The Best American Poetry

"It's a Wonderful Life" [by Paul Violi]

It's a Wonderful Life

          After the national fanfare died down, the quintuplets grew up protected from further exploitation in the safety and privacy that state funds and public donations ensured.  But, inevitably, they had to enter the real world.  On their eighteenth birthday they went to work as tellers in the same bank, my bank, the National Bank of Westchester. The first time I walked in and saw them behind the counter my heart skipped a beat:  Veronica, Vanessa, Vivian, Next Teller Please, Valerie, Vicki.  With their dark complexions, ruffled white blouses and full red lips -- like petals from a mythical flower, like the tens they plucked from their tills, they were identical down to the last curlicue.  All I could think was that it would take a lifetime to explain this moment, an eternity to explain a lifetime.  All I could say was, "Marvelous, incombustibly marvelous!"  Words that echoed down the line as people from all walks of life couldn't help but agree.  Behind his desk smiled B. Yourgrau, Manager, assured that another customer had found the answer to all his banking needs.

-- Paul Violi [photographed above with Star Black at KGB Bar 1998]
Happy birthday, Paul.

Poet Spotlight: Shane McCrae [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm thrilled to introduce this new poem by celebrated writer Shane McCrae.  As a longtime admirer of McCrae's work, I never cease to be amazed by his ability to bear the distinctive lineation of Frank O'Hara and the cadences of classic New York School poetry into new and unforeseen sociopolitical territory.  

Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School.
 
McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule(2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

--Kristina Marie Darling 

A New Poem by Shane McCrae

Alicia Jo Rabins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Alicia J. Rose

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Sunday School

 

Look around this cafe, everyone is reading the New York Times and talking,

which all adds up to a clamor of breakfast noises and a mosaic of Sunday papers.

Look at this messy cartoon I call my “life,” which does not know

whether it is living or being lived

It happened again on the way here:

a man looked at me on the subway, directly, meaningfully, brazenly.

This is a different way of being a woman,

which I always disdained, complained, refrained from and now

something must cry look at me, look at me!

And the thrill of being looked-at quivers me to attention.

Being noticed, like noticing, has a sharp blade.

I too cannot help but notice all the beautiful women who populate this restaurant,

it seems they are too beautiful to possibly be real;

and what is it all for anyway, all this ungraspable perfection, because

although right now their beauty is as full as a ripe boysenberry,

crushable, staining, straining their own edges, aching

to be popped in the mouth and tasted

(and they offer it as such)

soon it will be over, their beauty, and only the desire will remain.

All the fucking in the world never erases desire,

and moreover it creates a Next Generation with desire of their own.

So any cessation of desire becomes futile, impossible.

And so we keep putting on our strappy heels day after day,

just “not feeling right” if we wear sneakers or flip flops,

offering ourselves up for this one day:

offering our beauty on the altar of this particular Sunday

like a coffee and a newspaper, to be swallowed and read

and left behind on the cafe table,

leaving faint black smudges on our one-day-older fingertips.

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Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer, and Torah teacher. She is the author of two poetry books, Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (a finalist for the Jewish Book Award). As a musician, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah currently being developed into a musical. Most recently she is the creator, star, and composer of A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an indie feature film based on her one-woman chamber-rock opera, which The Atlantic calls “a blessing.” 

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   Francis Luis Mora (Uruguayan-born American, 1874-1940). Subway Riders in New York City (AKA Evening News), 1914.

Arthur Mitchell [by Marianne Moore]

Arthur Mitchell, right, with George Balanchine

Arthur Mitchell

Slim dragon-fly
        too rapid for the eye
               to cage,

contagious gem of virtuosity
make visible, mentality.
Your jewels of mobility

reveal
      and veil
             a peacock-tail.

                              -- by Marianne Moore

-- sdh 

Mark Wunderlich: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Proposition

 

That the smell of cows drifting through the open window is, indeed, that of a living beast.

That I too am a living beast.

That the body I possess is inhabited only by me.

That my body is neither at rest nor occupied by dramatic motion.

That I am, by my best account, fully alive.

That the room in which I am seated is in Germany, in a town called Worpswede.

That a poet I admire once lived here too, though he is long since dead.

Rilke wrote, “That I gently wipe away the look of suffered injustice sometimes hinders the pure motion of spirits a little.”

That there are such things as “spirits.”

That we were born suffering, but that we are not meant to suffer.

That the wind blows and the birches outside my window sing a little.

And that cooing and chucking of the dove I hear is also a kind of song.

That the difference between the living and the dead is mostly one of conjugation.

Er starb. Er istgestorben.  Ein gestorbenes Mensch.

That what we make when we speak is a kind of music, but disjointed and that music seeks

a unity that our speech does not possess.

Once I felt as though I was dead, but now the reasons for that feeling baffle me.

I marvel at what it is to feel the sun on my skin.

“Burnish,” is the word that comes into my head.

“Burnished by the sun,” as if my torso was a copper shield.

That my torso is a kind of shield protecting the inside from the outside.

Though we all know we are penetrable in many ways.

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Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness, published in 2021 by Graywolf Press.  His other titles include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, and elsewhere and has published individual poems in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine  He serves as the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program, and lives near the village of Catskill in New York's Hudson Valley.  

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   Jonathan Meese, DR. Z.U.K.U.N.F.T. FÜHRT, WIE SAU, COOL COOLISM… (ZEDADDY), 2017. Acrylic, Caparol-dispersion binder and mixed media on canvas; 2 panels.

"Appeal to the Grammarians" [by Paul Violi]

Paul Violi (1944 -2011) would have been 78 today. So let's read one of Paul's poems.

Appeal to the Grammarians

We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we're capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we're ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,
The flat tire at journey's outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, "See, that's why
I don't like to eat outside."

Paul Violi is pictured here with David Shapiro and George Green at the "Best American Poetry 2009" launch celebration in September 2009.

Olena Kalytiak Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hello Poem

 

Aren’t you supposed to be all alive and tell me what is going on? What is

A-happening?

Poem, why so nonplussed? So hors-rendu? So hasard? So misérable?

Poem, you are supposed to be for me

Not against me.

Do not tell me that part of the problem is I know I am hot!

It’s spring, Poem, take us outside.

Poem, why did I come home from France without any idée and an Italian

Vogue?

Poem—so silent so—handsome, Poem.

So Mediterranean.

Poem, you have a nice face,

A good form, but

Poem—you are wrongheaded.

Poem—I want to be left alone.

Such a dabbler you are, Poem—a dilettante

And a renaissance man.

So hard to tell, Poem, till you take off your clothes.

Poem, I think you are straight.

Poem, I know Hemingway baise-ed you in the derrière.

Poem, I know you are freer from history than prose fiction or drama!

Poem—do you want to be translated into French?

Poem—avez-vous ce que vous voulez?

French poem, you are very sexy.

Poem—did you depart for Marseille?

Poem—votre train is retarded! Quelle voie? Quelle garde?

Dream poem, you have shaved genitals!

Poem you are a plump pretty girl with feather earrings and a quick thick

Unread book.

Poem, eat my poussez!

Poem, Kay Ryan doesn’t like you!

Not at all!

Poem, you have a engraved stone for a heart!

(No, I will not tell you with what.)

A sheep for a lover.

Poem, you farted in your sleep.

Poem, you only have to do it once. . .

Poem, you get so sad at all the right/wrong places.

Poem, I’m afraid your strangeness is still not that true.

O Poem, we could have been so good together!

Poem, you think you are working, but

Poem—get a job.

Poem—get a life.

(Then, of course,

You of all people

Poem, must

Change it.)

 

Poem—you say too little.

Poem—you are so not enough.

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Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of four full-length collections, including Late Summer Ode, out this fall from Copper Canyon Press. (See also this link.)

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    Hannah Hoch, Modenschau (Fashion Show),detail, 1925.

 

Finland in the Headlines [by David Lehman]

"What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success." It doesn't quite measure up to "Worthwhile Canadian Endeavor," which won the award for dullest headline of the 1980s, but it is still a thing of beauty, and it reminds me of James Tate, pictured above, for a reason I will explain.  

In the age of advanced technological surveillace, there is little about us that the computer doesn't know. So everyday one gets an e-mail tailored to one's specific proclivities, with a link to a can't miss headline. This is what Big Brother sent my way on January 12, 2012:

<< What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success theatlantic.com -  The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because . . .

 >>

What I love most is "Keep Ignoring." Irresistible.

James Tate, who died on July 8, 2015, has a wonderful poem titled "I Am a Finn," which Mark Strand chose from The Iowa Review for The Best American Poetry 1991:

I Am a Finn

I am standing in the post office, about
to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).

Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger

no one suspects that I am a Finn.
I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
on the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid

to show their quivery emotions, secure
in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
emigrate from Finland in 1910 – why

is everybody leaving Finland, hundreds of
thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue

or grey eyes. Today is Charlie Chaplin’s
one hundredth birthday, though he is not
Finnish or alive: ‘Thy blossom, in the bud

laid low.’ The commonest fur-bearing animals
are the red squirrel, musk-rat, pine-marten
and fox. There are about 35,000 elk.

But I should be studying for my exam.
I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
assuming I pass. Finnish Literature

really came alive in the 1860s.
Here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
no one cares that I am a Finn.

They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Finn, this infuriates me.

This and the companion poem, "I Am Still a Finn," appear in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

"Days of Winter" and "Limbo" [poems by Sean Singer from "Today in the Taxi"]

Days of Winter

Today in the taxi I brought a Chinese couple, parents of a student at Columbia, from Amsterdam Avenue to JFK. The girl was crying, the mother was crying, etc. The parents sat in silence for most of the trip. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Chinese. I did offer them a little package of tissues. On the other hand, the sun came out and it warmed to 24 degrees.

A driver should find a fixed object on the road, such as a sign or a tree, and when the car in front passes it, count three seconds before his own car passes it. Then add a second for each hazard—rain, or darkness.

The road is not unlike a little pressed-between vessel that the car pushes along its black bloodstream. A psalm instructs that It will be as it is said.

Limbo

Today in the taxi, driving a commercial real estate type from 43rd and Madison to 57th and Park I said, “Would you prefer to go up Madison, or Park?” He said, “It doesn’t matter. Either way we’re fucked.”

And it was true when a black pier of birds burst from the building, like fulfillment.

I too, seek to weave a memory from foam. A black bottle opener and the blackest bottle, and the flow of liquids. You cannot know it; you can see it.

General “Beedle” Smith reported that in April 1945 when they liberated Buchenwald, he witnessed:

“General Eisenhower go to the opposite side of the road and vomit. From a distance I saw Patton bend over, holding his head with one hand and his abdomen with the other. I too became sick.”

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, it is said you should look to the side at the lines on the road. You would stop yourself from being blinded, and stop yourself to imagine the road ahead, unstrung, and the rubber against it.

Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1974. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. Singer is the author of three books of poetry: Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022). In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Find out more about Sean Singer here.  You can purchase Today in the Taxi, from Bookshop, Amazon, and Tupelo Press.

"The Value of Stones" [by Michael Quattrone]

The Value of Stones

It’s never what they weigh; it’s not the depth
of silence they have known; it’s not the round-
or hardness of their edges, certain color
or uncertain age that proffer worth. Metals,
crystals, precious on their own, may dwell
within the body of a rock, but never mind
those false alarms of wealth. The treasure
of each stone lives in its skill: the subtle art
of timing, moving even still, invisible
for eons—until now, when heavy, sad,
I sought a place to put my head, first walk
without the old dog; not wanting to
remember, nor forget the creamy softness
of her faithful fur, one velvet ear; her
eager and then fallen eyes, her earthy
nose, dank breath; her batting tail and puppy
temperament, until her body failed. I
sank down and something bore me up: a piece
of bed unnoticed on the overlook
we’d risked each day on our six aging legs—
but here it was: a stone that never left
a man unturned. I sat and stayed, I curled
up and yelped. It polished me, the surface
of the hurt I felt. Such is the kindness
of a rock: however ancient, deep or sharp,
it waits, the patient body of the earth
immune to what afflicts our softer flesh,
as we dig up what modest giftedness
we can in human time. The measure of
a stone, and what it marks, is never mine.

Michael Quattrone is the author of the chapbook, Rhinoceroses (New School, 2007). His poems have appeared in journals like Barrow Street, New York Quarterly and Pool, as well as the Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and the Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2018). Click here for the poem as it appeared in Streetlight.

Sherman Alexie: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gentrification

 

Let us remember the wasps

That hibernated in the walls

Of the house next door. Its walls

Bulged with twenty pounds of wasps

 

And nest, twenty pounds of black

Knots and buzzing fists. We slept

Unaware that the wasps slept

So near us. We slept in black

 

Comfort, wrapped in our cocoons,

While death’s familiars swarmed

Unto themselves, but could have swarmed

Unto us. Do not trust cocoons.

 

That’s the lesson of this poem.

Or this: Luck is beautiful.

So let us praise our beautiful

White neighbor. Let us write poems

 

For she who found that wasp nest

While remodeling the wreck.

But let us remember that wreck

Was, for five decades, the nest

 

For a black man and his father.

Both men were sick and neglected,

So they knew how to neglect.

But kind death stopped for the father

 

And cruelly left behind the son,

Whose siblings quickly sold the house

Because it was only a house.

For months, that drunk and displaced son

 

Appeared on our street like a ghost.

Distraught, he sat in his car and wept

Because nobody else had wept

Enough for his father, whose ghost

 

Took the form of ten thousand wasps.

That’s the lesson of this poem:

Grief is as dangerous and unpredictable

As a twenty-pound nest of wasps.

 

Or this: Houses are not haunted

By the dead. So let us pray

For the living. Let us pray

For the wasps and sons who haunt us.

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Sherman Alexie’s most recent book is You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a memoir. He has published six books of poetry with Hanging Loose, the most recent being What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned. He lives with his wife and sons in Seattle.

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                                                     Mher Chatinyan (Armenian), Wasp, 2021.

 

"Ode to My Father’s Manhattans" [by Beth Gylys]

Ode to My Father’s Manhattans

Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.

Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.

My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing
(hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.

Wendy Xu: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I Must Change My Form

 

It’s true, nothing is coming out like it used to anymore

Usually I am rather neat and tidy in my work

It is spring, that time of year when all rain is expired cherry blossoms, the ground pink like above us, more pink

Walking through the park with my love I think about Chang-e, goddess of the moon, her exquisitely timed appearances at my moments of deepest need

I’m so tired of the compromises of women in my cultural folklore, as if: sacrifice is defensible as a feminist vision?

For example:

Your husband is greedy and demands ever greater production of silk from you, plucked from your own tender skin, spun overnight to meet his needs

Your husband is hoarding the immortality pills and so now you must live on the moon

Your husband loves you even in your true form, an enormous white snake, but he dies because you’re pregnant

Your husband is a dick, generally, and the other details are fluid

Thank god you are beautiful and a wonder to be regarded from earth

GuanYin remains the champion of mercy except in her punitive dealings with men

As a child I admired her for being above all helpful in my limited aspirations, perhaps I only aspired to that much, to function with use

Do you have context for this legend? Shall I include it here for you?

If I do, who is my perceived audience?

Some of you are my brothers and sisters and I allow you your infinite transgressions

My father writes me:

I just read your new poem NOTES FOR AN OPENING, it makes me think a lot, feel a lot, a lot about my life and our life. It will make me think and feel much more and more about myself and my children and the relatedness of our life in the true meaning of living or simply being alive. I love you Wendy, my daughter. Keep writing it. Let the thoughts flow whenever they come in your poetic form or other forms. Please ask if you need anything from me. I have been thinking a lot lately about our life journey. Nothing is better than writing it out and fully express it although it is really hard to re-experience many things.

Note: punctuation and grammar have been corrected

As per: your convenience

 

Do as much as you can as best as you can

I think about the wonderful hyphen, the place where I am allowed to live and am never followed

Blank Hyphen American

The hurt is the bridge, the bind, the unnatural (Hyper Hyphen Natural) adjoining my frankenparts

A grammar joke is: “Chinese-American” privileges the “Chinese” over the “American”

Get it?

I wish my life were so good that I was frequently bored

“A fatal sickness”

Which is despair but despair does not equal death, so what is unto death?

I am so glad I did not have to love him unto death, though I love him there

All good things must end and give rise to still undetermined things

If I despair of it I am sick with it, an already dead attitude, a levity I no longer feel

I am sick with love for my immigrant parents, the long mirror they hold out towards me

The poem will have no annotation, no disclosure, no burden, no qualifying exam, no end

It will be all language prerequisite

You might focus then on my sickness and use it to betray me

You might have no time no money no inner resources with which to begin

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Wendy Xu’s most recent books of poetry are The Past (2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, New York Review of Books, Tin House, and widely elsewhere. She is assistant professor of writing at The New School, where she teaches poetry.

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   Panel with the Moon Goddess and Attendants. 12th–13th century China.  Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ornate style of clothing worn by these four women suggests they are immortals. The osmanthus leaf held by the largest figure, at the right, identifies her as the Moon Goddess Chang’e, who inhabits her celestial palace along with a rabbit that prepares the elixir of long life.

"In night when colors all to black are cast": Fulke Greville's Great Sonnet

In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

"Girl Reading a Letter" [by William Carpenter]

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

-- from The Best American Poetry 1995 edited by Richard Howard

Thomas Devaney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Devaney. Photo by Patrick Montero.

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Oregon Ave

 

You can’t find a place to smoke anymore

Ro says, smoking and rifling

through her handbag looking for a number.

She sits in the backseat with Meg.

They’re not singing.

The ballgame’s on inside and outside

the game is always on.

Actually, sometimes they do sing.

What year is the car, a ’98?

A Ford? A Focus?

They always tip too.

 

There is dust, always; and terrible dirt;

but if that’s what you see you’re hardly looking.

We believe in the front stoop.

We believe in banging pots and pans and honking horns.

We believe that in the heat of day shadows come back.

Trashcan on fire says Things are hotting up.

The street’s a mix, water, water ice, LIVE CRABS,

jumbo jets, firecrackers.

Summer days are huge and often overlap late into fall.

Seriously, when you have a good spot, why move the car?

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Thomas Devaney is the author of You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2020) and Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019). He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City (2021) about the 1976 Bicentennial in Philadelphia. He teaches creative writing at Haverford College.

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    Philadelphia Muses by Meg Saligman. Photo by Steve Welnik.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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No Apology: A Poemifesto

Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes
in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize
for the sight in my eyes. Susan Briante

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.

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Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, Her forthcoming book. Nostalgia Has Such a Short Half-Life, will be published in 2023. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she is a Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She has served as the publisher of Noemi Press since 2002.

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                                      Roberta Levitow, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 2020.

 

The Enemy (L'Ennemi) by Charles Baudelaire [trans. Sandra Simonds]

The Enemy 

My youth was so full of rage
that only the most brilliant of suns
could puncture it. Thunder and rain
ravaged me until my garden filled
with venom. But now my mind
has come to the autumn of its ideas
and one must rearrange this earth
with a shovel and rake. Flowers
are holes as big as graves. What are
these new futures I dream of?
Futures that burst from a soil
of grief. What mystical alignment
gives them such vigor?
Oh, sweet things! Time is a strange
enemy that gnaws at my heart.
It is blood and blood
alone that fortifies it.

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently : Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Jerome Sala: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A History of White People

 

white people were paid well

not to witness

the fact that they were white

 

you know the theory

white isn't a color

but color's unlimited absence

 

white goes with anything

that's why it seemed fair that white people

conquered the world

 

they were the real invisible men

cause they could perch on top of a country

and say they weren't there

 

they could move through its neighborhoods

like mysterious aliens

with this difference:

 

in ufological lore

aliens often infiltrate a world

without its inhabitants knowing about it

 

but when white people invaded

everyone could see them

but themselves

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Jerome Sala’s books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books),The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, The Best American Poetry series, and many others. His blog–on poetry, pop culture and everyday life, is espressobongo. [“A History of White People” originally appeared in Hanging Loose magazine (circa 2004) and Look Slimmer Instantly 2005.]

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                            Emma Amos, About Whitness, 1995. Oil and laser transfer on paper. Whitney Museum of American Art

"The Trouble with David Lehman Is" [poem by Ken Lauter]

(ed note: Today is David Lehman's birthday and this poem, which came in "over the transom," seems just right! Thank you Ken Lauter. sdl)

The Trouble with David Lehman Is

that he’s like a huge hurricane spun up
in the Atlantic Ocean of Erudition
or he’s just a fucking non-stop reader

who blows in on our Coast of Lethargy
with a new introduction to a new BAP
that shreds our sheds of poetic assumptions

and prejudices and leaves us gasping for
poems, poems, and more poems which
Mr. Lehman, thank god, promptly delivers.

                               -- Ken Lauter

Emily Fragos: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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The Sadness of Clothes

 

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived

their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.

You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

 

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket

and had that beautiful smile on and you’d talk.

You’d go to get something and come back and he’d be gone.

 

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.

You tell them how much you miss the spouse

and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

 

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,

you will finally let grief out. The ancients forged the words

for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

 

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power

you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly

folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

 

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,

they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.

He is gone and no one can tell us where.

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Emily Fragos is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize  from the Library of Congress, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, Unrest, Saint Torch, Hostage, and Little Savage, and the editor of seven poetry anthologies for The Everyman’s Pocket Library: Music’s Spell, Art & Artists, The Great Cat, The Dance, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Poems of Gratitude, and Poems of Paris. She has also written numerous articles on music and dance, and served as guest poetry editor for Guernica. Her work has been translated into Spanish by Natalia Carbajosa and into Japanese by Yuka Urushibata. Emily Fragos has taught at Columbia, Yale, and NYU. She lives in New York City.

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                                                      Király Nikoletta, 1978. Hungarian Painter.