The Best American Poetry

"Caress" [by Ron Padgett]

In a dream I caressed you
and when I woke up
I caressed the memory
of the dream.
I never caressed you
in “real life.”
I never even wanted to
though I was close
to liking the idea of caressing you.
If I had caressed you
I would remember it,
which is what I did last night.

"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]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.)

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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 

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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.]

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                                                                                                                       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.

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                                            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]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

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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.]

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    Rothko paintings at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Greetings to the world from "Ithaka" [by C. P. Cavafy]

"Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. . ."

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C.P. Cavafy, 1911.

The poem, Jacqueline Kennedy's favorite, was read at her funeral.

"Hear My Prayer, O Lord... " [by Barbara Hamby]

Garrison Keillor chose Barbara Hamby's poem "Hear My Prayer, O Lord... " for "The Writer's Almanac" on January 10, 2022:

Hear my prayer, O Lord, though all I do all day is watch
old black-and-white movies on TV. Speak to me
through William Powell or Myrna Loy, solve the mystery
of my sloth. Show me the way to take a walk or catch
a cold, anything but read another exposé
of the Kennedys. Teach me to sing or at least play
the piano. For ten years I took lessons, and all
I learned was to hate Bach. Shake me up or down. Call
me names. Break my ears with AC/DC—I deserve far
worse. Rebuke me in front of my ersatz friends. Who cares?
They don't like me much anyway. Make me fat in lieu
of thin. Give me a break or don't. I'm a hundred million
molecules in search of an author. If that's you, thank you
for my skin. Without it I'd be in worse shape than I'm in.

Barbara Hamby, "Hear My Prayer, O Lord" from the poem cycle entitled "9 Sonnets from the Psalms" and from All-Night Lingo Tango. © 2009. Aired by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Charlotte Boulay: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pallikoodam

 

When it rained, even our shoes

turned green. The fan whirred

except when the power was out,

then we read by candlelight under

the mosquito net, or didn’t:

I feared it going up

around us, a fuzz of flame.

We lived with animals: small lizards

darting up the walls, lines of tiny,

imperious ants. Every night

we tried to trap the rat

in the rafters, baiting him with banana

until finally we awoke to a

snap. We had a small television

and we watched old sitcoms, new

pop videos, the twin towers falling

again and again. They said over

and over that nothing would be

the same after that, and for once

they were right. We ate chocolate bars

for their sweet familiarity, and we lined

books neatly on the shelves. We slept

holding each other and woke in the mornings

to hear someone singing, softly,

as she swept the yard clean.

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Charlotte Boulay’s first book of poems, Foxes on the Trampoline, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2014. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Boston Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. She lives in Philadelphia and works at The Miquon School as both a fundraiser and COVID prevention specialist.

*note: The word pallikoodam means “school” in Malayalam, the language of Kerala, India.

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                                      Ernst Stuckelberg, The Girl with the Lizard, oil on canvas, 2019

"A Song to a Child at Night-time" [Poem by Dylan Thomas, an @Ednaschoice Selection]

For your Sunday night insomnia: 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Edna (@ednaschoice)

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.