How Hansel Gets Eaten

Like any unremarkable sister, Gretel forgets the moral. When the spruces introduce

the wipeout-angel boy, all wax and eagle wing, she would like nothing

more than to lick him like she licked the candy cane

A-frame all those sleeps ago. Suck the kelp from behind his left ear.

You smell like burnt soup, Gretel says in lieu of licking. You smell like dying

gummy bears, Icarus replies. Salt-boy and sugar-girl sink together into the trough

of underbrush. She tells him about her gingerbread troubles. The brother. The cage. He tells her about how it felt to split open

the sky. The gull-caw. The contrails. A de-ascension in watercolor

with no time to dry. Gretel wants to know if it hurt. Oh yeah, Icarus says. It killed.

The apron has pockets, which means there are still good things. She shows him

the stashed bloodroot and black cohosh, picked special for tomorrow’s brother

stew. She meant to save room for the goldenseal. How are we supposed to know

how much is too much? she asks Icarus, who has don’t-ask-me eyes and globules of wax

on his cheeks that say, I am not to be trusted with twinkly objects. But Icarus, too, is a child.

Car chase of a boy. Lockjaw of a girl. How much & how close?

This is how it has always been. So forget the chicken bone, he tells her. Forget the cage.

And she does. She forgets. Forehead to forehead in the briar patch, they forget,

leaving Daedalus and the witch to the simple pleasures of a dead child.

—Eliza Gilbert, from Threepenny Review (Summer 2023)

116: Lotte Lenya // September Song and Other American Theatre Songs of Kurt Weill

September Song and Other American Theatre Songs of Kurt Weill Lotte Lenta 1958, Columbia Masterworks

Lotte Lenya recorded September Song and Other American Theatre Songs of Kurt Weill at 59, eight years after the death of her husband Weill and a few years since her Tony-winning return to the stage in a 1956 off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera. Her voice was no longer the graceful, swooning instrument of her youth but she retained the intelligence that had always made her a favourite of lyricists like Brecht and Ira Gershwin, and the years had gifted her enough guile to paper over the cracks. These are, as the title states, theatre songs, and Lenya acts the hell out of them, bringing the verses down to near spoken word, allowing the quaver in her soprano to shade the songs with an autumnal melancholy.

The collection is a love letter to her career with Weill, but also a celebration of an era of musical theatre that was drawing to a close. While we continue to recycle and refigure the cultural artifacts of the 1960s and the decades after, the music of the preceding eras carries the special poignancy of a world which has been allowed to truly die. (I'm reminded, maybe apropos of nothing, of the great Clinic lyric from “Distortions”: “You’ll never know how often / I’ve pictured you in coffins / […] But I love it when you blink your eyes.”) The collection of lyricists represented on this set is remarkable, from Gershwin to poets Langston Hughes and Ogden Nash, to multi-Oscar winner Alan Lerner, to Maxwell Anderson, whose words Lenya seems to mine most deeply. “Lost in the Stars” (the title song from the 1949 adaptation of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country) opens and closes with a prayer delivered by a male choir, but it’s Lenya’s lonely, underplayed admission of doubt that wrenches at the heart:

“But I've been walking through the night, and the day Till my eyes get weary and my head turns grey And sometimes it seems maybe God's gone away Forgetting the promise that we heard him say And we're lost out here in the stars, Little stars, big stars Blowing through the night.”

“Stay Well,” from the same play, is another winner, a paean to the ambiguities of love sung by a woman who has not forgotten her hunger for it: “Though you bring fear at dawn / Despair at even’ / Stay well, / Come to my door again.”

There are a few dollops of that marmalade sentimentality the early twentieth century was marinated in (such as the short dialogue with her child “Willie” on the otherwise sturdy “A Boy Like You” from Street Scene), but on balance Lenya’s selections from Weill’s songbook beautifully represent the couple’s cool continental style and compassionate souls.

116/365

I will watch and/or listen to the top two options before the end of October and post full reviews.

Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don’t publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines’ contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind—journals that love poetry not wisely but too well. Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader’s interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews— a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn’t command the reader’s attention wasn't considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell’s poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories. A few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic and The New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue, but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture. What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues. By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments.

– Dana Gioia, "Can Poetry Matter?", 1991 [x]

[William Blake :: Song of Loss]

* * * * *

Good Grief

by Adam Phillips

From a symposium on the topic of loss, which was published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Threepenny Review.

The cult of loss has many enthusiastic members. And as with any cult, critics tend to be demonized or ignored, if only for using the word “cult” about a group of committed, like-minded people. Emerson was never celebrated, or even really engaged with, for writing, after his son’s death, “The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.”

It can seem astoundingly callous not to take seriously the scale of loss. It is as though transience and deprivation define us, and so anyone challenging our being bewitched by the idea of loss, our wish to apply it everywhere, our wish to use it to explain everything (aging as the loss of youth, illness as the loss of health, madness as the loss of sanity, evil as the absence of good, and so on), is likely to be deemed merely out of touch with reality, or needlessly provocative. Mourning seems to be our universal religion.

But if we are essentially elegiac creatures—obsessed only with what we have lost, or can or will lose—we should note that no other animal seems to be similarly stricken. Clearly animals feel loss: we witness something happening to them when they are sick, or when a fellow creature dies. But they seem to live as though survival is their thing, rather than loss.

It is language, acculturation, that has given us loss and its elaboration. Just to use a word is to acknowledge the absence of its referent, as though language itself makes loss our theme and medium. Words are always a mourning, however blithe, for what they represent. And by the same token, language as our second nature makes it difficult to work out what loss may be a way of thinking about—other, that is, than loss itself. It is not obvious what we are using the idea and the experience of loss to do for ourselves, and whether this essential perplexity gets us the lives we want. What else could a good or viable life be preoccupied with? What might we be interested in, if we were not so interested in loss? Can loss be redescribed in any genuinely useful way, or is it simply our fate as mortal, dependent, and occasionally rational animals to see everything we do as somehow organized around loss, or the anticipation of it?

When Robert Hass began his great poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” with the lines “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking,” it seemed at once incontestable but also strangely dismaying. All experiment and curiosity and unpredictability and improvisation and complexity collapse in the wake of loss. This, we might think, is essentialism at its most extreme. This is what it is like to be the emperor of one idea. This is what it is like to live in a cult.

Childhood, for Freud, was primarily, if not exclusively, an initiation into loss. What is called development is what we can make out of loss. So when Freud famously described, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, what became known as the fort/da game of his grandson—in which the child threw a wooden toy on a string away from himself and then retrieved it, uttering as he did so infantile versions of “Fort!” (gone) and “Da!” (there)—Freud took it that the game was a way of mastering his mother’s absences, by repeating the traumatic experience symbolically. What he has had to suffer passively, he made into a game that he could actively control. This, Freud suggested, is what we all do. This is even how culture works for us, what culture is for—to master loss. Whether or not the child is mastering loss, he has certainly redescribed his experience of his mother’s inevitable intermittent absences. Is it now a loss or a game?

Loss may be the very thing we need to find ways of transforming, to prompt our inventiveness. We might become less terrorized by it, and so less obsessed and impressed by it. We might then be able to understand and use Picasso’s wonderful boast, “I do not seek, I find.” Finding would be the point, and not losing. Loss would no longer be, as it were, an end in itself. When loss is not catastrophic loss, it is a form of stage fright.

[from Harpers]

hi sweet, i’m not sure if you ever mentioned this but do you happen to have any tips on getting poetry published or self publishing? ☺️ thank you so much 🫶🏻

i may have answered this before but honestly i cba to go looking for it so! quick tips (no experience on self publishing so i won't go into that):

write a lot, submit even more. send each piece to as many places as possible

don't send poems to publications where they don't fit the genre or vibe at all tho that's a waste of your time & theirs

some editors offer critique for free or for a small tip! it can be helpful when starting out esp. if you're just getting rejections and don't know what needs fixing

beware of predatory publications and even of well meaning ones that will sadly dissolve after 1-2 issues and be forgotten and your poems published w/ them will not be eligible for most other pubs any more

there is a sweet spot between super fancy and hard to get into (threepenny, paris review, etc) and online-only journal with 2 editions and 31 followers. look for indie presses that actually print their stuff (although there are also good online-only journals) and ones that promote their writers effectively online

that being said you should absolutely shoot for the moon and submit to threepenny etc. just in case.

you WILL get rejected a lot and you have to remember it's no reflection upon you or your work

if you get a gut feeling that a certain poem would be the exact right fit for a publication's vibe though, that's a very likely acceptance in my experience

sometimes editors will request changes to your poetry. you should consider their advice and have the detachment to kill your darlings where objectively it would improve your work

but also know that you don't have to accept every edit request, and it's okay to reply "no, this is a hard line for me, i want this line unchanged" and often they'll be "ok no worries"

follow, talk to, interact with, and read other poets' work. their experiences can teach you a lot and also there is so much good indie stuff out there

unfortunately a lot of the publishing world happens on twitter. an account there is a necessary evil

if you wanna publish something, don't post it online until it's out (sometimes you'll have to wait a certain time afterwards bc of contractual agreements). it reduces your submission options

never sign a contract you haven't thoroughly read

enter competitions! they're a lot of fun! and you may actually win!

hey do you have any formal poetry magazine recs?

Hey! If you're looking to mags to submit to, I'm not the best person to ask -- @candiedspit will know much better than I. But New Pages and Submittable  and Chill Subs are always great places to check!

As for journals whose work I respect (outside of the obvious Poetry Foundation and New Yorker and Paris Review):

AGNI

The Georgia Review

Threepenny Review

The Kenyon Review

Ploughshares

Granta

New England Review

VQR

Poetry Northwest

Shenandoah

I’m totally forgetting tons of places. I tend to read poets more than I read literary journals themselves, but a great way to discover good pubs is to look up the work of poets you admire, find what journals they’ve been published in, and then read their work. 

Folks, please feel free to add on to this! 

on today's episode of Sol reviewing Threepenny Adaptions, the 1989 Mack The Knife movie

it was... cool? idk what to feel, some parts i enjoyed a lot, some very little, overall i am certainly happy i watched it but i probably won't watch it again

the main negative point for me was the music, i really, really didn't like the translation they used - i think it's the original Blitzstein one? i am familiar with the altered Blitzstein version that was used in the Broadway adaption, which i personally think is both the most aesthetically pleasing one as well as the closest to the original text (both in actual text as well as in Vibes™); the Donmare Warehouse one is too "edgy" (or shall i say crude?) for my tastes, and the one used in this movie was too tame AND too goofy, also the text in some parts didn't have anything to do with the original, like, at all; this really spoilt my enjoyment of the whole thing a lot

visually i was also not that much of a fan? my first thought when seeing the set was the Muppets' Christmas Carol, and it didn't really go away; the costumes were very hit or miss for me, some i loved a lot (Polly's costume with the top hat when she visits Mac in jail, the whores in general and especially Jenny, Jonathan's coat and changing hats), some were terrible (whatever Celia had going on but especially that horrible nightcap, Polly's costume in the beginning which looked like she wandered over from the set of Little House on the Prairie); i also thought the ensemble dancing scenes absolutely terrible

i don't have much of an opinion on Mackie's portrayal, he was fine, but nothing special to me, i was kind of indifferent to him, which was a little odd, since i loved Raul Julia in the Broadway staging, dunno what was the point here

Polly was also pretty boring to me, but then again, the movie didn't give her much to do, she was a little too much on the naive side for my tastes

for the first time, i really liked a Jonathan! he was tall and lanky and had a certain sleazy conman kind of vibe, which i think is essential to the character, the only thing i didn't exactly like was that he was very tame and more on the comedic side? he felt not cynical enough, and also not at all religious, which is an important facet of his character to me

Celia was nice, definitely not my favourite Celia, but her and the Jonathan played really well together, i didn't like it how she was just a bumbling drunk and nagging wife for most of the movie, but in the scenes where she wasn't, she was amazing! also i really loved that Jonathan was tall and lanky and Celia short and chubby, which is how i imagined them while reading :D

Tiger Brown was surprisingly good looking, the Filch surprisingly terrible looking, Lucy was very good although personally i would have switched the actresses for Polly and Lucy

my absolute favourite however was JENNY, she was absolutely flawless and perfect, the acting was great and she looked almost exactly like i imagined Jenny to look, tall, frizzy red hair and a big, aquiline nose, she just lacked the freckles and she would have been straight from my head, she even wore a black lace dress similar to the one i painted her in; this opinion might or might not be influenced by how goddamn GAY i am for this woman

the street singer was a really cool addition, i like narrator type characters like this a lot and he was very fun; the whole Suky Tawdry thing was less to my tastes idk it just struck me the wrong way; the ending was very Brechtian, but didn't fit with the decidedly un-Brechtian rest of the movie, so it just felt eh to me; also i sorely missed the Second Threepenny Finale (it's one of the best songs!!! how could you cut it!!) and why has seemingly no adaption ever the Kampf um das Eigentum scene between Polly and Lucy in it, why do y'all hate FUN! (maybe i should be thankful this had Lucy at all)

some details i liked a lot included the expanded conversation between Jonathan and Celia in their shop, the fact that Lucy bit Polly's fucking ankle during Eifersuchtsduett (please don't show me a staging that doesn't have this ever again), lots of funky hats, the whores in general and their costumes and set design in particular, the fact that Polly's parents both have a brogue and she hasn't, the chariot chase, the fact that the window scene with Mac and Celia was included (it's one of my favourites!), and last but not least the way the Ballad of Immoral Earnings was done almost making my cry

Why No One Could Find Mengele: Allen Dulles and the German SS

(Peter Dale Scott, The Threepenny Review, 1985)

Good morning, people of the platform, lost on your way to or from work in clouds of your own making, pot smoke, frozen breath, your own private microclimate. Good morning, beatboxers, and to everyone: sellers of loose cigarettes, of aluminum and copper wire, and to those leaning on windows, still asleep, and those propped up in the bus stop shelter.

—Cindy King, from “No Context” (Threepenny Review, Summer 2022)

D. Nurkse’s A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems charts the ongoing career of a poet whose music was forged in the dreamlike, fraught America he came to know as a child of new immigrants. This poem originally appeared in his 2005 collection Burnt Island, a book carrying echoes and reflections of 9/11.

Searchers

We gave our dogs a button to sniff, or a tissue, and they bounded off confident in their training, in the power of their senses to re-create the body, but after eighteen hours in rubble where even steel was pulverized they curled on themselves and stared up at us and in their soft huge eyes we saw mirrored the longing for death: then we had to beg a stranger to be a victim and crouch behind a girder, and let the dogs discover him and tug him proudly, with suppressed yaps, back to Command and the rows of empty triage tables. But who will hide from us? Who will keep digging for us here in the cloud of ashes?

. .

More on this book and author:

Learn more about A Country of Strangersby D. Nurkse.

Browse other books by D. Nurkse and read new work by D. Nurkse in The Manhattan Review, The Threepenny Review, and On the Seawall.

Nurkse will join Susan Wheeler on radio for an interview and reading on WBAI-FM, 99.5, on April 25 at 9 PM Eastern Time.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: City in a Seashell by Tiffany Osedra Miller – NWVS #180

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City in a Seashell features a selection of #Caribbean-American #Carnival #poems, literary sketches, fables, elegies and vignettes evoking personal expressions, memories and ancestors of Antigua, Jamaica and the mystical island of Gabinda. These poems come from an urban-tropical soul, a grieving American daughter of Caribbean parents who have gone on to that magnificent Carnival in the sky, leaving her an immigrant to every island she can find replicated in her city streets.

Tiffany Osedra Miller is from New York City where she teaches poetry and drawing workshops. She was a finalist for the 2020 Calvino Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review and Palette Poetry.

PRAISE FOR City in a Seashell by Tiffany Osedra Miller – NWVS #180

“Miller writes with a lush surrealism that manages to be joyful, urgent and haunted at the same time. Her words span familiar worlds but never stay in them for long: her true mission is to create in a space of imagination that, like the rhythms of the Carnival celebrations that thread through her work, feels more real than reality. Miller is a tremendous talent and a voice for our time and for our tomorrows.”

–Liz Fania Werner

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A poem by Rebecca Lehmann

Elegy with Land Bridge

for Dean Young

Death happens and we all have to keep going. Remember writing? I don’t. When my teacher died I remembered his collection of embroidered shirts, each thread a river to his heart. I remembered his dance moves, each jerk of his arms a line break. I remembered the way he ran through town, faster, faster, though surely his heart was already on the way to failing, surely he was on his way to a new heart, his feet hurrying the pavement. Let’s think about eyeballs or crazy shapes. About Dadaism. About Kenneth Koch. Let’s think about Keats, whose manic highs and lows fascinated my teacher, who my teacher even looked like! Now that I’ve put an exclamation mark in my poem, this is a real elegy to my teacher, who I will never see again. This is a real elegy to the landscape of soft rolling hills that edge dramatically into limestone cliffs when they hit the river. This is a real elegy for a small rock painted with green swirls that somebody left on my desk. I couldn’t see the edge of the cliff or the river or the rock. I could only see my teacher, at the front of the classroom gesticulating wildly as he quoted Hopkins, each quote an ecstasy, each movement of his arms a splash of sprung verse, and every time he pushed his glasses back up his nose bridge—a little goodbye. There, there are two people on a bridge, on a land bridge at the edge of a river, and one of them is stopping in the middle and turning around to take a last look at the trumpet vines blasting their blossoms in the late August fog, and at the hills, and at us.

Rebecca Lehmann

© Copyright 2023 by The Threepenny Review, where it was first printed.

Top Image: Dean Young

Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief by Jessica Hendry Nelson: Book Review

Jessica Hendry Nelson is an award-winning author and Assistant Professor in higher ed. Readers may recognize her from her debut novel and other work. She has been featured in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner,  North American Review, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. Now she’s back with another memoir. Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief by Jessica Hendry Nelson is…

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"Sea Spiders" and Works by K. K. Yee

"Sea Spiders" and Works by K. K. Yee

Kenton K. Yee recently placed poetry in Constellations, Plume Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, Stanford’s Mantis, The Indianapolis Review, Delta Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, among others. Kenton writes from northern California and consults in artificial intelligence. SEA SPIDERS Think about it.…

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