midget cars on the very day a newborn was presented to a
mother by the gull-wing armature of a nun. And it is this very Zebra-cat with its free birdseed
who is now heard neighing, meowing, and trilling from a James Tate poem standing alone near a
cotillion of fruit trees and Minnow-Bucket Road

Angela Ball directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Scarlet, and a volunteer cat, Whisker. Her most recent book is Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press).

 

Goodbye to All That!

On Silver Street, Cambridge, England. .  .

David Lehman and Kevin Young discuss John Ashbery's "Worsening Situation" for "The New Yorker"

In this New Yorker podcast, David Lehman joins New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young to read and discuss John Ashbery’s poem “Worsening Situation” and his own poem “Stages on Life’s Way"

To prep for the interview, David (pictured left in this 1997 photo by Jack Mitchell) wrote "On John Ashbery's 'Worsening Situation'":

On John Ashbery’s “Worsening Situation”

Like a collage, I wrote, the bruised words
Shampoo the hair of the dog. Or like
The simile eclipsing the thing it is likened to,
Which remains unnamed. The feast is
Near enough to watch but too far to reach
By foot. To up the ante, we get an echo
Of Keats's last poem or a quote from Rimbaud.
The key repetition occurs here. We feel
We have been riding the A train since 1965.
Rides, ceremonies, rites. What's the point?
Yet it bothers me, everything I haven't disclosed
Fully. I still read spy novels and get crank
Phone calls. I'm like the guy whose wife
You see on TV wondering how to get 
My collars clean. Tell her I'm somewhere 
Else -- Paris, Texas, for instance..

-- David Lehman [November 2017; in American Poetry Review, May/June 2018]

Mother's Day [by Terence Winch]

Mother’s Day

 

My mother did not live to be a hundred
like the old nuns in the Sacred Heart
convent, sheltered from life. She was
fifty-five when she died. I was the baby
of the family. It does not seem so long
ago to me that I snuck into bed
between her and my father, no greater
antidote to fear than that. Life is not
a slow read. We speed through it,
pages flipping. After her funeral,
I hated the smell of flowers.

She used to make my brother take me
to the movies to help me breathe
in the cool dark of the air-conditioned Elsmere.
Now all I want to do is watch movies in bed,
central air humming through the house. I cried
so much when she died that it still embarrasses me.

 

She used to visit me in my dreams,
even sometimes speaking to me from
the beyond. But I haven’t seen
or heard from her in years.

My own heart thumps
wildly in my chest sometimes,
when I think about the story ending.

My arms are swollen from allergy shots,
my son examining bumblebees
in the backyard. I inhale as deeply as I can.
Flowers don’t bother me anymore.

 

[This poem was written, I think, ca. 2000. The photo shows me, checking the time, and my best friend, Dennis O'Toole, sitting on my mother's lap in 1948 in Rockaway Beach, NYC. My mother was Bridie Flynn from Co. Galway, Ireland.]

In Memory of Will Gary