The Best American Poetry

THE MOODY TEMPLE and A HUM-DRUM NOT KNOWING [by John Hennessy]

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

Psalm on Sifnos

By Stephen Yenser

One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.

One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.

    Like this poem by Stephen Yenser, a straight-razor-witted fellow Hellenophile I got to know on a visit here several years ago, the island is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. From the ferry, Sifnos looks denuded, its smooth volcanic peaks all sun firing across a yellow skull. Disembark, though, and you begin to see that flora here is cunning, vines shifting along every available crack in stone, tamarisks lining the beach, olive trees low and orderly up on the terraces digging their roots deep.

    The people living here are pretty clever too; over the last five thousand years they’ve developed an architecture and agriculture to survive in style. Their houses are all clean lines and square angles, a series of unfolding cubes, thick-walled to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and painted uniformly white, shutters a limited variety of blue, green, brown, and pink. The blue and white domes of churches—one for every day of the year, one for every sixth Sifnian—speckle each inhabited hillside. Shrubs, vines, and fruit trees surround the buildings: lemons, limes, oranges, figs, pomegranates, mimosas, almonds, cascading bougainvillea, shady grape arbors, banks of flowering capers and night-blooming jasmine, enormous geraniums, and on and on. Beyond the limits of each town there are farmers’ fields, orchards, and pastures, chickens pecking, goats grazing, the odd cow, pig, or sheep poking, donkeys, horses and mules performing their tasks or stalling in attitudes of sublime passive aggression.

    And of course there is the sea. Visible from virtually every inch of this island. It’s kind of blue.

    Our arrival on Sifnos was a happy accident. In the summer of 2000, we found ourselves between apartments—Sabina Murray, Nicholas, our first child, two years old at the time, and I. In September we were to move into free housing on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover, where Sabina would serve as writer-in-residence for three years, but until then we had nowhere to go. We looked into summer sublets and seasonal rentals in Boston, Maine, southern New Hampshire, the Jersey Shore, all places near friends or family, but found nothing we could afford. It was actually cheaper, in the last years of the drachma, to go to Greece for a couple of months, than to stay in any of those local places. We moved around the Aegean that summer, but Sifnos was our favorite spot and we continue to return there when we can.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

    Our apartment on Sifnos abuts the grounds of the chapel of Panagia Ouranofora, once a temple to Apollo, the god from whom our town, Apollonia, the island’s capital, takes its name. Lengths of marble column and fragments from the walls of the temple have been integrated into the more modestly designed church, and ancient marble blocks still provide a few of the long steps up from the steno, the path that cuts between a block of terraced white Cycladic houses and Mamma Mia, the popular Italian restaurant next door.

    I feel deeply moved by this site; I’m at home here.

    But why?

My wife likes to call New Jersey the old country. Peterstown, Elizabeth, Price Street and Seminary Ave. in Rahway—that’s it for you, she says. The old country.

    She’s more than half serious. I grew up there with my mother’s family from Sicily. Cusumanos, Catalanos, Frangiamores and Federicos. As it is with other émigrés, my old country, my New Jersey, is gone, colonized by time and change, made unrecognizable by a tyrant present. I wasn’t around to see it happen. To observe without noticing. I go back as often as I can, but I’m a shade there, almost as out of place as I am in Sicily, even though I visit family in both places. Before Elizabeth and Rahway, we’re from Agrigento, Akragas, an ancient Greek colony. According to my grandfather, our family house of worship began as an altar for Phoenician traders, sailors from the Eastern Mediterranean, some of the earliest visitors to the island. Later the Greeks raised a temple around that altar, offered their own sacrifices there. The temple was rededicated by the Romans when they colonized us, consecrated as a church after Constantine Christianized the empire, converted to a mosque in the time of Arab rule, and re-transmogrified into a Roman Catholic church under the Normans. Even if it is in the old old country, I pass many days feeling very much like that building.

***

    I prefer going to Greece because Sicily is fraught for me: I’m more of an outsider there even though I look like everyone in town. In Greece I’m an outsider, sure, but a kind of distant cousin. There’s a certain level of acceptance, even welcome, offered to me, attended by very low expectations. You’re here? Great, just don’t get in the way and we’ll all do fine.

    The same courtesy extends to my family. Sabina, who is half Filipina (Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese) and half Irish, is a chameleon: she looks Asian in Asia, South American in South America, Mediterranean here. Our sons also have friends of their own in Greece. Although our command of the language is limited to the most basic transactions, that seems to satisfy us. Until we open our mouths, we even pass for Greek.

    I don’t mind not understanding what people are saying. It reminds me of childhood—and I don’t just mean the English words and constructions that flew over my head. Between my family and neighbors there was always some unintelligible language being spoken: various Southern Italian dialects, Spanish from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the DR, Armenian, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and whatever the hell my buddy Paul’s grandfather McCarthy from Cork was firing from the side of his mouth. It was just a given that you couldn’t understand everything being said in your presence—even if you were the one being addressed. You moved from Dennis Rivera’s apartment to the Keossians’ to the Smiths’, you ate the food, played the games, took the physical and multilingual abuse from the older siblings, and you tried to keep your head down, avoid attention. There was nothing profound about this—it was the Negative Capability of the quotidian. A humdrum not-knowing.

(For a brief discussion of the Greek economy and links to articles on the Greek political situation, please see yesterday’s post.)

From the archive; first posted July 23, 2012.

Emerson of the week: Why travel?

<<
Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
>>>
Emerson, "Self Reliance"

Dancing history, art and color to another state of mind [By Tracy Danison]

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d’Isenheim”, Musée d’Unterlinden. Photo © Cie Callicarpa

 

The retable d’Isenheim, the “Isenheim altarpiece”, is made up of three folded layers that open out to depict scenes of the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, along with ordinary disease, suffering, anguish and death. Visually, the presence of Saint Anthony, a healer-hero in the Catholic-Christian pantheon and the symptoms of “Saint Anthony’s Fire” – ergot poisoning and plague: carbuncles, gangrenous swelling, madness, convulsed death – create a thematic unity.

In 1277, religious from the order of Saint Anthony set up an ergot poisoning and plague specialized hospital in “Isenheim” (nowadays written “Issenheim”). Isenheim was then, Issenheim is now, part of a string of upper-Rhine river towns, pretty much equidistant from Colmar to the north and Mulhouse to the south, all three anchored by Basel in Switzerland and Strasburg in Alsace.

Though a mere village, Issenheim retains some of its old-time shine: Prince Albert of Monaco is hereditary Lord there. Centrally located on trade routes, “Issenheim” is today in wine country but Isenheim was then in rye-growing land and, because ergot molds are especially common in rye and there was a great deal of human passage, Saint Anthony’s Fire was a big problem.  No surprise, the hospital did a booming business and came to hold many treasures, among them, the altarpiece. Painted for its chapel, the piece is a dramatically unique example of bright and colorful Renaissance painting: beautiful, visually ingenious, also shocking, revolting. New Science burgeons in the gorgeous horror, too. The lesions, carbuncles and convulsions featured are as medically realistic as disgusting.

Looted from the hospital during the French Revolution, the retable d’Isenheim is now dismounted as a separate exposition in the Musée d’Unterlinden in Colmar.

And that would be that –  place, time, a little O-wow-did-you-know?! commentary – if not for Aurelie Gandit’s dance performance, meant to “open the regard, make the eye listen”.

For me, it opened a portal on a state of mind that, unless, of course, I’m concealing a lately personally accepted obscure form of first-century CE judeo-gnosticism, has long since passed away.

 

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d'Isenheim". Photo © Cie Callicarpa

The altarpiece’s Crucifying Jesus, Aurélie Gandit’s dance let me see, expertly anatomic, covered in scientifically accurate sores, is not a stern reminder of death from the unbending universal father. It is not either a commentary on the redemptive power of suffering. It is not either, as often explained today, a reminder of the universal god’s love.

Rather, that crucifying god, is a consolation by a brother, a fellow-sufferer, a sibling. Jesus is an agonizing inmate of Isenheim, just another sufferer in among the over-large family of a doting mother and a distant, if glorious, father.

Accepting pain, I realize, were no act of faith: plague-ridden Crucifying Jesus is a god like me. Anguished, we both face the gorgeously explicit horror of Saint Anthony’s Fire. Gods the Father might be out, but we little gods, Jesus and I and the other patients and the monks and the attendants are in it together, not alone.

Although Gandit’s performance notes say that she uses her body to project the strength of emotion in achieving her result, that is not my experience, or for that matter, my companion, Karine’s, either.

Though it has many figures, and notwithstanding sado-masochistic iconography, the experience of pain is just too personal to have an esthetic. Also, emotion may follow or precede pain but doesn’t seem to me (or us) to inhabit it – pain is deaf, dumb, dull, timeless, empty. I (or we) live inside pain.

To enable this other and more ancient state of mind in me, Gandit’s movement just tore a little hole in the fabric of routine.

Like an ordinary guide, she begins by describing the historic and symbolic and liturgical and esthetic ins and outs of the altarpiece. But there’s a flatness or lack of artifice to her. And her voice speeds up slightly. Her gesture becomes a little frenetic. She’s like a poor actor trying to play “hysteria”. She becomes absurd.

Then, all of a sudden, she falls to the ground.

And, when she falls to the ground, it’s a shock.

A little shock, but all shocks are a shock, are a breech in perceptual routine. And a little shock “open[ed my] regard, ma[de my] eye listen.”

__________

For another view of the experience of Aurélie Gandit’s dance performance with hisotircal artwork, see “Conundrums and sweet embrace: Aurélie Gandit’s “Visite dansée” with La Dame à la licorne”, The Best American Poetry, July 2022.

Three Poems from the Ukraine [by Slava Konoval]

The Ukrainian poet Vyacheslav ("Slava") Konoval sent us these three poems for publication. A member of the Geer Poetry Group (Wales) and a member of the Federation of Scottish Writers, Slava lives in Kyiv and is determined to weather the Russian military storm. He tells me he has devoted much energy to address "acute social problems, such as overcoming poverty, ecology issues, the relationship of people with the government." I mean to ask him whether he wrote these three poems in English or translated them. Do they not read like translations? On the theory that there is a certain charm in poetry as a second language, and in respect of the embattled nation for whom Konoval would speak, I present them here even before I find out more.

Now I have found out more:

<<< Yea, I am writing in English to promote my compatriots and show the thick skin of the Ukranian soul.

Translation of anything cannot guarantee the precisely, especially in art activity, so I do original form writing in non-my native language.

Yea, I live in Kyiv and haven't leave my city from time of the overwhelming Russian invasion till nowadays. >>>

Don’t be a freak

I can’t be a freak,
I can’t play it,
I have nothing to speak.
From thought about it
I want only to spit.

I’m not a freak,
I haven’t millions on account,
I’m not strong as beek,
which stands firmly on the ground or on the mount.

I was brought up with my mother’s milk,
it is precious like silk,
hey, artificial behavior is bilk.

Richard’s Castle

On the sprawling mountain of Usypalnytsia,
the neo-Gothic wind built
a castle for the Lion Heart,
below St. Andrew's Church.
The castle's a marvel of art!

An unknown architect
loved the pages of Walter Scott,
having built pointed Spires,
laid his heart.

Moody mountain, sharp descent,
she let the towers in
through philanthropic help, maybe cent,
neither royal funds, no sin.

The royal castle shines,
in yellow colors,
in the graceful contours and lines.

Night Singer

Where missile strikes hit,
where the borders with Belarus are close,
I am asking for Your consent, please, permit
to tell about the Ukrainian company,
I honor her, raise a glass, and toast.

In days of turmoil, in stormy days,
IKOC like a weapon took a thread and a needle,
IKOC has will, courage and actions,
not empty phrases.

Weavers, mechanics, accountants,
they are bees, buzzing in workshops,
IKOC flaunts its image and patents
sewn shoes and uniforms for the military,
sketches in laptops.

With style, taste, and quality
IKOC cares about defenders,
who grind the enemy in a meat grinder,
and like blenders.

May the company prosper
that IKOC had a pre-war profit,
an investor is waiting for him in line, a sponsor.

Ed: Re "Night Singer": Diligent Internet searches of IKOC turn up many a cul de sac. Other poems of his are posted here. Other of Slava's Engish-language poems, such as "Painful condition," can be found here.

Painful condition

Once on Thursday, I woke up weak,
having been covered with a warm quilt,
with a merciless temperature,
I am dying, and I am bleak.
Like a pendulum,
hearing the run of strikes in the clock’s click.
Laying in bed, I had exhausted from the undead,
I am similar to a sickly chick.
Contemplate on the white pills,
that had become the color of capitulation.
Please, God, stop all human ills,
overcome the pains, and be a healthy nation.

Or click here.

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Clare College, Cambridge, and John Berryman

Twice a day I crossed you. . .

Among the Columbia College graduates who attended Clare College were John Berryman (left), Norman Podhoretz, Morris Dickstein, and David Shapiro.  Much of Berryman's Love & Fame addresses his time at Columbia and Clare. The late Clive James tells some of the facts in this wrongheaded 1972 review. Perhaps the most curious thing about James's comment is that it regards ambition as morally offensive.

<< The first half of the book, before the suicide-laden poems and the exhausted addresses to the Lord, is a portrait of the artist as a young man at school, Columbia and Cambridge. It bears a startling resemblance to Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, not just in its itinerary (Phi Beta Kappa, Clare New Court) but in its psychological outline. The relish for the literary horse-race is exactly the same, except that Berryman raises it from relish to positive mania. Throughout his work since the early Dream Songs, Berryman’s ambitions for major status have been nakedly confessed and played off against his equally intense ambitions to be the poet maudit, like Ginsberg or (more relevantly) like Tristan Corbière, to whose memory Love & Fame is dedicated. Corbière has been called une chienlit permanente, and Berryman for a long time sought the same title. But even in the Dream Songs, where the interplay of these two ambitions is at its most successfully complex, the determination to spill the beans about the dark side of his nature was compromised by unjustified readiness to forgive himself in the name of art. In this way his ambitions served each other to produce a self-serving poetry: he would complicate the account of his drive towards artistic greatness by revealing himself as a slob, and take the edge off that revelation by justifying his behaviour as the experience necessary to artistic greatness. Berryman was a highly introspective poet, alive to many things going in his own mind, but he was never aware of just how consistently he worked this trick. It is the reason why the Dream Songs, which at their best offer a convincing poetic recreation of the mind’s plurality, lapse finally from dialogue into monologue — the pride at the mind’s centre heaps humiliation on itself but remains obstinately intact. >>

On the other hand, this is how Stuart Davis summarized the poet's reputation in the Harvard Crimson in 1966:

<<<
Rarely anthologized, sympathetic to many literary camps, but with a foot in none of them, John Berryman is as close to being sui generis as anyone but Blake, Trotsky and Christopher Smart. New York has adopted him only since the mid-fifties, for although his poems appeared in the Nation and the New Republic since the thirties, much of his earlier work and most of its critical acknowledgment were published in Chicago's Poetry. Today he is regarded by many as one who threatens the language and endangers the conventions it clings to.

That very reputation has made him a poet's poet, "that forlorn phrase," in William Meredith's words. And his role as an innovator relates directly to his role as a teacher and scholar. For better or for worse, Berryman is an academic--that once-unpleasant label that generated such a fuss in the late fifties. Most of his life has been spent in colleges and universities. Born in Oklahoma, in 1914 he was educated at Columbia, Clare College and Cambridge; since then he has taught "just about everywhere but the South," including Grinnell, Wayne (Detroit), Princeton, Minnesota--where he is now Professor of Humanities, on a leave of absence--and Harvard, where he was for two years an Instructor in English, with a Warren House office and an Appian Way, later a Beacon Hill, address. A student in his Freshman Composition course in 1941 remembers him as a cold and vigorous teacher who invited his students to his apartment, gave them drinks, played music and told them what and what not to like. >>>

In 2004, the Library of America published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young. In Poetry magazine

Here is the poet's "Dream Song" #13:

God bless Henry. He lived like a rat,
with a thatch of hair on his head
in the beginning.
Henry was not a coward.  Much.
He never deserted anything; instead
he stuck, when things like pity were thinning.

So may be Henry was a human being.
Let's investigate that.
… We did; okay.
He is a human American man.
That's true.  My lass is braking.
My brass is aching.  Come & diminish me, & map my way.

God's Henry's enemy. We're in business… Why,
what business must be clear.
A cornering.
I couldn't feel more like it. —Mr. Bones,
as I look on the saffron sky,
you strikes me as ornery.

 

And here is Dream Song 121:

 

Grief is fatiguing. He is out of it,

the whole humiliating Human round,
out of this & that.
He made a-many hearts go pit-a-pat
who now need never mind his nostril-hair
nor a critical error laid bare.

He endured fifty years. He was Randall Jarrell
and wrote a-many books & he wrote well.
Peace to the bearded corpse.
His last book was his best. His wives loved him.
He saw in the forest something coming, grim,
but did not change his purpose.

Honest & cruel, peace now to his soul.
He never loved his body, being full of dents.
A wrinkled peace to this good man.
Henry is half in love with one of his students
and the sad process continues to the whole
as it swarmed & began.

"RENE CHAR : Isle-Sur-Sorgue" [by Geoffrey Young]

It was early July, 1970, and we were at Le Chateau d’Lignane, guests of the Boutié family in Aix-en-Provence. Laura had spent a month with them when she was sixteen. The house had an all but empty long room, not part of the house, really, with a curved ceiling. All it had in it were a few tables and chairs. We worked there during the ten days we stayed with them. I can still hear the sound of my flute echoing in that monastic chamber.

We knew that René Char [pictured left] lived in a town not far from Aix. One day we drove to Isle-Sur-Sorgue, found his house, entered the yard, and parked. I’d been translating his poetry for the past year and wanted to see the landscape around his place--the river, the stones, the low hills, the bridge--and to meet him if possible, even without a letter of introduction.

Quietly, we walked around the yard looking at things, trying to get up the courage to knock on his front door. We noticed a marble slab lying on a patch of grass, with a line from his poetry carved into it.  “L’aigle est au futur.” My god, we thought, it’s his headstone! Did he die? But then we saw other slabs, planted here and there, memorable lines culled from his poems.

Three steps lead up to the front door, the house a dull-white two-story stucco with red trim. When we finally knocked, hoping to meet him, his housekeeper answered. I told her that I’d been translating the poet’s work into English, and hoped to meet him. She said, with kind regret, “Il garde son privé.”

We wondered if he was inside, peeking out of an upstairs window at two young Americans, uninvited, poking around his property with shameless audacity.

Nothing to do but get back in the car and drive away, disappointed, but armed now with the inscription on that stone: “L'AIGLE EST AU FUTUR.” Was it a prophecy? A projection? Symbolic or natural?

If “the eagle is in the future,” what did it mean?

Geoffrey Young has lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts since 1982. From 1992 til 2018 he presented hundreds of shows of contemporary art at the Geoffrey Young Gallery. His small press, The Figures (1975-2005), published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction. Recent chapbooks of his poetry, prose and colored pencil drawings include Thirty-Three (above/ground press, 2017), DATES, ASIDES, and PIVOT. Young has written catalog essays for a baker’s dozen of artists.

 

The Cat of Montserrat [by Lera Auerbach]

My memory: meeting a Montserrat cat –
she is sitting beneath Pablo Casals’ sculpture –
the true owner of his bronze cello
with whiskers sniffing mountain air.
It is Fall. It’s sunny, but the air is already
keeping a promise of the storms ahead.
I am now worried about this cat –
the cat that guards Casals and his cello.

Who will feed her during the winter?
Who will brush her tricolored coat?
Who will make her feel safe in the mountains?

I beckon the cat to follow, promising
to take good care of her if she lets me.
But the cat sniffs Casals’ dusty shoes,
raises her tail, and turns away.
I feel abandoned. I pray to the Black Virgin
to protect this proud feline. I ask Casals
to keep watch and play sometimes
for the cat’s hunting pleasures
El cant del ocells (The Song of the Birds.)

The air shimmers with hidden music.
The cat catches overtones – and the horizon shifts.

 

 

An Interview with Loren Goodman [by Aspen Matis]

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

I corresponded with Mr. Goodman via email about the ephemeral nature of insight, old poets who are powerful alarm clocks, the dreamtime origin of responsibility, poetry “as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party,” the unique capacity of thematic minds to unearth truth, and the inspiring optimism of a particular young Japanese boxer. We also discussed the definition of greatness “as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.”

photo credit: Mike Figgis

In your poem entitled “Poem,” you define a poem as “a face as empty / As the full page is blank.” What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Is poetry a part of me, or am I a part of poetry? What is my greatest role in the inner life of poetry? Why have certain poems chosen to write themselves through me? I’d like to thank poetry for collaborating with me.

This is a question we ask — or set out to answer — every time we write one: What can a poem be?

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

I like the idea of poetry as a compass: a compass that gets you lost, when getting lost is the only way to find a way. Which is the greater being/force — the more inclusive, all-encompassing — poetry or society? The radicals “god” + “soil” + “to throw a party” comprise the Chinese characters for society (社会) while “language” + “temple” make up poetry (詩). Combine the two and we have poetry as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Hang ten.

Your most recent book of poems, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems, was published in February of 2020. Poet and songwriter Michael Rothenberg calls the collection “Irreverent…a Dadaistic self-portrait of twins in an existential playground, where everyone and no one gets hurt too badly. …Truth slips between meanings, some words become other words, a conceptual kind of magician’s poetry that skips through a minefield of radioactive icons and self-detonating idols, each itinerant reflection, each telegraphic puzzle, expiring in zany isolation and nostalgia. We have come to this. Bankrupt and rejoicing. This twitchy book of poetry is history and hope.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Pirooz Kalayeh and I co-wrote this book together. It was a wonderful experience. We wrote it line by line, back and forth over the years, on Google Hangouts. It was fun goofing around with language, not intending to write a book, just having a good time, corresponding in and outside the parameters of ordinary language. Then at some point we looked back at our chats and said, “hey, we have some poems!” The Google Hangout poetry process is one I’ve used with students from many years before, which continues to inspire. My “ambition” is to keep on doing it. Please contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

Your first collection, Famous Americans, was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin as the winner of the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets and subsequently published by Yale University Press. Described by the publisher as “a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture,” the poems in Famous Americans question our definition and understanding of the concept of icon. Merwin compared you to the Dadaists and commended your poetry’s “plain ridicule.” In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

The back cover. Between that and the final page, I hope that readers will be left with the first page of their own new poem or book.

Explorations: how to make a book, and to make the most of my own mistakes.

You live in Seoul, Korea, where you serve as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director at Yonsei University/Underwood International College. As a Kansas-born American living in Seoul, what unexpected delights have you come across? What difficulties and disappointments? Have you experienced culture shock; or have you discovered that, to a great extent, students are students and English departments are insular and familiar? 

It is my first time being the Chair, and let me tell you, it is not easy. It requires a certain amount of readiness and stability, and over time, one learns to accept the pleasures of being sat upon. I’m working on becoming a table.

The students are great. Each unique, a brilliant, lively and considerate bunch — beyond comparison. Primarily third-culture kids.

So it’s really not that far from the heartland to Seoul. One thing I’ve learned in Seoul is that groove is in the heart.

I experience culture shock on a regular basis, and moonlight as a cultural shock therapist.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

I use 17th century and 18th century poets as internal alarm clocks.

The works of Blake, Coleridge, and Bashō have awakened in me dreams. As Tukaram writes:

I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
“Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time,” Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
“Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility.”

In dreams begin responsibilities!

What have you learned from your practice of Japanese boxing? Are you now competing? 

I learned many things, and forgot many things — do you find life is like that, a process of learning and forgetting?

Of the many things I learned, I’d like to share three: 1) While training with Japanese boxers, I enjoyed talking with them, interviewing them, recording, transcribing, and reflecting on their life stories. One of my standard interview questions was “What is the best thing that happened to you in boxing?” The answer that stays with me most came from a young pro boxer. He paused, looked up for a second, and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” What a wonderful optimism with which to approach the world: the best is always yet to come. 2) Don’t get hit. 3) Use your legs.

I’m still in the game. See you on August 14th, from Tulsa, on ESPN.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Thematic minds sometimes find out what inquiring ones don’t want to know.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Yes. But sometimes there are books that are better than the best. And the greatest works are the mortar that holds everything together — without them — and the books that go beyond greatness—the cracks themselves — our world would be little more than a heap of bricks. 

It feels good to be asked about greatness.

Didn’t Thomas Nashe say the best art is the most obscure?

One of my favorite stories on this subject involves Stanley Kunitz’ selection of Michael Casey.

It’s nice to find the greatness in everything.

I like the definition of greatness as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

I only share wisdom and guidance with old poets. Never let anyone convince you out of your youth.

All big things are made of little things. Bon Courage! Everything is practice for everything else. Do one thing at a time. Sleep.

I have plenty of ignorance to share with young poets, and a lot of wisdom and guidance I’d like young poets to share with me!

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

The trivial ones! The trivium.

Working on: a shijo workshop in Newfoundland, dreams, boxing, translations of Humberto Ak’abal, a Sci-Fi musical without the letter “I,” a Kung Fu sestina, and a series of dark chocolate-covered poems. Also collaborating with a Korean cosmetics company on poems that cleanse pores, and with Puma International on a line of shoes composed of recycled verses from the 17th/18th century.

Thank you for asking so many insightful and inspiring questions. Now for the question behind the questions: the answer is green.

Retroscope: Alan Bernheimer presents Ron Padgett's "Albanian Diary"

Alan Bernheimer writes:

<<<

Ever wonder what it was like in Albania soon after the Iron Curtain came down? Travel along with Ron Padgett for the sights, sounds, and smells in the latest episode of Retroscope:

https://nowheremag.com/2021/06/ron-padgetts-albanian-diary/

>>>

To which I add that Padgett's prose is a somewhat overlooked treasure. His book on Ted Berrigan, for example, is fantastic. -- DL

Why do the English like to live in ancient Greece? [by Virginia Woolf]

 

<<<

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

>>>

​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

<<<

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

>>>

​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Viennese Traffic Lights [by Lera Auerbach]

In Vienna, they have same-sex pedestrian traffic lights.

Typically, traffic lights are sexist: they display a matchstick figure of a man that turns green or red and sometimes flashes nervously, trying to speed up pedestrians so that cars can start driving.

In Vienna, they replaced the matchstick man with two matchstick figures holding hands.
No, I mean touching hands since matchstick figures have no fingers. 

In some Viennese traffic lights, instead of a matchstick man, there is a matchstick woman figure. No curves, but a triangle of a dress. Instead of a flashing man, there is a flashing triangle of a woman or, even better, two women touching hands. 

Gay traffic lights appear only in the center of the most touristy areas.

"Such a progressive city," I thought.

"No," my Viennese friend Verena objected. "They are more intolerant than most; they just hide it better." 

My apartment in Vienna remains empty throughout the pandemic, and sometimes I imagine that a part of me lives there, but then I remember about the lockdowns and quarantines and feel gratitude for spending the pandemic away from any large cities – in the Middle of Nowhere, surrounded by nature.

With the flights cancelled, cars parked, restaurants closed, and theatres and concert halls paused in a year-long fermata, the traffic lights in Vienna remain working, touching invisible fingers of the matchstick figures made of lights and reminding us that human touch may still be possible again one day and isolation will not last forever.

 

Making of an Opening [by Lera Auerbach]

"Opening" by Lera Auerbach

 

1. The Absence of Trees

You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.

At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing. 
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.

By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.

(After a while, there is no way back.)

 

2. Unborn Music

In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.

Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.

A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.

(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.) 

 

3. An Opening to Breath

I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening? 

Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal. 

A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear

who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.

They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”

(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
 

4. Quiet Chuckle

A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.

Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?

Why?

I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.

"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."

(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)

  

5. Trail of Breadcrumbs

If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful. 
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still. 

Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.

(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)

 

6. What’s Not Allowed in Svalbard

The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.

Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.

If you die, you will be fined, 
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard. 

(Dying and bringing cats.) 

A protective blanket of words [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Arctic Dreams - Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

I learned that a friend of mine was going through a tough time. His mother died, and he had debilitating neck pain. He needed to write the obituary and arrange for the funeral. His mother had dementia. Was he able to say goodbye? I did not ask. 

I don't know which scale would measure grief. Such a scale doesn't exist. 

Physical pain is easier to manage. If it is yours. Because at some point, the pain stops defining you. 
Grief buried deeper, so deep it can't be torn away, it becomes you.

In the Arctic, old babushkas, when they become unable to take care of themselves, hope to be killed by a polar bear. When they become too ill and weak, they look for the bear to eat them. I asked why. Being devoured by a wild animal didn't seem to me like an attractive way to finish life. 

"The bear will be nourished by eating me," explained an old Inuit woman. "The bear will become strong and fat. Then one day, my son will kill that bear. My son and his family will eat the bear's meat, make healing mixes from its fat, and make trousers from its fur. Thus, through the polar bear, I will nourish my son and keep him warm, even past my life, even past my death."

Post mortem motherly care.

(2)

A few years ago, I travelled to Greenland and stayed in Nuuk in the apartment of a polar bear hunter. A polar bear hunter's home looked like an IKEA house made by children constructors of adult sizing. Everything was modern, functional and perfectly unremarkable. 

A photograph on the wall showed a polar bear (or rather its fur) covered in blood, soaking in a bathtub. I realized it was the same bathtub in which I had showered that morning. It had rubber ducklings as lucky ornaments. Perfectly, chillingly, unremarkable bathtub.

(3)

"I wish I could make a blanket of protective words to shield you," I wrote to my friend, whose mother died after suffering dementia for several years. 

“A protective blanket of words” could be a definition of poetry. 
“Could be” because, like everything else, it rejects any definitions. 

Poetry is no different than spell-making or alchemy.

As if words could make a difference. 
As if anything could still make any difference.

In the world gone mad with apocalyptic craziness and fear, can words remain protective talismans? 

(4)

Bears in the Arctic are suffering from global warming. They're skinny and weak; they couldn't kill even old babushkas on their suicide mission. 

If I could stitch a protective blanket of words, I would make one for the polar bears, another one for the suicidal babushkas on their mission to feed the polar bears, and the third one for the polar bear hunters. I would then make a gigantic frozen quilt for the Arctic to protect it from climate change and even a bigger blanket for the entire world to save it from madness. 

Every stitch would be a word of love, a talisman against impending disaster. 

But I never learned how to make blankets or quilts. I can mend sounds and strings but not threads. The thoughts made of words are unravelling, and I can't weave them together. 

 

Ashbery on Paris (and Ellsworth Kelly)

from Ellsworth Kelly, Plant Drawings (Matthew Marks Gallery, 1992), Essay by John Ashbery. Unpaginated. About the life of an American expatriate in Paris:

          "I suspect that in this burgeoning period of his art the limiting force was Paris itself, that dome of intuitive appreciation of one's own powers of observation, a specific place and time where `some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, -- for that moment only,' in Pater's famous formulation, and where, as Gertrude Stein said, Americans can discover what it means to be American. One can never predict what form the generating impulse will take: in my case (my own years in Paris came just after Kelly's) I found my poetry being more `influenced' by the sight of the Paris phenomenon of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was learning to read at the time."

"Thinking" at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria (Summer 2006)

Two poems at Civitella Ranieri, July 2006

Thinking

                        You see a man / trying to think. -- Adrienne Rich

Here an orange and black-spotted butterfly
tests the lavender. There a bee sips
the yellow and deep red interior
of a red zinnia in full bloom.
The man needs to be alone.

The butterfly shies away.

You see a man trying to think,
but first he must clear his head
and throat.

The man coughs.
The butterfly leaps from a lush pink to
a bright orange zinnia. The man is thinking.
Give him room. Figs grow plump and green
on the trees while he does his thinking.
The pomegranates in the bushes
are pregnant with seeds.
The orange butterfly has white spots
on a black border.
It is not the same butterfly as before.

Thunder in Umbria

How odd. Blue skies, white clouds, hardly any gray,
the sun a flaming disc, and warm,
and yet big drops of rain are coming down.
cooling my head for the sun to dry it out,
and now two hours have gone by, it’s still sunny
and yet there’s thunder in bursts and rumbles
as evening’s breeze blows the clothes
I hung out to dry on the line: burgundy t-shirt,
navy t-shirt, boxer shorts, khaki trousers, socks.
Real things. Well, more or less. There it is again,
that ominous rumble like the sound
of the elevated train in your bedroom if you lived
on 125th Street and Broadway, where I am not.
I am in a hammock in Umbria, and I’ve decided
that every day I spend some time in the hammock
is a victory for the human race. Behind my clothes
there are grasses, green and yellow, fields
of wheat and corn, a diagonal line of cypresses
climbing the hill. It is, for the first and last time,
six thirty on the twenty-sixth of July, 2006.
I wonder whether it will rain.

Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Summer 2006.

 

"Abstand" (a dispatch from Berlin) [by Kathleen Heil]

In German, there are various nouns that can be used to convey what we mean by the word distance in English: Zwischenraum, Abstand, the cognate Distanz.

With its repellent prefix, Abstand is the one used for social-distancing measures in Germany, with posters calling for a 1,5M or 2M Abstand outside of all establishments. Last Friday, cafés and restaurants in Berlin were allowed to reopen under these restricted conditions for the first time since the lockdown began, nine weeks prior. I had some food and drink that evening at an eerily empty restaurant in Mitte, and then, while cycling home, ran into a friend, the artist Hilla Steinert. This was happenstance, but also likely enough to happen, as we live in adjacent neighborhoods. It had been a while since we had last seen each other. So odd, after all that time, to be unable to reconnect by embracing my friend.

We met in the studio on Monday and made this dance instead. The word "Abstand" in German can also denote an interval of time. Ours is presented at a distance of two minutes, rather than two meters.

 — Kathleen Heil, Berlin; May 20, 2020

"Oxford (Summer 1968)" [by Peter Ferry]

Lehman and I hitchhiked from Oxford to Bournemouth one July Saturday that summer of 1968.  He was a gawky redheaded teenager from New York City, and I was a shaggy headed Midwesterner who had never even been to New York much less London; I was trying very hard not to be the fish out of water I clearly was.  David wanted to go to Bournemouth because it was where his mother had landed when she fled Austria in 1938; I did not know that at the time, and I didn’t know why I wanted to go to the sea until we got there.

The coastal resort of Bournemouth is only ninety miles from Oxford (I just Googled it), but it took us all day.  Much of the time we spent standing beside the road, we played games.  The “First-Line” game: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,”  “Call me Ishmael,” “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my mind ever since.”  The “Guess-the-Poem” game:   I knew some Kipling verses and a few Robert Frost lines.  David recited whole great chunks of Chaucer and Paradise Lost.  Perhaps as a concession to me, we also played the “Old Baseball” game:  name the starting infield of the 1958 Cincinnati Reds:  George Crowe at first, Johnny Temple at second, Roy McMillan at short and Don Hoak at third. 

I don’t remember the rides we got except for one old man in a ’56 cream and sky-blue Hillman Sunbeam hardtop.  That I remember the car better than the person is because I was not far beyond that stage in life where cars were more important to me than people.  As a kid I had had a Dinky Toy of that very car in those same colors.

I remember a raucous waterfront pub in Bournemouth.  We were still charmed by our ability to sidle up to a bar and drink a legal glass of beer (neither of us was twenty-one yet), but it was probably just one because neither of us had much money.  Later that night, I remember going from one cheap B&B to another without any luck finding a room.  I remember finally asking for help at a police station hoping, I suppose, that the cops might let us sleep in a cell.  Instead the Sergeant on duty said, “If I were in your shoes, I’d sleep on the beach.”

“You can do that?”

The town even provided rather nice beach lounges on which we stretched out and shared a bottle of cheap Spanish wine.  When David fell asleep, I wandered out onto the town pier where two German guys were playing guitars and singing.  I looked out across the water, and then I realized why I had been drawn to Bournemouth.  I was homesick.  I wanted to be looking out at Lake Michigan in the middle of the night while people sang, but the English Channel and the German guys would do just fine.  Close enough.

Of course, David and I did lots of other things that summer.  We both sort of fell in love with cornfed girls, his from Kansas, mine from Jeffersonville, Indiana. We bought secondhand bowler hats, climbed all over Stonehenge (you still could do that then), ran around the track where Roger Bannister had broken the four minute mile, made Charles Baudelaire’s Milk and Honey Mixture (an inch of milk, a half an inch of honey and a heaping tablespoon of hashish: stir, drink) and became friends. All these years later we still are, even though our initial encounter was a bit rocky. 

The day I got to Oxford, David stuck his head out of his room next to mine and asked if I had a copy of The Paris Review. “I have a poem in there.  I’m a poet.”

“Right,” I said.  And I’m Under Secretary of State. But before the summer was over David had given a reading for the assembled faculty and students, and John Fuller, one of our dons and a bright young British poet, had published a broadsheet of David’s verse.  The son-of-a-bitch really was a poet. 

When I got home to Chicago, I quickly put Oxford out of my mind.  The tumultuous ’68 Democratic Convention was in full swing, and I dived right in.  I enlisted as a courtesy-car driver for Eugene McCarthy and got a front row seat to the whole show.  I watched cops chasing protesters under the el tracks on Wabash Avenue and protesters fleeing clouds of tear gas in Lincoln Park.  I delivered tipsy delegates to the Conrad Hilton under blinding klieg lights between banks of cops in riot gear and banks of kids in riot form on Michigan Avenue.  On TV I watched Abbie Hoffman drilling Yippies in self-defense techniques and Mayor Richard J. Daley shouting “Fuck You” at Senator Abraham Ribicoff on the convention floor.  Then I sat up all night typing angry letters about American injustice.  When the convention was over and the smoke finally cleared, I went to our family’s summer cottage in Michigan to decompress.  My favorite aunt, Ollie, patted the seat beside her and said, “Come.  Sit.  Tell me all about your amazing summer.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said.

“Then tell me the most important thing that happened to you this summer.”

“Okay,” I said, and then somewhat to my own surprise, “I met this writer….”  I told her all about Lehman and even read her some of his verse.

She listened attentively as always.  “What do you think all of that means?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think you would like to be a writer?”

“Well,” I said, “I think it might.”

 

Ed. note: The two young men had enrolled in the "Oxford Summer Seminar" organized by Prof. Ernest Hofer of the University of Massachusetts. It was a six-week program preceded by a week in London with tickets to "The Importance of Being Earnest" in the West End and a Richard Strauss opera at Covent Garden. I remember taking the train from Paddington and seeing, from the station, the most magical looking city on a magnificently blue day most rare in England.  Ed Goltz and I arrived a day early, and stayed at a bed and breakfast.

Our group, which included undergrads from U Mass, Columbia, the University of Ohio, Oberlin, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley, and Smith, among other places, was housed at St. Hilda's College, ordinarily an all-female college (photo at top). Christopher Ricks gave us lectures on the differences between America and Britain ("You have climate, we have weather"), on the one hand, and between prose and poetry on the other. We saw productions of "As You Like It" and "The Cocktail Party" and a son-et-lumiere show at Christ's College.

The other photos are of Bournemouth; a Hillman 1956 automobile (wrong colors, alas); Magdalen College, Oxford (which has its own deer park), where John Fuller taught; The Paris Review 43 (which included the poem Pete referenced), and the cover of his superb novel Travel Writing. While there may be no good excuse for how I introduced myself to Pete, it is true that I shamelessly identified myself as a poet. What can I say? I was very young. -- DL

Alan Bernheimer's "Retroscope": Focus on Robert Louis Stevenson

Turning his back on lawyering and the family business of lighthouse design, the young Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on his literary career as travel writer with An Inland Voyage, his day-dreamy canoe trip through rivers and canals in Belgium and northern France.

 

Check it out in the latest episode of Retroscope, [Alan Bernheimer's] monthly series of literary travel writing from yesteryear in Nowhere magazine! Armchair travelers can binge read the whole series so far.

https://nowheremag.com/2020/02/robert-louis-stevensons-an-inland-voyage/

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.

The Mushroom Chronicles Part II: Prugnoli Frittata [by Barbara Hamby]

(Ed note: This is Part II of Barbara Hamby's mushroom chronicles. Find Part I here. sdl)

All human history attests                                     
That happiness for man, - the hungry sinner! -
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 99

We were out past midnight on Friday and arrived at the Sant'Ambrogio market too late the next morning for the ovoli mushrooms with their gorgeous red caps, but I noticed the box of little brown mushrooms with the label "Prugnoli." They were expensive--30 euros a kilo as opposed to 8 euros a kilo for the porcini--which led me to wonder if they were a seasonal specialty. I bought "due etti." An "etto" is an eighth of a kilogram, which is about a quarter of a pound. I asked the mushroom man, who my friend Sue says is called Cecco, what I should make with my little bag of prugnoli. His answer was "risotto o frittata." My husband, who loves rice, said, "No more rice," so I decided on a frittata. I remembered a small stand with fresh pecorino and eggs, so I bought six eggs that had a little handwritten sign: Uova di nostra gallina, eggs from our hen. I also bought some chives, because they would give the frittata some visual zip and not be as overpowering as onion.

Fresh prugnoli at the Sant'Ambrogio market

When I returned to the apartment, I looked up prugnoli to see what I had found. Little did I know that there was a Prugnolo Cult in Italy. It has been chilly and rainy in Florence this year, and perhaps that's the reason why I was lucky enough to find prugnoli in the market. Late May and April are their time in the world. In Southern Italy they are sometimes called fungo marzolino or marzulolo, because March is marzo, and they mature a little sooner in the warmer parts of Italy. In central Italy they are also called il fungo di San Giorgio, because they start popping up close to the feast day of St. George (April 23). I had always dreamed of being a member of a mushroom cult, and finally it had happened. Italy--the land where dreams come true.

I had due etti di prugnoli, and I set about making a frittata for lunch. First I washed them with great care, now that I knew they were at the center of a cult, and then sliced the larger ones.

Whole Prugnoli, washed.

Prugnoli sliced, ready for cooking

I'm winging it here. I don't have a recipe, but I've made omelets and frittatas before. When I was first married and traveling in Italy, I was a devoted slave of Marcella Hazan, who wasn't afraid of butter. And as I've said before, butter and mushrooms go together like Sinatra and The Sands, so I put a little of that glorious green extra-virgin olive oil in my skillet and a tablespoon or more (probably more ) of butter. When they had warmed up, I put in the prugnoli.

Olive oil + butter = magic

market-fresh chives

While the prugnoli were cooking, I chopped the chives. How much did I use? Half the bunch I'd bought at the market.

Here I will take a minute to rant about color in cooking. A dish has to be beautiful as well as delicious. When I'm making a salad, I want a range of colors. It's almost like painting. Three different greens--maybe the pale green of frisee, the dark green of arugula, and the medium green of escarole or butter lettuce--make a canvas, and then you add the purples of red onion and radicchio, the orange and crunch of carrots, and the crimson of tomatoes. In Italy right now, Piccadilly tomatoes are all the rage. They are smaller than Romas and larger than cherry tomatoes and are very sweet. A salad would be very compatible with this frittata.

How many eggs to use? I broke four into the dish, but it didn't seem to be enough, so I broke the other two and stirred them with a fork until I had a lovely golden bowl. Then I added salt and freshly ground pepper.

How are the prugnoli doing?

They've cooked down a bit with their lovely juices mixing with the oil and butter. I taste one and it's perfect, still firm but softening. Time to add the egg mixture:

Now that's a lovely brown and gold canvas, but it needs something:

Chives! However, I have an kitchen equipment emergency. This skillet has no lid, so I place a white ceramic dinner plate on top of the skillet and try not to check it for five minutes. I'm aiming for the consistency of a just baked custard: set enough to hold its shape but still trembling in the center.

The result makes a satisfying lunch for me and breakfast the next morning for two. One of my favorite Italian cookbooks, Antipasti by Julia della Croce, says that room temperature frittata makes a welcome addition to an antipasti selection. I'm convinced! Now I'm dreaming of an antipasti party with at least ten dishes and prosecco and Negronis. Everyone's invited!

Barbara Hamby is the author of six books of poems, most recently Bird Odyssey (2018) and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009).She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.