The Best American Poetry

Darragh Park's cover for "New American Writing" (#1, 1987)

In 1987, Darragh Park did the wraparound cover for the first issue of New American Writing (edited by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover). The magazine had been formerly known as Oink! Here is the front:

Wallace Stevens and the Iambic Line

from "Sunday Morning"
:

<<<
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

>>>

 

Is there a better example of the pentameter line in modern American poetry? The only real competition -- diferfent in every other way -- comes from Robert Frost. 

"The End" [by David Lehman]

from Harvard Review

The End

by David Lehman

The day Graham Greene died
I didn’t know he had died
but months before I’d written
a poem and called it “The End
of the Affair” stealing his title
and on this April day in 1991
I went to the Blue Fox bookstore
which no longer exists
on Aurora Street in Ithaca
and bought “The End of the Affair”
thinking it was time I read it
and I started reading it right away
it was great he really knew adultery
and I still remember the surprise
when you find out whom Bendrix
loses Sarah to, the one rival he
could never hope to vanquish,
the God who answered her prayer
I stayed up all night reading
reached the end and the next day
on the radio he died

Published on May 1, 2017

See also "Epiphany"

"May Day" [by Nicholas Christopher]

The demented song of a woman
forty four people in this city
die of the same disease

Her voice rises and falls
between two notes
up and down the scale
two words unintelligible at first

She is unseen invisible out of sight
maybe no more out of her mind
than anyone else
except that she has taken herself

to a dark corner crying out
not for help
not for the sick and suffering
not for those who embrace or reject death

not for the healers
but for no one:
the two words — clear now —
that she's been wailing to everyone.

Nicholas Christopher is the author of nine books of poems, most recently Crossing the Equator and On Jupiter Place, seven novels, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night.  He lives in New York City.

The poem appears in TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS: AMERICA’S POETS RESPOND TO THE PANDEMIC edited by Alice Quinn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). 

Nic says he wrote this poem on a day when a woman was "wailing on a street corner I could not see from my window.  She went on for hours while I was at my desk, and at some point I pushed aside the work I was involved in and wrote the poem on a lined pad with my fountain pen." 
Photo credit: Constance Christopher.

from the archive; first posted July 17, 2020

The demented song of a woman
forty four people in this city
die of the same disease

Her voice rises and falls
between two notes
up and down the scale
two words unintelligible at first

She is unseen invisible out of sight
maybe no more out of her mind
than anyone else
except that she has taken herself

to a dark corner crying out
not for help
not for the sick and suffering
not for those who embrace or reject death

not for the healers
but for no one:
the two words — clear now —
that she's been wailing to everyone.

Nicholas Christopher is the author of nine books of poems, most recently Crossing the Equator and On Jupiter Place, seven novels, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night.  He lives in New York City.

The poem appears in TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS: AMERICA’S POETS RESPOND TO THE PANDEMIC edited by Alice Quinn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). 

Nic says he wrote this poem on a day when a woman was "wailing on a street corner I could not see from my window.  She went on for hours while I was at my desk, and at some point I pushed aside the work I was involved in and wrote the poem on a lined pad with my fountain pen." 
Photo credit: Constance Christopher.

from the archive; first posted July 17, 2020

On the First of May: "While you love your lover let / blue skies be your cover-let" [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

You can find on Youtube many terrific cover versions of Rogers and Hart's "Mountain Greenery," a song that made its debut in the 1926 "Garrick Gaities." I love Lee Wiley's take though she omits the fabulous introductory verse as do Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore in a jazzy duet that aired in a 1962 episode of the Dick Van Dyke show. 

I'm partial to Bing Crosby's version (confession: it was my warmup song during morning runs along the waterfront in New York City). You just can't beat his phrasing, which calls attention to those witty Lorenz Hart rhymes. And dig those horns in Buddy Bragmen's arrangement!

 

Mountain Greenery (Rogers & Hart)

On the first of May
It is moving day
Spring is here, so blow your job
Throw your job away
Now's the time to trust
To your wanderlust
In the city's dust you wait
Must you wait?
Just you wait!

In our mountain greenery
Where God paints the scenery
Just two crazy people together
While you love your lover, let
Blue skies be your coverlet
When it rains, we'll laugh at the weather
And if you're good
I'll search for wood
So you can cook
While I stand look-
Ing
Beans could get no keener re-
Ception in a beanery
Bless our mountain greenery home!

In our mountain greenery
Where God paints the scenery
Just two crazy people together
How we love sequestering
Where no pests are pestering
No dear mama holds us in tether
Mosquitos here
Won't bite you, dear
I'll let them sting
Me on the fing-
Er
We could find no cleaner re-
Treat from life's machinery
Than our mountain greenery home.

-- sdl

The Sixties [by Bill Wadsworth]

The Sixties

 

The cruelties of April

            and mornings in America still

                        reverberate even now

on the further side of the hill

            with our sixties behind us

                        and the day getting late

and the old wars behind us

            and our hair turned white

                        there's a late snowfall

melting fast into the Hoosic

            River there's a natural bridge

                        the water rushes below and through

and down over ledges into a gorge

            so deep no one can see how

                        it ends or if it ends at all

(4//22/23)

"The Sixties" is a 15-line sonnet written in response to a birthday sonnet sent to me by my old friend and collaborator David Lehman.  The poem looks back to the historical experience we've shared, and forward to the time when inevitably we ourselves will be history. 

-- Bill Wadsworth

Three Cheers: Poems by Cayanan, Lehman, Musakovska in "The Common," April 2023

The Common
Poetry editor John Hennessy
April Is Poetry Month: New Poems By Our Contributors

MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN, DAVID LEHMAN, and YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA (translated by the author and OLENA JENNINGS)

The Remedy
By David Lehman

Although I do not have
the remedy for the isolation
despite the illusion
that we’re in constant touch
beyond the hectoring
that passes for discourse,
I console myself with
the knowledge that life
as a wounded old-timer
coupled with a loving wife
is superior even to sleep,
which is what one poet
wrote that she will miss
the most when she is dead.

Click here for the other poems in the April poetry feature. https://www.thecommononline.org/april-2023-poetry-feature/

In Honor of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

John Tranter, one of the foremost figures in Australian poetry over the last half-century, died earlier this week aged 79. Perhaps no one has done more than Tranter, as poet, editor, anthologist, publisher, critic and radio broadcaster, to place Australian poetry’s response to modernism (and postmodernism) into an international context. From his early interests in the the poetry of Rimbaud and the American avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s -- whose formal experimentation became a rich source of inspiration in his own writing -- to his revolutionary online magazine Jacket, Tranter seemed set to blow apart the provincial, Anglo-centric character of Australian poetry and open direct lines of communication to the rest of the world.

Described by the publisher and poet Michael Brennan as the “established agent provocateur of Australian poetry”,Tranter achieved a status in his home country similar to that of his good friend John Ashbery in the US: that of being a major poet accepted and acclaimed by both the avant-garde and the establishment. With his 22 collections, Tranter won nearly every major poetry prize in Australia. His poetry was relentlessly inventive. He seemed to live and die by the motto found in the early poem “Red Movie” (1972) that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious,” and maintained the urge to reinvent his poetry into to his later works through his embrace of technology, including a series of mistranslations of poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallamre using speech-to-text software. Tranter’s love of experimentation was matched by his mastery of form and a detached, ironic voice, distinctly Australian, that Tranter himself referred to as the “Laconic Mode.”

Born in the small country town of Cooma, Tranter grew up on a farm on the south-coast of New South Wales (in an interview with Toby Fitch, Tranter, tongue in cheek, draws a line between Rimbaud, Ashbery and himself as poets who all grew up on remote farms). Moving to Sydney in the early 60s, he studied intermittently for a decade, traveling across Europe and Asia before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Literature in 1970, the same year he was to publish his first full-length collection Parallax. Disappointed with the state of Australian poetry, and the country writ large, which he described as “suffocatingly dull and hideously authoritarian in those days”, he took a role as a publisher’s editor in Singapore after completing his degree.

On his return to his homeland  in1973, Tranter became a vitalising force in Australian poetry as an editor, anthologist and radio broadcaster. He edited the two major anthologies of modern Australian poetry: The New Australian Poetry (1979) which confirmed the status of the “Generation of 68”, who, in Tranter’s own words, “rose to public notice on the crest of a wave of poetry readings, ‘underground’ magazines, and a generally expressed antagonism to the established mainstream of poetry at that time, which they saw as too conservative,” and were to change the course of Australian poetry; and The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) co-edited with Philip Mead, which includes the entire oeuvre of the hoax-poet Ern Malley alongside works by indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty. Tranter also resurrected his journal Transit as a publishing company, publishing collections by friends including Gig Ryan, Martin Johnston and John Forbes. In 1975 he co-developed the first iteration of Books & Writing on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio. He would later take charge of a weekly, two-hour arts program, Radio Helicon on ABC Radio National from 1987-88  on which he interviewed a range of Australian and international poets including notable interviews with John Ashbery and John Forbes.

Tranter was early to recognise the power of publishing through the internet, and in 1997 began the international online poetry journal Jacket. His championing of Australian poets alongside internationally recognized names was instrumental in establishing contemporary Australian poetry throughout the world as a distinguished and distinguishable poetics. In 2004, Tranter established the online Australian Poetry Library which presented biographical and bibliographical information on over seventy Australian poets, as well as poems, book reviews and interviews.

Tranter’s own poetry, meanwhile, became renowned for its innovative style in which heightened disjunction and the use of surprising and irregular metaphor appeared to respond to the postmodern condition, in which we daily encounter a confluence of incoherent phenomena. 1976’s ambitious long poem “The Alphabet Murders”, in which each new stanza opens with the proceeding letter of the alphabet, begins:

“After all we have left behind

this complex of thought begins

a new movement into musical form, much as

logic turns into mathematics and automatics

turn into moonlit driveways — ‘form at the edge

of hearing’

Tranter’s increasing formal experimentation, including audacious pastiches, mistranslations and reimaginings of other poetic works, seemed to dislocate the poet almost entirely from the “I” of the poem. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald upon the occasion of the publication of 2010’s Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter compared his poetry in the light of Buneul’s quote about the ideal film having no names in it, and for the screenwriter and director to be anonymous. “In the same way medieval cathedrals give you this intense emotional experience yet you have no idea who designed them or built them, films and poems could be like that too, in a way.” The opening lines to Tranter’s poem “Having Completed My Fortieth Year” seems to confirm this outlook “Although art is, in the end, anonymous, / turning into history once it’s left the body.”

In my favorite poems of Tranter’s, however, the “I” is very much located, grounded in both a temporal and geographical space, and more often than not that space is the city of Sydney. In his verse novel The Floor of Heaven, Sydney appears almost as a character, while in “In Praise of Sandstone,” which takes the end words of Auden’s famous poem “In Praise of Limestone” and places them in a Sydney landscape, we get a portrait of the city’s topography, a short history of it’s convict past and a study of a typical workday.  “Ode to Col Joye” takes its setting as a shower in Sydney, with the speaker trying to pin down which poet the day he has woken to most represents. Is it a John Forbes day? a Ken Bolton day? a John Ashbery day?

                                         it’s the kind of day

where I notice that my Renault—

      a beat-up Renault; how

          Sydney, and how French!—

has the name RENAULT on its side in chrome letters—

how metonymic

                             that the name of the object is seen as

being part of the object to which it refers

This is the Sydney I grew up in—cosmopolitan, sardonic, colorful, confident, playful— the same features that we most often encounter in Tranter’s poetry, which, like “Ode to Col Joye”, begins in Sydney and spirals across Australia and the world, continually delighting those who happen upon it.

-- Thomas Moody

See also this obit: https://jacket2.org/commentary/remembering-john-tranter

An inspired editor, John was always able to get me to write something for Jacket -- or to find a place for something wonderful that came my way. A wonderful writer, he was, until the day of his death, Australia's leading poet.-- DL

Laurence Goldstein, Editor and Poet, 1/5/1943 - 4/16/2023, Ann Arbor

On April 16th we lost Larry Goldstein, longtime editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review (32 years!), an inspired anthologist, editor, poet, and professor at the University of Michigan. I have often said that the editors of literary magazines, underpaid and overworked, are among the unsung heroes of literature. Larry was certainly in that category.  He would have an idea -- for a special issue of the magazine, or for a book -- and he had the knack of getting a writer to drop all else and get to work on it. I speak from experience. Larry's interests were many; his knowledge of poetry was matched only by his devotion to Los Angeles and classic Hollywood movies. Richard Howard selected Larry's poem "Permissive Entry: A Sermon on Fame" for The Best American Poetry 1995.

When Larry contemplated stepping down from MQR, the university established a Laurence Goldstein Prize for the best poem published ion the magazine that year. Asked about the editor for whom the prize was named, one winner, said, "what makes it great is that Larry's just about the best there is." 

Here is my favorite sentence from the official obit: <<< An essay on the mystery word "Rosebud" in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and another on poets' fascination with Marilyn Monroe, both published recently, testify to Larry's abiding interest in films.
-- DL

from the Ann Arbor News

<<<
Laurence Alan Goldstein died on Sunday, April 16, in Ann Arbor with his loving wife Nancy and sons Andrew and Jonathan at his side. The cause of death was an overwhelming bacterial infection. Born in Los Angeles Larry graduated from UCLA, later earning a PhD from Brown University. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan's department of English Language and Literature in 1970 and retired as Professor Emeritus in 2016.

Beginning his career at Michigan as a specialist in the field of British Romanticism, Larry moved on to offer such courses as Modern Poetry and Contemporary Poetry, and undergraduate and graduate seminars in a variety of specialized topics such as William Faulkner's fiction, the literature of Detroit, the literature of Los Angeles, Hollywood and Visual Culture, and the literature of the city. Graduate students whom he mentored--as well as undergraduates--kept in touch over the years from their careers and lives around the world, writing to let him know that they remembered his generous gifts of teaching.

As a poet and literary critic and historian, he wrote, edited or co-edited sixteen books and published dozens of essays and book and film reviews. At UCLA, Larry was arts editor for the Daily Bruin, seeking out interviews with local movie industry notables such as director Billy Wilder and Stan Laurel (Laurel and Hardy). As an undergraduate, and later in his career, he wrote several book reviews and op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times, and later for The New York Times.

At Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, he founded a poetry magazine and wrote book and film reviews for The Providence Journal. In addition to teaching and writing at the University of Michigan, Larry delighted in his secondary position: "My 32 years as editor of the University's flagship scholarly and creative arts journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, is arguably the defining accomplishment of my tenure at the University of Michigan. I changed it from a literary magazine to an interdisciplinary journal reflecting the diversity of subjects studied at the university. . . . attracting notable U of M talent as well as Nobel Prize winners and renowned writers such as Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe and others. I am especially pleased to have introduced many now-eminent authors to the reading public."

Larry especially loved baseball but also was a Go Blue football fan, always wearing his lucky MICHIGAN shirt to watch the games on TV, thrusting a fist in the air to the cheers from the Big House, quite audible in his comfy OWS home.

Memorial tributes may be made to Hospice of Lenawee www.hospiceoflenawee.org, Alzheimer's Association, or to the Michigan Quarterly Review. Muehlig Funeral Chapel, Ann Arbor muehligannarbor.com
>>>

Published by Ann Arbor News from Apr. 19 to Apr. 23, 2023.

In Praise of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

Word has just reached us that John Tranter, the brilliant poet and editor, died on April 21, just eight days shy of his 80th birthday. We will be running a tribute to John Tranter and posting some of his poems in the coming days. For now, let us let Thomas Moody introduce American readers to Australia's leading poet and literary editor. Part one of Moody's essay is below; click here for part II, which we posted on  September 1, 2021
 -- David Lehman

An Introduction to John Tranter [April 29, 1943 – April 21, 2023] (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

The difficulty in introducing John Tranter is knowing where to begin. Surely any attempts to elucidate his poetry would be reductive, and any measure of its influence fall embarrassingly short. Tranter is a major poet and in my estimate the major Australian poet of the second-half of the twentieth-century (though John Forbes might have something to say about that). His renown stretches far beyond our antipodal boundaries. As his good friend John Ashbery wrote in the introduction to Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter is an "international phenomenon".

In the course of his more than twenty collections, Tranter has seemed to live and die by the motto found in one of his most ambitious and accomplished poems, "Red Movie," that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious." Tranter's poetry always surprises and refuses to rest on its laurels—just as you think he's hit on a winning formula in one collection, he upends it in the next. Through his fifty years of writing he's employed a multitude of styles and techniques, but always present are his keen ear for the Australian vernacular, a frighteningly sharp intelligence, and a "larrikinism" that never lets his poetry take itself too seriously. 

 The poem I'd like to share today is not particularly representative of Tranter's oeuvre, though it does exhibit several qualities that we can find in many of his poems: his wit, a love of the movies, and his extraordinary ability to absorb the essence of another poet and transmute it into a contemporary Australian landscape (both geographical and emotional) to offer us something at once uncannily familiar and entirely original. "After Hölderlin" is a favorite of mine, and I suspect it may be a favorite of Tranter's too, as it serves as the opening poem to his new & selected, Urban Myths. I plan on sharing much more of Tranter's poetry over the coming months, so stay tuned.

After Hölderlin

When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
or the office routine. I dreamed
in the mottled shade of many a beer garden
among a kindness of bees and breezes
my lunch hour lengthening.

As the flowers plucked and set in the little bottle
on the table still seem to hanker for the sun,
nodding in the slightest draft, so I 
longed for a library loose with rare volumes
or a movie theatre's satisfying gloom
where a little moon followed the usherette
up and down the blue carpeted stairs.

You characters caught up in your emotions 
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.

I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn't let you live;
I felt for you when you were thrown from the car
again and again; when the pilot
thought he was lost and alone, 
I was speaking the language of the stars
above his tiny plane,
murmuring in the sleepy garden, growing up
among the complicated stories.
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and the shadow
in the arms of the gods.

Posted by Thomas Moody on August 04, 2021 at 10:45 AM in Australia | Permalink

Comments

Thank you, TM, for this column on the "international phenomenon" that is John Tranter. I love the poem -- perhaps the more so because, for me as for the two Johns referenced (Ashbery and Tranter), Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry is and has long been an inspiration. Looking forward, I am, to more Tranter -- and more Moody.

Posted by: David Lehman | August 05, 2021 at 12:24 AM

How good to be reminded of Tranter’s excellent poetry which doesn’t get seen much here in the US.

Posted by: Mark Pawlak | August 21, 2021 at 08:59 AM

From the archive; first posted  August 4, 2021

See also

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/an-introduction-to-john-tranter-part-1-by-thomas-moody-1.html

"Northern Pike" by James Wright [as presented by Jenny Factor]

Jenny Factor on James Wright

Stacey Harwood's important post earlier this week put me in mind of James Wright. A poet and exemplar of endurance. A sturdy fragile voice. Perhaps I'm looking for an antidote. Perhaps I'm just looking. In any event, I was reminded this morning of his "Northern Pike". 

This is one to read slowly to oneself, twice-in-a-row. (It's an argument with the self, I think...). It works best on a kind of rhythmic repetition...

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.                      

       --  James Wright

Mary Oliver once wrote of those poets and other artists who commit suicide, "I forgive them/their unhappiness.../...for walking out of the world./But I don't forgive them.../for taking off their veils/and dancing for death. for hurtling/toward oblivion/on the sharp blades/of their exquisite poems, saying:/this is the way/// I was, of course, all that time/coming along/behind them, and listening/for advice. She concludes "Members of the Tribe" from her 1986 Dream Work with these lines that remind me of my own high school darkness, and how, on the day after, I'd feel so light my head and shoulders just floating up without any of the ego or striving left in me:

And the man who merely
washed Michelangelo's brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,

lived to be a hundred years old.

So here's a toast...To the muskrats. To the game warden's blindness. And to life. Inventive. Fragile. Liveable.

L'chayim!

Posted by Jenny Factor on April 18, 2009 at 05:04 PM in Jenny Factor -West Coast Correspondent | Permalink

Comments

Dearest Jenny, I had a few bad months and didn't tend to things, so missed this. I too love Wright, especially The Green Wall, his first and more formal book. But I love his spirit in all of them, though he was a problematic guy, I guess. (Ask Franz.) I met him once; he and Annie danced around the room after the reading; the room was full of sunlight and the gesture was not a gesture but a feeling. I took them to the airport and the three of us spent a glorious hour giggling and reminiscing about the (his) old days. (I didn't have any old days then.) I'd spent two years trying to get him to visit; we'd talk on the phone. He didn't want to leave NY even for a visit; he said he didn't have enough courage to leave his shrink for any length of time. Also, he reiterated, many times, what we already knew: that Ohio was, for him, the Land of the Dead; and crossing the Ohio River, even in a plane, was not something he wanted to attempt. But he did finally come (we paid for Annie's ticket, too, of course); and I, at least, had one of those "times" that one remembers forever, and that becomes part of one's own old days. Thanks for the love that shows through everything you write.

Posted by: jim cummins | July 15, 2009 at 01:04 PM

Ah, Jim. So good to hear from you. Sometimes I don't even have the words (and i'm sorry about the months...)... (i know you only online but you have an online presence that is like when a kindred spirit walks into the room at a big party. Well, I look up and before I smile, I flush).

My own months have been pretty odd too. Taught a few courses last term and helped to build a large online learning module for the low-residency MFA program. A lot of work--but the good news about that arrives roughly now--there are students in the module, so I have the pleasure of those ether-voices during the distance-learning project periods which can otherwise become so...distant. I really love my Antiochians--smart, interesting, and good company. And it's nice to have a place to settle in and teach in the five months that separate each residency...if only because I can ask my scads of unanswerable poetry questions aloud.

Is it possible that I've read about that later-in-life trip to Ohio? I think I have--perhaps in the notes from some 92nd Street Y audio-recording, or perhaps I heard it in Wright's patter to the audience (which is my better guess). Or perhaps I'm thinking only of Marilyn Hacker's, "Elevens" which is about flying into Ohio, thinking about Wright flying into Ohio: "James A. Wright, my difficult older brother.../You are the lonely gathering of rivers/below the plane that left you in Ohio...."--(it's in rough sapphics, and that first line sounds best when you really let the trochee-trochee-dactyl-trochee-trochee out. The other lines have wandering dactyls, so you have to let 'em wander).

Do you know this poem of Billy Collins, "This Much I Do Remember"?
http://nexus.typepad.com/nexus/2003/12/this_much_i_do_.html

Then all of the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all of the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

Your moment reminds me of that. Do you remember--cause I don't--who wrote about how little we control the moments we get to mint--how they simply sneak up on us? How the milestones--the ones we hope to remember always get lost--but some odd inadvertant instant finds a way into forever.

Hoping you'll mint yours in the big factory where they chug out puffy clouds and happiness...on a series of long and languid summer days. Will write again soon if that's okay.

thinking of you--

Posted by: Jenny Factor | July 17, 2009 at 10:13 AM

From the archive; first posted April 18, 2009 as “Dear Life: Still Here!" [by Jenny Factor]

Introduction to a History of the Sky [by Tom Disch]

There is not a single sky but rather a diversity
of single sky-moments strung out like beads
on a celestial necklace. The Greeks believed
in a single sky with Zeus its ruler
and his son Apollo a traveler
traversing it each day like the conductor
on a modern railway train. Any child knows better
now, knows that the sun is a burning cloud
of hydrogen, a fire that is never extinguished,
just as the sea never stops feeding the sky
with the clouds bringing rain. Like those clouds
the sky lends itself to much vain speculation.
"Very like a whale," Prince Hamlet says,
agreeing with Polonius, but he is not being
serious. No cloud is even approximately
whale-like. [See Table 3, in Appendix D:
Cloud shapes.] Nor should we try to analyze
the sky in terms of ages and eras. The sky
does not have its own French and Indian Wars.
It has, as we have observed above, moments.
To begin to understand the sky
you must find a vantage high enough
to command a view in all directions,
some mountain top or the crow's-nest
of a ship at sea. Then you must integrate
your observations with those of sky-chroniclers
in other latitudes, measuring such variables
as Bright and Cloudy, Auspicious and Dull,
and set these down in a bound ledger.
At first the task may seem beyond
your capabilities. It is! History is
a humbling discipline. The sky is finally unknowable,
but only its historians know that.

February 19, 2008

"An Argentine Gaucho Named Bruno. . ." [from The Best American Erotic Poems]

<<<
Even to attempt a definition of key terms such as erotic and pornographic is a hazardous task. But about a few things there is general agreement. This is from My Secret Life (c. 1890), that classic work of late Victorian pornography written by an anonymous gentleman with a big-time itch and the compulsion to repeat and record his amatory adventures:

“Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of coupling the sexes, called fucking,” he writes. “It is not a graceful operation – in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can.”

The artless simplicity of these sentences is their charm, though they are more complicated than meets the eye. Notice the relation of “coupling” to the perpetuation of the species on the one hand and to superlative pleasure on the other. The conjugation of the bodies is the observance of a sacrament, a religious imperative, but it also involves the unrelentingly gross human body in an “operation” no finer than urination or defecation, and “more ridiculous.”

Call it fucking or call it making love: the “process of coupling” is the central fact, the rock thrown into the previously placid pond, around which widen the circles of erotic implication. Fucking remains the ultimate profanity. But any word or phrase for sexual intercourse, euphemistic and genteel, or clinical and precise, or lewd and graphic, will prove problematic, and the array of possibilities suggests that contradictory impulses are at work, or contradictory ways of presenting the same impulse. An instance of heterosexual love, for example, can be depicted as the union of yin and yang, husband and wife engaged in the blessed task of procreation, or contrarily as an anomalous episode during a temporary truce in the battle between the sexes. We know, in any case, that sexual desire is a drive that seems to trump all others and dictate human behavior sometimes against all reason or beyond any rational explanation. We know that it is the most intense and irresistible of bawdy pleasures, that it makes fools and rascals and buffoons of us and often lowers the attitudinal level from tragic postures and epic vistas to bedroom farces and comedies of Eros. Yet as Anonymous noted in 1890, “most people try to do as much of it as they can,” and everyone thinks about it more than anyone will admit.

In the realm of the erotic, the sacred and the profane converge, and so do the sublime and the ridiculous. The familiar image of the “beast with two backs” is ridiculous but accurate and therefore a valuable corrective to high-minded or romantic representations of the theme. The subject of sex gives rise to elegant aphorism (“Sex is the lyricism of the masses”: Charles Baudelaire), extravagantly mixed metaphor (“Sex is a black tarantula and sex without religion is like an egg without salt”: Luis Bunuel), and exceedingly clever limericks (“An Argentine gaucho named Bruno / Declared there is one thing I do know: / A woman is fine, / A boy is divine, / But a llama is numero uno”). Sex in The Waste Land is a nightmare from which the typist may never recover, consisting of passionless caresses, “unreproved, if undesired,” from “the young man carbuncular” – surely the least desirable epithet ever conferred on a man. But then T. S. Eliot’s poem is an example of what Lee Upton calls “dysterotica,” which bears the same relation to the erotic as the world-view of 1984 or Brave New World has to Utopia. 

-- David Lehman
>>>

from the introduction to The Best American Erotic Poems (2008)

Quote of the Day [by Harrison Ball]

NYCB Principal Dancer Harrison Ball. Photo © Ricky Cohete

Ed note: Soon after Harrison Ball was made a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet in 2022, he suffered several injuries that have ended his promising dance career. He is retiring from the company this spring, at 29. His final performance is on April 30. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview. Substitute just about any pursuit for "dancer" and the words of wisdom would still apply: 

Do you have any special words of wisdom or helpful hints to share with dancers who are either new to the art form or to the Company?

If I could give advice to dancers who are in training or beginning a performing career it would be a few things. I would say that as deeply as you work on your craft, you must work on yourself. The body is indeed the instrument you use but it is the mind that informs everything you do. Travel, travel, travel. See the world and expand your mind. You must attend performances in all theater mediums, go to museums and galleries and learn about the great artists, educate yourself on cinema and culture, keep up with the current affairs of humanity, watch other companies all around the world (social media can be a tool in this regard), learn new styles of dance, read the great literature of the world, take an acting class and learn how to be truthful in the moment, find a hobby that enhances your creativity as a performer. Most importantly, learn to be honest with yourself. It’s easy to get wrapped up in small things in the dance world. It is not life or death. Stick to the big picture. Once you get your first paycheck, you are an adult. Take responsibility in your life. There is no such thing as authority once you begin working. You will fear performance, colleagues, and faculty. Tell yourself to not be afraid anymore until you aren’t. Have no fear! And remember to not take yourself or everything too seriously. Fight to maintain your curiosity and joy. Have fun and enjoy your career no matter where you are. Work as hard as you can. It goes quickly. Most importantly, enjoy life.

You can read the full interview here. 

And it's not too late to catch Ball in his final performances. Find more information about programs and casting here. 

--sdl

"What It Feels Like to Be Aaron Smith" [by Aaron Smith]

What It Feels Like to Be Aaron Smith

 

Though you would never admit it, you’re still shocked by pubic hair

in Diesel ads on Broadway and Houston, and you wonder what

conversations lead up to a guy posing with his pants unzipped to the

forest. Maybe the stylist does it, but somebody had to think, let’s show

pubic hair, and was that person nervous about saying, hey, I have a great

idea: pubic hair. You think about David Leddick’s book Naked Men

Too, and the model with the cigarette whose mother photographed

him with his jeans falling off and his pubic hair showing and how that’s

weird and you can’t even begin to process how someone would let his

own mother photograph him nearly naked and why a mother would

want to. Everyone pretends pubic hair in pictures is artistic, but we all

know it’s really about sex, which you quickly remind yourself is okay,

too, because you’re liberal, which you sometimes think means you

don’t believe in anything because you want people to like you. Then

you think how you hate the phrase shock of pubic hair in novels and

spend the next several minutes trying to think of a better phrase, shrub

of . . . patch of . . . spread of . . . taste of . . . wad of . . . then you think

how Joyce Carol Oates describes fat men’s chests as melting chicken fat

in her story ____________ and get paranoid because you used to be

fat and can never get your chest as tight as you want no matter how

much you bench press. You make a mental note to send poems to

Ontario Review, Joyce Carol Oates is one of the editors and might like

your work. They published Judith Vollmer’s poem about the reporter

covering a murder scene, and you love her and her poems (maybe you

should send her an e-mail and see how she’s doing). Then you think

about pubic hair again, how embarrassing it can be at Dr. Engel’s when

he examines you and stares at it (do you have too much, how much

can you trim and still look natural) both of you trying to pretend it’s

professional when he asks you to move into the light, holds your penis

like a pencil, squeezes your balls, this guy’s fine, this guy’s fine, and you

don’t know how to be when he shakes your hand before you leave.

Then you feel perverted because you’re still thinking about pubic

hair, maybe everyone has pubic hair issues and nobody talks about it?

You know for a fact Laura does because she told you after she read a

Sharon Olds poem out loud and the two of you giggled. You think of

Tara, with thick eyeliner, who said well-groomed underarms are really

sexy and you adopted that phrase when you say you think underarms

are sexy, well-groomed underarms you say and friends agree, especially

Tom who also loves underarms and sex clubs. You pass a hot guy

(not as hot as the bag check guy at The Strand whose shirt comes up

when he puts your backpack on the top shelf) and you want to sleep

with him and stare, hoping he raises his arm so you can see his hair.

 

from The Best American Poetry 2013 edited by Denise Duhamel

Remembering Darragh Park [by David Lehmam, David Grant Noble, & Others]

Cherry blossoms filled the air, swept by the May wind, and a friend said, "Oh, I thought it was snowing." That, Darragh Park said, was the effect he tried to get across in his paintings. He wanted to convey the pink cascade before it gained definition as blossoms or snowflakes --  and to convey the friend's face at the same time.

Darragh, who died Friday (April 2009) of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said he had "a vision of vision." As a motorcyclist he learned on entering a curve that he had to focus "beyond my immediate destination if I was to operate the machine smoothly and stay alive." He had to be able to divide his sight between two points and let "the rest of [his] vision" take in everything between them. The beauty of his paintings is a beauty achieved by the supremacy of vision. How cruel that of all ailments, he had to suffer the progressive deterioration of his eyesight.

Darragh did the cover of "An Alternative to Speech," my first book of poems: a wraparound black-and-white cityscape in the rain: the traffic, human and vehicular, on the corner of 25th Street and Ninth Avenue. Darragh was devoted to James Schuyler and did the covers for Schuyler's "Collected Poems" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and for "The Diary of James Schuyler" ed. by Nathan Kernan (Black Sparrow): both are portraits of the poet. Darragh must have done covers for other books, and I would be grateful for details from anyone who has them.

-- DL  (from the archive; first posted April 19, 2009)

 

<<<< Darragh Park was a roommate of mine at Yale, a fellow French major—he liked Proust, I liked Zola—and lifelong friend.

After graduation, Darragh taught English in a private school in Sierra Leone, an experience which triggered an interest, and later graduate study at Columbia, of African art and culture.

When Darragh returned to America, he came to terms with his being gay. He let his life style evolve, quit his job, and began studying painting under the tutelage of the Long Island painter, Robert Dash. Through Dash, he became part of a circle of artists and writers based in Manhattan and the Hamptons. One particular friend of his in this group was the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, James Schuyler, for whom he illustrated several book covers and eventually became his literary executor.

Darragh’s early artwork was strongly influenced by the landscape painter, Fairfield Porter, whom he knew and who, after viewing his paintings, offered him encouragement. Darragh’s focus shifted from landscapes to cityscapes, especially panoramic scenes in Miami and street scenes with pedestrians and traffic in Manhattan. One especially successful series of paintings was of the Empire State Building, which he painted at different times of day and night and in changing illuminations.

Darragh had a series of successful shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Alfred Corn, reviewing a 1994 show of his in Artnews, wrote, “There are few things more satisfying than witnessing a moment in the development of an artist when she or he takes a quantum leap into uncharted territory and surprises us with a new sense of mastery.” The leap referred to was Darragh’s new painterly attention to physical vision. He was intrigued by how the eye sees both small areas in sharp focus and blurred abstractions in sight’s periphery. Interpreting this visual phenomenon in his paintings became almost an obsession. The forms in a painting would slide from abstraction to realism and back again. His last works became so large in their dimensions as to be hard fit in standard gallery settings.

When Darragh moved from Manhattan to Bridgehampton, Long Island, another creative expression emerged: landscaping and gardening. He built a pond, put in a variety of native plantings, and developed a network of pathways through the luxuriant vegetation. Wildlife thrived in this environment. Darragh cared for every tree, bush, and flower as if it were a personal friend and kept knew all the birds that came and went through the seasons. In a letter to me one February, he wrote:

“My companions, this year, are the gold finches, now dusky gold, who have chosen to hang in here to my huge delight. Watching their loping Matissian flight pattern as they pass in front of me is a constant lift. A flicker family is in residence, most awe-inspiring. The big tree with its ghost-like great gray bones is often studded with cardinals. Visitors gasp!”

I have many memories of Darragh Park, but perhaps the most vivid was zooming through the empty streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn on the back of his motorcycle on a cold mid-winter Sunday morning en route to Coney Island.

In his last several years, Darragh’s mind and health began to fail and it became increasingly difficult for him to manage his daily life and needs. When the situation worsened, he came to what must be the most difficult and unfortunate decision some people face: to continue living or not. On April 17, 2009, he chose the latter. >>>

—by David Grant Noble, January 5, 2023

<<< Darragh also did the covers for Marc Cohen's two books with the Groundwater Press--a drawing for "On Maplewood Time," the Intuflo chapbook, for which, incidentally, Jimmy Schuyler wrote the intro (http://webpage.pace.edu/erichie/groundwater/u3.html); and a full-color cover for "Mecox Road" (http://webpage.pace.edu/erichie/groundwater/p3.html). >>> -- Rosanne Wasserman

<<< In addition to the books already mentioned, Darragh also did the covers for the following books of James Schuyler: THE HOME BOOK, Z Press, 1977; A FEW DAYS, Random House, 1985; SELECTED POEMS, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1988; TWO JOURNALS, his collaboration with Schuyler, Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995; SELECTED ART WRITINGS, Edited by Simon Pettet, Black Sparrow Press, 1998; JUST THE THING: SELECTED LETTERS OF JAMES SCHUYLER, Edited by William Corbett, Turtle Point Press, 2004; and the two New York Review Books re-issues of the novels, ALFRED AND GUINEVERE, Introduction by John Ashbery, 2001; and WHAT'S FOR DINNER, Afterword by James McCourt, 2006. >>> -- Nathan Kernan

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/04/darragh-park-continued.html

Jackie Robinson

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He played first base. In  subsequent years he was the game's premier second baseman. The first black player in the major leagues endured insults, taunts, threats, slurs. He was a terrific player, a Hall of Famer and World Series hero, with guts and nerve to match his god-given abilities on the field. On April, 15, 1947, some teammates bitched about having to play with a black man. To them Dodger manager Leo Durocher said "I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a ... zebra. I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make all of us rich. And if any of you can’t use the money, I will see that you are traded.” Jackie's uniform number 42 is permanently retired and April 15 now universally observed as Jackie Robinson day in the major leagues. And to think I would have seen him steal home at Ebbets Field if the man in front of me, a man of gargantuan size, hadn't stood up, blocked my view, and shouted, "Jackie's stealing home! Jackie's stealing home!" -- DL

Lera Auerbach's Symphony #6 at Carnegie Hall (Wednesday, April 19, 2023) [by David Lehman]

Lera Auerbach's Symphony #6 at Carnegie Hall (Wednesday, April 19, 2023)

"Vessels of Light"

for violincello, chorus, and orchestra

American premiere

Presented by the American Society for Yad Vashem and Yad Vashem

A Concert for Sugihara

Wednesday, April 19, 2023 7 PM Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage / Carnegie Hall

https://leraauerbach.com/biography/
https://leraauerbach.com/compositions/

 

Kristina Reiko Cooper, Chiune Sugihara

 

A concert commemorating the heroism of Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul to Lithuania, who saved thousands of Jewish refugees during WWII. The performance will feature the American Premiere of Lera Auerbach's Symphony No. 6, Vessels of Light, dedicated to Sugihara and all those who risk everything to save others. This symphony was commissioned by Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, along with the American Society for Yad Vashem, and was catalyzed by cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper.

 
<<< A renaissance artist for modern times, Lera Auerbach is a widely recognized conductor, pianist, and composer. She is also an award-winning poet and an exhibited visual artist. All of her work is interconnected as part of a cohesive and comprehensive artistic worldview.

Lera Auerbach has become one of today’s most sought-after and exciting creative voices. Her performances and music are featured in the world’s leading stages – from Vienna’s Musikverein and London’s Royal Albert Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall and Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center.

Auerbach’s exquisitely crafted, emotional, and boldly imaginative music reached to global audiences. Orchestral collaborations include the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, Oslo Philharmonic, Munich’s Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Staatskapelle Dresden, and Vienna’s ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester, among many others. Auerbach’s works for orchestra are performed by the world’s leading conductors, including Christoph Eschenbach, Alan Gilbert, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Neeme Järvi, Vladimir Jurowski, Charles Dutoit, Andris Nelsons, Osmo Vänskä, Hannu Lintu, and Marin Alsop, to mention only a few.

Her large-scale theater works have been produced in major venues on every continent, including Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, New York’s Lincoln Center, the Hamburg State Opera, the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, the Royal Danish Theater, the Nuremberg State Theater, the Finnish National Theater, Moscow’s Stanislavsky, the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing China and the NHK Hall in Tokyo. >>>

-- DL

"Peace of Mind" [a prose poem by Sean Singer]

Peace of Mind

 

Today in the taxi I got a fare on Main Street and Front Street in DUMBO going to Madison Square Garden. She got in and said, “I’m so late! Today might be the day I get fired!”

 

We reasoned with the movement of the potholes, the people and things coming from all directions.

 

The bridge had its iron sounds and brown loneliness, the pikes of waves on the East River, and the solid axe of wind.

I got her there on time and she tipped me $20. “This is for you my friend.”

Kafka interjects that The inner world can only be experienced, not described.

 

--- Sean Singer

 

<<< Today in the Taxi is a collection of prose poems, narrated by a cab driver. The poems tend to include a mixture of storytelling and reflections—literary, philosophical, and spiritual. On the one hand, the poems feel grounded in personal experience, and indeed, Singer writes on his website: “I drove for nearly six years, from 2014 until 2020, working as an independent contractor for ride sharing companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, and Via.” At the same time, within the poems, the persona of the driver is completely veiled: We do not have any indications as to his name, age, or personal history. We don’t know where he was born and where he grew up. We don’t know where he lives and whether he has a family. It is clear that the narrator is an intellectual engaged in decidedly blue-collar work, and yet, there isn’t, at any point, a contemplation of the resulting class tension. Instead, the narrator is watching himself and his passengers from afar, with a keen eye and curiosity and also with detachment that at times borders on alienation, which is reinforced by his constant evocation of Franz Kafka, who, of course, was the paradigmatic example of a writer with a fraught relationship to his work life.

Unlike Kafka, however, Singer does not seem to complain. Although he doesn’t gush with pride in his work, there is nevertheless a constant sense that something momentous is happening to him. “I moved the city around the city,” he writes reflecting on one evening. And, to avoid the tedium, he constantly changes gears. For instance, encountering one exceptionally difficult customer, he contemplates the act of driving as a metaphor for psychological underpinnings of an interpersonal encounter: “After a while driving eight hours a day, the driver and the car become one. It is not unlike being a person—moving forward on a one-way that is irreversible and pre-determined. I instinctively compute the spaces around the car and move faster—mirror in the mirror—then only briefly letting my eyes meet his eyes.” >>>

--  Jake Marmer

 

from Poems for Taxi Drivers: Sean Singer’s latest collection of prose poems offers a glimpse into the world of blue-collar gig work

BY JAKE MARMER

APRIL 09, 202
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/poems-driving-taxi

Remembering "Easter 1916" [by Terence Winch]

On Easter Monday of 1916, 150 or so Irish rebels took armed action against their British rulers, seizing the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin. After a week of fighting, they lost to the thousands of British troops arrayed against them, but the Rising ultimately led to Irish independence from the mighty British Empire. Given the musical and literary traditions of the Irish, it is no surprise that the rebellion also gave rise to poems, songs, movies, and books. (In fact, Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Rising, was himself a poet.) Probably the best-known of the poems is William Butler Yeats's "Easter 1916":  

Easter 1916

I
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

II
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

III
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

IV
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

_________________________

One of the best of the many songs that came out of the Easter Rising is "The Foggy Dew," written in 1919 by Charles O’Neill, a parish priest from County Down. This version by the great Dublin singer Frank Harte, who died a few years ago and who was once described by my friend Doug Lang as having "a voice like a tenor sax," is my favorite (listen here to "The Foggy Dew"), though Sinead O'Connor's rendition with Chieftains also gives me the chills.   

And here let me offer a BAP scoop. One of the heroes of 1916 was the socialist and labor leader James Connolly, whom the Brits executed sitting down, as his battle wounds had yet to heal. One of the most stirring songs about Connolly was composed by poet-songwriter-playwright Patrick Galvin, from County Cork. Paddy, now in his 80s, visited my brother Jesse's house outside D.C. in February of 1981 for a house party, a few days after Paddy and Celtic Thunder, the band started by me and Jesse, had performed in concert together.  We recorded him talking, reading poems, and singing. So here is Paddy himself singing his composition "James Connolly" from that magical evening ('James Connolly'). Jesse, currently Cathaorleach (chairman) of our local chapter of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (the worldwide Irish music society), accompanies Paddy on the bodhran (drum).  Ten years earlier, we got to spend some time with Brian Heron, James Connolly's grandson and the founder of  the National Association for Irish Justice, one of a number of groups that were formed back in those days to support the civil rights movement in the north of Ireland. [right: Brian Heron, 1971; © Jesse Winch]  

The Easter Rising became the starting point for modern Irish history, its echoes clearly audible throughout the recent Troubles in the north of Ireland (as this song of my own, called "The Streets of Belfast,"demonstrates). In the years immediately following the Rising, the struggle for independence from Britain continued, eventually leading to the partition of Ireland as a condition for the establishment of the Irish Free State. Partition, in turn, spurred a terrible civil war among Irish nationalists that tore the country apart. This grim and bloody period has inspired a number of searing films, including two of recent vintage: The Wind that Shakes the Barley,  Ken Loach's 2007 film starring Cillian Murphy, and Michael Collins, the 1996 Liam Neeson film written and directed by Neil Jordan. But for me the greatest of them all is the 1935 John Ford classic, The Informer, based on a Liam O'Flaherty novel and starring Victor McLaglen as Gypo Nolan, an ill-fated "gutter Judas," to use the New York Times's memorable phrase.  (Here's a clip of McLaglen at work.)

Happy Easter & Up the Republic!

from the archive; first posted April 4, 2010