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    New and Selected Poems
    New and Selected Poems
    New and Selected Poems
    Ebook350 pages3 hours

    New and Selected Poems

    By David Lehman

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    About this ebook

    A major collection of poems from one of our most accomplished poets, the prominent man of letters behind The Best American Poetry series.

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateNov 5, 2013
    ISBN9781476731889
    New and Selected Poems
    Author

    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

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