The Best American Poetry

This Week's Critic's Pick

Gusto aperitivo.  Check it out if you're in NYC.

-- sdh

Hello Johnny! from Don Juan Canto I, CXXIII [by Lord Byron]

'Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog's honest bark
     Bay deep-mouth'd welcome as we draw near home;
'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark
     Our coming, and look brighter when we come;

                    -- from Don Juan Canto I, CXIII by Lord Byron

(Ed note: Every reading of Don Juan yields a new pleasurable discovery. Johnny wasn't in our lives when I first read Byron's poem so this passage did not leave a lasting impression. -- sdh)

Love / Hate [by Terence Winch]

Ed. note: I had just about exhausted every crime series available on Netflix when Terence Winch [pictured here with a friend at La Maison blanche] wrote to suggest that I check out Love/Hate, an Irish crime drama series broadcast on RTÉ Television. The show is irresistible, and I was especially drawn to Darren, a central character played by the compelling young actor Robert Sheehan. Just the other day, this poem appeared in my in-box. I love it! Thank you T.P. Winch for letting me share it here. He is pictured on the left talking to a friend at the Maison Blanche. -- sdh

Love/Hate

                        for stacey harwood

I will be upstairs in just a minute,

I promise you. But first I must

compose a long, complex symphony

dedicated to Duke Ellington, which

I have pieced together from riffs

and bits off old tinny 78s, scratched

with skips but full of musical

notes, like A, G, and E.

If I could get out of this chair,

I would. And I would ascend

then to the Throne of the

Angelic Mobsters of RTE

who are right this very moment

murdering each other on those

dark Dublin streets. It would be

a laugh and a half times two.

But I can’t get up. I am not

able to keep my promises.

The serenity prayer is a cruel

joke. Baudelaire was an alcoholic

and so’s your mother, and

that's a fact, revealed in the third

act, which I can’t stay around for.

Sorry, sorry. My bad. I’m sorry.

from the archive; first posted January 13, 2014

On Seeing the Nutcracker Suite as an Adult [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Several years ago, a colleague who was leaving NYC for L.A., asked me what should be on her “bucket list” of things to do before heading west. “See a performance of the New York City Ballet’s “Nutcracker Suite,” I said, without hesitation. That was my answer then, and it would be my answer today, even more emphatically so, having taken in a performance last Wednesday afternoon.

I can’t recall the first time I saw George Balanchine’s "Nutcracker" but I’m certain I was a child. Over the years I've had my doubts about how an adult could enjoy a ballet so geared to a child’s sensibility. Those doubts are put to rest. The show is magical, for any audience, at any age. The music, the costumes, the sets, the dancing! 

My sister Amy and I got our seats late in the game, and I was surprised to discover that the theater was mostly sold out by the time I logged on to get our tickets. The best available that we could afford were in the back row of the second ring—still excellent and far better than the fifth ring $1.00 seats that my parents subscribed to way back when.

One of the great pleasures this time around was in observing the audience. So many children! Little girls in their fanciest dresses, all lace and ribbons and embroidery; little boys in velvet suits and bow ties,  clutching the hands of a parent, also dressed to the nines, as if they could leap on stage and join the show.

Under most circumstances any noise from the audience during a performance—talking, unwrapping candy--would be an annoying distraction, but the sounds of awestruck children throughout the house marveling when the Christmas tree soars from 12 to 41 feet, or gasping when giant mice overrun the stage, or shrieking with delight when Harlequin and Columbine emerge life-sized from their gift-wrapped boxes, and laughing when they fold in on themselves to be put away, filled me with pleasure. “Where did they go?” whispers a curious boy. Even the occasional crying toddler was a joyful sound. Kudos to those parents who decided the time was right to bring their children to this annual spectacle.

It might be too late to find tickets for this year's run (maybe not?) but it's not too soon to plan for next.

-- sdl

Remembering My Dad on Veterans Day [by Stacey Lehman]

My dad landed on Utah beach, not as part of the first wave, thank god, or I probably wouldn't be here, but later, to clean up. He was a soldier in the 94th Infantry Division that fought in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated a concentration camp. It was in Nennig, Germany, that the Germans gave his division its nickname "Roosevelt's Butchers" for stacking the dead in houses and along roads and refusing prisoners, lacking the means to guard and transport them. Like so many others, he enlisted, a tough street kid from the Bronx, the child of immigrants from Poland and Ukraine.  During boot camp, he was court-martialed for striking an officer who called him a dirty kike. Though he was acquitted, he got shipped out soon after without having completed his training.
    I don't know much about his service, not because he was particularly reticent but because he died suddenly at 50, before I was mature enough to imagine my parents had lives worth learning about. How I regret that I never asked him about those years. Anyone who has tried to get WWII military records knows that a fire destroyed many of them. Thus, all I have are the things he carried: his dog-tags, a French-English dictionary, a guide to Europe, and, oddly, a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish.  Several years ago, I gathered these mementos together and along with a few photographs asked Star Black, the brilliant poet, photographer, and collage artist to make something of them.  A few weeks later she presented me with three collages, one of which is shown here. That's my dad in the middle, looking handsome, and so young! In the upper left is a page from his guidebook in which he wrote a list of the places he fought his way through, ending with "and a funeral in some god-forsaken place."

One of the more moving accounts of life as an infantryman during WWII can be found in Roll Me Over, by Raymond Gantter.  Ganttner was a teacher who decided to turn down his third deferment.  He was unfit for officer status so he joined the infantry as a private.  His service was almost identical to that of my father's.  Here's a passage: 

It is the slow piling up of fear that is so intolerable. Fear moves swiftly in battle, strikes hard with each shell, each new danger, and as long as there's action, you don't have time to be frightened.  But this is a slow fear, heavy and stomach filling.  Slow, slow . . all your movements are careful and slow, and pain is slow and fear is slow and the beat of your heart is the only rapid rhythm of the night . . . a muttering drum easily punctured and stilled.

    Upon completion of his service and return to the US, my dad had difficulty finding work. I recently discovered among my mother's things, a cache of the letters he wrote to potential employers along with a pile of rejections. Over time, my dad's letters became increasingly imaginative (some might say desperate). At around the same time, he and his brothers agreed to change their names from Horowitz to Harwood, the surname of a minor British royal. It was the name I grew up with and that made it possible for me to witness anti-Semitism by those who had no idea that I'm Jewish. I thought of myself as an undercover Jew.

-- sdl

Arthur Mitchell [by Marianne Moore]

Arthur Mitchell, right, with George Balanchine

Arthur Mitchell

Slim dragon-fly
        too rapid for the eye
               to cage,

contagious gem of virtuosity
make visible, mentality.
Your jewels of mobility

reveal
      and veil
             a peacock-tail.

                              -- by Marianne Moore

-- sdh 

What Would Kafka Do? [by Stacey Harwood]

On October 21, 1985, The New Yorker published this poem by Raymond Carver:
 
Kafka’s Watch

I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns, and
an infinite eight to nine hours of work.
I devour the time outside of the office like a wild beast.
Someday I hope to sit in a chair in another
country, looking out the window at fields of sugarcane
or Mohammedan cemeteries.
I don’t complain about the work so much as about
the sluggishness of swampy time.  The office hours
cannot be divided up!  I feel the pressure
of the full eight or nine hours even in the last
half hour of the day.  It’s like a train ride
lasting night and day.  In the end you’re totally
crushed.  You no longer think about the straining
of the engine, or about the hills or
flat country, but ascribe all that’s happening
to your watch alone.  The watch which you continually hold
in the palm of your hand.  Then shake.  And bring slowly
to your ear in disbelief. 

            To a devoted Carver fan, the poem seemed uncharacteristic: more lush than the spare style that tagged Carver as “minimalist.”  I loved the poem, clipped it, and committed it to memory.

            Ten years later while reading Kafka’s letters, I came across this passage, written in October 1907, when Kafka was 24 and had begun work for the Italian insurance company Assicuraziono Generali:           

My life is completely chaotic now.  At any rate, I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns and an immense eight to nine hours of work; but I devour the hours outside the office like a wild beast.  Since I was not previously accustomed to limiting my private life to six hours, and since I am also studying Italian and want to spend the evenings of these lovely days out of doors, I emerge from the crowdedness of my leisure hours scarcely rested . . .

            I am in the Assicurazioni Generali and have some hopes of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries; and the whole world of insurance itself interests me greatly, but my present work is dreary.

            I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time.The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first.Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm . . .

My immediate reaction was dismay. Although I know all about collage and "sampling," I wondered about the propriety of what RC had done. Did he take too many liberties? Does the title indicate that this is a “found” poem? When Carver later published Kafka’s Watch in a collection, he added the epigraph “from a letter.” Does that addition make it right? Or is it plagiarism pure and simple?

Would Kafka approve?  Do you? -- sdh

from the archive; first posted November 29, 2014

"The Kiss" [by Italo Svevo]

The first kiss, I gave you as coldly as I would have put my name to a contract; the second, I gave with enormous curiosity to analyze you and myself, but in fact, I didn't analyze anything and understood nothing, as I was still feeling a kind of timidity that froze me; at the third kiss, and those which came after it, I could feel in my arms the sweet girl I had been searching for, and all that was left of my youth.  Now, I understand the whole business less and less; what's certain is that my powers as analyst are not what I thought they were.  I don't know the color of your eyes, your hair often surprises me, and I still don't really know your kisses.  Mine too have a strange quality; not passionate warmth, to be sure, because I'm careful, very careful, that they shall not be more than you allow them to be.  I don't want to be violent, I want to be gentle and kind.  My greatest pleasure lies in feeling that I've changed -- I don't care to say grown young again. 

-- letter from Italo Svevo to Livia Veneziani (from Memoir of Italo Svevo, Marlboro Press, 1991). 

-- sdh

Lina Wertmüller, August 14, 1928 – December 9, 2021

Tracy Danison, who writes for us from Paris, e-mailed me last week with the news that Lina Wertmüller, the award winning director, had died in Rome, at 93. Together we had seen a series of Wertmüller's films (including Seven Beauties and Swept Away), at an old movie house in Schenectady, NY.  You can find the New York Times obituary here. 

Her films are streaming now on the Criterion Channel and I look forward to watching them. Do they hold up? 

Meanwhile, here's the opening montage from "Seven Beauties."

 Have you seen it, or other Wertmüller films? What do you think of Swept Away? -- sdl

How to Write: First you've got to think of something . . . [Agatha Christie's secret, by Stacey Lehman]

 

        Agatha Christie

  “It’s splendid that you’ve rung me up,” she said.  “I was just going out to give a Talk on How I Write My Books. Now I can get my secretary to ring up and say I am unavoidably detained.”

            “But, Madame, you must not let me prevent—“

            “It’s not a case of preventing.” said Mrs. Oliver joyfully. “I’d have made the most awful fool of myself.  I mean, what can you say about how you write books?  What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it.  That’s all.  It would have taken me just three minutes to explain that, and then the Talk would have been ended and everyone would have been very fed up.  I can’t imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk ab out writing.  I should have though it was an author’s business to write, not talk.”

            “And yet it is about how you write that I want to ask you.”

            “You can ask,” said Mrs. Oliver, “but I probably shan’t know the answer.  I mean one just sits down and writes. . .”

-- from Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie

-- sdh

        Agatha Christie

  “It’s splendid that you’ve rung me up,” she said.  “I was just going out to give a Talk on How I Write My Books. Now I can get my secretary to ring up and say I am unavoidably detained.”

            “But, Madame, you must not let me prevent—“

            “It’s not a case of preventing.” said Mrs. Oliver joyfully. “I’d have made the most awful fool of myself.  I mean, what can you say about how you write books?  What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it.  That’s all.  It would have taken me just three minutes to explain that, and then the Talk would have been ended and everyone would have been very fed up.  I can’t imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk ab out writing.  I should have though it was an author’s business to write, not talk.”

            “And yet it is about how you write that I want to ask you.”

            “You can ask,” said Mrs. Oliver, “but I probably shan’t know the answer.  I mean one just sits down and writes. . .”

-- from Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie

-- sdh

Fall Haiku [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

 

Saturday market
In Union Square: Cantaloupes
Alongside apples.

Confused by weather
The woman on the subway
Wears socks and sandals.

Turning a corner,
Into Sixth Avenue wind,
The man holds his hat.

At Gonzo cafe
On Thirteenth, outdoor tables
Are empty by eight.

Looking up, nothing.
On the horizon, two lights
Grow brighter, then dim.

Stacey Harwood (NYT, October 4, 2004)

What is "The Longest Pleasure"? Lord Byron Knows

And is there not religion, and reform,

            Peace, war, the taxes, and what's call'd the "Nation"?

The struggle to be pilots in a storm?

            The landed and the monied speculation?

The joys of mutual hate to keep them warm,

            Instead of love, that mere hallucination?

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;

Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

      
                                                by Lord Byron from Don Juan, Canto the Thirteenth

--sdh

Stravinsky: "I surround myself with obstacles. ."

Albert Gleizes, Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1914, Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 114.3 cm. Muséum of Modern Art Collection

"My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit." -- Igor Stravinsky

—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

from the archive; first posted May 15, 2016 by sdh

Grief Canning [by Barbara Hamby]

(Ed note: This post first appeared on this date in 2016 and it became the most popular post of the year, read and shared widely. It seems fitting to bring it back this year, when many might be adding canning to their summer of Covid activities. sdl)

Tomatoes, before and after (photos (c) Barbara Hamby)

Four months before my mother died, I was visiting her in Honolulu. She had quit cooking, and I worried about her getting enough vegetables in her diet. I usually spent the first few days of a visit making vats of soup and pouring the soups in individual containers for the deep freezer she had in her condo. I have a wonderful vegetarian minestrone recipe I'd started making as an undergraduate and developed over the years. I had also started making my own tomato sauce every August, and I'd brought jars to add to my mother's soup. She picked up a jar and asked what I was doing. I explained that I had made the sauce myself over two days the previous August. I ordered a box of forty tomatoes from my local organic market, and spent the first day peeling and preparing the pulp. The next day I made the sauce with basil, garlic, onions, and olive oil and canned it using a water bath.
           My mother shuddered. She had grown up on a farm, and she hated everything about farm life. She couldn't wait to go away to college and then live in a city. She had worked for seven years in Washington, D.C. before she met my father and then followed him on his career in the Air Force, first to New Orleans (where I was born) and then to Washington, France, and finally to Honolulu, a city she loved above all the others she had visited. She had left the farm far behind, but she was horrified to see her daughter embrace an activity that had marred her summers as a girl.
            I didn't really think much about it. So much I had done had horrified her that I was pretty used to this reaction. She was a life-long Republican and Baptist, so we didn't talk about politics or religion. She knew I was a Democrat, which was bad enough, but if she had known how far I had strayed from her Billy Graham take on the world, she would have been truly horrified. If I could have described my beliefs, I think I would have called myself an Epicurean, because I love thinking that we are made of the same matter that makes the stars. Also, I loved Epicurus saying that there was a soul but that it died with the body.
            On the way to all this, I had passed through a Buddhist phase, and it was these years of meditation that helped me forge a beautiful relationship with my mother during the last 25 years of her life. She loved to fight, and I refused to do it. My brother would fight with her about politics, and I would ask him how successful he thought he would be in changing a 60-year-old woman's mind, and then a 70-year-old woman's mind, and finally an 85-year-old woman's mind. But they continued to argue, and they both seemed to enjoy it.
          

My mother, shortly before she died.

  I think we thought that my mother would live well into her 90s, because she was so vital. When she died suddenly at 86, it was a shock. After the funeral my siblings and I cleaned out her condo, and I went back home to Tallahassee, and spent the next year writing, settling her estate, and making jam.
            My mother had a great death. She was getting ready to go to work, and she lay down for a moment and had a stroke. She was still working, still driving, sharp as ever, still beautiful. We all want to go this way, but it was hard on those left behind. It was especially hard on my brother--he was her favorite because he made her laugh--but we all felt it. I thought I had asked her everything, but every day I have questions about her past and mine. My history book is gone. She never wrote anything down, and she wasn't a storyteller. Every piece of information had to be pried out of her.
            This was the year I received a Guggenheim fellowship, so I was working on my project, but after the time at my desk, there were hours that loomed. I could have started drinking, but it just feels so bad the next day. What I really fell into was canning.
            My mother died in August, so once the fall came around, I was back home and it was citrus season, marmalade time. I found a great book, The Blue Chair Canning Book by Rachel Saunders, and I made orange, grapefruit, lemon, kumquat, and clementine marmalades. Chilean cherries came into the market, and I made cherry jalapeno jam, cherries in red wine sauce (gorgeous decorating a coconut cake), brandied cherries, which Saunders calls Christmas in a jar. I made plum cardamom jam, strawberry chamomile jam. Like a witch, I set up my cauldrons on the stove. I had a giant copper pot that my mother-in-law, Josie Kirby, had used to make jams for years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and I was giving it another workout.
  

Figs becoming jam in Josie Kirby's copper pot. (photo(c) Barbara Hamby)

          I'd go to the market a couple of times a week, and scout the fruits. I made friends with the produce guys. When I had my fruit, I'd put half-pint or pint jars in the dishwasher to sterilize them. Then I'd fill my huge immersion pot with water and turn it on. After the first few batches, you set up a rhythm. While the jars are being scalded and the immersion cauldron is heating up, I put the fruit in Josie's copper pot, and poured in the sugar, lemon juice and sometimes pectin, depending on the pH of the fruit.
            I've learned a lot about pH, because I don't want to kill anyone. And I give a lot of jam away, because there's no way I could eat as much as I make. It's a sweaty business, one that requires concentration and constant stirring. You can't think about all the questions you didn't ask your mother, how she will never excoriate you again and how you'll miss that. No one will ask you about your eternal soul, which I don't think for a minute is eternal. But while I'm stirring a vat of macerated figs or white peaches and saffron or a mix peaches and blackberries, I feel a deep connection with something. Who knows what? Maybe part of the pleasure is lining up the labeled jars in my pantry, which is like lining up poems for a book or the memories of someone who loved you more than she understood you, as if understanding matters.

Favorite canning books:

The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook by Rachel Saunders
Gourmet Preserves by Madelaine Bullwinkel
Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber
Well-Preserved by Eugenia Bone (her recipe for cherries in wine is worth the price of the whole book)
The River Cottage Preserves Handbook by Pam Corbin
Canning for a New Generation by Liana Krissoff
Preserving the Taste by Edon Waycott

Barbara Hamby is the author of several volumes of poetry, most recently On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (Pitt Poetry Series). Her new book of poems, Holoholo is forthcoming in Spring, 2021. She teaches creative writing in the English Department at Florida State University. Find out more about Barbara at her website here.

 

Contact Tracing circa late-1970s [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Two boys view a demolished block for construction of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, NY

Shortly after I moved to Albany, NY as a college sophomore, I volunteered nights at the Washington Park Free Clinic, a walk-in facility run by Albany Medical School students under the supervision of licensed doctors. The clinic was in a ramshackle brownstone in a run down part of town, a couple of blocks away from the not-yet-finished Empire State Plaza (aka Rocky’s last erection, in honor of governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had conceived of the project.).

All services were free. My job was to answer the phone, staff the front desk, and conduct minimal intake. Clients came in, gave me their names and described their condition. I passed the information on to one of the med students, who took over from there.

One night a young woman came in who was in her final weeks of pregnancy. She was huge and this was her first visit to a doctor. She was led into an exam room and soon after the supervising doctor could be heard throughout the building scolding her apprentices. Who did they think they were crowding around this young women as if she were exhibit A? And how stupid could they be to have her on her back, her feet in stirrups at that late stage in her pregnancy? Did they want her to go into labor right there? One by one the doctors in training left the room, chastened.

On another occasion, five young women, housemates, were each diagnosed with a venereal disease. They had to disclose the names of all of their sexual partners so the carriers could be tracked down, treated, and prevented from infecting more women.

They all named the same young man.

A few days later, he arrived at the clinic, looking smug and relaxed.

His test was negative.

-- sdl

Abecedarius for the 21st Century by [Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Zealous
Young
Xenophobes
Write
Verse.

Useless
Threats.

Shouted
Recriminations.

Questionable
Practices.

Odious
Nefarious
Masquerading
Liars.

Kiss-ass
Jurists
Invent
History.

Generations
Faulted.

Expert
Deniers
Clearly
Benefit.

Again.

--  10/2001

Johnny Angel, How We Love Him and "If Feeling Isn't In It" [prose by Stacey Lehman, poem by John Brehm]

For the past four weeks, we’ve been under the rule of Johnny, a twelve-year-old twenty-eight pound Schipperke. David and I have never had a dog together and I haven’t had a dog since childhood. My family always had German shepherds and though I remember each of them-–-Noah, Cito, Yoffey, Regan–-I can’t remember lifting a finger to care for them. For a brief period in the late 1970s I took in a puppy that I rescued when I caught him trying to cross the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I gave him to my mother, who was between dogs at the time.

Since Johnny has been with us in Ithaca, I’ve learned that dogs force you to reorder your life. You may be able to put them on a schedule, but face it, when they have to “go” you have to jump. Johnny wakes me at around 6:00 am. He’s on a strict diet. And even though he no longer has the energy of a puppy, he’s quite good at getting into trouble. He’s figured out how to open the garbage to get at any scraps. When he wants something, he lets us know thought we can’t always figure out what it is that he’s after. A walk? A treat? A massage?

We’ve grown quite fond of Johnny, especially David, who likes to take him for long walks and whom I’ve overheard saying sweetly, “I love you, Johnny,” and it is with mixed feelings that we look forward to returning him to my sister and brother-in-law on Monday. Will he miss us? Will he ask to visit? If he does, how will they, or we, know? 

One day about three weeks ago Johnny burst into a paroxysm of growling and barking. Someone was approaching our front door to deliver a package. I realized that he was both warning us of what he sensed was approaching danger and threatening what could be the source of that danger. I was deeply moved. He was protecting his home.

So much has been written about dogs and how they make us human. My favorite dog memoir is “My Dog Tulip,” by J. R. Ackerley. I also love this poem by John Brehm.

If Feeling Isn't In It 
        by John Brehm

You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . .  
                                                                                   Howard Moss

Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.

Their bodies will shiver with happiness.

A simple walk in the park is just about

the height of contentment for them, followed

by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,

a place to curl up and sleep. Someone

to scratch them where they can't reach

and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.

Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen

and other bringers of bad news and will

bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell

fear and also love with perfect accuracy.

There is no use pretending with them.

Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy

or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed

or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.

They make no secret of themselves.

You can even tell what they're dreaming about

by the way their legs jerk and try to run

on the slippery ground of sleep.

Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.

They don't try to impress you with how serious

or sensitive they are. They just feel everything

full blast. Everything is off the charts

with them. More than once I've seen a dog

waiting for its owner outside a café

practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,

what if she doesn't come back this time?

What will I do? Who will take care of me?

I loved her so much and now she's gone

and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people

who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.”

And when she does come, what a flurry

of commotion, what a chorus of yelping

and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!

It's almost unbearable, this sudden

fullness after such total loss, to see

the world made whole again by a hand

on the shoulder and a voice like no other.

 

        from Sea of Faith by John Brehm

Amplified vs. Transformed: Robbins & Balanchine [by Stacey Lehman]

Mr. d’Amboise in the title role of George Balanchine’s “Apollo” in 1962. “I want American boy!” Mr. d’Amboise said Balanchine told him. “He wanted me to be a wild, untamed youth, not just look pretty and make poses.”CreditJack Mitchell/Getty Images

[Jerome] Robbins took what you did naturally, enhanced, packaged, and presented it--he helped you become more of what you already were. [George] Balanchine took the music, developed his own ideas of movement, and challenged you to become more than you thought you could be. With Robbins, you were amplified; with Balanchine, you were transformed. 

                    - from I Was A Dancer by Jacques d'Amboise

Myth(ologies) in the Making in Chicago [by Stacey Harwood]

From the Archives (November 8, 2012):

About a year ago, the Chicago-based theater artist Erica Barnes approached David Lehman for permission to adapt his poem "Mythologies" for the stage as a dance performance piece [photo credit Lauren Sudbrink]. According to Erica, she was in the midst of a somewhat fallow period when on a whim she visited the Poetry Foundation website, clicked on the "Poem of the Day" and "fell in love." David's sequence of thirty sonnets "Mythologies," first published in the Paris Review issue 106 (1988) and awarded the Bernard F. Connors prize, was the Foundation's featured poem. Erica has this to say about David's poem:

We need new myths. Our old heroes are too unattainable, too perfect, too… heroic. David Lehman’s poem ‘Mythologies’ tells the story of a man struggling to construct new myths in the wake of the disintegration of his expectations. Blending the language of poetry with the ritual of theatre, ‘Mythologies’ searches for the answer to the age-old question --  what is it to be human?

David granted permission and over the next several months Erica dispatched periodic updates of her work- in-progress. She secured funding, hired a full cast and crew, found performance space, and held rehearsals. On November 1, "Mythologies" opened at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago.  "It was a success," writes Erica, and her excitement is palpable. .

 Meanwhile, you can find out more about "Mythologies" in Chicago by visiting the dedicated website.  You will find Erica's interview with David here.  And check out this link and this one for more about Erica and the various works she has adapted for the theater since 2012: https://www.ericawray.com/about.html

Erica describes herself as "a proud Chicago theatre ex-pat [who] served as Co-Founder of Knife & Fork, a theatre company dedicated to social practice around food, feminism, and body politics and as Co-Artistic Director of Blank Line Collective, a movement-based and devised theater company." She "holds a certificate in Laban Movement Analysis and is currently seeking certification for Intimacy Direction.  She uses aspects of these movement modalities to create work that is highly kinetic, physically expressive, and makes the impossible possible. Specializing in directing new plays by feminist and queer writers that explore relationships, loneliness, and the need for human connection, she is fascinated by shifting energy between people onstage and attempts to harness this energy to tell stories."

Congratulations Erica!

"Mythologies" was included in David Lehman's New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013).

-- sdh

"A cookbook is a political document." January Market Report [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

A cookbook is a historical and political document.  Think about it. Pick up any cookbook and you will learn as much about the economic forces of its time as you would from any history book. What do the recipes tell you about the demographics of its preferred audience? What is their class? Their social standing? How accessible are the ingredients and challenging the preparation? I’ve often wondered why definitive histories of a period tend to leave out the goings on in the kitchen.  If we don’t know what people were eating and how their food was prepared during this war or that upheaval, we’re missing a big piece of the pie, so to speak. Browse the cookbook shelves of a bookstore and you learn about current economic and social trends; visit the shelves of your local library and you’ll be amazed by once popular diet trends that are now obsolete.

A sub-genre of cookbooks that can teach us about the time in which they were written is the “charity” cookbook compiled by women and sold in order to raise money for a cause.  The first such cookbook was A Poetical Cookbook, written over 150 years ago for the 1864 Sanitary Fair, to support those wounded, widowed or orphaned by the Civil War. The practice of selling cookbooks to raise money has thrived ever since.

Jan Longone, curator of American culinary history at the University of Michigan Hatcher Library points out that no matter what the specific cause for which charity cookbook raised funds, the underlying purposes began as “women helping themselves, helping other women to help themselves, helping still other women help themselves and finally blossomed into women taking on the role of helping to solve all societies ills. All the time learning how to organize, to write, to publish, sell ads to sell cookbooks to run a business and to network.” In other words, the making of a lowly cookbook helped women develop life-saving skills.

Continue reading . . . 

 

Word of the Day: "Otiose"

 

o·ti·ose ˈōSHēˌōs,ˈōtēˌōs/ adjective      1..serving no practical purpose or result.

"So we must be vigilant in keeping story lengths appropriate. Bluntly — but obviously, I hope — every story should be as short as it needs to be. There's no excuse for a single otiose word or punctuation mark in our writing. Too many stories have repetitive anecdotes or unnecessary quotes. We will cut them."

Memo on October 11 by Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker to reporters advising them that unnecessarily long stories would be trimmed as the newsroom ups its focus on digital journalism.

-- sdl