The Best American Poetry

Columbia To Host Richard Howard Tribute March 31st

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

David Alexander >>>

 

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

 

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

 

Richard picked the poems for The Best American Poetry1995.

 

It was wonderful to work with him.  -- DL

Crocus & Daffodil welcome you to Clare College

What you see when you approach the gate at Clare College, Cambridge, in March:

The vew of the bridge and the old court in the near green future:

Lally and Winch at KGB Bar Last Night (When We Were Young) ["Poets' Photos" by Star Black; report from Julia Cohen]

Terence Winch and Michael Lally read at KGB Bar last night when all of us were fifteen years younger. Star Black took their photographs. Julia Cohen's filed this report:

<<<
On Monday nights, sometimes I think about buying groceries after work and then going straight home. This week I actually made it to the grocery store. But then instead of getting on the subway to Brooklyn, suddenly I'm at the KGB Bar, tucking my groceries under a table, waiting for the reading to begin.

Last night the room was packed -- I was afraid my broccoli raab would be kicked by the crowd. Michael Lally and Terence Winch have such distinguished and dynamic careers, it's clear why the KGB was filled with a diverse and supportive audience. Lally is an actor, an anthology editor (re: None of the Above: New Poets of the USA, 1978), and the author of 27 books. On his blog, he characterizes himself as an, "ex-jazz-musician/proto-rapper/Jersey-Irish-poet-actor/print-junkie/film-raptor/beat-hipster-"white Negro"-rhapsodizer/ex-hippie-punk-'60s-radical-organizer's take on all things cultural, political, spiritual & aggrandizing." His poems have an intense musicality to them, a blend of Irish ballads, disco, and jazz that at some points spin out into archly political poems that address the disgraces of the Bush administration and at other times refocus on the microcosm of tensions embedded in his own Irish American culture/childhood that created a sense of rich tradition and community to the exclusion and expense of others, which Lally still contends with.

Winch is an acclaimed musician, a short fiction and a non-fiction writer, as well as a poet. Switching between elegies, villanelles, the Q&A format, and humorous but biting narrative digressions about his youth, Winch steered his reader through his Irish Catholic upbringing and examines the personal experiences, the larger social movements, and philosophies that made him test his faith. It's as though he has opened his memory box and allowed us to sort through it. In the process, we find much more than birthday cards and old love letters -- there are broken beer bottles, communion wafers, and a few flakes of dried blood.

-- Julia Cohen

Terence Winch
Photo by (c) Star Black

Michael Lally and son Flynn
Photo by (c) Star Black

from the archive; first posted October 7, 2008

Haunted by Dead Souls and Lively Angels: Jennifer Homans’s "Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century" [by Mindy Aloff]

Mr. B. airborne (left), and in a deep plié during a 1961 teacher workshop. Photograph © Nancy Lassalle

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is generally considered the greatest--and, with 425 known works, the most prolific-- choreographer of the twentieth century, possibly of any century. By the time that Jennifer Homans, his newest biographer (herself an erstwhile professional ballet dancer and the author of Apollo’s Angels, the much-heralded history of ballet) decided some ten years ago to write a book about Balanchine, his life and work had been examined intensely in several languages.

First off, in English alone, there were five critically appreciated book-length Balanchine biographies (by journalist Bernard Taper, whose book was based on his interviews with Balanchine for The New Yorker; by Richard Buckle, the critic and biographer of Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky; by the ballerina Moira Shearer, star of the film The Red Shoes; by Robert Gottlieb, the head of Alfred A. Knopf and a member of NYCB’s board who had programmed company seasons for ten years as a volunteer; and by the music critic and biographer Terry Teachout). Francis Mason’s anthology of memoirs I Remember Balanchine, which runs to six hundred pages, could be considered a sixth biography.  Balanchine himself had (with the editorial assistance of Mason) already published a long autobiographical essay on his career up to his early years in the U.S. and--assisted editorially by Lincoln Kirstein, with whom he had co-founded both the New York City Ballet and its affiliated School of American Ballet--theoretical essays on music and choreography and on the filming of ballet. 

Kirstein, on his own, had published two books on the history of NYCB plus a personal memoir; and Balanchine had given long, unguarded interviews concerning his thought processes to Ivan Nabokov and Elizabeth Carmichael at Horizon Magazine, to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov, and to essayist and poet Jonathan Cott. Furthermore, scores of his dancers and nondancing colleagues had produced remembrances of him, and biographies and other studies of Balanchine’s collaborators contain extensive information. There were the unpublished memoirs of him (by ballerinas Ruthanna Boris and Karin von Aroldingen)—not to speak of the many studies of his ballets, beginning with historian Nancy Reynolds’s Repertory in Review, critic Nancy Goldner’s two excellent collections of essays, and the collected reviews and penetrating essays of Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce. And there is the large section on him in the immense oral history by dancer Frederic Franklin, Balanchine’s choice as ballet master at Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where Mr. B worked in 1940 and then again, as the company’s resident choreographer, from 1944 to 1946.

And when Homans was starting, there were already available many analyses of his choreographic process in the video programs that constitute The Interpreters Archive and of The Archive of Lost Choreography, produced by The George Balanchine Foundation. (In these film shoots, currently numbering 75 and counting, the original principals and/or early principal casts of individual ballets, going back to 1925, coach younger dancers to pull from their dancing bodies what Balanchine had asked for when the works were being made.) 

So, when a press release from Random House, the U.S. publisher of Homans’s Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, and the dust jacket of Granta’s British edition of the book present it as the “first major” biography of its subject, a reader familiar with the literature is brought up short.

More perplexing than that are the covers of the U.S. and UK editions. Their common source is an image by Martha Swope showing a rehearsal moment from Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, a ballet Balanchine made for Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in 1968, based on the number he’d choreographed for the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes. On both book covers, Swope’s photo has been severely tampered with, but more objectionable is that they present the relationship of Balanchine and Farrell as a summarizing illustration of Homans’s title, “George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century.”

Farrell was a very great dancer indeed, but to encourage the notion that her relationship with Balanchine overshadows his entire career is not only distorting but is also unfair to the book, which diligently attempts to relate his story from cradle to grave. Homans offers enough here for a small monograph about what made Farrell’s dancing unique to Balanchine, viz. that, by choice, she did not use her technique in service of conventional models of perfection, which was fortunate, as Balanchine did not want perfection. Homans is fascinated by how their mutual experiments with Farrell’s capabilities led the ballerina to make impeccably arresting musical choices freshly at every performance and to look beautiful even when her body was violating academic rules of classic dance: That is, Farrell somehow intuited what Balanchine really wanted from dancing and, even more, to his delight eventually taught him what he ought to want.

The Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyíregyházi (Hungary 1903 - Los Angeles,1987)

On Richard Howard's Birthday

Twice, for the fall semesters of 1991 and 1993, I rented Richard Howard's flat (5X, as in Xanadu) in the Waverly Mews ("but in your case it should be spelled m-u-s-e"). Richard taught at the University of Houston in the fall and I needed a place in the city and was wilgling to be kidded by JA about what the arrangement may have implied. Here I am in 1993, with my son Joe, then nine. We're surrounded by books, with Richard's picture (painted by David Alexander) on the wall. Happy birthday, Richard, born on October 13, 1929. -- DL

Yom Kippur, Grand Concourse, Bronx, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Renee and Huy Harwood, my parents, eager to end the Yom Kippur fast.

-- sdl

BAP 2009: The Gala Launch [by Liz Howort]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

The Tracy K. Smith Poetry Forum in 2012 (photos by Lawrence Schwartzwald)

Tracy K. Smith, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2021, was the guest of honor at our New School poetry forum on December 5, 2012. Here is photographic evidence, courtesy of photographer Lawrence Schwartzwald.

(Great thanks to Lawrence Schwartzwald.)

Fifteen Years On: Bezanson, Bibbins, Deming, Lehman, Yeager Remain in Fashion

In 2007, the Italian magazine Io Donna devoted a section of their men's issue to what New York poets were wearing. Here's the evidence. Top row: Mark Bibbins (left), Matthew Yeager. Second row: David Lehman (left), Taylor Mead and Chris Martin. Third row: John Deming (left), Graeme Bezanson.

 

Adam Zagajewski Memorial (for Polish reaaders residing in Berlin)

Tadeusz Dąbrowski na spotkaniu poświęconym Adamowi Zagajewskiemu

W nieco ponad rok od śmierci Adama Zagajewskiego w monachijskiej Kunsthalle odbędzie się spotkanie z pisarzami, który jako twórcy i jako ludzie wiele mu zawdzięczają. O poezji i eseistyce autora Jechać do Lwowa rozmawiać będą: Michael Krüger (poeta oraz wieloletni przyjaciel i wydawca Zagajewskiego), Renate Schmidgall (jego tłumaczka) oraz poeta Tadeusz Dąbrowski. Słowo wstępne wygłoszą: dr Stefan Kirchberger (Kunsthalle München), Holger Pils (Lyrik Kabinett), Jo Lendle (Carl Hanser Verlag) oraz Mateusz Werner (miesięcznik Twórczość).

28.04.2022, godz. 20.30

Kunsthalle München

Theatinerstraße 8

80333 Monachium

 

Photo, left to right: Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagjewski, Derek Walcott. Photo crtedit: Jill Krementz.

Who Will Stop the Madman – A Gogol's Prophecy [by Lera Auerbach]

My mother was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. As Hitler's army marched East in 1941, my grandparents abandoned all their possessions (including their beloved library and cherished collection of musical instruments). They boarded the train – heading towards Siberia. The news of ghettos and the fate of Jews in Hitler's territories had reached them – all they could do was to flee into the unknown.

A few years earlier, my mother's grandfather, Berl Fishbein, the head of the family, was tortured to death by Stalin's secret police). His only "guilt" was being born Jewish. While my family evacuated, their train was bombed by Hitler's armies. Another tragedy occurred: the family lost my mother's grandmother Ettel Fishbein in the confusion and chaos. She was grief-stricken after the death of her beloved husband, frightened and confused over all the changes and sorrows that the war and evacuation brought. Somehow, after the bombing, she was no longer with my grandparents on the train. They never found her and never learned of her fate. 

With my one-year-old mother, my grandparents deboarded in Chelyabinsk – a closed industrial city at the gateway of Siberia. I was born there some thirty years later. They never returned to their abandoned homes in Ukraine.

In today's war, the invading army marches from the East, and more than a million Ukrainian refugees head West – to Germany in a mirror retrograde of history.

Earlier this year, I wrote a cello concerto, Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol's famous short story about Poprishchin, a government clerk who gradually descends into insanity. The concerto was premiered last month by the Munich Philharmonic, Giedrė Šlekytė, and Gautier Capuçon. Nikolai Gogol (or, more correctly, romanized from Ukrainian – Mykola Hohol) – was a genius writer, born in Ukraine, father of Russian language literature, and a visionary far beyond his time. I have been fascinated by his work all my life. Ten years ago, while composing my opera Gogol, I read and re-read everything he ever wrote. After my opera's premiere in Vienna, I received an open letter from Russia calling me "Vrag Naroda" (Enemy of the People) – the same terminology used against Shostakovich and many other artists years earlier. My website was hacked, erased, and replaced by the slogan "Death to Jews" and a skull. It felt terrible, but I was not afraid – since 1991, I lived in the West, and since 2001, I no longer had any relatives in Russia. I was responsible only for myself, my words, and my actions. 

While composing the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, I did not think of Vladimir Putin. Now, Gogol's tale carries an eerie resonance. Diary of a Madman is a story of a lowly government bureaucrat with a minimal, easily forgettable personality. In his increasingly demented diary entries, Poprishchin claims that a state cannot "be without a king." As the storyline progresses, he becomes increasingly mad, starts having delusions of grandeur, and, finally, on the "43rd of April of the year 2000" he believes himself as the King. (V. Putin was first elected president of Russia on the 7th of May of the year 2000. Gogol wrote his story in 1835!) Finally, Poprishchin ends up in an insane asylum. 

Perhaps, Gogol, the visionary and one of the greatest writers who ever lived – could see beyond the 19th and 20th century – into the heart of the 21st, where we are doomed to continue the eternal tale.

I think of my grandparents and my child-mother in Ukraine, leaving everything behind, heading into the unknown – evacuating from the onslaught of Hitler's army. Could they have imagined that eighty years later, the land of their birth would face again a very similar nightmare and that refugees would now head West to Germany to save their children?

Gogol's visions and nightmares become a reality, with the whole world turning into a lunatics' asylum as the great tragedy unfolds. Who will stop the Madman? 

 

Frank, Fred, and Elvis

 

ELVIS PRESLEY, FRANK SINATRA and FRED ASTAIRE at Nancy Sinatra's opening night party, which was also celebrating the closing night for Elvis, at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, in 1969. Elvis's bodyguard, Joe Esposito, is in the background. "Elvis was a prince," says Mr. Abolafia. "He would give you the shirt off his back."

Photograph by Oscar Abolafia

from "A Photographer's Files" / Sidebar to "In an Era of Glitz, a Witness With Panache" by Lily Koppel

New York Times, February 10, 2008

Boston, April 2013: "The Best of the Best" with Robert Pinsky and Co.

A happy memory: Celebrating "The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Annviersary Edition" in Boston with editor Robert Pinsky and assorted contributors, including Charles Simic, Rosanna Warren, Lloyd Schwartz, and Frank Bidart.

Making an Inventory [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Bruegel's Sky - Fragment [Photo by Lera Auerbach]

To live, one must make an inventory:

Item 1: The sky. It is everywhere.

 

Item 2: People. There are many of them.

 

Item 3: It is hard to believe, but there are still birds. They occupy space between people and the sky. Sometimes they touch the heavens; sometimes they touch the earth.

 

Item 4: Conceptual thinking.

 

Item 5: Garbage cans. Discarded objects, personal treasures no longer loved such as broken limbs of dolls.

 

Item 6: Cars. Be aware of them.

 

Item 7: The rest of the world.

 

The dead are watching the shadows caused by light. 

Inside of each shadow, a small invisible death is practicing the art of dying.

 

Relevant Nature [by Vincent Katz]

In 1928, André Breton published the novel Nadja, loosely based on a brief affair. Text from the back cover the Grove Press edition, translation by Richard Howard, calls the novel “the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life” and goes on to state, “The first person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work — pictures of various ‘surreal’ people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja’s presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.” Breton invented a genre, the book as photographic prose poem, which has found new life today.

In Breton’s day, taking all the photos and having them printed and readied for publication were arduous tasks; today all that is almost an afterthought. Some creative artists today have been stimulated to try to reinvigorate the photograph in its relation to text, thereby heightening both the potential of image, usually produced via that mundane accessory, the smart phone, and the text, which often lingers in some nebulous zone, neither poetry nor prose, a different gambit from the blending of the two that entranced French authors last century.

When Claudia Rankine used photos in her epoch-marking Citizen, the images were usually in the mode of illustrations, or jumping-off points for her verbal manifestations. In her follow-up, the massive and in some ways more experimental Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), the photos are still illustrative, often historical in nature, but they are simultaneously more deeply embedded in the book’s meaning.

A more experimental approach, one with deeply satisfying results in terms of the co-habitation of word and image is s*an d. henry-smith’s Wild Peach, published by Futurepoem in 2020. henry-smith is an artist and writer, and everything about Wild Peach makes it clear the book has been thought about as an object in its entirety. The endpapers and dividers are a dusky mustard yellow. The typography and layout of the titles is raw and energetic. Eager to get to the first section, “in awe of geometry & mornings,” one turns the page and finds a centered photo of a hazy view of a dried-out field being moisturized by the obscuring fog above it. Turning the page again brings us to the book’s first text, “dirty nails,” which begins, “eat me Infinity Serpent High Priestess of Sun the flowers we ate went straight to my hips rosy red w/ sweet water linen draped I feel so squishy today…” An erotics of the word reminding me of de Kooning’s erotics of paint is quickly palpable. Yet this short text ends surprisingly, “…I inhale light dirty pupil learns today how mud purifies & an increased sensitivity to nightshades I lift my head from the train tracks it is nice to sweat it reminds me that I am open whether I like it or not the conditions will decide”. This book is open, “dirty nails” beseeches almost that, despite everything not in our favor, we too should lift our heads from whatever train tracks we may find them on, to live in the squishiness of our real.

As the book continues, it swerves and peaks, picks up velocity, then swoops. All along, it is bringing us, however we are: “if it doesn’t cost me my life, it doesn’t cost anything at all.” Suddenly that line reminds me of a line from a different context, but now they are inextricably bound. It’s from a rehearsal by the Grateful Dead; before they start, Jerry says, “We’ve got nothing to lose but our lives.” I love that line too, because our lives are the most valuable things we have (wait a minute, did I not know that before reading Wild Peach?), and yet we must risk everything in any moment if we (the planet) are to survive. As henry-smith puts it in “calm down calm down,” “I’ve wasted a lot more time than necessary looking for the tools / they’ve always been right before me”. Wild Peach is a lush volume, the poetry as much as the photos, which are mostly of nature, but viewed in a way that makes it contemporary. Relevant nature. The more I read and look, the more I am amazed by its generosity.

My Parents on Yom Kippur, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Block-flute [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Marianna and I are at a summer retreat.
I am five years old. I have a wooden recorder
with me, a block-flute. I blow out melodies.

My parents left – they have some urgent matters.
What urgent matters could there be during the summer?
I play my flute. Igor is here with us. 

He is a genius, a chess prodigy who has won
chess games against the former world champions.
He is my brother, and he has very long legs. 

When Igor walks, I must run after him like a dog.
I quickly get tired. Igor puts me on his shoulders.

I imagine myself as an eagle, a stormy petrel, a seagull.
Igor runs; I fly after him – I am the wind.

The wind plays the flute. Grownups lie.
I know – my grandma, Musenka, is dead.
That’s why my parents left.
I will never see her again. Ne-ver.

“Iga, do you know?” I ask, landing my flight.
 “No,” he answers seriously.
Igor is almost an adult. Grownups lie.
(He Knows)

A Rainy Night on Broadway in 1957

Wang Ping: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wang Ping on the rooftop of Rudy Burckhardt's apartment building in NYC. Photo by Rudy Burckhardt.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Our Prayers on Father’s Day

Dear God, we are not child actors. We are children. Real children.

Dear God, where is my papa and mama? We just walked 3,000 miles, fighting coyotes along the way. We thought we’d be safe once we crossed the Rio Grande.

Dear God, you said everyone is born equal, every life is a gift, and the kingdom of heaven resides in the mustard seed.

Dear God, we are small and young. Some of us just learned to walk, some still wear diapers, and some are still nursing. Are we not your tiny mustard seeds, dear God?

You say a kid must not be boiled or eaten in mother’s milk. Why are you ripping us from our mother’s breasts, from our father’s hands?

Dear God, we have lost everything: our country, our home, our friends and tomorrow. We have nothing left but our papa and mama. Please give them back.

Dear God, here’s my mama’s number. Here’s my papa’s number. Here’s my aunt’s number. I have it memorized. Please call so we can get out of this dog kennel.

Dear God, you cried for donkeys moaning under loads and falling on the roadside. Are you crying for us, as we fall off la bestia, crushed under tren de la muerte?

Dear God, you wept when you heard starving baby ravens crying from the nest. Are you weeping for us, Lord, as you hear our wailing for papa and mama from the cage?

Dear God, we followed your law to flee from danger: a burning forest, a roaring tsunami, a raging war, violent gangs.

But dear God, it’s been months since I was yanked from mama’s breasts, since I’m left in the cage, crawling in circles . . . as I turn the tender age of 11 months old.

Dear God, we didn’t want to leave home, walk 3,000 miles, or fall off la bestia.

Dear God, we are not criminals or child actors. We just want our mama and papa. Our parents are not criminals or actors. They just want to raise us. There’s no script. Our only word is to live, like all God’s children.

Do not turn off the light on us, dear God. Do not throw away the key to our cage. Give back our papa and mama, dear Lord. Do not forsake us, alone, terrified, drowning in our tears. Hear our cries on Father’s Day. Hear the cries of our fathers and mothers, dying from the death sentence of separation.

Dear God, please let us be children again, like arrows in the hands of a warrior. For we’re your mustard seeds, your heritage, keys to thy kingdom of heaven, dearest God.

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Wang Ping was born in China and came to the U.S. in 1985. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, The Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, The Last Communist Virgin, Flashcards: Poems by Yu Jian, Ten Thousand Waves, and Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi (AWP 2017 award for non-fiction). She won the Eugene-Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and is the recipient of an NEA felllowship, the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry, the McKnight Fellowship for non-fiction, and many other awards. She received her Distinct Immigrant Award in 2014, and Venezuela International Poet of Honor in 2015. She is the Minnesota Poet Laureate 2021-23, appointed by International Beat Poetry Foundation. She’s also a photographer, installation artist, and flamenco dancer. Her multi-media exhibitions include “Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges” and “Kinship of Rivers,” shown at schools, colleges, galleries, museums, lock and dams, and confluences along the Mississippi River. She is professor emerita of English at Macalester College and founder and director of Kinship of Rivers project.

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                                    Rudy Burckhardt 6 fotos,1992

 

A Lie [by Lera Auerbach]

Finek

My dog
whimpered
quietly
in his sleep.
His legs
were twitching –
he had a nightmare.

I woke him up
gently
with a lie:
“It’s all right,
I will never
leave you
alone.”