The Best American Poetry

Emily Starts, You Finish: The Finish Line

On April 25, we posted Emily Dickinson's # 1066, a two-line poem that can be construed as the opening of a longer poem. We invited readers to complete the poem. Mitch Sisskind and Rachel's Friend concluded the stanza with exquisite metaphors that Emily would have liked; JL borrows from Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide"; Hg elaborated the two lines into twelve. You choose.

--DL

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born ––

– Emily Dickinson

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born --
Their epitaphs -- memorialized --
Cut in water -- frozen in stone.

-- Mitch Sisskind

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born ––
Endure a lone Eternity
Of longing for the Tomb.

-- Rachel's Friend

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born –
Better to go down - dignified –
where nobody can call you crone -

-- JL

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born,
Are rare creatures: gold nuggets panned
From a river of dirt.

But who wants immortality?
A gilded brooch to wear
On a preening cocktail dress breast
Twice, thrice a year at most,

A butterfly pinned for show? No,
I'll float in the water,
Swept downstream with everyone else
To a last resting place.

– Hg

Emily Starts, You Finish

Here is Emily Dickinson's # 1066 in its entirety:

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born --

While this can be read as a complete work, you may argue that it represents the beginning of a poem that Dickinson intended to finish but never did. You now have the chance to add lines to the poem -- as few as two as many as ten -- to bring it to completion. What do you write?

-- DL

Happy Birthday

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) sits in a parked car in Ithaca, New York, September 1958.
Carl Mydans/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Happy birthday, Vlad -- and you too O Swan of Avon!

"Improba Carmina" by Catullus

The Latin poet Catullus is often presented in expurgated versions thought to be suitable for teenage boys. But the whole transgressive flavor of the original is lost in the process. His poems are full of invective, passion, lust, and a graphic delight in body parts. Catullus was born in Verona in 87 B.C. and died in Rome in 58 B.C. He had a love affair with a consul's wife, whom he calls Lesbia and whose real name may have been Clodia. He praised her pussy ("A single whiff and you'll get on your knees") and denounced his rivals for her affections ("scumbags") in immortal verse. The following is a good example of the intimate insult as practiced by Catullus:

*

Improba Carmina by Catullus

I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth,
Aurelius you sodomized ass-licker
And Furius, you perverted cock-sucker
Who read my sensual poems and conclude
I'm too wanton. For everyone knows
It's meet and proper for a poet to be
Pure, pious, and always correct in his behavior.
But we don't expect the same of his poems.
Of mine they'll say sure, they have wit, they have charm
They're so sexy and lewd they can
Arouse – I won't say boys, but these hairy
Men whose unstiff dicks wilt on the vine.
You who have kissed many thousands of mouths
Upper and nether, man and girl,
How dare you think me less than manly?
I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth.

*

Molly Arden (translator) majored in classics at Bryn Mawr. She has worked as a librarian and arts administrator. Her translations of Catullus have appeared in Classic Literature in Translation. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

copyright c 2003

*

For more "F-U" poems. . .see issue # 17 of SLOPE: http://slope.org/archive/issue17/FU_main.html

The Knights of the Round Table (Part Two)

The Marriage of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere

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King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Part Two)

            T. S. Eliot paid Tennyson a decidedly left-handed compliment when he marveled at how the Poet Laureate of Victorian England had “adapted this great British epic material” and made it “suitable reading for a girls’ school.” There’s some truth to this; Tennyson valued piety as assistant professors today value subversiveness. Nor is narrative his strong suit. Still, his peerless ear offers ample compensation. When Arthur weds Guinevere, it’s in a perfect pentameter line: “Let chance what will, I love thee to the death!”

            The triple iteration of “May” that precedes the exchange of marital vows is exquisite: “Far shone the fields of May thro’ open door,/ The sacred altar blossom’d white with May,/ The sun of May descended on their King, / They gazed on all earth’s beauty in their Queen.”

            Idylls of the King follows Malory in opening with the “coming of Arthur” and closing with his passing. Most medieval romances take place somewhere between these two poles, but in most Arthur is a background figure, at best a figurehead, at worst a cuckold. Yet some of these works far exceed Malory in literary greatness. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan are unsurpassed renderings of the quest for the Holy Grail and the love story of Tristan and Isolde.

            Undoubtedly the finest Arthurian narrative in medieval English is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by an unknown poet writing at the end of the fourteenth century. A giant of a man, green in hue from top to toe, rides into Camelot and challenges any knight to “exchange one heavy blow for another.” Sir Gawain accepts. The Green Knight gives Gawain his battle-ax and awaits the first blow without armor. Gawain strikes, the giant’s “handsome head fell from the neck to the earth,” and yet “the knight never staggered or fell.” Calmly he picks up his head and rides off saying he expects his rematch in one year and a day.

            And that's just the beginning. W. S. Merwin's verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004), which I've been quoting, renews the conviction that this medieval romance is one of the glories of world literature. 

"Welcome, Sir Gawain," cried the green knight.

-- DL

Who is this man? The Answer

Giorgio de Chirico - Italian painter, writer, theatre designer, sculptor and printmaker. De Chirico was one of the originators of Pittura Metafisica. His paintings are characterized by a visionary, poetic use of imagery, in which themes such as nostalgia, enigma and myth are explored. He was an important source of inspiration for artists throughout Europe in the inter-war years and again for a new generation of painters in the 1980s. His abrupt stylistic changes, however, have obscured the continuity of his approach, which was rooted in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and this has often led to controversy.

When asked about writers who had influenced him, John Ashbery cited de Chirico and encouraged his audience to read de Chirico's work including the de Chirco novel written in French that Ashbery himself translated. The poet took the title of his 1970 collection The Double Dream of Spring from a de Chirico painting. "De Chirico's novels would be among those that Andre Breton would want if stranded on a desert island," Ashbery noted. 

-- sdh

Alone with John Ashbery (by Angela Patrinos)

“We had macaroni for lunch every day,” John Ashbery read, “except Sunday, when a small quail was induced / to be served to us”

This produced laughter from the audience.  Mr. Ashbery looked up from the page at us, and delivered the last two lines:

“Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.”

But we were there — at least three hundred of us, possibly more — we’d come to see him, to hear him tell us these things, and more things. Every chair was taken in Wollman Hall and those audience members who’d arrived not late, but not early, either stood or sat on the floor. The poem, titled, “The Room,” begins:

“The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.”

                                                                                          At the start of the evening, in his introduction, the poet and scholar David Lehman said that he’d studied Ashbery’s poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University. And while Mr. Ashbery read from Notes From the Air, the two men sat side by side at the table, as intimately unacquainted as people sharing a table at the public library, each reading from his own copy of the same book, one aloud, one silently, and Mr. Lehman seemed a student again, absorbed in the poetry of one of his favorite poets.

Mr. Ashbery, in a white shirt, read not slowly, not quickly, and rarely looked up.

After reading from his published poems, Mr. Ashbery pulled loose pages of new poems from a well-handled manila envelope. Now, it wasn’t going to be possible for any of us to follow along, either from a book or from memory.      

To hear a poem being read without having had time with the poem on the printed page is to feel mildly unmoored, and in between poems, when Ashbery looked up, his gaze was as piercing as it was opaque, which lent to the sensation.  But his gaze is a private gaze that allows for privacy; one needn’t be seen drifting in public.   

He read a new poem titled, “He Who Loves and Runs Away,” and then searched in silence for another poem to read. As he leafed through his papers, we watched in our own silence, staring at him so intently as though it was our duty to keep him from vanishing between poems.

“I wanted to read something, but I can’t find it,” he finally said. 

He moved on to his translation of Reverdy, and then he talked some about his poetry, and took questions.

Of the poem “The History of My Life,” he said, “The poem sounds like straight autobiography, and actually it is, but I didn’t realize it when I was writing it. I had been writing about my own life without knowing it.”

Once upon a time there were two brothers.

Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,

even.  There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests

someone might take an interest in.  No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed

like the pleasant early years.  As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable

with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.

Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking

it up, for what seemed like months or years.

About the strange non-engagement between dreams and life: “We dream, we get up, we go about our business and a few hours later, we’re back to being invaded by dreams. The president dreams, the pope dreams. But we go about our lives as though these dreams never happen.”

Ashbery had read a pantoum, the title poem of his collection, Hotel Lautreamont (which also appears in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.) About this unusual form Ashbery said, “The pantoum is weird and rather frustrating — you have to abandon what you wanted to write and let [the form] write it for you.  This is one of the only poems I have written on a computer, and I found it rather helpful.”  He usually types his poems on a manual typewriter.

About starting poems in the middle: “The middle is where everyone starts writing.  It’s not as though there is a threshold called The Beginning.  The same can be said for the end — there’s no formal ending.” 

John Ashbery looks forward to visiting the Poussin exhibit at the Met where he might see Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.

Two Byrons (by David Yezzi)

OK, it has been a day from hell--two days from hell, in fact. I don't know about you, but taxes were completely brutal this year. I envy you, if you are one of those fortunate people who actually gets money back! I more than envy you; I want to come stay with you and eat food out of your refrigerator. I'm also exhausted this morning. I was up until 2:30 finishing a review, for which I will receive a small amount of money that will then be reported to the IRS so that I will owe taxes on it next year.

I thought I might write about the blues today. I'm in the mood. I was planning to expatiate on the pleasures of Mississippi John Hurt's alternating-thumb base line on the acoustic guitbox, and how his treble-line melodies infuse traditional songs like "Stack O'Lee Blues," "Casey Jones," and "Frankie and Albert" with his singnature sound. Then there's "Candy Man." "Candy Man"!: "He's got stick candy that's nine inches long, / He sells it faster than a hog can chew his corn / Candyman, candyman!" But I think I'll do that tomorrow . . .

Instead, I want to quote from a book of Macaulay's essays that I picked up on the giveaway shelf at the library this morning. A free book! Things are looking up. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an English poet, reviewer, essayist, historian, and MP for Edinburgh. Here's a bit from his essay on Lord Byron, which I read on the subway on my way to work (I want to quote a bunch of it because, a) it's a great portrait of Byron and B) the prose rocks):

In the rank of Lord Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he possessed over others was mingled something of misery ans debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which he had attained a scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and, but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had a naturally generous and feeling heart: but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and most judicious training.

Macaulay goes on in this vein for quite a while. It's pretty good stuff, and wonderfully sympathetic to Byron, though not nearly as sympathetic as Auden's tribute to him in "Letter to Lord Byron." Auden doesn't name Macaulay, but it's critics of his ilk that he is skewering. In fact, there are enough correspondences between the essay and Auden 's poem that I can't help wondering if Auden had it partly in mind:

I like your muse because she's gay and witty,
       Because she's neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European city,
       And country houses long before the slump;
       I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.

A poet, swimmer, peer, and man of action,
--It beats Roy Campell's record by a mile--
You offer every possible attraction.
      By looking into your poetic style
      And love-life on the chance that both were vile,
Several have earned a decent livelihood,
Whose lives were uncreative but were good.

You've had your packet from the critics, though:
      They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
      A "vulgar genius" so George Eliot said,
      Which doesn't matter as George Eliot's dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: "an uninteresting mind".

--DY

The Scene

The crowd waits for John Ashbery to begin his reading at The New School, April 15, 2008.

More later . . .

Ashbery on the Roof, 1981

Photo by Bill Hayward

John Ashbery reads from and discusses his work, including the recent
Notes from the Air

Tuesday, April 15
6:30 PM
The New School
Wollman Hall
66 West 12th Street
Free to students with ID
All others, $5.00

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