The Best American Poetry

Think about it. . .

"Every form is a kind of mask." -- Paul Violi

Paul Vioi at the New School (by Ben Mirov)

Current New School professor, Paul Violi gave a poetry reading and interview at the New School this Tuesday night. Both the reading and the interview that followed were filled by Violi's warmth and humor. There was also a palpable affection for his poems, felt by the mixed crowd of older established poets and MFA students.

Sipping on a "Go Banana's" Snapple, Violi read an assortment of poems from his most recent collection, Overnight, as well as a number of new poems. Poems read included "Appeal to the Grammarians,"  "Finish These Sentences," "September 13, 2001," "Counterman," and "A Podiatrist Crawls Home in the Moonlight," among others. Many of the poems, such as "Acknowledgments" (which takes the form of an author's "acknowledgments" section from the back of a book of poetry) displayed Violi's skill and inventiveness with form.

Violi's poems are often ostensibly humorous, but just as often they encapsulate equal parts cynicism, melancholy, and a fine sense of the absurdity of quotidian life (see "Goddess," a poem about Martha Stewart fluffing her chickens in the morning before setting them out on her lawn). Perhaps one of the most remarkable moments of the evening was the reading of a new ekphrastic poem on Alessandro Magnasco's "The Tame Magpie," a painting in which a group of "...people from the fringes of society have gathered to watch the spectacle of a man trying to teach a magpie to sing—an impossible task."  

An extraordinary aspect of the reading was the eclectic coherence of Violi's oeuvre. No two poems seemed alike, except for the undeniable stylistic qualities of their author.

The interview that followed was more of a conversation between David Lehman, Violi and the crowd. Questions focused on Violi's sense of humor, his reading tastes (Samuel Johnson was mentioned) and "urban poetry".

Violi said little about his writing process other than he likes to write in situations that "defy concentration" (an example of this might be found in his poem "Summer Reading, Interrupted by Rain," based Violi's experience reading a paragraph from John Wain's biography of Samuel Johnson during the beginning of a summer rainstorm).

When Violi was asked about the connection between poetry and architecture, this is what he said:

"I was asked that once on a radio program and I had absolutely nothing to say... it was       dead air time. Umm, but you...I think I've said before about the connection between             architecture and... There’s a rather narrow view of architecture that didn't exist before    there was internal space. Putting up a lot of columns and covering them wasn't       architecture, it wasn't, until the invention of the arch, and I think in terms of poetry, you     know, consciousness, the human consciousness, the invention of metaphor provided that          interiority, that I like to read in poems. So umm, I also think there's a wondrous feeling             about the way space can surprise me in terms of form... is one of the things that interests   me in poetry. I can take an old form and do something new with it, or I can take a form            people are accustomed to and use it... Form always interests me, always has. Not      everything I write is in a recognizable form, but I just like using it."

Both Violi's reading and interview were pervaded by the sense that the Promethean continuity, charm and idiosyncrasy of his poems continue to enthrall a wide range of readers.

-- Ben Mirov

Lehman on Auden [by Angela Patrinos]

“April 6, 2009"

Even with all the rain, last night’s event at the New School was standing room-only.  Yet again.

David Lehman presented a lecture on W. H. Auden, giving us in one hour’s time the vital details and contradictions of the poet’s life and work, and addressing such questions as “Can a flawed poem be a great poem?”

By the age of twenty-two, Wystan Hugh Auden was the most prominent poet in England, with a sound more modern than any of the day.  For example:  “It’s no use raising a shout./No, Honey, you can cut that right out.”  And yet, in January of 1939, he left England and moved to New York City. His reason for coming to NYC—not definitively clear:  “He’d become accustomed to peregrinating,” David said.  Perhaps NYC was the next place on his list.  But perhaps, too, Auden desired to be a less-known entity.  Or perhaps it was because he fell in love with a young man from Brooklyn named Chester Kallman.

He seems to have been happy in New York —it certainly was his choice to be here—and yet he wrote “Refugee Blues” and “The Unknown Citizen,” and he spoke of loneliness.  Perhaps this was a loneliness that followed him here.  David read a poem that Auden wrote just before his arrival in NY, a poem inspired by a painting he’d seen in a museum in Brussels. “Pay attention to the adjectives and adverbs,” David said.

In order of appearance, they are “human, dully, reverently, passionately, miraculous, dreadful, untidy, doggy, innocent, leisurely, forsaken, important, white, expensive, delicate, amazing, calmly.’

The poem is titled “Musee des Beaux Arts” and the painting is Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  Without a title placard for this uncanny painting, it’s unlikely that a viewer would know to search for, and find, the very subject of the painting.  No clues can be gotten from the gaze of the personages in the foreground, who leisurely turn away from what’s taking place in the horizon—the disaster, the forsaken cry, the unimportant failure of the fallen Icarus.

Paul Violi Poetry Forum Tonight!

Tonight at 6:30 at the New School (in room 510 of 66 West 12 Street) Paul Violi will read his poems and converse with David Lehman.

Read Michael Quattrone on Paul Violi here

In Khlebnikov's Aviary

O you Cacklers, cackle away!
   O Cacklers and Cacklettes,
         cackle cackle cackle!

Arise, O Ridicules, O righteous Cacklings,
   snicker and snigger, cackle and gloat!
Cackleladies and Cacklegents,
   cackling cackleophonously,
                  O my Cackleeeeers!

Greet the morn, O you Cacklers and Cacklettes!
         Welcome Chuckleheads,
Welcome to Cackledom!
   O you cacklishly contagious Cacklings!
Splattering cachinnations, cackle every which way!
      Cease not, O noontide Cacklettes
                     and Cacklings—cackle away!

Cackle away all ye Cacklers,
      O Cacklings and Cacklettes,
                                    cackle away!

-- Paul Violi

Lehman to Lecture on Auden Tonight

 David Lehman will lecture on W. H. Auden's poetry this evening at the New School (66 West 12 Street, Room 510) at 6:30 PM. To prepare, read the Auden selections in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Among the poems Lehman will address are "Musee des Beaux Arts" (below), "September 1, 1939," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," and "Under Which Lyre."

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-- W. H. Auden

   

Lee Upton at the New School [reviewed by Angela Patrinos]

"Cocktail Hour with Lee Upton”

At the New School last night, Lee Upton told us that it’s been a lifetime since she was drunk. “I only had maybe a thimbleful of alcohol at the AWP,” she says. Nevertheless, she was sitting in her car one day “when I suddenly remembered what it was like to be drunk at a party.” 

            From the memory came “Drunk at a Party,” the first of the poems she read to us.  The last line: “What keeps a lobster out of a tank?”

             The poem “Beer” came next and was (in proper order) followed by “Wine.”

            In Russia, a friend of Lee’s learned to alternate bites of sausage with shots of vodka (the sausage absorbs the vodka). “First comes sausage then comes vodka”: so the poem “Shots of Vodka” begins. It ends with a roasted pig on a platter wondering:

            “Why do they put an apple in my mouth as if I’m still eating?”

           

“I like to write about love, writing, failure, and dystopia,” Lee said, and then read “Dyserotica.”  This poem, too, ends with a question that is startling, strange, and strangely hurtful: 

            “I know you don’t love me, but why do you have to brag about it?      

The antidote to “Dyserotica” was “The Table” wherein a man has his way with a table.

           

“Do you get a lot of wrong numbers?” Lee asked us. “And does the caller get angry at you because you’re not the right person?”  This happened to her recently, and a few weeks ago she wrote “All the Wrong Numbers,” which begins: 

            “Are you Linda?”  

            At the end of the poem, the speaker effectively neutralizes (or absorbs, as sausage does vodka) the acute humiliation of the caller by assuming craziness:       

“‘What’s your name?’” she asks him.  And then: “He hangs up a bit terrified of you.”

Lee was once sent home from school for employing the vocabulary she’d picked up listening to her father as he cursed at the T.V.  “My father was a kind man,” she said, “who didn’t vent his rage at his family, but only at the T.V.”  Two shows triggered his rage: Bonanza and professional wrestling.

The Adam character in Bonanza was a bastard for thinking he was too good for the ranch, and professional wrestlers were bastards and sons-of bitches that had it coming to them.  “I learned that there was a vast range of ‘bastards’ and a vast range of ‘sons-of-bitches,’” Lee said.  In the poem “Vocabulary” she writes about her father:

            “He was a saint, but nobody gets to be an amateur.”

In “The Blouse” the speaker becomes suddenly visible, and therefore, ironically, unrecognizable, on the day she wears a new blouse.  By way of complimenting her, two men tell her: “I didn’t recognize you!”  At one point the speaker asks (another stinging question): “How could I wear the blouse forever?”

Trevor Winkfield at the New School [Reviewed by Meg McGuire]

Seeing a screen and a slide projector set up in Room 510 is unusual for Poetry Forum gatherings at The New School, but we had artist Trevor Winkfield to visit Tuesday night, and of course, seeing the work is its best introduction. John Ashbery says, paraphrasing Walter Pater, “If all art aspires toward the condition of music as Pater wrote, Trevor Winkfield must be counted among the most successful artists of all time.” (Check out Trevor’s website here. )

       An attitude of precise methodical whimsy pervades his work, and it was especially illuminating to listen to a painter who is also a writer who has collaborated with poets.  In his introduction, New School poetry coordinator David Lehman (above, right, with Winkfield, left) explained that he and colleagues believe in the inter-dependency of the arts, and that if you’re looking for inspiration, “It makes as much sense to expose yourself to painting as to poetry.”
       Trevor Winkfield has collaborated with Ashbery, John Yau and Ron Padgett among others. Exact Change Books recently re-published the Winkfield's translation of Raymond Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Works.  Winkfield has collected his writings in In the Scissors’ Courtyard and his art in Pageant.
       At the beginning of his talk, Trevor tackled exactly that: How to begin. The problem -- “Where to

Pierrot and Harlequin, Winkfield, 2006

place the first mark on a canvas, and what it should represent” – is a problem for poets as well. The speaker also noted the special blessing (which doubles as a challenge) for artists and poets –  unlike ballerinas, they have or can have life-long careers. That’s the blessing. The challenge is how to keep developing and coming up with fresh ideas. He made the comparison to Scheherazade, who, in the Arabian Nights, is constantly in mortal danger if her powers of invention fail her. Winkfield warned against what he called the Marc Chagall effect -- the endless repetition of motifs from the start of one’s career. The room tittered at that -- it’s always fun to poke fun at one of the "big names."       

Poetry Reading by W. D. Snodgrass, October 2008, Syracuse, NY.

-- sdh

Andrey Gritsman at the New School, Dec. 10, 2008 [by Meg McGuire]

Room 510 at The New School rumbled and danced on Wednesday evening with  the Silver Age of Russian Poetry as presented by Andrey Gritsman, poet in both Russian and English, translator and eloquent ambassador of the greats of 20th-century Russian poetry, such as Innokenty Annensky; Alexander Blok; Vladislav Khodasevich; Anna Akhmatova; Osip Mandelstam. (Variant spellings abound.)

I wish I could convey the sound of the poems as declaimed by Andrey. He started reading them in the original Russian and moved seamlessly into his English translations. 

Even better we had a visit from the David Lehman/Andrey Gritsman Traveling Mayakovsky Road Show!! After Andrey treated us to a selection of his own poetry, including one from his new book Pisces, he conspiratorially retreated to the back of the room while David read his own translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's "Brooklyn Bridge" (from Lehman's book When a Woman Loves a Man). Then, clad in a black tee-shirt and startling yellow overshirt (the better to scandalize bourgeois taste), Mayakovsky (looking quite fit for a man who's been dead some 78 years) strode to the front of the room and brought 1925 alive.

Black Mountain on West 12th Street [by Angela Patrinos]

Last night, Vincent Katz, the poet, translator, art critic, and curator, brought the Black Mountain School of Poetry to The New School.  He read poems by Ed Dorn, John Wiener, Charles Olsen, and Robert Creeley. 
          The Black Mountain poets, Vincent reminded us, were a huge influence on the Language writers, and the Language writers continue to influence poetry today.
           From his own work, he read the poems, “Joy Street” “Window,” “The Hard Way,” and “Fecundity,” a recent poem written for the painter Alexander Twombly, in which the speaker says that he keeps all of what is given to him by his children, but of his own possessions, he keeps less and less.
          Vincent also read a poem that he’d written for Robert Creeley, “Raleigh Night: to Bob.”  
         “Creeley was huge for me,” Vincent said.  “Even now — he never ceases to amaze me.  As great artists do, he changes — he doesn’t stick with what he has done before.  He writes about elemental experience: anger, fear, birth, death, suffering.”
          Vincent said that, early on, he was as much attracted to Creeley’s poetry as he was to Creeley’s personae.  He cited Jonathan William’s 1955 photograph of Creeley, “Portrait of Creeley as a Spanish assassin,” and said, “There was something dangerous, and Rock & Roll about him.” And yet, Creeley liked to write in exclusion, in silence, whereas Frank O’Hara could write poetry at a cocktail party.
           Speaking of the New York School of Poets, David Lehman said that the New York School poets wanted to charm whereas The Black Mountain poets didn’t care about being charming. Or very funny.
           “The Black Mountain Poets were a bit aggressive,” Vincent said, “and more likely to be adversarial, politically minded.  They weren’t interested in description and simile and traditional forms, such as the sonnet.”
            David said: “I think that today we can be influenced by both the Black Mountain Poets and the Language writers, and still feel O.K. about writing a sonnet.  Battles have been fought and won, and now we’re free to write the kind of poetry we want to write.  Look at Ted Berrigan.  Even if he didn’t always follow a strict sonnet form, he still used the sonnet.”
          “I agree with you,” Vincent said. “But, again, I think of Robert Creeley.  He’s a powerful example of someone who stuck to his principles.  When you read his work, he makes you think twice about returning to the sonnet.”
            David (who has probably written at least one poem at a cocktail party) said as a kind of non-concession, concession: “Well, I guess the New York Poets were more interested in traditional forms.” 
            And then Vincent and David moved on to the subject of Creeley’s celebrated line breaks, and Vincent offered this, by Clark Coolidge:
           “In a quiet moment I hear Bob pause when I never would have expected it.  Such resolve.  Such heart. And an ear to reckon with.  No truly further American poem without his.”

-- Angela Patrinos