The Best American Poetry

"Idiot's Tale" [by David Lehman]

Idiot’s Tale

When you're shooting well, you're unconscious, you're sick.
No thoughts distract you, your touch is as the silk
of your rich sister's scarf. Now don't sulk.
The key to our business is buying in bulk.
Don't walk the batter. Don't risk a balk.
Look who's talking on the commercial-free talk
show you mocked before the idiot's tale
turned out to be true. But, then, no tale was as tall
as the epic poems that minstrels used to tell.
If anyone asks, just say: well, well, well.

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.

The Winning Entry: "When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" [by Angela Ball] with judge Jim Cummins's comments & runners up

Charles Bukowski in One Corner; in the Other, Bob Dylan

If anyone should take eighteen-shot Dylan Thomas’s name,
it’s me. I challenge you to a duel
with two bottles of Four Roses.

--Chuck, that may be you, but
me, I crossed the green mountain
I slept by the sea.
you’re walkin’ in dreams
where black is the color
and nothing the number.

Bob, I got to tell you
I’m sorry for my wife
I’m sorry for anyone’s wife.
If you want me, find me clinging to a freight car,
Find me underground.
But you’ll never find me
vagrant in the rain, nabbed by a rookie cop,
a skirt, no less,
in Long Branch, New Jersey.

-- Angela Ball

James Cummins writes:

As with most of David's prompts, this one resulted in some terrific entries.  I went with Angela Ball's poem for the first prize, but there was a good pool to pick from (I counted eight entries as possibles).  It came down to some great lines.  Angela wrote (in Buk's voice) "I'm sorry for my wife / I'm sorry for anyone's wife" which seemed to me to combine the compassion B. tried to keep hidden with the world-weariness we love about the guy.  And the ending, referring to Dylan's run-in with the police in 2009, who thought he was a homeless vagrant, was perfect; the word "skirt" was inspired.  George Schaefer's prose-poem "scene" takes second; it combines the grittiness of many of the entries with a lyric grace I love.  "The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour" and "Poetry only happens when nothing else can" are two examples.  And again, the ending is perfect.  Finally, Adam Baron's poem gets honorable mention for the use of the word "dumb," the moon sitting on Bukowski's solipsistic rim, and the friendly atmosphere of two schmucks having a moment together.  The difference between these three and at least four or five other entries is as thin as the bill Buk slides into his favorite pinball machine.  Thanks to all.  

George Schafer's prose poem (second place):

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

A jaded old bard pounds a shot of J.D. and mocks an idealistic young troubadour. “So just how many beers must one man drink before he’s allowed to pass out?” The bartender chuckles at the joke. The young troubadour debates if Jesus will ever forgive these sins. Loose leaf papers holding his poems gets blown away in the wind. With a soul deader than a dead Christmas tree, the jaded old bard orders another beer and another shot. The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour. After all, poetry only happens when nothing else can. The sooner this kid learns the ways of the world the better. The young troubadour claims everyone gets stoned so he can abide. He pulls up a stool and throws down the shot. Old poet says “Don’t try.”

Adam Baron's poem (third place)

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

Night fell, broke.
One day they'll reward you old man.
Chuck laughed. Me? Not me, but I'll tell you
this: if I knew guitar I'd strum the
moon out of the dumb sky. I'd make it sit on
the edge of my glass - and stare
at me for a change.
But you don't, Bob said
and Chuck laughed. Then I'll leave it
where it is, which he did, and
though Bob tries now and then, he
can't shift it.

"Modernist Lament" [by James Cummins]

Modernist Lament

When his gods are fragments, man’s of a piece;
But once he put his Higher Self in charge,
Man languished in a dualistic grief,
Always seeking a demon he could purge.
The desert was empty, so Self learned late
It didn’t have to bellow like a Fool—
Dark rants about its destiny and fate,
Prostrate before a statue of a bull.
Then ‘new man’ rose—hypocrite lecturer—
And the Obsequious found they could sway
Whole empires, built on fault-lines of the Slave.
Now artists are agents-provocateur,
Returning home to Ithaca’s blue bay,
Lashed to the mast against the song and wave.

 

From Recalcitrant Actors (2021, Dos Madres Press) by James Cummins, who judged this year's BAP poetry challenge. Tomorrow we will post his pick for the best submitted poem titled "When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan." 

Poems on Dylan & Bukowski: only two days left to get your entries in

On September 02, 2021 we accounced

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan": A Contest

As we head into Labor Day weekend, we announce a new contest:

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" 

With this as your title, write a maximum of 14 lines (verse) or 140 words (prose).

Post your entry in the comments field.

Entries will be judged on the criteria of excellence, lucidity, wit, and brevity. Prizes, including a copy of The Best American Poetry 2021, will be given to the best and to the briefest coherent piece of writing. 

Judge: Jim Cummins 

Contest end date Sept 30

Previous BAP contests were judged by Mark Strand, Paul Violi, and Mark Bibbins.

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest1winner.html
http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest2winner.html

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest3winner.html

See the winners for 2007 and 2009.

To see the entries, check the comments field here -- and click here for a couple of others:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/when-charles-bukowski-met-bob-dylan-terence-winch.html 

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan": A Contest

As we head into Labor Day weekend, we announce a new contest:

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" 

 

With this as your title, write a maximum of 14 lines (verse) or 140 words (prose).

 

Post your entry in the comments field.

 

Entries will be judged on the criteria of excellence, lucidity, wit, and brevity. Prizes, including a copy of The Best American Poetry 2021, will be given to the best and to the briefest coherent piece of writing. 

 

Judge: Jim Cummins (pictured left with a poet friend, circa 2009; photo credit Stacey Lehman/ One Fifth)

 

Contest end date Sept 30

 

Previous BAP contests were judged by Mark Strand, Paul Violi, and Mark Bibbins.

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest1winner.html
http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest2winner.html

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest3winner.html

See the winners for 2007 and 2009.

 

To see the entries, check the comments field below -- and click here for a couple of others:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/when-charles-bukowski-met-bob-dylan-terence-winch.html  

Good luck!

"A War in Tawara" [by Paul Hoover]

A War in Tawara

Add “A,”
A nut for a jar of tuna,
A Santa at NASA.

Borrow or rob,
Boston did not sob.
But sad Eva saved a stub.

Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic.

Don did nod,
“Dogma, I am God;
Devil never even lived.”

Evil Olive,
Ed is on no side.
Ed is a trader, cast sacred art aside.

Flesh saw Mom wash self.
Flee to me, remote elf!

God lived as an evil dog.
Go, do, dog!

Harass Sarah!

I prefer pi.
I, a man, am regal; a German am I.
If I had a hi-fi . . .

Jar a toga, rag not a raj.
Jar bar crab, raj.

Kayak salad, Alaska yak.
Key lime, Emily—ek!

Late, fetal,
Leon sees Noel.
Live, devil,
Laid on no dial.

Ma is a nun, as I am,
Mirror rim
Murder for a jar of red rum;

No lemons, no melon,
Never even
Noon.
No sign, in evening, is on.
No slang is a signal, son.
Nurses run—

Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo.
Oh, who was it I saw? Oh, who?

Poor Dan is in a droop.
Pull up if I pull up.

“Q,” said Dias, “Q.”

Rise to live, sir.
Rats live on no evil star.

Stack cats,
Solo gigolos.
Swap paws,
Step on no pets.
Sexes, exes,

Too hot to hoot,
Tug at a gut.
Tell a ballet
Tulsa night life: filth, gin, a slut.

U.F.O., tofu,

Vanna, wanna V?

Wow!
Was it a bar or a bat I saw?
Won’t lovers revolt now?
We panic in a pew.

Xerox orex,

Yawn a more Roman way!
You bat one in, resign in evening. Is Ernie not a buoy?

Zeus was deified, saw Suez.
ZZZZ, Otto, ZZZZ.

Ed. Note: Paul Hoover gave himself the challenge to write an abecedarius in which every line is a palindrome. The result, "A War in Tawara," is a tour de force. It is from his new collection-in-progress, The Windows. When Paul posted the poem on Facebook -- as part of the "8 poems in 8 days plus 8 invites" project -- he included the image below "When Paradise Arrived" by Enrique Chagoya.

Poetry Challenge: A Prompt [by David Lehman]

Prompt: Write a poem sparked by the deliberately unidentified portrait above. Imagine that it is the portrait of either (a) a celebrated modern poet or (b) a wounded World War I veteran war or (c) a dashing art critic, champion of Cubism or (d) an avatar of Frank O'Hara in Paris.

Quiz: Name the subject and identify the painter, who denounced anti-Semitism ("not only a phenomenon of sadistic evil, but also one of great cowardice") in the controversial conclusion of his memoirs. He feels that Jews have been too eager to assimilate and be accepted and that they therefore "place themselves in a state of inferiority before the non-Jews." In his view, "Anti-Semitism will end only when the Jews stop hiding and assuming the attitudes of whipped dogs and will say in a loud voice and to everyone's face: 'I am a Jew and I am proud of it!'"