Writing News

A poem of mine, “Sunset,” was just published in Humana Obscura, a lovely literary journal that I recommend to you all.

Four Things To Read

I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings, by Jill Filipovic: “Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely.” As a teacher, I have never liked trigger warnings, not because I think there is no merit in the idea that students deserve fair warning that they are going to be reading “difficult” or “problematic” texts, but because the warnings themselves have always seemed to me a sign of pedagogical laziness. Good teaching, it seems to me, calls for instructors to put that kind of material in context for students, providing them beforehand with a critical framework with which to approach the text, especially when it comes to the difficult or problematic aspects of the work in question. My own experience has been that students who might need an accommodation—up to and including the chance to read a different text—or even just a reassuring conversation about the one that has been assigned, are more likely to approach me if I provide that kind of framework than if I give one of the canned trigger warnings that have become so common. Filipovic’s essay doesn’t deal so much with what I have just described, but it’s a thoughtful consideration of this subject nonetheless, and worth reading. (I will also add that I think it’s similarly lazy pedagogically if the only texts one can assign that deal with what we might broadly label “trigger-warning-appropriate subjects” are those that center trauma and therefore primarily invite teaching strategies that do the same in the classroom.)

Aunt Taibele, by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, translated from Yiddish by Miranda Cooper: “She hated going to celebrations as much as she loved going to funerals. For her, going to a wedding or a bris was a punishment. At parties she would sit hidden in a corner and watch the happy family members with a sour expression; it got on her nerves to see young people merrymaking and beaming with joy, and she would sneak quietly out of the hall.” Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn (1905–1975) was born in Nowo-Radomsk (today Radomsko), Poland. Her work, according to Cooper’s introduction was “radical for its time: it is feminist simply in its implicit assertion of the literary value of women’s domestic and emotional lives.” It is worth mentioning that the end of the story incorporates a Jewish folk tradition we would today find deeply problematic: plague weddings, known as mageyfe khasenes or shvartse khasenes (literally black wedding. This superstitious ritual involved marrying people on the margins of society to one another in an effort to ward off the plague. I’d never heard of this tradition till I read this story, but a Google search revealed this article in Tablet, which gives a history of the custom.

The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass, by Ted Gioia: “His family was opposed to his music career. They feared he would turn out like Uncle Harry, a dental school dropout who worked as a drummer in vaudeville and Borscht Belt hotels. So how did Glass pay his way at Juilliard? Glass, like the musicians mocked in the song ‘On Broadway,’ took a Greyhound bus back home to Baltimore. But he didn’t stay there for long—just five months. He made enough money in that time to pay for his New York education. But that’s only because this intrepid 20-year-old aspiring composer somehow convinced Bethlehem Steel to give him a job at their plant in Sparrows Point, Maryland.” What I resonate with most in this article is the respect Gioia expresses both for Glass’ commitment to his art and the humility that is embodied not just in the kind of work Glass did to support himself, but in the way he embraced that work as an equally, if differently, valuable part of who he was. I especially appreciated the story Gioia quotes from a 2001 interview Glass gave to The Guardian:

I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo. While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

The Lost Art of Waiting, by Christine Rosen: “To be kept waiting is generally viewed as a negative experience; to make someone wait often denotes hierarchy, dominance, or power in a relationship.” Rosen troubles this notion by talking about how waiting can be a positive experience, using as examples people whose happiness, according to a Dutch study, was rooted in the pleasurable anticipation of a vacation they were planning, not in having taken the vacation in and of itself. She also makes some interesting connections between what she doesn’t quite call a culture of impatience with the ever-increasing speeds at which digital technology offers up its content. The article made me think of the Slow Food Movement.

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Four Things To See

These images are all from the Library of Congress and are in the public domain.

Sheet music cover for “The Popular Fire Song”

An elegy for the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire. (Source: Heskes, Irene, Yiddish American Popular Songs, 1895-1950)

Cover of Fancy’s Sketchbook: First Published Work by an American Jewish Woman

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Penina Moise (1797-1880) became a widely published author and poet. A deeply religious woman, she composed hymns for use in prayer service as well as this book of poetry, which includes poems on biblical themes and on contemporary Jewish life. Few copies survive of Moise's collection of verse.

Window of a Jewish religious shop on Broom Street

Taken by the photographer Marjory Collins (1912-1985), probably in August 1942.

A Portrait of Two Girls Wearing Banners with Slogan “Abolish Child Slavery!!” in English and Yiddish

Probably taken during May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City. Published in American women: a Library of Congress guide for the study of women's history and culture in the United States, edited by Sheridan Harvey [et al.]. Washington: Library of Congress, 2001, p. 347.

Four Things To Listen To

“5784” by Six13

This is just to say an early Shanah Tovah! to all who celebrate.

Yer Blue Hair, by Alfonso Vélez

If Something Breaks, by Front Country

Barton Hollow, by The Civil Wars

Four Things About Me

Recently, I was looking through some old photographs and I found a bunch from when my brother and I were little and we would spend big chunks of our summer at the place my grandparents had in upstate New York. I hadn’t thought for a long time about how we used to run around naked in the grass, sometimes taking rain showers, if the weather was warm and the rain gentle enough; sometimes splashing around in the kiddie pool we had; sometimes playing in the water from the sprinkler my grandmother used to water the lawn. I look at those pictures now and they seem so innocent. My brother and I were laughing together, having a good time, in the completely unselfconscious way children have of being in their bodies, whether clothed or naked. Then I think about how these pictures would be received if they were taken today. Would the person who took them, probably my mother, be reported as a possible child pornographer, the way Sally Mann was flagged for her very professional, very artistic pictures of her own children? Probably they would be; and if they were, what would it take for my mother to demonstrate she was not sexually exploiting her children. I am well aware of the dangers pedophiles pose, of just how ubiquitous child pornography is if you know where to look for it, of the damage sexual exploitation does to children. No one has to convince me of the need to be vigilant, but it makes me sad that someone now might look at these pictures that are more than fifty year old and find the act of having taken them in the first place to be a questionable act at best. To me, that means, for all our vigilance, we have lost something that was worth preserving.

I taught a couple of sections of freshman composition as a graduate TA when I was at Syracuse University. One time—and I know this sounds like something out of a movie satirizing the kind of story I am going to tell you, but it actually happened this way—a young woman sitting in the second row, almost directly in front of me, started blinking at me and pursing her lips. I did not notice at first, but once I did, it became very distracting, especially because, in my own naivety, I could not figure out why she was doing it. The fact that she might have been trying to flirt with me was the farthest thing from my mind. Eventually, though, it dawned on me that this was exactly what she was doing, and a range of emotions flooded through me. I was indignant, embarrassed, a little bit flattered, and profoundly uncertain about whether and how to respond. Finally, because I was finding it more and more difficult to ignore her and stay focused on whatever the lesson was, I looked straight at her and blurted out, “Are you blowing kisses at me?” She, of course, was mortified and, if I remember correctly, left the room and never came back to class. While it’s silly to wish for a do-over for something like this—which took place, after all, forty years ago—I do sometimes wonder what happened to that woman after she left the room. It feels odd to say now that I hope she was not seriously scarred by my insensitivity, but that is how I feel.

That year, we were forced to teach from a book called *The Practical Stylist,* by Sheridan Baker, which I hated, not the book per se, but the way we were expected to teach from it. It wasn’t that I thought I knew better than Baker about what good writing was, or about what it took to craft an argument, but I distrusted from the start the slavish way we were expected to adhere to the text in our classrooms. We were given little room for flexibility and experimentation in how we taught the material—at least if we wanted to get a good teaching evaluation and a passing grade from the professor, whose name I have forgotten, who supervised the TAs and taught our practicum. Even back then, before I really knew what I was talking about, I had the same doubts about teaching Baker’s five paragraph essay, including what he called “the concession paragraph,” that I had about the pass-fail, in class, five paragraph final essay exams ESL students have to take at my institution in order to move up a level in their classes: almost nowhere else in the world but an English Department will they ever have to write like that.

My brother’s name—he died in a car accident a very long time ago—was Paul. So, Paul Newman. I don’t remember how old we were when we discovered that he shared that name with a very famous movie star, but when we did, we decided to make some money by selling “Paul Newman’s” autograph for $.25 a piece. This was back when a quarter actually bought you a candy bar at the corner store. I have no memory of how many we actually sold, except that I know we sold some, nor do I remember which adult found us out, though I know someone did, or if we were forced to give the money back. I do wish, though, that I could recall the whole thing in more detail.

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Four Things To Read

One Book

The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015–22, by Henry Sussman: ”[I]t is more urgent than ever for us to explore and articulate the commonalities of the professoriate and other university workers with journalists, librarians, school directors, dramaturges, and managers, editors, therapists, and clinicians of various stripes, and even attorneys (in their capacity as ‘counselors’). What this rather amorphous conglomerate of vocations holds in common is the dissemination of literacy—the act of inculcating others into the articulate, differentiating, and modulating capabilities within the panoply of language systems and social codes. The combined effect of these varied roles and functions is nothing other than the distribution of empowerment—outfitting neighbors to full cultural enfranchisement.” The central, crucial importance of literacy in all its various guises as the only foundation from which an adequate response might be launched against the right-wing onslaught against what it means to be literate, as Sussman defines it here, is the core theme of this book. The book itself is not easy reading, nor is it intended to be. Sussman gathers into essays, along with a few poems, a broad enough range of cultural analysis that one reading is certainly not enough fully to grasp what he’s talking about. My own experience of one reading is this: At the beginning of the book, Sussman elucidates that value of the kind of meticulously close reading practiced by Derrida—who was Sussman’s teacher—and other cultural theorists and then goes on to illustrate how this way of reading plays out in four books that he then uses throughout these essays as touchstones not only of analysis, but also of the potential for change: Dark Money, by Jane Mayer; The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff; Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare, by Tobin Smith; and The Cruelty Is The Point, by Adam Serwer. Sussman draws from many more sources than these—journalists, columnists, sociologists, theorists—but, at least in my first reading, the issues raised by these four books (money, technology, the media, the United States’ history of oppression, and how the right has marshaled them all to its cause(s)) form the infrastructure of his argument. The Great Dismissal is well-worth reading.

Three Articles

“At Michigan, Activists Take Over and Shut Down Student Government,” by Halina Bennet: "At the University of Michigan, many student activities are usually funded or subsidized by the Central Student Government, known as C.S.G., an elected undergraduate and graduate council that decides how to dole out roughly $1.3 million annually to about 400 groups. But last spring, pro-Palestinian activists, running under the Shut It Down party, won control over the student government. They immediately moved to withhold funding for all activities, until the university committed to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s war in Gaza.” I am fascinated by Shut It Down’s strategy, which one the one hand feels not so different in principle from workers seizing the means of production, while at the same time being reminiscent of the way the right has increased its power and influence by running in and winning local elections. I know there are those who will argue that what Shut It Down did crosses a line, though it’s not clear to me what that line is. It’s not just that I am personally sympathetic to the idea that people should not be able to turn a blind eye not only to what Israel is doing in Gaza, but also to the ways the institutions in which we are implicated support Israel’s actions, tacitly or otherwise. Whether you agree that what Israel is doing in Gaza is technically a genocide or not—and I am not insensitive to the political complexities embedded in the use of that term—to argue that Israel’s actions do not call for some kind of deviation from business as usual is ultimately to argue, on some level, for the normalization of those actions. I also want to add did find the group’s relative silence, as reported in the article, concerning, though, to be fair, the new semester has only just started. It will be interesting to see if there is any follow-up coverage.

“The Fallacy of the Literary Citizen,” an interview with Alina Stefanescu published in The Only Poems Newsletter: "As a concept, literary citizenship acknowledges the duties of citizenship (however those are constructed or interpreted) vis a vis the Republic of Letters, while downplaying the underlying inequality between various passports and citizenship regimes. Obviously, some literary citizens are freer than others—but the concept wallpapers over such distinctions…Let’s imagine a concept of literary community that refuses the hierarchical power dynamics of states. A concept that reconfigures solidarities in defiance of nation-state citizenship rather than accepting that vision for the future.” When I teach creative writing, I always include two or three “literary citizenship” assignments which ask students to participate in literary activities of one sort or another, including but not limited to going to a reading, reading at an open mic, submitting work to the student literary magazine, or becoming involved in producing the magazine. If I remember correctly, I chose to use the term “literary citizenship” to make the assignments congruent with a similar requirement creative majors have to fulfill in order to receive their degree. For me, the term is connected both to the notion that one purpose of public education—and I teach at a public institution—is to prepare students for meaningful, critical, substantive citizenship and to the fact that public eduction has been one of the most powerful democratizing forces in the history of this country. (One reason it is now under attack from the right.) In this interview, Stefanescu troubles that notion in important ways by making visible how the term citizenshipvalidates, in both its denotations and connotations, hierarchies of worth and systems of oppression and exclusion. Ultimately, she raises the question of how the notion of literary citizenship shapes what we understand the cultural role of literature to be and whether or not that is in fact the role we want our work to play. Her argument is well worth taking the time to think about.

“The Internet Is Not Forever: 38% of Web Pages From 2013 No Longer Exist,” by Rob Pegoraro: “A new study on the state of link rot suggests that a floppy disk might have better odds of surviving the next decade with its information intact than a web page published today. The Pew Research Center finds that 38% of the pages extant in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023 and that a quarter of the pages that were online at some point over that period have now vanished.” Pegoraro points to this study and the phenomenon it captures should concern all of us as the world becomes more and more embedded and invested in, as well as dependent on, digital media. I don’t have much to say about this other than that I think it’s important to be informed about phenomenon, even though the overwhelming majority of us are in no position to do much of anything about it.

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Four Things To See

Richard Roland Holst (1868-19368) was a man of many talents, an author, sculptor, etcher, glass painter, professor, illustrator, lithographer, furniture designer, painter, draftsman, muralist and more. Born into a wealthy Dutch family, he still had an understanding for the life of the working class. A trend among young artists in the Symbolist movement was to convey social messages and not only focus on monetizing. Holst used his social commitment in his art as well as politically in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. As a professor at Rijksakademie he promoted his artisanal and ethical ideology to his students. He believed that art had an important role to play in society as it had the ability to reach the whole population.

A Farmer Standing Near A Hay-Stack (1889)

Original from the Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

Head Of The Blindfolded Justitia

Designed for the marble decoration in the Supreme Court in The Hague (1868–1938). Original from the Rijksmuseum.

Horse Head (1881)

Original from the Rijksmuseum.

The Industry (1878-1938)

Original from the Rijksmuseum.

Four Things To Listen To

Jackson, Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash

Manssa Cise, Habib Koité

New Old Age, Peter Erskine

Oxygène, Part 2, Jean Michel Jarre

Four Things About Me

I’ve only been in one fistfight, ever. I was in third grade. We’d just moved into the neighborhood and one of my classmates asked me during recess what my religion was. I told him. The next day, when we were choosing up sides for a recess game of dodgeball, he told me I couldn’t play because his parents told him he wasn’t allowed to play with Jews. I don’t know if the fight I’m telling you about happened then or if it happened some time after that, but I remember being shoved into the center of a schoolyard circle of boys. “He’s a Jew! Punch him in the face!” I heard someone call out. I tried to break out of the circle, but they pushed me back into the center where I had no choice but to face off not with the boy I just told you about, but with the toughest boy in the class. (Both of them happened to be named John.) I don’t remember if he swung first or if I did, but I know I connected with his jaw and that blood started to trickle down his chin. The other boys saw it as well and, all of us suddenly horrified, we quickly dispersed. I have no recollection of what happened next, only that the blood turned out to be from a scab on his chin that I broke and not from any serious damage that I’d done to the boy’s face. The experience, though, frightened me enough that I have managed, even in situations where it might have been justified—and when I was younger and still living in that neighborhood there were more than a few of those—I have managed never to hit someone like that again.

I remember when I started not to believe in a god. I was in my late teens or early twenties, sitting in shul on either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur and listening to the rabbi’s sermon. He was talking about the “Al Cheit,” the communally recited confessional prayer, each line of which is addressed to God and begins “For the sin we have committed before You.” I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he connected it to the lines from the Avinu Malkeinu that are recited between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in which the congregation, again communally, asks God to: “[I]nscribe us in the book of good life, …in the book of redemption and deliverance, …in the book of livelihood and sustenance, …in the book of merits, …in the book of pardon and forgiveness.” I suddenly had this image of God as a bookkeeper, complete with a green tinted visor, tallying up everyone’s sins and good deeds on a balance sheet. The image reminded me, frankly, of what God might look like in a Monty Python skit, if the members of Month Python had been Jewish. No matter how hard I tried—and I did try—I could not get that metaphor out of my head, which made it increasingly difficult to take the idea of God–of a god, of any god–very seriously.

I was suspended from school in eleventh grade for cutting class with all the girls in my grade. The boys in my class–this was when I was in yeshiva–were scheduled to take a class trip to a yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey. I don’t remember which one. For some reason that I also don’t remember, I was not able to go on the trip with them. Since our morning classes, which were religious studies, were segregated by gender, that meant I spent the morning by myself with nothing to do but shoot baskets and fiddle around on the piano that was on the stage in the room that did triple duty as a gym, a dining hall, and an auditorium. When it came time for the afternoon classes, the girls and I decided not to go, since more than half the class wasn’t there. We got caught because the boys’ bus broke down after stopping, I think in Brooklyn, so they could get a blessing from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. The bus got fixed in time for them to go to first period math. The girls and I, of course, were conspicuous by our absence. We were suspended and told we could not go back to class until our parents came in to speak with the principal of secular studies. My mother couldn’t do that because she worked, so she had to make an early morning appointment with the dean of the school, according to whom the bigger problem wasn’t that I had cut classes, but that I had been alone with all the girls in the class without any supervision. He couldn’t bring himself even to suggest to my mother that I had done anything sexually inappropriate, though, so all he said was, “I want you to know that your son is a real mensch. He made a mistake. I am sure he will never do that again.” That was it. I walked my mother out of the building to her car and, as soon as we got outside, she started laughing. “What were you actually suspended for?”

I had a serious girlfriend when I was in my twenties. Early on in our relationship, she asked me what I thought our home should be like if we ever decided to get married. It told her that, assuming we could afford it, we should have a place with three bedrooms, one that we shared and two more so we could each have our own private space, in case we wanted to sleep alone or if we wanted to work late into the night—at the time, she thought she would be an artist and I knew I was going to be a writer—and we didn’t want to disturb the other’s sleep by climbing into bed with them. She was horrified. “That is the most unromantic thing I have ever heard,” she said. A few years later, though, when the possibility of us living together and maybe getting married was becoming more and more real, she brought the subject up again. “The more I think about it now,” she said, “the more I like your idea of us having separate rooms in addition to the one we share.” I don’t remember if she told me what changed her mind, but it didn’t really matter in the end. We broke up not too long after that.

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Four Things To Read

One Book

Days When I Hide My Corpse In A Cardboard Box, by Lok Fung, translated by Eleanor Goodman: Lok Fung is the pseudonym of Natalia S. H. Chan, a poet from Hong Kong. Eleanor Goodman, who read for First Tuesdays back in 2022, is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center with numerous translations of contemporary Chinese literature to her credit. As I read this book, navigating the syntactic moves and disjunctions that the almost complete lack of punctuation make visible, I kept thinking about how Goodman focused in her introduction on Fong’s “artistic obsession” with dance. While Goodman’s focus is on dance in the content of Fong’s work, however, I found myself thinking about the way the lack of punctuation in the poems turns the movement of the language into a kind of dance. What I mean is this: the lack of punctuation forces the reader to figure out the syntactical relationship between the clauses and phrases in a poem, in particular where the sentence boundaries are, in the same way that, because there is no obvious “punctuation” in a dance, the audience needs to discern for themselves the interior structure of the movements being performed before them, not just the boundaries–where one section ends and another begins–but also the syntax, because there is a way in which dance, like poetry, cannot help but be linear, that connects and creates relationships between and among movements across those boundaries. I also want to tell you about one other moment in my experience of reading this book. The final poem, “Tale of a Modern Day Knight,” ends with these lines: perhaps it’s a circle, a pattern, a letter/even a riddle, a line of poetry/but I know it absolutely isn’t/a vow.“ I almost never have the experience of finishing a book of poems and feeling the final poem ”click“ into place like a final puzzle piece, but I felt these lines like that. Many of the poems in this book, perhaps all of them, seemed to me to be about proposing what things ”might be“ in order to illuminate by implication what the speaker knows for sure, and wants the reader to know for sure, that they are not. Here, for example, are two lines from ”October in the City: A Book of Amnesia:“ When the sick city lies down and becomes an occupied stone/the canals of the body stir the consciousness awake. This is my entirely intuitive response, but, for me, the subtext of these lines, and of much of the book as a whole, mirrors the structure of the lines from ”Tale of a Modern Day Knight:" perhaps this is what the city is and perhaps this is what living in that city feels like, but knowing this means we know for sure that the city and its inhabitants are not [and then you need to fill in the blank here with your understanding. Each of the poems in this book seems to me to be a journey through some variation of that proposition. It’s a journey worth taking.

Three Articles

In a Poem, Just Who Is ‘the Speaker,’ Anyway?, by Elisa Gabbert: “The question here, the one I think my friend was asking, is this: Does our use of “the speaker” as shorthand — for responsible readership, respectful acknowledgment of distance between poet and text — sort of let us off the hook? Does it give us an excuse to think less deeply than we might about degrees of persona and spokenness in any given poem?” I like this question a lot, and I like the way Gabbert teases out the implications of using the term “speaker,” as opposed to persona, as a way of acknowledging the distance between the person writing a poem and the voice that person constructs to speak in and through a poem. It’s not quite, as she suggests a persona, the way the speaker in a dramatic monologue, a la Robert Browning, is a persona, but it is, or at least can be, as she says elsewhere, a way that “the poem always gives my own I, my mind’s I, the magic ability to say things I wouldn’t in speech or in prose.” In my own work/practice, I don’t experience this as magic, though I understand why someone else might. Rather, for me, the poem is a field, or a context, or a staging area, or a path where I can say the things I need to say, whether they are autobiographically true or not, to map the emotional territory the poem explores. I was at a conference recently where a poet, speaking about the way her work reflected her autobiography, said explicitly, “I am the speaker of my poems,” claiming the gap between poet and speaker-of-the-poem as part of who she is. I’m not sure she was saying that everything in her poems is factually, autobiographically, true, but if that was what she meant, then I think she was being disingenuous about herself and her art. If, on the other hand, she meant that the speaker of her poems is no less a part of her than her factual, autobiographical self, and that it can therefore be meaningfully talked about as her, then I think she said something very much worth thinking more deeply about.

The Poet Who Commands a Rebel Army, by Hannah Beech: “The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.”W. H. Auden wrote in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” that “poetry makes nothing happen,” which has always sounded to me very much like the Daoist exhortation to “do nothing,” which, as I understand it, is not a call to inaction, but rather a call against trying to force something specific to happen; and Auden seems to see poetry in a similar vein, because he goes on to say that poetry “survives” as, or because it is, “a way of happening.” It’s interesting to think about that in the context of what Beech reports on in this article about a Myanmar poet, Ko Maung Saungkha, who has become a military leader in the war against that country’s dictatorship. “Myanmar,” Beech writes, “is a country entranced by poetry. Poets are celebrities, accorded the kind of adulation that, in other places, might be showered on actors or athletes. And verse, delivered in punchy rhymes made easy by the Burmese language, has long been political, used to galvanize the masses.” Myanmar, in other words, seems to be a country where poetry can indeed make something happen, and the government seems to know that. “Since the coup,” Beech goes one, “at least half a dozen poets have been killed, as the military junta crushes dissent. More than 30 poets were imprisoned in the aftermath of the coup, according to the National Poets’ Union.”

A 12-Minute Show, Played Only Once, Just Might Live Forever, by Chris Almeida: “This is modern drum corps. It is a competition for mostly college-age students, but the groups are not affiliated with any schools. When they are in season, the corps consume the lives of their members — perfecting a single performance, and then continuing to drill it until it is somewhere beyond perfection. Rehearsals last up to 12 hours a day, and intense tours dominate the performers’ lives in July before culminating in a world championship in Indianapolis…The activity is a study in passion — or perhaps delusion. It is not easy. It does not make money. It does not clearly translate to a career. And it ends; groups like the Bluecoats that compete in Drum Corps International’s world-class division are made up exclusively of participants under the age of 22.” I wrote a little bit in Four by Four #19 about playing bass baritone bugle in my neighborhood drum corps when I was a teenager. I don’t think, though, that I have ever seen drum corps get the kind of coverage that it gets in this article, which comes pretty close to describing what drum corps do as pursuing art for art’s sake. The point made by the title is worth unpacking a little bit, since it is true that each drum corps performance is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, except for the encore performance that the world champion corps gets to play. Putting that performance together is a nearly non-transactional experience for the young people who participate, which I thought about a lot while reading the article, given how transactional life in general has become, especially in the college classrooms where I teach.

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Four Things To See

All these images, taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are in the public domain.

Ecorché- Torso of a Male Cadaver

Eugène Delacroix, French, 1828?

The posthumous sale of the contents of Delacroix’s studio contained 126 of his anatomical drawings. None of the known surviving examples are dated, and Delacroix never mentioned the practice in written accounts. However, a drawing by the sculptor Henri de Triqueti of a corpse in a pose similar to this one records Delacroix’s presence with him at a hospital in June 1828. This work may derive from that same visit. Triqueti’s testimony makes clear that this was not an activity restricted to Delacroix’s student years. By this time, Delacroix had exhibited paintings in three Salons and earned considerable renown.

Portable diptych sundial

Probably by Charles Bloud, ca. 1666–80

Although Charles Bloud (1653-1699) was the inventor of this variety of azimuth sundial, several other Dieppe sundial makers, including Gabriel Bloud and Jacques Senecal, are known to have made and signed similar sundials. The principle by which their sundials worked is based on a variation in the magnetic declination of the area around Dieppe which existed for only a short period in the seventeenth century, beginning about 1666.

Songs of Innocence- The Little Boy Found

William Blake, 1789, printed ca. 1825

Blake etched twenty-seven printing plates for Songs of Innocence in 1789, completing those for the Songs of Experience in 1794. He then printed and hand-colored copies of the combined sets over succeeding decades as patrons ordered them, each one visually distinct. Verse and image work together to celebrate poetic inspiration and reveal aspects of the divine as expressed through nature. The poetic voice is often that of a child, whose emotions range from delight to fear, with darker feelings usually resolved in the earlier Songs of Innocence by adult intervention. This first group of Songs was shaped by the heady early days of the French Revolution, when British liberals and radicals believed that true reform was imminent on both sides of the Channel.

The artist Edward Calvert met Blake around 1825 and commissioned this copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience soon thereafter. These richly decorated pages, with their deeply saturated hues and distinctive ornamental borders, reveal Blake’s late vision and the order is established by small red numbers at upper right.

Study of the left hand and arm of Meditation

Auguste Rodin, modeled ca. 1894, cast before 1912

Four Things To Listen To

Each of these pieces is from The Blue Notebooks, by Max Richter. Richter originally composed the piece in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and described it "a protest album about Iraq, a meditation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict." Perhaps these four selections will inspire you to listen to the entire album.

The Blue Notebooks

Shadow Journal

On The Nature of Daylight

Horizon Variations

Four Things About Me

I am afraid of roller coasters, of any amusement park ride designed to leave your stomach in your mouth or make you dizzy or both at the same time. I have no idea why, but I remember very clearly being at Coney Island with my father and my brother when he and were little boys. We were on some kind of tilting and spinning ride and I was crying. I have this memory of my father reaching over and trying to comfort me, reassuring me that it would be over soon, though of course it wasn’t over sooner enough; and I remember clearly feeling betrayed. He had talked me into trying the ride by saying that it wouldn’t go very fast, that it spun very slowly, and that he’d be right next to me the whole time. It went way too fast; the spinning made me nauseous; and while it was true that he sat next to me, that fact did absolutely nothing to calm the fear and near panic that set in almost as soon as the ride started.

I get my love of reading from my mother. I only remember the titles of two books that I pulled from the shelves that were in our living room—The Other, by Thomas Tryon, which gave me nightmares, and The World Is Made Of Glass, by Morris West, which I also wrote about in Four by Four #21—but I knew reading was important to her and that sense of importance is what I absorbed as much as anything else. (I know I read more than those two books—she had, for example, some volumes of Victorian pornography that I know I read—but I don’t remember the titles.)

When I was a graduate student in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program in the mid-1980s, my friends and I used to go dancing at a place called, appropriately enough, POETS, which stood for Put Off Everything Till Saturday. I still think that’s a cool name for a bar with a dance floor in a college town. My wife, though, receives a mail order catalogue for women’s clothing–the old fashioned kind, in the mail–and its title is Poetry, which is bad enough, but, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in the interior of the catalogue that capitalizes on the title in any way, shape, or form. Here’s an example of what the cover looks like:

When I was in seventh grade—my teacher’s name was Mr. Kaiser—I won second place in my junior high school’s science fair. Using, if i remember correctly, a piece of meat, I grew a culture in a petrie dish, documenting how long it took for me to be able to see microorganisms through the microscope we had in our classroom. Then I froze the culture and documented how long it took after I thawed it out for microorganisms to reappear. I must have articulated a hypothesis I was trying to prove, though I don’t remember what it was, and so I don’t remember what I thought the experiment showed, but I know that I called it an experiment in cryobiology. Back then, my primary academic interest was science, not English, though it was a toss up as to whether I would pursue biology or—I was also learning to write programs in Basic—computer science. I was very disappointed, therefore, when I switched schools and went to yeshiva. Unlike the junior high school I’d attended the previous year, they had no computers. Their computer science program consisted of teaching us how to program using Fortran punch cards. They also didn’t have microscopes or any of the other equipment we had in the junior high school, and I did not like the woman who was our science teacher. I don’t know if I would have ended up a literature person anyway, but those two factors nudged me in that direction and, by the time I graduated, there was no question that writing and literature were my primary academic interests.

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A Correction and A Request

In the last issue of It All Connects, I shared with you a poem from my second, Words For What Those Men Have Done. Some of you, I know, clicked on the link that took you to the website for Guernica Editions, which published the book in 2017. Unfortunately—and I forgot to account for this when I sent my newsletter out—the book is now out of print. If you clicked on the link thinking you might be interested in getting a copy of the book, please consider contacting me directly. (You can also simply reply to this email.) I have copies of the book and I’ll be happy to discuss getting one to you.

Also, if you, or anyone you know, has connections with a publisher that is willing to discuss putting books that have gone out of print back on the market, I’d love to discuss Words For What Those Men Have Done With You. Circumstances made it impossible for me to do the kind of promotion the book deserved when it came out, and I do think, in part because I think the poems in it have become relevant again, it’s a book that should be out there. You can read a review of the book here.

Four Things To Read

Why Do People Make Music?, by Carl Zimmer: “Across cultures, the researchers found, songs share certain features not found in speech, suggesting that Darwin might have been right: Despite its diversity today, music might have evolved in our distant ancestors.” There is a reason people call music “the universal language.” Put any number of musicians in a room together, with their instruments, and even if they cannot communicate any other way, they will find some way of making music together. This article summarizes a studywhich suggests that there may be a set of acoustical features shared by all sung music, regardless of its culture of origin. Zimmer also links to another study which found that there are neurons in the brain that “only responded to singing — not speech or music played on instruments.” When I was getting my MA in TESOL—and my MA was really an applied linguistics degree—one of the more fascinating topics of discussion in the field was the search for language universals, features shared by all languages. The question of why people make music and the possibility that there are “music universals” seems to me part of the same overall discussion. The beginning of yet another study Zimmer links to suggests that it is: “Humans produce two primary forms of vocal communication: speaking and singing. What is the basis for these two categories? Is the distinction between them based primarily on culturally specific, learned features, or do consistent acoustical cues exist that reliably distinguish speech and song worldwide?” In terms of language universals here are two: all known languages have nouns and verbs and all spoken languages have sounds that can be divided into vowels and consonants. The question then becomes: Do those two facts tell us anything truly meaningful about who we are as human beings?

The Icelandic love secret: should we all try ‘sex before coffee’?, by Zoe Williams: “’Sex before coffee’ is the go-to cliche of Scandinavian romantic habits, but in each country it means something different. In Sweden, it’s shorthand for quite an upfront, efficient dating style. Only in Iceland is it meant literally: whatever happens— whether you end up having coffee another day, or more sex, or moving in together, or pretending it never happened—any possible romantic permutation will start with sex rather than a date.” An interesting article that unpacks some of the cultural reasons Icelandic culture is so relaxed, matter-of-fact, and in many ways distinctly egalitarian when it comes to sex. What I found most interesting is when Williams gets to the but: “It’s better to be young, in a country where everyone knows everyone and constantly takes their clothes off, than not young.” There’s also some fascinating analysis of the fact that Iceland’s population is so small, under 400,000, making it truly a place where “everyone knows and/or is related to everyone,” and how that impacts the dating/sex/relationship scene. I was intrigued to read one woman’s critique of Iceland’s gender roles. A woman named Gudrun is quoted: “Yes, we had the first female president, but women and their roles in the household, it’s very old-fashioned, at least when you’re 50.” I’m not sure if she means that roles become traditional once a woman reaches that age, or if she’s making a statement about (or about the need for) generational change, but it does make the point that power in sexual/gendered relationship gets negotiated one way or the other no matter what the context is.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad: “Oslo Is Over”, by Jeremy Scahill: "The West had its issues with the Jews. In short, it could be said that antisemitism is a European problem that did not exist in the East. It was solved, however, at the expense of the Palestinian people and the region. The Zionist project is not about the Jews in the first place. Rather, it is a Western colonization project that aims to control the region and preclude its independence and development." This is a quote from Dr. Mohammed Al-Hindi's response to the first question Jeremy Scahill asked in this interview. Al-Hindi is the second highest-ranking official in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and reading his responses to Scahill’s questions is the first time I have had a chance, as the introduction to the interview states, "to examine the perspectives of a top figure in the current Palestinian armed resistance." There's a lot to chew on. One of the things I have been chewing on for while now is how to come to terms with the fact that Al-Hindi's reading of "the Zionist project" as a Western one that has nothing to do with the Jews can be, if you look at it from outside the kind of Jewish education I received, a totally supportable reading. I'm not suggesting it is the only reading, or that it is, necessarily, the most accurate reading; but if you think about the fact that the West, and certainly Western Europe, has not been the most hospitable place for the Jews, and that the West is far more powerful than the Jews, then the ways in which Jewish self-interest and the self-interest of the West coincide in Zionism can certainly seem to be more about the West's manipulation of Jewish self-interest than an honest support of it. I also think it's important to acknowledge that there are Jews who have the same, or a similar analysis. (I think as well that what Al-Hindi says about antisemitism being a European problem needs to be unpacked, since it's not like there was no such thing as Jew-hatred in the Muslim world, even if it did not take the same historical form as European antisemitism.) I also find the way Al-Hindi talks about his organization's resistance being rooted in Islam fascinating, since I think there are real parallels between the way that idea gets played out (in some of Hamas' rhetoric as well) and the way many Jews not only will talk about Zionism being rooted in a Jewish connection to the land that is, almost inevitably traced back to Judaism, but will then go on the frame Zionism as a "Jewish civil rights movement," as, in other words, a form of resistance against oppression. About that I want to say two additional things: First, it is important to acknowledge the fact that Jewish lives in Europe were legally circumscribed in ways that are parallel to what African Americans experienced in the United States up until the civil rights movement. So, while the terms "civil rights movement" when applied to Zionism, which originated in Europe, may be anachronistic in some ways, it is, or can be, metaphorically apt. Second, I am not trying to suggest an equivalence between how Al-Hindi and others root Palestinian resistance in Islam and the way some Jews root Zionism in Judaism, especially if we are talking about Zionism as embodied in the policies and actions of the Israeli government, but I am intrigued by the ways in which each group connects the notion of peoplehood back to religious tradition.

The Paris Olympics Are A Lesson In Greenwashing, by Jules Boykoff: "Yet in the city where global leaders signed a landmark agreement in 2015 to limit postindustrial global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’re getting a recycled version of green capitalismthat is oblivious in its incrementalism, vague with its methodology and loose with its accountability. It’s too late for Paris, but if the Olympic organizers truly want to be sustainable, the Games need to reduce their size, limit the number of tourists who travel from afar, thoroughly greenify their capacious supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability. Until then, the Olympics are a greenwash, a pale bit of lip service delivered at a time when climatological facts demand a systematic transformation in splendid Technicolor." Boykoff takes a tough look at the environmental impact of the Olympic games, acknowledging the "significant sustainability strides" made by the Paris Olympics,but focusing on a report by Carbon Watch and Éclaricies, two environmental organizations, that criticizes organizers for their "lack of transparency and precision." There are details in the essay that I understand in principle—like the idea that a renewable energy certificate does not necessarily translate into the "actual procurement of renewable energy"—and details that are crystal clear in all senses, like the environmental damage the Olympic games created in Tahiti, which is where the surfing competition took place. Overall, the article, for me, was a good illustration of how complicated, politically and logistically, tackling environmental issues really is.

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Four Things To See

Cupid wrestling with Pan, amongst the clouds, with two allegorical women seated at left

Jacob Matham (Netherlandish), After Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) Italian Publisher Hendrick Goltzius (Netherlandish), 1598–1632

A Rider and a Dead Horse in a Landscape

Artist: Gustave Doré (French, Strasbourg 1832–1883 Paris)

Maffet Ledger: Drawing, 1874–81

Oklahoma, Southern and Northern Cheyenne, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1968

Vanneaux et Sarcelles

Félix Bracquemond French 1862

Four Things To Listen To

Three Pieces for Four Hands: No. 2, Stokes

By Philip Glass, on Alexandre Theraud and Friends

Crystal Silence: Chick Corea

Sandman: America

The Gallows From Gaspard De La Nuit (Le Gibet), Maurice Ravel

Four Things About Me

I played a lot of sports when I was younger. I was starting center on my high school basketball team, though when I switched from yeshiva to public school, I was too short for that position and made the team as a second-string forward. The school’s football coach tried to lure me with promises of potential college scholarships to try out as a wide receiver, since I was tall enough, could jump pretty high, and was a fast runner. I wasn’t interested in the rigorous practice schedule; it would have interfered with too much else that I wanted to be able to do, like march in the drum & bugle corp. I didn’t play college sports, except on my dorm’s soccer and football intramural teams. I played goalie for the former and took a turn at quarterback for the latter, except that one of my dorm mates complained that I threw the ball too hard. It’s funny how stereotypes work, though. People have assumed both because I am a college English professor and that I am not a sports fan—at least not anymore; I used to enjoy following the New York teams—that I’ve never played sports and/or that I don’t enjoy watching the games, as if the only way one can enjoy sports is to care about which team wins.

I was a very serious chess player as a teenager. Along with two friends, Michael and Robbie, I studied books of openings to the point where I knew their names and the moves by heart; I learned middle-game strategy; and I became quite adept at mating my opponent with as many different combinations of pieces as possible. Michael, Robbie, and I played regularly, and talked chess for hours. Only Robbie, if I remember correctly, went beyond that and actually got rated, though I have no idea what his rating was. I’m not sure why I stopped playing. I have on occasion played friends and really enjoyed it, but I can feel how much I’ve lost in terms of discipline, of being able to see moves ahead, to hold in my head the different moves my opponent might make, and, in general, the desire to win. Maybe that would all come back to me if I put my mind to it, I don’t know, but even as I write this, I can feel that I’m not really motivated in that direction.

I met my first Holocaust denier when I was in high school. After seventh grade, I’d switched from the public schools in my neighborhood to the yeshiva which I attended till my junior year. The yeshiva did not have a twelfth grade. Instead, you could choose between going to Israel to learn in a yeshiva there for a year or enrolling in an early college program, where you learned Torah in the morning and took college classes in the afternoon. I decided to do neither and returned to my local high school for my senior year. It was a strange experience. Before I switched schools I had been one of two, or maybe three, top students in the class, and when I returned, the classmates who had been at the top with me, and who were still at the top, were concerned that my grades would be high enough to upset their rankings and that I might even bump the girl whom everyone was sure would be the valedictorian out of that honor. For this reason, among others, they viewed me with suspicion and many would have nothing to do with me. Eventually, though, a girl named Joan invited to her house for dinner. I don’t remember anything about how the invitation came about, or that there was any particular chemistry between us—romantic/sexual or otherwise—but I do remember liking her. I also don’t remember how the subject of the Holocaust came up, but I can still see her father shaking his head at the head of the table and saying, “There’s no way the Germans killed six million Jews. Maybe a couple of thousand is all.” I have a vague memory that he launched into an explanation of how he came to that conclusion, but the sense memory I have of that moment is an overwhelming nausea. I recall nothing else about that dinner, except that I know I did not walk out. I think Joan attempted to correct her father, or at least to change the subject, but I’m not sure. I do know, though, that Joan and I never became friends after that, which was too bad. She was the first of my classmates, and the only girl, who tried to befriend me in that way.

My best friend that year was a guy named Tony. We were so close that everyone thought we were gay. I don’t know that we would ever have become lovers, but I definitely loved him. One day, when we were sitting in my room, he turned to me and said, “People are talking about us. They’re saying we’re too close.” This was news to me, though when I look back I am not surprised that I didn’t hear about it. I was too new to the school to be connected in that way to any of the various gossip networks. “Who cares what people think,” I said. “We’re friends.” His eyes went wide with a kind of sadness I don’t think I’d ever seen before. “Maybe they’re right,” he almost whispered. “Maybe we are too close.” We never talked about it again, but when we were both home from college after our freshman year, we met up at a local bar—this was back when the drinking age was eighteen—where we’d hung out a lot. I thought it was going to be just the two of us, but he brought his girlfriend with him. I remember nothing about that evening—not what we talked about, not whether I liked his girlfriend—except that it was awkward, as if he and I were strangers meeting for the first time, and I think that was the last time we spoke. Years later, we connected briefly on Facebook and I found out he was married to a man. One more bit of the story: During my freshman year of college I ended up standing in line at the registrar with the girl who sat next to me in English class. “You know,” she said, “everyone thought you and Tony were gay. That’s why none of the girls who thought you were cute ever flirted with you.” I didn’t know how to respond to that, but I don’t think ever saw or spoke to her again.

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When I first shared these poems with you in June 2022—two from The Silence of Men and one from Words For What Those Men Have Done—this is how I introduced them:

Sometimes you publish a poem in response to the current moment, whatever that may be, and then the moment passes, and the poem no longer feels as urgent as it once did. In our current moment, as the right begins its prosecution of what are essentially two wars, one on the reproductive autonomy of anyone who can get pregnant and one on LGBTQ folks, three poems of mine have suddenly become more relevant than they ever should have been in the first place.

Well, in light of both the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision and the ways that J. D. Vance’s vice-presidential candidacy crystallizes the right’s agenda, the poems feel even more (and enragingly) relevant than they did two years ago. Each is a response to the right’s drive to police as out of bounds the bodies of all those who do not conform to its holy writ, the heteronormative social script, but I think the poems also address, at least subtextually, the ways in which that policing is imposed on those of us who are cisgendered and heterosexual, an aspect of state-sanctioned sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that often goes unremarked.

I hope, if the poems move you, that you will consider sharing them. Poetry is not the only way, but it is one important way that we can speak truth to power, whether the power we are speaking to is the one we are resisting or the power within ourselves from which we draw the strength for that resistance.

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These two poems from The Silence of Men emerged from my reading of Back Rooms: Voices from the Illegal Abortion Era, edited by Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May. The first one, “Melissa’s Story,” is spoken by a woman who pays a doctor for an illegal abortion. I think it speaks for itself:

Melissa’s Story

The doctor gave instructions like a spy:
Be there, seven pm, on the dot.
If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about
another appointment. Got it? That day,
of course, there was traffic, and the money
had to be in small, old bills. You will get
in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,
you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.
Make a mistake and I leave. Understood?
I did. Somehow it went without a snag,
and there I was, legs open on a bed,
with a man crouched between them like a dog.

He reached into me and scraped away the life
I’d almost made, not yet mine to give.

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The second poem from The Silence of Men, “Bill’s Story,” is spoken by a man some non-specified but significant number of years after his pregnant girlfriend was sent against her will, and against what the couple wanted for themselves, to what used to be called a home for unwed mothers, where she was forced to put the child they conceived up for adoption. While I think this poem also speaks for itself, and while in practical terms at least, we are no doubt farther away from men having to live Bill’s experience than we are from people who can get pregnant having to live Melissa’s, I do want to say that I wrote “Bill’s Story” because I think it’s important to give voice to experiences like his, which embody a rarely acknowledged stake that those of us who can’t get pregnant have in reproductive autonomy.

Bill’s Story

He talked about her like she was a boat.
You just loaded the ship, son. Where the wind
takes it is out of your hands, hear? She’ll find
a port to dock in. Just be glad you got
what you wanted without getting shot.
Her parents were no better, as if I’d planned
to make her pregnant. We begged them not to send
her away. Once she was gone, they moved out.

Not long after the birth-month, her single
letter came: I named him Bill. Then they took him.
Years later, I drove to where the postmark
pointed. No one would speak to me. I still
hope, though. My son is old enough to look,
and I deserve to tell him who I am.

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The poem I want to share with you from Words For What Those Men Have Done is called “It Must Include The Body.” It is rooted in an actual conversation I had with my son before marriage equality became the law of the lands. The poem takes a while to get where it’s going, so just go with the flow of it.

It Must Include the Body

Belly like a watermelon
stuffed up the front
of her white cotton summer dress,
the pregnant woman at the corner
turns her back to me to face
the direction she’ll cross the street in,
and what she’s wearing
flares from the waist down
in a twirl that settles
along the line of her hips
till only the hem that falls
to just above her ankles
is still rippling, a flag
waving surrender
to this late September day.

My eyes lift to her shoulders,
follow the contour the fabric traces
down from the loops
through which her tanned arms emerge
to the curve of her butt cheeks
that bounce lightly as she steps back,
just avoiding the taxi
pulling up fast to the curb where she’s standing.
She’s as tall as me or taller,
black hair tied tight in a braid
pointing like a compass to the small of her back,
and her dress is not unlike the one
you wore the night we wandered the beach,
till the boardwalk lights were stars blinking at our backs
and the campfires scattered across the sand
were the signal flames of a distant town.

The moon over the ocean
cast our shadows behind us.
You leaned against me, the blue cloth
of what you were wearing
bunched in my left hand.
With my right, I found you wet,
though wet
doesn’t really do it justice.
You half-purred a laugh
as I stroked and pulled and gently parted
the hair you let grow in
once the lover who kept you shaved was gone.
Lifting your face to mine, you whispered
that the breeze was like the water’s breath
just before it touched its tongue to you,
and when I kissed the lips
you shaped those words with,
you came, calling your pleasure
out to the open sea
for the wind and tide to carry
who-knows-where.

Walking back to our hotel, I thought
how you have only ever called it your vagina.
Then, later, while you slept, I tried to list
the rhyming words I’d need to write a sonnet,
but China, Carolina, trichina, and angina
were the best I could do. The off-rhymes—
Montana, banana, cabana—were no better,
but then I heard that New Yawk accent
you love to mimic: designah, finah, minah,
reclinah—that last one bringing back to me
the woman from the conference,
who worried over two more whiskeys
than either of us should have had
that three kids had made her
“roomier down there”
than any man other than the husband
she’d been needing to leave for years
would want, and so she hadn’t left him.

“I can’t believe I’m telling you this,” she said,
blushing that the man she planned to make the next night
the only other man ever to touch her
might think he should be moving “furniture in down there, not his dick.”

“If a man cares that much about size,” I told her,
“he doesn’t deserve an adulterous woman.”

The light turns green,
and the mother-to-be
who started these lines
crosses First Avenue
into the rest of her life,
the crowd she moves with large enough
that the left turn I have to wait for
will get me to our son’s school
five minutes later
than the fifteen he’s already missed.

“But why does George Bush care
if two men get married?”
he asks from the back seat,
giving voice yet again
to last night’s bedtime conversation.
“I know a man’s penis fits
a woman’s vagina, but that’s not
love; and people love babies,
but babies aren’t love;
and two women, if they
get married, each one
can have a baby, but even that’s
not love. Two men can’t, but if
they love each other,
so what? You don’t marry
a body; you marry
a person. Bush doesn’t
get this? He’s an idiot!”

Our boy takes my hand for the few steps
leading up to the building’s entrance,
letting go, as has become his habit,
just shy of the security guard’s line of sight.
“Seriously,” he says, “when I get home
you need to explain this to me.”
Then he’s running fast as he can
past the front desk, arms and legs
pumping, backpack swinging,
the long hair that some still take for a girl’s
bouncing with each stride
up around his head.

I get back into the driver’s seat,
turn the key, put the car in reverse.
With my foot on the brake,
my eyes in the rearview mirror
stare back at me what I know is true:
if you will not love the body,
you cannot love the person.

I’m glad our son
can’t yet imagine that.

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Four Things To Read

One Book

Let Us Believe In the Beginning Of The Cold Season: Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad, translated by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.: Forough Farrokhzad is one of Iran’s most important contemporary poets, both because of her vision—she dared to write unapologetically out of her own experience as a woman—and her craft, which broke new ground for Iranian verse in a whole lot of ways. Her life—the Wikipedia article I linked to above is a good place to start—was cut short by a car accident when she was thirty-two and she is one of those artists about whom it is impossible not to wonder what she would have accomplished had she not died so young. One of the things I admire about Elizabeth Gray’s translations is that they do not have the trace of romanticism/sentimentality that I detect in some of the other translations I have read. One thing I have learned about myself as a reader is that I tend to find connections between poets and writers that others do not necessarily see. I have heard Farrokhzad called Iran’s Sylvia Plath, and I understand why people would reach for that comparison, but the poet whose work came to my mind the most while I was reading this book was June Jordan. I have not yet thought very deeply about why, so I will offer here an intuitive leap that has primarily to do with craft. Jordan wrote somewhere—though I can’t find it now—about the concept of vertical rhythm, by which she means how the language moves itself down the page in a sort of contrapuntal relationship to the horizontal rhythm in each line. Gray’s translations, it seemed to me as I read, created precisely that kind of rhythm. I asked her about this, and this is what she wrote: “[Farrokhzad] uses syntax, especially parallel syntactical constructions that align with/ her line breaks or stanzas, to propel…the rhythm of the work forward…It’s often far more complex than mere anaphora.” I can’t speak to the original Persian, of course, but I think Gray’s translations capture that aspect of Farrokhzad’s poetry beautifully.

Three Articles

Boiling Macaroni in Space? You’ll Need a Weirdly Shaped Pot, by Andrew Chapman: “On Earth, gravity keeps water at the bottom of a pot. In microgravity, however, keeping water contained within the pot so it doesn’t float away is a big issue. But water molecules are also attracted to each other, and to any surface they touch; when water is weightless, capillary action and surface tension can have a much larger influence on keeping water in one area within the pot.” An interesting article about a potential solution to a problem that will have to be solved if we want to be able “to think about a life in space that is as much about thriving…as it is about surviving.”

Kamala Harris and the Threat of a Woman’s Laugh, by Sophie Gilbert: “In insisting that Harris’s laugh is somehow a sign of psychological depravity or narcotic-induced lack of inhibitions, conservatives are doing their best to couple Harris in people’s subconscious with a specific reaction: disgust.” A quick but interesting read on how the politics of disgust has been, and continues to be, deployed by conservatives against women who seek political power. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to the United States and west. The Taliban beat women who were seen laughing in public and, as Gilbert points out, as recently as 2014, a former Turkish deputy prime minister suggested that women not laugh in public, since their laughter could be read as a sign of “moral corruption.”

New York’s First Black Librarians Changed the Way We Read, by Jennifer Schuessler: “For Black librarians of the period, librarianship wasn’t just about hosting writers or connecting books with patrons. It was also about creating an intellectual infrastructure that made Black materials visible — and findable — in the first place.” This article not only makes visible the first Black women librarians and the role they played in building “communities of readers” for Black writers and scholars; it also shows how these women transformed library cataloging systems in ways that had profound political implications that went far beyond issues of race. Shuessler’s piece is especially important today when libraries are increasingly under attack by the right.

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Four Things To See

The Plate Mansion by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

A traditional Japanese Ukyio-e style illustration of traditional Japanese folklore ghost, Okiku. Original from Library of Congress.

Astronomical chart illustration of the Monoceros, Canis Minor and the Atelier Typographique.

By Sidney Hall (1831) Original from Library of Congress.

Tulip, by Johan Teyler (1648-1709).

Original from The Rijksmuseum.

Magnolia Branch with Four Flowers (ca. 1910-1925).

Original from the Rijksmuseum.

Four Things To Listen To

Boat to Nowhere - Anoushka Shankar

Glen Gould - Ombres (Shadows)

A composition by Barbara Pentland

The Path To The Bridge

The epigraph to T’shuvah is the lyric to a song, Kol Ha’Olam Kulo, that I learned when I was in high school. (The link will take you to a version by Ofra Haza.) The words—כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד, והעיקר - לא לפחד כלל (Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od, veha’ikar lo le’fached klal)—which were adapted by Baruch Chait from a saying by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, mean, roughly, “All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be overwhelmed by fear.” It’s a song I’ve been playing on the piano for a long time and it came to mean a lot to me while I was writing T’shuvah. I recorded this improvisation on my iPhone. I’ve called it “The Path To The Bridge” because the melody to the song itself does not appear until the very end.

The Bridge Is A Blues

This is also an improvisation on Kol Ha’olam Kulo, but played on a different piano and in a very different style.

Four Things About Me

I expected to encounter profound cultural differences when I went to Seoul, South Korea to teach English for the 1986–87 academic year. One thing I did not anticipate at all, however—and this shows you how deep ethnocentric thinking runs—was that I would also experience what it was like to be a racial minority. I don’t remember how long I’d been in the country before it hit me that I did not see my face reflected back at me pretty much anywhere in Korean society—not in the people I saw on the street or rode the subway with; not in the faces and bodies I saw in magazines and on TV (though the Armed Forces Korea Network (AFKN) and the western movies that played in some theaters were obvious exceptions); not in the faces of the men and women who were part of my life, as students, friends, and/or lovers—but I do remember very clearly looking at myself in the mirror after a long night of being out with my friends and realizing that I’d forgotten what I looked like, that my western features seemed strange to me, “off” somehow.

It’s not that I didn’t know what it was like to be a minority. As a Jew who’d experienced antisemitism, violent and otherwise for a good portion of my life, I knew that all too well. I had never experienced, however, what it was like to be defined as Other based solely on the inescapable facts of my physical appearance. Not that this experience was at all equivalent to what people of color experience here in the United States—I did not, for example, have to worry about racist violence of any sort—but I did learn what it was like to be feared and fetishized because of my appearance. More than once when I was riding the train, a baby started crying after taking one look at my face; and I also had the experience of older women coming up to me and, without asking permission, stroking what was then the thick black hair on my arms. Once, when I was out dancing with some friends and a woman started flirting with me, one of my friends, Jun Won, told me to be careful, that she was probably only interested in “riding the white horse,” a bucket-list kind of idiom that Korean men used back then—I don’t know if it is still current—for having sex with a white woman, but which, he explained, could apply to Korean women as well. The woman’s friends pulled her away because they’d decided to go to another club, so I have not idea if Jun Won was right.

The only thing I remember about the first poem I wrote in which I explicitly confronted my experience as a survivor childhood sexual violence are the last two lines—Your image fades./You cannot know.—but I do not remember to whom they were addressed or the context in which the speaker of the poem said them. I wrote the poem in 1985, not too long after I dropped out of Syracuse University’s MA in Creative Writing. I sent it to Philip Booth, who’d led our second-semester workshop. I don’t know if he knew how far ahead of its time his response was, but reading it even all these years later can still bring tears to my eyes:

That’s in all ways an important poem for you to have written, yes. And it’s a very considerable poem by any standard. What it means to have written it, to have found such terms for such experience, I don’t want to presume to guess. The important thing now is that you have done it, that is no longer entirely inside you but out there on the page, an act of courage and an event in its own right, a way of exploring in order to come to terms, to arrive in order—again—to begin.

The other thing I remember is not about the poem itself, but about how the editor of a journal to which I submitted it responded. I don’t recall the exact wording, but he’d written it on the back his rejection slip, which in my memory was blue. It went something like this, “You can call me whatever kind of heartless monster you want, but don’t ever submit another poem to this journal again.” While I’m sure I listened to him in the years immediately following that response, since I don’t remember the name of the journal and have no idea if it’s still in existence, I have no way of knowing if a time came when I did submit there again.

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Shameless Self-Promotion

Back in April, The________Experiment premiered composer Owen Bloomfield’s setting of “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life,” a sequence that makes up the second section of my recent book of poems, T’shuvah. I finally posted the video to YouTube. I’ve put the text of the poem in the notes that accompany the video so you can follow along if you like.

Four Things To Read

One Book

A Common Violence, by Pat Falk: Pat was my colleague for more than thirty years before she died during the pandemic, if I understood correctly, of post-surgery covid complications. I knew her as a teacher passionate about helping students come to the awareness of themselves that writing can bring, as a deeply committed poet, and as an unapologetic feminist. In this book, her last, she brings all those parts of herself to bear on the question of the violence—political, interpersonal, and within our own bodies—that is an inescapable part of the world we live in. The poems are spare and allusive, locating meaning in descriptions of the physical world that take on the significance of symbol and metaphor; and the truths they arrive at are correspondingly unadorned and beautiful in the simplicity with which they hold both what is dark and difficult and frightening, and what is filled with light and hope. I bought the book soon after it was published in 2019, but such is the way of the to-be-read-pile that I did not read it in time for me to tell her how much I admire it. It’s a book I recommend to you without hesitation.

Three Articles

“The Resistance Will Continue,” Hamas Pledges Amid Gaza Ceasefire Talks, by Jeremy Scahill: “Hamas and Israel appear closer to some form of a Gaza ceasefire deal than at any time since the brief truce last November,” Scahill writes, but then goes on to draw out in detail just how politically complex, fraught, and intractable the situation is and is likely to continue to be over the long term. This article, thought-provoking and in many ways disheartening, is well worth reading.

After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was, This Lecturer Quit, by Adrienne Lu: “Reiterman, who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, recommended a former student of hers who had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree and would be pursuing a master’s in education. But when administrators started the hiring process and copied Reiterman on the emails, she was shocked to learn that the teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month — about $300 over Reiterman’s own monthly pay.” The situation discussed in this article illustrates perfectly both the value of union organizing in higher education and what is wrong with the adjunctification of higher ed.

What I’m Doing About Alice Munro, by Brandon: “As I read Skinner’s essay, I confess, I did not think of the short stories. I did not think of Alice Munro, the great writer. I did not think of Alice Munro the brilliant spinner of stories that had seen me through periods of alienation and isolation. I did not think of the work or the art, or even what are we going to do with the work now that we know this? My first and only thought was Andrea Skinner’s words, which I believed in their totality.” Andrea Skinner is the daughter of the late Alice Munro, a Nobel Laureate whose name I know, of course, but whose work I will confess that I do not. Skinner revealed, in an essay she published in the Toronto Star, not only that her stepfather sexually abused her when she was a child, but that Munro chose to stay with the man even after her daughter disclosed what he did. Adding insult to injury, he did not deny the accusations. Instead, in a letter to the family, he accused Skinner, who was nine-years-old at the time of the abuse, of having seduced him. Skinner used that letter to get her stepfather convicted. Even after that Munro chose to stay with him. (Unfortunately, Skinner’s piece is behind a paywall.) What I find compelling about Brandon’s response to this story is the emotional and intellectual clarity he brings to explaining why he finds the question that so many people are now asking about how to deal with Munro’s art both uninteresting and, ultimately, irrelevant.

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Four Things To See

These images are all from a collection that the British Library uploaded to Flickr. All images in the collection are in the public domain.

Rudaba and Zal

This is an illustration from a 17th century manuscript of the Shahnameh originally produced in Isfahan, Iran. It shows Rudaba, on the roof of her palace with two maids, letting one of her ringlets down to Zal, who presses it to his cheek. Zal and Rudaba are the parents of Rostam, probably the best known hero of the Shahnameh.

Illustration of the constellation Pisces

By Marcus Tullius Cicero, circa 820-840

from Flore de virtu e de costumi (Flowers of Virtue and of Custom)

Detail of a tinted drawing of a woman protecting a unicorn from a hunter, originally published/produced in Northern Italy in the 2nd quarter of the 15th century.

A miniature painting from a sixteenth century manuscript of Nizami's Khamsa ('Five Poems')

Nizami Ganjavi is an important poet in the classical Persian canon. This illustration of the owner of a garden discovering maidens bathing in a pool is from a 1595 Indian manuscript of his Khamsa, which is made up of five narrative poems.

Four Things To Listen To

Four Hit Songs From The Year I Was Born

There are so many good songs to pick from, but for some reason these stuck out to me.

The Duke Of Earl

The Loco-motion

Sealed With a Kiss

Surfin’ Safari

Four Things About Me

One thing I can truly say I learned from my father is not to be afraid to try different kinds of foods. When my brother and I were kids, he would. take us to two different Chinese restaurants in Queens. One of them, King Yum–he was friendly with the owner’s son, if I remember who the guy was correctly–is now out of business. The other, Peking House, is, remarkably, still around. I don’t remember any of the less common dishes he ordered, but I can still hear him encouraging us to “try it” before we decided we didn’t like it. He always promised he would send the dish back if we didn’t like it, but I don’t ever remember that happening. To celebrate my bar-mitzvah, my father took me to a restaurant called the Swiss Pavilion. He ordered escargot–the dish is mentioned in the review at the above link–and when I asked him what it was, he said, “Try it first, then I’ll tell you.” I tried it and I really liked it, though I smile now at the irony of celebrating that particular Jewish rite of passage by eating something as incontrovertibly treif as snails.

I do not like coffee and I have not liked since I was a boy and my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who drank her coffee black—Maxwell House, if I remember correctly—offered me a taste, most of which I spit out. My father, or maybe it was his father—I don’t remember which—did the same thing with beer. They were talking in the kitchen of his parents’ apartment, a beer in front of each of them. I was very young, not more than five or six. I walked in and hopped onto my father’s lap. One of them asked me if I wanted to taste what they were drinking. Of course I said yes and I’m assuming it was my father who let me sip from his bottle. I spit it out. I did eventually learn to like some beers, though, especially during the summer I spent in Scotland in 1985, which is also when I learned to like Scotch, but beer has never been my drink of choice.

Hanging on the wall of my living room are five abstract paintings by mother’s Aunt Gus. There’s also an abstract stone sculpture of hers sitting on the floor in front of our fireplace and, secreted around the house, sculptures of a family that looks like they might be refugees from something. Some of Aunt Gus’ artwork is in a museum down in Georgia, where she lived. My grandmother, her sister, wanted to be a professional singer and, in fact, did sing on the radio at one point. If I remember correctly what I was told, Jimmy Durante, early in his career, was the accompanist. She was also friends with Henry Bellamann, who inscribed copies of two of his books for her, The Upward Pass and Cups of Illusion. They now sit on my shelf.

I just learned that the poet Robinson Jeffers died on the day I was born.

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Four Things To Read

Two more books by people I know that are on my shelves, but that I hadn’t read yet:

Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices, edited by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond (who read for First Tuesdays back in September 2020): I was in graduate school in the mid-1980s when I was first introduced to the idea that English literature was not the monolith I had learned about as an undergraduate. I don’t remember the name of the course I took in my second semester, but, specifically to break down that monolith, the professor had assigned The Deptford Trilogy, by the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies and two or three of not-yet-Nobel-laureate Nadine Gordimer’s novels, though I don’t remember now which ones. That semester also taught me a lesson in just how stubborn hierarchies can be when you try to break them down. I decided to write one of my papers, maybe even the final one, on a novel that I really liked called The World Is Made of Glass, by the Australian writer Morris West, which I think I remember having taken down from my mother’s shelf before I left for school. I got a B on the paper, one reason for which, the professor told me when I asked to discuss it with him, was that I had chosen a book by a writer “no one had ever heard of.” (Take a look at West’s Wikipedia page. My professor might not have heard of him, but West was certainly no lightweight.) I say this by way of suggesting why Brew-Hammond’s anthology made such an impression on me. I knew something of the poetry being written in Africa through the New-Generation African Poets, but I had not paid close attention to the entirety of English-language literature being written in Africa and/or by people from Africa who are living in diaspora. (I know that using Africa as a catchall term is in some ways problematic because of all the erasures it contains, but the jacket copy lists twenty-seven countries as the writers’ places of origin and/or residence. I am conserving space.) Relations opens a wonderfully multiplicitous set of windows onto that diversity by including work from three genres, poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and through an admirable eclecticism of subject matter. 

Soundtrack Of A Life: New and Selected Poems by Gil Fagiani, translated into Italian by Luigi Bonaffini: I met Gil only once, shortly before he was diagnosed with leukemia. We were in the process of scheduling a reading at First Tuesdays, which, sadly, never came about. His illness eventually killed him. I was glad, therefore, when Maria Lisella gifted me a copy of this book—which I read, obviously, in English, not the Italian translation. (Still, it was interesting to have the Italian on facing pages. Not that I read or speak Italian, but it was interesting once in a while—when I could follow a little bit—to compare the two versions, just to see how differently Italian handles, in syntax, line length, and so on what Gil was writing about.) The book is called Soundtrack of a Life, but, for me, the experience of reading it was more like paging through a photo album or a lifelong sequence of paintings. Fagiani’s poems capture moments in time—whether between the speaker and other people, the speaker and a place, or the speaker and himself—framing them the way a good artist does, so that meaning emerges as much from the unstated relationships between and among what the frame contains, as from what is explicitly stated (visible) on the surface. It’s a kind of poem I have a very hard time writing, and it was a real pleasure to spend a couple of days reading the work of someone who makes it appear truly effortless—which we all know is the sign of a true craftsperson. This is a book definitely worth picking up.

Two Articles

The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex, by Katharine Smyth: “The truth is that no one knows for sure why women come, and our descendants may well look back on such theories with as much derision as we do on the treatment of hysteria or the tie between climax and pregnancy. The female orgasm is a kind of Rorschach test—an abstraction upon which each new generation of doctors and scientists can project its worldview, almost always to the benefit of men and their assumptions about normally functioning female sexuality. But if you think the debate over why women have orgasms is complicated, try solving the mystery of why some women don’t have them.” Given Smyth’s assertion that she enjoys sex just fine even though she is anorgasmic, one way of phrasing the central question this piece asks is, “Why do we not trust women’s account of their own pleasure?” The lens she uses, though, about how the female orgasm has been weaponized against women/commodified to the point of there actually being a “female-orgasm industrial complex” made me think of “The Punctureproof Balloon,” the last chapter of David M. Friedman’s A Mind Of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, which focuses on Viagra and what could reasonably be called the “erection industrial complex.” It’s a comparison worth exploring.

Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?, by Steven M. Teles: “More conspicuously than at any time in living memory, elite higher education has found itself in the political crosshairs. While the Hamas attack on Israel — and the inept response of university leaders — lit the fire, the dry tinder for a political assault on our most prestigious universities has been sitting around for some time. Those who sense more than a whiff of political opportunism and anti-intellectualism in this assault are not mistaken. But the public’s impression that American higher education has grown increasingly closed-minded is undeniably correct. Indeed, concerns about the ideological drift of the university are no longer limited to conservatives, but now include some left-leaning faculty who worry that higher education has become, in the words of Gregory Conti, a political philosopher at Princeton, ‘sectarian.’ This mounting sectarianism manifests itself in various aspects of the university, including the scope of debate within and outside the classroom, the growth of campus administration, and the tenor of student life. For a professor like myself, the character of the professoriate is the most salient aspect of the change. And where conservative faculty are concerned, the facts are beyond dispute: Their numbers are low and continue to fall.” This very interesting essay from The Chronicle of Higher Education makes an argument worth wrestling with on why it’s important to reverse the left-leaning trajectory of higher education. My usual caveat applies: I don’t agree with everything Teles says, but he makes points about the value of an intellectual inclusivity that proactively includes conservative scholars that I think should not be ignored. An interesting companion piece, also published in The Chronicle is “Will Republicans Save the Humanities,” by Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey. Notably, both these essays see greater ideological inclusivity within the academy as a way of combatting what Teles calls the “political opportunism and anti-intellectualism” at the heart of the current attacks on higher ed. Both pieces, I think, downplay the profoundly reactionary goal of those attacks, but they are worth reading nonetheless.

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Four Things To See

from Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta

The images below are all from the J. Paul Getty Museum.

In the 1500s, as printing became the most common method of producing books, intellectuals increasingly valued the inventiveness of scribes and the aesthetic qualities of writing. From 1561 to 1562, Georg Bocskay, the Croatian-born court secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created this Model Book of Calligraphy in Vienna to demonstrate his technical mastery of the immense range of writing styles known to him.

About thirty years later, Emperor Rudolph II, Ferdinand's grandson, commissioned Joris Hoefnagel to illuminate Bocskay's model book. Hoefnagel added fruit, flowers, and insects to nearly every page, composing them so as to enhance the unity and balance of the page's design. It was one of the most unusual collaborations between scribe and painter in the history of manuscript illumination.

Because of Hoefnagel's interest in painting objects of nature, his detailed images complement Rudolph II's celebrated Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities that contained bones, shells, fossils, and other natural specimens. Hoefnagel's careful images of nature also influenced the development of Netherlandish still life painting.

In addition to his fruit and flower illuminations, Hoefnagel added to the Model Book a section on constructing the letters of the alphabet in upper- and lowercase.

Guide for Constructing the Letter E

On two grids, Joris Hoefnagel demonstrated the proper form of a capital E , with the proportions of the letter determined by the relation of its parts to squares and arcs. About thirty years after Georg Bocskay finished his Model Book of Calligraphy, Hoefnagel added his Guide to the Construction of Letters to the manuscript. Hoefnagel's Guide uses diagrams to demonstrate how geometric principles might be applied to typographical design. The motifs surrounding these diagrams are charged with allegorical and symbolic meaning. At the top of the page, the XPS (Chi-Rho-Sigma) monogram for "Christus" in the azure medallion suggests the dominion of Christ over the world, represented by the maps of the continents on the sides. Echoing this idea, at the bottom of the page Hoefnagel included a verse from Psalm 56: Exaltare super caelos deus et in omnem terram gloria tua (Be exalted above the heavens, God, and your glory through all the earth). The two columns call to mind the so-called Pillars of Hercules, Habsburg imperial symbols since Emperor Charles V had used them in his emblem. The toucan probably does not have a specific symbolic meaning but interested Hoefnagel because of its rarity.

Guide for Constructing the Letters U and V

Almond in Flower

Caterpillar, Dog-Tooth Violet, Pear, and Apricot

Four Things To Listen To

Last Train To Clarksville Jeff Daniels Ben Daniels Band City Winery NYC 8/15/2018

I loved the Monkees when I was a kid, but I did not know until I found this video, that “Last Train to Clarkesville” was about a young man being shipped off to Vietnam.

Grace Potter & the Nocturnals with Heart - Paris & COY

Two rock and roll songs I really like.

4 Ballades, Op. 10: No. 1 in D Minor "Edward Ballade" - Andante

Fourplay "Bali Run" Live at Java Jazz Festival 2011

Four Things About Me

The first personal computer I owned was an IBM PCjr that my grandmother bought for me in 1985 when I went to graduate school. She insisted on buying an IBM machine, she said, because she owned stock in the company. In a precursor of things to come, though not until much, much later, the keyboard was wireless. I wrote my first graduate school papers on that machine, including the one on Morris West, which I mentioned above.

I don’t have that paper anymore, but I do have scanned copies of some of the other papers that I wrote on the PCjr. Here, for example, is a paragraph from a paper I called “The Problem of Form,” which I wrote for a course on modern poetry taught by a Professor Shires:

What is gained by thinking of prosody, the formal aspects of poetry, in the same way we think of the formal aspects of music? (It is important to remember that the comparison between music and poetry is not absolute; poetry cannot exploit the same kinds of vertical structures which music can. Rhyme comes close to being vertical, especially in a sonnet; but our experience of rhyme is still linear.) It is possible that we gain nothing; or that we lose more than we gain. Since music is another art form and carries with it its own vocabulary and its own set of conventions by which it must be experienced to be enjoyed by anybody, we may be making things more complicated for ourselves by trying to understand prosody in terms of music. However, certain confusions and problems do clear themselves up when we begin to think of prosody as music.

Reading this paragraph, which I wrote in the fall of 1984, I notice two things: first, the beginnings of how I have come to understand the role that form and craft play in my poetic and, second, a clear demonstration—though it took me a while to understand this explicitly—that my interest in studying literature had more to do with what it could teach me as a poet than with the pursuit of literary scholarship per se.

The next excerpt I am going to share with you, from a paper called “The Poet as Deviant” that I wrote on an electric typewriter for an undergraduate sociology class also shows that the core of my thinking about what it means to be a poet has not changed much from when I was in my twenties: 

One of the things that is most important to a poet is recognition that his poetry is worth something. This recognition need not be from a large public; it could just as easily come from a few people who are very important in his or her life. 

My MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) was, in practice and content, more of a degree in applied linguistics than in ESL pedagogy. This explains why one of the papers I wrote in pursuit of that degree was called “Political Language as Magical Speech.” In this paper, I compared what happens during a presidential State of the Union address to what happens when a shaman, or other community member understood to have magical powers, casts a spell. Ronald Reagan was president at the time. This, in part, is what I wrote:

Instead of a presidential report on the state of the union, we have a presidential invitation to enter with him into an optimistic belief that his words either are already true, or will be coming true sometime in the future. The State of the Union Address becomes, instead of a statement of fact, an expression of hope. And an expression of hope as an illocutionary act contracts for a very different set of behaviors than does a simple reporting of the way things are.

And, finally, an excerpt from another paper I wrote with the PCjr, a book review essay of Extraterritorial and After Babel, by George Steiner. Because I had studied linguistics as an undergraduate, I was very interested in Steiner’s critique of Chomskian linguistics, which is implicit in the first of the two following paragraphs. Now, though, I am drawn much more strongly to the idea embodied in the last sentence of the second paragraph: that translation, and literary translation in particular, and I would probably extend that to include literary creation in general, is an act of trust. Regardless of whether Steiner’s overall argument holds water—and, if I remember correctly, he came in for an awful lot of criticism (and ridicule)—given the state of our culture today, I think that idea is one we should hold to as strongly as we can:

Language is both a private and a public property. Each member of a language community shares the conventions and materials of their language; they also, however, bring a body of individual associations, a personal context, to the language. Each person speaks their own version, an idiolect, of their language. It is this idiolect which allows us to maintain a sense of self; without some way of separating ourselves from the community, we would be nameless. This functional view of language leads Steiner to the conclusion that the original linguistic impulse was inward, was a way for people to see themselves as unique. Interpersonal and interlingual communication came later in response to other economic and social needs.

People can lie, discuss the future and also what might have been. This quality of language, that it can be used to create “alternate worlds,” is, for Steiner, the main function of language. Through this “alternity” of language, this ability of language to transform the world, people need not face the actuality of death. Communication, translation, then, especially through literature, is a sharing of alternate world views, an act, for Steiner, of extreme trust.

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Pre-COVID memories.

I am thrilled that this interview is up at Green Linden Press. Catherine Fletcher asks really good questions about my book, T’shuvah, about my writing process, translation, about poetry-as-healing/therapy. The questions made me think, which is why I had such a good time answering them.

from “The Necessity to Speak,” by Sam Hamill

“The true poet gives up the self. The I of my poem is not me. It is the first person impersonal, it is permission for you to enter the experience which we name Poem."

—Sam Hamill, “The Necessity to Speak” in A Poet’s Work

Dealing with health insurance is a healthy pain in the ass! And I have, truly, a good employer-provided plan.

Teaching starts tomorrow. Two syllabi down, one to go. I wish I were more excited.

Four by Four is a curated list of four articles, four images, for pieces of music, and four things about me—lessons learned, books read, random fact…that sort of stuff. Right now subscriptions are free. Number 11 is live. I hope you’ll check it out.

This song, music and lyrics by the award winning composer David First with vocals by Yvette Massoudi, speaks to the desire for peace in Israel/Palestine without choosing a side.

The final installment of my series Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On? is now live on Subtack.

“Subtext,” the second part of my series, Palestine and Israel: Whose Side Are You On?, is live on Substack.

I’ve written a three part series called “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?” “Part 1: Context” posted today. Parts two and three will follow tomorrow and the day after. Because the question is not always as simple as one might think.

I’ve decided on two notebook projects for 2024. First, I bought a 5 year memory book from Leuchtturm1917, and I am looking forward to seeing if I have the discipline to keep it until 2028. Second, I bought Moleskin, one-page-per-day 2024 planner. I am going to try to repeat the daily writing practice that I did in 2020. I got so much good material out of that year that I want to see if I can repeat it.

My mother runs a dog rescue in New Jersey. These are pictures I’ve taken of her dogs over the years. I confess I don’t remember their names, but I do like the pictures.

I put this out every two weeks: A curated list of articles, images, music, and some stuff about myself. I hope you’ll check it out:

From my wedding thirty years ago. My wife had no idea what to expect.

This is quite an honor. It’s a post from Asymptote that one of the poems by Salvador Espriu that Sonia Alland and I translated was the fourth most popular piece of the year.