The Best American Poetry

July Market Report [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

My husband’s recent diagnosis of celiac disease came as a complete shock to both of us. He had been experiencing many months of debilitating symptoms that had been attributed variously to chemotherapy, post-surgery recovery, and an intractable infection. Doctors told us that his symptoms would wax and wane and that he might just have to live with them. 

Finally, and almost as an afterthought, his oncologist Dr. Dean Bajorin ordered the simple blood test for celiac (“highly unlikely, but we may as well be sure.”). Within a week we had a preliminary diagnosis, within two, it was confirmed by a biopsy.

Continue reading . . . 

"Kibbitzing and Noshing with Kevin Young at Russ & Daughters Cafe" [by Stacey Harwood]

Kevin Young (L) and David Lehman at Russ & Daughters Cafe (127 Orchard Street, NY NY). Photo by Stacey Lehman.

If you visit New York City and want to try the restaurant of the moment, your best chance of getting seated is at lunchtime. So we picked a slow Monday and arrived after the early rush. Even so, we had to wait ten minutes for a table at Russ & Daughters Café, one of the hot new restaurants specializing in foods of our Eastern European and German Jewish ancestors. David and I went with Kevin Young, in town from Decatur, Georgia, where he lives with his wife, the writer Kate Tuttle, and their son Mack. In between writing and editing, Kevin teaches at Emory University and curates the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. He had flown in to participate in the Poets’ House annual walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and to read from his latest collection, The Book of Hours, just out from Knopf .

I know from our visits to Decatur that Kevin is an adventurous eater. He’s also something of an afficianado of Southern food and cooking (he’s been active in the Southern Foodways Alliance). The foods of Kevin’s childhood inform some of my favorite of his poems (see “Ode to Pork” and “Ode to Gumbo”). Like the best food writing, these poems evoke memories and arouse feelings of love, grief, and intimacy without being saccharine or sounding overly sentimental. 

How would Kevin feel about our food? As it turned out, and should have come as no surprise, Kevin was familiar with much of what was on the Russ & Daughters menu. We settled on cocktails--“Schmoozers” for David and Kevin, (Rye, Aquavit, sugar, Bitters and Herbsaint rinse), “Break-Fast Martini” for me (Gin, jam, lemon juice, egg white, Pernod Absinth, Bitters)--and an assortment of small plates or “Noshes.”  Kevin was particularly impressed by the pickled herring trio (“exquisite”) and the latkes. I favored the “Super Heebster,” an open-faced sandwich of whitefish and baked salmon salad, wasabi-infused fish-roe, and horseradish dill cream cheese on bagel.  “This I never had as a kid,” I said, helping myself to a second piece. To round out our feast we added potato latkes, pastrami-style cured salmon, pickled vegetables, and kasha varnishkas (a favorite of mine, owing to a goodly amount of caramelized onions) and new to Kevin. “An acquired taste,” said David. The prices were standard Manhattan, nicht billig. 

Our conversation ricocheted between food and drink and matters of poetry and academe. What is the best bourbon for a Manhattan? (Kevin favors Dickel or Michters, with Cocchi vermouth.) How do you make a perfect Old-Fashioned (by slowly stirring the sugar and sans cherry or orange). How do you make brisket (me: slow braise, lots of onions, Kevin: smoked). At the mention of brisket Kevin recalled his Auntie’s, which held its flavor and texture even after being transported from Louisiana to Cambridge, Massachusetts and reheated.

After reminiscing about the year they worked together on The Best American Poetry 2011, David and Kevin took turns recommending heist films. Kevin touted The Heist and The Bank Job, David plugged Rififi, and the two of them waxed eloquent about Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Sterling Hayden’s parting shot at film’s end.

How do we account for the resurgence of Jewish food? Begin with nostalgia, a curiosity about our roots, and the belief that Jewish food is as worthy of attention as any other regional or ethnic food. But Talmudists could spend many an hour on the question with no prospect of resolving it. Is there as much interest in Southern food? Not in the same way, says Kevin. Unlike the eager-to-assimilate Jews, Southerners have largely held on to their traditions. They never lost the taste for regional foods like beans, greens, and field peas. There isn’t the same need to bring back foods that never fell out of favor.

By then our cocktails were long gone.  Should we have another round? What we need is a  “suppressor,” says Kevin, a low-alcohol drink that one sips before ordering something more potent. Instead he and David test the bartender with Old-Fashioneds. These, they agree, are nearly perfect.

I wish I could say the same for the two additional dishes we ordered. Thumbs down on the Matzo Brei, a dish which Kevin first tasted in Kansas and is David’s Passover specialty. R&D’s was a dry and flavorless disc, as if they hadn’t bothered to hydrate the matzo before cooking. The blintzes were, well, meh, though in all fairness the bar was set high by my grandmother’s, which were truly superb, light pillows of farmer cheese wrapped in delicate nearly translucent crepes. Eating Russ & Daughters’ I was reminded of what Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren said the first time he had a traditional dish prepared by someone other than his mother: “When I tasted it, that’s when I realized that my mother was dead.”

I picked Russ & Daughters Café because it has a great heritage that I knew would not be lost on Kevin. The parent store on Houston Street has been in business since immigrant days when Yiddish was still common in many households. You can imagine such a café--with its roomy booths, and soda fountain where the bar is--existing side-by-side with other now defunct establishments that emerged to serve the growing Jewish population. Russ & Daughters, store and restaurant, are reminders that delicacy and deli can go hand in hand.  They can even inspire poetry:

"Three Flights Down the Stairs" by Harvey Shapiro

Three flights down the stairs,
south one block to Houston
cross the street and maybe a half-block
west to Russ & Daughters.
Take a number—why is that woman
buying all that sturgeon?—for black
Russian bread, 3 smoked fish, farmer
cheese (the bulk kind) and nova.
Retrace the route, up the stairs,
and she’s just getting out of the tub
right by the kitchen sink, pink
thighs slowly rising so you can get
the whole flavor of it, water
streaming from the red muff thick
as bread. That was Sunday.

from How Charlie Savers Died and Other Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 2001

from the archive; first posted June 14, 2014

She Got Pinched in the Assss. . . tor Bar! [by Stacey Harwood]

[In 2011] I visited my mom for a couple of days and while with her I went through some of her old photo albums.  Whenever I do, I find something that had previously escaped my attention.  This time, I came across this bit of memorabilia from a different age (below left, click to enlarge):

  



The Hotel Astor stood at 44th Street and Broadway, a stunning example of Beaux-Art architecture that was demolished in 1967 to make room for a 50-story office tower.  It was  walking distance from the Milk Barn, the coffee shop where my mother worked as a waitress.  Many of her customers were "garmentos" (as those who work the rag trade are now called) who would on occasion give her gifts of belts (she had a tiny waist) and monogrammed hankies.  I love imagining my mother stopping in at the Astor Bar for a post-work cocktail.  Did she?  She won't say.  But it was quite the place,  made even more famous by Cole Porter's "Well Did You Evah/What a Swell Party."  There are many great versions of the song (I like Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop's subversive take here. Listen for raunchy lyrics that Porter would have loved) but you really can't beat Der Bingle and Ole Blue Eyes in High Society as rivals for Grace Kelly, who is betrothed to another.

from the archive; first posted on February 14, 2011.

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

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

                                                  Photograph by Jennifer B. Hudson: http://www.jenniferhudsonfineart.com

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. 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. She sent along a preview video, which makes us wish we could put the production on the road, and we would reproduce it here if we could.

Meanwhile, you can find out more about "Mythologies" in Chicago by visiting the dedicated website.  You will find Erica's interview with David here.

Congratulations Erica!

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

-- sdh

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)

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

Summer Reading: Jeanne McCulloch's Debut Memoir "All Happy Families" [by Stacey Lehman]

 

 Two days before Jeanne McCulloch was to marry, her father John suffered a massive stroke and lay in a coma from which he would not emerge. Patricia McCulloch, Jeanne's formidable mother, insisted that the celebration proceed at the family's beachfront East Hampton estate as planned.

So begins All Happy Families, Jeanne McCulloch's absorbing memoir of growing up in Manhattan's Upper East Side and on Long Island. The timing of its publication couldn't be better. Orchestrated by the wedding planner and complete with bagpipes, a guest list drawn from the Social Register, lilies of the valley, and the ocean as backdrop, Jeanne's nuptials, took place on August 13, 1983. You can take All Happy Families to the beach and thanks to McCulloch's sharp observations and imagine you are among the guests.

August 13, 1983. Jeanne McCulloch on her wedding day

Here's what Vogue writer has to say about All Happy Families: 

[McCulloch]  is by turns piercingly vivid and and devastatingly amusing nonetheless, evoking the smell of her siblings’ take-out food in a hospital room where her father lies comatose, her husband summarizing their relationship in a gesture of leaves falling from a tree, and tour de force period pieces, such as the below description of her mother and her girlfriends:

“Nancy and Mu regularly came with their husbands to visit us at the house by the sea, and the three women would do exercise classes together on the lawn, poking their pedicured pink toes into the air for a few minutes to tone their legs, then breaking for a cigarette.” Talking of cigarettes, the special emphatic language her mother has developed around smoking is skewered to perfection by the author. “This was cigarette smoking in ‘I just had to call and vent’ mode, the indignant inhale, the agitated exhale. . . . There was busy smoking—economic quick puffs in rapid succession, or busy with no hands free—speaking on the phone and writing, say, or sorting through place cards for a party, in which the cigarette was held in a clench between her lips. Then there was brooding smoking, the deep inhales and the long, whooshing exhales.”

There is much to enjoy here and much to think about. The most ritualistic and defining of family occasions—a wedding, a death, Christmas—are pulled apart and held up to the light. McCulloch shows all the pieces in turn and the past that led to now. In the midst of all these fragments straining for togetherness, there is, in fact, nuance and grace.

You can read the complete review here. 

Read an excerpt of All Happy Families here. 

-- sdl 

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

An Invitation for Wednesday Evening: Pen & Brush hosts poets Elaine Equi, Jen Huh, and Crystal Curry-Vassilakis [by Kate Angus]

 Wednesday (2/1) at Pen and Brush, 29 East 22nd Street between Broadway and Park Avenue. 7:00 pm. Free

 

Two falls ago, on the second round of drinks at the late lamented Puck Fair, a friend and I found ourselves talking—as often happens when two women writers sit down at a bar—about VIDA’s yearly count that tallies up the gender ratio in publishing and book reviews and the dismal numbers it often reveals. As my friend is the director of a nonprofit for poetry and I’m an editor at an independent press, the conversation eventually meandered into discussing the many amazing women we know in publishing. When we realized that no one had yet compiled a comprehensive list of the organizations, presses, and journals run by women, we began scrawling out our own. I spent a few more weeks crowdsourcing to find more names and eventually gave the list to VIDA to be published as a ever-updating community resource. 

Around the same time that I was researching this list, I finished up a stint guest editing for Pen and Brush, the 122-year-old nonprofit for women in the literary and visual arts, who had just launched their publishing wing and moved to a new space, a beautiful art gallery in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. With the VIDA list in hand, I began Pen and Brush Presents, a monthly reading series that features women, non-binary, and genderqueer writers who read work in honor of the female editors who have nurtured and supported their work by publishing them in the past. 

This Wednesday, Feb. 1st, we will be honoring the important work done for the literary community by Stacey Harwood, our gracious host here at the Best American Poetry blog, as well as Laura Cronk’s editing work for the wonderful literary food journal The Inquisitive Eater and Melinda Wilson’s work for the invaluable poetry resource Coldfront. Our readers will be the brilliant Elaine Equi (reading for BAP), Jen Huh (The Inquisitive Eater) and Crystal Curry-Vassilakis (Coldfront).

I would like to invite those of you who are in or near New York, to come join us this Wednesday (2/1) at Pen and Brush, located at 29 East 22nd Street between Broadway and Park Avenue. We'll lift a glass (or two or three!) to the talented poets who'll be reading and the amazing editors who have published them. The evening begins at 7 and extends as long as poetry and wine allows. All are welcome. 

The Inquisitive Eater: Market Report by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

In January of 1974, a five-pound bag of sugar cost 85 cents; by year-end, just in time for the office cookie exchange, the price of the same five-pound bag increased to $2.35.  The trend was driven by a complicated combination of geopolitical events, including bad weather that wiped out crops, changes in domestic subsidies, import quotas and tariffs, along with a growing national sweet tooth.

I was aware of the price-hike and the reasons behind it not because I was a preternaturally astute observer of market forces but because I worked after school and on weekends as a cashier for Shop-Rite supermarket in our largely working-class neighborhood. Where there had once been rows of yellow and white Domino sugar bags, shelves were empty. Cereal, candy, bottled juice, cakes and cookies, baking mixes, even TV dinners with their gelatinous desserts, were now out of reach for many customers. With soaring prices, the market behaved as if there were a shortage. Management cut back on inventory and over the course of the year customers who would typically buy one bag of sugar every couple of weeks hoarded it whenever word circulated that another price increase was on the horizon. For a short time, my store rationed sugar at one 5-pound bag per customer.  Some families gamed the system by having each spouse and child march through the checkout line alone with a single bag.

For some of us, myself included, it was the best thing that could have happened. At the time, I took my coffee with three teaspoons of sugar and drank a lot of soda. During weekend lunch breaks, a friend and I would share a smoke and to satisfy the inevitable hunger attack that followed would devour a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. There was no combination of sugar and fat that I would turn down.

My consumption of all things sugary had to stop. Over time I weaned myself of sugary drinks and sweetened coffee. It helped that nutritionists were finding an audience for their claims that sugar was detrimental to one’s health. They encouraged consumers to find alternatives, like fresh fruit for dessert and fruit juices or plain water instead of soda. Newspapers and magazines published recipes for sugar-free desserts. The sugar crisis of the ‘70s marked the beginning of my interest in healthy eating.

Alas, in the forty-plus intervening years, sugar and its evil sibling high-fructose corn syrup, continue to be a mainstay of the American diet. You find it in the obvious places but also hidden in processed foods like bottled salad dressings, canned soups, hot dogs, bread, and even in nut butters. While sugar alone has been cited as the cause of obesity and the associated illnesses (heart-disease, diabetes, and certain cancers), Gary Taubes, (The Case Against Sugar Knopf, December 2016) writes in the Wall Street Journal that “the evidence for the hypothesized chain of cause and unfortunate effects—eat sugar, become insulin-resistant, fatter and diabetic and then die prematurely—is ambiguous. It will probably stay that way. The National Institutes of Health have never seen the need for the expensive clinical trials that would be needed for a rigorous study of the issue.”

We do know with certainty that those whose eat a lot of processed foods are not as healthy as those who don’t and processed foods are where sugar lurks (along with other dubious ingredients). The good news is that the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a change in nutrition labels that will require manufacturers to list how many grams of sugar have been added to a product and what percentage of the recommended daily maximum that represents. Curious minds want to know, everyone else should know.

Read more at the Inquisitive Eater here. 

On My Wish List [Stacey Lehman]

Silence Please: The Appeal of Dance During Hard Times [by Stacey Lehman]

Sara Mearns in Alexei Ratmansky’s Fandango. At back: (L to R): Scott Borg, Elena Heiss, and Felix Fan of the FLUX Quartet. Photo: Erin Baiano

“Wartime, here as abroad, made everyone more eager for the civilized and peaceful excitement of ballet. More people could also afford tickets. And in wartime the fact that no word was spoken on the stage was in itself a relief.” from Looking at Dance by Edwin Denby

Last Thursday morning I went online and impulsively bought a single ticket to that evening’s Vail Dance Festival: ReMix NYC, at New York City Center. The theater was mostly sold out; the best available seat was in the nosebleed section but I took it anyway, hopeful that I would find a single seat closer to the stage during the first intermission.

As curtain time approached, I began to regret my purchase. Wouldn’t it be nice to stay home? My husband would be out for the evening and I had laundry to do. I imagined myself folding and sorting while watching Law & Order reruns followed by the Kelly File. Perhaps I would phone the box office and tell them to donate my ticket.

Then, at the last minute, I shook off my malaise and made a mad dash to the theater, settling into my seat just as Leto was giving birth to Apollo to the strains of Stravinsky’s Apollo Musagete. I’ve seen this Balanchine ballet many times over the years and each time it’s a revelation. Last night was no exception with the versatile New York City Ballet principal Robert Fairchild stepping into the lead for the injured Herman Cornejo. Damian Woetzel, a former premier danseur with the New York City Ballet and the director of the Vail program, wisely restored the opening birth scene that Balanchine had omitted from later productions because he was “bored with it.”

There’s a narrative line to the ballet that follows Apollo’s growth—together with Calliope, Terpsichore, and Polyhymnia--from boyhood to maturity. Here’s how the brilliant dance critic Edwin Denby described Apollo in 1945:

Apollo is about poetry, poetry in the sense of a brilliant, sensuous, daring, and powerful activity of our nature. It depicts the birth of Apollo in prologue; then how Apollo was given a lyre, and tried to make it sing; how three Muses appeared and showed each her special ability to delight; how he then tried out his surging strength; how he danced with Terpsichore, and how her loveliness and his strength responded in touching harmony; and last, how all four together were inspired and felt the full power of the imagination, and then, in calm and with assurance left for Parnassus, where they were to live. . .

So Apollo can tell you how beautiful classic dancing is when it is correct and sincere; or how the power of poetry grows in our nature; or even that as man’s genius becomes more civilized, it grows more expressive, more ardent, more responsive, more beautiful.

As I had hoped, a kind usher found me a seat, front-row mezzanine, at intermission. I was seated next to Gal, a young Israeli tap-dancer who had traveled around the world to take classes the MacArthur Fellow tap-dancer Michelle Dorrance, who was next up on the program. When her performance began, an electric charge seemed to course through Gal’s body. Dorrance was joined by three others, the Jook dancer Lil Buck, Robert Fairchild, and Melissa Toogood, formerly with Marsha Graham. Dorrance’s clapping and tapping provided the music for this rapid improvisational performance that maintained a fever pace throughout. (If my husband were reading this, he would say that Melissa Toogood is the best name for a dancer since Maria Talchief.)

The evening’s program was a festival indeed, with six dances following Apollo. Those employing the classical vocabulary of ballet left me breathless and trying to hold on to what Arlene Croce called “afterimages,” the fragments that remain for the inward eye to recall when the dance is over. I was stunned when Gal told me she didn’t care for Fandango (choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, music by Boccherini). It is full of surprises and has the feel of a spontaneous encounter between music and dance, executed with good humor and stunning virtuosity by the powerful Sara Mearns of whom Gal said, “I don’t know what she is trying to say.” “Isn’t the beauty of the music and her amazing technique enough?” I said. Gal was not convinced.

The festival concluded with Lil Buck @ City Center: A Jookin’ Jam Session. Jookin’, a Memphis style of hip-hop, reminds me of the break-dancing I used to see on NYC subway platforms in the 1980s, taken to an extreme. It is fascinating to watch in the way that watching a dancer on point is; the body executes moves that are completely unnatural. A Jookin’ dancer moves as if without joints or bones. The head slides from side to side seemingly independent of the neck and spine. The arms undulate fluidly and call to mind those videos of a suspension bridge during an earthquake.

Thursday’s jam session began with Lil Buck and Prime Tyme emerging from the audience to “Gangsta Walk” by YOUNG JAI. I’m guessing that this is the music to which Jookin’ was originally performed. What followed was a demonstration of Jookin’s adaptability to a global range of music, from traditional Galician bagpipe, to Kazakh folk, to Chinese Sheng, to Bach. Among the musicians was cellist Yo Yo Ma, who arrived on stage without fanfare and who closed out the evening with Camille Saint-Saëns haunting “The Swan.” The audience went wild. 

I don’t remember what was happening in 2009 that inspired this post by David St. John, but it describes perfectly my feeling and state of mind as I walked home on an unseasonably warm evening, grateful that I had chosen dance over news:

Last night, I decided to go with friends to see The San Francisco Ballet, which has become one of the great American companies. It was exactly the right thing to have done. Watching the dancers carve the space of the stage with their bodies, each drawing a shifting calligraphy of flesh and bone along those pages of music, against the insistence of linear time, well ... it mattered. It made a difference. As each of the ballets passed through its sequence of emotive circumstances, the bodies of the dancers first stilled, then erupting, then collapsing, I felt something in me also quietly unclenching. I felt my own body, which had felt so fiercely coiled and provisional, assume a sense of its more natural place in the world again .. its place in the physical as well as the cerebral, imaginative world. I felt, for those few hours, slightly less mortal. It's one of the things that art can do -- defy time, and time's smug billboards announcing it, Time, will always go on, but that we, the living, will not. Yet art does go on, poetry does go on. And so as I said a week ago, closing the very first piece I wrote for my guest week here: We continue; we go on. Let me say it once again. We too continue. And we go on.

 

An Autobiography in Cookbooks Part I: The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook © 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

My mother received this cookbook as a wedding gift and passed it on to me many years ago. It remains one of my favorites, not because of the recipes though there are some good ones, but because this book is responsible for kindling my love of cooking and poetry, especially poetry that rhymes.

The recipes are punctuated with light verse to serve as mnemonics for proper technique. For example, the captions to a series of photos illustrating loaves of bread read:

This is the well-made bread about which we’ve all read;
It’s so easy to make, so come, on, let’s bake.

See what results if the oven’s too hot;
decreased volume and over-brown top.

If the oven’s too slow, the crust will be pale,
the texture’ll be porous; it’s sure to fail.

In homemade bread, especially rye,
you know there’s more than meets the eye.

and on and on through yeasted breads and rolls, specialty loaves, quick breads and muffins.

My mother was a competent cook though not an enthusiastic one. She fully embraced the post-WWII convenience foods such as frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and canned soup. It seemed that for years everything was made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, with its sponge-like brown bits suspended in a gelatinous goo. I loved those meals.

They were children of immigrants, my parents, who left the Bronx in the 1950s, first to New Jersey, then to Rockland County, New York, where my mother found work as a school teacher while my dad worked a salesman ("plastics"). From the outside, our's was a typical suburban development home. Not so inside.

My mother was a long-time subscriber to both Women’s Day and Family Circle magazines, with their projects for the thrifty homemaker (“Feed a Family of Four on Fifty Dollars a Week!” “Transform Your Home with Color in One Weekend!” and “Bring the Outdoors In with Rustic Cedar Shingles!” The latter project transformed a wall in my parents’ bedroom with hours of furious hammering.).

My father was a scavenger who often arrived home with odds and ends he’d picked up while making his sales calls in and around New York City. The combination of mom's and dad's talents was on full display in our kitchen where one wall was covered with silver metallic wallpaper illustrated with scenes from the Folies Bergere, done up in pink and black; the floor was covered with carpet tiles in every color; and the cabinet pulls were ringed with the colored plastic inserts to 45 RPM records. My mother made new curtains for every season, some quite beautiful. 

The crowning glory of the kitchen was the table--a wood slab that my dad refinished with pockmarks to make it appear aged--suspended from the ceiling with picture wire. One day I arrived home from school and Noah, our large white German shepherd, was reclining on the table as it swung gently to and fro. Meals at that table were an adventure as one had to take care to avoid the wires while passing dishes. You could lose an arm. At my mother's insistence, my dad eventually anchored the table to the floor with more wire.

Years of preparing meals for our family of six, on top of full-time work, took their toll. When I was in my early teens, my mother declared a moratorium on cooking. My two sisters and I would have to take over responsibility for dinners several times a week. She delivered this news as if it were a punishment and my sisters took it as such but I thought it a grand opportunity to experiment. We were told we could cook whatever we liked; my mother would shop though she refused to buy exotic ingredients, like ground black pepper, or nutmeg. “You don’t need that,” she said, crossing off those items on our shopping lists.

I remember my attempt at Moussaka, the Greek casserole of eggplant and ground beef baked under a layer of béchamel. Is there a sound more dreaded to the cook than that of diners' forks silently pushing a poorly executed entrée around a dinner plate? Finally, my father put his fork down and looked across the table at my mother. “Renee,” he said, mouthing his words, “I don’t like it.” The leftovers were fed to Noah, who devoured them without complaint and in short order deposited them on the carpet-tiled kitchen floor.

Union Square Farmers Market Encounter: Only in New York or is this a Paul Violi Poem? [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Woman: Do you have pullet eggs?

Vendor: Yes.

Woman: Great! I'll take some.

Me: I'd like some too.

Woman: Would you consider splitting a dozen? I live alone and half a dozen is just right for me.

Me: Sure.

Me: How do you use them? For baking? Or just as you would use any egg?

Woman: I like to fry them. Like in the Velazquez painting, the one at the Prado. 

Me: So you fry them in olive oil? 

Woman: Yes! 

Me: That painting was here briefly, at the Frick, last year. 

Woman: I didn't know that! 

Me: Yes, it's gorgeous. 

Woman: I agree. Enjoy your eggs! 

(Me, to myself: I miss Paul Violi)

-- sdl

 

Flashback circa1965 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

I'm walking with my father through the first floor of Alexander's department store on 3rd Avenue and 58th Street. A tall, well-dressed and made-up woman walks by. My father shakes his head. "Now there's a rangy broad!" 

Happy Birthday Mr. B! [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

George Balanchine rehearsing "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" (music by Richard Rodgers) with Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell, 1968.

George Balanchine's "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" is permanently imprinted on my brain, perhaps because I saw it during the year of its debut as a stand-alone ballet and with the original cast but also because the choreography perfectly matches the music, which is gorgeous, sexy, and haunting (listen to the theme that begins at around 1:30). I've seen it many times, most recently with David, during a NYCB collaboration with The Dance Theater of Harlem, the acclaimed company started by Arthur Mitchell. 

Suzanne Farrell has written that she was unaccustomed to dancing a part that required her to be overtly sexual - she plays a stripper in the ballet. Early on in rehearsal, her partner Arthur Mitchell said, "Come on, Suzanne, sex it up!" When Farrell stepped onto the stage, she really let loose. The heat these two premier dancers generated when they performed together was captivating and memorable. 

It's hard to pick a favorite from among so many brilliant dances but if I had to, I might settle on Balanchine's Serenade with music by Tchaikovsky (Serenade in Strings in C, Op. 48).  First conceived as a lesson in stage technique, Balanchine worked unexpected rehearsal events into the choreography. When one student fell, he incorporated it into the dance; another day, a student arrived late, and this too became part of the ballet.

Balanchine is famous also for his table talk and witty aphorisms: "God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do" and "I disagree with everybody but I don't even want to argue” and “Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time.” When a young choreographer sought his advice, he said, "Just keep making dances. Every now and then you'll make a good one." Good advice for poets, too. 

Happy Birthday! 

-- sdh

Unleash Creativity Part 4: Limit your Palette [by Tess Callahan]

When artist Xu Bing was asked by the Chinese government to create two phoenix sculptures for the atrium of the new World Financial Center in Beijing, he accepted, but when he visited the site and saw the dismal working conditions of the migrant laborers who were building the luxury towers, he was so disturbed that he decided to create the phoenixes out of the workers’ battered tools. The elegant, gargantuan birds are constructed of shovels, hard hats, jackhammers, pliers, saws, screwdrivers, plastic accordion tubing and drills. The building’s developers worried about the message the sculptures conveyed and asked if Xu would consider covering them with crystals. No dice. They withdrew the commission, but the artist forged ahead with the project and the birds have been exhibited in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and elsewhere. While the limited materials made the sculptures more challenging to construct, they also made them infinitely more compelling both aesthetically and symbolically.

In the introduction to his book WIND/PINBALL: TWO NOVELS, Haruki Murakami explains that he discovered his writing style by first composing in English with limited vocabulary and syntax and then “transplanting” those sentences into his native Japanese. In the process, a new style of Japanese emerged that was entirely his own. He describes the experience as a moment of clarity when the scales fell from his eyes. “Now I get it,” he thought. “This is how I should be doing it.”

“The Ten-Minute Spill,” a Rita Dove poetry exercise found in THE PRACTICE OF POETRY by Chase Twichell and Robin Behn uses a limited palette of words and an inverted cliché to point writers toward a similar eureka experience. After doing this exercise with my creative writing students, we tried it a second time using a palette of words they “found” on a “field trip” (see yesterday’s post) and then exchanged with one another. They complained about the confines of the exercise, but promptly produced great stuff.

Material is one way to exploit constraints. Structure is another. Frank Lloyd Wright would not have created his Fallingwater House if he had seen the waterfall as an obstacle to be overcome rather than an asset to be incorporated. Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” came from an exercise in end stops, and Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box” would not exist if she hadn’t been trying to figure out a creative way to use the impossible limitations of Twitter.

In my creative writing class, students first groan over and then feverishly tackle the constraints presented to them. They have written villanelles, sestinas, haiku, 6-word stories, Yelp reviews, fictional book blurbs and recently “Contributors’ Notes” in an emulation of Stacey Harwood’s poem by the same name (BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2005). The ratio of early complaints to eventual satisfaction is gratifying. Great ideas come from pushing against boundaries. The frustration of constrictions can distract the thinking brain enough to allow the deeper work of the creative mind to unfold. Get your students moaning. You won’t be sorry.

Tune in to tomorrow’s post for ways to find fresh entry points into your writing.

Poets on Thanksgiving: A Roundup [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Thanksgiving
 

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos

of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds

until I just can’t stand it another second.

I am not at one with nature.  Never was.

Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,

even when you yawn right in their faces.

 

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,

lounging in the living room, watching t.v.

Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.

Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this

knot can be untied and our hearts released.

 

-- Terence Winch

 

Happy Thanksgivukkah from Over Here [by Moira Egan, 2013]

"I'm already sick of turkey" (by Karen Resta, 2012)

Boxed in, Blue Humorous and Bleary Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

How to Chop a Fuckton of Onions (more Bildungsroman Holiday, by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Bildungsroman Holiday (by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Thanksgiving, 1977, Albany NY (by Stacey Harwood, 2010)

A Poem for Thanksgiving (by Martha Silano, 2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2009)

A Poem for Thanksgiving Week (by Laura Orem, 2009)

Venerdi Nero (?) by Moira Egan (2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (2009 - photograph)

"We Gather Together" (2009 - video)

A Thanksgiving Post (by Laura Orem, 2008)

Thanksgiving and Black Friday (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2008)

Your Brain on Turkey and Fixings (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Live Poetry Blogging on Thanksgiving (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

(Not so) Live Blogging, 10:54 pm [(by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Live Thanksgiving Blogging 12:26 pm (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Happy Spanksgiving, from the flarflist [by Sharon Mesmer, 2008]

Pre-Thanksgiving Emergency Narrowly Averted (by Martha Silano, 2008)

The Sonnet, Three Journals, and Four Graces [by Anna Maria Hong]

For my final post, I’d like to talk briefly about my favorite poetic form, the sonnet, which I played around with for eight years, and which I continue to love for its rigor and ductility, its ability to hold and propel contra-diction, bad puns, good-for-nothings, great sentiment, and terrible occasion.

You can read more about my approaches to invoking the form in this article and in this blog post for the versatile literary journal Drunken Boat, but in short, the form spoke to me in a way that no other received one does. I consider myself a weird sonneteer, not a formalist.

I do have a fondness for poems in form by poets who take a similarly experimental approach, letting the constraints push and pull the language, as in this sonnet by the poet, scholar, and translator Douglas Basford, which appeared first in Diagram:

 

*

Bore

 

Call it a bore, if you like, or a boor,

but sound has a way of coercing sense

into bottlenecks worse than your parents

find late in the day driving to the Eastern Shore.

 

You'll hear about it later. You can be sure

images your mother half-absorbed--goldfinches,

drab bramble, wafer sun--will come. Clairaudience

of your eye, let's call it, keeps your eye turned

 

out the car window when the traffic's stock-still,

with nothing much to hear, no road noise, essence

of life distilled down to siblings squabbling

in a backseat ahead, to a few drunks stumbling

out past the shoulder and back. Something pinches

after you and misses. Reasons to speak dwindle.

 

*

This poem is from Doug’s work-in-progress, Very Memory, which he describes as “a Baltimore-centric series of sonnets exploring gentrification, race and class relations, turn-of-the-millennium courtship, and workplace bullying, among other things.”

Along with the poets Ida Stewart and Jason Gray, Doug edits the ever-spritely Unsplendid: An Online Journal of Poetry in Received and Nonce Forms. I was particularly happy to read the resplendent Women and Form issue that the journal published in July of 2014.

And speaking of great literary journals and their ardent editors, I’d like to mention my friend Liz Powell, the editor of Green Mountains Review and an amazing poet with a new book coming out. Her collection Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances just won the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

The subtitle comes Sanford Meisner of the famed acting technique, and the book employs method acting to process the poems’ information, resulting in a provocative mix of verse, essay, drama, and meta-forms in which alternate personas converse as a way to find truth out of erasure. I’ve had the privilege of reading an early draft, which is like nothing I’ve read in the best possible way. Here is the title poem:

 

*

 

WILLY LOMAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER: A Story in Couplets

 

Prologue:

 

Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly,

fluttering like a silk-moth behind me

 

blocking my life, my scenes

in whichever stage direction she wants.

 

Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me,

her ringing calls like an imperial decree.

 

When she sleeps she crashes, like a car

into the guardrail of my ambition.

 

Her curse like a poison I cannot smell,

an asphyxiation of the self by the self, that hell and hard sell.

 

Split personalities we dream through the night,

of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light,

 

Not even my husband can feel

her there between us—a secret contract under seal.

 

When I awaken, her irises touch mine;

an awful, indecipherable fault line.

 

She’s a character in search of an author, a devotee,

trying to recount her history through me,

 

until I channel her. She’s like a phantom limb,

hymn to the invisible. Her shameless whims,

 

the subtext of my lies. Under her tinted hair

the forest murmurs, becomes a thought, or prayer.

 

Until her thoughts tumble into mine;

colors bleed. In the morning, I’m overwrought—

 

My patrilineal kin, she begins to wear thin,

when she undoes hospital corners I’ve tucked so gently in.

 

Her cool white rising is meringue completing—

the high-pitched silence of our congealing.

 

She was always ceremonially unfolding

his white shirts, unpressing the folds

 

in my circumstance. I did and didn’t want her. I kept

trying to catch her, then let her slip. Any intent

 

to have her near made her more invisible. Her electric

breasts overfilled my brassieres. An interaction, our dialectic—

 

She never removes her hat upon entering the door

to my personality. Ma semblable, ma soeur!

 

*

I can’t wait for this book and the others I mentioned earlier this week to come into the world.

And now seems like an apt time for me to express my gratitude to the journal and anthology editors who have supported my writing and without whom I wouldn’t be here blogging for The BAP. I didn't know Liz or Doug before I published poems in their journals, but I now consider them friends and fellow spirits, which is part of the reason I started writing poems long ago. And I'm grateful to have the opportunity to share their poetry, which I believe often gets overlooked by their work on behalf of others. 

A thousand gratitudes to David and Stacey for inviting me to be here. 

And a great holiday week to you all!