The Best American Poetry

Talking Pictures: On "The Asphalt Jungle'"

Ed note: Since December 2019 I have written a regular column on classic movies for The American Scholar. Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest, which was posted yesterday (April 17) under the heading "Blind Accidents: How John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle brilliantly epitomizes the caper film." -- DL

<<< “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town,” Louis the “box man” Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) tells Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe),the mastermind of a million-dollar jewel heist, in John Huston’s 1950 noir, The Asphalt Jungle. Surprise: the robbery doesn’t go off as brilliantly planned. Doc, also known as “the professor” and “Herr Doktor,” will end up in prison along with Gus (James Whitmore), the hunchbacked counterman who is a top-notch getaway driver; Cobby (Marc Lawrence), a bookie; and Lieutenant Ditrich (Barry Kelley), a crooked cop . Louis will leave a widow and a small, sickly child after a watchman is punched and falls to the ground,  misfiring his gun, and a slug finds its home in Louis’s belly. Oh, yes—“box man” means safecracker.

Based on the novel by W. R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle is the ur-example for the whole caper subgenre. The booty could be the gems in a shop on Paris’s ritzy rue de Rivoli (Rififi), the proceeds at the track on the day of a big race (The Killing) or, in a comic register, the take of five Las Vegas casinos at midnight on New Year’s Eve (Ocean’s Eleven). Whatever the setting, the result is failure, not because of the ratiocinative powers of the police but because of the inevitability of betrayal, miscalculation, and violent death. Nearly all of noir is founded on this assumption made somehow romantic and even glamorous.
>>>

For the rest of this piece, please link to The American Scholar website here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/blind-accidents/
For other "Talking Pictures" posts, click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/dept/sections/departments/talking-pictures/

Photo: Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, and Sam Jaffe in The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

David Lehman’s “Peace and War in American Poetry” [by Anne Holmes]

from the Library of Congress:

November 22, 2019 by Anne Holmes

The following essay was written in 2012 by David Lehman as part of the Poetry and Literature Center’s online “Poetry of American History” series that ran from 2012-2014. The series included essays and interviews by leaders in the literary field, including former Poet Laureate Consultants in Poetry, that illustrated how poems by Americans helped define or expand the country. The aim was to complement conventional historical texts and showcase poetry’s place as an essential tool for recording our nation’s past. Though the series is no longer active, From the Catbird Seat is reprinting essays from “Poetry of American History” to bring them new light.

Peace and War in American Poetry

1.

David Lehman. Photo credit: W. T. Pfefferle

War and Peace: the title of Tolstoy’s massive novel of Napoleonic Europe trips off the tongue. Not so “peace and war”: the inversion of the customary word order represents a victory of hope over experience—or of the poetry of aspiration over the prose of sad actuality. As a subject for poetry, war has an immediate advantage over peace, because war entails action, whereas the experience of peace is an absence, not noticed until not there, like the absence of pain.

War was the first subject to quicken the pen of an epic poet. But the author of The Iliad knew that the scenes of the Trojan hero Hector in battle with Patroclus and later with Achilles would not be so remarkable if there were not also a tender scene of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache, his wife, and their baby boy, who is scared of daddy’s helmet. Epic poets have followed Homer’s lead, widening the scope of war inevitably to include peace—whether peace be construed as the absence of hostilities or as something positive in its own right.

In book XVIII of The Iliad, Homer describes the shield of Achilles that the lame god Hephaistos has fashioned for him. The shield depicts two cities—one embattled, besieged; the other functional, with a wedding and a court of civil law where disputants can settle their differences without violence. In layers of concentric circles the shield also shows some of the things conspicuously lacking in fields of battle: a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a circle of young men and women dancing, the bounty of the harvest—the fruits of peace.

W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” (1952), one of the strongest poems of his later period, invokes the Homeric precedent to throw into relief the bleakness he sees around him. World War II may have ended in 1945, but Auden’s shield reflects a world dominated by implacable hostility between erstwhile allies. We were at peace, but the supreme metaphor of the era joined winter freeze with military might: the Cold War. On the shield of Achilles, as Auden pictures it in 1952, are “an unintelligible multitude,” a disembodied voice proving “by statistics that some cause was just,” a martyrdom enclosed in barbed wire, a thug wielding a weapon:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.

It is a deeply pessimistic view of human nature.

In his elegy for William Butler Yeats (1939), Auden declared that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The assertion is debatable; exceptions come to mind. But the larger point seems incontestable. Art and even love are powerless against the ruthless use of superior force. Indifference “is the least / We have to fear from man or beast.” [1] A spirited rendition of Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto will not stop the wars, make the old young again, or lower the price of bread. [2] “We must love one another or die”: a noble sentiment, but it will not help you win the war against the Third Reich or the Empire of Japan. [3]

The early Auden might have branded as defeatist some of the things he writes in his later work. During the Spanish Civil War, Auden had written about “the necessary murder,” a phrase he would come to rue, to disown, to revise unsatisfactorily, and to disown again. “Spain, 1937,” the poem containing this offensive phrase, ends with an exhortation to action, for “the time is short and / History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.” In retrospect, this line struck the mature Auden as fundamentally wrong, even wicked, for justice (he came to see) has nothing to do with history or inevitability.

In the years between the “age of anxiety” (Auden, 1946) and the “age of Aquarius” (Hair, 1968), there were few poems of unalloyed joy upon the conclusion of wars that left the populace weary and wounded. The self-consciously public utterance of the time was either a howl or a chant from Allen Ginsberg or perhaps a nervous meditation punctuated with creepy imagery, as in Robert Lowell’s “Fall 1961,” in which a grandfather clock ticks away the seconds and “We are like a lot of wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears.”

Click here for subsequent parts of the essay, including a discussion of World War II poets.

Amy Gerstler in Conversation about "Index of Woman" [Sunday, April 18, 2021]

Chevalier bookstore:
L.A.'S Oldest Independent Bookstore, Est. 1940 

Virtual Event

Monday, April 19, 2021 at 7:00PM

INDEX OF WOMEN
by AMY GERSTLER

the author in conversation with LOUISE STEINMAN

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO JOIN: 

https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/amy-gerstler

 

From a maestra of invention (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

AMY GERSTLER

Author

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play. She is also collaborating with comics artist, author and scholar Trina Robbins on a comic about women comic book artists from the 1940s. 

LOUISE STEINMAN

in conversation

Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history, and reconciliation. Her three books include: The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation; The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.  Steinman founded-- and was for twenty-five years the curator—of the celebrated ALOUD literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Her essays have been published widely, most recently in Los Angeles Review of Books.   She is the editor of the 2018 anthology: Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump. Her installation, “Welcome the Stranger: An Urban Installation for Social Engagement” (with Dorit Cypis), was featured at the 2019 Lublin (Poland) Open City Festival. She is co-director of  The Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California.  Her lead essay, “The Questions We Ask,” appears in the forthcoming volume A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art 1979-2000. www.louisesteinman.com

Join us here | 04/19 at 7PM PT on Zoom

Who said it? [A Challenge]

Remember when the Sunday Times Book Review, frankly middlebrow and proud of it, used to run author's queries ("for a biography of Maxwell Anderson I would be grateful . . .") and legitimate questions from college grads who wanted to track down a favorite quotation (was it Scott Fitzgerald who said "live fast, die young, and have a handsome corpse?") In that spirit I offer you this cocktail party line that would have beguiled Flo Bear.

"If the Kennedy White House was decadent; the Clinton White House was sordid." Who said it? I have asked a lot of smart people, to no avail, and would be grateful for any leads. Meanwhile, my friend Burt Hooton proposes this multiple choice list of possible candidates:

1) Jane Fonda
2) Arthur Schlesinger
3) Diana Trilling
4) Senator Susan Collins
5) Jacques Barzun
6) Lawrence P. Berra

I'm not convinced by any of Burt's suggestions, though the terms of the distinction do sound as though they could have come from #3 or #5, and I appreciate the convention observed in #6.

You get extra points if you can say what Ava Gardner is doing in this post or if you can make a convincing case in favor of Oliver Stone's theory of JFK's assassination. -- DL

Larkin, Uncensored (On Robert Lowell)

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. From the archive; first posted March 18, 2013.

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. From the archive; first posted March 18, 2013.

On the Street Where You Live [by Robert Wrigley]

 

                        “Love takes time to overcome.”--Confucius

Certain love songs beloved by men are listened to with something like derision by women.  So I have been assured, by a woman, and I wonder about that.  I don’t doubt it, but I wonder.  I have known for many years that most of the canonical American songbook “torch songs,” for example, were written by men but in their classic versions sung by women.  Imagine Sarah Vaughn singing “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.”  We are to believe she would never get over loss of the man for whom she carried forever “a torch.”  Right. 

But I would like to consider a song almost diametrically the opposite of a torch song.  I mean “On the Street Where You Live,” jaunty and upbeat, its lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, from the musical play My Fair Lady (Frederick Loewe wrote the music), first staged in 1956, when I was five.  The film version, which I saw in a theater in St. Louis with my parents and sister, appeared in 1964, right about the time I crashed face-first into puberty.  I remember being resistant to the improbable fact that the handsome young Englishman was standing on the street and singing, with orchestral accompaniment, but I also remember thinking that such a feeling as he expressed (turns out the actor was lip-synching; someone else did the expressing), that that feeling might be—I didn’t know—real.  I suppose I wanted it to be.  Why wouldn’t I?  He seemed so happy, so thrilled, that young man, and the lyrics of the song represented his happiness very convincingly, even to, or perhaps especially to, a thirteen year old boy. 

Somehow, I’m sixty-eight now, a year older than Alan Jay Lerner was when he died in 1986 of lung cancer, impoverished, owing the IRS over a million dollars, and unable to pay his medical bills.  Lerner was married eight times.  He said once, “All I can say is if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood.”  (Something in that quip and its delivery is in his best lyrics too.)  It seems that Mr. Lerner might have felt the exhilaration his song expresses a few more times than anyone ought to. 

The character who sings the song in My Fair Lady, one Freddy Eynsford-Hill, is lost in infatuation with Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl taken in by Professor Henry Higgins, after she comes to him seeking elocution lessons.  The play, of course, is adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.  Professor Higgins wagers with his friend and houseguest, Colonel Pickering, that he can turn Eliza into a passable young “lady,” one who can, with his lessons, function in the upper social caste of which he and Pickering are a part.

The scene in which Freddy falls for Eliza takes place at a gathering of exceeding privilege and decorousness, at a race track.  Women in gowns and elaborate, even outlandish, hats; men in tophats, tails, and spats.  The musical number in the scene is “Ascot Gavotte” (also known as “Ascot Opening Day”—its opening lines: “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here/Ev’ryone who should be here is here”).  Eliza does quite well among the hoity-toity until, in the midst of the race’s final stretch she can stand it no longer and with all her suppressed Cockney fervor bellows at her favored horse, “Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin’ arse?”  The vocal intro to “On the Street Where You Live” includes Freddy remembering, and repeating, Eliza’s unfortunate (or fortunate) ejaculation; it even suggests that that ejaculation may be what, beyond Eliza herself (played in the film by Audrey Hepburn), precipitates his headlong fall. 

Soon thereafter Freddy arrives at Professor Higgins’s house with flowers.  Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza are having dinner.  The maid takes the flowers and invites Mr. Eynsford-Hill in, but he declines and at the bottom of the stair, back on the street, sings his song.

The plays, both the musical and its Shavian model, are fraught.  Shaw took as his inspiration an ancient Greek myth.  Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with one of his statues, which—presumably so deeply and intimately loved and, much more importantly, so perfectly created—comes to life.  In Lerner and Loewe’s version, Eliza is matter, medium, raw material fashioned by a man into an acceptable, respectable, lovable, and cravable woman—made so, created even, by a man.

To say that the gender issues in the movie went right over my head at thirteen is accurate and predictable and an understatement.  Although one might also say that the issues went over a lot of heads:  both the plays and the film were enormously successful.

But Freddy seems head over heels for a fully-formed woman, as far as he can tell, one who is just enough like but not at all like the other women in his circle.  Something about class is involved in it too, of course; Eliza’s sudden coarseness is electrifying.  Who knows what it might suggest to Freddy?  But what I’m curious about is this: could “On the Street Where You Live” be one of those love songs beloved by men but derided by women?  Does the man’s infatuation seem, well, fatuous?  The word “love” is never spoken in the song.  Does infatuation really have anything to do with love?  (One might ask something similar about music or poetry.)  Freddy has seen but hardly even met Eliza—just once—but he is intoxicated by her, the possibility of her.  He’s smitten.  Is it Freddy’s smittenness itself that is suspect?  Is the very act of feeling smitten by another person suspect?  In the hetero-world, in and out of movies, it’s usually the man who is smote, so to speak, and his condition, in terms literary and historical—and in reality—is all too often dangerous for the woman.  Think of Daphne and Apollo, Zeus and Leda.  The list is endless; it is added to every day in brutal stories in the news.  Vastly more women are killed by obsessed lovers and husbands than by infatuated strangers.

Is Freddy’s smittenness a form of potentially dangerous, power-mad insanity?  Probably not.  He seems too callow to be a monster.  Shaw resisted the “happy ending,” with Eliza and Higgins in love and together; the musical, not so much.  Higgins seems to realize his love, or his loss (though of what, exactly?  His dejected song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” is another of the musical’s long-lived chestnuts).  But then Eliza returns.  The happy ending is at least implied.  As for Freddy, when Eliza leaves Higgins earlier, she tells him she’ll marry Freddy because he, at least, is one who loves her.  But in the end, that doesn’t matter.  She comes back to the man who, as it were, made her what she is. 

This is an excerpt from Nemerov's Door: Essays by Robert Wrigley
(Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA)

Paper $19.95

https://www.tupelopress.org

Wit and Metaphor in George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)" [by David Lehman]

Like John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though not as flamboyant as the first or as metrically inventive as the second, George Herbert proved that devotional poetry can generate high intellectual excitement.

Born in Wales in 1593, Herbert distinguished himself at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was elected to Parliament twice. In 1630, a year after he married, Herbert took holy orders. He served as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury, delivering sermons and writing poems, for the rest of his short life. Before he died in 1633 he entrusted a gathering of his poems, The Temple, to a friend. The poems won an immediate audience.

Herbert is one of the so-called “metaphysical” poets, who rely on cunning wit and use elaborate, sometimes incongruous metaphors to explore complex themes. He has a poem, “The Pulley,” in which God pours all his pleasures on man except “rest.” Anyone who doubts that the lowly pun can perform sublime feats need only consider these two lines in which “rest” meaning “remainder” and “rest” meaning “repose” are entangled to their paradoxical enhancement: “Yet let him keep the rest, / But keep them with repining restlessness.”

Where Herbert is most obviously innovative is in his use of carmen figuratum – shaped or patterned poems. He has one in the shape of an altar and another, “Easter Wings,” that demands to be viewed as a pair of winged birds in flight. Herbert was also an inveterate compiler of proverbs. To him we owe that durable cliché: “His bark is worse than his bite.”

But Herbert is most dear to us because his poems suggest an intimacy of discourse between the poet and his creator.  Not for Herbert the attitude struck by Donne, who can begin a poem by telling off a heavenly body (“Busy old fool, unruly sun”). The speaker in Herbert’s poems is marked by an unforced humility – he may be the only poet in the body of English poetry who is believable not only when he addresses the divinity but when he transcribes the responses he gets.

Among my favorites is “Love (III),” the most admired of three Herbert poems with that title:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
          Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
          From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
          If I lacked anything.

“A guest," I answered, “worthy to be here”:
          Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
          I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
          “Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
          Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not," says Love, “who bore the blame?”
          “My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down," says Love, “and taste my meat.”
          So I did sit and eat.

The poem is the record of a dialogue. The key metaphor is the personification of “Love” at the door welcoming an invited but trepidatious guest to enter and dine. The guest is not the speaker exactly but one part of him, “my soul,” who bears the guilt “of dust and sin.” To have a body is to participate in human nature, universally understood as selfish and competitive. And so the soul, thus tarnished, tarries at the door.

Here we cannot help feeling that Love the host is not an abstraction in an allegorical parade of proper nouns.  No, “Love” as presented by Herbert is “quick-eyed,” confident (“drew nearer to me”), even romantic (“sweetly questioning”).

Is Herbert’s Love, then, female, a goddess like Athena? And is “Love” not simply “caritas,” or Christian “charity,” but something almost sensual?

The second stanza complicates matters further. The speaker confesses himself unworthy, an ingrate, but Love is infinitely patient.  To “I cannot look on thee,” Love responds, “Who made the eyes but I?” With the majestic pun of “eyes” and “I,” the answer is as irrefutable as the statements Job in the Bible hears when he complains of his lot– with the difference that it is difficult to picture the God of Job except as a fierce patriarchal authority whereas the Christian Love depicted here takes the sinner’s hand like a “dear” friend. .

          The would-be guest’s sense of guilt is not easily abated. Herbert – who elsewhere depicts himself as “A wonder tortur’d in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace” -- fears he should enter not this house but a place where “shame” receives the punishment it “deserves.”

          Is the house, then, not the church but the divine afterlife? Do we stand at heaven’s gate? If so, is the poem as much about death as about love?

          The poem is resolved in its last four lines. The guest must be reminded that the God who speaks is capable of triple form and that in one of them, he is the son of God, who dies on the cross for humankind, accepting all the “blame.” The argument carries the day and the guest, in a fit of enthusiasm, volunteers to “serve” the Lord – as Herbert himself did as the rector of a church. The word “serve” is beautifully chosen, reviving the image of the dinner party, in which waiters serve guests. But, then, look how much is conveyed by the rhyme words alone of the last stanza.

          Herbert’s deity is an unfailingly good host – and here we cannot overlook the religious meaning of “host” as the body of Christ in the ritual of the Eucharist.

          Love says, in effect, eat me and be whole. In this poem of communion, Love defeats not sin but guilt. Love overlooks shame. Love is a feast and even the “unkind, ungrateful” may partake.

           I am proposing a way of reading “Love” that would help explain its appeal to the secular reader, whose enjoyment of the poem depends less on its structure of orthodox Christian belief than on its brilliance as verse. But let it also be noted that more than a few former atheists have found their way back to God’s good graces through George Herbert’s poetry.

Ed note: This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2014 under the headline "A Feast for the Guilt-Ridden Guest" and sub-hed "Exploring complex themes with cunning wit and elaborate metaphors in George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)." 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

New Trilling Essay the Talk of the Town

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung campuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considered coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Public Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be caricatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" (or variants, including celebrations of poetry as the antithesis of sociological claptrap, have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Ashbery Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

from the archive; March 31, 2011.

Professor Trilling, asked to comment for the record, replied with this link but said he was of "mixed minds, because of the implicit inaccuracy in the record of any correspondence between two persons, neither of whom is alive." The court decided in favor of the plaintiff, who affirmed his belief in the "irony of circumstance," as he termed it, and a distrust of any idea that, if stated flat out, could be construed as signifying both itself and its opposite. "You know, Fitzgerald was right about consciousness," he said to me one afternoon, sneaking a cigarette. -- DL

Much better late than never. . .a (more or less) favorable review

Today (3/31/21), Caesura posted Inspector Watt's review of Poems in the Manner of, and in a curiously contrarian way I am pleased that in the poetry business, in which it sometimes seems that business is always personal (in defiance of the Corleone family's command not to mix the two), a review of a poetry book can appear four years after the book's pub date.

You ask who is Inspector Watt? I don't know, but the pseudonymous one also comments on Maureen McLane's 2014 volume This Blue and Chelsea Minnis's 2018 collection Baby, I Don't Care, with its wonderful title: Robert Mitchum's line in Out of the Past (which so well sums up Mitchum's attitude that it served as the title of Lee Server's biography of the actor). Inspector Watt's idiosyncratic style makes one wonder whether he praises with feigned damns. -- DL

<<<
Poems in the Manner of  by David Lehman. Scribner Poetry, 2017 ($18.00)

There are two ways to look at this strange book of poetry, which “channels” poets from Catullus to Joe Brainard.  If you’re not convinced that Lehman can imitate any poet you can name, at the end of the book, just for good measure, he includes his satirical lyrics for songs by Bob Dylan, Lorenz Hart and Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.  Lehman can parody anyone, with aplomb and humor.  Here’s his tribute / goof on Bashō’s famous haiku: “Pond / Frog / Splash.”  So, on the one hand, the book is a display of brilliance.  But on the other hand, it wonderfully illustrates where contemporary American poetry is — driving forward by looking in the rear-view mirror.  This book implies that the best poetry is behind us.  The new and improved poets who have rose petals tossed at them by critics for their shockingly new and improved poetry pale in comparison to the poets listed on the front cover of Lehman’s book: Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda.  OK, Ernest Hemingway not so much.  Damn you, David Lehman.  You’ve left me elated and depressed.

https://caesuramag.org/posts/anvil-and-rose-10

"Flesh 78" [by Herbert Engelhardt, 1925-2021]

Flesh 78

Brancusi hinted it
Giacometti stinted it

Miró laughed at it
Degas choreographed it

Bosch hated it
Bruegel skated it

Watteau crêpe de chine covered it
Manet gape to dine uncovered it

Botticelli virgin Spring emerged
Titian love-in fling resurged

Kandinsky ignored it
Gaugin adored it

Renoir bathed his coquette in pink
Bellows slathed hot sweat in stink

Ingres slipped in two vertebrae
Maillol worshipped her in clay

Seurat biked it to the park
Tintoretto liked it for St Mark

Gorky mangled it
Pollock tangled it

Picasso pranced in Avignon
Matisse danced in primary tone

Michelangelo mixed genders
Fragonard transfixed splendors

Cézanne preferred yellow lemons
Van Gogh preferred star-glow demons

Lachaise inflated it
Schiele conflated it

Beckmann painted bloody stumps
Hals sainted ruddy rumps

Warhol silk-screened it
Chagall flute-dreamed it

Giotto enrobed it in gesso
Géricault unrobed it al fresco

Daumier mocked it
Wood defrocked it

Rodin raptured eroticized it
Braque fractured analyzed it

De Chirico enigmatically stylized it
El Greco astigmatically exorcized it

Velásquez grew a mischievous chin
Da Vinci drew a mysterious grin

Rothko dazzled with colors bold
Klimt razzled with showers gold

Lautrec wrapped Braunt’s neck in red
Stieglitz snapped O’Keeffe’s pec in bed

Duchamp sighted it descending
Caravaggio whited it offending

Rubens sketched it out
Modigliani stretched it out

Artists obsess on flesh
From Marrakesh to Uttar Pradesh

Published in HARVARD REVIEW ONLINE on February 25, 2016 with this contributor's note:

Herbert Engelhardt was born in New Jersey in 1925. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II from 1943 to 1946 and was awarded the Purple Heart in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. He received his BA and MBA from Harvard in 1949 and 1951, respectively. In his late seventies, he began to write poems. He has lived in New York City since the early 1950s.

Ed. note: Herb, whom I met twelve or thirteen years ago, had a passion for poetry and a zest for life that continually inspired me. We met sixteen years ago, when he was eighty, and worked together on his poems. His book, Ordinary Soldiers, which he published under the title World War II Poetry: Memories of an Ordinary Soldier, deserves to be far better known and celebrated. One reader commented that the book is "Intimate. Visceral. Honest. First rate. Fine poetry and also a valuable as a historic record of a soldier's life, much of it in Okinawa and the Philippines, during WW II."  Herb and I lunched together often and talked about all manner of thing -- his travels, his years in the service, his time at Harvard (where he housed with Henry Kissinger), and his own successful business career. For years he taught a course at NYU's Business School, with a reading list that included Julius Caesar and other works in which management made costly decisions to their detriment. Herb is quoted in my book One Hundred Autobiographies. We were comparing medical experiences and he said with his customary salty wit, “No matter what the longhaired Buddhist full of shit poets write about flowers and rocks and clouds, you don’t really understand life until you’ve had a Foley catheter stuck in you for six days." He was right about that and so much else. We miss you and honor you, Herb. -- DL

On James Schuyler's "Arches" [by Edward Hirsch]

              James Schuyler is often celebrated as a poet who celebrated the everyday and ordinary, what he called “the pure pleasure of / Simply looking.”  He took a walk or peered through his window, and the poem became the daily record of what he saw.  He had a keen eye and reveled in particularity.  But Schuyler was afflicted by periodic bouts of mental illness and he was often looking at life from the outside, as through a looking glass.  The reason that daily life takes on such a luminous glow in a great deal of his work is because he was effectively cut off from it much of the time.  He cherished the familiar because it was never quite familiar enough, never something that he could take for granted.  He reminds me of the eighteenth-century English poet, Christopher Smart, in the way his work spotlights and exaggerates familiar things.  Both fastened themselves to daily life as a meaningful way to hold onto the world. 
            It’s not necessary to pathologize Schuyler’s enthusiasms or the way that he took pleasure in describing ordinary things.  But this way of looking at some of his work from this angle does help account for its psychological pressure, its odd intensities.  The language is plain but seems psychologically lit from within.  He looked hard at things, but he wasn’t an Objectivist poet, like Louis Zukofsky or George Oppen.  There is an inner nervousness driving his work.   
            Schuyler’s mental health was fragile, and he was institutionalized several times in the 1970s.  In 1975 he wrote “The Payne Whitney Poems” while he was interned at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City.  He published the entire eleven-poem cycle in the New York Review of Books in 1978.  The diary-like series subsequently appeared in The Morning of the Poem (1980).  Here, as the poet David Herd suggests, “Schuyler presents in miniature many aspects of his work: the importance of observation, a fascination with the vicissitudes of weather, a fondness for the collage-like list (as in ‘Sleep’), and, throughout the cycle, a sense that in writing one might better make oneself at home in one’s world.”
            “The Payne Whitney Poems” are nervous, low-key, focused on the daily, sometimes funny.  The opening lines of the poem “Trip” set the tone and establish the subject: “Wigging in, wigging out: / when I stop to think / the wires in my head / cross: kaboom” (“Trip”).  Here’s the poem “Arches”:

                                                        Arches

                                              of buildings, this building,
                                              frame a stream of windows
                                              framed in white brick.  This
                                              building is fireproof; or else
                                              it isn’t: the furnishings first
                                              to go: no, the patients.  Patients
                                              on Sundays walk in a small garden.
                                              Today some go out on a group

                                              pass.  To stroll the streets and shop.
                                              So what else is new?  The sky
                                              slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
                                              A gray in which some smoke stands.

            The title runs into the first line and the poem sets off on its own hesitant string of thoughts.  As so often happens in Schuyler’s poems, the speaker is looking out the window and recording what he sees, as if the window serves him as a protection against what Gaston Bachelard calls "exterior dizziness."  He is engaged but slightly removed from it all.  The lines are cut short, the rhythm jittery.  There isn’t much to hold onto.  What’s striking is how immediately Schuyler’s speaker begins adapting (“Arches // of buildings, this building”) and correcting (“This / building is fireproof, or else / it isn’t”) what he observes.  The buildings narrow to a single building.  The poem itself is visually “framed.”  The speaker is looking through the enclosure of his own window and through the arches that “frame a stream of windows / framed in white brick.”
            Everything is provisional, every statement leads to a revision.  This building is fireproof or, whoops, it isn’t.  There’s dry grim humor in the recognition that in a fire the patients will go before the furnishings.  The uncapitalized word patients is immediately capitalized.  This poem has the simple language of someone who has come through a great catastrophe, who needs to remember how to use language again.  It is very shaky and tentative.  
            There is a tiny drama here.  The speaker is looking at the windows of the other buildings, at the patients walking in the garden on Sunday.  He isn’t one of them.  They’re free, or somewhat free, to stroll about; he is not.  He takes a moment to ask himself “So what else is new?”  It is almost as if he is trying to think of something interesting to tell a visitor.  He seems slightly desperate to come up with something fresh in a place where life has come to a standstill, where nothing new seems to happen.  That’s why he turns to the weather:

                                                                                 The sky
                                              slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
                                              A gray in which some smoke stands.

            Schuyler manages to capture the texture of a small moment in time, how the day darkened and dusk sets in, simultaneously slowly and swiftly.  No other poet would have jammed those two words together as “slowly/swiftly”.  A person is sitting or standing by the window as the day closes shop.  As soon as he describes the sky going from blue to gray he immediately corrects this observation, noting a “gray in which some smoke stands.”  The three alliterative s sounds—“some smoke stands”—enact the way that the day comes to a lingering and yet sudden close.  Something can still be seen, something preserved.  Something is left standing.  But it is mist and vapor.   
            The poet Michael Hofmann hears an undertone of nervous amusement in this poem, despite everything.  He writes: “However halting, impaired, almost uncommunicative the poem, I still have the perverse sense that the station to which it is tuned, however low, is merriment.  The sentences may be mumbled and reluctant and short and full of wrong turnings, but there is still a low ebb of wit in them—in the macabre speculation, in the observation of others like or unlike himself, in the unexpectedly fluent linkage of smoke and fire.  It is, in other words, and perhaps again unexpectedly, literary.”  This is well said about a poem that is somehow hesitant and yet sure of itself.  It seems quietly aware of its own construction, of being made in front of us.  The speaker of this poem is ill, but the poet who crafted it was healthily—slowly/swiftly—making a new kind of poem.   

From 100 Poems to Break Your Heart  by Edward Hirsch (published on March 30, 2021, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Above left: James Schuyler. 

RIP Adam Zagajewski: "Black birds pace the fields. . ."

Adam Zagajewski, who died Sunday, the first day of spring, age 75, was a wonderful poet and sweet gentleman.

 

This is from "Self-Portrait":

 

Black birds pace the fields,

waiting patiently like Spanish widows.

I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.

I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,

and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses

dissolve like cumuli on sunny day

 

The photo above was taken by Jill Krementz in January 1986. Left to right: Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagajewski, Derek Walcott

Grains of Paradise - for Adam Zagajewski [poem by Angela Ball]

Grains of Paradise

                                     -for Adam Zagajewski

The time of impossible friendships,

cruel steps, the time of refrigerated semi-trucks
and their willing assistance,

the time of I-pad goodbyes,

of casual stock, pastured, backs
to the wind,

of taking counsel from vibrating
grass,

the time of light stored in windshields,
in chrome trim,

of recipes written on matchbooks,
on prison stationary, in braille, calling for

grains of paradise. Unseen, they are
anywhere, not waiting,

just beyond recognition.

The Meaning of Life [by Jean-Paul Satire]

"Mourning the Loss of Bob Hershon" [by Thomas Devaney]

Mourning the loss of Bob Hershon.

His life-long work at Hanging Loose Press is beyond measure.

Bob’s poems, with their "downhome speech," lead with the heart.

The one where he puts his hand back to reach-out for his son's hand as they're crossing the street always hits me. The son much older now, Bob writes:

Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge.

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand.

Bob was one of the great walkers in the city. Cut out of that same generous grain celebrated by Alfred Kazin and Walt Whitman, where he says: "Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else."

The streets of the city are before us: Bob's gait remains distinctive. His stride is deliberate with a range of tempos. His sense of being is transmitted in the stride of his line breaks and lines.

Notice the poem “Pace.” Yes, we never know which direction he might go, or the pace the poem may take to get there. But, in its own workaday way of that form, it’s also a concrete poem. Bob writes:

on skinny old
Lexington Avenue
I speed up
to pass this man

so I can
slow down

I take
great pleasure in the exact size
of my steps

The poems are living maps: all the worlds in all of the names, all the places, which continue to live in Bob's honest and vivid words.

Somewhere, I believe, Sherman Alexie credits Bob and Donna Brook with saving his life. They published Sherman's first book with Hanging Loose Press. Later, even though his big publishers wanted him to publish all of his books with them, Sherman stuck with Hanging Loose for his poetry collections. His tribute to Bob helps to tell the larger story: "Bob's Coney Island" –

Let's begin with this: America.
I want it all back
now, acre by acre, tonight. I want
some Indian to finally learn
to dance the Ghost Dance right
so that all of the salmon and buffalo return
and the white men are sent back home
to wake up in their favorite European cities.

I am not cruel.

Still, I hesitate
when Bob walks us around his Coney Island:
the Cyclone still running
the skeleton of the Thunderbolt
the Freak Show just a wall of photographs
the Parachute Drop
which has not been used in 30 years
but still looks like we could
tie a few ropes to the top (Why the hell not?) and drop
quickly down, spinning, unravelling
watching Bob's Coney Island rise
from the ashes of the sad, old carnival
that has taken its place now, this carnival
that is so sad because, like Diane says

all carnivals are sad.

We drop to the ground, our knees buckle slightly
at impact. We turn to look at each other
with the kind of love and wonder
that only fear and the release of fear can create.
We climb to the top and parachute down
again and again, because there is an ocean
a few feet away, because Manhattan is just a moment
down the horizon, because there was a 13-year-old boy
who believed that Coney Island belonged to him
though we know that all we see
doesn't really belong to anyone

but I'll let Bob have a conditional lease
because I know finally
somebody will take care of this place
even if just in memory.

___

Thomas Devaney wrote and co-director the film Bicentennial City and is the author of Getting to Philadelphia, Hanging Loose Press and You Are the Battery, Black Square Editions. His work is featured in Best American Poetry 2019. He teaches at Haverford College.

—

photo credit: Star Black

A Fond Farewell to Bob Hershon [by Terence Winch]

Like many others, I am deeply saddened today over the death of my dear friend Bob Hershon. Bob was smart, funny, and generous. He was also a wonderful poet. Bob was the co-founder of Hanging Loose magazine and press, and helped bring the work of hundreds of writers (including me) to light. He was beloved by many, and earned that love through his great generosity of spirit. Here is a poem by Bob's from last August. It may very well be one of his last poems, but like all his work it is characterized by his warmth, humor, wisdom, and literary genius ---- Terence Winch.

Chatter

I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and

the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I

watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers

when my friend assigned me the task of writing

a baseball poem, since right now there is no

baseball except in memory so I thought of

the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer

but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I

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

the Boys of Early Spring—Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser

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

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

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

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

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

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

the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming

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

and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents

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

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

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

but maybe with a sip or two of Scotch

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

Ed. note: "Chatter" was the "pick of the week" for August 30, 2020, and it elicited enthusiastic and charming comments from Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally, and Jack Andreson, among others. I woke today to the sad news that Bob died in his sleep last night. Our hearts go out to Donna and Lizzie. --DL

Chatter

I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and

the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I

watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers

when my friend assigned me the task of writing

a baseball poem, since right now there is no

baseball except in memory so I thought of

the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer

but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I

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

the Boys of Early Spring—Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser

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

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

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

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

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

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

the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming

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

and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents

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

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

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

but maybe with a sip or two of Scotch

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

Ed. note: "Chatter" was the "pick of the week" for August 30, 2020, and it elicited enthusiastic and charming comments from Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally, and Jack Andreson, among others. I woke today to the sad news that Bob died in his sleep last night. Our hearts go out to Donna and Lizzie. --DL

"So I said like why so he said like maybe" [by Molly Arden]

So I said like why so he said like maybe my place?

So he said I'm on the job around the cock
So I said that's hard
So he said what
So I said around the clock
So he said yes
that's what i meant 
like it was like he looked straight
at you when he spoke
of guns versus flowers
or Walt Disney versus Picasso
as the century's greatest artist
everyone will chill
so I said typo
so he said type-A
so then we unambiguously
did the thing that has no name,
the secret everyone knows
so no one ever spills it.

Lovely to be the queen of the wards!

-- Molly Arden

Ed note: From the archive; first posted August 13, 2008. Molly asks me to mention the symposium she is organizing on the question raised in the poem: namely, whether Walt Disney or Pablo Picasso may be said to have been the greatest artist of the 20th century. DL

From the archive: The Black Swan [by David Lehman]

<<<
I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

<<<
I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

The Starmakers [by Nin Andrews]

Lately I’ve been thinking about how my father used to say, There’s no such thing as the self-made man. Think about it.

It was one of my father’s ongoing arguments with the world, with American optimism, and with the whole idea that anyone can succeed if he or she works hard enough. (My father grew up during the Depression. And, as he put it, his own father lost his shirt. As a young girl I always pictured my grandfather shirtless.) My mother would simply roll her eyes once Dad got started. And I would think of one of my favorite books, Harold and the Purple Crayon, which I re-titled, Harold and the Purple Wand.

Harold is self-made, I would say. Harold can draw the world and make it into anything he wants because he has a purple wand. (Was I the only one that noticed it wasn’t a crayon Harold held?)

Alone in my room, I daydreamed about what I would do with a purple wand. I drew endless pictures in purple. Sometimes I imagined making myself into a girl with wings. (Who doesn’t want to fly?) Other times a star.

My father, an artist and architect, took great interest in my artwork. But he wasn’t a fan of the Harold stories, or of my purple sketches. I would try to shield my paper to keep him away. Once, he pointed out that even Harold didn’t make himself into a star. He could only draw stars. Or make others into stars. (He was, back then, a bit too philosophical for my child-mind.)

In spite of his criticism, I spent days drawing purple girls, imagining myself as a kind of Haroldina, who wore glasses just as I did, but who lived in a world I could only dream of.

As an architect, my father took on many apprentices in his day. He spent hours both going over their blueprints and introducing them to builders and potential clients. He told me once that he never felt fully credited or thanked for his help. After his funeral, one of the architects he trained told me what a pain-in-the-ass my dad was. Without asking, my father would correct his blueprints, and he never thought anything anyone else drew was quite right. But his influence, this man added, is still present in all that he designs. And if he had not had him as a teacher, he would not have become the architect he is today.

I think of my father when I think of all the people who have helped me and other poets and writers, all of those who are the bearers of purple wands in the literary world, who have made others into stars, who have changed the career paths of other poets and writers, often without bringing much attention to themselves. I am thinking of reviewers, editors, anthologists, book sellers, interviewers, translators, social media divas, those who run reading series, and all those that buy books, or who take the time to love and share poetry.

Given stardom, many writers simply bask in the light. They don’t think of all those who helped them shine. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t grateful. I think most of us just don’t quite know how to say thanks. Or how to say thank you enough. Because there is no enough.

So I thought I’d do a series of blog posts next week on just a few of the star-makers in the poetry world: a few of the reviewers, anthologists, editors, YOUTUBE reviewers, book sellers, and translators who have made others’ literary lives possible—and even wonderful at times.

Nin Andrews' is the author of several books including Why God Is a Woman, Our Lady of the Orgasm, and Southern Comfort. Her next collection, Miss August, will be published in May, 2017. You can find her and even sign up for her email (seriously?) by going to ninandrews.com.

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2017.

"Nothing is as Boring as an Atheist" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Trapped on a long drive with an atheist
I closed my eyes and sought refuge in 
My earliest erotic fantasies of capture 
By an Apache warrior maiden, cruel
At first but then merely unpredictable.
As the atheist droned on the scent of
Formaldehyde characteristic of his
Persuasion suffused the vehicle and
Obligated me to explain this aroma 
To the warrior maiden who fiercely 
Demanded ‘What’s that awful smell?’
‘Formaldehyde,’ I answered and 
With a shrill war-whoop she bared
Her breasts and pounced on me.

from the archive; first posted November 2017