The Best American Poetry

"No Love Is Not Dead" [by Robert Desnos; trans. Bill Zavatsky]

No Love Is Not Dead

            No love is not dead in this heart and these eyes and this mouth that proclaimed the beginning of its own requiem.
            Listen, I’ve had enough of the picturesque, of colors and charm.
            I love love, its tenderness and its cruelty.
            The one I love has only a single name, a single form.
            Everything goes. Mouths cling to this mouth.
            The one I love has only one name, one form.
            And some day if you remember it
            O you, form and name of my love,
            One day on the sea between America and Europe,
            When the last ray of sun flashes on the undulating surface of the waves, or else one stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,
            One spring morning, Boulevard Malesherbes,
            One rainy day,
            At dawn before putting yourself to bed,
            Tell yourself, I summon your familiar ghost, that I was the only one to love you more and what a pity it is you didn’t know it.
            Tell yourself you shouldn’t be sorry for anything: before me Ronsard and Baudelaire sang the sorrows of old women and dead women who despised the purest love.
            You, when you die,
            You will still be beautiful and desirable,
            I’ll already be dead, completely enclosed in your immortal body, in your astonishing image present forever among the perpetual wonders of life and eternity, but if I outlive you
            Your voice and how it sounds, your gaze and how it shines,
            The smell of you and of your hair and many other things will still go on living in me,
            In me, and I’m no Ronsard or Baudelaire,
            Just me Robert Desnos who, for having known and loved you,
            Is as good as they are.
            Just me Robert Desnos who, for loving you
            Doesn’t want to be remembered for anything else on this despicable earth.

– Robert Desnos, From the sequence To the One of Mystery (A la mysterieuse) [1926]
Translated from the French by Bill Zavatsky

Originally in The Sienese Shredder (eds. Brice Brown and Trevor Winkfield).

Donne's "Hymn to God the Father"

John Donne couldn't resist punning on his name, and that of his wife (Anne More), even in a deathbed meet-your-maker hymn.

A Hymn to God the Father

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sins their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

-– John Donne (1573 - 1631)

"On the Cards and Dice" [by Sir Walter Raleigh]

"On the Cards and Dice" is my favorite poem by the redoubtable Sir Walter Raleigh. What I admire most is the sustained metaphorical ingenuity and the slippage in the analogy between games of chance (cards and dice) and the events of the Christian calendar culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. The poem achieves a stirring and ominous effect, rising to a prophetic level, though at its base it is merely a vivid description of men playing poker (or bridge) and throwing dice. The implicit relation beween gambling and religion is the poem's secret power.

-- DL

On the Cards and Dice

Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn

– Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

"Song" [by Edwin Denby]

Song

I don't know any more what it used to be
Before I saw you at table sitting across from me
All I can remember is I saw you look at me
And I couldn't breathe and I hurt so bad I couldn't see.

I couldn't see but just your looking eyes
And my ears was buzzing with a thumping noise
And I was scared the way everything went rushing around
Like I was all alone, like I was going to drown.

There wasn't nothing left except the light of your face,
There might have been no people, there might have been no place,
Like as if a dream were to be stronger than thought
And could walk into the sun and be stronger than aught.

Then someone says something and then you spoke
And I couldn't hardly answer up, but it sounded like a croak
So I just sat still and nobody knew
That since that happened all of everything is you.

-- Edwin Denby

Garrison Keillor read this poem on the Writer's Almanac of June 12, 2008.

"Bread and Wine" by Friedrich Holderlin (part 7)

"I don't believe you have any notion of the pleasure that the arrival of the fourth volume of Höölderlin's collected works provided me. I had been waiting for it so long and so eagerly (you see, I had ordered the collected works in August(!) at a bookstore). Because of my excitement, I was almost incapable of doing anything else the entire day. I am now eagerly awaiting the sixth volume. After reading the Reich fragments, I must presume the sixth volume is also inordinately valuable. Another factor is that, at the moment, I need the broadest base imaginable for coming to terms with Höölderlin."

---Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gershom Scholem, December 23, 1917.

See Scott Thompson's chronology of Holderlin's life.

Here is part 7 of Holderlin's major poem "Bread and Wine":

But my friend, we have come too late. True, the gods are still alive
But somewhere high above us, in another world.
There they repeat themselves eternally, and don’t give a damn
If we live or die, so little do they care about us.
For a weak vessel cannot contain them. Only from time to time
Can humans bear the fullness of the gods. And therefore,
The life we know is a dream about them. But confusion
And sleep assist us, sorrow and night make us strong,
And soon heroes enough will emerge from the warlord’s cradle,
With hearts rivaling a god’s in courage.
In the meantime, I believe it is better to sleep than to live
Without friends, waiting without hope, not knowing the right
Thing to say or do -- and what, after all, is the use
And purpose of poets in an age of darkness?
Yet you say they are like the priests of the wine god,
Moving from place to place in the sacred night.

–- translated by David Lehman

"Paradoxes and Oxymorons" (by John Ashbery)

Ed. Note: John Ashbery is one of the readers tonight at the gala reading for Best American Poetry 2008 at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium  (66 West 12 Street in New York) at 7 PM. And it’s free. David Lehman, series editor of The Best American Poetry and poetry coordinator of the New School’s MFA program, will introduce poets chosen by Charles Wright for the 2008 volume, the 21st edition of the acclaimed annual anthology. Other readers include Charles Bernstein, Ciaran Berry, Laura Cronk, Richard Howard, D. Nurkse, Meghan O'Rourke, and Lee Upton.

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

This poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What's a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there.
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

– John Ashbery

The Mad Hatter's Take on BAP 2008 [by Lauren MacArthur[

On The Best American Poetry 2008

Charles Wright is a boonie hat, sullied --

not soiled from his own hunt,

rather, kneeling, peering inside the forest's dirt

watching the aborigines capture and mercilessly kill.

He is mentally honed to the experience,

admiring.

Simple and nostalgic, he tolerates only dense grasslands

historically rooted in the wild,

with no use for gluttony on paper

-- The Mad Hatter

Happy birthday, Donald Hall

Donald Hall pictured here with his wife, the late Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall was born on this day in 1928. As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989 -- the second volume in the series -- he taught me much about the making of an anthology. As a man of letters, who felt as comfortable writing a profile of Henry Moore or a sports story about the Boston Celtics as a romantic poem for Jane or an essay in literary appreciation, he proved that the life of a poet and the career of professional writer could coincide. He worked in a variety of genres and wrote for periodicals as different from one another as The Paris Review and Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe and Yankee and showed by his example that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do, and all the styles and forms of writing are valid: the interview, the children's story or poem, the textbook, the diatribe, the anecdote, the blessedly unself-centered memoir in which the emphasis is on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Join me in saluting this masterly poet, teacher, editor, writer. -- DL

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-- Donald Hall

"Question" [by May Swenson]

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

– May Swenson

"Just Walking Around" [by John Ashbery]

Just Walking Around

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

-- John Ashbery

John Ashbery is one of the poets scheduled to read at the Best American Poetry 2008 reading at the New School's Tishman Auditorium (66 West 12 Street in NYC) on Thursday evening, September 25, at 7 PM.