November 25, 2014 Poetry The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri By Frederick Seidel A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack. Then the zipper got stuck. An angel flies in the window to unstick it. A drone was monitoring all this In real time And it appears on a monitor on Mars, Though of course with a relay delay. One of the monitors at the Mars base drone station Is carefully considering all your moves for terror output. But not to worry. Forget about about about it. The body of the man you wereHas disappeared inside the one you wear. Reminds me of the story of the man who had nipples Where his elbows should be and whose skeleton Was on the outside of his body. The guy walks into a shop on Madison to buy some clothes And buys some and walks out wearing them Wearing them and into the Carlyle bar. One of the waiters, originally from Algeria of all places, Recognizes him and says with the strong accent He has despite many years of living in the United States: Your usual? A man has disappeared inside his corpse. His corpse has disappeared inside a cause. Reminds me of the video of Robert Kennedy Announcing to a largely black audience at an outdoor campaign rally At night in Indianapolis That Martin Luther King had been shot And killed and by a white man. Martin Luther King is dead. Skin color is the name. Skin color is the game. Skin color is to blame for Ferguson, Missouri. The body of the man you were Has disappeared inside the one you wear. I wouldn’t want to be a black man in St. Louis County. A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack. Then the zipper got stuck. An angel flies in the window to unstick it. Here comes light-skinned Billie Holiday, Lady Day, no angel! A drone was monitoring all this, Which appears on a monitor on Mars, Though of course with a relay delay. One of the monitors at the Mars base drone station Is carefully considering all your moves for terror output. But not to worry. Fuhgeddaboudit. Reminds me of the story of the man whose smile Shot out flames and whose skin Was on the outside of his body. The guy walks naked into a shop on Madison Avenue to buy some clothes And buys some and walks out on fire wearing them and goes straight Across the street in flames to the Carlyle bar. One of the waiters looks as if he’s having a stroke And raises his hands in Arabic, Palms in, and murmurs a prayer, And brings God a glass of humble water. You can change From chasing Communists And chasing Jimmy Hoffa, the mobster union president Who however supported civil rights, And change to blessing and being blessed. Some victims change from a corpse to a cause. You can change Reminds me of the video of Robert Kennedy Announcing to a largely black audience at an outdoor campaign rally At night in Indianapolis That Martin Luther King had been shot And killed and by a white man. Martin Luther King is dead. Frederick Seidel received the 2014 Hadada Prize. This poem will appear in our Winter Issue, available next month.
November 4, 2014 The Poem Stuck in My Head Walt Whitman, “Election Day, November, 1884” By Dan Piepenbring A polling place in New York ca. 1900. A reminder: Walt Whitman really, really liked Election Day. Nothing could quicken the man’s pulse like a good showing at the polls. As “Election Day, November, 1884” has it, he preferred the spectacle of democracy—the “ballot-shower from East to West”—to any of our nation’s natural wonders, including, but not limited to, Niagara Falls, the Mississippi River, Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Great Lakes … you name it, Whitman thought the vote was better than it. (You’d think someone could’ve sold him on the Rockies, at least.) One can imagine a latter-day Whitman passing up a trip to the Grand Canyon and instead hunkering down at the TV, flipping anxiously from network to network as the precincts begin to report, wringing his hands. Not, mind you, that he would have any particular stake in the outcome; he’d just be along for the great democratic ride, clucking his tongue at the gerrymanderers of the world. (If you need an antidote for all this unalloyed patriotism, try Charles Bernstein’s “On Election Day,” which contains, among many excellent lines, “The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.” I know which poet would get my vote.) If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser- loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes— nor Mississippi’s stream:—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name— the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,)The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland —Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and con- flict,The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.
September 3, 2014 On Poetry Postcards from Another Planet By Dan Piepenbring The art of spam. Detail from a 1987 German postage stamp The Daily gets thousands of comments a day. Nearly all of them are spam. This should be annoying, and I suppose it can be. Problem is, I find myself captivated by our spam, so much so that I keep a running list of my favorite comments. As far as I know, they’re entirely computer generated: an algorithm hurls together bits of text from around the Internet, hoping to rustle up enough verisimilitude to trick our spam filter. The results are unduly captivating—they’re by turns ludic, cryptic, disquieting, emotional, and inadvertently profound. On many days they’re more interesting than the comments we receive from real people. Here, for instance, is an automated comment from “geniadove”: If you give it your name it will call you by it when you start up the GPS. These incidences come about quite normally, showing that Peter dislikes his daughter. A huge clue that your ex boyfriend still has feelings for you. —geniadove That swerve at “Peter dislikes his daughter”—whoa! Dissertations have been written about less. And to see a clinical phrase like “These incidences come about quite normally” next to a casual one like “A huge clue”: What does it all mean? The mind searches restlessly, somewhat desperately, for connective tissue, some semblance of conventional narrative. Like autostereograms, these comments always verge on resolving into a discernible whole; unlike autostereograms, they never do. Read More
July 31, 2014 On Poetry On the Slaughter By Peter Cole A political poem’s ironic new life. Bialik at around age thirty. ON THE SLAUGHTER Heaven—have mercy.If you hold a God(to whom there’s a paththat I haven’t found), pray for me.My heart has died. There is no prayer on my lips.My hope and strength are gone.How long? How much longer? Executioner, here’s my neck:Slaughter! You’ve got the ax and the arm.The world to me is a butcher-block—we, whose numbers are smallit’s open season on our blood:Crack a skull—let the bloodof infant and elder spurt on your chest,and let it remain there forever, and ever. If there’s justice—let it come now!But if it should come after I’ve beenblotted out beneath the sky,let its throne be cast down.Let the heavens rot in evil everlasting,and you, with your cruelty,go in your iniquityand live and bathe in your blood. And cursed be he who cries out: Revenge!Vengeance like this, for the blood of a child,Satan has yet to devise.Let the blood fill the abyss!Let it pierce the blackest depthsand devour the darknessand eat away and reachthe rotting foundations of the earth. Political poems lead strange lives—they often wither on the vines of the events they’re tied to. Old news gives way to new, and the whole undertaking starts to seem, well, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. For many and maybe most American readers, “poetry and politics just don’t mix.” But sometimes they do. Quite violently. On June 12, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped while hitchhiking home together from their West Bank yeshivas. They were murdered—most likely within hours of being taken—and, eighteen days later, after an extensive search, their bodies were discovered under some rocks in a field near Hebron. Israel mourned, and raged. Emerging from a cabinet meeting convened just after the corpses were found, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his condolences to the families and quoted the great modernist Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik: “Vengeance … for the blood of a small child, / Satan has not yet created.” He went on in his own words: “Hamas is responsible—and Hamas will pay.” For good measure, the Prime Minister’s office tweeted the lines as well. As anyone who hasn’t lived atop a column in the Congo for the past seven weeks knows, a series of violent, retaliatory acts followed. Israel carried out mass arrests on the West Bank, killing six in the process; a Palestinian teenager was beaten and burned alive by a group of Jews; throngs of Palestinians destroyed tracks and stations on the Jerusalem light-rail line; Jewish gangs shouting “Death to the Arabs!” rampaged through Jerusalem in search of victims—and found them; some thirty-five thousand Facebook users “liked” a page called “The People of Israel Demand Revenge”; Hamas fired rockets by the dozen into Israel from Gaza; Hamas officials warned that “the gates of hell” would open if Israel attacked in retaliation for the killings or the shelling. Read More
July 17, 2014 The Poem Stuck in My Head Rita Dove’s “Canary” By Chantal McStay Billie Holiday and her dog Mister, New York, ca. June 1946. Photo: William P. Gottlieb Many eminent American poets have elegized Holiday, attempting to capture something of her exquisite voice, whose unique tough-tender grain suggested a life of extremes. Langston Hughes’s “Song for Billie Holiday,” Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” and Rita Dove’s “Canary” are just a few of the diverse poetic responses to the loss of Lady Day; Kevin Young’s anthology Jazz Poems devotes an entire thoughtfully curated section, “Muting (for Billie Holiday),” to her memory. These works belong to the larger tradition of the jazz elegy, a genre that attempts something next to impossible: to commemorate and preserve music that’s defined by its immediacy and transience. The grain of the voice. The physicality of the performer. The improvisations and flourishes and intangibles that exist for one night only. If the essence of jazz exists in the moment of performance, then much of the work of the jazz elegy is to make such music legible while also acknowledging the futility of such a project. Rita Dove’s “Canary,” from 1989, begins: Billie Holiday’s burned voicehad as many shadows as lights,a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,the gardenia her signature under that ruined face. Read More
July 8, 2014 On Poetry Those Who Hope Not to Be Erased: An Interview with Carol Muske-Dukes By Alex Dueben Photo: Carlos Puma. A writer and poet whose verse recently appeared in the Spring issue of The Paris Review–Carol Muske-Dukes has long been interested and active in presenting a public face of poetry. A former poet laureate of California and a teacher for many years, she founded the Ph.D. program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and began a writing program, in 1972, at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island in New York. On the heels of National Poetry Month, I spoke with Muske-Dukes at her home in Southern California about the many contemporary approaches to reading, writing, and thinking about the art of poetry, from hip-hop to “unoriginal genius” and how language matters. What do you think the public face of poetry looks like? Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that “there is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” but we need education, because “we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music—that you can’t expect to read it like a novel.” A few years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry. Is there a particular critical ideology you have in mind? I’m thinking of the idea of “unoriginal genius,” though no one outside of the academy much cares about how some academic critics are now promoting it. “Unoriginal genius,” oxymoronic as it sounds, means simply that you can call yourself a genius in this age of technology if you’re savvy at editing, deleting, and erasing certain words from canonical poems and calling what remains proof of your genius. Read More