Who said poetry makes nothing happen? -- SDH Continue reading

Put this on your calendar and be there! Terence Winch, September, 2022. Photo by Tom Goodwin An Evening of Poetry By and With Terence Winch OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Friday, March 31, 2023, at 6:30 pm That Ship Has Sailed, Terence Winch’s ninth collection of poetry, synthesizes the serious and comic to address sex, love, loss, death, belief, the afterlife, and the past. In February 2023, the University of Pittsburgh Press published this latest collection by Winch as part of its fabled Pitt Poetry Series. ACW Members Free - Non-members $15 Reading and Wine Reception Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I St NW Washington DC 20006 Find more information about this event here Find out more about Terence Winch here. -- sdl Continue reading

POLITICAL AMBITION A pig swallowing an entire apple tree then sleeping under covers Politics must be hard You can’t step into the same politics twice I take off my boots When I try to put them back on they won’t let me Politics is wearing them now Politics can always step into a victim twice Here’s Pharaoh here’s a basket and inside the basket is the death of Pharaoh’s son. MY FJORD I will sail through my own fjord and I will name the fjord My Fjord. I know it’s incorrect to say that the Vikings wore horned helmets, but I will wear a horned helmet, for my job is to correct history. I’ll leap over vats of mead and let libations drench my puffy skirt. (I like mead, but it’s amazing how refreshing milk directly from the cow can be.) And then I will sail on My Fjord plowing through every flaming funeral. Enough celebrations of victory over life. And who will stop my marauding? For these are my violent decades, and everyone everywhere from all time: those are my own people. from The Day Every Day Is by Lee Upton. Saturnalia Books Continue reading

Basketball great Willis Reed spoke about his literacy project. David was eager to get his predictions for the upcoming Knicks season. In 2003, then chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, invited David to join him in Washington for the annual Washington Book Festival, hosted by Laura Bush. It was a great event. Dana had even arranged for David's mom Anne to come along and for all of us to join him at the White House for the breakfast ceremony preceding the Festival. Just as the guests were taking their seats for Bush's opening remarks, David saw former Knicks great Willis Reed enter the room. He was impossible to miss, of course; at 6'10" he towered over just about everyone in the room, with the exception of former Detroit Pistons center Bob Lanier (6'11"), also in attendance. Reed was on hand to talk about his literacy project. I watched David from across the room (he was seated among the day's speakers; I was elsewhere, with Anne). He lit up when Reed took the podium. When the proceedings adjourned and guests made their way to the exits, David practically lept over seats with the finesse of a point-guard making a layup shot with two seconds on the clock. I've seen him focus on an objective, but this was masterly. He reached Reed and I snapped the photo, above. As it so happened, my office in New York City was at One Penn Plaza, across the street from Madison Square Garden. On a whim, I phoned the Knick's publicity department with the request that Reed sign the photo, which he graciously agreed to do. I've given David many gifts over the years, but I think this signed photo of the basketball great ranks among his favorites. -- sdl The moment no Knicks fan will ever forget: when Willis Reed hobbled onto the court in the deciding game of the 1970 championship series with the LA Lakers. When Reed came out, the crowd roared. Reed, injured, played well. The great unselfish Knicks of Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBuschere, Bill Bradley, and Dick Barnett, coached by Red Holtzman, won the game, the series, and the hearts of New Yorkers. -- DL Continue reading

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Dear Bleaders, I’m supposed to be cleaning! I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend. But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post. I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good. So. What I want to tell you is pretty important. I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States. What great people I met. Ridiculously cool people. Ridunkulous. And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420. If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know. I gave 6 talks in four days! One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired. Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me. I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism. There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community. What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true. It’s us. We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love. We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion. The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds. Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning. There is no hidden world of meaning. The feelings of meaning are the meaning. It’s all true. Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual. We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another. It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark? Yes. Come sit with us. We're right here. Turn on the light. We must look after one another. There is no heaven. We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty. It doesn’t matter all that much. There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares? Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end. You are here. It’s wonderful. We made it into existence together. We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating. Health Care, people! Gorgeous African-American president... Continue reading

After bursting through the allusion-barrier so dramatically, as related on Thursday [Oct. 16, 2008], there has been no stopping me, and I would like to conclude my very enjoyable stint as your guest-blogger with a poem in a genre my young self would have despised, ie. the poem about another poet –- which, come to think of it, was exactly what the poem imagining Whitman’s youthful conquests in my last post, was too. Oh well…. This one is about Hart Crane, and is in prose – to be precise it’s in the form of a letter addressed to the editor of a literary journal. The rest, I hope, explains itself. Thanks for having me, and for the many entertaining responses I’ve received; it’s been a ball…. I should perhaps say in preface to this piece that Crane was christened Harold, but shortly after deciding to become a poet adopted his mother’s maiden name of Hart. The Death of Hart Crane Sir / Madam, I was intrigued by the letter from a reader in your last issue that recounted his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat made from Vera Cruz to New York in April of 1932, a voyage that the poet Hart Crane never completed. According to her Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan. This reminded me of a night in the early seventies on which I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village. I got talking to an elderly man called Harold occupying an adjacent booth, and when the conversation touched on poetry he explained, somewhat shyly, that he had himself published two collections a long time ago, one called White Buildings in 1926, and the other, The Bridge, in 1930. I asked if he’d written much since. ‘Oh plenty,’ he replied, ‘and a lot of it much better than my early effusions.’ I expressed an interest in seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment on MacDougal Street. Here the evening turns somewhat hazy. I could hear the galloping strains of Ravel’s Boléro turned up loud as Harold fumbled for his keys. Clearly some sort of party was in progress. At that moment the door was opened from within by another man in his seventies, who exclaimed happily, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come in!’ The room was full of men in their seventies, all, or so it seemed, called either Hart or Harold. The apartment’s walls were covered with Aztec artefacts, and its floors with Mexican carpets. It dawned on me then that Hart Crane had not only somehow survived his supposed death by water, but that his vision of an America of the likeminded was being fulfilled that very night, as it... Continue reading

Lawrence Joseph interviewed the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai for The Paris Review, Spring 1992. Amichai was born in Germany in 1924. With his family he fled from Hitler in 1936, emigrating to Palestine with his orthodox Jewish family. He fought form the British in World War II, for the Haganah uderground in 1948, and for the Iarseli army in 1956 and 1973. "I really have the feeling that I am the result and very contents of the twentieth century," he tells Larry Joseph. <<< I was [raaised a Zionist], but my family’s Zionism wasn’t ideological in any intellectual sense. It was the Zionism of religious orthodoxy, a practical Zionism—going to Palestine. For my parents, going to Palestine was typically romantic, motivated in part by their sense of Orthodoxy and in part by the longing to be in their own country. I had cousins who may have seen Zionism in utopian socialist terms, though my parents did not. There was, of course, zealous anti-Semitism before Hitler, which also had something to do with my family’s going to Palestine. Some people think that anti-Semitism didn’t really exist in Germany until 1933. I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Hitler’s guilt, but the anti-Semitism I grew up with predated Hitler. We were called names. We had stones thrown at us. And, yes, this created real sorrow. We defended ourselves as well as we could. Funny thing, the common name we were called was Isaac—the way Muslims are called Ali or Mohammed. They’d call out, Isaac, go back to Palestine, leave our home, go to your place. They threw stones at us and shouted, Go to Palestine. Then in Palestine we were told to leave Palestine—history juxtaposed can be very ironic. But I do remember in 1933 when the Nazis came into power the anti-Semitism had been religiously based. Then it became political and economic. Before that the two hadn’t merged—there was a kind of horrible limbo—but you could feel what was happening. I remember my parents telling me to keep away from the military parades, not to become mesmerized by the music and marching. I was also told—Würzburg was a very Catholic town—to keep away from the Catholic processions on certain feast days. All Saints’ Day, I remember in particular. The processions were very somber, very German in a way, with students, priests and nuns carrying banners and holy icons and figures. Once—I was nine or ten—I was watching a Catholic procession because I liked its colorfulness and pageantry. Since I was Orthodox I was wearing a yarmulke. Suddenly, someone hit me in the face and shouted, 'You dirty little Jew, take your skullcap off!' >>> Memorial Day for the War Dead Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) Memorial day for the war dead. Add now the grief of all your losses to their grief, even of a woman that has left you. Mix sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history, which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning on one day for easy, convenient memory.... Continue reading

What you see when you approach the gate at Clare College, Cambridge, in March: The vew of the bridge and the old court in the near green future: Continue reading

Janice Erlbaum participated in the group reading we did for "The Best American Erotic Poems" at KGB Bar on March 10. 2008. She read her sestina ("The Temp") from the book, but time constraints stopped her from reading a second sestina, which she has posted on her own blog and which you will find below, along with a few prefatory sentences from Ms. Erlbaum. -- DL The "Other" Sestina by Janice Erlbaum Janice Erlbaum at KGB Bar March 10, 2008 Because I am fanatical about not running over my alloted time at readings, especially when there are nine other people on the bill, I didn't read this other sestina, which I'm dying to read in public, especially after it was rejected by McSweeney's for being, and I quote, "too much." I present it to you now, for your consideration for the Best American Completely Unerotic; In Fact, Makes You Never Want to Have Sex Again anthology: How do married people masturbate? How do married people masturbate? What do they picture when they come? They think of the guy at the office, the girl In the video, her asshole stretched, wincing; Ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, the ones they still hate. There’s nothing safe to think about, they fall asleep. This is how you prepare to go to sleep, How you wake up, how you run home and masturbate. Everybody does it! Why can't you? You hate Me for wanting to fuck when you just want to come – I turn to stroke you, you turn away, wincing. I don't care if you think about another girl. I would want to fuck her too, that girl, Anybody but me, laying next to you asleep, A big fat fucking obstacle to your wincing Nightly ritual: Pop in a tape and masturbate, Watch that girl get drilled. Two minutes to come. You mop up, drift off. You burned off some hate. Not me. I walk around with mine. I hate What I saw on that tape. I thought, poor girl, She's in pain and she has to pretend to come. I lay next to you that night, unable to sleep, Therefore you were unable to masturbate. The clock shined mean and bright in the dark. We winced. Some nights I straddle a pillow, wincing, Squeezing at thoughts I don't want to think, I hate The way you come to me when I masturbate. Face down on my belly, I look like that girl. I writhe a while. I give up. I go to sleep. I don't come. It's okay. I don't need to come. I don't care what you think about when you come, As long as it's me you're fucking, wincing, Waiting for you to get off and slump, fall asleep. You are faithful. I have no right to hate You, hate myself, hate the hundreds of girls With their assholes stretched, so you can masturbate. I know who you are when you masturbate. I come Into the room, kiss your forehead, your lover girl.... Continue reading

<<< Columbia University will be holding a memorial for Richard Howard, the greatly beloved poet, teacher, editor, and mentor, and on March 31, 2023, at Miller Theatre. For those of you not familiar with the campus, the entrance to the auditorium is to the left of the gate to the university on Broadway at 116th St in New York City. Colleagues and former students will read from Richard's writings. The event starts at 7 pm, with a reception afterwards in Pulitzer Hall across College Walk from Dodge Hall. I hope you can come. David Alexander >>> Note: Miller Theatre is asking that people who want to attend make a reservation. Here is the official announcement with a link for reserving: https://www.millertheatre.com/events/a-tribute-to-richard-howard Richard picked the poems for The Best American Poetry1995. It was wonderful to work with him. -- DL Continue reading

A few excerpts from Kay Ryan's "I Go To AWP" (written for Poetry, in 2005, the year AWP was in Vancouver) <<< Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP. Another Fear I have a weak character. I am very susceptible to other people’s enthusiasms, at times actually courting them. I like to sit among people who feel strongly about a basketball team, say, and get excited with them. I love to love ouzo with ouzo lovers. These are, of course, innocent examples. But this weakness concerns me in going to AWP. If I’m exposed to the enthusiasms of others, I know that I am capable of betraying my deepest convictions, laughing in the face of a lifetime of hostility to instruction, horror at groupthink. The only way I’ve ever gotten along in this world is by staying away from it; I have had only enough character to keep myself out of situations that require character. Now here I am, going to AWP. How am I going to remember: these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus. Back to the Panel The ways the panel members say they stay creative are not what I would have said in their place, which is that I had abandoned the teaching of creative writing and run as though my clothes were on fire. Rather, one says she teaches but she also does her own writing projects at the same time, currently putting together an anthology of stories by sex workers. This is a person of an industriousness, social res-ponsibility, and generosity beyond my imagining. A number of panel members, with members of the audience nodding in agreement, say that they are actually nourished by student work, and stimulated to do their own work. I am speechless. My sense of this panel, mostly made up of women and attended by women for what reason I can’t say, is that these are sincere, helpful, useful people who show their students their own gifts and help them to enjoy the riches of language while also trying to get some writing done themselves. They have to juggle these competing demands upon their souls and it is hard and honorable. I agree and shoot me now. Lunch Break I met up with Dorianne Laux at the sonnet panel. In spite of my abstract contempt for everyone in attendance here, I am on the functional level delighted as well as grateful to see this person whom I know and like, a warm human being, a strong poet, and the head of a writing program in Oregon. This is all so distressing. I knew it would be. We find Dorianne’s husband, world’s-nicest-poet Joe Millar, and collect Major Jackson, a young poet making a name for himself, teaching in a writing program, and not incidentally an old student of Dorianne’s, and we all go for lunch at a little... Continue reading

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown. After I finished my MFA at University of Oregon, I packed up my worldly possessions (some clothes, a lotta books) in my beat-up minivan and was off to New Orleans. A week prior I was called with an offer to teach at Xavier University, an HBCU there. The job didn’t pay much, but I could mostly make rent. I was teaching five courses of composition writing each semester to remedial students. In my idealism, I was doing more than passing along the mechanics of writing. By teaching my students to express their realities and opinions, I was teaching a pathway for them to control their future. The job didn’t leave room for much else. I thought about the students’ papers in the morning over bowls of oatmeal, and while brushing my teeth at night. And yet, when anyone asked what I did for work, I never mentioned the job that paid the bills. I pretentiously announced that I was a poet, often to quizzical looks. Even though I desired to be seen as an artist, truth be told, I wasn’t writing. I hadn’t published a book yet; I just had a few poems in journals. I was posing. I told myself the intensity of grading crushed my creativity. When I showed up to write a poem at my local coffee shop with its rows of tables and green lamps, I sipped my latte, fiddled, and looked around at all the Tulane law students studiously buried in their law books. Then, one of those students walked by and noticed a volume of poems by June Jordan. She stopped abruptly and said, “I love her! You must be a poet.” and I said, “Yes, well, indeed I am.” and she said, “What kind of poetry do you write?” And it was like my brain slammed into a wall of air. Nothing. I had become that disconnected from my writing life. The next morning, at a crossroads, I woke up early and began to write down, with as much detail as possible, the previous day’s activities, a log of living. I abandoned the notion of poetic language, profound metaphors, and philosophical musing. I simply let myself go into myself, deeper and deeper. That process helped me find the real writer. Maybe he was somewhere in those depths, but maybe he was in the routine itself. Today’s instructive poem realizes that sometimes, simply saying what happened with accuracy is the poem, naming in such a way that we become enchanting to ourselves. Panama Hat by David Lehman “What kind of poems do you write?” the interviewer asked and I said occasional poems each day is an occasion take today The sun shone on my face shielded by a Panama hat made in Ecuador and the fate of a leaf in a hurricane was the day’s best simile for financial markets where the value of green keeps going up. The trees and the grass are vying in... Continue reading

Mary Jo Salter on W. H. Auden in Literary Matters What is the secret meaning of the last line of "Epitaph on a Tyrant": "And when he cried, the little children died in the street"? To what extent does "New Year Letter" owe its greatness to Auden's mastery of the tetrameter line? "Poetry might be defined as". . . complete the sentence with a six-word formulation derived from Auiden. David Lehman thinks "Caliban to the Audience" is Auden's greatest prose poem. What would Mary Jo Salter say? To get the answers to these and other fascinating questions related to the great W. H. Auden read Mary Jo Salter's essay in the new issue of Literary Matters, edited by Ryan Wilson. Salter reviewed the two new volumes of Auden's collected poetry edited by Edward Mendelson, with elaborate annonations, published in 202 by Princeton UP. An excerpt: <<< One could spend years tracing such unwitting rehearsals and deliberate rethinkings. In Another Time’s “XXIX. Song,” whose manuscript Mendelson dates from September 1939, Auden writes “Silence invades the breathing wood” although he has already written, in January of that year, the famous line of the Yeats elegy, “Silence invaded the suburbs.” Maybe he didn’t remember. I prefer the line from the Yeats elegy, not because of the difference between a wood and a suburb, but because the past tense, “invaded,” makes you wonder what comes after the silence. In “X. Brussels in Winter,” I prefer the arresting 1966 revision “And fifty franks will earn a stranger right / To take the shuddering city in his arms” to the milder 1938 original, “And fifty franks will earn the stranger right / To warm the heartless city in his arms.” In “Music is International” (1947), Auden writes that “we may some day need very much to / Remember when we were happy,” which is fine, but it’s not as delightful as the ending to “Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno” (1958) : “…though one cannot always / Remember exactly why one has been happy, / There is no forgetting that one was.” Auden was often wrong-headed to ditch his earlier poems, but it’s a pleasure to see him, late in his career, writing better versions of similar material, either in revised poems or wholly new ones. He also recasts ideas from prose into poetry, or the reverse. Among many examples, in “Vespers” (1954) from Horae Canonicae, he writes, “In my Eden our only source of political news is gossip”; in a section of his essay “Reading,” he lists the attributes of his “personal Eden”, and one of them is “Sources of Public Information: Gossip.” And there’s yet another pleasure in store for the reader who plans to peruse these two volumes—as I do—for the rest of life itself, studying just a few pages in detail at a time. You can never overestimate Auden’s technical ingenuity. [Edward] Mendelson alerts us to some of the most winning bits: for instance, a note says that Auden told Malcolm Cowley that the... Continue reading

Lesbian Corn In summer I strip away your pale kimono. Your tousled hair too, comes off in my hands leaving you completely naked. All ears and tiny yellow teeth. -- Elaine Equi from the archive; first posted October 1, 2008 Continue reading

The Publisher of Heaven I looked at my leg and became a publisher. The day was bright with my leg. The trees laughed quietly, the wind shifting their leaves this way and that, in unison, each one a good example of a leaf. There is a halo in search of each of us, but we are trees who lift our wooden limbs and moan like Scandinavians who have taken life far too seriously. The publisher has a book on this subject, printed in 1929. In it we see color pictures of slender pines in a bright blue day before the Crash. Then the r left that word, which spelled panic. But we have a book on that subject, too. Sometimes I curl up in front of the fireplace and read it—not the words, just the white space around them. I published it that way. —Ron Padgett Continue reading

Terence Winch's That Ship Has Sailed (University of Pittsburgh Press) arrived last week, and reading it has given me many pleasurable hours. Here is "Father," a favorite poem that in a few brief lines conjures an entire life: Father I have your cuff links and tie clips. I have a box with your IDs in them. Your steamfitters union card from the middle of the war. I have the toolbox you and I made together when I was a kid. I have the bookcase you brought home when the Monsignor bought new furniture for the rectory and threw it out. It's right upstairs in my living room. I have your banjo, which still sounds great. All I'm missing is you. by Terence Winch from That Ship Has Sailed You can read Anne Harding Woodworth's fine review in the Innisfree Poetry Journal, along with new poems by Terence Winch here. Continue reading

Terence Winch and Michael Lally read at KGB Bar last night when all of us were fifteen years younger. Star Black took their photographs. Julia Cohen's filed this report: <<< On Monday nights, sometimes I think about buying groceries after work and then going straight home. This week I actually made it to the grocery store. But then instead of getting on the subway to Brooklyn, suddenly I'm at the KGB Bar, tucking my groceries under a table, waiting for the reading to begin. Last night the room was packed -- I was afraid my broccoli raab would be kicked by the crowd. Michael Lally and Terence Winch have such distinguished and dynamic careers, it's clear why the KGB was filled with a diverse and supportive audience. Lally is an actor, an anthology editor (re: None of the Above: New Poets of the USA, 1978), and the author of 27 books. On his blog, he characterizes himself as an, "ex-jazz-musician/proto-rapper/Jersey-Irish-poet-actor/print-junkie/film-raptor/beat-hipster-"white Negro"-rhapsodizer/ex-hippie-punk-'60s-radical-organizer's take on all things cultural, political, spiritual & aggrandizing." His poems have an intense musicality to them, a blend of Irish ballads, disco, and jazz that at some points spin out into archly political poems that address the disgraces of the Bush administration and at other times refocus on the microcosm of tensions embedded in his own Irish American culture/childhood that created a sense of rich tradition and community to the exclusion and expense of others, which Lally still contends with. Winch is an acclaimed musician, a short fiction and a non-fiction writer, as well as a poet. Switching between elegies, villanelles, the Q&A format, and humorous but biting narrative digressions about his youth, Winch steered his reader through his Irish Catholic upbringing and examines the personal experiences, the larger social movements, and philosophies that made him test his faith. It's as though he has opened his memory box and allowed us to sort through it. In the process, we find much more than birthday cards and old love letters -- there are broken beer bottles, communion wafers, and a few flakes of dried blood. -- Julia Cohen Terence Winch Photo by (c) Star Black Michael Lally and son Flynn Photo by (c) Star Black from the archive; first posted October 7, 2008 Continue reading

Oy vey, my country! I would sob if it weren't such … an American crisis: goofy, headstrong, distracted, with a bunch of old men in dark suits running around looking for their mommies. And we're poets: what do WE know? -- Jim Cummins from the archive; first posted October 3, 2008 Continue reading

it may be too hard to think of me as silence like thirsty flowers in the Luxembourg I paused to cry for hours beside patient friends I read Thus Spake Z in a minute or two and saw my life in clouds and inside last clouds I saw my sister hiding behind the grillework snakes danced up curtains and a miserable pink of which Michaux spoke Half a century later I look at tulips try to see glory not Lawrence's kind but the modest buds in Bronx where diners pop up thirteen synagogues and some are shuls the way Saul Bellow preferred them Unlike a true Jew I like to go alone, weep (kills community) Today someone writes as if anyone around Frank froze him with lies Generosity is not a word for critics but Frank hated pricks haha the theory is he was a dead man and this is false theory But let's go back to say l962 or let's pay attention involuntary memory as in Proust is more than I can bear in England I smelled my mother's glitzy perfume and I also heard inside myself the tune of her blue jewel-box I still remember Too tired to forget too rebellious to count lonely syllables well father would say what's so lonely about them the one equals one I want to build that with long Icelandic "menhirs" one plus one is one for the madness of my old friend the architect One monument one You pushed me into talking today but really the best rest is two but I want to build one day like white white Legos one plus one is one -– David Shapiro, September 8, 2008 Continue reading

My mother was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. As Hitler's army marched East in 1941, my grandparents abandoned all their possessions (including their beloved library and cherished collection of musical instruments). They boarded the train – heading towards Siberia. The news of ghettos and the fate of Jews in Hitler's territories had reached them – all they could do was to flee into the unknown. A few years earlier, my mother's grandfather, Berl Fishbein, the head of the family, was tortured to death by Stalin's secret police). His only "guilt" was being born Jewish. While my family evacuated, their train was bombed by Hitler's armies. Another tragedy occurred: the family lost my mother's grandmother Ettel Fishbein in the confusion and chaos. She was grief-stricken after the death of her beloved husband, frightened and confused over all the changes and sorrows that the war and evacuation brought. Somehow, after the bombing, she was no longer with my grandparents on the train. They never found her and never learned of her fate. With my one-year-old mother, my grandparents deboarded in Chelyabinsk – a closed industrial city at the gateway of Siberia. I was born there some thirty years later. They never returned to their abandoned homes in Ukraine. In today's war, the invading army marches from the East, and more than a million Ukrainian refugees head West – to Germany in a mirror retrograde of history. Earlier this year, I wrote a cello concerto, Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol's famous short story about Poprishchin, a government clerk who gradually descends into insanity. The concerto was premiered last month by the Munich Philharmonic, Giedrė Šlekytė, and Gautier Capuçon. Nikolai Gogol (or, more correctly, romanized from Ukrainian – Mykola Hohol) – was a genius writer, born in Ukraine, father of Russian language literature, and a visionary far beyond his time. I have been fascinated by his work all my life. Ten years ago, while composing my opera Gogol, I read and re-read everything he ever wrote. After my opera's premiere in Vienna, I received an open letter from Russia calling me "Vrag Naroda" (Enemy of the People) – the same terminology used against Shostakovich and many other artists years earlier. My website was hacked, erased, and replaced by the slogan "Death to Jews" and a skull. It felt terrible, but I was not afraid – since 1991, I lived in the West, and since 2001, I no longer had any relatives in Russia. I was responsible only for myself, my words, and my actions. While composing the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, I did not think of Vladimir Putin. Now, Gogol's tale carries an eerie resonance. Diary of a Madman is a story of a lowly government bureaucrat with a minimal, easily forgettable personality. In his increasingly demented diary entries, Poprishchin claims that a state cannot "be without a king." As the storyline progresses, he becomes increasingly mad, starts having delusions of grandeur, and, finally, on... Continue reading

Permanently, by Kenneth Koch One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty. The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence. Each Sentence says one thing—for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth." Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?” Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.” In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass. A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!” But the Adjective did not emerge. As the Adjective is lost in the sentence, So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat— You have enchanted me with a single kiss Which can never be undone Until the destruction of language. Continue reading

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My latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar (February 23, 2023) is titled "Brilliant Carnage: Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion bullet ballet" I have seen The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, many times. The film marks the definitive end of the truly Western Western, a farewell to the time when desperadoes played poker in frontier saloons, gunfighters fought legendary battles, and the cavalry saved the day or died with their boots on. A righteous man could be John Wayne romancing Claire Trevor in Stagecoach or Gary Cooper taking on three killers in High Noon, and a little boy could end the movie by begging “Shane! Shane! Come back!” Once, when my son Joe, then twelve, and I watched The Wild Bunch together, he came up with the perfect two-word description of the movie: “brilliant carnage.” Myths die not all at once but in stages, and the Western always owed something of its appeal to the knowledge that the era it depicted—and, to some extent, invented—was long since gone by the time talking pictures filled movie screens. With each year, the cowboy-as-hero, whether lawman or bandit, grew more distant. Of the horsemen making up The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen are the only two who ride off into the sunset. Though they have defeated the bad guys who terrorized Mexican farmers, they know their days are numbered. “Only the farmers won,” Brynner says. “We lost. We always lose.” In The Wild Bunch, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads the eponymous outlaws with Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) as his right-hand man. Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates) are brothers with bad tempers and a healthy lust for liquor and ladies. Angel (Jaime Sanchez) is the one Mexican among them, passionate and brave, while Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), a good-natured elder statesman, remains behind the scenes, because he can no longer meet the physical demands of a hold-up job. The bunch would have had one extra fellow, but Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s closest friend, was arrested, flogged mercilessly, and blackmailed by a vicious railway baron (Albert Dekker) into leading a team of “peckerwood” trash to hunt down the gang. The actors up and down the line give sterling performances. The movie begins on the outskirts of San Rafael, a small Texas town, with children gleefully burning straw atop a battle of ants and scorpions. It is a powerful image, conveying the idea that cruelty and an impulse to destroy may be innate in even the youngest and most innocent human beings. In sharp contrast, a salvation salesman leads an open-air temperance meeting in the center of town, where a pathetic crowd swears off alcohol and sings “Shall We Gather at the River?” It is then that Pike and his men, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, ride in to rob the railway’s offices. Their plans have been anticipated, however, and an ambush organized against them. In the ensuing crossfire, only Pike and five others ride their horses to safety. One of them... Continue reading

In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson urged resistance to the conformism implicit in thought-control. It is possible that independence of mind, resistance to the mentality of a mob, is something that cannot be taught To the extent that the poet is a public figure, Emerson’s belief in “the independence of solitude” retains its pertinence. “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Assignment: what would Emerson say about Twitter and "the twitter mob"? Continue reading