Farewell to George Stade, Dead at 85 [by David Lehman]
Columbia professor George Stade died of peneumonia on February 26. He was eighty-five, a mainstay of the Columbia English department for nearly forty years, blessed with good looks and athletic ability in addition to brains. Here's a link to the Washington Post obit.
George was a great guy, easy to talk to, who knew an awful lot about modern literature but never put on airs. He was also exactly right about the fate of English departments in the US. “There are those people who see literature in traditional ways, which includes historical circumstances, and there is a school that wants to see literature as a symptom of all the evils of society.”
Beyond nostalgia and the memory of an excellent teacher, I have a special reason for remembering George with great fondness. It was he who suggested that I write my PhD dissertation on the prose poem in America and England. He made the suggestion in a casual conversation on the fourth floor of Hamilton Hall, and I grasped its rightness instinctively. I spent much of the next four years reading widely as the subject demanded --Baudelaire and Poe; Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Henri Michaux; such antecedents of the prose poem as the King James Bible, Macpherson's Ossian, and Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; theories of prose and verse as propounded by Coleridge, Shelley, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valery, Owen Barfield, and Christopher Ricks; full-length books of prose poetry by William Carlos Williams and Geoffrey Hill. My dissertation had individual chapters on four writers -- Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden ("The Orators," "Caliban to the Audience," and "Vespers"), and John Ashbery ("Three Poems"). And I began to translate Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris.
All that was your doing, George, and I wish I could turn back the clock and spend an afternoon with you talking about this project when it was new. You'd have made me improve it. I see all its defects, but in my own defense I was teaching full-time for three of the four years when I wrote "The Marriage of Poetry and Prose." I should have dedicated it to you. -- David Lehman
On the Life and Poetry of William C. Mullen (1946-2017) [by Anthony Antonucci and Andrew McCarron]
[Guest Author Note: I asked Andrew McCarron and Anthony Antonucci to share the news of their project to write a literary biography of their friend and mentor the classicist and poet William Mullen. Their essay is below along with a reproduction of Mullen's Enchanted Rock, which was selected by John Hollander for inclusion in the 1998 edition of Best American Poets.]
Think of this post as a press release. We are currently in the process of composing a short literary biography of the late classicist and poet Dr. William C. Mullen (1946-2017). Professor Mullen died last November, just two days shy of his seventy-first birthday. As the unofficial stewards of his literary legacy, we wish to share the insights that we have gleaned from our mentor’s life-in-letters and to demonstrate our gratitude for the compassion, companionship and exemplary model of the life of the heart and mind that he embodied for us.
Bill spent the majority of his dynamic career teaching Global Classics at Bard College, a liberal arts campus in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he was a colleague and friend of the poets Robert Kelly, Joan Retallak, and the late John Ashbery. Unlike these celebrated authors, Bill built an international reputation as a scholar and a translator, rather than a poet. Harvard’s Gregory Nagy, for example, referred to Bill’s book Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton University Press, 1982) as the best book ever written on Pindar’s odes. In the margins of his works and days, when he was not pursuing his research, participating in conferences, and teaching his popular seminars, Bill wrote poetry. Although individual poems of his were published in The Best American Poetry series (1998) and elsewhere, he didn’t live to see his dream of an original book of his own verse in print.
The remarkable thing about someone’s poetry is that the spiritual fingerprint of that person is contained in their words long after he or she is gone. And perhaps those fingerprints are especially vivid for poets who write primarily for themselves, free from the constraining literary personae demanded by identification with any specific school of writing (e.g., Language Poetry, Beat Poetry, New York School Poetry, etc.), or by the suggestions of market-minded editors and publishers. Indeed, reading Bill’s poetry suggests that it’s in the private work of unpublished writers that we can more readily glimpse the unique role that poetry can play in how we go about making meaning out of our lives as we attempt to decide how to occupy the tent of night. Bill’s poems draw on the traditions of poetic form to engage the places and topics that affected him most: from the landscapes of the Southwest, to Mesoamerican mythology, to the exhibits he’d encountered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, to his lifelong love affair with Homer, to his fleeting romances with men far and wide, or the many locales he lived and taught in over the years, from Harvard to Austin to Berkley and Bard, to Greece, Russia, Italy and Manhattan. As an aesthetic devotee of Wallace Stevens, Bill’s verse combines formal discipline with lyrical beauty to trace order out of chaos, rendering his fraught, thoughtful life meaningful through poetic composition.
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that every life that succeeded in making something meaningful from what it was made of deserved to be told. By this criterion, Bill Mullen’s life story warrants telling, particularly for readers who believe that art can help human beings to realize their final, spiritual form, no matter how difficult the odysseys undertaken to get there. In the space between Bill’s prodigious accomplishments and his private struggles with HIV/AIDS, loneliness, and depression are the marvelous poems he left behind. Stay tuned. The story of William C. Mullen will soon be told! Sing in us, Muse, and through us tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.
Ebbs and floods with the estuary's tides.
Floats in the limpid spaces between worlds,
undemanding as Epicurus' gods.
Would the clouds look different after immersion?
Back in the endless and the beginningless?
In the meantime I sit and think of the Rock,
that its sweetness was, that its spell took place.
It is like the sun sunk in these fountain ledges
(their film over the granite an abyss).
Now it is a disc under the cloud cover.
Now it is a dazzle I couldn't face.
A terrific poet. Many speak of "taking risks" in their work. Tony did it. --DL
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 24, 2018 at 11:05 AM in Feature, Obituaries | Permalink | Comments (0)
Arthur Mitchell R.I.P [by Stacey Lehman]
New York City Ballet principal dancer, Suzanne Farrell, rehearses Slaughter on Tenth Avenue with Arthur Mitchell while George Balanchine looks on. Photo (c) Martha Swope/NYPL
Reading this obituary of the brilliant Arthur Mitchell fills me anew with gratitude for my parents who, despite their rather modest backgrounds, exposed me to the New York City Ballet during it's flowering under the direction of George Balanchine in the mid-twentieth century. Later, my parents got season tickets to The Dance Theater of Harlem, the company Mitchell created in 1971. At the time, it was possible for a family of six to see such performances without breaking the bank (though our seats were always in the outermost reaches of the theater).
I saw Arthur Mitchell perform "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" with Suzanne Farrell. With music by Richard Rodgers, it remains one of my favorite ballets and I was thrilled to introduce it to David in 2000 when the NYCB celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Dance Theater of Harlem with a joint program. When making this ballet, Balanchine entrusted Mitchell, who had early training in tap dance, with the choreography for the "Hoofer" role. “O.K., you have 16 bars,” Balanchine supposedly told him. “I’ll be back in an hour, and you have something.”
Posted by The Best American Poetry on September 20, 2018 at 07:00 AM in Dance, Feature, Obituaries, Stacey Lehman | Permalink | Comments (1)
Tom Clark: Try to look upon death as a friend (Terence Winch)
No one who knew Tom Clark would ever deny that he was irascible, brilliant, generous, difficult, funny, erudite. He was also immensely prolific—even in old age, he published his blog, Beyond the Pale, on a daily basis. BTP was a relentless illustrated catalogue—with scores of photos spanning the globe—usually revealing world’s woes and conflicts, often complemented with various texts he admired. He also wrote and published dozens of books of poetry and prose. His illustrious literary career is outlined here.
I felt really shaken by the news of his death yesterday: he was hit by a car near his house in Berkeley and died several hours later in the hospital.
We had met in person only once, back in April of 1978, when he came to DC to read in Doug Lang’s Folio Bookstore reading series. I have a distinct memory of taking him somewhere on the DC Metro.
We got to know each much better in recent years, mostly through emails. He liked my work and posted poems of mine from time to time in Beyond the Pale. We had many exchanges about poetry, music, our shared Irish heritage, etc. I am haunted today by his occasional references to the perilous streets of his neighborhood, where pedestrians had to risk their lives to take a walk. Indeed, he had been injured in an earlier accident some years ago.
Here is what he wrote me in June on this very subject:
“Admire your getaroundability. Could never ride on any airplanes nevermore no!! Cannot lift right leg off ground. Get on bus impossible. Cross street a prayer every time, plus plenty straight out hate speech outa me, unheard by robo drivers on software cruise control. They never talk back. I set up in shooter stance w metal cane pointed like assault weapon, they smile and laugh and roar past w/o stopping @alleged pedestrian crosswalk!
Little known fact you probably won't believe or care why should you, but the stop lights here are "smart" - that is, have sensors to detect approaching vehicle, stay green for same, but green goes to yellow in 2 seconds (literally), if you're a ped, and if there is a more unliveable country on earth, defining living as having a soul, I want to go there, just to comparison shop - but I've never owned a credit card or a cell phone, have no i.d. and indeed no idea how to shop, so there might be a problem there, but no worries.” email from Tom Clark, June 2018
Tom will be missed and mourned by his many friends and colleagues. My deepest condolences to Angelica Clark, his wife of 50 years.
Nocturnal Resolutions
Be opaque
Have no memory
Make no attempt to be understood
Stop suffering fools
Be kind to animals no matter what
Listen to the angel
Try to look upon death as a friend
Accept pain as the condition
Be more patient
Don’t turn on the light
Poems ought to have memories.
They should remember other poems.
At this moment the noisy city
has fallen quiet, and the edge
of the forest is abuzz with voices,
the voices of poems beneath the old trees
talking quietly about the poems that were
once here but are not here any longer,
remembering each other.
Posted by Terence Winch on August 19, 2018 at 12:40 PM in Obituaries, Poems, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (21)
Les Lieber Loved Living the Life [by David Lehman]
On Monday the 16th of July, the New York Times ran an obituary for Les Lieber, who died last week at the age of 106. Here are four facts about Les Lieber:
(1) In 1965 he started Jazz at Noon, which lasted forty-five years as a great New York notion achieved with artistry and renewed with vigor and vibe on a weekly basis. Every Friday you could go to whichever club or tavern was hosting and you'd hear Les on his saxophone joining other gents who, like Les, held demanding jobs in medicine, finance, or other professions, but relished this one hour when they could honor their love of jazz. News of Jazz at Noon spread from mouth to mouth and a dedicated following followed. Dizzy Gillespie dropped in with his trumpet, and Buddy Rich visited to play drums.
(2) Les's main job was as a journalist, a sports journalist, whose profile of the great Yankee catcher Yogi Berra ran under the title "There's No Place Like Home Plate."
(3) Les, fluent in French, spent many a summer in St. Paul de Vence with his charming wife, Edie, a beauty in the Ava Gardner manner, where they befriended the painters and poets who made this hillside town in the Alpes Maritimes a destination worth a journey.
(4) A veteran of the air force in World War II, Les had a sharp wit and was adept at delivering a humorous comment or aside with a straight face in the Bogart manner.
Jazz aficionado Jamie Katz, Les's stepson, has spoken movingly about his "talented, lovable stepdad, who spoke six languages, pitched a no-hitter in college, landed in Normandy, recorded with Django Reinhardt in Paris in 1945, and wrote hundreds of imaginative, beautifully turned, whimsical magazine articles."
When I met Les, he was twenty five years younger than I am now, which sounds like a math problem but is just a way of saying that he was a longtime friend who was exemplary in demonstrating that possibly the best way to appreciate great music -- better even than the joy of listening -- is to play it. This is a lesson that applies as much to poetry as to jazz. -- DL
Les Lieber, who for more than 45 years ran Jazz at Noon, a fabled New York institution where talented amateur players got together every week to stretch their skills and to perform alongside top-flight professionals, died on July 10 on Fire Island, N.Y. He was 106.
His stepson Jamie Katz confirmed the death.
Mr. Lieber had already had a substantial career as a publicist and journalist when, in September 1965, he organized the first Jazz at Noon, partly to give himself a chance to play his alto saxophone and penny whistle for an audience. It was on a Monday at lunch hour at Chuck’s Composite, a restaurant on East 53rd Street.
“I was dying on the vine as a musician,” he told The New York Times in 1975, recalling the origin of the sessions. “I hadn’t had my sax out of its case in eight years. I felt there must be others like me who would love to play but couldn’t get a rhythm section together without disrupting their families.”
The experiment soon had a following, as players who might have once had thoughts of a professional career but had become doctors, lawyers or accountants pulled instruments out of closets. Soon Mr. Lieber added to the allure by recruiting professionals, for a modest fee, to drop in as guest stars.
Max Fuchs, a rifleman in the First Infantry Division of the US Army, died on June 6, almost 74 years to the day from when he landed on Omaha Beach as part of the D-Day invasion in 1944.And on Oct. 29 of that year, Private Fuchs — who had attended a yeshiva and sang cantorial music in a choir while growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — sang the traditional Sabbath hymns at a hugely emotional open-air service on the Aachen battlefield before some 50 fellow Jewish soldiers.
If you listen closely, you'll hear the words of Rabbi Lefkowitz, who lead the service:
“How sweet upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger of good tidings.”
"Profound with me is this service which we celebrate today. It is not the first which we hold in Germany but it is the first we broadcast to the world. With the prophet we say, "How sweet upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger of good tidings.'" i ....The light of religious freedom has pierced through the darkness • of Nazi persecution that freedom of conscience again exists in the land which had been denying men that. That eternal truth has lived through and will outlive the fanatical power which fought to destroy it. Again there is demonstrated these eternal truths that man cannot forever in the face of heaven, put himself in the place of God .... divinely given spirit in slavery and bondage."
You can read his obituary in the New York Times here.
Fuch's tour of service was similar to that of my father, who landed on Utah beach and went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. I'd like to think that my dad was among those who participated in the service.
After his war service, Fuchs worked as a diamond cutter in Manhattan, as did my father. Perhaps they knew each other!
Here's a feature about Max Fuchs and the service in Aichen, Germany. Avoid the comments:
May his memory be a blessing.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on July 06, 2018 at 08:14 AM in Feature, Obituaries | Permalink | Comments (0)
Donald Hall's Life Work [by David Lehman]
Donald Hall died two days ago. Back in 1988 I reviewed The One Day for the Washington Post. It may be Don’s finest book of poems and it pleased me enormously when we awarded it the NBCC prize in poetry. He deserved greater recognition than he got for his many contributions to the literary culture. In addition to all his other accomplishments, and there are many, Don (shown here with Jane Kenyon, his wife, in 1993) served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989, the second volume in this series. He was a friend and mentor, and his ideas and methods, based on years of experience as an anthologist, proved invaluable to me in subsequent years. In Dana Gioia’s words, “Few people did as much for American poetry as Don did. He lived the idea of championing the ‘best American poetry’ long before the anthology emerged.”
Defying medical prognostication he lived to be 89 and never ceased to produce fine work -- his octogenarian essays are terrific. Last year on Don’s birthday, the Oxford University Press’s blog reposted a piece I’d written when Don was named Poet Laureate of the United States. This is what I wrote:
Donald Hall is a wonderful choice for US Poet Laureate. I’ve worked closely with him on such projects as “The Best American Poetry 1989,” and in 1994 he asked me to succeed him as general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s “Poets on Poetry” series. So I feel a special kinship with him. But there are many poets and other writers out there who feel a similar bond with Don Hall, for he has always been a generous mentor and an exemplary figure, proving (for example) that an outstanding poet can also do admirable work as an editor, an anthologist, a writer of children’s verse, a sports writer, a writer of short stories and of textbooks. In his versatility and with his energy, Donald Hall has always demonstrated the value of hard work in one’s poetic practice. The title of one of his prose books, Life Work, sums up the almost moral imperative that work represents for Hall. Reviewing his book “The One Day” in The Washington Post in 1988, I called it “loud, sweeping, multitudinous, an act of the imperial imagination,” and cited a climactic line suggestive of Hall’s fundamental take on life: “Work, love, build a house and die. But build a house.”
The contributor’s note indicated that as “the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry, which was published this spring [ie. 2006],” I included “The Impossible Marriage” and four other poems by Donald Hall.
I like “noble” as the adjective to associate with Donald Hall's life work.
– DL, June 25, 2018
See 
Posted by The Best American Poetry on June 25, 2018 at 01:34 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Obituaries | Permalink | Comments (0)
Rest in peace Philip Roth (1933-2018)
The great Philip Roth has passed away at age 85.
Philip Roth didn't win the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Mr. Roth, 80, the author of 29 novels and the only living American author to have his works anthologized by the Library of America, is “an epicist who examines contemporary American life with incorruptible scrutiny.” He is the 14th American and the 14th Jew to be anointed with the honor.
The Newark-bred author will add the Nobel Prize to an unparalleled array of accolades, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the French Legion of Honor, and the National Humanities Medal. Often short-listed by the betting site Ladbrokes, in recent years, Mr. Roth’s name had dropped to 50/1 odds, making him a perennial long shot.
When reached by phone at his apartment in Manhattan, Mr. Roth seemed nonchalant about his new laurels. “I wasn’t in a hurry,” he said.
I became a fan of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra's poetry when I saw the title of his 1967 New Directions book: POEMS AND ANTIPOEMS. The idea of antipoems fit with my own approach to poems, which at the time I was having a lot of published in what we called then "little magazines" and "underground newspapers."
I couldn't read much Spanish, so I depended on the translators of the poems in the book, which ranged from Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov to W. S. Merwin and Miller Williams, all of whom I knew then, a time when it was possible to know most of the poets on your side of the poetry fence.
Miller Williams was the main translator and wrote the introduction, in which he stated something that I thought expressed my approach, or my desire, at the time: "antipoetry is unadorned, is unlyrical, is nonsymbolist; in antipoetry what you see is what you see; antipoetry is chiseled, solid."
I met Parra a few times, but it was in 1970 at a reading in DC where he signed my copy of POEMS AND ANTIPOEMS, with just a big cursive version of my name followed by an explanation point: "Michael!" then "Nicanor" and under that "70" and under that "Washington." A chiseled, solid inscription.
He was a scientist as well as a poet, and he was 103 when he passed. I am grateful that he led such a rich, full, long life and was recognized as an important and influential poet. He was to me.
Here's Miller Williams' translation of a short poem from that book:
For half a century
Poetry was the paradise
Of the solemn fool.
Until I came
And built my roller coaster.
Go up, if you feel like it.
I'm not responsible if you come down
With your mouth and nose bleeding.
Richard Wilbur, who died last night, was born in New York City in 1921 and grew up in rural New Jersey. His father was a portrait painter, and his mother came from a long line of journalists. A graduate of Amherst College (class of 1942), he served during World War II with the 36th Infantry Division. He saw action in Italy, France, and Germany. He taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Smith, and his alma mater. Dick liked living in the country. With his late wife Charlotte he lived year-round in Cummington, Massachusetts, birthplace of William Cullen Bryant, and spent many springs in Key West, Florida. In 2004 his Collected Poems 1943-2004 appeared from Harcourt. Twice he won Pulitzer Prizes. He wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and his translations from seventeenth century French drama (Molière, Racine, Corneille) are performed widely in the United States and abroad.
Dick's greatness as a poet, translator, and wordsmith are (or should be) self-evident to all practicing.poets. He was also the most genial and gracious of individuals. It was an honor to know him and work with him. I profited from his expertise on many subjects: Edgar Allan Poe, the great American songbook, French classical tragedy, Milton, riddles, the haiku stanza put to narrative or expository use. In a New York City hotel in 1981 or '82 I heard Dick read his poem "Lying." He prefaced the reading by rehearsing his doubts about the merit of the work. But James Merrill had reassured him that it passed muster. "Lying" was one of Dick's great poems, I like teaching his "Boy at the Window" alongside Stevens's "The Snow Man." We were lucky to have Richard Wilbur among us for so many years. -- DL
Advice to a Prophet
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?
Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters.  We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
Remembering Kate Millett [by Catharine R. Stimpson]
Kate Millett, sculptor, author and feminist, on her booted stool by her useless piano, two-headed bed and bachelor chest at Judson Memorial Church in New York, March 1st, 1967. Photograph: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
Kate Millett died on September 6, 2017, in Paris, eight days before her 83rd birthday. We met in the mid-1960s when we were doctoral students at Columbia University and part-time lecturers in English at Barnard College. For years, we were close friends, and then, without any quarrel, without any design, we met with less and less frequency. However, I never lost touch with my feelings of love, some concern, and respect. She was streaked with genius. Now, I must be one of her sorrowing mourners.
The first time I heard her voice was over the phone in 1963 or 1964. I was living over an Irish bar in an apartment with a Pullman kitchen and a pink-tiled bathroom at 1254 Lexington Avenue in the Yorkville District of New York. I was experimenting with the contours of my adult life. I had begun teaching at Barnard. I was going through one of the transitions of that period, from a putative heterosexuality to a precarious bisexuality to a settled if partially secretive lesbianism. When a women’s sports magazine later satirically selected me for its Hall of Fame, my sport was “Hide and Seek.”
That first conversation with Kate was professional and correct. She had been told to call me for advice because she was in a situation that was similar to mine. She had a B.A. from Oxford. I had one from Cambridge. She had gone to Japan for a while, but she was now back. She was entering the doctoral program at Columbia. I was already there. What was it like? I am, I said, truthfully, an indifferent and probably irritating graduate student, but here is how I managed the situation with credits from an English university. She also inquired about teaching at Barnard. The students are wonderful, I answered. .
We ended up with adjacent desks, two of the four in an office on the 4th floor of Barnard Hall. We were urgently earnest, enthusiastic teachers, who adored literature and learning, and who marked student papers with zeal. We once calculated that with our classes and our attention to student writing and our conferences, we were earning $.81 per hours. We seemed to understand each other, a balance of seriousness and irony. Soon we became known as the “two Kates.” All the pictures in her current obituaries, whether of the young or the aging Kate, show her with long hair, but in the office, her hair was in a bun, and she wore long skirts and shoes with wooden heels. She seemed to be emulating a stereotype of a female Oxford don. I, on the other hand, danced around in mini-skirts and ran my hands through my curly black locks.
Soon I met Fumio Yoshimura, the artist, whom she had met in Japan. She had helped him through the death of his wife there. He came with her to America. Kate would say that they married because of immigration. She also murmured, muttered once about pleasing her family. But it was also a marriage of love, support, and shared devotion to making art. Sexual Politics is dedicated to him. Their marriage was no dash to City Hall, but in a church, albeit a progressive one. After the wedding dinner the night before, we were all hung over, but I could still notice that she was wearing a white bridal gown, and Fumio was ceremoniously dressed, and Kate’s brother-in-law walked her down the aisle. An officer in the military, he wore his dress uniform.
Kate and Fumio were living on the Bowery, and Kate persuaded me to move downtown. I found my loft at 352 Bowery. We were neighbors at home and work. Then, in 1966, she walked in the office, holding a piece of mimeographed paper. “Stimps,” she said, I could be either Stimps or Stimpson, “there’s this meeting about a civil rights organization for women. We should check it out.” She was already a fervent supporter of black civil rights. The meeting took place in a church office on Morningside Heights, a few rows of folding metal chairs. Instantly, it made sense to be there. Like starfish, we suddenly grew back missing limbs. She became chair of the Education Committee, I of the Image Committee. Competition for these posts was minimal.
In Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think of Sex and Politics (2004), Rosalind Rosenberg writes ably about these days on Morningside Heights. For Kate and me, moving back and forth from Downtown to uptown, from politics to scholarship, was a seamless journey. Sexual Politics, famously her doctoral dissertation, embodies this. I still remember, with some chagrin, sitting on a beach with Kate. She, Fumio, Ruby (my partner at the time), and I were on vacation. I was reading a draft passage about D.H. Lawrence. “Kate,” I said, “you can’t say that about Lawrence. He’s a great writer.” In the sun, on the sand, she was non-committal.
Looming behind Sexual Politics, and perhaps insufficiently recognized, were two formidable intellectual forces: Simone de Beauvoir and the Second Sex, translated into English only a few years before, and Steven Marcus, the Columbia scholar who was her adviser. Kate was scrupulous about her intellectual debts. In her “Preface,” she writes, “I am particularly grateful to Steven Marcus who gave the manuscript the most careful reading and could always find time and patience to insist rhetoric give way to reason.”
Kate was an artist. One of my most treasured possessions is her sculpture of a diner at a table, with fork and knife pointing in the wrong direction. I bought this representation of frustration, paying $15 per month for a period of two or three years. Kate had a passionate imagination. Yet, she was a scholar, a woman of research and reason. She was proud, legitimately, of her first at Oxford. Later, when we looked at each other, we saw paths not taken. We were, of course, mildly competitive, and I was wildly jealous of her portrait on the cover of Time magazine in 1970. In Flying, she gave me two names, Emerson and Morgan, both a sly reference to certain of my tastes. Was I the woman who lived downtown but who did not take up the rugged rigors of the artist’s life? As for Kate, she should have been a tenured professor of literature who wrote burning books and made art, an outlier in the profession who would have become an icon.
As her obituaries point out, the Barnard English Department did not renew Kate’s contract, a terrible wound for her. It was not only her politics, not only her presence. Polite though she could be, her direct gaze could be discomforting. Some members of the Department, now dead, were narrow prigs. One woman thought a passage from Lawrence, on a syllabus, was too bald and bold for Barnard undergraduates. One man harrumped to me that she had not written him a thank-you note after she taught his course in Victorian literature when he was on leave. Kate did stay on at Barnard for a little while. Powerful members of the faculty, such as Mary Mothersill, then the chair of the Philosophy Department, helped to arrange a position as director of the Experimental College (new, of course). Perhaps, after Sexual Politics, Kate did not need the academy, but she would have been an astonishing professor.
I have all of Kate’s books, including her early pamphlets, except for my inscribed first edition of Sexual Politics. I often wonder who nicked it. After I heard about her death, I ran my hand over them. I thought that I must write about them all, because her cultural reputation cannot be reduced to Sexual Politics. The books have a consistent spine. They are about the suffering of the powerless, about the hell into which the powerful cast the powerless. Kate urges us, forces us, to look into hell and then dares us to put out its fires. In her cosmology, ethics, sense of martyrdom, ferocious capacity for hard work, and anguish, she was, I believe, radically Roman Catholic, the rebuked church of her youth.
One headline in an obituary called Sexual Politics a “Bible of Feminism.” Another named her a “’high priestess’ of second-wave feminism.” Perhaps their writers knew more than they knew. I have imagined us together in Medieval times, before Protestants so rubbished women’s convents. We would have been in a convent, a place for women who relished holding books and manuscripts open before them. But, like some of those irrepressible and renegade saints, she would have been difficult. She would dispatched her disruptive messages, written in both impeccable Latin and in the vernacular, and she would have walked out into the countryside, perhaps in sandals, perhaps in her bare feet, founding new communities of yearning believers.
Dear Kate, I believe this fantasy would have amused you.
I met John Asbery in November of 1973 when I went with a group of friends to hear him read in DC. Maybe it was the Library of Congress. I can’t remember. Michael Lally had turned me on to John’s 1970 book, The Double Dream of Spring, which knocked me out. This was poetry that was at once grand, symphonic, silly, profound, and comic all at once. His formal virtuosity and his mastery of language set a new standard for many of us young poets back then.
We stayed in touch over the years. John read in Washington with some regularity and would often put me on the guest list for pre- or post-reading get-togethers. He loved a good party, preferably one that included plenty of drink, dope, wit, and attractive young men. [photo at left by Allan Penn from the New York Times Magazine]
He was extraordinarily prolific. In his 60s, he published one of my favorite Ashbery books—the dazzling, monumental Flow Chart, a 216-page epic of the imagination that I regard as one of the most significant works of literature in English (“It’s my Sonata of Experience, and I wrote it for you”). I count another 14 books after that (not including his essays, translations, and art criticism), an astonishing late-life output that continued up to 2016’s Commotion of the Birds. It seemed like every 18 months or so, a new Ashbery book would show up. I waited for, bought, and read each one, hoping they would keep coming forever. John’s death yesterday, 3 September 2017, at age 90 brings that streak to an end. Though I hope a few more posthumous books will appear to help all his friends and readers adjust to a world that no longer includes him.
My deepest condolences to David Kermani, John’s spouse, friend, collaborator, and companion for the past 40 years or so.
This evening I read though Flow Chart. Here are a few excerpts that called out to me:
Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo,
leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a cozy
place, preferable in many cases to somewhere)...
...Still, life is reasonably absorbing
and there’s lots of nice people around. Most are well fed
and relaxing, and one can improve one’s mind a little
by going out to a film or having a chat with that special friend; and before
you know it it’s time to brush your teeth and go to bed.”
to feel nervous about? We all know that we have to live for a certain time and then
unfortunately we must die, and after that no one is sure what happens. Accounts vary.
...I have the feeling my voice is just for me,
that no one else has ever heard it, yet I keep mumbling the litany
of all that has ever happened to me, childish pranks included, and when the voluminous
sun sets, its bag full, one can question these and other endeavors silently:
how far wrong did I go?
I’m the experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though to myself
I’m full of unworked-out bugs and stagefright...
Any day now you must start to dwell in it,
the poetry, and for this, grave preparations must be made, the walks of sand
raked, the rubble wall picked clean of dead vine stems, but what
if poetry were something else entirely, not this purple weather
with the eye of a god attached, that sees
inward and outward? What if it were only a small, other way of living,
like being in the wind?
I must ask you now to leave. It seems we are fresh out of turnips.
Mort de John Ashbery, poète américain
LE MONDE | 05.09.2017 à 11h31 • Mis à jour le 05.09.2017 à 12h26 | Par Olivier Brossard (maître de conférence à l'université Paris-Est-Marne-la-Vallée)
Figure majeure des lettres américaines, l’écrivain s’est éteint dimanche 3 septembre, à 90 ans.
Cette page-ci n’est seulement la fin de rien/Au sommet de cette autre », écrivait John Ashbery dans Fragment, son premier livre publié en France (Seuil, trad. Michel Couturier) en 1975. Pour le poète américain, l’écriture était ouverture, fuite ou fugue, le refus d’une identité ou d’un poème qui soient clos ou définis à jamais. L’écrivain, figure majeure des lettres américaines, est mort dimanche 3 septembre, à 90 ans, dans sa maison de Hudson (État de New York), auprès de son mari, David Kermani. Jusqu’à récemment, il aura continué à composer une œuvre monumentale : une trentaine de livres de poésie, des pièces de théâtre, un roman, des écrits sur l’art, un imposant corpus de traductions du français.
Après une enfance passée à la ferme familiale de Sodus, marquée par la figure de grands-parents érudits, John Ashbery intègre en 1945 l’université Harvard, où il rencontre les poètes Kenneth Koch et Frank O’Hara. Avec eux, installé à New York, il fréquente la galerie Tibor de Nagy, qui expose les œuvres de peintres comme Jane Freilicher et Larry Rivers. C’est en raison de leurs affinités et collaborations avec ces peintres de l’école de New York que ces jeunes auteurs se voient affublés du titre de « poètes de l’école de New York ». John Ashbery n’a jamais apprécié cette appellation qu’il jugeait artificielle, d’autant qu’il est parti vivre en France de 1955 à 1965, où il a rencontré son compagnon d’alors, l’écrivain et journaliste Pierre Martory.
Virtuose de la langue
A Paris, John Ashbery se prend de passion pour l’écrivain Raymond Roussel, qu’il commence à traduire. Alors critique d’art, il se lance aussi dans un vaste travail de traduction de poètes français (ses aînés comme ses contemporains), collaborant avec son ami écrivain Harry Mathews à la publication de la revue Locus Solus. Ashbery commence alors à explorer de nouvelles voies poétiques, dont celles du collage et de la disjonction, notamment dans The Tennis Court Oath en 1962 (Le serment du Jeu de paume, Corti, 2015). Par ses expérimentations verbales, ce livre marque la ­nouvelle génération de poètes américains, dont ceux du mouvement L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E.
Though in 1970 this must have struck many as far-fetched, by the end of the decade that saw the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Houseboat Days (1977), the “tribe of John”, as his followers were dubbed, seemed everywhere. “Since the death of Robert Lowell,” observed Helen McNeil in a Times Literary Supplement review of As We Know (1979), “the title of most important American poet has been on offer to John Ashbery.”In 1982, Ashbery suffered an almost fatal spinal infection that necessitated an 11-hour operation. His partner, and later husband, David Kermani, was informed that if Ashbery survived it, he would probably be quadriplegic. In fact, he made an almost complete recovery, and was soon busy again at his typewriter. In all, he published 28 collections of verse, and was the first living poet to have his work collected in the Library of America’s editions of classic American writers.
He was the recipient of numerous honours, awards and prizes, including two Guggenheim fellowships, a MacArthur fellowship, the chancellorship of the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost medal, the Feltrinelli prize, the International Griffin poetry prize, and a National Humanities medal, awarded by President Barack Obama in 2012. His work has been translated into dozens of languages. As well as poetry, he published a volume of art criticism (Reported Sightings, 1989), two volumes of literary criticism (Other Traditions, 2000, and Selected Prose, 2004), and numerous translations of French writers, collected in two volumes published in 2014.
From 1979 onwards, Ashbery divided his time between an apartment in Manhattan and an imposing 19th-century mansion in Hudson, New York state, that he purchased partly because it reminded him of the happy times he spent as a child in his grandparents’ house in Rochester. This housed paintings by such as Fairfield Porter and Joe Brainard, and collections of all sorts of Americana snapped up by the magpie-like poet. Gracious, witty, surprising, his conversation ranged from avant-garde composers to advertising jingles. He had an extraordinary memory for dates and events – and quotations, particularly from Ronald Firbank.
In 2014 I gave a reading with him in New York, at the 92nd St Y, and was touched almost to tears by the lines of people queuing to pay their respects to him afterwards. “John, your work has meant so much to me,” was the gist of what they had to say, though one or two went still further: “John, your poetry has changed my life.”
A Very Sad Day for American Letters: John Ashbery, July 28,1927 - September 3, 2017
John Ashbery, 2011 (c) Stephanie Paterik
Here is a link to David Orr's obituary for John in the New York Times.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on September 03, 2017 at 12:36 PM in Announcements, Feature, John Ashbery, Obituaries, Portraits of Poets | Permalink | Comments (1)
Remembering Liam Rector on the 10th Anniversary of His Death (Terence Winch)
It's difficult for me to accept that 10 years have passed since my old friend Liam Rector took his own life. We had known each other since my early days in Washington, DC, where we were both part of the Mass Transit open poetry reading group started by Michael Lally in the early 1970s. We became better friends in the '80s and after, and I still miss his often outrageous, but always smart and funny perspective on life and poetry. I wrote about him here a year after his death. And Wikipedia offers this short bio. [photo at left by Parrish Dobson]
I learned of his death very quickly after it occurred from his longitme friend and protege David Fenza. I was shocked, but in some ways not surprised. Liam had hinted very clearly that suicide was something he regarded as a real option for him. It was over-the-top, dramatic, arresting, absolute---an act, in other words, that fit his personality perfectly. I respect his right to take his own life. I don't know what he was contending with that pushed him to this extreme, but I suspect it was a combination of medical problems and spiritual despair. He left behind his wife, Tree Swenson, herself a significant figure in the New York literary world back then; his daughter Virginia from his second marriage; and a multitude of friends, colleagues, and students.
He is a hard person to forget, and I miss him still. Here is a message he left on my answering machine sometime not too long before his death. I offer it not because of its flattering praise of my work, but to give a sense of the kind of friend he could be---full of appreciation and support for the people he cared about:
Liam Rector phone message
Here are two of my favorite poems of Liam's:
OLD COAT
Dressed in an old coat I lumber
Down a street in the East Village, time itself
Whistling up my ass and looking to punish me
For all the undone business I have walked away from,
And I think I might have stayed
The one I built with my hands and furnished
Using funds which came to me at nightfall, in a windfall....
Just ahead of me, under the telephone wires
On this long lane of troubles, I notice a gathering
Of viciously insane criminals I'll have to pass
Getting to the end of this long block in eternity.
There's nothing between us. Good
I look so dangerous in this coat.
MENTAL MOMMY
Home from school at six years old, first grade,
And uncle there to tell me Mommy
Gone, Mommy not be coming back any
Time soon, Liam, Mommy had to go to
Mental hospital. Nervous breakdown.
Years later Mommy, when she gets out
Of mental, often says, "If you're
A bad boy for me Liam you're
Going to send me back, back
Into mental hospital, like you did
First time." At 13
I find out Mom had been doing years
In a federal prison all that time,
For stealing, so no mental hospital for
Mommy. Breakdown ours alone.
I was on my own.
---Liam Rector
Tom Raworth was an English ["Anglo-Irish" says Terence Winch] poet whose work fit into no categories. He was as unique and original a person as he was a poet. We first met in the late 1960s (if I remember correctly, no later than '71 anyway), and my first impression was my last: what a decent person he was.
Just one small recent example. One of his last emails to me was after poet Ray DiPalma died. Ray had burned a lot of bridges including with poets, once friends, whose earliest work Ray championed and published in his little magazine DOONES. Tom emailed me to commiserate over Ray's passing but also to say he had posted on his web site NOTES (see the list on the lower right of sites I recommend on my blog Lally's Alley) his appreciation for Ray as a poet and artist, but first of all as someone who had supported Tom as a poet early on by publishing Tom's poems in DOONES.
Tom suffered from a heart condition that folks in our poetry world (back then the outside-the-academy-approved scene) whispered about with the supposition that he would die young. Maybe it was that ever present possibility that gave him the calm I remember him most for (being the exact opposite myself, I envied him and wished I could be like him in that regard).
Where I was always defending my right to even be a part of that world (having grown up in a very different one) which led to me overstating my importance in it, Tom seemed oblivious, or at least unconcerned, about status and recognition and other ego-related aspects of being a poet in the world. And he had the knack, or good fortune, to have the most innovative publishers making his books almost universally precious works of art in themselves (see LION LION or ACT among his early books).
I wish I had seen him more on his visits to the states (I met him when I lived in DC and he came to read and stay at my place) or had traveled to England more myself, but even in his presence he seemed amused though accepting of my frantic energy and volubility in ways that left little room for me to fully appreciate his presence anyway. Fortunately I've settled down over the years in ways that have left me even more appreciative of the gift Tom had for living life at its fullest while appearing, from my perspective at least, to be not taking it too seriously if seriously at all.
He had a good full life for someone so many of us expected not to be around even this long (he was 78, I believe) and summed it up best himself in his last entry on his site NOTES when he knew he had only days to live: "Bits of it all have been fun and it's been a decent run."
My heart goes out to all his family, especially Val, his friends, and his fans.
I'll leave you with this early poem of Tom's (from MOVING). I feel like he's still whispering it calmly in my ear, advice I couldn't hear from anyone else:
THE TITLE : HEAR IT
you are now
inside my head
better you were
inside your own