The Best American Poetry

Willis Reed, Legendary Center of the World Champion N. Y. Knicks, RIP [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Basketball great Willis Reed spoke about his literacy project. David was eager to get his predictions for the upcoming Knicks season.

In 2003, then chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, invited David to join him in Washington for the annual Washington Book Festival, hosted by Laura Bush. It was a great event. Dana had even arranged for David's mom Anne to come along and for all of us to join him at the White House for the breakfast ceremony preceding the Festival. 

Just as the guests were taking their seats for Bush's opening remarks, David saw former Knicks great Willis Reed enter the room. He was impossible to miss, of course; at 6'10" he towered over just about everyone in the room, with the exception of former Detroit Pistons center Bob Lanier (6'11"), also in attendance. 

Reed was on hand to talk about his literacy project. 

I watched David from across the room (he was seated among the day's speakers; I was elsewhere, with Anne). He lit up when Reed took the podium. When the proceedings adjourned and guests made their way to the exits, David practically lept over seats with the finesse of a point-guard making a layup shot with two seconds on the clock. I've seen him focus on an objective, but this was masterly. 

He reached Reed and I snapped the photo, above. 

As it so happened, my office in New York City was at One Penn Plaza, across the street from Madison Square Garden. On a whim, I phoned the Knick's publicity department with the request that Reed sign the photo, which he graciously agreed to do. I've given David many gifts over the years, but I think this signed photo of the basketball great ranks among his favorites.

-- sdl

The moment no Knicks fan will ever forget: when Willis Reed hobbled onto the court in the deciding game of the 1970 championship series with the LA Lakers. When Reed came out, the crowd roared. Reed, injured, played well. The great unselfish Knicks of Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBuschere, Bill Bradley, and Dick Barnett, coached by Red Holtzman, won the game, the series, and the hearts of New Yorkers.

-- DL

"That Ship Has Sailed" by Terence Winch [by Stacey Harwood Lehman]

Terence Winch's That Ship Has Sailed (University of Pittsburgh Press) arrived last week, and reading it has given me many pleasurable hours. Here is "Father," a favorite poem that in a few brief lines conjures an entire life:

Father

I have your cuff links and tie clips.
I have a box with your IDs in them.
Your steamfitters union card from
the middle of the war. I have the toolbox
you and I made together when I was a kid.

I have the bookcase you brought home
when the Monsignor bought new furniture
for the rectory and threw it out. It's right
upstairs in my living room. I have your banjo,
which still sounds great. All I'm missing is you.

        by Terence Winch from That Ship Has Sailed 

You can read Anne Harding Woodworth's fine review in the Innisfree Poetry Journal, along with new poems by Terence Winch here.

Recommendation: "Why Dance Matters" by Mindy Aloff [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Raphael Soyer Raphael Soyer (American, b. Russia, 1899-1987) "Dancing Lesson"

I've been reading Mindy Aloff's Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press, 2022) and was delighted to see this much deserved rave review by Willard Spiegelman in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). The range and depth of Mindy's dance scholarship is, frankly, astonishing. I've had the lucky experience of attending ballet performances with Mindy, and she even agreed to join me at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to screen a film of an obscure ballet ("A Wedding Bouquet" by Fredrick Ashton with words by Gertrude Stein). Mindy's observations and insights have deepened my appreciation of ballet and now, having read Why Dance Matters, I am even more eager to contionue my exploration of the wide world of dance. 

About a third of the way through Why Dance Matters, you encounter several paragraphs that address the question "Why does looking at dance matter?" I've often left the theater having been deeply moved by a performance and desperate to hold on to the afterimages of what I've just witnessed only to have them slip away when city noise intrudes. Here's why, says Mindy:  "If you consider dancing seriously -- as something more worthy of your concentration than gazing at a Lava Lite -- then you quickly learn that even for a short, simple number there is quite a lot of information to take in, and to do so requires fast eyes, keen hearing, and a capacious memory. There are elements in any dance, regardless of the tradition or style, that are difficult simply to recognize as they go by, much less to analyze and then discuss, just as there are indeed layers of possible significance to poetry that begin to reveal themselves only after many rereadings." 

And later: 

Simply trying to appreciate what actually takes place in a dance -- the facts of dance action -- is hard enough. A more extreme brain workout is trying to witness what the dancers are doing while remaining aware of the theatrical effects or illusions their movement is intended for the audience to see. If the choreography is coordinated to a musical score, then to recognize and track points of coordination as they happen and be able to recall them later should earn you admission to Mensa. And trying to keep track of all of this while remaining receptive to whatever epiphanies of meaning the dance may provoke -- and perhaps while being overtaken by rapture, too--requires a type of multitasking in while your consciousness, so to speak, has one eye on the stage and one watching your brain be a brain. 

The reader is then invited to take a walk with Mindy among dances where "the multitasking might prove not only as usefull to brain health as sudoko but even more enjoyable."

Take the walk! Buy Why Dance Matters here. 

Dance matters. You already know this if you're a season ticket holder to the local ballet company. And it matters if you dance alone while dusting, or with your partner at a wedding or Bat Mitzvah. 

Learning how to be dead [from "Mr. Palomar" by Italo Calvino]

<<< A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important to him, and makes him say, 'How could I have lived without having read it!' and also, 'What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements to not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his whole life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. 

This is the most difficult step in learning how to be dead: to become convinced that your own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which you can add nothing and can alter none of the relationships among the various elements. Of course, those who go on living can, according to their shifting experience, introduce changes in the lives of the dead, too, giving form to what had none or what seemed to have a different form: recognizing, for example, a just rebel in someone who had felt doomed to neurosis or delirium. But these are changes that matter mostly to the living. It is unlikely that they, the dead, will profit by them. Each individual is made up of what he has lived and the way he has lived it, and non can take this away from him. Anyone who has lived in suffering is always made of that suffering; if they try to take it away from him, he is no longer himself. >>>

-- sdl

Yom Kippur, Grand Concourse, Bronx, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Renee and Huy Harwood, my parents, eager to end the Yom Kippur fast.

-- sdl

Spontaneous Aphorism: Hope

"Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent."

-- Mignon McLaughlin
The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

via The American Scholar (Summer, 2008)

The line (which has also been attributed to Jean Kerr) makes it easier to grasp why Emily Dickinson [pictured left] ends with "despair" when "hope" is expected at the end of her poem "It was not Death, because I stood up." Implicit is the image is of a shipwreck:

But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool -
Without a Chance, or spar -
Or even a Report of Land -
To justify - Despair.

Ben Jonson Proposes a Toast to Stacey Lehman on Her Birthday

 

Song: To Celia

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
        And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
         And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
         Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
         I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

         Not so much honouring thee

As giving it a hope, that there

         It could not withered be.

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

         And sent’st it back to me;

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

         Not of itself, but thee.

 

-- Ben Jonson

 

Note: Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572 --  birthday, too, of other stars from Vince Lombardi and Joe Montana to Barnabe Googe and William Styron --  which makes him a prototypical workaholic manic-depressive Gemini poet who refused to limit himself to one genre and who fathered the "tribe of Ben" -- the Cavalier poets who were, in effect, the children of his right hand, Benjamin meaning "child of my right hand" in Hebrew. 

Happy anniversary to us!

Happy anniversary to us.
With thanks to Mahinder Kingra, who snapped this shot of us at Simeon's in Ithaca on August 10, 2022.

The Definition of Gardening [poem by James Tate]

So many people in my various social media feeds are posting pictures of their gardens these days. I'm reminded of this poem, by James Tate, from his wonderful book Shroud of the Gnome. sdl

The Definition of Gardening

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.

He likes nothing better than to put on

his little overalls and his straw hat.

He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim."

But then doubt begins to set in.

He says, "What is a garden, anyway?"

And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden

begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.

He stands in the driveway a long time.

"Horticulture is a groping in the dark

into the obscure and unfamiliar,

kneeling before a disinterested secret,

slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,

birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and

destroy, pull out and apply salt,

hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,

where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,

the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,

into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,

through the nose, the earsplitting necrology

of it, the withering, shriveling,

the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder

and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,

wireworms are worse than their parents,

there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,

pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently

at me, the me who so loves to garden

because it prevents the heaving of the ground

and the untimely death of porch furniture,

and dark, murky days in a large city

and the dream home under a permanent storm

is also a factor to keep in mind."

Some People [poem by Wislawa Szymborska]

Members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine's defense forces walk with civilians during U.N.-led evacuations from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, after nearly two months of siege warfare on the city by Russia during its invasion, in a still image from handout video released May 1, 2022 by the Azov Regiment. DAVID ARAKHAMIA/AZOV REGIMENT/HANDOUT/REUTERS

Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something like all they’ve got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

What happens quietly: someone’s dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone’s bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp child back to life.

Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across another oddly reddish river.
Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane sort of circles.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or a longer while.

Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won’t be the enemy
and will let them live some sort of life.

—Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

(Ed note: Many organizations are sending aid to Ukraine. If you have a favorite, please note it in the comments. sdl)

For the Love of Ballet: In conversation with Dana Gioia [by Stacey Lehman]

New York City Ballet rehearsal of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with Edward Villella and George Balanchine, choreography by George Balanchine (New York) The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (photo © Martha Swope)

During a cultural exchange trip to Moscow in October 2007, I discovered that Dana Gioia and I share a love of ballet and of George Balanchine’s choreography in particular. It was fitting that we made this discovery while in the country that gave us Balanchine, Nureyev, Makarova, and Baryshnikov among other great dancers.

Dana and my husband David Lehman have known each other since they were young men. They worked together on the 2018 volume of The Best American Poetry. In 2003,  while Dana served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he and David shared the stage at the National Book Festival, where they read favorite American poems to a rapt audience. The trip was memorable for many reasons, chief among them that Dana arranged for David’s mother to join us. She was 88 at the time, and told us that the visit to D.C. and breakfast at the White House was a high point in her life. As a girl she had barely escaped the Nazis, and there she was, with her son, at the White House, thanks to Dana! It was thrilling.

Dana is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, and librettist. You can find out more about him here. I wanted to know more about Dana's experience of ballet. He generously agreed to answer these questions during a recent e-mail exchange.

SL: In his essay “How to Enjoy Ballet” the choreographer George Balanchine writes that “It is strange that many people think ballet is a difficult thing to enjoy. Ballet isn’t any harder to enjoy than a novel, a play, or a poem—it’s as simple to like as a baseball game” and “[we] don’t have to understand [the language of ballet] in detail to enjoy ballet, any more than we have to know about the pigments of the painter or the complex meters of the poet.” Do you agree?

DG: I came to ballet slowly. Although I was immersed in music as a high school and college student, ballet wasn’t part of my formation. I only saw ballet three or four times, always because I was interested in the music being choreographed. Ballet was expensive and felt too genteel for my taste. In the 1960s and 70s, dance in California had a sort of hand-me-down quality—conventional classics safely done mostly by visiting companies.

I started to see ballet regularly only as an adult in New York with my girlfriend and soon-to-be wife. She and a group of friends bought a large block of season tickets at the New York City Ballet. Someone in the group usually cancelled, so I would pick up the spare ticket.

In New York dance had an enormous sense of energy. The art was entirely different from what I had experienced in Los Angeles and San Francisco. During the twenty years I lived in New York there was no question that the NYCB was the preeminent performing arts institution in the city. The greatest choreographer who ever lived had formed an astonishing company to perform his masterpieces. Evenings there were an astonishment.

SL: The dance critic Arlene Croce writes of dance “afterimages,” those visions that remain in the mind’s eye long after exposure to the original. I have many such images of ballet that I can conjure (perhaps the most potent is of Karin von Aroldingen’s “siren” wrapping herself around Mikhail Baryshnikov’s “prodigal” in George Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son”). Which afterimages endure for you?

DG: Speaking of Prodigal Son, I have never forgotten the final moment of that overwhelming ballet. When I watched Mikhail Baryshnikov climb the upright body of his father and then fold himself into his arms as if he were a baby, it brought me to tears.

New York City Ballet production of "The Prodigal Son" with Mikhail Baryshnikov, choreography by George Balanchine (1979) New York Public Library Digital Collection (photo © Martha Swope)

I have many other striking memories for New York City Ballet, especially of Suzanne Farrell. But if I had to pick my favorite moment with any ballerina in that golden age, it would be Helene Alexopoulos as the heartbroken Helena in Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lost in her romantic despair, she dances around what she thinks is a tree, but which is actually the invisible Puck.

SL: Say you find yourself with an extra ticket to the New York City Ballet and you are going to invite a friend who has never seen a ballet to join you. What ballets would be on the ideal program, where in the theater would your seats be, and how would you advise your friend to help him or her overcome their skepticism?

DG: I would pick any of a dozen great Balanchine works based on well-known scores. I feel if the person recognizes the music, it’s easier to understand the dance. A couple of obvious choices would be Serenade, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Concerto Barocco, and Liebeslieder Waltzes. If the person didn’t know that much classical music, I would pick Slaughter on Tenth Avenue or Union Jack.

If I wanted to make the person addicted to ballet for the rest of his or her life,  I would pick Jerome Robbins’s homage to Fred Astaire, I’m Old Fashioned.

I would not start with abstract works set to difficult scores such as Agon or Episodes.

Suzanne Farrell as "the stripper" and Arthur Mitchell as "the hoofer" in George Balanchine's "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" (1968) The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (photo © Martha Swope)

SL: What is the ideal audience for ballet?

DG: The actual audience tends to have more women than men because more girls than boys study dance. It helps to know any art from the inside.

At the old New York City Ballet, there was surely an ideal audience for a poet. The audience was full of literary people—much more so than at the Metropolitan Opera across the plaza. During the intermissions, writers would gather around Edward Gorey, occasionally wearing his famous fur coat, who attended every performance. They would critique the performance and gossip. I would talk to Howard Moss, Edward Albee, Samuel Lipman, Richard Howard, Frederick Morgan, Paula Deitz. Sandy McClatchy, and perhaps James Merrill.

SL: Is it true that during your tenure as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (2003-2009) you were able to increase funding for the arts? Were there dance programs that you were especially pleased to support? 

DG: I was able to increase the budget of the NEA every year during my chairmanship. That allowed me to sponsor both the creation of new dance works but also help American dance companies tour. That brought dance to many communities that didn’t have their own groups.

 I had a great Dance director at the agency, Doug Sonntag. Together we worked to increase funding as well as to support a special dance critics institute—an intensive two-week workshop at a major dance festival to train newspaper arts reporter to increase coverage of regional and local companies. I also made sure that a major dancer, choreographer, or company was on the list for each year’s National Medal of Arts. We honored Suzanne Farrell, Twyla Tharp, Tommy Tune, Tina Ramirez, and Cyd Charisse, as well as the Jose Limon and Jacob’s Pillow companies. It is important for America to honor its artists.

I gave several thousand speeches as NEA chairman. The only one that terrified me was when I was asked to speak about the NEA and the City Ballet on the stage of the New York State Theater with the company waiting in the wings about to perform. I felt as if I were profaning a sacred space. I didn’t make a fool of myself, but I have never been happier to get off stage.

----

(Ed note: If you happen to be in NYC at the end of the month, you can catch a performance of Balanchine's "Prodigal Son" and "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" as part of the "Short Stories" program. I'll be there! More information here.) 

Ballet for Your Weekend [by Stacey Harwood Lehman]

Cynthia Gregory was one of the great prima ballerinas of the last century. I'd seen her American Ballet Theater performances countless times and the "after image" of her Odette-Odile in Swan Lake is indelible. She was memorable for her long expressive line, her subtle acting, the intelligence that always seemed to find something new in classic roles. She was the epitome of elegance.

Shortly after I moved to New York City in the late '70s, I went to a movie at a theater near Lincoln Center. I don't recall the feature, but before it began, this short film of Gregory dancing with Ivan Nagy rolled. It has haunted me ever since, and based on the comments below the YouTube video, which surfaced recently, others had a similar reaction. What do you think?

During those years, my sister Amy and I often attended the summer weekend matinees at Lincoln Center. One afternoon, moments before the first curtain, we grabbed a couple of empty orchestra seats we had spied from our perch in the balcony. Just as the conductor tapped his baton,a voice came over the loudspeaker to announce that Ms. Gregory would not be dancing. "Damn," I said. "You can't plan on anything these days." "Sometimes we have injuries," said the woman seated to my right. I turned. It was Cynthia Gregory, and her ankle was bandaged. I hadn't recognized her in street clothes and without stage makeup.

On another occasion, my sister and I had a post-performance snack at O'Neal's Balloon, a casual restaurant that faced the State Theater dressing room exit. Just as our drinks arrived, Cynthia Gregory stepped onto the street and into a cab. Her arms were filled with bouquets of lilies. She was wearing a white silky summer dress and a white straw hat with an enormous brim. Was she a vision or a waking dream?

-- sdl

This is an update of a post that originally appeared in 2010. 

Igor Stravinsky: "I surround myself with obstacles. . ."

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

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

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

-- sdl

George Balanchine Was a Genius: John Clifford Breaks it Down [by John Clifford]

Editor's note: I've lately been following choreographer and former principal NYC ballet dancer John Clifford on Instagram (john_cliff26) where he posts clips of notable performances along with helpful commentary. This recent post, which I'm sharing with his permission, is fascinating, even for those, like myself, who don't have the language of ballet. Clifford explains how Balanchine would choreograph "against" the music; the steps are off the beat, in much the same way that, say, Sinatra's phraseology would at times either race ahead of the musical count or hold back. I've watched Clifford's clip of Patricia McBride a dozen times and now I understand how the choreography creates a delightful tension that ultimately resolves as McBride takes her bow. Brilliant and beautiful! -- sdl

Find out more about John Clifford here. Order Balanchine's Apprentice (University Press of Florida, September 2021), here. 

The Ten Best _______ of 2021 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Instead of a usual end-of-year ten best list (books, movies, restaurants, albums, news stories) what are your ten best of something else (anxious thoughts, revenge fantasies, annoying tv commercials, famous hypocrites)? Please post in the comments. 

-- sdl

Poets on Thanksgiving: A Roundup [by Stacey Lehman]

Some favorite Thanksgiving poems, starting with this one by Terence Winch:

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)

https://theamericanscholar.org/addressing-the-universe-or-one-aspect-of-it/

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/11/the-best-thanksgiving-ever-by-jennifer-l-knox.html

from the archive; first posted November 25, 2015

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

My Parents on Yom Kippur, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

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)

Mycology [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

photos 2021 (c) Jessica Kerns

This summer we have had so much rain here in the Finger Lakes that mushrooms, both edible and toxic, are popping up everywhere and the hunters are out. Better be careful! Over on Facebook, where friends are posting photos of their fungus finds, polymath Jessica Kerns responded with an emphatic "NO!" when I asked if I could serve up a spectacular mushroom I'd spotted while walking the dog. Elsewhere she notes that "[t]he forests are magical right now. Hunting mushrooms for harvest is therapy." Scroll through her photos, above, and you'll see what she means. "Not all of these are edible," says Jessica, "but two of them are and they are delicious!" Extra credit if you can guess which to saute with butter and garlic and a splash of wine and which belong in an Agatha Christie novel.  

I'm reminded of this poem: 

Mushrooms

        by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
>>>

And this passage from The Debt to Pleasure, a favorite contemporary novel by John Lanchester, also comes to mind: 

    On the seat beside me were my wicker basket, my Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass (hardly ever used or needed), and my copy of Champignons du nos pays by Henri Romagnesi (ditto, though I also keep all six volumes of Champignons du Nord et du Midi by Andre Marchand back at the house).

    In the following account, the alert reader will notice that I am being a little bit coy about the geographical specifics. Forgive me, but we amateur mycologists, especially amateur mycologists of a culinary bent, passionately guard our favored patches of land--a promising batch of cèpes-yielding beeches here, a cropped roadside thronging with ink-caps there, a yonder patch of nettles known to feature spectacular examples of Langermannia gigantea, or the giant puffball, and somewhere else a field with a healthy quantity of cow excrement conducive to the fructation of the nasty tasting but currently popular halucinogen Psilocybe semilanceata, appropriately known in English as the Liberty Cap. (This, by the way, is not as it is sometimes taken to be, the hallucinogen used by the notorious shamans of the Koryk tribe in far Siberia, the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, ingestible via reindeer or indeed human urine, most often popularly reproduced in the image of a re-capped white-dotted toadstool, providing a convenient seat for any momentarily resting elf or fairy. The shamans call that mushroom the Wapag, after a body of magical beings who inhabit the fungi with a view to passing on secrets from the realm of the spirits.) We mushroom hunters are a secretive and wary breed, and it is through ingrained force of habit that I confine my account of the site of my labors to the description: a patch of land somewhere in the south of France. . .

Bon Appetit! 

Celebrate Independence: George Balanchine's Stars and Stripes [by Stacey Lehman]

Russian born choreographer George Balanchine loved America. It was here that his genius found its full expression in the New York City Ballet. Nowhere is that love more manifest than in the exuberant "Stars and Stripes" which Balanchine choreographed to music by John Philip Sousa, as arranged by Hershy Kay. The ballet premiered at New York's City Center on January 17, 1958, and was also on the program during the company's 1964 inaugural performance at Lincoln Center. 
On January 26, 1981, following the release of the American hostages from captivity in Iran, the New York City Ballet gave a surprise encore performance of the "Stars and Stripes" finale. In introducing the encore, principle dancer Jacques d'Amboise said that it was presented by the ''dancers, orchestra and stage crew to celebrate this event with you. Our American hostages are free at last.'' As reported in the New York Times, "Mr. d'Amboise wore a yellow ribbon on his arm and yellow ribbons adorned the orchestra music stands. As the American flag rose that traditionally ends the ballet, the audience began to clap rhythmically. At the ballet's close the dancers, led by Mr. d'Amboise and Lourdes Lopez, swept to the front, waving yellow ribbons and kerchiefs to a standing ovation." How I wish I could have been there!

 "Stars and Stripes" is one of my all-time favorite ballets. I can't keep myself from crying as the American flag unfurls behind the dancers giving their all. You can find many clips of the ballet on Youtube. Here's one that, while it doesn't include that beautiful flag, it does feature Jacques D'Amboise and Melissa Hayden from the original cast. The speed, precision, elegance, and joy of their dancing makes me want to stand up and salute.