The Best American Poetry

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

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young [by Angela Ball]

Chaos Magic for Beginners

Don’t we all love when the announcer
gets choked up? When the roller coaster
gets stuck, that an octopus can eat
one of its own hearts when stressed enough
and aren’t we all? Don’t you like to know stuff?
Sperm leaves the penis at 28mph,
in many countries being bird-pooped-on
is considered lucky, Goya’s skull is still missing
although the last thing my mother said
no one understood and I’m okay with that.
Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory
heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever
the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate
the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,
the detective who’s yet to realize
he’s stalking himself. It’s okay
to be a demon, to be a thrown angel
on the spectrum. Maybe you just feel
too much, too much serotonin so
even swans make you crazy, anyone
talking on their phone in the elevator.
Nothing needs a reason to happen,
the cause of all this has yet to occur
if it ever will. Often it’s like being fed
to raptor hatchlings or trying to get
information from a corpse, possibly
your own. Almost everything doesn’t work.
I like when the lovers can somehow
stay together. I like when the tower
collapses, that sense at the end
that it’s never over

--Dean Young

I think one of the most important lessons and permissions I have tried to absorb from the originals of the New York School is the sense that anything language can do can be in a poem, be it cri de coeur or blunt information, if the poem and the poet's receptivity is open and playful enough. –Dean Young

Dean Young's most recent book is Solar Perplexus.  His poems have appeared a dozen times in Best American Poetry.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young

The title of Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners,” is a welter of contradictions—“magic,” as a skill, depends on utmost precision—what is “Chaos Magic” and how begin to impart its principles? Perhaps the way is demonstration, and “Chaos Magic for Beginners” is wonderfully demonstrative.

The poem’s outer subject is expressed in its title, its inner one in the pattern of its imagery: things being blocked or unblocked, expressed. Bird poop turned awkwardly proverbial, a famous skull on the loose. Extractions, ingestions. Its method is not so much “ultra talk” as ultra thought—expression so swift as to almost precede formulation.

The poem begins with schadenfreude prompted by a broadcaster’s fallibility. The late Jon Anderson once said, “The secret of poetry is cruelty.” It may also be the case that chaos is its secret. Who can explain the wonder of reading Young’s list of comic frustrations and striking oddities—the stuck rollercoaster, the heart-eating octopi (that we resemble), the speed of sperm, the great artist’s cranium, ending with the scalding mystery of a mother’s last words--lines that might also be read, as I did at first, as the mother saying, “No one understood. And I’m OK with that.”

With “Let’s try to take pleasure,” the poem turns to its teaching mission:

     Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory

     heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever

     the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate

     the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,

     the detective who’s yet to realize   

     he’s stalking himself. It’s okay

     to be a demon, to be a thrown angel 

     on the spectrum.

Chaos is magic, is both question and explanation, and must be appreciated—celebrated, in fact—because it is what we have. Disorientation orders the day. We are reminded, perhaps, of T.S. Eliot’s overly-friendly April hound; and of Oedipus, old swollen-foot, the classic “detective yet to realize.” In a pop-psychology gesture, we learn that it’s ok to be expelled from heaven, afflicted by a malady that allies us with every color. Most of all, we learn the wonders of disorientation—a state celebrated by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Kenneth Koch, struck smart by a meaningful sign: “One Train May Hide Another.”

Our guide through a series of unpredictable occurrences, the poem primes us to enjoy how contemporary physics interprets the cosmos: the unknown unknown surrounds us. The unseen cat in the box is simultaneously dead and alive. The lines “Nothing needs a reason to happen, / the cause of all this is yet to occur / if it ever will” posit a retrograde world of reversals in which we are neophyte interpreters, and the corpse we interrogate may be our own.

The poem ends with two vastly different enjoyments, both owned by an “I”: The first, homely in its generality, “I like when the lovers can somehow stay together,” invokes pleasure at seeing cinematic and/or real-life romance grow durable. The second springs at us, its generality giving way to the nightmare of the World Trade Center attack, to schadenfreude recombinant with sorrow, its magic a startling kinesthetic image, specific and encompassing: “that sense at the end / that it’s never over” (period omitted).  Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners” schools us not just in chaos, but in the tragicomedy and comic tragedy of our unbreakable fall.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Nine): Matt Hart [by Angela Ball]

DEAR BERSERKER

The light came into my dream
from the right, so I opened my eyes
to a mulberry bicycle that Sam stole
heavenward in a poem of many errors.
Then I was puffed rice or a poisonous
enjambment. I ate a bowl of scrambled eggs.
I could’ve sworn I was drowning in the engines
of an airport. Patiently, I contrived
to replace the painted target
with a small silver policeman,
redacted from the force. But
all of that was earlier, before I drove
Agnes and Juliet to their final exams
in Algebra and Chemistry, and also
before I went back to blitzing in the denim
and dimming—sitting for my portrait
in the juice of a lemon. Sometimes
more than one of them puckers
a Venus Flytrap or rattles a contingent
of cloches that stream from the Exits to enter
the drag-strip, the testicle, the syrup
of The Muses. Why The Fates
and The Hours often fail to intervene
is a question. Why The Sirens often fail
to alert me to their presence is another.
I’m already dead when I notice the petunia.
This particular occasion is whatever/wherever
you want it to be, or merely the time I have left
before I go to meet Dean and drink more
of the oracular in the future where I’m shards
in the maw of the racehorse Conundrum. To start
or not to start? To stop or not to go? One thing
I can recommend is Andrei Voznesensky
via Anselm Hollo, where I, too, am hollow
and translated into a speakeasy, though
nothing’s ever easy that involves language,
and just to be clear, this is not
“channel surfing,” so don’t believe
the one-trick readers of ponies.
I have never been a pony, and this isn’t
some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle.
If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered
geraniums of saints, then you have problems
that I can’t even begin to address.
Let’s just say we agree to split the baby birds
into teams—your failure of imagination
versus my deliberate distortions.
The long bombs get longer in the teeth
with every wallop. I’ve never met a shadow
in the light I didn’t like. The score
is a touchdown on an alien planet.
I am the alien at home in my amazement,
and you’re what comes in waves to destroy me.

--Matt Hart

 I hope, if nothing else, you can tell that I enjoy tremendously the process of writing poems and that I am in all of them trying to discover something about, and/or be surprised by, language and life. Writing is always, for me, a celebratory occasion. Even when the shadows rise up and the darkness falls, there may be some possibility that the soul will be shattered or moved or redirected, and through that we might connect in some way to the self, other people, and the world. A poem is a call for a response, and any response is itself a new call. 

--Matt Hart

Matt Hart is the author of nine books of poems, including most recently Everything Breaking/for Good and The Obliterations. A new book, Familiar, is forthcoming in 2022 from Pickpocket Books. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, POETRY, and Waxwing, among others. He was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety from 1993-2019. Currently, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band NEVERNEW: www.nevernew.net. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Nine): Matt Hart

Matt  Hart’s surprising and provoking  “Dear Berserker” is a story and an essay. So it is a real poem. I borrow that formula, of course, from Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter,” in which he says, "One day I am thinking of / a color: orange." He begins to write: "Pretty soon it is a / whole page of words, not lines," and O'Hara is transported: "There should be so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by. It is even in / prose, I am a real poet."

Here, as in O’Hara’s poem, a self is under discovery, defined with and against the names that surround it: Agnes, Juliet; Anselm Hollo and the poet he translates, Andrei Voznesensky, “where I, too, am hollow / and translated into a speakeasy, though nothing’s ever easy that involves language.” Maybe not, but in Hart it is playful and punning, with an Ashberian enjoyment of cliché’s syntax.  And is a kind of whistling in the dark, a counter to “how terrible orange is / and life.”  According to Oxford Languages, a “Berserker” is “an ancient Norse warrior who fought in a wild frenzy.”

As ally against these warriors, Hart enlists the angel of surprise. The poem starts with the filmy line, “The light came into my dream,” but instead of something equally filmy, we get something exact: “from the right,” then the commonsensical “so I opened my eyes,” followed by the beautiful and puzzling “mulberry bicycle that Sam stole” (a mulberry-colored bike, a bike made from mulberry? Sam a miscreant neighbor?), then, “heavenward in a poem of many errors.” Perhaps Sam is S.T. Coleridge, levitating language in response to dejection. He is, after all, a poet known for error, at least in the case of the star he inserts between the horns of the crescent moon in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” when in fact the dark moon is between those horns, and a star is impossible, dammit. (It should be noted that an older meaning of “error” is “wandering,” as in Milton’s streams of Eden in Paradise Lost, that flow “With mazy error, under pendant shades.” I would like to call Coleridge a “poet errant.”)

Poems that rely on animation of voice, on what has been called "ultra-talk," can sometimes look like a series of stunts. Not this one. The transformations the voice reports in its straightforward way aren’t arbitrary, but make nonsensical sense. For example, “Algebra and Chemistry” are well known scholastic berserkers. And the collisions the poem reports are comic in their absurdity—absurdity that nails something about the thing described. This section, for me the funniest in the poem, begins with writing frustrations and moves to academic ones:

     . . . Why The Fates

     and The Hours often fail to intervene

     is a question. Why The Sirens often fail

     to alert me to their presence is another.

     I’m already dead when I notice the petunia.

     This particular occasion is whatever/wherever

     you want it to be, or merely the time I have left

     before I go to meet Dean and drink more

     of the oracular in the future where I’m shards

     in the maw of the racehorse Conundrum.

“I’m already dead when I notice the petunia” is apt. In fact, were I of a tattoo persuasion, this might be my pick. (The problem with tattoos is that they trust the future. In this they are romantic.) Deans and other university administrators sometimes seem to dwell in a grandeur-filled future that will exist if we only implement this or that cut; survive on a pittance; serve a galloping purpose, outcome unknown.

From “nothing’s ever easy” onward, the poem challenges the unconvinced, advocating its own method while practicing it (the latter something that, to a certain degree, all the founding poets of the New York School do and that “Why I Am Not a Painter” does in spades).

     and just to be clear, this is not

     “channel surfing,” so don’t believe

     the one-trick readers of ponies.

     I have never been a pony, and this isn’t

     some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle.

     If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered

     geraniums of saints, then you have problems

     that I can’t even begin to address.

“I have never been a pony, and this isn’t /some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle,” attacks the opposition with the winning vehemence of wordplay, a Groucho Marxian chicanery. “If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered / geraniums of saints,” a gonzo version of William Blake’s “heaven in a wildflower,” dizzily shifts to logic and sanity: “you have problems / that I can’t even begin to address.” The close of Matt Hart’s “Dear Berserker” relies on a pledge he exacts from us to “see the ineffable” and make a home in “amazement”; though in so doing we choose a terrible vulnerability, as holy and foolish as Saint Francis eschewing bodily drapery for the sake of his home-hewn church. In this case, of course, the sanctuary is art, visible only to those who are civilized: uncertain, open to breaking.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Eight): Claudia Keelan [by Angela Ball]

Life-Sentence(s)

 

One full-grown woman

A recently born child

A gleam of sunshine

& Pointed hill

One saint in a silent movie

Agee in a cab

Martin King on a Memphis balcony

Clouds when examined under glass

Salt water on solid rock

Jesus on the cross

Father in the guest room

4 to 6 feet

Now

Stupid Fucking White Man

Then

A pebble and a clod

The Future

Mr. William Blake

The stars of the southern hemisphere

Moisture

The climbing up

Doris Lanard

The climbing down

Robert Creeley

Overhanging ferns and lilies

A level and brilliantly white sea

A little haystack

Port Desire

The first landing

Flaccid Overlook

Entropy’s missed triumph

Your luminous body

Mine

--Claudia Keelan

 

Claudia Keelan's most recent books are We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems (Barrow Street) and Ecstatic Emigre: An Ethics of Practice (University of Michigan Press).  She is the editor of Interim and the Test Site Poetry Series.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Eight): Claudia Keelan

Claudia Keelan’s enthralling “Life-Sentence(s)” is thirty-three end-stops. Thirty-three doors. Lives and deaths our experience may elaborate. Is abundance and disappearance, both playful and solemn, like Frank O’Hara’s in such poems as “Talking the Sun at Fire Island." The first line, “One full-grown woman,” suggests a catalogue. But instead we taxi thirty-three runways for imagination. Their directions different for each reader. But not runways, because that suggests that the context, the universe inhabited, is consistent. The mortalities of the first twelve lines alone encompass quotidian fact (in the woman and “recently born” child), the fevered world of a silent movie, geography, literary history, chemistry, martyrdom, and familial grief. The poem’s cross-sections interrogate time’s givens:

     Now

     Stupid Fucking White Man

     Then

     A pebble and a clod

     The Future

     Mr. William Blake

     The stars of the southern hemisphere

Throughout the poem, contextual shifts jolt, disrupt memory. The snatch of invective, “Stupid Fucking White Man” prompts many sad examples. Pebbles and clods endure in their lowly ubiquity—here, two paragons of the indistinguishable. To think of William Blake with the honorific accorded a living man, moving about the world, makes him again an agent of eternity that we leap from into stars.

The quotation above reveals a signal part of the poem’s method: diverse entities alternate with familiar markers: “Now”. . .”Then”. . . “The Future” . . . that suddenly seem to us insubstantial. We live a world not of progress, but of disordered parallels.

For me, looking up “Doris Lanard” yielded a jumble of similar names, but also the heading “We have found Doris,” a poignant assertion. Here, in finding “Robert Creeley,” we dwell on a great poet entrained by a litany of small and large beauties:

     Overhanging ferns and lilies

     A level and brilliantly white sea

     A little haystack

     Port Desire

 

A tumble, a plane, a cone of sustenance, an inlet of longing.

Claudia Keelan’s vivid and unsettling “Life-Sentence(s)” contains no period, no confining mark of closure. Ending, it gives us “The first landing,” that may remind us of John Ashbery’s paradoxical “The Mooring of Starting Out,” then the comical “Flaccid Overlook,” and, finally, a vision of two beings—overlooked by the universe’s all-powerful spin-out of energy, the agent of bodies’ parting—joined in ecstatic possession: “Your luminous body / Mine”

Rejecting anchors, we reach Port Desire.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Seven): Major Jackson [by Angela Ball]

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

All through my days, elaborate silken rays
coming through screens carrying
its own occult. I am in the habit of questioning love
which is a storm of rare light
silvering spider webs in a sacred forest,
the silent clock in the town square,
the heavy footprints of the homeless,
the museum we do not enter.

So when I say I’ve subdued
the stallions raging in my blood,
know that I travel here only to watch
the sparrow hawk flying low over marl prairie,
to take in the sedge wren’s flits and jukes
like teenagers learning a new dance.
I’m here guarding my freedom,
rubbing my hands over yesterday fires.

--Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and Zyzzva. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Photo Credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Seven): Major Jackson

Major Jackson’s intricate “Nothing to See Here, Move Along,”  begins by conflating biography (“All through my days”) with car accident; readers with gawkers. The title, appropriated from law enforcement, suggests not just smashups, but more sinister scenarios involving abuse of power and denial of freedom. We see none of these things, but think of them while witnessing a series of complex relations.

An aura of enforcement, of necessity, surrounds the poem. Jackson’s work resembles John Ashbery’s in its ability to establish a metaphysical place. For Ashbery, his early poem ,“The Instruction Manual,” is foundational—providing an imagined version of a real Guadalajara—later poems travel further, producing mind-dwelling places, “lacustrine cities,” definite in detail. This is the realm we inhabit here, but with a freshness and vitality of image that is Jackson’s own.

Jackson’s first stanza lives in the metaphysical, its “screens” of “silken rays”—light’s waves “coming through screens” (of molecules?) “carrying its own occult.” Its serial definitions of love, the results of “questioning,” are ethereal—

     which is a storm of rare light

     silvering spider webs in a sacred forest,

     the silent clock in the town square,

--until “the heavy footsteps of the homeless” lead us to the ominous museum “we do not enter”—repelled, perhaps, by the pain exhibited inside.

The best poems balance clarity and mystery. Throughout this one, the two get equal play. The stanzas themselves balance each other; the first emphasizing the hidden; the second, the revealed.

The second stanza begins with “So,” making all within it the result of the first and magnifying the white space between them. The speaker, “moving along,” has been caused to renounce the violence of “stallions raging in my blood.” And that violence is considerable. A stallion will crash fences or gates to get at a mare in heat.

Yet beauty arrives, transcending all necessity. Who can fathom the refreshment offered by these lines, that embody two of nature's strongest pursuits, feeding and mating? And a third: watching.

     know that I travel here only to watch

     the sparrow hawk flying low over marl prairie,

     to take in the sedge wren’s flits and jukes

     like teenagers learning a new dance.

We last see the poet “rubbing” his hands, as though himself homeless, over “yesterday fires”—distinct from “yesterday’s fires,” or memories. “Yesterday fires” are continuations, energies passed on to others—as Major Jackson’s “Nothing to See Here, Move Along,” warms us with its creative rub, its friction between what is and ought to be, guarding not just the poet’s freedom, but our own.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret [by Angela Ball]

We May Never Get Back Here

That soft yellow two-story place
in the Spanish style was a movie
       house, remember? Marilyn who
       pitied horses danced the desert

conscious while Clark watched.
       They don’t open doors in Niagara:
       too many bodies in the bell tower.
At the movie house, they exclusively
served expired snack cakes. Everyone

       should have to see a horse experience
a storm for the first time much like the way
it is a sin not to sneak into a movie house.
       When sad birds sleep, certain moths

       salivate, eat from eyes like a record
needle, music carving circles in a mirror,
like when you hear a sound or phrase so
       right you have to hum. Every once
       in a while, you notice you’re the only
animal at home & no one is waiting
to remember you & no, there’s not
       a person with a different perfume

in each individual eyelash waiting
to be squeezed like honeysuckle,
       someone you can turn to & say,
       I think you’re the talking I’ve
been with all day, someone

       to help you miss a movie house
       & a dog that lives to bite the air,
the right there. Again, I climbed
into a taxi with all your time.
       The dog you don’t even own
       yet hears your disc slip. Our

home is a lilac dropped at the feet
       like cigars or the afternoon, all those
       fortresses at the mercy of my breathing.
Driving by the movie house can turn you

       confident enough to make a noise, regret
       small things like owning one too many
clocks, the trouble of objects that give
you no trouble. One day, all at once,
       your neighbors realize they’re old
       & in the wrong room & I’ll just
wish I had been there the night

       you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t
       want their whole life to be a funeral
for a movie house, & who can afford
to live in a house with a person no one

       bothered to name? The mind is a generous
butcher. You’ve forgotten me like a child
spending his entire life in a water tower.
       At least I was always a laugh. Just one
       more film before they feed us vacation
footage. Perhaps it’s not a sad idea to stay

       children, a home without money, laughed
       human. What I mean is many families
moved, were moved in this house.
That’s all. What kind of families? Who cares.
       I was going underground until I touched you.
       Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m
in is not what I meant. When I watch movies,

       I often think about the time my teacher hugged
       his daughter like a haunted rocking chair. Had
I stepped into a play by Pinter? Was I a bird

       crying on pictures of more beautiful birds?
       I think of how the angel left Mary in Luke,
like my grandpa left Nilda with hell on her
hands, shrinking in some coffee shop. Stay

       for the morning, I’d say, my wings a torn
movie ticket. You’ll like getting born.

--Chad Foret

This began as a writing exercise after reading and watching Pinter's play The Homecoming. Around the same time, my wife and I drove past a building out in the country and she told me how it used to be a small movie theater. Each time we were in the area and I tried to point out the building, it was the wrong one, or it was in a different place than I remembered. It was like it was never there to begin with, or like all the buildings were a theater once. I drafted and revised with this experience in mind, and the allusions and mutations of memory and place all fused into this poem. --Chad Foret

Chad Foret is a freelance writer and editor from southeast Louisiana. His first book of poems, Scenes from a Rain Country, will be published with Lavender Ink in New Orleans. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, CutBank, Electric Literature, Prime Number Magazine, Bayou Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Flock, Barely South Review, New Rivers Press, and other journals and anthologies. More info can be found at chadforet.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret

Chad Foret’s fugue on a lost movie house begins with references to two films featuring Marilyn Monroe: The Misfits, her last completed film; and Niagara, her first film with star billing. A  movie exposes us as we watch,  sets us in juxtaposition. For Frank O’Hara of the New York School of Poets, the movies were education, with eager gunfire banging from horseback cowboys as hands, fingers slid toward new places; sexual discoveries juxtaposing the Little Tramp as he strolls his cockeyed sailor’s stroll away from  a scorned circus poster, a naked field. For Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits it was her being in a movie that her now-unloving husband had written when he loved her, so that the character she portrayed no longer existed, only her own boundless anxiety; for Clark Gable it was life beyond life, being a photogenic husk, concerned and leathery. The poem’s second movie, Niagara, carried this tagline:

“Marilyn Monroe and Niagara—a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control”

Here, Monroe and a waterfall are one: amalgam of fluvial and sexual potency, their combined power overmastering the forces that produced them.

Foret’s poem displays a related power: the uniting of statement with a compelling impulse to search. Surrealism had film as an ally almost from its start, gathering vigor when movies were just beginning to talk, when Spain and South America were talking to North America through Federico Garcia Lorca, through Pablo Neruda. Its dream method, opposing the sober, fed the young New York School of Poets, especially Kenneth Koch. In an interview with David Kennedy recorded in 1993, Koch says:

I wrote poem when I was just eighteen, maybe on my birthday, called 'For My Eighteenth Birthday' or 'Poem For My Birthday' and it was influenced by French surrealism in so far as I understood it. I understood it mainly from a surrealist magazine called View. It was edited by Charles Henry Ford and André Breton had something to do with it too. Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things and I wrote this poem when I was eighteen beginning, I can only remember part of, "At eighteen I walk on the surface of things, I tread in my stocking feet in houses of soft love..." [Laughs] and other sort of surrealist lines.

Foret’s poem, I believe, walks in “stocking feet in houses of soft love”: “I’ll just / wish I had been there the night / / you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t / want their whole life to be a funeral / for a movie house . . . .”  In this declaration, soft love meets extravagance. A possible dictum of surrealism: Going too far is not enough.

Wherever they run, movies make night, though in them the sun may blister the plank sidewalks of a western town, challenge the lonely nubs of cacti; a fluid night where all is new and possible, nothing held back by usual identities or connections. “Had I stepped into a play by Pinter?” the poem asks. Though Harold Pinter was no surrealist, his plays remove conventional social cushioning to establish an associational atavism that captivates and disturbs. He was a writer of terrific screenplays, like the one he wrote for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, in which Julie Christie in a gauzy dress becomes a scissoring butterfly in flagrante with Alan Bates.

Every house a movie—either in one, or containing one, or both. In home movies, we are most real and most illusory, always doing things that look like fun. In non-movie life, fun is hard to identify, our place in it elusive: “Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m / in is not what I meant.”

In Chad Foret’s vivid, cinematic poem, “We May Never Get Back Here,” we live in film’s sacred craziness, we fly—our wings “a torn movie ticket.” We absorb his lens’s feverish optimism, rewarded in the poem’s vivid close: “Stay for the morning,” it invites. “You’ll like getting born.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Five): Mary Ruefle [by Angela Ball]

Müller and Me

Wilhelm Müller, 1794-1827

I am an ordinary fauna, one
who can’t remember if a fife
is a rifle or a flute.
After all, there’s strife
and fight in it,
but on the other hand
it’s a short sweet word
that rhymes with life.
The way the cemetery looks made of books
and the library is a graveyard.
When love frees itself from pain
the angels cut off their wings
and throw them down to earth
(throw in your scarf
to cover my eyes
so your shadow won’t wake me).
I’d like to teach
a young starling to speak,
but clearly and distinctly
so his words wouldn’t be
like human ones.
I really believed my pain
was not that small,
but how heavy is my happiness
that no sound on earth
can encompass it?
I’m on a fifer’s ride
My steed is black and steady
I say goodnight to everyone
To everyone goodmorn

--Mary Ruefle

"Müller and Me" from Trances of the Blast. Copyright 2013. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate.

Photo credit: Libby Lewis Photography

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Five): Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle’s “Müller and Me” is an imagined collaboration with William Müller, the great German poet whose best-known works are Die shöne Müllerin and Winterreise, transformed by Franz Shubert into song cycles.

It begins with the surprise announcement, “I am an ordinary fauna. . .”—word coined in 1771, normally plural in usage—and moves to the word “fife,” embedding it in childlike, jokey play:

     After all, there’s strife

     and fight in it,

     but on the other hand

     it’s a short sweet word

     that rhymes with life.

We think, perhaps, of the well-known Archibald Willard painting, The Spirit of 1776, featuring three musicians marching into battle, one of them a bandaged fife player. The fife is most often found in the fife and drum corps of an army—as anomalous, in its ornamental lightness, as a lyric poem in a world of wars. Müller fought against Napoleon as part of the Prussian army.

“The way” provides a short-stemmed transition to a graveyard, perhaps an 18^th or 19^th-century one, in which stones are upright, leaning books; their titles, lives. In characteristic reversal, the metaphor turns on its heel: “and the library is a graveyard.”

Transitions in Ruefle’s poems follow a logic whose mainspring is play—the opposite of that referred to in Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto”: “Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.” Müller’s poems, as Shubert translates them to song, are pain-drenched, Winterreise in particular. As sung by Thomas Quastoff, a German bass-baritone whose artistry belies severe thalidomide-induced deformities, its winter journey is surpassingly sad. Müller worked on Winterreise as he was dying of syphilis.

“Müller and Me” daydreams a war with pain—pain that in these three lines recalls William Blake’s Tyger, beast so fierce he makes the stars “throw down their spears”

     When love frees itself from pain

     the angels cut off their wings

     and throw them down to earth

and we are invited to discrete participation in art’s mission, with the light weapon of word-music, to overthrow pain:

     (throw in your scarf

     to cover my eyes

     so your shadow won’t wake me).

The poem’s “I” would “like to teach / a young starling to speak, / but clearly and distinctly /so his words wouldn’t be / like human ones.” “I really believed,” she says, “my pain was not that small.” These two attempts at articulation—one projected, one owned—dramatize the difficulty of uniting words with experience, difficulty that can convert to paradoxical joy:

     but how heavy is my happiness

     that no sound on earth

     can encompass it?

Mary Ruefle’s ludic and majestic collaboration with Müller ends with an expression of poetic mission not unlike Kenneth Koch’s first childhood poem: “I have a little pony / I ride him up and down . . . .”  Her pocket artist’s statement formally and tonally echoes both the cosmic reach of William Blake and the wholesale friendliness of Frank O’Hara:

     I’m on a fifer’s ride

     My steed is black and steady

     I say goodnight to everyone

    To everyone goodmorn

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan [by Angela Ball]

Deerfield Crossing

Sheet lightning pulses like blood
vessels in the sky above the post office.

It is Sunday empty. I caress the edges
of failed delivery in my pocket

and continue on the acid-
rain pocked sidewalk to the station.

Down the block, a dog fights his leash
toward the smell of angel hair

and meatballs
escaping from a kitchen window.

Television sets and crickets coalesce
with the steady hum of residential air

conditioning units. The syncopated eyes
of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

Families fold together
their fingers in prayer.

When the thunder claps

like an infomercial
the streetlamps come on

all at once.

                                               (originally published in Blue Earth Review)

--Collin Callahan                              

In the poem before this one in Thunderbird Inn, “Horizontal Tuxedo,” a woman left her address in wet hair on the shower wall. –Collin Callahan

Collin Callahan was born in Illinois. His first collection of poetry, Thunderbird Inn, is forthcoming with Conduit Books & Ephemera. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, SLICE, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors’ Prize in poetry. You can find his work at collincallahanwrites.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan

A poem of blended messages, beginning with lightning that strobes itself somatic, “Deerfield Crossing” intersects what Robert Frost called “inner and outer weather”: the limited scope of its interplay a despoiled landscape, a “Deerfield” without deer or fields, only crossings, a Levittown diaspora community far from the animation of Frank O’Hara’s NYC, but nonetheless a place with things to say, and with a poet willing to listen.

The first half line of stanza two, “It is Sunday empty,” may be the most economical, on-the-nose description ever provided for a day of the week. We see the speaker for the first and only time, automatically caressing a returned letter he has received, headed for “the station”—a still place, sieve for travel. We glimpse the ghost of T.S. Eliot, towering figure that the New York School of Poets dismissed, but that John Ashbery received via W.H. Auden.

Ashbery once characterized New York City as a large empty space perfect for poetry, and Deerfield Crossing possesses some of the same emptiness, one that enjoys defying itself, as in  

     Down the block, a dog fights his leash

     toward the smell of angel hair

     and meatballs

     escaping from a kitchen window.

Throughout, this poem is a model of what Paul Fussell calls “vigorous enjambment”: its line breaks faking closure, supplying surprise. In the lines above, we are half prepared for something celestial--and get, instead, “meatballs”—the dog’s eagerness vivid against flatness. Then, the stark loveliness of the post-natural,

     Television sets and crickets coalesce

     with the steady hum of residential air

     conditioning units. The syncopated eyes

     of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

in which nature is unnaturally included in the amalgam of  “Television sets and crickets” and the wind turbine’s robotic “syncopated eyes” that “blink red,” composing a kind of heartbeat “in the distance.”

There’s something prefab about the church services in which “Families fold together/their fingers in prayer.” The thunder near the close could not less resemble that of The Waste Land. Yet the response, as “streetlamps come on / all at once,” surely the result of automatic eyes, contains in its simultaneity an impulse of rightness, even joy. Then Collin Callahan’s abrupt and intriguing “Deerfield Crossing” leaves us to caress, alone, the whiteness of Sunday.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Three): Donald Revell [by Angela Ball]

SENESCO SED AMO

         “Starlight is almost flesh.”—Basil Bunting

One life, not one among
A thousand others of quail
Like tipsy mandarins crowding
The cold of a low wall
Along a line of trees, the angel
Promised me and nothing
More, nothing to weigh.

Menippus and Lucian
Be with me now as I
Feel my way among
Misted pillars and ghosts
Of breath on upper Broadway.
A quick kiss in the crosswalk is
More to me than mankind.

There is no middle ground.
There is our empty bench.
There is the stoop of pigeons.
Either I have been alone
Every hour of my life or
Never once, not even
One moment, and the mist rising.

Angel, how stern you have become.
Stricken, almost as strange as Uruguay
Against traffic in the middle distance,
You stride, and there is bread in your step
And sunlight ground into fine powder.
All the same, I feel comforted.
The sharper the mist, the sweeter the hour.

For good reason, enormous windows
Gape the walls of our museums.
Brancusi’s woman asleep awakes to see
Riotous sunlight feeding the air
Because air is what becomes of light
When no one is looking. Only myself,
And I have never been alone until now.

The stern angel gives me bread and the courage
Of satire. Crossing the street towards me
Menippus and Lucian extend their arms,
And birds alight upon their arms, shitting,
Cooing. What is mankind to me
When I have remembered a kiss in the night sweats
Against the traffic, without a breath of air?

The word “steadfast” comes to mind, a word
Like “dusk”, awaiting its formal elegy
In abandoned train-yards. Little fires
In bins are all that remains of English.
I step into the crook of the wing of my
Steadfast angel. I catch the scent
Of newly washed hair, and she says to me

“Shelter here.” Satire is shelter in extremis.
Christ has the dispatch of it, having
Inscribed bitter verses upon human eyes
For angels’ delight and the increase
Of crooked human sleep. Let mankind sleep
Forever. Christ has suffered enough,
And my angel is clean enough to kiss. We kiss.

--Donald Revell

Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently of White Campion (2021) and The English Boat (2018), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine's Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Sudden Eden: Essays;  Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, Donald Revell is currently a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

About the poem ....it's my beginning adventure into old age, an adventure I've always imagined would lead to one of those benches on the medians in upper Broadway. And there I'd be joined by other embittered curmudgeons, such as Menippus, such as Lucian. Still, I would hope for bitterness to be eased somehow by love--love remembered as a first kiss on upper Broadway, or an elder love as beautifully avowed by Bunting in "Briggflatts,” or love as the angel who appeared to me on the morning of the day I wrote the poem. --Donald Revell

The New York School Diaspora, Part Twenty-Three: Donald Revell

Donald Revell’s “Senesco Sed Amo,” a walk on workaday “upper Broadway,” both celebrates and enacts mystery and its sotto voce operations. As we follow this poem, a parallel life is with us; a body we know but from reports; a spirit that traces our outlines. Like dark matter, otherness outweighs the familiar, its unknown gravity tugging at our sleeves. Birdlife around us, we “feel our way” in the mixed company of an angel and (at the poet’s request) two ancient cynics, Menippus and his acolyte, Lucian, that arrive in a crosswalk, arms extended, “And birds alight upon their arms, shitting, / Cooing.”

The seven lines of the poem’s rooms are the seven twists of wire holding champagne’s cage; the seven heavens that progress and abide; the seven leagues of our loneliness, its injuries and salves.

“There is no middle ground,” says the poem.

     Either I have been alone

     Every hour of my life or

     Never once, not even

     One moment, and the mist rising.

The poem’s title (in English, “I Age but I Love”) is from Ezra Pound’s great Pisan Cantos, written in implausible circumstances, alone in the bare grace of a prison yard under stars. This context is part of “Senesco Sed Amo”’s alternation between harshness and benediction, its vision of “a kiss in the night sweats / Against the traffic, without a breath of air.”

In our mixed state, words are called forth as companions, are mourned:

    The word “steadfast” comes to mind, a word

     Like “dusk,” awaiting its formal elegy

     In abandoned train-yards. Little fires

     In bins are all that remains of English.

In a poem this ineffable, kin to the most lucent John Ashbery joined with Rainier Maria Rilke; joined with Brancusi’s women ovally asleep on the sides of their glowing faces; joined with Basil Bunting’s (in his great Briggflats) young lovers under rain, old lovers indoors breakfasting on scones laved with bacon fat; repetition steadies us. The word “steadfast” reappears as the “steadfast angel” offers her wing and “the scent / Of newly washed hair.”

Donald Revell’s calm, generous, and exhilarating “Senesco Sed Amo” leaves us with a vision of shelter, with satire (like cynicism) as hedge against circumstance, and with the swift logic of love’s union: “And my angel is clean enough to kiss. We kiss.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng [by Angela Ball]

Birds of Passage

We roll out of bed before sunrise, put the two pull bags in the trunk, crank up the engine, and back the car out of the driveway; we have a two-hour drive to the airport in Memphis to catch the flight to Japan. We cross the Yazoo River Bridge, pass Baptist Town where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison, turn left onto Route 7. We cross another bridge in a few minutes, pass the cypress bayou that looks eerie with thin mist floating above the water, and then pass Avalon where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds. Now a thin line of dawnlight is shimmering in the low sky, and I start to speed up, but right after a curve I must slow down to catch this gorgeous flight:

crack of dawn
thousands of snow geese
honk off the fields

--Jianqing Zheng

We were afraid we would be late for our flight to Japan so I began to speed after I drove out of Greenwood, but seeing the snow geese really was a sign to slow down. Upon returning, I wrote several haibun about Japan, and when I wrote "Birds of Passage," I thought of borrowing O'Hara's way of telling about doing small things before approaching the end for the death of Holiday. I published 'Moonlight'--my first haibun—in 2003 and returned to haibun writing in 2010. A big challenge as the prose part and haiku have to complement each other or juxtapose each other. Now I seem to write more of it than free verse.
--Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and Enforced Rustication, editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia and four other scholarly books, and recipient of grants from the NEH, Fulbright Programs, and Mississippi Arts Commission. His forthcoming book of poetry is The Dog Years of Reeducation from Madville Publishing, 2023.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” is a masterful example of haibun: a form invented by seventeen-century haiku master Basho that pairs the levelness of prose with the levitation of haiku.

The poem’s drive toward Memphis calls out places sacred to the blues and encompasses a succession of flights: the poet’s flight from his home to Memphis Airport, his imminent flight to Japan (home of Basho), the bluesmen’s flight into legend, and the snow geese’s (sonically linked to the car’s horn) timely but timeless migration, that becomes, in the closing haiku, the flight which the poet must “slow down to catch.”

Zheng’s polyvalent treatment of space in “Birds of Passage” recalls Frank O’Hara’s navigation of NYC streets in “The Day Lady Died,” in which landmarks (“the bank,” “PARK LANE liquor store,” “Ziegfeld Theatre”) compose a poetic map. “Birds of Passage” travels faster, by car, (“rolling out of bed” prefiguring its wheels); crosses “Yazoo River Bridge”; passes Baptist Town “where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison”; crosses another bridge; passes the “cypress bayou” “eerie with thin mist floating”; passes “Avalon [in legend, the “earthly paradise” King Arthur was carried to after death] where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds.” Zheng’s “thin line of dawnlight” “shimmering in the low sky” recalls the charged horizontality in O’Hara’s poem as Lady Day “whispers a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron.”

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Snow Geese are possibly the noisiest of all waterfowl. Their main call, made by both males and females, is a nasal, one-syllable honk given at any hour of the day or night, at any time of year, in the air or on the ground. Distant calling flocks are reminiscent of a pack of baying hounds.”

The cacophony of geese both drowns the car’s hurry and “honks off” the tragic history witnessed by land that produced that earthiest art form, the blues—music that consumes its own impetus, as Lachey Doley avers in his song, “The Only Cure for the Blues is the Blues.” Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” ends in bluesy glory and stunning uplift as, through opening daylight, a flock of geese sounds.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-One): Jennifer Grotz [by Angela Ball]

The Crows

There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them,

but now she only remembers
the goodbyes, the countless times

they stood together speechless
under a starry meal of snow,

crows congregating above them
in bare winter branches, all through

the desperate sadness at the end,
one of them still madly in love

while the other admitted defeat,
taking turns as if exchanging

a heavy suitcase. And they were after all
always traveling. Somehow never at home.

He loved her in libraries and parking lots,
in cemeteries and cafes. She loved him

in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells
and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also

in the dark. She loved him most at the end
of the day, telling a story at dinner

while waving his fork and knife. He was her
never husband and she his never wife.

There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them.

All along, though they couldn’t hear it,
before they had stopped being lovers,

before they had even started,
back when they were two people leaving

a restaurant in summer’s dusk,
the crows were growing busy, numerous,

there was one coming to land
on every branch of every tree, once

the thumbless black hands of their wings
had finished stroking the malleable sky,

all along, though they couldn’t hear it,
the birds had been winging

their silent applause
for the love that was going to be, then was.

--Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open, and translator of three books from the French and Polish, most recently Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated with Piotr Sommer. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. Still Falling, her fourth book of poems, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2023.

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-One): Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer’s Grotz’s mysterious, generous poem, “The Crows,” is parable—but more; the crows, its totems, but more. Reading it, we are pulled in two directions. There is much to say, there is nothing to say—the direction of the ordinary, the direction of the holy. The poem’s almost-refrain, “There must have been greetings / that rhymed with each of them” suggests a Blakean song of innocence in which the world is right, is true; but also suggests the calls of crows announcing something dead and ready to eat; and Ted Hughes’s landmark book, Crow, the dark parable he made of marriage.

The poem dramatizes Robert Frost’s useful dictum, which applies so well to the New York School of Poets and their diaspora: poetry must possess either outer humor and inner seriousness or outer seriousness and inner humor. Dead seriousness is powerless to move us. That’s why the late Stephen Sondheim, in his wrenching (though often over-acted: Judi Dench sings it best) song of lost love, calls for clowns.

The poem’s two characters are isolated, as in parables and fairy tales:

     they stood together speechless

     under a starry meal of snow,

     crows congregating above them

     in bare winter branches, all through

     the desperate sadness at the end,

     one of them still madly in love

     while the other admitted defeat,

     taking turns as if exchanging

     a heavy suitcase.

Dark humor informs the mechanical exchanging of roles, the absurd simile of the suitcase.

The poem partakes, also, of Wallace Stevens’ “mind of winter,” in which silence has the most say.

Yet at its heart there’s a beautiful fairy tale in which each lover’s action is answered variously but exactly by the other’s:

     He loved her in libraries and parking lots,

     in cemeteries and cafes.  She loved him

     in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells

     and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also

     in the dark. She loved him most at the end

     of the day, telling a story at dinner

     while waving his fork and knife. He was her

     never husband and she his never wife.

How exact, that “held breath of elevators.” The last sentence of the interlude, with its nursery-style clinching rhyme, pronounces both the perfection of the moment and the disaster hovering over the couple from and, indeed, before their beginning. Arrive it does, with a suggestion of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:

     the crows were growing busy, numerous,

     there was one coming to land

     on every branch of every tree

     that introduces the poem’s final trajectory with this most lovely, most chilling couplet: “once / / the thumbless black hands of their wings / had finished stroking the malleable sky,” finally declaring the ascendency of fate, the force that ever and always operates in silence:

     all along, though they couldn’t hear it,

     the birds had been winging

     their silent applause

     for the love that was going to be, then was.

It is the last small phrase of Jennifer Grotz’s The Crows that pronounces victory not just for fate, but for love. Love “was”—existed, held sway. The small word, a weak verb’s past tense, declares both loss and possession, two forces that equally hold us—until, at last, they fade.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty): William Stobb [by Angela Ball]

Beep Boop

Once like oxygen these people—
you drove all night across Utah to sob
peel puke-hair celebrate
weddings supervise divorces in everyone’s best interest.

Relationships shriveled in the relentless
attack-phone-election-virus
-five-star-economy-doom-delivery-system.

Against the white glare
of right now sky behind
the surplus auto yard you walk alone
the creek-side trail toward the closed-down
ice cream stand falling
over in long grass along the highway.

You’re only out here because an attractive
television doctor said
active legs fuel immunity.
Something about being a machine
prompted you to shift

from in- to exterior seclusion—some current
of possible nobility triggered by a vision
of a lost appliance wandering in the world.

A can opener seeks its garbanzos.
A dishwasher a nozzle. A father
a son. A Roomba.

Where the creek widens and meets the river
through branches over the bluff line
you notice the moon
setting in afternoon correction
of an idea as basic as night or day.

You are still alive.
Your thinking is not accurate.

The trail drops off where waves lap
at a graffiti rock and a fire pit
littered with empty White Claws.
The sounds of birds and small animals
scrabbling among the twigs.
Something bobs to the surface
and vanishes back in current.

Across the river, people you loved.
A person named Francis
who danced at underground sex clubs
met Tina, got sober, and now goes by Frank.

People. Off in the squirrely distance.

--William Stobb

About "Beep Boop"

I was a little freaked out about having the COVID-19 virus in my body in March of 2020. I was over-dramatic, probably, thinking about "my life." I mean... the whole idea of being alive doesn't compute for me, sometimes. Some things are "alive?" and others aren't? I'm not trying to be cavalier or ungrateful or undermine the value of anything. And I'm not trying to die. I'm thinking that'll take care of itself. Look at Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty saying "I want more life, fucker," and then crying so poetically in that monologue: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.... All these things will be lost in time, like tears in rain." What a beautiful robot. I wish my poem were as awesome as that. Mainly, I'm saying I don't understand what I am.

--William Stobb

William Stobb's most recent poetry collection is You Are Still Alive (42 Miles Press 2019). His five previous collections include the National Poetry Series selection, Nervous Systems (Penguin 2007) and a chapbook of desert fragments focusing on the work of artist Michael Heizer, entitled Artifact Eleven (Black Rock Press 2011). Stobb works on the editorial staff of Conduit and its book publishing arm, Conduit Books and Ephemera, and as Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty): William Stobb

“Beep Boop” is a walk poem, a bop whose lightness is belied by a host of losses. Most crucially, it is a lament for friendship, that entity so central to the New York School of Poets. In William Stobb's nature, the depredations of industry and the strains of global malaise confront and confound inner and outer worlds.

The poem begins in deft overdrive, with a montage of bacchanalia, loss, and recovery. In pandemic isolation, the speaker is far enough—several months, a river—from friendship to limn its devolution:  “attack phone election virus / -five-star economy-doom-delivery-system.” The landscape is not the gently modulating elevations of peripatetic William Wordsworth’s Lake Country, but “the surplus auto yard,” . . . “the Creekside trail toward the closed-down / ice cream stand falling / over in long grass along the highway”—a description whose cadence seems to presage a James Wright-style epiphany never reached. We and the speaker (the “you” that includes us ) have insular reasons (“attractive TV doctor,” “immunity”) for moving. The poem zig-zags between perception and half-perceived possible transcendence:

     Where the creek widens and meets the river

     through branches over the bluff line

     you notice the moon

     setting in afternoon correction

     of an idea as basic as night or day.

The daylight moon is recognized; vision “correction” is still possible. An idea can modify, and false separations disappear.

The two lines that follow: “You are still alive. / Your thinking is not accurate” assert and deny possibility. (The first could have been written by James Wright, the second, never.)

The transformation, near the poem’s end, of the “person named Francis” functions to further distance them. We think of another person named Francis, who went by Frank, having a Coke with Vincent Warren and us or walking around at lunchtime in “Personal Poem.” But here, in lieu of construction workers in their lovely silver hats, we have the absent homeless, their quenched fire strewn with empties of their drink of choice, “White Claw”—this so distant from Frank O’Hara’s hopeful urban scene, in which lunch is both favorite meal and poem opportunity, and demolition an entrée to the new. In O’Hara’s city, people prosper; their work and breaks from work are brisk; a louse who shows up on Frank while he is at work in his MoMA office gets a name, “Louise,” and immortality in a poem. In this poem’s purview, relationships shrivel; animals struggle, “scrabbling among twigs,” and we contemplate “—some current / of possible nobility triggered by a vision / of a lost appliance wandering in the world.”

The penultimate word, “squirrely,” both locates that ubiquitous animal and comically epitomizes the tenor of thought that rules the poem. William Stobb’s “Beep Boop,” strongly addresses time’s distempers. Its adroit wanderings—haunted by a ghost appliance, machined appendage—subside to isolation, “the white glare of right now.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler [by Angela Ball]

Night Life

How can this equal rest or peace, this garble of gasps, snuffles,
and horse-like snorts? His lips flutter as though he’s blowing
bubbles, his moans so choked he must be drowning…or are
his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant
critic sucks the bones of her osso buco? In my overheated,
night-gowned silence I watch him flinch in a puddle of bedside
light. A range of ages and plights wash over his face. Who is
this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this
leaky ship of divinity? I stare across the chasm which divides
each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched
each other or not. He’s a magician who made an orchard
disappear, an unhinged shooter from St. Louis, a plum
colored shadow, a handful of chameleon teeth, one of god’s
toboggans, a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.

--Amy Gerstler (from Index of Women)

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her previous books include Scattered at Sea and Dearest Creature. She is currently working on a musical play with composer/arranger/actor Steve Gunderson.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biograpia Literaria of 1817, draws a signal distinction, declaring that “the objects of fancy are fixed and dead”; whereas the objects of imagination are imbued with “esemplastic power.” In Amy Gerstler’s humorous and revelatory poem, “Night Life,” the object of her imagination, her sleeping partner, is anything but “fixed and dead.” In fact, the poem embodies a rare quality I’ll call “logo-plasticity,” in which a poem’s images, made of words, rise from the page to model a sculptural and kinesthetic likeness. The poem’s speaker watches in “overheated, nightgowned silence” as whole swathes of human and animal peril are enacted to appalling dramatic effect: “. . . or are / his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant critic / sucks the bones of her osso buco?” With the speaker, we grow transfixed as “a range of ages and plights wash across his face,” and wonder “Who is / this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this / leaky ship of divinity?” Coming after what may be the poem’s most hilarious comparison, “this slab of snoring meat,” “this / leaky ship of divinity” announces a turn in Gerstler’s free-wheeling sonnet. The partner’s disordered repose becomes an entrée into mystery, “the chasm that divides / each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched / each other or not.” What a direct, modest, and thus effective way to describe the isolation in which we move. Observer turned sculptor, the speaker cycles the dreaming man through deeds and identities, including the astonishing, tragi-comic “God’s toboggan,” shifting him to shapes that contain us all: murderous, yet powerless; decaying, yet primordial in beauty: “a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.” Amy Gerstler’s “Night Life” is the work of a poetic magus.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighteen): Jennifer Michael Hecht [by Angela Ball]

September

Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.

The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.

Tonight there are people getting just what they need.

The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree,
standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

Tonight, there are people who are so happy
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.

Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.

--Jennifer Michael Hecht

You know Whitman’s “ample hills of Brooklyn”? I’ll tell you a secret that has been hidden by ample hills of ice cream. And the two kids. What can I tell you?, you swell. So the point is, the secret is inside my wedding ring, which no longer comes off. Though, is my husband’s ring equally stuck? Just checked and Yes! So it’s a quite secret message that I’m sneak-peeking you. Inside our wedding rings we had engraved G.F.U.G.W.W.W. Can you guess? It’s Good For Us, Getting What We Want. The poem of mine we took it from, "September," came out in The Best American Poetry in 1999 and we were married in 2001. Just had our twenty-year anniversary — and we’ve got two teenagers. On Getting What We Want I’d say it’s not great to want anything specific, but apparently, as the Stones taught, if you try, and practice a ruthless patience with yourself, you get can what you need. I wouldn’t say that even now I’ve exactly got my oars in the water, but the four of us manage to keep afloat under the weird glowing skies of recent times.
--Jennifer Michael Hecht

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, historian, and commentator. She is the author of seven books including Who Said (Copper Canyon), Doubt: A History (Harper), and Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It (Yale). Hecht holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and is finishing a book on poetry and post-religious ritual for FSG. She blogged with great fun on BAP for years and is delighted to visit in this form. Thanks Angela, for thinking of me.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighteen): Jennifer Michael Hecht [by Angela Ball]

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s “September” is a living paradox: it works through allegory, but is absolute in its immediacy. It is an “I do this I do that” poem—not of exuberance, but of despair.

     Like Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—”

     The Feet, mechanical, go round

     Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—

     A Wooden way, regardless grown,

     A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

Hecht’s poem seems enunciated from afar; yet, unlike “After great pain,” and like Frank O’Hara’s action/observation poems, we are with the speaker in the moment. A time freeze analogous to the invocation of held breath at the end of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” galvanizes the poem’s center:

     The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.

     I remember you in a black and white photograph

     taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree,

     standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

 

     When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

“The Day Lady Died” ends in a tumble of syntax without a period—“and everyone and I stopped breathing”—in ecstatic tribute to Billie Holiday’s passing. The syntax of Hecht’s poem is crystalline and correct—“A Wooden way”—declarative, accurate, end-stopped—so much so that it invites life’s vital disorder—the welter that includes people “getting just what they need”—to its edges, killing it on contact: “I remember you in a black and white photograph / taken this time of some year.” The figure stands in lost leaves, hardly distinguished from grayness, but with the power to produce an endlessness the opposite of bliss: “When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.”

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s masterful “September” has so numbed us with sadness that when the speaker “trails her hand” in the water and produces a mild exclamation, “Such a soft wind,” the change is electric. From wooden despair, the speaker wakes to recollect nature. Yes, the oars are gone. But the lone skipper obeys the ironclad law of maritime advice: Stay with the boat.
--Angela Ball