The Best American Poetry

A Bloomsday Note: I visit James Joyce's grave with Craig Arnold (by Jill Alexander Essbaum)

Statue of James Joyce at his grave in Zurich

A favorite memory from Switzerland. Craig and Robin come to visit me. We share a picnic of cheese and cherries and bread in the park behind the Landesmuseum near the Zurich Hauptbahnhof.  We sit on the concrete-floored gazebo, and there are ants. Later, it is a trek to James Joyce's gravesite. We are appropriately reverent and also appropriately irreverent. We may or may not quote passages from Joycean works (alas, I do not recall). I may or may not mention that my prefered Joyce is 'Carol Oates.'  Robin, I think, is bored. The sun is high and hot in the sky. It is summer. I had broken a tooth on a frozen bar of chocolate the night before and am wearing an odd prosthetic. My Swiss dentist also has a son named Robin. Later, Craig cooks a supper for all of us. It is pasta, if I remember rightly, and it is exquisite.  As Craig's meals always were.

Poetry Hi-Jinx in West Chester PA (by Laura Orem)

Here's a cool way to spend a Wednesday evening: attend a poetry reading by our own Jill Alexander Essbaum! Last night, I drove out to West Chester to hear Jill and poet Ernest Hilbert give a reading at the West Chester University Poetry Center's Poetry House. They read to a standing-room only audience from their latest work, and a gala time was had by all.

    

JAE has the audience in the palm of her hand.

   

Ernie Hilbert reading from Sixty Sonnets and his upcoming (2012) book.

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Brilliant AND beautiful - poets who multitask!

All The Fun’s In How You Say A Thing* (even more travelogue by Jessica Piazza)

Hi travel pal!

It’s almost six p.m., and daytime is only a glowing line of bright yellow clinging to the black hills of West Texas.   We just rolled through border patrol, where a very nice female officer inquired about our citizenship.  “USA,” we said, and she snickered.  Me with my Apple laptop plugged via converter into the car charger, and the GPS system suction-cupped to the windshield telling us it’s “recalculating.”  When she asked where we’re going and we said Marfa we got yet another eye-roll, my crazy-looking dog turning around in his doggie-booster seat and Josh flashing a charming smile behind his aviators and hipster-fisherman’s cap.  Small artists’ community in the desert?  Umm, obviously.

 

In this case, we were exactly what the officer expected.  But during the trip today, with nothing—and I mean nothing—but scrub brush and the occasional metal pre-fab shed for a hundred miles at a time (what’s in those things, anyway?), Josh and I started talking about a particular unexpected phenomenon we sometimes witness: the terribly good or wonderfully bad poetry reading.

It all started because, between This American Life podcasts and naps, I sat in the passenger seat and read aloud each of the poems from the “56 Days” section of Kate Greenstreet's latest book “The Last 4 Things.”  For those of you who know Greenstreet’s absolutely wonderful poems, they’re an eerie, disjunctive lot, full of recurring lines, reappearing characters and settings, random bits of dialogue between unknown persons and scarce little linear storytelling.  Which, honestly, isn’t such an easy read out loud (though she does quite the job herself, as anyone who’s heard her knows). “The eye fills in what it knows,” she writes in one poem, but so does the ear.  Surrealistic and leaping, the listener of these poems can never really anticipate what might come next, so the speaker has to slow down, stay focused, and, ultimately, use the voice to convey some of the emotional import and changes in mood the text attempts.  I did my best.

I think this difficulty rings true for much non-narrative poetry, but also for any poetry read in public to an audience. And that’s where I declared a major problem I have with graduate poetry-writing programs in general: the lack of focus on public reading skills, as though those weren’t integral to our work as professional poets.  As a PhD student, I’m not required (nor even encouraged) to take public speaking or drama courses.  Nowhere in the curricula is it acknowledged that, because we poets have a devastatingly small audience matched by terrible underrepresentation in book stores, most of us will sell the majority of our books (if we’re lucky enough to publish some) at poetry readings.  Shouldn’t that fact be considered when deciding what professional poets should learn in school?

The Cat Piano [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

In a city of singing cats, 

a lonely beat poet falls for a beautiful siren. 

When a mysterious dark figure emerges, 

kidnapping the town’s singers for his twisted musical plans, 

the poet must save his muse 

and put an end to the nefarious tune 

that threatens to destroy the city.

From the official site of The Cat Piano

Cats? Check. Poetry? Check. Narration by the inestimable Nick Cave? Check, check, check.

These are a few of my favorite things.  Watch it. Now.

What the minister counseled the small-bladdered groom before the ceremony:

Leak now, or forever hold your pee!

(Groan.)

Why did the cumin flatter the turmeric?

To curry flavor with the rice.

Ouch.  

I promised David Lehman ten puns today

Here they are. Plus one to grow on. 

Didya hear about the infamous movie director who tumbled down the snowy mountain?

...He had a roaming pole and ski. 

Didya the good natured Hasid who couldn't bring himself to true hooliganism?  

...He only threw Mazel Tov cocktails through windows. 

Didya hear about the Jewish matron who got an obscene phone call from a famous Mexican guitarist?

...So overcome with the perplexing emotions of both shock and flinching desire, she responded in the only way she could: "Oy vey! Come ovah!"

Now for some Tom Swifties:

"Buy my trout!  Mine alone!" Tom said, selfishly.  

"I'll take another gin," Tom said, slowly. 

Bathroom humor alert:

"Indeed, I poop every twenty four hours!" Tom said, yesterday.  

"Whoops! I farted!" Tom said, astutely.

And a few more because I cannot help myself, really. 

"This I do on behalf of my former spouse," Tom said, exactingly.  

Tom was forthcoming: "I can masturbate ALL NIGHT!"

"It seems this bird is missing something," Tom said, knowingly.

And lastly, leastly:

Tom totally announced: "Yep, there's ten of them!"

Thank you, thank you.  You've been great.  

"All the Things You Are": The Greatest Love Song?

The other day, David proclaimed that Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are" is the greatest of all love songs and Jill Alexander Essbaum asked why. David played a Sinatra cover from 1944 and Stacey searched vainly for the "Broadway Showstoppers" album that John McGlinn put together, which features a full operatic version of the song, verse and all, as it would be presented theatrically. But Jill's question lingered in the air. Jamie Katz talked about how the changes in the song held a great appeal for jazz musicians, something you couldn't say about "Some Enchanted Evening," for example. David talked about the soaring melody, the changes in key and the range that make the song so challenging to a singer. Stacey talked about how the lyrics expressed longing and epitomized the poem in praise of one's sought-for partner. Laura Orem recalled that Oscar Hammerstein wasn't very proud of the inversion toward the end: "Someday I'll know that moment divine / when all the things you are are mine" -- the inversion was forced on him by the rhyme. David remembered reading that Hammerstein fan Stephen Sondheim preferred the same songwriters' "The Song Is You" perhaps for that reason. We sat and we talked and we listened and we hope you will listen to -- two versions below -- and weigh in with your opinion. Leaving superlatives aside, since they are there to emphasize a point and not as statements that can be logically verified, what makes "All the Things You Are" a consummate example of the romantic love song in the great American songbook?

If you listen to Barbara Streisand's interpretation, you will hear the introductory verse Sills and Forrest leave out. 

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The Grief Tourist

From the mixed-up files of your Coeur Despondent:

I am in Switzerland.  I have come--ostensibly, insensibly--to praise, honor, mourn, and conjure the endings of some things.  I have two endings in mind. 

The ostensible: I have traveled all this way to find the ending of my novel.  The novel’s set in Switzerland and I am fully convinced that my ending’s hidden somewhere here.  Behind a wall clock or in a bank vault, I am sure.  

The insensible: I have come here to revisit (for reasons entirely pathological) a precise and beckoning sadness, a sadness that was, upon the collapse of my marriage, my sole companion.  A sadness I am at once in love with and am indifferent to.  I am staying in Wallisellen, a town near Zürich, at the home of poet, publisher and altogether enchanting editrix, Susana Gardner.  Wallisellen is one town away from Dietlikon, where I lived.

If you know me even tangentially, you know that my relationship with Switzerland is multivalent.  Would that there existed a single word broad enough in its own connotations to describe the all-at-once sensation of aggression, bewilderment, despair, pathos, boredom, longing, and straight-up anger that jolts through me when I spend any real time thinking about this place. But think about this place I do.  And think and think and think about it. 

So like the criminal who returns to the scene of her crime, or the ghost that haunts the rooms of the house she died in, I have come to Switzerland, that I might holiday in the land of my hopelessness, vacation in the place that vandalized me.  That I might wander once more the paths that woe-ed me, wounded me, made me weep.

For I am a tourist of grief, you see.