The Best American Poetry

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.

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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?

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

The Critic [by Kenneth Tynan]

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The critic knows the way but can't drive the car.

-- Kenneth Tynan, famous critic

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Auden on the Difference Between Authors and Critics

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There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics.

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W. H. Auden, "Reading" (in The Dyer's Hand, 1962)

William Holden tells it like it is in the "Executive Suite" [by David Lehman]

"Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?"

William Holden in Executive Suite (1954) with Barbara Stanwyck & Louis Calhern (pictured, left,enjoying a smoke off camera) & with Fredric March, June Allyson always bright and merry, Walter Pidgeon, the world's greatest number two man, Paul Douglas, dour Dean Jagger, long-suffering Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, elegant as ever, and playing a better hand than in "An American in  Paris." 

With screenplay by uncle Ernest Lehman. -- DL

Epigraph of the Month: James Baldwin, "Another Country"

from James Baldwin’s Another Country:

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. 

            -- Henry James

Epigraph of the Month: "Tremor of Intent"

Anthony Burgess's Tremor of Intent (1966), his satire of espionage novels, bears a double epigraph. The first is from W. H. Auden:

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But between the day and night
The choice is free to all, and light
Falls equally on black and white.
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The second, from T. S. Eliot (pictured, right):

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The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. >>

Epigraph of the Month: "Dusty Answer"

Rosamond Lehmann took the title of her novel Dusty Answer (1927) from George Meredith's "Modern Love." This quotation serves as the book's epigraph:

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Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!
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Hypothesis: a good epigraph makes you want to read not only the book it prefaces but also the work from which it is taken. -- DL

Hart Crane's Epigraph for "A Streetcar Named Desire" [Epigraph of the Month by DL]

Tennessee Williams chose these lines from Hart Crane's poem "The Broken Tower" as the epigraph for’ A Streetcar Named Desire:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

 -- Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower”

"The Monday morns, the Monday morns . . ."

"Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end. And yet, when I sat for Fellowship, but for the boil on my bottom . . . The rest, an ordure. The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps. And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father's and my mother's and my father's father's and my mother's mother's and my father's mother's and my mother's father's and my father's mother's father's and my mother's father's mother's and my father's mother's mother's and my mother's father's' father's and my father's father's mother's and my mother's mother's father's and my father's father's father's and my mother's mother's mother's and other people's fathers' and mothers' and fathers' fathers' and mothers' mothers' and fathers' mothers' and mothers' fathers' and fathers' mothers' fathers' and mothers' fathers' mothers' and fathers' mothers' mothers' and mothers' fathers' fathers' and fathers' fathers' mothers' and mothers' mothers' fathers' and fathers' fathers' fathers' and mothers' mothers' mothers'. An excrement . . . "

                                                -- from "Watt" by Samuel Beckett

-- sdl

Epigraph of the Month: JA quotes Pasternak on Mayakovsky

Here is the epigraph John Ashbery chose for his poem "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers":(in his first book, Some Trees):

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He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty.

-- Boris Pasternak (Safe Conduct)

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Ashbery adapted the title of his poem from Andrew Marvell ("The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers"). I believe he wrote the poem while waiting for Kenneth Koch, who arrived a half hour late for an appointment.

-- DL

Emerson on "Compensation"

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And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.
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Why would the English love to live in ancient Greece? [by 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?

Epigraph of the Month: Why Art? [by David Lehman]

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                   We have Art
in order that we may not perish from Truth.

                                      -- F. W. Nietzsche
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The opposition of art to truth is vehement in this, the epigraph to Auden's essays in The Dyer's Hand (1962). -- DL