The Best American Poetry

Time 2020-11-05 11:03:50

Web Name: The Best American Poetry

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There’s a picture of Brendan Behan standing outside the Dublin Zoo with a bemused look on his face and a large snake curled around his neck. The photo reveals much about Brendan, who died 55 years ago today, on March 20, 1964, at the age of forty-one. He was a comedian who liked to shock people and who wasn’t afraid to take chances. He was an unstoppable ham who would do nearly anything to entertain his audience. His life, or legend, nearly overshadowed his work in its claim on public attention. His fans were sometimes more interested in the snake around his neck than in his writing.He was a man of many talents, with the charm and magnetism of a movie star. An accomplished singer who knew hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs, Brendan came from a musical background—his father played the fiddle, his uncle wrote the Irish National Anthem, his brother Dominic wrote “The Patriot Game,” one of the best-loved Irish songs to come out of Ireland’s struggles. Brendan himself composed many songs, some of which are part of his plays and one which he claimed was written with a threatening pistol at his head. He was fluent in the Irish language and wrote the first version of The Hostage (an Giall) as Gaeilge. He had lived in France, spoke good French, and claimed to have written pornography in Paris. He was precocious writer, turning out reasonably good verse as early as age nine. He first started drinking when he was a boy, so his two major activities in later life—drinking and writing—were off to an early start.As he grew older and more famous, his taste for “the gargle” took greater hold of him. In his late twenties and early thirties, when he was turning out the work on which his reputation would ultimately rest, he was capable of long periods of hard work without any intake of alcohol. But as he conquered the public with his brilliant memoir Borstal Boy and his two best plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, he lost the stamina to keep on producing work of the same stature. His public demanded the famous tough-talking funny Irish writer, and Brendan hated to disappoint a ready audience. It wasn’t, of course, all the public’s fault. Brendan loved pub life, good times, music, talk. He was certainly aware of how he was ruining himself and his future as a writer, but that awareness was no match for his thirst. As a boy and young man he was a political extremist, having taken part in a 1939-40 IRA bombing campaign (one with numerous parallels to the later IRA bombings that were part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland) in Britain, where he was arrested in Liverpool at the age of sixteen and sentenced to three years in borstal (something like reform school). Although he had abandoned active participation in the IRA by the time he was an established writer, the same wild and rebellious spirit that landed him in borstal—and in an Irish prison for his part in a shoot-out between the Irish police and the IRA less than a year after his release from borstal—also landed him in numerous bars on both sides of the Atlantic, wherein he challenged his health rather than the established order. It was in the pubs that he played Brendan Behan, the famous ex-con with a big mouth and great talent. Ultimately, the booze got the best of him. Friends, family, doctors, editors—many of the people in his life—tried to help him control his need for drink. But he wasn’t up to the task. There was a public hungry for the character Brendan Behan had created, and he wanted to come through for his fans. His drinking, though it was bringing him closer to an early death with every passing day, was also a central element of his public act. Towards the end he was in and out of hospitals frequently. His wife Beatrice, or some friend perhaps, would discover him unconscious in his hotel room in a diabetic coma and rush him to a hospital. He amazed medical people with his powers of recovery and disheartened those who loved him with his many drunken escapades and self-destructive compulsions. Much of his talent was destroyed along with his liver, so that at the end he was almost a parody of himself, trying desperately to live up to his reputation as legendary raconteur and tireless literary comedian.His life was full of contradictions. He hated and feared death and didn’t even like the subject brought up in his presence. Yet he destroyed himself at an age when he should have been just reaching the peak of his powers as an artist. He was known throughout the world as a brawling macho Irishman, yet he was also bisexual and wrote at least one early story, unearthed by Ulick O’Connor in his fine biography of Brendan, which can clearly be categorized as gay. Even Borstal Boy includes many touching scenes (no pun intended) among the imprisoned boys that are obviously sexual in nature. Brendan apparently worried about what a public revelation of his sexual complexities would do to his image, but such an expose never occurred in his lifetime.Brendan’s last books were all spoken into a tape recorder and later put together with the help of his devoted editor, Rae Jeffs. He had lost the ability to sit down at a typewriter and work at his craft. In the end, Brendan was in the hospital, dying of alcoholism, when he got hold of some drink through a misguided visitor. That apparently finished him off. There were to be no more miraculous recoveries. Borstal Boy was Brendan’s masterpiece, the book in which, as they say, he found his voice. In the making over a period of many years, it displays all Brendan’s talents as a story-teller and humorist. A moving account of his life from his arrest in Liverpool to his release from borstal and return to Ireland, the book is put together with exacting skill and literary vitality. Borstal Boy is in the tradition of portraits of the artist as a young man and rivals Joyce’s more highly regarded Portrait. If Brendan had gone on to write something approaching the brilliance of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, Borstal Boy would perhaps have a higher rank in literary history than it now enjoys. The best-known of his plays, which are both performed from time to time, are The Quare Fellow and the Hostage. They are first-rate works that clearly demonstrate Brendan’s gift for dialogue and his ability to create authentic human drama. The rest of his output—more plays, two “travel” books, a novel, and a follow-up to Borstal Boy are second-rate only in comparison to Borstal Boy and the two major plays. When I was a high school kid in the 1960s, my two favorite writers were James Baldwin and Brendan Behan. I couldn’t get enough of their work. I was thrilled when Brendan released two LPs back in those days. In fact, I pretty much memorized Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs and Ballads, so much so that I can still instantly summon up his voice in my mind any time night or day. (Photo below: Visiting Brendan at his permanent residence in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Oct. 2016; photo by Dominick Murray.) from ther archive; first posted March 21, 2019 The new issue of Stay Thirsty, edited by Dusty Sang, is here, with articles on Cary Grant, Bascove s bridges, April Gornik, Stephanie Chase, much more.https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/fine-romance-lehman.htmlhttps://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/nicca-ray-nicholas-ray.htmlhttps://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/april-gornik-paintings.htmlhttps://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/eyman-cary-grant.html https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/bascove-kiosk-bridges.html STAY THIRSTY: How do you feel about French cinema and its embrace of your father s [Nicholas Ray s] work?NICCA RAY: I’m not as well-versed in the French cinema as I ought to be. But! The Cahiers du Cinema writers/filmmakers of the 1950s held Nick in the highest regard. When I interviewed the film historian and writer, David Thomson, he said, “In the 1950s the Cahiers du Cinema had started a policy of recovering American films, saying, ‘Oh look, these commercial films are great. Maybe they’re the greatest!’” My father felt misunderstood within Hollywood. His movies weren’t the critical box office hits that, say, Elia Kazan’s were. Nick, who had met Kazan in the 1930s New York theater and stayed friends with throughout his life, measured himself against Kazan. In France in the 1950s, when Nick was making On Dangerous Ground and Johnny Guitar (both box office flops) the Cahiers du Cinema, whose writers became the directors of the French New Wave, started championing Nick’s films, calling him an auteur. He was sort of a poster boy for their Auteur Theory. When I asked the Cahiers writer, Charles Bitsch, how the auteur theory came about he said, “The need came mostly because of the weight of the screenplay. Two or three screenwriters wrote the script and the director was just the technician making images to tell what the script was saying.” The Cahiers folk said, Woah, hold on there. They saw that directors like Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang were more than technicians. They were the authors, not the screenwriters. Bitsch said to me, “You see further beyond the scene.” Nick used to say, “If it’s all in the script why make the movie?” Seriously, why? If you look at the body of Nick’s work (including his paycheck films) you will see his mark in the same way you notice an artist’s brushstroke. He had a painter’s eye and used light and camera movement to build a subtext that informed the scene. The French New Wave directors of the Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, gave Nick authorship and were, I believe, the first to give him critical acclaim. In the 1960s, Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinemateque Francaise, screened Nick’s films and the younger generation of filmmakers were introduced to and influenced by his work. I am forever grateful to the French for defining the auteur theory. I set out to find my father in his films. It was a place for me to start. I had a dream, which was not all a dream.The bright sun was extinguish d, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space,Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earthSwung blind and blackening in the moonless air;Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,And men forgot their passions in the dreadOf this their desolation; and all heartsWere chill d into a selfish prayer for light:And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,The habitations of all things which dwell,Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum d,And men were gather d round their blazing homesTo look once more into each other s face;Happy were those who dwelt within the eyeOf the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:A fearful hope was all the world contain Forests were set on fire—but hour by hourThey fell and faded—and the crackling trunksExtinguish d with a crash—and all was black.The brows of men by the despairing lightWore an unearthly aspect, as by fitsThe flashes fell upon them; some lay downAnd hid their eyes and wept; and some did restTheir chins upon their clenched hands, and smil And others hurried to and fro, and fedTheir funeral piles with fuel, and look d upWith mad disquietude on the dull sky,The pall of a past world; and then againWith curses cast them down upon the dust,And gnash d their teeth and howl d: the wild birds shriek dAnd, terrified, did flutter on the ground,And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutesCame tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl dAnd twin d themselves among the multitude,Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.And War, which for a moment was no more,Did glut himself again: a meal was boughtWith blood, and each sate sullenly apartGorging himself in gloom: no love was left;All earth was but one thought—and that was deathImmediate and inglorious; and the pangOf famine fed upon all entrails—menDied, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;The meagre by the meagre were devour d,Even dogs assail d their masters, all save one,And he was faithful to a corse, and keptThe birds and beasts and famish d men at bay,Till hunger clung them, or the dropping deadLur d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,But with a piteous and perpetual moan,And a quick desolate cry, licking the handWhich answer d not with a caress—he died.The crowd was famish d by degrees; but twoOf an enormous city did survive,And they were enemies: they met besideThe dying embers of an altar-placeWhere had been heap d a mass of holy thingsFor an unholy usage; they rak d up,And shivering scrap d with their cold skeleton handsThe feeble ashes, and their feeble breathBlew for a little life, and made a flameWhich was a mockery; then they lifted upTheir eyes as it grew lighter, and beheldEach other s aspects—saw, and shriek d, and died—Even of their mutual hideousness they died,Unknowing who he was upon whose browFamine had written Fiend. The world was void,The populous and the powerful was a lump,Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,And nothing stirr d within their silent depths;Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp dThey slept on the abyss without a surge—The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,The moon, their mistress, had expir d before;The winds were wither d in the stagnant air,And the clouds perish Darkness had no needOf aid from them—She was the Universe.July 1816 ______________________________________________________________________________________ The Magic Rule of 9 Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn toget by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory overdeath all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as gooda time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell ofmany a meantime, many have diverted themselves withgreat success. Hence civilizations’ discontents andgreatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine.That the sums of all numbers within the sums of allmultiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9:1x9=9, 9=9; 2x9=18, 1+8=9; 3x9=27, 2+7=9; etc.This is numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to thespecies that longs for more than a first glance affords.Someone will say, If you really think this is magic, youdon’t properly understand the decimal system (birdfalls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic.Who among us truly understands the decimal system.______________________________________________________________________________________Joan Retallack s BOSCH D (Fables, Moral Tales Other Awkward Constructions), in which this poem appears, came out from Litmus Press on April Fools Day, 2020. She feels it s impossible to dispute the aptness of that date given local and global circumstances at the time. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press) and Procedural Elegies—Western Civ Cont d (Roof Books) among many other volumes of poetry and essays. Her Gertrude Stein: Selections (California) and conversations with John Cage (MUSICAGE, Wesleyan) examine the humor and gravitas of idiosyncratic aesthetics that became, respectively, so widely influential. Prior to BOSCH D, Litmus Press published Retallack’s The Supposium: Thought Experiments Poethical Play in Difficult Times— 2018 textual/visual continuation of an event she organized at MoMA in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. In all her work, Retallack combines socio-political inquiry with linguistic, visual, performative experiments in what she considers poethical wagers.” ______________________________________________________________________________________ Triumphantly, the bone bore no oboe,none at all. It was eerie. I stuck myprohibitory toe in the lane. I hadto unlearn about enemas. Nor was Ian amulet invisible to the mauler.Noel, I cried! Do not let the manurebe an omen! It is unreal, all this neonin the rubble. Your bunion is bonierthan mine. But my ruin is bluer.Ed. note: The poem consists of anagrams derived from the title, a cowboy folk song that Johnny Cash recorded in 1965. Star Black took the photo of Terence Winch (c 2008). We post it here on November 1, 2020, to celebrate the poet s seventy-fifth birthday. No sun—no moon! No morn—no noon—No dawn— No sky—no earthly view— No distance looking blue—No road—no street—no t other side the way — No end to any Row— No indications where the Crescents go— No top to any steeple—No recognitions of familiar people— No courtesies for showing em— No knowing em!No traveling at all—no locomotion,No inkling of the way—no notion— No go —by land or ocean— No mail—no post— No news from any foreign coast—No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility— No company—no nobility—No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member—No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November! Even now this landscape is assembling.The hills darken. The oxenSleep in their blue yoke,The fields having beenPicked clean, the sheavesBound evenly and piled at the roadsideAmong cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:This is the barrennessOf harvest or pestilenceAnd the wife leaning out the windowWith her hand extended, as in payment,And the seedsDistinct, gold, callingCome hereCome here, little oneAnd the soul creeps out of the tree.-- Louise Glück Poor Keats. A Scorpio with Virgo rising and, just to clinch the deal, his moon in Gemini. This is the equivalent of being dealt the Fool, the Lovers (inverted), and the Tower as the three culminating cards in an eleven-card Tarot reading. There is sadness in his life, illness, a consumptive cough. But he has a generous soul, he meets afflictions with renewed resolve, he is capable of great feats of self-discipline. Willing to work hours on meters and rhymes, he is a born dreamer, who can shut his eyes and transport himself in a second to fairy lands forlorn, an enchantment of mist, an early autumn of heirloom tomatoes and three varieties of peaches. Life is a struggle, but he prevails, and then dies young. Born on the 31st of October, Keats had a soft spot for Halloween and tried his hand at writing spooky verses that would scare school chums sitting around the campfire during the season of burning leaves. The fact that Keats s moon is in Gemini, that the nocturnal northeastern quadrant is predominant in his natal chart, and above all that Mercury is his ruling planet, supports the view of this poet as a divinely-ordained messenger of the gods trapped in the frail body of an undernourished London lad with his face pressed against the sweet shop window, as Yeats wrote.[1] Keats s Venus is, like his sun, in Scorpio. This is crucial. It means he is as passionate as he is sensitive and a gambler not by instinct or by social association but by his intransigent attachment to his ideals. He can be loved by many but reserves his own love for one. Auden s poem “The More Loving One” depicts a conflict that Keats resolved each time he picked up his pen to write. He felt he was destined to be the more loving one in any partnership, and he would not have had it any other way, but he didn’t live long enough to test his resolve.Keats loved the four elements and presented their interplay with the clarity that Vermeer brought to the study of light. Vermeer, too, was born on Halloween. In an unpublished story by E. M. Forster with a strong hint of bisexuality and a blithe disregard of historical possibility, the seventeenth-century Vermeer and the nineteenth-century Keats -- accompanied by Dorothy Wordsworth (nineteenth century) and Virginia Woolf (twentieth century) – meet in Oxford and discuss aesthetics and metaphysics as they float slowly down the Isis on a punt. The story that Keats died because of a bad review in an influential Edinburgh journal is to the biography of English poets what history was in the mind of the automobile manufacturer who invented the assembly line, bunk, but it was kept fresh by Byron’s oft-quoted couplet in Don Juan: “Tis strange the mind, that fiery particle / should be snuffed out by an article.” But the mischievous Byron, born on January 22 (1788) -- an Aquarius trailing clouds of Capricorn, and with Cancer as his rising sign -- was as conflicted on the subject of his younger Cockney-born contemporary as Emerson was about Whitman after the former praised the latter, who proceeded to enlarge Leaves of Grass almost beyond recognition. The position of Mercury in the third house has caused the greatest amount of comment among professional astrologers. The consensus view is that Keats resembled certain musical geniuses in his extraordinary talent, his humble origins, and his early death. Though he was less dashing than the patrician Byron and less angelic of aspect than Shelley, all the women polled said they would welcome a relationship with Keats, especially if she is in England while he is in Italy writing long gorgeous letters to her about Shakespeare plays, the nature of inspiration, the smell of mortality, and what Adam felt like waking up in Eden. Keats proved that greatness descends on the novice only after he has opened himself up to the risk of failure or embarrassment.If Shelley is the poet of the autumn wind, the wind that destroys and preserves, animating the leaves and the waves and the clouds in a fury of activity, Keats is the poet of autumnal ripeness. Here are the last three lines of “To Autumn,” his ode to the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”:Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.The closing music shows that Keats took to heart his own advice to Shelley (“load every rift with ore”). A comparison of the two poets -- the one prospective, anticipatory, the other all righteous fire and visionary fury but also retrospective and melancholy -- is a fascinating study in comparative astrology. It has been said that the single most revealing piece of information you may have about a potential dating partner is whether he identifies himself more with Keats or with Shelley. The muse visited Keats often in the spring of 1819. First came “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the lovers rushing away into the night; then “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the lover seduced and abandoned. These poems were as immediate as dreams. And then came the odes, the greatest odes that English has to offer: to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, to Indolence. No poet ever packed as much magnificence in a line or wrote stanzas of such melodious charm that a simple, naive statement of Platonic optimism, which in lesser hands would be anticlimactic or worse, should seem to penetrate the heart of the mystery: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”[1] Note: If you mix up the names Keats and Yeats, or pronounce one as if it were the other, the chances of your appreciating either are diminished by a seventh but not eliminated. The two names are separated by nearly five decades but linked by lyrical genius, with the prophetic mode ascendant in Yeats, while Keats -- brainy, anxious, and quick as befits a son of Mercury -- wins the laurels for sensuality and freshness: the palpable bubbles in the wine glass, the burst of a grape in the satyr’s mouth, the humming of flies on the porch screen in August, keen fitful gusts of wind. I wandered lonely as a mapI had to return to the poisonous, little town of WuhanI played with my father’s ancient microscopeAnd I played with my mother’s telescopeAnd I met my sister’s metronomeAnd I walked to the line, the laser lineAnd I met and I sangOn my way through the buddhafieldsOn my way through each snowy peakAnd I wandered through each snowy jagI wandered, and that was thatAnd that was thatI wandered lonely as a mapShowy words and every wordAnd that was thatNear the poisonous little town of WuhanAnd that was that--David Shapiro10 / 25 / 20Archie Rand, Motet #1, 2013, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic, enamel and fabric on canvas.BravinLee is very pleased to exhibit the Motets, a series of 20 paintings by Archie Rand, after the poems of Eugenio Montale. Schedule: October 28-31 and November 4-7, 12-5pm. Appointments encouraged. For further information or to make an appointment please email us at info@bravinlee.com “What you see is not what you see” – Philip GustonRand had previously responded to the work of Nobel Prize winning author, Eugenio Montale in a series of paintings (“Men Who Turn Back”) and then in 2013 Rand again engaged Montale’s formidable “Motets”, a group of 20 love poems that Montale seems to be mouthing into the air as they are addressed to a departed lover. In these poems a bombardment of imagery attempts to fill the negative space around an unhealed pain, the avenue to which Montale needed to, in futility, keep open. Rand’s pictorial armature derives from Giorgio De Chirico’s parallel entropy, which shares a spirit of the unfulfilled. Long recognized as a masterful artist, Rand brings the full force of his invention and lyricism to these works.______________________________________________________________The Archie Rand collaboration with the poet David Shapiro has its roots in their shared experience of growing up in New York City and being maverick teen prodigies. In his mid-teens Rand played piano professionally with artists who were to become major stars and, at the age of 17, was showing at the legendary Tibor de Nagy Gallery - and Shapiro, in high school performed as a violin soloist under Leopold Stokowski and at the age of 16 had published a major book of poetry that received praise from John Ashbery and Jack Kerouac. When the exhibit went up at Peachtree Center,the Chinese of Atlanta flocked downtown.Jews had been in Henan so close to forever,they weren’t seen as foreign. And we had foundan exhibit on China that wasn’t old vases.Jews were Chinese in more ways than food.Migration was not always out of the placesour families had fled; it had once been to.Our pantries were “ethnic” not just for the shrimp chipsand wood ears, but as well for the matzah.Maybe, when asked, Do you celebrate Christmas?,we were not being checked for Zen or the Buddha.We didn’t say it in so many words.The line between Asia and Europe had blurred.from the new issue of The Common, October 28, 2020 (Ed. note: In 2011 Mark Ford wrote for us about the experience of translating Raymond Roussel s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique. You can read yesterday s post here. Find Ford s new translation here. )The first two extracts are footnotes from Canto IV. There are 98 lines of the main text in this canto, and 134 in footnotes! The first footnote is on the general theme of ambition, and the second on pride, and the fact that animals and birds (apart from the peacock) don’t have it, despite their various accomplishments. The third extract is from the enormous list in Canto II in which Roussel presents 207 examples of things that are visually similar but of different sizes.1There is no one who does not cherish an ambitious dream; The worker believes he will see himself dictating, at the time of a strike(These days people use their reason, and each, with their eye on the goal((We all have one: as long as the nape of his neck,Laid bare for the blade of the guillotine,Remains for a quarter of an hour longer connected to his spine,Thinking: “Letting one s prey slip occurs — often — evenTo someone who holds it most securely” (((and indeed, the imbecileEscapes from his padded cell, the prisoner in solitary confinement from his jail,The cheese from the beak of the duped crow;— On some occasions keeping silent is the best option;))),The murderer has only one aim: escape;)),Whatever his or her ideal is: to earn a large salary,To give birth to children, to see the threshing floor overflowing with his grainOr to make his pulse rate slow and settle down,Feel that, to succeed, it is better to think and actThan to make — jobbing worker, infertile wife,Harvester or invalid — a wish in the momentThat a shooting star leaves its shining trail;),Tired of giving his sweat to the bourgeoisie to drink(It is often for Peter that Paul suffers and works;Vespucci exploited Columbus’s discovery;And it is to furnish a pearl for some finger or waistcoatThat an oyster spends its life labouring;), laws to his boss;The slut in her attic dreams of living in style;And to see his hands adorned with amethysts and holding a crozierIs a fantasy dear to each fledgeling priest.2If human excellence drives out modestyAs much as Monday does the ardour of workers(One gets used to leisure; the soul and the heart elsewhere,The lycée pupil is sombre when he returns in October;),And insanity, in the case of a criminal, the shame of his crime,And an unsnowy winter high prices for road salt,Yet pride is not a universal vice;Leaving aside the peacock, it steers clear of beasts:The swallow, despite its ability to predict tempests;The ram, although it is the emblem of the order of the Grand Cross(Everyone is familiar with the Golden Fleece); the cat,Although it can work out its bearings at midnight without a candle,Although it knows how to predict — just like the swallow,But not so accurately or publicly —By the static its fur gives offThe anger lurking in a sky that feigns calm,Although it allows spinsters to enjoy a sweet old ageAnd can walk in silence even when not on a carpet;The wolf, although a she-wolf had famous dugs;The he-goat, although his skin furnishes humans with water-bottles;Despite the high price currently demanded for his skin, the otter;Although his name designates a fabric, the alpaca.3 the candle end of a miser,For a flat-headed drawing pin on its ownWith its point in the air; — in Switzerland, at the bazaar, for an eyelash,Curved escapee from a soft eye, the black hornOf a chamois; — a warming pan after it’s been hung on its nail,For a motionless pendulum, called back to life;— In a rickshaw just as it s being readied,The puller’s degrading harness, for a pair of braces;— At a lewd woman s house, a pleasant lace-fringed pillow,For an unused pincushion with a merry flounce;— A mask put aside by a tired fencer,For an eye protector to be placed over the glassesOf a stonebreaker; — the clearly wrinkled templeOf an old man, for the upper part of the underside of a fist;— For the hair-touselling black cloth of a photographer,That with which, generating a breeze, four people coverA coffin; — an album of portraits, if, to open it,You have to overcome one or two fasteners, for a parish register;— For a lowly button hook, the hook, almost a part of his body,Whose noble fate is to stand in for the five fingers of an armless man;— An arm sling, for the scarf in which a much enlargedCheek is hidden on a day when it s inflamed;— When he s making iron hot enough to be bent,For a pair of hearth bellows, the bellows used in a forge;— For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat-doctor,An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,With a solitary stalactite; — a lake of blood that appearsIn a dangerous district, for the treacherous spittleOf a consumptive; — at a saddler’s, the tetherFrom which an empty stirrup gleams, for the broken fastenerOf a yellow umbrella; — for the perfidious, sworn-at bit of shotThat an eater of game spits aside, cursing it to the devil,A cannonball cleaving the air… from the archive; first posted April 22, 2011 Carlota wears her sister’s life like skin,a snug imprisonment. She wanted lesssurety, wanted not to bemoonservant to a planet on its boisterousorbit. But Maria Conceição’schildren were easy, their facesbowls to be filled. And soonce the dispensation had been grantedshe married him, her sister’s widower,brother by affinity but notby consanguinity. He was, at least,good-looking. She was young, she did her job,she made the soup. When the babies cameshe fed them. He was always offdriving his mules or singing in those sillycontests. She was the one they circledholding up fingers to be bandaged,confiding fears and dreams. She scrubbed the purplestains of fear, but dreams make a soft shimmy,blank as milk. So she curdled milk,ladled it into molds and drained the wheyand waited. In the morningthey had fresh cheese with their breakfast bread.These are your dreams, she said.If you eat your dreams, you will liveyour dreams. What did they know? They thoughtshe was the earth because she was the mother.That was when she knew her sister’s lifehad flaked and peeled away. Her arms were tannedand strong, and she was hungry. She sprinkledsea salt on the surface of her pieceof cheese and she ate it with a knife.Ed. Note: This is from the Lusosphere feature at The Common. What does Lusosphere signify? The term encompasses the diverse people, 270 million of them, who share one thing: Portuguese as a principal language. Nancy Couto is one three Luso-American poets in the feature. Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is largely made up of lists. Most of Canto II, for instance, is taken up by a list of 207 examples of things of things that might be mistaken for smaller things with which they have a visual similarity. The first of these is a lightning conductor, which is (much) bigger than, but looks like, a grey thread being passed through the eye of a needle; the last is a spider in a fisherman’s net, which looks like, but is (a bit) bigger than a louse in a hairnet. Some of Roussel’s examples in this list amply demonstrate why his writing was so popular with the Surrealists – though the compliment wasn’t returned; he said he found their work ‘un pur obscur’. — for a single fried egg, on its own, With a vigorously salted yolk, the skull, bent in prayer, Of an old priest with jaundice; — For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat doctor, [ie. aninflamed uvula] An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun, With a solitary stalactite;All of these lists are introduced by a sort of ‘hook’. The ‘hook’ introducing this particular one is an eavesdropper overhearing a conversation about himself; our vanity is such, Roussel goes on to note, that even when we hear our large faults enumerated, it’s as if we fall under a spell that that makes us likely to mistake big things for little things: a porthole for a monocle; a guillotine for a cigar-cutter; an alligator by a sun-umbrella for a lizard by a mushroom. And so on. And so on.There is no real reason why any of these lists should ever end. In Canto I the dominant list is introduced by someone having his photo taken, who wonders if, even if he keeps as still as he can, he will end up coming out blurred. At this Roussel breaks in: ‘((((Tels se demandent: - / ((((Such also wonder: -’, and we get 54 instances of people – and things – in comparable states of wondering; a lamppost if the three-headed dog Cerberus would sniff it with all three of its noses before urinating on it; a wall being battered by a loose shutter during a storm, what it is being punished for; an animal-tamer being eaten by a wild beast if his mourning widow will still be strictly in black (sans gris ni mauve) a year on; hot milk that has been left in the pot, if it will be poured with or without its skin.It occurred to me that that Roussel’s lists, though undoubtedly the product of a very singular imagination, could actually also be the basis for quite useful and interesting writing school exercises. Just as Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’ format is widely employed to stimulate autobiographical prose pieces, wouldn’t the ‘Such Also Wonder’, say, work as an inspiring format? Such also wonder: the bic pen-cap, how often it will be used to clean the writer’s ear; the child’s tooth under the pillow, if fairies really exist…Like ‘le très special procédé (the very special method) that he used to write his novels and plays and posthumously explained in the essay ‘Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres’ (see the note on p. 233 of this edition of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique), the special methods Roussel developed in this, his final poem, might also, or so it seems to me, prove useful for later writers.from the archive; first posted April 19, 2011 A poet sobers up. A seer sits up. Sees a literary establishment. A mother. An order seamless as glass. Sees his enemy and says: let’s be honest. Says to the child: let’s be honest. Let’s act like adults. The poem reveals a word. A hole punched in glass, foreign matter quaking forth a rash. Sees the world’s immune system attack. A boy becomes a master of illusions. A seer seeks truth. Sprays acid on his illusions. Wilts the world to its essentials. Pain comes to terms with a lyre. A lyre lives to retire. A poet asks the question: On whom can we depend? The one who knows the self is other depends on himself. Is hobbled and becomes dependent. The sky breaks open with my light. My love feeds the world. A word becomes the emblem of the victory of the world, a man with money. A poet becomes a man with money, truth in one body and soul. I want a wife, a son I can teach.from the excellent new issue of Bennington Review, which includes poems by Troy Jollimore, David Kirby, David Lehman, Erika Meitner, Emily Pettit, Sean Singer, Elizabeth Willis, many o/thers, and nonfiction by Kelle Groom and Craig Morgan Teicher.https://www.benningtonreview.org/current-issue-8 In today s New York Times, a place I know we all rush for the latest and greatest in poetry criticism, David Orr asks, in The Great(ness) Game, basically, what will happen when THE generation of GREAT poets is gone. Orr begins with noting that John Ashbery is the first living poet to have a volume in the Library of America. And this leads Orr to ponder: What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness. Hit the 7-elevens! Stock up on greatness before the twister hits! First off, “Great,” is a sloppy term, something to which Orr’s pile-up of potential definitions and questions, mostly rhetorical questions, gestures. To give him some credit, the definition of “great” is his topic; but notice the plague of single words meat hooked in quotation marks (“greatness,” “great,” “boring,” “good,” “major,” “serious,” c.)—and THEN notice when Orr increasingly decides meat hooks aren’t necessary. Words whose meaning he begins by suggesting are up for grabs, are by the end of the essay, grabbed. The start of the essay is addicted to quotation marks on terms, while the end, I’m not sure if he thought this was subtle, features few. For a piece dealing with definition he plays faster and looser with the indefinite and definite than any writer I’ve ever read. Defining “great,” he opines, is an “increasingly blurry business.” [these quotation marks are mine—from now on I will bold the words he himself puts in quotation marks.] However “increasing blurry,” the term “great” is at the beginning of the essay more often then not held in quotation marks, and, by the end, great stands naked, proud, and apparently self-evidently in focus. 1. “The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business.” Orr blames this on postmodernism’s questioning of “Truth, Beauty, [and] Justice.” But simple sense might tell us that as history progresses, we have fewer and fewer filters (years, critics, just plain old historic contingency) through which poetry must pass to get to us eager readers. Contemporary poetry is precisely that, contemporary, these poems haven’t been around long enough to have dependable gauges of “greatness” even were we to wish to make such questionable judgments. And there is the adventure! There is the delight, the pleasure, the challenge for the contemporary reader. I do not for one read a poem to decide, “Is this great?” I read it to see if it invents, if it makes me run out and read it to all my overly-patient friends, if I can’t stop running through lines of it as I fall asleep, if it gives me insight into big or little questions I’ve been puzzling over. Or if it shapes in language something that has been floating in the often addled ether of my thinking. Or if a new device makes me see language and its possibility in an unexpected way. After reading our post on painting fabric-covered furniture, Stacey Harwood sent us an email about her great “guest” chair. “I knew a white chair would not stay white for long in my NYC apartment so I bought some fabric markers and I invite our guests to sign it. I’m happy to say that it has been signed by some of our most celebrated poets: Mark Strand and John Ashbery are toward the top; Charles Simic is on the seat. You can also distinguish Jim Cummins, Susan Wheeler and Star Black (poet, collage artist, photographer). To the lower right is Gabriella Gershenson, a senior editor at Saveur. On the left are Deborah Landau and Richard Howard…”Harwood’s husband, David Lehman is series editor of the annual The Best American Poetry books, which is how they come to have to many fine poets and writers as friends. Their blog is The Best American Poetry.“It’s a wonderful record of the first two years in our apartment and truly a one-of-a-kind piece that gives us much pleasure.”Harwood improvised a whole other order of guest book… from Improvised Life: A Treasury of Inspiring Ideashttps://improvisedlife.com/2011/02/22/guest-chair-a-charming-play-on-guest-book/ ______________________________________________________________________________________________________Shibboleth One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.Another couldn’t strip the cellophaneFrom a G.I.’s pack of cigarettes.By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected. By the second week of battleWe’d become obsessed with trivia.At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,An ignorance of baseball could be lethal. The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.” ___________________________________________________________________________________________Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents. In his thirties, he settled in the UK, where he became a well-known and highly regarded poet. Also an accomplished flute and whistle player, he was an active part of London’s traditional Irish music scene. His sudden death at age 50 was a great loss to both the literary and traditional music communities. Fintan O’Toole’s piece for the Irish Times examines Donaghy’s “elastic identity.” Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman, published a book in 2014 about their life together. See also The Guardian and the Poetry Foundation for more on Donaghy s life and work. See the Session for information on his life in Irish music. To hear him play, see this clip:__________________________________________________________________________________________________ of coming backten hours laterto the greatnessof Teddy Wilson"After You've Gone"on the pianoin the cornerof the bedroomas I enterin the dark A creative communications, branding, and resources consultancy founded by Victoria C. Rowan

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