The Best American Poetry

Elinor Nauen: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The History of Western Philosophy

 

Bertrand Russell had just about convinced me

there’s more to life than sex

I’d like to go to bed

with him but he’s dead      even windowless

monads are sexy     they remind me of gonads

careening around & bumping

each other     hitting on each other

 

I know more philosophy than that

 

you’re not supposed to mix

your muse with your mistress or they’ll both

fuck you     over     the real question

is

is there anything we can think of

which

by the mere fact that we can think of it

is shown to exist outside

our thought   

 

the answer is sex

therefore god exists

 

sex is a revelation

a reason

empirical

possible     credible     self-consistent

the best of all possible worlds

sex precedes existence

precedes essence

I fuck      therefore

I attract every body with a force

directly proportional to the product

of their masses

 

Buridan’s ass

unable to choose between 2 equidistant bundles of hay

died of hunger

call me up sometime     I’ll make you lunch

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Elinor Nauen is a poet and prose writer who writes frequently about baseball, cars and driving, and place, and maintains a six-day-a-week blog (at ElinorNauen.com). Her books include Now That I Know Where I’m Going, American Guys, So Late into the Night (a book-length poem in ottava rima), My Marriage A to Z: A big- city romance, Cars and Other Poems, and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on Cars & the Road and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball. She hails from South Dakota, lives in Manhattan’s East Village with her husband (Johnny Stanton) and a cat (Lefty), and studies Norwegian and strict traditional Japanese karate. She hosted (with Martha King) the Prose Pros series from 2007-2019.

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Matthew Rohrer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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News of the Dead Pope

 

Out of a window musical notes float in single file

past the windbreak of sage-colored trees.

 

The notes are black with mourning. Black birds

hang in the stillness over the courthouses

and other sacred buildings.

 

At the lake a child notices the sound as if it were coming from the ground,

out of a strange nautical cellar nearby.

 

The news travels quickly on such a clear day,

through the clouds shaped like Valkyries,

the clouds swinging swords.

 

On the child’s screened-in porch a radio lights up.

It is old and made of wood;

nevertheless it rises to the occasion.

 

The child, who heard everything

including the bankers sobbing in the chapel across the lake,

 

thought he might play saxophone when he grew up.

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Matthew Rohrer is the author of ten books of poems, most recently The Sky Contains the Plans, published by Wave Books. His book-length poem The Others won the 2017 Believer Book Award. His book A Green Light was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. “News of the Dead Pope” is from his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton in 1995. He attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City, and then moved to Brooklyn, and that is where you will find him from now on. [For more information on, and poems by, Matt Rohrer, click here.]

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30th Anniversary of the Death of Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

It was thirty years ago today that Tim Dlugos died at age forty of AIDS. Tim was a poet of enormous talent and creative energy. He was beloved by many, myself included. His warmth, humor, and congeniality made him very easy to like. When his friend David Trinidad brought out Tim's collected poems (A Fast Life) in 2001, I was impressed by how much great work Tim had produced in his short life. Like so many others, I still miss him and, as the poem below demonstrates, still dream about him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Next Best Thing

 

I am having lunch in the humongous

cafeteria at my workplace. I’m not sure

what my job is, but the cafeteria is packed.

I scan the room and see that my best friend,

Michael David Lally, is sitting alone ten or so

tables across from me.  So I go to join him.

 

But just as I start heading his way, he bolts up

from his chair and scoots off to another table

where Conway Twitty is also having lunch.

Conway is alone and looks like a successful

businessman. He has glasses and wears a suit.

I can’t imagine why he is in our cafeteria,

but he and Michael seem to be in an instant

intense conversation and I don’t feel that I should

interrupt them. Their faces are only an inch apart.

 

Then I am in front of the Childe Harold, a great

bar in Dupont Circle that went out of business

some time back. I’m sitting on the little brick

wall in front waiting for Tim Dlugos. We’re

having lunch together. I haven’t seen him since

he died and am hoping I won’t have trouble

recognizing him. But along he comes, looking

older but good. He has very long hair, mostly gray,

and he’s clutching a briefcase from which papers

seem to be tumbling. It’s so good to see him again.

 

Bernard Welt happens along. I want to invite him

to join us for lunch, but I also feel selfish about

seeing Tim. We have so much to catch up on.

So I don’t invite Bernie, and feel a little guilty about it.

I am trying to call him Bernard rather than Bernie,

just as I want people to call me Terence rather

than Terry, but I ask him if he would mind if

I started calling him “Bernardie” instead.

Tim thinks that’s funny. Then we part ways.

11/28/2020

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Here is a Tim Dlugos post I wrote for this site in 2008. There's a good bit of information online about Tim, including sites that offer examples of his work. This DC site is especially good. Tim's greatest poem is, arguably, "G-9," which can be found here. 

 

 

Meg Kearney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Gabriel Parker

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George Says Stop Writing About Yourself

(New York, December 2001)

 

This one’s for George, who urged take off those

shit-kicker boots, leave your husband wrapped

in the scroll of last night’s sheets, forget your mother

sipping a cigarette, a Dugan’s Dew—forget

your other mother, your other father, too,

 

and the one you last saw in a coffin not looking

at all like himself, so much not-him you couldn’t

bear be near that body. Forget your first kiss—

how it sounded like peanut butter, tasted like

a train. Stop talking about the Alabama Slammers

 

and four Blue Whales or those men you drove crazy

with your push-him, pull-him love. And don’t speak

of babies, about not having them or the ugly one

who’s so much a part of your nights she must be

real, her mongrel face breaking into sadness.

 

Don’t talk about holding her above your head,

calling her Sweet Girl, Mama’s Girl—how she almost

smiles. Just for George, this poem looks beyond

Sea Monkeys and that first Louisville Slugger.

It opens the window to the stench, three months

 

now of that smell, man-made, human, wafting

from downtown. This poem is in the street,

where war does its thing. See, there’s a man

walking up Broadway: his shoes, suit, eyelashes,

lips covered with dust that used to be a building.

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In June 2021, The Word Works Press will publish Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as chapbook in 2020; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasha Tretheway, guest editor). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.

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Charles Bernstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On Election Day

 

I hear democracy weep, on election day.

The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election day.

The miscreant’s vote the same as saint’s, on election day.

The dead unleash their fury, on election day.

My brother crushed in sorrow, on election day.

The sister does her washing, on election day.

Slowly, I approach the voices dark, on election day.

The men prepare for dying, on election day.

The morning hush defends its brood, on election day.

So still, so kindly faltering, on election day.

On election day, the cats take tea with the marmoset.

On election day, the mother refuses her milk.

On election day, the frogs croak so fiercely you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth.

On election day, the iron man meets her frozen gasp.

The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.

Your eyes slide, on election day.

Still the mourners mourn, the weepers wept, the children sleep alone in bed, on election day.

No doubt a comet came to see me, fiery and irreconciled, torrid, strummed, on election day.

On election day, the trespass of the fatuous alarm and ignominious aspiration fells the

       golden leap to girdled crest. 

The tyrant becomes prince, on election day.

Neither friend nor foe, fear nor fate, on election day.

The liar lies with the lamb, on election day.

The last shall be the first and first sent to the back of the line, on election day.

The beggar made a king, on election day.

“Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” on election day.

Let he who has not sinned, let him sin, on election day.

The ghosts wear suits, on election day.

On election day, sulfur smells like beer.

On election day, the minister quakes in fear.

On election day, the Pole and the Jew dance the foxtrot.

On election day, the shoe does not fit the foot, the bullet misfires in its pistol, the

        hungry waiter reels before steadying himself on facts.

The grid does not gird the fiddler, on election day.

Galoshes and tears, on election day.

The sperm cannot find the egg, on election day.

The drum beat becomes bird song, on election day.

I feel like a nightmare is ending but can’t wake up, on election day.

 

(November 4, 2008)

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Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry. ROOF recently published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. University of New Mexico Press has published a facsimile reprint L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, a volume of related letters, as well as the late 1970s collaboration Legend. He lives in Brooklyn.  [For more information on, and poems by, Charles Bernstein, see the Poetry Foundation.]

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Sandra Beasley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Vocation

 

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino.

For six months I played Brahms in a mall.

For six months I arranged museum dioramas;

my hands were too small for the Paleolithic

and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit.

I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them

Help. Yes, I speak Dewey Decimal.

I speak Russian, Latin, a smattering of Tlingit.

I can balance seven dinner plates on my arm.

All I want to do is sit on a veranda while

a hard rain falls around me. I'll file your 1099s.

I'll make love to strangers of your choice.

I'll do whatever you want, as long as I can do it

on that veranda. If it calls you, it's your calling,

right? Once I asked a broker what he loved

about his job, and he said Making a killing.

Once I asked a serial killer what made him

get up in the morning, and he said The people.

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Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode (forthcoming February 2021); Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. ["Vocation" is from I Was the Jukebox: Poems. Copyright © 2010 by Sandra Beasley.]

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Ahmos Zu-Bolton: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ravis

 

My brother turns his life insideout,

from a jail in Leesville,

from a half-way house in Lake Charles,

from a slave-quarter in DeRidder.

He is prisoner of his own rage,

trapped behind the swollen bars

of some lingering chains

and some sudden cage.

 

I speak to him from miles away,

from the cell next door and

lightyears away,

from motherlands and the fertile earth

our Mississippi father plowed:

 

I am trying to be the lawyer he needs,

the father who died fighting for his son,

the big brother with muscles in his miles,

the preacher with his pitiful prayers,

 

I am trying to give him

the key to the cage, the hammer

to break the chains, the plot

the escape, the magic, the ju-ju

the tunnel under the demon walls,

the North Star to follow,

 

I climb inside all his sins,

find them in the flesh of this poem,

do bloody battle with them,

rip them apart like a white man's curse,

become their bitter judge,

their merciful jury,

their solemn executioner,

 

I leave them on the open floor

of his cell, spread out like the pages

of a testament, shadowboxing him

like a mirror,

 

I can forgive them

those far-away long-ago sins,

but I can't erase them,

for they have their own afterlife,

their own ghost pulsating

on the hot breath where

my brother's frustrated bloodline boils...

 

yet no loving offering

from my elderly black hand

can reverse his youthful middle passage

as he sits

on the frontporch of his betrayed generation,

sent to his silent room

like a spoiled boychild,

where he conjures secret maps

for whatever freedoms

he chose to rock his dusty soul with.

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I remember Ahmos Zu-Bolton II as a charismatic and gifted poet. He occasionally took part in the Mass Transit readings in Washington DC's Dupont Circle in the early 1970s, which was when I met him. A poet, playwright, Vietnam War veteran, and tireless promoter of African-American writers, Zu-Bolton was born on 21 October 1935 in Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana. He founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, and, with E. Ethelbert Miller, edited the 1975 anthology Synergy D.C. His poetry collections include A Niggered Amen (1975), Ain’t No Spring Chicken (1998), and 1946 (2002). He died  at age 69 on 8 March 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.  See Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s excellent post on Zu-Bolton; Doug Lang’s 2007 blog on Zu-Bolton offers links to more information, plus brief remembrances by Michael Lally and Beth Joselow; see also Grace Cavalieri’s perceptive essay on Zu-Bolton’s work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  

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Brendan Behan Remembered [by 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.)

from ther archive; first posted March 21, 2019

Joan Retallack: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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The Magic Rule of 9

 

Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn to

get by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory over

death all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as good

a time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell of

many a meantime, many have diverted themselves with

great success. Hence civilizations’ discontents and

greatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine.

That the sums of all numbers within the sums of all

multiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9:

1x9=9, 9=9; 2x9=18, 1+8=9; 3x9=27, 2+7=9; etc.

This is numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to the

species that longs for more than a first glance affords.

Someone will say, If you really think this is magic, you

don’t properly understand the decimal system (bird

falls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic.

Who among us truly understands the decimal system.

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Joan Retallack's BOSCH'D (Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions), in which this poem appears, came out from Litmus Press on April Fools Day, 2020. She feels it's impossible to dispute the aptness of that date given local and global circumstances at the time. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press) and Procedural Elegies—Western Civ Cont'd (Roof Books) among many other volumes of poetry and essays. Her Gertrude Stein: Selections (California) and conversations with John Cage (MUSICAGE, Wesleyan) examine the humor and gravitas of idiosyncratic aesthetics that became, respectively, so widely influential. Prior to BOSCH'D, Litmus Press published Retallack’s The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times— 2018 textual/visual continuation of an event she organized at MoMA in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. In all her work, Retallack combines socio-political inquiry with linguistic, visual, performative experiments in what she considers "poethical wagers.” 

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"Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" [by Terence Winch]

Triumphantly, the bone bore no oboe,
none at all. It was eerie. I stuck my
prohibitory toe in the lane. I had
to unlearn about enemas.  Nor was I
an amulet invisible to the mauler.
Noel, I cried! Do not let the manure
be an omen! It is unreal, all this neon
in the rubble. Your bunion is bonier
than mine. But my ruin is bluer.

Ed. note:  The poem consists of anagrams derived from the title, a cowboy folk song that Johnny Cash recorded in 1965.  Star Black took the photo of Terence Winch (c 2008). We post it here on November 1, 2020, to celebrate the poet's seventy-fifth birthday.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Shibboleth

 

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.

Another couldn’t strip the cellophane

From a G.I.’s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

 

By the second week of battle

We’d become obsessed with trivia.

At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,

An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

 

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,

Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,

Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.

“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

 

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Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents. In his thirties, he settled in the UK, where he became a well-known and highly regarded poet. Also an accomplished flute and whistle player, he was an active part of London’s traditional Irish music scene. His sudden death at age 50 was a great loss to both the literary and traditional music communities. Fintan O’Toole’s piece for the Irish Times examines Donaghy’s “elastic identity.” Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman, published a book in 2014 about their life together.  See also The Guardian and the Poetry Foundation for more on Donaghy's life and work. See the Session for information on his life in Irish music. To hear him play, see this clip:

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Kim Roberts: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Roberts (photo, Art Omi, Oct 2019)

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Double Indemnity

 

No, not insurance. What I

meant to say was “double identity,”

 

as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,

William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,

 

Lady Gaga. For these folks, surely,

The Postman Always Rings Twice.

 

But now I’ve Mildred Pierced myself

to the image of James M. Cain,

 

typing away in his little white house

in suburban Maryland. His typewriter

 

is preserved in a university library;

I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the change

 

from manual to electric to electronic

to what-the-hell-is-a-typewriter

 

and no one will be archiving

our battered beloved iPads,

 

even if they once belonged to Yo-Yo Ma,

Flavor Flav, or Marky Mark.

 

Now all our devices must do at least

two things: phone-cameras,

 

calculator-umbrellas. But in truth

all of us lead double lives, an outer

 

story plus a hidden story, separated by

such a thin skin. Tell us that one again

 

Ford Madox Ford, Kris Kristofferson,

Humbert Humbert, Richie Rich.

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Kim Roberts is the editor of By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018). She has published five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017).

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Doug Lang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Lang at the Rodin Museum in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann

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Lang’s Special Fortune Cookies

 

Nothing special is coming your way.

Your luck will not change today.

Your sense of humor is of no use to you.

No one is thinking of you this evening.

Your determination has gotten you where you are today.

You will always be surrounded.

If you see someone, why not have doubts?

You have no sense and you don’t know what time it is.

Nothing in this one.

 

Please ignore the music. it is not for you.

If you stop looking for what you want, you will be sure to find it and lose interest in it.

Everything will now come your way and go right past you.

You do not need to be patient anymore: do not think, do not listen, do not heed signs.

You should regard delays and setbacks as normal.

Versatility is beyond your reach.

A good home is too expensive.

 

You are unable to show your true self to others. You have no true self.

You will conquer all obstacles and achieve world domination, but first you must shave your mustache.

You will notice that nothing has changed in the near future.

You are capable of repeating everything endlessly.

Don’t put your egg in one basket.

A true friend always walks away when you start whining.

A small house will not hold as much as a big one. This should not be a problem for you.

You have a superficial understanding of the arts and music.

You will never forget a friend who owes you.

You will go a long way.

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Doug Lang is from Swansea in Wales. He came to Washington DC in 1973, the year that his novel, Freaks, was published by New English Library. He ran a now legendary reading series at Folio Books in Dupont Circle from January 1976 to June 1978. His erudite command of literature, cinema, music, and visual art, along with his wit, intellectual generosity, and good will, made him the most popular professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he taught writing for 37 years. His most recent book is dérangé, published by Primary Writing in DC in 2013. A new collection, In the Works, Selected Poems 1973–2013, is forthcoming from DC’s Edge Books. For more of Doug’s poems, see the Beltway Poetry Quarterly. For his 2008 post on the poetry of the 1970s, click here.  His film blog from 2007 is also worth checking out. For a multi-part, six-hour conversation between Terence Winch and Doug Lang, visit PennSound. The Doug Lang Papers are held by the Burns Library at Boston College.  [editor’s note: Doug is currently off-line, but I will make sure he gets any comments on this post.] 

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   Doug Lang with Blaise Cendrars book in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann.

Patricia Spears Jones: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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If I Were Rita Hayworth

 

I would hear Spanish first.

My father would teach me how to shimmer.

My mother would keep her mouth shut.

 

I would wear red dresses at age 12

and dance like a woman many years older.

I would dance in my father's arms.

 

Later I would dye my hair red

and pluck the last Spanish words from my mouth.

 

I would masquerade as an American­

that healthy girl next door who knows

how to crack a whip.

 

I would dream only in black and white

(after Technicolor, some peace is needed).

 

As the Studio built a whole world for me

full of fresh cream and gingerbread, I would seek

out the darkest men, nigger dark, then fuck them

into marriage. I would wed a Prince of Darkness

and bear daughters named for the perfumes of Arabia.

 

If l were Rita Hayworth, strung between living a lie

and bearing a sickness so furious it ages me to dream of it,

I would rage in my illness, make a black hole

wide enough to swallow the damnation of my beauty.

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Patricia Spears Jones grew up in Arkansas and has lived and worked in New York City since the mid 1970s.  She is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist. The recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2017, Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and other books. Her poems are widely anthologized, including in the forthcoming in 250 Years of African American Poetry: Why African American Poetry Matters Today.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, msmagazine.com, and numerous other print and online journals.  She co-edited ORDINARY WOMEN: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets (1978) and edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). She curated programs as Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn.  She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University, and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence.  She has taught summer poetry workshops at Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Naropa, Rutgers University, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and Wild Seeds Workshop for Medgar Evers College and at The Poetry Project, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, for Cave Canem New York classes and at branches of the NYPL and the BPL. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. 

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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.

Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

The last time I saw Tim Dlugos was 30 December 1989. We met for dinner at Kramer Books & Afterwords, the first bookstore/café in the land (as far as I know). It’s one of the few independent bookstores still going strong in DC, but probably more because of the food than the books. Tim had been battling AIDS for a while, and I remember being a little apprehensive about seeing him, wondering to what extent the disease might have changed him. So his arrival came as a relief, a cause for optimism—he looked better than ever, and seemed full of energy and purpose.

Starting in the early 1970s, Tim and I were part of a group of poets who participated in an open reading every Monday night in a room over the Community Book Shop in Dupont Circle in DC. The readings, called Mass Transit, were started by Michael Lally in 1971.  Mass Transit was a poetry lab, where all experiments were welcome, or at least tolerated. Many poets came up through Mass Transit, and became friends—Ed Cox, Lee Lally, Beth Joselow, Tina Darragh, Pete Inman, Liam Rector, Lynne Dreyer, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Bernie Welt, to mention a few. We hosted a reading series at the Pyramid Gallery, bringing poets like John Ashbery to town to read with local poets. We also started a publishing venture called Some of Us Press, bringing out chapbooks by everyone from Ed Cox to Bruce Andrews. Michael left for New York in 1975, and I think Tim left town around the same time. Fortunately, Doug Lang appeared on the scene and, in his capacity as manager of Folio Books, also in Dupont Circle, became the same kind of catalyst that Michael Lally had been. Doug’s Folio readings featured Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, Ray DiPalma, Barbara Guest, Maureen Owen, Susan Howe, Fielding Dawson, Ted Greenwald, and dozens of others, each usually paired with a DC poet. Doug, who started a small press called Jawbone and was part of another called Titanic Books, also hosted a number of workshops, whose participants included Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, and others.

In fact, Some of Us Press published High There by Tim in 1973, which I believe was his first book, and in 1977, Jawbone brought out Tim’s chapbook For Years. In New York, Tim seemed to flourish. He became editor of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter for a while, his magnetism and openness as a person always drawing people to him. He also partied hard in the big city. Later, in poems like “Powerless,” he would write with great passion about getting sober.

Tim’s masterpiece is the poem “G-9,” named after the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in NYC. I’m not an expert in the literature to come out of the AIDS epidemic, but it’s hard to believe there is anything in that body of work more vivid and powerful than this poem (here's the text of "G-9"). In November of 1989, Tim sent me a fat envelope of poems—“Here are the fruits of my hospital stay and my first week out.” I was blown away the contents, which included “Powerless” and “G-9.” He was doing his best work in his final year of life.  “G-9” was accepted by the Paris Review not long before Tim died, of complications from AIDS on December 3, 1990, at age 40. He never lived to see the issue (#115) come out, but he was delighted to know that it would be in the magazine.

The good news is that Tim’s friend, the poet David Trinidad, is working on the first complete poems of Tim Dlugos. I’ve looked at a chunk of this manuscript, and I very much believe its publication will be a landmark literary event, bringing back to public attention an amazing and important writer. Like Whitman, Tim, through his poems, seems to be with us still. (Wikipedia entry on Tim: click here.)

In his research, David came up with a poem by Tim that I had no memory of, but was very grateful to have. I think the poem is from 1973, when I was the poetry book buyer at a shop called Discount Books:

THINGS I MIGHT DO
for Terry Winch

Might write a letter to Jim Carroll
this p.m., I finally found his address.
Might get an answer; probably not.
Might start crying when Joey calls
tonight. Might wonder if he slept
with Michael; probably won’t ask.
Some time might remember the name of
the star that the statue on the fountain
at the Circle resembles: not Leslie Howard,
but that’s pretty close. Might quit
work today, might dream about my job
again tonight, the 4th night in a row.
Might lose something if I keep on
working. Might forget to cash my check
again. Might go out dancing
with Billy whom I might call this afternoon,
and might go to bed with when parents split
for West Coast in just two weeks. Might
look for an apartment. Might make
a tremendous break and move to New York City

Might do the streets. Might get crabs.
Might be missing the world’s most beautiful
boy by writing now. Might get a sunburn.
Might go bald. Might fall asleep on the bench
like some old bum. Might leave the Circle.
Might check the poems out at Discount Books,
find Joe Brainard, find Geraud. Might wave
to Terry as I just walk past, his waving back
a p.m. highlight and distinct possibility.

Ed. note: From the archive; we first posted this piece on July 28, 2008.

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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