New and Selected Poems
By David Lehman
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About this ebook
Drawing from a wealth of material produced over the course of more than forty years, David Lehman’s New and Selected Poems displays the remarkable range of his poetic genius. A gathering of stunning new poems, prose poems, and translations from modern French masters ushers in the book. Selections from each of Lehman’s seven full-length books of poetry follow and are capped off by a coda of important early and previously uncollected works. Lehman writes poems that captivate as they stimulate thought, poems that capture the romance, irony, and pathos of love, and poems that are lyrical and lovely in unexpected, sometimes even comic ways. This is David Lehman at his best.
David Lehman
David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.
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New and Selected Poems - David Lehman
I
Escape Artist:
New Poems (2013)
Sixteen Tons
To prolong the moment
as a simile extends a sentence
about the heroine’s innocence
which she yielded to her lover and now
she hates him as Eve hates Adam
when she risks her life
to give birth to their child—
To sit in your car and listen
to the last bars of something great
(Bernstein’s Divertimento for Orchestra,
you find out later) and then you turn off
the engine, open the door
and return to your life, "another
day older and deeper in debt"—
That’s what the authorities fail to get.
You can learn a lot from
the sportscaster’s present tense:
Three years ago he beats out that hit,
about a player who has lost a step or two
due to a leg injury.
Three years ago, we all beat out that hit.
When I escape from this party
of unloved doves and loveless hawks,
I shall head to my desk and write
the sonnet that praises the antique pen
used to write out prophecies of today
with you on my arm, unafraid.
On the Beautiful and Sublime
Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime.
—Kant
1.
Radio is a hot medium;
Television, a cool one.
A train ride in Russia is a novel.
A train ride to Chicago is a movie.
A flight to Miami is a disaster movie.
A yew tree is a poem.
A banyan tree is the prose
Of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry.
A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.
Panties (white, silk, high-rise) are beautiful.
Jockstraps are sublime.
Paranoia is poetry.
Insomnia is prose.
2.
Death by lethal injection is prose.
Death by hanging is infernal.
Death by firing squad is the noble sublime.
Homer is the tragic sublime.
Cigarettes are sublime.
Cigars are sublime.
Pipes are beautiful.
The Song of Songs is beautiful,
Genesis and Job are sublime.
Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.
Ruth is beautiful and sublime.
Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.
Knowledge is beautiful,
Understanding is sublime.
Reality Check
1.
In the last analysis—does anyone still use that phrase?
it’s a great fake phrase, like the moment of truth
which Nabokov ridiculed so convincingly—
you can be sure of two things.
One is that Congress is going to kick the can down the road.
You know it, I know it, but somebody who doesn’t know it
can turn a sucker bet into a sucker punch and that is the essence
of what we call a derivative. And today we like to bank on the VIX,
which measures volatility as the square root of variance.
2.
My friend Ajax (who used to play hockey for the Islanders)
says he is a momentum investor, leery of value traps,
and didn’t recognize my wife because he has facial blindness.
He looked me in the eye like a marshal in a Western
and said, "What was the other thing
that we can be sure of?" I sold him on derivatives.
It seemed an act of kindness to lie.
It could be a game changer,
I said, knowing the phrase
would get him to take out his checkbook.
We’ve passed the point of no return,
he said as we shook hands.
We always do,
I said.
What about the long run?
he asked,
lighting a cigar with the fifty-dollar bill
he had used to snort white powder
from a mirror to his nostrils.
In the long run,
I said, we are all dead.
Keynes,
he said, recognizing the quote.
Canes,
I said, helping him to the door.
The Great Psychiatrist
I visited him three times. The first visit we spoke about T. S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party and the character he reminded me of, a sort of spiritual psychiatrist: a no-nonsense male authority figure with T. S. Eliot’s world-weary deep rueful skeptical intellect, the waspish sting neutralized by Anglican gentleness with a smile of resignation. It was a scary but fascinating ordeal—talking to him, I mean. The fact that his first name was Eliot may have had something to do with it. I went home and reread the play and I saw it performed on Broadway and in London’s West End. When I talked to him about it, I realized that one out of every ten of Eliot’s analysands is a martyr in the making, preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice in a South American revolution or a famine in Africa. One out of ten,
Eliot agreed. But not you and not me.
The third time I visited him we played a game of free association. He would say death wish
and I would say pleasure principle
and then we reversed roles, and I would say pleasure principle
and he would say death wish.
The sessions had a profound effect on me. It was after the last visit that I understood that these two impulses, the death wish and the pleasure principle, meet at the point of orgasm. From this insight everything else followed: job, wife, children.
Mother Died Today
Mother died today. That’s how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today. She laughed and said you sure know how to cheer me up. The telegram came. It said, Mother dead Stop Funeral tomorrow Stop. Mother read it in the hospital and laughed at her college boy son. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t remember. Mama died yesterday. The telegram arrived a day too late. I had already left. Europe is going down, the euro is finished, and what does it matter? My mother served plum cake and I read the page aloud. Mother died today or yesterday and I can’t be sure and it doesn’t matter. Germany can lose two world wars and still rule all of Europe, and does it matter whether you die at thirty or seventy? Mother died today. It was Mother’s Day, the day she died, the year she died. In 1940 it was the day the Germans marched into Belgium and France and Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister. The telegram came from the asylum, the home, the hospital, the assisted living
facility, the hospice, the clinic. Your mother passed away. Heartfelt condolences. The price of rice is going up, and what does it matter? I’Il tell you what I told the nurse and anyone that asks. Mother died today.
(May 10, 2012)
The Laffer Curve
On the back of a restaurant napkin he composed
the definitive exposition of the theory
that the economy is driven or decisively
restrained by the federal income tax rate,
and a lot of people went along with that, because
it was in their interest to do so but also because
he made the argument so casually and lent his apt name
to the diagram describing a direct ratio
between tax rates and the rate of unemployment.
That was an economist named Laffer, Arthur Laffer.
But I heard the news on the radio and in my mind
there was a curve that a mathematician had devised
to measure the success or failure of a comic endeavor
with highest honors awarded to practical jokes
that turn out to have a major influence on history
despite their intent to be just funny, a harmless
diversion, demonstrating that the last laugh,
whether bitter or hollow or even downright mirthless,
is always at the expense of the losers.
Story of My Life
There must be dozens of poems with the title Story of My Life.
Maybe even hundreds.
It’s a natural, a meme—which is pronounced to rhyme with team, by the way,
though I keep thinking it should be même, as in the French word for same.
It is spelled m-e-m-e and examples include self-replicating phrases,
knock knock
jokes, an almost au courant idiom like same old same old,
or a beer jingle, Émile Waldteufel’s Estudiantina
waltz (op. 191) adapted to the needs
of a Brooklyn-based brewery named after a Wagner opera, Rheingold.
"My beer is Rheingold the dry beer. Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer.
It’s not bitter, not sweet, it’s the extra dry treat,
Won’t you try extra dry Rheingold beer?"
What memories that jingle stirs up, mostly about the futility
of the New York Mets, whose on-the-air sponsor was Rheingold beer.
Anyway, this meme, story of my life,
has the virtues all clichés have:
You can rejuvenate it, jolt some meaning back into it, while honoring the vernacular,
and to do that is a challenge for young poets, and an opportunity,
and so every year a poet on the faculty somewhere is asking his or her students
to write the poem in them that finds its inspiration in the title Story of My Life.
It’s not a form exactly but a prompt, an assignment, an idea for a poem,
like getting everybody to pick photographs of themselves as teenagers
and write poems triggered by the associations.
The assumption is that everybody has a story to tell,
a sad story perhaps but one full of hidden corners and exciting detours,
and the trick is to tell the story as succinctly as possible,
it being understood that by story
the poet means
not a narrative so much as the suggestion of one, an enigmatic anecdote
the length of a Zen koan or a poem by Stephen Crane,
that can serve as the allegory of the writer’s life.
And today, as I sit here in the yard of 105 Valentine Place in Ithaca
hoping to get some sun
at this time of day when the angle of vision is perfect
and I can survey my properties:
the passing clouds that mask the yellow sheen
of old man sun, and the gray clouds that are drifting off like his daughters,
and here comes the blue, patches of it, and clouds like big balls of cotton,
the new hemlock, the adolescent juniper, the old reliable quince bush,
and three dark, tall, and graceful pines that stand sentry over the pre-sunset celebrations
of evening, another job accomplished, another day in the book—
I sit here, just as I wanted to do all day,
with my legs and arms warmed by the sun,
with my notebook and my pen in hand,
and I am the Daddy of all the scene,
knowing the sun and the clouds, the wind pushing them
and even the stately evergreen with clusters of yellow nuts on its branches
are performing for my benefit and at my command—
I sit here, as I wanted to do, and the breeze grazes my cheeks
and there are bowls of plums and white-flesh peaches
and a sweet-smelling melon on the table beside me,
and the day offers other enticements to come:
a swim in a blue pool followed by dinner prepared by Stacey
for me and special guest son Joe,
grilled swordfish steaks with the pesto sauce Stacey concocted,
a salad of heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, pasta punctuated with corn,
and a bottle of premium sparkling Blanc de Blancs.
And so, now that I have it, what do I do with the happiness of this moment?
I, who never took a writing workshop but have taught many,
think of how I would handle the assignment for next week’s class.
I write about a boy, not me but like me, in green tennis shirt
and khaki shorts, a blue baseball cap and well-worn brown moccasins,
and the boy wants nothing more than to sit in the sun
but always arrives too late: the diagonal line dividing the yard
into equal areas of sun and shade
vanishes as soon as he gets there.
That’s all. I write it in the third person, call it Story of My Life.
Yours the Moon
Yours the moon
mine the Milky
Way a scarf
around my neck
I love you
as the night
loves the moon’s
dark side as
the sky, distant,
endless, wears her
necklace of stars
over her dress
under my scarf
that she wears
against the cold
The Breeders’ Cup
1. To the Fates
They cannot keep the peace
or their hands off each other,
breed not, yet preach
the old discredited creed.
Love is charity conceived
as a coin dropped
in a beggar’s cup.
Reason not the need.
Gluttony is no nicer than greed
or wrath, but lust
is our categorical must.
We have no choice but to breed.
2. Olympia
Olympia lies on her couch
with an insolent stare,
her hand hiding her crotch,
a flower in her hair.
She splits the lot of us with a sneer:
We are either breeders or queer.
We will fight wars because of her.
She will root us on. We will win.
The face in the mirror is not brave,
but we crave contact with her skin
and the jewel in the mouth of her cave.
She tempts like a sin
and we fall
into a deep enchanted sleep,
and wake up ready to make the leap,
ready to heed her call,
only now we’re alone,
a platoon of ex-pals in Manhattan,
on streets less friendly than wilderness.
She tempts like a sin
but then sends us home to the wife,
commands us to resume the life
we had planned to give up in her honor:
the life of a dutiful husband, a modest success
in his profession, impressive
in credentials, in mood depressive
(but nothing that a pill won’t cure).
You ask if he is happy? Sure.
And Olympia lies on her couch,
with her insolent stare,
her hand hiding her crotch,
a flower in her hair.
Three Dialogues of One
"What you call freedom
I call privilege
what you call law
I call biology
what you call liberty
I call pornography"
"What you call necessity
I call capital
what you call poverty
I call subsidy
what you call pornography
I call art
what you call crime
I call freedom"
*
"Say Pop
how come
you talk
about ‘this
country’ as
if you
from another
country come?"
"But I
do from
another
country
come"
*
"The beauty of your skin
is my sin," said Adam to Eve
in the garden.
(The face in the mirror
swims to the surface
and sees her face there.)
"When we lie together
for warmth in winter,
the beauty of our sin
produces our kin,"
said Eve to Adam
in the garden.
Why I Love You
for Stacey
A woman in California asked me whether I have a favorite word and if so what is it? I said my favorite word is you.
I love you.
She was disappointed. I think she expected me to opt for mellifluous
or sibilance
or some other onomatopoeic special.
But pronouns in a poem or prose poem function as unknowns do in algebra, and you
is the most versatile one out there. The word means the same singular and plural, and it is gender-free, so it can conceal not only identity but sex and number. This makes you
as useful as it
and even more complicated from the epistemological point of view. You
can be Albert or Albertine, and no one need be the wiser.
When I say you
in a poem, I immediately establish a certain intimacy even if the words I
and you
in the specific case are pronominal fictions representing abstract entities, imaginary selves, characters in a dream, the author and the reader. Thus T. S. Eliot begins his love song: Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky.
Join me in this adventure. Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock may lack confidence. But I, the author, am as suave a seducer as you are likely to meet.
Many claustrophobic poems would get an instant oxygen infusion if you were to add a second person, you, to the I-dominated mix. In I Believe in You,
one of the great songs in Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Robert Morse sings to himself, to his mirror image in the executive washroom, while the man’s rivals harmonize ("gotta stop