The Best American Poetry

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-One): Anselm Berrigan [by Angela Ball]

What the Streets Look Like

Mom: the sweet rotted
summer stench still
taps the nasal cavity
inside breezes several
times per block. I have
a greater empathy for
pigeons after two months
at work in the unnatural
country, & find it
instinctively nerve-
wracking to remove my
wallet from its pocket
here in town despite
the general lack of threat.
The streets look grey
nonplussed, post-
pubescent relative to
ancient times but
nonetheless grid-wizened
in the face of an ever-
changing lineup of
banks, bars, and specialty
shops with their weak
signs and distant tones
(lighting). Second Ave
is giving up, slowly
its cheap depth store-
front by storefront.
One feels less than
nostalgic for the like-
lihood of being mugged
but likelihood itself
feels less than evident
unless one is being
unstable and unspoken
coming to dreaming
while pushing a stroller
over the variously cracked
slabs of concrete each
block yet greets the
wheels with. The right
part of the y heading
west on tenth between
2nd and 3rd is still
tree-lined and aristocratic
as feint, though its
sidewalk looks like
late Auden's smoked
cheeks. I loathe it,
amiably, when Sylvie
is asleep.
                -Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan is the author of several books of poetry, including Pregrets (Black Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody (Wave Books, 2018), Come in Alone (Wave Books, 2016), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). With Alice Notley and his brother Edmund Berrigan, he coedited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2011).

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-One): Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan's "What the Streets Look Like"—perhaps a letter to “Mom,” also a poet—employs a somatic/psychological Rimbaud-like intoxication—the speaker, immersed in the city, entrains us. A special feature is New York City’s “summer stench,” inseparable from the perception of it, as it “taps the nasal cavity / inside breezes.” Like most raptures “coming to dreaming,” this one is both personal and impersonal (“one feels less than / nostalgic”), both full-throated and guarded. The poet’s time “working in the unnatural country” has not only affected his “empathy for pigeons” but renders it “instinctively nerve-wracking” to take out his wallet “here in town despite / the general lack of threat.” The poem’s compact lineation and hard enjambment make the city’s press more than palpable, audible. We receive a vivid précis of the neighborhood's commercial background and prospects, its tired variety show:

     The streets look grey
     nonplussed, post-
     pubescent relative to
     ancient times but
     nonetheless grid-wizened
     in the face of an ever-
     changing lineup of
     banks, bars, and specialty
     shops with their weak
     signs and distant tones
     (lighting).

The oddly-wonderful "grid-wizened" captures so much of the American city street, its "line-up" of putative entertainment also suggestive of crime's usual suspects.

Two-thirds of the way through our walk, we discover that the poet pushes a stroller. This poem, part of a genre Ron Padgett usefully terms “The Walk,” is—because it happens in a city—also a flaneur poem. Who has heard of a flaneur with a baby? A lobster on a string, maybe, but not progeny. And why not? In its twisty, inward/outward progress, this walk rehearses and refreshes tradition.

The poem’s “variously cracked / slabs of concrete each / block yet greets the / wheels with” are the clunky opposite of free association, are planes for walking forced by weather into a union of fissures that brokenly leads, following the course of “right” as opposed to sinister, of letters (“y”), and Arabic numerals (“2^nd and 3^rd is still / tree-lined and aristocratic / as feint”), this latter an accurate and surprising characterization that comically frustrates our expectation for another “f” word and supplies one that suggests half-hearted pretense. The city is a place of artifice. A reason to love it; a reason to be wary.

The Y’s “aristocratic” arm is a sidewalk surprisingly resembling a great poet’s face: one who once flaneured the same streets; once advised, I’m told, that “the secret of walking in New York is jaywalking.” How killingly accurate, those “smoked cheeks”—the mask of tobacco combined with age, a look both preserved and ravaged.

A languorous, pleasurable word for dislike appears: “loathe,” surprisingly followed by “amiably”—and this walk has received its full and rightful depiction.

But wait,  in the quietus of her sleep, the baby must be named. Because “Sylvie” means “woodsy,” she is angel of the city and of the poem. In “What the Streets Look like," Anselm Berrigan masters the improvisational essential, which is to say, the right kind.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams [by Angela Ball]

Border Clashes

 

We stroll out of El Zocalo

to find a world turning white

with snow. Not more than an hour ago,

or so it seems, it was still just a neighborhood

of homemade heaps and small dark houses

huddled against the single-digit skies

of southwest Detroit.

Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,

turn on the wipers.

1-75 to the Lodge,

I pretend to follow the north star

but pull off at the Warren-Forest exit

and pull into the Third Street Saloon.

I take out a five for a Stroh’s

and take a look around

at the only other patrons,

a table of students,

one of whom I know, a poet.

She catches my eye, looks away,

carelessly laughing as I recall

*

Christmas night at the Detroit-

Windsor border. I sat alone

in the back of an Accord

being driven by Mary, Katie

beside her, two sisters,

nearsighted, brown-haired, blond.

The guard bent down, jerked his head

my way, and sneered, “You gals

bringing anything across?”

Flashing licenses and teeth—

“Is—that--all?”—

Katie, enraged, swore for hours,

but how could I, I who have always

lived between countries,

between that night and another night,

thirteen years before,

when my girlfriend and I

found ourselves detained by Customs

because I was said to resemble

a West Indian brother

twenty years my senior?

Later, back in the U.S.A.,

Katie and I danced our asses off.

Sweat flung from the sprinkler

our figures cut, twinkled like icy

stars on the stage

lit unlit by slo-mo strobes.

I could smell the sweat of a hundred

worlds, the sweet and sour stench

of cheap perfume and bargain-brand soap.

It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

teeming with bloods.

When the lights came up, we filed out,

stunned, as though the places

to which we had to return--

Plymouth and Detroit--

had been found dead

in each other’s arms:

murder-suicide.

*

Last call, and I’m just fine.

I stumble to my car, spin out

of the lot in a spray of sleet and mud

and hit the northbound Lodge at sixty.

Not a few of these vehicles are harboring drunks

like me. The world is still turning white.

The white dotted lines are useless now.

We weave our ways home,

as best we can,

in lanes of our own making.

-Tyrone Williams

About the poem: It was written during, and about, the year I returned to Detroit (1986-1987) after spending three years in Cincinnati (1983-1986). For me it evokes that year I was trying to decide if I'd stay in my hometown or return to my job in Cincinnati (which I did) .-Tyrone Williams

Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford)(Delete Press, 2021)and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is at https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams

Every border is a question, a passage from one state of being to another. Tyrone Williams’s compelling poem of passage negotiates straightforwardness and peril: the evening of a man-about-town á la Frank O’Hara, the decay of towns and their possibilities, and the danger of passing between worlds when trolls and their questions guard the bridge.

At the start, “we stroll out of El Zocalo”—a Detroit bar channeling a Mexican bandstand—“to find a world turning white / with snow.” We feel the pleasant shock of transformation that ennobles “homemade heaps and small dark houses,” but at the same time can’t avoid the ominousness of “a world turning white”—a world in which the poet-speaker’s presence is at best, questionable; at worst, dangerous—seemingly unlike the cityscape O’Hara strolls in “The Day Lady Died,” its material choices so rich that he almost falls asleep with “quandariness.” Yet mortality and injustice are at large in both poets’ worlds. As a Black performer and drug user, Lady Day has been targeted by law enforcement and forbidden to sing. She triumphs through a whispered performance so powerful that her audience stops breathing—as she herself will do, before long. The poem, steeped in this retrospect, carries both exhilaration and chill.

This poem’s “I do this, I do that” moment, “Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,” conveys massive information with a glancing touch. This is a familiar scene; the cars basic, their upbeat names ironic. The poet, after pretending “to follow the north star” finds himself diverted to another drinking spot—whose specific highway exit and name, along with “Stroh’s”  and “a five,” sink us into the scene the way O’Hara’s “New World Writing” and “Strega” do in “The Day Lady Died.”

The poet sees students, including “a poet I know,” whose laughter shades into a memory of “Christmas night at the Detroit- / Windsor border,” and an incident featuring a border guard who “jerks his head” in the speaker’s direction, asks the white women in the front seat, “You gals / bringing anything across?” His friend Katie swore for hours after this, but the poet, all too familiar with such scenarios, who “has always lived between countries,” remembers a worse incident, a time he was falsely detained on suspicion of being someone else.

The mood changes to manic festivity as, “back in the USA,” Katie and the poet dance frenetically: “Sweat flung from the sprinkler / our figures cut, twinkled like stars. . . ,” a moment eloquent with joy—human precipitation joins the poem’s snow and sleet-spray. The stanza throngs with place names—a sign, we have come to understand, that the poet is at home:

     It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

     and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

     and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

     and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

     teeming with bloods.

But the section ends with a darkly comic image of “The places to which we had to return-- / Plymouth and Detroit-- / . . . dead / in each other’s arms: / murder-suicide.” In its fatality, the poem reminds us that the border between place and people is permeable, that places determine lives, and that these are places that manufacture death.

The last section heads the poet home. “Just fine,” he stumbles to his car, spins out “in a spray of sleet and mud.” The highway’s milieu resembles the bar’s, except snow blinded: “The white dotted lines are useless now.”  Some borders are crucial to all.  We remember, perhaps, O’Hara’s statement, early in “The Day Lady Died,” that he will get off the train and go “straight to dinner / and I don’t know the people who will feed me,” this trivial uncertainty pointing toward an existential one, an uncertainty much more radical in Williams’s poem. Its “I” has become “We,” and we are left, in William Stafford’s phrase, “travelling through the dark”:

     We weave our ways home,

     as best we can,

     in lanes of our own making.

What is a free-verse poem if not “lanes of our own making”?  Tyrone Williams’s masterful poem recreates a complicated dystopia in which living while Black generates endless “Border Clashes.” Williams’s lines (or lanes) string tight, summon the tension between knowledge and mystery, safety and danger. Making of it a sort of song. -- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Nine): Dobby Gibson [by Angela Ball]

Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber

Little glass planet,
I like picking you up.
As if I’m holding my own thought,
one blown molten with a puff
of some craftsman’s breath⏤is it still inside you?
You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine
anyone hurling you into the sea,
but eventually we all have a job to do.
I think of the early mornings and storm warnings
you braved to find the village dinner.
I don’t remember carrying you
home on the plane from Seoul,
crew dozing behind the cockpit door,
autopilot engaged⏤what were they dreaming of?
I don’t even know what shore
you washed up on: Busan, Incheon, Samcheok.
Are you glad we made you a home here so far
from the sea? is a question I won’t ask in case
your answer is the one you don’t want to give.
I love how perfectly you fit in my hand,
at first cold, and the way the morning looks
through you, as green and cloudy
as an unknown we no longer fear.
But I wouldn’t want to be held up
to the sun either, not because I’m a monster,
but because I, too, am transparent and trusting,
and mistake both for the truth.
Beneath our lives there are sordid undulations
and embraces brief and sweet,
a nearly invisible line connecting us to the fleet,
with every breath worth saving,
like the sip of air inside us
full of an old sea’s grace
or the ancient word hidden in our lungs
that once released back into the wild
will finally set us free.

-Dobby Gibson

Someone told me a story, possibly apocryphal, that Robert Bly, at the height of his Bly-ness, would walk into a creative writing workshop, place a rock on the table and say: “Write a poem about this. When I’m back, we’ll share the results.” He’d then go across the street to a bar and enjoy a drink. For a while, I employed this same somatic ritual, using objects around my house. I drafted this poem quickly, beginning to end, in a few minutes. When I showed it to a friend, they said it was about fatherhood. I revised it with the belief they were right. - Dobby Gibson

Dobby Gibson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press, 2019). He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Nine) Dobby Gibson

“Poem for An Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” is an ode, a poem of praise for an object with implications beyond itself. It begins intimately, “Little glass planet, / I like picking you up.” Isn’t the pleasure of holding a small object a sine qua non for collecting?  The image move outwards from the speaker’s “own thought” to the craftsman’s creating breath perhaps still contained in the “beautiful bauble.” But this is no fancy objet d’art, but a tool “with a job to do” that has earned its praise through the hardship of “early mornings” and “storm warnings.” The speaker freely admits not remembering where he found it—“what shore / you washed up on.” We travel with object and owner in the digressive company of sleeping pilots, the long blur of the journey. In a rhetorical twist, the speaker doesn’t ask the bobber how it feels about being dry docked “far / from the sea,” but returns to the object’s tactile presence, its “thisness,” in a lover’s discourse:

I love how perfectly you fit in my hand,

at first cold, and the way the morning looks

through you, as green and cloudy

as an unknown we no longer fear.

This description becomes phenomenal, moving from physical presence—nailed by “at first cold”—to astronomy and epistemology. It makes the bobber a cosmic object, but homelike—with the mystery that home always entails: “an unknown we no longer fear.”

The next lines resemble in tone the bluff friendliness of Frank O’Hara in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun At Fire Island” ‘. . . Sorry, Sun, I stayed up late last night talking to Hal’--—no preamble necessary, just casual fellow feeling:          

     But I wouldn’t want to be held up

     to the sun either, not because I’m a monster,

     but because I, too, am transparent and trusting,

     and mistake both for the truth.

 

Like O’Hara, our speaker is vulnerable—but where O’Hara finds himself implicated in the sun’s transience (“. . . go I must, they’re calling / me,” the sun says)—the speaker here is vulnerable because “transparent and trusting.” He asserts a psychological affinity with the bobber, both mistaking transparency and trust for truth.

The speaker goes on to assert an broader affinity for the bobber and its situation, making of it a microcosm for the workings of human community: “a nearly invisible line connecting us to the fleet. . . .”  After all, we too are creatures made of breath, some of it from “an old sea”—we go back that far. The poem’s final leap, made possible by the object but reaching beyond it, attains the heart of human need:

     . . .the ancient word hidden in our lungs

     that once released back into the wild

     will finally set us free.

Dobby Gibson’s entrancing “For an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” renders us dazed and lucky travelers, fetched up at a wonder that is ours—not just to hold—but to embody: essential as the line, “nearly invisible,” that connects human ingenuity and survival, spirit and flesh.—Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Eight): Nathan Hoks [by Angela Ball]

Poem for Wendy’s Eyes

Last week as I was eating an apple pie
With my bare hands all by myself
In a small room painted lime green
And lit by a dim chandelier which
Hung from a white ceiling that sparkled
I thought about Wendy’s green eyes

Which made Wendy’s eyelashes look green
Which reminded me of the ocean
Which was spitting up so many jigsaw pieces
Sea glass empty shells old wigs
Dead fish elongated squid folded jellyfish
All the junk of friendship the bracelets and twigs

And then Wendy closed her eyes --

Nothing lasts forever, not Wendy
Not apple pie, not the crappy light bulbs
In the dusty chandelier, not the pain
As one awakens in an empty room
So cheer up --
even the nurse won’t
Ignore your screams all night --

When the battery acid bubbles out
It looks like a syrup but I resist
The urge to lick it and instead watch
The flaccid plastic bag that drifts

Like a winged creature or a leaky brain
Hyperactively dreaming of Wendy --
Look how it comforts the bulldozer
While the thunder bumbles its way
Around the arid interior

-Nathan Hoks

Nathan Hoks's most recent book is Nests in Air (Black Ocean). He teaches in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, and in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Eight): Nathan Hoks

The title of Nathan Hoks's “Poem for Wendy’s Eyes” leads us to expect a conventional love poem. We get everything but. The speaker is currently “eating an apple pie / with my bare hands all by myself”—unexpected behavior from a troubadour.  But who doesn’t sometimes eat like a mythical Goth or slightly more complex Visigoth? The speaker notes his surroundings, “a small room painted lime green / And lit by a dim chandelier”—and this fixture, and its magic effect on the ceiling, brings him to “Wendy’s green eyes”—and to their connection, not to the rest of Wendy, but to the sea, not eating, but disgorging "jigsaw pieces":

 

     Sea glass empty shells old wigs

     Dead fish elongated squid folded jellyfish

     All the junk of friendship the bracelets and twigs

 

Then we are unexpectedly again with Wendy, but only long enough to see her close her eyes. Just for a moment? In sleep? Death? Then the poem becomes memento mori and/or ubi sunt,

 

     Nothing lasts forever, not Wendy

     Not apple pie, not the crappy light bulbs

     In the dusty chandelier, not the pain

     As one awakens in an empty room

     So cheer up --

                            even the nurse won’t

     Ignore your screams all night

 

The poem’s nadir may be its fourth negation : “not the pain / As one awakens in an empty room. . . .”

From there, we are urged to “cheer up” and given the back-handed comfort that even over-taxed medical professionals will eventually respond to our “all night” screams.

This is a poetry of direct announcement, like that of Charles Simic. It speaks as Andre Breton might, were he a Zen master; or Pablo Neruda, were he to let go of the majestic.

The penultimate stanza gives us oddly appetizing battery acid—are we still on shore, watching “jigsaw pieces” appear from a puzzle that can never unite?  And gives us Wendy for the last time, as if flying like Peter Pan, on the wings of a “flaccid plastic bag” a little like the plastic bag that appears in the film, American Beauty, though without its pretentions. How wonderful that the bag “comforts the bulldozer,” also appearing out of nowhere, suddenly an animate, giant glumness. And, finally, weather arrives in the form of clumsy, bee-like thunder: “While the thunder bumbles its way / Around the arid interior.” (This last recalling John Ashbery's riotous sestina,"Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.")

This unexpected ending to Nathan Hoks's disorienting love poem confirms, in an oddly cheering way, that the conflict between what Robert Frost called “inner and outer weather” will never resolve, but continue to seduce us into new forms of thought, bonding them to our old, sanctified loves; admitting what Kenneth Koch so memorably called “Fresh Air, “ the perpetual tonic of surprise.

- Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky [by Angela Ball]

 

The Ballet

The dancers
In a terribly bright
Light blue gauze
Retained the mystery

Skating on a lake
Blue and ice
An illusionary time
Where poetry feels inevitable

The terrific clown
Who lies inside
Every blue dress
Does he see me

Always a star
Always a root
Horrible auras
At the door

But no matter where we start
It all ends in an ocean
Hard and fast
On the approaching blue dawn

Until then
A deep low whisper
What is language anyway
An ending that never happens

-Dorothea Lasky

"The Ballet" was originally published in American Poetry Review in 2021. It is from a book called The Green Lake, which is forthcoming from Wave Books. The book is in conversation with the horrors of our time, particularly in regards to climate change and its effects. -Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Animal (Wave Books). Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry in the MFA program at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she directs the Poetry program.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky

In her luminous “The Ballet,” Dorothea Lasky both caresses the idealization art brings and exposes its divided nature. Her address to ballet reminds us of Emily Dickinson’s address to God as “burglar, banker, father.” We are also perhaps reminded of Frank O’Hara’s love of ballet as embodied by his lover, dancer and dance-historian Vincent Warren; and of O’Hara’s frequent comic alternation between idealism and realism (“we love you get up”).

The poem’s short, heavily stressed lines carry candor close to the unspeakable. In the first stanza, “terribly bright” is a first suggestion of a deformed reality that jealously retains “the mystery.”

The second stanza, moving from a specific past to a sweeping present, works a little like an old toy in which figures are slotted into a base, below which the player’s hand moves them unseen, so that that they glide from one position to the next, “Skating on a lake / Blue and ice.” By now, it’s clear that this is a poetry of constraint, of frightening concentration, of the breaking of the “illusionary time / Where poetry feels inevitable.”

“The terrific clown / Who lives inside/ Every blue dress / Does it see me? brings a coterie of associations. The circle of blue gauze  (the poem’s central color)  hides the dancer’s sex, with its horrific mysogenized lips, so like a clown’s—like Lon Chaney’s rictus in the silent film, Laugh Clown Laugh, in which Chaney’s character is terrorized by desire for his innocent, beautiful ward (Loretta Young, in her first film role).

We may think of the custom, in the 19^th-century foyer de la danse of the Paris Opera Ballet, of devoting the hours from five to seven to assignations between impoverished dancers and the aristocratic “patrons” who make of them divided creatures, ethereal and hungry, gliding and grasping.

This is a world tied to two horses who gallop in diametrical directions:

 

     Always a star

     Always a root

     Horrible auras

     At the door

 

The ocean’s blue is “hard and fast”—impersonal, impregnable, riding the “blue dawn”: a destiny, the sadness and travail of age.

The poem’s absorbing fatality, accomplished in “a deep low whisper,” is altered at its close, denying closure: "What is language anyway? / An ending that never happens."

In these lines, the feigned offhandedness of “anyway” carries an excruciating Dickinsonian “zero at the bone.” Dorothea Lasky’s sui generis “The Ballet,” a masterpiece of mixed feelings, sears and purifies with honesty and the unreasonable comfort of an apt surprise.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Five) Matthew Yeager [by Angela Ball]

The Ongoing Lamentation
of Anna Nicole Smith

“You have a beautiful face Mr. Gray. Don’t frown.”
- Wilde

….Right now, for instance, there’s my terrycloth robe,
the walls, the curtains, the carpet, my slippers,
and the sofa. Six pink things. Six pink things
I can see. There’s also the mirror I like,
with the real gold-plated frame, which, from where I sit,
multiplies some of the pink. (It must be lucky
for such a pretty mirror to get to mirror
such pretty things.) And my skin’s almost pink
(it’s peach) and underneath my pink furry slippers, unseen,
are ten pink-painted toenails.

In the corner of the mirror, a shame,
is the window, showing off some drifts of cumuli,
but even when skies are clear,
the picture’s pretty much the same:
just green trees and green hills, a few white specks
of houses, berserk-looking and all
spread out, with jutting decks and sparkling light blue pools –
houses just like mine, that manage to be different
but all alike. California
is not so great. It’d be better,
I think, if I were to replace
all the windows with mirrors to keep all this pink
inside. Then my pink would bang around, wild,
like a bird in a sealed glass box! Maybe
I could even get those mirrors
like the ones they have in the cop movies,
that can be seen through in one direction. That way,
people outside could enjoy the room,
and I’d never have to give any of it up
or look at their faces. I’d stare at the mirrors,
and the people would think I was staring at them
and would wonder how I stayed
so expressionless. Poise, they would think,
and grace. I would like that…
The world’s pinkest prettiest room.

I’m fat. I’m old. I’m a fat old woman now,
though I’m fatter than I am old.
Sitting makes it worse. My stomach
is gross; it bulges; it’s big always
as if half-sticking up
out of tub-water. But I’ve been fat before.
I was a fat little girl.
If you could pull apart my closet doors,
slide the hangers, finger the tags, you’d see.
You’d see my story; that’s all I mean.
There are so many sizes,
a department store rack’s worth of rising sizes.
I keep them anymore so I won’t have to re-buy them,
which is sad, at least to me.
Up and down I go, fatting out
and slimming down. It’s odd;
I’ve been alive thirty-eight years,
and no-one’s ever asked me what size I am
when I dream. Not even Daniel.
Well…I’m fat. Every night! I’m fat and I stomp around,
and I don’t know what to do; I look down,
and the fat pushes out the tops of my shoes.
And even when it’s gone, when I’m thin,
when even my arms are thin, it tingles.
It tingled even when I was beautiful and in magazines
because I was beautiful. It tingles
like those limbs of amputees and scares
the daylights out of me….

But there are tricks, tricks to scare the fears into holes,
sayings I can say into myself any time,
as if started up by a doll’s tugged string.
I just say, "Vickie," putting on my Texas twang,
“Vickie," which is my real name, "Shut up;
at least you were beautiful once.
How few in the world get to be.”
But then I stop; isn’t that the same as saying
that I’m beautiful no longer
and won’t be again? Still, I’m right.
For awhile, I was stunning; I stunned,
and I have framed photos to confirm it,
and remembered looks-in-mirrors to confirm it,
though I’m not always in the mood
to be consoled. Even the teenage boys are old;
they must be pushing thirty now,
with receding hair-lines,
milk-eyed dogs, mortgages, two-car garages.
Do they ever blow the dust off thoughts of me?
Can they climb back into outgrown fantasies?
I used to think of them, up late
in their little darks, gulping, diddling their little peckers,
one me each in their million boy-minds.
At times I’d even cross over, imagine I was them,
let myself play across my very own mind.
I’d see myself, or rather, see a me
patched together from that me in the magazines.
It was sick, but I liked it.
I liked them with my magazines.
I thought of them huddled behind playground dumpsters,
up on their tip-toes, excited.
I pictured them in the backs of yellow buses,
slapping shaken-out centerfolds to rear-aisle windows.
I’d giggle thinking how all this
must make those pretty, skinny, kid-girls cluck.
I am not a vengeful person,
but it wasn’t without its teardrop of revenge.
“Do you know how many people will see this?”
Hef asked, and looked carefully up into my eyes.
(Hef was capable of seeing
into peephole-eyes like mine.)
"Do you? Do you really?"
Truthfully, I didn’t. I still don’t. I tried
to wrap my head around how many,
thought of cities, big foggy numbers,
of people in yellow boxes stacked on top of one another,
but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to;
The idea of all those people
drugged me groggy with vengeance and bliss.

I was invisible once, was an invisible girl,
although I always had a pretty face.
“She has a pretty face,” I’d tell myself.
I’d chant it to myself, chant it till it started swinging,
till it had hills and valleys – a new melody each time:
“She has a pretty fay-ace, she has a pretty fay-ace.”
It was really all I had.
I had an awful yellowing room with no posters,
a ratty-robed mother in curlers,
no breasts, no boyfriends, really no friends at all.
And I wasn’t smart.
But the face was like something I could build on.
My only moon, it, or the lovely idea of it,
would circle me by night, at a perfect speed.
You couldn’t be beautiful without one
(I knew that even then), so I had a small, but real hope,
and because of it, I could dream.
Did others dream what I dreamed?
Of course they did (I wasn’t that stupid),
but because of the face, I dreamed
more and bigger and better than they could.
I dreamed scandals and sequins, red carpets and street vents,
men with rough, experienced hands,
more diamonds than I had fingers for….
There were classrooms (certain ones in particular)
in which I was the new girl at school, except
I walked to my seat not as me,
but as Marilyn Monroe, in silence and heel-steps,
and felt heads turn as if for a bride.
I mapped the bleak side too.
I imagined fame’s worst parts. In my dreams,
I wore big sunglasses, pulled baseball caps low,
tugged un-washed hair into a ponytail.
I left lovers, fell down in public, attended funerals
wracked with grief, wearing no make-up.
I punched a cameraman at a funeral….
And I loved these dreams too.
And I’d replay them, my favorites, over and over,
cycling through them, like records,
amassing new details each trip around,
and soon they became something else I had.
I could be beautiful. And famous.
– But when I’d look at myself, really look at myself,
full-length, towel at my feet,
my heart would beat fast: I was just a fat girl….

But why waste time with the misery of that?
What’s the use re-shedding old tears?
They’re lousy ones anyhow. If the tears
were themselves fat, hot droplets of fat
that dribbled off my chin in pearls
and dried in patches on the floor like candle wax,
maybe then I’d cry. Actually, I’d cry for days on end.
I’d cry till I was thin again!
I’d cry with purpose! I’d weep my tears into a little hill,
then squeeze that hill into a candle.
I’d then stuff the candle, like a conquering flag,
into my next birthday cake, and let it burn
all the way down into the icing,
like a sun going down,
watched the entire way.
Oh, it’s these slow days that get me.
When there are no appointments to be fretted over,
or shoots or interviews to be prepped for,
and the clock-hands drag like a diner waitress’s feet,
(I was a diner waitress once),
that’s when I feel gone. I watch the clock (mine tics),
and beg my dumb pink phone to ring (you fucking thing!)
and think my stupid, crazy thoughts,
which begin either I should or What if,
(I should jog; I should make a list; what if I stretched
my stomach onto a cutting board, like a lower lip,
grabbed a knife and lopped it off? What if….))
then the sky turns white and the trees turn black,
and I… I take more drugs.
It just happened so fast.
It or "I," whichever applies:
one minute sixteen, pregnant and afraid,
the next learning a register in a Wal-Mart apron,
the next whirling around a cold bronze pole
on a platform at Gigi’s Cabaret.
I was too young to serve cocktails, still too fat
(though I’d lost weight) for a night slot,
shaking my clumsy body for the lunchtime sect.
They’d come and go, go and come, letting in
cracks of awful Texas sun,
ugly, blinking, face-scratching men: a type.
But I stripped my fucking heart out.
Oh, you should’ve seen me! Their eyes
would follow like babies’ eyes, mesmerized,
or like a dog’s eyes when you grip a biscuit.
I was their favorite. They said so,
and though the other girls said, “they’re just saying that,”
they weren’t just saying that.
There was a reason they liked me best;
they could tell I needed them;
they could tell I liked what their grabby little eyes,
by taking, could give.
Naturally, I took the older girls’ advice,
changed my name, bleached my hair, got implants,
but there was no “real me” to protect….
That was my secret.
No real me. And I flaunted it; I tossed it off in handfuls,
flung it out to everyone, anyone,
fluttering, dropping, like dollar-bills let go off balconies.
And I fucked too. I fucked like a collector.
True they were sleazy, greasy, small-minded men, losers,
and Gigi’s was a dump, but still
I etched pictures of myself
on their eyelids’ insides. Still I was there, floating,
when they took their wives from behind,
and stared around their boring rooms.
And I liked that too.
Every day I stripped; every day I fucked.
Then suddenly, because it felt sudden,
I’d stripped myself thin;
I had a body pretty as my face,
was being featured outside, on promo posters,
had rubber-banded shoeboxes packed with money,
was flashing strangers out limousine sun-roofs.
Men compared me to Marilyn,
and I saved these Marilyn comparisons into a stack
and marveled at them. It was happening;
and the mirrors said so too.
(But to whom? Whom was it happening to?
Did I dare call that woman me?)

And then...and then...around when Playboy
found and flew me away,
I met Mr. J. Howard Marshall,
who was old; I’d never seen someone so old;
it was like he’d exited oldness altogether,
like when you out-drive a radio station’s reception,
and the station frays into pure fuzz. I peered
at him like a mantis, as if he couldn’t see;
Who or what was he
with his old-man nose and spotted head and wheelchair,
with his ten-gallon hat and folded ears?
Well, he was a big deal, that’s what!
He was rich, and the strippers spoke of him
like a prince. They sighed at my questions:
“Seeer-yuss Annar? Yunh dunno who JAY Howard Marshall iz?”
Then suddenly we were engaged,
this old guy and me.
He’d cock back his head like a baby bird,
wheezing, wanting kisses.
What could I do? I kissed him and kissed him,
left dutiful red smooch-prints
all over him like a napkin. I swam
lap after lap in his pool, tips of my hair wet,
till he drooled himself asleep on deck,
warm as an old tire, except breathing.
Or was he? A fear about that would crank up
and distract me more each lap,
as if my pool-laps were the units fear grew in.
I could see the headlines:
PLAYMATE SWIMS FOR HOURS
UNAWARE BILLIONAIRE HUSBAND IS DEAD,
and feel people circling, again,
as if with black magic markers, my sad parts,
my stupidity, my incompetence.
Then he’d die! I’d burst, slap my wet palms on the edge,
push myself up, run over to him,
and until I slid a confirming finger under his nose,
he actually was dead.
He was dead in my head – no, he was dead
in my whole body, all through me,
out to my shaking hands and contracting toes.
But my heart, in the steady heat, after a talking-to,
would quiet; I’d laugh.
The feeling that I was alone (stronger even
for the fact I technically wasn’t)
would spread out to his estate’s natural borders,
the house, the far-off wall of trees,
the wagging glossy leaves blazing white in the sun.
I’d feel myself perfectly unseen.
I would breathe and breathe, and feel fine again.
God was that a house.
Space! So much of it! I loved it. He loved it,
and he loved me. But that I loved him
is what no one ever believes. For me
there’s never been much difference between
being loved and loving. Is that odd?
Maybe, but I had my little Daniel to think of.
I have always had
my little Daniel to think of.

Daniel, you’ve been comfortable, isn’t that so?
I’ve been a good mother, haven’t I, in my way?
Didn’t I give you the newest toys, once I could?
You can’t be honest; you can’t with me; I know.
Daniel, my best decision and my baby always,
the hairs in my locket, the teeth
in my jewelry box, my snotty nose,
my macaroni necklace and arms-up little boy;
Daniel who is the life preserver
(I’m certain) making a blurry circle on the water’s surface
in my recurring dream, who still slips
and calls me “Mommy,” who is the reason
I smile; Daniel who is practical, Daniel who is tall,
Daniel who asks my opinion of his new goatee,
who, when I’m swaying drunk or in a mood,
tells me I don’t need to apologize,
waving me off. But I do. I need to;
I’ve been a shit mother.
I’ve spent so much time so fucked up.
I am so…so fucked up.
And I know it! Don’t lie to me! Don’t say I’m not!
Because then I can’t be sorry,
and I’m sorry for it all,
sorry for the flashbulbs and the tabloids and the men,
for the times I turned on the TV and left,
for what you saw at night when you opened my door,
(sometimes I didn’t even stop)
for telling you my own mother wanted me,
before you were you, to “take care of you,”
for squeezing your palm so hard at the courthouse,
that you couldn’t be my constant concern
(although you were the reason
I first walked along a highway shoulder to Gigi’s,
the reason I blew a limp “octogenarian”
(as he called himself) in a motorized chair.)
Or maybe I’m wrong about that too.
Maybe I’ve been wrong about it all.
Maybe what I had in mind when I made my decisions
was only my idea of you,
which might mean I confused you into me
– a fat girl with a closet of empty, chiming hangers.

It’s no use; I can’t un-do, cant un-do.
No matter how I wring my hands, my decisions
hang like clouds that won’t dry out
or move. And I’m sorry, in advance, for the future
which I stare at like a sea
because there’s still a sea between the sunset and me.
Thirty-eight is young.
Daniel, you say it’ll be fun
growing old together, that sixteen years isn’t much,
and the gap is closing fast. I agree;
I nod in agreement, but then you leave.
You go off to live.
Alone in my pink room, on my pink couch,
in my stupid pink room, on my stupid pink couch,
your cruise-ship shuffleboard courts
curl at the corners and blow away.
My mind won’t stay.
I stare at some gold-framed photo of me,
and I’m already older than I pictured I’d be,
one year older than Marilyn,
with wrinkles cob-webbing my eye corners,
wrinkles marching from my mouth corners,
wrinkles that make me fear sun, fear laughter.
Mirrors are back to being walls
which I bang my swollen head against, thinking,
trying to find a solution,
a way to twist my story toward a happy end.

But then I’m off course, fantasizing again.
I think, like one about to be fired,
I should flip my lid, go bananas, roll down the long hill
dizzily. (I’m rich enough, I think,
to be labeled “eccentric.”)
I’ll retire my breasts, mount them on a plaque,
maybe two plaques,
and have filmed conversations with them.
I’ll propose marriage to the mailman, lipstick-print
the citizens’ bills with kisses,
parade him in uniform for the paparazzi.
I’ll eat till the couch tips up on one end,
scissor my wedding dress into a bib.
I’ll dye the pool in the back pink,
and live inside it, like a fish.
Yes. That’s it. I've come to it.
A few buckets of food coloring, a coat of pink paint,
and on incoming airplanes, captains will say,
“Down below, you’ll see a pink pool,
property of Anna Nicole Smith;
she sits, all day, on the bottom of it.”
And the tourists will point and murmur,
foreheads pressed to the plastic panes,
and there my pool will be,
glaring up, unblinking,
like a badly photographed eye.
“She’s completely nuts!” they’ll agree.
“She is as nuts as we are not!”
(Just as I was pretty as you were not.)
– But who is the captain and who are “they”?
And isn’t the view from the plane mine too,
taken from that first flight into L.A.,
when I gaped at the dots of blue,
at the circles and ovals and rectangles of blue,
and imagined dying beautifully.

-Matthew Yeager - Spring 2003, Fall 2007

from Rocket Surgery, NYQ Books, forthcoming

Matthew Yeager's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, as well as in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2005 and 2010, The Strategic Poet, and Inquisitive Eater. "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment," his micro-budget short film, was an official selection at eleven film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in short prose, multiple fellowships to MacDowell and Yaddo, and inclusion in Oprah magazine’s “Top 50 Love Poems of All-Time.” The co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series since 2011, Yeager worked in the NYC catering industry for fourteen years in various capacities: truck driver, waiter, sanitation helper, sanitation captain, bartender, bar captain, lead captain, producer. His first book, Like That (Forklift Books, 2016) received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. His second book, Rocket Surgery, is forthcoming with NYQ books. He is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of Cincinnati, where he lives with the poet Chelsea Whitton and their cats Merle and Dolly.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 45) Matthew Yeager

When, as a student, I romantically, sentimentally dreamed of writing the voices of lonely women who, I imagined floated above us, departed but still yearning to be heard, I was not thinking of Anna Nicole Smith.

Any reading of this poem would do well to start with a definition of “lamentation”: “The passionate expression of grief or sorrow; weeping.” This Biblical word seems an odd fit with its speaker, a disgraced queen of pop culture; but it aptly reminds us that her griefs are age-old and continually shared.

In Matthew Yeager’s brilliant dramatic monologue, comprising a partial autobiography, Anna Nicole Smith is simply herself; her voice unforced, perfectly colloquial. She is the Lana Turner of O’Hara’s “Poem,” but she has gotten up, and is talking, her voice carrying some of Robert Creeley’s forthrightness in “I Know a Man” (that beyond-succinct portrait of cultural malaise): “John, I / /sd, which was not his / name. . . .”

“The Ongoing Lamentation of Anna Nicole Smith” carries an epigraph from Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray; and indeed, the poem is very much about the fragility of beauty:

     I stare at some gold-framed photo of me,

     and I’m already older than I pictured I’d be,

     one year older than Marilyn,

     with wrinkles cob-webbing my eye corners,

     wrinkles marching from my mouth corners, 

     wrinkles that make me fear sun, fear laughter. 

We know how the subjective “old” of thirty-eight can be oddly more convincing than the genuine “old” of seventy or eighty. “Older than I pictured I’d be” emphasizes the terrible power of the self-assessing gaze:

     Mirrors are back to being walls

     which I bang my swollen head against, thinking,

     trying to find a solution,

     a way to twist my story toward a happy end

What an astute portrayal of the our impulse, when the worst has happened, to retrace steps, somehow arrive at a benign outcome.

While giving us a woman’s identity via her pink possessions, her avid needs, the poem also gives us a portrait of fame, which is nothing if not a succession of mirrors:

     I could even get those mirrors

     like the ones they have in the cop movies, 

     that can be seen through in one direction. That way,

     people outside could enjoy the room,

     and I’d never have to give any of it up

     or look at their faces.  I’d stare at the mirrors,

     and the people would think I was staring at them

     and would wonder how I stayed

     so expressionless.  Poise, they would think,

     and grace.  I would like that…

We are far into Anna Nicole’s account of her life, with its riotously funny impersonations of her fellow strippers, and chillingly comic descriptions of second husband “J. Howard Marshall,” fresh nonagenarian, “warm as an old tire, except breathing. / Or was he?” when we discover the poem’s primary addressee: her son.

     Maybe, but I had my little Daniel to think of.

     I have always had

     my little Daniel to think of.

She offers Daniel this blunt, sad apology:

     I’ve been a shit mother.

     I’ve spent so much time so fucked up.

     I am so…so fucked up.

The poem, far from idealizing its speaker, gives us a woman buffeted by emotion, drugs, or both into serially idealizing and de-idealizing herself. She is both “fat girl with a closet of empty, chiming hangers” and beauty’s would-be apotheosis.

The story of a single mother leveraging her breasts, her face, to provide for a child is classically American; Anna Nicole (not her real name) is, in William Carlos Williams’ phrase, “a pure product of America,” the mirroring world crazing her in its glass. Not yet done for, she exuberantly imagines taking charge of the process (in lines that faintly recall Gregory Corso’s “Marriage”):

     I should flip my lid, go bananas, roll down the long hill

     dizzily.  (I’m rich enough, I think,

     to be labeled “eccentric.”) 

     I’ll retire my breasts, mount them on a plaque,

     maybe two plaques, 

     and have filmed conversations with them. 

     I’ll propose marriage to the mailman, lipstick-print

     the citizens’ bills with kisses,

     parade him in uniform for the paparazzi.   

The voice, magically ferocious and Ortonesque in its dark comedy of body parts, emerges from Matthew Yeager’s ear for speech and his mastery of what might be termed the demotic iamb—an uber-loose echo of rhymed iambic verse, both taut and springy. (I’m told that Kenneth Koch sometimes spoke to classes in improvised iambs.) If, as my brilliant, Yvor-Winters-influenced poetic forms teacher, John Williams (the posthumously famous author of Stoner), declared, Wallace Stevens wrote “parasitic” verse, Matthew Yeager’s is epiphytic, drawing sustenance from whiffs of metrical tradition.

The great astonishment of this poem, for me, is that there is no telegraphing or show-through of the poet’s own sensibility. It is not Matthew Yeager speaking for Anna Nicole Smith. It is Anna Nicole Smith, in the same way that John Berryman’s Mistress Bradstreet is Mistress Bradstreet, and Randall Jarrell’s housewife, sad among supermarket shelves of “Joy” and “Cheer,” is that housewife. In other words, the poem animates the speaker; the speaker animates the poem.

     But there are tricks, tricks to scare the fears into holes,

     sayings I can say into myself any time,

     as if started up by a doll’s tugged string. 

     I just say, "Vickie," putting on my Texas twang,

     “Vickie," which is my real name, "Shut up;

     at least you were beautiful once.

     How few in the world get to be.”

Anna Nicole Smith is, in Matthew Yeager’s expansive “The Ongoing Lamentation of Anna Nicole Smith,” the architect of her own identity, despite all. Her voice, at poem’s end, is antic and poignant, as she imagines eating “till the couch tips up on one end”; imagines a pink swimming pool, “Property of Anna Nicole Smith,” “like a badly photographed eye”; imagines being “captain” of her fate; remembers framed lozenges of blue, like face shapes: “circles and ovals and rectangles,” she saw when first descending into LA. Like her favorite “real gold-plated frame” at the poem’s start.

     And isn’t the view from the plane mine too,

     taken from that first flight into L.A.,

     when I gaped at the dots of blue,

     at the circles and ovals and rectangles of blue,

     and imagined dying beautifully.

There’s morbidity inherent in being an icon, a coldness that courts eternity. The young actor had looked forward to a romantic demise—like Harlow’s perhaps—a tenuous wasting, a doom. We are left with her foreknowledge of her sad, confused, unglamorous fate; and a thought: knowledge isn’t always power.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner [by Angela Ball]

from "The city has sex with everything"

                                                                     The city has sex with Megan

when the air shaped like the inverse of Megan
accepts Megan as she moves.

   If Megan is a system of exchange
that floats her labor and her point

  of view in vapor/liquid soup
passàging through her valves

and if her later corpse, collapsing,
  updates its inversion of the air

 even more than did the air displace
when she grew from brown-eyed baby

into strong laboring woman in blue jeans
  and heathered wool,

and if the air and earth draw from Megan’s corpse
  all the energy and minerals

  she pulled from her surrounds
to build her nails and bones and teeth—

  if the exchange doesn’t stop
but only ceases to support her consciousness,

 and if her consciousness was corpse anyway until
it found relation,

 then what demises
is the potential for the human social,

and another sociality
 will unbutton my whole shoe

and tongue hang limp,
  what sex is for but stops me

  at the barrier, a pixellated
glamor reef though very

   close and simple, smell a
flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

 energy funneled through a shape.
You filtered chemical

 information in such a pointy
fulgent scrambled way, in the city

    and outside the city in the vernal zones
   and aqua zones the city shaped, flow-charted, realist

trucked. The city caved under
    when the zones rose and lapped around the pilings,

manged foundations green,
   rotted the teeth out of the mouth of the city,

 harbor high-rises
dark and blown. The city is extremely fragile tender

human mesh and will be mush
  and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

                                          Speech by a flaneur—no a flaneuse

         On my face, D. folliculorum are relaxing
          like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks
           against the bases of my hair follicles
          which provide shelter and shade.
         These critters are peculiar to
            the ecology of the human face
             which I take around the city
             open, close it is my means
            of feeding I rely on
         changing its shape
        in response to others’ faces and postures
         to reduce my risk and increase my safety
          and my likelihood of being
           included in the group’s collective
            life. I smile a lot and hope it
           don’t look fake.

--Catherine Wagner                              (first appeared in Poetry)

 

Catherine Wagner is a Cincinnati poet originally from Baltimore. She is author of five books of poems, most recently Of Course (Fence, 2020) and Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012), and she recently co-edited a collection of environmental humanities essays, Contesting Extinctions (2021). She is professor of English at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where she is organizing a labor union with colleagues.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner’s extended poem, “The city has sex with everything,” like William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, is an epic built on the urban mundane. Instead of personifying the city (“a man in himself is a city”-W.C.W.), in this excerpt it depicts, as if from above, the city’s consumption of a person, Megan (“strong laboring woman in blue jeans / and heathered wool”) and also, I think, hers of it.

The poem is remarkable for its mating of metropolis with organic decay:

 

The city is extremely fragile tender

 human mesh and will be mush

    and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

and also for its mating of the abstract/philosophical to the immediate/physical, done in pungent language:

 

what sex is for but stops me

 at the barrier, a pixelated

glamour reef though very

   close and simple, smell a

  flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

The “pixelated / glamour reef” may call to mind comic-book illustration, while the last phrase, a ballet of p’s, lingers, dropleted, in mind and on the tongue.

The poem traffics in pulchritude and homeliness, giving both life and afterlife to its “manged foundations.”

Who is the “you”? Is it Megan? Us? It hardly matters, since matter is now  so confounded with idea and association.

Then we arrive at a kind of window in which the poet [?] announces herself as Baudelaire and/or O’Hara-like “flaneuse,” where we see, in all its teeming vitality, “the ecology of a human face” in hyper-granular detail:

1. folliculorum are relaxing

 like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks

  against the bases of my hair follicles

 which provide shelter and shade

The extended poem, in a breath-taking alteration in scale, has taken us from observation-deck telescope to microscope; from the city’s destructive and destroyed life force to the intimacy of one human’s personal biosphere, in the process taking its diction from wet and marvelous hybridity to bland scientific specificity. Cartoonist Sir John Tenniel was the organism-portmanteau illustrator for Alice in Wonderland. As these ultra-specific organisms relax, they imitate art. Catherine Wagner’s riveting and wonderful dystopian  “The City Has Sex with Megan,” after having its brilliant way with us, ends by conveying the poet’s forlorn hope of survival, fronted by a humble, demotic teeth-baring:

I smile a lot and hope it

     don’t look fake

-Angela Ball

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Three): Rebecca Holifield [by Angela Ball]

Unidentified Apple Picker

(1)
Black-and-white 3/4 length re-
print of Grover Cleveland Alexander (left)
and an unidentified man (right), apple-
picking. Both wear three-piece suits, overcoats,
[canes] and [top] hats. Posing for the camera,
each reaches up to grab an apple
gloved in a branch. Down
to bite an apple. Back to throw
an apple like a baseball. Forward
to shake hands.

(2)
Grover Cleveland Alexander and unidentified
man here called Apple Picker. Yesterday
may forget your name, Mr. Picker, but
because of you I remember the whole round
feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach
up, the snapping pull down. The sluice
from the bite. The sun in our eyes.

-Rebecca Holifield

About the poem:

“Unidentified Apple Picker” was inspired by a photograph in the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This poem is part of my master’s thesis, “Digital Pastoral,” which theorizes a few ways in which the internet and the digital archive have altered the tradition of the pastoral poem, at least in my own work. If the internet is the city in which we get lost, it is also the pasture in which we can find ourselves again. This poem begins with stuffy-sounding found text, describing the found image, and gradually redirects until it ends on a connection to the personal, the sensory. From the vague and impersonal, we make our own connections and imbue things with our own meaning. From the search engine comes the search, from the search comes the image, and from the image comes the personal connection we form with it. - Rebecca Holifield

 Rebecca Holifield is a poet with a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Rebecca Holifield

Rebecca Holifield’s brilliant and enticing poem, “Unidentified Apple Picker,” does not depend upon the photograph it speaks to. Indeed, the poem places the photo at further removes by telling us that it is “3/4-length” and a “re- / print.” Nonetheless, we are provided the positions of its two inhabitants and what they are wearing. One is a baseball player, a famous pitcher called “Grover Cleveland Alexander,” named for an even more famous person, a president, whose most notable accomplishment may have been marrying his much-younger ward.

Why the brackets around “cane” and “top”? For me, they function to emphasize the photo’s distance from us in time—and that time’s degree of formality.

Indeed, the poem’s details consistently emphasize one another, with “Grover Cleveland Alexander”’s almost too-elaborate name contrasting with “unidentified man”’s total lack of one.

Part of the poem’s quaint, Victorian formality is its highly posed nature, mimicked by the lineation of the second half of section (1). The poem is arranged as formally as the photograph, to humorous effect, as its images reference Grover Cleveland Alexander’s more famous role, as pitcher rather than “picker.”

Section (2) addresses itself to the speaker’s relationship to and with the second man, who is here somewhat more fulsomely identified as “unidentified / man here called ‘Apple Picker’.” Then, following a wonderfully deft personification of the past, “Yesterday / may forget your name,” the speaker exuberantly dubs him: “Mr. Picker,” a move all the more comic because parenthetical.

And it is “because of you,” because of the second, anonymous man, that the speaker, and we, receive the encompassing epiphany of the last four lines:

     the whole round

     feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach

     up, the snapping pull down. The sluice

     from the bite. The sun in our eyes.

Our kinesthetic, tactile experience of apple picking ends with the double climax of “The sluice / from the bite” and “The sun in our eyes”—the dazzlement of looking upward at a ripe apple—and our dazzlement by the photograph the poem develops just for us. Its darkroom, the poet’s mind; its emulsion, words.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Kirsten Kaschock [by Angela Ball]

MY STUDENTS WANT MY TENURE

They want a little bit of mothering
and a little bit of God.

They want a little bit of someone-who-admits
-mistakes from someone who never makes them.

They want a safe space built where As
are hatched into beds of cotton. They want

a teacher who knows all the things so they
need not click on needless links.

There are so many of them
and their lives, so varied. I cannot intuit

their lives. And they are more afraid
than they’ve ever been—but not of disclosure.

Not of trauma. Their own is not what they find
impossible to offer. And they secretly crave

triggering. To feel. No, what they cannot say
is how they come to think.

It’s not refusal—I think most
do not know their home computers

to be machines they should take apart
to learn. To know this is to know a mind

may be manipulated. That alien
voices from far across space/time

can alter radically perspective through old
fangled technologies

called books. Such knowledge over-
whelms and shames. And eventually obliterates

me as I teach, as is my job, instructing students
in my needful obliteration. Here, I think

is the crux of their desire: more than almost
anything they want, they want

me, someone like me, to acknowledge my
inherent uselessness while I please

please retain my position.

                                          (from Explain This Corpse)

-Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock, a 2019 Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (winner of Blue Lynx Prize from Lynx House Press). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. Recent work can be read at Conduit, The Diagram, and Los Angeles Review.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock’s “My Students Want My Tenure” astonishes in its astuteness about pedagogy, a subject so often dealt with in lofty abstraction. Like Frank O’Hara, Kaschock gives us, in dialogic, enjambed couplets, a live public, a marketplace of needs, opening with “They want a little bit of mothering and a little bit of God.” This brilliant comic statement clarifies an exchange too seldom explored. One other example occurs to me, and that is Donald Barthelme’s hilarious and affecting short story, “Me and Miss Mandible.” In Kaschock's poem, as in Barthelme’s story, what students need is vastly more murky than help with punctuation. The poem constructs an expansive empathy akin to Frank O’Hara's as he illuminates our need for Billie Holiday’s voice “whispered . . . along the keyboard” and for Lana Turner, whom we love, to “get up.”

How spot on, Kaschock’s description of students’ desire for authority minus its blunt edges: “They want a little bit of someone-who-admits / -mistakes from someone who never makes them.” And they want “A safe space built where As / are hatched into beds of cotton”—none of bewilderment’s discomfort, effort’s uncertainty. Students are haunted by the need to “make” grades—as though mere desire—or past achievement—can insure an outcome. Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” comes to mind: “If someone is chasing you down the street, you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep!'"

How accurate, Kaschock’s reproduction of the fuzzy, the approximate often so central to human desires: “They want // a teacher who knows all the things so they / need not click on useless links.” And for their own part, the teacher is locked in approximation: “There are so many of them / and their lives, so varied. I cannot intuit // their lives.” Undaunted by this impossibility, after first dispatching what the students aren’t afraid of—“disclosure,” “trauma”-- the poem moves on to touch obscure, ineradicable aversions: the inability to see beyond the structures, economic and cybernetic, that so determine their thinking; the origins of which remain, to them, obscure.

       . . .That alien

       voices from far across space/time

 

       can alter radically perspective through old

       fangled technologies

 

       called books. Such knowledge over-

       whelms and shames. And eventually obliterates

 

       me as I teach, as is my job, instructing students

       in my needful obliteration. . .

 

How apt, the word “crux,” in “This is the crux /of their desire.” The students want to see someone, a teacher/martyr, swallowed by the impossibility that presses them onward (too frequently goaded by parents’ insistence that they “make something of themselves”) so they won’t be. To take the hit of knowledge in their stead. So that confusion lessens, pain lessens. There’s nothing personal about it:

     . . . they want

     

     me, someone like me, to acknowledge my

     inherent uselessness while I please

 

     please retain my position.

 

Kaschock’s final phrase, “retain my position,” in its bureaucracy-speak, underscores the obliteration that the teacher invites. This is dark comedy indeed; and, like the best examples of that genre, it refuses to absolve us from futility—except that we know that this poem, as a bearer of insight, is itself one of the “voices from far across space/time” that “can alter radically perspective.” Kirsten Kaschock’s “My Students Want My Tenure” is a true emissary of fresh air to counter sentimental, self-serving, and otherwise perverse depictions of the classroom, that micro and macrocosm.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-One): Bob Hicok [by Angela Ball]

Civilization, as I understand it

 

To pee or not to pee

sitting or standing is never a question, sitting

whenever possible on a toilet

in the Pantheon a floor above

Marie Curie's body still alive

with the radium she endured

without knowing the harm her brilliance

was doing to her, then a baguette

and over to the Luxembourg to dream

of being home where I'd dream

of being there, our minds are water, you see,

touching the sun whenever we please

and the moon and Kahlo's paintings

despite what the do-see-docents say,

then on to London or Cairo or Boise

I hear has toilets as well, how civilized

the world can be in the spaces

we protect from our cruelty and greed,

such as the Pantheon with its oculus

suggesting the sky keeps an eye on us

at all times, indoors or out,

while juggling or writing a constitution,

praying to god or walking a dog

who pees with such sophistication

that another dog can come along

and sniff the story of her stream,

tell friend from foe, wag from woe,

and as science knows, dogs

are the only animals generally happier

when they're with us, including us

-Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok's eleventh collection of poetry, Water Look Away, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023. He has received  nine Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, and his poetry has been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of the Best American Poetry.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-One): Bob Hicok

“Civilization, as I understand it,” Bob Hicok’s inspired, inward and outward facing soliloquy, takes form from a Paris walk and raises—like all good poems—more questions than answers. Its opening, a parodic riff on Shakespeare, reminds us that peeing and bathrooms are basic to civilization—did not the Romans think so? We talk of the house of memory, but the smallest, most memorable square footage of every house, of every restaurant or public building, is its lavatory. Our heads are full of them.

This poem enacts how civilization is built from incongruity, happenstance, and physical need. Why should we be able to pee “above” Marie Curie? Because her brilliance is “still alive” along with the radium that killed her. Instead of discussing where he stands on this or that, Hicok shows us his position. It’s in Paris, where “the Pantheon with its oculus” suggests “the sky keeps an eye on us / at all times, indoors or out,/ while juggling or writing a constitution, / praying to god or walking a dog.”

What is humor but something that changes suddenly, becomes more interesting, scary, or overwhelming? Hicok’s oculus that “keeps an eye on us”—might be reassuring, as in tragedy’s notion that human life matters, but here is comically unnerving. Undiscriminating, the eye presides over the most disparate of activities, “juggling or writing a constitution,” and our minds’ fantastic ability to touch “the sun whenever we please / and the moon and Kahlo’s paintings / despite what the do-see-docents say”—as here another fabulous pun plunges us to the depths and origins of humor.

As the foundational figures of the New York School knew, incongruity is inextricably mixed with who we are and have been. Hicok’s wanderings take him from the Pantheon to the Luxembourg, from death to garden via baguette, “to dream / of being home where I’d dream / of being there, our minds are water, you see. . . .” This may remind us of Thales’s statement, “Everything is made of water,” from a time when philosophers liked to posit universal origins for nature and civilization. If this poem made such a statement, which it doesn’t, it might be “Everything is made of incongruity”—as at its center, the poem renders “our cruelty and greed” both nearly ubiquitous and decidedly incongruous.

As E.M. Forster knew when he said, “Only connect,” connections join things while emphasizing their difference. This difference comes wonderfully into play in “Civilization, as I understand it,” when “praying to God” becomes “walking a dog,” and dog civilization is revealed as peeing “with such sophistication / that another dog can come along / and sniff the story of her stream, / tell friend from foe, wag from woe,”

     and as science knows, dogs
     are the only animals generally happier
     when they're with us, including us

The poem’s final truth, stated in Groucho Marxian convolution, brings us to rest in happiness—the happiness of a truth both small and large, that both proceeds and diverges from where we have been: the paradoxical pleasure of recognizing that life is both simple and ineluctable, after all.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty): Dara Wier [by Angela Ball]

95% of Thoroughbred Horses Descend from Eclipse

 

I’m walking slowly the way trees walk. 

I’m letting my branches slip over steaming coastline.

My bucket, my stick, my good boots.

My eyelids shoot out lightning bolts.

They’re over before anyone sees. 

I tie them down with strips of old bed sheets.

If you’ve never ripped up a sizable piece of cotton, try it.

My wolf pal thinks I’m jumpy and says so. 

Where hide the really good sifters when we need them?  

If you take some yellow and rightly apply it

You can rid yourself of something or other. 

This campaign I’m on is addictive. 

Close to the vest plays good with some cats.

Someone’s fretting I’m betting on fill-ins.

My twin, my subtle other, my upright shadow,

My me, my myself, My I, I multiply as if

Famines of me are not something to treasure.

--Dara Wier                                           (first published in The Laurel Review)

 

Dara Barrois/Dixon's (née Dara Wier) new book is TOLSTOY KILLED ANNA KARENINA
(Wave Books 2022). Others include in the still of the night, YOU GOOD THING, and REVERSE RAPTURE.
A new chapbook, Nine, is forthcoming very soon from Incessant Pipe; other chapbooks, Thru and Two Poems, 
have recently appeared from Scram. Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations have supported her work.
She lives in western Massachusetts.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty): Dara Wier

Dara Wier’s “95% of Thoroughbred Horses Descend from Eclipse,” declarative and urgent, explores the vagaries of identity—its bloodlines and sightlines—and how we make ourselves through imitation and adoption, “By letting our branches slip over steaming coastline”—a coast both itself and a boat powered by water.

In this poem both “close to the vest” and generous, lines unleash surprises like resurrections: “the way trees walk,” “over steaming coastline,” “lightning bolts.” “Lightning bolts”? The speaker’s eyelids shoot them out. Though they are over “before anyone sees,” she must restrain them “with strips of old bed sheets.” A humorous surprise, the practical inserts itself: “If you have never ripped up a sizeable piece of cotton, try it.” As in everyday life, utility combines with mystery: “Where hide the really good sifters when we need them?” and “If you take some yellow and rightly apply it / You can rid yourself of something or other.” A woman at home is either problem-solver or dormouse, quiescent as a popsicle. There’s always something to be rid of—a flutter of khaki-colored wings, a dark seam rimming the stainless, a psychotic thrum from the fridge. I think of patent remedies, of Earwigs-No-More, M’Lady.

That’s part of why the speaker acts in fits—is “jumpy”—the self or home she is making, that we all make—is provisional, depending on what props we can gather to shore up or restrain. Its genealogy dark, it is always emergent, mysterious as Elizabeth Bishop’s “Monument”; enticing as John Ashbery’s “Lacustrine Cities.” Once we have begun, there’s no stopping: “This campaign I’m on is addictive.”

This is serious play; the rhythm lilts; words call out to one another in rhyme: “Someone’s fretting I’m betting on fill-ins.” The “fill-ins”: “My twin, my subtle other, my upright shadow.”

The penultimate line, with its assertions of multiple ownership, pelts us with questions. Who is behind the “my” of “My me, my myself, My I” that, proliferating, riffs both on idiom and on Arthur Rimbaud’s enigmatic: “Je est un autre.” If we let them, a horde of explanations descend, from Freud down to the most craven self-help tomes—but these are proforma, shallow, and useless.

Too soon, we approach the close of Dara Wier’s towering poem of refreshment and humorous solemnity. The ending’s emphatic back-handedness, “as if famines of me were not something to treasure,” discombobulating in its union of multiple want and our single speaker, releases a simple word, “treasure,” that deserts all conundrum for art’s self-forgetfulness, its gleaming oblivion.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Nine): C.T. Salazar [by Angela Ball]

FORGIVE YOURSELF FOR SEEING IT WRONG

 

     under the rosequartz clouds even a man glimmers

     like a bride his hatchet a bouquet       I am waiting

     for his tears to turn pearl      ache and its flag

     of unfurling twilight   the telephone wires make a strange harp

     over our heads  and if we weren’t here who

     would talk about heaven         root-ridden and a little afraid

     of the notion that light has a tendency to keep going 

     like my father on his motorcycle                    maybe I’ve spent too much

     time listening to the distant  rain on the rooftops of people who may

     kill each other and believed it’s not too late for me 

     to make this about love                       the man in the field and his farmtruck 

     even now I hear him his voice such a split of lark and lemon 

     this crooked intimacy how the last train mixes its smoke with the dusk

     and the cattle bed down around the chevy     taking it

     as one of their own     light sinking unable to chime and helpless to touch

     --C.T. Salazar                                                            

From Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking

This poem was written in wrestling with the strange and surreal violence that comes with a loved one experiencing rapidly developing Alzheimer's—C.T. Salazar

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) was named a 2023 finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Award. His poems have most recently appeared in West Branch, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Nine): C.T. Salazar

C.T. Salazar’s “Forgive Yourself for Seeing it Wrong” is a poem of ructions and unions, of doubted and confirmed precision, of the tearing of heaven. It begins with surprising and lovely “rosequartz clouds,” a man (a farmer) astonishingly like a “bride,” his hatchet (violent, indispensable farm tool) “a bouquet” as the poet speaker waits for “his tears to turn pearl”—another unlooked-for transformation. Where do the tears come from? Like so much in this poem, we take it on faith that such a man of rough labor would have them, would fly “ache and its flag of unfurling twilight.” It’s a world, we are given to know, of scarce-acknowledged sadness, where, in another astonishing image, “the telephone wires make a strange harp over our heads.” People are speaking with one another, unseen and unheard, untouched by the thrumming solitude here, a solitude that somehow “makes” the poet’s lone voice, joined with a “we” that includes the reader, “talk about heaven," but are “root-ridden and a little afraid / of the notion that light has a tendency to keep going . . . .” Suddenly, for the first time, the ethereal summons the personal: “like my father on his motorcycle.” We are given a double beat to think about this before we are told, “maybe I have spent too much / time listening to the distant rain on the rooftops of people who may / kill each other”—what a telling evocation of romanticism and its antidote. I think that Salazar can be likened to Ashbery in his radically inconsistent meditations that surprise us out of one way of thinking and into another, and often back again; that navigate between ordinary life and a lustrous transcendence.

After more thought beats, the poem turns again: “and believed it’s not too late for me / to make this about love” [beat beat beat] –should we believe it now is “too late”?  The poem retrenches to its plainest scene: “the man in the field and his farmtruck.” But then it swoops outward into memory: “even now I hear him his voice such a split of lark and lemon” (this a voice we taste), “this crooked intimacy” a style of affection created in its clash of words. C.T. Salazar’s moving poem ends in powerful mixture of involuntary, mistaken, and thwarted intimacies that could be the story of our lives, telling “how the last train mixes its smoke with the dusk / and the cattle bed down around the Chevy  taking it / as one of their own   light sinking unable to chime and helpless to touch”—the cattle’s assumption as strangely affecting as Elizabeth Bishop’s famous moose's when she ("It's a she!") “sniffs at" at the traveling bus’s “hot hood.”

The final three words, "helpless to touch," radiate among light and the poet and us—sad and glad to be included in this poem as it passes understanding.

-Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Eight): Sharon Mesmer [by Angela Ball]

I Have Thirteen Penises

— for Drew Gardner

My first penis is a reclusive pet alligator
My second penis is so not a girl figure skater
My third penis was never declared unconstitutional
My fourth penis is not the winner of the contest for the coolest
pimped-out cubicle

My fifth penis does not believe that unicorns are taking over
my fourth penis with lasers
My sixth penis never ever removed a brain tumor using a taser
My seventh penis is not the giraffe who swallowed My Little Pony
My eighth penis does not use Comic Sans when lonely

My ninth penis is doing a background check on me
My tenth penis punched a werewolf in the face in Kentucky
My eleventh penis wants to know how come a cupcake is not a mineral
My twelfth penis wants to know if any other planets besides Earth
are spherical

My thirteenth penis resembles—oddly—a whippoorwill.

--Sharon Mesmer

From 2003 to 2010 I was a member of the Flarf poetry collective: 30+ poets utilizing Google to mine the internet for content, emailing the work around several times a day via our listserv, and making new poems by putting lines from each other’s poems through Google. The group came together in response to the post-9/11 overwhelm of political/cultural/social absurdity. Drew Gardner, to whom the poem is dedicated, was one of the original members of the collective, and I’m sure this poem was composed by putting a line from the poem he’d sent around that day through Google, though at this point I don’t recall what that line was. –Sharon Mesmer

Sharon Mesmer is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and teacher. Her most recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books), was voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy magazine. Other collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Half Angel/Half Lunch and Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). She has also published three fiction collections, The Empty Quarter and In Ordinary Time (both from Hanging Loose Press) and Ma Vie à Yonago, from Hachette in French translation. Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine/The Cut, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Purple, Commonweal, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. Her awards include a Jerome Foundation mentoring award (grantee: Elisabeth Workman, poet) and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. She teaches at New York University and The New School and lives in Brooklyn.

https://bloofbooks.com/authors/sharon-mesmer/ 

https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781931236911/the-virgin-formica.aspx 

https://www.amazon.com/Annoying-Diabetic-Bitch-Sharon-Mesmer/dp/0972888039 

https://www.amazon.com/Ma-vie-%C3%A0-Yonago-Illuminations/dp/2012357164

--Photo by Sophie Malleret

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Eight): Sharon Mesmer

Sharon Mesmer’s ebullient “I Have Thirteen Penises” shares something of the shock-immune élan of Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Ave Maria.”  It can be regarded as a more explicit version of Joy Harjo’s splendid “She Had Some Horses.” The presumptive female speaker dedicates the poem to “Drew Garner” who could be woman or man or both or neither—it doesn’t matter.  The poem asserts a special freedom for its penises. They belong not to a particular corporeal form, or a lover’s pocket (à la In the Realm of the Senses) but to language and imagination. Anatomy need not be destiny.

The thirteen penises are characterized by what they are (“a reclusive pet alligator”); what they are not (“a girl figure skater”); what they have not been declared (“unconstitutional” or “the winner of the contest for coolest pimped-out cubicle”); what they do not believe (“My fifth penis does not believe that unicorns are taking over my fourth penis with lasers”); what they have “never ever” done: (“removed a brain tumor using a taser”); what (again) they are not (“the giraffe who swallowed My Little Pony”); and what they do not use (“Comic Sans when lonely”). The poem’s third stanza shifts to proactivity, to what the penises are doing (“a background check on me”); and what they want to know (“how come a cupcake is not a mineral” and “if any other planets besides Earth are spherical”).

The ultimate, the thirteenth penis, is characterized by its form—something the poem has thus far avoided, a challenge when discussing a body part relentlessly tied to shape and parodied by mock-embodiment in obelisks, produce, and joke pasta. This is an apt ending for a poem that plays with expectation and surprise, and that surprises us throughout with impetuous free-verse rhymes (akin to doggerel but far from dogged). its scheme, both manic and maniacal, goes roughly as follows: aabb/aacc/ccbbb.

The superstitions surrounding the number thirteen darken the ending, as does the penis’s comparison to a “whippoorwill,” a bird named for its ominous song, that if heard near a house signifies “death, or at least bad luck.” On the positive side, it may cure an aching back--if the sufferer turns somersaults in time to its call (Almanac.com).

The insertion of the word “oddly” is humorous—especially since non-odd comparisons include a pugilist practicing on a werewolf. Almanac.com also informs us that “whippoorwills do their courting after sunset,” and that their excellent camouflage means they are more often heard than seen. Sharon Mesmer’s wonderfully exhaustive “I Have Thirteen Penises” teaches that even the most well-known appendage may have new things to impart; that penile silence can be broken by poetry in thirteen (are you listening, Wallace Stevens?) irrepressible ways.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Seven): Angelo Verga [by Angela Ball]

Under Scaffolding Across from Saint Nicholas Park

 

Even in this cold March rain

And plague-frightened air,

Spring threatens to attack today.

--Angelo Verga

about the poem

this is an urban haiku 

also it's a covid poem, in the first cold months of the outbreak

where the trees in the park across the street 

coming back to life whisper of danger and death--Angelo Verga

Angelo Verga's seventh & most recent book is Long & Short, including The Street in Your Head (2016). He was an owner of The Cornelia Street Café, where his literary programs (1997-2015) provided a home for poets & audiences alike. He is currently a resident of Harlem, USA.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Seven): Angelo Verga 

Angelo Verga’s “Under Scaffolding Across From Saint Nicholas Park” is an ultra-efficient city poem, built from primal components.

Its work begins in its title. We are placed “under scaffolding,” a temporary shelter with ominous associations. The view is of a park dedicated to the wintry saint of generosity.

The poem’s cold, rainy March (with its looming “Ides”) is the start of the pandemic’s hold on the city. Its thievery of life.

Like Emily Dickinson’s despair, it is “an imperial affliction sent us of the Air.” How chilling that the air itself fears what it carries—not spring smells, but death. Fear inverts hope.

In time of death, spring is unrelenting irony. 

Instead of opening out, as traditional Haiku does, Angelo Verga’s three eloquent lines contract, locking us in a state of ominous expectation: “Spring threatens to attack today.” Inside its today, we fear for ourselves and pity our time’s victims. And rejoice in poetry’s counter-attack.--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Six): Clarence Major [by Angela Ball]

Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving

                                                                   --based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999
No sound, the whole thing.
Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass
to people below in an ongoing meadow.

Side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,
and because what is moving is not moving,
you catch a state of stasis.

Opposite of this inactivity
you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets
and that special hot smell of summer.

To the garden past the Bay to the meadow,
cliff sheltered with low clouds, offset by nodding thistle.
Tatter-wort and Stinking Tommy along footpath
worn down by locals. But who and why?

In the photograph itself you’re now looking the other way
to unknown clusters of houses.
Where forces are balanced to near perfection.

Who could live
in such a great swollen silence and solitude?
You hear church bells
from Our Lady’s Tears breaking that silence nicely
but just in the right way so silence continues
as though nothing else matters day after day.

And anyway, each face seems so familiar.

What do you do when you wave back?
You wave vigorously.
You remember your own meadow,
your cliffside and town,
photographs forgotten,
the halfhearted motion of your hand,
your grandmother’s church-folk
gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.

You name the people
whose names are not written on the back.
You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.

You enter house after house and open top-floor windows
and you wave down to future generations like this.

--Clarence Major

From CONFIGURATIONS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. Copyright © 1998 by Clarence Major. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Source: Waiting for Sweet Betty (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

The old photograph got my attention right away and stirred my imagination. Who were these people? Who were they waving to? What were their lives like? Where are they? What is their history, their future? Sometimes old photos—and I used to look through a lot of them in street bins in France—evoke so much. --Clarence Major

CLARENCE MAJOR is a novelist, poet and painter. His novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection; My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and One Flesh. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry. A Fulbright scholar, Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal, the Western States Book Award for fiction, a National Council on The Arts Award; in 2015 he won a “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts” from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and in 2016 a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature.” He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Fall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Six): Clarence Major

Clarence Major’s “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving” is an ekphrastic of the unnamed, named. Which is to say it speaks to and for its subject. Major, himself painter as well as poet, is a maestro of relations between art and life, experience and memory, motion and stillness. It is fitting that the poet found the photograph at a store at the mysterious-sounding “Half-Moon Bay.” A bay is a stasis, a peacefulness—it is the sea’s Sunday.

The poem starts by removing sound, since a photograph is silent, and this one particularly so—so it can surprise us later. The poem is not just visual, but kinesthetic. It moves us, not just emotionally, but spatially.

The first motion is of the anonymous hands, whose undulations translate into “ripple grass,” to an “ongoing meadow,” to “side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,” "and because what is moving is not moving / you catch a state of stasis.” The “you” makes us spectators of the photograph, puts us under its spell.  And, since opposites invite one another, “you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets / and that special hot smell of summer.” How effective, that leap of smell, how it penetrates.

The poem continues its waves of description, “to the garden past the Bay to the meadow / cliff sheltered by low clouds, offset by nodding thistle,” its rhythms lifting and dipping, to the pungent surprise of the “common” names “Tatter-wort” and “Stinking Tommy,” plants that become personages “along footpath worn down by locals. But who and why?”

And then, we may feel, we suddenly enter this domain of strangers—“you’re now looking the other way / to unknown clusters of houses.” What a fine précis of architecture, “where forces are balanced / near perfection,” but also of the poem, its rolling descent of the page.

Just as we wonder at the lives of those within the “great swollen silence and solitude,” we hear: “church bells” from the wonderfully-named “Our Lady’s Tears,” each bell a tear made audible, each bell inviting silence, “as though nothing else matters day after day.” Isn’t silence the essence of church, and bells its handmaidens?

Then a wonderfully casual one-line stanza, “And anyway, each face seems so familiar.”Just like that, we have moved from contemplating anonymity to feeling at home:

     What do you do when you wave back?

     You wave vigorously.

     You remember your own meadow,

     your cliffside and town,

     photographs forgotten,

     the halfhearted motion of your hand,

     your grandmother’s church-folk

     gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.

At one stroke the people are real to us, our familiars, forgiven their aloofness—and our own past forgiven its lost photographs, our half-gift of a reluctant wave; all of this blessed by the “saintly quietness” of “your grandmother’s church-folk,” a vanished generation:

      You name the people

      whose names are not written on the back.

      You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.       

Clarence Major’s bravura “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving,” itself a wave, ends in a cascade of wonders. Finally, we access the soi-disant cliffside mansions to “to open their top-floor windows, . . .and wave down to future generations like this”—the casual, masterful “like this” both describing our own waves—for we are now waving—and making us at home inside the photograph, its life and art.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce [by Angela Ball]

 

The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes
       

And then we woke up. And our uncles
were still missing, our azaleas yanked

and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.
But before we woke, we heard you say

in a voice that hummed without words
that you'd gone too far and would hold

that rushing hole at your center for the rest
of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

like church. We are people who forgive, but
who can forgive something with no eyes,

no ribs, no head to bow in shame?
In the dream, though, we sat and spoke

somber. In the dream, we reached out
and took what must have been your hand,

vanishing and damp. You let us.
And when your whir-voice said, full

of torn-off roof shingles and children's
coin collections, that you were sorry,

we wanted, with all our blood and breath,
to believe you. So, for the span of a sleep, we did.

--Catherine Pierce

When a devastating natural disaster occurs, it’s so hard to reckon with the seeming arbitrariness of the destruction—why this town and not that one? Why this house, this car, this family? In this poem, I wanted to give the townspeople a chance to imagine, at least briefly, intention, remorse, and grace.—Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words, all from Saturnalia Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce’s revelatory poem begins with its title, “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes.” “And then we woke up” dashes this fantasy, yet the poem obsessively continues it: working to anthropomorphize, even negotiate with, an impossibly brutal natural force that slams all it encounters, killing cowering people and animals and carrying photographs thousands of miles to where they are sometimes posted on social media and recovered. Catherine Pierce lives in Tornado Alley, as do I. Coined as part of a geographical research project in 1952, the term, with its Noir quality, suggests permanent destitution—and indeed, many towns must rebuild from zero, knowing that more tornados will spin towards them.

How to deal psychologically with this situation, let alone poetically? Though this is a more rural than urban problem, urbanity is needed—an approach with play in it—play that, far from trivializing the tornado’s impact, lets us, in part, get our minds around it. One model informing this poem may be Kenneth Koch’s brilliant addresses to large, abstract entities, such as World War II. Another may be Frank O’Hara channeling Mayakovsky in the famous sun-initiated conversation poem, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” 

A true literalist of the imagination, Pierce begins by dramatizing the phenomenon’s absurd violence: “And our uncles / were still missing, our azaleas yanked / / and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.” Like O'Hara's sun, Pierce's tornado speaks first:

 

     But before we woke, we heard you say

 

     in a voice that hummed without words

     that you'd gone too far and would hold

 

     that rushing hole at your center for the rest

     of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

 

     like a church . . . .

 

“We heard you say” reminds us that this is fantasy—but it is also reality: a tornado cannot live without its “rushing hole.” Feeling “a little / like a church” is a wonderful literalization of faith, akin to William Blake’s expose of hypocrisy in “London,” where “the Chimney-sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls.” Then there is the wonderfully funny and spot-on

     We are people who forgive, but

     who can forgive something with no eyes,

     no ribs, no head to bow in shame?

In what context can this happen? In dream, of course. There, the tornado has a “whir-voice” that Pierce, in an inspired move, fills with “roof shingles and children’s / coin collections”; a voice that says “sorry,” a bare-bones apology that the town wants desperately “with all our breath and blood” to believe. Catherine Pierce’s riveting “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes,” a poem that reminds us of the radically communal nature of weather, ends with a modest Shakespearean sentence—one that encompasses much of human nature: “So, for the span of a sleep, we did.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Four) The Fizz of the Theatrical: Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]

THE BUCKET AND THE RAIN

[Scene: a farmyard. It is raining cats and dogs. A metal bucket stands out in the rain, three yards from the barn.]

The Bucket [muttering to himself]: Why did they leave me out here and not in the barn? If it carries on like this I'm gonna be full in no time.

[The rain falls harder.]

The Bucket [still to himself]: Just because I'm a bucket they think they can leave me out here in all weathers. But I hate water. They could've at least turned me upside down.

The Rain: Hey there Bucket, I hear you complaining again. All I ever hear is you complaining when I'm raining. Beats me why you hate water so much. Don't bucket and water go together like peaches and cream, Laurel and Hardy, and bra and panties, and other much loved pairings?

The Bucket: I am not familiar with those terms. My feeling is . . . You change me. I am not myself when I'm full of you. You make me so heavy. You keep running over my lip.

The Rain: What about functionality? I make you useful. Otherwise you're just an empty container.

The Bucket: Emptiness is potentiality!

The Tractor: That's not your real issue. Your real issue is lack of choice. You can't choose to stay empty when the rain is raining. Similarly, I can't choose to work since my battery failed three months ago. This is life on earth.

The Bucket: Please mind your own business. You could choose to keep your nose out of other characters' conversations instead of choosing to butt in.

The Rain: Most people think I do not choose to fall, but fall as a consequence of certain meteorological conditions. How wrong they are . . .

The Bucket: As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, emptiness is potentiality. I have so much to give!

The Rain: What, exactly? I think being full of me is rather lovely.

The Tractor: All right – so, now, I think the issue is sexual. Is that perhaps an intense version of the wider issue of lacking autonomy? In any case – let me just say that my tank is still full of gasoline. I mean, full to the top.

[The Sun breaks forth from clouds.]

The Sun: Things of the earth! Each day is a gift from me! Rain, relax for a while. All of you relax and dry off. When you accept your being, each of you, the barnyard of life will be good.

The Bucket: The barnyard of life! But I came from the monger of irony, better known by most people around these parts as Halliday's Hardware (“Forget the rest – We're the best!").

The Rain: A fine store, but frustrating from my point of view. The owner has an excellent collection of umbrellas, and try as I might I've never been able to give him a jolly good drenching. But I'll never give up. I am nothing if not persistent.

[Rain falls. From the farmhouse offstage comes the sound of a phonograph record, and an old song: “There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole." The Bucket weeps into itself and overflows.]

CURTAIN

© Mark Halliday & Martin Stannard

We met in 2003 at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on England’s east coast where we had both been invited to read, and we immediately discovered our shared admiration for the work of Kenneth Koch--particularly for Koch's hilariously odd tiny dialogues in One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. Soon we decided to try co-writing such things and we've been doing it ever since--we must have written almost a hundred plays (from one page to five pages long), via email. Our procedure has been emphatically casual;  one of us starts a play, with a few lines, and then we take turns adding a few lines, seldom with any plan or declared purpose.  It has been fun to try to surprise each other. Occasionally this has caused a little tension, when one of us has become hopeful for a certain plot twist or theme or joke to arrive, and Stannard prefers brevity whereas Halliday leans toward the epic. But the basic assumption has been that each of us accepts whatever the other has added. We like to say we resemble Jagger and Richards in this respect. –Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard

Mark Halliday is a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). He has published essays on more than twenty contemporary poets since 1996.

Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, and his poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s. He has also had the honour (and pleasure) to read his work at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City. He was the founding editor of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978-93 which, after Martin in 1980 discovered the work of Paul Violi (with whom he subsequently became a close friend), was the first magazine in the UK to regularly publish New York School poets including Ashbery, Koch, Violi, Charles North and Tony Towle. The magazine’s complete archive can be found as downloadable PDFs at www.martinstannard.com/jsc. In 1993 he arranged and accompanied Koch and Violi on a reading tour of the UK, after helping to organize an exhibition of Koch’s collaborations with artists at The Wolsey Gallery, Ipswich, Suffolk. Martin’s recent publications include “The Review” (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2020) and “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters” (Leafe Press, 2020). More information can be found at www.martinstannard.com

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Three) The Fizz of the Theatrical:  Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]

To see Kenneth Koch’s love of speech as interchange, as challenge and riposte, we must go to his One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, jeux d’esprit that, refusing fusty closeting, are staged in the fresh air of imagination--and sometimes in theaters. (For a brief, affectionate production, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcVc4wUP4N8 .)

Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard’s “The Bucket and the Rain” pays homage to and continues Koch’s line of invention: a sensibility that takes something from cartoons’ parodic exploitation of self-importance in all its forms; but also, I think, from the tradition of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, in whose milieux action is always precipitous.

“The Bucket and the Rain” begins, quite naturally, with stage directions. To literalize “It is raining cats and dogs” imagine toy cats and dogs plummeting from above. The Bucket, soliloquizing, bemoans being left outside. It is a bucket who, naturally enough, hates water. The Rain tries to dissuade The Bucket from its aversion: “Beats me why you hate water so much. Don't bucket and water go together like peaches and cream, Laurel and Hardy, and bra and panties, and other much loved pairings?” So do The Tractor and The Sun. When The Sun invokes “the barnyard of life,” The Bucket says,  “But I came from the monger of irony, better known by most people around these parts as Halliday's Hardware,” a meta-moment combining humor with illumination. Reaching maximum frustration,The Bucket, weeping, overflows.

In a great and true simplicity, the characters see and explain life in terms of their own impulses. They cannot do otherwise than act out. The sun, self-appointed deus ex machina, urges harmony and acceptance: “Each day is a gift from me!” In actorly terms, The Bucket’s “action” is to seek emptiness; The Rain’s to tout its helpfulness; The Tractor’s to assert its virility; The Sun’s to be avuncular, to save the day. Altruism? Non-existent. The characters stand apart, galvanized by need.

At play’s end, a folk song serendipitously arrives. In “The Bucket Has A Hole in It,” (famously sung by Harry Belafonte and the singularly named Odetta) two characters sing to (or at) one another, the male singer repelling at every turn the female’s attempts to get him to fetch water. The song enacts the very lack of choice expressed by The Tractor. The man’s action is to rest, the woman’s not to let him. In this Koch-esque avant-garde play, collaboratively invented by Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard, our isolating obsessions reveal themselves as comic, mere bugaboos; and we laugh, made one by the knowledge. What Sun can’t manage, the play accomplishes. –Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Three): Jane Zwart [by Angela Ball]

Poem with a Hole in It

My great-aunt had a typewriter that knocked the belly
from every O she wrote. Every poem has a hole in it.

A rifle’s sight, the peg of lens in a motel door. The circle
cut in a kaleidoscope so we can see colors petaling

down the straw that cores the tube. Your pupil guzzling
data and light, my pupil guzzling data and light.

I think of the divots left in a birthday cake when the kid
uproots the candles. I think of the pocks Christmas lights burn

into a porch rail’s ruff of snow. We are on different sides
of this eyelet. My great-aunt taught me that. Every poem

is riddled with holes. But I am threading two tin cans’
punctured floors that you might know me yet.

--Jane Zwart                                                           first published in South Carolina Review

 

This poem is one I would not have written were it not for the poet Amit Majmudar, my closest sibling in the literary world. “Poem with a Hole in It” is a product of what Amit’s named “mirror writing”: for a number of days running, we take turns sending each other titles. We each improvise a poem to suit each title within 24 hours. Then we swap poems, the only hard and fast rule being that you cannot read the other person’s verse until you’ve sent them yours. – Jane Zwart

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. She also frequently writes book reviews, most recently for Plume.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Three): Jane Zwart

The product of collaboration, Jane Zwart’s “Poem With a Hole in it” not only invites us to consider apertures of all kinds, it asserts its own shape with mysterious ferocity, as if contracting in response to our gaze.

The two gazes, ours and the author’s, meet at the poem’s center: “Your pupil guzzling / data and light, my pupil guzzling data and light,” as if somehow one person’s dominant eye could join another’s to form a new set. The poem encourages the possibility that every poem does this, and also that every poem resolves into the image of both reader and writer—not as composite, but as possible wholeness. Unlike the convexity of John Ashbery’s extended self-portrait, this poem is concave, drawing us in through the accuracy, the acuity of its descriptions: “the peg of lens in a motel door”; the kaleidoscope cut “so we can see colors petaling / / down the straw that cores the tube.” Its taut yet playful (“knocked the belly,” “rifle’s sight”) declarations, subtle yet resounding, encircle our attention.

How apt that after beginning with the great-aunt’s wonderfully flawed typewriter—with its “O” that fails to complete its concentrated syllable of surprise, of grief—the poem brings the great-aunt back near the end to deliver this clinching insight: “We are on different sides / of this eyelet.” (Collaboration works within the poem, as well as in its inception.)  “Eyelet” is kin to “inlet”—place for ocean to thread land. This separating eyelet calls for filling, and the poem closes in the act of doing just that, “threading two cans’ punctured floors / so you may know me yet.” Jane Zwart’s elegant “Poem with a Hole in It” fashions from two holes a device from childhood, the tin-can phone: primitive, flawed, yet a welcome and sturdy connection.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch [by Angela Ball]

YOU COULD

I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.
It was 11 a.m. on an overcast morning
I was wearing—well, let’s not worry about
what I was wearing. I don’t make a habit of this—
I’d never done it before. It wasn’t a whole stick,
though a good half inch. Popped it in
and let it melt into the flesh under my tongue,
the place where you’d insert nitro-glycerin,
if that’s what you needed. I won’t describe
the taste—you’ll have to try it for yourself.

Perhaps when you’re thinking about goals,
that would be a good time to let some
butter have a ride on your tongue,
or stick a thumb in a bowl of icing,
scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf—
whatever pulls you in from, or shoves you out on the ledge
you might need to come in from, or go out on.
You don’t have to climb Mount Everest,
unless you find yourself in front of it
and can’t come away. Unless something’s
calling you to do something your friends
wouldn’t understand in a million years.

I don’t understand butter. I know it
comes from cows, who have given so much
for so long. But it’s a person I picture,
the first to try it. Others in the tribe
discarded the floating globules, but this one
opted to taste the world, the same world
that has us so worried and confused.
You could do it, and afterwards write it down:
Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.
Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

--Diana Goetsch

Poems come out of nowhere and then you see what went into them. “You Could” is a carpe diem/anti-bucket list type poem. I knew a bucketlister whose goal was to see a baseball game in every major league stadium. This same person also said he wanted to die by age 60—which actually makes sense because been-there-done-that-ism is more about dying (“kicking the bucket”) than living. “You Could” was also influenced by Nazim Hikmet’s great poem, “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” which recommends against certain activities (“to think of roses and gardens inside is bad”) in favor of others (“to think of seas and mountains is good”) in order to stay truly alive. Hikmet’s rating system may be cryptic to some, though the incarcerated kids I used to teach had no problems relating to the poem. “You Could” also elevates some experiences (butter tasting) over others (mountain climbing). And yet it ends with a journal entry, which makes every life look like a bucket list. –Diana Goetsch

Diana Goetsch is the author of several poetry collections, including Nameless Boy (Orchises, 2015) and In America (Rattle 2017), and also the memoir This Body I Wore (FSG, 2022), which was pronounced “achingly beautiful” by The New York Times Book Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.  She used to teach at Stuyvesant High School. Her website is www.dianagoetsch.com

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch

In her important “You Could,” Diana Goetsch treats us to the miraculous ordinary, like Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch when they thrill at “the park full of dancers and their tights and shoes / in little bags . . .” or at staring into, as into a musical telescope, “a bottle of sparkling pop.” Like both O’Hara’s and Koch’s work, “You Could” instructs by delighting.

The poem begins with a bald announcement of the kind a Noir narrator might make, complete with place, time, and weather: “I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.” The speaker begins to tell what she was wearing, then rejects this as unimportant, launching instead into rationalization: it’s something she doesn’t do often and “wasn’t a whole stick / though a good half inch.” The butter dissolves into, in disconcerting coincidence, “the place you’d insert nitro-glycerin, / if that’s what you needed.” The poet declines to usurp our experience of butter by detailing her own encounter.

The poem’s second stanza introduces goals only to supply anarchic ones sure to be rejected by America’s ultra-serious dieters and exercisers, including “scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf.” There’s no call to go all death-defying—“You don’t have to climb Mount Everest, / unless you find yourself in front of it / and can’t come away.” It broaches matters mysterious and serious, though mentioned casually: “Unless something’s calling you to do something / that your friends wouldn’t understand in a million years.” Something, perhaps, like changing your métier, your name, or your sex, as eels do going to or from the sea?

Then the poem makes a strange and wonderful pronouncement: “I don't understand butter.” Normally, butter does not offer itself to our understanding, not even on cooking shows that display its behavior as an ingredient, but tell us nothing of its inner life, its thisness. After a nod to the all-important cow, the poet moves to what truly interests her, the discoverer of butter—the explorer who, despite unfamiliarity “opted to taste the world, the same world / that has us so worried and confused.” The poem dares us to dare—to assume an MO arcane merely because so few have followed it—among them Frank O’Hara, who in in his poem “Autobiographia Literaria” transforms from reject to poet:

     And here I am, the
     center of all beauty!
     writing these poems!
     Imagine!

“You Could” ends by relating the author’s journal entry for the day as possible model, generous example, happily including the detail withheld at the start, what she is wearing:

     You could do it, and afterwards write it down:
     Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.
     Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

The slip here, a garment now sadly in neglect, is the same one worn by the young Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, and by the character Alison in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; garment whose very mention (as “shift”) provoked riots during the run of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 Dublin. In putting it on, the poet puts on its feminine power, its fierce delicacy “just because”—the very reason we dare to indulge our dangerous and life-affirming impulses, the reason we enter an irresistible poem like Diana Goetsch’s “You Could” not knowing who we might be when we leave.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-One): Mark Halliday [by Angela Ball]

                                    MERCILESS YOUTH

Merciless youth in the coffee shop
unaware that my mother died thirty years ago on this date
they study Marine Biology or investment banking
so they can thrive and win in a world of laws and bodies
they’re so not serious they have no idea what matters

okay that one over there is reading As You Like It
which is one of the Shakespeare plays I can never quite remember
but I guess it ultimately recommends humorous tolerance
which is fine but doesn’t correspond well to my wet raincoat
and my broken-spoke umbrella and how I feel

remembering what day today is
in a world of laws and bodies where my mother got so robbed
but okay I hope that one reading As You Like It
grows up and has kids if she wants and understands
what matters with the help of Shakespeare . . .

My mother could recite Lady Macbeth’s “Glamis thou art” speech
incredibly fast – she was funny
about ambition and about rote learning
and being funny she helped the neighbor girls Karen and Jeannie
not take things too seriously in their high school years

so they would survive and find the parts of life they could love
all right I forgive these students let them thrive I guess
and let them rethink (as I have to rethink) what serious is.

--Mark Halliday

"Merciless Youth" appeared in The Yale Review in 2010

My mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-two. This is the one gigantic wrongness in my life, a life otherwise mostly very lucky and happy.
I was twenty-five when she died. Her illness and her death became inseparable in my mind from the idea of seriousness -- of what is serious in life.
"Serious" is the key word in "Merciless Youth". In the poem I catch myself trying to feel superior (as I remember losing my mother) to the much younger persons around me in the coffee shop; I need to realize that this easy sense of superiority is itself un-serious.
--Mark Halliday

Mark Halliday is a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). He has published essays on more than twenty contemporary poets since 1996.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-One): Mark Halliday

Mark Halliday’s “Merciless Youth” is a perfectly informal, casually exact meditation on the poet’s mother, Shakespeare, mercy, the nature and quality of seriousness, and that biggest of questions, How to live? –all addressed in two continuous sentences featuring one ellipsis, one pair of parentheses, and one period.

The phrase “merciless youth” is formal, but also humorous—youth in itself can’t be accused, but those who lack it charge it with crimes: chief among them, “they study Marine Biology or investment banking / so they can thrive in a world of laws and bodies.” The trouble with youth, we all know, is “they have no idea what matters.” 

The poet’s thirty-year grief for his mother, worn like his wet raincoat and “broken-spoke” umbrella, is of no moment to them—bears no relation to winning. But one is reading a Shakespeare play; and that fact opens a new avenue of thought, leading casually to a dead-on perception of what the play does: “recommends humorous tolerance”; and back, in the poem’s looping progress, to the poet’s mother. As You Like It contains the axiom, “All the world’s a stage,” apt metaphor for a poem that happens both in a coffee shop and in the poet’s mind, as a kind of dramatic musing distinct from the far-flung associativeness of “ultra-talk.” Its questionings and connections resemble Kenneth Koch’s in such poems as “To My Father’s Business” and “To the United States Army”—both, post-facto meditations; but, like Halliday’s poem, active, in-the-moment sense making, with the nowness of theater.

The “Glamis” speech the poet’s mother recalls by rote (and comically accelerates) worries that Macbeth has too much of “the milk of human kindness”—a substance that the mother surely possesses. (Some commentators assert that, with all her imagery of suckling, Lady Macbeth is obsessed with her own absent motherhood.) That Mrs. H. recites a speech spoken by a woman full of toxic ambition--that is, her diametrical opposite--suggests playful flexibility and acceptance.

Here, reconciling loss has to do with discovering/reencountering/remixing connections: between youth and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Mrs. H., Mrs. H. and very specific young people, Karen and Jeannie—how she helped them, as Halliday expresses: “survive and find the parts of life they could love.” This “so robbed” mother empowers her son to do, in his own way, the same thing: “all right I forgive these students let them thrive I guess," the qualifying “I guess,” both colloquial and precise.

False solemnity was a pitfall Kenneth Koch recognized in certain poet contemporaries and memorably satirized in the wickedly funny “Fresh Air.” With its essential “is,” Mark Halliday’s “Merciless Youth” demonstrates that poetry, like a mother’s/neighbor’s attitude, can encourage us to eschew fixity and find respite from grief as the poem, poet, we, and even possibly the students, in future lives, reimagine “what serious is.”

--Angela Ball