One Bright Case of Idiopathic Cranofacial Erythema
I blamed the malady on my Irish side: the relatives who stared out from baby pictures like porcelain dolls. My mom’s parents were immigrants, effortfully proper in that just-hoping-to-blend-in-and-prosper kind of way, not to mention Catholic. Severely Catholic. When I read about “lace curtain Irish” in an American studies course in college, my ancestors provided an instant visual.
My father’s side, on the contrary, is a long line of American mutts, California-based for too many decades to trace back across the Atlantic. Dad grew up in a house with sandals, TV dinners, various pets, no religiously-coded conduct rules. The paternal genes were more loosely bound: less Mass, more beach. I never considered them as carriers.
Until the night the loud speaker called my Dad.
“Would the parents of the players please come out…”
He and I were high in the bleachers, slumped against the wall, waiting for the Holy Angels basketball game to begin. We were not expecting a voice.
“Oh geez.” Dad obeyed the voice, rising to his feet.
I consider my father a self-assured man. He started a business; he gives a fine toast; he’ll make small talk with a corn farmer as easily as a senator. But standing at half court, amidst the other parents, my dad turned the color of a pig roasted on charcoals. The blush spanned from shirt collar to balding spot. It dimmed none as Sister Kristen thanked the parents for their support, brownies, carpools—nothing remotely mortifying.
I looked down court, baffled. I’d have to revise my inheritances. Mom was the reason I wore SPF 45. Dad: why I sat in last rows.
“Blushing, though a fleeting episode, is experienced as an unwelcome public revelation of one's most private thoughts,” wrote Angela Simon about a study at Morehead State University. “By ‘blushing,’ we specifically mean the transient feeling of warmth and/or skin color change associated with the occurrence of acute self-consciousness.”
A Note on the Misuse of Adverbs
One time my brothers and I were sitting at a balcony table in an ancient pub in New York City, conducting scholarly research, when my brother Thomas overheard a conversation below us and embarked on a memorable adventure that I believe should now be shared with the world, as his prompt and courageous action in the face of what some might call an emergency is something of a lodestar to us all even now, many years later.
We were perhaps ten feet above the floor tables, my brothers and I—high enough for a semblance of privacy, but not so high that you couldn't hear shreds and shards of conversation from the floor. Just below us was a young couple, the woman eager and attractive and the man cocky and fulsome. He was oiling her up at such a rate that finally my brothers and I slowed our conversational ramble and bent to listen. We debated the right word for the young man: unctuous, said one brother, sharkacious, said another, oleaginous, said a third, horny as Howard Hughes' fingernails, said a fourth. Finally there was a moment when the young man leaned toward the young woman and gently covered her exquisite digits with his offensive paws and said, hopefully, you and I . . . at which point my brother Thomas stood up suddenly, launched himself over the balcony rail, landed with a stupendous crash on their table, and said to the young man, Never, and I mean never, begin a sentence with an adverb.
We had to take up a collection to pay for the table, of course, and we were ejected from the premises, and the young man made a show of glower and threat until my brother Thomas told him gently to stop, but to me and to my brothers, and to my mom and dad when they heard about it, my dad being a newspaperman and my mom a teacher and so the both of them relentless sticklers for good grammar, the sort of parents who would instantly correct you when you started a sentence Tom and me instead of Tom and I, which drove us all insane, but it worked, because even typing the words Tom and me here in the prospective context of the beginning of a sentence gives me the willies and makes me expect to hear the polite dagger of my mom's voice from somewhere near my shoulder blades saying if you say that again I will sell you as a slave to Malaysian pirates, a sentence my brothers and I heard more than once, and to which one time my brother Tom replied is that a conditional statement?, for which he was sent to his room for a week, but anyway, my point was that my brother Tom's quick and decisive action is still a beacon and compass point for us all, and something we should remember when we are daily faced, as we are daily, by the egregious misuse of adverbs.
Alfred Corn - Existentialism and Homosexuality in Gunn’s Early Poetry
Kevin Stein - Death by 0s and 1s: The Fate of Paper Manuscripts and Drafts
Hikmet
i.m Nazim Hikmet
A little unknown folktale
is that Nazim Hikmet could tune
into radio transmissions using
the power of his heart alone.
Guards at Bursa Prison noticed
he used to stroke his breast
and a loud transmission
would start to come out of his
mouth. He liked to listen
to broadcasts of Shostakovich,
the news, underground speeches.
Months before he died guards
reported that he was curled up
in his cell, frantically trying
to tune into the weather report,
eager for news of thunder.
Read another poem by Christian Ward.
Ars Poetica with Vulture
Researching a poem—diclofenac’s chemical chain,
for arthritis—to explain thousands of white-backed
vultures, & the owls who eat what the first carrion birds
leave on the skinned cattle shot full of the stuff,
found dead in India, I began to speak
into the mouth of another poem in which I’d yoked
the then-separation—they are now back together—
of two friends with how her hands—dressing the haddock
in lemon, stuffing its cavity with rosemary & salt-
butter—reminded me of how they’d once witnessed a sky-
burial—Parsi, not American Indian, Zoroastrian—
which are becoming endangered, the ceremonies that is,
with the plummeting populations of those birds, because
they migrate from India up into the mountains—at least
I imagine they do, I haven’t looked it up—to finish the job.
New York, New York, New York, New York, New York
Our souls too big for us,
our laugh, hands, sex too big for us,
we’re coming, dragging excess skin that looks,
in dim light, like flowers. Coming
to tear you down whenever
our eyes close. Coming,
when they startle open,
to have failed. That’s what need is now:
grabbing and then checking to see
what it is you are holding.
We want only the bold and shapeless,
only the rare as in bloody.
We don’t know what it is.
It rings, though, and can afford
to be made of glass. The people around us
sharpen slowly like teeth
in a mouth so crowded
it must remain open.
Review of Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
Review of Daniel Hall's Under Sleep
For Form's Sake: X. J. Kennedy's In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955 - 2007
Review of Brian Hall's Fall of Frost: A Novel
Viking, $24.99 (hardcover)
Elegant prose in fiction always grips me, but only occasionally does a novel come along whose language holds me spellbound, makes me forget the tyranny of plot. Fall of Frost defies fast reading and so probably won’t be a runaway bestseller. It doesn’t fit the rush of plane travel or the distractions of the beach but demands tranquility. I lingered, dwelled on haunting phrases, flights of wordplay, and happily reread paragraphs.
Brian Hall’s biographical novel of Robert Frost is absorbing art worthy of its subject. Although numerous biographers have anatomized Frost’s life and work, this is the first “fictional” treatment. Its “fiction” is formal rather than literal: little in Fall of Frost is invented, though some scenes are fanciful; the endnotes demonstrate Hall’s meticulous research. He seems to have read everything, published and archival, on Frost. “America’s greatest poet” was, however, no Rimbaud or Hemingway, no self-destructive adventurer, so a life of Frost must instead study his mind and words. Form rather than action. A complex, often paranoid, guilt-ridden, indolent, narcissistic figure, Frost outlived diverse family tragedies, struggled at breadwinning, sought privacy while taking on the role of public figure. He became a sort of rock star of American poetry, a celebrity who performed at JFK’s inauguration and imagined himself a friend of Kennedy’s and literary knight of Camelot. At age 88, Frost traveled to the USSR to confront Khrushchev about East Berlin, a culminating episode with which Hall begins and ostensibly organizes his story and one of its central themes, that of the tension between poetry’s aesthetic necessity and its larger (e.g., political) irrelevance.
Review of Peter Stanlis's Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher
ISI Books, $28.00 (hardcover)
On Robert Frost’s 85th birthday, Henry Holt and Company, Frost’s lifelong publisher, threw a party in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and invited the eminent critic Lionel Trilling to deliver the keynote address. Widely regarded at the time as the champion of high modernist culture, Trilling stunned Frost’s friends and supporters by confessing that he had long disregarded Frost as a purveyor of rural pieties and had only recently begun to admire him for the “Sophoclean” horror he saw in the poems. ''I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet,'' he announced. “The universe he conceives of is a terrifying universe.” In the wake of the controversy his address instigated, Trilling sent a letter to Frost apologizing for any discomfort his remarks had caused. ''Not distressed at all,'' Frost wrote back. “You made my birthday party a surprise party.” Frost then concluded his letter with a sentence that would prove prophetic: “No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.''
With the long anticipated publication of Peter Stanlis’s far-reaching and impressive Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, the clash of arms over Frost’s career will likely reach détente. Having promised Frost in 1944 that he would write the “best book on Frost he had it in him to write,” Stanlis spent the next sixty years formulating and refining the argument that would eventually become the thesis of this book, namely that the key to understanding Frost’s poetry is to place it the context of the poet’s complex, though unsystematic, philosophical dualism. A clear understanding of Frost’s dualism, Stanlis argues, dispels much of the negative criticism of Frost’s poetry (Yvor Winters, for example, once condemned the poet as a “spiritual drifter”) and allows us better to comprehend the underlying principles behind all of Frost’s thought, including his ideas about aesthetics, science, religion, politics, education, and ethics.
Ivan & Imelda
What he did then, this Ivan Carmody—a tall man, though bellied out to a good two-hundred, sixty pounds—he jerked open the passenger door of the car, got in, and said to the woman: “Get out of this car. I’m taking your car so get the fuck out.”
The woman—her name was Imelda Economy —stayed fairly calm, however.
With the sound track from The Phantom of the Opera coming out of her CD player the car was ripe with sound and Ivan Carmody thought at first she hadn’t heard him. In only a moment, though, and after turning down the stereo, Imelda quietly said, “I can’t.”
“You can’t?” said Ivan.
“Not quickly,” said Imelda, “and I’m sure you want things to go quickly here.”
Purposely, she did not look at this man sitting next to her. She’d read somewhere it was not a good idea to do that.
“Get out of this car,” Ivan repeated, “or I will shoot you in your head with this pistol gun.”
Ivan Carmody did indeed have a gun, Imelda noticed, a small revolver with a brushed chrome finish.
“Pistol gun?” said Imelda. “That’s an odd way to put it. Anyway, look at my legs, sir.”
Ivan looked under the steering wheel then and saw that Imelda’s legs were made of two metallic tubes going down to feet that looked like metal or maybe hard plastic boxes. They didn’t even look like feet or shoes at the bottom, something Ivan thought unusual. Most of the time they tried to make those things look real, didn’t they?
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