The Best American Poetry

"Visiting Faculty" by Andrea Selch

After figuring out the right answer to our poetry challenge, Andrea Selch composed this acrostic in which "John and I / Observed the interaction" of a visiting poet (who may or may not be Louise Gluck) and the campus literary community. See how well she conjures up the scene. The line about bitterness is, alas, dead on. -- DL

Visiting Faculty
                                    
Lurking at the dead end of the table, John and I
Observed the interaction — obsequious graduate students
Underdressed to the nines, eager for wine and limelight, and the
I-am-also-successful program faculty, nodding knowledgeably
(So much bitterness beneath their jovial politesse and
Extemporaneous paeans) — while she sat, looking, truth be told, a little

Glazed. At dinner's end, the clink of glasses celebrating, at long
Last, her reunion with an old student, whose accomplishments
       yadda yadda yadda…the
Über-moment for all poets in these programs, and the two of us, 
Coming from "outside" (up the road), wove our stems among the others,
        disappearing into
Kultur, even before the evening's unaffected reading had begun. 

             -- Andrea Selch

"After Achilles" by David Yezzi

After scrambling the anagram to come up with the correct answer -- "The Triumph of Achilles" by Louise Gluck -- David Yezzi wrote this acrostic poem in two stanzas. The first letters of the lines spell out the name of the poet who served as guest editor of THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1993. But beyond its poetic correctness, what I love here is the way Yezzi invokes the trope of wrathful Achilles -- the warrior in THE ILIAD who best exemplifies what Kant meant by the "terrifying sublime" -- in the light of "recent / Updates from the embattled / Interior."  -- DL
 
After Achilles

Love worth dying for, she thinks
Of it often, reading through recent
Updates from the embattled
Interior: once again
Senseless slaughter
Erupts in the outlying villages.

Gone are the innocent attractions
Lately praised by the poets. Instead, the poor
Überglücklich throng
Cleaves dearly to its own,
Kills for the simple love of it.

                        -- David Yezzi

Jerome Kern's Birthday

It's Jerome David Kern's birthday. Jerry would have been 123 years old today. Jonathan Schwartz is devoting his Sunday show on WNYC-FM to Kern's songs as interpreted by Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Margaret Whiting, et al. Terrific, and interspersed are songs composed by Jimmy Van Heusen, born yesterday (and here's Stacey Kent with "The Tender Trap"). Van Heusen, real name Chester Edward Babcock, named himself after a shirt.

Here's my own playlist for today, twenty canonical Kern numbers (one of them played twice]:

A Fine Romance (lyrics Dorothy Fields) [as sung by Billie Holiday c. 1934]

All the Things You Are (Oscar Hammerstein) [Ambrosian Chorus/ London Sinfoniette/ John McGlinn]

Bill (P. G. Wodehouse) [Helen Morgan]

Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man (Hammerstein) [Teresa Stratas with Frederica Von Stade, Karla Burns, Bruce Hubbard, and chorus]

I'm old Fashioned (Johnny Mercer) [Eileen Farrell]

I Won't Dance (Fields) [Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald]

Long Ago and Far Away (Ira Gershwin) [instrumental Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt]

Look for the Silver Lining (Buddy DeSylva) [Judy Garland]

Lovely to Look At (Fields) [Fred Astaire]

Make Believe (Hammerstein) [Ambrosian Chorus / London Sinfoniette / John McGlinn]

Ol' Man River (Hammerstein) [Sinatra 1945]

Pick Yourself Up (Fields) [Mel Torme]

Pick Yourself Up (Fields) [Nat King Cole]

She Didn't Say Yes (Otto Harbach) [Ella Fitzgerald]

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (Harbach) [Sarah Vaughan]

The Song is You (Hammerstein) [Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with Sinatra vocal]

The Way You Look Tonight (Fields) [Astaire in Swing Time]

They Didn't Believe Me (Harold Reynolds) [Sinatra radio c. 1950]

Why Do I Love You? (Hammerstein) [Ambrosian Chorus / London Sinfoniette / John McGlinn]

You Couldn't Be Cuter (Fields) [Ella Fitzgerald]

-- DL

Judge Paul Violi Picks Frank Osen's Penelope's Shield as Winner of The Best American Poetry Poem Challenge II

Read Osen's winning poem here.

Violi also singled out as runners up As the Underworld Turns by Sally Cook and Lo Mein Palace, Here I Come by Michael Quattrone

Violi has this to say about Penelope’s Shield: “What struck me about "Penelope's Shield,” besides its subtle command over "Some peaceful Province in Acrostick Land," is the way the poet packs so much into a short, affecting monologue. There's a good ear and a sharp eye at work here, a fine ironic touch tipping the balance on a very sensitive scale.

The three poems selected by Violi will be published in a forthcoming issue of Pool.

Check back often to read selections of the other fine entries. 

Freud Quiz # 2

According to Freud in The Future of an Illusion, what is an illusion?

(a) A falsehood.

(b) Something that may be true or may come true but probably won't.

(c) Religion.

(d) Art.

(e) A ghost in the sense intended by Ibsen in his play Ghosts.

-- DL

"Endgame" by Barbara G. S. Hagerty

This entry didn't win the BAP Poem Challenge that Paul Violi judged for us, but it merited honorable mention, and I love the glucklich allusions (oranges that mock, figures that descend, a missing umlaut, a vita nova) and other echoes (dogs of war, wounded heels) that make Barbara G. S. Hagerty's "Endgame" a puzzle-solver's delight. -- D.L.

Endgame

Liebling, ach! Someone has unleashed the dogs of war.

Oranges in the garden mock us with their scent.

Uselessly it drifts over the descending figure, firstborn, wild

iris, house on marshland. The apple that inspired war.

Shield yourself and soldier on: time wounds all heels.

Elementary, in any age: conceal, unlock your

glock, uzi, colt: unload the quiver's poison arrows;

love, unloose the umlaut, don't be diacritical,

umbilical, attached, heroic, Homeric.

Coming forth on dove's wings: a vita nova, the odyssey's

kiss in time that, at endgame, heals all wounds.

-- Barbara G. S. Hagerty

Freud Quiz # 1

Freud in German means

(a) Fright

(b) Joy

(c) Sauteed lightly with olive oil

(d) "The young eagle, a rank impostor, fled the Reich."

(e) The same thing "it" means in English.

-- DL

Coming: The Best American Erotic Poems

In bookstores in time for Valentine's Day.  The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present Edited by David Lehman. Scribner, $30 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4165-3745-8; $16 paper ISBN 9781-4165–3746-5

Lehman's cheerfully eclectic, determinedly accessible and defiantly sex-positive collection—a savvy extension of his successful Best American Poetry franchise—marches from an unlikely beginning ("On a Young Lady's Going into a Shower Bath" by Francis Scott Key), past Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, through the modernist era (Conrad Aiken's truly sexy "Sea Holly") and on to the present, where poets male and female, gay, straight and bisexual, describe bodies and pleasures in an array of verse forms. Sestinas abound; Lehman also finds a villanelle, a pantoum, a brace of sonnets and, not surprisingly, lots of swinging free verse. Lehman's best choices give off both heat and light: Dennis Cooper remembers the aches of eighth grade; Maggie Wells's "Sonnet from the Groin" approaches her own sex organs with bounce and honesty; and Bernadette Mayer's echoic couplets in "First turn to me..." evoke the lucky days at the start of a great romance, when sexual wishes are commands. (Publishers Weekly)

Epigraph of the Month

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to launch The Best American Poetry blog with a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph. It involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

T. S. Eliot was terrific at the game. Examples will follow. Meanwhile, I wonder whether others agree with my contention, and if so would they please indicate their own favorite epigraphs?

-- David Lehman

Welcome to The Best American Poetry Blog