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Romulus and Remus (for Paul Violi) [by David Lehman]
Look for Remus in the index of a book And you are bound to get “See Romulus” Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonder About indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the former As the plural except in a financial context, and how An index to a book that may not exist may imply A whole biograp...
Name a Song (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)
Hey Bleaders Collaboration continues. Picture and 6 Stanzas. In other news, Cry if you want to, Hecht said to herself, who wouldn't listen, and maybe you. Love, Jennifer Rapture The two-tone girl, mouth wide open, head-back, squinting blind at the rock-stars on the stage. Screaming. Louder than the music; so loud out here that in her head it must have been astounding. Above her, on the stage, the musicians keep playing. They sway their elegant teen-aged hips to music even they can only feel. Outside, geese fly overhead, honking. Dogs listen with their bodies and then bark. Wings bat at the ancient night air so that it rushes, like love out of breath, beneath the flock. A man says listen and stretches his neck to do it. A woman says Iisten and covers her eyes with her hands. photo © Reuben Radding poem by Jennifer Michael Hecht from The Next Ancient World (Tupelo, 2001); first published in Poetry (2000). http://amzn.com/0971031002 Continue reading
Posted May 20, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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Propagation of the Species (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)
Dearest Bleaders, So, yeah. As I keep sort of explaining. There's this photographer Reuben Radding whom I only know online, through our dear mutual friend Yvany Peery. He posted one of his photos, an important hand outside the window of a big black car, and Yvany commented that it reminded her of one of my poems, of which she offered a big chunk, about how sometimes when Stalin retouched Trotsky out of photos, he forgot the hand on the shoulder of the person next to him, so there's this floating hand, leftover. The point is, Yvany bossed us to do more match ups and it is fun so far and careful work. Here's our third on purpose. From On The Propagation of the Species We parse the problem, nouning out the principle players: friends, families, prospects. I interview the possibility of a child; ask it questions. Intone the word: Interested? Then: Want to learn the word for widget? Want to read Beowulf? Want to get named? Shall we grin and bear it? I admit, existence is where woeful was conjured. Nonetheless, to recommend it, there is Jell-O; average rainfall; the anchovy app at Luna’s; and the fact that in the middle, many change their minds on the whole shebang — get a good one off in both directions. But you and I are going to have to choose. It is our autobiography we are eating; you snooze you lose. Still, in the midst of going too slowly, all hell has been known to break loose. A gang of snails attacks a tree sloth, steals her wallet. Down at the station, police chief questions: How’d they get ya? Sloth says, I dunno, it all happened so fast. The photo was taken by Rueben Radding in Brooklyn, NY in 2015. The poem excerpt is from my second poetry book, Funny (Wisconsin, 2005). It was first published in In Posse, where you can see it in its entirety. It occurs to me that it was also in the Best American Poetry Anthology 2005, when it was special edited by Paul Muldoon. I wrote it when I was figuring out whether to have kids. I did. I'm nodding at how well it reminds me of that feeling of trying to figure out if the odds were in favor of such a drastic move. I'm writing prose right now on the mystery of why people have children and I'm taking the stance that it is a real mystery. I get why they're okay with it once they do it, the kids are rewarding as hell. But how do we know that before it happens? Why would anyone take on such a responsibility, expense, potential for pain. I'm starting to think there is no answer to that question. Better to just ask how we feel when we have done it, and how it feels when we have not. Happy Mothersday-Late. Anyway, I'm sharing these here, so far weekly, and I hope you are glad about it.... Continue reading
Posted May 9, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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On the Past Denied (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)
Posted Apr 28, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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Oughta be in Pictures (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)
Hi again Bleaders, I wanted to show you this. On fb the photographer Reuben Radding and I have stumbled into a collaboration. Here's the first official one. RR had posted a photo on his page and our mutual friend posted a poem of mine in the comments, and she was right, it was a compelling match up. So we're going agin. Reuben Radding April 18 at 12:40pm · New York · History Even Eve, the only soul in all of time to never have to wait for love, must have leaned some sleepless nights alone against the garden wall and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild and wished to trade-in all of Eden to have but been a child. In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place. photo © Reuben Radding text © Jennifer Michael Hecht http://www.reubenradding.com http://tinyurl.com/hofhadt The the girl in nature but confined, the grown woman walking away, the line between adulthood and childhood formed by the other children, in stages of growth, and the main girl's amazing expression which could mean several things. I see the face of being surprised while doing something illicit, or just about to pounce, or. I hope you are all well, but the very questions thus phrased informs me that this is impossible. To the woeful, courage! To the vibrant, maybe write another line? Love, Jennifer Continue reading
Posted Apr 20, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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Thanks Stacey. xo
Rhapsody in Despair and Wonder, and notes on my return - Jennifer Michael Hecht
Dear Bleaders, Much have I traveled in the realms of gold. Also spent a lot of time in realms of muck, and the town of what the. But I’m back here in my page away from page, The Lion and the Honeycomb, on BAP. Its title refers to the way Yeats used a phrase from the Biblical story of Samson. I’...
Rhapsody in Despair and Wonder, and notes on my return - Jennifer Michael Hecht
Posted Nov 18, 2015 at The Best American Poetry
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Thanks David - that's lovely to hear and yes, it is a moving tribute.
And Desmond, Amazon will be fine. I await my photograph, but the negativity is as but dust.
Also: Yowza you know a lot about Irish myth! I especially like Norse-berserker.
Jennifer
It is nice to be known, to be called out specially by the uncanny. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Dear Bleaders! So a poem is in my head today, and I thought of you. The Song of Wandering Aengus - W. B. Yeats I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like star...
Well, glad you guys worked that out. I was going to stay out of it, but not happy. I put in some time writing that little essay on the Wandering Aengus (why? no money in it. no pleasant comments usually. just a desire to talk about the verse in my head, and a hope for at least imagined community) and the only response was a paragraph of curses in my inbox. I am an established philosopher and poet, a mother of two, (I should add broke and struggling public intellectual) and that is not how one speaks to me. Interestingly, my new poetry book Who Said tells how curses strike me. Why not buy a copy so we can put this unpleasantness behind us?
It is nice to be known, to be called out specially by the uncanny. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Dear Bleaders! So a poem is in my head today, and I thought of you. The Song of Wandering Aengus - W. B. Yeats I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like star...
It is nice to be known, to be called out specially by the uncanny. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Mar 21, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Bleaders, I have missed you. You ver always on mine mind. Terrific poet Anthony Madrid [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Feb 22, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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The "No Hemlock Rock" came before Stay; and a poem by Lisa Marie Basile [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Dec 30, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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love this. It's so good, and twisted.
Old Friends by Jennifer L. Knox
(Ed note: Laurence Goldstein's posts this week about encounter poems reminded me of this poem by one of my favorite poets. What do you think? Do you have a favorite "encounter" poem? -- sdh) Old Friends I’m in a coffee shop, remembering a woman I knew years ago who had drowned eight kittens i...
Hardball. Not Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Dec 26, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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Poem by Tommy Pico [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Dear Bleaders! It's been about six months since my last post - I've been super busy getting my two new books to press. They both came out last month and it's been very exciting - and sometimes a lot to handle. More on that soon. Right now I want to introduce you to a wonderful young poet who I met when he was in the MFA Program at the New School, Tommy Pico. His poetry is great; he grew up on the rez and writes movingly about it; he's been a community builder in poetry, starting reading series, putting out a magazine, etc. Pico has an app coming out in January with his poetry collection on it. I'll tell you more about that when it comes out. For now, here's a poem of his: Inheritance 1. My mother was voted “best legs” in her senior high school yearbook, despite the fact that she was also student body president and editor in chief of the school paper. Only boys got superlatives like, “Most Likely to Succeed.” 2. Doctors say that Indians are predisposed to a lot of illnesses, like alcoholism and diabetes. At the clinic, patient history starts the first time you get sick. They ask me why don’t I eat, nearly commit me when I say because my great grandfather’s horses were stolen in 1890. 3. Myths aren't told to make things seem down to earth. 4. Thinking all the time vs Giving up (the butt). 5. Cigarette habit that kicks in around the third drink and the right lung. 6. Things that make me want to run: I) Seeing other people run. II) Eating a whole pizza. III) Everyone adoring the same person. 7. Upon being drafted into Vietnam, my father guided tanks through minefields in the jungle when he was very young. I have never not once walked in the wrong direction surfacing from the subway. 8. Waiting to be moved. 9. Waiting to be introduced. 10. Always wanting to raise my hand first. 11. My father's unfinished collection of poetry is called, "In the Days of Tall Cans and Short Hopes." 12. Songs to sing when the roommates are gone vs songs to sing at karaoke vs songs to listen to, pretending. 13. Collections: do they get better, or just bigger? 14. Devin at Blue Olive. James at Pine State. Barry at Cup. Angelo at Dave & Busters. Jean Baptiste at Point Ephemere. Eric at Pop In. Federico at Monster Ronsons. BigGuySF365 at Adam4Adam. Me at Gmail. 15. There must be a word for this in some romance language, for looking down at your legs and seeing mom; for looking down at your hands and seeing dad. --- Great, right? Alright, more soon. I've missed you all terribly and hope to now start blogging at you regularly again. As always, don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again. love, Jennifer Continue reading
Posted Dec 16, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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Storm's a comin'; and a poem by Marilyn Nelson [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Jun 6, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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Early Summer Due In, and a Poem from Major Jackson's Holding Company [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted May 29, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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Clouds, Potatoes, Timothy Donnelly [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted May 20, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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Bodies, baby. About a poem by Tom Healy [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Dear Bleaders, Well when it remembers to rain it certainly remembers how to do it! It’s been storming off and on here in the spring of early-twenty first century Brooklyn and just now the birds are whistling hosannas to the sun. This is the fourth iteration of my newfangled blog here at BAP; the old fang, long in the tooth, deep in the truth, was about poets equally established, Dickinson, Bishop, and Szymborska, Keats, Yeats, and Stevens; the new fangs, familiar with fresher truth and bluer truth, are poets of my age, era-wise; wise beyond error. I pick the poem first, for the slinky pleasure of it, then ask myself why and type to you my answer. This one is so goddamn dead-on real about where so many of us actually live a good part of our painful inner lives that I want you to read it before I say more. It’s by the wonderful poet Tom Healy, whose deep and compelling book is What the Right Hand Knows. Mirror, Mirror What do we do when we hate our bodies? A good coat helps. Some know how to pull off a hat. And there are paints, lighting, knives, needles, various kinds of resignation, the laugh in the mirror, the lie of saying it doesn’t matter. There is also the company we keep: surgeons and dermatologists, faith healers and instruction-givers, tailors of cashmere and skin who send their bills for holding our shame-red hands, raw from the slipping rope, the same hands with which we tremble ever so slightly, holding novels in bed, concentrating on the organization of pain and joy we say is another mirror, a depth, a conjure in which we might meet someone who says touch me. - Tom Healy Isn’t that brill? Being American is such a weird endeavor. First wave first world. For most of history every generation knew famine. Rich or poor, you saw people starve and you either starved too, or at least did without. Food was just not there. Letters home from the New World didn’t only describe what people ate here, they described the shops themselves and sometimes said things like – “There are ten kinds of fruit at the market and five kinds of meat – while you in the old world count as a market a slab of wood balanced between two rocks and displaying three wilted carrots, some sad greens, and a short pile of slightly putrid chicken feet.” They worried over their poor emaciated bodies and dreamed of heaven as an endless feast. Then within a generation of the first people to have enough food across their lifetimes, we started worrying about the sad avoirdupois of bodies, and fantasize about ourselves as trim as a sail. Thin as a rail. Humanity has a genius for despair. I’ve got a lot to say about this in The Happiness Myth, just fyi. Then too, fat isn’t our only beastly burden, though it is the one that chases me around the... Continue reading
Posted May 9, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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Cicadas and a Poem by Jennifer L. Knox [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Dear Bleaders, Blue skies, pink cherry trees, yellow and red tulips, new-green leaves. As your correspondent from Brooklyn I report that all this color is exploding on the usual grey of asphalt and slate, dark blush of brick and brick-shade paint. In a matter of days the magical Magicicadas will be here. These are the 17 year cicadas – who we haven’t seen since “the Macarena” was the top of the pops – and they will be creeping out of the ground in the millions on the East Coast, sometimes 1.5 million an acre. The nymphs crawling out of the dirt has been described as looking like boiling water. The males soon start singing for sex and hit an incredible 100 dB, deafening with desire, and the lady bugs flit their wings to them to come hither; then mostly lay their eggs in the sweetly named “chorus trees” where all that sound is singing like a torch of noise. Branches bow with the weight of the fertilized nests. Then within two months (by early July) the adults are all dead and the kids are back underground to suck the sweet sap of tree roots and wait until 2030 to emerge and buzz at us again. All this puts me in the mind of a great poem by Jennifer L. Knox whose brilliant books are Drunk by Noon, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, and A Gringo Like Me. The poem has nothing to do with cicadas, but it is about the magic of listening with your eyes, and brains. Babies in Silent Movies How’d they make it cry so loud? You know under the ragtime roll’s a wail that’d peel paint, can see the blond brows crimped like claws under the gingham bonnet, cheeks red hot despite spectrumlessness. Maybe a lackey’s pinching its thigh beneath the table. A good mother’d shrug off the short pricks of pain one outgrows to keep a kid back then that fat. - Jennifer L. Knox Quiet yelling and black-and-white red. I love the rhythm of this, “the blond brows crimped like claws” – it just tumbles along at a double-quick. Behind it there’s this mother making a hard calculation to pinch the baby rich, or rich enough eat, anyway. She’s right to call the mother good, too, despite the obvious argument against it. Who among us doesn’t have to goose ourself into doing what’s good for us? What would we do without literature to remind us that no one escapes these dear-inflicted pinches? A lot goes on under the table, or out of range of sound and color. It takes so much imagination to know we’re not alone. I try hard to remember on my own, but art is always surprising me with the sound I can’t hear, the shades I can’t see, the unknowable pain of others. And like I say, I’m really trying! Well, I’m awake again now. Here’s hoping it lasts. Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you... Continue reading
Posted May 2, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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Spring Notes and a Poem by Mark Bibbins [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Apr 29, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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With a Poem by Cate Marvin (and a few words about Boston) I start a new phase of The Lion and the Honeycomb [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Dearest Bleaders, I’ve been away so long! Been tending a few other fireplaces, to wit, I’ve got two books coming out in the fall; also changes in husband’s work has given me more time alone with my kids, now seven and eight, which, of course, leaves less time alone with words. To be scathingly honest it might be truer to say I simply couldn’t get my blogging fire lit of late, but look now, I’ve got a spark and some tinder, and hope for smoke. My idea is to return to the blog but with a new focus: poems I love by contemporary poets. In the past I wrote mostly about the greats of our common canon, especially Bishop, Plath, O’Hara, Dickinson, Milton, Yates, Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot, Auden, Wordsworth, Keats, Stevens, Blake, well, you get the type. Now I’ll be offering poems by the living and wonderful. We start with this intense little fascination by Cate Marvin, author of the terrific books World’s Tallest Disaster and Fragment of the Head of a Queen, both with Sarabande. Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page Spokes, spooks: your tinsel hair weaves the wheel that streams through my dreams of battle. Another apocalypse, and your weird blondeness cycling in and out of the march: down in a bunker, we hunker, can hear the boots from miles off clop. We tend to our flowers in the meantime. And in the meantime, a daughter is born. She begins as a mere inch, lost in the folds of a sheet; it's horror to lose her before she's yet born. Night nurses embody the darkness. Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far. Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends. I am no friend. According to them. Accordion, the child pulls its witching wind between its opposite handles: the lungs of the thing grieve, and that is its noise. She writhes the floor in tantrum. When you climbed the sides of the house spider-wise to let yourself in, unlocked the front door, let me in to climb up into your attic the last time I saw you that infected cat rubbed its face against my hand. Wanting to keep it. No, you said. We are friends. I wear my green jacket with the furred hood. You pushed me against chain-length. Today is the day that the planet circles the night we began. A child is born. Night nurses coagulate her glassed-in crib. Your organs, distant, still float the darkness of jars. - Cate Marvin There’s a deep drumbeat, heartbeat, that jogs us down the midnight hallways of this poem. Or is it only the gloaming, night not yet come fully down? There are secrets here, but also confidences rendered, something terrifying yet also the glory of birth, possibilities of life and the awful proximity of death. "I am no friend. According... Continue reading
Posted Apr 19, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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September Day [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Sep 11, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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Good news; Exit from the Monkey House [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Mar 2, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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Goodbye WS; Hello to you in this dark evening season [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]
Posted Feb 18, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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