Tanuja Desai, in homage to Prince

Earlier this month, June 7th, was Prince’s birthday—the Minnesota governor even declared it Prince Day.

In honor that “The Morning Papers,” a collection at Media Diversified, invited writers of color and Prince devotees to reflect.  Tanuja Desai Hidier remembers him in her poem “Zindagi bhar nahin bhoolegi woh Purple barsaat ki raat”:

Dearly Beloved,
My mama she loved U
Wrote me when they found U
New England—North London
En route 2 our girls’ school

Trans-Atlantic we mourned U
WhatsApp; Gram-on-phone too…
What’s funny and so true
My memories of U

Take me back 2 that shared roof
Mom, Dad, Raj
(Ur sister too)
And a lifetime of U…

Read the whole thing HERE.

Hat-tip Paris Review, where many moons ago Tanuja worked with this editor.

On Simin Behbahani, an Unacknowledged Legislator of Iran

A fine tribute this week by Sohrab Ahmari on the poet Simin Behbahani, dubbed the Lioness of Tehran.  She was 82, nearly blind, but the regime still felt compelled to slap a travel ban upon her.

For a lesson in the power of artists to shake despots, consider the Iranian poet Simin Behbahani. The Islamic Republic four years ago imposed a travel ban on her in retaliation for poems she'd written denouncing Tehran's crackdown on the 2009 Green uprising.

She was 82 and nearly blind, yet she was barred from boarding a France-bound plane and interrogated through the night in March 2010. Behbahani died Tuesday from respiratory illness.

Behbahani's poems are routinely memorized and quoted in Iran. "In more than a thousand years of Iranian literature, it is unprecedented for a woman to have reached this level of national recognition during her lifetime," notes her English translator, Farzaneh Milani, in an essay on Behbahani's work. She was popularly dubbed the "Lioness of Iran."

Born in 1927 in Tehran, at the dawn of the Pahlavi dynasty, she published her first poem at age 14. Persian poetry was at the time undergoing a revolution of sorts, and Behbahani eventually came to lead its vanguard, alongside the likes of Nima Yooshij, Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad.

In their work, idyllic wineries and star-crossed lovers were replaced by serious social and psychological themes and portraits of everyday life. [...]

Behbahani's most-beloved ghazal, widely anthologized in the West, was published soon after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"My Country, I Will Build You Again" expressed the fragile optimism of a nation still convinced that it had just staged a democratic revolt—not one to usher in a new Islamist dark age. Its opening couplet:

My country, I will build you again,

If need be, with bricks made from my life.

A tip of the hat then to Simin Behbahani, another "Unacknowledged Legislator."

Read the whole fine article by Ahmari "in" the Wall Street Journal HERE.

Mirror, by Mark Strand

A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks.
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looked up into the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me, but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.
Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

- Poem courtesy of Knopf Poetry.  Listen to Strand read this poem here.  Sign up for Knopf's Poem-a-Day service here.  Lastly, a hat tip, and deep bow in her direction, to Andrea A. for her suggestion of the poem. 

The River-Merchant's Wife, by Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you

- translation by Ezra Pound

with my thanks for the suggestion to Lawrence Osborne

Frank O'Hara reads "Having a Coke With You"

Epilogue by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

-- Robert Lowell

... hat tip to Miss Whistle

Sitting at Night, by Po Chu-I

Facing the courtyard at day's end, I welcome night--that dark

realm ripe for sitting at this lamp, looking into bright clarity.

No words for such depths of heart, I wonder who can share them.

That's when the moment allows a whispered howl: once, twice.



-translated by David Hinton

Mary Kinzie - OBJET

Dear child, why
is it still, along the pillow
this hand of yours half
open on the brightness
thrown by the lamp
anemone in
water the current
once passed through

In sleep you answer
that life catches
against the edge of
its own likeness
vein ever blue
in the body's
marble drift

... posted with permission of the author

Elizabeth Bishop's Vision

"Off and on I have written out a poem called 'Grandmother's Glass Eye' which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye."

... thanks to the heroic Jeannie Vanasco for sending this.

Unacknowledged Legislators

I'll soon again begin posting admired poems and thoughts about poetry at Unacknowledged Legislators. A hat-tip here to the heroic Jeannie Vanasco, who sends me most of the best that will be appearing.

A further thought on the subject from Charles Borgen:

"Literature, at its best, bridges gaps of experience and culture. It helps you stand in another’s shoes. If one of the things we, as international lawyers, care about is a just world then fostering an understanding of each other’s views is an important step in that direction, regardless as to whether we actually agree with those views. You cannot let rhetoric bury nuance, anger bury analysis. Anger can spur great literature and righteous anger can be the seed of political reform, but great literature and just policies are more than angry reactions. Writers (and international lawyers) are fortunately not the world’s legislators. But both can have a profound influence in how we understand and shape our world."

Poem by Jeannie Vanasco

I want to be wrong in a beautiful way

like the stagehands who wheeled out the sun when the actor
was under the moon;
like the scientist who thought the seeds of trees
blown into the sea make birds—
“I have seen them fly from the waters,” he wrote;
like me saying my father died last night—
he died ten years ago;
like Newton dividing white light
into the seven colors of the spectrum for the seven notes
of the musical scale for any other way would break
the Pythagorean principle of harmony.

Under the Elm, by Pierre Martory

- translated by John Ashbery

Under the elm for a long time
I've been waiting for you, O my soul.
Weeks follow each other like books
Perused, my thoughts elsewhere,
Full of music that's distracted too
Full of a deep buzzing where words images
Perceptions dwell in the jumble of memory
Of which our mind is composed.
And nothing comes to assert your coming
No other sign than smoke.
Is it you that we should have welcomed
When tenderness filled our hearts?
You that we should have discovered
On the shores of pity or of love?
I have not been taught to notice your presence
Even when reveille raises the limbs
Of a future happiness; even when
Tired of a long day I seek
Silence in the immense dark where I jettison
What differentiates the sun from death.
Hours accumulated, absurd riches,
I am ready to give up the trees and the cities
But I still hope to receive you, my soul,
Laden with my own eternity.
You who are me, who resembles nobody,
You that I must give back some day to who knows who.

Recommended to TMP by the heroic Jeannie Vanasco

Fiery Furnace's "Pricked in the Heart"

Listen, these are not drunken as you suppose.

It might not be 3 o’clock in the morning like it seems:

The little children will be prescient. And your

young men will see shows,

And your old men will dream dreams.

- from the album Widow City

On sad suburban afternoons of autumn by Reginald Gibbons

On sad suburban afternoons of autumn,
the piercings, leather and tattoos that bought
these bungalows from mixing bowls and golf
barbeque and drink beer, watch football, eat,
laugh like ponies--everything has changed
and not a lot except which music blares
through the meat-scented smoke and streaks of sun.
Big motorcyles drip dark staining oil
where Oldsmobiles once waited between breakdowns.
Slightly aslant on windows are the self-
adhesive souvenirs of stadium concerts
by rockers getting osteoporosis;
T-shirts advertise five-pointed leaves;
kids are neglected in the age-old ways,
unkempt and shrieking as they run--or older,
buy their own weed, sneak drinks, ditch school and fuck.
In front yards, back yards, alleys and dead ends
may all these signs convince the distant gods--
or Fate, or The Fates, an absent "G-d," a Christ
somewhere or other, not right here, an Allah
with gnashing prophets, or a great magician,
or the chance events that can destroy a life--
that there's no need to bring down any more
than customary miseries and brief
illusions of good luck on such old, young,
different, same, frail creatures of a day.

first appeared in Ontario Review #62
posted to TMP with the author's permission

Useful Advice by Carl Dennis

Suppose you sat writing at your desk
Between days, long before dawn,
The only one up in town,
And suddenly saw out the window
A great star float by,
Or heard on the radio sweet voices
From wandering Venus or Neptune,
A little hello from the voids.
Who would believe you in the morning
Unless you'd practiced for years
A convincing style?
So you must learn to labor each day.
Finally a reader may write he's certain
Whatever you've written or will write is true.
Then all you need is the patience to wait
For stars or voices.

posted to TMP with the author's permission by the heroic Jeannie Vanasco

Brooklyn Bridge at 125

Today the Brooklyn Bridge turns 125 years old. And it looks so good I'd buy it. As Hart Crane wrote: "O, harp and altar of the fury fused/ How can mere toiling align thy strings?"

Photo courtesy of the G. G. Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

Insta-lanche! For which nod thank you, GHR.

What Hands Remember by Johanna Ekstrom

What hands remember

arms at sides
seeming to be waiting

the big words
sleep beneath
the palm of the hand

a sweet sucked
to a sliver
words like glass
a splinter under the fingernail

Who died of love?

In the lining all the children sleep
mouths and eyes wiped clean
They have no mouths where mouths should be
no sight where sight should be
Whoever would trust to the injury itself?

From these hands fires can dart
characteristics be burned away

Hands fall like tulip petals
sweep away a facial feature

As hands do in sleep
they remember their loneliness

She places the petals over the children
covers them with the palm of her hand

No-one died of love
There is a contrary wind I have never known

Johanna Ekström, born 1970, is a writer and artist. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Coda by Jason Shinder

A sad and beautiful coda by the late poet and arts administrator...


CODA

And now I know what most deeply connects us

after that summer so many years ago,
and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry,

and it isn’t illness, although we have that in common,

and it isn’t gratitude for every moment,
even the terrifying ones, even the physical pain,

though we are grateful, and it isn’t even death,

though we are halfway through
it, or even the way you describe the magnificence

of being alive, catching a glimpse,

in the store window, of your blowing hair and chapped lips,
though it is beautiful, it is; but it is

that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches

of what humans can find out about each other. 

More by and about the late Jason Shinder HERE.

Away by Nicole Burdette

Last week I asked my favorite poet/actress/playwright for another poem for TMP, and she sent "Away," which you can see below. Burdette was a co-founder of the Naked Angels Theater Company in New York and in her spare time played Tony's cool sister Barbara from California in the HBO series "The Sopranos." My favorite Burdette performance, however, was as Brad Pitt's sullen Indian girlfriend in "A River Runs Through It." Along with the poem, she also sent this reminiscence of my old boss George Plimpton:

"I read this at the Oak Room at the Algonquin and the Great George was there, and after I read he picked me up into the air (my feet clear off the ground) and told me that was the poem HE had been trying to write all these years - I still don't know quite what he was talking about, and Steve Clark had to take his shoulder and say 'Okay George, you need to let Nicole down now.'"

AWAY

I lived in a windowsill once
A year plus; I never slept
Hardly ate – saw the sun
I was in love then – with a boy
He never saw where I lived
And it frightened me to think
Of a place where he would keep
His things – though he never frightened me
He, rather, held me in his arms,
At night on the steps of that church
On Sixteenth Street and one night
Again – in his arms on a park bench
On St. Luke’s Place he made me a poet
That boy – I sometimes think – that boy
Who was fifteen years older then –
Still is – that boy who brought me
A single silver bracelet made by Indians
In Montana – that boy whose father is a Saint
It’s true that boy –
Who was a prodigy many years back –
At Trinity in Dublin – the favorite son
Until the day he read Yeats and suffered –
Suffered so much – suffered I guess
What his father did before him –
- Listen carefully to what I say –
- About this boy

He read Yeats one day
And lost his mind –
He got lost –
They found him and sent him home
Destroyed
You see I could never go to his place
see his things –
I but lived in a windowsill –
Barely enough for my weightless self
That’s the summer I watched a Saint
Walk away from my windowpane
He always had a slight limp
And his eyes squinted as if he was
Forever in the midst of making a very important decision
Should I go up University or down Ninth Street
I saw him last contemplating that corner

- posted to TMP by James Linville. See more by Nicole Burdette here, here, and here.

Imperfect Paradise by Nicole Burdette

Only an American would bring a canary
Down with him in the mines
Only an American would make a sport
Where you could steal home and win
The Greeks say if catastrophe strikes
To practice composure
Is the credo – no irony – no opinions
Go back. Go back. To Huckleberry Finn
With exceptional flux I dreamt of
Orange blossoms and violence

Is there nothing quite like the face of a losing man?
A soldier, a boxer, a lover, a boy
I see all sorts of Johnny Boys strut
Down Saint Marks Place
They know. That greatness falls…
And all those underdogs and Mary Magdalene’s
Do their best
For as the sailors proverb goes
A sea refuses no river

These are not the bravest men –
But some of the kindest
Not the strongest men –
But some of the smartest
We stand there; witnesses to it
We can’t help but worship
Even the most ragged soul
A flawed ideal is worthy of reception
I wait here
From ‘prayer to shivering prayer’
As Yeats put it returning to war