Foothills Publishing releases American Portraits by Gary Lehmann

American Portraits

Poems

by
Gary Lehmann

 






Home Guard Dance, 1917




The dance took place in the ballroom of Valentown Hall
to raise money to support the Home Guard,
a motley assembly of those too young or too old for the draft.

Thus, a great number of teens elbowed each other for access to a few girls
while a great number of old couples sat quietly their hands in their laps
or danced sedately around the Hall showing the youngsters how it’s done.

As this was a military event, a guard was posted out front
consisting of an armed man at either side of the entrance.
Every half hour, the guard changed, dancers relieving guardsmen.

Through most of the dance they maintained their stiff military demeanor, but
after a while, as the dance started to break up, soldiers and their sweethearts
drifted outside into the moonlit summer night for a little spooning.






A Jar of Pickles


Jerry McKay had been working all day
as an archeological excavator
on the site of the sunken riverboat, Arabia.

On September 5, 1856, it hit a submerged log,
was badly holed, and went down hard
at a bend in the Missouri River.

The work of recovery was dangerous.
Shifting currents buried the boat 300 feet
below the surface of a Kansas corn field,

far from today’s river channel.
Jerry’s trowel struck a bottle.
Carefully, he revealed it in the wet mud.

Against all the odds,
the bottle was whole,
and the pickles looked perfect.

Everyone gathered around.
Jerry pried loose the corked top.
“Anybody want a pickle?” He laughed.

No takers. Anticipation hung in the air.
“Well, I’m starving,” said Jerry smiling.
He fished a pickle from the jar.

Everyone took in a breath.
Jerry bit off a good chunk.
“That’s one good pickle.”





 

presenting Lady Jane Seymour Fonda




When Jane Fonda attended Vassar, so the story goes,
a daily tea was held in the Rose Room to which each girl
was required to wear pearls and elegant white gloves.

One day, Jane arrived without the necessary accessories.
She protested that the habit was a stupid formality.
The head mistress insisted. “Pearls and white gloves!”

So Jane complied. Minutes later, she reentered the Rose Room
showing off the body that millions paid to see on screen,
wearing nothing -- but pearls and long white gloves.

Now a septuagenarian, she vigorously denies the story,
but then that’s just exactly what she would say,
now that she’s attained the age of discretion.







What Adam wants for Christmas




“I saw you cuddled up with Adam earlier on the sofa.
Did you ask what he wants for Christmas?” my wife inquired.
“He says he only wants one thing this year,
but I’m not sure we can get it for him.”
“What can a 5 year old think to want?”
“He wants an elf – a real one. Raising a finger of warning,
he made that very clear. It has to be real.”
“Did you ask him how he defines real?”
“Yes, he said you can tell an elf by his long pointy ears.”
“How tall is a real elf?”
“About 6 inches shorter than Adam.
Then I asked him “What does a real elf do?”
“Whatever you ask him, daddy,” he said impatiently.”
“Do you think he’s trying to tell us we don’t answer
his demands fast enough any more?
He needs his own personal slave.”
“Well, he looked at me with one of those blank expressions
as if I ‘d just fallen considerably in his estimation.
He could tell I was struggling.
“My friend Nick has one—a real one,” he offered.
I thought I’d cracked it now.
“So where does your friend Nick live?” I asked,
thinking we might call his parents to get the story.
Adam just looked at me again, sadly, and replied,
“Elves live at the North Pole, daddy.”
“Now, what do we do?”

 




Settling Down



The American painter, John Singer Sargent was born in Florence,
but he traveled around Italy and France for most of his early years.
As a teen, he showed a love of painting, but due to their nomadic life,
his mother insisted he work quickly to complete a painting every day.

As he accompanied her on morning walks, where ever they might be,
Mary Newbold Singer Sargent sketched in the open air with her son
teaching him the pure joy of rendering the surrounding countryside
in rapidly executed bright watercolor sketches of stunning beauty.

“No matter how many works are started, one must be finished each day.”
In the end, it was her abiding legacy to him and a useful one at that.
The world little values the unfinished work of artists. It is best if they
can learn to work fast and true – with an eye toward the uncertain future.






Getting the News



It was an early winter day with snow lingering in the air.
I walked out to pick up my mail from the box by the curb
when I heard this clatter of squawking overhead,
a bomber squadron of geese resolutely flying -- North.

You crazy geese, I thought.
You’re in for a nasty surprise when you get there.

I pulled the newspaper from its holster.
The headline told of troops being killed in some foreign land
not worth fighting over. More deaths and more suffering
as if the world had not had its fill of that already.

You crazy fools, I thought.
I’ll bet you never thought you signed up for this nonsense.

I pulled out the mail and leafed through the bills and circulars.
Everyday the post man brings me ads for things I never buy.
Most of it goes directly into the trash unopened.
Somehow the world rolls on despite our inefficiencies.

You crazy people, I thought.
Don’t you know you’re in for a nasty surprise one of these days?




What Sarah Said



After reading the news of his wife’s death,
Sarah Goodridge, notable Boston miniature painter,
decided to paint something very special
for her long-time client, Daniel Webster.

In her studio, she positioned a mirror by the window,
took off her blouse and proceeded to paint on ivory
a perfect watercolor likeness of her bosom,
plump and full, the envy of Aphrodite.

Some woman at 40 may have blanched at such a challenge,
but Sarah produced a small, exquisite image
which shone with a luminous quality that
reproduced very well the glow of breathless flesh.

Each nipple stood out in bright pink contrast
to the creamy flesh around it, all
framed by drawn white curtains of fine lace.
She called it Beauty Revealed.

Sarah rarely left Boston, but for this occasion
she boarded a coach for Washington DC
to present her likeness to the great man herself.
Oh to have witnessed that interview!

Evidently, no clerk was available to sit in or take notes.
Were there tears? Recriminations? Or passionate embraces?
Did she throw herself melodramatically upon the protesting Puritan?
Or did he secretly admire her all those years of fruitless marriage?

We know he kept the miniature for the rest of his life.
In fact, it stayed in the Webster family for over 150 years,
locked away from prying eyes and inquiring minds until
no one can quite recall the true character of either party.

 


The Ice Man



My Uncle Frank drove his truck on the ice every year.
Regardless of the weather or what the boys said
at the Chat and Chew about ice conditions,
he just laid out two planks and drove
his red truck right out there on the ice.
Damn you all!

He was always the first with his shed on the ice,
because he refused the hard labor of pulling
it manually when he could drive out.
I think after a while the bigger thrill
was tempting fate each year.
Damn you all!

He was an arrogant cuss
and you’d be excused for anticipating,
even wishing, that sometime
he’d drive his red Ford truck out there
with his damned shit-eating grin
and go right through with a quiet blurp!

But you’d be wrong.
Much as every man on the lake
wished it secretly, that bastard
drove his big red Ford truck out on the ice
year after year in confounded redneck defiance.
Damn you all!


 
The Inheritance




Fingering through
this careful assortment of objects,
accumulated over a lifetime,
I see many were well-worn with hands
not unlike mine.

Now I stand here like a barbarian at the gate
demanding gold of these objects
so I can buy new objects
which I will wear down
over my score of years

to pass in time
to some other stranger to sell
and reforge into
a new life --
not unlike my own.

Some Recent Poems

part of the problem



Think of the courage, the raw courage.
The plan was simple really.
Go into Woolworth’s, sit down at the lunch counter
...and don’t leave ‘til you get served.

The most ingenious plans are simple
...and complicated at the same time.

In 1960, Joseph McNeil was a freshman
at the Ag & Tech at Greensboro, NC.
He had everything to gain and everything to lose.
He might be beaten to death or die in jail.

He just might start a protest that would ignite
national awareness of racism and oppression.

To face this kind of experience and not challenge it
meant we were part of the problem.
If they dealt with it, they might die or be ruined, but...
if they endured it silently, they were dead already.





Jazzman




An elderly man with a jaunty plaid hat and patterned tie and shirt,
got on the bus at the Marina where they were serving a Seniors luncheon.

He sat down next to a lady who seemed happy to see him.
They certainly know how to lay out a fine spread, she said.

Leaning over anxious to talk with him, the lady was dressed in white,
elegant and fashionable in her ancient way.

She wore big spectacles and a scarf over her shoulder.
She laughed politely and easily at his little jokes.

They were clearly friends, maybe even lovers at one time,
cute together, obviously happy in each other’s company.

Are you doing any jobs right now? she asked.
I just got back from Hong Kong, he replied,

finishing up some details on a new CD.
I’m happy I won’t have to go back. It’s a long flight.

The lady got off at Embarcadero with a discreet wave.
Another promptly took her seat and picked up the conversation.




The Spaghetti War


Initially, spaghetti was a concession to prisoner demands for better food,
but as time went on, the sauce got thinner and the meat more scarce.

If they serve this mush one more time, I’m turning the table upside down.
They did. We did. The war was on. It was total chaos in the chow hall.

Prisoners jumped on tables and chairs and started yelling No more!
Spaghetti got thrown at guards. Plates, knives and forks were flying.

Then the chief screw brought in a machine gun and took out three windows.
Everybody’s locked down, he yelled when the din subsided.

As if someone had played the national anthem or started a prayer, suddenly
all you could hear was the sound of prisoners slipping in globs of spaghetti.

We filed out and back to the cell block, outwardly subdued -- for now,
but inwardly free -- for the first time in a long time.








Prisoner of Alcatraz



When I got off the transport boat,
I stood transfixed at the bottom of the gangway.

The guard told me I could go.
I was a free man now.

I stood like a statue at the curbside listening
to the whir of the cars as they drove past.

Everyone else had somewhere to go.
I’ve never been so lonely in all my life.





News from the Trenches




Back in the trenches, the 25 year old poet
Wilfred Owen was cold, tired, and disgusted.
He had been treated for shellshock after being
blown into the air by a mortar and landing
on the remains of a fellow officer.

Now he was back, crawling about on his belly
somewhere in France. He had been assigned
light duty, censoring soldiers’ letters.

The war had hardened him. Once he would
have cried over the things they said. Now
he just wrote DECEASED on the outside of
the unopened envelope, mailing it home
without even shifting the cigarette in his mouth.




Metro Fashions





Black Black Black
All I see is Black

Black hoodies in the subway
Black cocktail dresses
Black shawls, Black coats
Black trousers, Black pants
Black sneakers on the streets
Black glasses in the bookstore
A whole city in mourning

Black Black Black
All I see is Black







So, Man Ray, when were you born?




I don’t actually remember.
I was young at the time, you understand,
and it was a long time ago.

Besides,why should I bother remembering
All these little details?
These days everything is written in books

I suppose I’m just lazy, but
If I wanted to know the answer to this question,
I’d do what you should do. Go look it up!




Object of Desire




The artist Man Ray fell in love with his model,
but was devastated when she dumped him.
To get over her, he did a pen and ink sketch of her eye
and attached it to the pendulum of a metronome with a paper clip.
He called it -- Object to be Destroyed.

25 years later, anarchists broke into an art exhibit and,
seeing the title, Object to be Destroyed, destroyed it.
When Man Ray was asked to make a reproduction,
he agreed, only this time he insisted
on calling it -- Indestructible Object.




Doing What Comes Naturally




When Man Ray hired the same artist’s model as Andre Derain, he was surprised
when she took off all her clothes and jumped into his lap in the nude.

What’s this all about? protested a startled Man Ray who drew
his models from a distance. The young thing looked perplexed.

I’m just doing what Monsieur Derain requires of me, but come to think of it
I don’t know why he is a painter when he seems to like sculpture so much.





At the Roxy





Every city in the world has at least one museum dedicated to the best of art,
MOBA is the only museum dedicated entirely to collecting and showing the worst.

The Museum of Bad Art in suburban Boston celebrates the enthusiastic work
of artists with limited talent, abysmal judgment, and little sense of color.

It’s a sort of touchstone or foil for every other art museum in the world.
We’re here to celebrate the right to fail, explains the permanent interim director.

The collection is hung in the basement outside the Men’s Room.
The smell adds a certain something which is not inconsistent with the art.

The MOBA has a firm policy of not paying more than $6.50 for a new acquisition,
though noteworthy exceptions have been made for particularly squalid attempts.

One painting in the permanent collection has a big knife slash through it.
We like to think this represents a moment of epiphany on the part of the artist.

We are more or less forced to rotate our exhibits, the director explains
apologetically. Take a look around. The public can only stand so much.





Thesaurus of Pain



Peter Mark Roget was obsessed with classifying words in part to cover his despair
after the early death of his father and the subsequent insanity of his mother.
So much sadness drove him away from people into the comforting arms
of words which offered him solace in the “starry region” of ideas.

Roget started making lists of word when he was 8 in 1787.
He listed heavenly bodies, animals, vegetables, anything at all.
He borrowed the exemplary Linnaean system to divide all thought
into 6 categories. It took years to classify every nuance.

He listed 1002 concepts to further subdivide every slight variation.
With words so divided, a writer could refine written thoughts
by reviewing similar words for gradations of meaning --
and Roget could keep his mind off the sadness that obsessed him.


Roget completed the first draft in 1805 when he was just 26,
but the public had to wait for his retirement from a long career
in medicine before Roget found 4 years to revise his book
and publish it in 1852.

J. M. Barrie wrote an homage to Roget in Peter Pan.
The Thesaurus is the one and only book Captain Hook keeps in his shipboard library.
Dylan Thomas used him. Every major 20th Century writer relied on him.
Sylvia Plath said she would sooner take Roget to a desert island than the Bible.






A Flirtation With Ecstasy



Peter Mark Roget, author of the Thesaurus, was 20 in 1799,
when he inhaled nitrous oxide in an experiment to help
his friend, Humphrey Davy, find a cure for consumption.
Little did he understand the lesson it would teach him.

As soon as he inhaled the gas, Peter began to feel dizzy.
A tingling sensation emanated from his hands and feet.
He got disoriented and found it hard to breathe or speak.
Suddenly, he got worked up, losing track of time and place.
His body and mind raced and throbbed through thoughts.

Gradually, a gentle feeling of well-being suffused his body.
His whole life seemed to be reduced to a feather in the wind.

15 minutes later, he began to return to his normal senses.
He hurried to his desk and wrote: I cannot remember that
I experienced the least pleasure from these sensations.
I can however easily conceive that by frequent repetition
I might reconcile myself to them. He feared addiction.

For Humphrey Davy the ecstasy won out. He liked it.
Not so for Roget. For him, life itself was a struggle for control.
This moment of ecstasy was an unpleasant reminder of just how
fragile a grasp he had on this state he was pleased to call reality.






Alice Ramsey’s Great Adventure


In the pouring rain, Alice Huyler Ramsey, age 22, got into her
green Maxwell 30 on June 10, 1909 in Hell’s Gate, Manhattan, and
drove down Broadway, heading out for California, 3800 miles away.

Her three friends, Nettie, Margaret and Hermine accompanied her,
but she was the only one who could drive. Most of the way there were no
paved roads. It was an endurance test and a statement of female independence.

The press loved it, though common people thought she was crazy. She was
a young lady, just two years out of Vassar College , a wife and mother with a
perfectly good home in Hackensack NJ, risking all for a wild, unimaginable stunt.

She was no Amazon either. Driving is not a matter of gender she explained,
and she was bound and determined to prove it. So was the Maxwell-Briscoe Co.
of Tarrytown NY which helped finance and sponsor the cross-country event.

In 1909 only 155,000 Americans owned cars, mostly clustered along the east coast
where there were better roads. They were anxious to prove that even a woman
could drive a Maxwell over all sorts of terrain -- and even have fun while doing it.

Doctors did not generally advise women to drive. It was felt that it upset
the delicate balance of their body chemistry and would cause them to become dangerously agitated, and agitated is exactly what they became.

West of the Mississippi, roads quickly degenerated into trails, rough terrain
for delicate eastern technology. Many breakdowns resulted which had to be
repaired where they occurred with what they had along. 11 spare tires were needed.

The car was loaded with equipment and 4 passengers, but had only 30 hp and a
top speed of just 40 mph on perfectly level roads, which, of course, they never had. Many times in the far west, the ladies had to get meals in bars and saloons.

At night, they couldn’t always find appropriate accommodation and sometimes
had to resort to sleeping in the car. After 59 days, they reached the St. James Hotel
in San Francisco just in time for a big party. Everyone celebrated discreetly.

It was a great triumph for the cause of female liberation, but after they all had
a good hot bath and a late sleep, they turned right around and went back home.
In NJ once again, Alice Ramsey returned to being a wife and mother.




The Poor Guggenheim


With a yearly allowance of just $80,000, Peggy Guggenheim considered
herself to be the poor Guggenheim. Peggy felt she needed to be frugal.

In her famous salons, she sometimes served nothing but crackers and whiskey,
but even so, people in the elite art crowd coveted an invitation to her parties.

For many years, her first husband complained, they lived in apartments furnished
with little more than orange crates so Peggy could spend lavishly on modern art.

She negotiated hard with her chosen starving artists, driving them to the brink.
Even when she didn’t particularly like an artist, she paid for quality work.

She was a harsh critic. She might just walk into your studio, look around,
and walk right back out without saying a thing. She was notorious like that.

At one boring party in Venice, a friend came up and declared I should take off all
my clothes and jump in the canal. Without hesitating she replied, If you do, I will.

You can say that rich people like Peggy Guggenheim don’t influence anything,
but you’d be wrong. Money talks and money coupled with taste leads the way.

The Case for Prose Poetry

For a long time now, 15, 20 years, I’ve been writing a mixture of tradition poetry about personal experiences and prose poetry about special moments in the lives of famous people. Nobody actually deputized me to write this way. It just emerged as the best way to tell the story of key moments in these people’s lives. I’m talking about the first time FDR’s polio caused him to fall down in public. Or when Sigmund Freud discovered that he had misunderstood his father when he was a boy.

Some editors have written back to say that what I have sent them is not real poetry. I never disagree. It’s poetry-like, but written in prose. It’s not strictly fictional since it’s based on facts related to a real person. It’s not prose non-fiction either. The language is tighter than prose narratives. The intent is to encircle a moment in time with some words that illuminate character, like an essay, but to do so in a very limited number of words. It has a poetic design in that it is short and pointed. It looks like poetry on the page.

Well, rather than try to define it, why don’t I just show you some of the poems I have been writing and let you decide what to call it.



Mother Love

by
Gary Lehmann


Her good friend, Harvey Bailey said Ma Barker couldn’t plan breakfast.
Yet, Ma Barker is known to history as an illustrious gun moll of the early thirties.
It is true that she was frequently around while her four sons planned bank robberies,
but when the day came, they sent their mother to the movies -- out of harm’s way.
No police station had her photo. No law enforcement agency got her fingerprints.
She never spent a day in jail. She was the notorious crime boss who never was.

Some say the fledgling FBI spread the rumor of Ma Barker’s criminal activities
after they inadvertently killed her in a raid on her son’s cabin on Lake Weir, Florida. After gunning her down, the G-Men took a picture of her with a Tommy gun.
The implication was clear enough. The press loved it. Mother and son shoot out.
Did she pick up the gun after the police started filling the cabin with flying lead?
Was she cowering in the corner the whole time? Does it really matter in the end?

Her sons were bad boys for sure. Highway robbery, auto theft, vagrancy, several bank robberies, killing a night watchman in a hospital, attempted burglary, a shootout with the police, several murders, suicide, burglary and killing a sheriff, killing their own attorney, killing a policeman and a innocent bystander, two police murders, kidnapping, payroll robbery, assassination, wounding a policeman during a traffic stop, killing a doctor and a gangster in Chicago, mail train robbery, and escaping from prison.

Surely she profited from the proceeds of crime, but that doesn’t get the death penalty. The litany of the gang’s criminal activity doesn’t offer her much of a defense, but her participation in the gang can be more easily explained by pure mother love. I think the FBI shot first and covered up later to draw attention away from their misdeed. She doesn’t exactly qualify as Public Enemy #1 -- except in the annals of FBI history. It’s hard to show love for your sons when they act up and cause trouble all the time.




The Dukinfield Connection


by
Gary Lehmann




He was born with the ridiculous name, William Claude Dukenfield.
So, he changed it to W. C. Fields. He claimed to be descended from
Lord Dukinfield of Cheshire, even though there is no evidence to prove
there ever was any such a noble personage. W. C. Fields a Lord?

In 1857, U.S. Immigration authorities listed his grandfather as a
comb maker. His father, James, appears in the 1860 census as
a baker, but by 1870 he claimed to make his living as a huckster,
someone who sells things in the street. That’s more like it.

His son, W. C., helped him in this trade until he was 11 when
he ran away to join a vaudeville company. He developed a
juggling act, but things went wrong. He kept dropping the balls.
So he turned to comedy, a natural enough transition considering.

I guess he found that if you have the right joke, you don’t really
need a product to make the sale. His humor was based on his
disrespect for authority and his dislike of the politically correct.
If W. C. Fields were alive today, he’d die of terminal propriety.




The Goat
dedicated to General George Armstrong Custer and Major General George Pickett

by
Gary Lehmann



At West Point, graduation was conducted by rank in class.
At the top, competition was extremely fierce, but a much more
subtle competition existed at the bottom of the class to graduate the Goat,
to have the honor of saying you graduated last in your class.

This achievement involved infinitely complex manipulation of the final reports.
To achieve your goal, you had to know the answers to the exam questions cold
so you could correctly answer just enough to pass, but not one more than
required. Otherwise, some other lucky fellow would sneak in on you.

As West Point faculty came to recognize over time, this takes intelligence,
strategy and verve of the sort required on real-life battlefields.
After all, anyone can win with a vastly superior force. The trick in life,
and in war, is to achieve a strategic goal with limited resources.




In the Frame

by
Gary Lehmann


The Indian chiefs were invited to Washington after the fighting was largely over
to sign treaties, define reservation boundaries, and settle terms of surrender.

They came by rail and dressed in white man’s clothes, visible signs of their defeat.
They were shown immense arsenals of weapons to convince them never to fight again.

They met in endless meetings and went home knowing concession was the only option.
Many joined the Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and became sideshow attractions.

The defeated chiefs were sent to the photo studio of Alexander Gardner where
their pictures were taken in miscellaneous Indian costumes, regardless of tribal customs.

Crazy Horse was the only major chief to refuse to succumb to white authority.
He tried to surrender with the rest, but his spirit could not be conquered.

He fought until the end and when he was finally arrested at Fort Robinson, Nebraska,
he broke away and fought to the death. No one ever took his picture for framing.






The Death Ray

by
Gary Lehmann


Nikola Tesla worked for Edison and Westinghouse
to be part of electrifying America. He was dark and gaunt,
every film maker’s model of a mad scientist.

As early as 1908, he planned and with the help and money
of J. Pierpont Morgan, built a giant magnifying transformer
in Shoreham, Long Island called the Death Ray.

It had something to do with particle beams and terrestrial stationary waves.
The idea was to concentrate electrical energy into a thin beam
so intense that it would travel large distances without dissipating.

When he fired it over the North Pole, it was unclear whether
the device was working until an owl flew threw in to the beam a bird
and flew out a fluff of feathers. Then reports came in from Siberia.

A 15-megaton blast appeared, probably a comet, causing
a giant fire ball which destroyed half a million acres of land.
It was the largest explosion in human history.

See! Tesla cried gloating intolerably.
Immediately after his death in a New York hotel room,
the plans for the Death Ray mysteriously disappeared.

People say the Germans stole them, but
it could have been the Russians or even the US Army.
Tesla was gone, so what did it matter?




Like Ice on a Hot Skillet

by
Gary Lehmann



Every city in the world has at least one museum dedicated to the best of art,
MOBA is the only museum dedicated entirely to collecting and showing the worst.

The Museum of Bad Art in suburban Boston celebrates the enthusiastic work
of artists with limited talent, abysmal judgment, and little sense of color balance.

It’s a sort of touchstone or foil for every other art museum in the world.
We’re here to celebrate the right to fail, explained permanent interim director.

Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're simply not bad enough.
What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards.

The MOBA has a firm policy of not paying more than $6.50 for a new acquisition,
though noteworthy exceptions have been made for particularly squalid attempts.

One painting in the permanent collection has a big knife slash through it.
We like to think this represents a moment of epiphany on the part of the artist.

We were more or less forced to rotate our exhibits, he explains apologetically.
Take a look around for yourself. The public can only stand so much.



The Big Meeting

by
Gary Lehmann


In 1991, Bill Gates’ mother tried to get him to meet Warren Buffet.
Fortune Magazine listed them as two of the richest men in the world.
Gates was against it. Why bother? he said. What will we talk about?

But powerful men don’t resist the wishes of their mothers for very long
and eventually they did meet, and they found they had a lot to talk about.
IBM, for example, and why information technology is a good investment.

They talked about the special obligation big money imparts on the wealthy,
but, they both agreed, it was hard to be philanthropic in a way that does good.
Buffet encouraged Gates to read the World Bank Report on the causes of poverty.

Gates encouraged Buffet to think about the method he uses at the Gates Foundation
to screen potential fields of philanthropy before even inviting grant applications.
Buffet was impressed with Gate’s integrity and dedication to giving money away.

They both agreed that it was a lot harder than earning big money in the first place.
More talk ensued. Pretty soon Gate’s people were sharing ideas with Buffet’s people
and Buffet’s people were sharing some realistic numbers with Gates and his people.

It was all very different for everyone. What they ended up contemplating is one
of the biggest mergers of fortunes the world has ever known for the good of mankind.
Mother was right, and who knows what good she has done for the world?


Rodin tries to catch the wind

by
Gary Lehmann


In 1851, the sculptor Auguste Rodin accepted a commission
from a Parisian writers’ group to produce a sculpture
of the famous French author Honore de Balzac,
but things did not go well in Rodin’s drafty studio.
Cold weather froze his brain and the real Balzac evaded him.

Balzac was self-conscious. Few images were taken of him in life.
Besides, he died 40 years earlier. Few remembered exact details.
Of his personality, they remembered plenty.
He was physically large and overbearing in his mannerisms.
In his opinions, he was powerful, controversial, sexy.

How to convey all these contradictions in bronze?
The metal seemed harder than ever.
Rodin tried a nude Balzac, but the corpulent Balzac looked flabby.
The statue failed to convey Balzac’s immense sexual power.
Only the face reflected his strong will and powerful beliefs.

So, Rodin tried an athletic Balzac, much slimmer
than he appeared in life, his hands only partially concealing
a half erect penis. The public reacted with shock.
It didn’t even look like Balzac. The pose was lewd.
The failure was a great humiliation, but Rodin did not give up.

Finally, Rodin settled on an expressive face
with the rest of the body covered in a flowing dramatic cape
meant to convey his potency and brooding romanticism.
The public ridiculed this version as well. They called it,
Balzac’s head stuck on a tree trunk.

Exhausted after years of effort, Rodin retired from the field,
sent the commission back to his patrons and reclaimed his work.
Even in defeat, the modern world reveres his failed sculptures,
as a testament to the futile effort to capture real life in bronze,
the hopeless quivering toil of every artist to capture the wind.

Is Flarf Real?

The word has come up in poetry discussions for the last few years, but nobody seems to have a very good idea of what Flarf means. Flarf sounds like a cross between fluff and barf, which doesn’t exactly give the term the gravitas of words such as sonnet or sestina. When you seek out a definition from standard sources, they come up with contradictory definitions.

In a recent issue of Poetry, the editors say, “Flarf is quasi-procedural and improvisatory.” That’s not very helpful. Procedural is generally considered the opposite of improvisatory, but they go on. “This new poetry [is]...reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there.” Isn’t that pretty much what poets have been doing for centuries, sculpting poetic language from the great mass of free-floating language? But there’s more. “Many of the poems are sculpted from the results of Internet searches, often using words and phrases that the poet has gleaned from poems posted by other poets to the Flarflist e-mail listserv.” This definition doesn’t tie things down very tightly. How can we readers tell a word that occurs in the poet’s mind from one that pops up on an Internet search? Why should we care about its source? Isn’t poetry about the impact words make, not their ancestry? For clarification, I guess, the editors add, Flarf is more Dionysian than Apollonian. OK. There it is then.

If you are still a bit confused, you might go to the web sources to get a definition. Flarf by all accounts appears to have been fathered by the Internet. Wikipedia defines Flarf as “an avant garde poetry movement” [That’s safe enough.] dedicated to the aesthetic “exploration of the inappropriate in all of its guises.” This definition doesn’t exactly tell you where to put the rhymed lines and how many stanzas maketh a Flarf. But it goes on. Wikipedia says that Flarf is a “hodge-podge assortment” of words taken from miscellaneous Internet searches offered up with all their grammatical inaccuracies, and is therefore not to be taken seriously. I think I can go along with that idea at least.

So what is this thing anyway? According to both sources, Flarf was a term coined by a poet named Gary Sullivan who says that Flarf is not to be taken seriously, because it was originally intended as “an in-joke among an elite clique, a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing.” All right now that’s enough. If it’s an in-joke how can it be of interest to the general public? It’s either one or the other. And how does an in-joke turn into a marketing strategy? One looks inward; the other outward. It doesn’t make any sense. Other critics have called it Spam poetry after the junk mail that comes with an e-mail address. That might be true, but how does Spam become poetry exactly? There’s something missing in all these definitions.

Reading the poems that have been labeled as Flarf does not clarify the problem. Poems by Gary Sullivan appear on the page as the words to a cartoon narrative but without a connective story line. Poems in Poetry by self-styled Flarf poet Jordon Davis range from what I call short joke poems, complete with a punch line, to poems that reframe cultural icons like Bugs Bunny as a thug. Mel Nichol’s “I Google Myself” is a more traditional modernist poem about the self-absorption that occurs in the cyber-arena when people look at their own reflection too often. Sharon Mesmer’s Flarf poem “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” shows no sign of flarfliness that I can discern, no assortment of miscellaneous Internet words, not even a reframed icon. Instead it focuses our attention on shockingly lewd statements offered pretty much for their own sake. If there’s a common thread, here, I’m not finding it. I’m back where I started. What is Flarf poetry anyway? Some kind of joke?

If it’s a joke, it’s one that has traveled at Internet speed. The poetry world has been going Flarf crazy. Self-styled Flarf poets were invited to read at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City sponsored a Flarf poetry reading. Edge Books is planning to release the first Flarf anthology very soon. And the Poetry Club in Manhattan has sponsored its third three-day Flarf festival complete with flarfy music to accompany the general mayhem. So, it must mean something to somebody. Doesn’t it? Surely Flarf must mean something to somebody, even if Flarf’s proponents haven’t bothered to tell us common folk about it just yet. Can a whole movement in poetry just come along before it gets any real definition of itself?

Of course, part of Flarf’s definition is the counter-cultural effort to mock poetic conventions. Gary Sullivan says he wrote his first Flarf poem as a mock out of Poetry.com’s perpetual poetry “contest” which was widely advertised in the poetry press. For a fee, your poem would be included in an upcoming poetry book. Sullivan consciously tried to write a poem so bad that the editors of Poetry.com would be forced to reject it, but he couldn’t stoop low enough to exceed their low standards. The worst poems he could imagine could not solicit a rejection, but the effort to write consciously bad poetry became addictive. One of Sullivan’s early works was entitled “Flarf Balonacy Swingles.” The typos are intentional. Flarf has been associated with intentional typos and offensive language from the very first. Self-mockery is part of the Flarf culture, but does Flarf have legs? When we get past the initial joke, is there enough substance to Flarf to cause it to actually become the twenty-first century’s first literary movement, as advertised, or is Flarf just a silly lark which will die out when the joke wears off?

My personal reading is that it’s just too early to tell. As far as I can tell, Gary Sullivan and his fellow Flarfists are just spitting in the eye of high poetic culture for now, making fun of our poetic conventions and daring us to take them seriously. Sullivan is just a remake of Salvatore Dali, custom-designed for our day. Still, it’s too early to count Flarf out either. It may yet find a Dionysian niche and prosper there. A more settled idea of what Flarf represents still has time to emerge. What started out as pure silliness in Andy Warhol’s New York studios turned into a real artistic movement, called Pop Art. Maybe Flarf will be the Pop Art of this decade. It’s possible.

So, in the general spirit of the thing, here is my first Flarf poem. Although it appears to be against the grain of Flarf culture, I will justify it as a true Flarf poem, thus showing my contempt for even counter-cultural Flarf conventions. First, the poem is lifted from words written by another hand. Second, it is capable of multiple levels of reading and Third, it makes little sense outside its natural context and even there it’s full of useless advice. I take the poem to have sufficient self-mockery in it to qualify it as vintage Flarf. See if you don’t agree.

Pool Rules

by
Gary Lehmann



1. NO swimming without an adult present.

2. NO diving in the shallow end.

3. NO dunking or pushing.

4. NO running on the pool deck.

5. WAIT for the person in front to be
out of the way before diving.

6. NO glass on the pool deck.

7. NO peeing in the pool.



Flarf on dudes and dudettes.

1270 words

Inspiration: Comments on Some New Poems

People often ask me where I get my ideas for a poem. I write narrative, historical verse and it's a natural question since most of my poems are firmly rooted in personalities and events. Most readers specialize their reading by their interests, but I'm a generalist. I love to read widely and from that reading, I get ideas for poems. Sometimes, the original idea gets reworded but stays largely in the form it originally appeared, but sometimes the original idea is just a jumping-off point for an entirely different approach to the subject.

Here are some recent poems with brief comments on their inspiration.


Oh, please do read it


Charles Algernon Swinburne was a poet who loved himself
and his poetry so much he would read verse at any time.

He wrote poetry that the public considered scandalous, so
he particularly loved to show off when calling on friends.

To lure them in, he cleverly placed an oversized sheaf of poems
in his breast pocket where it could not be missed.

Oh, please do read it. This was all the goading the poet needed
to be induced to produce some delicious new verse to delight all.

While reading, he’d get so excited he couldn’t sit still,
but jumped up gesticulating wildly as he pranced about the room.

The audience usually tired of this show before he did,
but he appeared not to notice. So enthralled was he with himself.



COMMENT: I read Swinburne's poetry in college and taught some of it over the many years I taught college English, but I never really knew much about him. Garrison Keillor has a website called The Writer's Almanac which I read almost every day. One day he had a brief comment on Swinburne which got me started reading some of his poems and doing some research on his life. I highly recommend the site for literary snippets and a daily dose of poetry.



For Love of All

Into the sky my beloved flies.
See his silver machine cutting the air.
With rare courage and a rising sun
into the enemy ships -- he dies.



COMMENT: This is a short poem for me. I was watching the History Channel one evening. A Japanese-American girl returned to her ancestral land to explore the question of why anyone would want to become a Kamikaze pilot. She grew up in America with the view that it was crazy to willingly go to your death, even for your country. When she went to Japan, she interviewed family members who were alive during the Second World War and recall the attitude that everyone must sacrifice for the Emperor so Japan could win the war. Slowly, she discovered the mental framework of patriotism and family pride that allowed this phenomenon to exist. The poem just dropped out of the sky pretty much as you see it today.



The Man Who Saved the Whole Country


J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire until the President called.

The panic of 1893 dragged on and the gold reserve was getting dangerously low.
Grover Cleveland knew there was only one man with the liquidity and pull,

but J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire until the President called.

Morgan was not going to be hurried, and he wasn’t about to work on the cheap.
A few calls to European bankers and to some Morgan cronies for a tidy profit.

So J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire until the President called.

Cleveland was holding back. He knew his party would explode in protest.
William Jennings Bryan would launch a withering attack; McKinley would roar.

Still, J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire. It’s the President, Mr. Morgan.


COMMENT: Everyone has been thinking about what happened to unhinge the financial system in America -- and the world -- recently. I came across a passage while reading somewhere that told of J. Pierpont Morgan's role in saving America from a similar financial collapse in 1893. The original statement I encountered described Morgan in his private room in the Arlington Hotel. I started to think about the immense power he exerted by waiting and not pushing himself on President Cleveland at the White House. He knew that if he waited long enough, Cleveland would come to him. When he did, Morgan would have the power to dictate terms. This is the essence of Morgan's genius. I had to try to capture it in a poem. When I wrote the poem originally, I didn't yet have the repetition in the lines, but later it became clear that waiting is the essence of the story and repetition is the poet's best way to indicate patient waiting to the reader.



Love Letter to the Ford V8


While I still have breath in my lungs
I will tell you what a dandy car you make.

Clyde Champion Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame
had the fastest guns in the mid-west because
they drove fast, real fast. They had to drive fast.

I have drove Fords exclusively
When I could get away with one.

Between 1930 and 1934, they had every cop
in the mid-west on their tail for bank robberies,
gas station and small business robberies.

For sustained speed and freedom from trouble,
The Ford has got ever’ other car skinned

Driving a Ford V8 gave them that extra edge
during a shoot-out. After all, G-Men chasing
an 8 with a 4, only had half a chance.

and even if my business hasn’t been strictly legal
it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.

Bonnie Parker probably wrote the actual letter to Henry Ford
on a scrap of writing paper she stole from a grocery store,
but they never got around to prosecuting her for it.



COMMENT: I have long wanted to tell the story of the romantic adventure/love affair of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. In desperation they marauded across the mid-west for a brief chronicle of years. One thing that I loved was the letter Clyde supposedly sent to Henry Ford praising his V8 engine. Research on the web turned up handwriting evidence that convinced me that Bonnie wrote the letter, but what's the difference really? When I started writing the poem, I quoted extensively from the letter, but finally it just became clear that using the entire letter with alternating comments by me was the way to go. This poem came largely from web research and the fact that Bonnie and Clyde had just a terrific story to tell. You'll notice I prefer italics to quotation marks in poetry.




The Deed to the City of White Plains

I won it in a poker game from John Steinbeck.
His hand was hot, but the bet was $400 to him.
He was cleaned out, but claimed he had
this deed of title from the 1600s.
We let him bet it on the pot.
He had a full house,
but I was dealt
four kings
.



COMMENT: This poem came from a brief caption under a picture in the Maine Antique Digest, a journal I read and have read monthly for many years. I retold the story slightly to meet poetic demands, but basically the idea came from the newspaper. In all my poems, I look for an ironic moment to capture the essence of a human dilemma. This poem looks a lot better when centered on the page, but I couldn't figure out how to do that here.



Bathed in Penetrating Light


The novelist Elizabeth Bowen visited Virginia Woolf
at her country home in Sussex in southeast England.
just a month before her death by suicide in March of 1941.
At the youthful age of 59, a despondent Woolf drowned
herself in the swiftly moving waters of the Ouse River.

She suffered from periods of depression for many years.

Bowen wrote about Virginia: I remember her kneeling
back on the floor ... and she sat back on her heels and
put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun.
Then she laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful,
hooting way. And that is what has remained with me.



COMMENT: This poem started out with the quote by Bowen as it appeared in The Writer's Almanac some time ago. I did a lot of extra research on Bowen and Woolf and the poem emerged. Some poetry editors have rejected my work, because it is too prosey for them. They understand the elliptical quality I try to impart to each story, but there is always a narrative element which makes my work a stretch for some editors. Luckily, not all. It amuses me that some editors publish my work as flash fiction and some as poetry. I don't really care what they call it as long as it gets published and read. Poetry lives in a big tent. At least, that's what I believe.


The Eyes of Gustav Klimt

The remarkable thing about Gustav Klimt’s drawings is that they are quite unremarkable.
Focus on the drawings only, and you find they are merely academic, even ordinary.

They’re good -- as you’d expect from an artist as practiced and talented as Klimt – but
the reason we look at his work today with such rapture is not that he could draw faces.

No, what makes his paintings so spectacular is what he places around his faces.
That’s what creates eroticism in portraiture and glorifies gaudy golden materialism.

After his brother’s untimely death, Gustav Klimt broke away from traditional images.
He encrusted his works with metal objects, thick gold paint, patches of fabric, and eyes.

Klimt’s paintings are studded with eyes. Eyes and more eyes. They stare out at you.
Cat eyes, Egyptian eyes, square eyes, hooded eyes, round eyes, golden eyes, wiggly eyes.

At the turn of the century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was at its very height.
They didn’t yet know it, but the Hapsburg dynasty was dying. Its glory was past.

Only the Secessionists remained, the last sparks of the comet that once flashed
so brightly across the eastern European sky, like the eyes in a Klimt painting.



COMMENT: Last November, I had the opportunity to go to Vienna, Austria for the wedding of my niece which took place in a small castle right in town. While I was in Vienna, I visited as many art museums as possible and was repeatedly struck by the jewel-like quality of the paintings of Gustav Klimt. I had seen his work in New York, but Vienna museums had dozens of his lesser works as well as most of his iconic pieces. This poem developed over a couple of months after the trip. It took some time for me to focus on the eyes and to understand how vital they were to what Klimt was attempting artistically. As the poem appears on this page, it illustrates a problem editors have with prose poetry. Frequently the prose poet's long lines jump over and create orphan words which look funny stuck there on lines of their own. I appreciate it when editors give me the chance to rebreak the lines to suit their journal's line length to avoid this awkwardness.



What a beautiful thing is a sunny day


I arrived late for the college opera class’s end-of-the-year song fest.
Each student had a favorite aria to perform and
a youth from Mexico City stood forth to sing his favorite,
O Sole Mio.

He held his hands in front of him and, as the piano accompanist
set up the solo, the shoulders of the youth began to heave.
Suddenly it was not just a rhythmic sympathetic pacing
but something else altogether.

A stream of projectile vomit cascaded across red carpeting of the aisle.
The piano player, not noticing, played on and,
after a somewhat awkward wiping of the mouth,
the Mexican opera aficionado belted out his song.

O Sole Mio -- The Sun, My Own Sun -- to a standing ovation.

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day,
The air is serene after a storm
The air's so fresh that it feels like a celebration
What a beautiful thing is a sunny day


COMMENT: This spring I had occasion to attend a college concert, the graduation recital for an opera class. The story emerged just as I recount it, but the youth did not lose his cookies. But it certainly looked like he was about to. Luckily, I had my poetic licence with me when I wrote the poem a few days later. I think the story is better this way. I like the shock value and the fact that I can lay claim to being the only poet I know to have written a poem about projectile vomiting.



Nothing Happens for Nothing


Last fall, I flew to Paris and Vienna while
reading this book about DaVinci’s bicycle.
When I arrived in Vienna, I came across a
replica of DaVinci’s bicycle standing on a
side street near the Esterhazy Palace.
It was quite unexpected. I felt connected.

One of the reasons I flew to Vienna was to
see Freud’s couch and the apartment
where he first practiced psychiatry.
I learned that his couch is in London where
he took it running away from the Nazis.
I felt connected, but events came undone.

On the way back to Baltimore, I read about
Gertrude Stein delivering babies in tenements
from the John Hopkins Medical School.
So I went looking for Gertrude’s Baltimore,
but no where could I find a single remnant.
Puzzling journey. A writer is a foreign country.



COMMENT: This poem emerged from a couple of unscheduled coincidences that occurred during and immediately after the Vienna trip. My wife had a conference to attend in Baltimore, so we went there directly from Vienna before coming home. While in Baltimore, I was deeply involved in writing another poem, but a few months after the trip this poem emerged as I had time to contemplate the incredible coincidences involved in the trip. I don't frequently write poems about the writing process. I mostly leave that to my essays.



Cosmetic Friends


Although they lived just 5 blocks apart on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue,
and competed their whole lives for the same elite cosmetic trade,
Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden refused to meet each other.

After a while, it became a game. They assiduously avoided each other
even while they were spying on each other’s new product lines,
stealing employees from one another and pirating ad campaign ideas.

They had a lot in common. Both were hard working immigrants to NYC.
Both were self-conscious of their appearance, took classes in posture,
and bobbed their hair about the same time to suit the fashion.

They both sold red lipstick to suffragettes in 1912 and neither believed
that a woman would think much of face cream that wasn’t expensive.
They both believed you are only as old as you look, but when

death finally did catch up with Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and was
overheard to say as she passed the entrance to Helena’ Fifth Avenue store,
What a shame. That’s the closest they ever came to speaking.


COMMENT: Somewhere in my reading, it might have been the Smithsonian magazine, I came across the unusual relationship between Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden. What a colorful pair they were. I researched them both on the web and wrote a much longer poem focused on the development of the cosmetics industry. Then I went back and refocused on the pair of them and their unusual non-relationship, because that seemed more interesting in the end. Sometimes, it takes months for the real focus of a poem to emerge.



An unknown person,


probably his appointment secretary, is seen in this photo
with Norman Rockwell's dented, blackened brass bucket.
It was used as a receptacle for turpentine-soaked rags.
The rags often would catch fire, explained our tour guide.
Then someone -- maybe Rockwell, maybe his assistant,
would calmly throw the bucket out the door of the studio
to extinguish the flames. That's how it got dinged so badly.



COMMENT: Years ago, I went to see Norman Rockwell's museum in the Berkshire Mountains. The museum was interesting, but the reconstructed studio was really fascinating. There in the actual place where most of his paintings were made, you really gathered in the character of this all-American painting hero. Years later, I encountered an article about the studio, I don't remember what magazine, and a brief passage leapt out at me as an icon of the quixotic nature of this painter so known for his regularity. The irony in this rag bucket story struck me, and the poem emerged. I like the idea of letting the title become the first line of the poem and offering the entire poem -- title included -- as a quotation from an unknown source.


Poems come from a variety of inspirations. Sometimes, they bear a striking similarity to their sources; sometimes they don't. The trick is to find raw material that contains what you -- as the poet -- want to say about the subject of the poem. I like the ironic and seek out stories that characterize what I feel is the essence of the famous person or event. It's a strange way to go about writing poetry, I suppose, but it satisfies me.

How to Win the Poetry Game

There is natural tendency, especially when you’re just getting started, to try to write like everybody else. After all, that’s what gets published. That’s what everybody is reciting at poetry readings. That’s what everybody appears to like. Why buck the crowd? Still, just sometimes, the fresh and the unique still manage to win out. Case in point? The selection of Kay Ryan as the new United States Poet Laureate.

Kay Ryan was a surprise candidate to many. She has always been an outsider. The appointment has usually, until very recently, been given to a consummate insider --like Billy Collins or Rita Dove. The Poet Laureate is appointed annually by the Librarian of Congress who consults with prominent poets before making a selection. All the more surprising then that Kay Ryan was picked. Dana Gioia, a poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has described her as a “skeptical outsider,” a sort of modern Emily Dickinson.

How is she an outsider? She’s always lived out west, California, away from the eastern poetry establishment, so-called. She writes in an unusual style, compact, rhyming and clever with an ironic aftertaste. And she hasn’t published an overwhelming quantity of poetry in her lifetime. As a student at UCLA, she was turned away from admission to the Poetry Club, because her work was too different. She was something of a loner. Now she teaches at a college. That’s to be expected, but remedial English at the College of Marin, not poetry composition at UCLA, as you would expect. She restricts her classes to Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to enable her to write the rest of the time. In short, she’s a breath of fresh air in the tight world of poets laureate.

In a recent Christian Science Monitor profile, she talked briefly about her style and method of drafting a new poem. She says the way she forces herself to write is by creating what she calls “self-imposed emergencies.” These internal crises create a pressure to produce something. Each day she has breakfast, reads the paper, and then goes back to bed where she composes with a cat to hold down the covers. Her poems don’t begin with imagery as is so common today, but start out with an intellectual problem. She tries to look behind common phrases like the chicken crossing the road or letting the other shoe drop. We all know these phrases, and they must have some deep-seated place in our consciousness since we continue to use them, but why?

The other shoe
by Kay Ryan

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.
if the undropped
didn’t congregate
with the undropped.
But nothing can
stop the mid-air
collision of the
unpaired above us
acquiring density
and weight. We
feel it accumulate.

Simple routines are suddenly transformed into philosophical icons for reconsideration. Ryan wants to parse out the meaning of our most fundamental notions. She takes up clichés we have long ago discarded and imparts them with new significance. Here is another example.

Home to Roost
by Kay Ryan

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

There is an ominous warning here. Things fall apart as we try to remanufacture our chicken-loving world. This new life she gives old ideas revivifies them for us. The simple suddenly looks complex once again.

Kay Ryan started writing when she was 19 after the death of her father. After 10 years, she decided to become a serious poet while undertaking a 4000 mile bike ride with her life partner, Carol, starting in California. The regular rhythm of the pedals, the highway noises and the monotony of the road gave her time to think. Do I like poetry enough to make this commitment? Yes. Can I sustain it? Long pause. She found that poetry was taking over her mind and the poetry she has produced since has that same combination of the mundane and the original, the repetitious and the new.

Unlike other poets who rewrite for years, Ryan stays with a new composition until it comes to a natural completion. Her partner says this is because she has a very short-term memory. Many things are developing in a poem at once, and so she has to capture them before they escape. Some times a poem goes through a number of drafts, but by then the compositional process has been started up all over again with new contingencies to guide it.

Ryan tries to write in the moment, and the resulting poem has a kind of linear unity and spontaneity that transforms old words into something new again.



Nothing Ventured
by Kay Ryan

Nothing exists as a block
and cannot be parceled up.
So if nothing's ventured
it's not just talk;
it's the big wager.
Don't you wonder
how people think
the banks of space
and time don't matter?
How they'll drain
the big tanks down to
slime and salamanders
and want thanks?

The Niagara River
by Kay Ryan

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

Ryan is unlike other writers of poetry. She does not seek to be part of a grand tradition, or to do what others are attempting. She is not into imagery. Her poems do not use the first person singular to draw attention to herself. Instead they are philosophical really, meditative truisms that emerge as she works the ideas into poetic form. The goal is to strike common ground, find the unique in the common and reveal what has been hidden by overuse.

One might fear that such a poetic philosophy would be distant and aridly intellectual. Ryan sees it otherwise. “It gives my poems a coolness,“ she says. “I can touch things that are very hot, because I’ve given them some distance.” Sometimes she touches things that are hot. Sometimes she touches things that are cold, but she does it in a totally individualized way.

In a time when MFA programs all over the country seem to pump out poets with remarkably similar visions -- all too often, Kay Ryan makes us stop and see her world and forget our own. She is an outsider in the best sense. She has taken the whole complex world of poetic conventions, picked out what she likes and dislikes and left the rest for others to handle. She’s not trying to be everybody’s favorite poet. She’s just trying to be the best poet she knows how to be, and isn’t that a perfectly fine ambition? What results is work that is completely unique. It works because of its freshness. Her recent nomination to the nation’s highest poetry position just proves that you don’t have to write like everybody else to produce quality work.

1246 words

New Verse from the News

The Way to Win is to Lose
[for Sarah Palin]

by

Gary Lehmann



In the days of rising winds, about 500 BC,
the Viscount of Wu was faced with an
overwhelming enemy at his gates.

Wu calmly arrayed his 3000 soldiers in the field
and commanded that they cut their throats.

When they all obeyed, the enemy was so horrified
they ran away, refusing to enter a city of madmen,
and leaving Wu in command of his city.

Sun Tzu says the essence of effective warfare
is not destruction, but disorientation.







Mountains and Sea [1952]

by

Gary Lehmann



On October 26 in New York City, Helen Frankenthaler
tacked a large canvas to her studio floor.
Then she climbed a ladder to gain a world view.

The 7 by 10 foot untreated cotton canvas stretched out
like a blank landscape, crying out for Mountains and Sea.
She mixed her colors, highly thinned oil paints, in coffee cans.

Then she poured pools of color directly onto the raw canvas.
She used some long-handled brushes to spread the blue, purple,
orange/red, yellow, and green into translucent washes.

Unlike Jackson Pollock, her painting did not convey
deeply moody alcoholic patches of emotion, but
light, pastel fields, like a watercolor landscape.

She added some random splatters to highlight the staining,
allowing the diluted colors to dig into the unseasoned cotton,
like a giant napkin soaking up gently filtered light.

By late afternoon, it was time to take another look.
Back on the ladder, she thought for a long while.
Then descending, she added a few black lines to train the eye.

She thought for a time, then mixed orange/red with green/yellow
to make a rustic brown which she dabbed on a central field.
Remounting the ladder, she instantly declared, It’s right.





Not Ready to Lead

by
Gary Lehmann


He failed at Greek and Latin – the road to a Harrow education.
Even remedial classes didn’t help. He disliked math and foreign languages.
He got tutoring for the Sandhurst entrance exams, but failed twice.
He only passed when his father got him the questions in advance.
His low grades precluded the infantry, but he was able to join the cavalry,
though he had no money for a proper horse.

At Sandhurst, he was short, red-headed, pale and profoundly accident prone.
He fell off a bridge rupturing a kidney and giving himself a concussion.
In Switzerland, he nearly drowned when his boat floated away.
He dislocated his shoulder while disembarking in Bombay harbor.
He did it again when he fell off his polo pony and
yet again when he took a tumble during a steeple chase.

In New York, a car nearly ran him down for his carelessness.
He got wounded while conducting rifle practice.
He caught pneumonia and herniated his gut.
He crashed his plane while learning to fly.
In Pretoria he was in a train wreck, got captured, and imprisoned.
No doubt about it. Winston Churchill was not ready to lead.




13 Reasons Annie Edson Taylor Should not have Gone Over the Falls in a Barrel
by Gary Lehmann

1. She was 63 years old, a retired school teacher, and not in good physical shape.
2. There was no control over exactly where the barrel went over the Falls.
3. The barrel might have split open after hitting the rocks.
4. The sudden increase in air pressure underwater may have caused the barrel to burst.
5. The barrel may have gotten trapped in the plunge pool beneath the falls twisting her for hours into unconsciousness.
6. Impact with the water after a 170 foot fall might have driven her long bones into her torso.
7. She may have consumed all the air in the barrel in her excitement and suffocated to death.
8. If the chase boat missed the barrel, she would have drifted into the Whirlpool.
9. If the barrel leaked enough, it may have floated down river submerged.
10. The water temperature was slightly below 40’F.
11. The crowds did not expect her, and most people didn’t even see her go over.
12. She did not get rich.
13. Her manager ran away to Chicago with most of the money, taking the barrel with him.



Oliver Phelps’ Desk

by
Gary Lehmann


At the museum, we have Oliver Phelps’ desk.
There he sat as land agent, or so the story goes,
to transfer title to most of the farms and mill lots
of Western New York between 1780 and 1825.

We’re proud to have it, but we don’t know what it means.
It’s blue. Was it then? It’s on a newer stand.
Was that an imitation of the original wooden base
or did the upper portion originally rest on a table?

Was this where great stretches of land transferred title?
Did great men strain their eyes reading the fine print here
or was this just one more desk in a room full of desks?
Did it belong to a clerk? There’s a lot we don’t know.

What we have are the rumors surrounding a piece of furniture.
The file says this is the actual desk Oliver Phelps used
and, to make ourselves feel important, we accept this as fact.
For all we know, some antique dealer made it up in 1922.