The Best American Poetry

Carolyn Heilbrun on Barzun, Fadiman, and Trilling [by Barbara Fisher]

When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling

By Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Carolyn Heilbrun is best known for her books of feminist theory, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny and Writing a Woman’s life, but she also wrote a small book that few seem to know, titled When Men Were the Only Modes We Had: My teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. Published by the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, this compelling book describes a young woman’s earnest search for an appropriate academic model when there were none.

The three models Heilbrun found for her motivation, inspiration and fantasy were, of necessity, men. There were no older women for a young woman to admire, emulate or imitate. The few women who were literature professors at universities were sadly deficient as models. They were unmarried, unloved, and unbeautiful. Heilbrun did not want to be them, but she did not want to be excluded from the world of male accomplishment.

Thus, she was in the uncomfortable position of wanting to join a club that did not want her as a member. Even more uncomfortable was her desire to join the club while also wanting to dismantle it.

Before recognizing her wish to be a serious student of literature, she admired the unpretentious writing of Clifton Fadiman, whose modestly titled and popular book Reading I’ve Liked, she delighted in at the age of fifteen. Fadiman, whom she never met, considered himself a pitchman-professor, a popular commentator, a mere book reviewer. Heilbrun writes of him with affection and admiration for his curiosity, his precision, and his unpedantic prose.

She writes about her Columbia professor and subsequently her colleague Jacques Barzun with gratitude. Although terrifying at first, Barzun was kind and courteous to students. He happily shared with Heilbrun his interest in detective novels as well as his appreciation of high culture. Most importantly and surprisingly, he offered her something like friendship as well as encouragement.

But it is Lionel Trilling, remote, diffident, and shy who truly captured her spirit and her mind. Although she grew somewhat disenchanted with him, she treasures what he represented to her — an important kind of honor and courage and an “enduring gift for inspiring with its essential magic a piece of literature only seriously engaged with for the first time.” (p. 145)

But what drew her to him most powerfully was that he seemed to offer salvation, “Not religious salvation, of course, but a sense of how to live in a culture I both treasured and wished to overturn. What Trilling provided was an acrobatic balance between ‘bourgeois’ values and the need radically to affect them.  It was in literature that he believed this balance, and profound instruction on how to live, could be found.” (p. 26)

When accused of having no position, of always being in-between, Trilling responded, “Between is the only honest place to be.” (p. 52) Between was where Heilbrun lived at the time.

I have tried to reconstruct how I came to know Heilbrun. I believe it happened like this. Heilbrun, as the token woman, sat on a committee that awarded fellowships in the spring of 1969, when I applied for financial aid to continue on for my second year in the graduate program in English literature at Columbia. Against her strong objections, the committee denied me the fellowship that she believed I deserved. She fought for me and lost, and then she sought me out to reassure and encourage me. It was an extremely kind and generous thing to do.

Though I hardly knew her when she brought me this comfort and consolation, I came to know her, value her, and confide in her.

Some of what I confided in her about my time at Bennington College, she borrowed for a character in one of the detective novels she was working on in secret at the time. Titled Poetic Justice and featuring her female detective, Kate Fansler, the fiction was published under the pseudonym Amanda Cross in 1970. The character who resembles me has been elegantly idealized. Stunning, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she is named, like me, Barbara. She is also fierce and fearless, and the only character in the novel with enough guts to deliver a scathing put-down to Professor Cudlipp, the villain of the piece. Lionel Trilling forms the basis for a major character in the same novel. Only slightly disguised as Professor Clemance, he turns out to be the unwitting murderer in the case. Many years later, when ther portrait of Barbara in the fiction was brought to my attention, I was flattered by my cameo appearance and completely surprised to learn of Heilbrun’s second career.

I knew Carolyn in 1969-70 at a time before she became an outspoken feminist, while she was still trying to be admitted to the unwelcoming Columbia fraternity. Denying her Jewishness and disguising her feminist beliefs, she moved uneasily and probably unhappily about Columbia. As one of the very few women professors on campus, she was a person of great interest to me, but she was not a figure I wished to emulate. Only later did she herself become a mentor, a model, and a heroine for me and for a multitude of smart, ambitious women.

Barbara Fisher is currently working on a biography of Lionel Trilling.

A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes [by Witold Gombrowicz]

Who hasn’t wished for a painless way to find out what the big shots of philosophy – the Hegels and Kants, the Nietzsches and Sartres – thought of the human condition? It has never made for easy reading, the pondering of such formidable thinkers, and most explainers and textbooks tend either to get things wrong or to massacre the language.

Still, the reader aproaching Kant or Hegel needs help, and when it comes from someone with a sense of humor and a refusal to be boring, my heart leaps up.

So it did when I opened Witold Gombrowicz’s Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (trans. Benjamin Ivry; Yale University Press), an exceptional effort at summarizing concepts in bold, declarative sentences. Descartes had one important idea, “absolute doubt.” Kierkegaard had grown up on Hegel’s philosophy, then suddenly “declared war on him, in one of culture’s most dramatic moments.”

Gombrowicz (1904-1969), arguably Poland’s greatest modern novelist, took Schopenhauer's pessimism in stride. Schopenauer's "is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality." 

Gombrowicz writes with a comic wit that made him persona non grata in his Soviet-controlled homeland. He spent his last years lecturing in Paris. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, which he was working on when he died, is like the course in philosophy you wish you had taken in your junior year.

-- DL (2004). Reading the book rekindled my fascination with Schopenhauer and inspired me to write my poem "The Will to Live," which went on to win the Laurence Goldstein Award from the Michigan Quarterly Review. Pictured above: Raphael's "School of Athens."  

The Will to Live [by David Lehman]

“They say that Schopenhauer [pictured] is pessimistic. That is not saying very much. [His] is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality.”

– Witold Gombrowicz, A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

1. Arthur Schopenhauer was a competitive man
   who felt nothing but scorn for Hegel.
   So he scheduled his philosophy lectures
   on the same day and at the same time
   and therefore Hegel had a packed auditorium
   while only a handful of us – a Polish writer,
   an ex-girlfriend, a few wayward apostles
   and I – heard Schopenhauer’s lectures
   on Descartes, doubt, and the will to live.

2. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Everything proceeds from this proposition.

3. Many philosophers, professional sad sacks,
   make merry with women and whiskey at night.
   Not Schopenhauer. He was logical. Eating
   a delicacy like pressed goose livers with
   a good Sauterne proved only that nothing
   exists except the temporary satisfaction
   of a hunger that will return and a thirst
   without which no liquid tastes good.
   Pleasure is merely the absence of pain,
   not a thing in itself, and the same may be said
   of peace in relation to war. And yet –

4. Look at all the things we need to endure –
   death and pain, struggle and fear –
   in order for the species to survive
   and so great is our determination to live
   that endure these hardships we do, putting
   a good face on things, hurricanes
   and suicide bombers, the death of adulthood
   and the abandonment of the beautiful
   English language. And yet –

5. One of the apostles asked about suicides.
   What about them, Schopenhauer replied.
   "Don’t they invalidate your theory
    Of the will to live?” “Not at all,”
    he smiled for once. “In suicide they prove
    the will to live is greater than they are.”

6. There were two proofs:

    (a) God must exist
    if we can conceive of god

    (b) God must but cannot exist
    if we can conceive of that
    than which nothing greater
    can be or be conceived.

    Therefore,
    God has to exist
    as a logical possibility
    impossible to disprove
    or credit.
    That’s what he said.
    I wrote it down.
    You may think he was
    a world-class pessimist
    but then you didn’t know him
    as I did in Berlin
    a hundred years before Hitler.

– David Lehman (October 2004)   

Poetry on Vinyl: An Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli of Fonograf Editions [by Daniel Nester]

I suspect I know what you’re thinking, dear readers. “Poetry and vinyl records?” you exclaim. “That’s a recipe for commercial disaster!” 

To this hypothetical remark I would point out that interest in vinyl records is the highest it’s been in decades. While streaming remains the dominant way we listen to music, vinyl sales have outpaced CD sales for the first time in 34 years. Selling and listening to vinyl is no longer a niche interest for sad, middle-aged men trying to recover a mythical past; it’s for sad people of all ages!

One of the most interesting developments in the poetry on vinyl universe: Fonograf Editions, a bona fide literary record label that was founded in 2016 and has put out a steady run of superb poetry on wax, from Rae Armantrout’s Conflation to Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe’s Stray: A Graphic Tone (cover pictured here), and has recently branched out into CDs and print books such as Lovability by Emily Kendall Frey. There’s just so much to praise and cover in the Fonograf Editions universe, so I reached out to Jeff Alessandrelli, one of their editors. Over email, we talked about records as objects, an upcoming John Ashbery release, and branching out into books.

Fonograf has been around for a couple years now, and its backlist is really impressive. Can you tell me a bit about the receptions among the vinyl and poetry communities? 

Being at quite a few writing conferences and book fairs in the past few years has made clear that people are always really excited to see literary vinyl in the world—even if they don’t have a record player or really listen to records. All of our vinyl releases also come with a download card and poem/liner notes insert, so there have definitely been people who have bought our albums simply for the album-as-artifact (coupled with the electronic listening option).   

I do appreciate your whole packaging and pricing credo. You’re not going for the bespoke and often overpriced vinyl packages we see now during the vinyl renaissance,  but at the same time these are quality records with inserts and the recordings are always high quality.  

Whether it’s a book or record or t-shirt, the actual Fonograf Ed. object is supremely important to us. The goal with our albums is for them to be part of the owner’s collection for the long term. Meaning that I have a lot of literary vinyl records—from Gertrude Stein to Marianne Moore to Albert Camus to Langston Hughes—and I don’t listen to them every day. I sometimes go years without listening to them. But in my opinion the point of a literary album isn’t to constantly be putting it on your turntable; it’s instead to capture a specific time and place by a writer you really like or love. Our first three albums by Eileen Myles, Rae Armantrout and Alice Notley were all, to a certain degree at least, recorded live, and that exact experience will never be recreated, except in listening to the actual album. I like that concept/notion.

Where are your records physically made? Records are so much in demand that I have heard of actual shortages.

We’ve used a variety of different record pressing plants and suppliers over the years. One of the tricks is that most record pressing plants don’t also make album jackets/inserts, so what has often happened is that things are manufactured at different times and then it’s a process of coalescing everything together. That said, we’ve been lucky in that we haven’t had any major delays or anything of that sort…it’s been a learning process, though. It takes a lot of work (and $) to put a vinyl album out, 100%.   

Were there any specific record labels or publishers, past or present, that inspired you to do what you do?  

Caedmon Records was a big influence—a few years back I wrote a bit about Caedmon over here on the website TheFanzine.

OK, as they say in business meetings, blue sky thinking: what’s your dream record project? Any wish-list for releases, or is it a more organic process? 

Next year we’re putting out an archival John Ashbery LP, from a reading he gave in 76—that’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while. Our last LP release—Fodder by Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty—is one that took a while to come together and we’re super happy with how it turned out. It was recorded live in Portland in the summer of 2019 and seems to supremely speak to our present moment. As for other LP releases—moving forward we’re looking to move more into actual music, albeit music that still has a literary bent. In November we’re releasing an album of original music by the poet/musician Brian Laidlaw that takes its album concept and (translated) lyrics from the 19th century French-Canadian poet Emile Nelligan. So we’re very excited about that.  

What's coming up next—any releases you'd like to plug, or photos of your headquarters you can share?

In the future we’re actually going to be as much a book press as a record label. In the last year we’ve released full length collections by the writers Dao Strom (which included a musical album component), Mark Leidner, Charles Valle and Emily Kendal Frey, with two forthcoming debut poetry collections by Brandi Katherine Herrera and Jan Verberkmoes. Next year we have the Ashbery LP, a magazine, a chapbook by Matvei Yankelevich, a poetry collection by Krystal Languell, and an essay collection by Hilary Plum. And in Winter 2023 we’re releasing two volumes by Alice Notley—one a 600-page collection (comprised of 6 books) of new work called The Speak Angel Series and the other a volume (tentatively) entitled The First Four Books of Poems, one that collects all of Notley’s now out of print early collections in one solidified book. So we have a lot in store and are verily hustling.  

Poetry on Vinyl: Ernest Hilbert’s Elegies and Laments [by Daniel Nester]

What would it sound like if a book of poetry had its own musical score, like a film, written specifically to match the poems line for line and word for word?

So begins the liner notes booklet that comes with poet and critic Ernest Hilbert’s LP, Elegies & Laments, which was released in a limited-edition pressing of 100 copies back in 2012. 

Ernest, Ernie, is a good friend. We are both South Jersey boys, both went to Rutgers-Camden, and are both poetry and music nerds. Ernie’s a a real renaissance man, a rare book dealer, and  bon vivant. To hear Ernie hold forth about metal metal bands of all varieties—hair, death, speed, thrash, parody, glam—is one of my life’s immense pleasures. 

It wasn’t that big of a surprise, then, to hear from Ernie about his plans to put out a record to go along with Sixty Sonnets, his 2009 debut collection from Red Hen Press.

[https://open.spotify.com/album/4IKzfIXSR8Z4HridaIklet?utm_source=embed_v2&go=1&play=1&nd=1]

What was surprising? The production value. This is not just a recording of Hilbert reading or performing poems. This is a music and poetry collaboration, produced by Dave Young and Marc Hildenberger, with orchestral composition by Christopher LaRosa. Sixteen poems feature over the course of four tracks, backed by the band Legendary Misbehavior and several string players. The record itself, a beautiful white-colored disc, sounds beautiful through my Technics 1200 turntable. 

Part One, “Failed Escapes,” features a kind of overture of famous spoken word and poetry snippets—Sylvia Plath, others—under a bed of transistor radio squelch sounds, and leads into the first four Hilbert poems. The remaining tracks pull off similar experiments, and even feature guest readers Paul Siegell, Quincy R. Lehr, and Kristine Young.

One question, when it comes to music combined with poetry performances, is if the music will overpower the poetry. There’s always the chance the music will drown out the vocals in the mix, or the music won’t really complement the poetry itself. Or, frankly, the music is more interesting than the poems. In Elegies & Laments, the music and poetry work together magically well, miraculously well. It’s a legitimate collaboration. The photos inside the liner notes show Hilbert drinking a beer at a studio console, watching the musicians lay down bass and guitar tracks, and smoking a cigarette on a rooftop with the Philadelphia skyline in the background. 

As with many things related to Ernie, I’m jealous I didn’t think of doing something like this first. Rounding up musician friends and colleagues to put together a musical score for a poetry book? It sounds like such a simple idea, at least now that Hilbert has done it. Here’s hoping more poets experiment with music with their poetry. And please: put out a vinyl record, so I can fill my house with more records.

Glad to be Unhappy (with Hart Crane and Lorenz Hart) [by David Lehman]

Today is July 21. Hart Crane was born today, so I reread his “Chaplinesque,” a poem inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid. Crane recognized Chaplin as a kindred spirit on an artistic mission like his own. The “we” in the poem stands for the two of them: “We can still love the world, who find / A famished kitten on the step.” In a letter Crane makes it clear that the kitten stands for poetry, and what the poem appears to be saying is that the redemptive nature of modern art makes it a Romantic enterprise, a secular version of a spiritual project.

These are magnificent lines: “We have seen / The moon in lonely alleys make / A grail of laughter of an empty ashcan.” The key phrase here, “a grail of laughter,” is a great example of a poetic image that defies logical analysis, for we instinctively grasp it as a figure of the sublime, though we know that a grail cannot be “of” laughter in any conventional sense. It is a poem I have read many times, and on one of these it dawned on me that Crane’s first name was a hidden subject in the stanza of the poem in which “you” may or may not stand for the world:

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

I am not sure how to construe these lines regardless of whether heart refers to the organ of the body associated with sentiment and romance or to the artist in general and Hart Crane in particular. Why would “blame” attach itself “to us” in either case “if the heart live on”? Who are “you” that we – the artist as embodied by Charles Chaplin and the poet in their separate realms – can evade? It is a difficult poem -- most of Crane’s are -- but then again, conventional meaning is not necessarily what one prizes in Crane’s poetry. Rather it’s the promise of a new meaning, ambiguous and elusive but full of possibility, as exemplified in such a triumphant phrase as “a grail of laughter.”

Poetic logic works in unusual ways, and it’s no accident that several of Robert Frost’s signature poems take place on cold winter nights, or that Hart Crane depicts the heart as inescapable and enduring, or that in a Rodgers and Hart song you can’t be in love unless your “heart stands still.” When Larry Hart writes, in My Funny Valentine, “you make me smile in my heart,” is there a clue here about the nature of the love Hart felt for Rodgers, which the latter could not reciprocate? (Here’s how Frederick Nolan concludes chapter two of his biography of Hart: “Poor Larry,” one of his close friends said. “What a shame he had to fall in love with Dick.”[1]) Could the song’s “unphotographable” but lovable individual, whose “looks are laughable,” be Hart himself? Picture Hart in the splendor of his wit and the sadness of his being the next time you listen to "With a Song in My Heart" or "My Heart Stood Still" and see if it makes a difference.

[1]  Frederick Nolan, Lorenz Hart (Oxford UP, 1994), p. 19.   

Robert Hershon Presents "Counterman," a Poem by Paul Violi

 

This poem by Paul Violi appears in his collection Overnight and has been reprinted in a number of places, including The Best American Poetry.

Counterman

What’ll it be?
   Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

Whudduhyuh want on it?
   A swipe of mayo.
   Pepper but no salt.

You got it. Roast beef on rye
… you want lettuce on that?

   No. Just tomato and mayo.

Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…Salt and pepper?

   No salt.  Just a little pepper.

You got it.  No salt.
You want tomato?

   Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

No lettuce.  You got it.
…No salt, right?

   Right. No salt.

You got it. – Pickle?

   No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
   And pepper.

Pepper.

   Yes, a little pepper.

Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

   Right. No pickle.

You got it.
Next.

   Roast beef on whole wheat, please.
   With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice
   Of beefsteak tomato
   The lettuce splayed, if you will,
   In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
   And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
   In a multi-foil arrangement
   That eschews the Bragdonian pretensions
   Or any idea of divine geometric projection
   For that matter, but simply provides
   A setting for the tomato
   To form a medallion with a dab
   Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
   And—as eclectic as this may sound –
   If the mayonnaise can also be applied\
   Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
   And as a festoon below the medallion,
   That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

   Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
   At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.
Next.

-- Paul Violi

This is my twelfth and last Sunday Poetry Post, and I thought I’d end the party by leaving a big gift box on your doorstep, one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.  You want elegance, wit and a flawless ear?  You got it.

-- Robert Hershon 

from the archive; first posted April 25, 2010

This poem by Paul Violi appears in his collection Overnight and has been reprinted in a number of places, including The Best American Poetry.

Counterman

What’ll it be?
   Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

Whudduhyuh want on it?
   A swipe of mayo.
   Pepper but no salt.

You got it. Roast beef on rye
… you want lettuce on that?

   No. Just tomato and mayo.

Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…Salt and pepper?

   No salt.  Just a little pepper.

You got it.  No salt.
You want tomato?

   Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

No lettuce.  You got it.
…No salt, right?

   Right. No salt.

You got it. – Pickle?

   No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
   And pepper.

Pepper.

   Yes, a little pepper.

Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

   Right. No pickle.

You got it.
Next.

   Roast beef on whole wheat, please.
   With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice
   Of beefsteak tomato
   The lettuce splayed, if you will,
   In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
   And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
   In a multi-foil arrangement
   That eschews the Bragdonian pretensions
   Or any idea of divine geometric projection
   For that matter, but simply provides
   A setting for the tomato
   To form a medallion with a dab
   Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
   And—as eclectic as this may sound –
   If the mayonnaise can also be applied\
   Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
   And as a festoon below the medallion,
   That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

   Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
   At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.
Next.

-- Paul Violi

This is my twelfth and last Sunday Poetry Post, and I thought I’d end the party by leaving a big gift box on your doorstep, one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.  You want elegance, wit and a flawless ear?  You got it.

-- Robert Hershon 

from the archive; first posted April 25, 2010

"Commedia Violi" [by Michael Quattrone]

(Ed note: In 2014, Coldfront published a wide range of writing in an attempt to capture the spirit of Paul Violi and his writing. Here is part 2 -- on 20 July, Paul's birthday.)

Commedia Violi

by Michael Quattrone

Tuesday morning in Putnam Valley, New York:

Population: 9,500
Elevation: Infrequent

Paul Violi is standing at his desk in a navy blue, flannel bathrobe and brown, Ecco walking shoes. He has just returned from a driveway jaunt to retrieve the Times, which his wife, Ann, had run over on her way to work. He tosses the paper aside, removes a deerstalker cap and unwinds a wool scarf from his neck.

“It’s windy out,” he reports. He reaches for his coffee, but the mug has vanished. “By the time I find it, it’ll be cold.” Violi has the stoic squint of a movie star. The corners of his mouth draw in when he smirks, or laughs, or grimaces. Disappointed but not flummoxed—or perhaps flummoxed but not truly disappointed—Violi surveys the familiar territory of his workspace.

The poet’s desk is long and narrow, more sideboard than escritoire. Its antique varnished oak bows beneath the weight of books stacked high on either side of Violi’s circa-1985 Wizard™ word processor. Histories on the left side, everything else on the right. Atop a moldering volume of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria sits a bouquet of cigarette butts in a restaurant-style, glass ashtray, and a red plastic lighter on a half-empty soft-pack of Tareyton cigarettes. He proffers one to his guest before lighting up himself, and then leans over the precarious stacks to peer outside. The second-story window reveals a trapezoid of lawn below, badly in need of raking. Violi has decided to wait for all the maple leaves to fall before addressing them, at which point they will likely be covered in snow, and he will have to chop firewood instead. In the distance, a dog barks at the passing of a neighbor’s invisible car; Violi sits.

Continue reading here.  

See also
http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2011/04/18/paul_violi_66_satirical_poet_wrote_poem_of_index_entries/

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/books/paul-violi-poet-dies-at-66.html

Poetry on Vinyl: Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle [by Daniel Nester]

"You know what they say about actors performing poetry?” my old professor, Philip Levine, once asked our class. “They make bad poems sound good, they make good poems sound good, and they make great poems sound good."

I don't think we necessarily need to unpack that quote, which I think Levine got from someone else. Let's just let it hang in the air as we go over the next entry in our Poetry on Vinyl series: Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle.

I picked up my copy at Last Vestige record store here in Albany back in 2009. Released in 1970, Some Haystacks is in fact a companion double-record release to Some Haystacks Don’t Even Have Any Needle and Other Complete Poems, published by educational publisher Scott, Foresman and Co. in 1969, and edited by Stephen Dunning, Edward G. Lueders, and Hugh Letcher Smith. This is not a rare record. You can buy the record or book used online for under ten bucks. My ex-library copy comes from Doane Stuart, a private school that was located in Albany and now located across the river Rensselaer, NY (pronounced by the locals as REN-sler). File under “Smalbany”: as the library card shows in the image, my copy was once checked out by the sister of none other than the renowned poet and Doane Stuart alum, David Yezzi.

Some Haystacks, from the poem selection to the performances, adds up to a professional, sincere effort to get kids into a selection of poems that, while good and great, aren’t written specifically for young people. They’re not particularly scandalous for kids, either. I’m trying to imagine myself in school, listening to this record, and trying to get into poetry. I don’t think it would have done the trick. I think I’d probably dive back into my beloved Mad magazines.

It is indeed a trip to hear actors read these poems. Tony Randall’s take on e.e. cummings’ “since feeling is first” rings faithful and, well, actorly. Tony winner René Auberjonois (of Deep Space Nine and Benson fame) takes on Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and does it justice. Anne Anglin, whose name I recognize from Scanners and who appears in a TV movie based on Mia Farrow's life, recites Larry Rubin’s “Warning,” a poem I’d never heard of, in an able, affable manner. 

“As the album was being planned, the taped interpretations were auditioned by several hundred students and by teachers and other adults,” reads the liner notes. “These audiences were asked to indicate their reactions to both the poems and their interpretations....the degree of enthusiasm, the spontaneity of discussion, and majority preferences determined the final structuring of the album.”

This account makes the album sound more of a joyless, scientific project than what it is, which is a recording of contemporary actors performing poems of mostly contemporary poems. Considered that way, it makes me wish there were more recordings like this nowadays, even if adds up to a noble experiment, even if it flattens our expectations of poetry and poems in some ways, and even if it doesn’t connect or work—it still does what poetry on vinyl does, which is bring poetry’s musical qualities to the forefront. I mean, imagine current actors reciting current poems from our own era, and putting it on wax, posting performances on YouTube and TikTok. You could do a lot worse with your time, no?  

Someone should digitize this record and post it online so more people can hear The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Donald Harron recite James Wright’s “A Blessing,” or Robert Creeley’s “The Invoice.” Even if it wouldn’t float Philip Levine’s boat.

Mycology [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

photos 2021 (c) Jessica Kerns

This summer we have had so much rain here in the Finger Lakes that mushrooms, both edible and toxic, are popping up everywhere and the hunters are out. Better be careful! Over on Facebook, where friends are posting photos of their fungus finds, polymath Jessica Kerns responded with an emphatic "NO!" when I asked if I could serve up a spectacular mushroom I'd spotted while walking the dog. Elsewhere she notes that "[t]he forests are magical right now. Hunting mushrooms for harvest is therapy." Scroll through her photos, above, and you'll see what she means. "Not all of these are edible," says Jessica, "but two of them are and they are delicious!" Extra credit if you can guess which to saute with butter and garlic and a splash of wine and which belong in an Agatha Christie novel.  

I'm reminded of this poem: 

Mushrooms

        by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
>>>

And this passage from The Debt to Pleasure, a favorite contemporary novel by John Lanchester, also comes to mind: 

    On the seat beside me were my wicker basket, my Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass (hardly ever used or needed), and my copy of Champignons du nos pays by Henri Romagnesi (ditto, though I also keep all six volumes of Champignons du Nord et du Midi by Andre Marchand back at the house).

    In the following account, the alert reader will notice that I am being a little bit coy about the geographical specifics. Forgive me, but we amateur mycologists, especially amateur mycologists of a culinary bent, passionately guard our favored patches of land--a promising batch of cèpes-yielding beeches here, a cropped roadside thronging with ink-caps there, a yonder patch of nettles known to feature spectacular examples of Langermannia gigantea, or the giant puffball, and somewhere else a field with a healthy quantity of cow excrement conducive to the fructation of the nasty tasting but currently popular halucinogen Psilocybe semilanceata, appropriately known in English as the Liberty Cap. (This, by the way, is not as it is sometimes taken to be, the hallucinogen used by the notorious shamans of the Koryk tribe in far Siberia, the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, ingestible via reindeer or indeed human urine, most often popularly reproduced in the image of a re-capped white-dotted toadstool, providing a convenient seat for any momentarily resting elf or fairy. The shamans call that mushroom the Wapag, after a body of magical beings who inhabit the fungi with a view to passing on secrets from the realm of the spirits.) We mushroom hunters are a secretive and wary breed, and it is through ingrained force of habit that I confine my account of the site of my labors to the description: a patch of land somewhere in the south of France. . .

Bon Appetit! 

Our Rules -- for Posts and Comments

 

1

Be kind and courteous

We aim to create a welcoming environment. Let's treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required.

 

2

No hate speech or bullying

Make sure everyone feels safe. Bullying of any kind isn't allowed.

 

3

Self-promotion, spam and irrelevant links aren't allowed.

 

4

Let's keep in mind what made us love poetry in the first place.

Daniel Nester, Guest Author July 19-23

This week we welcome back Daniel Nester as our guest author.  Daniel is the author most recently of Harsh Realm: My 1990s, a collection of poetry and prose poems coming soon from Indolent Books. His previous books include Shader, a memoir; How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction; and The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which he edited. His first two books, God Save My Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On, are hybrid collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His work has appeared New York Times, Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Bennington Review, The Hopkins Review, Word For/Word, Court Green, Love’s Executive Order, Barrelhouse, and other places. He edits Pine Hills Review, the online literary journal of The College of Saint Rose, where he is  professor of English.

Find out more about Daniel here. Follow him on Instagram @danielnestermfa

Welcome, Daniel. 

-- sdl

Stock Lineup [by David Lehman]

Stock Lineup

for Charles North, inventor of the form

Pepsi SS

J. P. Morgan 2B

Apple LF

Microsoft CF

Berkshire Hathaway C

Johnson & Johnson IB

Deere 3B

* Crowdstrike RF

DH Amazon

* LHP  Paypal

RHP Alphabet

 

* = rookie status

Introducing poetry from Scotland: Thomas A. Clark [by Robyn Marsack]

The Homecoming

the true south and the upland grass
the bright glade and the fallen lintel
the driving rain and the sudden calm
the fiddle tune and the rowan berries
the ruined chapel and the black water

the hard road and the steady light
the heat haze and the peat smoke
the pebble bed and the yellow flag
the grey song and the fault line
the dog rose and the meeting place

the keen air and the pine needles
the furze blossom and the brown trout
the far hills and the broken boat
the bleached bones and the summer dwelling
the slack tide and the raised beach

the blue sky and the summit cairn
the hanged crow and the sheep dip
the bracken fronds and the healing pool
the lobster pots and the teasel patch
the old fort and the malt whisky

the scree slope and the circling buzzard
the lonely glen and the heather fire
the sphagnum moss and the golden lichen
the bladder wrack and the shell mound
the west wind and the last harebell 

the lark notes and the ripe brambles
the tweed jacket and the grouse moor
the barbed wire and the holy island
the standing stone and the loud burn
the wild goats and the bog myrtle

We begin with Scotland as observed by one of its most attentive poets. Born in 1944, Thomas A. Clark lives in a small fishing village on the east coast of Scotland, and his affinities lie with poets such as Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker.  He publishes  small books and cards through his own Moschatel Press,  in collaboration with the artist Laurie Clark, while Carcanet Press has published The Hundred Thousand Places (2008) and Yellow & Blue (2014). Clark’s work is spare and meditative, taking its rhythm from the pace of long-distance walking. As Peter Riley remarks, ‘The language doesn’t just advise patience, it enacts it.’ To hear Clark read is to fall under the spell of his phrases, where the seeing ‘I’ is rarely present. ‘The Homecoming’ evokes rural Scotland, her sea, streams and  hills, wild life and history; amongst these, malt whisky takes its place as part of a palette of gold tones. What is manmade in this landscape is dissolving back into the land.

See  http://thomasaclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/
from the archive; first posted January 25, 2015
See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/02/poetry-from-scotland-2-liz-lochhead.html

the true south and the upland grass
the bright glade and the fallen lintel
the driving rain and the sudden calm
the fiddle tune and the rowan berries
the ruined chapel and the black water

the hard road and the steady light
the heat haze and the peat smoke
the pebble bed and the yellow flag
the grey song and the fault line
the dog rose and the meeting place

the keen air and the pine needles
the furze blossom and the brown trout
the far hills and the broken boat
the bleached bones and the summer dwelling
the slack tide and the raised beach

the blue sky and the summit cairn
the hanged crow and the sheep dip
the bracken fronds and the healing pool
the lobster pots and the teasel patch
the old fort and the malt whisky

the scree slope and the circling buzzard
the lonely glen and the heather fire
the sphagnum moss and the golden lichen
the bladder wrack and the shell mound
the west wind and the last harebell 

the lark notes and the ripe brambles
the tweed jacket and the grouse moor
the barbed wire and the holy island
the standing stone and the loud burn
the wild goats and the bog myrtle

We begin with Scotland as observed by one of its most attentive poets. Born in 1944, Thomas A. Clark lives in a small fishing village on the east coast of Scotland, and his affinities lie with poets such as Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker.  He publishes  small books and cards through his own Moschatel Press,  in collaboration with the artist Laurie Clark, while Carcanet Press has published The Hundred Thousand Places (2008) and Yellow & Blue (2014). Clark’s work is spare and meditative, taking its rhythm from the pace of long-distance walking. As Peter Riley remarks, ‘The language doesn’t just advise patience, it enacts it.’ To hear Clark read is to fall under the spell of his phrases, where the seeing ‘I’ is rarely present. ‘The Homecoming’ evokes rural Scotland, her sea, streams and  hills, wild life and history; amongst these, malt whisky takes its place as part of a palette of gold tones. What is manmade in this landscape is dissolving back into the land.

See  http://thomasaclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/
from the archive; first posted January 25, 2015
See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/02/poetry-from-scotland-2-liz-lochhead.html

Ishamel Reed on Tokenism

<<<
On Tokens and Tokenism

From George Washington to Jill Biden, Black literature has long been plagued by ignorant white patrons, who arbitrarily anoint a few writers as symbols of the Black experience

BY

ISHMAEL REED

JULY 07, 2021

Tokens are the bane of Black literature, and for that matter, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American literature. They are often selected arbitrarily as symbols by those who know little about Black literary traditions or literature in general, and their work overshadows the production of writers who might write as well or better.

From George Washington, who anointed the poet Phillis Wheatley back in the day, to Jill Biden, who gave Amanda Gorman the nod earlier this year, a powerful white patron can offer a Black writer huge sales and exposure. In return, these writers become the go-to sources about the Black experience for readers as well as academics who are spared the trouble of viewing Black writing as a tradition that extends at least to the 1700s. This includes Black writer-slaves who wrote in Arabic. Instead, we are limited to renaissances, each generation canceling the previous ones.

Both John A. Williams and John Oliver Killens, who wrote as well as any of the tokens, agreed that once a powerful white literary trend-maker or institution selects a token, segments of the Black cognoscenti line up to ratify the choice no matter their politics. Before the decline of the Black newspapers, those writers who were neglected by the outsiders, who control the patronage networks, could get some space. Langston Hughes, John A. Williams, and Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote for newspapers. Dunbar’s newspaper, The Dayton Tattler, was supported by his classmate Orville Wright. Black writers had influence over which of the younger writers would receive support.

Then came the ascendancy of critics who are housed in universities and paid by foundations. These critics decide which writers will receive grants that might provide them the time to complete creative projects. Critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. controls the patronage of at least three foundations. He often provides grants to his Harvard colleagues instead of awarding them to creative writers. Contrast this with the generosity that Richard Wright extended to a struggling James Baldwin. In 1948, Wright used his influence to provide Baldwin with a Eugene Saxton Memorial Trust fellowship from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

For my part, after the publication of my novel Reckless Eyeballing I was left as literary roadkill because I took aim at some of the dizziest ideas of bourgeois feminists, among them women who regarded Valerie Solanas as a hero, viewed male ejaculation as “an act of war,” or argued that Emmett Till, who allegedly whistled at a Southern white woman—who confessed on her deathbed that she lied—was just as guilty as his murderers. Luckily, I received a cash award from the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks that helped to sustain me, financially.

Who are some of the writers that have been neglected by these guardians of patronage more likely to extend grants to fellow professors than to struggling artists? One of today’s most important Black female writers is homeless. Fortunately, her classic novel is in the midst of a revival as a result of a boost from The Paris Review. She could use a grant.

So could Louise Merriweather. Ninety-five-year-old Merriweather had to raise $36,000 through GoFundMe for round-the-clock care after she contracted COVID-19. Her 1970 Harlem novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, was as good as any Harlem novel including Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. But those who curated Black culture at the time might have found some of her characterizations uncomfortable. For example, her novel reports that Harlem girls had to submit to fondling by lecherous shop owners in exchange for food (a practice that still goes on in my Oakland inner-city neighborhood, except the predators might be Muslim immigrants who have a traditional family in the suburbs and a “baby momma” in the ghetto.) Merriweather might have also been obscured because of her role in halting the film production of William Styron’s 1967 Confessions of Nat Turner, in which the Black hero was subjected to trendy pop psychoanalysis by the author—to which she took objection.

Mrs. Merriweather is a writer who doesn’t hold back. She could have used the backing of Karen Durbin, the white feminist former editor at The Village Voice who takes credit for Gates’ rise as a public intellectual. A Black writer who worked there told me that the white women who had editorial positions were always encouraging her to attack Black men.

Durbin and her ilk are part of a tradition of token creators that reaches back to George Washington. So flattered was Washington by Phillis Wheatley’s 1775 tribute to him that he offered to publish her poem, a panegyric to his achievements, but decided that it would be vain and instead sought to have the poem published by another publisher. Washington sold a slave for rum, raffled off slave children to pay his debts, and was a dedicated fugitive slave hunter. Maybe Ms. Wheatley was not aware of Washington’s treatment of slaves who lived in miserable conditions, according to a visitor to Mount Vernon as he worked to have her poem published. Regardless, Phillis Wheatley became the most famous Black person of her time, and the first Black American literary token. I’m sure that some other poets and storytellers of her time were just as good.

I often get into arguments with liberals, Black and white, when I direct them to writers who write as well as the tokens. They are invested in the belief that because they’ve read Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) they have Black literature covered. Very few of the tokens had as much support from powerful sources as did Baldwin, whose champions were the members of the New York literary elite—literary modernists like William Phillips of The Partisan Review, and Philip Rahv, who was responsible for Baldwin’s receiving a contract for Giovanni’s Room. One of the reasons that Phillips published Baldwin’s Everybody’s Protest Novel, a fierce critique of notable Black protest novels like Richard Wright’s Native Son (albeit with an ironic title, since protest also runs through Baldwin’s novels), was because Phillips regarded Wright as lacking patriotism.

Phillips was the chairman of a literary organization of which I was a member. Without having read their work, Phillips deemed two of my nominations to the board to be unqualified. They were the late Toni Cade Bambara and Leslie Marmon Silko, both of whom are now part of the canon. Silko was just elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If the champions of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which promised to redeem white liberals instead of harming them, had read works other than The Fire Next Time, they would have discovered that by the time he wrote Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, a roman à clef, in 1968, Baldwin had given up on redeeming liberals. In this novel, he gave his sponsors on the white left the finger in such a scathing manner that Mario Puzo was hired to do a hatchet job on the book in The New York Times Book Review on behalf of The Family, the New York literary establishment, which has been laying tokens on Black writers for over 100 years.

After that rebuke of those who brought him fame, according to Truman Capote, who was interviewed by Cecil Brown, and published in Quilt magazine by the late Al Young and me, the New York establishment then treated him like “shit.” Baldwin was replaced by Eldridge Cleaver, who, according to Ralph Ellison, another token with powerful white sponsors, was also “publicity sustained.” The same issue of Quilt carries a story by Mona Simpson, then a student. She is now the publisher of The Paris Review.

Presently, there are more Baldwin imitators than Elvis impersonators. Every token and his brother are writing letters to their nephews. But Baldwin was shrewd. He was writing to the “Chorus of Innocents” who was looking over his shoulder. His was a variation of the old indulgences game that was promoted by the Catholic church in the late Middle Ages. Buy my product and you’ll only have to spend one year in purgatory instead of two. Of course, the Baldwin cult neglects to mention the Black writers that he stepped on during his ascendancy.

The newest star creator is Jill Biden, who heard Amanda Gorman read poetry and chose her as an inaugural poet. Predictably, the Black cultural elite swooned all over this choice, and powerful whites with media power who know little about Black literature chimed in. A chorus of academics and intellectuals, who display their militancy at every opportunity, endorsed Ms. Gorman’s trite, platitudinous high school patriotism, the poetic equivalent of the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Chinese American poet Genny Lim was called a “racist” for pointing out the flaws in the poem.
>>>
 from Tablet (July 7, 2021)
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/tokens-tokenism-black-literature

Kryptonite: A Parable for Bastille Day

"You can't cancel me. I'm Superman."

<<<
Superman 
is just a  flash in the pan. . .

I've been  around the world in a plane,
Settled a revoltuion in Spain,
The North Pole I have charted,
But I can't get started with you. 

On the golf course I'm under par, 
Metro Goldwyn wants me to star,
With queens I have a-la-carted,
But I can't get started with you . . .
>>>

(from "Can't Get Started," music Vernon Duke, lyrics Ira Gershwin; you'll hear it in the background of Chinatown, which has a world-class soundtrack from Jerry Goldsmith.)

A Rainy Night on Broadway in 1957

The Poets House Controversy: The Protest and Monica Youn's Response

from Poets & Writers

<<<
The letter protesting the temporary closing of Poets' House during the pademic, because the institution is saddled with debt] recognized the work and commitment of the board, [executive director Lee Ellen] Briccetti, and [pmanaging director Jane] Preston to sustain Poets House, but described being “saddened and deeply unsettled that, through whatever combination of financial and intra-staff/management crises, the organization has fired its entire staff in an abrupt, unkind, and otherwise questionable manner.” Belladonna* added that the board’s press release did not “assuage the appearance of anti-union, anti-whistleblower retaliation around the timing of this extraordinary move.”

The letter went on to ask the board of directors why they did not opt to furlough staff if they intend to reopen the organization, and why they did not organize a “community-wide fund-raising campaign.” (The iconic San Francisco bookstore City Lights, for example, launched a GoFundMe in April after the pandemic forced it to close; it has since raised nearly $500,000.)

“Without pretending to be versed in the full specifics of institutional culture at Poets House,” the letter continued, “the grievances we are reading about are familiar to us: a personality-driven system of management; exploitative wage labor structures that use the poverty of poetry to take advantage of committed workers, who are often young; desired donors actively being protected from having to reckon with or curb their racist and transmisogynist habits. These are dishonorable and corrosive practices that your staff was correct to call out—for their own workplace environment and for the larger causes at hand.”

The letter concluded by urging the board to reverse their decision to fire staff and to let them unionize. “We want other organizations to learn by your example (take note) because they are no different. There is no poetry in exploiting workers and protecting power. We ask you for an honest engagement with your community. We ask you to commit resources not to lawyers and stonewalling but to positive change. We ask you to accept the need to change and respond ethically, with care for all concerned.”

On December 9, board member and poet Monica Youn responded to several of the questions raised in the Belladonna* letter, and reinforced that the organization temporarily closed because it was operating at a $200,000 deficit and running out of operating funds. She noted that, unlike many literary nonprofits, Poets House faced the challenge of financing and fund-raising for its main service—operating a free, physical library and event space—that was now closed due to the pandemic.

Youn went on to address the charge of union busting: “I am a member of the UAW. I spoke at a UAW rally during which I pulled my child out of school rather than cross the picket line in October. I also work on antiracism and gender equity issues both as part of my job and in my nonprofit involvements. If I thought for one second that that the closing of Poets House was in some way a pretext for either union busting or retaliation for complaints about DEI issues, I would resign from the board immediately.” She added: “Along with other board members, I reviewed financial and other documents as well as the plan to address DEI issues. I didn’t just take management’s word for it. My fiduciary duty is to the institution and to its continuing mission to the public. Although we were focused on the financial crisis rather than on the unionization issue, I and what seemed to be a majority of the board felt that a union rep could serve as a useful liaison, as it has for other arts nonprofits.”

As for the timing of the decision to suspend operations, Youn pointed out that the staff filed the union petition when the organization was nine months into the pandemic and “basically teetering on the edge of the cliff.” She added: “That was just when we were running out of money.” She repeated that the board made the decision when they did so they could pay severance and back vacation pay.

As to why the organization did not opt to launch a public fund-raiser, Youn said it wasn’t seriously considered by the time it became clear that their emergency fund-raising campaign—which they had launched to a smaller group of donors and members of the board itself, raising $189,938, of which the board gave $125,632—was not going to cover payroll for much longer; Youn says payroll expenses amounted to $17,000 per week. Youn also noted that the board did not furlough staff because they are not positive what form Poets House will take in the future. “We did not want our staff to not be seriously looking for jobs and to think that this existential crisis was only short-term—this was a long-term crisis for our revenue model, and Poets House was likely to change its structure and functions in order to survive in this new reality,” she said.

Youn also noted that “the pandemic created challenges for more informal workplace conversation,” and that it was exacerbated by Briccetti being on bereavement leave from late February to mid March, and then on personal leave from June through October.

When asked about the depiction of the workplace shared in Di Liscia’s November 20 piece for Hyperallergic, Youn acknowledged that staff had raised issues about the workplace, but added: “We are taking these issues seriously and we are taking the steps to address them. Yes, there are communication problems. I think a lot of organizations are going through similar periods of self-assessment at this point. We have heard about incidents that made staff uncomfortable and that we plan to address as part of our DEI efforts going forward, including DEI training for the staff and board. Our last communication with staff about specific candidates for DEI facilitators was on November 2, and we had applied for and received funding for this training, which will take place when we resume operations.”
>>>

See "Former Poets House Workers and Board Dispute Reasons for Suspension" (by staff; December 11, 2020). Pictured: Monica Youn.

https://www.pw.org/content/former_poets_house_workers_and_board_dispute_reasons_for_suspension

From “Game-changer: A Philosophy for Homo Ludens” [by Vid Simoniti]

For all who are wondering what the philosophers in England are up to, take a look at “Game-changer: A Philosophy for Homo Ludens” by Vid Simoniti, a review of Games: Agency of Art by C. Thi Nguyen (Oxford UP). Here are the opening grafs:

<<
“Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.” When Jeremy Bentham notoriously declared all pleasures to be interchangeable, he chose a children’s game to represent pleasures of the lower sort. What entertainment could be more banal than push-pin, a sort of Victorian “thumb war” played with pins? Since Bentham’s day, though, games have come a long way. Video games now create more revenue than television, music or films. Together with board games, they span a variety of subgenres, and foster loyal communities of connoisseurs and critics. And yet games are still largely considered to be (mere) entertainment rather than art. They are seldom given sustained attention in literary reviews, say, or in university syllabuses.

Thi Nguyen’s philosophy of games seeks to redress this bias. Games are an art form, Nguyen argues, and their medium is human agency. Just as a painter manipulates pigments to create a likeness, so a game designer induces the players to live out certain patterns of doing things. Chess compels us to deduce and to plan; poker to dissimulate and to take risks; and the ungainly choreographies of Twister push us towards hilarious self-abasement. The art of games is the creation of such “agential modes”, be they intense or jovial, cerebral or daft.
>>>

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/games-c-thi-nguyen-review-vid-simoniti/

In Defense of Ange Mlinko [by David Lehman]

Ange Mlinko is one of our most astute and courageous critics.  She is unafraid to speak her mind; she has a subtle intelligence, does her homework, arrives at an opinion and states it with precision and without worry about crossing the boundaries of conventional wisdom. It is this rare quallity of critical intelligence brought to bear on poetry, something she cares deply about, that would make her valuable even if the times were not as inimical to free spech as they are. Herself a poet, she has a vigorous and lucid prose style.

Here are two brief sections of her characteristically engaging review of two books, Adrienne Rich's Of Women Born and Hilary Holladay's biography, Ther Power of Adrienne Rich (Doubleday, 2020). The review appeared in the London Review of Books (15 July 2021) under the heading "Waiting for the Poetry."  I have a feeling the piece is causing a ruckus in some circles, but it should be read -- the whole piece, not just excerpts -- because of its heartfelt, mindful engagement with an important poet, whatever your politics or your affection (or lack of same) for Adrienne Rich. -- DL

<<<

The collections that mapped Rich’s personal and ideological trajectory during the tumultuous aftermath of [her late husband] Conrad’s suicide include The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978). Stylistically Rich broke no new ground: when she abandoned formalism, she found her footing in the confessionalism of Lowell’s Life Studies and Plath’s Ariel – which, as Holladay points out, ‘had driven a stake in the heart of New Criticism’. But her work was now getting exhilarated responses, such as Margaret Atwood’s review of Diving into the Wreck, with its twist on Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry:

‘When I first heard the author read from it, I felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer. The predominant emotions seemed to be anger and hatred, and these are certainly present; but when I read the poems later, they evoked a far more subtle reaction. Diving into the Wreck is one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it; but what you think about yourself.’

Atwood wasn’t alone. Elaine Showalter, Catharine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan and Susan Griffin were among her admirers. Reporting on the crowd that descended on a women’s bookstore when Rich gave a reading in New York, Holladay says that she ‘was welcomed as a sort of messiah’.

Overall, however, the verdict was mixed and would remain so throughout her career. Holladay refers to an ‘enigmatic’ review by Rosemary Tonks, but there’s nothing enigmatic about it: it is the frank confrontation of a poet of the Nerves with a poet of the Will:

‘In Miss Rich’s work, the moral proportions are valid, the protagonists are sane, responsible persons, and the themes are moving on their courses. Why is it then that we are still waiting for the poetry?’ Reading the poems, Tonks suggests, we are given ‘the illusion, at moments, of having gained an objective picture of events, even of our own thoughts’:

'This is well done, so that we really believe while we are reading it that it is how thoughts behave. In this instance the idiom has justified its impersonal quality by an ability to produce convincing objective effects. It is the clean diction used by all good reporters (the method of Tolstoy when he is reporting), and it is insidious because of its invisibility.'

But what really puzzles Tonks is Rich’s fixation on secondhand suffering. She describes the milieu of the poems as ‘living a life very close to the life of newspapers; Manhattan is a living newspaper’ – a brilliant observation – and marvels at the mind’s ‘intellectual toil of taking on emotions not its own ... Tears of rage can come to our eyes in the street, but usually, if we are scrupulously truthful, from less abstract causes.’ She’s right: Rich’s poetry is overwhelmingly one of sirens heard in the night, cataclysm streamed from the radio. ‘I find myself in tears,’ she writes in ‘Merced’. And then:

I think of Norman Morrison
the Buddhists of Saigon
the black teacher last week
who put himself to death
to waken guilt in hearts
too numb to get the message
in a world masculinity made.

It’s this that makes her so relevant today – when otherwise comfortable people live in thrall to newsfeeds and phone alerts. Rich’s Collected Poems is a century’s compendium of emergencies, telegraphed in proper nouns:

Mississippi, Harpers Ferry, Jaurez, Catalonia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Central America, Lebanon; ‘Appomattox/Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma’; ‘Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.’

Helen Vendler wrote dismayed reviews of Rich’s work, excoriating the stereotypes, the bombast: ‘One longs, reading Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, for the poem to take an unexpected byway, to reverse itself, to mock itself, to question its own premise, to allow itself, in short, some aesthetic independence. In Rich, the moral will is given a dominating role that squeezes the lifeblood out of the imagination.’ But one doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort – unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal. Yet Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics: diagnosed in her early twenties with rheumatoid arthritis, she struggled with bouts of debilitating pain and underwent successive surgeries, including one to screw a metal ‘halo’ to her skull to relieve pressure on the spinal cord. She suggests that Plath’s unkind description of Rich in her twenties – ‘little, round & stumpy’ might be explained by the steroids Rich took for her condition.

. . . . .

Is there a moral here about the futility of self-willed ‘identity’? Or is it a cautionary tale about the religion of achievement? Was Rich afraid that her deepest identity, that of a poet, would vanish without endless revolution? (Remember she was only six when her father published her first poems.) Whatever the case, a stable identity eluded her. That didn’t deter her from creating a poetic record that amounts to more than a thousand printed pages. Her admirers see a woman who stood up to authority, lived by her principles and modelled resistance to racism, misogyny, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, militarism, antisemitism, and class privilege – they won’t be deterred by Holladay’s revelations of interpersonal difficulties. When Lowell died, she wrote to Carruth that ‘his death left me feeling virtually nothing at all’ – though they had been lovers only ten years earlier. Even her relationship with Cliff was fraught with power struggles and substance abuse. They endured until Rich’s death from complications of rheumatoid arthritis in 2012, aged 82. Cliff followed in 2016, aged 69: ‘Alcoholic hepatitis and chronic alcohol abuse were identified as conditions leading to the cause of her death.’

Animus was Rich’s muse. While many were struck by her courage in rejecting the National Medal for the Arts in 1997, it was the culmination of a series of highhanded refusals: in 1977 when Loyola College of Maryland offered her an honorary doctorate, she copied her letter of refusal to the Baltimore Sun. Honorary degrees, she claimed, were a ‘ritual of tokenism’. The same year, she refused to write letters of recommendation for the Guggenheim, and instead wrote to the foundation condemning its discriminatory criteria. As she had been a recipient not once but twice, this repudiation was aimed partly at her own earlier self, the driven ingénue and Harvard wife, who used the ‘St Gugg’ largesse to fund her Oxford education and then to go to the Netherlands (a rejuvenating sojourn part funded by a concomitant spousal award to Conrad). ‘She had made a Talmud out of her life,’ Holladay suggests, ‘the multiple meanings of which demanded endless study, debate, and interpretation.’ But the image that sticks with me is of Adrienne Rich at home in Santa Cruz, recently liberated from the metal halo, tending to a collection of cacti.>>>>

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/ange-mlinko/waiting-for-the-poetry

Photograph of Ange Mlinko from University of Florida (Department of English); caricature from The New Yorker.