The Best American Poetry

Lally & Winch at KGB Last Evening

Terence Winch
photo by (c) Star Black

Michael Lally and son Flynn
Photo by (c) Star Black

Last night at KGB Bar. . .

Last night Nicole Cooley and Kimiko Hahn read at KGB Bar. Many of Cooley's poems centered on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in her native New Orleans. Hahn read a scary but amusing, or funny but frightening, poem about the mating habits of the praying mantis.

Kimiko Hahn and Nicole Cooley
photo credit Star Black

Michael Quattrone and Star Black
photo credit David Lehman

Star Black: Photos from the BAP Gala, 9/25/08

Meghan O'Rourke

Richard Howard

Lee Upton

Laura Cronk and David Lehman

John Ashbery and Adam Zagajewski

All photos by Star Black. Adam Zagajewski was reading at NYU that evening, but he and his party joined the BAP / New School crowd at Cafe Loup, where this picture was taken, after the reading.

Caroline Knox, Michael Quattrone, and Danielle Pafunda

Caroline Knox, Michael Quattrone, and Danielle Pafudna
at KGB Bar, September 22, 2008
photo by Star Black

"The Work is All" - Roland Flint: An Appreciation (by Laura Orem)

from "Stubborn"

                                . . . I'll write about this
as well, pulled through the pages by something,
as if in the hand, to write it down here.
Besides despair of writing it well enough
is this revulsion at smearing grief
in order to do it, to use a poem as if you were
trading what you have lived through for words,
selling out, by using, the worst secrets.
But the words come anyway. So when, finally,
I have to write them down, I fear
I may be stupidly tempting death, and yet
I write them as if my life is the poem to give -
its work come clearly, saying, go and write,
do what has been given to do, and
if it is given in grief, accept it there,
where you may see whatever else is given. . .

Roland Flint, from Stubborn , University of Illinois, 1990.

The poet Roland Flint, who died in January 2001, is something of an undiscovered treasure in American poetry. He is familiar to poetry-lovers in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area (he was on the faculty at Georgetown, was a regular at the St. Mary's College of Maryland Literary Festival, and served as Poet Laureate of Maryland), and he taught at Bread Loaf, but his work is not as widely known outside the region. This is unfortunate, because his poems are powerful, moving, and beautiful; at his best, they are as good as any poems you will ever read.

Roland's work is large-hearted, generous, and encompassing, much like Roland himself was. I met him in 1991 at St. Mary's College. He was a big man, with a big red beard, bright blue eyes, and a rollicking, jolly laugh. He seemed to be someone who enjoyed himself hugely; certainly, he enjoyed being surrounded by young, pretty, female poetry students. When he smiled, there was a twinkle in his eye that made him look like a slightly lecherous Ghost of Christmas Present.  But beyond his appreciation for the feminine form, it was obvious he liked women, relished their company and conversation. He was an exceptionally gifted teacher and a marvelous raconteur, and he had more poems by heart than anyone I ever met (except possibly David Lehman). I have a vivid memory of him reciting Edward Arlington Robinson's  "Eros Turannos"  to about a hundred hushed and mesmerized people. Roland in front of an audience was wonderful.

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Of the canonical English poets, was there ever a finer rhymester than "rare" Ben Jonson? His poems sing; they are lyrics that require no musical accompaniment, though the impulse to set his words to music must always be great. Jonson's facility with triple rhymes is unrivaled, as in this gorgeous song from his masque Cynthia's Revels (Act I., Sc. ii.):

ECHO'S SONG

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
   Yet slower, yet, O faintly gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
         "Woe weeps out her division, when she sings.
              Droop herbs and flowers;
              Fall grief in showers;
              Our beauties are not ours":
                   O, I could still,
(Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, )
               drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature's pride is, now, a withered daffodil.

-- DL

Happy Birthday, Harold Hart Crane

Hart Crane (1899-1932) is the greatest might have been in our literature, the closest thing to an American Keats, a sublime visionary and transcendent phrasemaker. Though sober-minded critics have long warned against the excesses in his life, Crane's poems remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Consider "a grail of laughter" in the poem "Chaplinesque," a perfect example of surplus value in poetry; its force is greater than the sum of its meanings. By the way, the kitten in this poem stands for something very specific in the allegory in Crane's mind. Can you tell what?

-- DL

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

-- Hart Crane

Robert Herrick and "Liquefaction"

A friend from Cambridge, England, writes:

The sexiest word in the language, I think sometimes on lovely days as I walk on tree-lined streets and look at the women in their loose summer frocks, is liquefaction. The word refers to the transformation of a substance from a solid to a liquid state. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), in one of his most beautiful short poems, captures the exact sense of the word that I have in mind.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!

-- Robert Herrick

And here is the man himself:

Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Shelley drowned a month before his thirtieth birthday. At the cremation his heart refused to burn.

-- DL

Page meets Stage at the Bowery Poetry Club

left to right: Michael Cirelli, Taylor Mali, David Lehman, Arianne Benford
photo credit: Marie-Elizabeth Mali

At the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC on Wednesday evening May 15, Arianne Benford read her poems followed by a poetry face-off featuring Michael Cirelli and David Lehman. Michael read from his nifty new book, which Hanging Loose Press has published. Asked to show off his memorization skills, Lehman recited from memory Antony's speech over the fallen Caesar in Julius Caesar. Taylor Mali, organizer of the series, was the debonair host. At an earlier event that Mali directed, Jeff McDaniel and Sage Francis read their work.