The Lady is a Tramp

It happened incrementally
I needed the dough
I was in a lot of trouble
I went to the library
I needed to come up with 40 bucks
to get my kitty’s, Doris’s, tests back.

I took a couple of Fanny Brice letters
slipped them in my sneakers
sold them to a place called Argosy.
They would pay more for better content.
A big white space at the bottom of a letter
after, 'yours truly, Fanny Brice’
I got an old typewriter
I wrote a couple of hot sentences
improved the letter and elevated the price.

“I have a hangover out of Gounod’s Faust”
“canny old Kraut remains one of my most cherished friends”
“a bright, talented actress,
quite attractive since she dealt
with her monstrous English overbite.’’

larky and fun and totally cool

Is it absolution she’s seeking, or admiration?

On and off welfare,
a horror beyond my talent to describe
My most enduring memory
is the odour in the elevators:
eau de desperation!



From Lee Israel, literary forger - obituary, The Telegraph, 24 February 2015. Submitted by Grace Andreacchi.

In no great hurry

In order to build
a career
and be
successful,

one has to be
determined.
One has to be
ambitious.

A window
covered
with raindrops

interests me
more.

Seeing is
a neglected
enterprise.



Taken from the New York Times article, Saul Leiter, Photographer Who Captured New York’s Palette, Dies at 89, The New York Times, 27th November 2013. Submitted by Howie Good.

La vie aux bouts des doigts

Solo and ropeless
Edlinger climbs out
underneath an overhang,

hangs effortlessly off one arm
several hundred feet
off the ground while

dipping the other
into a bag of chalk,
utterly indifferent

to the danger,
before swinging his foot
into a crack above his head

and pulling himself up.



From the obituary of Patrick Edlinger, 15 June 1960 – 16 November 2012, in the Daily Telegraph. Submitted by Angi Holden.

The Shape of Our Rage

Gradually men rise up to confront them.
One of the bravest is
a teenage hairdresser’s apprentice.

Vidal Sassoon, the man who gave us
the Five Point Cut, the Asymmetric Bob
and Mia Farrow’s £2,500 haircut

was a street-fighting man.
“That popinjay Mosley.
Fascists preaching hate on every corner.

The same abuse that I remembered
from the 1930s,
I was too young to do anything about it.

The pictures we were seeing
from Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau
changed the shape of our rage.

I went to work at the salon in Mayfair
with a badly scratched face
and this refined client said

Good God, Vidal, you look terrible.
What happened to you?
Nothing much, I said. I just fell over a hairpin.”



Taken from a report published by Anti-Fascists Online following the death of Vidal Sassoon, published on 9 May 2012. The poem consists of selections from the article, with punctuation added. Submitted by Jo Bell.

On the surface

Greed probably undid her in the end.
She was said to have taken a bait of uncooked tiger nuts,
which swelled inside her until she floated upwards.
Telltale empty paper bags were found on the bank of the river.
Or she may have been pregnant,

with 300,000 eggs causing complications, or stressed
after so much catching and releasing,
those constant brushes with extinction.

On the line between life and death, at Kingfisher Lake,
she breathed the fatal air and did not sink again.
And there she lay,
like Wisdom drawn up from the deep:
as golden, and as quiet.



From the Economist, the obituary of Benson, England's best loved fish. Submitted by Mat Riches.

Post-Painterly Abstraction

for Helen Frankenthaler

She departed from the romantic search
for the sublime to pursue her own path,
pouring turpentine-thinned paint
in watery washes onto raw canvas
so that it soaked into the fabric weave
becoming one with it.

Her method emphasized flat surface
over illusory depth and the nature of paint,
releasing color from the gestural approach
and romantic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,
landscapes looking to many like a large paint rag
casually accidental and incomplete.



From the biography of Helen Frankenthaler in the New York Times. Phrases have been picked from the article and put together, in order, instead of one whole excerpt. Submitted by Jenni B. Baker.