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.

"Balance" [by Bruce Kawin]

we all have a

center of

gravity

 

so where is our

center of

levity?

Denise Duhamel’s "Kinky" turns 25! [by Stacey Lehman]

Barbie and Ken,1960

And Limp Wrist magazine is celebrating with a special two-part issue. I'm on board! I love Denise's Barbie inspired book of poems and if you haven't read it, you owe yourself that pleasure. For a taste, I give you these lines, from Sensational Barbie:

        When Barbie was under
anesthesia, her whole body
replaced with smooth plastic,
she swore she heard her doctors
telling smutty jokes.
When the surgeons sliced off her nipples
to put in the silicone implants
they decided to leave the milk-outlets off
because, after this, the nerve endings
would be dead and Barbie
wouldn't be able to feel
anything anyway....

            from Sensational Barbie, by Denise Duhamel

Here's an excerpt from Dustin Brookshire's editor's letter to Limp Wrist's readers along with two poems from this landmark issue, selected by Kinky's author Denise Duhamel:

Anyone that knows me knows I’m the super fan of two Ds—Dolly and Denise.  I discovered and fell in love with poetry through the work of Anne Sexton, but it is the poetry of Denise Duhamel that showed me I could write the type of poems that I wanted to write. While a few high school teachers encouraged me to write poems, they taught that pop culture references don’t have a place in poetry. Denise, a queen of pop culture references, taught me otherwise. . . 
Kinky is the book I recommend that shows poetry can be about anything.  It’s the book I pull from when people tell me that they don't like poetry. It’s the book that (actually!) taught me something about the “Dolly rumor mill”—thanks “Barbie in Therapy, Part II” for enlightening me about the rumor that Dolly is a lesbian.  It’s a book that I keep a backup copy of in case my original is damaged beyond use. Kinky is a book that I turn to again and again, and it never ceases to entertain and inspire me. . .
Kinky turns 25 today, and this milestone birthday has inspired this special issue of Limp Wrist.  When I realized that the publication date of Kinky and Barbie’s birthday are only separated by eight days, I knew the universe was signaling that this special issue had to be created.  I’ll be forever appreciative that Denise immediately agreed when I asked if she would co-edit this issue.

Here are two poems from the Limp Wrist Kinky issue, chosen by Denise Duhamel:

In Defense of My Mother Who Never Bought Me a Barbie Dreamhouse

            by Caridad Moro-Gronlier 

I was too young to understand
just how young my mother was
when she worked the nightshift
at TRW, building spacecrafts
with her hands, too young to know
how it felt to hand over the whole
of her check to my father
who gave her an allowance—
ten dollars after 40 hours,
ten dollars he’d drop into her palm
every pay day.

I understood Barbie called the shots.
That Dreamhouse was hers, Ken,
an accessory sans the authority
to tell her what to do.

I wrote thirty-one letters
to Santa that year,
but he wasn’t in charge.

My father was.

I thought I stood a chance
because Mami loved Barbie’s
mid-century mod A frame too,
how the chalet gleamed up at us
from the slick pages of the Sears catalog,
the wonder of real jalousie windows
and wall-to-wall carpets unfurled
on the kitchen table where she calculated
just how long she’d have
to lay that chalet away,
just how much she’d have to beg
to convince my father to pay.
I watched her turn the page,
no dogear to save her place.

I’d like to say I was happy
with the Barbie Dream Plane
she placed under the tree, but I blamed her.
It would take years to understand
she didn’t want me to dream of staying put,
she wanted me to dream of flying away.

Abused Barbie
            by Dorianne Laux

Always wears long sleeves, scarves
to disguise her long neck, leggings
even in summer.  She flinches
when anyone raises a posable arm,
shoves an opposable thumb
at the door and tells her
to get out.  She drives
to the ocean’s ragged edge
with the top down, parks
near the pilings, a seagull
perched on each, the chains
between them swinging,
singing in the sea breeze. 
Here she can breathe, bring
the clean salt-scrubbed air
into her hollow body, one
of the first ever made
before they went to solid
plastic to make the legs
and arms more bendable
so she could throw them up
to cover her face. 

You can read all of Limp Wrist's Kinky issue here.
Find out more about Denise Duhamel here. 
Read Denise's blog posts here. 

-- sdl

Dean Young: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Archaic Torso of Me Too

 

There was the guy in the next room

screaming he wanted some goddamn sugar.

There was the lady who my first night

conscious tried to get me to pray while

a falcon-headed shade carried off

my biowaste, hexes welting the walls—

she was also a hallucination.  How

I was strapped to the face of a sundial,

names of drugs like archangels,

the breathing machine pulling in

an Army-Navy game and tolling

like Big Ben. Hovering beside me,

another me entirely free of pain

like the idea of a rainbow beside

a fading rainbow.  Huff of alcohol,

fentanyl, urine, red beets.  The one

I made leave because he couldn’t stop

acting triumphant.  It wasn’t only death

in costume.  But always there was my darling

who’d kiss me even though the pulse-spike

would bring nurses running.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, the very place that Coleridge and Southey were thinking of founding their commune.  Maybe.  He is also maybe currently living in Cincinnati where he is trying to fit a two-bedroom house into a loft apartment.  His, hopefully next book, completing his IT’S ALIVE!! Trilogy, Creature Feature is almost finished.  Then from there on in it’s all petal drop blast radius.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary bringing food for the inmates of a hospital. Oil painting by Adam Elsheimer, ca. 1598           

"Parallel Bars" [by Geoffrey Young]

PARALLEL BARS

It gets bad and then it gets worse
And then the bottom falls out
But then it gets better, even great, you think
You’re there, but then it goes sour, totally alone, hurting,
But it comes back, new breath, friends again,
It’s the best it’s been in months,
Really clicking, it’s heaven, and then
Just about the time you think it’s going to stay heaven,
It gets bad, and then it gets worse, and then
The bottom falls out, will it ever get better? and then
It does, it’s even great, you blink an eye
And it goes sour, vicious, destructive,
But it comes back, new breath, friends again,
It’s the best it’s been in months, really clicking,
It’s heaven, and then just about the time
You think it’s going to stay heaven

--Geoffrey Young. Above: the cover of Young's new book Money (Prepared Remarks, 2022.)

"I hear an army charging upon the land. ." [by James Joyce]

 
I hear an army charging upon the land,   
  And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:   
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,   
  Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.   
   
They cry unto the night their battle-name:        
  I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.   
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,   
  Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.   
   
They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:   
  They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. 
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?   
  My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

-- James Joyce

Evie Shockley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________

quiet as it’s kept

 

no one tells you about these boys  :  their quiet feminism

grows like wildflowers  :  in their mothers’ gardens  :  you

should take a field

                                   trip  :  i’m telling you  :  they are

                                                                                             like

architechtural flourishes

                                             unseen

                                                            all about town  :  baroquing

libraries  :  finishing museums with clean modern lines  :  no

one tells you not to look past neat

                                                                 in search of

                                                                                          shine

or brawn  :  the masculinity that winks and whistles at you

like times

                    square or roars and kicks up dust like a pick-up

truck  :  the open

                                secret of such sexiness has its charms  : 

but the boys who open doors for men

                                                                      and

                                                                                women  :  who

catch you watching them adjust

                                                            their glasses and eye you

a smile  :  no one tells you what such subtle signs can mean 

:  i’m telling you that these boys

                                                            flowering

                                                                                 flourishing

and their quiet twinkling eyes can spark enough heat to warm

you through a massachusetts winter  :  pools of melt making

mud of your footprints  :  behind you

                                                                    the ice freezing silently

over your private spring

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections, the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the latter was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize.  Her poetry has appeared internationally in print and audio formats, in English and in translation. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem, among others.  Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

      James Dunbar, Field of Wildflowers

Brandon D. Johnson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

In Concert

 

Earl grins and flicks ash from his shoulder.

he scans the scene, ears tuned for sirens,

says less gunpowder might blow just

the door off next time.

from our safe distance, we stare at the yacht’s cabin;

it flips, hits water, disappears like a penny in used motor oil.

one narrow smoke column mixes with moist air.

this guy counts on next times the way a wet thumb

snaps hundreds off a roll, lives for

on-the-job practice like a rookie surgeon

who never says oops.

 

I clamp the top buckle on my McIntosh,

push pant legs deep into gum boots.  it’s cold,

the boat’s bowels are water-logged, sinking.

my jaw is tight thinking how Earl

slings explosives the way he slaps

an upright; all feeling, no control.

it’s the reason they have so few gigs,

why gaps are filled clutching

black bags and looking around corners.

it’s been difficult explaining how discipline

and popularity are related but that’s what got

them interested in my proposal in the first place.

 

four men and Cynthia follow

me down the pier dragging heels,

scraping meaning

from all this.  match heads

crackle, smoke blows through lips

like dead whistles.   

 

I knew the woman could use a gun

the first time I saw her lips part

to loose a somber note.  she was not to be messed

with. the only one allowed to pack heat.  if she had to,

she could even do bullheaded Cedric, the drummer,

holding that sledgehammer to knock away

what Earl’s excess hadn’t already. 

Charles, the gloved pianist, refused anyone’s hand,

distrustful of others and the manly art of handshaking.

his fingers spin combo dials.   Kevin, wheel man,

player of anything needing wind, thought being smart

made him next in command.  No one fought him on it,

knowing he never shut-up when he thought he was right. 

he was not.

 

when riffing, they meshed like gear-teeth

but out here, someone is always to blame

for one misstep or another.

I thought it’d be easy to teach

a bunch of musicians

how to play off each other like the call

and response of alternating solos, but

this is the fourth time.

they should have it down by now.

my last two gangs, formed from scratch

and good liquor, did better, sooner.

but they weren’t as well-traveled

and they weren’t as young.

 

perhaps I’ve aged beyond this avocation,

the thrill of rousing people past abilities.

these pieces can’t be played alone.

I suppose, in a moment’s clarity, I’ll cool.

my head will settle.  I’ll accept

for this quintet, doing scores

is harder than sight-reading Mingus.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Brandon D. Johnson is author of Love’s Skin, Man Burns Ant, The Strangers Between, and co-author of The Black Rooster Social Inn: This Is The Place. He is published in several print and online journals and anthologies. Brandon is also a photographer. Born in Gary, Indiana, he received a BA from Wabash College and his JD from Antioch School of Law. He lives with his wife and children in Washington, DC.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

        Charles Mingus record cover. Design and painting by S. Neil Fujita, 1959.

"A Letter" [by David Shapiro]

A Letter

It's three o’clock. The Mongolians should be asleep.
Mayakovsky sleeps and Josef Brodsky
used my book as a door stop
a few minutes after I gave it to him.
The Inner and Outer Mongolia sleep.
And David sleeps with Stacey in Mongolia
and David's eyes rapid as a sparrow
or a starling in snow sees something
in the bookshelf: an old book sleeps
like bats in the rafters like bats out of mind.
I will try to find some poems in the snow
Or little lashed poets all in a row.
It is late now, later than a monkey.
I look in the mirror and am just like a gibbon.
Same voicebox, same genitalia, same pride.
Who has placed us in this zoo of worlds?
He who has a strong bell and shepherd's arrows.
Let us take as they say arrows of our enemy
And use them in our fight as if they were our own.
O photo of myself I hope to find you
the one that doesn't cause disgust in Baudelaire
the one I saw on the island of love in mistranslation
Never knowing whether we had landed or
were taking off. The island had little snow.
The loudest sound was some flirtation.
I sent you my virtual collage. You sent me Mongolia.

-- May 28 2008

Myra Sklarew: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________

Birdland

                        for Sterling Brown

So I take my seven bucks

to buy a railroad ticket.

 

And with a little luck

hitchhike to the station.

 

The money comes from playing

in a dance band with Vinny Gallo

 

braying on his tenor sax

and Charley Panzner—

 

I forget the others—

and me on the piano.

 

When no one is looking I play

solo piano in taverns after hours

 

up and down Long Island’s South Shore,

singing Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life.

 

I don’t tell my folks when I hop

on a train at age 14 and head

 

to Birdland where I sit

in the Peanut Gallery for nothing

 

and drink in Miles Davis,

John Coltrane, Count Basie

 

and Oscar Peterson. And not far away

you could go to the Embers

 

and hear Red Norvo on the vibraphone

play the Blues in E Flat.

 

And Stan Getz whose tunes I’d been trying

to play all year and ever since.

 

Sterling, this was before I met you.

Were you there too, singing your poems:

saying “Slim in Atlanta” and “After Winter”

and “Sister Lou.”  Or listening to “Ma Rainey”:

 

O Ma Rainey,

Sing yo’ song:

Now you’s back

Whah you belong,

Git way inside us,

Keep us strong…

O Ma Rainey,

Li’l and low…*

 

Sterling, you made us stand up

in your living room while you played jazz

 

on your phonograph and wouldn’t let us

sit down till we could name who was playing.

 

Sometimes we stood a long, long time.

It was Erroll Garner and Lester Young.

 

Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.

And there was Satchmo who we loved.

 

I never told my folks where I’d been, pretended

to spend the night at a friend’s.

 

But I wouldn’t trade that smokey room

and that gorgeous music that filled us up

 

to the top until it was time to sneak out

of the house and head uptown to Birdland

 

once more. And years later, Sterling, to stand

in your living room, under the alms

 

of a great poet having us listen

to the music you loved and to the words

 

you wrote. Sterling, we could have stayed

there the rest of our lives.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Myra Sklarew, professor emerita American University, founder of the MFA Program, former president of the Yaddo Artist’s Community, studied biology at Tufts, bacterial viruses at Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, and did research at Yale Medical School in memory and the prefrontal cortex. She has an  M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. Her twelve poetry collections include Lithuania: New and Selected Poems; Prose: Like a Field Riddled by Ants, Over the Rooftops of Time, An Invitation to a Country called Aging (with Patricia Garfinkel), and A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania.  A new collection of essays on science and medicine, Lie Perfectly Still, is near completion. In 2011, Sklarew helped launch "A Splendid Wake"—a project to document poets, poetry movements, and literary organizations in the Washington, D.C. area from 1900 to the present, sponsored by the Special Collections Research Center at the Gelman Library, GWU, organized by local poets.  [For more on Sterling Brown, click here.]

(*from Beyond the Blues by Rosey E. Pool, The Hand and Flower Press, 1962, England.)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Interview with Tzimon Barto: Languages, Poetry and Education [by Lera Auerbach]

 I am always fascinated by people who are masters of more than one profession.  I interviewed Tzimon Barto for the Best American Poetry blog. His passions and knowledge run deep. Tzimon Barto speaks seven languages fluently, reads ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; his love of poetry is contagious, his ideas about education are inspiring.

      

For a taste of Barto's music-making here he is performing Mozart's Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in A major with the SWR Symphonieorchester and Christoph Eschenbach.

 

Stepping through that door: "An Immigrant’s Story" by Wanjiru Kamuyu [by Tracy Danison]

Nelly Celerine signifying doubly in "An Immigrant's Story" by Wanjiru Kamyuyu. Photo©Anne Volery/ Palais de la Porte Dorée

I’ve never mentioned the very kind and excellent teachers I have had – especially including the SUNY-Buffalo teaching assistant who gave me Adrienne Rich’s 1962 Prospective Immigrants Please Note in 1976.

Prospective Immigrants is a manual of human physics, a starting perception for my long-long unfinished grapple toward self-liberation –

Either you will/go through this door/or you will not go through

If you go through/there is always the risk/of remembering your name.

–  … That would be my realization that when, back in 1959, Great Grandma Steinmetz pleaded with us to push away the 10-foot tall, one-ton oak armoire looming over the bed where she lay dying, she was neither imagining sad things nor whining unwomanly.  

The scene is literary, Sherwood-Anderson ghoulish and amusing. It seems doing a small thing in a great world to take a poor old dying lady's fears seriously, yes? All the same, thanks to Adrienne Rich, I know this perplexing dream-memory of a toddler is a primal step toward my self-liberation. I’ve even come to see that tolerance is fraud and only the sincerest pricks talk of charity. Nowadays, if you ask me to lift a dead rhinoceros off your back, I swear, I’ll try, I'll gladly heave hard as ever I can, gratis, no questions asked, no thanks necessary.

Things look at you doubly/and you must look back/and let them happen.

Imagine my pleasure to see my human physics manual made into – Almighty Christ! What else could it be made into, a serious poem like Prospective Immigrants? – a dance performance called An Immigrant’s Story.

Created and performed by the very thoughtful Kenyan & American Wanjiru Kamuyu, An Immigrant’s Story premiered at the newly inaugurated Musée de l’Immigration at Porte Dorée last year. It was then taken up by the annual Faits d’Hiver dance-performance festival. I saw it at Espace 1789, an excellent (and successful) multimedia venue in the near-Paris suburb of St. Ouen.

When I told Wanjiru Kamuyu about Rich’s poem during the meet-and-greet in the bar after the performance, she made it clear to me that her manual of human physics has developed independent of the dead Canadian poet. It's comforting to understand that Rich's lines exist without her, not only in my head, but in the ether I share with beautiful strangers. Kamuyu said she'd read it.

Thinking it over, I guess I shall take Wanjiru Kamuyu’s choreographic meter & foot as a sort of Large Hadron Collider for Truth & Beauty that proves with a new energy in a new rig what was before, for me, but the occasional and accidental symmetry of immortal hand and eye. I mean, An Immigrant's Story makes Prospective Immigrants be.

More than symmetry. Nelly Celerine, dance performer, left, on stage with choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu. Photo© Anne Volery/ Palais de la Porte Dorée

Kamuyu was born in Kenya to an American mother who was there, no doubt, to aim toward self-liberation. When mother moved to Detroit, no doubt still aiming herself towards self-liberation, Wanjiru of course moved with her. She was a young teen.

Kamuyu now lives and works in France.

In Detroit, Kamuyu found a queerly-cracked looking glass to pair with the one she’d brought from Kenya, which certainly spurred Story’s development but, in my take, certainly did not finish it – like Rich’s work, there are many little expanding ideas swelling inside.

It was surprising and pleasant to find a savor of musical comedy in Kamuyu’s contemporary dance performance take on Rich’s rather disorienting precepts, precepts which I had for so long associated with the earnest flöt bread of an American poet’s circle circa 1980.

An Immigrant’s Story is a two-strong woman show: Kamuyu, projecting a strong friendly lucidity and intellectual gravity and Nelly Celerine, independent dancer, singer and teacher, a natural anchor and attracting presence.

Celerine and Kamuyu are not a duo. They are a double play.

Story opens with Kamuyu lightly stage left, Celerine stage right front. Ostensibly to interpret Kamuyu’s dance in sign (LSF), the moment she Celerine her expressing hands, her interpretation becomes a full-blown story – twin, with Kamyuyu’s. As the twin grows strong other stories and potential stories and possible stories emerge in me. This one, for instance, and the others I am keeping for my own.

Sounds that split into two twin rhythms parallel Kamuyu’s voyage from Africa to America. Celerine’s signing self-choreographs into an upper body or aerial energy that swings over and under her presence: imagine an atom with a single electron. Hydrogen? Primary, light, rich and explosive. Right?

As Kamuyu’s and Celerine’s movement shapes, it binds them together in a thickening band of energy. This energy resolves into an orbit; the orbit resolves into a slow-moving cyclone; the cyclone resolves into an eye; the eye resolves into a looking glass.

When I look into the looking-glass eye, I can hear fat drops of rain and the roll of thunder beside a buzzing of bees and a languor of mid-summer.

I was afraid to ask my neighbor what they heard.

But the important thing is that, as far as I can tell, Wanjiru Kamuyu’s dance proves, as Rich’s poetry posited, as my manual of human physics suggests, that, yes, in human physics, be is the finale of seem.

Michael Palmer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Palmer. Photo by Juno Gemes 

__________________________________________________

Falling Down in America

 

Every three seconds someone over sixty-five

falls down in America.

Our records show

that you are over sixty-five

and may therefore have already

fallen down in America

maybe more than once.

Perhaps upon entering your bath

you slipped

and cracked open your skull

and subsequently drowned

in a pool of blood.

If so, disregard this notice.

Perhaps while gazing at the sea

distractedly one day

your balance failed

and the waves carried you away

toward the irradiated swells

of Fukushima.

If so, never mind—

the flesh has already peeled

from your limbs

and your eyes

have melted in their sockets

in which case

you should disregard this notice.

We need hardly remind you

that many of your friends

and relatives, perhaps beloved uncles,

aunts, cousins, your seven brothers

and sisters, parents assuredly,

may have succumbed in some manner

to the fateful equation

of gravity and age.

In addition, it is likely

that your investments recently caved

and as a result, from the shock,

you fainted upon the cheap

Mexican tiles

of your dining room floor

and days later awoke

among impersonal professionals,

masked and clad in white,

and addressing you

as if you were a child.

If so, you now know

that you are utterly alone

in this life.

Please favor us with a reply

regarding our one-time offer

which will soon expire.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969.  He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. He has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions, was published in May of 2021.Early in 2022, Nightboat Books will bring out a new edition of a prose work, The Danish Notebook. [For more on Michael Palmer, see this link.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                                                       Laurel and Hardy in Hats Off, 1927

"What's Happening": David Shapiro in memory of Kenneth Koch

What’s Happening

(“Write 19 lines under that heading and I’ll post it” – DL to DS)

1. Mostly decathected as they say in analysis: forget forget!
2.  I pause don’t dance don’t leap. "I rarely dance."
3.  I don't own the four volumes of Herzen just a sliced bio like his bio.
4. "Bankers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse"
5. What's better? Alain Delon and Monica Vitti loiter at stock exchange.
6. Someone dies, a minute of silence grows, then the beasts roar back.
7. I love stringing beads in a bead store in New Orleans. Beads in trees.
8. I wanted a random necklace to give to a random friend.
9. I was attacked for randomness. It was indeed too expected.
10. The critic's glasses are flying, and also a Mondrian flower torn apart.
11. "I am afraid of nothing. I have BEEN to Mexico."
12. Spinoza the lovable philosopher fried spiders and watched: what?
13. Don't overcome obstacles, find easiness. KK's motto from VL
14. What's happening? What am I thinking? "Do you actually think?"
15. Ron Padgett: you don't actually think I will read all this, do you?
16. Don't ever use the past tense in discussing physical beauty.
17. My friend said he was sinking into the white spaces between letters.
18. Whitman said "Leave the best unsaid----------------------------------
19. How do you end a poem? With the proper sense of endlessness.

in memory of KK

-- David Shapiro [March 31, 2009]

from the archive

Elaine Feeney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________

Red

 

I am growing in this dress.

 

I plunge my wide curves

to the taut edges and

lift my shoulders to the

raspberry red,

 

I almost trust the seams.

 

Soft on my rounded stomach,

my breasts full,

my charcoal deep eyes.

 

I am growing into this dress,

it is wearing me, moving

me along the street,

clutching and gathering,

in around my rib flesh.

 

Soon I will be this dress.

 

Some evening

with laughter lines

with less clutter in my head,

we will melt together.

 

But not this evening,

this evening is only practise,

this evening on

Grafton Street’s cobbles,

this is only dress up.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Feeney has published three poetry collections, including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise (Salmon Poetry). Her debut novel, As You Were (Vintage & Biblioasis), won the 2021 Dalkey Book Festival’s Emerging Writer Prize, The Kate O’ Brien Prize, The Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize (UK), and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Rathbones-Folio Prize. Feeney’s work featured widely on Best of 2020 lists, and she was chosen by The Observer as a top debut novelist for 2020. Her short story “Sojourn” was published in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, and she also wrote the multi award-winning drama, WRoNGHEADED, commissioned by the Liz Roche Company. She lectures in poetry at The National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is also a founding member of the Tuam Oral History Project.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                 

                                            Roderic O'Conor (1860–1940), Seated Woman in a Red Dress, 1929 (oil on canvas).

Growing a Book [by Lera Auerbach]

 

© Lera Auerbach - Monoprint

 

A tree is never just a tree.

Physical distance one can measure.
But what about the distance from oneself?

(Too far – and numbness spreads.
Too close – and you fall apart.)

A book is a tree:
it needs to take hold,
to find nourishment and water.

In its early stages it is fragile,
while the hurricane season is coming.

Where do all unwritten books go?
Completed manuscripts waiting for editors?
Lost publications waiting for readers?
Forgotten lives?

Like a child, a book requires sacrifice.
Its birth is painful.
Ultimately, it is never yours.

Who are you?

You are only its tool –
(and a highly imperfect one at that.)

Dramaturgy [poem by Jason Schneiderman]

Dramaturgy

I’m writing a play about a Kommandant at Auschwitz
who recognizes one of the Jewish prisoners
as a famous poet, and as the Kommandant
has poetic aspirations himself, he pulls the prisoner
away from the work detail to receive poetry lessons
from the celebrated Jewish writer. The bulk of the play
is their discussions of poetry, which the poet
is initially reluctant to have, the power differential
being so stark, and though he flatters the Kommandant
at first, when he begins to see his Nazi pupil’s
true devotion to the art, as well as his untrained
and untapped talent, he goes to work in earnest,
and at times they are both simply lovers
of the German language, though the truth of their
situation often interrupts. In the last act,
the Kommandant is on trial for his crimes,
and in the days before he is to be executed,
he begs the poet to publish his work under his own name—
the Nazi’s writing under the Jew’s name—
because as a Nazi, he feels his own name is disgraced,
but he believes so strongly in poetry that it matters
more to him that his work survive than that anyone
know it was his work. The play is pulled entirely
from my imagination, a careful rereading
of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, and the poetic ideas
of Rilke and Goethe, with a smattering of Nietzsche.
In readings of the play, the Kommandant
has seemed more noble than I had intended—in many ways,
more noble than the Jew, because the Jew is suffering
by no fault of his own, while the Kommandant is tortured
by conscience, and driven by a sense of poetic calling
that separates him from the Germans around him.
On the morning of the third workshop reading, I watched
a video of two Russians on an ice-dancing reality show
performing as Jews in Auschwitz. I was sickened,
even though I couldn’t follow the pantomimed action,
and I wondered if I was producing Holocaust kitsch myself,
if my work was as disgusting as theirs, though I knew
if I asked any of my team, they would reassure me
that I am doing important work that rises to the level
of art. Last night, during a break in the workshop of the play,
I told the story of how my grandmother, upon learning
that her entire family had died in the camps,
had burned the photo albums of everyone she had loved.
I have told that story many, many times,
without feeling much more than regret, or sympathy,
but this time I broke down crying, and I couldn’t stop.
Everyone at the table came to comfort me,
and I felt ridiculous, but the only thing I could say was,
“It’s time for us to go. This isn’t a place we can live anymore.”
I left the studio embarrassed, and later that day,
I resigned from the production. I don’t think they believed
that I was serious, and they’ll expect me to show up
at the next table reading. I won’t. The play will go on
though I can have nothing more to do with it.
This morning, after taking a shirt off the hanger,
I looked in the mirror and realized I hadn’t put it on.
Without thinking, I had started packing a bag.

-- 

Jason Schneiderman is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020); he edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford, 2016). He is an associate professor at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the graduate program for writers at Warren Wilson College. This poem appears in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2021 and was the featured poem on Poetry Daily, February 8, 2022. 

Hymns to Hymnself [by Tom Disch]

Hymns to Hymnself

1.

He had his haiku too, as who does not.
Where there are compounds there will be
molecules, thence atoms and apothegems. Eagles
will appear high overhead
screaming unheard in the ecstasy of sex
and Walt, down here, will hear
and make an annotation. That is how
poetry operates – now,
in his day, and in old Edo.

2.

He hated to be talked of when he was
out of the room, fearing to miss
some wild encomium he might agree with
and add to the great mass of his blurbs.
That was just part of being
All-Encompassing. He was,
in Himself, the Compleate Lover,
male and female, rough and tender,
dark and light; as such, a star,
a little jealous of those who might think
to be his co-stars. Look up at the night sky
(he did, all the time). Do you see co-stars there?

-- Tom Disch (1940-2008)

April 10, 2008

"Buffalo" [by Tom Disch]

Buffalo

He knew how he would die. We all know that.
Some day the same as any other he'd be chewing his cud
And ruminating about the larger weather patterns
The clouds spoke of when Whump! like the trump of Doom
He would be stampeding to his death
With the whole country around him, their pounding
Hooves sounding like the drums you sometimes
Heard when the herds of horsemen camped
In some canyon close by, the very canyon it might be
In which he was destined to die.
Aiee! they would cry, or words to that effect,
As they sat by their fires beating on the stretched skin
Of one's relatives, which was their way
Of saying We won! We won! They were
An intolerable presence and he prayed
That someday someone would come, someone
Even nastier, someone even worse than the wolves,
And kill them, level their smelly villages
And cover them with rocks, like the rocks
He would lie on and rot when it came
His time to join the great stampede and die.

– Tom Disch (1940-2008)

May 1, 2008, 4:13 am

"The Proud Beggar" [by Tom Disch, 1940-2008]

The Proud Beggar

Am I happy to have lived
When and where I did
America The 20th century
I've often said so
Grateful anyhow for my good luck
But I'll be happier soon
To have shed both when and where
My landlord has had me evicted
Katrina struck
As Charlie lay on the mattress
Of a New York hospice
And he had as little care
For the deaths of those other paupers
As for his own
May I achieve the same
Dark wisdom
Yet still I scrawl
These codicils and think
It matters who gets
Dibs on the dust
From my shitpile
Didn't I write
Just after he died
"Nothing we had
Was worth the having"
And isn't that still true?
These few disintegrating molecules
And then the mattress
Will be rotated
To receive the next deposit
Our chiefs may rejoice
For when they die
Their ships go down
In the same flames
They aren't evicted
They laugh at the poor in their rags
Pushing crook-wheeled grocery carts
Filled with moldy books
Please buy one, Sir
Just a dollar
Less for you

-- Tom Disch

from Endzone, "Tom Disch's Live Journal," entry for June 1, 2008

Michael Whelan: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

Dermot Healy at the Phillips

 

For the last half hour Healy’s been gone—

he’s digging up the potatoes he sees

in Rothko’s hazy fields of color, staring at them

from his bench, alone in their chapel at the Phillips.

Three days ago he turned a corner as we walked DC.

Helen and I found him in a tiny Arabic library that caught

his eye on N Street. So thrilled with the place,

he’s gone back each day to meander in obscure conversation

 

with scholars there about the first sounds

that made language, hints of them secreted still, he says,

on N Street in frail mystery-embedded manuscripts

that took his odd eye and confirmed what he holds

 

as his only faith: that every word is a

living entity with a soul of its own

that longs and morphs and heaves in its letters

sideways and forward chanting its history

in its agony of thanksgiving for living.

 

Healy has moved now from

Rothko’s potato chapel to a minuscule Klee

intricate in light blue lines. He’s traveling

inside its mysteries, multifarious in minutiae.

 

“Will we go home now for the tea?” he nudges.

In the short time of his stay, we’ve shaped a ritual

of tea round the Irish bread he found at the Dupont

Farmers Market. He cuts it thick and toasts it for us.

 

Then slathers it with butter and closes his eyes

in a way that puts the tea and toast

in league with the mysteries

of Rothko and of Klee.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A set of poems by Michael Whelan, including “Dermot Healy at the Phillips,” on the late Irish poet and novelist, appeared in Éirways magazine.  Whelan’s spiritual memoir After God, published in 2014, is a poetic story of a lifelong lovers’ quarrel with God.  § Whelan won first prize in the juried Leitrim Guardian 2012 Literary Awards. His poems have appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Coachella Review, The Healing Muse, and The Little Patuxent Review.  His prose work has been published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and online on the Irish Central site. [For information on Dermot Healy, click here.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Rothko paintings at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC