The Best American Poetry

"Dependable Epigraphs" [by Tony Towle]

                       

Dependable Epigraphs

My epigraphs will prepare you for the excursion
                         but not for the ruts in the road.

                                                                           — Virgil                                                                                       

Stay well ahead of your turnips in the garden of life. 

                                                            — Michel de Montaigne

Never parade your ignorance; a discreet amble down a side street will suffice.

                                                                 — Benjamin Disraeli

Don’t swat flies close to the ear of God.

                                                            — St. Francis of Assisi

Metaphors are the unstable companions of an already impractical fellow.

                                                                                                — Henry Ford

Those who are not willing to subvert the law do not have sufficient stake in the outcome of events.

                                                                        — Niccolò Machiavelli

 If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, religion is certainly the first.

                                                                                                          — Voltaire

Everywhere I go I find a poet has already been there neurotically before me.

                                                                                                 — Sigmund Freud

Socializing is networking to no purpose.

                                                                        — Oscar Wilde

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

                       — Paul Valéry, as quoted in the original French at a press conference by George W. Bush

Farewell, O insatiable biographers of the future.

                                                            — William Shakespeare

Pimp my soporific and annoying orchestral arrangements, bitch.

                                                                                    — Lawrence Welk

The peasant’s place is in the hovel.

                                                 — Harry & Leona Helmsley

The woman’s place is in the novel.

                                                — Henry James

Never let Henry James have the last word.

                                                             — Edith Wharton

You’ve got to know when to stop.

                                                 — Leo Tolstoy

from Winter Journey (Hanging Loose Press, 2008)

The Secret of Secrets [by Sir Henry Taylor]

From Sir Henry Taylor, "On Secrecy" (1836:

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A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being a secret.

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I believe Poe was paying attention. Borges, too. -- DL

Soviet Humor

 

 

 

American reporter: "How's it going?"

An engineer in Moscow (circa 1948-1989): "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Preceded by a shrug. 

Followed by a shot of vodka.

 

Woody Allen, "Apropros of Nothing": "I'm eighty-four; my life is almost half over.. ."

Woody Allen's autobiography, Apropros of Nothing, is full of pithy bon mots, good humor, and unfailing generosity toward the actors and other professionals he has worked with.

His self-deprecating humor is natural to him, a gift that yields spontaneous one-liners on every other page.

His tips on courtship are valuable. A brilliant French meal prepared by the suitor (blanquette de veau with clafoutis for dessert) works so well that it is "an express ride to the boudoir to work off some of the calories in the sack." 

Lots of juice, lots of dish, lots of inside baseball, and the personality of the genius rises to the occasion, 

His true ambition: "If I could trade my talent for any other person's, living or dead, who would it be? No contest - Bud Powell." 

"Nothing in the The Wasteland or Pound or Auden moves me as much as Cole Porter's 'You're not worth the ransom of asparagus out of season.'"

"I'm eighty-four; my life is almost half over. Not believing in a hereafter, I really can't see any practical difference if people remember me as a film director or an amateur clarinetist or at all. All that I ask is my ashes be scattered close to a pharmacy."

On posterity: "Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public, I prefer to live on in my apartment."

-- DL

Quote of the Day: Sylvia Plath

"August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time."

            — Sylvia Plath The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, August, 1952

The French and the British Vie for the Yankee Dollar

Who said it:

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The French try to deal with us by making us feel foolish, to prove to us that we didn’t have the brain power to follow them; the British dealt with us by making us feel guilty that we had let them down. 
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a) Julia Louis-Dreyfus
b) Art Buchwald
c) Henry Kissinger
d) Walter Lippmann
e) Walter Neff

Hint: “There were differences at the beginning of the relationship," he said about himself and Marilyn, or Byron and Castlereagh, or the US and China, or the Dodgers and Yankees. "Nevertheless, we’ve learned to live with each other for many decades." Red herrings: “There is still a tiny Seventh-day Adventist inside of me screaming to get out every time I make a pass at a tuna fish sandwich.”"When all men think alike, no one thinks very much."  "Elaine is just in pain." "How could I know that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?" 

 

Quote of the Day: Bright Blue Mailboxes [by John Updike]

"The place where my personal hopes and dreams and the intentions and provisions of the state intersected was the postal system. Its workers, whom in my small town I knew all by name, brought to the house the printed journals--the newspapers and magazines--that represented to me a world where I wished to locate my future. In those days when a postage stamp cost three cents, I sent letters to great and distant men, cartoonists and writers, some of whom deigned, to my eternal gratitude, to respond. Each day's mail brought potential treasure. This is still true for me. I send manuscripts away, I sometimes get praise and money in return. It is the United States mails, with the myriad routes and mechanisms that the service implies, not to mention the basic honesty and efficiency and non-interference of its thousands of employees, that enable me to live as I do, and to do what I do. I never see a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit." - from John Updike's contribution to a panel, "How does the State Imagine?," conducted on January 13, 1986, as part of the 48th International Pen Congress, held in New York City with the overall theme of "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." 

-- sdl

Emerson on the poor and the "wicked dollar" (with a comment from Michael Schiavo)

A powerful and perhaps surprising moment in Emerson's great "Self-Reliance":
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Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
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Michael Schiavo comments:

Of course the phrasing is important, and something that many people overlook, in Emerson, and particularly in this passage. It's not "the poor" but "my poor." We all have obligations to specific people. There's also this passage from "Circles":

"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty, another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty, and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker! there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?"

--October 27, 2011

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

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There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime.
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I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

"Film Noir" [by Sean Speers]

Why me?

Editor's Note: This is, I submit, the epitome of film noir in a two-word sentence. James Stewart says it in Vertigo, Edmund O'Brien says it in DOA, and Janet Leigh never gets the chance in Psycho. --DL

Great Blurbs de Nos Jours [by Mitch Sisskind]

Mitch Sisskind's candidates:

". . . an excellent blurb line is, "i put this book in my son's/daughter's suitcase when he/she went of to Harvard/Yale/Berkeley." it shows you have a family, which makes many people feel closer to you, and it also shows that you trust the book enough to put in in the hands of your kids -- in whom you have a huge financial investment.

another good line is, 'if you read only one book this year, make it this one.' Because that sort of gives them permission not to buy any more books this year. but if it's getting close to the end of the calendar year this line could look funny -- in that case make sure you say 'if you only read one book this fiscal year....' "

Nabokov on Chess

You wrote this marvellous novel The Luzhin Defence: are you a very good chess player? And what do you think of [Bobby] Fischer’s attitude?

Forty years ago I was a good enough player of chess, not a grandmaster, as the Germans say, but a club player sometimes able to set a trap for a heedless champion. What has always drawn me in chess is the trick move, the hidden combination, and that’s why I gave up live play to devote myself to composing chess problems. I don’t doubt that there exists an intimate link between certain mirages of my prose and the texture, at once brilliant and obscure, of enigmatic chess problems of which each one is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia. I especially like so-called suicide problems, where White forces Black to win.

Yes, Fischer is a strange being, but there’s nothing abnormal in the fact of a chess player’s not being normal. There was the case of the great player Rubinstein, at the start of the century: an ambulance would drive him each day from the insane asylum, his home, to the café room where the tournament was taking place, and then drive him back to his dark cell after the game. He didn’t like to see his opponent, but an empty chair across the chessboard also irritated him, so they put a mirror there, and he saw his own reflection.

See https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/melting-with-tenderness/

Oscar Levant Nails It Again: "A politician is a man who. . ." [by DL]

Oscar Levant, who "knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," defined a politician as a man who will "double-cross that bridge when he gets to it." Has anyone read his book Memoirs of an Amnesiac?. It's the sort of book I must have read, but I can't remember doing so. I have a feeling that I would have liked it. I am sure of it in fact. Putnam published it in 1965. Three years later came The Unimportance of Being Oscar, another bravura performance -- not too wild, not too earnest, but full of self-deprecatory wit and wisdom. "I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients," he confided. He was very fast, very smart and knowing, a good guest on a talk show, a mordant foil to Gene Kelly's native optimism in "An American in Paris." He wrote these lines that he says in the movie: "It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character." He also wrote "Blame it on My Youth" and other songs and was a buddy of George Gershwin. The jokes were spontaneous and delivered deadpan. When he said that he knew Doris Day "before she was a virgin," it was a valuable reminder of the band singer's brilliance -- with the Les Brown Orchestra in the 1940s, as Ruth Etting in "Love Me or Leave Me," in duets with Sinatra in "Young at Heart" -- which preceded the virginal image projected in the sugary pillow-talk movies of the 1960s. After Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism, Oscar said, "now that Marilyn Monroe's kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her." -- DL

 

From Pity to Wisdom to Coercion [by Lionel Trilling]

 

 

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Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

from The Liberal Imagination 

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Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

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

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

*

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

*

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

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The painting on the right is by Gail Campbell, 2016.

Why the English love to live in ancient Greece? [by Virginia Woolf]

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

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

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

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

>>>

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

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

On the Act of Blaming [by Lionel Trilling]

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He [Scott Fitzgerald] really had but little impulse to blame, which is the more remarkable because our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. 'Forbearance, good word," is one of the jottings in his notebook."
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--Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)

Quote of the Day: On Inspiration [by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky]

"Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy." 

            Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Discuss.

--sdl

from "'Meditations in an Emergency" [by Frank O'Hara]

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

-- Frank O'Hara

View of Manhattan from the Smith/9th St. subway station (photo by Stacey Harwood)

Gastronomical Perfection [by M. F. K. Fisher]

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   I feel now that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.
   Three or four people sometimes attain perfection either in public or in private, but they must be very congenial, else the conversation, both spoken and unsaid, which is so essential a counterpoint to the meal's harmony, will turn dull and forced. Usually six people act as whets, or goads, in this byplay and make the whole more casual, if, perhaps, less significant.
   The six should be capable of decent social behavior: that is, no two of them should be so much in love as to bore the others, nor at the opposite extreme should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put poison on the plates all must eat from. A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better acquainted diners could sharpen their questioning wits.
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-- M.F.K Fisher
   An Alphabet of Gourmets

Quiz:  Name the poem written by W. H. Auden in response to this passage. --- sdh