The Best American Poetry

Paul Newman: all eyes, and more [by Ken Tucker]

The salutes to Paul Newman's eyes have ranged from 20/20 (Manohla Dargis' sharp squint in the Times) to blurry-teary (Bob  Mondello's drippy evaluation on NPR). As far as filmographies go, no one will best my colleague and friend Mark Harris’ remarkably concise yet complete look at Newman’s work on EW.com.

My only disagreement with Mark is that he doesn't give greater credit to Newmans Slap Shot, the ferociously funny, profane 1977 hockey film that has been given a typically impassioned yet meticulously observed appreciation by Kim Morgan here.

When I was a teenager, my Favorite Film Of All Time (you can have those when you're an adolescent) was Cool Hand Luke, the martyrdom of whose title character suited my teen self-pity so perfectly I saw it 16 times the year it was released including once in Copenhagen when I snuck off from a church-group trip to see it once again (from the silence in the audience, I could only deduce the Danish subtitles didn't do justice to Newman's witty line-readings).

If I had to pick one Newman film to gaze upon over and over these days, however, it would be The Verdict (1982), his last great role and by some accounts his favorite. As the rhuemy-eyed rummy lawyer Frank Galvin, Newman did what he loved doing in the second half of his career—which was to do his best to demolish the first half. By which I mean, this least narcissistic of beautiful men seemed to enjoy suggesting what the ultimate fates of  characters such as Hud, John Harper in Hombre, and the Lew Archer surrogate in Harper would have been had they lived to late-middle-age.

Working with co-conspirator director Sidney Lumet, Newman turned himself into a shambling wreck held up by an expensive-turning-threadbare lawyer's suit. The early scenes in which Newman leans over a pinball machine for drunken support as much for the purpose of playing the game, and—even more chillingly, repulsively, movingly—attends the funeral wakes of people he doesn't know to press his dog-eared business cards into the hands of the bereaved are marvels of actorly control. Newman played cynicism and dissipation with even more of the commitment he brought to his lovely light comic turns in bigger hits such as The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Lesser actors would be content merely to have sketched a portrait of an alchoholic making one last stand for dignity; Newman let you know that, in the end, this was no mere proto-episode of Law & Order, ending with the attorney pulling himself together for redemption. After the credits rolled, you knew that Frank Galvin would probably, eventually, end up looking closely at a bottle for the rest of his short life.

There's another whole piece to be written about Newman's other life as a public personality—I expect David Letterman, his fellow race-car buff, will summon his usual humble grace to salute the numerous appearances Newman made on Letterman’s show over the years, content to sit in the studio audience and wave silently, humorously, once again subverting his celebrity with bright-eyed enthusiasm.

And some time I'll have to tell about the day my construction-worker dad shared a beer with Newman and confirmed everything you may have thought about the man when he was off-camera…

--Ken Tucker

Ken Tucker on Craig Ferguson

Ken Tucker was a guest this week on Craig Ferguson's late night show. Catch all the action here.

Mad Men and artists (by Ken Tucker)

I have refrained from commenting on Mad Men in this precinct since I sense a great enthusiasm among the BAP gatekeepers for a TV series I find intelligent, lovingly crafted, and yet often irritatingly mannered and obvious. Why is it, for example, that whenever a Mad character turns on the TV, he or she just happens to come upon, say, Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House? The regular historical coincidences strain credulity, and are cute, not acute.

But I have been enjoying the second season of Mad Men more than the first because the cracks are beginning to show in the porcelain foreheads of important smoothies like Don Draper, and I found the episode in which he appeared at the bedside of post-natal Peggy, advising her to forget about the baby she’d just birthed, to be at once shocking and thrilling (yes! Don is the only person independent-Peggy would take advice from!).

This past Sunday, art intruded upon the business of Madison Avenue in two ways. Robert Morse's Cooper had acquired a Mark Rothko, and the painting, mounted in his office, became a deep-orange litmus test for his underlings, its saturated colors seeping into their workaday minds. Everyone immediately supposed its abstraction was some kind of test of whether they "got it" or not, and by extension, were able to understand and fawn more effectively over their frequently inscrutable boss.

And then there was the wining and dining of Cooper Sterling Accounts Manager Ken Cosgrove by the excruciatingly closeted art director Salvatore. Ken, you may recall, has had a short story published in The Atlantic Monthly, which immediately made him the envy of many copywriters at the ad agency. (As someone whose first job was as a proofreader at Ogilvy & Mather straight out of college, I can tell you this rang very true. At the time I was also freelancing for Rolling Stone, and I had more than one copywriter tell me to flee the ad biz before I got promoted, and one middle-aged fellow who closed the door behind me and asked furtively how one got published in Jann Wenner's magazine. I think my response was an eloquent, um, you just have to like a lot of punk rock, send in your clips, and say yes when asked to review crap like Black Oak Arkansas.)

Ken the published literary writer is pure catnip to the sensitive, unhappily married Salvatore, and the scene in which Salvatore had Ken over for dinner — gazing longingly into the younger man's averted eyes as Ken lit his cigarette, while Salvatore's wife looked on in quiet agony — was one of Mad Men's… most clunkily obvious moments. Sometimes I think of series creator Matthew Weiner as Daffy Duck, slamming us -- whom I imagine he sees as a collective Elmer Fudd -- over the head with a baseball bat, screaming, "Get it? Get it? Boy, they were repressed in those days! These people were desthpicable!"

Weiner has upped the art-versus-life quotient this season, starting with the earth-quaking Frank O'Hara reference in the season premiere. I’m not sure it's really working. I'm much more caught up in the inter-office politics involving head secretary-queen bee Joan, and, on the homefront, the way Don's wife Betty has become so mercurially, cavalierly cruel to their son. These subplots strike me as being, if anything, more "literary" than the overt art-referenced scenes. Between the secretaries and the children, Weiner and company are evoking similar themes in the work of writers such as Richard Yates, John O'Hara, and Christina Stead the best way you can on television: by not overreaching for profundity. Perhaps you disagree?

--Ken Tucker

Maureen Owen: Talisman and magic [by Ken Tucker]

Yesterday I bought a copy of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics—the Fall 2007 issue, is it the latest one? Who knows with poetry mags and who cares, really, when good journals like Talisman bring timeless pleasure? Anyway, I snapped it up because among its many inviting pieces was an interview with Maureen Owen conducted by Barbara Henning.
    Now, I have an ancient vested interest in following Owen's work and statements; she published two poems of mine in her Telephone Magazine in the 1970s—indeed, the only two poems of mine that have ever seen print. (Not that I have submitted a helluva many anywhere since those college days. Ah, youth!) So, you know, even though I don't know her, I have fond feelings toward Owen and admire her taste.
    And her poetry. The occasion for this interview was the publication of Erosion's Pull (2006, Coffee House Press). At one point Owen discusses this poem:

Whenever I Snow

I think of Black
Beauty
when he was
pulling a cab

standing
streetside
under a lamppost
his dark harness gathering flakes
a jet horse becoming white powder

a dark horse disappearing

In the Talisman interview, Owen refers to this poem as "mysterious": "this simple image of an illustration I remember from my childhood book on Black Beauty that stuck in my head forever… I'm kind of overwhelmed by that image. Here is this beautiful animal and he's pulling a cab and it's night and the streetlights are coming on and it is snowing [and] the snow is covering him and he is gone in a way. It's not exactly sad, but it's more like he has flown away. He's disappeared from that path, that job of pulling the cab. It's almost like magic. There are certain things you can do in poetry that are truly magic, and I don't mean in terms of an illusion. You cannot devise this method of magic. It just has to happen. To me in this poem I have succeeded in doing this."
    It seems that way to me, too. Hello, Maureen Owen, magician.
--Ken Tucker

RIP: Manny Farber, 1917-2008

Manny Farber, major film critic and painter, has passed away at the age of 91.

See Ken Tucker's August 18 post on the EW blog, "Remembering Manny Farber," which begins with these paragraphs:

<<<
Manny Farber, who died last night at the age of 91, was one of the 20th Century's greatest critics, as well as a powerful painter in his own right. Notice I didn’t just say "film critic" — Farber wrote primarily about the movies, but his collection of film criticism, Negative Space, is essential to understanding all modern non-academic criticism. Farber established a tone, cleared a patch of cultural landscape, and filled it with more ideas, opinions, and attitude than a thousand reviewers and bloggers — not just in movies but in music, television, book, and art criticism too — will ever muster.

With the exception of Pauline Kael, Farber was probably the movie critic other movie critics most often quoted, particularly his hugely influential 1962 essay "White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art," which came as close to anything he wrote to boiling down his critical creed. In that piece, Farber positioned himself ferociously against what he called the "self-aggrandizing masterwork" that "treat[s] every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity." In opposition to this he championed "termite art," which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries… leav[ing] nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." At a time when crap nostalgia is routinely praised with unthinking effusiveness, it's harder now to appreciate how daring and emboldening it was to read Farber's championing of supposedly such minor work as the then-ignored Westerns of director Budd Boetticher and the face-slamming camerawork of director Sam Fuller.
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For the rest of Ken's report, click here.

Also just a click away are Ted Burke's "Like It Or Not" appreciation of Manny and the Movie City Indie's feelings on Farber's demise.

Here is one of Manny Farber's remarkable paintings:

 

Death of a Fussy Man [by Ken Tucker]

In the space of a week, another great editor has died. First Ted Solotaroff, and now L. Rust Hills, dead at age 83 and one of the finest fiction and magazine editors, as well as one of America's most neglected humorists. Hills' run at Esquire, where he edited everyone from Norman Mailer to Raymond Carver, was covered pretty thoroughly in his Times obit.

I will speak up for Hills-as-humorist. As someone who has spent half his life quoting Hills' axiom, "Cleaning up as you go along is half the fun," I am squarely in the camp of Hills' idealized "fussy man," the sort of reader who found Hills' 1972 book How To Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man both rib-tickling and soul-satisfying. This collection of comic essays, gathered from Esquire, The New Yorker, and other publications, were models of the sort of precise, unadorned prose Hills valued in the more literary writers he edited, while also containing just the right amount of obsessive crazy-juice that would compel a man to explain the proper way to eat an ice-cream cone. ("First, revolve the cone through the full three hundred and sixty degrees, snapping at the loose gobs of ice cream [...] Then, with the cone still 'wound,' which will require the wrist to be bent at the full right angle toward you, apply pressure with the mouth and tongue to accomplish the overall realignment, straightening and settling the whole mess.")

In an essay such as "How To Refold A Map," Hills can be read as a precusor to early Nicholson Baker, of the Mezzanine era, with Hills' languid, meticulous descriptions of everyday objects yielding a fresh way to look at banal items. Looking back to writers preceding Hills, there was an element of Robert Benchley-ism to his advice, the sense that the world (frequently in the more immediate form of the family) was looking over his shoulder wondering why Husband/Daddy was being such a stick-in-the-mud, when of course what he was trying to do was nothing less than impose order upon an increasingly anarchic (or in Hills' comic framework, messy) universe: "You may have to inspect the road map carefully to determine which is the original crease. Use a flashlight at the picnic table, if necessary, if it's getting late and the family is gathered around you, watching anxiously. Don't hurry. Be careful. Explain it all to the young ones-the theory, the practice, the inevitability of the second fold after the first fold, the beauty of the conception."

There was another side to Hills' comic writing, however, an aspect that may today strike us as being at odds with his "fussy man" strictures: The smoking, hard-drinking, priapic suburban man he was, or at least suggested he was, when he devised such Platonic concepts as "the Three-Legged Stool, supported by Booze, Coffee, and Smokes, which interdepend essentially." And then there is Hills' deathless comment on the essential problem with those who engage in adultery: "Split-second timing is required of the sort of people who may not even wear a watch."

Like the magazine era over which he commanded such influence throughout the 1960s, the humor writing Hills practiced will seem ever-more quaint as the years go by, I suspect. But re-reading How To Do Things Right after hearing of Hills' death, I was exhilarated once again at the tangy zest of his approach to both writing and life, of his enviable raffishness, of a WASP-y charm that can make the TV show Mad Men seem like a kiddie, aspirational text when compared to Hills' artful, effortless embodiment of it.

--Ken Tucker

Tennyson Goes To Hellboy

Over the weekend I saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the summer's latest super-hero movie, and, until The Dark Knight arrives in theaters on Friday, the season’s most soulful one. That’s because Hellboy's director is Guillermo del Toro, creator of Pan's Labyrith, The Devil's Backbone, and the first, 2004 Hellboy film. Del Toro works on our imaginations by inserting his dreams into ours; his visual vocabulary includes such things as solemn faces with displaced eyes (they peep from hands in Pan's; from wings in Hellboy II). He’s the artiest commercial filmmaker this side of Todd Haynes working right now (I intend that as a compliment), and I hope you stuff Hellboy II into your summer moviegoing.
Just as David Lehman has taken the time in recent editions of The Best American Poetry to point out uses of poetry on TV shows, I will add that this movie uses poetry as a plot-point: Hellboy II—a romance every bit as much as it is an action-film—includes a verse from Tennyson's "In Memorium"; a small chunk perfectly suited for a scary movie, beginning with the couplet, "When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick/And tingle; and the heart is sick." Del Toro adds to the literariness of the movie by having a main character hide a crucial desired object in the pages of a volume of Tennyson, and then, Poe-like, make it almost impossible for the other characters to find by hiding the book in full view in a crowded bookshelf. If you think there's nothing but dumb noise in summer blockbusters (Hellboy II was #1 at the box office this past weekend), think—and look—again.
--Ken Tucker

Tom Disch, 1940-2008

It has been reported that the extraordinary science-fiction writer, poet, and essayist Thomas M. Disch has died—he is said to have commited suicide on the 4th of July. He was 68.
The general public may know his best-known credit: He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, which became the acclaimed 1987 Disney cartoon. But Disch also wrote ten science fiction novels and scores of short stories that placed him at the center of his genre for their uncommon literary adroitness, dry wit and clear-eyed skepticism. Go read the lyrically beautiful On Wings Of Song (1979) immediately, please. He also wrote a unique trilogy of mordant thrillers: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994).
Disch's primary calling, however, was as a poet. He published a half-dozen collections characterized by a mastery of poetic form, and in 1995 published a collection of essays, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, that overflowed with glowing appreciation and ruthless criticism of what he considered the best and worst tendencies in modern poetry. I kept it on my bedside table for periodic re-reading and inspiration.
I'll quote just one apercu among many from that collection that all critics would do well to heed: "The larger value of negative criticism—beyond the sigh of relief that 'At last someone has said it'—is that, without it, any expression of delight or enthusiasm is under suspicion of being one more big hug in that special-education classroom where poets minister to each others’ needs for self-esteem."
Others will doubtless comment on the importance of Disch’s poetry in this space; my small request is that you also read the full range of what Disch wrote and fully appreciate his art, craft, and passion. It was the failure of an audience to appreciate the scope of what Disch accomplished that, I'm willing to bet, was one cause of his sad, too-early death.

--Ken Tucker

"Lookout" for David Berman and The Silver Jews (by Ken Tucker)

The Silver Jews is a band led by singer-songwriter-poet David Berman. In existence with varying personnel since 1990, formed in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Silver Jews has its sole constant in Berman. He is a singer in the same sense that Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, or Allen Ginsberg is a singer. Vocalizing in a flat, nasal monotone, speaking his lyrics as much as singing them, Berman isn't American Idol's idea of a star, and all the more reason to like him for that. But a flat voice and poetic imagery can get you either neglected or as overrated as Nick Cave or Kristofferson. Berman navigates a cozy middle ground on his new album with his band the Silver Jews, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, recorded in Nashville. It's is sort of country-rock, sort of art-rock. It's sure as hell not (feh) spoken-word; neither are his performances of the tunelessness-as-a-sign-of-integrity sort in the manner of James McMurtry.
Before I go any further, let me remind/recommend Berman’s 1999 poetry collection Actual Air. His publisher was probably glad to get the money-quote (ha!) from Billy Collins for the back cover, but close readers will note that Berman's conversational grandness is closer to a contemporary with an equal passion for music, the mighty Mark Halliday, than Collins. As a print poet, Berman deploys his wordplay with poignant sincerity. As sung poetry, the lyrics on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are more than poignant and/or sincere. They’re also willfully obscure and philosophical (typical song title: "What Is Not But Could Be If"), and occasionally simple and direct to the point of abstraction. (No, the song called "Open Field," is not, as I first assumed, some sort of Bermanesque homage to Charles Olsen's gang—it's an adaptation of some lyrics by an obscure-to-me Japanese musician and artist, Tori Kudo.)
But one thing "Open Field" and Berman’s own songs on this album suggests is the magical, chimerical idea that anyone can make music as forthright and unadorned as this. Berman emphasizes this notion by including drawings of the chords he used to create this album, adding the note, "Anyone can play these songs." No, David, not anyone; only some Silver Jews.
Among whose number is Berman’s wife, Cassie, who also plays bass, and who provides the right vocal notes of plaintiveness on "Suffering Jukebox," a deceptively simple song with the brilliant notion of assigning human feelings to an old jukebox filled with sad country songs. Rarely has the use of the pathetic fallacy in pop music been more precisely pleasurable, and I like way Berman puns on the phrase about the jukebox "breaking down."
A number of compositions on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are big, knotty story-songs, chiefly "San Francisco, B.C.," a version of the Summer of Love if it were re-told by a lower-depths novelist such as David Goodis or Charles Willeford. Another garrulous ramble, "Aloysius Bluegrass Drummer," concerns the title character’s raucous involvement with a tough customer of a woman named Brick Butterfly. David Berman carries both his poetic and country music influences lightly, quoting a phrase from Emily Dickinson in that song as casually and appropriately as he does one from Roger Miller, the songwriter of "King of the Road," among many other, lesser-know great songs.
People who’ve followed Berman's career for more than a decade may be flummoxed by the paucity of autobiographical-seeming, or advice-containing, tunes that put the "cult" in cult-following for this artist. Some early reviews has ascribed this to Berman’s real-life sobriety and what appears to the outside world as a happy marriage. But while I think one of the pleasures of pop-culture criticism is in not merely analyzing the work at hand but bringing to the subject everything one knows about a performer's life and reputation, in this case, I'm going to chalk up the disarmingly uneven, fitfully majestic music on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea—get an earful of "My Pillow Is The Threshold" immediately, please—to a mundane yet thoroughly admirable motive: a desire to be heard by as many people and as various an audience as possible.
--Ken Tucker

Nashville Star-making machinery (by Ken Tucker)

Nashville Star is the country-music version of American Idol—its new season premiered last night on NBC. I hate American Idol (all that florid over-singing; melisma delpoyed as a bludgeon; Simon Cowell as a bludgeon trying to pass as a critic), but I like a lot of country music, so watching this was, in more ways than one, a no-brainer: stupid fun that made you think about how words are used.

Yes, Nashville Star's format is complete Idol rip-off: contestants sing a few bars, then are critiqued by a panel of three judges. At the end of 12 weeks, as official new "Nashville Star" is anointed, complete with a record contract and crushing pressure to get a makeover that will force the the victor to resemble not Hank Williams or Tammy Wynette but Nashville’s current look of the moment: a 70s daytime soap-opera star, in boots. That trio of judges consists of John Rich, a producer and performer; Jeffrey Steele, a Nashville pro songwriter—he looks like the actor Bruce Greenwood with a dyed-blonde crinkle-cut—who has cranked out million-selling quatrains for the likes of Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and Montgomery Gentry (that last is a group, not a person); and published poet Jewel, whose most eloquent comment last night, to one sorry melodramatist-with-a-twang, was, "I just don’t buy it."

The performance she didn’t "buy" was "I Like It, I Love It, I Want Some More Of It," a 1995 song in the great country tradition of containing an internal rhyme in the title (another one preceded it last night, when a different cowboy hat sang George Strait’s "All My Ex's Live in Texas"). I agreed with the panel that the song as bellowed by would-be star Charley Jenkins was florid and drippy, but no more so than the composition we saw him penning in the biographical montage that preceded his performance: a ballad about his dead veteran father called something like "My Hero At Home." (Shameless? Who among us has not written some shameless doggerel in the service of saluting a loved one?)

A trio calling itself Third Town did a version of the Oak Ridge Boys' "Elvira," a song that contains one of my favorite strained rhyme couplets ever (I’m transcribing it phonetically—"My heart's on fire-ra/For Elivira"). Unfortunately, Third Town was so showy—so scrambling all over the stage, making imploring moues to seduce a crowd that already looked ravished—that one could hardly make out these deathless lines.

While my own taste in country music resides in the honky-tonk of the 1950s and 1960s as practiced by Webb Pierce and Ray Price (I offer as my bona fides a recent Apple Store iPod download of Ferlin Husky’s greatest hits), I realize that these artists have about as much to do with contemporary country music as Sam Cooke does to contemporary rhythm & blues. Not that I think all current country is slick junk. In fact, one of my favorite new singers—and writers—is 18 year-old Taylor Swift, who kicked off last night's Nashville Star premiere with a typically kicky performance.

Swift's glossy youth reminds me that gifted artists can create excellent work at a tender age. She’s no Rimbaud, but she’s awfully good at turning recent heartbreak recalled in anything-but-tranquility into lashing songcraft, as when she pours "Teardrops On My Guitar" and lets you in on her thought process leading up to those tears.

I'm not sure I'll be watching Nashville Star every week, skeptical as I am that it will crown, in Jewel's words, "not [just] a great singer, [but] a great artist." However, it's already prodded me to listen to Webb Pierce more frequently.

--Ken Tucker