The Best American Poetry

Quote of the Day: Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (1903-1989)

Born on this day, 1903, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

“Always there should be a little mistake here and there - I am for it. The people who don't do mistakes are cold like ice. It takes risk to make a mistake. If you don't take risk, you are boring.”

 

-- sdl

BAP 2009: The Gala Launch [by Liz Howort]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

Introducing "Wednesdays with Denise"

Watch this space on Wednesdays for dispatches from Denise Duhamel. Denise’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Find out more about these books and others here. A proponent of collaboration, she and Maureen Seaton have co-authored five collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). Denise was guest editor of the Best American Poetry 2013. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Find more BAP blog posts by and about Denise here. 

Welcome, Denise. 

-- sdl

 

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

For this ‘Wednesdays with Denise,” I point you in the direction of Gulf Stream, Florida International University’s national literary magazine for which I am a faculty advisor.  Here’s a throwback to Ashley M. Jones (an alum of FIU’s MFA program and now Alabama’s Poet Laureate) interviewing David Lehman about the prose poem:

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/archives/online-archives/online-8/features-8/gulf-stream-interviews-david-lehman/

Our latest issue is Spring 2022.  The editors will be reading submissions through November 3 for the next issue.

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/issue-30/

The picture on top, from the issue, is "Marco Island" by Kevin Norwood.
Marco Island, Florida, November 2021
-- September 28, 2022

The Proud Beggar [by Tom Disch]

Am I happy to have lived
When and where I did
America The 20th century
I've often said so
Grateful anyhow for my good luck
But I'll be happier soon
To have shed both when and where
My landlord has had me evicted
Katrina struck
As Charlie lay on the mattress
Of a New York hospice
And he had as little care
For the deaths of those other paupers
As for his own
May I achieve the same
Dark wisdom
Yet still I scrawl
These codicils and think
It matters who gets
Dibs on the dust
From my shitpile
Didn't I write
Just after he died
"Nothing we had
Was worth the having"
And isn't that still true?
These few disintegrating molecules
And then the mattress
Will be rotated
To receive the next deposit
Our chiefs may rejoice
For when they die
Their ships go down
In the same flames
They aren't evicted
They laugh at the poor in their rags
Pushing crook-wheeled grocery carts
Filled with moldy books
Please buy one, Sir
Just a dollar
Less for you

June 1, 2008

"Made Bed" [by Beth Gylys]

Made Bed

He could have been my lover again that night—
a whisper of dress lifting over ears,
the tie unknotting, the sheets predictably white,

the fumbling urgency leaving us breathless, light
from lust tinged by guilt, the vanished years.
He could have been my lover again that night,

confusing past with present, desire with flight,
image with image: elbow, breastbone, sheers—
the tie unknotted, the sheets ironically white.

Entangled, our voices pitching like a kite
in a storm with vowels, bleats, stifled swears...
he could have been my lover again that night

if the night were only and alone, if right
and right had not had different names. Affairs:
the ties unknotting, the sheets iconically white

and damp, and something's broken, lost, bright
as shattered glass, as side-lit, backstage mirrors.
He could have been my lover again that night,
the ties unknit, the sheets shamelessly white.

-- Beth Gylys

from Verse Daily, September 26, 2019

http://www.versedaily.org/2019/madebed.shtml

L'Shana Tova: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

What are the Scariest Poems in the English Language? [by David Lehman]

            What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the dickens out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. There are poems by Emily Dickinson that, like a Magnum .44 wielded by Dirty Harry, could "blow your head clean off." Byron's "Darkness" makes you shudder, and many poems from the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals make you see a skull and bones on the other side of your pillow. You can, however, make the case that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written as dark and frightening a poem as we have.  The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not only the death in quick stages -- brilliantly captured in that line with two dashes -- -- but also the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

             The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror.

              In his "Pensées" (i.e., thoughts), Blaise Pascal wrote: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Here is the final stanza of Frost's "Desert Places":

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL

from the archive; first posted October 31, 2015

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

For my first post, I’d like to highlight Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast which began in December of 2021.  The hosts, James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith, offer insightful, hilarious, dishy (or “Bysshy” in the case of Percy Bysshe Shelley) commentary on all things poetry. These endlessly inventive hosts play literary games like “When Rita Dove Cries” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Rita Dove or Prince) and “More Moore and Moore” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Marianne Moore or Julianne Moore). So far, Hall and Smith have interviewed Maureen Seaton, David Trinidad, Carl Phillips, Miguel Murphy, Jacques J. Rancourt, Diane Seuss, and moi, with more interviews on the way. Breaking Form starts with a warning that the two hosts will gossip, interview, and throw shade, acknowledging “we are not for everyone.” If you have Victorian sensibilities or a low tolerance for raunch, maybe stick with NPR.  But if you are up for filth, poignancy, and belly laughs, you will be hooked. The hosts have an easy banter which makes you feel like you are at a party trying to keep up with really smart people …except you don’t even have to put on your lipstick (I’m looking at you Diane Seuss)! -- Denise Duhamel

https://breakingformpod.buzzsprout.com

"Affirmation" [by Donald Hall]

The late Donald Hall pictured here with his wife, Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall was born on this day in 1928. As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989 -- the second volume in the series -- he taught me much about the making of an anthology. As a man of letters, who felt as comfortable writing a profile of Henry Moore or a sports story about the Boston Celtics as a romantic poem for Jane or an essay in literary appreciation, he proved that the life of a poet and the career of a professional writer could coincide. He worked in a variety of genres and wrote for periodicals as different from one another as The Paris Review and Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe and Yankee, and showed by his example that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do, and all the styles and forms of writing are valid: the interview, the children's story or poem, the textbook, the diatribe, the anecdote, the blessedly unself-centered memoir in which the emphasis is on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Join me in saluting this masterly poet, teacher, editor, writer. -- DL

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-- Donald Hall

Susan Brind Morrow Guest Author September 19-23

Susan Brind Morrow is an author and poet who has written extensively on language and metaphor drawn from the natural world. Morrow studied Greek, Latin, Arabic and hieroglyphic texts as an undergraduate and graduate student in Classics at Columbia University in New York. Morrow first went to Egypt as an archaeologist on the Dakhleh Oasis Project, and continued to live and study in Egypt and Sudan, ultimately as a fellow of the Institute for Current World Affairs, living with the nomadic population for two years, studying the Arabic language and desert traditions with a particular interest in the origin of hieroglyphs in the desert environment. This decade of work became her first book The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, one of three finalists for the Pen Award in 1998. Morrow’s analysis, translation and commentary of the hieroglyphic text in the Pyramid of Unis, The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2015. Morrow is the author of Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World. Morrow’s work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, The Seneca Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her papers are in the Sowell Collection at Texas Tech University.
Susan Brind Morrow is a recipient of the 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Morrow is a fellow of The New York Institute for the Humanities and a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation.

Find out more about Susan Brind Morrow here.

Welcome, Susan. 

--sdl

"Jack Benny's Violin" [by James Cummins and David Lehman]

Jack Benny’s Violin

I have always wanted to write a poem called Jack Benny’s violin.
How often have I begun a poem with that title.
At a key moment a mugger intercepts our man in sin
with a gun. “Your money or your life?”
There follows the longest pause in the history
of stand-up comedy.  “I’m thinking!  I’m thinking!”

Jack Benny’s violin was the thinking
man’s violin,
as if a scratchy sound symbolized Jack’s whole history,
metonymic for the man who wore the title
“King of Comedy” for most of his working life.
No, he couldn’t play it like Henry Mancini;

he played it straight.  Yet in his mind he was a man seen
hurling the javelin in the glory of his youth, not thinking
of his job, his boss, his wife, or of what life
after sixty has to offer.  At night he plays the violin
badly (Brahms’s concerto), but Y. A. Tittle
passes to Del Shofner when he dreams his story

is metonymic for the whole Giants’ story,
even as he might say Del was his main man in sin:
their opponents thought it a sin, to rob them of a title.
Could the mugger have been thinking
it was a sin to rob Jack of his violin?
Or was he just giving Jack the straight line of his life?

“Jack Benny was my role model,” John said.  Life
has been good to the deadpan master of the double-take.  History
to him was like a theme for solo violin:
playing it he proved that the love of god and the need to sin
can coexist.  It defied reason, but thinking, real thinking,
was like that—like a poem abandoned without a title.

We were listening to a new rapper, Li’l N Title,
when John said, apropos nothing and everything, “Life
was a joint, and the Firesign Theater, and poems that did their thinking
at warp speed, and on vinyl.  But I guess all that’s history
now.  Jack Benny shuffled off the stage as Charlie Manson
shuffled on — we should’ve listened better to Jack’s violin.”

And you, dear reader, are entitled to hear this violin
duet and imagine it is a hymn to life, to man and woman in sin,
because it wears its thinking on its sleeve and calls it history.

-- James Cummins and David Lehman (2012)

When Insults Had Class [by Terence Winch]

With thanks to Terence Winch, here are some well-turned insults from back in the day before the era of the ubiquitous four-letter word.

Lady Astor: "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it"
[Note: it has to be said that Churchill is the Yogi Berra of witty British repartee; when you're not sure who came up with the bon mot, Winston's your man.]

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or  of some unspeakable disease."
"That  depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your  mistress."

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.." -- Oscar Wilde

"I  am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend. . . if you have one."
-- George Bernard Shaw to Winston  Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second. . . if there is one." -- Winston Churchill, in response.
[This exchange has been attributed to Shaw and James Whistler.]

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- John  Bright

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain
[A retort a philatelist has to love.]

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -- Mae  West
[In a fit of remorse, a convicted murderer said, "my father should have used a condom!"]

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- Oscar  Wilde

"He  uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts . . . for support rather  than illumination."
-- Andrew Lang  (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." -- Billy Wilder

"I've  had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

from the archive; September 16, 2009

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me [by Delmore Schwartz, 1913-1966]

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me   

                        "the withness of the body"

The heavy bear who goes with me,   
A manifold honey to smear his face,   
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,   
The central ton of every place,   
The hungry beating brutish one   
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,   
Crazy factotum, disheveling all,   
Climbs the building, kicks the football,   
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,   
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,   
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,   
A sweetness intimate as the water's clasp,   
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope   
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.   
—The strutting show-off is terrified,   
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,   
Trembles to think that his quivering meat   
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,   
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,   
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,   
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,   
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,   
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,   
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,   
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed   
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,   
Amid the hundred million of his kind,   
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

When Bad Lines Happen to Good Poems [by Laurence Goldstein]

(Ed note: David Lehman's Bad Line Contest post of September 2 reminded me of this earlier post by Laurence Goldstein. Follow this link to read the many comments on the post when it ran in 2009, then add your own take. sdl)

If you were empowered by the gods to travel back into the canon of poetry in English and change or delete one line, which would it be?  On occasions, sometimes years apart, I’ve put this query to literary acquaintances, and the winner of this unscientific survey is. . . Percy Shelley’s plaintive cry, “I fall upon the thorns of life.  I bleed.”  The reason often given, and it’s clear by the swiftness with which this line is proffered that many of my contacts have not heard the question for the first time, is that this line is a blemish on a great poem that has no other bad line, not even a so-so line, but is poetry at its purest and most consummate perfection.  The poem, of course, is “Ode to the West Wind.”  Actually, I have come to like “I fall upon the thorns of life,” which is thoroughly in tone with the fine succeeding lines, “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”  One has to hear and feel the desperate abandon of the whole passage to appreciate the upsweep of canto 5 when the poet becomes a seer of divine power who, “by the incantation of this verse,” trumpets a prophecy to mankind.

    But “I bleed” is, admittedly, beyond the pale, over the top.  Within the decorum of the poem it reaches too far and the strain of the gasped two words causes an audible snap.  How might we improve the line.  Substitute “, and need” or “, a seed”?  Those are bland enough to not claw at the reader’s taste.  I recall the story of Paul Valéry pausing at a bookstore window and reading two pages of verse from an open book. France’s reigning poetic genius, he tries to improve even one word of the text before him, and fails.  He goes into the bookstore and finds that the book is Racine’s Phèdre.  No, I am not Paul Valéry, and will not presume to tamper with Shelley any longer.

    Another favorite response is (you saw this coming) the last line of the first stanza of Stanley Kunitz’s great poem “Father and Son.”  The speaker pursues the phantom figure of his dead father, who never shared the boy’s childhood (and who, we know, took his life while Stanley was in the womb).  The boy is lost in “the silence unrolling before me as I came, / The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”  The principle is the same as with Shelley:  the high quality of the entire poem casts a brighter light on the offending lapse.  As it happens, a younger and brasher version of myself asked Kunitz about this line on the occasion of his visit to the University of Michigan .  He smiled wanly and gave what I took to be his standard response.  Many people had asked him about the line over the years, but now the poem is so well-known, so often anthologized, even (I reminded him) praised as a precursor to the movement of Confessional Poetry, that it was now too late to change it.  He looked down and said again in a whisper, “Too late.”  Never too late I wanted to reply, but I felt intensely his desire to change the subject.

    There is the problem of failed locutions – Matthew Arnold’s “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad

Ethelbert Miller Reviews "The Best American Poetry 2022"

Read it here

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/best-american-poetry-2022

and for a foretaste, here are a few paragraphs from Ethelbert's review:

<< In the opening paragraph of his introduction Matthew Zapruder tells us what’s coming before we place our order.

“If you are reading this and don’t read much poetry, or feel uncertain in relation to it, you are more than welcome here. Maybe you are browsing in a bookstore, or have been assigned this book for a class, or have received it as a gift. Please know that I chose these poems thinking of you.”

This is an admirable approach to editing a collection of poems. If we were talking about food we would expect carryout even before the pandemic. Might the reader find a milkshake after turning a few pages?

One will find quite a number of poems dealing with death. No surprise here. Our lives the last few years have been restricted; many people separated from their families and loved ones. Death is a writer’s topic, the poet ponders not just loss but the meaning of life. Zapruder writes, “Many of our contemporary poems enter into that conflict between the self and the collective—not to resolve it, which would be impossible, but to clarify our position.”  >>

Zoom! BAP 2022 Launch Reading on Thursday, September 15

Also featuring Major Jackson, Camille Dungy, Jake Skeets, Dara Barrois/Dixon, Shangyang Fang, Brionne Janae -- and surprises!

Dara Barrois/Dixon

Camille Dungy

Shangyang Fang

Major Jackson

Breezy Janae

Ada Limón

Yesenia Montilla

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Matt Rohrer

Diane Seuss

Jake Skeets

To register to attend: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_XoXkYGLYRge3uojdTWmKBA?fbclid=IwAR22y7WUmB8ltsy8QWluNfDulY4Eed37fA-VhT6MgmCC8Iu-Us3IUHlpHZA

 

from "The Fraying of America" [by Robert Hughes]

It took a while but Time got around to reporting Nietzsche's brainstorm announcement. The question mark is merely a rhetorical cover-up. And here are some thoughtful paragraphs from "The Fraying of America" by the magazine's art critic, the late Robert Hughes, thirty years after he filed the article (Time, February 3, 1992). Newsmagazines are usually behind the times -- if you read of a high flying stock in a magazine, the easy money hss been made -- but Hughes was way ahead of the curve. -- WC 

<<<
The obsessive subject of our increasingly sterile confrontation between the two PCs -- the politically and the patriotically correct -- is something clumsily called multiculturalism. America is a place filled with diversity, unsettled histories, images impinging on one another and spawning unexpected shapes. Its polyphony of voices, its constant eddying of claims to identity, is one of the things that make America America. The gigantic, riven, hybridizing, multiracial republic each year receives a major share of the world's emigration, legal or illegal.

To put the argument for multiculturalism in merely practical terms of self- interest: though elites are never going to go away, the composition of those elites is not necessarily static. The future of American ones, in a globalized economy without a cold war, will rest with people who can think and act with informed grace across ethnic, cultural, linguistic lines. And the first step in becoming such a person lies in acknowledging that we are not one big world family, or ever likely to be; that the differences among races, nations, cultures and their various histories are at least as profound and as durable as the similarities; that these differences are not divagations from a European norm but structures eminently worth knowing about for their own sake. In the world that is coming, if you can't navigate difference, you've had it.

Thus if multiculturalism is about learning to see through borders, one can be all in favor of it. But you do not have to listen to the arguments very long before realizing that, in quite a few people's minds, multiculturalism is about something else. Their version means cultural separatism within the larger whole of America. They want to Balkanize culture.

THE AUTHORITY OF THE PAST

This reflects the sense of disappointment and frustration with formal politics, which has caused many people to look to the arts as a field of power, since they have power nowhere else. Thus the arts become an arena for complaint about rights. The result is a gravely distorted notion of the political capacity of the arts, just at the moment when -- because of the pervasiveness of mass media -- they have reached their nadir of real political effect.

One example is the inconclusive debate over "the canon," that oppressive Big Bertha whose muzzle is trained over the battlements of Western Civ at the black, the gay and the female. The canon, we're told, is a list of books by dead Europeans -- Shakespeare and Dante and Tolstoy and Stendhal and John Donne and T.S. Eliot . . . you know, them, the pale, patriarchal penis people. Those who complain about the canon think it creates readers who will never read anything else. What they don't want to admit, at least not publicly, is that most American students don't read much anyway and quite a few, left to their own devices, would not read at all. Their moronic national baby-sitter, the TV set, took care of that. Before long, Americans will think of the time when people sat at home and read books for their own sake, discursively and sometimes even aloud to one another, as a lost era -- the way we now see rural quilting bees in the 1870s.

The quarrel over the canon reflects the sturdy assumption that works of art are, or ought to be, therapeutic. Imbibe The Republic or Phaedo at 19, and you will be one kind of person; study Jane Eyre or Mrs. Dalloway, and you will be another. For in the literary zero-sum game of canon-talk, if you read X, it means that you don't read Y. This is a simple fancy. So is the distrust of the dead, as in "dead white male." Some books are deeper, wider, fuller than others, and more necessary to an understanding of our culture and ourselves. They remain so long after their authors are dead. Those who parrot slogans like "dead white male" might reflect that, in writing, death is relative: Lord Rochester is as dead as Sappho, but not so moribund as Bret Easton Ellis or Andrea Dworkin. Statistically, most authors are dead, but some continue to speak to us with a vividness and urgency that few of the living can rival. And the more we read, the more writers we find who do so, which is why the canon is not a fortress but a permeable membrane.

The sense of quality, of style, of measure, is not an imposition bearing on literature from the domain of class, race or gender. All writers or artists carry in their mind an invisible tribunal of the dead, whose appointment is an imaginative act and not merely a browbeaten response to some notion of authority. This tribunal sits in judgment on their work. They intuit their standards from it. From its verdict there is no appeal. None of the contemporary tricks -- not the fetishization of the personal, not the attempt to shift the aesthetic into the political, not the exhausted fictions of avant-gardism -- will make it go away. If the tribunal weren't there, every first draft would be a final manuscript. You can't fool Mother Culture.

That is why one rejects the renewed attempt to judge writing in terms of its presumed social virtue. Through it, we enter a Marxist never-never land, where all the most retrograde phantoms of Literature as Instrument of Social Utility are trotted forth. Thus the Columbia History of the American Novel declares Harriet Beecher Stowe a better novelist than Herman Melville because she was "socially constructive" and because Uncle Tom's Cabin helped rouse Americans against slavery, whereas the captain of the Pequod was a symbol of laissez-faire capitalism with a bad attitude toward whales.

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,974806-6,00.html

The Great Paradox [by Lionel Trilling]

"Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."

-- Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination

Who can explain it, who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons; wise men never try.

-- Oscar Hammerstein, "Some Enchanted Evening"

But Oscar was writing of love. Is the tendency Trilling describes as inevitable and as beyond reason?

Trilling also wrote, prophetically, "We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."

I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The esay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal. 

The picture on the top right is the cover of Saturday Review, February 12, 1955.-- DL