The Best American Poetry

I. B. Singer on the sexual organs

 

 

"The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being. The eye or the ear seldom sabotage  you. An eye will not stop seeing if it doesn't like what it sees, but the penis will stop functioning if he doesn't like what he sees. I would say that the sexual organs express the human soul more than any other limb of the body. They are not diplomats. They tell the truth ruthlessly."

-- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Who said it? (2025 series, #5)

"You can be free if you want to be."

"Don't kill the criminal; make him work for you."

"Don't kiss the fool; ignore his opinions Opinions have killed more people than earthquakes and vocanoes."

"The public is a ferocious beast that can never be satisfied."

"If god didn't exist, it woud be necessary too invent him."

"You are gulty of all the things you could have done but didn't."

"If I had more time, this would have been a shorter letter."

[Picture of La Grenouille in NYC contains no hints or clues.]

Chesterton Issues a Poetry Challenge

 

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

-- G. K. Chesterton.

 

Can you prove him wrong?

Who said it? (quote of the week 2025, no.4 )

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

"You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them."

"History is an agreed-upon lie."

"The leader deals in hope (as does the dope dealer )"

"If you fear defeat, you will surely lose."

"Death I can endure. Buit to live conquered and humiliated is unbearable."

"In war, as in prostitution, amateurs are often better than professionals."

For other posts in this "quote of the week" series, click here:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/quote-of-the-week/

[Picture -- Franz Kline with one of his canvases -- contains no hints or clues.]

Who said it? [2025 series, no. 3]

 

"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as psychoanalysis leads us to unconscious impulses."

"When you are high on hashish, your thinking contnues on the samr path, only now it is strewn with roses." .

"History teaches us that a state of emergency is a constant. Cisis is not the exception but the rule."

"The present comprises the whole history of humankinid."

"Events occur as flashes of lightning. History is the thunder you hear later."

[The picture accompanying this quote is not a clue.].

 

 

Who said it? [quote of the week #2, 2025 series]

"Hans was mediocre in the most honorable sense of the word."

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also the truth."

"Speaking French is, for me, like speaking without saying anything -- as in a dream." 

“Don't you like the sight of a coffin? I really do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively sublime.”

“Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism."

"Terror is what our age needs, what it demands, and what it will get."

"“Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience,” Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving an occasional beating—which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.”

[The picture is unrelated to the quotations.]

"Who Said It?" [quotes of the week: no. 1, January 20, 2025]

A novel's true suspense is felt not by the reader but by the author, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Europe is the negative that American developed into the finished photograph.

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Hell man, every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."

The happy ending is our national belief..

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

A doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole.

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Ed. note: Who wrote or said these things? The picture on the left contains no clues or hints.

Maugham on writing, reading, friendship, and the inevitable selfishness of humanity

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life."

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

“It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.”

“You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.”   ― W. Somerset Maugham

Schopenhauer can cheer you up at any hour

Human satisfaction is "like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow."

We find out what we wanted not when we get it, but when we don't get it.

The brain is a slave of the will. Consciousness follows the whims of  cock in pursuit of pussy..

What I call will, Freud would call the triumph of the id.

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

"The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on" [Oscar Willde]

and therefore:

 

The Meaning of Style

Style is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.  -- Robert Frost (pictured)

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. -- W. H. Auden

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ― Mark Twain

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. –Emily Dickinson

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.  -- Vladimir Nabokov

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. ~Oscar Wilde

 

This week's harvest

"God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." -- Bismarck

"The greatest danger to most men is not that they aim too high and miss the mark, but that they aim too low and reach it."

--- Emil Ludwig

 

-- "Show me an actress who isn't a personality, and you'll show me a woman who isn't a star." -- Katharine Hepburn

 

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“Think twice before burdening a friend with a secret.”
― Marlene Dietrich

 

"I praise loudly. I blame softly." -- Catherine the Great

 

‘There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." – Oscar Wilde

 

“When I want to read a novel, I write one.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

 

“Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's”
― Madame de Stael, De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations

 

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

From Pity to Wisdom to Coercion [by Lionel Trilling]

<<<

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 

>>>

I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The essay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal.  -- DL

from the archive; first posted by The Best American Poetry on September 09, 2019 at 09:28 AM.

<<<

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 

>>>

I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The essay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal.  -- DL

Matthew Arnold’s Secret [by Lionel Trilling]

Matthew Arnold’s Secret

Of Matthew Arnold’s habit
of meditating on the sayings
of great thinkers, a different one
each week, after first writing them
down in his pocket diary,
Lionel Trilling wrote,
“It was as if he were obeying
as literally as he might
the commandment to fasten
the truth upon the door
of his house and upon his hand
and to set it as a frontlet
between his eyes." Aha!
Welcome to the Minyan, Matt.

-- DL

.       
Matthew Arnold.

Bacon & Eggs [and 4 other poems by Howard Nemerov]

The God of This World

He smiles to see his children, born to sin,
Digging those foxholes there are no atheists in.

 

Because You Asked about the Difference Between Poetry and Prose

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

 

 

Bacon & Eggs

 

The chicken contributes, but the pig gives his all.

 

Mystery Story

Formal as minuet or sonnet,
It zeroes in on the guilty one;
But by the time I’m told who done it,
I can’t remember what he done.

Morning Sun

How many more this morning are there dead of
The peace I came to bring a sword instead of?

"Instant Freud" [by David Lehman]

Instant Freud

The holiest word in the language
is mother
and the nastiest
is motherfucker

-- David Lehman

Great Epigraphs

 

 

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

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

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

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

T. S. Eliot was terrific at the game.

 

Here is the epigraph Adous Huxley used for Point Counter Point:

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

—Fulke Greville

Joseph Conrad chose these lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faeire Queene for his epitaph:

"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"

Graham Greene on truth, fiction, journalism and "the Media"

Ask Graham Greene the difference between journalism and fiction, and he'll say that "novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

He will add that "Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

-- DL [from the archives; originally posted May 9, 2014)

He will add that "Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

-- DL [from the archives; originally posted May 9, 2014)

Kafka: It can always get worse. . .

"Let the bad remain bad, otherwise it will grow worse." 

T. S. Eliot Criticizes the Critics

<<<
Upon giving the matter a little attention, we percerive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.
>>> 

Here comes GBS

“A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

"“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”

"If at age 20 you're not a liberal you have no heart. If at age 40 you're not a conservative you don't have a brain."

“The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.”

"“Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation.”

“Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."