The Best American Poetry

Land Fishing [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

The Rolling Stones are making it hard for me to garden.  I am thinking too much about the underground.  Live on the green side of the grass (forget walk on the sunny side of the street) is what I advise, but for myself, I got a dark heart.

In part my morbid refusal of north is a fault of San Andreas.  I'm unpolarized. 

I also blame my dear friend, the poet Amy Holman, who wrote a brilliant interview with Bill Wyman, bass player for the Rolling Stones, called "Land Fishing," published in Barrelhouse last September, 08.  Can't get to the interview online, (though here's where it lives) but I'll just say it makes you aware of certain unforeseen factors of reality: 1) the coolest items work their way up to the surface, or were always there, but are sometimes just lying there. 2) if you are in England on the hay side of Hadrian's wall, a coin from 1220 AD is disappointing, and one from 122 AD delightful indeed, whereas in my back yard, a soldier's leg from any era not my own can cause a curious poet to dig up much of Brooklyn (without hitting what a bassist hits under the couch in his living room) in a spectacle of spectacular bespectacled speculation, spade in hand.  

Okay, go to Wyman's Website.  Wait for the top line of menu items to appear and click on Archaeology. You don't get the metaphysics that Holman helps him get at, but you get pictures and the strange sense that there is something on which strange is going.  I too, am a strange thing, so I rully like it for that reason too.  But mostly the metaphysical and actual digging.  So much less messy than autopsy.  Well, less sticky.

More beauty on the theme?  The Past is Always Coming, Holman at Archaeology.  

Enjoy the sun, chums.

love,

Jennifer

ps  Here are my great grandmother's ceramic dogs, a tiny perfume bottle being the only thing I ever stole in the particularly way I stole that, as a child, my paternal grandfather's wedding ring, a small bird skull, and a bottle of no.  They are in the first pic too.  I made that mosaic fish scene.  I love sun dapple.  xox

pps My friend Amy will forgive me I think if I share with you that she is on return trip from scattering the ashes of her mother, recently passed.  Archeology no idle theme.  Courage, bleaders!  Courage my friends!  Soon we shall feast on eggplants.

Jennifer

hardy garden hardening [with full deniability, the furious Jennifer Michael Hecht]

This young cuke has a wrong idea about how to hold on in life, but the old flower is enjoying the attention.  Those soft tendrils.

oh bleaders, i grow weary.  do you grow weary?  i know that you do.  let's see what else we can find in nature today.

this cuke has got hold the heirloom tomato plant.  tomato is thinking, thank sod for the fence.

Why is spam in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprise?  

Want to see how funny the faces of the sharks are at the Coney Island Aquarium?

What if this shark was a genius human shark and you fell in love?  It would be hard to kiss, but you'd find a way.  Especially if you were this cucumber plant, if you know what I mean.  Bleaders who are sometimes needers and sometimes the sturdy reed, and which is worse?  Well, if equal affection there can not be.  (let the more loving one be me) as the man says.  butum, umbut, let's look again.

at a certain point it touches itself and thinks it has touched something else and begins to start the long climb up some imaginary tree, a vine entwined

in its own mind.

yes, yes, i know:

fine.  you win again.

seeyanex,

Jennifer

in nonsense of defense, and verse vica [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Beloved Bleaders,

 The Seedish are a red haired branch of that long line of sourdough from which our saltines, in a pinch, can liberate the farmer’s plow. Oh pigeon. Oh my death in life. Oh lie down on the floor. You want to read a little less and then you read some more. 

Grrrrationalists have long followed reason into unreason.  If you are investigating cause and effect you notice that when you cut out all the variables, you still just have coincidence not cause.  One thing happens, then another.  Proves nothing, unless you define proof around it.

Grrrationalists also note that the more they try to simply define normal reality the more they notice that point of view is everything.  It changes everything about the truth of description if the describer big or small, long or short lived, etc.

and that's why grrationalists are more likely than plain old rationalists to have another part of their conversation in which they say, of course, we do not know anything at all, the everything is big and hard to know, so follow feeling, dance and play, create and be humble.

 the more ultrarationalist, materialist antisupernaturalist knows nonsense is in some many ways better than sense.  the mind and the universe being what they are.

 slithy toves is: grimy boys? 

gyre and gimble: gyrate and gambol?

wabe is: field 

mimsey were the borogroves is: how flowering were the area groves

and the mome raths outgrabe is: raging sons are also blooming

poetry, though no good for shekels and a bit of a shika, is the good garden where the garden tools are golden but the real goal is dirt.  dirt rich and dolla poor.  nobut yeahbut poetry is the one place where if you get up lifting velocity you can just hella take off and go and you don’t have to hold back for the stragglers and no one can say nothing if you start unmaking sense.  say anything.

I like a) dreamin' b) big butts c) to watch.

 Over on my poetry blog Dear Fonzie I just post whatever rises and converges and recently (June 21, 09) I posted the piece of nonsense with which I  began this present post, next to a photograph of a clown and my girl, and the clown, though very lovely in real life, in this photo appears to be giving me the stink eye, as if he were the true defense of all children and I but a suspicious lens.

 Husband walked by my blog and issued an admiring, “Did you write that?”  Which after ten years you don’t hear very often and was quite pleasurable.  Such strange news for the mind striving so eagerly for lucidity in prose and some through-cidity in poetry, to learn it can light up just as well the room by blowing a fuse.

 He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  

Long time the manxome foe he sought --


So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  

And stood awhile in thought.

vorpal is vortex-causing with an opal handle

manxome is man’s x chromosome, which means woman, or maybe an aspect of man?

Whatever.  I shall now call upon my subconscious to sing me out with a little nonsense, strung with youse in mind, dear bleader.

It rains.  Holding a fallen spleen it sniffs and sighs.  Is a confession more often a secret, or a secret a confession?  I like my salad with blue trees dression.  The lession loined is that ten ounces of possession are worth a pound of Thor.  You got a lid your lithe.  Gotta bee a cell, a shelfish, your shelf.  Trade on you good books.  Stop kissing everyone!  Stop smiling!  Everything different is wrong.

OK, that's that.  Let me know if you figure out what it means.  I shore a hella doe noe.

Try to get something done this week, okay?

Just kidding.  Don’t.  The Buddha said sit still and stop trying.

Fuck the Buddha, write something.

love is just evolve without an ev,

Jennifer

Donald Justice; or Coming of Age in America [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

It is One pm.

I’m moved by Jim Cummins’s recent post, where he cites Charles Wright on Donald Justice.  DJ was reviewing the young CW’s poetry and a fly flew around the room and near DJ’s open mouth. CW wrote: “He actually swallowed the damn thing, so intent was he on the poem at hand.  "Did I swallow that fly" he asked, astonished.  I allowed as to how he had.  "Jesus," he said.  Amazing!  Then he actually went back to the poem.  From that moment, he had me in the palm of his hand."

I love it so much.  "Did I swallow that fly" he asked, astonished.  I allowed as to how he had.  "Jesus," he said."  so good.

I have a Donald Justice story too.  I was at the Sewanee writer’s conference over a decade ago and had yet to publish, but I soon would.  I had had very little input on my poetry, because I never went to school for it.  

The meeting with Donald Justice was a big deal in that I had never had a tete-on-tete with a poet of renown about my work.  But it wasn’t a big deal because I knew I liked the poems I’d sent in, and I still do – those poems are in my first book and remain the best location of many of my thoughts and lexipleasures.

I thought he’d praise my work and also infuriate me someway or another, because that was what usually happened in the few meetings I'd had with people about my poetry, and I was ready to take it, braced for praise and scalding.  So I go in and sit in what I remember as a room full of glass.  It is just me and him.  We are at a corner of a large glass table.

Right out of the gate he wants to know why I wrote one of my poems, “Send in the Swans.”  This is not what I was expecting.  “What do you mean?”  I ask.  He tells me the opening of the poem is brilliant [well this is my story] and he wants to know what made me think to write this from a man’s perspective?

I suppose you need some poem here.  Here is the first two stanzas of it-

 Send In the Swans

                        I

Summer streets and the ring

sent back.  Like my hand might

float away, it felt at first.  Now, nothing.

Just a stubborn taste of skin when I

look around and there is Leda on every

street corner.  Everywhere, unknowing.

She seems to think that she’s the swan.

You should have seen my face as I figured it out.

                        II

I’m the swan.

After the rain, the grass still complains of dryness.

It takes predators longer, is what I discovered.

Sadists come and go like food allergies.

But predators need several lives

to find their nature and several more

to isolate their style.

There was a perfect frozen moment after he said “man’s perspective?” and creased his eyes.  I don’t mean to tease him, and I suppose he had been wondering this since he read the poem and saw the name.  What had walked in to talk poetry was a girl with a rather full semiotic sailboat, all pointing butch-butcheast.   But he wasn’t reading me, he was busy with his question.  He has posed it, and is waiting.

So I have zero experience being with a world-renown poet, and this is his question, sitting in the air and not falling.  I’m in short-short hair, men’s long shorts.  My girlfriend had given me a wallet with a chain, and I was wearing that too.  I tell him it is not a man’s perspective it’s me.  I’m the one that wants to jump all these hot Ledas.  I lean back and hint: Don’t I look like the rapacious swan?  Again the pause.  “Hmm,” he says and nods.  He smiles and I smile.  He returns to praising the poem.  

Walking back from this meeting, heart buzzing and banging like a horsefly stuck in a roomful of windows, thinking about how I was going to relate these events to my friends, a song came to my mind, which I have never forgotten.  To wit: “I told Donald Justice/ that I like the ladies/ I told Donald Justice/ I’m a little queer.”

In the rest of the conversation he drew my attention to something about that poem and said if I could do more of that, I should, and that advice influenced the voice of The Next Ancient World, which came out a few years later.  I sent the book to him.  Now that I think about it, the little encounter may have influenced Funny too.  Funny how long it takes to see things, despite the impressive speed of light.

[It’s three thirty and I’m going to go post this.  But I also took a shower since I started writing this at one, and also hung out with Jessie a little.  This is a record for the sake of certain parts of my subconscious (you know who you are) who tell me I don’t have time to post and will tell me so in the future.  Calm down and write something, it is fun.  Oh and dear future self, while I have you here, have we proofed the article for Humor?  If not, get on that.  kthxbai]

{Ok now I'm posting it and it is 3:55. but I think I'll add a picture.}

[ok, now I'm really actually done proofing and am hitting save publish now. 4:16]  [it's still not bad.  it was fun to write and will now be exciting imagining people reading it.]  Now it's back to Bertrand Russell, but when husband comes back with the kids: Gardening!]

Well bleaders, I hope you like your *philosophers a little, uh, transgressive.  You probably do.

love, 

Jennifer

*JMH is a registered philosopher with the state of New York.   

 

Secret String Beans [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear fellow poets and esteemed bleaders,

My mac froke out on Sat night and I have been pretty disconnected since then.  It’s always a bad time for such a thing and of course it is a bad time for it now.  Still, I have been spending a lot of time gardening, and that is a good time.  So I just checked this blog for the first time in a bunch of days. 

Great Caesar’s ghost, you guys have been busy. 

First, congratulations to us for being one in a hundred, which is the same as being one in a million, but from the other direction. 

Second, Matthew you crack me up.  I haven't read all your posts yet but I am already very interested and certain you have to come over my house and talk about this with me.  I will give you a choice of coffee, tea, beer, or sangria.  

Third, my attention for David on Marylyn is the ablated ablate of bated breath.

Fourth, yall are talking gardening!  I’m in sun-dappled Brooklyn having exactly the same experience.  This is the first time in my life that I have ever made a garden.  Last summer we had only just moved in and I threw in some flowers and clipped a few things and enjoyed the roses on either side of our yard (though they were/are a bit bright, loud red on one side, shrieking pink on the other, and then in the middle my little dark hidden garden under a cherry tree that blinks pink for a week then goes somber as a shadowed hombre). 

I go for a variation of greens and soft oranges and marigolds and washed out pinks, a little bright blue, a little bright yellow.  This year I discovered that I am noticeably less of what we used to call a “mental case” when I am in the garden fussing about.  But still I share the various expressions of hope and total existential despair, as did Jim Tate in the poem Stacey posted.  My yard was not really being used by the prior tenant, so it was mostly mine to do, which I didn’t fully appreciate until reading Laura’s post.  It is easier for me to just put things where I want, by feel, than it is to rip out stuff.

My first challenge was the grass.  Not entirely straightforward, the growing of grass.  A lot to it.  Very satisfying.  Then I put in some flowers.  Most recently it’s been all about vegetables.  I don’t have many of each but I have lots of variety.  We’ve already eaten a strawberry.  The four of us split it.  Pretty exciting for 3 and 5 year old and their parents. 

Laura, I too grew some from the seed; I too made it pretty hard on the poor little its  When the roof collapsed out back and were were not allowed back there, I let them all go arid of soil and wan of leaf.  The plants I later bought as toddlers and teenagers are much more encouraging, but who knows.  No one knows. 

Well, I don't have much more computer time right now, so I can not respond further to all the ghosts of Caesar.  Even Caesar ceases.

And you,  such a brute.  Next week: poetry!  photographs!

love,

Jennifer

Chapter X: In which I publish a poem in The New Yorker. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

The Best American Poetry Blog seems to have an affection for the poetry of lyrics and with that in mind I offer the lyric to this keen ecstatic classic, which I think one rarely sees but only hears.  Bowie wrote the music. 

Iggy Pop LUST FOR LIFE lyrics

(hear the song)

Here comes Johnny Yen again

With the liquor and drugs

And a flesh machine

He's gonna do another strip tease

 

Hey man, where'd you get that lotion?

I've been hurting since I bought the gimmick

About something called love

Yeah, something called love

Well, that's like hypnotising chickens

 

Well, I'm just a modern guy

Of course, I've had it in the ear before

'Cause of a lust for life

'Cause of a lust for life

 

I'm worth a million in prizes

With my torture film

Drive a G.T.O.

Wear a uniform

All on government loan

 

I'm worth a million in prizes

Yeah, I'm through with sleeping on the sidewalk

No more beating my brains

No more beating my brains

With the liquor and drugs

With the liquor and drugs

 

Well, I'm just a modern guy

Of course, I've had it in my ear before ...

I bring this to your attention because I have a poem in the current New Yorker.  Page 84, all the way at the back.  It is very beautiful to me, as is the Contributor’s page, which speaks of me as if we were old friends.  It is a sweet week, seeing my issue in strangers’ hot strange hands on the subway.  Anyway, here is My Hero.

 See that?  Thus Quoth Iggy. 

 Like billions of others, I have a long and storied relationship to this song not least because of the hypnotized chickens.  Also because of getting to say I’m worth a million in prizes.  Which must have meant something to me, hmm?  But also the utter buttered uddery-ness of the milky “Well, I’m just a modern guy/Of course, I’ve had it in my ear before.”  That has always made me happy.  The first time I heard it I thought, can a person say that?  A person can. 

But there’s also “Here comes Johnny Yen again,” which comes to mind at times as I know what it is like to run like a demon to the sugar bowl.  I suspect cookie monster hears that line growl its way into his mind and out his mouth.   

Still, like trillions of other emotional wretches I’m weak for the line “Lust for Life.”  Just saying it is a kind of paradise.  Now that I think about it as a slogan it sounds like anti-abortion prostitutes.  It could happen. 

Seeing the Stooges live a bunch of times helped muscle me through a BA and a PhD. Including times I barely clocked in at taking it one heartbeat at a time.  At times, I wasn't taking it.   Somewhere there is a video of Iggy leaning down to where I stood in the pit against the stage and allowing us to scream some lyrics together, “Now I want to be your dog,” if you must know.  It doesn’t sound quite right in this context but I assure you it was a romantic triumph. Also somewhere there is video of me crowdsurfing in the pit.  

So here we are.  Now I only surf remotely.  I do not remotely surf.  I do not have a million in prizes, but I am, at last, a modern guy.  I have to get back to Bertrand Russell but I want to see if I can get Iggy to read this post, and so please indulge me this allowance. 

Hi Iggy.  I hope you like my poem.  I love you.  

Okay, I guess that wraps it.

kisses of the appropriate nature to all of you,

Jennifer

My son, the ladybug [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

Today I attended my first school play as a mother.  Max was outstanding.  It didn't occur to me to put up this picture of it captioned with the first lines of Kafka's Metamorphosis until long after I had done it.  Me and David and Paul had a nice reading outside in Bryant Park last night.  Their poems were great as always, they both write poems that are serious when you read them but when they read them the poems are also hilarious.  It was fun and so nice to see all the friends who showed up, really sweet.  The only problem is that I had therapy just before the reading and afterwards we went out for dinner and drank martinis and now I kind of can't be sure what I said to my therapist and what I said to the dinner table and am feeling ambiently abashed.  Well I suppose martinis always leave me ambiently abashed.  It looks like I will have a poem in the next New Yorker.  

So, everything is great except I am a monstrous verminous bug.  Everybody stay alive and we'll meet back here next week.

Jennifer

The Gravity of the Situation [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

You know when you have just figured out that working in the garden zens you out about as well as the more problematic intoxicants and then the building next to your outdoor space collapses and you get a notice glued on your door that you have to stay out of your backyard?  Sucks right?

Roof caved in, then demo knocked out the floors from within (hanging by crane) then knocked the top floor in, and those bricks from the walls of the top floor is what is filling the downstairs doorway of the place in the top picture.  Strong men are saving the day, as you can see, with hammers and shovels and something that sounds like a giant dentist's drill that hates you.  But now it is quiet and the birds and new bird babies are going nuts.  Baby squirrels running around in the open like silly idiots, because they can not read the injunction on the front door, nor the evidence of several visiting cats.

Thanks Stacey for the Ammon's poem.   I've been thinking of you and David, and the losses, personal and communal that we share. I'm grateful for the community we have here.  

I thought I'd show these pictures because while the building is clearly in despair it is also clearly relaxing.  Soon there will be sun and sky there, in the shape of a building, and then eventually, just sun and sky.  My point is that at least things do keep happening.  We are never going to run out of pizza, and things are always going to keep happening.  Death isn't even that much of a drag, a lot of people feel just fine about disassociating their elements when the time comes, and what do you care how long you last, life isn't theater, you don't miss the end if you leave early.  Just getting into existence is cool.  Staying forever would be exhausting and weird.    Some of our friends are in the first reel of the film, safe at last.  We're out here in the open, and it is very strange.  Like Bono says, we have to carry each other.  I think if a building comes down on your garden the demo crew should provide neighboring tenants with opiates.  Is that wrong?

Of course, the only people whose hearts don't break when they grow up are people whose hearts were already broken.  The unbearable insults us by being bearable, but what loss to us if the Hart lives on?  It's very sad of course though, let's face it, nothing helps.  Well, a hot cup of tea or coffee or a refreshing cold beverage helps a little, if you feel bad you should get one of those.  And taking walks.  If I had a collie I'd name it Melon.  Someday, when they hear us in film and tv shows saying "I'll get the paper" they won't know what paper we could be talking about.  And if the pill is available by injection, is it still the pill?  So get you gone, Von Hugel, but with blessings on your head.

love,

Jennifer

PS. If you want to see more pictures of the building.

Tweet tweet: A punch that won't pack, A guest not a snack. [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

I've been stricken by an anonymous germ and have coughed my way back from the trench of despair to the light of no longer feeling terrible but still feeling beat up and blue.

Also, thanks to the below post by DL (not in this case the down low), I keep thinking about Marlene Dietrich going down on Tallulah Bankhead at a party.  

So I won't even try to focus.  Which brings me to the subject of twitter.  Twitter statements are limited to 140 characters, which is fewer than your average sentence.  (fewer is a funny word to type, like a musical scale going up and then, like Marlene...) 

Poetry is also a craft of arbitrary rules and syllabic limitations, and some tweets are indeed poetic.  Most however are uncondensed yammer or overcondensed blither, the latter the worser for having been hoisted on its own petard.  I'm not a kid anymore, but I still know it's better to get hoisted on someone else's petard.

Yet like so many others, I have recently joined the tweeters.  At first I tried using it to promote my books, but that made me feel like a twit, so I quit it.  Basho don't sell soap.  Tweeters brag about odd things, the cleverness of their meal or a celebrity in their afternoon.  To tweet is to crow.  Others do in fact sell soap, so to tweet is to hawk.  Not the worst idea, but as the parrot said, why tweet when you can talk?

Then again, I received a direct message tweet sending me to this link, and I thought it was about the greatest thing ever.  I thought twitter was supposed to be good for getting answers to questions, but I asked it if anyone knew if Howard Hughes germ phobia worked, that is, did he successfully avoid colds and the flu?  Doesn't seem anyone knows.

On tweeting, the verdict is still out I suppose.  I posted in two consecutive tweets Emily's tell all the truth but tell it slant and that was fun for me.  Did others also feel her glow?   Despite the trade's tricks, I got no feedback, I was not fed tweetback, so I can not know.

I was just thinking that someone who "doesn't know their own strength" in fact doesn't know how delicate the world is, and how much everyone does, in fact, care.

I'm drinking coffee for the first time after a full week of tea and honey.  There are bees in NYC, does that mean there is honey here somewhere?  Where?  I just taped an interview for Air America to air this Saturday.  I think I was lucid.  Lucider than I am being here.  I love letting down my lucid for you, dear bleaders, bogs and leaders, blobs of eaters, bloggy readers.  I was so sick I missed the poetry brothel last week -- major drag.  Do the kids still say drag these days?

I grew up with no sports watching and always envied people whose moods tacked to the scores of distant heroes.  Thusly I follow my amazon numbers, as if the fortunes of single volumes on certain days could tell me to a digit that everything was going to be OK.  

Everything is going to be OK.  I say this not from conviction but because my concern lifts when I'm stumping for optimism.  Get up.  I'm talking to my inner Lana Turner.  That goes double for you Dietrich.  And Tallulah, sweetheart, you are a guest, not a snack.  

yers most devotedly,

Jennifer

JenniferMichaelHecht.com 

Poetry Brothel in the New York Post [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear bleaders,
I have been acting up again, for your amusement.

Check out the Poetry Brothel in the New York Post

That's me with the glasses and my husband next to me, the others are really great young poets who are part of the Poetry Brothel (my husband is mc).  We're mostly all connected to the New School, a bunch of them were students of mine when they got their MFAs there.  There is some amazing talent here.

In this photo the stunning and bold:

The Madame (aka Stephanie Berger)
Tennessee Pink (a k a Nicholas Adamski)
The Car Sargasso (aka Christie Ann Reynolds)
Oola Waistbinder (aka Sarah Autumn Feeley)
Le Petite Mort (aka Joey Cannizzaro)
The Emcee, John Chaneski

(Car  is on the floor, Tennessee has the eye-patch, the Madame is the darling redhead in the middle, you can guess the rest from this)  Several poetry whores are missing from the shot, but I am holding a book by one of them, the brilliant Amy Lawless.  That's her real name, I can't remember her pw name right now.

It's so cool, and nuts.  I love it.  I also enjoy that all the books in the shot are mine, my poetry and my philosophy/history books, except I'm holding a friend's poetry book.  Anyway, I love the shot, and the others at the site.

Also, this little video is delightful.  I'm at the start and the finish and, admittedly, a bit dramatic.  It's really a nicely done little piece.  I can't stop grinning and biting my lip at it.  

See folks, all you have to do to get people interested in poetry is shake it a little.

love,
Jennifer
JenniferMichaelHecht.com