The Best American Poetry

A Mountain of Poetry (by David Yezzi)

The new Parnassus: Poetry in Review, edited by Herbert Leibowitz and Ben Downing, is finally out. (Supposedly a semiannual, it’s more like a biannual!) The thing is massive. It’s almost 700 pages, and it’s a bargain at $15 (though you might have pay to repair your rotator cuff after attempting to lift it). If you don’t know Parnassus--though if your on the BAP site I bet you do--you must check it out:

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a)      because it’s been around for 30 years and is one of the only journals I can think of that is devoted almost exclusively to poetry criticism (it has poems, too, but a relative smattering and almost as an afterthought). Criticism is Parnassus's meat and potatoes, and over the years it has featured the best critics around: Helen Vendler, Donald Davie, Guy Davenport, Paul Mariani, John Bayley, Donald Sutherland, Michael Wood, M. L. Rosenthal, Christopher Ricks, Ross Feld, Adrienne Rich, Hugh Kenner,  Howard Nemerov, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Williams, Denis Donoghue, and Seamus Heaney. And that’s only the first five volumes! And, because

b)      it probably won’t be around for much longer. In fact, it’s enjoying a Lazarus-like revival at the moment. A year or so ago, the magazine announced it was closing doors. When Willard Speigelman, editor of the excellent Southwest Review, wrote a valedictory piece on Parnassus in The Wall Street Journal an angel (the kind with dosh not wings) sent them some do-re-me to see them through another issue or two. But after that, who knows?

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Words that come to mind to describe Parnassus are independent, eclectic, frank, elegant, witty, erudite. Parnassus espouses no school or program. It is unafraid to discriminate. It is generous with space, and exacting in maters of style. It stands in opposition to mealy-mouthed writing. Timidity in literary criticism, Herb Leibowitz writes in the 25^th anniversary number, is “failure of nerve.” It “quashes the frank exchange of ideas . . . What should be a bracing intramural conversation turns bland, parochial, prevaricating.”

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In that same issue Leibowitz explains that he stubbornly maintained “that poetry criticism is an art, one requiring airtight argument, a passion for style, and even an entertainer’s wit and timing.” Susan Sontag called it “the best magazine in the United States, no, in the World, particularly, she said, in its loving attention to style. . . .”

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Here’s some highlights from the latest issue:

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Eric Ormsby on La Fontaine;
Mark Polizzotti on Surrealism;
Eric Murphy Selinger on Latino and Latina Poetry
Cathy Park Hong on Asian-American Poetry;
Mark Scroggins on Ronald Johnson;
Daniel Albright on Shakespeare's Songs;
Tom Sleigh on Moosehunting with Robert Duncan;
William Logan on Robert Frost;
Leonard Barkan on Ekphrastic Poems;
Paul West The Shadow Factory (Memoir);
Richard Wilbur's translation Corneille's "The Liar";
Mark Halliday on Kenneth Koch (pictured).

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Oh yeah, and a bunch of poems (including a few by me, I should say, though I dare you to find them amid the reams of good stuff here).

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Thanks for a great week BAP! I’m out a here. As Avon Barksdale once said on David Simon’s brilliant series “The Wire”: “Take it slow, but take it.” I had a super time!

--D.Y.

Subway Sketches (by David Yezzi)

So I'm riding the train to work this morning, and I have to say: the subway can be a wonderful place sometimes. I’m surrounded by people, but I don’t need to make conversation (in fact conversation is tacitly discouraged). People jostle each other, make room for each other, secretly check each other out, ignore each other, read, coast, float. It’s a weird instance of privacy in public. For a few minutes out of their day, people aren’t multi-tasking, taking the bull by the horns, kickin’ ass and taking names; they are swaying with the movement of the tracks, thinking, staring blankly, listening to music, people-watching, taking it all in, working out the meaning of life, or not. Here’s a painting by my friend John Dubrow, whose new show opens today at Lori Bookstein Fine Art on 57th Street in Manhattan:

The painting grew out of a thirty-second sketch that John made while riding the train. Unlike most of his paintings, which get reworked for years, this one came together quickly, with few alterations to the basic composition. It captures the public-private thing I’m talking about.

Of course, the subway can also be a tense place. The downside of people being in their own worlds is that they can be completely inconsiderate to others. I’m afraid I can gat a bit obsessive on this subject. If only that guy would move his bag so that somebody could sit down. (Did his bag pay $2 for a seat on the subway.) And how come, when the electronic announcement encourages people to step all the way into the train, do people stand crowding the doorway. If only they would have a little consideration, that poor slob on the platform could actually get on the train instead of having to wait for the next one. Let people on! Let people off! OK, I need to take a breath. It’s impossible to get through one’s commute without having to make a number of telling ethical and even moral decisions involving the way in which we behave toward others.

The inevitable frustrations of the subway, though, are surprisingly mild, given how many people ride it every day. It rarely gets as bad as this:

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Subway Seathe

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What could have been the big to-do

that caused him to push me aside

on that platform? Was a woman who knew

there must be some good even inside

an ass like him on board that train?

Charity? Frances? His last chance

in a ratty srtring of last chances? Jane?

Surely in all of us is some good.

Love thy bloody neighbor, buddy,

lest she shove back. Maybe I should.

It’s probably just some cruddy

downtown interview leading to

a cheap-tie, careerist, dull

cul-de-sac he’s speeding to.

Can he catch up with his soul?

Really, what was the big crisis?

Did he need to know before me

whether the lights searching the crowd’s eyes

were those of our train, or maybe

the train of who he might have been,

the person his own-heart-numbing,

me-shoving anxiety about being

prevents him from ever becoming?

And how has his thoughtlessness defiled

who I was before he shoved me?

How might I be smiling now if he’d smiled,

hanging back, as though he might have loved me?

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This poem, by J. Allyn Rosser, is from her latest book, Foiled Again, which won this year's New Criterion Prize. Full disclosure: I was on the panel of five judges that chose it. It’s loaded with excellent stuff. Straphangers and other poetry lovers should check it out.

-- D. Y.

This Week's Guest Blogger

For those of you joining us for the first time, our guest blogger this week is David Yezzi.  David Yezzi has published three volumes of poetry, most recently, Azores (Swallow Press, 2008).  His poems and criticism have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2006, and elsewhere. He is executive editor of the New Criterion. Read all of his posts here.

Two Byrons (by David Yezzi)

OK, it has been a day from hell--two days from hell, in fact. I don't know about you, but taxes were completely brutal this year. I envy you, if you are one of those fortunate people who actually gets money back! I more than envy you; I want to come stay with you and eat food out of your refrigerator. I'm also exhausted this morning. I was up until 2:30 finishing a review, for which I will receive a small amount of money that will then be reported to the IRS so that I will owe taxes on it next year.

I thought I might write about the blues today. I'm in the mood. I was planning to expatiate on the pleasures of Mississippi John Hurt's alternating-thumb base line on the acoustic guitbox, and how his treble-line melodies infuse traditional songs like "Stack O'Lee Blues," "Casey Jones," and "Frankie and Albert" with his singnature sound. Then there's "Candy Man." "Candy Man"!: "He's got stick candy that's nine inches long, / He sells it faster than a hog can chew his corn / Candyman, candyman!" But I think I'll do that tomorrow . . .

Instead, I want to quote from a book of Macaulay's essays that I picked up on the giveaway shelf at the library this morning. A free book! Things are looking up. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an English poet, reviewer, essayist, historian, and MP for Edinburgh. Here's a bit from his essay on Lord Byron, which I read on the subway on my way to work (I want to quote a bunch of it because, a) it's a great portrait of Byron and B) the prose rocks):

In the rank of Lord Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he possessed over others was mingled something of misery ans debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which he had attained a scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and, but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had a naturally generous and feeling heart: but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and most judicious training.

Macaulay goes on in this vein for quite a while. It's pretty good stuff, and wonderfully sympathetic to Byron, though not nearly as sympathetic as Auden's tribute to him in "Letter to Lord Byron." Auden doesn't name Macaulay, but it's critics of his ilk that he is skewering. In fact, there are enough correspondences between the essay and Auden 's poem that I can't help wondering if Auden had it partly in mind:

I like your muse because she's gay and witty,
       Because she's neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European city,
       And country houses long before the slump;
       I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.

A poet, swimmer, peer, and man of action,
--It beats Roy Campell's record by a mile--
You offer every possible attraction.
      By looking into your poetic style
      And love-life on the chance that both were vile,
Several have earned a decent livelihood,
Whose lives were uncreative but were good.

You've had your packet from the critics, though:
      They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
      A "vulgar genius" so George Eliot said,
      Which doesn't matter as George Eliot's dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: "an uninteresting mind".

--DY

Paul Scofield's "Lear" (by David Yezzi)

Paul Scofield is my favorite Shakespearean actor. When he died earlier this year, I was fascinated to learn more of the details of his life from the many obituaries, both in the British press and here in America. An intensely private man, he declined a knighthood and preferred the stage over Hollywood. Of course he was great on screen. Every role he took on he made indelibly his own: in A Man for All Seasons, Albee's A Delicate Balance, as the King of France in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, and as Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show. When Scofield's friend Richard Burton returned form California, he told Scofield "You shouldn't be wasting time doing these plays. You could make a fortune in Hollywood." Scofield would have none of it.

In one sense, it is a shame that Scofield did not commit more of his roles to film. For years he was Peter Brooke's star actor on stage, but his Hamlet, to name only one, will never be seen again. Here's how the great theater critic Kenneth Tynan described Scofield's melancholy Dane:

No living actor is better equipped for Hamlet (Phoenix [Theatre]) than Paul Scofield. On him the right sadness sits, and also the right spleen; his gait is a prowl over quicksands; and he can freeze a word with an irony at once mournful and deadly. He plays Hamlet as a man whose skill in smelling falseness extends to himself, thereby breeding self-disgust. He spots the flaw in every stone, which makes him either an idealistic jeweller or a born critic. He sees though Gertrude, Caludius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius and Ophelia--what remains but to see through him self.

Wow. That is some smokin' criticism. Tynan was an ace--more about him in a moment. (For the Burton and Tynan quotes I am indebted to Peter Brook's obituary in The Observer from March 23.) Now that Scofield has become his admirers (as Auden might say), the good news is that his greatest performance can still be seen and heard. In 1971, Brook made a film of King Lear starring Scofield, which is now available on video. Also: an excellent audio version of the play produced by Kenneth Branagh (who gives voice to the Fool) exists on three CDs from Naxos. This CD will change your life. Scofield's ability to turn verse into music, speech, lament, outrage, organs, drums, terror, etc. is indescribable. Don't just take my work for it. Several years before his death, two hundred actors and other members of the Royal Shakespeare Company voted Scofield's Lear the greatest Shakespeare performance ever!   

So here's a funny story: After an evening of scenes from Shakespeare that I put together at the Poetry Center of 92nd Street Y a few years ago, I was having dinner with the actors: Philip Bosco, Rosemary Harris, and Brian Murray. I was completely dizzy with wine and the stories of working with the greats: what Olivier said, what Burton did, etc. Then Brian Murray launches into this story that I will never forget. Murray was in the stage version of Brook's Lear, playing Edgar beside Scofield's king. If the movie is any indication, the production was quite gritty looking. Edgar, who spends a fair amount of time in the mud, appears begrimed for much of the play. The week before opening they changed his make up, so that the mud was in fact chocolate sauce smeared across his face.

All went swimmingly until opening night, when Murray (pictured on the right) gets the jitters and, as he told it, begins to freeze up. Scofield, sensing this, crosses to him, which he had never done before, kneels down and runs a finger across his face. He then licks the finger and whispers loudly, "Mm. Mars. Delicious!" This absurd stunt puts Murray back on track, and he is able to continue.

Now here's the part I've always wondered about. It's a story too good not to be true, so I've never verified it. According to Murray, Tynan was in the audience that night and in his review wrote something to the effect that Scofield clearly marked Lear's descent into madness by picking a piece of mud off of Edgar and eating it. And, of course, despite this bit of praise Scofield never repeated the moment.

I don't have the heart to look up the Tynan review, but here is a bit of it quoted by Brook in his memorial tribute to Scofield (best to let Tynan have the last word here):

Paul Scofield enters with grey crew-cut and peering gate; one notes at once the old man's trick of dwelling on unexpected vowels and lurching phrases as if his voice were barely under rational control . . . And suddenly, greatness. Scofield's halting, apologetic delivery of "I fear I am not in my perfect mind," sightless Gloucester, sitting cross-legged on the empty stage while the noise of the battle resounds in the wings; and the closing epiphany, where in Lear achieves a wisdom denied in his sanity--a Stoic determination, long in the moulding, to endure his going hence . . .

--DY

Modernist Mag (by David Yezzi)

I realize it’s cheeky of me to kick off my first day of guest-blogging on the BAP site not with a look at a best American literary journal but with one of the coolest poetry magazines from the U.K.: Agenda. I’ve followed Agenda for years, beginning with my time at Parnassus: Poetry in Review--more about the new issue of that estimable doorstop later in the week!--when it would show up in Parnassus's dilapidated one-room office on Union Square in New York crammed with news of that vital tradition of innovation and experiment called modernism.

Is it strange to think that there should be a magazine devoted to modernist poets coming out of England? Only last week, someone suggested to me that modernism had to a great extent bypassed Britain. True, the poems of Hardy, Edward Thomas, Betjeman, and Larkin might lead one to think this, but what of David Jones, Basil Bunting, and, more recently, Geoffrey Hill, who strikes me in many ways as the last of the modernists? Several years ago, Agenda put together a splendid special issue on Hill. (Others special issues have focused on: Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Hugh MacDiarmid, Kathleen Raine, David Jones, R.S. Thomas, Thom Gunn, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Dale, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott.)

In fact, the modernist slant of the journal is not strange at all: it was founded by Ezra Pound and William Cookson in 1959. Agenda is currently edited by Patricia McCarthy, who co-edited the magazine with Cookson for several years before his death in January 2003. As Cookson tells it: "Pound liked the first issue and wrote, 'Pleased with Agenda. It don’t look too Poundista. At lease not too unadulteratedly.' "

The current issue is titled "Lauds," after Auden's poem from Horae Canonicae. I love the photo on the cover of young Wystan reading with his mother sometime around 1912. The little sailor suit just kills me. The issue includes tributes to Auden and to Louis MacNeice, both of whom had their centenaries last year. Peter Mumford, at the time married to Auden's niece Rita (whose sister Anita was a long-time editor at Agenda!), recounts family dinners in the Sixties and early Seventies with Auden in his essay "The Memorableness of W. H. Auden":

These dinners were very much family occasions; and as with all family reunions not without their tensions. Wystan enjoyed them because of his affection for a family he did not have, and because this was a place where the public figure, his face recognized wherever he went, could become entirely the private man. . . .

. . . Wystan, who always arrived promptly at six for his martinis, brought with him laughter, with irritation at times, concerning every-day things, and gossip about mutual friends. The local and the particular sometimes ranged into the universal. On one occasion, he was especially delighted by Martin Gardner's The Ambidextrous Universe (1964) which provided the scientific evidence for Nature having a "left-handed twist."

That sounds like Auden down to the ground. The issue also includes a feature on Michael Hamburger and a host of fine poems, as well as poems by two "Broadsheet Poets," from the magazine's ongoing series of features on younger poets. It's well worth a look--DY

"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