The Best American Poetry

"At the Gate" [by Indran Amirthanayagam]

At the Gate

My mother lies down in her bed to wait,
in a white robe, hair spread on the pillow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate.

My mother said she couldn’t rise, even late.
She says take her to a nursing home tomorrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.

She speaks to her aunt, to mater and pater.
She wants to fly to Ceylon to a bungalow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gat.

Try to move your fingers, feet, shift your gait.
Try to straighten your legs, temple unfurrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.

Try, try, fall, try again. This is not fate.
This is obstinacy and wisdom not sorrow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate.

I will wait by the gate, Mummy, and tell fate,
that angel, to give us ‘til tomorrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate

Of Ithe author of this villanelle,  Terence Winch has noted, 'Indran Amirthanayagam is one of the most remarkable figures roaming the contemporary poetic landscape. Like some of the poets he most admires—Cavafy, Neruda, Hikmet (all mentioned in the poem below)—he is a citizen of the world. Born into the Catholic Tamil community (a minority within a minority) of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960, he left with his family for England when he was eight, seeking refuge from his native land’s ongoing strife as well as care for an autistic brother. He lived in the U.K. for six years, attending grammar and primary school there. When he was fourteen, the family moved again, this time to Honolulu, where his father, also a poet, had been offered a job. In Hawaii, Indran was one year ahead of Barry Obama, whom he knew slightly, at Punahou School.  In 1978, he left Hawaii for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After getting his B.A. there, he moved to New York to become, like Lorca, “a poet in New York.” He picked up a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and remained in New York until 1993, when he got a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, having  become a U.S. citizen in the late ‘80s. >>> For more, click here. The poet was also the "pick of the week" in September 2021.

A Scary Prediction from June 2012 [by David Lehman]

On January 6, 2012, we ran this piece under the heading “A Scary Prediction -- China: Better Dead Than Red”:

<<<  Back in January 2008, when the media was fixated in Iowa, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the presidency and be re-elected. Stacey can confirm this prediction. Scarcely infallible, I picked Kerry to win in 2004. Nevertheless -- I think it's fun to go on the record with a prediction, and here is mine of the season:

I believe that in my lifetime the Unted States will go to war with China. And by war I mean military conflict -- to be fought primarily on the sea. It will require the shifting of our navy to the Pacific, which is under way, and our disengagement from the fruitless and basically irrational forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, which are winding down, as the Obama Administration replaces boots on the ground with drone strikes in Pakistan and computer hacking in Iran.

Since this is an interactive blog, I invite you to choose the Sarajevo or pretext for the naval battles to come in the ironically named Pacific Ocean:

(1) China's ancient cultural conflict with Japan rears its head. The Chinese interfere with a Japanese ship, and the loss of face in Japan is such that they ask the US to intervene.
(2) Chinese efforts to control North Vietnam spills over into South Korea
(3) China presses spurious claims to mineral-rich islands off Japan and the Philippines
(4) On the corporate level, China eats America's lunch because Chinese regulations put US firms at a decisive disadvantage
(5) A recession in China exposes the fundamental contradiction between the capitalism the Chinese practice and the government's repressive policies. Google makes its inroads. Riots break out among people whose consciousness has been raised. Among the rioters are parents dying to have more children than the government permits, laborers who feel exploited, and an intellectual class that learns there is a discrepancy between the government's official line and the truth -- as in: what were the real reasons the earthquake of May 2008 was so devastating?
Your pick, dear reader?  -- DL >>>

The collage is by David Lehman Copyright (c) 2012

RJG BD [on Dick Gallup; by Ron Padgett]

RJG BD

Richard John Gallup, wake up,
it’s your birthday, or maybe you’re
already awake and the spotlight
of the day is following you around
the stage and you can’t get away,
you are shining and special all
this very day you came sliding out
and your mother said Oy vey
though she was not Jewish
and in fact had never even heard
that expression before you taught it to her,
but let me explain that she said it
because having a child can hurt
and plenty, and being a child can hurt too,
which is why we never grow up or if we do
we’re awful, so it’s great that you never did
and I never did and probably won’t,
for even though we might totter and drool
we can always say Oy vey!

—Ron Padgett
2003 (previously unpublished)

Here's the cover of Ron Padgett's forthcoming book, a memoir of Dick Gallup, which Cuneiform Books will publish.

James Earl Jones (1931-2024) reads "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

For Friday the 13th:

"Unforgettable" [by David J. Rothman]

Unforgettable

            --in memoriam Emily Desire Gaynor Rothman, 1964-2020

Let me forget all that reminds me of

You: the shoes, heels worn down the way your gait

Would wear them, the photos, rings pledged with love,

The documents from your dissolved estate,

Our wedding china, sons, notes to yourself,

The boxes, stones and shells that you collected,

The old ski gear, the stylish belts, the shelf

Of jewelry that you carefully selected

With instructions to give it to friends.

And let me soon forget the sound of your

Low voice when you said After my life ends,

I hope you wait a while, but then live your

Life. Find another woman. Live your life.

If I forget all that, will you return, my wife?

-- When young, David J. Rothman had the good fortune to study with Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand and Robert Fitzgerald. His most recent books are a textbook, Learning the Secrets of English Verse (Springer 2022), co-authored with Susan Spear, and My Brother’s Keeper (Lithic 2019). "Unforgettable" is one of two poems by David J. Rohman in the current issue of The Hudson Review.

Leopardi's "The Infinite" [translated by Henry Weinfield]

THE INFINITE
Giacomo Leopardi

Dear to me always was this lonely hill,
This hedgerow also, which to such extent
Keeps the horizon hidden from the view.
But sitting here and gazing brings to mind
Interminable spaces, superhuman
Silences, and the very deepest calm
Beyond what sight perceives, till what I feel
Is on the verge of fear. And when the wind
Is rustling through these branches, I compare
The infinite silence to this voice I hear.
And then eternity returns to me,
And the dead seasons and the present one
Alive with all the sounds it bears. And so,
My thought is shipwrecked in immensity,
And sweet it is to drown in such a sea.

(1819)

Roger Eagle [by John Harbourne]

from the artist John Harbourne, this missive from Liverpool:

<<<
The drawing was done in 2017. It’s a portrait of Roger Eagle, who was manager of the world famous Eric’s club in Mathew Street, Liverpool in the 1970s. In the 60s, Roger had been DJ at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, where he played his vast collection of R&B records and eventually promoted his favourite artists, who came over to Britain to play. Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker and Howling Wolf were just a few of the famous names he promoted over here. 

The jukebox in Eric's club was famously eclectic, full of Roger's favourite music and was an education to many of us back in the day. My drawing shows three of his favourite artists: Bo Diddley, Charlie Parker and King Tubby (on the lapel badge).

>>>

johnharbourneartist.com

Jack Kerouac, Columbia's football star [by Mitch Sisskind]

I have enjoyed reading on this site about Jack's outstanding work in Mark Van Doren's class at Columbia. However, while it may be true that Jack quit the football team after receiving an 'A' in the class, this is not actually why he quit the team. In 'Vanity of Dulouz,' one of his last books -- it may even have been posthumous -- Jack makes it very clear that he left the team out of frustration at the Columbia Coach. The Coach's real name was Lou Little, and I believe in the book Jack refers to him as Lou Libble. Here he is...

As the book describes it, Little (or Libble) had a tremendous fixation on a reverse play called KF-79. He had won a game with it thousands of years ago, when he was so happy he fell off his dinosaur. Now he kept insisting that Kerouac practice this play over and over, which pissed Jack off. Plus, Jack had broken his leg sometime earlier and Lou had moved him down in the depth chart, very unfairly in Jack's opinion. So Jack left the team. In fact, not long afterward he left Columbia altogether.

Jack was a good player in high school in Massachusetts, and I believe he did a postgraduate year at Horace Mann School where he also played. He was probably the best football playing writer ever, certainly the best since U. of Penn All-American T. Truxton Hare in the early years of the 20th century. 'Vanity of Dulouz' is one of the best books ever about football, although only the opening section actually deals with the game. Jack had the ability (like Homer) to magnify a small incident like a football game into something on the scale of the Normandy invasion. 'Dulouz' is really good, and you feel like you're right next to Jack on the field, or on your barstool.

However, the all time best book on football -- in fact, it's in a completely different league than any other football book -- is Don Delillo's End Zone. Which is wonderful, because unless I am mistaken Delilo did not play the game past the high school level and I'm not sure he even played high school ball. In this sense he's a kind of Stephen Crane, who wrote convincingly about combat without having taken part in it. Well, Tolstoy said if you've seen a street fight you can write about a war. If you've seen Mr. Smee, you can write about Captain Hook. If you've seen a dachshund, you can write about a Shar Pei. Trust me!

from the archive; July 27, 2008

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes [by Thomas Gray]

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

'Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide
The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A Favourite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.

-- Thomas Gray

with thanks to Henri Matisse for the great painting. A critic recently wrote that "One poem like Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' will drag you into anthologies forever, no matter how dull your other poems."  Thomas Gray is anything but dull in such poems as this one, or "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," about which I wrote this..Here is an excerpt from the piece.  DL

 <<<
I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate.
>>>   

https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

https://panoply.fm/podcasts/slatepoetry/episodes/yfUbNxo70OwA8us0iCy0K

Tom Hall interviews Mary Jo Salter about BAP 2024

https://www.wypr.org/show/midday/2024-09-03/the-best-american-poetry-of-2024

Midday

The Best American Poetry of 2024

By Tom Hall, 

Teria Rogers

Published September 3, 2024 at 12:40 PM EDT

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster

The Best American Poetry 2024, edited by Mary Jo Salter

Tom's guest is Mary Jo Salter, a Professor Emerita in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She has published nine volumes of poetry and has written essays, lyrics, and children’s books. This year, she’s been chosen as the guest editor of an anthology of verse called The Best American Poetry 2024. 

Salter will discuss this new anthology this evening[(Setpember 3, 2024: our official pub date]at The Ivy Bookshop.

Courtesy Photo

Mary Jo Salter, poet and former professor at Johns Hopkins University

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Midday MiddayWYPR Programs

JA & Paul Auster remembered in "The Forward"

By Daniel Witkin

How Poets And Novelists Are Mourning John Ashbery

September 6, 2017

John Ashbery was among the very greatest poets of the postwar era, one of the most imaginative and accurate chroniclers of what he called “the experience of experience.”

But he might have blanched to hear himself spoken of in such portentous, non-poetic terms. Following Ashbery’s passing on September 3, his friends and acolytes offered reminiscences that shed light on the person behind some of our era’s most challenging and enchanting verse.

David Lehman, a poet and the editor of The Best American Poetry series, included in his remembrance for The American Scholar a mention of sharing an office with Ashbery in the 1970s. He noted that “It was also fun to observe as things JA said in interviews entered the general discourse. For example, ‘Often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.’ And: ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.’”

Reflecting on him in the Times, poet Rae Armantrout reflected on how Ashbery’s down-to-earth humor manifested within his poems. “He is one poet who can somehow be simultaneously elegiac and playful, even goofy,” she wrote. “If you could find the impossible space where Franz Kafka overlapped with the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, John would be sitting there happily, grinning like the Cheshire cat.”

In a piece for The New Yorker, poet and novelist Ben Lerner imagined Ashbery inserting some jokes into his tribute in an august periodical, like Tom Sawyer spying on his pomp and ceremony of his own funeral. “I’m dizzied by my luck at having overlapped with John Ashbery, one of the good things about being born when I was,” Lerner wrote.

Innisfree (eg. Greg McBride): Poems by David Lehman

Dutch Interior

He liked the late afternoon light as it dimmed
In the living room, and wouldn’t switch on
The electric lights until past eight o’clock.
His wife complained, called him cheerless, but
It wasn’t a case of melancholy; he just liked
The way things looked in air growing darker
So gradually and imperceptibly that it seemed
The very element in which we live. Every man
And woman deserves one true moment of greatness
And this was his, this Dutch interior, entered
And possessed, so tranquil and yet so busy
With details: the couple’s shed clothes scattered
On the backs of armchairs, the dog chasing a shoe,
The wide open window, the late afternoon light.

Click here for this special issue of Innisfree, edited by Greg McBride, with a portfolio of poems by David Lehman.

paintings by David Lehman. copyright (c) 2024 by David Lehman

"The Best American Poetry" 2024": Pub Date Today (Sept 3, 2024)

Mary Jo Salter will be the guest of Tom Hall's renowned  "Midday Show" today probably between 12:40 PM and 1 PM East Coast Time .https://www.wypr.org/show/midday

<<<See https://lithub.com/lit-hub-daily-september-3-2024/ for a sneak peak at Mary Jo's amazing intro as published in Literary Hub:

We Are All Nobody: Mary Jo Salter on Finding Beauty and Community in Poetry

“Let’s try to put our own vanities aside when we write poems, and let’s read the poems by other people that make us feel most alive.”

By Mary Jo Salter

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” asked Emily Dickinson. It’s clear to many of us who she was and is—one of the greatest poets ever—and certain poems of hers suggest she knew it herself. Still, she had a sense of humor about swelled heads, and we love the zinger that concludes her eight-line Nobody poem:

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

Readers delight in these lines because we recognize the empty pomposity that too often afflicts people (that is, other people). We also suspect that the hermetic Dickinson (who eschewed publication, dismissing it as “the Auction / Of the Mind of Man”) seems specifically to be skewering that subset of people called writers: the people who may have little to tell us other than their bylines, but who look to the admiring “bog” to confirm their brilliance. And among the general class of writers, which includes bestselling novelists and blockbuster screenwriters, we poets risk being the most deluded about our prospect of fame in that bog, now or ever.

The greatest poems may even, in exemplifying beauty, just marginally re-define it.

The business of poets, I would argue, includes at least some of these aspirations: to witness the world, including the layered, shifting moods of their own minds’ interiors; to feel deeply and also to think through their feelings; to experience life with all of the senses, which sometimes get profitably jumbled; to express some aspect of the human comedy and the human tragedy by exploiting the unique resources of a particular language or languages; to suggest with figures like simile or metaphor the surprising congruity of seemingly unlike things; to speak to their contemporaries about contemporary matters; to place themselves also within the history of humankind, including the history of literature, and to add something to it; to channel our universal musical instincts, our childlike but never merely childish love of song; to dare to remain uncertain and paradoxical and inconclusive as life itself, while also making a finished “thing,” a poem, of beauty. The greatest poems may even, in exemplifying beauty, just marginally re-define it, sometimes without the awareness of the reader.

>>>

and furthermore, https://www.theivybookshop.com/event/the-best-american-poetry-2024-with-guest-editor-mary-jo-salter/

Here at last: "New American Writing" no. 42

This special issue edited by Paul Hoover has been eagerly anbicipated for months by the Cognoscentis, one of the five families that meet at the cafe in Little Italy where fortunes are bet, lost, and recovered, from a corner table. Among the poets included are such all-stars as Elaine Equi, Donald Revell,  Vincent Katz, Maxine Chernoff, and Jerome Sala. The new issue of New American Writing is now available from MadHat Press online or by mail, PO Box 01225, Cheshire, MA 01225. $15.

 

See "Picnic" on Labor Day [by DL]

Hal Carter (William Holden), a football star in college and a failure at everything since, hops off a freight train with nothing but the ragged shirt on his back. He arrives at a last resort: the small town in Kansas where his fraternity mate, Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), the well-to-do son of an industrialist, lives. It is Labor Day, 1955, and everyone has the day off, but Hal offers to do back-yard work for Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton), the kindly old lady who feeds him and obligingly offers to wash his shirt, thus giving us a look at his buff, shaven chest.

The “us” in that last sentence includes Benson’s girlfriend, Madge Owens (Kim Novak at her most stunning). At the town’s annual Labor Day picnic, Madge will be crowned the Queen of the Neewollah (Halloween spelled backwards). Many, including Millie (Susan Strasberg), Madge’s young sister, drink too much at the picnic, and Hal gets blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Neither Holden nor Novak is a natural dancer, but when they dance at the picnic to the tune of “Moonglow,” the sparks fly. Whereas Novak and James Stewart play out a passionate romance on the interior level of the psyche in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the physical attraction between Novak and Holden is electric. Benson castigates the “same old Hal” to whom he had earlier promised a job, albeit as a “wheat scooper” rather than the executive positon Hal had unrealistically hoped for. Hal leaves town the same way he arrived, only this time, Madge packs a suitcase and plans to take a bus to meet him in Tulsa.

Rosalind Russell and Arthur O’Connell give outstanding performances as the town’s frustrated schoolmarm and her reluctant suitor, who must settle for what small-town life can give them. Joshua Logan directed this film adaptation of William Inge’s Broadway play. See Picnic on Labor Day weekend if you can. It’s hot.

For recommendations on movies for Halloween (Arsenic and Old Lace) and Thanksgiving (Hannah and Her Sisters), click here  for my "Talking Pictures" feature that appeared in The American Scholar of August 28, 2021.

from the archive; posted Labor Day 2022

September 1, 1939” [by W. H. Auden]

Here it is again: September 1, 1939, seventy-eight years later. Can you picture Auden at that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked the earth? One of the best stanzas is a metaphorical description of that bar and others like it.

Quiz of the day:
WHA disliked the last line of the penultimate stanza because he felt it was "dishonest," by which I think he meant "untrue."

He changed it to
(1) We must love one another and die
(2) We must love one another or die
(3) We must love one another or diet
(4) One must love mother nature or die
(5) If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Light up a Winston and think of dear Wystan. Bragging rights go to the winner!

Roadside Stand [poem by Charles Simic]

Earlybird Farm Stand (closed), Newfield NY

If you travel the back roads at this time of year, you might get lucky and come across a roadside stand where seasonal produce is for sale. Oftentimes these work on the honor system: there's a price list for the produce, and a can or box where you deposit your money. Some stands sell a single crop, others sell a wide variety of whatever is ripe and ready. Whenever I pass one of these places, I pull over. I'm reminded of this poem by Charles Simic: 

Roadside Stand
                    -- by Charles Simic

In the watermelon and corn season,
The earth is a paradise, the morning
Is a ripe plum or a plump tomato
We bite into as if it were the mouth of a lover.

Despite the puzzled face of the young fellow
In scarecrow overalls reading a comic book,
It’s all there, the bell peppers, the radishes,
Local blueberries and blackberries
That will stain our lips and tongue
As if we were freezing to death in the snow.

The kid is bored, or pretends to be,
While watching the woman pick up a melon
And press its rough skin against her cheek.
What makes people happy is a mystery,
He concludes as he busies himself
Straightening crumpled bills in a cigar box.

"Corn Dog with David Lehman" photo@Stacey Lehman

-- sdl

Erasers [by Mary Jo Salter]

Erasers

As punishment, my father said, the nuns
     would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day's erasers.

Punishment? The pounding symphony
     of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm's length overhead

(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
     powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)

was more than remedy, it was reward
     for all the hours they'd sat
without a word (except for passing notes)

and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
     black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk

baton, the only one who got to talk.
     Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,

poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
     My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black

chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
     those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices

gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
     can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn't spell

this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
     who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.

"Erasers" is from Open Shutter by Mary Jo Salter (2003). The poem was Terence Winch's "Pick of the Week" on June 13, 2021.

And summer's lease hath all too short a date. . . [the best comments of 2021]

<<< On August 10, 2021, Barbara Lemon said: I was very interested and studied "New Trilling Essay the Talk of the Town" at my leisure. To be honest, I really liked it. In fact it displays a high level of professionalism. I recommend my own blogsite in addition to "The Liberal Imagination," which is boss, also "The Opposing Self," although I didn't get all the references, and "Beyond Culture," which really points the way forward by looking back over the other's shoulder and seeing something as grim as what Lot's wife may have witnessed, although reports of that event disagree. >>>

<<<Martha Ullman West said: This is a wonderful interview with [Suzanne] Farrell, questions and answers, both. Farrell, in describing the specifics of working with Balanchine, says many of the same things Todd Bolender told me and and many others about working with him in the studio (which he did from 1940 to 1960, originating roles in Four Temperaments, Ivesiana, and Agon, to name a few). I interviewed Bolender extensively for my book, Todd Bolender, Janet Reed and the Making of American Ballet; Bolender, who was arguably Balanchine's first choreographic apprentice, was particularly interesting about analyzing roles, which Balanchine left up to the dancers, never in fact seems to have mentioned. And Emily [Fragos], my copy of the Everyman anthology of dance poetry was given me by Ursula Le Guin. I value your work.>>

<<< Bruno Anthony said:
I totally agree with Ms. [Lilly] King and hate the idea of "going for gold" and "settling for silver" as if the latter were a consolation prize. Another thing the announcers can do to improve their presentation is to shut up -- to allow some silence rather than talking all the time. Also, to honor the athletes who finished two seconds slower than the top three. >>>

Howard Bass wrote regarding Gardner McFall's "First Kiss", our pick of the week, on July 4, 2012):
<<<This terrific poem brought back a vivid memory from my own elementary school years. In 4th grade (or thereabouts) we were taught to make candles by dipping our wicks (ok, there's a vulgar image for you) into a big vat of melted wax. We'd file into the school kitchen, dip, and go out, circling in and out of the kitchen as the wax hardened and our candles thickened. So some students were in the kitchen, others outside waiting to go back in. A couple of the boys kissed Lynn Kaiser and they dared me to do it, too. So I did, kissing her on her forehead, just at the moment when the teacher looked out at us from the kitchen (no doubt we caused something of a commotion). So while Larry and Mark got away with it, I had to stay after school and receive a stern lecture from said teacher. I was not, she declared, a gentleman! I took my punishment like a gentleman and did not implicate the other kissers. Poetry can have a powerful effect on memory--this one really worked for me! Many thanks for posting it, T >>>

On June 13, 2021, Dr. Earle Hitchner said, re a "pick of the week" selection by Terence Winch:
<<< Among the questions simmering in Mary Jo Salter’s skillfully constructed poem is this: What gets erased in the formation of character by inculcating and then enforcing acquiescence in adolescents? Salter shakes off the dusty notion of rote compliance and imposed silence as conducive to learning. The noisy boys turn affliction into fun, thus temporarily thwarting their martinet nun’s discipline by speaking and behaving as the boys they are. Brava to Salter for this bravura verse lending voice to these “unrecorded voices,” including her father’s. >>>

 

 

 

 

On May 14, Ken Deifik said, responding to Lera Auerbach's "Viennese Traffic Lights": << I'm sure you know the German saying that the Austrians want us to think Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. I got to visit with my mother in '75. She was born and raised there, and sent to America at 16. She showed me the concrete tool shed on the Ringstrasse where she was imprisoned overnight for the crime of sitting on a bench while Jewish. It was still there 36 years later, probably still holding tools. Her parents got her out of the country ASAP after that. They were not so lucky, themselves.>>

May 14, 2021 on Viennese Traffic Li…

 

On January 31, Don Berger wrote appreciatively of Ron Padgett, whose poem "Morning" was chosen by Terence Winch as his "pick of the week." << This fable is characteristically fabulous work from Ron Padgett, whose poems I've loved since first learning of him from James Tate in the late seventies. His translation of Cendrars is my Bible and will always be (I own two copies, just in case!). In this poem "Morning," myth marries history--imagination's in its highest gear, clarity and direct speech form the great groundwork, fun wins! >>> Posted by: Don Berger | January 31, 2021 at 12:30 PM

On May 7, 2021, Emily Fragos responded to Mindy Aloff's piece on Jacques D'Amboise: <<< I well remember seeing Jacques d'Amboise partnering the great Suzanne Farrell in Balanchine's late masterpiece, Davidsbundlertanze, music by Schumann. It was at the end of his glorious career. When he carried Farrell offstage, the audience gasped. It was one of Balanchine's most breathtakingly beautiful and haunted moments. What genius! What divine dancers! I am so grateful that I got to see it. >>>

On May 6, 2021 in resonse to "On Freud's Birthday: The Definitive What Do Women Want?", Jill Newnham wrote:
<<<
Is Peace Corpse [a] typo or error for Peace Corps?
>>>

<<< Emily Lloyd said, regarding this post by Jenny Factor on the subject of Sappho:

"Transgressive love has to unmake the world a little before it gets on with loving. All other love only has to knock over the Self. So Sappho (who existed in the day when Hera could still order Zeus around) was the first non-transgressive lesbian erotic poet because there's not an iota of shame in her. Take a look at this fragmentary sample..." Yes, but--for whom was Sappho writing? Herself, her lover/beloved? In which case, the idea of apology or shame or identity consciousness or politics wouldn't really enter (or be near as likely to enter) into it, would it? How often are we writing in such deliriously pure circumstances? Good post. Thanks. >>>

<<<

Timothy Swain said, re "An Interview with A. E. Stalling by Aspen Matis":

A.E. Stallings is one of our greatest poets today. I've been following her for years--her translations, too; everything is superb!

May 29, 2021 >>>

 

<<< Molly Arden said, in response to "Larkin, Uncensored":

Bill Lawgen und Mary Syer

Wurden letzten Mittwoch Mann und Frau.

Hoch sollen sie leben, hoch, hoch, hoch!

Als sie drin standen vor dem Standesamt,

Wusste er nicht, woher ihr Brautkleid stammt,

Aber sie wusste seinen Namen nicht genau.

Hoch!

Wissen Sie, was Ihre Frau treibt? Nein!

Lassen Sie Ihr Lasterleben sein? Nein!

Hoch sollen sie leben, hoch, hoch, hoch!

Billy Lawgen sagte neulich mir:

Mir genügt ein kleiner Teil von ihr!

Das Schwein.

Hoch!

-- Brecht und Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper

 

 

 

Richard Kirschenbaum said re Lawrence J. Epstein's post "The Little-Known Film That Changed History" (Pimpernel Smith, 1941), a post that went up on July 12, 2013:
<<< All true with the possible exception of the Churchill inspired mission to keep Spain out of the war. By June 1943 there was little danger of Spain joining the Axis. Franco was far too savvy for that. Hitler had pressured Franco to join him in October 1940 when nobody could give you a reasonable scenario by which the Nazis could lose. Even then Franco said no, causing Hitler to state that he would rather have three or four teeth yanked out than have to deal with Franco again. Still a great film with no small amount of humor from that "Finest Hour" of British history when they held the line for civilization and all looked bleakest. The author of this post is sooooooo correct about the significance of the time line.  May 21, 2021 >>>

 

Alan Ziegler writes, re this post of May 14, 2021 ("Poets, Law and Order, and Criminal Intent")

<<< And there's this dialogue from [Dick Wolf's] Law and Order the Original:

Librarian: Verlaine was the real talent, you know. Rimbaud just latched onto his coattails and wouldn’t let go.
Briscoe: We were just saying that on the way over here.
Librarian: He shot him.
Briscoe: Who shot who?
Librarian: Verlaine popped Rimbaud. Paul loved Arthur. Paul also loved Matilda. It was a whole mess. The French—what do you expect?
Briscoe: So can you tell us if you sold any copies recently?
Librarian: If you really want decadent, I’d stick with Baudelaire.
May 19, 2021 at 09:04 AM  >>>

Alan Ziegler writes, re this post on The Asphalt Jungle:

<<< My father told me it was essential that I see The Asphalt Jungle in order to understand his father, a bank robber, jewel thief, and frequent convict. My grandfather always worked with a crew of specialists (he was the one who could crack the safe).>>> April 20, 2021 at 05:22 PM

On "Remembering Bob Hershon" by Terence Winch, Justin Jamail writes on March 24, 2021.
<<<<
Bob published my first book. He and Charles North invited me to read with them at Zinc Bar. Just two of countless generosities large and small. I used to bring beers and my children to his house for talks. When we would leave, he would say "goodbye sweetheart" to my then two year old daughter in his gruff voice and she would shout in a tiny voice "goodbye sweetheart!" in return, and Donna would wonder what was going on downstairs. He was a good hugger and a good neighbor.

I think I never left a conversation with Bob without learning the names of writers or other interesting people who had been part of his life in one way or another. >>>

[Pictured left to right: David Lehman, Bob Hershon, Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally]

Also re "Remembering Bob Hershon" by Terence Winch, Maureen Owen writes on March 25, 2021 09:19 AM:

<< One of my greatest joys has been hanging out with Bob and Donna [Brook] in their kitchen, talking poetry and perfect avocados. Whenever I visited NY, after I moved to Denver, Bob and Donna would insist I stay with them and even set up museum visits and readings we must go to. In the evenings we would walk over to one of their favorite Brooklyn restaurants, having invited others to join us, and have amazing delicious rollicking dinners. Pure fun to be in the presence of Donna, who could tell all wonderful stories about Hanging Loose authors, and Bob, a rigorous, generous, co-editor of one of the most important small presses ever and all his incredible, passionate energy transforming the space around him. That energy and zen-of-the-moment presence flooded his poetry and gave us all a bigger than life poem that was totally a poem about everyday life and all of its sense and nonsense. A poet of his beloved Brooklyn, of place and all place, his voice spoke to and for us all. He will be sorely missed, but never missing. >>>

Joanie Mackowski wrote, in response to "Most Popular Funeral Songs" (March 6, 2021):

<<< Great post. Songs to go out to, to be gone by. I second or third Denise's nomination for "Is That all There is"-- such a weird & wonderful song. My own nomination is "Words of Love," as sung by Mama Cass Elliot: a song for going to new places-- https://youtu.be/2b6rm5yTx44 >

Hey, that’s not Mama Cass, that’s Helen Forrest!

Mark C Minton said, re "The Haiku Masters of Japan Drop in For a Visit" by David Lehman (Feb 15, 2021)

Thanks, David. This might be a bit more Japanese:

Pond
Splash
Frog

The reason I worried this small point is that the second half of the haiku is very ambiguous in Japanese. The first item in the sequence referring to the "old pond" is followed by the "cutting phrase" "ya," which separates it as an object from the remainder of the haiku. The second half is meant to be read as one flowing unit -- frog jumping and water sounding. Basho chose to express this grammatically in a way so that the leaping frog modifies the water sound. So, it is literally something like "frog-leaping water sound." So, in English word order this would conventionally lead to putting the frog last in the sequence, such as "the sound of water made by a frog leaping into it" But this is pedestrian, awkward and not mysterious in any way. The manner in which Basho did this, however,creates a "which came first, chicken or egg?" feeling, fusing the splash and the leaping frog into a single phenomenon. This is reinforced because Basho places no cutting phrase "ya" between the mention of the leaping frog and the water sound. Thus, he enacts what haiku is made for: like a koan, a bit of cognitive confusion provoking thoughts about the true nature of perception. Seems to me the sequence I suggested -- Pond,Splash, Frog-- best recreates this authorial intention in English. Best, Mark
February 22, 2021
>>>

[What I wrote was "Frog, / Pond, / Splash." I am sure the very syntax reveals my subjective Western response to Basho's situation. I instinctively identified the frog as the actor; the more Japanese way of looking at it is from the point of view of the tranquil pond.-  DL]

 

 

Ron writes, in response to "The Master of Gamblers" (January 17, 2021)

 

"Do not, beloved, regret that you yielded to me so quickly:
I entertain no base, insolent thoughts about you.
Arrows of Cupid work divers effects. Some do but scratch us:
Slow and insidious these poison our hearts over years.
Yet with a head freshly honed and cunningly fledged, certain

     others
Pierce to the marrow, inflame rapidly there our blood.
When gods and goddesses in days of heroes made love, then
Lust followed look and desire, with no delay, was indulged.
Surely you don't think the goddess of love lost a moment

    reflecting
When, in Idean grove, Anchises caught her eye.
Nor did Luna delay about kissing that beautiful dreamer—
Jealous Aurora had else hastily wakened the lad.
At the loud banquet Hero regarded Leander—then promptly
Into dark waters he plunged, ardently swam toward his love.
When Rhea Silvia, princess and virgin, came down to the Tiber
Just to fetch water, a god seized her and that is the way
Mars begat himself sons, a pair of twins whom a she wolf
Suckled. Today a proud Rome claims to be queen of the

    world..."

 

 

On April 10, 2021,Suzanne said in response to "Who Said It?"

<<< What is Ava Gardner doing in this post? Answer: Ava Gardner knows who said "If the Kennedy White House was decadent, the Clinton White House was sordid." But -- as we can tell by the expression on her face -- she's not talkin'. Where can I redeem my points? >>>

 

 

<<< On August 21, 2021, Derrida invoked his concept of the Pharmakon in relation to this New York Post cover of 8/21/21:

“(the pharmakon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, neither penis nor vagina; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference; the clitoris is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc., but hidden as if by common tribal consent; the left tit is neither a signifier nor a signified, the right tit is neither a sign nor a thing, neither a right wing presence nor a left wing absence, neither a position nor a nightgown, etc.; spacing is neither space nor time; nyet; et la langue Doc (Papa); neither you nor he nor any of my envious enemies can define what you can’t define and that includes deconstruction, the big-time bug spray at the border of Plato and solider Aristotle; the incision is either the circumcised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, and the orgone-box lather as prescribed by Wilhelm Reich, no longer in favor, but tested only in theory; that is, simultaneously either or, but also, and not even; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc., and not just the victim of a hoax.”) DL  8/21/21>>>

On August 30, 2021 at 08:33 AM David Beaudouin responded to Chaucer Gets Canceled 
<<< Sadly, this critical attitude, couched in current correctness, is strangely blind to the fact that folks in the 14th century simply did not behave or think the way we do today. It's thus a specious argument to expect them retrospectively to do so or else be censored. And may I add that Chaucer authored what's considered to be one of the first feminist narratives in the English Language, the Wife of Bath's Tale. >>>

"The Desire to Paint" [by Charles Baudelaire]

Unhappy the man, but happy the artist who blazes with desire.

I burn to paint the woman who visits me once in a blue moon and always makes an abrupt exit, like the ghost in a hotel room, something the previous occupant left behind with her nightgown. It’s been a long time since I last saw her.

She is as beautiful as the black of her nocturnal dress.  Her eyes are two dark caverns where dim lights flicker and go out, but when she fixes you in her gaze they light up again, a blaze of light in the dark.

Shall I compare her to a black sun? I can picture a sky full of dark stars that have supplanted the lighted ones to which pursuers of happiness aim their prayers. But it is usually the moon that she makes me dream of. It’s the moon that acts on her, changes her; not the idyllic white moon that resembles a cold bride, but a sinister drunk-making moon suspended among clouds driven by storm winds at midnight; not the moon that presides over the devout dreamer’s slumber, but a moon ripped from the heavens, a small planet where revolutions follow conquests and even the witches of Thessaly dare not dance upon the ground.

In her brow you can see her undying hunger for prey. But her nostrils flare, she smiles a smile that glitters with grace, and when she laughs, her wide-open mouth, white teeth, red lips, make you dream of a flower that opens miraculously atop a volcano.

Some women arouse in you the unyielding desire to woo them and win them. But she makes you wish to die in her arms slowly as she watches, and flinches not.

Le desire de peindre by Charles Baudelaire; translated by David Lehman
first published in Conduit 

Comments

On August 30, 2021 at 08:33 AM David Beaudouin responded to Chaucer Gets Canceled 
<<< Sadly, this critical attitude, couched in current correctness, is strangely blind to the fact that folks in the 14th century simply did not behave or think the way we do today. It's thus a specious argument to expect them retrospectively to do so or else be censored. And may I add that Chaucer authored what's considered to be one of the first feminist narratives in the English Language, the Wife of Bath's Tale. >>>