The Best American Poetry

Jo Stafford Gone

It was the sort of hot humid day that most people hate but I perversely love. Driving to a pool at the base of a waterfall where floating I could feel like an ice cube in a highball, I listened to Bill Shedden's weekly "Classic Sinatra" program on WCNY (90.3 FM) in Syracuse. Labor Day will mark four full years of this weekly one-hour program, one of several shows that demonstrate the superiority of a public radio station that designs its own programing rather than buying the national feed (e.g. "Performance Today"). Shedden started this evening with Sinatra's late Capitol period (Porter's "You Do Something to Me" and Rodgers & Hart's "Lover"). Later he played a little-heard rendition of Berlin's "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow" from 1940.

More songs from the Tommy Dorsey period were coming, because Jo Stafford -- who was one of the Pied Pipers accompanying Sinatra in the Dorsey band before her own highly successful career as a solo vocalist -- died at age 90 last Sunday. Congestive heart failure.

Jo Stafford -- "GI Jo," to ardent soldiers during World War II -- had as fine and as pure a voice as any Big Band "girl singer" or cabaret chanteuse in a period rife with great examples of both. Her interpretations were not unusual or offbeal but she had great pipes and sang with a sweetness that combined the essence of sincerity with the intimacy of a slow-dance. She sang with great clarity and had magnificent range. Her versions of "Too Marvelous for Words" and "Embraceable You" are definitive. I also recommend her versions of "Manhattan Serenade," "Yes, Indeed," and "The Things We Did Last Summer," all from the late 1940s. She is audible in "I'll Never Smile Again," "Let's Get Away from it All," and "O! Look at Me Now," which Dorsey arranged in 1940 and '41 when Sinatra was the boy singer and Connie Haines the girl singer in his band.

I once wrote a poem beginning "When I fall in love, I want Jo Stafford's voice in my ear."

-- DL

Marian McPartland: Piano Jazz

Here's to you, Marian McPartland, and your piano jazz, the way you play "Love Walked In" is sublime, and "Piano Jazz," your radio show, rhymes with sublime every time you had or have a guest on your show like Cy Coleman or Bill Evans, Dizzie Gillespie, Eileen Barton, Oscar Peterson, Ben Webster, Chet Baker, Benny Golson, Mel Torme, Dianna Krall, talk about diversity, so many for so many years, were you really born in 1918, and even recently you introduced me to Anat Fort and Anat Cohen. Fridays at 7 pm. I like driving then if only from my house to the lake or to Buttermilk Falls just to hear you on the piano or riffing with your guest.

With Mary Lou Williams, 1953. I believe Mary Lou was Marian's first guest on "Pianoi Jazz" in, gulp, 1979.

-- DL

Writing Blurbs [by Nin Andrews]: Part One

Writing Blurbs

1.  My Secret

I know I should never tell anyone about this, but sometimes, when I have to write a blurb, I go to Barnes and Noble, and I read the backs of all types of books. Books by and for pet lovers, poets, star-gazers, magicians, trapeze artists, sexual athletes, businessmen. I mean to say, I read the backs of everything. Then I copy the best blurbs onto note cards, one sentence fragment at a time. At home I cut these blurbs up so they’re just fragments of fragments.  Then I cut them into fragments of fragments of fragments.  I place them in a shoe box (I call this my fishpond), and I shake the box.  I shake it three times for good luck.  I take out the cards and arrange them on my page. 

In this way I have composed many nice blurbs.

2.

I hate writing. It's true. I think, sadly, that nice things are boring to say, and to say them nicely is even more boring. And to be believable? (Well, best not to worry about that. Best to say incomprehensible praises, in Latin, say, or maybe ancient Greek.)

-- Nin Andrews 

In Memoriam: Jason Shinder, 1955-2008

Jason Shinder died on April 25. He was 52. Here is a poem that he wrote in the mid-1990s:

Work
for Stanley Kunitz

Poem is difficult when it's still dark,
lying in bed without sleep.
Poem is difficult entering the kitchen,
another working day.
The poem I once loved made breakfast
while I wrote down my dreams.
I remember the first poem , brown hair piled high
above a never-to-be nordic smile,
a crown of lit candles and leaves.
When I mentioned the word love, keeping it on my tongue,
poem said, yes, yes, love,
but neither of us really knew.
I swore never to hurry poem, never say,
What time is it? Are you ready?
I played Frank Sinatra singing
the summer wind came blowin' in,
a glass of wine on the table.
I wore nothing under a black, silk robe,"
read poem the great poets.
Where is the poem of June 6, 1975,
sitting before the window of my father's house?
Poem dressed in purple with the promise of Spring.
Poem of the moon dreaming in its October night.
Let's face it. Poem loves me
but doesn't love me enough.
Poem just wants to be adored,
swinging from bar to bar, eighteen years old.
Maybe poem will be the light I need.
Maybe it's dark inside the body no matter how bright the poem.
Maybe we'll marry. Maybe we won't. No matter.
                   Poem is a window open and a faint breeze.

– Jason Shinder

Leaving New York: An Experiment (Part IV)

[Joy Katz]

“There are just three days in the history of Manhattan: the day you first see it, the day you get to move there, and the day you, far smarter, much less intact, still find the strength to leave.”

Leaving New York for real is a divorce. You can’t simply drive off, the way I drove out of San Francisco, picking up my dry cleaning and pointing my car into the desert. There’s a lot of explaining to do, to dear friends dug in, with their hard-won jobs, their apartments made carefully personal over the years— apartments cunningly arranged so that everything nestles between the top of the refrigerator and the ceiling, the radiator and the wall. Apartments wherein every bit furniture has been thought about, thought so much about that it’s warm from the thinking, from being regarded with such fondness. In New York, our apartments are our bulwarks, our lifeboats.

All that, I can imagine leaving.

It’s the narrative makes it hard.

You know the narrative. It’s very familiar. If you’re living in New York, and you leave, it’s because you’re returning to some way you were, or to the people you Really Are, or because you hate the person you became there, or, worst, you can’t face the person you didn’t become. But what if that’s not so?

What if my people are in New York, but it’s not my city anymore?

Anyway, who could be so cruelly demanding, so petulant, as to say, if you admit, if you concede, maybe even with tears, that you’re weary and fed up and, yes, not all that intact in certain ways—if you say you’ve been unhappy for a while, and you tried to make it keep working, but it isn’t, in fact it’s killing a part of you—if you say quietly, I have to go, I need some time to think—who would be so slammingly assholish as to say, all right then, go back to your boring life, go off to Kansas (or St Louis, whatever)? Who would have so little imagination about anything outside itself, such a throbbing narcissistic disorder? Who would, then, after not bothering even to ruffle up a fight, jump into a cab and disappear for ever into Midtown traffic at four p.m., leaving you on the curb at Sixth and 43rd in the rain? (Wait: a cab? At four o’clock? In midtown, in the rain? And as for being narcissistic, I suppose it’s possible New York might be having a drink with Berlin.)

Who would do all this? Why, your grand, granite-bedded, mirror-skinned, busy busy all-lit-up polyglot city, the one you pledged yourself to.

*The quote is from one of my favorite New York stories, Plays Well With Others by Allan Gurganus.

Satire Can Be Nitro: Obama's Lips

I hope this doesn't come across as "politics" or "bashing," as neither is intended; the subject is really satire, not personalities.  Like most of the known world, I've been following the THE NEW YORKER cover flap the past couple of days.  I read Maureen Dowd's column in the TIMES yesterday, and appreciated the irony of her humorlessness attacking Obama for his perceived humorlessness.  Then I caught David Remnick doing damage control on Charlie Rose's show last night.  When Remnick compared himself to Jonathan Swift, I admit I started to take notice.  Whence the disingenuousness?  Whence the defensiveness?  And whom is Maureen Dowd covering for?

Satire isn't usually as abstract as this; the subject of the satire is usually onstage, not offstage.  What I mean is, the Obamas, who are the ostensible victims here of prejudice by the offstage targets of the satire, are in fact victimized a second time.  Instead of the fat Hoosier in a ball cap who can barely get his gargantuan belly out from under the counter of the luncheonette as he turns laboriously on his stool to proclaim Obama a Muslim and his wife a terrorist, we see the projection on the part of a third party, the caricaturist Barry Blitt, of what he "gets" this to mean.  The "framing device" for this satire is an offstage abstraction called "American racism" or something, and we as viewers--if we're hip--are supposed to "get" it, too.  (Mr. Remnick was very clear about "getting it" on TV last night.)  The problem is, it's the Obamas who are mocked and humiliated by the force of the picture, the truly ugly vitriol of it; they're not vindicated by the abstract argument.  The Hoosier clown is nowhere to be seen.

When I was thirteen years old I lived in Indianapolis and my parents had realized their long-held dream of fleeing to suburbia with all the other white people.  We lived in an aluminum-sided house, not unlike a trailer, in a subdivision that was a barren treeless expanse of concrete and dirt; in fact, my job was to turn the clods surrounding our house into a lawn.  One night my father and several of the neighbors, high-spirited jokesters that they were, burned a cross in front of the house of the only Jewish family in the neighborhood.  Much hilarity all around, except for the Neffs, the Jewish family, who were--I remember quite clearly--hurt, very angry, and a little afraid.  Because they voiced their protests--and in particular, their anger--they were immediately vilified for their inability to take a joke.  For their "humorlessness."

Not to channel Woody Allen channelling Marshall McLuhan, but the medium here is very hot; is it possible that it has incinerated the abstract message?  As good liberal "theorists," surely we know that no artist finally projects any id but his own?  I'm not suggesting at all that Mr. Blitt--and by extension Mr. Remnick--are racist, just that whenever we cross the wires of satire and race in this country we have to be very careful.  Look at Mr. Obama's lips: they are rouged and pursed.  His face is prissy, effeminate.  He is a scold.  Does this vision arise from the parameters of the obese Hoosier's fears, or is it actually directed at Mr. Obama by hip Ivy League supporters who would like to cut his nuts off for his talking down to them, as Jesse Jackson acted out off-microphone last week?  Is Mr. Obama actually being eviscerated for his "humorlessness"--and the Hoosier joker is really the occasion, not the cause?

Or maybe the real thing here is that Mr. Remnick--as the enabler of Mr. Blitt's work--was carried away by his cleverness--their joke--without considering what the picture might reveal on deeper levels about them both.  In Mr. Remnick's case it could be that it was perfectly all right to trash the Obamas on the way to a wickedly clever white boy joke. 

One more clerihew for you

William Logan's mistakes
include Sullen Weedy Lakes.
Can anyone think of a worse
title for a book of verse?

-- DL

Congratulations to Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate

Photo credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Kay Ryan, 62

Longtime BAP contributor Kay Ryan has been named the nation's sixteenth poet laureate succeeding Charles Simic in the post.

Kay Ryan first appeared in the 1995 edition of Best American Poetry (ed. Richard Howard) with her poem "Outsider Art," which Harold Bloom selected for his Best of the Best (1998). You'll also find her work in the 1999, 2005, and 2006 editions of BAP and in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She writes with wit and brevity, has a flair for the epigrammatic, does not disdain a readership that values accessibility, and skillfully uses internal rhymes, often snapping a poem to closure with a rhyme that seems both surprising and, in retrospect, inevitable. Unconventionally, she uses modernist techniques to further her engagement with the public world. Kay Ryan lives in Marin County in California where she has taught the same course in remedial English at the local college for the last thirty years.

We posted her poem "That Will to Divest" on this blog on July 10th.

See Patricia Cohen's piece in today's Times, "Kay Ryan, Outsider with Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate."

-- DL

Three days after Bastille day, yes

Here's a quick quiz for all frankophiles:

(1) Who died today?

(2) Fix the error In the following three lines

<<
It is 12:20 in New York a Thursday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
>>

(3) Who is "Frank" in these lines?

<<
    "Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you're OK."
>>

And now I hear the familiar voice
Down around the river
All I see / for me / is misery!
I Got a Right to Sing the Blues.

-- DL

"Debbie Overmeyer" (by Jim Cummins)

Debbie Overmeyer

Once, for some official reason
or other, I asked a woman if her name
were "Debbie Overmeyer" though

I knew she was Debbie Overmeyer:
we worked at the same place,
but had just never met, officially.

No," she said. "I’’m not Debbie Overmeyer."
I smiled. ""I know you’’re Debbie Overmeyer.
We work at the same place. I’ve seen you

around. We’ve just never met, officially."
"No," she said, "you’re mistaken.
My name isn’t Debbie Overmeyer."

I stared. ""Why would you deny your name
is Debbie Overmeyer? Is it some sort
of reverse-narcissism that out-narcissisms

real narcissism, thereby rendering it
false narcissism, due to the new hegemony
of this fake-real reverse-narcissism?""

No," she said. "I just don’t like you."
Oh," I said. And that was the last
I ever saw of Debbie Overmeyer.

– Jim Cummins