The Best American Poetry

Speak the Speech, Part II [by David Yezzi]

If you can keep your head, while Dennis Hopper recites Rudyard Kipling’s “If” on the Johnny Cash Show, then you are a better man than me, my son. Check it out:

 

The poem (still wildly popular in England) and Hopper are both quite good. Personally, I have been unsuccessful thus far in recruiting celebrities to recite my work on television. My fallback is to read the poems myself, occasionally in public. There's an open mic near me that I like called Carmine Street Metrics, though it takes place on Ave. B (after getting bounced from the Bowery Poetry Club last year). If I have a new poem, I like to try it out there. Reading a poem out in front of an audience has become an important step in finishing it, or in seeing if it is, in fact, finished. 

When, several years ago, I started teaching a class in performing poetry (it’s basically an acting class for poets), what struck me most was that performing a poem invariably led to revision. But testing the poem on the voice—where, more and more, I’ve come to feel the poem really lives, i.e., in its spoken music—the rough spots become more appaent. I can easily hear places where the rhythm falters, where the clarity and precision of the expression are obscured.

Not surprisingly, people are often much better at reading other people’s work than at reading their own. The difficulty of presenting one’s own poems is two-pronged, I think. On the one hand, our own poems are so personal, so close to home, so connected to our sense of self-worth that it can be terrifying to present them to an audience. (Even if one's poetry is not autobiographical, it is a charged expression that can be ticklish to read in public.) 

And, on the other hand, the poem may have gone cold for us, written, as it was, sometimes months or years earlier. It reminds me of the wonderful passage in G. K. Chesterton’s book on Robert Browning: “There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply: 'When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.' ”

The fact is that, over time, we lose touch with the emotions that gave rise to the poem; we become dull to the very intensities of sound and meaning that we were at pains to include in the poem. In order to give the poem its due in performance, we have to reawaken our emotional connection to the words. 

It’s just what we would do if we were called upon to read out the work of another poet, so why not do it with out own work. I’ve gone on too long here, so I won’t get into specific exercises at this point. For an unbeatable example of how to break down the sense of a verse passage and find hidden in each word both meaning and feeling, one cannot do better than this excerpt from John Barton’s “Playing Shakespeare” (the book of the same name is an invaluable text for poets as well as actors). Watch as, at about 2:10, Ian McKellen begins to go word by word through “Tomorrow and Tomorrow”:

 

 

(Tomorrow and tomorrow, a look at Geroge Green's poem "Bangladesh" from his new book Lord Byron's Foot.)

 

Richard Hell's punk poetry memoir 'I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp': No void here [by Ken Tucker]

Richard Hell wrote one of the best songs built around one of the least useful, or at least most misunderstood, phrases of 1970s punk rock in “Blank Generation,” for his band the Voidoids. To his great credit, as his new memoir I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography (Ecco Books) proves, he and a few of his cohorts were among the least blank, most thoughtful and informed young musician-writers working during that period, not nihilists but poets with the romanticism wrung out of them by some combination of natural asperity, experience with music-biz venality, and a genuine passion to make some kind of art.

         And so while I Dreamed is indeed the memoir of a man who spiked his hair, consumed a lot of different chemicals, and lived in the shadow of Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, and Johnny Rotten, Richard Hell stakes out his status as an always-intelligent man whose musical value has been underrated and whose excellent taste extends to a casual yet more than knowledgeable reference to “my main man New York poet Ted Berrigan.”

         Indeed, the most interesting aspect of this swiftly paced tale of a Kentucky-born first-gen punk-rocker is that he was a poetry fan and a poet before he was a bass player, a lyricist of concise note, a by-his-account profligate yet caring ladies-man. Hell – born Richard Meyers in 1949 – writes with some of his greatest passion about the second generation of New York School poets including Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Tom Veitch, as well as ornery outliers like Bill Knott, the latter for writing “fully thought-through funny word-packs of imagery and ideas of loneliness, desperate love, shock and fury.” He lavishes as much praise upon publications such as “C” magazine and “Ashbery’s and Koch’s and Schuyler’s and Mathews’ swoon of witty word-chess” Locus Solus as he does influential recordings by the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. If Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir Just Kids took a more literary shape than the straightforward prose and chronology Hell offers here, his is the book to read to get a less self-mythologizing view of what it was like to live in the blended musical-literary circles that overlapped and bedded down with each other in the late-70s/early-80s.

         It may be that, as someone who wedged into the vibrating narrow corridor of CBGB’s and sat at the same Gem Spa counter stools as Hell during this period, I am more susceptible than an average reader to his amiable rambles not just through CBGB lore but also his jobs at the Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore. But that also means I know his details are pretty much spot-on. Plus, I like the way Hell is not so highfalutin’ that he doesn’t enjoy sharing gossip about and quarrels with characters including his Television band-mate Tom Verlaine (boyhood buddies who became thoroughly sick of each other over the course of launching a career – that’ll happen when you’re a part-time drug-head and he’s a full-time control-freak); record-biz hustler-talents like Richard Gottehrer and Terry Ork; or Hell’s quick, vivid portrait of a pre-publishing-agent shark Andrew Wylie when he was still a punk-loving poetaster (a would-be Aram Saroyan, no less!); and the way Hell disliked Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye because Kaye disliked Hell’s guitarist Robert Quine (I know Lenny; I like Lenny; but the late Quine was undeniably great).

         Even better, Hell writes vividly about “what it felt like to be creating electrically amplified songs,” the way “it was like making emotion and thought physical, to be undergone apart from oneself.” Hell halts his story at 1984, when he “stopped making music and stopped using drugs.” Yet I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is not that dreadful thing – the “survivor’s memoir”; it’s a chronicle of an assiduously adventurous life lived with an acute awareness that the adventure is not something to be exaggerated or obliterated, but rather a blessing to be well-remembered.

--Ken Tucker 

J.R.I.P.: Larry Hagman haunts "Dallas" [by Ken Tucker]

The wonderful TV and literary critic and dexterous light-verse emitter, Clive James, once wrote that “J.R. Ewing’s reign as the King of Dallas reached its apotheosis under Reagan. Now that corrupt America was passé and straight-arrow America was back in business, it was time for J.R. to get his. The shooting of J.R. was announced in advance all over the world. It was fictional, but it made news like fact… J.R. was no longer an actor, he was a real man. He was more than that, he was a Messiah. He rose from the dead and continued with the next series, like a President going into his next term.”

         Well, last night, J.R.’s body was lowered into the grave once more, with finality, because we were also, in effect, watching Larry Hagman’s body achieve sepulchral grace. J.R. was Hagman’s creation as much as it was creator David Jacobs’, or any writer or producer, who worked on the original run of Dallas. The actor invested what could have been a cartoonish villain with an evil intelligence. Yes, sure, because this was a frequently outlandish nighttime soap opera, with what has come to be called in the fan-boy culture of TV analysis as a knotty “mythology,” there were regular moments when J.R. was a caricature of venality. But more often, Hagman made sure that J.R. was in on the joke – the big-buck Ewing relished his power and his ability to make mere mortals (frequently his brother Bobby, played with superb asperity by Patrick Duffy) tremble.

    J.R. was capitalism with unruly eyebrows, aging but still fitfully potent. Last week on Dallas, two shots rang out during a phone call J.R. had placed from another country. He referred to a gesture he would make that he called his “masterpiece.” No: It was a fate forced upon the character after Hagman died during production of the rebooted Dallas’ second season. The bang-bang occurred at the very end of that hour, and so last night’s edition featured the funeral and a deepening mystery. Old Dallas characters were hauled out to pay their (sometimes dis-)respects to J.R., and even the most ardent fan probably spent some time gazing at his or her HD screen to note whose jaw-line was sagging, whose gut strained a Texas belt buckle.

         Now that J.R. is gone, who beyond the hardcore devotees will continue to watch Dallas, with its cleverly conceived but mostly plastic-looking young co-stars intended to continue the J.R.-Bobby brawling? Certainly Josh Henderson, as J.R.’s son John Ross, has stepped up to achieve his own semi-original take on J.R.-style mendacity. (I qualify the originality since what Henderson, with his drooping eyelids and mumbled menace is doing frequently seems half-Hagman, half-Elvis Presley.)

         The hour, titled “J.R.’s Masterpiece,” was written by Cynthia Cidre, and was shrewdly executed. By the end, we knew that J.R. had not been killed in Mexico by a random thug; that Sue Ellen had fallen off the wagon; that Emma Brown was popping clonazepam and having sex with John Ross, who is technically her step-cousin – kissin’ cousins.

    I’ll be interested to see how much the ratings dip, or surge, in the weeks to come. The young demo that the new Dallas is aiming for have far less invested in J.R.; just as original fans used to admire what Clive James called the “peachy epidermis” of Sue Ellen and Pam Ewing, so the current generation of viewers may be entranced by the Bachelor-style curviness and musculature of the younger actors.

    Writer Cidre has set up the rest of the season with an echo of the famous 1980 “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger. Now it’s being promoted as “Who Killed J.R.?” Cancer killed Larry Hagman, but he hovers over the proceedings now and forever. We’ll never again see eyebrows that did as much acting as any puny human who tried to share to screen with J.R.

--Ken Tucker

"Girls" review: Lena Dunham's problems for, and with, parents

This week’s Girls was a high point in a second season that’s been a bit of a disappointment. After making a well-deserved media splash as a novel TV approach to the depiction of Young Women In Our Time, Girls is showing some of the wear and tear that occurs when an ambitious creator also becomes The New Voice of Her Generation. (Promise: no more capitalized theme phrases from hereon.) At least, that’s the sense I get, given the timing, shooting schedule, and result of Lena Dunham’s intensely scrutinized, It’s Not Just TV (oh, damn – sorry) creation.

The second season feels more like a conventional sitcom, with snappy punchlines and increasingly lovable characters, or at least characters we’re meant to understand as earnest, wounded birds. Except for the male characters, who tend to be angry wounded pitbulls. Dunham’s Hannah and her sisters-in-the-sisterhood are never more engaging when they’re not engaging each other, but rather, interacting with people older than themselves: Parents, employers, would-be mentors, patrons, and sleazebags.

So it was this week’s installment, which found Hannah accompanying Jemima Kirke’s Jessa to spend the weekend with the latter’s father and most recent stepmother – played respectively by Ben Mendelsohn and Rosanna Arquette. The half-hour contained the usual amount of Girls hijinks, Seinfeldian phrase appropriations (the repetition of “sexcapade”; “You are ‘the cushion’” – i.e., the absorber of too much emotion), and sight gags (Hannah, her bladder too full at a remote outdoor train station, squatting to pee in semi-full view of an older couple).

But this episode, titled “Video Games” after a nutty belief of Arquette’s character – that the world is “literally” a video game – was filled with nice touches and filled in a bit more of the Girls universe. Jessa is, you’ll recall, coming off the dissolution of her brief marriage to a wealthy heel. If it was typical of Dunham’s writing strategy that this haughty, assiduously devil-may-care yet totally-together Brit would prove to have a thoroughly dissolute, emotionally unstable and needy father, it is to the show’s credit that the relationship felt right – that Jessa is the daughter such a man would produce, in that we-react-against-what-we-dislike-the-most about our parents.

Significantly, I think, this episode was written by producer Bruce Eric Kaplan, better known in some circles as “BEK,” the cartoonist whose work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker. I say significant not merely because Kaplan also wrote a few episodes of Seinfeld, but because the series this season has featured more fully delineated male characters whenever Dunham and/or another female collaborator aren’t writing them. Sorry, not sexist, but it’s just true: The early half-hours of this second season featured the show’s least believable new characters, most notably the happily brief appearance of Donald Glover as Sandy, the dreary, surprise!-he’s-a-black-Republican creation.

Where the second season of Girls has frequently carried a distracted air, as though the cast members were rushing through their jokes and problems because Dunham had a scheduled Rolling Stone or I-D cover photo-shoot, “Video Games” had a wonderfully languid pace – Kaplan created a warped idyll that allowed the series to pause, take a deep breath of non-Brooklyn air, and gather its senses.

The beautiful capper to the episode was that, having seen how dreadfully Jessa had been parented, Hannah felt moved to call her own parents to express in a sweetly sincere, fulsome manner, how much she loved and appreciated her own parents, played with the usual terrific verve and comic-stressfulness by Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker. The phone call was a failure for Hannah, of course – her neurotic, suspicious, yet always-Hannah-obsessed parents chose to interpret her call as another occasion for worry, suspicion, and alarm. But the final scene provided a lovely conclusion to a 30-minute meditation about how they fuck you up, your mum and dad.

--Ken Tucker

Ken Tucker's Take on the New "House of Cards"

"House of Cards finds Kevin Spacey being waspish, supercilious, and meanly clever — in other words, just the way we like him, and the way he’s been most effective." That's how Ken Tucker opens his EW review of the brand new House of Cards. I believe he had to turn in his copy on the basis of only the first two episodes, so he is bound to have a lot more to say after digesting the whole series of thirteen, but he is certainly right in characterizing the Netflix original series as "a finely nasty showcase." Ken likes Kevin Spacey's asides to the viewer and asks quite pertinently whether people plan to "watch a whole batch [of episodes] in a row or to parcel them out for more conventional TV viewing." I have a feeling he will revise his opinion of Zoe Barnes ("some combinaton of cynical and dim"), but I do get a kick out of the graf that concludes, "You know what? Forget I mentioned it." -- DL

House of Cards: Whist versus Bridge (or the British versus the US Versions) [by David Lehman]

No spoiler-alerts needed here. We refuse to give away the goods. Only a week has gone by since the Netflix release of the new "House of Cards" and we have watched all thirteen episodes in a state of heightened pleasure. This is the best thing I've seen on television since "Mad Men." The script is very smart and so is the cast, beginning with Kevin Spacey as Congressman Francis Underwood (South Carolina, a Democrat), Robin Wright as the resourceful and cunning straight-faced Mrs. with the butch haircut and Kate Mara as the feisty reporter with the perfect source for a scoop. We promise to keep radio silence. We've also watched -- multiple times -- the old (1990) British series of the same name (with Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhardt, the Tory Party's chief whip). We loved both versions of "House of Cards," and as both are streaming on Netflix, we recommend warching them, in either order. But be prepared to lose a lot of hours that could otherwise have gone into reading "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Bleak House."

 

Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart

The we here is neither editorial nor royal but factual; Stacey and I watched the new HOC together at our own pace, which averaged out to 2.16 episodes a night. Six nights are better than a binge, though it is easy to see why the issue has surfaced. This is living-room entertainment of the highest order. Seeing it with a companion adds tremendously to the pleasure if you're anything like us. My wife knows her "television conventions," as she'll be the first to admit, and she is almost always right when she anticipates a plot development that would have taken me by surprise.

Very soon in the first episode you can tell that the American version (the AV for short) and the English (EV) are completely different in tone. What surprised me was how different the series are in plot and character as well -- so much so that you might risk a few generalizations on the basis of a comparison. The English version relies on wit, bite, satire. There is a nasty sado-masochistic undertone in the way the inimitable Ian Richardson wields power ("I put a bit of stick about"). Richardson -- as the FU figure at the center of the action who is also our chief narrator, making frequent asides to the viewer --- dominates. It is black humor in the stiff-upper-lipped English manner. And because it is technically a comedy, you suspend your ethical sense. You identify yourself with an incorrigibly charming but thoroughly despicable master of deceit.

The AV, twenty three years younger, is naturally more sophisticated in visual presentation. Equally naturally, the AV reflects certain all-important digital facts that were unknown in 1990: the cell phone, the text message, the increased surveillance of the civilian population, the rate of acceleration in technological upheaval. These are the inevitable changes brought on by time and a bigger budget. But there are changes in spirit dictated by differences in the national temper. The English version radiates charm and a certain amount of Schadenfreude. The American version is filled with heartache and bile, guile and guilt.

In contrast to the EV, with its London cool, its cheerful irreverence signaled in the trumpet fanfares of the theme music, the AV is saturated with Washington, DC, a place that considers itself the center and capital of the Western world. The AV has its dark humor, but it is fraught with high anxiety, tension, heartbreak, the possibility of redemption or the premonition of tragedy. In the EV, sex is a sport, indulged in for robust pleasure, forbidden or otherwise, and sexual infidelity parallels political treachery. In the AV, sex is many things, but a sport is not one of them. Sex in the AV can involve infatuation, redemption, desperation, hostility, or the weakness of an addiction, which is also a paying profession. The thematic linkage of prostitution to politics is established early on in the AV and is powerfully sustained. Addiction is a key plot element. In the EV, we have the irony of a government minister routinely breaking the law by snorting cocaine and funding the habit at his party's expense. It is a proof of his weakness and seals his doom as a mere instrument of someone else's power. In the AV it is not an irony but a tragedy when a recovering alcoholic drops off the wagon -- and it is entirely possible that his AA sponsor will betray him when the stakes are down.

Spacey, a brilliant actor at his best (except when he forgets his South Carolina accent), has his asides, but there are fewer of them, and they do not resemble theatrical soliloquys. He is masterful when he has to shuttle between his home district and a labor dispute in Washington. Ruthless he is, but vulnerable as well. Robin Wright as Clare Underwood is a far more complicated mystery than the deliciously diabolical Diane Fletcher, who gives Lady MacBeth a run for the money as Elizabeth Urquhart in the EV. We see Elizabeth entirely in relation to her husband's aspirations and the obstacles in his path. But Clare, though in cahoots with her husband, has her own professional identity, her own lover, and her own agenda, which can clash with his. There is a scene where she visits a trusted former aide of her husband's, who is dying in his hospital bed. I refuse to say another word about that scene here but I know we will want to to talk about it sometime. That is true as well of the scene at the military academy that Francis Underwood attended, the Citadel -- I mean the Sentinel -- where they sing Dixie when they're feeling patriotic, and the boys get drunk and two of them remember just how close they had once been.

This was the first time I heard one woman call another "a twitter twat." Ditto the joke told by the owner of the "Washington Herald" (they mean the "Post" but my guess is they didn't get permission). The last line of the joke is, "Where do you come from, cunt?" The newspaper owner is a woman. On the other hand, the crack about "sleeping your way to the middle" could have been left on the cutting room floor.

There are so many moments or sequences that one would like to single out for praise. Several characters are interesting enough to warrant a thousand words of speculative analysis. Journalist Zoe Barnes played by Kate Mara, for one; the Pennsylvania congressman played by Corey Stoll, for another. But I will end this note by recalling the speech Kevin Spacey makes at a church in his own congressional district where a tragic accident (and potential public relations disaster) has occurred. The speech is brilliant and brilliantly delivered, and by "brilliant" here I should explain that I mean something very unusual. The rhetoric is effective politically in winning sympathy for the speaker but it also manages the crisis in a way that enables the victim's parents to come to terms with calamity. The ironies mount up; a bad guy can do a good deed for unholy ends. In the middle of the speech Spacey turns to us, the viewers, his confidantes and confreres, to make sure we get it, and we do: See, it's all cynical -- even or especially this oratory that helps a community heal. I wondered, watching the scene, and I wonder still whether it would have been better without the Brechtian interruption. What do you think O reader? -- DL

Lydia Davis on TV! [by David Lehman]

On July 15, 2012, we reported in this space that Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame would play the part of Dr. Susan Wheeler in a two-night miniseries based on Robin Cook's 1977 novel, Coma. That show aired last fall. Now we learn that a character named Lydia Davis plays a vital role in the pilot episode of Revenge, a successful series now in its secnd season, about a girl who grows up to avenge her wrongfully disgraced father. The Hamptons are the locale and pretty much everyone is evil, vain, treacherous, and bitchy except for the men who are evil, vain, clueless, and unfaithful as the day is long. There is a hierarchy in this evil queendom, and the queen bee here is Victoria Grayson (played by Madeleine Stowe). The avenger was once named Amanda Clarke; now she is Emily Thorne (played by Emily VanCamp). Stacey said, "imagine what Barbara Stanwyck would do with either of these parts." Joe pointed out that the show is basically "The Count of Monte Cristo" meets summer in the Hamptons. Lydia Davis is Victoria Grayson's best friend, as rich as she is blonde. It was Lydia Davis who gave a Van Gogh to her friend as a token of her esteem, But Lydia Davis is about to be excommunicated from the golden realm for having been caught fucking Victoria Grayson's husband! Who had a fake heart attack! Which was arranged by Emily Thorne! And you the viewer are left wondering about the exact relation between the character of Lydia Davis and the texts created by the author Lydia Davis even as you applaud this new fashion of naming the characters in TV series after contemporary poets. -- DL

Mark Your Mad Men Calendars for April 7! [by Stephanie Paterik]

Folks, our favorite literary television show announced today that it will return April 7 with a two-hour, movie-style premier. 

Brush up your O'Hara, stock up your vermouth and plan your parties accordingly -- and invite me, please!

"Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner isn't giving much away about the penultimate season opener. But new cast photos suggest that Pete grows sideburns, Betty slims down and our favorite women, Megan, Peggy and Joan, are still in the picture.

"It has some cliffhanger elements to it, it does propel you into the rest of the season -- it does foreshadow a lot what the season is about," Weiner told The New York Times. "But I was like, I want to write a movie here, that we can create the atmosphere and vibe of the season.”

I don't know about you, but I'm always a little amazed that the show gets away with poetry. When Don Draper reads section four of Frank O'Hara's "Mayakovsky," it's like bumping into a good friend in an unexpected place. "What, you go here, too?" Confusion and happiness ensue.

 

Because of this, I find myself wondering, who are these writers? How did they find themselves in TV? And how can I take their jobs?

It turns out Weiner does most of the writing himself. He studied literature, philosophy and history at Wesleyan and got an MFA from USC. He penned the "Mad Men" pilot back in 1999 while working for "Becker."(!) The strength of that script landed him a gig with "The Sopranos," and he waited until the mob show wrapped to shop around his period drama.

Weiner spoke about the writing process with the Times last year, saying, "There's about a three-week rumination period, which involves a lot of napping, a lot of holding books. Whether I'm reading them or not, I cannot say." 

Sounds familiar.

When he started writing season six, he put off his best ideas, saving them for that nebulous "later." Finally, his producers told him, “go for broke, use up everything you have.”

“So I decided to throw it all in,” Weiner told the paper. 

David Lehman offers the same advice to poets. Don't put off writing the poem. Catch it when it comes to you. I can't wait to watch "Mad Men" go for broke, and can't help but wonder which 60s poet we'll run into next.

***

Your daily prompt: Recap a televesion show episode in poetic form.

-Stephanie Paterik

 

Photos by Frank Ockenfels/AMC

I Be Monsters [by Tomás Q. Morin]

When I was an undergraduate with limitless energy and cranking out poems left and right for my workshop classes, all I wrote about was my family. There were poems about everything from my grandfather’s hands to the years he spent working in a field. Even the paisley print of one of my grandmother’s shirts made it into a poem. As did my brother, mother and father, even a certain rude classmate whose name or face I can no longer remember made an appearance as a giant rat.

Some of these poems, in spite of how poorly made they were, brought my mother to tears when she read them because there we were, our family, our struggles, on a piece of paper. It was a record, albeit a weak one, that we had lived and suffered and were still here.

Take all the records the government could use to prove someone’s existence (deeds, bills, social security card, pay stubs, etc.) and they would say little more than my family had lived on a certain street and used X number of watts of electricity to power our washer and microwave and the TV that once the day’s robberies and Reagan’s pearls of ignorance had been reported by news anchors and Johnny Carson had bid us goodnight, began broadcasting pure static snow all through the night until the morning brought the national anthem and our beautiful, waving flag. None of this ever made it into my poems back then because I was, in my ignorance, mining what I knew and being a third-rate Confessional.

Later, when I was a graduate student and I had run out of things to write about in my life, I tried slipping into the lives of others and liked it, so much so in fact, I never tried to put myself in a poem again, aside from the minor personal detail I might secretly slip in like my tendency to mumble or my awful memory, details no one would ever know unless I pointed them out. What’s more, I tried to hide these details in scenes that might be filled with Johnny Carson and images of patriotism sitting snugly beside a microwave dinner.

I was, to put it simply, trying to obliterate myself in my poetry so that I could make up stories about people and places and things that were far more interesting than I was, stories that might help a reader meet someone new or travel somewhere different. In Lord Jim, Conrad writes, “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” Conrad had it easy, as do most writers of fiction, in that if a reader could be made “to see” something, she would most likely not think the character who spoke about writing and seeing was Conrad himself, just as no one I know has ever mistaken Huckleberry Finn for Twain or Gatsby for Fitzgerald.

And yet, it is our burden as poets is it not, to be confused for our speakers, even if they be of a different age or gender or species, all of which was the subject of conversation while my family and I passed turkey and dressing and peach wine during Thanksgiving. Try as I might, I could not convince them that the book I had written and whose poems they had carefully read—a thousand blessings on their heads for that—was not written by a 200 year old half man/half bear who had moonlighted as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a Soviet scientist, a preacher, and countless other things.

Having to choose between thinking that I could spin a really good yarn or that I was a centuries-old hybrid creature living among them, they happily picked the latter, a choice which delights me to no end because it is just one more of a thousand masks I am happy to accept and wear and for which I will always gladly give thanks. 

The Don Draper Advertising Awards for 2012

The best TV commercial of the year is Direct TV's "Don't attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley." The cause-and-effect sequence -- "when you wait forever for the cable guy you get bored, when you get bored you stare out the window, when you stare out the window you see things you shouldn't see, when you see things you shouldn't see you need to vanish" -- creates a rapid absurdist narrative Don Draper would have liked. The clauses escalate: "when you need to vanish, you fake your own death" (with a picture of a man surfacing in the ocean, a burning ship in the distance), then "you dye your eyebrows," and finally the coup de grace: "you attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley." The specificity of this name is a nifty touch. I wonder whether it's the name of a guy at the ad agency.

The worst TV commercial of the year -- take it from one who has watched too many baseball and football games this fall -- is a forty-way tie among car commercials that use the fake word "introducing." Even a commercial for Mercedes, with Jon Hamm's voice over it, is guilty of this triteness next to which the cliches of car ads from the print magazines of yore ("runs good," "loaded") seem amost OK.

The weirdest commercial of the year is, hands down, the one from Direct TV featuring a blonde wife emerging from the shower, wrapped in a towel, looking distraught. The huge TV screen on the wall reports a "recording conflict." (Apparently the household cable TV system can record one show at any given time.) She says she is "sick of this thing," adding, "I just feel like it's watching me walk around naked." Snarls hubby, in front of the bathroom mirror, "Well, at least somebody gets to." Then he continues brushing his teeth, noisily, the noise communicating his contempt. The idea of a "recording conflict" -- and of warring TV tastes -- as emblematic of a marriage on the rocks is smart, but the use of a bitterly quarreling couple to sell a product is negativity of a kind usually seen only in political ads. Still, it does a lot in fifteen seconds, and it does not involve a talking animal. -- DL