The Best American Poetry

"Ten Foolish Things Anyone Can Do" by Molly Arden

Ten foolish things anyone can do:
10 Vote Republican hoping this will precipitate the inevitable next stage in the collapse of Capitalism
9 Lose your virginity to a sex columnist
8 Write a pisser of a dissertation on Henry ("Scoop") Jackson Mac Low & expect to get it published by Calvin Coolidge Archibald Mac Leish
7 Lose your job after blogging about blow job given to ungrateful boss
6 Convert to Catholicism and lie at your first confession
5 Pretend you like Joan Didion's books
4 Join a woman's only pyramid scheme and lose $3,000
3 Tell boyfriend your e-mail password
2 Watch reruns of "Project Runway" instead of doing your homework
1 Drive to Mexico in a rented car and park it in the street overnight.

Your own lists are welcome! See Molly's blog.

-- Molly Arden (10/29/06)

Movie Moments - Richard III (1996)

This might be my favorite "movie moment" of all.  It combines great singing by the singular Stacey Kent, jaunty music, and snappy lyrics by none other than, well, you tell us.  (FYI, the singing begins about 2 minutes in.) Be sure to listen to the very end before you supply your answer.   This version of Shakespeare's Richard III has been moved from England of the 1480s to England of the 1930s, a country about to be overrun by fascists. (Given the non-aggression pact the English entered into with Hitler in the '30s, this setting is not all that far-fetched.) It stars Ian McKellan, who co-wrote the adaptation with director Richard Loncraine. 

-- sdh

"Girl without Her Nightgown" and other poems

Answer any ten:

Who is Helen Twelvetrees and what interests John Ashbery in her?

How many prose poems are in The Best American Poetry 2008?

What is the connection between Dmitri Karamazov, the Battle of the Somme, and Emily Dickinson's gardener?

In whose poem are leaves torn from Genesis to cover the genitalia of a man and a woman who would otherwise be "naked as newborns"?

Of all the poems Charles Simic published in 2007, which did Charles Wright choose for the 2008 edition of BAP?

"The cells divide. The cells that will not die" is the first line of a
(1) pantoum
(2) villanelle
(3) prose poem
(4) sonnet
(5) diatribe

What is the subject of Patti Smith's poem "Tara"?

Who said it: "How splendid yellow is!"
(1) Peter Paul Rubens
(2) Vincent Van Gogh
(3) Willa Cather
(4) Isaac Babel
(5) Su Tung P'o

According to Maxine Kumin, when will the Messiah come?

Why is Frank Bidart's sestina only 36 lines long?

In her double sonnet "Millay Goes Down," Moira Egan addresses
(1) Edna St Vincent Millay
(2) Oral sex
(3) The idea of capturing chaos in fourteen lines.
(4) The search for the fountain of youth.
(5) All of the above.

There is one sure-fire way to gets the answers: they're in the 2008 edition of The Best American Poetry.

Matt Hart's heartfelt Review of Paul Violi

From Matt Hart’s review of Paul Violi’s Overnight in ColdFrontMag:

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out.

Two Versions of a Marianne Moore Poem

Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by baseball fan Marianne Moore.

The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book of American Poetry. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web.

What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem – and it is certainly not as good a poem.

The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."

The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase "I was goaded into doing by XY" implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what "This man" (or "the teacher") said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks "a sort of heightened consciousness." The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word "occasion" in line four, obliging us to understand how the closing epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.

From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
    and rhyme is outmoded,
       I shall revert to you,
    Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
       into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
   his identical words:
      "Hebrew poetry is
   prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
   the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

corrupt / alternative version found on on the web:

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

Rare Stamps in Black Movies

Everyone who has seen Charade, the Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn thriller directed by Stanley Donen, knows the vital role that rare and valuable stamps play in that mystery.

Can you name another crime-centered movie in which stamps function as a means of transferring large sums of ill-gotten gains?

Hint: a stamp album has a merely incidental role in this movie set primarily in Paris (as is Charade) but with parts in Menton, Rome, and New York.

Second hint: Jean Gabin, who as a young man was most marvelous in Grand Illusion and Le Jour se leve and Pepe le Moko, here is sixty-five years old and the head of a crime family.

-- DL

Political Applause Lines [by Bob Kerrey]

Bob Kerrey, president of the New School, has analyzed the structure of effective political applause lines: Reagan in a "debate" saying that he wouldn't hold Mondale's youth against him; Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle that he bears no resemblance to John Kennedy; Ann Richards's observation that George Bush #41 was born with a silver foot in his mouth. We tend to remember the line itself but forget the set-up. Here is Bob's analysis of how it gets done. And Bob knows: remember, he represented Nebraska in the US Senate for two terms and before that he was the state's governor. And yesterday was his birthday!
Take it away, Bob.-- DL

<<<
First and foremost, an applause line must sound good. The cadence is crucial. When Al Gore said, "it's time for them to go," he relied on an iambic trimeter line to galvanize the crowd.

The ideal applause line measures 24 to 26 seconds and can, as a result, be converted into a 30 second television or internet ad. The structure has three parts:

   Part One: An observation, eg  Most rooms in America have four sides.

   Part Two: An assertion that the thing observed is good or bad, eg Square rooms are turning our children into walled-in squares

   Part Three:  A promise to end the negative or implement the positive, eg When I am elected I will see to it that kids burst out of the walls of inhibition into the open air of freedom.

If the observed phenomenon is obvious and the speaker is pretty confident that the audience is hip, then Part Three may be all that is needed:  "And I shall not cease from mental fight until we build a university without walls" or "With your help I will make sure that the city of the future depends not on the squares of the past but the circles of perfection." 

My favorite example from Tuesday night's DNC convention was Brian Sweitzer's: "The petro dictators will never own American wind and sunshine!" He had a set up line, but he didn't need it.

Challenge to readers: Make a three-part applause line in favor of free sunglasses for everyone, because the August sun can be blinding.

-- Bob Kerrey
>>>

Trochaic Theory of Election Picks Obama - Interview Part II

Interview with David Lehman about the trochaic theory of elections that predicts Barack Obama will win the election this November.  Watch Part I here and read about it here and here.

April 29, 1962 at the White House

April 29, 1962. White House dinner and reception in honor of Nobel Prize winners. Front row: President Kennedy chats with Pearl Buck, while Jackie lends an ear to Robert Frost. Buck's back is turned to Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the Vice President, looking "lovely."

Quiz: Which of the front row authors won the Nobel Prize?

Challenge: Analyze the body language of President and Mrs. Kennedy.

She coulda been a contender. . .

Jesse Taylor hypothesizes that "Hillary Clinton" would have won the Democratic nomination if she had run for (and been elected to) the U.S. Senate from Illinois rather than new York. Thank you, Gerry Canavan, for the heads up.

This makes sense if only because the Clinton express would have elimninated competition from any other Illinois politician. More to the poetic point, the metrics would have been superb, as "Hillary Clinton of Illinois" is an exact repetition of the immortal pattern of dactyl, trochee, and double iamb last found in "Abraham Lincoln of Illinois."

Not enough has been made of Hillary Clinton's decision to quote T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" for the epigraph of her senior thesis at Wellesley College.

Maya Angelou (who read a poem at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration) and Hillary Clinton on the campus of A. R. Ammons's alma mater, Wake Forest University in North Carolina (2008).

Ryan of Pawtucket asks whether there have been presidents whose names scan as double dactyl. Yes: Benjamin Harrison and Theodore Roosevelt.

Virginia H. of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, wonders what are the longest presidential periods dominated by double troochees: 1913-1933 (Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover); 1976-1988 (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan); 1963-1974 (Johnson, Nixon).

-- DL