The Best American Poetry

Happy Birthday, Emily

I am alive -- I guess --
The Branches on my Hand
Are full of Morning Glory --
And at my finger's end --

The Carmine -- tingles warm --
And if I hold a Glass
Across my Mouth -- it blurs it --
Physician's -- proof of Breath --

I am alive -- because
I am not in a Room --
The Parlor -- Commonly -- it is --
So Visitors may come --

And lean -- and view it sidewise --
And add "How cold -- it grew" --
And "Was it conscious -- when it stepped
In Immortality?"

I am alive -- because
I do not own a House --
Entitled to myself -- precise --
And fitting no one else --

And marked my Girlhood's name --
So Visitors may know
Which Door is mine -- and not

-- Emily Dickinson
(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

Catullus #53 (translated by Molly Arden)

Listening to the learned Calvus
with many an oratorical flourish
castigate the demagogue Vatinius,
a man in the crowd lifted his hands
in astonishment and pleasure, and said,
"God, that little prick has a big mouth!"

-- translated by Molly Arden

Il Premio Napoli a New York [by Moira Egan]

We can't be there, but we hope you can. 

The Ashbery Playlist

John Ashbery read these poems in this order at his reading at NYU on Thursday evening, 3 December:

"The Black Prince"
"Thrill of a Romance"
"Objection Sustained"
"So Long, Santa"
"Default Mode" [e.g., "They were living in America Stella by Starlight"]
"Episode"
"Floating Away" [begins with echo of Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"]
"He Who Loves and Runs Away"  [begins "The bad news is the ship hasn't arrived; / the good news is it hasn't left yet"]
"Idea of Steve"
"Leave the Hand In" [ref. Milton, "Lycidas"]
"Pernilla"
"Planisphere" [ref. Marvell's "Definition of Love"]
"Sons of the Desert" [ref. "Antiques Road Show"]
"They Knew What They Wanted"
"The Tower of London"
"The Winemakers"

Bukowski's Creed

so you want to be a writer?        

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.

unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in
you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

-- Charles Bukowski

"Thanks, Joe" [by John Tranter]

John and Lyn Tranter are spending the week in New York City. In addition to being one of Australia's leading poets, John has edited Jacket, the superb on-line magazine, for a record number of years; Lyn is a top literary agent in Sydney. To welcome them to our territory, we'd like to post a characteristically clever poem by John. You'll notice that the end-words duplicate those of Keats's "On Melancholy." The title is an anagram of "John Keats." -- DL

Thanks, Joe

Thanks, Joe, I'll have a martini with a twist.
I can drink spirits, but I can't take wine.
I lost my taste for it, the first time I was kissed.
I met this woman, down from Proserpine,
she'd been out at Wagga picking boysenberries,
came up to Sydney, wanted to be
a model. She liked sherry. She had this owl,
and a ferret that bit me. Life's full of mysteries.
We drank - what a night. I woke drowsily
the next day, and looked at her naked body. My soul
shrivelled, my blood froze, I thought I'd fall
flat on my face, it was like a cloud
had hidden the sun. What she'd told me, that was
bullshit. She was a bloke! The sheet was a shroud,
the bed a grave for my self-respect. She rose,
put on some makeup, dressed and was gone with a wave
of her pretty hand. I stared at the bowl of peonies
I'd bought her - they cost a packet, and quality shows.
I couldn't remember much - she'd been on some rave
about disordering the senses, how you could fantasise
a new life for yourself. I wanted to die.
I remembered her filthy kisses, her lying lips -
she'd said she was a student, name of 'Gayleen Nye',
a virgin! And I fell for it! As for drink, three sips
and she was a slut. Barman, turn up the light,
will you? This place is like the bloody Shrine
of Remembrance. Do you know the Latin tongue?
They have a motto: 'Love's like a river - clear
one day, dirty the next.' You know, I might
have another. Damn, she was well hung.

-- John Tranter

Good for you, Jude [by Catharine Stimpson]

  I had vowed to stay away from Hamlet, especially productions that starred celebrity actors but stuck to tried-and-true stagings.  I was tired of knowing what was going to happen--be it poetry or sword-fights---before it did.

    Loyal to my oath, I did not buy tickets to the Broadway transplant of  London's Donmar Warehouse Hamlet , which stars Jude Law (above). 

    Then my friend P. called, a clever woman who can  be emphatic in five languages.  "I have just seen the best Hamlet ever," she declared.  "I was transfixed. You must go."  I murmured and demurred.

    Then  she called again after the Ben Brantley review in The New York Times that panned and praised in unequal measure. "What a vile review," she said. "That man said this was a Hamlet for people who didn't know Hamlet.  He made me feel stupid for loving the play.  You must go and give me your opinion."

    P. and I have been friends since we were in college together.  Loyal to my pal, I found myself at a matinee on Sunday, November 1, with P. and her husband C. To placate me, P. had smuggled an Activa raspberry yoghurt into the theater so that pangs of hunger would not cramp my opinions.  "Be honest," she ordered, "Be ruthlessly honest."

    P., this blog is for you. Hamlet gave me what the staging of all canonical plays should give its audience---the suspension of the belief that the play on the stage has been done before. Tears even  trickled down my cheeks when, amidst the carnage of the last scene, Horatio held Hamlet in his arms, a brotherly pieta, and sighed,  "Good night, sweet prince."  He paused before he spoke.  Oh, hell, I thought, he can't bear the idea of having to trot out these lines once more.  He must sense that the audience, although mostly silent and attentive, included that big, fat guy who bellowed during the performance, "This is Old English, and I can't understand it."  But then, experiencing the actual performance of the lines, I realized the actor was taking time to organize his words out of the chaos of grief.

    Honestly, this is not the most compelling Hamlet I have ever seen.  The women are wan.  One must feel enough sexual heat between Claudius and Gertrude to understand why, after her noble husband died, she would so quickly and happily turn to his brother Claudius.  At long last, she can release her repressed passions.  Only a little heat arises from this very, very good production---and deliberately so.  This Danish court is a place of hard necessities and cold  calculations.  The set looms over the actors like a stone prison cell.  To desire freedom and love and honor is to risk disaster and death---as Ophelia and Hamlet learn. And to be brilliantly intelligent and playful, and Hamlet is,  is to risk going mad. In the great debate as to whether Hamlet is mad or feigns madness, Jude Law's  force field of a Hamlet chooses the latter. He cavorts with energy, forethought, and cunning.  Despite his contemplation of suicide, he wants to survive. His only mistake is to kill the wily but obtuse Polonius, believing him to be Claudius.

    Why did I weep?  Because this court, which includes the ghost of the King, does break Hamlet and Ophelia. Because the toxic horrors of small, intriguing courts and of codes of revenge did not vanish with the early modern England of Shakespeare. Globally, they remain active. And because Shakespeare's poetry, worming and dancing and darting into our hearts, forces us to weep. Damn and exalt poetry's
power to do so.

    After the play, P., C., and I walked along West 44th Street.  Crowds of adolescents were waiting to get autographs, particularly that of Jude Law. In the audience had been several younger children as well. Good for you, Jude, I thought. You have used  celebrity to bring them to poetry----as handsome celebrity Hamlets before you have done.  And if you used obvious gestures to underline and bring out the meanings of your "Old English" script, as Brantley accused you of doing, you were doing your job. You were insisting that "Old English" and its puns and sorrows could be once again new.

The Spires of the Gleaming Kiln [by Emma Trelles]

Because it is Halloween, and because I love all that is dark sparkle and lore, I settled in last night and read one of the Grimm Brothers' bleaker fairy tales - Hansel and Gretel. It's the last chapter of a collection I've kept since I was a child and I don't think I've opened the book since then either. I recalled a sketch of the story - a brother and sister lost in the woods, trying to find their way home, and a witch who traps them because they are hungry and her house is made of gingerbread and cake.

Well. There's that, but there's also the whole other part I forgot about, such as that the reason they are lost to begin with is because their father and stepmother have deliberately left them to die in the forest. Twice.

The first time, the resourceful Hansel finds the path back because he marks the way with pebbles that shine in the moonlight. The second time he uses bread crumbs to track his trail, but they disappear into the mouths of grackles and rabbits and the like. The witch cages Hansel and fattens him to eat; Gretel is made into her kitchen slave. Eventually the clever girl shoves their captor into an oven, and the two return to their father without grudge. As if it was that easy to forgive betrayal.

I once loved the macabre theatre of these tales. It seemed to me, in my little girlness, that while the world was dangerous, at least it was interesting, a place where spells might explode at any moment or where children could rescue themselves. Last night I thought of H&G, now grown, perhaps choosing to forget the crone with the red eyes and the keen animal nose, the father who abandoned them. Perhaps not.

Here is their future, as seen by Louise Gluck, who authored the line I pinched for the title of this post.

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...

             Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of the gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Lorca is Green [by Emma Trelles]

 
 
 Federico Garcia Lorca was a poet with deep set eyes and a hood of thick eyebrows. When pressed together, his lips resembled two curved shells. He was a diminutive man who walked with a limp. His hands were delicate and resembled a child's.

Since I read recently that the Spanish government will soon try to exhume his remains, I have thought much about Lorca, his words but also his body, what must now only be his disassembled bones, his prettiness and his flaws dissolved to minerals. He is perhaps buried near Granada, where hundreds of men and women were executed by gunshot in 1936, during the Civil War, beside a cemetery wall  and its surrounding hillsides and olive trees.

Lorca died in summer, four months before the olive harvest and when the trees' silvered branches were likely heavy with petals and fruit. Some of them are very old, their leaves long threaded by a wind that arrives through a vacant archway, as Lorca wrote, "...blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby's spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things."

Lorca is green as the sky at the hour of the crepúsculo, when the moon begins its bright ascent and the sidewalks fall to darkness. Lorca is the shadow-green of mangroves and pines, the slash of green beneath the egret's eye. He is the green that enters in silence; he is the green that returns.

Lorca was a poet whose work I read out loud and in Spanish to my mother and stepfather. She made Cuban coffee and served it in tiny china cups. He sat at the kitchen counter and noted, kindly, that my pronunciation was better than he had expected, quite good, in fact. 

That summer when my mother's hair had finally grown back after her chemo, her head now dark and budding with curls, I could read espadas and adelfa but did not know they meant swords and oleander. It is easier to speak than to understand. Spanish, with its velvet-clad consonants and hopeful vowels, each letter sounding exactly as it appears. Nothing is left behind. Nothing is buried.

When my mother says my name, her voice rings like a little gold bell, and I think of yellow, a color that, like her, is filled with resolve. Yellow is a window, a locket, a poison that can heal. Yellow is Pinar del Rio -- heat and flat valleys and where my mother's people are from. When I was a girl, yellow was the braid she wore long and down the middle of her back; yellow was the garden of succulents she grew, their branches circuitous, and each leaf's shape a surprise: a paddle, a button, a dagger, a heart.

JA on RAI [by Moira Egan]

This just in!

Tomorrow (Thursday) at 5 p.m. Rome time (11 a.m. East Coast Time), listen to an interview on RAI with John Ashbery on the occasion of Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007 (translated by Damiano Abeni and Moira Egan, with an introduction by Joseph Harrison) having won a Special Prize from the Premio Napoli.

Go to http://www.radio.rai.it/player/player.cfm?Q_CANALE=3