The Best American Poetry

Epigraph of the Month: Poe

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

Virginia Woolf explains why the English would rather live in ancient Greece

<<<

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

>>>

​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

 

from the archive; first posted March 2018

"O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend. . ."

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

Vive la Différence [by Somerset Maugham]

“Have you never thought of divorcing Gray?”

“I’ve got no reason for divorcing him.”

“That doesn’t prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to.”

She laughed.

"Why d'you suppose they do it?"

“Don’t you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”

-- Somerset Maugham, "The Razor's Edge"

How the Times Reviewed Fitzgerald, Forster, Woolf, Henry James et al

YThis is how reviewers at the NY Times treated certain books:

Scott Fitzgerald:
“Bad news is best blurted out at once: ‘Tender Is the Night’ is a disappointment. Though it displays Mr. Fitzgerald’s most engaging qualities, it makes his weaknesses appear ineradicable, for they are present in equal measure and in undiminished form. … His new book is clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist.” Reviewed by J. Donald Adams, April 15, 1934

Henry James:
“In ‘The Golden Bowl’ we find, standing for subtlety, a kind of restless finicking inquisitiveness, a flutter of aimless conjecture, such as might fall to a village spinster in a ‘department store.’ … How like ancient and tedious cronies the ‘wonderfullys’ and ‘preciselys’ and ‘adequatelys’ and ‘competentlys’ turn up on these pages — as a rule in places where no self-respecting adverb would choose to be discovered.” Reviewed by H.W. Boynton, Nov. 26, 19

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out:
“Aside from a certain cleverness — which, being all in one key, palls on one after going through a hundred pages of it — there is little in this offering to make it stand out from the ruck of mediocre novels which make far less literary pretension. As for the story itself, it is painfully lacking, both in coherency and narrative interest.” Unsigned, June 13, 1920

E. M. Forster, Howards End:
“As a social philosopher, evidently, Mr. Edward M. Forster has not yet arrived at any very positive convictions. … He evinces neither power nor inclination to come to grips with any vital human problem.” Unsigned, Feb. 19, 1911

If, on the other hand, you want to go against the grain in a big way, hire Vladimir Nabokov to take on Jean-Paul Sartre:

“Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, ‘La Nausée’ ['Nausea'] was worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters … Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst.” Reviewed by Vladimir Nabokov, April 24, 1949

The Problem of Evil

Solzhenitsyn muses that if the intellectuals of Chekhov’s plays who wondered what things would be like in a few decades had learned “that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath . . . that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot . . . not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.” -- Gary Saul Morson, "The Gulag Archipelago: An Epic of True Evil." Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2023. 

Wallace Stevens and the Iambic Line

from "Sunday Morning"
:

<<<
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

>>>

 

Is there a better example of the pentameter line in modern American poetry? The only real competition -- diferfent in every other way -- comes from Robert Frost. 

Quote of the Day [by Harrison Ball]

NYCB Principal Dancer Harrison Ball. Photo © Ricky Cohete

Ed note: Soon after Harrison Ball was made a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet in 2022, he suffered several injuries that have ended his promising dance career. He is retiring from the company this spring, at 29. His final performance is on April 30. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview. Substitute just about any pursuit for "dancer" and the words of wisdom would still apply: 

Do you have any special words of wisdom or helpful hints to share with dancers who are either new to the art form or to the Company?

If I could give advice to dancers who are in training or beginning a performing career it would be a few things. I would say that as deeply as you work on your craft, you must work on yourself. The body is indeed the instrument you use but it is the mind that informs everything you do. Travel, travel, travel. See the world and expand your mind. You must attend performances in all theater mediums, go to museums and galleries and learn about the great artists, educate yourself on cinema and culture, keep up with the current affairs of humanity, watch other companies all around the world (social media can be a tool in this regard), learn new styles of dance, read the great literature of the world, take an acting class and learn how to be truthful in the moment, find a hobby that enhances your creativity as a performer. Most importantly, learn to be honest with yourself. It’s easy to get wrapped up in small things in the dance world. It is not life or death. Stick to the big picture. Once you get your first paycheck, you are an adult. Take responsibility in your life. There is no such thing as authority once you begin working. You will fear performance, colleagues, and faculty. Tell yourself to not be afraid anymore until you aren’t. Have no fear! And remember to not take yourself or everything too seriously. Fight to maintain your curiosity and joy. Have fun and enjoy your career no matter where you are. Work as hard as you can. It goes quickly. Most importantly, enjoy life.

You can read the full interview here. 

And it's not too late to catch Ball in his final performances. Find more information about programs and casting here. 

--sdl

Eliot of Becket (Thomas a) and Beckett (Samuel)

And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

--  Samuel Beckett in Watt, which Erica Cairo believes is a veiled reference to Thomas Becket and his king.

“They know and do not know, that acting is suffering
And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
To an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.”

― T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Borges: "Translators have impoved my stories"

Jorge Luis Borges said: "I respect translators, and my stories have sometimes been greatly bettered by them. One of them told me so himself. Besides, I am so fond of English that I like anything better in English than in Spanish." While the relevance of this quote to "No R" is not obvious, people of good faith can figure it out. Borges also declared unequivocally that Robert Louis Stevenson "is the most wonderful writer of all English writers, after Shakespeare."

Update on Muhammad Hussein Yaqub: Terrorist or Traitor?

This is what the Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub said in 2009 on an Egyptian television station:

"If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them?
Of course not. We will never love them. . .
They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine.
They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. . .
You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them
until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth. . ."
<<<

Sheikh Yacoub entered the Cairo Tora Court complex as a witness and was about to leave as either a terrorist or a traitor to his fans. He chose the latter. “I don’t know anything about Salafism,” he said.

Mohamad Hussein Yaqoub, one of Egypt’s most influential and extremist Salafi sheikhs, who spread the Salafi word around the world with his sermons on cassette tapes and on TV, is currently being heard in court in the ISIS Imbaba case, in which 12 individuals stand accused of a series of terrorist attacks.

Sheikhs such as Yaqoub started to appear in the 1980s under the reign of former President Hosni Mubarak, who supported the Salafist movement with the aim of creating a rival, and perhaps an alternative, to the Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banna.

Under Mubarak, the number of sheikhs rapidly multiplied, each with an even more radical approach to religion. Yaqoub was arguably the most prominent, and the cruelest. He advocated the predominance of religion in virtually everything and called for the establishment of an Islamic state.

One day, a group was formed that carried out a bombing in downtown Cairo, targeted a bank in Giza, and participated in other terrorist operations. According to case papers “271 of 2021,” the group had pledged allegiance to ISIS and operated under the name “ISIS Imbaba Cell.”

“I Do Not Know Them.”

Following their arrest, the group members did not hide the source of their ideas. They said they were students of Sheikhs Muhammad Hassan and Muhammad Hussein Yaqoub. They had adopted their ideas after hearing them in fatwas and sermons performed by the two Salafi Sheikhs. The same sheikhs whose influence spread after appearing on the famous “Al-Nas” TV channel, who did not come to the rescue of the seven defendants who fell into the hands of the Egyptian security

Perhaps the defendants had hoped for the two sheikhs to storm into the courtroom and prove, with evidence from Qur’an and Sunnah, that the acts for which they stand trial were nothing but “orders from God” to reconstruct the universe and implement divine law on earth.

But none of that happened. Despite being summoned, Sheikh Muhammad Hassan missed the first court session and he submitted a medical report to excuse him from attending the second session.

Seated in a wheelchair, Sheikh Hussein Yaqoub entered the courtroom, only to take back most of the statements he’d made in the past, and renounce the accused and their ideas. He even proclaimed that he was not a scholar but merely a reader with “a teacher’s diploma.” In response to the defendants’ plea that they were his “disciples,” he said: “They are not my students and I do not know them.”

In other words, Sheikh Yaqoub decided to jump ship as soon as felt the heat, disavowing his followers, faith and Salafi ideas.

His “martyrdom” widely echoed in the religious circles that had witnessed his emergence and had listened to his cries and fatwas live on air to compel Muslims to abide, warning them of the torment of hell’s fire, the wrath of the snake, the horror of the hereafter …

He was the first to advocate and support the foundation of a religious state in Egypt. In one of the referendums after the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, he appeared with his now famous slogan: “And the Voter’s Boxes Said to Religion: Yes.” 

The referendum of course meant nothing more but a fight between two political factions, one of which supported the new constitution proposal, while the other rejected it. The political Islam faction, to which Yaqoub and his companions belong, was mobilizing to approve the new constitution, arguing it to be “halal,” while claiming that the old one would be considered “haram” (forbidden).

The religious forces at that time formulated multiple narratives revolving around the position that approving the constitution was a religious victory bringing Egypt closer to God, making it a state in which Sharia prevails. Rejecting it would make Egypt a hostage to the liberals, secularists and “the enemies of religion.”

“People said ‘yes’ to religion and ‘no’ to secularism,” said Sheikh Yaqoub. “This is our country, and whoever does not like it can emigrate.”

His words were a warning alerting everyone to the extremism of the Islamic movement, the Salafi sheikhs, and the path they embarked on in an attempt to turn Egypt into a religious state. Disregarding the country’s cultural and political history, their statements and fatwas piled up, until they became one of the main reasons for the Islamic trend to fail.

Incitement to Jihad

Most Salafi sheikhs in Egypt stay away from calling for jihad in public in order not to get involved in explicit accusations of terrorism, and it is not possible to find fatwas by Sheikh Yaqoub that incite terrorism or promote jihadist ideology, as he was always keen not to be caught the wrong way. 

However, some of his fatwas did declare that Coptic feasts are “taboo,” celebrating Valentine’s Day is a “sin,” working in banks is “cooperating with sin and aggression,” falling in love a “sin,” also, singing as “forbidden” and jihad “a calling and legitimate duty,” without clarifying exactly what he meant by jihad. 

In addition to the slander targeting many segments of Egyptian society, Sheikh Yacoub glorified the sheikhs and founders of terrorist organizations, as well as those carrying arms. >>>

Hani Mohamad, Egyptian Journalist, June 17, 2021 
https://daraj.com/en/74458/
for more, click here

"Mush from the Wimp" Department [by Walter Carey]

When it was Megan's turn to pick a sentence we could ridicule, she took out a recent New Yorker and quoted Louis Menand on Charles Dickens: "In life, there is little evidence that Dickens was, in the context of his time and place, a sexist or a prude." 

Johnny said: How about Homer? St. Augustine? Rabelais? Was he a "sexist or a prude"? How about Emerson? Gogol? Gide? Coleridge? Flannery O'Connor? Alexander Pope? Virginia Woolf? Yeats? John Donne?

Katya: "In death, there is little evidence that Dickens was a sexist or a prude." See the difference?

Isabelle: An imperfect example of the historical fallacy: that we today, in our infinite wisdom, feel free to criticize the benighted citizens of the past.

Megan" Why "imperfect"?

Isabelle: Because of the hedging, as Katya pointed out.

Johnny: My professor at Rutgers said write every sentence as if it could be put on your gravestone.

Megan: My vote for most pernicious phrase goes to "It's not your father's Oldsmobile" ahead of "up close and personal."

-- Walter Carey

For other pieces by Walter Carey, the pseudonym of a self-styled "contrarian" writer of our acquaintance, click here, or here, or here, or here, or on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/farewell-to-leicester-squares-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/pitching-a-no-hitter-on-lsd-by-walter-carey.html  

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/the-two-party-system-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/a-curse-on-blockheads-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2017/10/the-real-reason-linda-amy-carlson-left-blue-bloods-after-7-seasons-by-walter-carey.html 

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.

Ogden Nash's Advice to Husbands

A Word to Husbands

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

from Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash (1962).
Did you know that rhymester Nash wrote the lyrics for Kurt Weill's beautiful love song "Speak Low"? 

Quote of the Week: Christopher Marlowe

Here is the epigraph T. S. Eliot chose for his poem "Portrait of a Lady":

<<

Thou hast committed --
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

>>

from The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe (act iv, scene i). Eliot was a master at choosing epigraphs (from Shakespeare, Dante, et al) for his poems, and the lines he lifts from others are among the most memorable in "The Waste Land."  Hemingway used "In Another Country" as the title of one the best stories in Men Without Women. -- DL

Quote of the Week: Fulke Greville

 

Aldous Huxley chose these lines of the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

 

 

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

This post is dedicated to the memory of Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, in whose popular courses and seminars he did his best to get us to read Fulke Grevillle -- and recognize his importance among the great poets of his time (Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell).

-- DL