The Best American Poetry

Is Eliot Trending? [by Walter Carey]

Jeremy Sigler, whose latest book of poems is Goodbye Letter (in which, according to the publisher, the poet “plays out an endgame of muses to deconstruct his poetry and his will to write – let alone speak – as he ruminates and articulates, verbally and graphically, the implied obsolescence of language itself, a deeply regressive technology of sorts, made up of phonemes, alphabets, metaphors, narratives, voices, and identities”) recently interviewed the famous literary critic Marjorie Perloff, now 90, and her new book.

Here’s an excerpt from Tablet. Note the pointed allusion to the Beatles’ “Give peace a chance.”

<<  Jeremy: I simply couldn’t bring myself to read the chapter on T.S. Eliot. All I could think about was his neatly combed hair with that perfect part running across his scalp. And I felt nauseated.

Marjorie: That’s a silly prejudice! Oh, Eliot is so wonderful. People really want to read Eliot these days. He’s incredibly popular again. You wouldn’t believe it. Just listen to those great lines:

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table

Jeremy: Wow. That is good! So Eliot is “trending,” as my daughter says.

Marjorie: Yes, you should give Eliot a chance. Your prejudice is based on the deserved mistrust of Eliot’s politics and his position on Anglicanism as the right religion. But if one looks at the subtext, the very real anxiety and brilliance of the poetry shine through.
>>
For more of this enlightening conversation, including thoughts on whether Marcel Duchamp wanted to be Jewish and on Picasso's statement, after Max Jacob's death at the hands of the Nazis, that Max was an angel who will "fly ovet the walls," click here.

Harvard Prof Disses Great Books [by Walter Carey]

 

Last nght at the Wilson Trust Foundation, Professor Beryl Dunkelheit began their lecture on "Why We Read Great Books" with the a priori premise that we read them "to become a better person."

"But look at me, look at my colleagues. Are we better people? I think not."

QED.

But hold on. Who says we read books "to become a better person"? Is that way we read The Iliad? Sophocles? Rabelais? Boccaccio? King Lear? Macbeth? Machiavelli? Byron? Shelley? Wuthering Heights? Moby Dick? Joyce? Hemingway? 

-- Walter Carey

"Mush from the Wimp" Department [by Walter Carey]

When it was Megan's turn to pick a sentence we could ridicule, she took out a recent New Yorker and quoted Louis Menand on Charles Dickens: "In life, there is little evidence that Dickens was, in the context of his time and place, a sexist or a prude." 

Johnny said: How about Homer? St. Augustine? Rabelais? Was he a "sexist or a prude"? How about Emerson? Gogol? Gide? Coleridge? Flannery O'Connor? Alexander Pope? Virginia Woolf? Yeats? John Donne?

Katya: "In death, there is little evidence that Dickens was a sexist or a prude." See the difference?

Isabelle: An imperfect example of the historical fallacy: that we today, in our infinite wisdom, feel free to criticize the benighted citizens of the past.

Megan" Why "imperfect"?

Isabelle: Because of the hedging, as Katya pointed out.

Johnny: My professor at Rutgers said write every sentence as if it could be put on your gravestone.

Megan: My vote for most pernicious phrase goes to "It's not your father's Oldsmobile" ahead of "up close and personal."

-- Walter Carey

For other pieces by Walter Carey, the pseudonym of a self-styled "contrarian" writer of our acquaintance, click here, or here, or here, or here, or on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/farewell-to-leicester-squares-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/pitching-a-no-hitter-on-lsd-by-walter-carey.html  

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/the-two-party-system-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/a-curse-on-blockheads-by-walter-carey.html 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2017/10/the-real-reason-linda-amy-carlson-left-blue-bloods-after-7-seasons-by-walter-carey.html 

The Assignment [by Walter Carey]

“The only virtue in life is survival,” Sanders said with his typical swagger and thick irony. “There is nothing heroic about the ‘survival of the fittest,’ a blasphemous notion and not a democratic one. Business is business. Television killed not only the radio but the movies, too. The movies had already taken care of Broadway. Messages with multiple syllables went obsolete. All that and the downsizing too had already gone down. Only one commodity retained its inflation-proof value."

And now? Now he was making a big bet on cloud computing. “As alternating current was to the rise of electricity, so fiber optic technology spelled out the death of the p.c.”  He smiled arrogantly. “Can you make a story out of that?”

The job was to write up the story in a one-line poem of one hundred words or less with lots of pictures, actors, women crying, men going out of business, a brutal election campaign going down to the wire, a scenario no stranger than reality but better-looking and happy-seeming as the faces in the ads for Miss Subways in the 1950s. You hung at the straps at seven in the morning, closed your eyes, married your secretary and kept her in fur from Fred Leighton with an occasional bracelet from Harry Winston. A man accompanying a woman to such a place was a hero. 

But now we do not have heroes. We do not have secretaries, let alone marry them. We have assistants and we have business associates and some of them are making big bets on Bitcoin or on disruptive technologies while I toil on my one-line poem of one hundred words or less to advertise a fake reality.

November 2011

Ed. note: Walter Carey is at work on a cultural history of the 1960s.

"The Two-Party System" [by Walter Carey]

The Republicans are like
a drowning man
who pulls down
his rescuer thinking
he's pulling him to safety

and the Dems are like
the girl on the shore
who pulls down
her boy-cut hipsters
when no one's watching

-- Walter Carey

Farewell to Leicester Squares! [by Walter Carey]

<<
Leicester University denies it is dropping Chaucer for being 'too white' after proposing modules on race and sexuality instead

By Dan Sales and Ross Ibbetson

The Daily Mail (21 January 2021)

• University courses featuring The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf are under threat 
• English department told of plans for a 'decolonised' curriculum via email
• Leicester today moved to deny Chaucer course was axed for being 'too white' 
• But added that it wanted its teaching to cater to the students' own interests

By DAN SALES and ROSS IBBETSON FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 11:13 EDT, 21 January 2021 | UPDATED: 16:58 EDT, 21 January 2021

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9171987/Leicester-University-denies-dropping-Chaucer-white-proposals.html
>>

Asked to comment on this new development, Professor Mallory Thomas of St. John's Wood College told Tim Kieffer of NBS News (Independent), "Anyone who uses the word 'module' in any context, but particularly the pedagogic one, and particularly in England, the land of the Mother Tongue, should be required to recite the first dozen lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and made to perform 248 hours of community service defined strictly by the archaic league of gentlemen on penalty of imprisonment in Borstal."

Olympic Musings [by Walter Carey]

"You know what expression I hate the most?"
"What?"
"When they say she, quote, settled for silver."
"That's why I say fuck 'em."

-- in support of which I refer you to today's New York Post reporting that Lilly King won silver, and Annie Lazor bronze, in the 200-meter breastroke in Tokyo and noting that King "pushed back against the media and American public, who, in her view, often downplay a silver or bronze finish."

"Pardon my French but the fact that we're not able to celebrate silver and bronze is bullshit," King observed.  

Do you know who composed the theme of Perry Mason?

It was Fred Steiner, who died at age 88, at his home in the town of Ajijic in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

but let's not overlook, Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the music for Patton and did some of the incidental music for many episodes of Perry Mason,

and while we're at it, let's saluter another Jerry, Jerry Fielding, who wrote the music of The Wild Bunch.

"Pitching a No-Hitter on LSD" [by Walter Carey]

It may be the accomplishment of which he was proudest.

He had pitched a no-hitter on LSD.

Not even his teammates knew.

On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates

no-hit the Padres in San Diego

on the best acid trip of the several he had taken.

He had to keep it secret, although he confided the secret

to Donald Hall, the American poet, for a biography he wrote

and published in 1976. But they had to take it out of the manuscript because

Ellis was signed by the Yankees, whose owner,

the imperious George Steinbrenner, had little patience 

for this sort of thing. But word leaked out, "trickling quietly

into the zeitgeist of a pre-internet world," as The Guardian put it 

on the fiftieth anniversary of the feat. O journalism!

How great is thy tribute to the anniversaries of the world!

The Real Reason Linda Reagan [Amy Carlson] Left "Blue Bloods" After 7 Seasons [by Walter Carey]

Ed. note: One of our most popular posts was written for the BAP blog by Walter Carey on October 13, 2017 preceded by this note: <<  Walter Carey writes: "David Huntley, my source for this story, is the pseudonym of an executive at CBS who asked that he or she not be named.  -- WC." For an update ("Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?) click here. And here for the latest on Erin's love life  >>>

For seven seasons, Linda Reagan as portrayed by the actress Amy Carlson was a stalwart figure in the hit series Blue Bloods. She plays the wife of hot-headed Danny Reagan, mother to their two boys, daughter in law of police commish Frank Reagan, sister in-law of Erin, brother-in-law of Jamie, aunt of the Columbia undergrad who used to go to Catholic school, granddaughter-in-law of grandpa, and a normal human being, who works as a nurse, lives in Staten Island, demands to be respected by her husband, and concludes phone conversations with him with this exchange:

"Love you."
"Love you more."
"Love you most."

Several theories have been making the rounds regarding Linda's sudden departure from the program. In episode one of season eight it is explained that she died in a helicopter crash transporting a patient. To those who believe that this is what happened to Amy Carlson, my source is happy to report that she is very much alive. There is also no truth to the rumor that she got sick -- "totally" -- with husband Danny always going off the rails and blowing his stack. That was actually something that endeared him to her, Linda admitted tearfully after one of their quarrels., according to Megin Draper, a close friend. 

It was really very simple, the actress confided, nursing a glass of Jameson's on the rocks as she negotiated her farewell package. It was "time to move on."

The network executive who bears a resemblance to Ned Beatty gave her a skeptical look.

"It really is time to move on," repeated the Knox College alumna, who graduated cum laude, made her TV debut as Josie Watts on Another World in 1993, and currently resides in Chinatown with her kids and her partner. But she winked and touched her nose like Robert de Niro in Good Fellas so her interlocutor knew there had to be more to it. The pro bono work she has done on Frenchkiss Records has never interfered with her work on Blue Bloods, and while her significant other plays bass guitar for the Seth Meyers show on another network, that has never raised any red flags let alone hackles in legal.

"Does the real reason have to do with Frank Reagan's political ambitions?" she was asked. "Warmer," she said. "But if you print it, Danny will kill you." Therefore my source has adopted a pseudonym and will employ the subjunctive to describe what the smart money is saying, which is this:

Frank Reagan, as played by Tom Selleck, has the distinction of wearing nearly the same tie on every episode of Blue Bloods. Each is a rep (or regimental) tie featuring a red field with diagonal stripes usually containing white, blue, or a combination of the two. I happen to own two such ties myself, purchased at Brooks Brothers, and from a study commissioned by the triumvirate of Rogers Peet, Hart Schaffner and Carlo Marx it has been ascertained that for a municipal leader, this is the tie of choice, inspiring trust and confidence in the populace.

The consistent use of ties of this order has long led Reaganites to suspect that Frank has political ambitions. The speculation, fueled by dissatisfaction with the de Blasio regime in New York coupled with the gag-me-with-a-spoon shenanigans in DC, has resulted in a "draft Frank" movement. Linda Reagan is said to have taken a position on the net-yet-official campaign. One of her pet ideas: a series of TV commercials featuring endorsements of Reagan by various Franks -- such as Frank Sinatra, Frank O'Hara, Frank Hogan, Frank Costello, Frankie Machine, Frank Malzone, Fenway Franks. Frank Bullitt in his 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback, Francis Ford Coppola, Pope Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Francine York, and Connie Francis. 

But this is all speculation, and the rocky relationship between the police chief and the mayor is nothing new. Still, the fact that Frank Reagan polls higher than the mayor in all five boroughs, with an almost unheard of 90% favorable rating in Staten Island, may affect Frank's decision, and if Linda Reagan has anything to say about it, it's a go. -- WC

from the archive; first posted October 13, 2017

For seven seasons, Linda Reagan as portrayed by the actress Amy Carlson was a stalwart figure in the hit series Blue Bloods. She plays the wife of hot-headed Danny Reagan, mother to their two boys, daughter in law of police commish Frank Reagan, sister in-law of Erin, brother-in-law of Jamie, aunt of the Columbia undergrad who used to go to Catholic school, granddaughter-in-law of grandpa, and a normal human being, who works as a nurse, lives in Staten Island, demands to be respected by her husband, and concludes phone conversations with him with this exchange:

"Love you."
"Love you more."
"Love you most."

Several theories have been making the rounds regarding Linda's sudden departure from the program. In episode one of season eight it is explained that she died in a helicopter crash transporting a patient. To those who believe that this is what happened to Amy Carlson, my source is happy to report that she is very much alive. There is also no truth to the rumor that she got sick -- "totally" -- with husband Danny always going off the rails and blowing his stack. That was actually something that endeared him to her, Linda admitted tearfully after one of their quarrels., according to Megin Draper, a close friend. 

It was really very simple, the actress confided, nursing a glass of Jameson's on the rocks as she negotiated her farewell package. It was "time to move on."

The network executive who bears a resemblance to Ned Beatty gave her a skeptical look.

"It really is time to move on," repeated the Knox College alumna, who graduated cum laude, made her TV debut as Josie Watts on Another World in 1993, and currently resides in Chinatown with her kids and her partner. But she winked and touched her nose like Robert de Niro in Good Fellas so her interlocutor knew there had to be more to it. The pro bono work she has done on Frenchkiss Records has never interfered with her work on Blue Bloods, and while her significant other plays bass guitar for the Seth Meyers show on another network, that has never raised any red flags let alone hackles in legal.

"Does the real reason have to do with Frank Reagan's political ambitions?" she was asked. "Warmer," she said. "But if you print it, Danny will kill you." Therefore my source has adopted a pseudonym and will employ the subjunctive to describe what the smart money is saying, which is this:

Frank Reagan, as played by Tom Selleck, has the distinction of wearing nearly the same tie on every episode of Blue Bloods. Each is a rep (or regimental) tie featuring a red field with diagonal stripes usually containing white, blue, or a combination of the two. I happen to own two such ties myself, purchased at Brooks Brothers, and from a study commissioned by the triumvirate of Rogers Peet, Hart Schaffner and Carlo Marx it has been ascertained that for a municipal leader, this is the tie of choice, inspiring trust and confidence in the populace.

The consistent use of ties of this order has long led Reaganites to suspect that Frank has political ambitions. The speculation, fueled by dissatisfaction with the de Blasio regime in New York coupled with the gag-me-with-a-spoon shenanigans in DC, has resulted in a "draft Frank" movement. Linda Reagan is said to have taken a position on the net-yet-official campaign. One of her pet ideas: a series of TV commercials featuring endorsements of Reagan by various Franks -- such as Frank Sinatra, Frank O'Hara, Frank Hogan, Frank Costello, Frankie Machine, Frank Malzone, Fenway Franks. Frank Bullitt in his 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback, Francis Ford Coppola, Pope Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Francine York, and Connie Francis. 

But this is all speculation, and the rocky relationship between the police chief and the mayor is nothing new. Still, the fact that Frank Reagan polls higher than the mayor in all five boroughs, with an almost unheard of 90% favorable rating in Staten Island, may affect Frank's decision, and if Linda Reagan has anything to say about it, it's a go. -- WC

from the archive; first posted October 13, 2017

A Curse on Blockheads [by Walter Carey]

Again thanks to Stacey Harwood for this opportunity to air my stray thoughts. . . I am a reader of poetry, get BAP annually, but write very little. . .mainly prose poems like the ones I read by french poets like char or reverdy though not in their league of course. . .I am an American, Chicago-born, in that line everyone quotes from Saul Bellow, a very smart fellow. . "everyone" in that sentence being a case not of rhetorical dishonesty but acceptable bullying. . . "I" am bullshit but so are "you" and "we" and "they" -- you have a soft spot for Chicago, especially Wrigley Field.  . we like our Calvin Klein jines. . .they say that the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach and behind him stands a successful woman. . .Bullshit. .Today my mind is on bullshit. . .also the Ukraine and Outin. . .Outin being a nice typo for Putin. . .who played a weak hand well (Syria) and a strong hand even better (Ukraine). . .at least he no take off his shirt yesterday. .  .maybe he and BO should arm-wrestle for the Crimea. . .but you really want me to write about the movement to ban cursive in schools. . . which is a foolish decision . . as Yeats once wrote . . "but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you." .

-- Walter Carey
from the archive; first posted March 1, 2014

The Two Party System [by Walter Carey]

The Republicans are like
a drowning man
who pulls down
his rescuer thinking
he's pulling him to safety

and the Dems are like
the girl on the shore
who pulls down
her boy-cut hipsters
when no one's watching

-- Walter Carey