December 15, 2011 The Poem Stuck in My Head Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster” By Olivia Cole Lately I’ve been thinking about Frank O’Hara and his sometimes terrible taste in men. I can’t help but see the painter Larry Rivers as a thoroughly undeserving recipient for one of my favorite poems, O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster.” The pair’s messy entanglement started (inevitably) at a party, with a drunken kiss and grope behind a curtain. The two were hidden, but O’Hara was wearing his trademark white tennis shoes, and the two pairs of shoes, his and Rivers’s, were in full view of the heaving room. O’Hara’s letters to Rivers maintain that he could take him or leave him, but, like those trainers peeping out from underneath the curtain, the poems rather give the game away. Rivers’s involvement with O’Hara was against his better judgement, and in his autobiography he claims never to have had full sex with a man, a fact that partly explains the poem’s fixation with impossibility and insurmountable distance. Read More
December 8, 2011 The Poem Stuck in My Head Jean Toomer’s “Beehive” By Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Jean Toomer lived in Washington, D.C., but “Beehive” could be about any city, and for me it’s Manhattan. I live in Red Hook, so from the window I can see Lower Manhattan across the river. It’s massive and always in motion. At night, the buildings and the cars on the FDR look crystalline. They are all bodies busy with their duties and delights, like “bees passing in and out the moon.” I like that Toomer is also alert to the solitude and melancholy of being merely one among millions. Beehive Within this black hive tonight There swarm a million bees; Bees passing in and out the moon, Bees escaping out the moon, Bees returning through the moon, Silver bees intently buzzing, Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb, And I, a drone, Lying on my back, Lipping honey, Getting drunk with silver honey, Wish that I might fly out past the moon And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.
December 1, 2011 The Poem Stuck in My Head Donald Justice’s “There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings” By John Jeremiah Sullivan Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, 1644, oil on canvas. Last year the writer Denis Johnson came to Wilmington, North Carolina, where I live, for a conference. Ben George, who edits the magazine Ecotone and was hosting him, graciously asked me to tag along. There were memorable days. Granted, I would file a trip to Food Lion with Denis Johnson under fairly interesting life events. Even so … It emerged that Johnson had been fascinated by Venus flytraps since childhood, and Wilmington happens to be the one place in the world where those strange carnivorous creatures grow wild (or at least where they’re truly native: the nutrient-starved coastal soil made them turn to insects for food). We took him to an actual flytrap preserve, behind an elementary school, where you walked on narrow paths through bright green clusters of the plant. You could bend down with a pencil and touch their little hairs, causing them to snap shut. The speed of it made us jump back. We touched only a couple, though, because once an individual trap has clamped down, it can never open again. The point is, after this excursion, we went to a barbeque joint downtown called Parchies. In the Cape Fear country, and throughout the piedmont of the state, we have this unusual kind of barbeque, which uses a light vinegar sauce instead of the red stuff and tastes totally different than what you expect if you grew up west of here. Strangest of all, it’s served with the coleslaw on the sandwich, right on top of the barbeque. Sounds vile, but when you eat it with a side of finger-shaped hush puppies, you feel that the coronary episode this meal will trigger at some unknown moment down the road makes for an even trade. Johnson grew visibly excited, waiting for the food. He told us that he had some roots in Carolina and that once, when he was very young, his grandparents had taken him to a barbeque place somewhere in the country and bought him a sandwich. He’d never gotten over the memory of this sandwich. It was perfect. In his mind it had become the ur sandwich. Every barbecue sandwich after it, even the good ones, had been on some level a mockery. “Hey,” Ben said, “what if this is the one? What if you’ve been remembering this piedmont-style all these years, and now you’re about to reexperience it? Is that a good thing?” Enter expectation, pressure. The sandwiches came. He lifted his and bit into it. Read More
November 3, 2011 The Poem Stuck in My Head Brenda Shaughnessy’s “I’m Over the Moon” By Lorin Stein It takes guts to apostrophize a heavenly body. Everybody’s seen them: Sappho, Keats, Mayakovsky, O’Hara, you name it. After all these millions of years, what’s left to say? And to write a poem addressing the moon herself—a breakup poem, no less!—you had better be extremely naive, or else know exactly what you’re doing, and get lucky, too. This is what bravery looks like in a poem. It is not (necessarily) a matter of sharing personal information. To my mind, a brave poem is one that risks seeming stupid or grandiose or frivolous, that nods in recognition at various poems that came before, then sweeps past, racing toward the thing it came to say. The first time I read Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “I’m Over the Moon” five years ago, it was a Sunday and I was sitting at the breakfast table. I remember because “I’m Over the Moon” is the only poem I have ever read out loud at a breakfast table. Having read it, I had to share it. The poem marked a new directness in Shaughnessy’s work (“I’ve had to learn to be direct”), but all the sass and sense of humor I loved from before were intact. Lately “I’m Over the Moon” has been on my mind again (ever since we published two of Shaughnessy’s more recent poems in the Review). It is the first entry in our series “The Poem Stuck in My Head”: Read More
October 6, 2011 On Poetry On Not Letting Go By Caleb Crain "Notebook on an Intended Dictionary." Bound manuscript written on wrappers from the 1855 edition of 'Leaves of Grass.' Courtesy The Library of Congress. Probably no writer ever finishes a book without wishing he could keep it to himself. For one thing, a book is company, during the writing of it; it’s hard to accept its departure. For another, a book is never free of flaws, its author being human. Poets have long been able to console themselves for the loss and the exposure by revising and republishing. Thus Whitman expanded, aggrandized, and eventually bloated Leaves of Grass; thus Wordsworth enlarged upon and finally diluted The Prelude. Some writers of fiction, too, have indulged themselves. Henry James returned to his early prose to render it more ineffable. Raymond Carver restored some of the fullness that a charismatic editor had cut from his early stories. Read More
September 29, 2011 Poetry ‘Echo’ in Madison Square Park By Jane and Jonathan Wells Jaume Plensa, Echo, 2011, white resin and marble dust. Installation view in Madison Square Park, New York. Photograph by James Ewing. “A poem is never finished, it is abandoned,” said the sculptor Jaume Plensa, quoting Paul Valéry on a sunny September morning in New York City, as he watched Echo, his forty-four-foot sculpture of a female head, being dismantled piece by piece. My husband Jonathan Wells and I are Flatiron residents. We had lived alongside Echo since she arrived in May and, for Jonathan, she had become an object of fascination and reverence. He had been working on a poem about her for months but found himself unable to conclude it. He had refamiliarized himself with the myth of Narcissus and Echo; he had learned all he could about Plensa and the nine-year-old neighbor in Barcelona who had inspired the piece, a child who had taken shape in the statue with the timelessness and serenity of a Buddha. On this, the statue’s last morning, Jonathan recognized the Catalan sculptor standing between the cranes and the crew. “I always hoped my work would inspire other artists,” Plensa told my husband, as they discussed myth, marble dust, art collectors, and teaching schedules. “Please send me your poem.” After watching Echo come apart, Jonathan knew he had an ending. Here is what he sent to Plensa: Echo White as x ray bone she rises through The trees in stone as if she were sublime, As if she knew what this grace was And she was only nine, framed Between her errands and her games. Her nymph’s body surges underground Not knowing what this buried love Is for. Beneath her neighbors play Frisbee On the grass and strangers take her Photograph. The final sun pours Into her sealed eyes and mouth as though She were the saint of radiant stillness Who says this marble flesh is a prison Stone yet the mind flies with The confetti of birds, soars into The beliefs of summer. Silence succumbs to air and the blossoms Sail down, the clocktower’s fretted hands Notched against her ribs. Questions flood her blood And darkness, flee and then she’s gone, Taken from our vanquished arms but She still speaks in the autumn leaves, In the furrowed bark, in the singsong Of the childrens’ swings. Jonathan Wells’s collection, Train Dance, will be published by Four Way Books in October.