The Best American Poetry

"Yonder, a Rental" [by Anna Maria Hong]

Time to howl at the celestial sphere,
that full frontal silver dollar, the very
paintball of pallor and elemental other.
It’s all or nada as noonnight’s empanada

discloses her pretty quarter, the priest’s collar
hung high on the hook of evening’s fluent
wall. Hung like a juror bent on acquittal
who can’t stall any longer, you’re a cobbler

hawking copper coins in an Oriental
bazaar. The Sultan’s power went horizontal
long, long ago. It’s fine to be sentimental,

though there’s no need to bother. Grab a handful
of shine like a disc of doll hair, a dollop of Neufchâtel,
                                                           valor and force, vital—

from Ecotone

Cognition, perception & whatever works, works in painting, poetics and dance [by Tracy Danison]

Like Dance, capital “D”, Kiefer’s show is a “whole” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. That includes Grand Palais Ephémère, an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations. View from the exhibition “Anselm Kiefer pour Paul Celan”, Grand Palais Ephémère©Georges Poncet-Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2021

Karine & I were delighted when we saw that the Grand Palais was holding an exposition called ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan”. A pandemic wet dream. Great visual art plus enough space to keep any virus concentrations in the air very low.

Kiefer honors the work of the remarkable German-language lyric poet by integrating his (Celan’s) words and lines and sense and sensibility into Kiefer’s own visual lyric.

We even came back to Paris a little earlier than usual to make sure to see it.

The experience of the show got me wondering all at once about the scope of dance creation. The logic of this wonder is of course complex. In part, I began wondering because I was struck with Anselm Kiefer’s, the show curators’ and Paul Celan’s intention and deliberation, with the venue’s place, placement and statement in its immediate environment. In part, I was struck with the show’s space, volume, size, light, shadow, with the editorial in the in the walls and ceilings, positions, with visual inventions, sculpted models and found objects, with tools, materials, material and immaterial effects… In part, I began wondering because of wider-world references in the show: Kiefer’s effect on Celan and Celan’s lyric world and on the sense of these effects Kiefer. Then there’s my own thinking on art structures in general and on dance structures in particular (see: Move that Cat, ‘Cleitus), thoughts on the indistinguishability of intention and accident (see: Machine de Cirque). And finally maybe a bit more in part than my other in-parts, the effects of a long chat I had with the dancer, choreographer, intellectual  Mylène Benoît on why she thinks dance is an essential human need.

Kiefer’s show is a “whole show” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. The neighborhood where it was held was pandemic-appropriate: at the Grand Palais Ephémère, a temporary annex to the Palais, which is in renovation. Ephémère is an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of urban Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that we suspect – Karine and I spent our time in line theorizing – it may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations.

Altogether, the Ephémère space, seeming made-to-order for pandemic times, is also an excellent piece of psycho-esthetic engineering where Kiefer’s art was to best advantage.

But, though accommodating and integrated into the exhibition, Kiefer’s gigantic canvases, life-model jet plane and the blockhouses, its intention and arrangement stands alone, as much a work affecting its showcase as being affected by it. Wherever it travels, and I hope it does travel, it can master its environment.

As spectacle, as in everything else, ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan” works really well.

Kiefer, they say, had a large hand in laying out his homage to Celan.

He left behind a lot of tools, equipment, material and unused applications, back near the coffee shop. As if he meant to keep working, or might be called back for maintenance, he’d tidily sorted it all on shelving bearing up, as Atlas might, the Ephémère’s huge volume of tightly-operated light and shadow.

Kiefer’s a complete painter, an expert in producing line, color and texture as well as in the mechanics of perception. Celan is a complete poet, conjuring the texture & tone of a thought or an idea or of an unsayable image and make the surrounding air vibrate with them.

The first few lines of Death Fugue (Todesfuge), a poem that a great many young people in Germany learn in school, give an idea of Celan’s all-round grasp of poetics:

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends / Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night

wir trinken und trinken … / we drink it and drink it …

Lift a glass to the banality of evil.

Light and dark. Step to one side, you are puzzling symbols, step to another and those are recondite words, step away and a grey wall becomes a horizon, white scars change to plaques of chased silver… To enable the spectator become experiencer of the sensibility that the painter and poet, whatever works, works. View from the exhibition “Anselm Kiefer pour Paul Celan”, Grand Palais Ephémère © Georges Poncet-Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2021

This “Schwarze Milch” is surely the universal food and mutter of the self-poisoned, the Kluxer, the Bircher, the Q-Anon dope in his basement lounge, the ultra-violent screed of the Turner Diaries, the black-shirt murder-tech who shoots granny in the face because regulations suggest she might be too weak to work before, before … What was that bureaucratic euphemism for mass murder? … Also, it feels like stumbling on Jeff Davis’ autographed copy of Essai sur les inégalités humaines. Also it feels of a certain moment of warm-beer hilarity, also of the joyful anarchy of Chagall, also, also, also… and, and, and…

"Other News on Page 234" [by Herbert Gold]

Someone famous will die that day,
My day,
And the newspaper will report:
“More obituaries on page 24.”

For the curiosity of some,
the regret of several,
and the grief of a few.

Those few, they matter,
So they have a nice walk
in the Marin headlands
Shadowed by a weary and worn mountain
(still green! still fragrant!
with pine and transplanted eucalyptus,
and most important: Still there!),
where I’m proud that the few gather trash,
But drop my ashes downwind,
And remember as I fly away.

— Herbert Gold

This is one of the poems by novelist Herbert Gold, now 97, that Tablet magazine ran in this  article about the verse correspondence between the writer and his two sons: "We See Exits and Entrances: A poetry correspondence between the acclaimed novelist Herbert Gold and his sons" by Ari Gold, Herbert Gold, and Ethan Gold
in Tablet  January 24, 2022
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/we-see-exits-entrances

Dan Gutstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Fox Who Loves Me + Other Developments in the Faunal and Floral Kingdoms

 

1. Deep, deep in the shrubberies: behold the beaver. Being human and smart-alecky, one ponders the paddle. We’re told that the paddle is for dam building, but that can’t be all. The beaver, for example, knows love. What doeth the paddle during the love-making of the beaver? People paddle each other, although the paddle is not—organically—attached to them. You might think “furry, cute little critter” but I think not. I see a varmint that can chew through a tree. Knowing not what might aggravate the beaver, I keep moving along.

2. This massive heron floats down to earth. It is equal parts dinosaur, goose, and 747. A comedian. Slender and plump. Where are the myths about this fine specimen? How come no Leda and the Great Blue? It is a stoic. Perhaps it thinks me a stoic, as well. The two of us, trudging along in the miserable murk that defines our lives. Me ‘n’ the heron, we complaineth not.

3. Thank you for inquiring about the Early Girl tomato plant. Given the absence of bees on the balcony, Dear Reader, I hand-pollinated every single flower. Lo, the plant begat many dozen tomatoes! We had a terrific affair. As for the fruits themselves, well, they were quite tasty, as it works out. This bit of gardening provided me with an essential activity as my skeleton reeled from an injury.

4. During my convalescence from said injury (which continues at present) I watched some reruns of Law & Order. I would like to say that Claire Kincaid, played by Jill Hennessey, is my favorite character. Dunno how the show continued on without her.

5. I got bitten! Not only that, but the venom (of whatever bit me) tried to slay me. But I endured.

6. Given the seriousness of the injury, I hadn’t seen my BFF from the faunal kingdom in several months. But one day, as part of my rehabilitation walk, I thought I saw the little ears sticking up, out of the sand trap. So I says, “Hey mate,” in my silly Australian accent. “Hey mate, you’re a good-looking fox.” This is how all the animals in my orbit know it’s me. The silly accent. She sits bolt upright, curling the big brush of the tail behind her. I think she even whined a little bit. That really broke me up!

7. The fox, stirring.

8. The fox, running. She looks hale and hearty. She’s a good-looking fox, mate.

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   Dan Gutstein’s most recent collection of writing is Metacarpalism (poetry, Unsolicited Press, 2022). His poems and stories have appeared in more than a hundred journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, American Scholar, The Iowa Review, Best American Poetry, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He is also co-director of documentary project Li’l Liza Jane: The Story of America Through the History of a Song and vocalist for NPR-featured punk band Joy on Fire

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                                                    Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt.

On Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" [by David Lehman]

“Where Ignorance Is Bliss, Tis Folly To Be Wise” 
David Lehman on why Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is an overlooked poetic masterpiece.
By David Lehman 

from Slate (January 22, 2013)

Portrait of Thomas Gray

Painted by John Giles Eccardt.

Favorite examples of poetic endings include the interrogatives of Shelley (“If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”) and Yeats (“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”), the declarative Milton (“They also serve who only stand and wait”), the ecstatic Coleridge (“For he on honeydew hath fed/ and drunk the milk of paradise”), the reiterated premonitions of Robert Frost (“And miles to go before I sleep”).

In this company belongs Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (written in 1742, published five years later), an overlooked masterpiece from the most underrated century of English verse. Gray’s ode ends, “Where ignorance is bliss,/ Tis folly to be wise,” an assertion that has attained the status of a proverb and can be discussed for many fruitful hours on its own or in relation to the Garden of Eden in Chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis.

In his Short History of English Literature, George Saintsbury says Gray was “probably the best-read man of letters of his time in Europe.” What he lacked in originality and inspiration he made up for in fastidious craftsmanship. His poetic output was small but choice. He subscribed to the idea, popular in the century of Alexander Pope, that excellence of expression trumped originality of concept. Gray felt, too, that true poetry was incompatible with the discourse of the tribe, and it is his artificial diction that earned him an attack from Wordsworth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth quoted the whole of Gray's sonnet mourning the death of his friend Richard West saying that only five lines were worth keeping. Gray’s best-known poem remains his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which even Samuel Johnson, no fan of the poet, praised: “The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

The “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” in its general contours, is a romantic poem of return, with some similarities to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”  In both poems the poet returns to a place after an interval of years; he feels the change as a loss; he recollects the past and looks to the future. Wordsworth’s poem travels from melancholy at the passing of youth to the compensations of maturity. But Gray’s poem is more radical, the poet less willing to talk himself out of his gloom.

I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate.

There follows an unrelenting list of pains, grievances, ailments, and sufferings—a catalogue without parallel in English lyric poetry. The vision of the life of man is grim, as grim as in Hobbes (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”), but the writing is so controlled and has such authority that one finds it delicious despite the dispiriting content. The balanced clauses reveal a subtlety of distinction—between, for example, the tender-hearted who feels “another’s pain” while “the unfeeling” is mired in his own.

Do we agree with Gray’s conclusion? Do we want to know the doctor’s bad news? Do we cherish our illusions rather than choose what Freud prescribes as “an education in reality”? Would Eve and Adam have been “wise” to reject the fruits of knowledge? These are different questions—not variants of the same question—and their urgency speaks to the epigrammatic power of what Gray wrote.

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear David Lehman read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"

By Thomas Gray

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy Shade;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way.

Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade,
Ah fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales, that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthrall?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?

While some on earnest business bent
Their murmuring labours ply
'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint
To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.

Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possessed;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast:
Their buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever-new,
And lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly the approach of morn.

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murtherous band!
Ah, tell them, they are men!

These shall the fury Passions tear,
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
And Sorrow's piercing dart.

Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning Infamy.
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness' altered eye,
That mocks the tear it forced to flow;
And keen Remorse with blood defiled,
And moody Madness laughing wild
Amid severest woe.

Lo, in the vale of years beneath
A grisly troop are seen,
The painful family of Death,
More hideous than their Queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

Ozymandias:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

Emily Dickinson
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/a-trip-to-tintern-abbey-by-david-lehman.html

To His Coy Mistress
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

Ben Jonson
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

or click on our "Great Poems" link here or on the left side of the page.   

Lyn Li Che: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sobriqu(i)ets 

 

On the corner of 12^th and Market, a man says

            Nihao, China and I’m in love,  

I just don’t know it yet. One day, I’ll love  

            the slant of my eyes, their slashing stare.

I’ll love the ching-chong clamour of the old country   

            and my grandfather’s names: both the one  

he was given and the one taken away   

            by the registrar’s pen. None of his siblings  

had the same last name but I’ll love them too:  

            the Che’s and Chen’s and Chong’s, all laid out  

like a racist’s naughty nursery rhyme.  

            I’ll be shook by my buck-toothed gook

reflection. I’ll be cool with my coolie shape  

            and my sideways drape, how easily   

my body zipperheads into anything else –  

            a container of chowmein, a coin slot  

cooter choking open. I’ll be someone’s 

            bamboo chink and kimchee kink, though bitch,  

I’m not even Korean. I’ll stan   

            my Jackie Chan doyenne Chinaman  

brand. I’ll idealize this Oriental disguise.

            I hope I just don’t know it yet.  

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Lyn Li Che was born in Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, PANK, Passages North, Tupelo Quarterly, BOAAT, River Styx, and others. A 2021 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow, she currently lives in New York City, where she works in tech strategy.

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                Mohd Noor Mahmud, Siri Kala Kota Bharu series: Main Ayun, acrylic on wood, 2006

"As Romance Fails" [by Star Black]

As Romance Fails

Indolence fans the aqua pools
before lovers’ spats prelude dawn’s make-up sex.
A chilling sky ensues, as everyone fears love,
the great mummer of regrets. Yet,

not even trees control their destinies,
half-stilled by burlesque bees, bird-burdened.
Nor can they turn upright one fallen limb, languishing
as if lonesome. You, Richard, have grown,

a green sailor upon a mulched sea, closer
to love, to reality, to the seashells of woodbine,
the seraph’s tunes; and, soon, trust,

regret’s second cousin, will alarm you
with devotion: its rose-lilt fathoms, their glass eye,
enfolding bold écrivains who, far-flung, revive.

from the archive; first posted December 1, 2008. Photo of Star Black and Paul Violi above. Photo credit: David Lehman (1998).

As Romance Fails

Indolence fans the aqua pools
before lovers’ spats prelude dawn’s make-up sex.
A chilling sky ensues, as everyone fears love,
the great mummer of regrets. Yet,

not even trees control their destinies,
half-stilled by burlesque bees, bird-burdened.
Nor can they turn upright one fallen limb, languishing
as if lonesome. You, Richard, have grown,

a green sailor upon a mulched sea, closer
to love, to reality, to the seashells of woodbine,
the seraph’s tunes; and, soon, trust,

regret’s second cousin, will alarm you
with devotion: its rose-lilt fathoms, their glass eye,
enfolding bold écrivains who, far-flung, revive.

from the archive; first posted December 1, 2008. Photo of Star Black and Paul Violi above. Photo credit: David Lehman (1998).

As Romance Fails

Indolence fans the aqua pools
before lovers’ spats prelude dawn’s make-up sex.
A chilling sky ensues, as everyone fears love,
the great mummer of regrets. Yet,

not even trees control their destinies,
half-stilled by burlesque bees, bird-burdened.
Nor can they turn upright one fallen limb, languishing
as if lonesome. You, Richard, have grown,

a green sailor upon a mulched sea, closer
to love, to reality, to the seashells of woodbine,
the seraph’s tunes; and, soon, trust,

regret’s second cousin, will alarm you
with devotion: its rose-lilt fathoms, their glass eye,
enfolding bold écrivains who, far-flung, revive.

from the archive; first posted December 1, 2008. Photo of Star Black and Paul Violi above. Photo credit: David Lehman (1998).

Dusk (for Barry Lopez) [by John Freeman]

DUSK 

for Barry Lopez [January 6, 1945 - December 25, 2020]

Horizon fades from blue to black
with infinite tenderness in London
tonight. Yet even at full dusk a smear
of cobalt rings the tree line. Maybe
endless love awaits us. I know you believed
so, even as forests and rivers turned to fire,
libraries to ash. Now that you’re not here
to tend them, I see the lamps you lit for us.
Sometimes it’s important to see the darkness,
you would say, to regard one another other,
and our trembling. Or on other nights, like
now: we must look up. How is this same
moon in my sky hanging over Eugene these
small hours? Do you feel its comforts?
As you sleep through this final stretch
how badly I want you to know we have
the torches now, my friend, we’ll protect the flame,
you are free to be the wind again.

-- John Freeman

John Freeman (pictured above) is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology of new writing about inequality in the U.S. today. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the New York Times. The former editor of Granta and one-time president of the National Book Critics Circle, he is currently Artist-in-Residence at New York University. The poem appears in a special issue of Orion magazine, in which writers and artists salute the late Barry Lopez.

https://orionmagazine.org/article/writers-artists-on-the-influence-of-barry-lopez/#freeman

Geoffrey Himes: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Swimming Pool

 

The diver was a knife that slit the surface

with the merest sliver of a splash.

 

Her zaftig mother was a pudding oozing

through the poolside plastic webbing.

 

The diver's boyfriend was a mannequin

in bronze tan and vermillion trunks.

 

He ran past the mother, leapt, grabbed his knees,

and landed with a cannonball tsunami.

 

I was a chimera, dog's head and walrus body,

swimming laps through the chlorine blue.

 

I knew the mother and the boyfriend would tire of the sun

and leave the pool to me, the diver and the indigo dusk.

 

The diver bounced on the board, lifted off, hinged at the hips,

straightened like a blade and sliced into the bubbles.

 

I stayed in my lane, scooping with my hands,

swimming toward her, away, toward her, away.

 

Water was our world. Water was our language.

Water was our worship. Water was our embrace.

 

I could be the spoon to her knife.

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Geoffrey Himes’s poetry has been published by December, Gianthology, the Loch Raven Review, Survision, January Review, Salt Lick, the Baltimore City Paper, and other publications. His poems are included in the anthologies Singing in the Dark and Poet Trees: Poetry Hiding in Plain Sight. His song lyrics have been set to music by Si Kahn, Walter Egan, Billy Kemp, Fred Koller, and others.  His book on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A., was published by Continuum Books in 2005. He has written about popular music and theater for the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian Magazine, Paste, Downbeat, Sing Out, and the Nashville Scene since 1977.

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                      Paul Cézanne, Woman Diving into Water, 1870. Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. National Museum of Wales, Wales, UK

 

Love's Philosophy [by Percy Bysshe Shelley]

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

"Palliative" [by Joyce Carol Oates]

1.

Hate hope!
Arsenic for weeks
we’d taken in micro-drops
on credulous tongues.

Hope the thing
with noisome wings
clattering
about our heads
with a broom at last swatted to earth. 
Stomped, smashed.

Now, clarity of silence.
Only the drip of minimal liquids—saline, Dilaudin.
Only the labored and arrhythmic breathing
as the chest rises, falls—rises,
falls.
Faintest of echoes--Give up on.

2.

Hold desperation
like a playing card
close to the heart
reluctant to reveal
what you feel
but (yes) you risk
the irrevocable loss
too late.

And so on the brink of too late
(when no one else is in the room)
(for a hospice room can be crowded)
(by “crowded” meaning more than two people)
you tell your husband that you love him
so much, what a wonderful
husband he has been
and he says—But I failed you by dying.
And you protest—But why are you saying
such a thing, you are not
dying, we are talking
Here together!—
And he says Because I am dead.

As after the final biopsy
he’d been incensed—They took my soul from me.
They took me to the crematorium, I saw the sign.
Don’t try to tell me I didn’t see the sign.

3.

Trapped in this bed like a prison.
Is the car out front?  Drive the car around.
Where are the keys to the car?
Joyce, don’t leave.  Joyce?
We need to get the car.  Where are the keys….
I want to go home.  Take me home.  Joyce—
don’t leave me!
What did we do with the car?

4.
In hospice time ceases.
Hours lapse into days
and days into night
and again day, and
night and the mouth
once fierce in kissing
and being kissed
is slack, mute.
And breathing slows,
asymmetrical
as a listing boat.
And fever dreams rage
beneath bluish eyelids
quivering in secret life.
Until at last the deepest sigh
of a lifetime…

5.

After such struggle
you must love
the unrippled dark
water in which
the perfect cold O
of the moon floats

-- Joyce Carol Oates
[First published in Salmagundi.]

Megan Falley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________

Telling Him I Kissed a Woman

 

I cut the pill of truth

with honey, promised,

We were drunk.

Said we were egged on

by barstools, wore dresses of gin.

 

Said I stumbled

onto her face, more so 

than an actual kiss.

 

Spun it as if cameras 

were rolling, an image he could beat

off to instead of curse. Said,

 

It meant nothing.

 

And how could it?

I was straight

as a wedding aisle.

I touched his beard. 

Begged him to stay. 

Insisted,

 

It was only a kiss,

and hoped he wouldn’t hear it

in my voice, how it sounded like,

 

It was only a decade.

It was only a war.

 

I didn’t tell him

there was no bar,

no audience 

 

except the magnetic poetry tiles 

falling to the floor as she pressed me

against the refrigerator, beaming.

 

I did not say I felt more in that 

one kiss than anytime he thrust

his tongue down my throat,

or wouldn’t get a condom,

or wanted it facedown. 

Swore instead,

It will never happen again.

He called me a whore.

I said,

I love you.

 

He called me a bitch.

I said,

 

Yes.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Megan Falley (she/her) is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently Drive Here and Devastate Me (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018). In 2019 she co-authored How Poetry Can Change Your Heart (Chronicle Books) with her poet and partner, Andrea Gibson. Falley's chapbook, Bad Girls, Honey (Poems About Lana Del Rey) was the winner of the 2015 Tired Hearts Chapbook Prize. Falley is both a National Poetry Slam and Woman of the World Poetry Slam Finalist and has performed her work on TV One's Verses and Flow and venues and colleges nationwide. In the last two years, since Falley began writing prose, one of her essays was the first place winner of the 2021 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Essay Contest, and another was the runner-up for Phoebe Journal's 50th Anniversary Nonfiction Prize as well as nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the creator of the online writing course, Poems That Don't Suck, which has been called "a degree's worth of education in five short weeks." Originally from New York, she now resides in Colorado where she is still awed by the mountains. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dans le Lit, le Baiser (In Bed, The Kiss). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892.

 

“December” [by Lise Menn]

Late December Sunday.  Low south sun
shines deep into the house, stooping
to give a little light, a little warmth.

Late life lover, quiet, bending
to look into my eyes and read remaining dreams,
to quicken what you can, and rock the rest to sleep.
Thank you for warmth and light, for loving me
this late December Sunday.

-- Lise Menn

painting: Claude Monet, Winter on the Seine, Lavacourt  (1880)

Ron Silliman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

You – I

for Pat Silliman

Hard dreams. The moment at which you recognize that your own death lies in wait somewhere

within your body. A lone ship defines the horizon. The rain is not safe to drink.

 

In Grozny, in Bihac, the idea of history shudders with each new explosion. The rose lies

unattended, wild thorns at the edge of a mass grave. Between classes, over strong coffee,

young men argue the value of a pronoun.

 

When this you see, remember. Note in a bottle bobs in a cartoon sea. The radio operator’s

name is Sparks.

 

Hand outlined in paint on a brick wall. Storm turns playground into a swamp. Finally we spot

the wood duck on the middle lake.

 

The dashboard of my car like the keyboard of a piano. Toy animals anywhere.

 

Sun swells in the morning sky.

 

Man with three pens clipped to the neck of his sweatshirt shuffles from one table to the next,

seeking distance from the cold January air out the coffee house door, tall Styrofoam cup in one

hand, Of Grammatology in the other. Outside, a dog is tied to an empty bench, bike chained to

the No Parking sign.

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Ron Silliman has published 40 books and had his poetry and criticism translated into 19 languages. Among his awards are the 2010 Levinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, a Pew Fellowship, a Kelly Writers House Fellowship plus fellowships from the Pennsylvania and California Arts Councils and the National Endowments for the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. [See also this link.]

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The Art of Falling [by Lera Auerbach]

Papa takes me to figure-skating school.
The school has classes every day: running, choreography,
floor gymnastics, figure skating. With skates over my shoulder,
we come to the school half an hour before the classes begin.
Putting on skates is a ritual. Papa ties the laces
very tight. I am wearing a woolen dress,
tights, and a gray hat with a visor and a pompom.

“Well, how was it?” Papa asks after my first lesson.
I am covered in snow from head to toe.

“I don't know. We were taught how to fall.
For the entire hour. Fall – get up. Fall again. Fall, fall, fall!”

“To learn how to fall,” Papa says seriously,
taking off my skates, “is an art form in itself.
Who knows, maybe it was your most important life lesson.
If you learn how to fall – nothing can harm you.
If you learn how to fall – you can be fearless.” 

 

What's Happening? [by David Shapiro]

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]

Previously unpublished.

Thomas Kinsella, R.I.P. [ed. Terence Winch]

Renowned Irish poet Thomas Kinsella died today, 22 December 2021, in Dublin at the age of 93 (see this link.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is one of his best-known poems:

 

Mirror in February

The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy -
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.

 

Karyna McGlynn: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

I Thought No One Would Ever Love Me

 

so I lay in my daybed at night

& fashioned myself a Future

Wife. Someone like the girl

up the street with the old tan

Volvo. The one with one foot

in volleyball & the other

in drama club. Maybe I hid

her bleach. Maybe I gave

her pearls & a satin-trim

robe. Maybe I cut her

diploma into fleur-de-lis

& dipped them in the dark

chocolate of my chintzy

desires. I installed My Wife

in a woody, masculine den

& made her whippet-willed

& full of brandy. I stole her

hairspray & gave her a letter desk

instead & an actual inkwell.

I gave her lockable, leather-

bound love. I imagined her parents

somewhere safe, warm & out

of the way. We summered in Monaco,

read nothing but Daphne du Maurier,

took our sun at the Top of the City.

She had a smile like a high-wire act

& a signature like a sigil. I never

stopped loving the way she slid

into day-old stockings like a snake

reassuming its shed. In truth?

Her name was Jill. She wore

athletic shorts & never spoke

to me. So I renamed her Miriam

de Havilland & had her

handle my correspondence.

We cohabitated fantastically.

I installed paintings throughout

our Morning Room: storm-

flecked seas, gold-framed

& foaming at the mouth!

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Karyna McGlynn is a writer, professor, and collagist. She is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande Books: I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, Hothouse—a New York Times Editor's Choice—and, forthcoming, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, The New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. Recent honors include the 2020 Rumi Prize for Poetry, and the2020 Florida Review Editors' Award in Fiction. McGlynn is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. [Find her at www.karyna.io or on instagram/twitter @karynamcglynn]

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Terrarium with Flaming Muse, collage by Karyna McGlynn

Gerald Fleming: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Brocade Dress

 

On the way back from the dance in the days of cars with bench seats, she slid over to you, put her hand on your thigh, said Shall we park? & she was dark & beautiful & now these many years later you see she was desperate for you & you for her & what did you say, Catholic boy? Oh, I’d better get home & fact was you could have said I’d love to, but I wouldn’t know what to do—and now you know that would have been OK, that she would have said I’ll teach you, then—she was kind that way—for she’d been taught & perhaps had taught others & for her this was not new, and what a lesson it would have been.

            Twenty years later you’re alone on an elevator in a department store, you’re going down & the door opens at a floor before the one you want & you see in the distance a gold brocade dress draped across an ornate chair & from hard right she steps into the elevator & you look at each other & you hear her quick intake of breath as she must have heard yours & she turns to face the door & at the ground floor the door opens & each of you walks away.

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Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, a collection of prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). Other titles include One (also HL), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press), Night of Pure Breathing (HL), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). Fleming taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools and has written various books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (a title taken from the great Turner painting), which details an innovative process of intensive writing with adolescents—writing accompanied by outrageously loud, carefully curated instrumental music. He lives most of the year in the Far West and, when there’s no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris. Fleming’s poetry and prose poems have appeared widely in magazines over the past forty years.

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"A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme" [by Stanley Moss]

Ben Jonson indicated,
never quite stated,
God prefers to be praised
in various meters, prose or free verse,
not in rhyme. I was raised
on rhyme and worse,
taught by example
not to praise God at all.
I offer, Jonson was wrong,
what about the Psalms and Song of Songs?
I count and wash the feet
when I write a poem,
Pope John XXIII washed the feet
of prisoners in Rome.
I dreamt I had a telephone call
from God. I said “Hello.”
He said, “Wrong number.
I never quite got out of my slumber.
I dialed nine-one-one.
I was not rescued by a bawd or a nun.
I knew Lady Macbeth walked in her slumber.
I was saved by poetry,
resuscitated by English prosody.
(Its hero, Shakespeare, gave me breath.)
I will work till I perish.

I speak and write American English.
My other languages are often a wish 
For rhyme, a sonnet will make lovers go
naked in deep snow,
instead of to bed, instead of to bed.

Music doesn’t rhyme,
there’s harmony at bedtime.
A shepherd wakes when a dog barks at his flock.
To me this morning, rhyme is an alarm clock.
Rhyme for readers like us
is promiscuous.
I’ve monkeyed around
with words, the meanings of sound.
The sound of the words “blood” and “bread”
comforted the Christian dead.
I know ocean speaks
to rain, my roof only leaks.
In New Zealand, a river’s a person.
In the States, a corporation’s a person.

It’s late, I do not speculate:
anyone who rhymes can sing,
Joseph Brodsky would sing
Christmas poems often
while Lenin slept in an open coffin.
“Rhyme wrestles words from their true calling.”
Auden rhymed about love and falling
in love. He loved God,
might he say, “I fell in love with God”?
He fell in love with Chester and languages.
His Caliban rages, language ages, meaning changes
for reasons like wars, defeats and immigration,
the future’s an asshole beyond imagination.
Rhyme’s a vision, a point of view,
it helps some poets chew and chew
in Hell and further beneath,
even when Sailing to Byzantium.
Rhyme always has a mouthful of teeth,
a bridge, some cavities, some false, some wisdom.

No Boundaries [by Lera Auerbach]

Sometimes I wish to press the knife against my skin and let out blood
because the world is growing within me, overflowing; it overwhelms me –
for how is it possible that the world is within me while I’m within the world?
Where are the boundaries between us?
Where do I end, and the world begins?
I step barefoot on the ground and feel the rotation of the Earth.
I’m falling through the universe at breathtaking speed while not moving at all.