The Best American Poetry

Billy Collins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Afternoon with Irish Cows

 

There were a few dozen who occupied the field

across the road from where we lived,

stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

their big heads down in the soft grass,

though I would sometimes pass a window

and look out to see the field suddenly empty

as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

 

Then later, I would open the blue front door,

and again the field would be full of their munching

or they would be lying down

on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

 

But every once in a while, one of them

would let out a sound so phenomenal

that I would put down the paper

or the knife I was cutting an apple with

and walk across the road to the stone wall

to see which one of them was being torched

or pierced through the side with a long spear.

 

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

laboring upward as she gave voice

to the rising, full-bodied cry

that began in the darkness of her belly

and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

 

Then I knew that she was only announcing

the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

while she regarded my head and shoulders

above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

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Billy Collins is a former US Poet Laureate. His latest collection is Whale Day (Random House, 2020.)

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 Cows in county Cork, Ireland. Sept. 2020. Photo by Jennifer O'Riordan.

 

 

Jiwon Choi: Pick of the Week (x2) [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Memoir Mori

 

In Part One, I will introduce my mother, butcher-in-chief

feasting on her young, bones and gristle, sauté

and sizzle with toothsome glee. Day-old tabloid soup

moving you on to

Part Two where I make my escape to a liberal arts college

and become afflicted with a condition known as poetry-writing

where I Ouija-board Plath nightly for instruction on restitution

and virgin suicides.

In Part Three I seek solace in philosophy (I fuck

therefore I am) also known as impersonating Freudian slips:

you’re not a family until you’re a tragedy.

How to begin Part Four?

Cue the tall, blond Tourette’s syndrome, a foolish moth

trapped inside my self-loathing. I pull his wings right off.

Must I make meaning of my stint at the 7-Eleven roasting wieners

for pimply boys seeking nirvana in Hot Pockets and Ding Dongs?

If I leave salvation unwritten, will it come in?

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Let’s Go Out Tonight

 

Charging from one neck of the woods to another

the cab driver pushes our chariot from one pothole to another

over patches of pigeons while the radio bleeds the blues

“Is that Blind Lemon?” I ask

“Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says

“But Blind Lemon liked Hopkins to play with him sometimes,” I add

“How come you know about that?” he turns to look at me

He is an older black man, forehead furrowed with Socrates’s worries

“I like the blues,” I reply

By the time we pull up to the curb John Lee Hooker is cajoling

“Let’s go out tonight!”

so I pay my fare and do just that.

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Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher, and urban gardener.  She teaches preschool at the Educational Alliance, a multi-generational non-profit located on the Lower East Side of NYC.  She is a long-time gardener and coordinator for the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Community Garden located near downtown Brooklyn. She is also a poetry editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Jiwon is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons, published by Hanging Loose Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

Bill Nevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo (detail) by Tony O’Hara

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No Prisoners

What can I say?
We met in Santa Fe.

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist
And she knew John Berryman.

Poets
are worse
than lawyers
she said
worse
than mosquitoes
Like those big flying cucarachas
down south
they get in your hair

Poets!
Poets tell you stories!
Stories about
anarchist painters
who won’t take cash
from the cruel corporate state
so
they live in boxes
made of cardboard
under bridges
without berets
without brushes
without canvas stretchers
without grants
without patrons

without brushes

Poets
she said
are like syrup
on a pancake
they soak in
until they wipe out all the taste
of the pancake itself
and fill it in with words
words
words
sweet, sticky
words!
Poets make everybody else
taste
what they taste
she sighed.

I
hate
fucking
poets
she said

First,
she hissed,
after the revolution
we’ll kill
all the poets!

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Bill Nevins has two books of poetry from Swimming With Elephants Publications: Heartbreak Ridge and AWE. Bill is an Iona College graduate who has lived in New Mexico since 1996. He is profiled in the 2007 film Committing Poetry in Times of War. He is also a widely published cultural journalist. He may be reached at bill_nevins@yahoo.com.

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Diane Ward: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diane Ward, McGinty's Pub, Silver Spring, Maryland, Oct. 2018. Photo by T. Winch

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Never Walk Out of Your Life

 

consumer, you are biologically

natural and acceptable

 

and I am imitating a man

imitating a toddler’s attempt to walk

 

there are tiny white shoes that

fit my fingers – yet they’re useful to me

 

I am the armchair spectator as my life

collapses under the weight of desire, one deepest level

 

the flight circumnavigates my bed,

my table, my toilet, my self

 

your one syllable is sentence to me

your no-more-forgetting, a world

 

the lap is lost when you stand – a joke

until the body’s consumed by lap when it’s down

 

there’ll come a time: no amount of

bracelet enhances the arm devoid of content

 

there’ll come a time: to mention the name will be

proof of no claim to its object

 

I am bound by doors so seriously, to enter your

apartment is to enter the creation of your life from your body

 

in anticipation of the burst declaring movement

imperceptively portrayed, we, for one, can wait

 

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Diane Ward was born in Washington, DC, and currently lives in Oakland, California. She attended the Corcoran School of Art in DC and earned a doctorate in geography at UCLA. Her publications include a collaboration with Tina Darragh and Jane Sprague, #8 in the Belladonna Elders series; No List (no list) from Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles; Flim-Yoked Scrim, Factory School; and When You Awake, New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Several of her poems have been set to music by the Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, including “Fade on Family,” which was performed in 2005 as part of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound series at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. “InHouse,” a constructed poem, appeared in Kindergarde, the first avant garde anthology for children.

Robert Hershon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chatter

I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and

the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I

watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers

when my friend assigned me the task of writing

a baseball poem, since right now there is no

baseball except in memory so I thought of

the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer

but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I

began to think of the teams of my boyhood, call them

the Boys of Early Spring—Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser

and Cookie Lavagetto,  Kirby Higbe and Ed Head and that perfect

baseball name, Dixie Walker, brother to Harry the Hat Walker,

and remembered more as a bigot who wouldn’t play with Jackie Robinson

than as an outfielder, but I didn’t know that when I was

ten and we had the only television set at 946 Bushwick Avenue

and  I watched the games by  myself with a bag of candy corn

the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming

the Dodgers and I would grow old together (twelve, fourteen, beyond)

and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents

and now the rich players and the even richer owners have finally

decided to play some baseball and I guess I’ll slump down and

stare at the games, by myself again, without candy corn

but maybe with a sip or two of Scotch

 

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Robert Hershon has written 15 books of poems, most recently End of the Business Day and Freeze Frame. He's won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts.  Hershon has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966.

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Sarah Clancy: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Turlach O'Broin

 

Ringing in Sick to Go Mermaid Hunting

 

Once when I wasn’t I called in sick for the evening shift

and went instead to meet you at Raftery’s in Kilcolgan,

we left your car there and I drove south-west down

the summer solstice evening, hitting for the coast.

We squinted through sunglasses at Ballinderreen and Kinvara

but didn’t stop, turned for Fanore at Ballyvaughan, you leaning back,

feet on the dash singing along to the Indigo Girls and Johnny Cash,

asking me where we were headed. But messing about,

I wouldn’t say, I told you: On a day like this, trust me,

it will all work out. We’re going mermaid hunting

and the signs are good for catching.

 

There were no mermaids though, at the pier before Black Head

just one dolphin doing her bit for inter-special integration,

she came in waist-deep to meet us and we were charmed,

and drenched. From behind wet hair you asked me how

I’d known and in my stupid humour I said: Oh you know,

I had my people call hers – that’s how it goes and of course

you pushed me backwards off the pier then jumped

yourself and our dolphin circled as if she got the joke,

spearing herself four feet skywards above our heads,

then vanishing beneath. Us two fools, we swam through seaweed,

feeling elemental. You’re half fish, you said,

and I said yea but I’ve caught you this time.

 

In Lenanne’s at dusk we had chowder and a pint

I sat with salty skin and hair and when you joined

the jobsworth band to sing ‘The Dimming of the Day’ for me,

you made every hair on every sunburned neck there stand.

You slept then as I drove back but I woke you in Kilcolgan

to send you down the Craughwell road–Me? I hit for home

but parked at Whitestrand Beach, the longest evening

of the year, too full of everything to go inside just then.

 

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Sarah Clancy is from Galway City, Ireland, although she now lives in county Clare. She is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Truth and Other Stories (Salmon Poetry, 2014), Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Press, Belfast, 2011), and Thanks for Nothing, Hippies (Salmon Poetry, 2012).  She has been placed or shortlisted in several of Ireland’s well-known poetry competitions. Sarah has won the Cuirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam Championship and was runner-up in the All-Ireland Grand Slam Championships. In 2015 she was named The Bogman's Cannon People's Poet and in 2016 she was the Lingo Festival's Poet Laureate. Her work is widely anthologized and has been published in translation in Mexico, Slovenia, Poland, Italy, and Spain, as well as in the UK, Canada, and the US in English.

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Lawrence Welsh: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo 2019 by Bruce Berman

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The Birds Are Flying Over

 

the birds are the dead

or the ghosts of the dead

flying over

 

we salute the birds

see their shadows

on this day of the dead

they are kings and queens

so much more than us

as we take our place next to them

 

the birds are the dead

or the souls of the dead

flying over

 

we salute the birds

and pray for their passage

we burn sage and candles

for their safe arrival

they carry our faulty traits

our lies

our stolen inglewood beer

our ripped off keg money

and every woman who ever wronged us

and every woman we ever wronged

they carry our children who were never born

they carry our drugged-crazed eyes

they carry our eight-balls of cocaine

our cheap marijuana

our irish whiskey

our pharmaceutical morphine

they carry our love for the black market

they carry the cities that are all black market

they carry el paso and los angeles

they carry every echo park overdose

 

they carry our nicknames like chuco and slim

slim angel and larry safeway

rolling red and mescalero dancing crow

gordo and flaca

standing man and standing bear

they carry the medicine that we carry

the medicine that we burn

they carry the medicine we didn’t know we had

like wolf and raven

owl and lizard

they carry us without regret

 

they carry our ancestors and entire countries

they carry all of ireland, all of mexico

the places we know and love

all of ireland, all of mexico, all of new mexico

and they tell us the irish are the mexicans of europe

and they tell us that everything

is the way it is supposed to be

they tell us don’t struggle just surrender

they tell us our day is coming soon

our chance at happiness

our chance for the other side

they tell us to light all the candles

to pray all of the rosaries

to mix the rosary with the medicine pipe

to accept your medicine name

to pray on your name

to contemplate the ardagh chalice

and the ditch banks of moss

to get in the sweat lodge

to hold the buffalo skull

to stuff its eyes with sweet grass and sage

they tell us to fly now

and respect those who never do or never will

and respect those mired in liquor and weed

and pills and rusted needles

respect them and love them

for their time is coming

they tell us our time is coming

when we will be them and they us

they tell us to open the windows and let them in

for we will be them and them us

 

and they tell us all paths are one

and death is a celebration

death is now

death is everyday

and death will only be the beginning

our chance to fly

our chance finally to be the birds

our chance to be them and so much more than them

or simply them and nothing more

for we will be the birds of the dead

the souls of the dead

and the birds are flying over

 

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Lawrence Welsh has published 12 books of poetry, including Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems (University of New Mexico Press).  His books have won the Southwest Book Award, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, the Southwest Books of the Year Award, and have been short listed for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award. His poetry, reviews, essays, as well as journalistic writings, have appeared in more than 300 national and regional magazines, journals, newspapers and anthologies.

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E. Ethelbert Miller: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

Photo by Max Hirshfeld

 

The South Bronx

We lived in the land of broomsticks

stickball played between cars

manholes for bases

We ran past fire hydrants

and caught balls near curbs

Now and then someone smacked

a Spaldeen to a rooftop—

Making pigeons fly

 

Fences

In the playgrounds

there were few left-handed

hitters so right field

is where the big kids placed us.

We became ghosts of the game.

We stood alone in sunlight.

Sometimes during a third out

we escaped through a hole in the fence.

We returned home like players sent down

to the minors.

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E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller’s latest book, If God Invented Baseball (City Point Press), was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. (See The E. Ethelbert Miller Papers.)

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Karen Sagstetter: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo [detail] by Diane MacEachern

 

No Crying in Baseball

No crying when I struck out swinging.
No crying when a runt smashed a grand slam
off my pitch. Or when I wrecked my legs
black and blue sliding into third. 
No crying when I was picked off
at third for the third time
or when my wondrous fly ball
whacked the rear fence
and bounced back like a prodigal to a centerfield glove.
Not even when my mind wandered to the beach 
and I bobbled the ball and the manager screamed
get out of my life!

I’ll tell you what brought me tears. 
I was in space, orbiting the generous blue earth 
and pressing my face against 
the plain window glass of my ship.
I witnessed ball fields in neighborhoods on every continent,
green diamonds shining through glorious clouds 
and dogs the world over
chasing grounders in the afternoons.

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Karen Sagstetter is author of Commotion, a book of poetry, as well as poetry and fiction in numerous literary journals, two chapbooks of poetry, two nonfiction books, and The Thing with Willie, a collection of linked stories set largely in Galveston. She  studied in Japan as a Fulbright journalist and  worked as senior editor for many years at the Smithsonian’s museum of Asian art and at the National Gallery of Art. She grew up in Texas and now lives in Maryland. 

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Bernard Welt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo by Arthur Gary

 

Sabbatical

for Doug Lang

 

We hear tales of a wonderful country called Wales

Only Wales is wholly imaginary, like Middle Earth

Or the Starfleet Academy

There is no holiday called Christmas

Children do not exist

 

Humans have as yet failed to discover

A reliable means of reproducing their kind

Except in elaborate fictions—a kind of imitation of life

Lana Turner has not collapsed, at least not yet

 

There was no ancient mariner

And he never stopped anybody

All the world is not a stage

Some people actually are islands

The world is not too much with us

 

All happy families are not alike

I know whether I am the hero of my own story

I think I am extremely likely to see

A poem lovely as a tree

I do not celebrate myself or sing myself

There is not much of me

And I don’t taste all that good

 

This not the saddest story I have ever heard

I am not a parcel of vain strivings tied

By a chance bond together

Although I admit it must look that way sometimes

I did not place that jar in Tennessee

I didn’t eat the plums

 

In the beginning God did not create anything

This is not Illyria, lady

The answer is not blowing in the wind

You are not my funny valentine

Fish do not gotta swim, birds do not gotta fly

 

‘Twas not brillig

Lafayette, we are not here

I do not want you green

 

I do not wander lonely as a cloud

If clouds really are all that lonely

I took the road everybody else takes

And it hasn’t made any difference at all

A thing of beauty is not a joy forever

I don’t have to go down to the sea again

The sea is not calm tonight

I don’t remember

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Bernard Welt is the author of Serenade (Z Press), and poetry in journals including The Antioch Review, Sun & Moon, Little Caesar, and Z, as well as of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art (Art issues Press). His poem, “I stopped writing poetry . . .” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001 (Robert Hass, ed., New York: Scribner, 2001).

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Amy Pickworth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ohio Poem

So even after all this time
when I see a dog that’s eager to bite
I think of my darling angry boys of southeastern Ohio
skinny kids on short chains
shortchanged and wary of the stranger’s hand
Their fury comes to them honest
as the mongrel great-great-grandsons
of unlauded Civil War heroes
who recklessly avoided death
so they could simply turn around and walk back home
shoeless and enraged over the mountains

Christ you poor dumb sweet lugs
now you’re cannon fodder
in countries they never showed us on the map
or working at Walmart or the basket factory
or maybe if you got lucky driving for UPS
You can shoot a deer and
leave its steaming organs in the snow
You’ve had pictures and words
tattooed on your necks
and will not regret it later
Sometimes it’s better when you just drink yourselves
into a great artificial calm

My beautiful sunburned farmhands of Appalachia
my first sweethearts you’ve all gone to seed
But you don’t need Mom to tell you you’re fat
You can see when you’ve gone soft lost your nerve
and your way as the heirs of all those pious Germans
who built modest houses and the furniture in them
checked their traps and stocked their cellars
with fat little apples from trees their fathers grafted
who knew the price by the pound as well as the cost
beat their wives and children into good behavior
and meted out their own pleasures with tweezers
or gorged on them in the dark
Whose boys served front line KP patrol any shit assignment
in Europe or the Pacific or Vietnam so that now as their grandsons
you can sleep on the couch in the waning light of the flat screen

O O O Ohio you were the Mother of Presidents
but now they’re always born someplace else
That industry has been outsourced
to where they make them prettier and cheaper and
no one has to worry about plowing and
salting the driveway

You, men of Ohio, were once my own
I grew tall in the light
of your refrigerators
I licked around the edges
of your ice cream sandwiches
I swayed in your arms at prom
I let a few of you lay me down
on the gold shag carpet
but not pull off my pants because
it wasn’t until after you enlisted
and I went to college that I put out
and then it was for boys
who weren’t from around here

So I’m sorry, Ohio
You were my home and
the home of my mother and her mother
and her mother’s mother before her
and the parking lot where I finally did lose my virginity
to a guitar player who’s now a banker in Tokyo
Your gentle hills once spectacular mountains
worn down over time by the monotony of glaciers
finally dismantled and cast aside for their paltry seams of coal
are still the setting for all my best plane-crash dreams
but in the end I betrayed your sons
          except that one who had the audacity
          to betray me first and for that of course
          I am doomed to love him forever

Sometimes I think I should’ve taken
one of those boys by the hand
          I could’ve found him in the dark by his calluses alone
and we could’ve lit out together

We had our opportunities, you know
“Goddamn it this movie sucks”
he whispered in the flickering light
“Let’s get out of here
Slap me hard across the face
scream ‘You’re an asshole’
run up the aisle
then I’ll come running after you”
God I remember our delight
at how we’d shock them all
But in the end we just stayed
in our seats obediently waiting
till it was over and
they turned the lights back on

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Amy Pickworth is the author of Bigfoot for Women (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2014). “The Ohio Poem” originally appeared in Smartish Pace issue 18.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Lally, ca. 2008

The Night John Lennon Died

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One warm night, when I was a kid,
we were all playing ringalario in
the high school field at the bottom
of my street when Mrs. Murphy, known
mostly for the time her hair turned
purple when she tried to dye it, stuck
her head out the door and yelled across
the street to us, “Go on home now and be
quiet, Babe Ruth just died.” And we all
did go home where everything was somber
and serious and adult and strange,
worse than when one of the family died,
because then there were outbursts of
emotion as well as jokes and stories
and good drunken parties, but
the night Babe Ruth died, everyone
felt as sad as if it was a close close
friend or a sister or a brother,
but no one was really related so
there was no call for an actual Irish
wake or funeral party. I couldn’t help
remembering that night again, the
night John Lennon died. Nobody
threw a wake or a party where we
could all get drunk and high and
have a good cry together. We all
went home and wandered around our
rooms and heads looking for answers,
unable to sleep or forget or accept
or understand what had happened.
It had to be a mistake and it was,
a fucking senseless, horrible,
deadening mistake.
                        It’s hard to
recognize even the most familiar
things. I don’t know where I am
half the time, the other half I’m
flashing on some song or line or look
or attitude so close to my own
personal history I thought it was
mine. But it ain’t, cause it’s gone
with John and I feel like I got to
go do something now to spread a
little joy and loving and honest
fucking answers and questions about
the world I live in and the only times
we ever have, our own. I hope I’m
not alone.

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A former jazz musician, Hollywood actor, and radical organizer, New Jersey-born Michael Lally is first and foremost a poet. The author of more than thirty books of soulful, outspoken poems that have inspired many other artists, Lally writes with wry humor and the simple grace that is the mark of deep thought and conviction. He is the recipient of an American Book Award, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and other honors. Commenting on Lally’s landmark selected poems,  Another Way to Play: Poems 1960-2017 (7 Stories Press, 2018), Charles Bernstein wrote:  “Michael Lally’s risky, talky, autobiographic, ethnic, disarming, poignant, desperate, consoling, elegiac, wily, vernacular lyrics have been challenging the poetry world for half a century.” 

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Don Berger: Pick of the Week (Terence Winch)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Peter Berger

Leaving the Tavern

How long should my morning

be?  They've never known

who I am but

I don't feel time's gone too fast

slow enough to fit the spirit in.

Sun brings gold to the right side

of all the people's faces,

half of the muscles used to smile.

Travelled through, based on a

true story, cliff surface or the cave wall,

how quickly does bamboo grow?

Two inches per hour.

Then after sixty days never grows 

in height or diameter again.

A truckload of walnuts

tells the tale of flirtations,

immune from the hazard of rebirth.

Heaven told me/us,

the sky told me

the arch is the dragon's mouth,

Thursday is orange, Friday is blue,

brick tea, silver and silk.

The heart doesn't have to fight

gravity to get blood back.

Take height

under the floating hip.

Mind your head.

The deer is loose.

Veal ribs in

Coca Cola.

Deep-fried tench.

We have these ingredients.

The head cleared, and then all of a sudden,

the king was an infant,

the peace feelers that were

already being extended,

strong enough to blow the tiles

off the roof of the church.

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Donald Berger is the author of The Long Time, a bilingual edition in English and German (Wallstein Publishers); Quality Hill (Lost Roads Publishers), and The Cream-Filled Muse (Fledermaus Press).  His work has appeared in The New Republic, Slate, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Fence, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review and other magazines including some from Berlin, Leipzig, Budapest, Hong Kong, and mainland China. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University. 

"Leaving the Tavern" includes the word "floating," which is the very word I would use to describe many of Berger's poems. His poems glide over wondrous landscapes of language and place, offering mysterious information at every turn. To hear him read several other poems, check out these videos:

 

 

 

 

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov---Soviet Texts (Terence Winch)

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov  (1940–2007) died of a heart attack on the Moscow metro  at age 66.  An artist of incisive comic genius with a taste for the bizarre, he would no doubt have found the circumstances of his death somewhat amusing. As Soviet Texts, an excellent new collection of his work translated and edited by poet Simon Schuchat (with Ainsley Morse) and published by Ugly Duckling Presse, makes clear, Prigov’s central literary mission was the dismantling of the language of officialdom. He is a satirist, a parodist, whose writing is a mocking commentary on the political misuses and other abuses of language. [photo left: D.A. Prigov]

The lead-off piece in Soviet Texts is entitled “Under Me,” and it sets the tone for the entire collection.  A long list-poem offering “a procession of details, elements, events, which took place ‘under me,’” it showcases Prigov’s absurd, expansive, comprehensive knowledge of history, art, and culture (not to mention sports and porn):

            And Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Kim Basinger, Michael Jackson appeared under me

            Tarantino, Platini, van Basten, Wim Wenders also appeared under me.

            Jeff Koons appeared under me, too

            And Ciccolina appeared under me

            And Ravi Shankar appeared under me

            Mike Tyson, Schumacher, Agassi, Magic Johnson appeared under me, too

In “Description of Objects,” Prigov takes aim at the deadly form and diction of Soviet propaganda in a series of pieces each beginning with “Comrades!” and proceeding to offer ridiculous definitions of everything from eggs to apes. Authoritative nonsense and faux logic lead to the final conclusion of every description: “For the reasons indicated above, its actual existence is considered unlikely.” In the brilliant mock-heroic “Moscow and the Muscovites,” one of my favorites, Prigov takes on inflated, nationalistic jargon, exposing its ludicrousness along the way: “Moscow is everywhere—its peoples are all over/ And where Moscow’s not—there’s only emptiness.” “Twenty Stories about Stalin” are scripture-like parables about Uncle Joe that are ultimately anti-hagiographic.

Also a prolific visual artist, Prigov clearly deserves the wider appreciation that this book will certainly bring him. As Simon Schuchat [photo right] notes in the frontmatter: “While Prigov’s writing is very definitely of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, it is also fully equal to, and sometimes consonant with, contemporaneous avant-garde writing elsewhere in the world.”   

Soviet Texts thrums with Prigov’s subversive sense of humor, almost making one hungry for something irony-free.  Though I don’t think you find that in his writing,  I thought these lines from “Terrorism with a Human Face” came closest, and could even serve as his epitaph:

            When the years have passed and the currently wild

            People have forgotten many things

            Fear of me will tear through all of Great Russia

            For what I wrote! But it was the truth, after all!

Indran Amirthanayagam---Poetic Globalist (Terence Winch)

Indran Amirthanayagam is one of the most remarkable figures roaming the contemporary poetic landscape. Like some of the poets he most admires—Cavafy, Neruda, Hikmet (all mentioned in the poem below)—he is a citizen of the world. Born into the Catholic Tamil community (a minority within a minority) of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960, he left with his family for England when he was eight, seeking refuge from his native land’s ongoing strife as well as care for an autistic brother. He lived in the U.K. for six years, attending grammar and primary school there. When he was fourteen, the family moved again, this time to Honolulu, where his father, also a poet, had been offered a job. In Hawaii, Indran was one year ahead of Barry Obama, whom he knew slightly, at Punahou School.  In 1978, he left Hawaii for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After getting his B.A. there, he moved to New York to become, like Lorca, “a poet in New York.” He picked up a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and remained in New York until 1993, when he got a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, having  become a U.S. citizen in the late ‘80s.

Indran reading “Fire Department”

His Foreign Service positions have included stints in Argentina, Belgium, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, India,  Canada, Peru, and Haiti. This is a man who gets around.

He writes and publishes in English, French, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese (but sadly and ironically, he has forgotten Tamil, his first language). In the DC area, where he has many friends, he runs a reading series at a Haitian restaurant called Port au Prince and has just become editor of the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an online journal. He is indefatigable; he works full time; he writes a poem a day, at a minimum; he travels constantly. In the first half of this year alone, he felt he simply had to go to San Francisco to help celebrate Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday; he caught a train from DC to New Orleans to take part in a literary festival; he brought his 83-year-old mother back to Sri Lanka for the first time in 30 years; he’s made several trips to New York. He may be the most ubiquitous poet on the planet.

He always wears a hat. 

His poems (the ones in English, anyway) have a directness, almost a plainness, about them. His work is deeply literary, full of reverence for his fellow poets, but devoid of stylistic pretensions. The poems are like enhanced emails, addressed to his friends and readers, but made resonant and luminous through the work of the imagination.

 

Gift at the End

I woke up the other day and thought about the best gift

I could offer friends turning a year older on the various

continents—I know people everywhere like you, thanks

to powerful social media—a poem, certainly, electronic

card, phone call, even a visit? Can you imagine boarding

 

a steel and aluminum plane—wood used only

for some interiors in first class, the metallic bird

driven by a well-rested pilot and a series of computers--

to say hello to you in Rotterdam, or Madras,

or in the port city of Alexandria? But I know only

 

Cavafy there, through poetry, and in Moscow,

Nazim tootling about in a car, metallic also, not yet

with dynamite under the hood, and Neruda straddling

a horse through the Andres on the way to Argentina,

walking on the beach at Wellawatta with his mongoose.

 

So how to justify these loose associations, stream

of consciousness running through the World Wide Web

without any brake, no formal mechanism to stopper

imagination and force, at least, the appearance

of form, migration certainly the only truth.

 

and the need to finish the poem, walk it back home,

stop the beast in the kitchen, give him a treat,

some Wilfred Owen, just days before

the War’s end, shot dead—dulce et decorum est—

or straight to the point, the full stop.

 

—Indran Amirthanayagam,  10 July 2019

 

 

 

Poem for Father's Day (Terence Winch)

My father, Paddy Winch (1905--1971), worked as the custodian of St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school in the Bronx, which this poem commemorates. He was a very generous and loving man, much beloved by his children and all who knew him. The photo shows him playing the banjo in 1958 in the house in Cahercrea, County Galway, Ireland, where my mother, Bridie Flynn, was born and raised. My parents were in Ireland that summer, their first trip back in almost 30 years. (Dublin cousins Noel Rogan and Martin Dawson are also seen in the photo.)

 

Custodian

            for charlie fanning

_________________________________

 

I ran the shovel along the street,

a razor path through the sidewalk face,

snow lather parting for me, for my father,

our feet crunching in the city night.

 

We grabbed the garbage cans from school

and church and dragged them up the iron

stairs.  I lugged burlap bags stuffed

with bingo cards, light as cream puffs.

 

We swept the auditorium with green sawdust

from huge drums.  We hammered and drilled

in his workshop, where tools hung on pegboard,

their images silhouetted behind them 

 

For instant identification and placement.

Once he sawed his index finger in half

on the power saw in a moment of inattention

in a life otherwise built of skill and care.  

 

Once a year the Monsignor made him climb inside

the giant boiler and clean it out

with enormous pipe cleaners till he was black

with soot that took days to wash off.

 

Sonny boy, he called me, and laddie buck.

He always said just do your best. 

We loved to watch him fall asleep

on the couch, Daily News over his face

 

Snores filling the apartment

with the music of rest well deserved.

His finger took years to heal enough

for him to play again but a black scar

 

Ran down its center. He’d give me a rub

with his unshaven face, rough as sandpaper.

He’d pretend he didn’t know me, scrubbed from

the tub, the lovely lie delighting me every time.

 

from Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose Press, 2007)

 

Brendan Behan Remembered [Terence Winch]

There’s a picture of Brendan Behan standing outside the Dublin Zoo with a bemused look on his face and a large snake curled around his neck.  The photo reveals much about Brendan, who died 55 years ago today, on March 20, 1964, at the age of forty-one. He was a comedian who liked to shock people and who wasn’t afraid to take chances.  He was an unstoppable ham who would do nearly anything to entertain his audience.  His life, or legend, nearly overshadowed his work in its claim on public attention.  His fans were sometimes more interested in the snake around his neck than in his writing.

He was a man of many talents, with the charm and magnetism of a movie star.  An accomplished singer who knew hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs, Brendan came from a musical background—his father played the fiddle, his uncle wrote the Irish National Anthem, his brother Dominic wrote “The Patriot Game,” one of the best-loved Irish songs to come out of Ireland’s struggles.  Brendan himself composed many songs, some of which are part of his plays and one which he claimed was written with a threatening pistol at his head.  He was fluent in the Irish language and wrote the first version of The Hostage (an Giall) as Gaeilge.  He had lived in France, spoke good French, and claimed to have written pornography in Paris. He was precocious writer, turning out reasonably good verse as early as age nine.  He first started drinking when he was a boy, so his two major activities in later life—drinking and writing—were off to an early start.

As he grew older and more famous, his taste for “the gargle” took greater hold of him.  In his late twenties and early thirties, when he was turning out the work on which his reputation would ultimately rest, he was capable of long periods of hard work without any intake of alcohol.  But as he conquered the public with his brilliant memoir Borstal Boy and his two best plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, he lost the stamina to keep on producing work of the same stature.   His public demanded the famous tough-talking funny Irish writer, and Brendan hated to disappoint a ready audience. It wasn’t, of course, all the public’s fault.  Brendan loved pub life, good times, music, talk.  He was certainly aware of how he was ruining himself and his future as a writer, but that awareness was no match for his thirst.  

As a boy and young man he was a political extremist, having taken part in a 1939-40 IRA bombing campaign (one with numerous parallels to the later IRA bombings that were part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland) in Britain, where he was arrested in Liverpool at the age of sixteen and sentenced to three years in borstal (something like reform school). Although he had abandoned active participation in the IRA by the time he was an established writer, the same wild and rebellious spirit that landed him in borstal—and in an Irish prison for his part in a shoot-out between the Irish police and the IRA less than a year after his release from borstal—also landed him in numerous bars on both sides of the Atlantic, wherein he challenged his health rather than the established order.  It was in the pubs that he played Brendan Behan, the famous ex-con with a big mouth and great talent. 

Ultimately, the booze got the best of him.  Friends, family, doctors, editors—many of the people in his life—tried to help him control his need for drink.  But he wasn’t up to the task.  There was a public hungry for the character Brendan Behan had created, and he wanted to come through for his fans.  His drinking, though it was bringing him closer to an early death with every passing day, was also a central element of his public act.  Towards the end he was in and out of hospitals frequently. His wife Beatrice, or some friend perhaps, would discover him unconscious in his hotel room in a diabetic coma and rush him to a hospital.  He amazed medical people with his powers of recovery and disheartened those who loved him with his many drunken escapades and self-destructive compulsions.  Much of his talent was destroyed along with his liver, so that at the end he was almost a parody of himself, trying desperately to live up to his reputation as legendary raconteur and tireless literary comedian.

His life was full of contradictions.  He hated and feared death and didn’t even like the subject brought up in his presence.  Yet he destroyed himself at an age when he should have been just reaching the peak of his powers as an artist.  He was known throughout the world as a brawling macho Irishman, yet he was also bisexual and wrote at least one early story, unearthed by Ulick O’Connor in his fine biography of Brendan, which can clearly be categorized as gay.  Even Borstal Boy includes many touching scenes (no pun intended) among the imprisoned boys that are obviously sexual in nature.  Brendan apparently worried about what a public revelation of his sexual complexities would do to his image, but such an expose never occurred in his lifetime.

Brendan’s last books were all spoken into a tape recorder and later put together with the help of his devoted editor, Rae Jeffs.  He had lost the ability to sit down at a typewriter and work at his craft.  In the end, Brendan was in the hospital, dying of alcoholism, when he got hold of some drink through a misguided visitor.  That apparently finished him off.  There were to be no more miraculous recoveries. 

Borstal Boy was Brendan’s masterpiece, the book in which, as they say, he found his voice. In the making over a period of many years, it displays all Brendan’s talents as a story-teller and humorist.  A moving account of his life from his arrest in Liverpool to his release from borstal and return to Ireland, the book is put together with exacting skill and literary vitality. Borstal Boy is in the tradition of portraits of the artist as a young man and rivals Joyce’s more highly regarded Portrait.  If Brendan had gone on to write something approaching the brilliance of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, Borstal Boy would perhaps have a higher rank in literary history than it now enjoys. 

The best-known of his plays, which are both performed from time to time, are The Quare Fellow and the Hostage. They are first-rate works that clearly demonstrate Brendan’s gift for dialogue and his ability to create authentic human drama.  The rest of his output—more plays, two “travel” books, a novel, and a follow-up to Borstal Boy are second-rate only in comparison to Borstal Boy and the two major plays. 

When I was a high school kid in the 1960s, my two favorite writers were James Baldwin and Brendan Behan. I couldn’t get enough of their work. I was thrilled when Brendan released two LPs back in those days. In fact, I pretty much memorized Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs and Ballads, so much so that I can  still instantly summon up his voice in my mind any time night or day.      (Photo below: Visiting Brendan at his permanent residence in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Oct. 2016; photo by Dominick Murray.)

Maureen Owen & Barbara Henning on the Road (Terence Winch)

 

Watch out, Mobile, Austin, San Diego, and any number of other cities in the U.S.: Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning are on the road and heading your way, armed with the power of poetry and good will. Transformations may take place, mirth may ensue, and who knows what else may happen.

These two illustrious writers are an inspiration to septuagenarians everywhere. They have over-loaded a 2007 Civic (with “only” a 130K miles on it, says Barbara) with pots and pans, sleeping bags, bags of books, food, yoga paraphernalia, and suitcases filled with anvils, and headed out into the poetry-starved American landscape for an 8-week road trip/reading tour.

I had the pleasure of reading with them on their second stop---Washington’s DC Arts Center---on Sunday (January 20, 2019), and of hanging out with them for the weekend. I asked each of them to read a poem, which they graciously did. (I apologize for the slightly distorted audio quality, but you will still get the idea.)

 

Maureen and Barbara are publishing an on-going blog that documents their odyssey. And you can check their agenda to see if they’re coming soon to a spot near you.

 

 

Here’s Maureen Owen reading “balmy tomorrow/saturday more snow predicted/the lilacs are in turmoil”  from Poets on the Road:

And Barbara Henning reading “Here We Are” from A Day Like Today:

 

 

Doug Lang reading "Pandaemonium Sonnet" (Terence Winch)

Last Thursday (8 Nov 2018), while visiting my friend Doug Lang, the great Welsh/American poet, at his studio apartment in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, the subject of movies about poets came up.  We discussed Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in Sylvia; Bright Star, the film about John Keats; Patterson, Jim Jarmusch's excellent 2016 film about a (fictional) poet that used real poems by Ron Padgett; and other movies as well. Doug reminded me that he has a poem on this very subject in his 2012 collection dérangé.  He agree to read it for the cameras:

[click to enlarge text]

 

Tom Clark: Try to look upon death as a friend (Terence Winch)

No one who knew Tom Clark would ever deny that he was irascible, brilliant, generous, difficult, funny, erudite.  He was also immensely prolific—even in old age, he published his blog, Beyond the Pale, on a daily basis. BTP was a relentless illustrated catalogue—with scores of photos spanning the globe—usually revealing world’s woes and conflicts, often complemented with various texts he admired. He also wrote and published dozens of books of poetry and prose. His illustrious literary career is outlined here.

I felt really shaken by the news of his death yesterday: he was hit by a car near his house in Berkeley and died several hours later in the hospital.

We had met in person only once, back in April of 1978, when he came to DC to read in Doug Lang’s Folio Bookstore reading series. I have a distinct memory of taking him somewhere on the DC Metro.

We got to know each much better in recent years, mostly through emails. He liked my work and posted poems of mine from time to time in Beyond the Pale.  We had many exchanges about poetry, music, our shared Irish heritage, etc.  I am haunted today by his occasional references to the perilous streets of his neighborhood, where pedestrians had to risk their lives to take a walk. Indeed, he had been injured in an earlier accident some years ago. 

Here is what he wrote me in June on this very subject:

“Admire your getaroundability. Could never ride on any airplanes nevermore no!! Cannot lift right leg off ground. Get on bus impossible. Cross street a prayer every time, plus plenty straight out hate speech outa me, unheard by robo drivers on software cruise control. They never talk back. I set up in shooter stance w metal cane pointed like assault weapon, they smile and laugh and roar past w/o stopping @alleged pedestrian crosswalk!

Little known fact you probably won't believe or care why should you, but the stop lights here are "smart" - that is, have sensors to detect approaching vehicle, stay green for same, but green goes to yellow in 2 seconds (literally), if you're a ped, and if there is a more unliveable country on earth, defining living as having a soul, I want to go there, just to comparison shop - but I've never owned a credit card or a cell phone, have no i.d. and indeed no idea how to shop, so there might be a problem there, but no worries.”                    email from Tom Clark, June 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom will be missed and mourned by his many friends and colleagues. My deepest condolences to Angelica Clark, his wife of 50 years.

Here are two recent poems of Tom’s that I especially like:

Nocturnal Resolutions

Be opaque

Have no memory

Make no attempt to be understood

Stop suffering fools

Be kind to animals no matter what

Listen to the angel

Try to look upon death as a friend

Accept pain as the condition

Be more patient

Don’t turn on the light

 

The Edge of the Forest

Poems ought to have memories.

They should remember other poems.

At this moment the noisy city

has fallen quiet, and the edge

of the forest is abuzz with voices,

the voices of poems beneath the old trees

talking quietly about the poems that were

once here but are not here any longer,

remembering each other.

 

both poems from Truth Game (BlazeVOX, 2013)