@ TaylorSwift, LeBronJames, AdamKinzinger et al.; Thank You, BAP; Hello, sun dried tomato basil tortilla quesadillas. (And RIP Ka).
I’m All Lost In …
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#53
1) In the tragic event that Trump, who’s now campaigning as an actual Nazi, wins the election, and there’s no question that he might (the Electoral College— Michigan in particular— is a real problem for Kamala Harris), I’m obsessing over this little personal fantasy:
@ CaitlinClark, BillieEilish, LeBronJames, RetiredUSArmyGeneralMarkMilley,, TaylorSwift, FormerUSRepAdamKinzinger, BarackObama, LizCheney, I hope there's a plan in the works to announce immediately prior to the start of any possible second Trump term, the formation of a new, high-profile bipartisan group called The National Association for the Preservation of Democracy and Truth.
Stacked with a venerable board of political leaders, hard-working journalists, business leaders, labor leaders, civil rights leaders, women's rights leaders, military leaders, and celebrities, backed by huge institutional money with a giant staff of smart attorneys, the group will be dedicated to fighting Trump’s 1933-slide.
The N-A-P-D-T, Protecting democracy since 2025.
This singular group should subsume the National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, NARAL, LGBTQ rights groups et al. because if Trump does get back into the White House, those of us who are worried about MAGA America will need a dramatic show of new strength and organization.
In the mean time, go Kamala Harris.
2) Thank you, Best American Poetry 2024.
Every October for six years now, when Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner Poetry publishes BAP —an annual, curated selection of poems from America’s top-tier literary journals—I lovingly rush out and buy a copy. They’ve been publishing it since 1988, but I’ve only been hip to it since October 2018. This yearly autumn purchase marks a somewhat new, and newly defining, chapter of my current life, reading and writing poems.
This year, however, I wasn’t feeling BAP. I have been disappointed in the poetry I’ve seen published over the course of 2024 — in the New Yorker, in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review (I subscribe to all of these), and in the bevy of chapbooks that arrive in my mailbox all year. My general, perhaps curmudgeonly, criticism is that too many contemporary poems read like a DEI training rather than like luminescent nebulae in print. Don’t get me wrong, I think the-personal-as-political can make for great poems; Jane Wong, who’s poetry I wrote about earlier this year—is one outstanding current example.
Fortuitously, despite my misgivings, I decided to go ahead and extend my BAP buying tradition. Last Saturday, while visiting Valium Tom at his Phinney Ridge bookstore, I bought the newest edition.
Things start off with a solid poem by Kim Addonizio (BAP is organized alphabetically by poet); Addonizio is a marvelously cynical, acerbic, funny, and thoughtful writer I’ve liked for a while. BAP 2024 selected “Existential Elegy,” her breezy diary outtake that, though drowsy with some later-in-life ennui, simultaneously bottles youth’s goofy lightning from a loving distance.
The collection really takes off, though, around “H.”
Starting with Richie Hofmann’s “Lamb,” a poignant reminiscence about a one-eyed stuffed animal, BAP goes on a tear.
There’s Marie Howe’s “Chainsaw,” a masterful poem that contemplates the basic human impulse to build and create, to work. After overlaying the “whine of a drill,” “the fastening metal to metal,” the “someone nailed to a cross,” and the “tearing it down” with varied vantage points from within and without the labor process, Howe settles in on the intimate and startling vantage point that humans at work have in relation to one another.
Then there’s Omotara James’ “Closure,” an elegant rumination on being the legal witness to the judicial proceedings of her parents’ divorce: “what’s louder: the pluck of the arrow, or the bang of the gavel,/or the everlasting gaze of the firstborn daughter.”
And also George Kalogeris’ “Byzantine Chanting,” a gorgeous account of a childhood memory starring the cantor at a working class Greek Orthodox church: “Like Arion, our master singer had crossed an ocean—/But not on the back of a dolphin (my favorite myth).”
Howe’s poem is the one that made good on the real reason I buy BAP: to discover poets I’d never read before—and then dig into more of their work.
The former poet laureate of New York (2012-2014) with four critically acclaimed books to her name, Howe, whose tidy poems are built up from short stanzas, is evidently a star player in the poetry world.
She has a new book out which, perfectly for my purposes, includes a large sample of poems from her four previous books—The Good Thief (1987); What the Living Do (1997); The Kingdom of the Ordinary (2008); Magdalene (2017), plus 20 new poems. Her set of new poems, which come at the start of this collection, includes “Chainsaw,” though here it’s titled “The Saw, The Drill.”
Like that omniscient poem, Howe’s poetry in general—which lingers in quiet, matter-of-fact observations—has an effortless way of deconstructing the disparate rhythms of daily life, much like the way a high school English teacher might diagram a sentence or a chess master might game out a chess board in play.
Howe’s talent lies in describing all those discrete POVs and then putting them back together again in a new way that seems to connote God.
Howe’s latest collection, ©2024
For example, a 2023 poem, “The Willows,” which begins, “As we are made by what moves us,/willows pull the water up into their farthest reach/,” concludes a few lines later this way:
So, under travels up, and down and up again,/
and the wind makes music of what the water was.
Hokey? Mary Oliver-y? Maybe? But Howe has a darker, sadder, even violent edge (see “The Split” from 1987’s The Good Thief) that renders her conclusions nervously unsure as opposed to coyly ambiguous.
Here are the closing lines to “The Saw, The Drill” (or is it “Chainsaw”?)
And who or what made us that we should make/such things as we do and did? We grow smaller. We break things./ Then turn to each other and beg for what no human can give.
3) I’m onto the perfect weeknight dinner: Healthy quesadillas.
Only “onto” because my kitchen was bachelor-devoid of provisions this week, so the last-minute quesadillas I fried up in avocado spray oil on Tuesday night were minimalist by default, but aslo so tasty in their own right that I can only imagine how good they may ultimately be with the works. That is, with fresh greens, diced tomatoes, grilled onions, sauteed mushrooms, and maybe blanched cauliflower piled on as well.
As it was, I had a bag of Mission brand tortillas, a can of Siete brand refried beans, Bragg’s nutritional yeast, and some Cholula brand hot sauce to work with.
Thanks to the fact that this particular make of Mission tortillas—Mission® Zero Net Carbs Sundried Tomato Basil Tortillas—were as fluffy and weighty as beautiful rain clouds, and that Seite’s vegan, organic-bean black beans were light and rich all at once, my ad-hoc quesadilla dinner ended up being supremely satisfying: Garden-flavor heft topped with smoky and smooth bean paste.
10/15/24, Vegan Refried Black Beans
Grocery Outlet on East Union & MLK Jr. Way is well-stocked with all the Mission brand selections, so, I headed over there later in the evening with XDX (who had come over to sample my dinner surprise) so I could get a new package of tortillas, along with all the fixings and veggies necessary to plate some intentional quesadilla perfection next time. …
Finally, and speaking of the poet laureate of New York, while this doesn’t count as an obsession, there’s a sad note this week:
RIP Ka, the lo-fi, yeoman Brooklyn rap artist (and recently retired firefighter and captain with the FDNY). Ka, birth name Kaseem Ryan, died Saturday at the young age of 52. His wife posted the sad news on Ka’s Instagram account; she didn’t specify the cause of death.
Minimalist, DIY rap artist, Ka, RIP, 1972-2024
One of my favorite all-time songs is Ka’s “Decisions,” an inspirational jam from his 2012 LP, Grief Pedigree (the second record from 11 self-produced, self-distributed, underground albums he released over nearly two decades).
Ka’s stripped-down music was insistently downcast, but “Decisions” buoyed me time and time again during many bouts with the blues.
Over a trembling carousel organ and a slow two-note bass and piano groove that channels Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” (which Ka alludes to with the quick line “Hustle here/or pick a better town”), the song’s lyrics catalog a series of everyday philosophical “Either-Ors.”
His basketball court reflection always lifts me up:
“Chuck like a motherfucker/or try to assist?”
We’ll keep trying, Ka.