The Best American Poetry

Chesterton Issues a Poetry Challenge

 

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

-- G. K. Chesterton.

 

Can you prove him wrong?

“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre”: 5 new "Next Line, Please" prompts

For our next round, write a poem using as your point of departure one of the following five “Proverbs of Hell” by William Blake (pictured left).. Your poem may, by anecdotal means, illustrate or confute the infernal axiom you have chosen. It need not quote the Blake line you chose; you can let your readers guess. Limit 15 lines. Or write a cogent one-paragraph discussion, elucidation, and analysis that brilliantly addresses (or argues with) the line. {Limit 15 lines for the paragraph as well?}

1. Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
2. Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
3. The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
4. The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
5. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

For the latest column, with a review of the outstanding entries written in response to last monthh's prompt, click here.

https://theamericanscholar.org/muse-circe-reclaims-her-lucre/

"Thanksgiving" [by Terence Winch]

Thanksgiving

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos
of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds
until I just can’t stand it another second.
I am not at one with nature.  Never was.
Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,
even when you yawn right in their faces.

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,
lounging in the living room, watching t.v.
Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.
Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this
knot can be untied and our hearts released.

-- Terence Winch

An acrostic spelling out the name of a poet who has written memorably about the family romance, Terence Winch's "Thanksgiving" works rather like a sonnet in thirteen lines. The point of departure is the sort of holiday get-together that many of us secretly (or overtly) dread, though unexpected epiphanies do occur ("I am not at one with nature") as guests consort with ghosts and watch "images of war and politics" on t.v.

  -- DL

from the archive; first posted November 27, 2014

"In Reprise: Next Line, Please" -- 3 new prompts

<<< Last month, I announced the return of my “Next Line, Please,” column, which ran on The American Scholar's web site from May 2014 to September 2019. In that first reprise (read it here), I proffered up 15 quotations from books, plays, and movies, challenging readers to identify the source of the quotations. Here are the first three identified, plus a prompt to go with each. Choose one prompt and enter your effort in the comments field.

1. “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.” This is the opening sentence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover—perhaps a surprise to readers expecting something racy. The prompt: write a one-paragraph narrative prose poem that surprises the reader by ending with this sentence.
2. “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” Thus concludes Virginia’s Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The prompt: write a one-paragraph narrative prose poem that begins with these two sentences.
3. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life”: This may be the most memorable sentence uttered by the title character of Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The late Maggie Smith spoke the line in the brilliant 1969 movie adaptation. The prompt: write a short elegy for Maggie Smith, or a poem about either the book or the movie, quoting this line.

Please remember that, as a loquacious fellow once said, brevity is the soul of wit. It is also kinder on the eyes of the reader. There will be intangible prizes not only for the best entries, but also for the shortest.

The next post will reveal the winning entries—and will announce a new prompt.

Deadline: Monday, December 2nd,2024
>>>

See The American Scholar for official rules  A collections of prompts and poems from Next Line, Please was published under that title by Cornell University Press in 2018. 

A Call for real presence: Exorcise Putin's Black Nail, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 [By Tracy Danison]

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his friends and followers have conjured the Black Nail – the murder idol. Joy in murder. They mean to spread it. 

Without your real presence, without exorcism, the murder idol will take root, in Russia, around the world.

That’s why I will be present in Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon.

Painters, performers, poets, philosophers, sculptors, dancers, bystanders and witnesses, those whose can only sit by and watch – it is time to move, dance, to be there with each other for our friends at war, for our shared vision of a better world, to exorcise the Black Nail.

Wherever you may be between dawn and noon on 15 August 2024, be with me, be with the spirit of poet Alan Ginsberg, who did this first, when it was needed in America. And, as Ginsberg was, be with the tradition of Walt Whitman, who sang liberty and served it, too. Be with the spirit of Isadora Duncan, who re-membered the sacred nature of dance and gifted it to the modern world. 

Putin's gang is not the first to conjure the Black Nail, but Putin is the first in my lifetime to have the power, means and will to drive it hard and deep into human hearts. 

The Black Nail goes beyond the joy of murder and the worship of its idol. Once in the heart, the Black Nail attacks what Dostoyevsky calls “Normal Life”, those things that make life easy and sweet in spite of everything, those things that prevent a war of all against all: fellow feeling, culture, reason, the ordinary integrity of mind, body and soul.

Putin needs the Black Nail now because fortune is turning against him. His fellow travelers, his agents provocateurs and his armies are failing. Normal Life puts a check on him because it puts a check on all grand schemes, evolutions and revolutions. But, especially, Normal Life checks those dreams, such as poor Raskolnikov’s – such as Russia's Bolsheviks' –that call men and women to cruelty, murder and mayhem for justice' sake. Mikhail Gorbatchev invoked Normal Life for Russia when the Soviet Union fell in 1991.  

Driving the Black Nail into human hearts is Putin’s last, best chance for success.

He and his confederates invoked it in the aftermath of the 22 March 2024 Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow.

Just a day after the murders, Russia state television featured a short, seemingly banal, play: four accused paraded before the stern and pitiless judge – from time immemorial, a trope favored by authorities in Russia and elsewhere.

But on closer inspection, it wasn't just ordinary authoritarian messaging. It was invoking the murder idol, tickling at murder joy, conjuring the Black Nail.

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

One of the accused, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, had the right side of his head bandaged, disguising an [a missing] ear. A second, Muhammadsobir Faizov, plopped half-naked in a wheelchair, missed an eye. Two other battered accused, faces swollen and bruised, shambled along with One-Eye and One-Ear.

Even as the sad parade staggered up to the pitiless judge, media were reporting that interrogators had cut off accused Rachabalizoda’s ear and forced him to eat it; accused Faizov’s interrogators had gouged his eye out.

The two battered accused were props, legends that said: With us, not just pitiless judges but bottomless cruelty, too.

Videos of the mutilations and beatings were and are available on the Russia internet as well, doubtless, as elsewhere.

Directed and deliberate, theatrical, naïvely comic, medieval, the conjuration cries: “Look at the cannibal who eats his own ear! Look at Cyclops the cripple! Look! Those sacks-of-shit black-asses can’t even walk straight!”.

Releasing the mutilation videos has no less a part in the dark spectacle.

Once conjured, the Black Nail, like Cupid’s arrow, must get purchase in the heart in order to prosper. Sadism and voyeurism are to the Black Nail what seduction and sex are to love: growth media. Pierced by the Black Nail, the heart longs for dark satisfactions: “Get that scum! Slap it up! Gouge it out! Rip it off! Make it eat it!”.

If you can, be there with me in Kyiv on 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon. Be on your own responsibility for what you believe and be with me to exorcise the Black Nail with real presence. 

______

“Okolotok”, meaning "self-sufficient village" in Ukrainian, is a village run by children in a well-known folk tale, explains Kharkiv-based photographer and creator Yevheniia Laptii. The Mad King is the wild child of the tale. He dreams of seizing total power and a princess living in the shadows along with it. ’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality” photo montage of a children's dramatization of the tale represents Laptii's realization that the tale is both sweet dream and nightmare after a soldier from Russia's occupation force told her “All will be well. If you join us”.

Yevheniia Laptii’s work featured in the 2024 edition of “Circulations”, an annual Europe-wide exhibition of emerging photographers at Centquatre Paris.

"Identity Card" [by David Lehman and William Wadsworth]

Identity Card

Identity may be difficult to define.
It equals itself, as a rose is a rose.
Tell me your name. I’ll tell you mine,

Though if I do, don't take that as a sign
That I am someone whom anyone knows.
Identity is not so easy to define.

Don'tt lose that card, or you may find
Another plays your hand.  Anything goes.
The name of the game is Anyone's, not mine.

Forensic science may underline
Our DNA, but family history shows
Identity ain’t so scientifically defined.

Released from history, nameless, a wine
Of no known vintage seduces my foes.
Tell me your name. I'llll tell you mine.

“I am who I am,” says the voice we've assigned
To God, but thanks to the dice he throws,
Our identity is impossible to define.
What's your name? Is it the same as mine?

-- David Lehman and William Wadsworth

 

For extra credit, what is the relation of the picture atop the page to the verse below?

"Quentyn Metsys" [by David Lehman]

Quentin Metsys

Eat a cheap peach, drink iced tea, ache kind,
Throw dice worth each system of Metsys, Quentin,
Painter trained in the north, throne of rain.
What law, O muse, old hat, new heater,
Doll's house absent wall, beats all?
Can fuse or refuse, clean lace, escape landscape,
The pear we reap, not rape, theater of satin?

O saint, my sin, no stain but dire,
There's my ride, no time to emit
On eve of every sacred dare, scared stiff,
Declared if read, dear to me, Aunt Em,
A meal of tuna salad fit for a lad, a nut, lame:
I, male, nod, don words, drowse
in an inn or a poem, not to mope
in a tub but to note a tone.

-- Ed, note: The picture at the top of the page is called "The Money Lender and His Mirrors." Who painted it? Hint: the painting below it is by the same Flemish master.

The Spirit of Parody [by David Lehman]

Who doesn't love the parodies Lewis Carroll inserted in the Alice books? What student of the late Henry James wouldn't laugh at (and with) Max Beerbohm's "Mote in the Middle Distance"? A chapter of Ulysses recapitulates the evolution of English prose styles via parody. There are delightful self-parodies, conscious (Oscar Wilde) or unconscious (Dwight D. Eisenhower). Jane Austen made her debut with a novel that parodied the Gothic novel then fashionable. In one sonnet J. K. Stephen captures both the majesty of Wordsworth at his best and the sinking feeling you get when he is at his worst. Henry Reed's parody of T. S. Eliot,  pitch perfect as it is, is true to the spirit of the author of Four Quartets: "As we get older, we do not get any younger."

The last great anthology of Parodies was compiled by Dwight Macdonald and published by Random House in New York and by Faber in London in 1960.  Veronica Geng's blurb graced a paperback edition: “If Parodies were a man I'd marry it.” In 1981 and `82 I was assisting Dwight toward a new edition of the book. He died not long after and I have little left of the project but notes. Dwight's papers are in the Beinecke Library at Yale and there's bound to be a file.

Back in 1981 I made a list of possible additions that included

Anthony Hecht's "The Dover Beach" (re Matthew Arnold);
the Ern Malley poetry hoax in Australia;
Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by WC Williams";
Nabokov's parody of Agatha Christie in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight;
The parody of Hemingway in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely;
Wendy Cope's rendition of The Waste Land  in the form of five limericks;
Prudence Crowther, "Insanity Fair" -- parody of Tina Brown (TNR, 11/4/91)
Woody Allen "The Kugelmass Episode" (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977)
Woody Allen's parodies of Martin Buber and Flaubert
John Ashbery's "To a Waterfowl," the cento as implicitly a parody of the canon
Veronica Geng’s parody of Pauline Kael (NY Rev of Books, 1975)
Tom Disch, parody of A. R. Ammons, Poetry magazine, 1978
May Swenson parody of Dorothy Parker

I'm writing without notes relying just on memory. In 1981 I had been writing parodies of writers from Christopher Smart to Thomas Hardy. Dwight liked them, and he approved also of the historian John Clive's parodies of Gibbon, Carlyle, and Macaulay, which I brought to his attention from an issue of the Times Literary Supplement.

I believe that the most successful parodies reflect more affection than contempt for the lampooned subject. There are a fair number of parodies in my book Poems in the Manner Of (2017).

The parody as a genre is a fertile one. The whole category is undervalued. It's as if, these days, the mind is too busy having a nervous breakdown to allow for a random laugh.  

Readers are invited to bring to our attention, in the comments section, parodies in verse well-worth reading. -- DL

"Next Line, Please" (Throwback Thursday: Valentine's Day 2017)

<<<   This week everyone was encouraged to visit an art museum—or, if that proved difficult, to go to the website of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery, the Barnes Foundation, or some other great institution—and write a sonnet about the painting you name in your title.

The wonderful works that came in re-confirmed my belief that what we are doing is not a weekly competition but a weekly challenge—and that we are all what Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront wanted desperately to be: contenders. We are also, it turns out, what Marianne Moore in a celebrated poem calls “critics and connoisseurs.” The exchanges and comments made each week are a model of civil discourse at a time when that is rare. No anger, no snark, just insight and enthusiasm—a collective commitment to an esthetic ideal and to the joy that comes with the territory.

The gold medal goes to the unrhymed but tight sonnet Cheryl Whitehead wrote after she “went to the Met Breuer website and studied the Kerry James Marshall exhibit.”

Silence is Golden
(after Kerry James Marshall)

Silence is golden. You hear? Might keep you alive
or maybe you die. Black on black background, gleam
of white teeth & whites of black eyes. Shh! Black fingers
censor black words. Each raucous-thought black man
might tighten your throat with rope. The night. The howl.
The owl, the torch. The char of the forest floor.
The fire of white headlights winding through the dark
in Birmingham or elsewhere a tired black man
walks home where his wife & two small children wait.
The stroke of dusk of brush a black man paints
himself. A door into the night of his own
interior volition. Smoke shimmers in star-light.
Yes, he’s a riot of teeth & contrite eyes.
Black man, what fires do you suppose might loose you?

Powerful stuff. Ricky Ray, our unofficial critic of the week, observes that the image of the door in the night of volition “puts just enough musk into the abstraction to taste it.” I wonder whether the poet means “lose” or “loosen” with the last verb in the poem.

Second-place honors go to Courtney Thrash, whose rhymed sonnet was inspired by a Maxfield Parrish from 1908 on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas:

The Lantern Bearers

“Who are you?” said I. “Sorcerers? Sideshow?
Are you all one or all six that I see?
And how your orbs glow! What do they carry?
Galaxies? Goddesses? Surely they don’t!
Listen to me talking as though you won’t
remain silent, just oil on canvas, the
stairs made of strokes and reflected wavelengths.
Oh, jesters! Pray tell, how do your orbs glow?”

“Tis true,” said they, “that we are what you say:
magical, hanging whole worlds on a bough;
we are what you see, one and twice three; though
you ask for the end, we show you the way.
Please do not worry your head about how.
We bring light, and that is all you need to know.”

I admire the staggered rhymes— not until line eight do we confront the rhyme for line one, and then it returns victoriously at poem’s end. If it is objected that the poem is artificial in diction, I would concede the point but plead that it is too splendid an example to dismiss. Perhaps because I have Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” on the mind (“So twice five miles of fertile ground”) I was charmed by “we are what you see, one and twice three.” I have taken the liberty of adding the infinitive (“to know”) to the last phrase to make more apparent the allusion to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian urn.” Ricky Ray praises the “double-rhyming in bough / though and how / know.”

Impossible to overlook Angela Ball’s lovely appreciation of a painting by Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Gallery in London:

Incunabula of Marthe Bonnard in the Bath

We know she is reticent, thirty years keeps secret
her true name and age. The pair’s domesticity inviolate,
Bonnard stands painting her in a bath so constant it seems
one, interrupted by a joint of ham, some cheese and vin
rouge, after which Marthe returns to its relief, its expanse
the blue-green-yellow of striated sky, of amplitude and seclusion,
of a body featureless but for divergent nipples, navel,
and labia’s unwavering statement. In time,
the bath bathes Marthe’s ancestors: scullery maids
naked to save fabric; beggars who wore fake
eye patches and corpse-robbed uniforms; artist’s models more regal
than any royal. The bath swells beyond its station, bathing even its own
          paint—
but at the crucial moment it stops, baffled
by Marthe’s persistence, her lunar, impassible face.

Ricky Ray’s take: “The sky line had me view the tub as a stretch of sky under an open window, the ancestral bathing suddenly brought Eliot into the experience, and the bath bathing its own paint sent me down a delicious, in-turning spiral simultaneously inhabiting and shedding forms.”

Nor can I leave unacknowledged Berwin Moore’s superb ode to color in general and blue in particular:

Picasso’s “Woman with a Crow”

Not cobalt, azure, or lapis –
there is no word for blue like this,
binding woman and bird in a rigid
embrace. Maybe the cold blue of heaven
shrouds them, the woman’s face the color
of a corpse – but there is no death here.
Her fingers, like talons, stretch across
the bird’s dense black; its head, turned
like hers, bows into itself, wings in mute
submission. All that separates them is color:
the cold blue moan, the hushed black caw,
the pale skin veil. It must be their kiss
that transforms me. They are not woman
and bird. They are not two – but one crow.

Like Ricky Ray, I warmed to “that lovely triad of triple stresses: ‘cold blue moan / hushed black caw / pale skin veil.’”

Honorable mention: Paul Michelsen twice over, for “The Persistence of memory” (Salvador Dali) and for the charming Frank O’Hara-ish “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware’ and Then Reading ‘On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware’ by Frank O’Hara,” the title of which is itself a poem. Both are keepers.

Michael C. Rush’s “Wanderer in the Storm, 1835,” after a painting of that name by Julius Von Leypold, ends brilliantly with this “melancholy fit” (Keats): “the day is spent / in discontent / with the wind / around this pond / until the storm /I wait for comes. Again I’m with Ricky Ray: “I swear I’ve taken that walk.”

Finally, Millicent Caliban shines new light on that dark favorite, Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” imagining that the couple at the counter saves their quarreling for when they are home and wondering about the fellow, “not quite depressed,” who “drinks all that coffee and cannot rest.”

As next Tuesday is Valentine’s Day, how about a poem in the spirit of the Rodgers and Hart song “My Funny Valentine”? If you don’t know it, listen to Sinatra’s version, or Chet Baker’s, or Ella’s. or Miles Davis’s, or all of these and more. Or just let the title take you where it will.
>>>

For the comments generated by this post, click here for the piece as posted by The American Scholar, February 7, 2017.

May Swenson's Four-word Lines

To welcome the new year, I turn to May Swenson and her poem “Four-Word Lines” for a prompt that I enjoy doing. Swenson’s poem explains itself and its procedures better than a paraphrase:

Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees’
legs, your pronged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I’m a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees’ warm stare.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at my core.

“The poem is breathtaking,” the writer Sharon Preiss observes. “The precise and compact ‘four-word lines’ move the poem ‘forward,’ yet the form forces line breaks that slow the reader down so that she can revel in the mellifluous aural flow of the poem. The sound of longing that the interlinked long i’s and e’s create in the first few lines then floats down and through the lilting feeling of relief the double f and l sounds create in ‘feel like a flower.’”

https://theamericanscholar.org/four-word-lines/

Here are poems that May Swenson's poem inspired: https://theamericanscholar.org/tributes-to-may-in-january/

Giorgione, "Three Philosophers" (a poetry challenge)

Who are they? In 150 words or less.  (Vienna, Kunsthistorische museum].

Daniel Nester and Jonah Winter's proposed names of poetry books

Poet-slash-evil genius Jonah Winter and your guest blogger [Dan Nester] spent an afternoon in Pittsburgh not too long ago, talking of our lack of faith in Jesus Christ as our personal savior as well as making fun of poetry book titles. They all seemed so aggressively portentous, imbued with such fawning obsequiousness. To exorcise ourselves of the real-life titles we were mentioning, titles that shall not be mentioned here, we played a word association game wherein either Jonah or myself would think of the second word of a two-word poetry book title, which would after after whatever the other participant named as the first. 

So, for example, Jonah would say “Imprimateured,” while I kept in mind the second word for the title, “Meanderings,” thus giving us a title ready for someone’s poetry manuscript, Imprimateured Meanderings. (That's Jonah in full evil genius mode pictured up on your left, reading at UMaine's reading series awhile back; do check out his books, the very un-portentously, unobsequiously named  Maine and Amnesia.)

Sometimes we would even think of the press one of our proposed books titles might be associated.  TransDarkness would fit right beside those titles published at the experimental Ahsahta Press, for example, while Tremulous Beaver might be more feasible for, say, Knopf.

Without further ado, here’s our list. Got any others?  Add them to the Comments box.

The Orchid Sac
Lunar Guest
Concrete Pedigree
Beviled Desires
Standard Flow
Leftward Thwartings
Modified Rapture
Tremulous Beaver
Uninformed Highwayman
TransDarkness
Uninformed Tomorrowings
Imprimateured Meanderings
Sluiced Regret
The Sentinel Awakes
In situ, Storms
Alarm Morningwood
Darling; Wandering
Streaked Pugnaciousness
Variegated Cock
Woman House
Descartes’ Pancakes
Fugitive Contraband
Entering Beaver
Airport Beaver
Damage Thruway
Matchstick Haven
Unsublettable You
Earning, Toward
The Felt Apogee
Technical Vulva
Tree Entrance
Veinous Miriam
Unvisited Stickerbush
Polished Lendings
Stiff Flowering
Penelope’s Nubbin

from the archive; first posted May 30, 2008.

Wordsmith's A.Word.A.Day: The Cento

The Cento

PRONUNCIATION:

(SEN-to) 

MEANING:

noun: A literary work, especially a poem, composed of parts taken from works of other authors.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin cento (patchwork). Earliest documented use: 1605.

NOTES:

Nobel-prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot’s observation is relevant to centos: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

Examples of centos:
The Oxford Cento by David Lehman
The Dong With the Luminous Nose by John Ashbery

USAGE:

“Louis Zukofsky continued to write ... a play, a novella, a book of criticism, a 500-page cento of philosophy in homage to Shakespeare ...”
Bob Perelman; Finding His Voice; Tikkun (Berkeley, California); May/Jun 2007.

THE CENTO AS A PROMPT:

https://theamericanscholar.org/lets-assemble-a-cento/

https://theamericanscholar.org/our-crowd-sourced-cento-stanza-one/

Visit Wordsmith.org for more on poetic forms.  And https://pachofaunfinished.wordpress.com/tag/david-lehman/ 

From the archive; first posted March 14, 2015.

PRONUNCIATION:

(SEN-to) 

MEANING:

noun: A literary work, especially a poem, composed of parts taken from works of other authors.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin cento (patchwork). Earliest documented use: 1605.

NOTES:

Nobel-prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot’s observation is relevant to centos: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

Examples of centos:
The Oxford Cento by David Lehman
The Dong With the Luminous Nose by John Ashbery

USAGE:

“Louis Zukofsky continued to write ... a play, a novella, a book of criticism, a 500-page cento of philosophy in homage to Shakespeare ...”
Bob Perelman; Finding His Voice; Tikkun (Berkeley, California); May/Jun 2007.

THE CENTO AS A PROMPT:

https://theamericanscholar.org/lets-assemble-a-cento/

https://theamericanscholar.org/our-crowd-sourced-cento-stanza-one/

Visit Wordsmith.org for more on poetic forms.  And https://pachofaunfinished.wordpress.com/tag/david-lehman/ 

From the archive; first posted March 14, 2015.

"Shouldn't the Sonnet?" [by Sandra Simonds]

Picture: Steve McCaffery, the structure of the sonnet

I.                    Is the Sonnet a Fascist Form?

 Somewhere, supposedly, William Carlos Williams calls the sonnet “a Fascist form.” Can someone tell me if this is true? I asked a number of poet friends, looked and looked, but couldn’t find the quote ANYWHERE. Even if he didn’t write it, the phrase has an irresistible ring to it and lots and lots of poets agree that writing in any form is like being told what to do by an authoritarian jerk. But…wait a second…I’ve read poems by Fascists and the poems don’t look anything like sonnets. Not even close.  All that those poems do is praise guns and airplanes in long, messy lines.  So, what’s the deal? I guess even Fascists don’t write in Fascist forms.

II.                  Sonnets and Power

 Now, it’s easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I’m in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons. Maybe it’s a poet’s disease. Last summer my partner and I had a whole bunch of problems that eventually led to a seven month separation. During that time, I thought that I had fallen in love with a few men at the same time (all poets, of course, since they suffer from the same disease) which culminated in my buying a plane ticket (never used) to meet a man on the internet I’d never met who kept saying nice things to me (and my poetry) on Facebook. I know, I know—it’s pathetic and embarrassing but here’s the thing, at the same time as all of this messy stuff was happening, I was writing sonnet after sonnet so I couldn’t stop myself from getting involved deeper and deeper in all of these pretend romances because I swear to god it was totally helping my poetry.

Auden talks about how Shakespeare‘s Dark Lady sonnets are all about the humiliation that comes with what he calls the “Vision of Eros.”  Basically, what he says is that when the Dark Lady becomes a real person, and not an object that he can control, he gets frustrated because he never really liked her in the first place. He’s just trapped in his own sexual obsession and frustration. Exactly! I was never really in love with these men, but I did want them to want me, like it was a game, a game perfect for TRANSLATION into the sonnet form. In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it’s the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins.  As Sina Queyras asks in an essay on the sonnet for the Harriet Blog: “Are you writing the “writing the sonnet or is the sonnet writing you?”

 III.                How Do We Define the Contemporary Sonnet?

There’s no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love?  Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you’ll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn’t really make it a sonnet.

I decided that I would call my sonnets “sonnets” when they become worthy of passing through the gates of Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, a quasi-mystical anthology of sonnets that I have compiled and that is housed in a three ring binder in my desk. My teacher in PhD school, David Kirby, taught me how to do this. Whenever I come across a sonnet that is fit to enter Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, I type it out, print it and add it to the book. I try to memorize the extra-special ones.

One of the poems I have recently added is from Great Balls of Fire (Coffee House Press, 1990) by Ron Padgett:

                    Nothing in That Drawer

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

I love Padgett’s simultaneous reverence and irreverence towards the sonnet expressed through the play between content and form. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics write in the introduction to The Art of the Sonnet, the sonnet is a form of, “rapturous praise, bitter exclamation, and step-by-step reasoning” but this example turns all of these notions upside-down. Even as the poem takes on the quality of a joke, the joke isn’t shallow or without a deep understanding of the sonnet’s history of posing a problem that it seeks to, if not solve, explore. I love that the empty drawers, line by line, come together to build a chest of emptiness. The take home message here seems to be that every time you write a really good sonnet, it’s kind of creepy like building a piece of furniture with the ghosts of history. One day someone is going to open one of Padgett’s drawers and some monster is going to pop out and scare the crap out of the reader.

 IV.                Bernadette Mayer

 Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets are captivating for all of the wrong reasons. Most of her sonnets aren’t even sonnets. In an essay posted on Jacket, Juliana Spahr writes that “one of Mayer's sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. Lines are split, are jammed; they spill over. Metaphors mix. The book as whole serves almost as an encyclopedia of the sonnet's possible violations while still remaining a sonnet.” Despite all of the formal deviations in Mayer’s book that Spahr notes, the poems seem to come together to point back to some imaginary Ur-sonnet. Someone tell me what makes up the Ur-sonnet!

Last fall, while staying with the poet Nada Gordon, I finally got to read a copy of Mayer’s book, simply titled Sonnets. In an email, I asked Nada to tell me what she thought about Mayer’s sonnets and she responded by saying, “What I love is how they are at once formally disciplined and also fabulously casual. This was the beauty, I think of much of first generation New York School writing as well, and she inherited that touch. I think that sonnets in general are powerful because they speak to our (Western, at least) expectations about how ideas should unfold and convince.” Here’s one of my favorites from the book:

 You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

* * *

To make love, turn to Page 32.

To die, turn to Page 110.

 
V.                  Failure!

 My first attempts at writing the sonnet were as a nineteen-year-old undergrad. I wrote a sonnet about the fjords of Denmark. I wrote one about the mongoose. I wrote one or two about drinking on Sunset Boulevard. They were all awful. My friend, Rebecca Hazelton told me that her first attempt at writing sonnets was also as an undergrad. “My professor handed it back with one line circled, and said, "This line works." The rest was pretty dismal, but I was crushed. Didn't try to write another sonnet for years, but I did learn that sometimes you take one line from a poem and scrap the rest, so that was important.” My friend Justin Marks told me that he doesn’t think the sonnet is a “complete form.” He says, “I’ve done drafts where the poem is basically fourteen lines that feel like they go together but somehow don’t add up to anything. They have no movement to them, or don’t wind up anywhere.”  All of this gets me wondering whether or not the form is a “mature one,” more suited for an experienced poet. After all, Shakespeare was pushing thirty when he wrote his sonnets. So was Sidney and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was almost forty when she started writing the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Kasey Mohammad, a Renaissance scholar, has written a book of sonnets called Sonnograms some of which are included in my GREAT BOOK. The poems are postmodern, Flarfy, anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When I taught Shakespeare last year, I had my students read them alongside Shakespeare’s and most of my students were horrified, arguing that Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love and truth and those great eternal things and that Mohammad’s sonnets were “trashy” and “made no sense.” “Shakespeare was a genius!” they cried. Most of them thought Kasey’s poems were failures. But one or two of students LOVED his poetry, defending it on the basis of its novel use of formal constraints, humor, and contemporary “feel,” arguing that the poems are like Shakespeare but for their generation. What I enjoy is how the poet feeds Shakespeare’s language into a technologically-mediated landscape, uses his own “subjectivity” to rearrange the words and lines and ends up with an entirely new language that cannot escape carrying around the heavy burden of the forms of history. I leave you, finally, with the poet’s take on Sonnet 47 (“Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took”):

The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:

Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.

I write that yummy shit to get me rich:

My iambs got more drive than Preston Tucker.

I also got that English rhyme shit straight,

That alternating shit the verses do.

Word: every foxy mama that I date

Feels how my goddam prosody is true.

And I don’t mess with no Italian shit;

I only blow your mind the one way, ho.

I line it up four-four-four-two, that’s it:

That’s how I do my sonnet bidness, yo.

My mad Shakespearean moves are “phat,” or “def”:

They weave my pet eel Lenny—what the eff?

from the archive; first posted August 15, 2012

Antigone, in 26 words [by David Lehman]

Antigone

Against brutal Creon,
doll establishes
fugitive greatness.
His internal
justice, knowledge
law mean nothing,
only piety.
Questing revenge,
she triumphs,
uttering virginal
wounds extravagant,
yearning’s zenith.

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/01/the-tears-of-antigone-an-astrological-profile-by-david-lehman.html

Paul Violi Picks the Contest Winners!

In December 2007, the late Paul Violi (left) read the entries for our BEST AMERICAN POETRY challenge # 2. We repost the results today, Paul's birthday.

THE CHALLENGE (devised by David Lehman):

When deciphered, this anagram

HIT THE LUMP OF RICH SEAL

represents the title of a book of poems by a past guest editor of The Best American Poetry. Solve the puzzle, then write a two-stanza acrostic poem in which the first letters of the lines spell out the name of that poet. Deadline: Midnight, December 31, 2007.

Our judge, Paul Violi, has chosen a first-place winner and two runners up.

All entries were judged blind; the names of the authors were not revealed until after the verdicts were rendered.

First Place: Penelope’s Shield by Frank Osen

PENELOPE’S  SHIELD

Laughing Boy returns, and the dog drops dead.
Odysseus, did you think I wouldn’t know?
Under this shroud
I’ve borne more absences than yours.
So what, if summer shared our golden bed?
Every winter wears the same disguise.

Growth and loss
loom longer with me, now—
urging weaves both ways,
casting my work in the sun’s or fire’s light—
knit with disciplined undoing.

-- Frank Osen

Runners Up: “As the Underworld Turns” by Sally Cook and “Lo Mein Palace: Here I Come” by Michael Quattrone

AS THE UNDERWORLD TURNS

Like her sis, Persephone 
On fair Adonis set her sights.          
Underworld talk had it that she    
Interfered with sister’s rights.  
So, old Zeus ruled there’d be seasons!             
Earth’s year went, two-thirds, to ladies.

Goodness knows, Zeus had his reasons  -- 
Life stayed sweet in the Cyclades.
Under, next to Hades’ furies            
Cabbage and anemones,
Kissed to life, were blessed by Ceres

-- Sally Cook

Lo Mein Palace, Here I Come!

Lo Mein Palace, here I come!
Out the door I spot Louise, who smiles
until I glance at her clavicle, etc.—
into the elevator, through the lobby,
sex never tasted as sweet & sour as the
egg roll dreams I'm hatching in the cab

grinding down, down a Second Avenue stand still,
licking my lips like some addled scavenger,
until the neon serenade: Wonton!  Tsingtao!
Chopstick! It's a wonder I get anything in my mouth.
Kate orders Kung Pao extra spicy, and I nearly faint.

-- Michael Quattrone

Honorable mention: Angela Ball, Barbara G.S. Hagerty, Andrea Selch, Terence Winch, David Yezzi.

Who's Who on A. R. Ammons's "Shit List" [by David Barber]

David Barber

from LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: 22 TAKES ON THE POETICS OF LISTS

 

[1] AMMONS, A. R.

[Broadside]: Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity

[Winston-Salem, North Carolina]: Privately Printed for Stuart Wright, 1979.

Price: $300.00

Unbound. Broadside. Measuring 7” x 16”. A bit of faint creasing else fine. Only 30 copies printed; printed as a Christmas greeting from Wright and Ammons, each of whom received 15 copies. Although not called for, signed by Ammons below his printed name. A humorous poem, sort of an Everyone Poops of the animal kingdom, with the closing epigram In stercore veritas. See Wright A22, ABC checklist. OCLC locates five copies.

Item #503822

Between the Covers: Rare Books Inc.

Gloucester City, NJ 08030 USA

[2] Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity. Ammons, A. R.

Primary Category: Literature/Poetry

Genre: Poem

Annotated by: Coulehan, Jack

Date of entry: Sept-13-1995

Summary

This poem is essentially a list of the splendid variety of shit in the world. It begins: “You'll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are . . .” and continues the catalog for 45 lines, from gosling shit, through cricket and mandrell shit, ending with “the shit of the wasteful gallinule.”

Commentary

One way to sing joyfully about the plenitude of nature! This poem is an ecstatic celebration of shit. It is also a celebration of language, particularly the spoken word, for this is a poem meant to be spoken. For a more reflective and meaningful (in the concrete sense of “meaningful”) poem on shit, see Maxine Kumin's “The Excrement Poem” (see this database).

Primary Source: Worldly Hopes (Norton 1982)

NYU Langone Medical Center

LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

[3] shit-list  n. a (notional or real) list of people in disfavour.

1942   L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §336/2   Blacklist, … shit or stink list.

1945   Amer. Speech 20 263   In the vulgar talk of the barracks, soldiers uninhibitedly use the

                phrase shit list, for a list of men whom one dislikes and is anxious to see embarrassed or           

                inconvenienced.

1953  C. Beaton Diary Aug. in Self Portrait with Friends (1979) xviii. 267  He [sc. Truman Capote]

          uses with a toughness that is healthy and refreshing all sorts of extremely crude and indecent

          phrases: ‘Oh, he’s on my dream trade.’ ‘He’s on my shit list.’

1965   Liberator Aug. 23/1  Sweet Mac is on my shit list.

1970   R. D. Abrahams Positively Black i. 8  Moynihan had made it onto the black shit-list in spite

           of his obvious sympathies.

2006   S. Gillespie Pissed off  ii. 29   People on my shit list can count on being cut off permanently. I

           don't suffer fools gladly.

Oxford English Dictionary. This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, September 2011; most recently modified version published online December 2022).

[4] “Shit List” (1982) is an apt illustration…

In poem after poem Ammons obsesses over the philosophical question of “the one and the many” as others may obsess over their favorite basketball team or popular singer. Consider the opening of “The Fairly High Assimilation Rag” (1983): “Plato derives the many from the one and Aristotle / the one from the many.” In a nutshell, the question of the one and the many is whether reality inheres in countless particulars (the many) or whether there is a motion and a spirit (the one) rolling through all things. Understood as a tug-of-war between unity and diversity, the question has an immediate application to the American scene….  Not “a whit manic” about Whitman’s influence, Ammons uses the inventory for the same reason it appealed to the author of “Song of Myself”: it is democratic, anti-hierarchical, a gathering of particulars, a reveling in what is at the “base” of the triangle, “base” understood as having an ethical or class meaning as well as a geometrical one. “Shit List” (1982) is an apt illustration of the irreverent Ammons inventory. 

David Lehman, “A. R. Ammons: ‘God Is the Sense the World Makes without God.’ ”

American Poetry Review (May 2006)

[5] Draft of a poem, titled: “Shit list; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity.”

Guide to the contents of the Journals of Archie Ammons found in the Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections Archie Ammons Papers, collection #14-12-2665

Journals of ARA: Box 7

Volume 50, Page 109

76. Letter from Betty [Academy of American Poets] to A.R. Ammons, dated 12 May 1970.
77. Letter from Richard Howard to A.R. Ammons, dated 10 May.
78. Letter from Harold Bloom to A.R. Ammons, dated “Tuesday.”
79. Leaf containing 4 poems, titled: “Hearkening,” “Image,” “Village, Town, City—Highway,

      Road, Path,” and “Meander.” Date unspecified.

80. Letter from Harold Bloom to A.R. Ammons, dated “Friday.”
81. Draft of a poem, titled: “Hearken.” Date unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y.
82. Draft of a poem, titled: “6 September.” Date unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y.
83. Draft of a poem, titled: “Shit list; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity.” Date

       unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y. 2 leaves.

84. Letter from A.R. Ammons to Harold Bloom, dated 7 May 1970.
85. Letter from A.R. Ammons to Richard Howard, dated 6 May 1970.

[6] … a joyous catalogue of ninety-five kinds of animal shit

With Ammons, even among such themes, one rarely feels “cramped in abstraction’s gilded loft,” because the poems, high and low, know just where they are, and they tell us. American modernism and whatever has followed it are heavy with long poems which attempt to contain the fragmentary, but lacking integration, are archives at best, and more often cluttered drawers. In the three astonishing long works in Collected Poems (“Extremes And Moderations,” “Essay on Poetics” with its poems within a poem, and “Hibernaculum”), we see how no poet is so alive to the processes linking the one and the many, the part and the whole, the high and the low, as Ammons is. He has always been simultaneously in flight toward “the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark” and knee-deep in his own backyard. “Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity,” is a joyous catalogue of ninety-five kinds of animal shit. Who but Ammons could include such in a book called Worldly Hopes? 

Mark Dow, Boston Review (Dec 2001/Jan 2002)

7] Subject(s): Feces – Poetry

Title: Shit List; or Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity

Description: Broadside by A. R. Ammons; one of thirty privately printed for Stuart Wright, Christmas 1979. Inscribed “For Reid [ie, Reid Overcash], ho ho, Stuart [ie, Stuart Wright].”

Date: December 1979

Original Format: Extent 17cm x 40cm

Creator(s): Ammons, A. R. (1926-2001)

Subject(s): Feces – Poetry

Location of Original: East Carolina Manuscript Collection

 

[8] (i.e., list every kind of feces you can imagine and call it a work of art)

Ammons’s most outlandish foray into a maggot aesthetic—and perhaps his most extreme experiment in reversing hierarchies—is the poem “Shit List; or, Omnium-Gatherum of Diversity into Unity,” a forty-five–line poem that consists entirely of different kinds of animal feces….

Ammons’s irreverent reverence for the lowly and quotidian (what could be more everyday than shit and shitting?), his Hopkinesque love for the “pied beauty” of the world’s variety, his brazen and comic refusal of poetic decorum, his often scatological appraisal of the human body and its daily processes, and his penchant for Whitmanesque cataloging and enumeration—all come together here. But “Shit List” is also a conceptual work, fueled as it is by a triggering idea that is at least as important as the poem’s content (i.e., list every kind of feces you can imagine and call it a work of art). Like many conceptual everyday-life projects, it creates an archive of everyday life, an “omnium-gatherum,” or hodge-podge collection, that displays the enormous variety of specimens making up a category. It is a repository of information, a work that deliberately employs excess as a formal device for thematic purposes, and an act of collecting and gathering as a form of attention and “radical mimesis.” [….]

The title jokingly takes the slang phrase (“he’s on my shit list”) and literalizes it, forcing readers to think about what an actual “shit list” might entail. The poem participates in a long line of list poems, but takes their Whitmanic desire to exhaust the world’s variety to an extreme. From its first line forward, the point of “Shit List,” of course, is affirmation, as it rejoices in the variety and awe-inspiring qualities of excrement. It also has an implicit moral dimension—the poem’s very existence, and the brio with which it flouts rules of propriety, serve to combat puritanical repression and any ideological forces that would relegate such basic, daily, and bodily facts of life to silence and oblivion.

Andrew Epstein, “The Tiny Invites Attention: A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse.” Chapter 3 in Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford 2016)

[9] A. R. AMMONS: A CHECKLIST

Broadsides

Recording. Winston-Salem, NC: Shadowy Waters Press, 1975.

Breaking Out. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press Limited, 1978.

SHIT LIST. Privately printed gift for Stuart Wright, 1979.

Chicago Review, 57, 228-234 (Summer 2012)

 

Ed note.: This is a chapter from David Barber's manuscript, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: 22 TAKES ON THE POETICS OF LISTS. He has also finished a new collection of poems, Naked (frothcoming from Northwestern UP). Barber is the former poetry editor of The Atlantic. The photo next to #5 is of A. R. Ammons. Photo on top: David Barber. See www.davidbarberonline.com

More Clerihews [with thanks to Rick Winston]

In 1995, Henry Rathvon and Emily Cox ran a clerihew challenge, and Rick Winston made a copy of the results:

<<<  ***Results of Clerihews in the News***

Mr. Rathvon and Ms. Cox
Don't fit any convenient box.
They push one to wax Ogden Nashish
For contests more addictive than hashish.

   Such is the opinion of contestant RPhill5136, whose views are expressed above in Clerihew style. The Clerihew, that odd little verse form invented 100 years ago by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, proved wonderfully fertile in a 1990s context. But it also proved quite challenging, as its staggered rhythms required an artful touch in order to elicit the proper funny-bone twang. Contestant Glemward mused:

Why choose
Clerihews?
How much sweeter
Are things that rhyme with the usual sort of meter!

   And VCRogers, reflecting on the havoc we word-gamers were wreaking, concluded:

E.C. Bentley
Did not go gently
Into that good night--
But after this, he might!

   Suffice it to say that your Clerihumor--from the subtle to the sledgehammer--gave us a lot of laughs. We'll conduct another of these Clerihew festivals in a future contest. Meanwhile our  favorite verses are listed below, topped by three jauntily witty winners. (Contestant Sean Med quipped, "Could the prize for this contest be considered a 'hew grant?") Each of our winners will receive 5 free AOL hours plus a book of his or her choice from the Atlantic's online bookstore. Congratulations Ravensegg, Cruciver, and JebMar!

***The Clerihew Winners***

General Shalikashvili--
Now, I ask you, really.
With a name like that
Shouldn't he wear a much bigger hat? (Ravensegg)

The Kennedys
Are used to having all of the amenities.
Their wealth's so great it even beggars
Schwarzenegger's. (Cruciver)

Peter McNeeley
Had a great deal. He
Fought Tyson from the deck and
Made thousands per second. (JebMar)

Five of the runners-up:

Dorothy Gish
Choked on a fish
At the cotillion
Embarrassing Lillian. (G8ly)

Henry Kissinger
Covets Kim Basinger.
If she were his frau
He'd be Kissinger now.  (G8ly)

Jean-Paul Sartre
Despised Descartes
Because of his insistence
On meaningful existence. (G8ly)

Warren Beatty
Loved to date, he
Fooled around with every girl he
Met except of course for Shirley. (StefSpad)

Elizabeth Taylor
Diets constantly so as to look frailer.
"Though I may at times be chubby,"
She says, "I'm never without a new hubby."  (Epithenas)

When Bad Lines Happen to Good Poems [by Laurence Goldstein]

(Ed note: David Lehman's Bad Line Contest post of September 2 reminded me of this earlier post by Laurence Goldstein. Follow this link to read the many comments on the post when it ran in 2009, then add your own take. sdl)

If you were empowered by the gods to travel back into the canon of poetry in English and change or delete one line, which would it be?  On occasions, sometimes years apart, I’ve put this query to literary acquaintances, and the winner of this unscientific survey is. . . Percy Shelley’s plaintive cry, “I fall upon the thorns of life.  I bleed.”  The reason often given, and it’s clear by the swiftness with which this line is proffered that many of my contacts have not heard the question for the first time, is that this line is a blemish on a great poem that has no other bad line, not even a so-so line, but is poetry at its purest and most consummate perfection.  The poem, of course, is “Ode to the West Wind.”  Actually, I have come to like “I fall upon the thorns of life,” which is thoroughly in tone with the fine succeeding lines, “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”  One has to hear and feel the desperate abandon of the whole passage to appreciate the upsweep of canto 5 when the poet becomes a seer of divine power who, “by the incantation of this verse,” trumpets a prophecy to mankind.

    But “I bleed” is, admittedly, beyond the pale, over the top.  Within the decorum of the poem it reaches too far and the strain of the gasped two words causes an audible snap.  How might we improve the line.  Substitute “, and need” or “, a seed”?  Those are bland enough to not claw at the reader’s taste.  I recall the story of Paul Valéry pausing at a bookstore window and reading two pages of verse from an open book. France’s reigning poetic genius, he tries to improve even one word of the text before him, and fails.  He goes into the bookstore and finds that the book is Racine’s Phèdre.  No, I am not Paul Valéry, and will not presume to tamper with Shelley any longer.

    Another favorite response is (you saw this coming) the last line of the first stanza of Stanley Kunitz’s great poem “Father and Son.”  The speaker pursues the phantom figure of his dead father, who never shared the boy’s childhood (and who, we know, took his life while Stanley was in the womb).  The boy is lost in “the silence unrolling before me as I came, / The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”  The principle is the same as with Shelley:  the high quality of the entire poem casts a brighter light on the offending lapse.  As it happens, a younger and brasher version of myself asked Kunitz about this line on the occasion of his visit to the University of Michigan .  He smiled wanly and gave what I took to be his standard response.  Many people had asked him about the line over the years, but now the poem is so well-known, so often anthologized, even (I reminded him) praised as a precursor to the movement of Confessional Poetry, that it was now too late to change it.  He looked down and said again in a whisper, “Too late.”  Never too late I wanted to reply, but I felt intensely his desire to change the subject.

    There is the problem of failed locutions – Matthew Arnold’s “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad

"Crimson is the Color of Shame": a Poetry Challenge [by Clark Thomas]

Crimson is the Color of Shame
-- for David Lehman

The demand on young Jews
to be less visibly and confidently Jews
is the price of social toleration
which found its most recent iteration
in the Harvard Crimson
editorial endorsing the Philistines vs Samson,
that is, the boycott movement against Israel
which is a big and ugly deal
according to Einat Wilf, in a sound-
ly argued essay. She calls it (BDS) the “pound
of flesh,” echoing The Merchant of Venice,
reminding us of a perpetual menace,
the attempt to intimidate the Jews
into being less Jewy, a typical political ruse.

-- Clark Thomas

"I wrote this poem at David Lehman's invitation in an attempt to refute his statement that 'political poems are usually successful neither as poems nor as political maneuvers.'"  -- C.T.

David Lehman replies: "Clark Thomas wrote to me that he would take up the 'poetry challenge' implicit in my arguing that political poetry is a doomed and often self-defeating proposition. While I applaud his use of rhyme, and the way he condenses an intelligent and ambitious essay into the box of a sonnet, I am far from confident that the result is more than a superior letter to the editor.  What do readers think?"

"Where's that map of the Middle East?" -- God

from Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet
<<<
When I attended college in the United States in the mid-1990s, liberal, left-wing Jews could comfortably be pro-Israel and even active in AIPAC without any fear of repercussions or social pressure to hand over a pound of flesh. That changed with the emergence of J Street, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace, until we arrived at the present condition, in which a Jewish student who does not show herself to be an ally of Students for Justice in Palestine, or does not agree that “Zionism equals racism,” or that Zionism is a form of apartheid, and Nazism, and white supremacy, and whatever other supreme evil will be identified next, cannot be considered a good Jew. This escalation in anti-Israel activism among some young Jews no longer seemed like a natural and excusable choice shaped by different generational circumstances, but the result of a relentless campaign of bullying.

Over the last several months, as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I taught a course called “Zionism and Anti-Zionism.” In the many hours I spent discussing student life with students and faculty alike, it became apparent that the anti-Zionist activism on campus—the college version of the pound of flesh dynamic—was not primarily a form of social protest or political expression, but a form of bullying. The anti-Zionist activists, like classic bullies, deliberately targeted the real and perceived frailties of their Jewish peers—fear or shame in the expression of one’s Jewish identity, with its calls to Jewish solidarity and deep connection to a faraway foreign country.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been one of the most effective expressions of the pound of flesh bullying tactic, inviting young Jews to participate in the cause of “social justice” only to ultimately demand the mutilation of their Jewish identity. BDS has demanded that diaspora Jews not only criticize Israeli government actions, but sever their connections with Israel completely. >>> -- Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet, May 10, 2022

See also https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-anti-zionism-anti-semitism in which Isaac tries to out-argue the head of the antri-defamation league on the subject. The best line is  "Give me a -- Isaac" -- where the speaker's frustration is conveyed beautifully. The reader supplies the missing word, "break."

Thom Gunn Summarizes Henry James in 2 Lines

Jamesian

Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.

--- Thom Gunn (pictured)

Poetry challenge: sum up a great author in eight words divided across two rhyming lines.