The Best American Poetry

This Just In . . . The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets

Congratulations to David Yezzi, for The Swallow Anthology of New America Poets.  To celebrate, Yezzi is hosting a reading this Wednesday night, 7:00 PM,  at Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn (718) 789-1534.  Yezzi will be joined by Pricilla Becker, Joshua Mehigan, and Mark Wunderlich.

-- sdh

Jarrell's well-tuned "Piano" (by David Yezzi)

In writing a review recently of William H. Pritchard's latest essay collection On Poets & Poetry, I got a chance to reread Randall Jarrell's sweeping-gorgeous-funny-breathtaking poem "The Player Piano." I just can't believe the way this poem sounds, the way it moves! It has a totally original music that, in all its wandering colloquialisms, touches down into strong feeling and odd mystery. As Karl Shapiro wrote (and Pritchard reminds us), "Jarrell was the only poet of his generation 'who made an art out of American speech as it is, who advanced beyond Frost in using not only contemporary idiom . . . but the actual rhythm of our speech.' " That's huge! Who wouldn't kill to do that?!

The poem was published after Jarrell's death and is spoken by an elderly woman, a grandmother:

The Player Piano

I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House
Run by a lady my age. She was gay.
When I told her that I came from Pasadena
She laughed and said, "I lived in Pasadena
When Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus."

I felt that I had met someone from home.
No, not Pasadena, Fatty Arbuckle.
Who's that? Oh, something that we had in common
Like -- like -- the false armistice. Piano rolls.
She told me her house was the first Pancake House

East of the Mississippi, and I showed her
A picture of my grandson. Going home --
Home to the hotel -- I began to hum,
"Smile a while, I bid you sad adieu,
When the clouds roll back I'll come to you."

Let's brush our hair before we go to bed,
I say to the old friend who lives in my mirror.
I remember how I'd brush my mother's hair
Before she bobbed it. How long has it been
Since I hit my funnybone? had a scab on my knee?

Here are Mother and Father in a photograph,
Father's holding me. . . . They both look so young.
I'm so much older than they are. Look at them,
Two babies with their baby. I don't blame you,
You weren't old enough to know any better;

If I could I'd go back, sit down by you both,
And sign our true armistice: you weren't to blame.
I shut my eyes and there's our living room.
The piano's playing something by Chopin,
And Mother and Father and their little girl

Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves!
I go over, hold my hands out, play I play --
If only, somehow, I had learned to live!
The three of us sit watching, as my waltz
Plays itself out a half-inch from my fingers.

"25 Painters Under 35," with an Intro by John Yau (by David Yezzi)

It's been a while since I've been on the BAP blog. (BAP!: it's like one of those legends that fills the screen when Batman kicks someone in the kisser.) To be honest, Craig Arnold dying kind of took it out of me a bit, and blogging about poetry just seemed strange for a while. At any rate, I hope to write a blog about one of Craig's poems soon, and I also have a copy of Jill Essbaum's Necropolis that I'm keen to report on.

But first: here's a dynamite show of young painters if you are in, or passing through, New York. It's at the Painting Center, 52 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, and it runs through July 19. A friend and a first-rate painter, Gabbe Grodin, who works with me at The New Criterion, has these paintings in the show:

As John Yau writes in the catalog: “Painting is a slow art, no matter how quickly viewers might believe they see and absorb a painting’s visual data. It takes time to make a painting, and it takes time to see it, in some cases far longer than it took for the artist to make it. And along the way, any number of things can happen. At a time when there isn’t any discourse telling painters what they should be doing, the situation is wide open and even scary. There is no dominant style, subject matter, or relationship to paint’s materiality or immateriality. You can work from direct observation, make everything up, or be conceptual in your decisions. There is no safety net; nothing that says this is the right or wrong way to go. Abstraction and figuration are two options among many. Some may regard such confusion (or anarchy) as unhealthy, but I am not one of them. The pot is simmering, and out of it many unexpected delights have been emerging, even if they have flown under the radar.”

Here's an installation shot of a few more pieces. Check out the show, if you can!

Larkin in the TLS (by David Yezzi)

If you are a Philip Larkin fan and you haven't yet seen the April 3rd issue of the TLS, then you are in for a treat. There is an amazing behind-the-scenes account by John Shakespeare of Larkin giving his first interview, in 1956, just after the publication of The Less Deceived but before anyone knew who he was. The article reprints contemporary correspondence between Shakespeare and Larkin that shows Larkin engaging in the most assiduous image management. He could have been a PR man. It's brilliant and a bit weird. Interspersed, however, are some very amazing statements about poetry (with which you might agree or disagree), such as this:

Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt or perceived. I feel it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation, since one’s deepest impulse in writing (or, I must admit, painting or composing) is to my mind not “I must tell everybody about that” (i.e. responsibility to other people) but “I must stop that from being forgotten if I can” (i.e. responsibility towards subject). . . . Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved, and that explains why obscurity is so often a disadvantage; the distinction between communication and preservation is one of motive, and I think the latter word gives a very proper emphasis to the language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication. In other words it makes it sound harder, which it is!

No wonder the poor fellow only averaged around four poems a year. But what poems!

Mighty Windy (by David Yezzi)

I'm a big Christoper Guest fan. (So are you. Admit it.) Spinal Tap? Fuggedaboudit. Brilliant! Nigel Tufnel is hilarious. So, if you ask me, is Corky St. Clair from Waiting fo Guffman (though I realize opinions vary on B-list Guest).

It was clear as early as Tap that Guest was an accomplished musician. Then came A Mighty Wind, his feature-length riff on the folk revival. Pretty funny stuff, I thought. Not as funny as Tap but impressive that Guest could perform an entirely different style of music.

Nothing in those earlier performances, however, prepared me for this: his latest CD, The Beyman Brothers: Memories of Summer As a Child. When I popped it in my player, the album genre came up as New Age, but that doesn't really describe it. It's yoga music. Don't get me wrong, I like yoga (quite a lot in fact), but who actually listens to the playlist on their own time?! It's music that you would play while driving through Big Sur on the way to the Eslin Institute. I actually heard a rain stick in one song!

Guest (Doc Beyman) plays mandolin mostly, while his band mates fill in with lilting acoustic guitar riffs and electronics. Given today's date, I wondered briefly if Guest was putting me on. Then I decided I only wished he was putting me on. This thing is genuine. The album photos (very well done, btw) are by Guest's wife, Jamie Lee Curtis. If you are a yoga instructor of just think that this might be your kind of thing, you can check it out at www.dharmamoon.com. Otherwise, repair to the purlieus of classic Guest and check out his bit of clowning on YouTube: it's Tufnel advocating for animal passports! (Type in Nigel Tufnel - Travel for Animals.) Or better yet, rent Spinal Tap (yet again). The extras alone are worth the price of admission.

Frost at Midnight (by David Yezzi)

So, it’s late last night, and I’m still puzzling over this Frost poem (posted below). I mean this thing is nagging at me. In a low-level way. I’m not a maniac (mostly). But the Tommy Lee Jones movie I’m watching has just ended, and I'm wondering about “The Lockless Door.” I have the one-volume abridgment of the Lawrence Thompson biography, so I pull it down and this is what I find on pages 93-94: Frost was afraid of the dark!

 

In the summer of 1895, he followed Elinor White and her sister to Ossipee Mountain in New Hampshire. He rented what amounted to a shack (with a lockless door!) in order to be near her. In the event, he was alone much of the time. His fear of the dark—with him from childhood—was so great, that he slept that summer with his pants on just in case.

Then one night there was a knock at the door, and Frost freaked out. He climbed out the window and called “Come In”  back over the sill, just like in the poem. When the door started to open, he ran for it, spending the night hiding out in the woods basically. Sometime after dawn, he crept back to the house to find his neighbor passed out on the kitchen floor "as though dead": he had stopped on his way home, to sleep off a bender. The experience, Thompson says, haunted Frost's dreams for years. The poem, he suggests, was “perhaps motivated in part by the hope that he might rid himself of the whole thing.”

 

Here’s proof that biography only gets you so far: I know now what motivated the poem and some of the actual events referred to, but I still can’t say what the tenor (subject) of the poem really is. And on some level I don’t really need to know for sure. There’s something of the allegory or fable to the thing, an indeterminacy that allows it to resonate deep in the psyche. The brilliant bastard!

I love Simran Khurana (by David Yezzi)

Look, I know everyone’s got way too much junk mail clogging their inboxes. Far be it from me to suggest adding to the daily wafts of e-ffluvia. I must unsubscribe to about five unwanted e-mail lists a day, and I still have enough spam to see me through to spring.

 

But here’s one daily e-mail I always look forward to (along with the 5-string banjo list, and Scuttlebutt, about boats getting thrashed in mid-ocean): it’s a poem-a-day sent out by About.com and chosen by Simran Khurana. Who is she? Does she actually exist? Here’s a photo of her from the site:

 

I’m am crazy about her. It’s like poetic philocaption. I just love that she sends me poetry—really good poetry!—every day. And she will send it to you, too!

 

It’s classic stuff: Yeats, Frost, Stevenson, Dickinson—all public domain, of course, and all worth a look. I’m constantly surprised to find a classic poem that I really didn’t know that well or that I hadn’t thought of in a long time.

 

Here is Frost’s “The Lockless Door,” which Simran sent me last week. It’s a killer. Anyone want to venture a guess as to what’s going on in this poem? I’ve got some ideas, but, man, this thing is mysterious. It just keeps opening up.

 

The Lockless Door

 

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a "Come in"
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.

A few spring titles (by David Yezzi)

A quick glance at some forthcoming titles for spring (from the few book catalogs I had to hand):

 

February

MERCURY DRESSING by J. D. McClatchy (Knopf)

March

CONTINUUM by Nina Cassian (Norton)

COLLECTED POEMS by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf)

THE UNFINISHED POEMS by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf)

SHUT UP, YOU’RE FINE! by Andrew Hudgins (Viking)

SELECTED POEMS by Geoffrey Hill (Yale)

THOUSANDS OF BROADWAYS by Robert Pinsky ( Chicago)

April

POEMS 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel (FSG)

SELECTED POEMS by Thom Gunn (FSG)

THE BEST OF IT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Kay Ryan (Grove Press)

May

TO BE READ IN 500 YEARS by Albert Goldbarth (Graywolf)

THE KITCHEN SINK: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1972-2007 by Albert Goldbarth (Graywolf)

In Your Own Voice: Performing Poetry (by David Yezzi)

A quick plug for a class I'm teaching at the 92nd Street Y beginning in February: It's on reading poetry--your own and others'--aloud to an audience (very useful for poets and public speakers).

Here's the description: This hands-on performance workshop, combining literary and theatrical practice, looks closely at what makes a poetry reading compelling, clear and resonant. Through textual analysis, vocal technique and group discussion and critique, students will create a pliant and powerful reading style to best serve their work. (Below is an anthology--my favorite when I was a kid--that has a poetry reading on the cover.)

The class runs for eight Tuesdays beginning February 10, 2009 (6:30pm-9:00pm) at the 92^nd Street Y (Lexington Avenue and 92^nd Street).

You can read more about it and register here.

W. D. Snodgrass passed away this morning (by David Yezzi)

W. D. Snodgrass passed away this morning in the company of his family. He was 83.

   

On the fortunate (for me) occasions when I was privileged to work with him as an editor, he was the sweetest and most genial of men. His poem "For Hugues Cuenod--in His 100th Year," which first appeared in the February 2004 issue ofThe New Criterion, was selected by Paul Muldoon for The Best American Poetry 2005. (De, as he was known, appeared many times in the series.)

Another poem that De published in The New Criterion (June 2005), "Packing Up the Lute," ends:

And what’s left now I could still sing?

Go lie with lovenotes and snapshots. You
      Were just too fine a vice to last.
Condemned to virtue, we thumb through 
      The evidence of our misspent past.

Much will be written and remembered about him in the coming days. He was an extraordinary poet, one of the greats.