Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Memorial Day weekend with my sister and her family in Fairfax County, Virginia. My parents have been staying with her for about a month now, and they were glad to see me. Not that we have very much to say to each other, but the visual contact was necessary. My dad is not able to walk about much now; he feels tired and breathless easily. He plays with his granddaughters but nothing strenuous like kicking a ball around or chasing them. Last night he sat for a while watching Barney with Hannah. My mother is somewhat stronger. She worries about her hair showing white under its henna dye. I understand better now what Rushdie says in Midnight's Children about characters coming to an end when they have run out of stories and energy. My parents have poured their lives into me and my sister, and now they have nothing left for themselves. I see my sister and brother-in-law doing the same for Hannah and Liesel, and doing it with such love and dedication. It is horrifying. Yesterday we went...

A memorial website has been set up for John Stahle. He was the publisher of the gay men's cultural journal Ganymede , a wonderful graphic designer, and a friend. He encouraged me to set up my own press, and designed my first full-length book of poems. He is sadly missed.

Cimarron Review Issue 171 arrived yesterday. I have a ghazal in it, accepted by Alfred Corn, one of the three poetry editors.  "Take heart and sing of love's recourse: the river" opens my ghazal sequence. Poets in the issue I recognize are Dorianne Laux, Edward Byrne, David Shapiro, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Billy Collins, Christopher Phelps, Michael Montlack, and Brent Goodman. Good company. Seeing my name in print, I feel like a poet again.

When does a life stay still? I am quietly terrified that I will not finish all the work I must before I leave for China in about two weeks. I have just announced at school the selection of the Common Book--Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith --but the books are still not in yet for distribution. There is a report on the diversity survey that I promised but have not written. I am traveling to Fairfax County, Virginia, this weekend, to see my visiting parents and my sister. The certain duties. The uncertain doubts. I escape into the gym almost every day so as to narrow my thought to the weights I am pressing. A hopeful thing, which brings along its own trepidation, is the daily email I am exchanging with KD who seems to make a great boyfriend. All the time the anxiety of these days is permeated by horniness, so that I want to smash my body against someone, and annihilate myself in an instant of pleasure. Watched a mildly good, mildly bad gay film last night called Denied . (Lee Rhumohr play...

I did not say in yesterday's post that another attractive aspect of Heaney's essay is its tender and non-ironic feel for sex. About his poem "Undine": It was the dark pool of the sound of the word that first took me: if our auditory imaginations were sufficiently attuned to plumb and sound a vowel, to unite the most primitive and civilized associations, the word "undine" would probably suffice as a poem in itself. Unda, a wave; undine, a water-woman-- a litany of undines would have ebb and flow, water and woman, wave and tide, fulfillment and exhaustion in its very rhythms. But old two-faced vocable that it is, I discovered a more precise definition once, by accident, in a dictionary. An undine is a water sprite who has to a marry a human being and have a child by him before she can become human. With that definition, the lump in the throat, or rather the thump in the ear, undine, became a thought, a field of force that called up other images. One of these...

I finally made my way to the end of The Poet's Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of their Art , edited by Reginald Gibbons. Some pieces are fully developed essays, some are collections of working notes or of aphorisms, a few are interviews, and a few more are poems. Most I forgot the moment I finished reading them. Except for Karl Shapiro's polemical piece "What Is Not Poetry?" Americans writing on poetry bore me. Too often they reduce intuitions to theories. Australian A. D. Hope does the same in his systematic exposition of "The Three Faces of Love." The Spanish are much more readable. Lorca on the duende. Antonio Machado on the sparing use of imagery in intense lyrical poetry. Of those writing in English, Seamus Heaney, in his essay "Feelings into Words" comes the closest to evoking the spiritual in poetry. His figures--the digger, the diviner, the Tollund Man--are originally and finally mysterious. He is ever...

TLS May 14 2010 Clive James on Peter Porter 1929-2010: He had spent much of his career caught in a fork, punished in Australia for trying to please the Poms, and punished in the UK for being an Aussie expatriate with a frame of reference above his station. Later on, he won acceptance in both camps, and by the time of his death he was a living example of the old country's culture reinforcing itself with the energy of the new, and of the new country's culture gaining scope from an expanded context. From the Australian viewpoint, if Les Murray was still the king of the stay-at-homes, Porter was the king of the stay-aways, the position of expatriate artist having at last come to be seen as a contribution rather than a betrayal. For the British, his work and stature added up to a powerful reminder that the old Empire lived on as an intellectual event. * To a painful extent, his character was shaped by what didn't happen: nobody, as he later complained, was ever kissed less o...

I think I may fall in love with Leonard Bernstein. His Symphony No. 2, inspired by W. H. Auden's poem "The Age of Anxiety," is melancholic yet optimistic, colorful yet witty, and, in its hospitality to different musical genres like jazz and big band, so generous. It captures what I like to think of as the best of New York. Bernstein is supposed to have said that he did not prefer any particular cuisine, musical genre or form of sex. A discriminating omnivorousness. Jean-Yves Thibaudet was poetic and funny on the piano. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Dudamel, attacked the music with discipline and gusto. (Glyn Maxwell wrote an interesting piece comparing the poem unfavorably to the symphony.) It made Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 "Pathetique" sound very old hat to me after the intermission. LW had the opposite reaction. The music was sculpted with emotional precision by Dudamel and his musicians. I could almost see the swirl of cream in the air above t...

Found Poem Two birds shat on my window. Two thumbprints, ridges and whorls. Dribbling a tail, they look like spermatozoa swimming up the sky. My landlord, who is also a cop, will be after me to clean the glass. *

Googling my name idly this morning, I discover Equal to the Earth has been briefly reviewed by  The Tower Journal : This first, full-length collection of poems by Jee Leong Koh, reveals why this young man has become an almost overnight sensation. His poetry can't be classified. It is at times internal and deep, then mundane and urban and even sarcastic and humorous. His language, mythic and crass, reveals a bold desire to comprehend love and human interactions. He uses words, rhythm and images like a daring, young master. Buy this book and watch this poet's future! You won't be disappointed. The Tower Journal is edited by Mary Ann Sullivan.

Walnut Literary Review Issue 01 is out. Poems by Annie Finch, Ocean Vuong, and Zhuang Yusa. I have three poems in it. * The Side Effects of the Cocaine , a comic, tells the story of David Bowie's life from April 1975 to February 1976. Addled from the addiction he claimed to have picked up in the USA, Bowie saw Jesus in a vision, which saved him from self-destruction and launched his Thin White Duke persona. Controversially he was quoted as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader." The story in the comic, written by Sean T. Collins, is tight, in a before and after structure. It does not explain too much, but enough for anyone who does not know Bowie's story to follow the comic. It compares rock stars to Hitler the expert manipulator of media, and asks why we give ourselves up to druggies and dictators. The serious message is inflected by a keen ironic awareness of role-playing. Near the end of the comic, when Bowie is asked by an interviewer wh...

Energetic dancing, rousing music, memorable songs, a story that shows its emotions on the sleeve, "Into the Heights" deserves its Best Musical Tony Award I discovered at the Richard Rodgers Theatre yesterday afternoon. Miranda, who grew up with his abuela in Washington Heights, started writing the musical when he was a sophomore at Wesleyan, and it performed on Off-Broadway before moving into the Great White Way. I especially enjoyed the crystalline voice of Janet Dacal (Nina) and the smoky singing of Christopher Jackson (Benny), who played lovers. David del Rio (Sonny) had great comic timing. The theater was packed with school groups, and there was plenty of whistling and sighing when Nina and Benny kissed, with a nod to West Side Story , on a balcony. Somehow the good-natured catcalls belonged to this stage re-creation del barrio as much as the salsa horn lines, bachata guitar lines and hip-hop. If the song "We are Powerless" was as much about political helpless...

The first of two ghazals accepted by qarrtsiluni is now up on their website . The theme for the issue is New Classics. You can download the podcast of me reading the poem. * Heard with LW last night Kurt Masur conducting the New York Philharmonic. The performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 was crisp and unified. It gave off the impression of great mastery, on the part of both composer and conductor. It was the first time I heard Number 1 live. I was too tired to pay close attention to Bruckner's Symphony No. 7, which followed after the intermission. Lots of swirling passages but I could not make sense of it in my sleepy state. The program notes tell me that Bruckner was a late bloomer. He composed the first of his nine symphonies in 1865-66, when he was 41.

This tale of an older woman writer mentoring a younger one came alive only in the second act. When Lisa Morrison (Sarah Paulson) wrote about Ruth Steiner's (Linda Lavin) long ago affair with Delmore Schwartz, the mentor threatened to stop the novel from going to press. The expected questions arose. Is it morally right to use someone else's life in one's writing? Where is the line between homage and exploitation? What are the claims of gratitude to a beloved mentor? Of all the justifications Lisa offered, the most intriguing one was that Ruth had given the story to her when she had told Lisa the story, that Ruth wanted Lisa to write it because she herself could not. I wish the playwright had pursued that line of thought, but the confrontation was diverted elsewhere. The whole exchange, the raison d'etre of the play, was somewhat repetitive and formless. Director Lynne Meadow did not help. The play's questions are my questions, but it gave off more heat than light. ...

The Garden joined forces with the Poetry Society of America to present a series of readings of Emily Dickinson's poems. Last night's kickoff had Billy Collins, Marie Ponsot and Brenda Wineapple (a biographer). Collins, reading partly from his introduction to a selected Dickinson, was particularly witty and concise. The Garden Cafe was packed to overflow, with about 150 people who had traveled to this location twenty minutes by train from Grand Central Station. Before the reading, HS and I wandered in Emily's Victorian homestead, recreated in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. We admired the tulips, heliotropes, bellflowers, camelias, daisies, columbines, peonies, and roses but were especially taken by the spectacular foxgloves. The lilacs, HS's favorite because of their lovely smell, were gone. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd...

An 11 AM concert on Saturday was a great idea. Rested the night before, I was alert and attentive throughout the All-Stravinsky program I heard with SB. In the first half, Valery Gergiev conducted the New York Philharmonic in Symphony in Three Movements (1942-45) and Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1923-24; rev. 1950). I liked the Concerto more than the symphony. The orchestration was lean but still sounded lush. Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and basses. Alexei Volodin was marvelously quick on the keyboard. After the intermission, what the audience came for, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1911-13). I remembered Helen Gardner playing it to her class at Oxford while explaining the clashing juxtapositions in "The Waste Land." The abstract, Cubist ceiling of the concert hall seemed to me a perfect accompaniment to the music: rigorous, scientific,...

On my way to school on Thursday, I was completely excited by reading Campanu's poems in PN Review 192. A Romanian poet (1932-94) exiled by the Ceausescu regime to Constanta (Roman Tomis that also hosted Ovid's exile), he wrote about place and placelessness in a voice at once witty, regretful and lyrical. The poems from The Ovid Complex (1989) are astonishing. The combination of thought and sight: Drift is what they worship here: on the cast iron shore the sea is rolling its dice and the heron, the only bird who cane make flying look difficult, hauls himself up on a ramp of wind like a geriatric on his stairlift. (from VIII) The knotty self-questioning expressed in self-irony: "I test my weakness... against some idea of fortitude, my impatience against the stoic or the socialist ideal... and I'm happy enough to be found wanting, or would be if I knew what it was I wanted. (from I) I have bought McGuinness's book Jilted City , which contains these t...

Am I becoming controversial? "The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity" is a mere reading list, according to Nicholas Liu, but Andy Quan thinks that the whole sequence "uses Asian images and ideas in ways that are not kitsch but instead playful and original and matches it with a voice that crackles with energy." Besides the question of personal taste, the different opinions pivot on a number of interesting issues, such as the reviewer's familiarity with Chinese history, his attitude to the same history, his poetics regarding historical references, his stance towards the recuperation of a lost tradition, in this case, that of Chinese homosexuality. That both Liu and Quan are part of the Chinese diaspora--Liu is Singaporean whereas Quan is Canadian--only makes the comparison more interesting. Quan's review  has just appeared in Mascara Issue Seven. The same issue publishes new poems by Patrick Rosal, and a youtube video of Franz Wright reading ...

I missed seeing this review when it first came out in April, in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore . It is a piece of intelligent criticism of my book. Though I disagree with several of his evaluations of phrase, line and poem, I find myself agreeing with a greater number than I am happy to admit. The comments on "The Grand Historian" and "Cold Pastoral" are particularly acute. I accept too that I am overdrawn at the Bank of Keats, as Liu so wittily puts it. He has a keen ear, and I am glad Singapore Literature has recruited an independent young critic. Koh Jee Leong's debut collection — discounting his intriguing chapbook of sonnets, Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada, 2007) — can fairly be described as overdue. Koh is no journeyman poet, and the best of these poems make important contributions to the Singapore lyric, such as it is. (One dares to dream that had this book been published sooner, we might even have been spared some of the past few years...

I enjoyed the play, performed in the Barrymore Theatre, more than I thought I would. When LW watched it, she walked out after the first act because she did not find its portrayal of racial issues in America convincing. She also explained, interestingly, that because she grew up in the South, she has a certain idea of racism. Not having grown up in the States, I have no idea how "true" the play is to racism in America. The perspectives depicted in the play may be unrealistic, overdrawn or cliched to many Americans, but I still find the play thought-provoking. A legal firm, with a white male principal, a black male principal and a black female associate, decides if and how it should defend a white man accused of raping a black woman. Jack Lawson (James Spader) is the tough-minded white lawyer who investigated Susan more extensively than other non-black applicants, before hiring her for being talented and black, although she lied in her application. Henry Brown, played by a fo...

TLS April 2 2010 from Andrew van der Vlies's review of Chinua Achebe's THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD: The lecture extols the virtue of the "middle ground", the point of view not given to extremism or "fanaticism." This is a space much appreciated in the Igbo society of Achebe's youth and one that informs his own insistence on considering the complex effects of the colonial encounter: "I could have dwelt on the harsh humiliations of colonial rule or the more dramatic protests against it", he writes, but he remains "fascinated by that middle ground . . . where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity". For many, it is Achebe's nuanced sense that while this "space was to be found primarily in the camp of the colonized", it was also "now and again" visible "in the ranks of the colonizer too", that lends his assessment of colonial contact its gravitas and pathos. Ikem Osodi,...

I have not read any Mishima but thought this interesting-looking film, directed by Paul Schrader, scored by Philip Glass, would introduce me. The film alternates between three sequences. The first, in "naturalistic" colors, shows Mishima and his cadets making their way to the Army Headquarters, where he harangues the assembled regiment on selling out to the capitalists instead of upholding the ancient samurai code of honor, before he proves his own honor by committing seppuku. The second, in black and white, flashes back to Mishima's childhood. The third, in "symbolic" colors, shows segments from three of his works "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," "Kyoko's House" and "Runaway Horses." The film is further subdivided into four thematic chapters: "Beauty," "Art," "Action," and "Harmony between Pen and Sword." All this is heavy machinery for telling a version of the life of this writer. ...