The Best American Poetry

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.

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

'Mes Occupations" [by Henri Michaux]

      

Henri Michaux died today twenty-five years ago. Nin Andrews has edited a superb collection of Michaux translations by diverse hands: Someone Wants to Steal My Name (Cleveland State University Press, 2003). Nin Andrews joins David Lehman for a poetry reading and discussion tomorrow night at The New School (6:30 PM, 66 W 12th Street, Room 510.  Details here).

My Pastimes

    It’s the rare person I meet whom I don’t want to beat up. Others favor the interior monologue, stream-of-consciousness, art and dreams. Not me. I like to beat people up.
    Now some people, unaware of my purposes, play right into my hands, sit opposite me in a grease joint, stay a while, pick their teeth, they want to eat.
    Here’s one now.
    Notice how swiftly I grab him by the collar. Pow! Then I do it again. Bam! Pow!
    Then I hang him on the coat rack. Unhang him. Hang him. Unhang him.
    Then I toss him on the table, hit him, kick him, choke him. I mean, I beat the shit out of him.
    Then I spit on him. I flood him with my spit.
    He revives.
    I rinse him off, I stretch him out (by now I’m losing interest, this is going on too long), I crumple him up, squeeze him dry, and roll him into a ball, which I drop into my glass. Then I lift it in the air and spill it on the floor. “Waiter, get me a clean glass, will you?”
    But I’m too fagged out, I pay the bill in a hurry and leave without another word.

  -- Henri Michaux (24 Mai 1899 -- 18 Octobre 1984)
(“Mes Occupations” translated by David Lehman)

The NBCC at 35 & Edgar Allan Poe

It's the thirty-fifth anniversary of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization that arose out of the conviction that book reviewers are the right people to decide book prizes just as sportswriters are the right people to choose the winners of the Most Valuable Player and Cy Young awards in major league baseball.
Click here for the recollections of one former board member and here for Allen Barra's recent post on the NBCC site concerning the reputation of Edgar Allan Poe, and what sense to make of the disparity in judgment on the quality of his work. On the one hand, many critics have held Poe in low esteem, condescending to him as a "jingle man" (Emerson) with an "immature" mind (Eliot). On the other hand, Poe has wielded a tremendous influence on everything from detective fiction and tales of terror to French symbolist poetry. Mallarme credited Poe with having "clarified the dialect of the tribe." Indeed, for many writers he has been indispensable.
Barra writes:
<<For the first 75 years after his death, he [Poe] was lionized by Europeans who couldn’t understand why we couldn’t understand him as well as they did. Tennyson thought him to be “the most original genius that America has produced.” Nietzsche, Kafka, Yeats, and Joyce all claimed to draw inspiration from him, and, as we all know, the French, most famously Baudelaire, regarded him as the greatest American export till Jerry Lewis. >>
Mindful of Poe's energizing effect on baudelaire and Mallarme, Harold Bloom mischievously asserts that Poe's "atrociously written" poems and stories "benefit from translation, even into English." This is a witty put-down, and Barra tentatively seconds the motion, though he manfully makes the case for Poe's importance to the development of Flannery O'Connor, "the ultimate writer in the Southern gothic tradition."
The debate about Poe's greatness will not soon die. For every derogation of Poe, you can find an unlikely champion, and I would recommend the poets Richard Wilbur and Daniel Hoffman as excellent guides to the terrain. It is true that detective novelists are working within the bounds of a genre, but unlike Barra I do not think that this observation minimizes Poe's accomplishment. He wrote the first detective story and it came with all or most of the trimmings that later authors exploited: the locked room, the eccentric detective who outwits the police, the sleuth's partner who tells the tale, the least likely suspect, the wrongly accused bystander, and so forth. When you consider the identity of the culprit in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," you realize that instinct or genius has guided Poe to propose a Darwinian solution to the riddle of the Sphinx -- more than fifteen years before "The Origin of Species." Barra asks: "Can a serious case really be made for Poe by claiming that H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King found inspiration in his work?" To which I would simply add such names as Borges and Nabokov, and urge readers to decide for themselves by reading "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Tell-tale Heart," and "Annabel Lee."
-- DL

Why typing John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual" is a good thing [by Dara Wier]

These, I suppose, two Candadians, have been watching me for many years.  They're in a painting James Tate and I found on a trans-Canadian road trip.  We don't know who they are, or why they're sitting in a field in their business outfits or what the painting might commemorate or what the hat's are about; nor do we know who painted the picture. But these two men have served many purposes over the years.

At first they constituted an exciting discovery, up on a barn's interior wall that served as a repository for an antique dealer's stash.  When we learned we could have these men, and their mysterious, unknown, unknowable company, we were very happy.  So, we took them with us back home to Amherst, Massachusetts.  Over the years they've watched me work, write, read, think, talk and live.  I've often thought I should please them.  I've often been amused by their situation.  I've sometimes made up somethings about who they are.  I've sometimes let them stare at me.  I grew to love these two strangers in a strange situation, a strange feeling that feels very familiar.  

This particular Cry Room is in Missoula, Montana.  For some reason, I'd never seen a Cry Room before or known that they are fairly commonly found in churches across the country.  My friend and I had been talking about how various people handle or have sudden bouts of crying, and we were about to head into a wedding where one expects a little bit of a certain kind of crying to go on, when I saw the door marked CRY ROOM.  I pointed toward it in such a way as to say without saying it, look, there's where crying gets done, it has its own room.

Recently I typed into a document John Ashbery's early poem, "The Instruction Manual."  This gave me no need of any kind of CRY ROOM of any kind.  This rewarded me with considerable layers of pleasures.  I was typing it so that it could be shown via computer to an honor's poetry seminar I'm meeting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  I typed from The Library of America's gorgeously produced, well-edited (by Mark Ford) 2008 volume Ashbery/Collected Poems 1956-1987.

Word by word the poem is such an amazing tribute to poetry, to imagination's desire, imagination's ability to save us or save something of us, or for us or in us. The poem treats invention's and sight's methodical rendering as a creative force equal in significance to that of the Big Bang's. The poem enacts how invention advances by careful degrees and attention, how taking time to build something (make up something) gives us such a time of potential beauty. Formally we get to experience an imagination within an imagination, a view of Guadalajara within the poem, Guadalajara's people in their town, in Guadalajara's square, in and around its bandstand, the neighborhoods around the square, a patio within a house, and love appears in most all of its phases and stages, ah, the poem does it all perfectly......and color, how the poem says: you're seeing by means of words what isn't exactly here, believe this with me now, here it is, such a generous gesture, here is this and this leads to that and that leads to there and over here we have, ah the precisely imagined and managed colors and then finally how the poem glides away from itself so perfectly...I love this poem (of course I love many other  Ashbery poems as well)......and so cool that Shahrazad (the one in the book) is in Scheherazade (the music mentioned in the poem) and is one of our ultimately successful model tellers of all time (......these are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad....) (The Modern Library Classic of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS has commentary or blurbs from:  Robert Louis Stevenson, John Addington Symonds, Agernon Charles Swinburne, and Lady Isabel Bishop, it's translated by Sir Richard F. Burton.  What a crew!

I was talking with a friend yesterday about collaborations, not how we do them, but how what we know about them causes us to feel as we receive them.  And how when one is told that something is a collaboration, suddenly, everything about how one receives it is different from how we receive something from a single author or artist.  Maybe almost everything about collaboration has to do with how we receive it almost as much as how it gets made.  Fictional collaborative efforts seem exceptionally aware of this.

I love the little Russian dolls hiding inside one another for their persistence, the Morton Salt Girl on her box for her flair (I haven't seen her for a while), anything almost that is something within something within something.  I like a frame on a picture.  I like a picture in a picture. I like a geode. I like time lapse photography. I like stop action action.  I used to not like poems about poems, these made me very nervous for a while, and then one day, in an antique store in Deerfield, Massachusetts, I came upon something that dropped that particular veil from my eyes.........walking in the door, my eyes directly were directed to a piece of calligraphy.........I walked closer........I looked more.........(never had calligraphy been anything I'd have thought too much about, all due respect to calligraphers, of course)......I saw there....something I'd never seen before........layers and layers of something written, graphed, laid on a page, words that were drawing me in by their design (like a vortex this is) (like a real reverie) and when I got close enough to see what finally (or perhaps firstly) (who knows which way this was made, at least in its illusion, one can't (and shouldn't) be able to tell which came first) I was caught up short, under a spell, ready to see what I could finally read: executed with a pen.  Way down deep in the almost perspectively vanished end of its existence.

It's a good thing when one is stripped of a prejudice of any kind.

That piece of calligraphy freed me from a prejudice I'd been longing to drop.  I wish I could show it to you here.

"Four Quartets" Revisited [by Belle Randall]

Ed. note: T. S. Eliot was born today 121 years ago. He remains the modernist poet par excellence, reliably moving readers -- sometimes to deep thought, sometimes to sly parody. Each period in his career is marked by a consummate example ("Prufrock," "The Waste land," "Four Quartets"). Here is  Belle Randall's confrontation with the supreme instance of the master's late style. -- DL

“Four Quartets” Revisited

On opening a long unopened book,
what odor rises from the parting pages,
what genie is released, what dark spell broken,
as if some spirit trapped inside for ages,

By this hinge swung open were set free?
My father’s hand has jotted in the margins
its own blunt text of what must be
lecture notes, and planted his place marker

Like a flag among “The Dry Salvages”—
a UC “schedule card,” a blank
grid for weekly classes, and on the back,
O fees and late fees time alone assuages—

We know the longhand’s labored look
was mine, but why that child should scrawl
a phrase so apt for now’s beyond recall:
on opening a long unopened book.

-- Belle Randall

Source: Poetry magazine (September 2009).
With thanks to Don Share, who posted Ms. Randall's poem as a comment on a day when we featured Wendy Cope's translation of "The Waste Land" into five limericks.

The Best American Poetry 2009: GALA LAUNCH READING SEPTEMBER 24, 7:00 PM The New School, 66 W. 12th Street FREE

Join series editor David Lehman as he introduces an all-star line up of the following contributors to this year's volume, chosen by guest editor David Wagoner:  John Ashbery, Mark Bibbins, Suzanne Cleary, Billy Collins, Jim Cummins, Mark Doty, Margaret Gibson, Douglas Goetsch, Michael Grabell, Dolores Hayden, Jennifer Michael Hecht readingSarah Hannah's "The Safe House," Richard Howard, Tina Kelley, Philip Levine, Phillis Levin, Susan Blackwell Ramsay, James Richardson, Martha Silano, Mitch Sisskind, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Matthew Zapruder.

Here's what Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker has to say: Lehman’s particular theme this year is the state of poetry criticism, and he doesn’t hold back: “Poetry criticism at its worst today,” Lehman asserts, “is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent,” and he goes on from there to apply an especially vigorous flogging to the critic William Logan . . . Read all of Tucker's review here.

This from Publishers Weekly (starred review):  * From the moment series editor David Lehman invokes the myth of Jacob wrestling the Angel in his introduction, the gloves are off in this year's installment of this popular annual anthology. Lehman devotes much of his introduction to throwing jabs at longtime sparring partner and professional poetry grump William Logan,whom Lehman calls “wounded” and “thin skinned.” Guest editor Wagoner chooses to abstain from the scuffle, but there's no denying the

The Origins of "Ozymandias" [by Paul Violi]

Ed. Note: In favor of contests and competitions as we are, believing them to be spurs to creativity and legitimate ways of generating inspiration, we were talking with Paul Violi [left] about poetic duels that produced sterling sonnets and Paul volunteered this story of the genesis of "Ozymandias."
<<<
One of the essays Guy Davenport includes in his The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981), describes how Percy Bysshe Shelley came to write one of his most famous poems. Shelley, his wife Mary, and a visitor, a banker and novelist named Horace Smith, had spent the afternoon discussing the rise and fall of empires and the recent discovery of ruins, most notably the colossal statue of Ramses II Egypt. Smith began to write a sonnet in which he imagines a wanderer far in the future coming upon the ruins of London and thinking about "what wonderful, but unrecorded, race/ once dwelt in that annihilated place." While Smith was still scribbling those concluding lines, Shelley, who had just concluded from his reading Gibbon that history was a hellish record of oppressive tyrants, began to write a sonnet as well.  Out of this informal, friendly competition, Shelley, who from time to time would dunk his head in a pail of water "to refresh himself" (and perhaps to distract Mr. Smith?) wrote "Ozymandias."  It took him about ten minutes. The poets sent the results to a newspaper that printed both of them.
-- Paul Violi
>>>

Catullus #25 (translated by Molly Arden: revised version)

Catullus # 25 (revised)

Thallus, you lech:  softer than fur
of rabbit, down of goose, flap of ear,
or sack of nuts and nest of cock
dangling from your old man crotch
with cobwebs festooned, and still
as greedy as a goddamn gale, you are
[line missing here]
I say: Give back the things you stole from me --
my cape, my Spain, my images of Carthage
which you claim you inherited from [unclear]
Get your sticky hands off my stuff, and send them
back to me, or I swear I’ll kick your ass
and make you twist like a toy battleship
in the bathtub when a hurricane hits the sea.

-- translated by Molly Arden