24 New Yorkers

In the first, a poem

By Victoria Amelina (1986-2023)

A Ukrainian poet and war-crimes researcher

Who died from injuries sustained

In a Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk.

Outside, the sun

Which has not read these words

Shines on breaking waves

Which could not bring themselves to read these words.

Together they distract each other from these facts.

Two weeks later, Alex Ross laments

Changes to programming at the Lincoln Centre

And the demise of Mostly Mozart.

He lists what appear monstrous alternatives –

With the populism embodied in Tik-Tok

And the whole grotesque immediacy

Of fingers flicking images across a screen.

Programs at the Lincoln Centre

Now promise these alternatives to Mozart:

‘The fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop’;

‘A Criminal Queerness Festival’;

‘Cultivating Access Ecologies’;

‘Korean Arts Week’;

‘Social Sculpture Interventions’;

‘Participating Movement and Mindfulness Sessions’.

Next, Stevens, cartoonist,

Who must be extremely venerable

Or else has left

A vast repository

Of delight to draw on,

Has a drawing of a resolute cat

Proceeding across the room

Leaving behind it a front door

off its hinges

And lying on the floor inside;

One of two cat-lovers is saying

‘That’s it. We get a cat door.’

Through the space

where the door was

We see trees and the outside world

Which is where I am walking now

Alone and without departed friends

With whom I am pictured

in sea-side photographs

Now in a drawer like a dusk shadow.

In another from the heap, two parrots remark

of a third:

‘He’s not afraid to say exactly

what other people say.’

Bird cartoons are often particularly charming,

including one

In which a bird returns to the nest

to find a note,

‘Hatched. Back soon.’

Sometimes perhaps due to a conjunction

Of shadows, a whole issue

Seems to exercise only the page-turning hand

Without pause. After such leafing through

One finds oneself pondering the odd construction,

I had as lief

As in the sentence, I had as lief

Taken a leaf out of another book entirely

With the cloud of doubts passing and parsing;

And there is the puzzle of the subjunctive

As it remains stranded in English

Like a flounder floundering above the tide line.

After reading about the amatory tendencies

Of Henri-Pierre Roché, roué

And Truffaut’s chance discovery

Of his first novel (published at 75)

We walked out on to the beach

Which seemed to be struggling

To reposition itself as metaphor.

The tide had brought detritus –

Cuttle-fish canoes, a carapace,

A moth pinned out as if still flying –

And I found in the same issue

For Aug.14, 2023, a poem by Nick Flynn

In which the past was configured as a horse,

That difficult figurative cantering

Cantilevered by an excellent refusal

To explain or resort to the picturesque.

There are limits to which the suspension

Of disbelief can be asked to extend.

Such liminals are embodied in those poems

In which the milking cow of metaphor

Leaps spectacularly over the moon. Many such

Appeared when Paul Muldoon steered the ship.

For New Yorker poems then seemed to sit uneasily

Shivering in their negligées of surrounding prose.

For instance, an extravaganza such as, “The flute

On which the present improvises on the past’

Might almost make it past the judges

But when it is pulled through a hedge backwards

(As used to be said of someone’s appearance)

Or is followed by apotheoses of the arbitrary,

The reader may find his gaze slipping

To the adjacent article on giant squids.

Elaboration such as The New Yorker espouses

Characterises the musical aesthetic of Liszt.

In 1835 Joseph d’Orlique wrote:

‘His performance is a waterfall,

An avalanche that tumbles downward

In a torrent of harmony whose swiftness

Produces the nuances of the rainbow;

A diaphanous, vaporous form,

Suspended by the rounds of aeolian harmony,

Its shimmering clothing flowers stars, pearls, diamonds.’

Despite Liszt’s fanatical devotion to Beethoven

And his tremolo-driven transcriptions of the symphonies,

He regularly performed the Moonlight Sonata

Overlaid with additional trills and flourishes.

In this, his aesthetic is of excess

And a relentless extemporization. In this

He shares affinities with The New Yorker

And William Shawm’s ideal of boundlessness.

This tendency towards limitlessness

Is found incidentally in the predilections

Of Henri-Pierre Roché, novelist and benign roué.

His zeal in libidinous pursuit corresponds

To his romantic ardour in buying and selling

Paintings by Derain, Picasso and Braque.

With his friend Duchamp, he believes

That not only is a painting, as Denis notes,

A succession of marks side by side

On the flat surface of a canvas,

But is also, happily, bearer of a succussion

Of American dollars, repeatedly renewable.

Enjoying the breeze in Derain’s Bugatti

Or a variety of Picabia’s cars, he pursues

Compliant demoiselles as well as those by Picasso.

From Kenneth Tynan’s expansive profile:

Louise Brooks, June 11, 1979.

‘She takes the screen and fiction disappears

along with art, and one has the impression

of being present at a documentary. The camera

seems to have caught her by surprise

without her knowledge’ – Henri Langlois.

That slick jet cloche of hair that rings

such a peal of bells in my subconscious.

Ebony bangs down the intelligent forehead

and descending beside her eyes

in spit curls slicked forward at the cheekbones

like a pair of enamel parentheses.

Trojan Helen with spit curls,

fiction vanishing like igniting celluloid stock;

the camera surprises her, but surprise

is as remote in her gaze

as seaweed flowers.

Tynan discovers her still alive

and living alone in Rochester.

She offers lemming-leaping facts:

‘Regarding Scott and Zelda

did you know that for years Scott

spelt Hemingway with two m’s?

I was a cocktail with vermouth

stirred by the swizzle stick of her gaze.

Here are accounts of increasingly daring,

Strenuous and abrasive or ‘guttural’ attack

For Summer from The Four Seasons

With added emphasis on the bass

And the ‘prickly sinuosity’

Of the upper voices. How endearing

And enduring to imagine even more

Extreme performances under Vivaldi’s direction

With the children’s naturally strident scraping.

Through the rails of the terrace

We are watching foam assert gravity

Down the face of a large standing wave.

The foam falls independently of the wave

Like rain down a frosted window

In a solitary room. And we think,

Of Louise Brooks at Rochester,

Equally independent, in her room, still reading,

When she was widely thought to have died.

Lemmings! A cover shows a joyful scene.

Crowds of lemmings, with beach umbrellas

And picnic baskets and sunglasses and buckets

And spades, press forward on the cliff top

To leap excitedly and float down

Towards the inviting beach below.

In a succession of excellent covers, the next

Shows the Mona Lisa with her hand

Held up to shield her face

From the cameras of paparazzi.

Here one reads of an intimate production

Of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya,

A chamber performance with an audience

Of forty barely accommodated in the space.

Those who remember Joan Plowright

As Sonya and hear still the ringing plangency

Of her recalling someone saying

‘What a pity she is so plain’,

The word ‘plain’ like a knife cutting ice

Will note the fact that the present Sonya

‘Is too old and too beautiful, making

Both unsuitabilities fused with eloquence.’

Perhaps even an audience of forty is too large

For the moment of affective startlement

‘At the moment when this Astrov and Sonya

By chance almost fall into one another’s arms.’

Another note on nonagenarian Kurtag, widower,

Still playing Bach transcriptions

As he did for many years with Marthe

And eloquent praise for those four hands

In transcriptions deliberately leaning forward

To cross hands as tokens of affection

Most notably in BWV 687

With the vaulted descent into the bass

Intricately walking its way through darkness.

And sensing or fearing mortality

One turns anxiously to the date of this issue

To determine the balance of probability,

Teetering in the breeze, that he is still playing.

A cartoon with buffaloes.

One says:

‘Home now is on the range

But I’m originally from Bridgeport, Connecticut.’

Herein are memories of the golden age

Of drawings

As exemplified in Charles Addams’

Wan youth looking into a pool

While his anxious girlfriend says

‘Is there someone else, Narcissus?’

Past New Yorkers have seen several

Digressions on ‘Home on the Range’

with particular attention

To the comic opportunities

of ‘Never a discouraging word’

As well as the question relating

To ‘And the skies are not cloudy all day’

At which one wants to ask

‘What proportion of the day

Are the skies not cloudy?’

A long article on language

Touching on a few outlying or outlandish

Wave-breaks

lapping at its edges.

At one of these edges a teacher

Expatiates and adduces the changing fortunes

Of the word ‘fantastic’.

‘Language

Evolves by isolating elements

Of itself and then irreversibly

Imposing on them

fresh meanings.’

An instance is given. A teacher

Introduces Berlioz and his ‘Fantastic’ Symphony.

A boy remarks, ‘He must have been

fond of himself.’

Brief Dylan riffs:

His first song was for Brigitte Bardot.

His voice has evolved to be

A rock-breaking plough

Or ‘like a dog with its leg

Caught in barbed wire.’

His is a complex minimalism;

He is pragmatic and therefore decides

‘Hemingway doesn’t use adjectives

So I read Hemingway.’

A poem (not published in The New Yorker)

Offering advice in fractured times:

Moonless in the quarter before New Moon

The sea sky takes on a defensive aspect.

‘Don’t describe the same thing for more

Than a line,’ it says. ‘Keep passing the ball.

‘And no matter what has gone before

Keep on keeping on. Don’t look back.

‘And if you’re tempted to make sense,

Be sure it is for a brief lightning only

Against a dark sky. To be published

Follow Jorie and Anne and spread out

Over a double page.’ Junket clouds

Now make it impossible to see the moon

(If it has at last put in an appearance).

Nothing depends on anything else, in the sense

That connective determinism is old hat,

To be replaced by chaos and a butterfly

Making waves across great distances.

For verse has taken off from the past

When people were intent on saying something

Into a disembodied speaking trumpet.

The day was multicoloured,

As bright as the folds of parrot silk

And perhaps Ottoline Morrell’s hat

Which The New Yorker reports was

‘A crimson tea-cosy trimmed with hedgehogs.’

The article commends also

‘Her pale pink voluminous Turkish trousers’

Which offset her flaming red hair.

The day resembled all of these and more

And was in many was as unusual

As Ottoline Morrell herself –

Six feet tall even without her red high heels,

And, in the painting by Augustus John,

Angular in a black velvet gown

‘Topped with a gargantuan black hat.’

Away from these pages, the day

Persisted in being peacock bright –

And as kind – as Ottoline appeared to so many.

Past greatness must include Charles Addams

And his two unicorns waiting on the shore

As the ark is already in the distance;

Or the sheep drinking at the bar

Who, as the bartender answers the phone,

Say, ‘If it’s Bo-Peep we’re not here.’

And related to this trope, the man

At the psychiatrist’s as the phone rings.

He says, ‘If it’s my wife I’m not all here.’

And the cat questioned in the dock. ‘Isn’t it true

That you merely feigned affection for your owner

For the sole purpose of obtaining tuna-fish?’

Then Thurber’s frozen pond with skaters:

One burbles, ‘I said the hounds of spring

Are on winter’s traces. But let it pass.’

In 1872 the British Government

Launched the first expedition to explore

The ocean’s depths and dredge the ocean floor

For scientific examination. The giant squid

Was not yet known. That expedition

Which lasted four years was gruelling

And led to two drownings, two incidents

Of madness and one suicide. Still

The giant squid was elusive.

Such long New Yorker narratives

Are characteristic and admirable, even somewhat

Like dredging the ocean floor for ephemera.

But despite these splendours one cannot avoid

Hoping against hope to find

More monuments to Salinger’s Glass family.

On the sea’s edge on firm sand

Spread out in the manner of a long

Discursive New Yorker opinion piece,

Feathers, tiny shells, moths

Pinned out as if waiting classification,

Bees, apparently sentient but strangely

Out of their element with grains of sand –

All of these objects are mysterious, as the sea

Like a reader approaches with curiosity.

With the utmost tact and deference

It could perhaps be noted – with regret –

That the current team of New Yorker cartoonists

Frequently, rather too frequently, err

In mistaking the grotesque and marginal

For the bright essence of absurdity.

Thus we feel that, were Mr Shawm

Still looking through a pile of submissions

He might red pencil rather more

Than are currently being red pencilled.

Granted that some of the old tropes

– The psychiatrist’s couch, the evolving fish,

Cats versus dogs – may have been

By multiple variations exhausted …

But what we miss is what Mr Shawm

Would surely have demanded more of –

The sweetness of Stevens, the charm

Of Maslin, the insouciance of Levin

In the halcyon days before Tina Brown

Flooded page after page with photographs.