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.

X.J.Kennedy's Nude

X. J. Kennedy’s Nude
by
Gary Lehmann

Ekphratic verse employs the rhetorical device of relating a new piece of art to another media to achieve its own point. To see how this works in practice, let’s look at a painting and then a poem written about it.

The painting is The Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp. It was unveiled at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. After that, it was a repeated theme of the painter. The other work he displayed in that show was a men’s urinal marked “R. Mutt.” Man as dog. Marcel Duchamp had a rare sense of humor, and these pieces created just the sort of uproar he wanted.

Duchamp intends that even today we should be shocked, disappointed, and self-critical upon viewing his Nude. He intends to confront us and to make fun of our expectations. For one thing, there is nothing nude about her, no nakedness appears, just the illusion of nakedness in paint and canvas. The painting is really all about illusions.

Duchamp’s works frequently convey a wry hint of accusation. The Nude is taking infinite pleasure in the sheer spectacle of herself descending the staircase. She is inviting open idolatry with her slow motion sensuality. She is displaying her nudity for all it’s worth. Here is the most risqué robot you’ve ever seen, a veritable declaration of robotic independence from man’s confining morality. Eat your heart out mere mortals!

The Nude is a parody of real life where movie stars wear semi-transparent dresses that almost reveal something naughty so they can get the attention of the television cameras which are lined up to catch her strutting down a red carpet and then going into a room where she is supposed to pretend to like everyone and applaud when her rival gets all the recognition she so richly deserves. Sometimes art is just like life, only toned down.

This painting has been mocked by critics who have called it an explosion in a shingle mill. I recently heard a report on the national news that the CIA reproduced a plastic pile of dog doo with a radio transmitter in it so that they could overhear the conversation of two men who habitually met at the same place in a Moscow park. I think Duchamp would have approved of this level of clandestine artistic license. It fits right in with his image of modern life.

Behind all this foolishness, Duchamp had a serious purpose in mind as well. The kind of stop motion photography he depicts in The Nude Descending a Staircase is intended to suggest, I believe, the irreversible and ephemeral quality of time and the camera-like progression of images that clatter through our well-worn sprockets to create what we are pleased to characterize as reality. To Duchamp modern life has made us all very much like this robot compelled to display her stuff in public. We’ve all been turned into automatons.

Now let’s look at the poem X. J. Kennedy wrote based on this painting.

Nude Descending a Staircase by X. J. Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

X. J. Kennedy’s poem has a different task from that which Duchamp tackled. If all he achieves in his 1961 poem is an imitation of a painting unveiled in 1913 -- which already has stated its message with plentiful clarity -- then why bother? Duchamp will always do Duchamp better than Kennedy can do Duchamp. The trick is for Kennedy to find something unique to say on the same topic, rather like a web chat board. It’s only worth reading if it moves onto new ground.

So what does Kennedy say that Duchamp does not? I think that what Kennedy adds to the painting is the personality of the nude in question. What the poet can do, and Kennedy does, is suggest something of the nude woman’s intentions and attitudes. When he cites her “snowing flesh” he suggests a certain coldness in her attitude, later reinforced by calling her a “one-woman waterfall.”

What Kennedy sees in this painting is the accumulated images of a performance, rather like all the frames of a film sequence bunched up so you can see them all at once. She “collects her motions into shape,” like an artist of the dishabille, deliberately inconsiderate of fashion, consciously concupiscent. “Her lips imprint the swinging air.” Her nudity is her clothing. “Her slow descent like a long cape.” In the poem, we see that she is consciously showing off her snazzy bod. “A constant thresh of thigh on thigh --/…/That parts to let her parts go by.”

These themes are effected by the use of alliteration in the opening stanza, the application of rhythm to the last lines of each stanza, and the use of metaphors to heighten the satiric characterization. Kennedy does not offer a radically different interpretation of the painting in his poem, but it comes from a different perspective. In this poem, Kennedy manages to use his words to reveal motivations that paint cannot reveal nearly as well.

Some New Poems

War of Words

by
Gary Lehmann



We invade Iraq unilaterally.
We disgrace Iraq politically.
We wreck Iraq economically.
We stack Iraq democratically.
We rumble Iraq systematically.
We ruin peace constitutionally.

Now
--
we lack the knack to exit Iraq
--
totally.





The Trouble With Kids Today

by
Gary Lehmann


The Strokes family lived in a kind of heaven for decades
supported by breaking into houses and stealing appliances.
The trick was moderation. Break in. Steal appliances. Period.
They’d walk right by a Picasso to pick up a nice toaster oven.

Then they’d rush off to a truck stop on the highway where
a waiting appliance dealer gave them a few bucks for a frigidaire.
Before the homeowner got back from work, the goods were
gone -- headed out for parts unknown -- even by the Strokes.

It was a clean business. No big scores. Just nice steady income.
They never carried guns or burgled when anyone was home.
Some fool might get nervous and do something stupid.
Grandpa Strokes was quite strict about violence. No sense in it.

Of course, any rooky detective could tell a Strokes job immediately,
and they did catch members of the family from time to time.
But what do you get for stealing a refrigerator -- 90 days?
No hard time and your job is waiting for you when you get out.

The deputies at the jail treated the Strokes family like their family,
like regular customers, and the Strokes family returned the favor.
Every Thanksgiving, there’d be some Strokes in stir, so they brought
turkey dinners to the jail with extra plates piled high for the guards.

What’s the harm in that in the season of family togetherness?
But the dream fell apart for the gang after Grandpa Strokes died.
The kids started taking diamond rings, trophies and season tickets.
Pretty soon it was the penitentiary for the Strokes clan.

Really, the story of the Strokes family is the story of America.
They had a good thing precisely because they kept it simple.
When the kids took over, they got greedy. Grandpa Strokes knew.
Steal in moderation. Best to do business the All-American Way.





At Home with the Family

by
Gary Lehmann



Somewhere in the wilds of upstate New York,
Joel Kopp lives with his children,

the Radiator Kid, Scrapasaurus and
Iron Minnie, the Queen of the Junkyard.

Tractor and mower parts combine with shovels
and radiators to create fantasy creations.

What else is there to do with broken axes
and shovel blades, kettles, rakes and hoes?

In his private moments, Joel talks with his animals
and let’s them play in the yard.

"I come across something,” Joel explains,
“and I can see it as the beginning of a certain creature.”

“It grows from there." Just like that!
The Arbus Twins, Big Face, Shelly the snail.

There’s whimsy in his fancy,
a mischevous twinkle in his eye.

Half the fun is in naming each one.
Joel is one happy man.






Beach Photographer

by
Gary Lehmann



The sand skitters with heat.
Little to do but bake until

a beach photographer sets up his gear
marrying photoed faces with crazy backgrounds.

The sweet young girl gets a cowgirl outfit.
The sunburned lawyer finds a Charles Atlas body.

Four teen friends see themselves doing the Hula.
The bearded man shows up on a wanted poster.

There’s some psychology in this game
bringing the inner and outer character together.

How we judge faces. One tiny hint.
How we shape lives. A world of assumptions.





The Stumble at the Gate

by
Gary Lehmann



Even a horse race isn’t a horse race
if you can comprehend the imponderables.

There’s the horse, the jockey, the track,
the trainer, the weather, and the post position.

Grasp all these and the game is yours,
The whole racing world is yours to command.

Trouble is, while you think you’re in control,
the imponderables ponder on despite you.

The best horse stumbles at the gate.
The clouds open up wetting your dry horse.

Life is like a horserace all right. Only it’s the
imponderables that are racing and you’re the purse.






Eminently Victorian

by
Gary Lehmann


When the homosexual writer, Lytton Strachey,
took up with the virgin painter, Dora Carrington,
they created an oddly mismatched couple.

He was all sticks and stones; she all fur.
They were totally incompatible sexually.
He chased boys; she painted but did not show.

Carrington was afraid of sex, hid away in her art,
but Lytton’s docility brought out her protective nature.
She painted his rooms like the Garden of Eden.

He wrote Eminent Victorians throwing
conventional biography a new, personal twist.
She eventually had a few casual affairs of her own.

But she always cared most for her Lytton.
Eventually, she married a returning war veteran,
and all three lived together in a cottage in Wiltshire.

The painter pursued the writer who rejected her;
The writer pursued the soldier who rejected him;
The soldier pursued the painter who rejected him.

On the surface, they got along swimmingly,
each reinforced the other in this queer harmony,
but beneath that, they knew it couldn’t last.

Strachey died of undiagnosed stomach cancer.
Carrington followed taking her own life with a shotgun.
The soldier wandered off into the mist between the wars.

Kipling’s Private War

George Orwell called Rudyard Kipling a “prophet of British imperialism,” and so he was. Kipling was born in India and believed deeply in the British Empire and the soldiers who made it stand strong. He implicitly believed in the superiority of the culture of white Europeans and saw first hand the need for British militarism to retain the shape of the British Empire worldwide.

In his day, the Brits had control not only of India, but of South Africa, Kenya, Rhodesia, Australia, Burma and Egypt, with smaller enclaves in Bermuda, Gibraltar, Turks and Cacaos, the Falkland Islands, the Ascension Islands, even the British Antarctic Territory. The British Empire was a vast network asserting global British domination which resulted for many years in a kind of Pax Britannica. It was a global cultural giant, not hard to believe in and easy to love – especially if you were British-born and white.

But when Kipling’s only son Jack was lost in action during the Battle of Loos in September of 1915, Kipling began to question his lifelong beliefs. The First World War was another sort of conflict altogether. It was a defensive action for the Brits who were vastly out-numbered. In early outings they were out-smarted and had their backs thrown to the sea. This was a grinding conflict for mere survival.

Rudyard Kipling used his pull in the government to make special exemptions possible so Jack could join the British military even though he was underage. He got him a commission and made sure he went to the war at the first opportunity. Jack went willingly, claiming to his sister that he was only doing it to get out of the house, but claiming to his father that it was the only right response to German aggression in Europe. Jack’s body was never recovered during Kipling’s lifetime, and the crushing loss of his only son caused Kipling to become more introspective about his earlier militarism.

It is unfair to characterize this shift as unprecedented however. In his earlier war poems “Tommy and “Gunga Din,” Kipling portrays the impulse to fight wars neither as noble nor as nightmares of unspeakable carnage, but as sad affairs set in tragic circumstances that bring out the heroic in simple men. Kipling saw the ironies of war, the uncomfortable truths that got buried with the dead. His stories and poems told the story of the lost men who were either ground up in the steam-roller of war or made heroic by circumstances they never could have foreseen.

Here is a fine example:

The Last of the Light Brigade
by Rudyard Kipling (1891)

There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four !

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighen the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.

"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made - "
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!


This poem is, of course, based on the immense popularity of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” that glorified the heroic deeds of these same men some 40 years earlier. Of course, while Tennyson glorified their charge, real military authorities doubt the strategic value of this heroic action. French Marshall Pierre Bosquet said of the decision to charge, “It was magnificent, but it is not war,” and even Tennyson acknowledges the foolishness of the decision to charge into such a hale of gunfire when he wrote "Not tho' the soldier knew/ Some one had blunder'd: / Their's not to make reply, / Their's not to reason why, / Their's but to do and die:" and this is the exact tone that Kipling was trying to pick up on in his poem. Now compare the public tone of “The Last of the Light Brigade” with the immensely personal lament in “My Boy Jack.”

My Boy Jack
by Rudyard Kipling (1916)

'Have you news of my boy Jack?'
Not this tide.
'When d'you think that he'll come back?'
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
'Has any one else had word of him?'
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
'Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?'
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind -
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

Children have a natural, untutored way of bringing into question all of the most cherished beliefs of their parents. They don’t intend to do it, usually, but they manage to do it nonetheless with remarkable and painful regularity. Most people can think of other people’s children who have proved this point. Many of us have our own children to make the point closer to home.

After Jack’s death, Kipling naturally questioned whether Jack entered the Army of his own free will or because he was being compelled by his father’s outspoken, public stand that the war had to be fought immediately.

Did Rudyard Kipling kill his own child? What question could weigh more heavily on any parent’s mind? In Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” bravery is brought to the service of stupidity. In “My Boy Jack,” Kipling is basically asking himself if he has taken the place of the commander of the Light Brigade and charged his son in a company of but one soldier into the stupid mouth of war. Has he acted as unfeelingly as his nation does in “The Last of the Light Brigade” in regard to the life of his own child?

A Reluctance to Bleed

Sometimes I encounter a poem that just won’t go away. It preys on my mind, and I have to explore it further to find out why it has captured me so. Bleeding by May Swensen (1913 – 1989) is just such a poem.

Bleeding by May Swenson

Stop bleeding said the knife
I would if I could said the cut.
Stop bleeding you make me messy with the blood.
I'm sorry said the cut.
Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife.
Don't said the cut.
The knife did not say it couldn't help it but
it sank in farther.
If only you didn't bleed said the knife I wouldn't
have to do this.
I know said the cut I bleed too easily I hate
that I can't help it I wish I were a knife like
you and didn't have to bleed.
Well meanwhile stop bleeding will you said the knife.
Yes you are a mess and sinking in deeper said the cut I
will have to stop.
Have you stopped by now said the knife.
I've almost stopped I think.
Why must you bleed in the first place said the knife.
For the same reason maybe that you must do what you
must do said the cut.
I can't stand bleeding said the knife and sank in farther.
I hate it too said the cut I know it isn't you it's
me you're lucky to be a knife you ought to be glad about that.
Too many cuts around said the knife they're
messy I don't know how they stand themselves.
They don't said the cut.
You're bleeding again.
No I've stopped said the cut see you are coming out now the
blood is drying it will rub off you'll be shiny again and clean.
If only cuts wouldn't bleed so much said the knife coming
out a little.
But then knives might become dull said the cut.
Aren't you still bleeding a little said the knife.
I hope not said the cut.
I feel you are just a little.
Maybe just a little but I can stop now.
I feel a little wetness still said the knife sinking in a
little but then coming out a little.
Just a little maybe just enough said the cut.
I feel I have to bleed to feel I think said the cut.
I don't I don't have to feel said the knife drying now
becoming shiny.


My first reaction to Bleeding was that it dragged out unnecessarily the moment of exquisite agony as the knife cuts into flesh. By the middle of the poem, after the knife has persisted too long, I get it, and want her to move on. Yet she seems to want to hold me there as the knife digs deeper. It’s pure masochism. I get mad at her for wanting to prolong my agony, and for what? She seems to want to assert as much pain on the reader for as long as possible. That’s all. How is that art?

Then it occurs to me that the poem is set up as a dialogue. What right does the knife have to ask the cut not to bleed? How can we not bleed when cut? And why is the cut so apologetic? What does the cut have to apologize for? Being flesh?

There seems to be some sort of gender discussion going on here. The knife has a hard edge. The flesh is giving and more emotional. The male knife is causing pain to the female cut who is trying to excuse her way out of being human. Ms Swensen seems to be referencing an event we’ve all seen transacted in the world of gender politics. Yet there is something inconclusive about her assertion.

Then there is a thingness quality to the poem that comes out most clearly at the end. The knife makes demands and accepts apologies but can’t feel. It prides itself on being shiny but remains sharp by getting messy with the cut. There is a disembodied quality about the thing in this poem which defines its qualities and the intimate circumstances of its existence without the narrator expressing any opinion concerning the objects existence in the poem. Swensen’s point of view is almost scientific, but not quite thorough.

This reminds me of another Swensen poem, That the Soul May Wax Plump in which she describes dispassionately the body of her mother on the morgue table presumably just before an autopsy. Swensen describes being there at the moment of her mother’s death. Her mouth opens in a big O. Air escapes from all cavities as she deflates into a state of death. There is a conscious effort to create thingness here. Even her mother is dispassionately examined like the caterpillars which describe the eyebrows of the naked maidens in a warm pool with James Bond in another poem.

The James Bond Movie by May Swenson

The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex.
A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man inside

The Embassy blows up. Eructations of flame, luxurious
cauliflowers giganticize into motion. The entire 29-ft.

screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting,
blackening, smithereened. I unwrap a Dentyne and, while

jouncing my teeth in rubber tongue-smarting clove, try
with the 2-inch-wide paper to blot butter off my fingers.

A bubble-bath, room-sized, in which 14 girls, delectable
and sexless, twist-topped Creamy Freezes (their blond,

red, brown, pinkish, lavendar or silver wiglets all
screwed that high, and varnished), scrub-tickle a lone

male, whose chest has just the right amount and distribu-
tion of curly hair. He’s nervously pretending to defend

his modesty. His crotch, below the waterline, is also
below the frame—but unsubmerged all 28 slick foamy boobs.

Their makeup fails to let the girls look naked. Caterpil-
lar lashes, black and thick, lush lips glossed pink like

the gum I pop and chew, contact lenses on the eyes that are
mostly blue, they’re nose-perfect replicas of each other.

I’ve got most of the grease off and onto this little square
of paper. I’m folding it now, making creases with my nails.

In The James Bond Movie, Swensen explores the dispassionate killing machine James Bond. There is a dialogue going on between what happens on the screen and what happens in the theatre. On the screen, scenes of absolute carnage are set off against pointless sensuality. By contrast, the moviegoer eats fat-saturated popcorn and chews gum at the same time. All her efforts to get ungreasy are to no avail. There is Bond, center screen, surrounded by naked female flesh, “pretending to defend his modesty.” The poem is rich in ironies and unspoken accusations.

There is a kind of self-loathing in Swensen’s poetry, a reluctance to bleed or feel emotion, a fear of sex and love. She has said that her own poetry is "based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness." It is instructive how much Swensen reveals here of her method and how little of her motives. Her point of view is clinical, and yet proscribed.

It almost seems like May Swensen is afraid to feel, embarrassed by life, reluctant to admit weakness and scared of death. The essence of her poetry seems to be that ability to step back from daily life and view the world as a parade of objects to be described in such detail that their usefulness and wastefulness comes forth without editorial opinion. It’s a strange strength, but one that reveals much.

735 words