The Best American Poetry

On Coming to America [by Anne Lehman]

David and Anne Lehman

In observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, here is an excerpt from Anne Lehman's essay about escaping the Nazis and coming to America aboard the President Harding:

It was a nightmare to live in Vienna at that time. Every time the doorbell rang, we were afraid--they're coming for us!
...

 A friend of mine got me a permit to go to England as a mother's helper. This way I got out of Nazi Germany. These people, Wright was their name, lived in Southsea. He was a shipbuilder and she was a dentist. They treated me very well and he gave me English lessons every day. But I was lonely there, so after a few months I went to London, where I have some friends from Vienna. My friend Trude and I found work in the home of an English theatre producer by the name of French. Trude was supposed to be the cook and I was the parlor maid. Once Rex Harrison came to dinner. He was very friendly, a real gentleman. 
. . . 

But the American consulate finally opened its door again [having closed it in 1938] and I received my visa to go to America. How happy I was. Naturally I was worried to travel on an English ship, so my cousin from America sent me additional money and I changed my ticket to an American ship, the President Harding. I think it was the last Atlantic crossing it ever made. It took us ten days of the most terrible shaking. Everyone on board was sick and wanted to die. We were so sick that we weren't even afraid of hidden mines, and as in a dream we did all the safe drillings, etc. The last day was Thanksgiving. We had, and for me it was the first time, a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, they played 'Oh, say, can you see,' and when I finally saw the Statue of Liberty, I was really grateful to God, that he let me live and see America. 

Find the complete essay in Yeshiva Boys, by David Lehman

A group of German and Austrian Jewish refugees  in New York on board the SS President Harding. New York, United States, June 3, 1939. (source: Holocaust Encyclopedia

(Ed note: Anne tried hard to get her parents to England from Vienna but "everything took so long," and by the time she had assembled the necessary documents, England was at war and she had no way of getting in touch with them to bring them to safety. She later learned that they were murdered by the Nazis in Riga, Latvia.)

-- sdl 

 

"April 19" [by David Lehman]

On this day in 1996, I wrote:

 

We have too much exhibitionism
and not enough voyeurism
in poetry we have plenty of bass
and not enough treble, more amber
beer than the frat boys can drink but
less red wine than meets the lip
in this beaker of the best Bordeaux,
too much thesis, too little antithesis
and way too much New York Times
in poetry we've had too much isolationism
and too few foreign entanglements
we need more Baudelaire on the quai
d'Anjou more olive trees and umbrella pines
fewer leafless branches on the rue Auguste Comte
too much sociology not enough Garcia Lorca
more colons and dashes fewer commas
less love based on narrow self-interest
more lust based on a feast of kisses
too many novels too few poems
too many poets not enough poetry

 

-- April 19, 1996

Ben Hogan Wins US Open (June 11, 2015)

On this day in 1950, Ben Hogan won the United States Open in a three-way playoff. What made it almost miraculous was that Hogan had suffered multiple injuries sixteen months earlier when a Greyhound bus swerved out of its lane and hit Hogan's car head on. Hogan, attempting to shield his wife, Valerie, from the impact, went to the hospital with a broken collarbone, broken ankle, broken ribs and a double fracture of his pelvis. (Valerie escaped with minor injuries.) A blood clot in Hogan's leg required emergency measures; doctors tied off the surrounding veins to prevent the clot from reaching his heart. As a result, Hogan’s legs atrophied. Would he ever play a round of golf again? The more pressing question was whether he would ever walk again.

Yet here he was at the Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, PA, site also of the 2013 U. S. Open. Hogan defied the skeptics, playing four rounds of superb golf, walking from hole to hole unassisted. At the 72nd hole, he needed a par to tie Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio for the lead and join the pair in a June 11th playoff. Hogan's one-iron shot to the green, one of the great moments in golfing history, occasioned Hy Peskin's photograph, above, undoubtedly the sport's most famous. A year later Hollywood turned the inspiring tale into a movie, Follow the Sun, with Glenn Ford as Hogan and Anne Baxter as Valerie. Click here or here for more on Hogan's heroics. -- DL

Poets Love Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marilyn Monroe not only loved poetry and poets, poets have reciprocated in writing Marilyn into poetry. While I may be the first to write an entire collection centered around Marilyn, in doing so I have entered into a long tradition of poets who have written poems devoted to or referencing the famous actress.

Marilyn appears in passing in Frank O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis” published in 1957, while Marilyn was still living, as “Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls” and more recently in Alex Dmitrov’s “LOVE” from his new collection LOVE and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over

the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in

champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, “I

cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way

she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will

say au revoir.”

 

In fact, it is Marilyn’s tragic death that poets have explored over and over. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” from 1968, with her death as metaphor for America:

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

        By Edwin Morgan

What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?

Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,

white hearse, Los Angeles,

DiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!

That Death should seem the only protector –

That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights

become an inquisition and a torment –

That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the

inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become

a blur of incomprehension and pain –

That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with

bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie

down and in her anguish

call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could

only dissolve her! A method

of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!

Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die

and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it, America.

Let no one say communication is a cantword.

They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.

But what she had not been able to say

perhaps she had said. ‘All I had was my life.

I have no regrets, because if I made

any mistakes, I was responsible.

There is now – and there is the future.

What has happened is behind. So

it follows you around? So what?’ – This

to a friend, ten days before.

And so she was responsible.

And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?

Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow

white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

 

Then in 1984, Sharon Olds writes a poem with the same title that appears in her collection from that year The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984).

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

By Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close
the mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the side, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

Their lives took
a turn-one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him-a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Marilyn’s death forever transforming the men, and the reader in Old’s poem. We cannot look away. In Frank Bidart’s 1996 poem, “Marilyn Monroe” that ran in The New Yorker, Marilyn becomes a vehicle for the idea and perhaps the impossibility of transformation.

 

Marilyn Monroe

by Frank Bidart

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it.

Your father’s name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind.

You are bitter all that releases

transformation in us is illusion.

Poor, you thought being rich

is utterly corrosive; and watched with envy.

Posing in the garden,

squinting into the sun.

 

Even nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn continues to serve as poetic muse, metaphor and mirror. And there’s no end in sight. Brava Marilyn!

Marilyn Monroe’s Love of Poetry: Happy Birthday Marilyn! [by Heidi Seaborn]

         

“I love poetry and poets”

                      ~Marilyn Monroe, 1962

So declared Marilyn Monroe on a list of notes she had made in preparing her response to a series of interview questions. The notes were among her journals and letters discovered decades after she died and later compiled into the book, Fragments. The editors of Fragments, Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, considered these notes to be her last, and that they may have been written within days before her death on August 4, 1962.

We’ll never know the question that inspired Marilyn’s answer. But we do know that she loved both poetry and poets. I wrote yesterday about her own poetry. Today, on what would have been her 95^th birthday, I’ll shed light on the poetry that Marilyn surrounded herself with.

After she died, her personal book collection of 430 books was auctioned off with other personal possessions by Christies NY on October 28-29, 1999. The collection includes many of the classics and shows she read broadly across genres and interests. Within that, her poetry collection included the following (with some identifiers missing):

A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman
The Poetry & Prose Of Heinrich Heine by Frederich Ewen
The Poetical works Of John Milton, by H.C. Beeching
The Poetical Works Of Robert Browning (H.C. Beeching?)
Wordsworth by Richard Wilbur
The Poetical Works Of Shelley (Richard Wilbur?)
The Portable Blake, by William Blake
William Shakespeare: Sonnets, ed. Mary Jane Gorton
Poems Of Robert Burns, ed. Henry Meikle & William Beattie
The Penguin Book Of English Verse, ed. John Hayward
Aragon: Poet Of The French Resistance, by Hannah Josephson & Malcolm Cowley
Star Crossed by Margaret Tilden
Collected Sonnets by Edna St Vincent Millay (2 editions)
Robert Frost's Poems by Louis Untermeyer (Poe: Complete Poems by Richard Wilbur (a 2nd copy?)
The Life And Times Of Archy And Mehitabel by Don Marquis
The Pocketbook Of Modern Verse by Oscar Williams
Poems by John Tagliabue
Selected Poems by Rafael Alberti
Selected Poetry by Robinson Jeffers
The American Puritans: Their Prose & Poetry, by Perry Miller
Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
Poet In New York by Federico Garcia Lorca
The Vapor Trail by Ivan Lawrence Becker Love Poems & Love Letters For All The Year
100 Modern Poems, ed. Selden Rodman
The Sweeniad, by Myra Buttle
Poetry: A Magazine Of Verse, Vol.70, no. 6
Poems Of W.B. Yeats

The Poems, Prose & Plays Of Alexander Pushkin

Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson

The Poems And Fairy-Tales by Oscar Wilde

Selected Poems by DH Lawrence

 

As an actress, Marilyn had met many writers before she famously married the great playwright, Arthur Miller. But their association broadened her circle of writers, playwrights and poets. Through Miller, she befriend Louis Untermeyer. And she became especially closeto the poet, Norman Rosten. Rosten introduced her a wide range of poets and poetry and encouraged Marilyn’s own writing. At dinner parties, Marilyn would often read poetry aloud, including a memorable reading of Yeats at a gathering at Rosten's home.

After her marriage to Miller ended, Marilyn continued to foster her love of poetry and to develop friendships with poets. Most notably with Carl Sandburg, who was at the time in his early ‘80s. In the list of interview answer notes is one that must have been in response to the question, “Who do you admire, and why?” Marilyn writes “Eleanor Roosevelt—her devotion to mankind”, President Kennedy and his brother Robert and Greta Garbo, each with a reason, then lists Carl Sandburg—his poems are songs of the people by the people and for the people.”

Marilyn always considered herself of the people. It is not surprising that she gravitated toward the work of Sandburg and Walt Whitman. As someone who befriended many writers who were blacklisted by McCarthy for the communist associations and who supported Miller during his own investigation by HUAC, and who was likewise investigated by the FBI for her communist sympathies, Marilyn was outspoken in support of labor, and always aware of her own humble childhood and hard work to get recognition.

Marilyn’s love of poetry and poets was not just a publicity ploy to knock her image of being a dumb blonde. From everything I have come to understand about her, the publicity ploy was pretending to be a dumb blonde, when in reality she was forever a student of learning and literature. Happy Birthday Marilyn!

Fifty Years On: March 19, 2021 [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

I was in North Liberty with Old Man Bud,

Old to the point where he just sat there

Looking out the window of his house.

He asked me, 'What's the date today?'

I said, 'March 19.' He said, 'What year?'

I said, '1971.' 'Eighty years ago today,'

He said, 'I shot my first duck.' We were

Silent for some moments, each keeping

His own counsel and it was so quiet

That through the half-opened window

You could scarcely hear the whoosh of

An occasional car passing on the road

Or discern the wheeze and whoosh

Of Old Man Bud's uncertain breathing.

 

What peculiar impetus or inspiration

Led me then to speak to Old Man Bud

Concerning Robert Frost's celebrated

Poem entitled 'The Road Not Taken'?

This was a sort of frisson whereby

I found myself calling into question

The whole collective enterprise of

Metaphorically interpreting the poem

To embrace instead a determinedly

Bland reading in which a not-bright

Rustic simply reports on a shortcut

That saved him a few minutes getting

From where he was to where he went.

 

Then through the kitchen behind us

And passing into the front room

A bear-like man in his fifties appeared

Who I knew as Old Man Bud's son,

Willard was his name, a car mechanic

Serving North Liberty and the rest of

St. Joseph County. Albeit his father

Was well within earshot Willard said,

'There is a groundhog case for you

'If ever there was one. I've seen

'Too many of them, I've moistened

'Their lips, I've put a cold cloth on

'Their brow and I've felt their hands'

'Go all clammy at the very end.'

 

He continued, 'I'd rather keel over

'In the trees tomorrow, or in the

'Duck blind, or in the winter when

'Some of us like to go ice fishing.

'I have tried to be a good man.'

Tears welled up in his eyes and

I averted my gaze to spare him

Any embarrassment. Thus it was

Exactly fifty years ago today that

I amended my understanding

Not only of 'The Road Not Taken'

But equally of 'Stopping by Woods

On a Snowy Evening,' both poems

From the pen of Robert Frost.

 

 

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. . .

Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, ended the first world war, leaving everyone relieved and no one the happier. The illusion of peace, and the reality of disillusion, lasted nearly twenty-one years. The United States entered the second global conflict on a day that shall live in infamy, the seventh day of December 1941.
This post is for all who, like Stacey's father, were awarded the purple heart for their service in World War II.

This Day in History: November 8 [by David Lehman]

Today  in 1957 Pan Am flight 7 went down
in the Pacific Ocean 
Three years later Kennedy was elected president
The Viet Cong ambushed the 173rd Airborne
in Operation Hump,1965, which should have made
McNamara rethink the whole thing
In 2004 the troops descended on Fallujah
and in 2016 Trump was elected president

In Celebration of Airplanes [by Dolores Hayden]

Alamy Stock Photo, Orville Wright flying in Berlin, 1909.

One hundred years ago, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made a non-stop transatlantic flight for the first time, taking off on June 14, 1919 from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landing near Clifden, Ireland, the following day. These pilots won money and fame at a time when flight was a dangerous undertaking: they froze in an open cockpit and their biplane had no directional instruments for steering through fog. Today, passengers look bored while standing in line at airports waiting for flights that will cross similar distances in a third of the time. Most of us have never known about the excitement generated by early aviation because our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were encouraged to forget the time before airplanes became safe transportation.

In the fall of 1901, Wilbur and Orville Wright traveled from Dayton, Ohio, to the dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to try out their first glider. Lying prone between wood and cloth wings, one brother at a time took off for a very short glide. Years of experiments brought greater control. By December 1903, the Wright Flyer I, a biplane powered by a lightweight motor and two propellers, marked the official start of aviation. The Wrights kept their invention quiet while they applied for patents, so quiet that one skeptical newspaper editor queried, “Fliers, or liars?” By 1905, Orville was able to keep the Wright Flyer III in the air for thirty-eight minutes. In 1908 Wilbur demonstrated the excellence of the Wright Model A in Europe where aviators Henri Farman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and Louis Blériot were making strides. With his Golden Flyer of 1909, Glenn Curtiss of Hammondsport, New York, became a major American contender in the race to manufacture successful airplanes, and his fierce competition with the Wrights has often been recounted.

Less familiar is the story of the young exhibition pilots who demonstrated the earliest aircraft at a time when very few Americans had ever seen a plane and the designers were still debating how many sets of wings one should carry. The first of many international air meets in the United States was held at Dominguez Hills field south of Los Angeles in January 1910. “WE FLY!” exulted the local paper. During a ten-day run, the gate totaled two hundred fifty thousand. Heavier-than-air flying machines dominated the meet. The women and men who flew in 1910 risked their lives for exhilaration as much as remuneration, viewing landscape from surprising angles: looking down on places from above, looking out or up at wind and weather. The aircraft generated awe, or what historian Joseph Corn has called the “winged gospel,” the belief in “mechanical flight as portending a wondrous era of peace and harmony.” At the same time, pilots began to do “Death Dives” for rowdy audiences, and promoters smiled at headlines like “Monster Crowds Thrilled by Air Devils.”

The 1910 Census listed pilots as carnival entertainers, and in the exhibition years, they often performed for tens of thousands at racetracks and state fairs. One promoter boasted of his “flock” of bird men and bird women. Drawn from cities like Rochester and San Francisco, as well as from small towns like Greenville, Texas; Mountain Home, Alabama; Arcadia, Michigan; Oxford, North Carolina; and Orofino, Idaho, stunt fliers were the sons and daughters of bankers and manufacturers as well as farmers, miners, saloon keepers, salesmen, and carpenters. Until the mid-1920s, when Bessie Coleman appeared, all were white. Some had made or raced bicycles, motorcycles, or automobiles. A few had experience in the air steering hot air balloons or dirigibles. Grade-school dropouts met college graduates in flight school, and on the exhibition circuit, they all had to master new skills. Around 1910, accounts of the exhibition fliers’ achievements began to appear in newspapers and magazines where their events often made the front page, accompanied by photographs. Interviews and profiles of pilots created aerial celebrities. Trade journals such as Aero and Hydro reported air meets in detail, but there were society page accounts as well. Wealthy individuals purchased some of the first planes, just as they had bought some of the first automobiles a decade earlier. Town and Country covered aviation.

Rich or poor, male or female, early pilots who performed at carnival altitudes needed exceptional stamina. Accidents were common. Pilots had no control tower, little advanced weather information, and few established landing places. Early aircraft were open to the weather, with cloth wings, wooden struts, bracing wires, and front or rear elevators or rudders. Powered by a small motor and a propeller, an early airplane’s landing gear might be rigged with bicycle wheels. The best flyers were skilled in both intuition and calculation. Basic equipment usually included a fuel gauge and an altimeter. Some pilots carried a personal compass. For a long-distance flight, a pilot who was “contact flying” spotted landmarks on the ground and checked them against a paper map strapped on a knee board. Exhibition pilots usually traveled from one venue to another by train or ship, sending disassembled aircraft as freight because it was safer than flying.

When the United States entered World War I, private aviation slowed in favor of military activity. Air combat in Europe was deadly, but the United States was late in entering the war, so relatively few American pilots saw combat. Extensive flight training and rapid airplane production resulted in postwar surpluses of both pilots and machines, especially the Curtiss JN-4D, the Jenny, a biplane with two cockpits designed as a trainer. After the war, cheap military surplus airplanes allowed dozens of pilots to make a living giving rides in pastures outside small towns. The earliest barnstormers in the United States were traveling actors who performed in barns and open fields, and the young pilots took up this name. Soon the barnstormers created small groups called flying circuses to increase attendance. Antics grew wilder. Parachute jumps, night stunts with fireworks, and finally, wing walking and transfers from plane to plane were added. A wing walker did acrobatics on the wings, tail, or landing gear of a two-cockpit plane while a partner handled the controls. Barnstorming pilots also began to earn money in outdoor advertising, dropping leaflets, forming smoke letters, trailing banners. Some drew customers to land sales by performing stunts in the sky above the tracts.

By the late twenties, the postwar Jennies were aging machines and the barnstormers made flying seem very dangerous. Entrepreneurs who aimed to exploit the commercial potential of moving passengers, mail, and freight by air called for more rules on safety. When John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew the Atlantic nonstop, Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919, they demonstrated both the civilian and military potential of flight. After Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon flew the Pacific nonstop in 1931, global connections were understood. U.S. Department of Commerce regulations went into effect near the end of the 1920s, and within a short time, most of the barnstormers were out of business, as aviation become safe transportation.

Dolores Hayden is a landscape historian and poet. Exuberance, her collection of poems based on characters from the early years of aviation, is just out from Red Hen Press.

November 22, 1963 [by David Lehman]

The day that Kennedy was killed
    Was the day before the Stuyvesant-Clinton football game.
    There was a rally in the auditorium
    And our coach who was from Texas or Oklahoma said slowly, carefully,
    “There isn’t a horse that can’t be bucked.”

    Meanwhile half the school was marching along
            Fifteenth Street to Union Square and then up to
            Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue and some got up to
            Fifty Ninth, and they were parading,
            Yelling, “De Witt eats shit” until they were stopped by policemen.
                  I didn’t go.  I stayed in school.
                  That day I almost got into a fight
                  With a fellow twice my size on the stairway
                  And he laughed at me.  A friend of mine broke it up.

    In English the head of the Physics Department walked
    Into the room.  He said, “I think you are old enough
    To understand this.  The President was shot today in Texas.”
            I stand up.  I do not understand.  I say, “What”
            And I think, the President was shocked today in Texas.
            He leaves the room.  I am sorry.

    I leave early. The Clinton game is called off,
            And the series has since been discontinued.
    My French teacher is waiting for me.  Smiling shuffling his legs
            Touching his teeth with his tongue looking at me
            He says, “There is a rumor that Kennedy was shot.
            Do you know anything about that?”

    A week later I go to my cousin’s bar mitzvah
            Out in Long Island, and I bring a catalog with me
            From the Bernard Baruch School of City College.
                        I want to be a stockbroker.
    It is windy outside and we walk a mile or more
            To get to the bar mitzvah
    And as I walk I talk to my mother
    And I think carefully of what I am to say
    And I narrow my eyes.
    It is a cold and windy three days after Thanksgiving
    And I point my thumb to my stomach and chest
    And I brush my scarf against my face
    And I say, “I too want to become President.”

-- David Lehman
from "The Presidential Years" in The Paris Review, #43, Summer 1968. Reprinted in New and Selected Poems by David Lehman (Scribner, 2013).

Happy birthday, Marilyn Monroe, Queen of June Geminis (Reprise) [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday is today), sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (In another column I will salute the wonderful voices that emerge from Mesdames Hayworth, Novak, Kerr, Wood, and Hepburn in those flicks. Say, does anyone say "flicks" anymore?)  See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. The way she pronounces the "z" in Berlin's "Lazy," for example, or the electricity when she strolls among the nightclub plutocrats and sagely notes that "after you get what you want you don't want it. / I could give you the moon, / you'd be tired of it soon. / You're like a baby, / that wants what it wants when it wants it, / ah, but when you are presented / with what you want you're discontented." (Irving Berlin never fails to amaze me.) This lyric was made to order for Miss Monroe. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. There's a heat wave coming in from the south and you can't keep your eyes of the north of her body even as your brain wanders to the tropics. "The way that she moves / the thermometer proves / that she certainly can can-can."  No, you can't keep your eyes off her, all of her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. Listen to her do "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare MM's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and commands Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to cease and desist; don't "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses. -- DL

Happy birthday, Mozart -- and Jerry Kern [by DL]

Spring 68 at Columbia was the season of the strike,
The occupation of the buildings (Low, Hamilton, Avery
Mathematics, and Fayerwether where a righteous
Mininster married a young couple), and Mitch and I
Went to the West End Bar to talk tactics because
We knew the "tactical patrol force" (TPF) was
Going to come and hit hard. The days went by
And the arm bands worn by angry students
Went from green (amnesty) to black (mourning
For Alma Mater). But I still had my music
Humanities final to face and I was so ignorant
I did the only thing I could do: bought Mozart's
Jupiter, and Beethoven's 3rd, 5th, and 7th,
And lucked out when on the final the prof
Played the slow movement of the 7th.
And the next summer I spent in Oxford
And the bells of one of the churches played
The opening of the Jupiter every hour
On the hour. Years later I learned
Mozart's birthday was also that of Kern,
Jerry Kern of "Show Boat" and "The Way
You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago
And Far Away." So I will just say
To both of you: happy birthday!

-- DL

Ben Hogan Wins US Open On My Birthday in 1950 [by David Lehman]

On my birthday today in 1950, Ben Hogan won the Unted States Open in a three-way playoff. What made it almost miraculous was that Hogan had suffered multiple injuries sixteen months earlier when a Greyhound bus swerved out of its lane and hit Hogan's car head on. Hogan, attempting to shield his wife, Valerie, from the impact, went to the hospital with a broken collarbone, broken ankle, broken ribs and a double fracture of his pelvis. (Valerie escaped with minor injuries.) A blood clot in Hogan's leg required emergency measures; doctors tied off the surrounding veins to prevent the clot from reaching his heart. As a result, Hogan’s legs atrophied. Would he ever play a round of golf again? The more pressing question was whether he would ever walk again.

Yet here he was at the Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, PA, site also of the 2013 U. S. Open. Hogan defied the skeptics, playing four rounds of superb golf, walking from hole to hole unassisted. At the 72nd hole, he needed a par to tie Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio for the lead and join the pair in a June 11th playoff. Hogan's one-iron shot to the green, one of the great moments in golfing history, occasioned Hy Peskin's photograph, above, undoubtedly the sport's most famous. A year later Hollywood turned the inspiring tale into a movie, Follow the Sun, with Glenn Ford as Hogan and Anne Baxter as Valerie. Click here or here for more on Hogan's heroics. -- DL

Sputnik: October 4, 1957 [by David Lehman]

On this day in 1957, Sputnik went up

and my sister Joan and I 
and our father went up

to the roof of our apartment house

on Arden Street, and watched the sky.

I don't know what we thought we saw
in the October night amid the lights and white dust

but it wasn't the space race

with our rockets exploding on takeoff

and their monkeys in space capsules orbiting the earth.

 

Only later did we memorize the names

of the seven clean-cut Project Mercury

astronauts on the cover of Life.

Project Gemini. Rendezvous and dock.

Project Apollo. A soft landing on the moon.

Science in the form of technology
was about to deliver a knockout blow

to the antiquated forces of culture,
and in Cambridge, England, they were

preparing to have one hell of a brawl about it,

 

but we were just glad to be watchers of

the sky from our Manhattan roof top,

and we had our money down on the Yanks

to take game three from the Milwaukee Braves
in the World Series tomorrow night.

-- David Lehman

On Debussy's Birthday [by David Lehman]

08 / 22 / 08

Today in 1862
Claude Debussy was born.
I remember where I was and what I was doing
one hundred years and two months later:
elementary algebra, trombone practice,
Julius Caesar on the record player
with Brando as Antony, simple
buttonhook patterns in football,
the French subjunctive, and the use
of "quarantine" rather than "blockade"
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was considered the less belligerent word.
Much was made of it in 1962,
centenary of Debussy’s birth.
And if today I play his Rhapsody
for Saxophone and Orchestra
for the ten minutes it requires of
my undivided attention, who will attack me for
living in Paris in 1908 instead of now?
Let them. I'll take my stand,
my music stand, with the composer
of my favorite Danse Tarantelle.

-- David Lehman

"and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again" Molly Bloom's Soliloquy

Happy birthday, Vic Damone (aka Vito Rocco Farinola)

 

D-Day, 70 Years On. . . [by David Lehman]

The general thought about prayer.
He lit a cigarette and thought about it.
If he was a praying man he would pray for a break in the weather,
But prayer was an act of futility, or of presumption,
And he put his faith in the men with the maps
Who read the clouds like ancient fortune-tellers
Only we call it science.
Yesterday they feared a major Atlantic depression
With cold front to follow.
All right (he thought), I’ll put it off one day.
But tomorrow came and he took out his fountain pen
And wrote that the failure of the mission lay on his shoulders alone,
That the men had done all they could.
Then he folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
He lit another Camel. There were days he smoked four packs.
Okay, he said. Let’s go.

--  David Lehman

On Marilyn Monroe's Birthday

 

Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman, Camerado

Reconciliation

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again,
       and ever again, this soil’d world:
... For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin — I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

-- Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

History: The Great American Lullaby [by Natalie Diaz]

Words become words because we need them. I don’t know what they are before that—impulses, energy, trilobites, Hydrogen—who knows. But once they become words, I believe in them, the power and the glory of them. Even the ugly ones—those terrible angels of our mouths—beating like dark wings from our throats—savage, nigger, half-breed, chink, faggot, indian, redskin. We built them—like bombs—with our need to break each other.  

I am drawn to the words that hurt me most—No.—I mean to say: I am not afraid to put into my mouth the words that hurt me again and again. The people who first gave them to me didn’t always tell the truth, so I take them in and spit them back out—the bones of them, the parts nobody wants to talk about now—and I tell them my way because I got tired of choking on them.

History is the name of the greatest American lullaby. When we know the words to it, we feel like better people, church-going people. We feel like we have learned something. Worst of all, we feel like it is over. This is what history really means to most white people: It is over.

It might as well be the title of all the history books in high schools across the nation— 

Teacher: Class open up your It Is Over text to “Chapter 2: We Fucked The Indians Again But Jim Thorpe, So It Is Over.”

Tommy: Didn’t we read that last week.

Teacher: No, Tommy, last week we read “Chapter 1: We Fucked The Indians But That Was A Long Time Ago Which Means It Is Over.” This new chapter has blankets in it, and Hotchkiss.

No, the worst part is that when we memorize the words to History, we get sleepy. Our eyes are lulled close. Just like at the end of “Rock-a-bye-baby” nobody asks what happened to the baby because they’re already asleep.

What is my point? Words carry within them the dark things we have done and the dark things those dark things continue to do. It is important that we know our words better than anybody else.

This is what I tell my students: Every word. And not just that word, also the word it was before. And the word that word was before it became the word you are using. Know those words the way they were when they first meant themselves. The beginning of language must have been something else—each sound like an entire song—a want we wanted so badly that it began like a lightning spark in our minds and rushed downhill to the lamp wicks of our tongues where it lit into a word. Fire, someone said for the first time in the universe, and for the first time in the existence of the ear, someone heard, Fire—how it must have burned.

So if every word is Promethean, why shouldn’t I rivet them all to the rock and tear them open?

What a gift: to know every word a word has ever meant.

What a wound: to know every word a word has ever meant—

Our word for policeman translates to the people who rope you, and our word for jail is the place you are roped. It’s the same word we use to describe roping cattle.

The US government used to rope Mojave children, sat on horseback and lassoed them like animals. They put them in the back of wagons or made them walk behind their horse all the way to the boarding school, leaving their mothers wringing the hems of their dresses in grief. My Elder teacher told me this: Grandma used to say that after they rounded up Momma and the other kids and took them away, all the dogs ran in circles in front of the houses and ran up and down the river banks crying and crying because they wanted their kids back. Those poor dogs cried and cried and cried. They went mad with crying. Today, when we talk about the law, the police, the justice system, we are talking about those men on horses who roped our children and took them away. We hear the crying. It is not over. It is happening again and again in those words.

School, or huchqol hapoove, means the place they put and keep children. And they did—they took Mojave children, their best shot at crushing us. And once there—nyayuu hapoove is our word for closet—my great grandmother was given a switching and locked in a closet for the day when she was caught speaking Mojave.

Language is nothing if not violent—No.—Language is silent when it is not violent.

Our word for metal is ‘anya kwa’oor, which means it has a golden light. Metal came to us first in a prophecy, which translated roughly goes something like this: It will come across the ocean and land here. It has no head, no arms, no legs. It is oval-shaped. It will move through us up our shorelines. The metal that was prophesied was not the metal of pots or pans or rakes—it was a bullet. Anytime we speak of metal, we are speaking of the way it first came to us—sometimes by going through us the way bullets have always done.

So when I say know your words, I mean the ones that have shaped your mouth and your page. Look at them, listen to the things they have endured, the things they have done. Even if they are one part memory, they are also another part living. Maybe what I have been trying to say is that when you walk into the room of your poem and hear History playing in the background, you find that poem, you look that poem in the eye and say, Wake your ass up.