The Best American Poetry

Why everything is going to be OK. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning!  I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend.  But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good.  So.  What I want to tell you is pretty important.  I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States.  What great people I met.  Ridiculously cool people.  Ridunkulous.  And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420.   If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know.  I gave 6 talks in four days!  One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired.  Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism.  There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community.  What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true.  It’s us. 

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love.  We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.  

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning.  The feelings of meaning are the meaning.  It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual.  We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another.  It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. 

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark?  Yes.  Come sit with us.  We're right here.  Turn on the light.

We must look after one another.  There is no heaven.  We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares?  Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end.  You are here.  It’s wonderful.  We made it into existence together. 

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating.  Health Care, people!  Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family!  Now is the time to lift our voices up.  We are all there is.  We don’t have it for very long.  We have it right now.  America is a lot of things.  I know.  Tea party.  I know.  Beck, and not the good kind.  But it’s okay.

We are here together.  We can keep each other company.  We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed.  You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is.  It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us.  We are getting better at this.  We are going to get even better.  That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you.  Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge.  Meanwhile we got out of our cars.  We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights.  Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump.  John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see.  So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear. 

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere.  We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it.  Then yesterday saw a report.  She’d jumped.  After we were home in bed.  She’s in critical condition.  A 41-year-old woman from Long Island.  Like so many of us, or thereabouts.  So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself.   Stay, everybody.  No more going off the deep end.  Stay.  Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake.  But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

I love you like crazy,

 Jennifer

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2010

“On Heaven” [by Ford Madox Ford]

On Heaven
--To V.H., who asked for a working Heaven

That day the sunlight lay on the farms;
On the morrow the bitter frost that there was!
That night my young love lay in my arms,
The morrow how bitter it was!

And because she is very tall and quaint
And golden, like a quattrocento saint,
I desire to write about Heaven;
To tell you the shape and the ways of it,
And the joys and the toil in the maze of it,
For these there must be in Heaven,
Even in Heaven!

For God is a good man, God is a kind man,
And God's a good brother, and God is no blind man,
And God is our father.

I will tell you how this thing began:
How I waited in a little town near Lyons for many years,
And yet knew nothing of passing time, or of her tears,
But, for nine slow years, lounged away at my table in the shadowy sunlit square
Where the small cafes are.

The Place is small and shaded by great planes,
Over a rather human monument
Set up to Louis Dixhuit in the year
Eighteen fourteen, a funnny thing with dolphins
About a pyramid of green-dripped, sordid stone.
But the enormous, monumental planes
Shade it all in, and in the flecks of sun
Sit market women. There's a paper shop
Painted all blue, a shipping agency,
Three or four cafes; dank, dark colonnades
Of an eighteen-forty Mairie. I'd no wish
To wait for her where it was picturesque,
Or ancient or historic, or to love
Over well any place in the land before she came
And loved it too. I didn't even go
To Lyons for the opera, Arles for the bulls,
Or Avignon for glimpses of the Rhone.
Not even to Beaucaire! I sat about
And played long games of dominoes with the maire,
Or passing commis-voyageurs. And so
I sat and watched the trains come in, and read
The Libre Parole and sipped the thin, fresh wine
They call Piquette, and got to know the people,
The kindly, southern people...

Until, when the years were over, she came in her swift red car,
Shooting out past a pram; and she slowed and stopped and lighted absently down,
A little dazed, in the heart of the town;
And nodded imperceptibly,
With a sideways look at me.

So our days here began.

And the wrinkled old woman who keeps the cafe,
And the man
Who sells the Libre Parole,
And the sleepy gendarme,
And the fat facteur who delivers letters only in the shady,
Pleasanter kind of streets;
And the boy I often gave a penny,
And the maire himself, and the little girl who loves toffee
And me because I have given her many sweets;
And the one-eyed droll
Bookseller of the rue Grand de Provence, -
Chancing to be going home to bed,
Smiled with their kindly, fresh benevolence,
Because they knew I had waited for a lady
Who should come in a swift, red, English car,
To the square where the little cafes are.
And the old, old woman touched me on the wrist
With a wrinkled finger,
And said: 'Why do you linger? -
Too many kisses can never be kissed!
And comfort her - nobody here will think harm -
Take her instantly to your arm!
it is a little strange, you know, to your dear,
To be dead!

But one is English,
Though one be never so much of a ghost;
And if most of your life has been spent in the craze to relinquish
What you want most,
You will go on relinquishing,
You will go on vanquishing
Human longings, even
in Heaven.

God! You will have forgotten what the rest of the world is on fire for -
The madness of desire for the long and quiet embrace,
The coming nearer of a tear-wet face;
Forgotten the desire to slake
The thirst, and the long, slow ache,
And to interlace
Lash with lash, lip with lip, limb with limb, and the fingers of the hand
With the hand
And...

You will have forgotten...
But they will all awake;
Aye, all of them shall awaken
In this dear place.
And all that then we took
Of all that we might have taken,
Was that one embracing look,
Coursing over features, over limbs, between eyes, a making sure, and a long sigh,
Having the tranquility
Of trees unshaken,
And the softness of sweet tears,
And the dearness of the dear brook
To wash away past years
(For that too is the quality of Heaven,
That you are conscious always of great pain
Only when it is over
And shall not come again.
Thank God, thank God, it shall not come again,
Though your eyes be never so wet with the tears
Of many years!)

ii

And so she stood a moment by the door
Of the long, red car. Royally she stepped down,
Settling one long foot and leaning back
Amongst her russet fires. And she looked round...
Of course it must be strange to come from England
Straight into Heaven. You must take it in,
Slowly, for a long instant, with some fear...
Now that affiche, in orange, on the kiosque:
'Six Spanish bulls will fight on Sunday next
At Arles, in the arena'... Well, it's strange
Till you get used to our ways. And, on the Mairie,
The untidy poster telling of the concours
De vers de soie, of silkworms. The cocoons
Pile, yellow, all across the little Places
Of ninety townships in the environs
Of Lyons, the city famous for her silks.
What if she's pale? it must be more than strange,
After these years, to come out here from England
To a strange place, to the stretched-out arms of me,
A man never fully known, only divined,
Loved, guessed at, pledged to, in your Sussex mud,
Amongst the frost-bound farms by the yeasty sea.
Oh, the long look; the long, long searching look!
And how my heart beat!
Well, you see, in England
She had a husband. And four families -
His, hers, mine, and another woman's too -
Would have gone crazy. And, with all the rest,
Eight parents, and the children, seven aunts
And sixteen uncles and a grandmother.
There were, besides, our names, a few real friends,
And the decencies of life. A monstrous heap!
They made a monstrous heap. i've lain awake
Whole aching nights to tot the figures up!
Heap after heaps, of complications, griefs,
Worries, tongue-clackings, nonsenses and shame
For not making good. You see the coil there was!
And the poor strained fibres of our tortured brains,
And the voice that called from depth in her to depth
In me... my God, in the dreadful nights,
Through the roar of the great black winds, through the sound of the sea!
Oh agony! Agony! From out my breast
It called whilst the dark house slept, and stairheads creaked;
From within my breast it screamed and made no sound;
And wailed... And made no sound.
And howled like the damned... No sound! No sound!
Only the roar of the wind, the sound of the sea,
The tick of the clock...
And our two voices, noiseless through the dark.
Oh God! Oh God!

(That night my young love lay in my arms...

There was a bitter frost lay on the farms
In England, by the shiver
And the crawling of the tide;
By the broken silver of the English Channel,
Beneath the aged moon that watched alone -
Poor, dreary, lonely old moon to have to watch alone,
Over the dreary beaches mangled with ancient foam
Like shrunken flannel;
The moon, an intent, pale face, looking down
Over the English Channel.

But soft and warm
She lay in the crook of my arm.
And came to no harm since we had come quietly home
Even to Heaven:
Which is situate in a little old town
Not very far from the side of the Rhone,
That mighty river
That is, just there by the Crau, in the lower reaches,
Far wider than the Channel.)

But, in the market place of the other little town,
Where the Rhone is a narrower, greener affair,
When she had looked at me, she beckoned with her long white hand,
A little languidly, since it is a strain, if a blessed strain, to have just died,
And going back again,
Into the long, red, English racing-car,
Made room for me amongst the furs at her side.
And we moved away from the kind looks of the kindly people
Into the wine of the hurrying air.
And very soon even the tall grey steeple
Of Lyons cathedral behind us grew little and far
And was no more there...
And, thank God, we had nothing any more to think of,
And, thank God, we had nothing any more to talk of,
Unless, as it chanced, the flashing silver stalk of the pampas
Growing down to the brink of the Rhone,
On the lawn of a little chateau, giving onto the river.
And we were alone, alone, alone...
At last alone...

The poplars on the hill-crests go marching rank on rank,
And far away to the left, like a pyramid, marches the ghost of Mont Blanc.
There are vines and vines and vines, all down to the river bank.
There will be a castle here,
And an abbey there;
And huge quarries and a long white farm,
With long thatched barns and a long wine shed,
As we ran alone, all down to the Rhone.

And that day there was no puncturing of the tyres to fear;
And no trouble at all with the engine and gear;
Smoothly and softly we ran between the great poplar alley
All down the valley of the Rhone.
For the dear, good God knew how we needed rest and to be alone.
But, on other days, just as you must have perfect shadows to make perfect Rembrandts,
He shall affect us with little lets and hindrances of His own
Devising - just to let us be glad that we are dead...
Just for remembrance.

iii

Hard by the castle of God in the Alpilles,
In the eternal stone of Alpilles,
There's this little old town, walled round by the old, grey gardens...
There were never such olives as grew in the gardens of God,
The green-grey trees, the wardens of agony
And failure of gods,
Of hatred and faith, of truth, of treachery
They whisper; they whisper that none of the living prevail;
They whirl in the great mistral over the white, dry sods,
Like hair blown back from white foreheads in the enormous gale
Up to the castle walls of God...

But in the town that's our home,
Once you are past the wall,
Amongst the trunks of the planes,
Though they roar never so mightily overhead in the day,
All this tumult is quieted down, and all
The windows stand open because of the heat of the night
That shall come.
And, from each little window, shines in the twilight a light,
And, beneath it the eternal planes
With the huge, gnarled trunks that were aged and grey
At the creation of Time.
The Chinese lanthorns, hung out at the doors of hotels,
Shimmering in the dusk, here on an orange tree, there on a sweet-scented lime,
There on a golden inscription: 'Hotel of the Three Holy Bells, '
Or 'Hotel Sublime, ' or 'Inn of the Real Good Will'.
And yes, it is very warm and still,
And all the world is afoot after the heat of the day,
In the cool of the even in Heaven.
And it is here that I have brought my dear to pay her all that i owed her,
Amidst this crowd, with the soft voices, the soft footfalls, the rejoicing laughter.
And after the twilight there falls such a warm, soft darkness,
And still there will come stealing under the planes a drowsy odour,
Compounded of all cyclamen, of oranges, or rosemary and bay,
To take the remembrance of the toil of the day away.

So we sat at a little table, under an immense plane,
And we remembered again
The blisters and foments
And terrible harassments of the tired brain,
The cold and the frost and the pain,
As if we were looking at a picture and saying: 'This is true!
Why this is a truly painted
Rendering of that street where - you remember? - i fainted.'
And we remembered again
Tranquilly, our poor few tranquil moments,
The falling of the sunlight through the panes,
The flutter for ever in the chimney of the quiet flame,
The mutter of our two poor tortured voices, always a-whisper.
And the endless nights when I would cry out, running through all
The gamut of misery, even to a lisp, her name;
And we remembered our kisses, nine, maybe, or eleven -
If you count two that I gave and she did not give again.

And always the crowd drifted by in the cool of the even,
And we saw the faces of friends,
And the faces of those to who one day we must make amends,
Smiling in welcome.
And I said: 'On another day -
And such a day may well come soon -
We will play dominoes with Dick and Evelyn and Frances
For a while afternoon.
And, in the time to come, Genee
Shall dance for us, fluttering over the ground as the sunlight dances.'
And Arlesiennes with the beautiful faces went by us,
And gipsies and Spanish shepherds, noiseless in sandals of straw, sauntered nigh us,
Wearing slouch hats and old sheep-skins, and casting admiring glances
From dark, foreign eyes at my dear...
(And ah, it is Heaven alone, to have her alone and so near!)
So all this world rejoices
In the cool of the even
In Heaven...
And, when the cool of the even was fully there,
Came a great ha-ha of voices.
Many children run together, and all laugh and rejoice and call,
Hurrying with little arms flying, and little feet flying, and little hurrying haunches,
From the door of a stable,
Where, in an olla podrida, they had been playing at the corrida
With the black Spanish bull, whose nature
Is patience with children. And so, through the gaps of the branches
Of Jasmine on our screen beneath the planes,
We saw, coming down from the road that leads to the olives and Alpilles,
A man of great stature, in a great cloak,
With a great stride,
And a little joke
For all and sundry, coming down with a hound at his side.
And he stood at the cross-roads, passing the time of day
In a great, kind voice, the voice of a man-and-a-half! -
With a great laugh, and a great clap on the back,
For a fellow in black - a priest i should say,
Or may be a lover,
Wearing black for his mistress's mood.
'A little toothache, ' we could hear him say; 'but that's so good
When it gives over.' So he passed from sight
In the soft twilight, into the soft night,
In the soft riot and tumult of the crowd.

And a magpie flew down, laughing, holding up his beak to us,
And I said: 'That was God! Presently, when he has walked through the town
And the night has settled down,
So that you may not be afraid,
In the darkness, he will come to our table and speak to us.'
And past us many saints went walking in a company -
The kindly, thoughtful saints, devising and laughing and talking,
And smiling at us with their pleasant solicitude.
And because the thick of the crowd followed to the one side God,
Or to the other the saints, we sat in solitude
In the distance the saints went singing all in chorus,
And our Lord went on the other side of the street,
Holding a little boy.
Taking him to pick the musk-roses that open at dusk,
For wreathing the statue of Jove,
Left on the Alpilles above
By the Romans; since Jove,
Even Jove,
Must not want for his quota of honour and love;
But round about him there must be,
With all its tender jollity,
The laughter of children in Heaven,
Making merry with roses in Heaven.

Yet never he looked at us, knowing that that would be such joy
As must be over-great for hearts that needed quiet;
Such a riot and tumult of joy as quiet hearts are not able
To taste to the full...

... And my dear one sat in the shadows; very softly she wept: -
Such joy is in Heaven,
In the cool of the even,
After the burden and toil of the days,
After the heat and haze
In the vine-hills; or in the shady
Whispering groves in high passes up in the Alpilles,
Guarding the castle of God.

And I went on talking towards her unseen face:
'So it is, so it goes, in this beloved place,
There shall be never a grief but passes; no, not any;
There shall be such bright light and no blindness;
There shall be so little awe and so much loving-kindness;
There shall be a little longing and enough care,
There shall be a little labor and enough of toil
To bring back the lost flavour of our human coil;
Not enough to taint it;
And all that we desire shall prove as fair as we can paint it.'
For, though that may be the very hardest trick of all
God set Himself, who fashioned this goodly hall.
Thus has He made Heaven;
Even Heaven.

For God is a very clever mechanician;
And if He made this proud and goodly ship of the world,
From the maintop to the hull,
Do you think He could not finish it to the full,
With a flag and all,
And make it sail, tall and brave,
On the waters, beyond the grave?
It should cost but very little rhetoric
To explain for you that last, fine, conjuring trick;
To give to each man after his heart
Who knows very well what each man has in his heart:
To let you pass your life in a night-club where they dance,
If that is your idea of heaven; if you will, in the South of France;
If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the night;
Where you will; how you will;
Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall;
He would be a very little God if He could not do all this,
And He is still
The great God of all.

For God is a good man; God is a kind man;
In the darkness He came walking to our table beneath the planes, And spoke
So kindly to my dear,
With a little joke,
Giving himself some pains
To take away her fear
Of His stature,
So as not to abash her,
In no way at all to dash her new pleasure beneath the planes,
In the cool of the even
in Heaven.

That, that is God's nature,
For God's a good brother, and God is no blind man,
And God's a good mother and loves sons who're rovers,
And God is our father and loves all good lovers.
He has a kindly smile for many a poor sinner;
He takes note to make it up to poor wayfarers on sodden roads;
Such as bear heavy loads
He takes note of, and of all that toil on bitter seas and frosty lands,
He takes care that they shall have good at His hands;
Well He takes note of a poor old cook,
Cooking your dinner;
And much He loves sweet joys in such as ever took
Sweet joy on earth. He has a kindly smile for a kiss
Given in a shady nook.
And in the golden book
Where the accounts of His estate are kept,
All the round, golden sovereigns of bliss,
Known by poor lovers, married or never yet married,
While the green world waked, or the black world quietly slept;
All joy, all sweetness, each sweet sight that's sighed -
Their accounts are kept,
And carried
By the love of God to His own credit's side.
So that is why He came to our table to welcome my dear, dear bride,
In the cool of the even
In front of a cafe in Heaven.

-- Ford Madox Ford
Friday, July 25, 1914

from "The Fraying of America" [by Robert Hughes]

It took a while but Time got around to reporting Nietzsche's brainstorm announcement. The question mark is merely a rhetorical cover-up. And here are some thoughtful paragraphs from "The Fraying of America" by the magazine's art critic, the late Robert Hughes, thirty years after he filed the article (Time, February 3, 1992). Newsmagazines are usually behind the times -- if you read of a high flying stock in a magazine, the easy money hss been made -- but Hughes was way ahead of the curve. -- WC 

<<<
The obsessive subject of our increasingly sterile confrontation between the two PCs -- the politically and the patriotically correct -- is something clumsily called multiculturalism. America is a place filled with diversity, unsettled histories, images impinging on one another and spawning unexpected shapes. Its polyphony of voices, its constant eddying of claims to identity, is one of the things that make America America. The gigantic, riven, hybridizing, multiracial republic each year receives a major share of the world's emigration, legal or illegal.

To put the argument for multiculturalism in merely practical terms of self- interest: though elites are never going to go away, the composition of those elites is not necessarily static. The future of American ones, in a globalized economy without a cold war, will rest with people who can think and act with informed grace across ethnic, cultural, linguistic lines. And the first step in becoming such a person lies in acknowledging that we are not one big world family, or ever likely to be; that the differences among races, nations, cultures and their various histories are at least as profound and as durable as the similarities; that these differences are not divagations from a European norm but structures eminently worth knowing about for their own sake. In the world that is coming, if you can't navigate difference, you've had it.

Thus if multiculturalism is about learning to see through borders, one can be all in favor of it. But you do not have to listen to the arguments very long before realizing that, in quite a few people's minds, multiculturalism is about something else. Their version means cultural separatism within the larger whole of America. They want to Balkanize culture.

THE AUTHORITY OF THE PAST

This reflects the sense of disappointment and frustration with formal politics, which has caused many people to look to the arts as a field of power, since they have power nowhere else. Thus the arts become an arena for complaint about rights. The result is a gravely distorted notion of the political capacity of the arts, just at the moment when -- because of the pervasiveness of mass media -- they have reached their nadir of real political effect.

One example is the inconclusive debate over "the canon," that oppressive Big Bertha whose muzzle is trained over the battlements of Western Civ at the black, the gay and the female. The canon, we're told, is a list of books by dead Europeans -- Shakespeare and Dante and Tolstoy and Stendhal and John Donne and T.S. Eliot . . . you know, them, the pale, patriarchal penis people. Those who complain about the canon think it creates readers who will never read anything else. What they don't want to admit, at least not publicly, is that most American students don't read much anyway and quite a few, left to their own devices, would not read at all. Their moronic national baby-sitter, the TV set, took care of that. Before long, Americans will think of the time when people sat at home and read books for their own sake, discursively and sometimes even aloud to one another, as a lost era -- the way we now see rural quilting bees in the 1870s.

The quarrel over the canon reflects the sturdy assumption that works of art are, or ought to be, therapeutic. Imbibe The Republic or Phaedo at 19, and you will be one kind of person; study Jane Eyre or Mrs. Dalloway, and you will be another. For in the literary zero-sum game of canon-talk, if you read X, it means that you don't read Y. This is a simple fancy. So is the distrust of the dead, as in "dead white male." Some books are deeper, wider, fuller than others, and more necessary to an understanding of our culture and ourselves. They remain so long after their authors are dead. Those who parrot slogans like "dead white male" might reflect that, in writing, death is relative: Lord Rochester is as dead as Sappho, but not so moribund as Bret Easton Ellis or Andrea Dworkin. Statistically, most authors are dead, but some continue to speak to us with a vividness and urgency that few of the living can rival. And the more we read, the more writers we find who do so, which is why the canon is not a fortress but a permeable membrane.

The sense of quality, of style, of measure, is not an imposition bearing on literature from the domain of class, race or gender. All writers or artists carry in their mind an invisible tribunal of the dead, whose appointment is an imaginative act and not merely a browbeaten response to some notion of authority. This tribunal sits in judgment on their work. They intuit their standards from it. From its verdict there is no appeal. None of the contemporary tricks -- not the fetishization of the personal, not the attempt to shift the aesthetic into the political, not the exhausted fictions of avant-gardism -- will make it go away. If the tribunal weren't there, every first draft would be a final manuscript. You can't fool Mother Culture.

That is why one rejects the renewed attempt to judge writing in terms of its presumed social virtue. Through it, we enter a Marxist never-never land, where all the most retrograde phantoms of Literature as Instrument of Social Utility are trotted forth. Thus the Columbia History of the American Novel declares Harriet Beecher Stowe a better novelist than Herman Melville because she was "socially constructive" and because Uncle Tom's Cabin helped rouse Americans against slavery, whereas the captain of the Pequod was a symbol of laissez-faire capitalism with a bad attitude toward whales.

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,974806-6,00.html

Is Thomas Disch the Right God for You? [by Tom Disch, 1939-2008]

Once a mortal, soon to be in Heaven, I may be
your best chance to distinguish yourself
as someone specially Blessed and bound for Glory
without going to a lot of trouble or expense.
The Scripture is out there now
[The Word of God, Tachyon Press, $14.95],
proclaiming my Divinity and promising Salvation.

So why not declare yourself a believer Now
and reap all the associated Tax Advantages?
Start with a little Tom My God shrine beside the BBQ
and before you can say Glory Be the whole back yard
and all its gardening tools are tax-deductible!
If your tax returns are challenged, show this poem
to the judge and ask him how many believers
constitute a Faith. More than a dozen?
That's what Christ started with. The Word of God
has got at least that many blurbs on its jacket.
And more keep coming in!

Then there's this: Believing on Me is a good way
to trump someone else's ace in an argument.
Suppose you come up against a McCain supporter
at a School Board meeting, who wants you to vote for
his guy while at the same time getting the Board
to buy a line of Science textbooks that show
how Darwin was no more than a know-it-all atheist
and no kind of scientist at all. You can insist
the School Board buy My book instead (there will be
a ten per cent rebate for orders of fifty or more).

Or suppose you just want to masturbate
and you're a teenager whose Mormon
(or Catholic or born-again Baptist) parents
absolutely forbid you to spill your seed
after the fashion of Onan. As one of my followers,
you are free to spill any amount of seed
(just do it in your own bedroom, alone;
otherwise somebody could be arrested).

N.B.: adoring me is not a crime,
it's your God-given right! So have yourself
the same kind of fun other believers do
by making a public nuisance of yourself
and pissing off all the officious old farts
you know. Insist that your First Amendment rights
be respected. And save Saturday night for Me!

So Be It!

-- June 24, 2008

Is Mom Dead, too? [by Charles (Bud) Dillon]

In the 1960s, the United States of America was home to a hundred million monarchies, lorded over by moms and dads who wielded absolute power over their children, ruling as if by divine right. Anti-war and anti-draft movements were full of mothers who were willing to do anything to keep their baby boys from being fed into the war machine like so much coal into a locomotive.

Americans concluded the second world war in 1945. We never came home from war, however; without the Euro-phobic FDR in the White House, we failed to return. Without a single vote cast by a single American citizen, the arsenal of democracy was transformed into an imitation empire. We re-modeled ourselves on the regime whose greedy lust for power produced Common Sense, the pamphlet and user's manual the United States of America is rooted in.

We established a democratic republic to take the place of nepotism and inherited power, which are as sensible as tweedledum and tweedledee and all other English nursery rhymes.

It is as if the country that had been called upon to drop what it was doing at home - plenty good, some very bad, so that it could rescue the world from itself, simply claimed ownership of the thing it had rescued. (Red Cross lifeguard training warns that drowning persons try to drown their rescuers)

Midway through America's make-or-break decade, April 1966, Time magazine published an issue with a cover designed to shock: Is God Dead?

As a leading organ of the business roundtable, Time thereby copped out loud to the obvious truth. Back-to-back global holocausts are all the evidence any reasonable person needs to illustrate the bankruptcy of the global god business.

After all, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany (and France), were heavily Roman Catholic. And, of course, so was England, before it quit sharing with Rome and re-branded itself as church and state.

The crowning glory of human evolution is the social construct we know as the family. No truth is more self-evident than this: absolute authority over every baby born vests in the mother and the father, because their love for each other produces the everyday miracle of birth.

As dreamy as that sentence sounds to you, please consider what a fairy tale you will need to dream up to convince yourself that authority over people is vested anywhere else.

The Constitution of the United States guarantees us the right to believe anything we want. People choose to believe that you can take what the pope tells you to the bank, so long he says it on Peter's chair; other people believe that their tribe is the teflon one and all other tribes have bad stuff stuck on them; others pitch the idea that if you die while killing a certain class of strangers, you will have metaphoric copulation over and over and over and over.

The point is that the job of answering the questions that make children afraid of the dark, the job of telling the fairy tales that prepare children for the metaphoric death of sleep, is the parents' job. The state, since it would contain an unlimited number of mutually exclusive propositions and divine edicts, from Zoroastrianism to Q-anon, must have no truck with any of them.

Henry VIII not only got away with wife-killing and murder but he scored good seats in heaven, too, because he was church and state. We, in the new world, have gotten as close to him as we want, and it was right in the damned White House. It was a successor of Henry VIII's who burned it to the ground. There's your original 9/11.

All animals have the same number of senses, except human beings. We were singled out for the gift of common sense, the thing that allows us to create common wealth, which alone enables the peace and security that guarantees a good night's sleep.

Common sense is the original viral pandemic, thank god!

The Respectable Burgher on “The Higher Criticism” [by Thomas Hardy]

The Respectable Burgher on “The Higher Criticism” by Thomas Hardy [pictured above]

Since Reverend Doctors now declare

That clerks and people must prepare

To doubt if Adam ever were;

To hold the flood a local scare;

To argue, though the stolid stare,

That everything had happened ere

The prophets to its happening sware;

That David was no giant-slayer,

Nor one to call a God-obeyer

In certain details we could spare,

But rather was a debonair

Shrewd bandit, skilled as banjo-player:

That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair,

And gave the Church no thought whate’er;

That Esther with her royal wear,

And Mordecai, the son of Jair,

And Joshua’s triumphs, Job’s despair,

And Balaam’s ass’s bitter blare;

Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace-flare,

And Daniel and the den affair,

And other stories rich and rare,

Were writ to make old doctrine wear

Something of a romantic air:

That the Nain widow’s only heir,

And Lazarus with cadaverous glare

(As done in oils by Piombo’s care)

Did not return from Sheol’s lair:

That Jael set a fiendish snare,

That Pontius Pilate acted square,

That never a sword cut Malchus’ ear

And (but for shame I must forbear)

That — — did not reappear! . . .

—Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair,

All churchgoing will I forswear,

And sit on Sundays in my chair,

And read that moderate man Voltaire.

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

"Jew You" in 2002 and today [by David Lehman]

Back in 2002, I wrote "Jew You." It appears in my book When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), and though it is not my favorite of the poems I wrote that spring, it does have one line that I continue to  like:

<<
Dear Jews: We liked you better as victims.
>>

I thought of it today when reading Jason Zinoman's article "Is It Funny for the Jews?" in the New York Times (Feb. 17, 2022), in which, considering such phenomena as the tendency to cast non-Jewish actors to play Jews in TV shows, he raises the possibility that what we are witnessing in the resurgence of anti-Semitism today is a reversion to the mean. And by "resurgence of anti-Semitism," I do not mean casting decisions but the appearance of swastikas on synagogue walls, murderous attacks in Jewish houses of worship, and hostility to Jews on campus, particularly those suspected of siding with Israel. (Click here for the Ha'Aaretz article about the "fuck Jews" graffiti on the outside of Miriam, a resturant on 74th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in NYC.) Here are a couple of thought-provoking paragraphs from Zinoman's piece: 

<<<<
. . .one reason some Jews don’t make a bigger fuss about discrimination, one reason they feel comfortable laughing at it, is that they — we — feel safe. It’s easier to laugh at antisemitism when it happens in an unthreatening place. The feeling is: There are worse problems in the world.

In her acclaimed book “People Love Dead Jews,” Dara Horn takes fierce aim at this blasé attitude, at the downplaying and rationalizations that Jewish Americans make, whether it’s the strained lengths intellectuals go to to argue that Shakespeare transcended bigotry in his portrayal of Shylock or to take comfort in the story of Anne Frank’s faith in the goodness of people (before bad people killed her).

Horn’s bracing argument is that there is a cost to denial, that the rise of antisemitic incidents and hate crimes against Jews — including the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — is directly tied to the fading of the stigma of bigotry against Jews. Hatred of Jews is not unusual, she argues; it’s the years after the Holocaust when that was socially unacceptable that were the anomaly. “Historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal,” writes Horn. Now, she writes, normal is back."

>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/arts/television/comedy-jewish-identity.html

Happy new year, everyone! L'shanah Tovah!

Eileen Myles: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

Eileen Myles, photo by Shae Detar

_______________________________________________________________________

Joan

 

Today, May 30th, Joan

of Arc was burned.

She was 19 and

when she died

a man saw white doves

fy from her mouth.

 

Joan was born in 1412

between Lorraine

and Champagne. Joan

was raised on legends.

Merlin said France would be

lost by a woman and saved

by a virgin. Joan was

not an adventurous girl, not

a tomboy, but very dreamy,

good, stay-at-home,

the baby of the family.

Joan never got her period.

 

She heard these voices

in the bells, she saw angels

in colored glass. She believed

the sun moved around

the earth because that’s

what she saw. She believed

God wanted Charles VII

to be King of France

because that’s what Michael,

Catherine & Margaret told

her when she listened to

the bells. Her father

said he’d drown her

if she didn’t stop this

nonsense.

 

She was 19 years old

when they burned her body in the middle of town

while she was still alive. A white dove

came out of her mouth as she died.

Five hundred and forty-eight years ago today.

A dove leaped right out of her mouth.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. [For more poems and information, see this link and this previous post.] "Joan" is from I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright© 2015 by Eileen Myles. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                  Isidore Patrois: Jeanne d'Arc allant au supplice [Joan of Arc Led to the Stake], 1867, oil on canvas. Musée des beaux-arts, Rouen.

Shema [poem by Primo Levi]

Shema

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

--- from If This Is a Man (tr. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swan)

Today is Holocaust remembrance day. Primo Levi was an Italian-Jewish chemist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. The poem "Shema" is named after the first Hebrew word of the prayer, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”

-- sdl

Tom Disch: "God's Big Giveaway!"

 On July 1, 2008, at 8:27 in the morning, Tom Disch posted this entry under the heading "God's Big Giveaway!" on his "live journal" blog. Under-appreciated to this day, this outstanding poet and writer -- brilliant, inventive, versatile (sci-fi author, book reviewer, theater critic) -- died by his own hand (gunshot) on July 4th, 2008.

<<<
And what's the best gift you could get from One Who is Himself a Big Idea? What else but a Big Idea of your own? So here are two of them to take up and run with--as I did with one of them once.

To wit: an Anthology of Nobel Prize Acceptance Speeches. By great writers who knew better than to ever expect such an Honor to fall on them and crush them to happy bits. Yet hasn't it been, for all the times its been misdirected to some Slobovian nobody, the Supreme Reward for any writer? Don't even the greatest seem to curdle with envy when it goes to someone else? What avails the acclaim of all one's Slobovian peers and competitors if that final feather is missing from one's cap? Finally, isn't a Nobel Acceptance Speech the one genre of writing that everyone would like a go at? Well, this anthology would be an opportunity for all the also-rans to have their day in court.

I broached the idea to some poets and novelists of my acquaintance, many of whom thought it was in the worst possible taste (and might queer their chances at the real thing?); others agreed it was a great idea, and when I got a contract. . . But the most interesting and over-the-top response was from the poet James Schuyler, since deceased.

I didn't know know he was a Mad Poet, for he kept that part of his oeuvre tucked away, out of sight. Sometimes, it seems, Schuyler was Christ, and he certainly thought a Nobel his due and an honor bound his way. My invitation, therefore, was like tacking up "King of the Jews" on the cross to which he would soon be nailed. He went bananas, and my poor anth went nowhere.

But it's still a good idea, and most writers with a sense of humor might agree. It would give them a chance to graciously acknowledge the public's applause for still unwritten masterpieces and to explain, with whatever degree of irony or sincere self-regard, what they were trying to say in all those honored tomes. Not just everyone can apply. There should be some faint likelihood of its not being entirely a pipe dream--or where is the fun or the edification? And a good advance is probably essential or the better sort of mendicant will simply reply with polite sneer. But in its ideal form wouldn't you want to read such a book enough to actually buy it?

I would like a mention on the Acknowledgments page if you do wrangle it into print.

As to Big Idea # 2, I'll get to that later.
>>>

from the archive: first posted November 1, 2008

In Memory of Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin, 1953-2015

On this day in 2015, Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin passed away. He was a greatly beloved Rev, acclaimed for his devotion to the cause of education and to the governing principles of Lubavitch-Chabad. Born and raised in Montreal, he was hand-picked by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson of righteous memory to serve as an "emissary" to Israel, in which role he distinguished himself, founding a network of Chabad kindergartens serving 1,500 children. He was an inspiring speaker.

 After undergoing radical surgery following chemotherapy, I spent a week in the same hospital ward as Rabbi Ceitlin, who was enduring the same treatment. When Stacey saw a group of Chassidim and heard the unmistakable sounds of davening from a hospital room around the corner from mine, she encouraged me to take a look. We were invited into a room crowded with Rabbis who had flown to New York from all parts of the United States to pay their respects and lend support. Rabbi Ceitlin let me put on his t'fillin, and we davened together on that day and again on the next. He gave a sermon and told a joke that only he and I found funny, so much so that I laughed out loud, prompting him to point to me and say "he got it!" I write about the encounter, which continues to inspire me, in my book,One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir.

This is from Menachem Posner's obituary in the Chabad.org newsletter of October 15, 2015.

<<<  A large man with a flowing beard and a booming voice, [Rabbi Ceitlin] was equally at home in Yiddish, English and Hebrew, and would speak passionately about Torah and Judaism to audiences across the globe.

Aharon Leizer, as he was known, was born in Montreal two days before Yom Kippur in the fall of 1953 (8 Tishrei 5714), to Rabbi Heshel and Rivkah Ceitlin, who had escaped the oppressive Soviet Union and found refuge in Canada. He was named after his paternal grandfather, Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin, who perished in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor as punishment for his efforts to keep Judaism alive in the face of Communist oppression. >>>

<<<  A passionate and inspired personality, [Rabbii Ceitlin] he was often invited to address Chassidic gatherings around the world. He would often weave together anecdotes from the Russian yesteryear with fresh experiences and teachings of the Rebbe [Schneerson], helping spellbound listeners appreciate the seamless bond of service and self-sacrifice that he personified.

Dedicated to the Rebbe’s work, he was among a group of young Chassidim who carried out the Rebbe’s instructions to print the Tanya—the seminal work of Chabad philosophy—in a number of locations in Lebanon during the 1982 Lebanon War. Despite the danger involved, he and his companions went directly to the front lines in order to print the sacred book, specifically in Beirut.  >>>

For more click here. 
https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/3098133/jewish/Rabbi-Aharon-Eliezer-Ceitlin-of-Israel-62-Passes-Away-in-New-York.htm

"G-D in a Cup" [by Loren Goodman]

The “o” in G-d
In “G-d in a Cup”
Is like the mouth
Of the universe
Into which G-d
Has from this world
Disappeared. This
Absence of the “o”
Is also like the coffee
That has been from
The cup faithfully sipped
The “u” in “cup” is like
The cup that holds the
Coffee while the “c”
Before the “u” is like
The handle you hold
Me with. The “p” at
The end is like the
Cup tipped to pour
Into you me. I went
Inside G-d in a Cup
Only once. It was
Empty and dark; the
Owner was as
Quiet and mysterious
As G-d and like the
Son of G-d, had long
Hair. Like G-d these
Days, he also looked
Sad. I didn’t go there
To drink coffee—
Just to cheer him up

from The Common (July 2020). Three other poems by Loren appear in this issue of The Common: "Dear Jeremy," "Due to the Light," "Dolphin Facts"

Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A professor of creative writing and English literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he chairs the department of comparative literature and culture and is creative writing director.

Wonders never cease: François de Brauer’s “La Loi des prodiges”, a performed graphic novel [by Tracy Danison]

François de Brauer, La Loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) © Victor Tonelli 

I heard on the radio that a bartender in New York has proposed clarity & truth as 2020’s watchword. Sounds good to me. You first. Ready. Set. Go!

I am one of those people who smile all the time, even sleeping, even toting a machine gun. In spite of everything; the smile reflects my true feeling; I’m with Isadora Duncan, feeling is all that really counts.

But neither smile nor feeling reflects what I actually think about things in the round.

Once, when I cautiously let her in on one of my thinkings, my late Mother burst into tears, sobbing out, What cynicism! I was 18 then, bless me, already a soldier. My Mother was among the most fully-integrated hypocrites who ever walked Yahweh’s Stony yet Righteous path. Rightly, I believe, I took her outburst for sign and portent; a thinking is mostly better left unspoken.

Lately, my thinking has been affecting my feeling.

I’ve been darkly thinking, for instance, that life might very well be a play – a story, fairy tale, novel, opéra, musical comedy – in which I’ve failed to play my assigned role.

Don’t get me wrong. I love narrative. But narrative is just a tool of art, an interesting wart on the clitoris that is Life. Narrative just ends up; Life becomes.

That’s why the non-narrativeness of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard), an absorbing two-hour one-man show that I saw not long since at La Scala Paris has very nearly brought me around to renewed smilingkeit. La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard, a veritable feat of thespian endurance and mastery, is scenarized and performed by François de Brauer, rather new to the dramatic scene but certainly upcoming.

I am not sure how to translate La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard). I can’t decide whether the prodiges are natural wonders or human prodigies. In France, a certain fetishistic pedantism means that laws get reformed rather than changed or replaced, or even dreamt up or projected. A réforme commonly carries the name of an individual guilty of proposing it, presumably so that he or she may be punished for sticking his or her neck out later, when nobody’s looking.

So, the title’s all very dense, as they say, and so is the piece itself. But good dense: “with depth that entertains”. La Scala has the knack of good dense. As I write, I’m thinking of, last year, among others, Machine de cirque’s breathtaking acrobacy within an entirely different framework of dramatic success or Anne de Mey’s wonderful Cold Blood multimedia piece, also an absorbing meditation on theatrical technology and technique.

François de Brauer’s La loi des prodiges strikes me as a performed graphic novel. Taking on about 20 rôles – amazingly, one never once loses sight of who is who and who’s doing what – de Brauer creates complex situations such as protagonist Rémi Goutard’s birth, his Dad’s myth-scale rassle with the evil psychic twin who prevents his (Dad’s) suicide or young Rémi’s encounter with Duflou, a self-sealing blowhard and contemporary artist as well as an ambiguous friend of or to Dad.

The situations of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) swirl around a welter of life emotions. Both situations and emotions belong, and/or not, to the said Rémi Goutard, who, as it turns out, is a future former député whose réforme seeks to stamp out artistic creativity as well as artistic endeavor. All through and into the end, La loi des prodiges makes perfect sense. However, anything you might say about it is your own story.

The sense of having seen it through – rather than, say, having seen through it to some sort of (fundamentally moral) narrative structure – is why I scribbled “performed graphic novel” on my hand as I was leaving.

As in my experience of graphic novels, in La loi des prodiges de Brauer’s word is subject to his image. The image in turn has its finger on the emotion rather than the idea. And that’s how it should be, sometimes.

Wonders never cease – François de Brauer is somebody to watch for.

La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) – Performance • 2019 • François de Brauer • 110 minutes • La Scala Paris • Ω Conception & performance: François de Brauer / Artistic collaboration: Louis Arene, Joséphine Serre / Costuming: Christelle André / Lighting: François Menou / Production: Les Petites Heures – La Scala Paris

There is No Final Word [by Vincent Katz]

For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.

First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:

In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.

Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.

She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:

Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.

Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”

The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.

Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:

yes! radiant lyre speak to me

become a voice

Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.

Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:

To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…

Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:

Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.

In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.

We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:

When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…

Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:

It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.

Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!

Poetry You Can Dance To [by Vincent Katz]

I’ve been thinking, looking out at the bright snow that fell all day yesterday, knowing that the temperatures will be in the teens for the next three days, how music is always such an integral part of poetry. After dinner last night, someone mentioned having heard a performance of Ancient Greek music. Only a couple of scraps of notation survive, and it is not at all clear how to interpret those. Greek and Roman music is essentially lost to us as to how it was composed. On the other hand, from visual depictions and accounts by ancient authors, we know quite a bit about the kinds of instruments they had and the uses to which music was put in society.

Music accompanied just about every social activity in ancient Greece, from religious ceremonies to athletic spectacles, to private dinner parties, known as symposia, because everyone drank together, to funerals. And it is safe to say that music probably accompanied most, if not all, presentations of poetry. Epic poetry was recited by professional rhapsodes, who travelled from place to place, giving performances of selected episodes from the epics. Those performers were also known as aoidoi, or singers. Lyric poetry gets its name from the tortoise-shell lyre that was played to accompany it. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, grew out of the choral dithyrambs, which were dedicated to Dionysos. Music and dance formed essential elements of Greek tragedy and comedy.

So it’s only natural that we should continue to associate poetry and music. For myself personally, I’ve always thought that popular song of any genre is a form of poetry. Everybody needs poetry, and everybody gets it. Most people get it from songs. Which leaves me thinking about poetry per se. Why did it separate from music, and where does that leave it? Poetry seems stranded in some sparsely populated zone, where some people light up at the sound of it or read it peacefully by a window, but where often it is met with complete incomprehension, even by those interested in the other arts.

What should poets do about this state of affairs, if anything? Should they simply listen to their own playlists, as everyone does, go to their own concerts? Should they try to dosomething with poetry, to bring it back into contact with music and movement and the stage? I believe that they can and should. Collaboration, as a process, is always fruitful, and the results of such experimentation can be spellbinding.

To a certain extent, though, these questions are rhetorical. Poetry is what it is, and those who need it will find it somewhere. Gregory Corso spoke of being a poet as a higher calling, or at least a level of verbal composition not achievable elsewhere. He made a point of denying that Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison were poets. I think he is right to make a distinction between what we call poetry and what we call song lyrics, and I applaud his pride in being a poet, which I also share, but I would argue that musicians who use lyrics intelligently use them in a way that makes them a form of poetry.

It doesn’t change the fact that poetry is out in the woods somewhere. People don’t line up around the block for it — most of the time. There are certain poets who have that star attraction, and they do pull in crowds. Partially, that is because they have branched out into other areas. Often fiction, or some other form of writing, will reach a larger audience, which can then be drawn in to the poetry. But really, it’s a quality in the poet herself (the poets I am thinking of with this star quality are all women). It’s about hitting the times with something they needed without necessarily knowing it. And then poetry makes it to the pedestal reserved for more popular forms. It’s exciting to see, and a reminder of what poetry can achieve.

But still I am fascinated by the relationship of poetry to music. Somewhere in it, music must live. It’s there for us, as poets and readers, to find. And then, maybe, we can dance.

[Image: Wall fresco of a seated woman with a kithara, 40-30 BC, from the Villa Boscoreale of P. Fannius Synistor; late Roman Republic.]

What's So Interesting About Works and Days? [by Vincent Katz]

I am on a train on my way up to Yaddo, where I'll be for the next three weeks. Last time I was up there, it was also February. I like it in winter, when the isolation is increased. A certain kind of person is attracted to that extreme. That other time, I wrote a poem for the people I met there, who impressed me with their dedication to their art. It’s called “The February People.” I’m curious who will be there this time.

While I look at the snow on the tracks and the ice in the river, I am listening to The Beatles’ Anthology 1collection. I’ve also been reading about why Pete Best was fired. Apparently, it was a combination of his playing ability, his lack of a sense of humor, and his refusal to comb his hair forward. It is interesting to think about the Beatles' Hamburg period. They did three stints there over a two-year period, and it was there, over many hours of club playing, that they honed their arrangements and their commitment to the lifestyle.

There has always been a connection between poetry and music. To paraphrase Mr. Pound, if you can’t dance to it, it can’t be very good.

I’ll be working on a few things up at Yaddo. One is a translation of Hesiod’s poem Works and Days. I’ve now finished his Theogonyand hope to get close to finishing Works and Days during these weeks away. Works and Days is 828 lines long. I’ve got about 600 to go.

When I finished my translations of Sextus Propertius, I decided I wanted to go back to Greek poetry, as it forms such an undeniable basis for the Roman poets. Almost all they wrote — in terms of the genres, the ideas, the mythology — comes from Greek poetry. Of course, the great Roman poets altered and innovated, and in at least one case — satire — they invented. But to understand Roman poetry, you have to know Greek poetry, and poetry only truly lives in its original language. The translation of a poem into poetry in another language is the creation of a new poem based on the original.

So, I pondered for a long time. Archilochos, Kallimachos, Sappho, Alkaios — they all hold enticements — but I finally decided on Hesiod. I was most fascinated by the Theogony, as I wanted to delve more deeply into Greek mythology. I’ve always had a hard time keeping it straight — who has had sex with whom, which gods or demigods are the offspring of which parents, and in which versions, as Greek and Roman writers famously invented or sought out variants to suit their purposes.

There was another reason for choosing Hesiod. He is so highly regarded among ancient poets, and yet the existing translations into English make him sound terribly dull. I was certain Propertius, among many others, wouldn’t have had time for a dull poet, not matter how edifying. I had a hunch there was more to Hesiod than met the eye. Certainly, it wasn’t only for genealogies and information on early Greek agricultural practices that he was praised so highly.

And so it proved to be. I found, translating the Theogony, a spicy wit and a collage-like element. The latter may be partially because Hesiod is so early (he is considered a contemporary of Homer’s by contemporary scholars), and there may have been interpolations by early readers and editors. But I think some of the shifts of subject and narrative are native to the poet. His poems are in the epic form; they are in dactylic hexameter and rely on the Ionic dialect associated with epic. But they can be considered non-heroic in aspect. Hesiod is the first Western poet to mention himself by name and to discuss his family background and current situation, giving him a good claim to being the first personal poet.

On coming to the end of my translation of the Theogony, I decided to take the plunge and translate the same poet’s Works and Days, as I would thereby have in my hand a translation of Hesiod’s entire extant work. I embarked with less enthusiasm than I had on the previous poem, but something strange happened. My hunch came into play again. I am finding this poem thoroughly enjoyable as a work of writing.

The poet’s attitude towards women is of course a problem, but we shouldn’t fail to investigate an artist because of their personal failings, no matter how egregious or disturbing. Within his own limitations, as well as those of his time and place, he is a remarkable artist, and I am grateful for this opportunity to examine his poetics in detail — his word choices, his use of adverbial phrases, his development of the longer poem. It is inspiring me to write something longer, and that is that best thing that can result from translating, or from reading — the desire to go to the keyboard or notebook and embark on a new attempt at writing poetry.

Poet Spotlight: Virginia Konchan [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Virginia Konchan.  The author of a poetry collection, The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, including That Tree is Mine (dancing girl press, 2018), Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, and elsewhere.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A Folio of Poems by Virginia Konchan

 

Spring

Out of view, more galaxies.
Out of time, more light. A naturalist
or archeologist can decipher symptoms,
messages engraved in the flesh
of ordinary things. When the engine begins
to purr again, the crowd applauds.
Lord of tissue, lord of hieroglyphs
and a puzzle full of theological quibbles,
it’s prettiness that counts in china dolls. 
Lord of allegory, of hidden meanings,
of radical fissures in the heart of rain,
I have a skeleton underneath my skin, 
I am serious. I careen through the house
like a killer. Lord knows I tried, like a dove,
to mate for life. I failed. It was the trash,
the detritus, I adored. No images but in things.
No things but in images. There could have been
so many versions of us, why this one?
Love will creep where it cannot go,
through the eyes of the dead horse
that burns slower than my hair.
It’s spring—meta chirp, meta chirp,
goes the bird, philosopher’s stone.
It is a conduit between what was,
will be. It is, like everyone, alone.

 

_________

 

Guiding Light

I wasted my life on language
and other soft constructions,
held the clammy hand of death
as if death was the snot-nosed kid
last to be picked for any team
where skill actually matters.
I could be a bride, and was,
was bridled, harnessed, and
groomed. Now I live in, and by,
a burning timetable, abetting
the landfill crisis by buying
ream after ream of paper.
The bright white paper.
The laser paper.
The paper whose opacity
rivals that of God.
I indicate I would like
the dessert menu by pointing to it
with my bony finger.
When it comes, I order a financier.
As The World Turns, I remain still,
Mona Lisa’s resting bitch face
blunted only by my silky curtain of hair.
Throw it all in the cauldron, I don’t care.
People keep mistaking me for a doll
when in fact I am a cyborg,
surrounded by The Young & Restless
snorting coke and drinking corpse revivers
in the General Hospital—downward,
I mean backward, glance of Orpheus
softening my every blow.
My fantasy for this script is simple:
I just want to edit out the boring parts,
the parts where I forgot to scream.
Guiding Light is my real life:
the world around me is the dream.

 

______________________

 

Meridian

I’ve been in this body so long.
My ace in the hole body, my one
bird in two hands body, my rut.
What does it mean to understand?
I count the syllables on my hand. I don
my leisure suit and stroll the boardwalk.
O bituminous coal. O indiscriminate
hulk. My Ikea bookshelf body
is bookended by equine statuettes.
The world is full of tall strangers
and I haven’t seen a face
that loves me for days.
O moon, you are a hangnail.
O moon, your hair’s a fright.
Note bene, this product has been
enlarged to show texture.
The cure’s a subtle realignment
between one’s inner monster
and the line of longitude that scores
the earth. I thought beauty would
save me. No, I really thought
beauty would save me.
I’ve been in this body so long;
I’ve forgotten how to flee.
Objects in the mirror may
be closer than they appear:
they too ache with unknown
want, dumb weight of destiny.

 

_______________

 

Epistemology

The bleeding title has bled like the idea of triumph,
white flag manifesting on the top of a summit or heap,
and the church bells sounding from the home’s interior
are in fact part of a discontinued sitcom, blaring from the TV.
Doubt takes over. What if there is no outside, no other side?
Dread takes over. How can the subject cross the divide?
Descartes curls up into the safety of his stove, while you
tightrope walk the abyss, or go through contortions
to deny it is there. Any way you twist it, the moon is a cop
and you can’t afford a vowel so as to spell it out, carefully:
with all certainty, nothing. Any purported solution
is smoke and mirrors. I am the planet Pluto in a play.
I mime the grief economy. The death economy.
The libidinal economy. There are so many kinds
of poverty, and the body is a kind of forgetting.
There is no magical leap across the chasm.
There is no way to make it disappear, either,
with a flourish of the metaphysical wand.
The sun, in this equation, is a ticking bomb,
and the lawn is a field where a field once was.
My desire is to be your shape, your data, your
blind spot, your moan. Ashes to ashes, art to art,
object to object. Now let us pray. Now let us
differentiate between the knower and the known.

"Zeno’s Paradox as Paraphrased by Sholom Aleichem" [by David Lehman with thanks to Maurice Samuel]

          In my senior year of college I was nervous about getting drafted and having to go to Vietnam. Morris Simon, father of Rochelle, the curly-haired brunette on whom I had a crush, was considered the wise man of the synagogue, and it was to him that my father suggested I go to for advice. Mr. Simon was the head of the temple’s Chevra Kadisha, which undertook the community’s funeral arrangements and cemetery maintenance. After I had my say, he made this cheerful little speech.

          “There’s really nothing to worry about,” he said. “You have to go to the army. Well, one of two things will happen. Either you’ll be sent to Vietnam or you won’t. If you’re not, what’s there to worry about?  But let’s say they send you to Vietnam. One of two things will happen. You’ll get a cushy desk job in Saigon or you’ll go to the front. If you get the desk job, there’s nothing to worry about. But even suppose they volunteer you into the 173rd Airborne Brigade and God forbid they send you to the Mekong Delta as part of Operation Marauder and there are two short artillery rounds, one of two things will happen. Either you’ll get wounded in the blast, or you won’t. If you won’t, what’s there to worry about? But even suppose you do get wounded, chas vishalom, one of two things will happen. Either you’ll recover or you won’t. If you recover, what’s there to worry about? But even suppose you don’t recover, one of two things will happen. You’ll be buried in hallowed ground like a good Jewish boy or you won’t. If you’re buried in hallowed ground, what’s there to worry about? But suppose you’re not buried in hallowed ground. Well,” Mr. Simon paused, “well, then, my dear David, you’re in one hell of a fix.”

-- David Lehman, with thanks to Maurice Samuel  (3 / 22 / 18). Pictured above: Sholom Aleichem.

What exactly does the Word create? (by Jenny Factor)

 

In my John Milton class at Brandeis University (I am there attending school), time spent occasionally talking about God is evidently time spent talking about the relation between literary texts and religious ones.

In both the KJV and NIV (versions) of the Bible, the Book of John recounts the creation of the world via words thus:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What I find lovely about this construction, literarily, is how one can use it to measure the space between saying and being, or one could say “word”-ing and “create”-ing. The repetitions and graduated iterations of the phrases describe potential geometries of the relationship between words and power: simultaneous or adjacent, identical or neighborly.

How much power do our words have to manifest what isn’t there? To portray what is?

Looking for more insight into this origin myth for language-qua-creation, I find myself grabbing for the Hebrew version of Bereishit (Old Testament) that describes the creational magnificence of words this way:

Yehi or va yehi or.

We translate that as “God said, ‘Let there be light and there was light.’” But look more closely. The actual words are not a graduated transition as the English implies. They are a sequence of identical twin-like repetitions—dual humps connected by a “v” (and). The uttered phrase (yehay ohr) is rendered identical to the performed one (yehay ohr). Only the single letter “v” (and) connects the languaging with the manifesting.

As poets and readers, we may find ourselves at times aware that words are incredible, and creative, and yet….there are often things in the manifest world that our human language can neither mimic nor summon up. Between words and being there is distance. And into that chasm falls...well, so much! childhood impotence, hocus-pocus, Lacanian lack, modes of consciousness, alternate realities, power and desire. 

What exactly do words create? What do the non-word elements of the poem bring into being? In a series of blog posts, I’ll talk a bit about words—and wordsmiths—as creational, depictional, powerful and powerless.

Next Up: Plato and the Dangers of Poetry. Or Percy Bysshe Shelley and Strategies of Unsaying.