The Best American Poetry

What's My Line? (June 1, 1958)

What's your line?

1)" When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions."

2) “Th' unwieldy elephant, to make them mirth, us'd all his might, and wreathed His lithe proboscis.

3) “My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk”

4) "Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the."

Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" [by DL]

Since the season premiere of Mad Men on AMC last night, people have been scrambling and googling to find out more about the poet Frank O'Hara and his book Meditations in an Emergency. In the show, the man reading it (with horn rimmed glasses and curly hair: code for highbrow) is sitting next to Don Draper at the bar of a midtown cafe -- like perhaps Larre's, where O'Hara, professionally a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, lunched often. Draper asks the man about the book. "You probably wouldn't like it," he is told. But Don buys it, we see him reading it in his office, and the episode concludes with Don's voiceover reading the fourth and final part of O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky" in Meditations in an Emergency.

The title poem of the book began as a very sophisticated literary joke, an allusion to John Donne's "Meditations on Emergent Occasions." But as sometimes happened in O'Hara's poetry, the joke turned out to have a surplus of meaning. His poems are meditations -- but not the kind that comes after hours of quiet thought; they proceed from the heart of noise; they are written on the run, in a hurry, on a lunch break, in a perennial emergency. O'Hara's poems perfectly capture the pace of a New York day in 1962. He is a master of the art of gentle self-laceration: "Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern."

from the archive, July 28, 2008

15 Years On: John Leonard, 1939-2008: Ambushed Into Sentience [by Ken Tucker]

John Leonard, who died Nov. 5 [2008] at age 69, was a dizzyingly inspirational critic. Lots of people are going to write appreciations of his extraordinary body of literary criticism, and although I am here to speak for his television criticism, I will inevitably include some of Leonard's observations about books, because for him, one informed the other.

When he began simultaneously reviewing books and TV in the early 1970s, he wasn't someone who wanted to make you feel it was okay to like pop culture (and he was then writing at a time when his readership often wanted such reassurance). No, Leonard's writing stood as proof that high and low culture could and should spark off each other, yield up fresh juxtapositions and ideas. He didn't merely write about watching TV, he Leonard-ized the experience, noting that we tuned in "wishing merely for a chortle or a pipe dream, suspecting our cable box is just another bad-faith credit card enabling us to multiply our disappointments, we are ambushed into sentience.
              Leonard’s crammed prose was a series of cultural references packed into sentences so densely that they exploded in your head. Lots of critics write year-end summation pieces; only Leonard could summarize 1971's TV-year thus: "The mind is a vacuum tube. The memory is artificial turf, videotape, consisting of images of George Plimpton and Archie Bunker; beneath it lies the bodies of four thousand lobotomized network vice-presidents, sewn together at their pineal glands and Achilles' heels… FCC commissioners and the bureaucrats of public television scrimmage with cleated prose and padded brains."
       Twenty-six years later, showing not a trace of abated energy, he praised an episode of Homicide: Life On The Street that focussed on a long interrogation scene by saying, "for a single hour in March, for which Tom Fontana won the Emmy he deserved, I learned more about the behavior of fearful men in small rooms than I had from any number of better-known movies and serious plays and modern highbrow novels by the likes of Don DeLillo, Mary McCarthy, Alberto Moravia, Nadine Gordimer, Heinrich Boll, and Doris Lessing." With Leonard, this wasn't idle cultural name-dropping—he had read and written about all of those novelists. That comparison was not idly made; he had also spent the year watching Northern Exposure and Roseanne ("about joblessness and lesbianism as well as bowling") and Picket Fences and the TV-movie "Roe V. Wade, with Holly Hunter as a Supreme Court case." He had his blind spots (he couldn’t get past Archie Bunker's bigotry to appreciate All In The Family's craft and sociological impact), and he had his TV crushes (Blair Brown and Veronica Hamel felt his prose caress many times). But he remained not merely sensible and passionate but revelatory. No one else could review a travel documentary with a sentence like this, a glorious example of one of Leonard’s signature devices—the list-sentence that becomes in itself a form of criticism: "We wandered with a shopping list—Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen koans, hearts of darkness, the blood of the lamb, and a double-knuckled antelope humerus from Oolduvai Gorge. We'd rub our fuzzy heads against the strange, and see if something kindled." We’d rub our fuzzy heads against the strange—that is poetry as much as it is criticism, and Leonard spun it out without warning, without ostentation, but like a newspaperman on deadline delivering a staggering gift.
       Over the years I have often repeated to writers who bitch about lack of recognition the story Leonard told in his first collection of criticism, 1973's This Pen For Hire, that he started writing TV reviews for Life magazine. But when he became the editor of the New York Times Book Review, he was told "it was considered inappropriate" for a Times-man to write about that lowly medium, and so he continued writing about TV, but under a pen name, Cyclops. "Life still receives letters thanking the magazine for getting rid of me in favor of Cyclops," Leonard wrote, "or demanding my return and the firing of Cyclops. So much for a distinctive prose style."
      But it is precisely his prose style that made anything Leonard wrote immediately identifiable. He was the first great TV critic. Of those who followed, James Wolcott, Tom Carson, Mim Udovich, and Clive James are the only other ones who can touch him. But none of them—and few of us—can rub our fuzzy heads against the strange and come up with thoughts as clear and complex as those of John Leonard.

--Ken Tucker

from the archive, first posted November 6, 2008. See too https://slate.com/culture/2012/03/john-leonards-reading-for-my-life-reviewed.html

Agree or disagree: one poll of TV's top ten themes

The Perry Mason Theme by Fred Steiner is also known as the Park Avenue Theme.

"In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders" (part three) [by Joe Lehman]

III.

Why did these former soldiers behave as they did? Was it greed pure and simple? As Ed Mireles opines, “Platt and Matix wanted the good life, and in Miami that means a big home, preferably on the beach, a new car, boats, trips to Disney World and lots of leisure time. That is the common profile of drug dealers and people who commit fraud on a grand scale. So, in that respect, they were normal criminal minded people.” 

Perhaps the most revealing scene near the climax of the movie takes place on the morning of Friday, April 11, 1986, when mere hours before the firefight, Mike Platt is driving his teenage stepson to school. Playing on the radio is a news report announcing U.S. military airstrikes against the rogue state of Libya. The airstrikes were conducted in response to evidence linking Libyan dictator Colonel Qaddafi and his agents to the terrorist bombing of La Belle disco tech in West Germany, which killed two American servicemen, just earlier in the month. (The airstrikes indeed occurred three days after the shootout.) Platt casually exclaims that “it’s about time we did something about that Qaddafi. If you ask me, it’s time to take him out.” Platt’s stepson nods in agreement and then tells Platt that he is writing a term paper on the Vietnam War. It is here, in an unusually rare moment of clarity, Platt reveals the sullen truth, that contrary to his earlier claims of battlefield heroics, he spent his entire Army career based stateside or in Seoul, South Korea, but he never served in Vietnam at all. He was “all ready to go, and then some wimp in Washington pulled the plug.” But, he says almost prophetically, “the way things are going in the Middle East, you might not need to worry about writing the paper. Why don’t you just join the service and kick butt?” The stepson chuckles nervously. It is here that Platt is exposed for what he really is, a narcissistic coward and a braggart, the irony of his prophecy about U.S. involvement in the Middle East notwithstanding.

In the aftermath of the shootout, numerous media reports played up the fact of Platt and Matix’s veneer of being upstanding, law abiding, and patriotic American citizens. But this brings to mind, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s classic saying that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels” in studying the contradiction between the villains’ outward appearances and the reality of their violent criminal activity.

One undisputed fact was that during the shootout, in real life, and as seen on the television reenactment, the bad guys, armed with automatic weapons, took an incredible number of bullet wounds, but managed to continue firing at the agents, who were less heavily armed. Why didn’t they surrender? What was their endgame? Had they actually managed to escape, they would have had to request medical attention; they could not have simply wandered into a hospital with a made-up story. Doctors are required by law to report gun injuries. Yet unbelievably, the dastardly duo made one last-ditch effort to drive away, after limping from their stolen car to a vehicle belonging to some of the deceased or wounded agents. When someone is running on pure adrenalin they act on pure impulse. in mind.

Mireles is shown preventing the killers’ attempted escape by firing final shots into them. The words “It’s over, you bastards” come from the televised Mireles’s mouth. In real life, Agent Mireles recalls shouting some much harsher language. Who can blame him? Two of his buddies—Grogan and Dove were killed in cold blood—and Mireles and the rest of the team were critically injured. As the real Mireles recalls:

“They did not hesitate to fire their weapons and shoot people in cold blood. Was it their military training? Partly yes, the rest was their psychopathic personalities. As far as their ‘not giving up’ goes, that is also, a very large part military training. But somewhere in the DNA mix is their psychopathic personalities. Those two main factors, training and personality, equate to how a person reacts, what a person does.”

Francois Truffaut is believed to have said that it is impossible to make an antiwar film. On screen, the action looks too exciting for the audience to be properly repelled by the idea of combat. The FBI Murders’ climactic firefight is sufficiently action-packed. But Ed Mireles has written in his own account the experience of feeling battle fatigue and survivor’s guilt.

C.S. Lewis once wrote “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’… …by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”

Perhaps, though, with all due respect to Lewis, there are some experiences that can never be familiar to audience members and critics and scholars. These are just a few minutes of combat situations. The televised depiction of the events that culminated in this infamous episode is certainly shrouded in myth and creative license. The FBI Murders’ value is that it takes the things we don’t know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of unfamiliarity.’ That is where the relationship of docudrama to reality merges positively.

"In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders " (part two) [by Joe Lehman]

Oscar Wilde [left], in his 1899 essay “The Decay of Lying,” wrote “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” It makes sense then that the mimetic relation of life and art is a vicious circle, as we see in books and films portraying True Crime stories.  There has been an accelerating demand for True Crime in the past half century since the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood marked its inauguration. NBC wasted no time in producing the TV movie In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders, which aired two years after the shootout. The usually-affable actors David Soul and Michael Gross play against type as the killers, Platt and Matix, in performances that one anonymous internet commentator describes as “too bad to be believed,” and yet they were "Freddy Kruger" and "Michael Meyers" incarnate, and as despicable a pair of murderers as were ever imagined by producers of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween series of dead teenager splatter flicks.”

The FBI Murders is a televised product of the latter half of the Reagan Era. The heroic FBI agents embody the bright, optimistic and virtuous side of ‘Morning in America.’ Ben Grogan and Jerry Dove, the slain officers are played with brightness and enthusiasm by Ronny Cox and Bruce Greenwood. Grogan is the wise veteran agent—"Fifty-three years old, and still the best shot in Miami.” Dove is the vibrant rookie—"I’m thirty years old, I live on the beach, and I drive a sports car.” When Dove’s girlfriend reminds him that he has to go to work, he says “that’s the good part.” The surviving agents are shown in exactly the same light. Gordon McNeill (Doug Sheehan) and Ed Mireles (Ronald G. Joseph) are both devoted family men, who instill a sense of idealism and scout-like preparedness in their children. McNeill is protective of his teenage daughters, to the point that as the two as-yet unidentified maniacs are running around loose, he fears for their safety at social activities as there may be an armored car present nearby. Mireles is shown having a heart-to-heart discussion with his young son, in which, he explains why he hopes he can arrest bad guys without violence. But, he explains, sometimes the use of deadly force is necessary—although he hasn’t yet had to, (but eventually will.) Nearly all of these scenes are fictitious. But they create the audience-friendly atmosphere conducive to recounting the actual events. The film captures the zeitgeist.

The movie’s villains, Platt and Matix, embody the dark and sinister underbelly of ‘Morning in America.’ The themes are greed; avarice; sloth; promiscuity; infidelity and spousal abuse; even religious hypocrisy.

David Soul and Michael Gross play up the “redneck” persona to the umpteenth degree. In fact, they wear it as a badge of honor, even at one point, citing “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer,” the Johnny Russell song, as an ample description of themselves. Though they served as Army Rangers, they seem to have few discernable skills necessary to navigate civilian life, nor do they have the moral inclination to make the effort to do so. Their values are hopelessly selfish and materialistic. Despite several failing business ventures, such as landscaping and installing pinball and jukebox machines, they amass new wealth through chaotically executed armed robberies and the insurance settlement from the bloody murder of Matix’s first wife, Patty.

Despite their outward image as simple family men, they are abusive and unfaithful toward their longsuffering wives and children, to whom they explain their newfound earnings by pretending to be mercenaries contracted by the CIA to assassinate drug dealers. In spite of their Walter Mitty-style fantasies of acting as mercenaries, Matix and Platt, display a squeamishness at the prospect of armed confrontations with drug dealers, who in Platt’s words are “all a bunch of greasers, and they have all kinds of weapons.” They are, as Platt says, “safer going up against cops,” who by 1980s standards, are lighter armed and easier to dominate. There is an obvious correlation between the villains’ brutish behavior at home and their crimes by day.

Matix is a born-again Christian, but it is revealed that he often has used church services as a place to seduce, bed, and then abandon vulnerable young women. The representation of the villains as religious hypocrites, merges with the larger picture of the rot setting into the milieu of religious revivalism in the Reagan Era, where a number of televangelists were ensnared in financially and sexually-based scandals. As Greg Barnhisel writes in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette: “Inevitably, they were felled by the old sins: lust and greed.” Lust and greed. Ed Mireles, the retired surviving agent, in several emails to this author, cuts through Platt and Matix’s façade of humble piety: “Their only motive was money.  They robbed, stole and killed for money to maintain the life style they wanted to have.  Nothing but greed…”

In nearly every scene, Platt and Matix appear as sweaty and crude; grunting their words while munching down potato chips and fast food.

It makes sense that NBC TV was inclined to embellish the true history of the lives and crimes of the two killers, as with both of them rendered dead by the final firefight, they are in no position to answer questions about their motivations or their interactions with each other. The myriad of scenes with Platt and Matix interacting with each other are clearly fabricated. Who knows for sure what their private conversations were really like? The filmmakers get around the dilemma of this type of speculation, by keeping the back-and-forth dialogue plain and simple and without much effort in developing.

Part three of this essay will appear next week.

The Great Miami Shootout (Edited for Television) [by Joe Lehman]

In some ways a Manichean story about the clash between the forces of good and evil, the 1988 television true-life docudrama In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders exemplifies the tendency of such programs to fictionalize what they purport to be true. Retired FBI Agent Edmundo Mireles Jr., in correspondence with this writer, has called the movie “about 50% accurate,” and having “taken a lot of liberties which led to a lot of embellishment and rewriting history to suit a script.” Nevertheless, on its own merit, The FBI Murders is an arresting movie, well worth examining, because it reveals an amazing symbiosis of truth and fiction in the presentation of crime and makes us understand the complicated relation of a docudrama to the events it depicts.

The villains in the movie conceive of themselves as believers in a militaristic code. They cloak their criminal behavior in the guise of commando operations. The heroes are federal agents, some of whom are military veterans and staunch believers in law and order, who engage in violence mainly or only to protect the lives of the innocent. While the movie’s conventions are stereotypical of American society in the 1980s, a decade that has been largely defined by the reign of President Ronald Reagan, these stereotypes convey a nostalgia for the clarity of values extolling right and wrong. Audiences generally flocked to the Rambo and Indiana Jones franchises because they longed for that clarity. The FBI Murders follows this trend. Interestingly in some scenes, agents apply the labels “Soldiers of Fortune” and “Rambos” to the villains. This suggests a fusion of the era’s pop culture icons into both the heroism and the wickedness depicted in the events of the story, which speaks to their lasting power in art and cinema.

In his 1770 speech “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent,” Edmund Burke proclaimed, “When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fail, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” A political party by implication can be translated as a community. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, as depicted in the movie, is a form of clan and community, united in its duty and purpose to root out criminality. The movie’s heroes are a band of brothers. Like any club, this particular Miami-based reactive unit—nicknamed “Funsters” by its members— has its code phrases, its initiation rituals, its training procedures, and its individual monikers for every member.

The backstory is as follows: Over a several-month period from late 1985 to the spring of 1986, Miami, Florida, as well as the surrounding rural areas, were subjected to a series of related violent crimes, committed by two heavily armed, well trained, army ranger veterans, identified later as Michael Platt, 32, and William Matix, 34. Together, these two devoted family men formed a folie à deux—shared psychosis—not dissimilar to that of Hickock and Smith, murderers of the Clutter family in Kansas, as chronicled by Truman Capote in 1966’s In Cold Blood.

Platt and Matix murdered motorists in order to steal ‘drop cars’ for the purpose of committing armed heists of banks and armored cars. During these robberies they maimed and killed guards and terrorized civilians in hails of wild gunfire. It is widely believed that both Matix’s and Platt’s first wives met fatal ends at their husbands’ hands, because the women were inconveniently in the way. According to Mary Thornton of the Washington Post, on Christmas Eve 1984 in Miami, “Platt's wife Regina died of a shotgun blast to the head. Police at the time ruled it a suicide.” Agent Gordon McNeill would later lament this ruling: “If she was a suicide, that would make her the first woman in the history of the FBI to kill herself with that kind of a gun that way.”

Just one year earlier, on December 30, 1983, in Columbus, Ohio, Matix’s wife Patty had been murdered in a purported robbery gone awry, along with a coworker Joyce McFadden at the hospital at which they were employed at. Reporter Michelle F. Solomon recounts Patricia Matix’s demise in vivid detail: “Joyce McFadden has been bound and gagged and stabbed to death. Patricia Matix is stabbed 16 times and her wedding ring is stolen.” There is no doubt this double homicide outdoes the imaginations of the creators of iconic slasher movie characters Michael Meyers and Freddy Krueger.

On April 11, 1986, when cornered by a unit of plainclothes FBI agents, following a highspeed chase, the suspects engaged the officers in a minutes-long firefight that left the two killers, along with the agents Benjamin Grogan and Jerry Dove, dead on arrival, with several other agents critically wounded. Since then, the case continues to be shrouded in infamy as one of the bloodiest shootouts in law enforcement history.

Part two will be posted next week.

Leah Umansky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In My Next Life, I Want to Be an Ad Man

 

I want to be donned in somehow. Donned in everything. Donned in

the forgotten and the ecclesiastics of sex. Drape me in the charged. Drape me

in the raptured. Drape me in meaning and keep it private. I want two

lives: one in the city and one in the country. Two women: a blonde and a

redhead. Drape me in wealth. Drape me in booze. Don me in diamonds

and fur. Drape a secretary, here, and then, there.

 

[Executive is the word that comes to the lips

and they smile for you, sister.]

 

Don me in designer suits. Don me in a new age. Don me in what’s coming.

Drape the future round my shoulders.  Drape the next life across my lap.

Drape me in the madness.  Don me in the twoness of passion. Don me in

pieces of last, of force; pieces of shaken and possible then drape me

in manhood.   Drape me in machinery and steel. Don me in utterly and plush

utterings and, [do I sound like I’m stuttering?] Make me look good; the

world is dangerous.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Leah Umansky is the author of three books of poems, most recently Of Tyrant, forthcoming from The Word Works in 2024. She is currently working on a hybrid-memoir called Delicate Machine, an exploration of womanhood, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, Poetry, The Bennington Review, and Guesthouse. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.

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                                                                                      Don Draper, collage by Borbay

 

Love / Hate [by Terence Winch]

Ed. note: I had just about exhausted every crime series available on Netflix when Terence Winch [pictured here with a friend at La Maison blanche] wrote to suggest that I check out Love/Hate, an Irish crime drama series broadcast on RTÉ Television. The show is irresistible, and I was especially drawn to Darren, a central character played by the compelling young actor Robert Sheehan. Just the other day, this poem appeared in my in-box. I love it! Thank you T.P. Winch for letting me share it here. He is pictured on the left talking to a friend at the Maison Blanche. -- sdh

Love/Hate

                        for stacey harwood

I will be upstairs in just a minute,

I promise you. But first I must

compose a long, complex symphony

dedicated to Duke Ellington, which

I have pieced together from riffs

and bits off old tinny 78s, scratched

with skips but full of musical

notes, like A, G, and E.

If I could get out of this chair,

I would. And I would ascend

then to the Throne of the

Angelic Mobsters of RTE

who are right this very moment

murdering each other on those

dark Dublin streets. It would be

a laugh and a half times two.

But I can’t get up. I am not

able to keep my promises.

The serenity prayer is a cruel

joke. Baudelaire was an alcoholic

and so’s your mother, and

that's a fact, revealed in the third

act, which I can’t stay around for.

Sorry, sorry. My bad. I’m sorry.

from the archive; first posted January 13, 2014

"Mad Men": The 4:20 Express [by David Lehman]

Think of tonight's episode, the best of the 5th season so far, as the Four Twenty Edition of Mad Men with a bummed out Peggy playing hooky smoking a joint with some horny stranger in a dark movie theater watching "Born Free" (I think that's what it was). . .

Roger Sterling goes on an acid trip with his wife, Jane, who, it turns out, speaks Yiddish when she is high (Roger thinks it's German). No sooner has Roger announced that LSD ("your product, Mr. Leary") is "boring" than he opens a vodka bottle and hears mighty Russian chorale music. You can hear it every time the bottle is uncapped -- and as long as the bottle remains uncapped. The cigarette in Roger's mouth shrinks. In the mirror he sees himself with half his hair gray, the other half black, as in a magazine ad, and Don Draper appears over his shoulder and tells him everything will turn out okay now go back to your wife and he does and she says things like "How can a few numbers contain all of time?"

In the cab Bert Cooper's face appears on the five-dollar bill.  And her epiphany is that he doesn't like her. And his epiphany is that it's going to be easier to get out of this marriage than he thought. "It'll be expensive," she tells him, but he doesn't care, he's free, it's gonna be a great day. . .

And Ginsberg, who needs no drugs to establish his extraterrestrial bona fides, finds a witty way to tell Peggy he was born in a concentration camp.

And Peggy is smoking more and drinking more Canadian Club and she resembles no one more than Don when she tells off the guy from Heinz who rejects her "Home is where the Heinz is" campaign, though it's, well, awesome ("the fire is primal. . .and it's the beans that brought them together on the cold night at the end of the summer") and she gets taken off the account and that is why she is bummed out enough to go to the movies and get high and fall asleep in Don's office and later she gets a weird brusque phone call from Don, "Did you get any calls? Has anyone called you?" which makes no sense until we go over the same stretch of time from the point of view of Mr. Draper himself, who is driving to a HoJo Motor Lodge with Megan (in beautiful orange-striped sweater that goes perfectly with the decor) where they have a blowout fight which ends when he loses his temper and bolts. "Don't you dare pull away. I'm talking to you," she says helplessly as he pulls out and drives off without her. Cooling off, he goes back and looks everywhere for her including the ladies' room. (She took the bus back, furious.) No pot, no acid, but a sleepless Don smoking cigarettes in a period sedan and having odd flashbacks to composite car trips is enough of a high to end on. A brilliant episode. 1966! -- DL

from the archive; first posted April 22, 2012

Bob Dylan to Host Reality TV: America's Next Top Bard [by Stacey Harwood]

Fox network announced today that it will headline its lineup of fall programming with "America's Next Top Bard."

In the pilot, contestants are asked to memorize and recite a soliloquy from Hamlet, to write a bad sonnet on a quotation to be disclosed from Susan Sontag's literary essays, and to take part in the "Instant Haiku" round. Veteran poetry impresario Bob Holman, poet Amanda Gorman, BAP series editor David Lehman, and writer Margo Jefferson will join host Bob Dylan as judges.

Forthcoming episodes will focus on competitors representing elite colleges, corporations, and television networks. The celebrity competitors in the pilot are Kate Mara, Josh Charles, and Elisabeth Moss, pictured at top left. Moss, a Los Angeles native, will turn forty on July 24 of this year, making her a Leo with Cancer rising and a water dog in Chinese astrology.

Julie Angstrom, a spokeswoman for the network, said that Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, says that ever since he feels an obligation to  American poetry. He said he memorized Frost's poems as a young man in Minnesota and recommended him without reservation.  "But I never liked Ezra Pound. In fact I never read him."

Ms. Angstrom explained that the thematic unity of the pilot derives from T. S. Eliot's characterization of April as "the cruelest month."

"That's as much as I can say right now," said Angstrom.

Subsequent episodes will follow the format similar to other "America's Top" reality programs: a large pool of aspiring poets will be winnowed down over the course of a season to one standout winning bard. Participants will be matched with poetry mentors who will advise them on developing a "voice," adhering to poetic forms while inventing new ones, writing a convincing bio note, and applying makeup for an author's photo. The winning prizes will include publication in The New Yorker "Page Turner" blog, an off-site reading at an upcoming AWP conference, and lunch with an esteemed poet of the winner's choice.

Judges will come from the ranks of former guest editors of The Best American Poetry. Rumors have circulated that Bill and Hillary Clinton (pictured at left, sharing a laugh with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) will be reunited with former White House guests Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, and Robert Hass to judge the crucial fifth elimination episode. Wesleyan graduate Matthew Weiner, creater of the popular Mad Men series, who recently disclosed in a Paris Review interview that from ninth grade on he "wrote poetry compulsively," is likely to anchor at least one episode as a judge.

Watch this space for more details as they come. Click here for the official press release.

In the pilot, contestants are asked to memorize and recite a soliloquy from Hamlet, to write a bad sonnet on a quotation to be disclosed from Susan Sontag's literary essays, and to take part in the "Instant Haiku" round. Veteran poetry impresario Bob Holman, poet Amanda Gorman, BAP series editor David Lehman, and writer Margo Jefferson will join host Bob Dylan as judges.

Forthcoming episodes will focus on competitors representing elite colleges, corporations, and television networks. The celebrity competitors in the pilot are Kate Mara, Josh Charles, and Elisabeth Moss, pictured at top left. Moss, a Los Angeles native, will turn forty on July 24 of this year, making her a Leo with Cancer rising and a water dog in Chinese astrology.

Julie Angstrom, a spokeswoman for the network, said that Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, says that ever since he feels an obligation to  American poetry. He said he memorized Frost's poems as a young man in Minnesota and recommended him without reservation.  "But I never liked Ezra Pound. In fact I never read him."

Ms. Angstrom explained that the thematic unity of the pilot derives from T. S. Eliot's characterization of April as "the cruelest month."

"That's as much as I can say right now," said Angstrom.

Subsequent episodes will follow the format similar to other "America's Top" reality programs: a large pool of aspiring poets will be winnowed down over the course of a season to one standout winning bard. Participants will be matched with poetry mentors who will advise them on developing a "voice," adhering to poetic forms while inventing new ones, writing a convincing bio note, and applying makeup for an author's photo. The winning prizes will include publication in The New Yorker "Page Turner" blog, an off-site reading at an upcoming AWP conference, and lunch with an esteemed poet of the winner's choice.

Judges will come from the ranks of former guest editors of The Best American Poetry. Rumors have circulated that Bill and Hillary Clinton (pictured at left, sharing a laugh with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) will be reunited with former White House guests Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, and Robert Hass to judge the crucial fifth elimination episode. Wesleyan graduate Matthew Weiner, creater of the popular Mad Men series, who recently disclosed in a Paris Review interview that from ninth grade on he "wrote poetry compulsively," is likely to anchor at least one episode as a judge.

Watch this space for more details as they come. Click here for the official press release.

"Jew You" in 2002 and today [by David Lehman]

Back in 2002, I wrote "Jew You." It appears in my book When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), and though it is not my favorite of the poems I wrote that spring, it does have one line that I continue to  like:

<<
Dear Jews: We liked you better as victims.
>>

I thought of it today when reading Jason Zinoman's article "Is It Funny for the Jews?" in the New York Times (Feb. 17, 2022), in which, considering such phenomena as the tendency to cast non-Jewish actors to play Jews in TV shows, he raises the possibility that what we are witnessing in the resurgence of anti-Semitism today is a reversion to the mean. And by "resurgence of anti-Semitism," I do not mean casting decisions but the appearance of swastikas on synagogue walls, murderous attacks in Jewish houses of worship, and hostility to Jews on campus, particularly those suspected of siding with Israel. (Click here for the Ha'Aaretz article about the "fuck Jews" graffiti on the outside of Miriam, a resturant on 74th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in NYC.) Here are a couple of thought-provoking paragraphs from Zinoman's piece: 

<<<<
. . .one reason some Jews don’t make a bigger fuss about discrimination, one reason they feel comfortable laughing at it, is that they — we — feel safe. It’s easier to laugh at antisemitism when it happens in an unthreatening place. The feeling is: There are worse problems in the world.

In her acclaimed book “People Love Dead Jews,” Dara Horn takes fierce aim at this blasé attitude, at the downplaying and rationalizations that Jewish Americans make, whether it’s the strained lengths intellectuals go to to argue that Shakespeare transcended bigotry in his portrayal of Shylock or to take comfort in the story of Anne Frank’s faith in the goodness of people (before bad people killed her).

Horn’s bracing argument is that there is a cost to denial, that the rise of antisemitic incidents and hate crimes against Jews — including the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — is directly tied to the fading of the stigma of bigotry against Jews. Hatred of Jews is not unusual, she argues; it’s the years after the Holocaust when that was socially unacceptable that were the anomaly. “Historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal,” writes Horn. Now, she writes, normal is back."

>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/arts/television/comedy-jewish-identity.html

The Assignment [by Walter Carey]

“The only virtue in life is survival,” Sanders said with his typical swagger and thick irony. “There is nothing heroic about the ‘survival of the fittest,’ a blasphemous notion and not a democratic one. Business is business. Television killed not only the radio but the movies, too. The movies had already taken care of Broadway. Messages with multiple syllables went obsolete. All that and the downsizing too had already gone down. Only one commodity retained its inflation-proof value."

And now? Now he was making a big bet on cloud computing. “As alternating current was to the rise of electricity, so fiber optic technology spelled out the death of the p.c.”  He smiled arrogantly. “Can you make a story out of that?”

The job was to write up the story in a one-line poem of one hundred words or less with lots of pictures, actors, women crying, men going out of business, a brutal election campaign going down to the wire, a scenario no stranger than reality but better-looking and happy-seeming as the faces in the ads for Miss Subways in the 1950s. You hung at the straps at seven in the morning, closed your eyes, married your secretary and kept her in fur from Fred Leighton with an occasional bracelet from Harry Winston. A man accompanying a woman to such a place was a hero. 

But now we do not have heroes. We do not have secretaries, let alone marry them. We have assistants and we have business associates and some of them are making big bets on Bitcoin or on disruptive technologies while I toil on my one-line poem of one hundred words or less to advertise a fake reality.

November 2011

Ed. note: Walter Carey is at work on a cultural history of the 1960s.

Do you know who composed the theme of Perry Mason?

It was Fred Steiner, who died at age 88, at his home in the town of Ajijic in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

but let's not overlook, Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the music for Patton and did some of the incidental music for many episodes of Perry Mason,

and while we're at it, let's saluter another Jerry, Jerry Fielding, who wrote the music of The Wild Bunch.

The Real Reason Linda Reagan [Amy Carlson] Left "Blue Bloods" After 7 Seasons [by Walter Carey]

Ed. note: One of our most popular posts was written for the BAP blog by Walter Carey on October 13, 2017 preceded by this note: <<  Walter Carey writes: "David Huntley, my source for this story, is the pseudonym of an executive at CBS who asked that he or she not be named.  -- WC." For an update ("Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?) click here. And here for the latest on Erin's love life  >>>

For seven seasons, Linda Reagan as portrayed by the actress Amy Carlson was a stalwart figure in the hit series Blue Bloods. She plays the wife of hot-headed Danny Reagan, mother to their two boys, daughter in law of police commish Frank Reagan, sister in-law of Erin, brother-in-law of Jamie, aunt of the Columbia undergrad who used to go to Catholic school, granddaughter-in-law of grandpa, and a normal human being, who works as a nurse, lives in Staten Island, demands to be respected by her husband, and concludes phone conversations with him with this exchange:

"Love you."
"Love you more."
"Love you most."

Several theories have been making the rounds regarding Linda's sudden departure from the program. In episode one of season eight it is explained that she died in a helicopter crash transporting a patient. To those who believe that this is what happened to Amy Carlson, my source is happy to report that she is very much alive. There is also no truth to the rumor that she got sick -- "totally" -- with husband Danny always going off the rails and blowing his stack. That was actually something that endeared him to her, Linda admitted tearfully after one of their quarrels., according to Megin Draper, a close friend. 

It was really very simple, the actress confided, nursing a glass of Jameson's on the rocks as she negotiated her farewell package. It was "time to move on."

The network executive who bears a resemblance to Ned Beatty gave her a skeptical look.

"It really is time to move on," repeated the Knox College alumna, who graduated cum laude, made her TV debut as Josie Watts on Another World in 1993, and currently resides in Chinatown with her kids and her partner. But she winked and touched her nose like Robert de Niro in Good Fellas so her interlocutor knew there had to be more to it. The pro bono work she has done on Frenchkiss Records has never interfered with her work on Blue Bloods, and while her significant other plays bass guitar for the Seth Meyers show on another network, that has never raised any red flags let alone hackles in legal.

"Does the real reason have to do with Frank Reagan's political ambitions?" she was asked. "Warmer," she said. "But if you print it, Danny will kill you." Therefore my source has adopted a pseudonym and will employ the subjunctive to describe what the smart money is saying, which is this:

Frank Reagan, as played by Tom Selleck, has the distinction of wearing nearly the same tie on every episode of Blue Bloods. Each is a rep (or regimental) tie featuring a red field with diagonal stripes usually containing white, blue, or a combination of the two. I happen to own two such ties myself, purchased at Brooks Brothers, and from a study commissioned by the triumvirate of Rogers Peet, Hart Schaffner and Carlo Marx it has been ascertained that for a municipal leader, this is the tie of choice, inspiring trust and confidence in the populace.

The consistent use of ties of this order has long led Reaganites to suspect that Frank has political ambitions. The speculation, fueled by dissatisfaction with the de Blasio regime in New York coupled with the gag-me-with-a-spoon shenanigans in DC, has resulted in a "draft Frank" movement. Linda Reagan is said to have taken a position on the net-yet-official campaign. One of her pet ideas: a series of TV commercials featuring endorsements of Reagan by various Franks -- such as Frank Sinatra, Frank O'Hara, Frank Hogan, Frank Costello, Frankie Machine, Frank Malzone, Fenway Franks. Frank Bullitt in his 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback, Francis Ford Coppola, Pope Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Francine York, and Connie Francis. 

But this is all speculation, and the rocky relationship between the police chief and the mayor is nothing new. Still, the fact that Frank Reagan polls higher than the mayor in all five boroughs, with an almost unheard of 90% favorable rating in Staten Island, may affect Frank's decision, and if Linda Reagan has anything to say about it, it's a go. -- WC

from the archive; first posted October 13, 2017

For seven seasons, Linda Reagan as portrayed by the actress Amy Carlson was a stalwart figure in the hit series Blue Bloods. She plays the wife of hot-headed Danny Reagan, mother to their two boys, daughter in law of police commish Frank Reagan, sister in-law of Erin, brother-in-law of Jamie, aunt of the Columbia undergrad who used to go to Catholic school, granddaughter-in-law of grandpa, and a normal human being, who works as a nurse, lives in Staten Island, demands to be respected by her husband, and concludes phone conversations with him with this exchange:

"Love you."
"Love you more."
"Love you most."

Several theories have been making the rounds regarding Linda's sudden departure from the program. In episode one of season eight it is explained that she died in a helicopter crash transporting a patient. To those who believe that this is what happened to Amy Carlson, my source is happy to report that she is very much alive. There is also no truth to the rumor that she got sick -- "totally" -- with husband Danny always going off the rails and blowing his stack. That was actually something that endeared him to her, Linda admitted tearfully after one of their quarrels., according to Megin Draper, a close friend. 

It was really very simple, the actress confided, nursing a glass of Jameson's on the rocks as she negotiated her farewell package. It was "time to move on."

The network executive who bears a resemblance to Ned Beatty gave her a skeptical look.

"It really is time to move on," repeated the Knox College alumna, who graduated cum laude, made her TV debut as Josie Watts on Another World in 1993, and currently resides in Chinatown with her kids and her partner. But she winked and touched her nose like Robert de Niro in Good Fellas so her interlocutor knew there had to be more to it. The pro bono work she has done on Frenchkiss Records has never interfered with her work on Blue Bloods, and while her significant other plays bass guitar for the Seth Meyers show on another network, that has never raised any red flags let alone hackles in legal.

"Does the real reason have to do with Frank Reagan's political ambitions?" she was asked. "Warmer," she said. "But if you print it, Danny will kill you." Therefore my source has adopted a pseudonym and will employ the subjunctive to describe what the smart money is saying, which is this:

Frank Reagan, as played by Tom Selleck, has the distinction of wearing nearly the same tie on every episode of Blue Bloods. Each is a rep (or regimental) tie featuring a red field with diagonal stripes usually containing white, blue, or a combination of the two. I happen to own two such ties myself, purchased at Brooks Brothers, and from a study commissioned by the triumvirate of Rogers Peet, Hart Schaffner and Carlo Marx it has been ascertained that for a municipal leader, this is the tie of choice, inspiring trust and confidence in the populace.

The consistent use of ties of this order has long led Reaganites to suspect that Frank has political ambitions. The speculation, fueled by dissatisfaction with the de Blasio regime in New York coupled with the gag-me-with-a-spoon shenanigans in DC, has resulted in a "draft Frank" movement. Linda Reagan is said to have taken a position on the net-yet-official campaign. One of her pet ideas: a series of TV commercials featuring endorsements of Reagan by various Franks -- such as Frank Sinatra, Frank O'Hara, Frank Hogan, Frank Costello, Frankie Machine, Frank Malzone, Fenway Franks. Frank Bullitt in his 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback, Francis Ford Coppola, Pope Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Francine York, and Connie Francis. 

But this is all speculation, and the rocky relationship between the police chief and the mayor is nothing new. Still, the fact that Frank Reagan polls higher than the mayor in all five boroughs, with an almost unheard of 90% favorable rating in Staten Island, may affect Frank's decision, and if Linda Reagan has anything to say about it, it's a go. -- WC

from the archive; first posted October 13, 2017

The Perry Mason Screen Tests [for Jim Cummins]

On George Gershwin's Birthday (9/26): Dean & Ella Sing a 'Swonderful Medley

The first four minutes are all Gershwin.

Joey Bishop Hosts the Tonight Show (4/10/65)

 

 

From the Archives: Lydia Davis on TV [by David Lehman]

From the Archives: January 29, 2013

           On July 15, 2012, we reported in this space that Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame would play the part of Dr. Susan Wheeler in a two-night miniseries based on Robin Cook's 1977 novel, Coma. (Genevieve Bujold starred in the 1978 movie.) That show aired last fall. Now we learn that a character named Lydia Davis [pictured left in Paris 1973]  plays a vital role in the pilot episode of Revenge, a successful series now in its second season, about a girl who grows up to avenge her wrongfully disgraced father. The Hamptons are the locale and pretty much everyone is evil, vain, treacherous, and bitchy except for the men who are evil, vain, clueless, and unfaithful as the day is long. There is a hierarchy in this evil queendom, and the queen bee here is Victoria Grayson (played by Madeleine Stowe). The avenger was once named Amanda Clarke; now she is Emily Thorne (played by Emily VanCamp). Stacey said, "imagine what Barbara Stanwyck would do with either of these parts." Joe pointed out that the show is basically "The Count of Monte Cristo" meets summer in the Hamptons.

Lydia Davis is Victoria Grayson's best friend, as rich as she is blonde. It was Lydia Davis who gave a Van Gogh to her friend as a token of her esteem, But Lydia Davis [pictured right] is about to be excommunicated from the golden realm for having been caught fucking Victoria Grayson's husband! Who had a fake heart attack! Which was arranged by Emily Thorne! And you the viewer are left wondering about the exact relation between the character of Lydia Davis and the texts created by the author Lydia Davis even as you applaud this new fashion of naming the characters in TV series after contemporary poets. -- DL

Over the Moon and Back Again [by Heidi Seaborn]

In an MFA workshop last summer, an acclaimed poet declared that the moon was over, that it had been over used and needed to be relegated to the poetry graveyard with ravens and heart. Just like that. Done. The MFAs took note. No more moons.

But I’m not yet ready to yield the moon. Instead I find myself now obsessed with it, guarding it from extinction. Like Diana, I hunt for moon references. Pounce on moon sightings. I keep an eye on the moon when it rises at night, as it lingers in the sky by day. I wane as it wanes, I am filled by its fullness. When a Super Moon blasts a hole in the night sky, I can’t look away, letting its spotlight hold me, entranced. I’m not alone. Google the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon and you’ll find over 55 million results. For one moon, on one night.

When the moon eclipsed the sun a couple of years ago, the world looked up in wonder. The poets wrote. It’s cultural. Remember moon pies and Michael Jackson performing The Moonwalk? It’s historical. Remember Neil Armstrong’s real walk on the moon? Or just watch First Man and pretend you were alive then.

In fact, the moon stars in nearly 1,000 movies according to IMDb. We croon to the moon, whether we are music fans of Oscar Peterson, Neil Young or Pink Floyd. Amazon lists over 20,000 albums and 60,000 books with moon in their titles. On poets.org, there are 107 pages of moon references. The poet Lillo Way has a prize-winning chapbook Dubious Moon [Slapering Hol Press] that is nothing but moon poems. Here’s one from Way’s book that captures the sensuality of the moon, its powerful draw:

Frame the Moon

Furred out, cased, paned and trimmed,
the opening of a window.

From my position here on the floor
in supine half-spinal twist,

my quarter-revolving eye catches
a perfectly sliced-in-half moon centered

in the upper right corner of the upper
left pane of a window blued by a sky

somewhere between baby-boy daytime
and electric-transvestite midnight –

the perfect globe cleavered by
a celestial butcher-boy –

the first half of hope, not the last,
depending, I suppose, on your viewing point,

mine being spine suppliant to floor,
floor kissing earth and holding the kiss,

earth sucking me hard, the half-moon
mullioned and muntined,

one four-millionth of a light-year away,
beaming me up and off from here –

half an inkling that, when the bones wave
their white phalanges of surrender

to whatever pulls us down – some unthing,
some weightless, scentless, tasteless,

wan thing, draws me up into a moon’s
glowy, showy, half-assed bliss.

 

The moon rules the tides of our oceans, of women’s bodies. It may orbit our earth, but we are in its powerful cosmic sway. Even Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “I’m Over the Moon” [Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press] where the moon is dismissed as: “A kind of ancient/date-rape drug” and “It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band./Better off alone” acknowledges it is the lover we can’t ever truly leave. Maybe we are destined to howl at the moon in our poems, to shoot past cliché to discover the ancient and constant inspiration of our one and only moon.

Uncle Milty and the Merry Texico Men (February 2, 1953)