April 13, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Shane McCrae Reads Lucie Brock-Broido By Shane McCrae In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements” by Lucie Brock-Broido Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000) for Harry Ford I was not ready for your form to be cold Ever. Even in life You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form, But a mind of Rarer liquid element. It had not occurred to me You would take Leave and it will be winter from now on, not only Here, in the ordinary, But there too, in the extraordinary elegance Of calcium and finery And loss. Keep me Tethered here, breathtakingly awkward and alive. If you had a psyche it was not known to me. If you had a figure it would be heavy ivory. If you were a man, you would be An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves From sycamore; trees, Not scattering. I was not ready for such Eanhward and unease. Good-bye to the imperium, the rinsing wind. You, cold As God and the great Glassed castle in which I’ve lived, simply Now a house. A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a vial of ether Thrown on fire—just A little jump of flame, like grief, or, Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing Off, it then is gone. Shane McCrae’s most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block and Sometimes I Never Suffered, both of which are published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
April 10, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Timothy Donnelly By Timothy Donnelly In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Rain Moving In” by John Ashbery Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983) The blackboard is erased in the attic And the wind turns up the light of the stars, Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know. And if somewhere in this great planet The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun, It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse. Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don’t you see It’s all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial had been set And that’s ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about. Timothy Donnelly’s most recent publications include The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently director of poetry in the writing program at Columbia University School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.
April 8, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Monica Youn By Monica Youn In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. Read More
April 7, 2020 Dice Roll The Black Gambling King of Chicago By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration © Ellis Rosen If you could trace the fate of just one dollar that passed through the hands of John “Mushmouth” Johnson, where would it lead? It probably came to his hands off a craps table or from an office of his policy syndicate, and more likely than not, it would go on to be slipped into the pocket of some crooked cop or double-dealing politician. But if Johnson, whom local papers called “the Negro Gambling King of Chicago,” managed to hold on to it, that dollar might end up supporting a hub of black music in the twenties, or the first black-owned bank in Chicago, or a poetic precursor of the Harlem Renaissance. It would grant Johnson, in death, a respectability he was denied in life. Johnson’s life was characterized by a constant tension between philanthropy and corruption. Born to the nurse of Mary Todd Lincoln in 1857, Johnson moved from his native Saint Louis to Chicago at an early age. Some said his nickname, Mushmouth, referred to how much he cursed. Others said it was because of a “thick utterance he had in his speech when a boy.” Either way, the name signals how Johnson’s mode of expression, coupled with his lack of formal education, cut him off from genteel society. “I didn’t exactly do much book learning,” he recalled, many years later. “I went out to see where the money grew. Some of those who know me say that I found it.” In 1882, Johnson got a job as a porter in a white-owned gambling house. He studied the business closely, and soon opened his own nickel-gambling joint on Clark Street. Johnson had a keen eye for real estate, and quickly managed to flip that location. In 1890, he took the proceeds and purchased a saloon at 464 South State Street. He called it the Emporium. It would be the seat of his gambling empire for nearly twenty years. Decked out in Gay Nineties style, with rococo chandeliers and a bar of Honduran mahogany, the Emporium offered three stories of action: billiards on the first floor, craps and roulette on the second, and poker on the third. In order of popularity, the bar served whiskey, gin, and beer. Scorning the day’s more flamboyant scarves, Johnson presided over the Emporium in a neat black four-in-hand knot, with a pin set with a small stone. As for that stone, one gambler said, “You can bet it’s the goods.” Read More
April 6, 2020 Happily The Fairy-Tale Virus By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Paulus Fürst, Plague Doctor, c. 1656 Once upon a time a Virus With A Crown On Its Head swept across the land. An invisible reign. A new government. “Go into your homes,” said the Virus, “or I will eat your lungs for my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The city that never sleeps shall fall into a profound slumber, your gold shall turn to dust, and your face shall be pressed against the windowpane.” “And the elders, for fear of death, shall not embrace the young.” The Virus was colorless and cruel. Some believed it to be the child of a bat, but no one knew its origin for sure. Some said it reminded them of a dead, gray sun. The fairy tale I will write about this time is this one. The one we’re inside. All night I dream of buying a chicken. I am scared of us all getting sick, so I need to make jars and jars of bone broth to freeze, but there are no chickens left in the poultry section of our supermarket. Instead, just cold, empty shelves. They glow white like hospital beds. If I can’t find a chicken I should at least sew my sons’ birth certificates into their wool coats, but it’s springtime and there is pink dogwood blooming everywhere and where are we going? We are going nowhere. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see my mother again. “What day is it?” asks Noah, my eight-year-old. He wanders away before I can even answer. Read More
April 6, 2020 Conspiracy Behind the Mask of Corruption By Rich Cohen Still from Eyes Wide Shut “Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!” — Allen Ginsberg, Howl If you are stuck at home, if a disease has begun to eat away the face of your nation, if illness has tinged even the once reliably boring moments of your life with terror, you might start to go a little batty, and, if that happens, you might start to watch the same few movies again and again, the passing hours registered only by the shade of light in the window, at which point you will begin to notice hidden patterns, secret meanings. You will finally hear what such films have been trying to tell you all along. This is what happened to me in the last few weeks with the movies of Stanley Kubrick, which, on repeat viewing, have turned out to be lousy with portents. Even the most overlooked of the director’s films, Eyes Wide Shut, which he was fiddling with when he died, sounds a clarion call through time, revealing the actual nature of a society now being swept aside by the virus. Kubrick’s message is simple: you know nothing. It’s a truth demonstrated via allegory, the story of a powerful man beset by demons. Of course, to many, the movie was always more than a parable. It was an exposé written in code. It revealed a dynamic that had long played out in sectors of elite society but was not glimpsed until our own age, an age of scandal, the most telling being the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein. In short, Eyes Wide Shut is not fiction. It’s documentary. It’s a great artist, at the end of a brilliant career, uncovering hidden evil. What is the function of art? Is it to show us something diverting, beautiful, new? Or is it to tell us what we’ve always known but never admitted to ourselves? Read More