The Best American Poetry

University cancels SONNETS as "products of white Western culture"

Hello, sucker. Thought you were smart to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet? Think again!

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from the London Daily Mirror 15 May 2022

University of Salford cancels SONNETS from writing course because they are 'products of white Western culture' amid push to 'decolonise the curriculum'

• University of Salford chiefs sideline sonnets from their creative writing course
• Second-year students will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment 
• Historian Dr Zareer Masani called the change ‘patronising’ and ‘outrageous’ 

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 17:34 EDT, 15 May 2022 | UPDATED: 03:42 EDT, 17 May 2022

University chiefs have sidelined sonnets from a creative writing course over concerns they are ‘products of white Western culture’.

The poetic form, notably used by Shakespeare, has fallen foul of efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at the University of Salford.

Following a drive to make the course more diverse, second-year students at the university will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment. 

Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford, said students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.

Acclaimed examples include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ozymandias" which includes the line: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

>>>

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10819139/University-cancels-sonnets-concerns-products-white-Western-culture.html

Sonnet 29

 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 

While it may be obvious to some professors that Shakespeare's sonnet 29 is not only the proiductf of white Western culture but also an act of "colonization," I, a former English major in the king's own regiment, don't understand the logic.  Bragging rights go to anyone who, in the comments field, can explain the reasoning to me. --  DL

"The Mysterious Romance of Murder": "Noir is the paradise of the damned. . ."

On Saturday May 14th The American Scholar posted my essay "The Last Cigarette," adapted from a chapter in my new book, THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER. Here's an excerpt -- and a link. --DL

<<<<
In the first sentence of Too Many Cooks (1938), Rex Stout’s narrator, Archie Goodwin, says that he “lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little, I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit.” That’s quite a lift to be gotten from a smoke.

Leave aside the rush of nicotine. Forget the ritual of opening a pack of unfiltered Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, tamping them down, pulling one out, lighting it, discarding the match, taking the first, satisfying long drag. Cigarettes are the greatest prop of all time: puffing, taking in the smoke, drawing in a deep lungful and slowly expelling it, holding the cigarette between your index and middle fingers, motioning with that hand to underscore a point.

“Cigarettes are sublime,” Richard Klein asserts in a book he wrote to console himself when trying to quit smoking.^[1] Sublime, maybe; sexy, for sure. “Cigarettes had to go,” the poet and noir connoisseur Suzanne Lummis concedes. “But the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence.”

There is the cigarette of loneliness, the  cigarette of desperation: Jean Gabin holed up in his attic room, chain-smoking his last Gauloises, as the police close in on him in Le Jour se lève. There is the cigarette of heartbreak, the chain of cigarettes that won’t help you “forget her, or the way that you love her,” with all the force Sinatra can put into the singular female pronoun in “Learnin’ the Blues.” And there is the cigarette of intense nervousness, jeopardy, and fear smoked by Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, stunning in black cap and veil with black dots. When with a shaky hand Dunaway lights up, Jack Nicholson points out that she already has a cigarette going, and says: “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”

Lighting somebody’s cigarette is a powerful gesture, suggesting intimacy or the desire for the same. “If you’re going to smoke, you gotta learn to carry matches,” Dix (Sterling Hayden) says when he lights up Doll (Jean Hagen) in The Asphalt Jungle. Aldo Ray does it for Anne Bancroft at the bar in Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, and Glenn Ford performs the gallantry for Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s Human Desire. When Lana Turner falters trying to light her cigarette, John Garfield does the honors, foreshadowing the adultery and murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The movie producer played by Kirk Douglas teaches the self-same Lana Turner how to smoke sexily in The Bad and the Beautiful, while Dick Powell has the flame Claire Trevor needs in Murder, My Sweet.

In her discussion of smoking, Suzanne Lummis also cites In a Lonely Place. Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) sit at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky-smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks: I was a lonely one, till you. “He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture,” Loomis writes. “He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that’s what happiness felt like.’ And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song. That’s noir.”

There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”^[3]

The cigarette as a prize: In The Snake Pit (1948), a so-called “problem picture” dramatizing the plight of the mentally ill, Dr. Kik (Leo Genn) wants to reward Virginia Stuart Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) for the progress she has made. On the wall, a framed photograph of a severe Sigmund Freud looks on as the doctor kindly says, “What about a cigarette now?”

The romantic cigarette, in defeat: On television in the late ’50s, Sinatra in fedora and raincoat, with a cigarette in his hand, takes his seat at the bar. It’s nearly three in the morning, and he begins to sing “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” with only Bill Miller’s piano accompaniment. There’s a glass, an ashtray, and an open pack of smokes on the bar. Joe the bartender pours whiskey into the glass when the singer tells him to “set ‘em up,” and Sinatra strikes a match, keeps it lit, stares at the flame, while telling his new pal Joe that tonight he is drinking “to the end of a brief episode.” Only then does he bring the flame to the cigarette and take a puff. He keeps the cigarette between fingers, or taps the ashes into the tray, and holds the glass of whiskey while singing. The song as written ends with “the long, long road,” but Sinatra never reaches the period at the end of the line. After “the long,” he pauses, takes a drag of his cigarette, repeats “the long,” and lets the music drift off like smoke.

The cigarette of melancholia: A triptych of Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd—World War II army buddies who reunite 10 years later and realize that they loathe themselves and one another—shows the guys smoking and singing “Once I had a dream, what a joke / Gone is that dream, up in smoke” in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the most underrated of the Kelly and Stanley Donen movie musicals, with wonderful lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The macho cigarette, cool under pressure: In The Godfather (1972), Michael Corleone is standing in front of the hospital where his wounded father lies unprotected. Enzo, the baker, has chosen this moment to visit with flowers, and Michael enlists him to help stand guard. The two men are to stand there, impersonating gun men, in an effort to deter the hit men driving by. Enzo, understandably nervous, needs a cigarette. Hand goes to pocket, pulls out cigarette. But his hands shake, he can’t work his lighter. Michael calmly takes the Zippo and lights him up. The ruse works. Michael has displayed initiative and imagination, and the signature of that moment is his icy demeanor when firing up Enzo’s lighter. By contrast, the unfiltered Camel that Michael smokes at the end of The Godfather II (1974) is a mark of his aloneness. The cigarette is his only friend as he sits and broods on the end of an ethic, a family, a film.

The royalty of cigarette smokers are Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep (1946) ends with the two of them in a car. She “guesses” that she’s in love with him, and he “guesses” that he’s in love with her. Says he: “What’s wrong with you?” She: “Nothing you can’t fix.” And next to the words THE END, there is an ashtray with two smoldering cigarettes in it.

Ah, cigarettes. What a wonderful prop. So sexy! Too bad they cause cancer.
>>>>
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-last-cigarette/

Today is the official publication date of THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER: CRIME, DETECTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF NOIR. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda writes:

<<<
David Lehman’s “The Mysterious Romance of Murder” surveys “crime, detection and the Spirit of the Noir” in fiction, film, poetry and music. As one might expect from this distinguished poet and versatile man of letters, his sprightly new book isn’t just deeply knowledgeable, it’s also a lot of fun. >>>

-- Washington Post, May 5, 2022

It's not in my book, but I just remembered that James Merrill once told me that he thought smoking was "a form of suicidal yoga."

"Rasa" by Joanne Dominique Dwyer hits the stands!

From Rasa by Joanne Dominique Dwyer, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. It's terrific!

Chaperone

To keep watch. Not my indigo eye on the ball
nor in the blacklight peephole.
Not on the blisters dappling my feet.
Nor on the beauty or the ugly in the mirror.
But on the children in the playground and on the fur-matted squirrels.
From a wooden tower, the running herds.
From the leaning alabaster lighthouse, a one-armed mermaid
out-swimming the divers, with tanks on their backs –
chasing her, like erasers of magic.
Eye on the bird, that its head does not hit glass.
On the sky, for the sun’s second coming, though she
might have been inebriated when she swore to return.
My small room smelling like canned tuna fish in oil.
My dry cough keeping both of us awake.
Chaperone: The supervision of vulnerable women in public spaces.
A shepherd is a chaperone.
Neruda asking What do they call the sadness of a solitary sheep?
Derived from the French word for a hood or a cape.
Covering the eyes of a prisoner.
And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue.
I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue.
And someone did come and grab my wrists.

Ars Poetica of “Chaperone” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer

       The conception of the poem Chaperone was hatched from the word itself. I am enamored with the geneses and meanings of words. In the act of making poems, I often find myself going down the yellow brick roads and the snow-covered paths of etymology. A treasure hunt that feeds my propensity for leaping imagistic associations in my poems.

       The existence of oral and written language is proof enough for me that life, in all its marvels and mysteries, is worthy of digging one’s heart and heels into. And so goes the poet, heave-ho, not deterred by the glob of purple Jell-O or virescent leek aioli on her chin, into the fecund snake pit, into the scalding sea of lava, into the sunbaked salt flats of the imagination with only a canteen of water and a quill. And what gets pulled out of the hat of the poet’s mind is sometimes preordained through careful plodding and other times is an unexpected dinner guest. And on rare occasions a bedfellow or a take-to-the-grave beacon of light.

       What excites me about Chaperone is that sans a premeditated intention or conceit, other than exploring its etymology, the poem, without forced entry, unveils a communiqué. It’s as if the poet gets out of the way and the poem writes itself. The poem is no longer mine. I do not possess it; it possesses me.

       And what uncoils is a suggested hierarchy of what to keep our eyes on, what to care for and be custodial towards, and what not to. The poem advises us not be concerned with the mundane, the lurid, or the beauty and the ugly of our individual bodies. Instead, to focus on beings with less agency, like children and animals. A one-armed mermaid and an anthropomorphized sun extends the girth of the poem into the mythic – an area of great psychic and cultural importance. Asking for custodial attention there as well, less there be an extinction of the mythological as well as the natural world.

       The poem drops in register with two confessional lines about the ordinary and faulted life of the speaker – her cough and her room smelling like tuna. From there, several imagistic pit stops or fueling stations caravan in a powerful line from Neruda’s “Book of Questions.” Pablo becomes a guest star.

       The poem culminates in narrative – at first global or collective: And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue. Then ends with the autobiographical singular: I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue. /And someone did come and grab my wrists.

       The unexpected surfacing of the mud memory, in the act of writing Chaperone, was a raptured surprise.

Listening to "The Man from Laramie" [by Elizabeth Samet]

The first thing you have to know is that the opinions I express as a guest blogger on the Best American Poetry site are my own and do not reflect those of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. The second thing you have to know is that I've been teaching a film course this semester. One of my favorite things about this class is that it allows me to see old films in new ways. One of the several films my students and I screened together was Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955), with James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, and Donald Crisp. David Thomson is exactly right when he suggests in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that what fuels The Man from Laramie as well as the other Westerns Stewart did with Mann are “the suppressed neuroses” of “the adventurer hero.” Some of my students were a bit surprised at Stewart's anguished character and at the film’s open-endedness. They expected less ambiguity in a movie from the 1950s. Perhaps part of what helped to create that expectation was the obligatory title song, “The Man from Laramie,” which, like the songs that begin High Noon and so many other Westerns of the period, digests the whole messy business into a straightforward ballad. The experience of seeing Laramie again got me thinking about music in Westerns in general and about the music from a very different kind of Western: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Jonny Greenwood’s score for that recent film is a world away from “The Man from Laramie.” Blood, however, like certain older films, is as remarkable for its silences as for its sounds. I admire Anderson’s willingness to let the picture speak for itself. He clearly trusted the image (and the acting of Daniel Day Lewis). Today going to the movies can be a deafening experience--especially the previews. Quiet movies are increasingly rare, as are filmmakers who permit long periods of silence. Remember the prairie bus stop scene in North by Northwest? Silence on the screen; I’d like to hear a little more of that.

from the archive; first posted May 19, 2008

Ron Horning on W. H. Auden in "The Brooklyn Rail"

The first question anyone interested in W. H. Auden’s poetry is likely to ask about the sumptuous new edition of the poems is, “What will I learn from these 2,000 pages that I don’t know from the Collected Poems, also edited by Edward Mendelson, that came out in 1976, has been in print ever since, and is 670 pages long?” Or, if you believe none of the poems Auden wrote after emigrating to the US bears comparison with those written in the late 1920s and throughout the thirties, “What will I find out about Auden’s best poetry that I don’t know from 1977’s The English Auden, also edited by Mendelson and still in print, where the poetry takes up a mere 300 pages?”

The answer to both is a lot, and the value added starts with the presentation. While the Collected Poems is retrospective, printing the poems Auden wanted as he wanted them by the time of his death, the Princeton Poems, exhilaratingly prospective, prints the poems as they first appeared in individual books, recreating Auden’s poetic development as it actually happened from 1928 to 1972, including many poems later eliminated, plus the poems from the posthumous Thank You, Fog. Also here are poems Auden published in magazines but chose not to reprint, as well as poems he didn’t publish anywhere, such as the first thirty-six lines of an unfinished 1940 sestina, “We get the Dialectic fairly well,” that sprang to life in The New York Review of Books last December.

Material changes are accounted for in textual notes that make up more than half the page count. Since the notes do not identify or explain names and other references, this may seem like a lot of unnecessary information unless you’re working on a PhD, but Auden treated his published books as notebooks and could make several different sets of revisions before deciding a poem was finished. This was certainly true up to his Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 and Collected Longer Poems, published in 1966 and 1968 respectively, and he might have made further changes to earlier poems and revised later poems if he’d had the chances he did in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Not only do the textual notes list Auden’s second, third, and fourth thoughts, they point out mistakes and euphemisms introduced by typists and publishers on each side of the Atlantic. So the notes are key to this edition of the poetry, which is both the climax of Princeton’s edition of Auden’s complete works and the foundation on which it was built.

And yet … you’d be hard pressed to find contemporary poems in English that exhibit an affinity with the poems gathered here, the kind of affinity that, without being anything like them, the early poems have with poems by Hardy and Frost, Yeats and Moore. Scads of poems in the 1930s and ’40s were influenced by Auden, some written by his friends, but the most recent readable and widely-available proof of his influence I know of is John Ashbery’s Some Trees, published in 1956, and a poem Philip Larkin added to his 1946 The North Ship when it was reprinted 20 years later, “Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair.” This apparent remoteness is partly a result of the inevitable historicizing of a recognized poet and partly due to changes inside and outside poetry during the last half century.

Some markers are obvious. One example: for Auden, “man” and “mankind” are nouns that include women as well as men, and he’s not concerned about the long range effects of a shared name that privileges one sex over another. Unless a poem is a love poem or character study, “he” is the generic pronoun for anyone alive: you take it in stride to get somewhere with the poems, and if you don’t, goodbye. But what really sets Auden’s poetry apart from poems now is his perpetual technical engagement with the poetry in English that came before him, starting with Beowulf—a body of work he expands in all directions, contributing elegies, clerihews, sonnet sequences, ballads, prose poems, villanelles, and englyns. For starters.

The sheer surprising novelty and quality of the alliterative, politically inflected, and electrifying early poems—“The Watershed,” “This Lunar Beauty,” “A Bride in the 30’s”—owe as much to the times and Auden’s life while England was homebase, as they do to the country itself. He lived in Weimar Berlin a year following graduation from Oxford in 1927, taught in prep schools back in England, wrote plays with Christopher Isherwood, traveled to Iceland with Louis MacNeice, provided texts for Benjamin Britten to set, wrote scripts and did odd jobs for a government-sponsored documentary film unit, visited the Spanish Republican front in 1937, and was in China with Isherwood when the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Once he traded national frontiers for state lines, though, Auden settled into what was rapidly becoming a norm for US poets, supporting himself by writing criticism, anthologizing, and traipsing around the country from college to college, teaching, lecturing, and giving readings. After 1945 he spent summers abroad.

It was on their return trip from China in 1938 that Auden and Isherwood saw the United States for the first time, liked what they saw, and decided to move there: Isherwood to Los Angeles, Auden to New York. They came back early in 1939, preceded by formidable reputations, and some Britons never forgave them for what they considered outright desertion during the worst threat to their native country since Napoleon. But the two men were professional writers, not soldiers or diplomats, and expecting them to put their lives on hold for the national emergency makes as much sense as believing that Neville Chamberlain wouldn’t have signed the Munich Agreement if he’d read The Orators or Isherwood’s Sally Bowles. Worth remembering, too, is that homosexuality was a criminal offense in England until 1967.

Taken together, the poems fall into three main groups, with the English Auden succeeded not so much by a US Auden but, in the four long poems written during and right after World War II, by a consciousness cutting loose from England and Europe and finding its bearings in the States and a renewed commitment to Christianity. “New Year Letter,” “For the Time Being,” “The Sea and the Mirror,” and “The Age of Anxiety” were the last long poems Auden wrote, but he hadn’t stopped writing shorter poems, often in thematic suites, and he continued to write them, along with opera libretti with his partner Chester Kallman and a steady stream of translations and critical prose, until he died in a Viennese hotel room in 1973.

While his poetry does relax after 1947’s Age of Anxiety, it never loses its brilliance or technical ability, and the later lyrics are as remarkable in their more circuitous ways as the earlier pointed work. Here are the endings of “First Things First,” “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno,” and “Partition”:

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
—So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

                                    *

…though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

                                    *

The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Besides assembling some of the most vivid poems ever committed to English, their pertinence no more confined to poetry than to the century in which they were written, these two books are also a monument to the acumen, scholarship, and perseverance of Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and the editor of the complete works, who brings to his task here, as he did to the eight volumes of plays, libretti, and prose, a single minded devotion usually associated with editors of Victorian poets’ letters, Cecil Y. Lang for instance, and, further back, establishers of texts like Herbert J. C. Grierson, whose 1912 edition of John Donne’s poems is still the only one that counts. You’d say Auden lucked out if you didn’t believe his work deserves this kind of meticulous and exemplary care.  -- Ron Horning

from The Brooklyn Rail, May 2022

Ron Horning is a poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanitas, and Blazing Stadium. He’s written about photography and rock-and-roll for the Rail.

"In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton" (Nightboat Books) [by David Lehman]

We welcome the publication of In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, a posthumous collection by a wonderful poet who died in 1994, entirely too young. The publisher is Nightboat Books, and the work of editing it was shared by Philip Clark and the late Reginald Shepherd. I knew Donald well; he is represented in an anthology I edited, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, for which he wrote a statement about the occasion and objectives of one of his poems. It may be the only critical statement that he ever published. Three of Donald's poems appeared in a low-circulation magazine I edited, Poetry in Motion, in the late 1970s.

In the picture above, Donald is the fourth poet from the left. To his right is Tim Dlugos, with Dennis Cooper standing on the other side of Tim. Amy Gerstler is second from the right. Also in the picture are Michael Silverblatt, Bob Flanagan, and Ed Smith.  The venue is the Ear Inn and I'd have to guess the date as early 1980s.

Donald, a great fan of Mexican food (chimichangas), loved the music of Khachaturian, was born in Texas but you'd never know ity from his speech, wrote a sensually abstract poetry. Donald was a most hodpitabler man; in the 1980s when I lived in Ithaca, I sometimes stayed at Donald's place on my visits to the city. In one of them, the poem "Blue Skies" was in his typewriter. In a letter to me dated December 13, 1982, he wrote, “For the longest time I’ve wanted to write things [ie. poems] that are both funny and serious, obvious and mysterious. And in [‘Empire of the Air’], perhaps, I have succeeded. Less so in ‘Winter Garden.’ And ‘Masters of Self-Abuse’. . .well, it has its moments. Someday, you’ll have to tell me what you think.”

Here is the first paragraph of Douglas Crase's afterword to the new collection.

<<  The appearance in print of the selected poems of Donald Britton is an affront to cynicism and a triumph over fate. When Donald died, in 1994, it was sadly reasonable to assume that the influence of his poetry would be confined to the few who had preserved a copy of his single book, the slender, deceptively titled Italy, published thirteen years earlier. As the few became fewer it seemed all but certain the audience for his poems would disappear. Donald never taught, so there were no students to mature into positions of critical authority. There was no keeper of the flame to incite publication, no posthumous foundation to subsidize it, not even a martyrology in place to demand it out of sentiment. The survival of his work would have to come about, instead, as a pure instance of “go little booke”—an instance that must now warm the heart of anyone who has ever believed in poetry. It was the poems in Italy themselves, free of professional standing or obligation, that inspired the successive affections of two remarkable editors and the confident publisher of the present selection. Donald, who despite his brilliance was a modest and self-effacing person, would be surprised.
>>

Crase's afterword concludes with this thought about the "longevity" of poetry as opposed to a "career" in the field.

<<<       Donald’s posthumous success in inspiring the publication of his selected poems, coupled with the undeniable failure in worldly terms of his career, is occasion to wonder if the career is ever the same as poetry itself. From time to time a critic will observe that Hart Crane’s suicide, for example, or Joe Brainard’s decision to stop making art, may be regarded as proof the artist realized what his admirers don’t, that the work was a failure and the career could not be sustained. The critic doesn’t quite dare to draw the same conclusion from the abjuration of Rimbaud or the suicide of Sylvia Plath, which reveals of course that the logic in the first case was as opportunistic as it is preposterous. Someday a critic will do us the service of disentangling poetry from the standard map of a professional career. The map is a convenience to committees but meaningless to the future reader—the twelve-year-old boy or girl in San Angelo—the very reader poets must hope to have. What is useful to that boy or girl is sometimes no more than a phrase, perhaps a book or poem, amounting to a style of mind in which to escape or dwell. I recognized such a style of mind in Donald Britton and it made us friends. The first time I heard him read his work in public was at the Ear Inn in New York, the afternoon of March 7, 1981. Blond as ever, he was in that environment an apparition of nervous grace. I can’t say he connected with the audience; he certainly didn’t flatter it. He conveyed, perhaps too clearly for the occasion, his sense of an audience beyond the room. One got the feeling he expected to reach across time and elicit a response composed of the same respect for intellect and desire that we had there, in the Ear Inn, that Saturday afternoon. Donald's poems were not lessons or anecdotes. They are invitations to the unending contemplation of ourselves, and things beyond us, that makes the human species a window on creation.
>>>

Here is a poem by Donald Britton from the new volume:

Notes on the Articulation of Time

It becomes a critical account
of all that’s spoken, done:
the drawing in of breaths, even,
these nights whose atmosphere
reminds us of mountains,
white volumes of air. We need

these narratives, we want them:
the city lies before us
and some one person in the sleeve
of a streetlamp awaits
our enraptured attention
as we await the concept of the city

which tells us how we move
in the particolored geographies
about us. We can’t be certain
we are moving toward this person
nor do we require certitude.
It is enough to acknowledge

the movement itself, shavings
of light inscribing a circle.
Our childlike sense of the other
bears these forces toward
completion and renewal,
a lexis of infatuated sounds.

-- Donald Britton

From the archive; first posted May 18, 2016

Alexey Tsvetkov: In Memoriam [by Andrey Gritsman]

“I am here together with myself and alone”

The great Russian poet Alexey Tsvetkov just passed away (February 1947- May 12, 2022).

He is a world-class poet, a world poet who happened to write in Russian.

Tsvetkov created his own poetic language, unrepeatable, addictive. Once started, a poem or a book could not be put down. One read to the end possessed by its magic. His incredible play, not of words, but of thoughts and images, bewitched the reader, as did his humor.

Alexey told us: whenever I write, I always write about death. The poet puts what’s created along with what is unsayable into metaphorical form. That is the power of poetry by Tsvetkov: he always writes about what is most important, what is deepest and darkest, presented metaphorically with an amazing mastery of words and meanings. His style of recital  I would characterize as toreutic, precise, cadential, and, on the other hand, paradoxically close to a natural speech, personal verbal communication.

Born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, formerly the Austro-Hungarian empire, Tsvetkov was educated in Odessa and Moscow. In Moscow together with other famous poets (Soprovsky, Gandlevsky, Kenzheev) he founded legendary underground poetry group Moscow Time. He emigrated to USA in 1975 after his arrest in Moscow and forced move to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya. He was awarded PhD degree in Slavic Studies from University of Michigan. 

Tsvetkov spent many years in Europe working as a journalist for the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (Munich and Prague, 1989-2004). He anchored the RFE/RL Russian Service programs The Seventh Continent and The Atlantic Diary.  He lived his last years in New York City among his poet friends. Supporting himself as a freelance journalist and essayist, he produced a large body of original, unique and very popular poetry. He read his poems at the Cornelia Street Café, Russian Samovar, Columbia University and other venues. In 2018 he moved to Israel, where he died.

Tsvetkov was an individual of very broad erudition, rough on the surface, very kind, with stunning sharp sense of humor. His poems in English are most unusual:  cadential, almost syllabo-tonic, very tight. But it looked very natural - the same poet, writing in a different language.

He was the author of ten books of poetry and translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His heritage will be studied and it will take a long time to look into layers of Tsvetkov’s art and thought.

Alexey Tsvetkov

the quiet ones

in a recurring dream i find myself
stuck in a tiny town a green and neat
affair the locals scarce and studiously silent
for the most part avoid me and stay indoors
although i dwell among them i assume
myself to be a thing apart the town
is strangely shorn of outskirts there's a river
flowing from north to south and the main street
cutting across with a bridge in the middle
yet both are terminated in oblivion

beset by this conundrum i've come up
with a hypothesis perhaps the locals
are candidates to be born on earth that never
made up their minds about the matter shaped
in human form already but afraid
to take the plunge hedging their bets and this
is what the actual limbo is like the river
forever runs on the road likewise but both
resolve themselves into the void the locals
would find it pointless to wake up their green
and tidy town remains the same no matter
whichever side of the retina it's on
the quiet ones within their silent walls
what do they want of us they share no subject
with us to serve them as a starting point
for striking up a palaver

it looks
like a half-way house perhaps a railway station
but with the waiting crowd resigned to the tracks
having been dismantled so that no train will ever
stop here they look alive but never having
been actually exiled to our vale of grief
there is no way for them to share our joy
the only thing they envy us in earnest
is death denied to the unborn it is
a mystery for them and a temptation
and i remaining stubbornly asleep
fall into a confusion like a rabbit
teasing a python on the eve of being
consumed by the above and peeking under
death's skirts then part of me awakens i
recall the other's name but hush it up

 

Andrey Gritsman

In Memory of Alexey Tsvetkov

What can be said about unsayable?
Poet departs with all his belongings.
To say nothing: it is unbearable.
On tree of life - invisible markings.

His airborne light verbs, evasive,
Escapable, straight and relentless.
Who knows what one is capable
Of, while alive and restless.

What is left now: only new language
Speaking in tongues, and no sound.
He rests in peace, his last message
Only by those can be found

Only by those, who departed
Crossing the line into darkness
Keeping belongings in heart and
Calling him: the answer is silence.

"Crimson is the Color of Shame": a Poetry Challenge [by Clark Thomas]

Crimson is the Color of Shame
-- for David Lehman

The demand on young Jews
to be less visibly and confidently Jews
is the price of social toleration
which found its most recent iteration
in the Harvard Crimson
editorial endorsing the Philistines vs Samson,
that is, the boycott movement against Israel
which is a big and ugly deal
according to Einat Wilf, in a sound-
ly argued essay. She calls it (BDS) the “pound
of flesh,” echoing The Merchant of Venice,
reminding us of a perpetual menace,
the attempt to intimidate the Jews
into being less Jewy, a typical political ruse.

-- Clark Thomas

"I wrote this poem at David Lehman's invitation in an attempt to refute his statement that 'political poems are usually successful neither as poems nor as political maneuvers.'"  -- C.T.

David Lehman replies: "Clark Thomas wrote to me that he would take up the 'poetry challenge' implicit in my arguing that political poetry is a doomed and often self-defeating proposition. While I applaud his use of rhyme, and the way he condenses an intelligent and ambitious essay into the box of a sonnet, I am far from confident that the result is more than a superior letter to the editor.  What do readers think?"

"Where's that map of the Middle East?" -- God

from Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet
<<<
When I attended college in the United States in the mid-1990s, liberal, left-wing Jews could comfortably be pro-Israel and even active in AIPAC without any fear of repercussions or social pressure to hand over a pound of flesh. That changed with the emergence of J Street, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace, until we arrived at the present condition, in which a Jewish student who does not show herself to be an ally of Students for Justice in Palestine, or does not agree that “Zionism equals racism,” or that Zionism is a form of apartheid, and Nazism, and white supremacy, and whatever other supreme evil will be identified next, cannot be considered a good Jew. This escalation in anti-Israel activism among some young Jews no longer seemed like a natural and excusable choice shaped by different generational circumstances, but the result of a relentless campaign of bullying.

Over the last several months, as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I taught a course called “Zionism and Anti-Zionism.” In the many hours I spent discussing student life with students and faculty alike, it became apparent that the anti-Zionist activism on campus—the college version of the pound of flesh dynamic—was not primarily a form of social protest or political expression, but a form of bullying. The anti-Zionist activists, like classic bullies, deliberately targeted the real and perceived frailties of their Jewish peers—fear or shame in the expression of one’s Jewish identity, with its calls to Jewish solidarity and deep connection to a faraway foreign country.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been one of the most effective expressions of the pound of flesh bullying tactic, inviting young Jews to participate in the cause of “social justice” only to ultimately demand the mutilation of their Jewish identity. BDS has demanded that diaspora Jews not only criticize Israeli government actions, but sever their connections with Israel completely. >>> -- Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet, May 10, 2022

See also https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-anti-zionism-anti-semitism in which Isaac tries to out-argue the head of the antri-defamation league on the subject. The best line is  "Give me a -- Isaac" -- where the speaker's frustration is conveyed beautifully. The reader supplies the missing word, "break."

Kristina Marie Darling Guest Author May 16-20

This week we welcome back Kristina Marie Darling as our guest author. Kristina is the author of thirty-six books, which include Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; Daylight Has Already Come:  Selected Poems 2014 - 2020, which will be published by Black Lawrence Press; Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; Silent Refusal:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing, newly available from Black Ocean; Angel of the North, which is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which was just launched by Persea Books in the United States. Penguin Random House Canada has also published a Canadian edition.  

An expert consultant with the U.S. Fulbright Commission, Dr. Darling’s work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; seven residencies at the American Academy in Rome, where she has also served as an ambassador for recruitment; grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; an artist-in-residence position at the Florence School of Fine Arts; an appointment at Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors. Dr. Darling serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly.  Beginning in the fall of 2022, she will also serve as Publisher-in-Residence at the American University in Rome. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she currently divides her time between the United States and Europe.  Find out more about Kristina here. 

Welcome back, Kristina. 

--sdl

Sudeep Sen introduces Sarah Arvio, Rachel Eliza Griffiths,Vidyan Ravinthiran. . .

"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

Yes, we have no bananas today,
but Cheetos and nacho chips—                                                                                                         
seven different brands—and instant
mashed potatoes complete with sodium                                                                                                  
acid pyrophosphate, and sodium bisulfite.
We have gummi bears and red cinnamon                                                                                         
candy hearts.  Ranch dressing, a whole row
of plastic-wrapped, sliced meat. Line up
for your diacetyl, your free glutamic acid,
your butylated hydroxyanisole.
We have everything but bananas,
those bright phallic bunches, those wrapped
wands of fruit-meat, potassium
hunger bombs, soft, sweet monkey crack.

Gylys writes:
"The poem emerged after my friend Jennifer sent the quotation that is the title as a writing prompt. It’s a bit of a playful rant against processed food.  I wrote it with that old Louis Prima song, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” running through my head.  so the playful energy probably emerged from that tune as much as from the quote."

The poem first appeared in the Crab Orchard Review in March 2019, and then in Gylys's most recent book, Body Braille (Iris Press, 2000). The poem will also asppear in the forthcoming book The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouthed Jars.

Ils ont entendu le vent dans les arbres . . .

Thanks to Jim Cummins for sending this along. Believed to be the only time Johnny Carson sang in public:

Thanks, Jim!   -- sdh

For "Plume," Another Feather in the Cap

The new issue of Plume is out. Edited by the admirably imaginative Danny Lawless, issue #129 (May 2022) contains work by D. Nurkse,  Tomasz Różyck, Susan Aizenberg, Bill Stratton, Jeffrey Skinner, Cartol Muske-Dukes, Lauren Camp, and, well, why don't we just copy the TOC below the picture? I recommend the section "Poets and Translators Speak," in which the writers comment on their work. 

 Ephrem Solomon
Folk Memory 3, Woodcut and mixed media, 2015

Plume: Issue #129 May 2022

Poems

 D. Nurkse Poetry: A Mirror, a Pencil and an Envelope. Seven Minutes with D. Nurkse and Nancy Mitchell

Lauren Camp Small Scenes without Apology

Danielle Blau (Blessed Are) They Who Preserve

David Lehman Three Poems from a Work in Progress

 Antonio Gamoneda Antonio Gamoneda, from Book of the Cold (World Poetry Books, May 2022) translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Jeffrey Skinner Four From Delos

Mark DeCarteret Lives of the Postmodern Poets

Susan Aizenberg Forced March

 Tomasz Różycki Two poems by Tomasz Różycki translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

Zoë Ryder White Close to now

Christopher Howell Ashes of Roses and Blue Chair

Carol Muske-Dukes Spam Risk

Bill Stratton What Almost Killed You

Alejandro Escudé My Fifth Tattoo at the Darkstar Ink Parlor

The Poets and Translators Speak
Rosenthal, Stratton, Aizenberg, et. al.

Book Review
distant transit by Maya Haderlap reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

Featured Selection
 A Travel Guide for the Exiled; An Interview with Zein El-Amine, by Leeya Mehta

Essays and Comment
A Kind of Sorcery: On Shame, Defiance and Moral Imagination by Richard Hoffman

The Fork in the Road: On Frost's Misunderstood Masterwork [by David Lehman]

Not the least of Robert Frost’s accomplishments is that he managed to balance popularity with artistic excellence. Take “The Road Not Taken” (1920), arguably his most famous poem. You probably read it in high school. You will find it any good poetry anthology. And indeed, in its wizardry, the poem deserves the highest accolades. The irony is it has often been loved and quoted – for the wrong reasons. The further irony is that this misunderstanding itself testifies to the subtlety and genius of its creator. The critic David Orr has written an entire book, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (2015), newly in paperback, on this misunderstanding and the nuances of Frost’s design. 

Here is the poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

            The last stanza sounds heroic. The tone – a blend of nostalgia, wistfulness, assertiveness, and pride – is as irresistible as the rhetoric. Look at the last three lines. A master of repetition, Frost repeats a portion of the poem’s opening line and then creates all the drama in the world simply by repeating the first person pronoun, suspending it across two lines, and clinching it with a rhyme: “and I -- / I took the one less traveled by.”

           The poignant repetition, accompanied by a gently insistent rhyme, is a Frost signature. Think of the end of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which John F. Kennedy carried in his wallet:  “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” The effect is magical. In “Stopping By Woods,” it is the specter of death that is evoked. In “The Road Not Taken,” it is the choice facing anyone about to commence upon a career.

            And here’s where the misunderstanding comes in. Generations of commencement speakers have quoted “The Road Not Taken,” because of its perceived message. Avoid the common route. Go your own way. Be a maverick, a non-conformist in the great American tradition of Emerson and Thoreau.

            But now go back to the second stanza. Note lines nine and ten. As far as the traffic on them, the two roads are “really,” Frost acknowledges, “about the same.”  Two questions immediately occur. If there is little to distinguish the two roads, what do we make of the last stanza? And if the poem is not a straightforward assertion of non-conformism, what is it about?

            One thing it is about is the inevitability of regret. You cannot “be one traveler” and take both paths. At any crossroads you must choose, and though you may keep alive the hope that you’ll return someday, you know deep down you will never get a second chance. “I doubted if I should ever come back.”

            What about the proud boast made in the last stanza? The key line, easy to overlook, is “I shall be telling this with a sigh.” The sigh communicates regret even as it paves the way for a stirring declaration of independence. But this declaration may just be a case of a proud man praising his own past.

            So subtle is this seemingly plain-spoken poet that he can have it both ways. He can appeal to readers who look for adages, nuggets of wisdom, and he can reward those who value subtlety and complexity. Frost’s economy is exemplary: the “yellow” wood in line one suffices to place us in autumn. And the vagueness of “Somewhere ages and ages hence” establishes that the speaker is an older gentleman given to recollecting the past with a distant look in his eyes. For those captivated by the poem, David Orr’s book is highly recommended.

.           When I teach “The Road Not Taken,” I ask students: What is the sneakiest word in the poem? Hint: it is in the title. The word is “not,” a powerful word because it gives presence to absence, summoning up what is not there. The poem is about the road the speaker takes, not about the one disdained. The road not taken is the road we will never know except perhaps in alternative versions of history, novels that center, for example, on the assassination of President Kennedy, at whose inauguration in 1961 Frost recited another of his great poems “The Gift Outright.”  --DL

Ed. Note: First published as a "masterpiece" column in The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2016, under the heading of "Clearing a Path to Truth: Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ is a poem that’s loved for the wrong reasons."

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html   
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

"B-Flat Elegy" [by Stanley Moss]

Stanley tells us he wrote this poem as an elegy for Richard Howard. "The poem is not a home run, it's a bunt, and I'm running as fast as I can to first base."

B-Flat Elegy

Three cheers and chairs for Richard who died,
the cause was complications of dementia,
Finders keepers, losers weepers,
along the Seine, the Thames, the Sligo and Hudson.
God knows why it makes a poet friend recall
a kind, contrary Irish lady, Bridget Boland, 
film writer, novelist, and gardener,
my close, close, close friend
I never slept with,
my devout Roman Catholic friend
lost her faith, couldn’t bear to hear music
for some reason hidden from her.

Incidentally I cheer
for a graduate student librarian,
Willa, whose mother is a horticulturist.
Her daughter can’t stand or abide flowers, 
ugly roses, tulips, or violets.
I bet God loves Mr. Auden
who received a letter from his mother
after she died, he could not read,
it would have broken his heart forever.

Listening to Mozart and Bach, I think about
a lady who lost her father, husband, and children
at Dachau. She made out okay, but fell down,
got torn apart when she heard music.
I refuse to defend myself.
Bridget, my Irish lady born in London,
and the death camp lady
were somehow sisters. It’s strange.
Cheer if it pleases you, cheer
for the joy of not remembering your name.
Notre-Dame is on fire, in Madrid the Gran Via
snakes to the Palace Hotel.

Unkempt hair
almost rhymes with dementia.
In the Ukraine a loudspeaker tells the static news:
a boy, six years old, watched his mother raped
for two days by Russian troops.
The six year old son’s hair turned gray.
I hide feelings from myself
my inappropriate, demented preoccupations,
I mourn for a dozen eggs,  Richard, and Bridget.

-- Stanley Moss. Photo credit: Bill Hayward.

Five years on: On Reading with Jerome Sala and David Shapiro at the Zinc Bar Last evening [by David Lehman]

 

What a pleasure
to read with
Jerome Sala and
my old Columbia
and Clare colleges’
chum, David Shapiro,
at the Zinc
Bar last evening.

Jerome read first.
His corporate sonnets
reflect years of
labor that Marx
would characterize as
alienated in the
tall tower of
Time and Life
on Sixth Avenue.

There is beauty
in a cliche 
just as there
is humor and
then just to
clinch the deal
comes the rhyme.
Well played, Jerome.

The host beckoned.
I read second:
I read poems
in the manner
of Catullus,Herrick,
Goethe, Keats, Mayakovsky,
Millay, Stevens, Dorothy
Parker, Charles Bukowski,
and Kenneth Koch.
I also told
an old joke.

David Shapiro read
poems from his
new book including
"Why Rimabud?" and
conversed with the
darkness wondering whether
you could see
the darkness or
whether total darkness
was a poem.
"As Kafka wrote,
there is hope,
but not for
us," he concluded.

The mermaids sang
to him. The
crowd cheered. I
promised I'd write
about the event
using only three
words per line.
Thanks were made.

All were glad.
Drinks were had. 

-- David Lehman

from the archive; first posted May 8, 2017 (je pense)

Lauren Hilger, Guest Author May 8-12

This week we welcome Lauren Hilger as our guest author. Lauren is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) and Morality Play (Poetry NW Editions, Summer 2022). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens. For more about Lauren Hilger, visit her website here.  Follow her on social media: Twitter: @lauren_hilger  Insta: @lauren.hilger    

Read poems by Lauren Hilger here: 

Jersey Shore, Sixth Finch

Greenery, Chicago Review

 

Welcome, Lauren.  Sdl

Adrian Matejka Named POETRY Magazine's New Editor

Adrian Matejka has been named editor of POETRY magazine. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Matejka grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was named Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018–19

 Here's the official announcement: 

Back in 2014, we posted Erin Belieu's conversation with Adrian:

Interviews with Poets--Day 3--Adrian Matejka (by Erin Belieu)

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

************************************************************************************

EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

from the archive; first posted September 10, 2014

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

************************************************************************************

EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

"Gift Means Poison in German" [by David Lehman]

And poisson means fish in French.
Therefore, on my first trip to Paris,
reading a menu I recalled
my cousin, now a fashionable designer,
then a survivor of Dachau, twelve years old,
a week after arrival in New York City
when Truman was President. I thought
of what she must have thought when,
for the first time, she rode on the Broadway bus
and passed one gift shop after another.

Poison itself is a funny word, a gift horse
given by deceitful Greeks: look in its mouth
and see: it sounds what it says, it seems.
For example, five years ago I walked
into the Jolly Corner grocery store
which no longer stands on 75th Street
and Columbus Avenue. A man and his wife,
ahead of me in line, were buying Camels
for him and Winstons for her when
a display case of brightly packaged junk food
next to the cash register caught his eye.
His wife said, in a tone it would take a gifted actress
years to perfect, “That stuff is poison!”
and then she stalked out of the store as though,
perhaps, the ongoing argument that defined their marriage
had taken a new, subtle turn. Tilting his head
toward the door, the man behind the counter
faced the abandoned husband and said,
“She’s poison.” He said it as if he knew
and by god I thought he did: very possibly both of them
were right, I decided: and wondered what the husband
was thinking, who had suffered in silence
this perfect stranger to insult his wife.

David Lehman

David Lehman is the author of numerous collections of poetry including New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), and The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000). His latest book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins, 2015). He is the series editor of Best American Poetry and edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP for A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken, 2009). He teaches in the New School graduate writing program. 

from Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983. Posted by VQR,  December 12, 2003. Poem appears in Lehman's first book, An Alternative to Speech (1986).

" Why I Wrote 'Old Heart' " [by Peter Ferry]

From Nu?Detroit, this write-up of Peter Ferry's novel Old Heart, which has been adapted for the theater and will premiere in Detroit next week.

<<<
United States forces liberated the southern third of The Netherlands on September 17, 1944. On that date 47 years later, I wheeled my bike out of the driveway on my way to the Dutch school where I was teaching. I was astounded to discover that every house on my street was flying an American flag.

That Saturday, a marching band came down our residential street. My wife and I bundled up our two little kids and followed along. Two blocks away, beside a small canal, there was a crowd, a ceremony, martial music, the unveiling of a plaque and rounds of applause. We joined right in.

Since the celebration was all in Dutch, I later asked my neighbor what it was about. He told me that during World War II, the Nazis went through the towns and villages and took the bells from the churches to melt down for bullets.

“We hid ours,” he said. “We sank it in that canal and put it back in the belfry after the war was over.”

I turned and looked at the bell tower, the same one I passed every day walking my daughter to school. The war had never seemed so close.

With half a dozen World War I and II museums spread across the Netherlands, the country’s recent military history is much in evidence. On a cross country bike ride with some Dutch friends, we stopped for a picnic lunch and spread our blanket atop a concrete slab.

“What are we sitting on?” I asked my Dutch Fulbright partner Corinne Mostert.

“A bunker. It’s from the war.”

“Oh.”

It turns out that these abandoned fortifications can be found all along the coast.

In Hoek van Holland, there is an intact subterranean World War I fort that is now a museum. Much of the City of Rotterdam is a grim monument to the Second World War. Between May 10 and May 14,1940, the Nazis bombed its center to smithereens. The result was a blank canvas, and after the war it became a laboratory for architectural experimentation. The Dutch built dozens of structures — from railway stations to bridges to apartment buildings to markets — that became models or prototypes. Echoes of these innovative designs can be found around the world.

Right in the middle of the area that was destroyed stands the Stadhuis or city hall that dates to 1920.

“Isn’t that amazing,” I said to Corinne. “How could the Nazis have missed that?”

“'Because they wanted to. It’s where all the birth records were kept. It’s how they found the Jews."

The Dutch are not known to be demonstrative people, but feelings about the war still run deep. Some are negative, but others are not. Early on in the year we spent in the town of Veldhoven, our five-year-old daughter came out of her Dutch kindergarten in tears because she had had a bad day. So had her mom. So they cried together. A Dutch mother there to collect her child saw this and told her own mother about it. At Christmastime, a small neatly wrapped package appeared on our doorstep with a carefully worded note:

               Once long ago your people helped my people. I have always wanted to say thank you. This is my thank you.

Inside was a hand knit child’s sweater with a rainbow across the front.

I wrote Old Heart, in part, as a thank you of my own to the Dutch people and a tribute to their strength, resilience, spirit and enormous generosity.

Editor’s Note: Peter Ferry is the author of Old Heart, the award-winning novel adapted for a play premiering at Detroit’s Redford Theater May 14 and 15. Ferry was a Fulbright Exchange teacher in the Netherlands in 1991-1992. We asked him to reflect on some of the experiences that led him to write Old Heart, a bittersweet love story set at the end of World War II and in 2006.

for more from this write-up in Nu?Detroit click here