Elegant Thorn Review

David Orr Reviews Thom Gunn: Selected Poems

2009-07-11T09:17:00.002-07:00

A nice review from the New York Times of Thom Gunn's new Selected Poems.

Too Close to Touch

By DAVID ORR

Published: July 10, 2009

Christopher Felver/Corbis -
Thom Gunn

All poets, if they are any good,” Charles Simic has said, “tend to stand apart from their literary age.” The key phrase here, of course, is “if they are any good”; average poets don’t just stand within their age, they compose it. But we sometimes talk as if poets are exceptions not simply when they write well, but because they write at all. According to this way of thinking, the art form demands such devotion to one’s individuality that every poet, no matter how lowly, is a kind of outsider — a Cheese Who Stands Alone. This perception frequently finds its way into depictions of poets in popular culture; it also emerges in the vehemence with which poets themselves regularly declare their opposition to labels, categories, schools, allegiances, booster clubs, car pools, intramural softball teams and so on. Yet when everyone is busy standing apart, how is it possible to stand out? What does real independence look like?
Possibly something like the work of Thom Gunn, whose new Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $14) is edited by August Kleinzahler. Gunn, who died in 2004, began his career as a hot young poet in England (he published his first book, “Fighting Terms,” when he was only 25) and was generally associated with the taut, plainspoken aesthetic favored by writers like Philip Larkin and Donald Davie. In 1954, he left England for San Francisco, where he eventually settled after studying with Yvor Winters at Stanford. Gunn embraced the city’s bohemian lifestyle — Edmund White called him “the last of the commune dwellers . . . serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night” — and he grew increasingly interested in syllabics and free verse even as he continued to hone the metrical forms that distinguished his early career. He’s possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD, and he’s certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both Winters (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch . . . well, Allen Ginsberg). This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd background.
It’s also the kind of background that leads to misleading career narratives. Like most people, poets rarely undergo multiple metamorphoses in their lives and art over a short period. In time, they might shift their style; they might take up different subject matter; they might buy a duplex in Miami. But generally speaking, their existence is reasonably consistent, and they stick fairly close to what they know. Gunn, however, not only moved from England to America, he exchanged the rarefied air of Cambridge for the hothouse of 1960s-era San Francisco, became openly gay, started dabbling in drugs, began writing about the urban underbelly and set about tinkering with the verse techniques that had made him (relatively) famous — all in the space of about 10 years. Critics often attribute changes in a poet’s style to changes in his life; this much change in both arenas threw some readers into what could be described as a tizzy of questionable causation. British reviewers who opposed Gunn’s technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his adventurous lifestyle with his more “relaxed” versification. (You can still see this dynamic at work today, whenever critics contrast Gunn’s libido with his tight metrics — as if no one had ever written quatrains about having sex before.) In any case, all of the talk about Gunn’s life and style, and style and life, almost makes one wish the poet had stayed in England; at least then no one could say he wrote seven-syllable lines because of Jefferson Airplane.
Kleinzahler believes that Gunn’s development was steadier and, in some ways, more conventional. He’s right. Gunn began to come into his own with the publication of “My Sad Captains” in 1961, when he was 32, and his work steadily strengthened for the next four decades. In his best, most characteristic writing, Gunn is what you might call a poet of friction: he’s interested in the ways in which surfaces push off, against or into each other. Consider his description of surfing in “From the Wave”:
The mindless heave of which they rode
A fluid shelf
Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,
Loses itself.
Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals
Loosen and tingle;
And by the board the bare foot feels
The suck of shingle.
There are many ways to write about surfing — one could focus on the danger, the grace, the speed and so forth. But it’s typical of Gunn that while he gives us a sense of all these elements, he’s drawn to instances of contact: the point at which “the bare foot feels / The suck of shingle”; the moment in which “marbling bodies have become / Half wave, half men, / Grafted it seems by feet of foam.” Feel and touch and pressure are constants throughout this selection, whether it’s the longing of a hawk for “the feel . . . / Of catcher and of caught / Upon your wrist”; the swimmer who remembers “the pull and risk / Of the Pacific’s touch . . . Its cold live sinews tugging at each limb”; or simply the “secure firm dry embrace” of longtime domestic affection.
Even in the AIDS-related elegies that dominate his most famous book, “The Man With Night Sweats,” Gunn is drawn to comparisons involving substance brought to bear on substance. “Still Life,” a poem about a terminal patient, concludes with the image of “the tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished O.” “The Missing” imagines the vast web of friendships, now vanishing, as a “supple entwinement through the living mass / Which for all that I knew might have no end, / Image of an unlimited embrace.” But the poem that gives “The Man With Night Sweats” its title is perhaps Gunn’s most arresting use of this sort of metaphor. The poem begins with a man waking at night (“I wake up cold, I who / Prospered through dreams of heat”) and recognizing the rising weakness in his once-powerful body. It concludes:
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
The delicate suggestion of alienation, or at least separation, between self and body (“Hugging my body to me”) presages the even greater disruption that occurs in the final couplet. We think of the earth as being our foundation: we’re “on solid ground.” The image of an avalanche is especially disturbing, then, because it suggests that what had supported our bodies is now bent on destroying them. The touch has become a blow; the heat of friction has become a conflagration. Here, Gunn is (consciously or not) rewriting the great American poem of unity between body and earth, Robert Frost’s “To Earthward.” That poem ends: “When stiff and sore and scarred / I take away my hand / From leaning on it hard / In grass and sand, / The hurt is not enough: / I long for weight and strength / To feel the earth as rough / To all my length.” Oh no, says Gunn, you don’t.
One can quibble with some of the choices in this volume. Kleinzahler’s version of Gunn is a little more austere than some might like, even when the poems themselves are bent on advertising their countercultural bona fides. It’s puzzling, for instance, that space was made for a druggy yet prim couplet about, yes, Jefferson Airplane (“The music comes and goes on the wind, / Comes and goes on the brain”), but not for any of Gunn’s epigrams; for instance, the superb “Barren Leaves,” which reads in its entirety: “Spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling: / Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing.” Gunn was a very funny poet, and it would have been good to see more of that. But of course, his total output ran well over 500 pages, almost all of which are well worth reading, and any selection was bound to have holes critics would cry over. It’s to the credit of this remarkable writer that those absences seem unimportant beside what is so rousingly present.

Two Poems: Ray Succre

2009-07-08T22:50:00.001-07:00

Apartment 208

I find the remnants of
his seasonal praise of a highness,
or of some god,
in the dumpster
by the parking lot.

Feathers and blood, a beak
that's been engraved with
a woodburner,
engraved with some haggard letters
in a pictogrammatical language
in a box
in the garbage.

That chicken-killing man
down the hall
makes animal sounds
in recreation, practices them,
nails money in envelopes to his
own front door,
makes me nervous and wary.

Either of us is made absurd
by the other.

* * * * *

A Nova Rests on the Briar

Red dot—why, because the dizzying stab
snapped apart the center of my thumb,
an accuracy of point;
every pore could be a torn open hole.
The grimy thumb was desert. The nail, sky.
The point? Impermanence.

I was pulling brambles to drink four p.m.,
as they were playful to me,
and had the look of freedom where they grew,
having spread wherever they pleased
like petrol on the surface of an eye.

If my own eye should quetch and leak,
for the human brambles I've seen vanish,
until my very skull were dry,
I would not, in a torte of grief,
rewind or blink, rub or drift my focus loose.

The red nova on my thumb is tasted and forgotten.
In the seconds between stab, red, and suck,
men and women had left the Earth forever,
red novas swollen over by cold, hands, clutched
and then dismissed.

I grasp the brambles and drag them out of life.
I can kill them all by five.

~ Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay) was recently released in print and is available most places. A second novel, Amphisbaena, is forthcoming in Summer 2009. He tries hard.

Poem: Gina Goldblatt

2009-07-08T22:40:00.004-07:00

Broome St.

lungs are full of smoke down on Broome Street
foamy voices babble out a cacophony of sounds
a flagrant boisterous symphony

plucked from the fingertips of late nights in melody
neither tendon nor freckle
out of sync

the children of a wise discussion on visionaries
urchins of the night
garlanding their balconies with carrot flowers

the men and women in the apartments above
dreaming brilliant dreams of puppy dogs and string instruments
seduced to hugging their bedposts with upturned sleepy smiles

~ Gina Goldblatt is an aspiring writer who attended Suny Purchase College in New York, where she earned her Bachelors in Literature. This is her first appearance in Elegant Thorn Review.

Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.

2009-07-06T19:20:00.001-07:00

A cool article from The Poetry Foundation.

Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.

An introduction to the 21st Century's most controversial poetry movements.

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Yet for as much as the two movements have in common, they are very different. Unlike Conceptual Writing, where procedure may have as much to do with meaning as the form and content, Flarf is quasi-procedural and improvisatory. Many of the poems are “sculpted” from the results of Internet searches, often using words and phrases that the poet has gleaned from poems posted by other poets to the Flarflist e-mail listserv. By contrast Conceptual Writers try to emulate the workings and processes of the machine, feeling that the results will be good if the concept and execution of the poetic machine are good; there is no tolerance for improvisation or spontaneity.

Flarf plays Dionysus to Conceptual Writing’s Apollo. Flarf uses traditional poetic tropes (“taste” and “subjectivity”) and forms (stanza and verse) to turn these conventions inside out. Conceptual Writing rarely “looks” like poetry and uses its own subjectivity to construct a linguistic machine that words may be poured into; it cares little for the outcome. Flarf is hilarious. Conceptual Writing is dry. Flarf is the Land O’Lakes butter squaw; Conceptual Writing is the government’s nutritional label on the box. Flarf is Larry Rivers. Conceptual Writing is Andy Warhol. No matter. They’re two sides of the same coin. Choose your poison and embrace your guilty pleasure.—KG

FLARF & CONCEPTUAL WRITING

Jordan Davis Three Poems on Demand

Mel Nichols I Google Myself

Sharon Mesmer The Swiss Just Do Whatever

K. Silem Mohammad Poems About Trees

Nada Gordon Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas

Drew Gardner Why do I hate Flarf so much?

Gary Sullivan Am I Emo?
A poetry comic.

Caroline Bergvall The Not Tale (Funeral)

Christian Bök The Great Order of the Universe

Robert Fitterman Directory

Kenneth Goldsmith Two Poems from “The Day”

Craig Dworkin Fact

Vanessa Place Miss Scarlett

	FLARF & CONCEPTUAL WRITING
	Jordan Davis	Three Poems on Demand
	Mel Nichols	I Google Myself
	Sharon Mesmer	The Swiss Just Do Whatever
	K. Silem Mohammad	Poems About Trees
	Nada Gordon	Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas
	Drew Gardner	Why do I hate Flarf so much?
	Gary Sullivan	Am I Emo? A poetry comic.
	Caroline Bergvall	The Not Tale (Funeral)
	Christian Bök	The Great Order of the Universe
	Robert Fitterman	Directory
	Kenneth Goldsmith	Two Poems from “The Day”
	Craig Dworkin	Fact
	Vanessa Place	Miss Scarlett

Steve Klepetar - Three Poems

2009-06-10T15:47:00.005-07:00

Minor Feats of Time Travel

I have opened the door to our meeting
next week, here in this bare conference
room, empty of coats. With the key I
found lodged in the snow near a broad
oak’s gray roots, I slipped the lock of past
time and drew you with me, here where
the future waits bent over its little bowl
of cream. Gently I pet its sleek coat
and, quite naturally, the future purrs
and I am comforted again. You emerge
from the well of time a little dazed, as if
you’d wakened from a dream – your father
offering mints from a ragged roll
pulled from his briefcase, smelling
of leather and cold. How kind his face,
how deep his longing for your success.
How seriously he takes your little
triumphs, multiplied by some mysterious
factor in his European brain.
Somewhere on a stage you stand, shy
and modest as ever, smiling as the Dean
(or is it the Mayor or some dignitary
with a smooth black coat) hands over
some prize – a snow white paper with blood
red seal or plaque of black granite set in wood,
your honorific etched on its gleaming face.

* * * * *

Turning to Stone

One night I turned to stone
bathing in glaciers of the moon.
So quiet then, and all the soldiers
sleeping on their pillows of sand.
We were hard then, and still,
not accustomed yet to the way our
blood congealed in cold blankets of sky.

I consulted my wrist, I asked my neck
how it would breathe and swell.

Even now, I wouldn’t count the stars
or pretend my restless feet were roped
with veins. Even when every whisper

serves another purpose in my twisted
ear, I will not pull sullen geese
around the northern rim of earth.
I will not stand bare-headed in the cold
nor offer rescue to patient worms.

Above a flash of cinders, guilt rises in smoky
swirl. What will I pull from the reed bed
when my arms can barely dangle

at my side? Even in this dream’s
dim light, I penetrate the secret name.

Today I own this granite face,
today embrace this hair of schist and shale,
this strange, quartzite body,
this voice transformed and hardened into glass.

* * * * *

Gates of Paradise

How long have we hunched here, backs
pressed against these bars
of bone? Some kind phantom marks

the rubble at our bleeding feet, consoles
our hungry ears with fables of home.

How long have we sung these wailing
psalms at the icy faces of stars? Mowers
hum in heat-drenched August grass

and tree tops sway in their maidenly dance.

Almost everyone we know is gathered
here beside the river
of indifference, cursing in their hasty

clothes the name of newts and milk and mud.

We wake late to headache light
where someone has paid our swollen

bill and left a crumpled twenty
for the maid. We lift our eyes, drink spirit
water from a plastic glass. Outside

our window a fire sword dances in glacial wind.

Where is that lovely fjord encrusted with blue
tinged ice? How far will the shelf of earth recede?

Here at the gates of Paradise midnight jugglers
haunt fire-lit ground and dog shadows sniff

the margins, high bush cranberry, wild grape vine.

By love’s burning ropes we are bound.
Cats wind ginger tails round slippery fingers of dawn.

~ Steve Klepetaris Professor of English and Faculty Director of Advising at Saint Cloud State University in Saint Cloud, MN. This is his first appearance in Elegant Thorn Review.

Joelle Nebbe - Rieveaulx Abbey (Four Photos)

2009-06-01T16:12:00.005-07:00

See more of Joelle's photos at her Flicker page.

David Baker - Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief

2009-06-01T15:57:00.002-07:00

Nice essay.

Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief

by David Baker

The issue is not just that we grieve, nor when we grieve. The issue is not just why we grieve in poetry, nor how the beautiful song of poetry capitulates to or conspires with the task of weeping. These and more. I like to think of the sound of weeping, along with the sound of laughing, as among the first thoughtful articulations a human being ever made. More than growls or grunts, more than snarls or barks or howls, weeping and laughter indicate passional responses to experience, to a perception of circumstances not only in the present but in the past and—even more fascinating—the future. Nothing else cries or laughs the way we do. These two primary forms of vocalization evolve further into songs: ecstatic language, as it were, standing beside itself, speaking out of its head. It is no accident that the two fundamental modes of lyric poetry are precisely these, crying and laughing, the intonations of grief and pleasure. By this I mean, the elegy and the love poem.

I want to consider the configuration of the elegy, with two particular examples from the American nineteenth century. At hand is the problematic of Walt Whitman's great poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," I want first to remind us of the complex narrative structure of Whitman's poem for his beloved deceased, and to unpack the poem's dense sets of images, stories, locations, and most important, its figures. As I intend the term, a figure is not just a body, a human figure; and not just a trope or metaphor, a figure of speech; but also a number, a mathematical figure. Next, I will relate this poem to another central nineteenth-century American elegy, Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death." Finally I will propose a paradigm shift in our thinking, and reading, about the American elegy.
"Whitman's elegy, like his great song
of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy"
Strange things are afoot. A foot in Whitman's poetry is a different body part than in other poets' work. Whose body is before us in Whitman's lilac elegy? The literal circumstance of Whitman's great poem is the funeral procession following Abraham Lincoln's assassination and death on April 14, 1865. Good Friday indeed. Whitman's poem accompanies the death-train that slowly bore Lincoln's body from Washington, D.C., all the way to burial in Illinois. At least in its beginning, the poem abides by a conventional, ritualized manner of mourning. Surely this poem is forefather of The Waste Land, commencing as it does in April, the cruel month, and proceeding in a series of aggrieved stages, through the city, into nature, into death, toward something sounding like prayerful redemption. As Peter Sacks argues in The English Elegy, the performance of ritual—the mournful, often staid formulation of grieving—is an elegy's primary rhetorical gesture.

Whitman's lilac elegy begins just so:

1.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

2.
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear'd—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.

In these first sections we hear a sober, then almost quietly sobbing voice of the poem, in radical contrast to Whitman's usually hortatory and encouraging profusions. This is, remember, the ur-poer of exuberance, cheerleader for democracy, the electrically charged poet of erotic contact and corporal intelligence. But note in section 1 the restraint, the underspoken dignity, as well as the formalized introduction of the poem's primary tropes, the triple image-into-symbol or, as he says, the "trinity sure to me you bring" that accompanies the poet's imagination through the odyssey of this poem. This trinity will evolve, eventually becoming the western star, or the planet Venus, which serves as a figure for Lincoln; the fragrant, plentiful, natural emblem of lilac; and, as a stand-in for Whitman, that hermit thrush with its doleful song. The particular curse of spring's eternal rebirth here, its immeasurable irony, lies in its perpetuating mementi mori, its blooming reminders of death. That is T. S. Eliot's terror in The Waste Land, and Whitman's, who not only mourns, but "yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring [italics mine]." But why Venus, the goddess of love, in an elegy? Why lilac? Why, for that matter, Lincoln?

Section 2 sounds the poem's death knell and identifies the crisis at hand: how to face "the black murk that hides the star," how to accept that Death has taken the new democratic hero. Juxtaposed with the stasis of this seemingly insoluble problem is section 3, the "miracle" of the natural trope, a lilac growing by an old farmhouse with its human "heart-shaped" leaves and its perfume. In the odor of lilac—is there anything so sweet, so profuse? —lingers a touch of the poem's subversive power. Psychologists tell us the sense of smell is our most nostalgic sense, the one most capable of triggering memory. It is also our least articulable sense. That is, we have far fewer words to describe smell than any other sense. Another irony then: such bodily knowledge yet such intellectual stupor. But of course this is the romantic's ideal formulation.

Section 4 activates another sense, the sound of the solitary thrush's song calling from deep within natures heart, from "the swamp," a place not quite water or land, or perhaps more meaningfully for Whitman a primordial place of both water and land. This solitary singer seems a strange figure for Whitman, usually so gregarious, hungry to situate himself among others and sing "over the roofs of the world," as he says in "Song of Myself." But again, so much about the lilac elegy is atypical. Whitman is not by any means an elegiac poet. Grief, sadness, pessimism are not the keys in which he typically plays. He is so energetically urban and hopeful, so enlivened by the prospect of crowds and bodily contact. But this will be one of the central trajectories of the poem: to move away from the city into the solitary, inhuman woods, in order to find his voice and regain his poetic vocation. The song he hears—always a necessary intonation in an elegy—is "deaths outlet song," and the singer, the bird, is literally his "brother." Notice the increasing archaic formality at the end of this section. "If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die" takes its diction from Quaker idiom. Whitman's mother was a devout Quaker, we may remember.

Sections 5 and 6 find Whitman propelling his poem forward, making it move, as the train moves. Elegies rarely have momentum, preferring the mournful deportment of stasis, stillness. Here the natural images seem battle-scarred (the Civil War blue and gray of violets and debris, the "spears" of wheat and grain-"shrouds"), but also potentially healing as the world "springs back" to life. The gathered crowd of people in section 6 abide by Sacks's elegiac formula, becoming a country-wide funeral mass, listening to the poem's song, here still a "dirge." Notice at the end of this section how Whitman transplants the sprig of lilac that he broke off at the end of section 3 into the coffin of the president.

Section 7 continues the gestures of enlargement and forward motion: "With loaded arms I come, pouring for you." Echoing the dark confessions of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"—which he first published in the great 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "The Sun-Down Poem" (note the westward-facing gesture)—where Whitman's desire for intimacy and human-sameness finds him admitting that not "you alone" are weak or blank or susceptible to pain, here the figure of the dead hero first becomes a trope for all the dead of the war: a figure, in fact, for Death itself, "O sane and sacred death." The "you" of the poem evolves, swelling past them all, to the very thought of death: "For you and the coffins all of you O death." Then in a gesture of quiet but fertile abundance, he hastens to cover death all "over" with bouquets of roses, lilies, and as he says, "mostly" lilacs. He seeks not just to adorn the coffin but literally to bury death.

An aside about all these flowers. I mentioned earlier the immense, lush fragrance of the lilac. Why this flower, apart from its springtime significance? Imagine the body of Lincoln traveling, so slowly, for days and days across the country. Imagine the potential smell. We know that people heaped flowers on the railcar as it passed or as it stopped. They are paying tribute, but they are also covering the stench. Thus, for Whitman, the lilac provides a powerful aroma, not just a "scented ... remembrancer" but a natural air freshener, making the very air new.

Whitman slows his momentum in section 8, at this point where he begins to discover his vision of transcendence. To be reborn, first he must die, or at least descend to an underworld. He calls it "the netherward black of the night." Thus Whitman's scheme for the elegy enlarges to include an epic trope. He himself walks into a dark wood, his Virgil the star, and commences his own journey to death. This is one of my central points: not just Lincoln, but also Whitman must die in this poem. His elegy, like his great song of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy. He asks for strength and direction in section 9, "lingering" in spiritual limbo in the swamp. He listens to the thrush; he begs for it to "Sing on." Like the bird, Whitman yearns to sing; it is his natural demeanor. But of course the second crisis of the poem is that the death of Lincoln has stifled or murdered Whitman's ability to sing and to praise. Such is the point of his awful doubts in section 10:

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on
the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

These first three questions serve to ask how Whitman himself might assume the qualities of the poem's eternal constants—the star, the lilac, the thrush. How, he asks, can he "warble," how can he shine, what shall be his perfume? Immediately nature answers. Carried on the world's winds, a breath of inspiration floats to him from around the globe. He breathes-in (spiro is Latin for "I breathe," we might recall) the breath of the world and knows now that his simple expiration will be his song. To expire exercises both of its meanings: to breathe out and to die.

Go read the whole article.

Three Poems: Amy Wright

2009-05-26T07:41:00.004-07:00

TEN

The farmer met the wife when they were both
already old by some measures, plumb
as the lines of fence coming together.
They turned back and became strangers,
condescended to the world and used words,
no longer accepting there were things
about each other they could never know.
I was born here, she said
& he touches it, reaching down.

The mountains are a sanctuary and the illusion of sanctuary.
One might become one there,
as Little Brushy is, as joy is one that feeds the cattle
and courses snowy into milk.

A deer does not surrender to a certain kind of life
but Amyntas wades the creek against the river,
the idea & slip. Harness and stall of the domestic.
The farm family made a home comfortable enough
to become strange in, framed by frost.
The people twist kleenex and trundle toward each other laughing.
We were taught to draw snow at school, she says.
We were taught to draw upon it.

* * * * *

ELEVEN

The dumb respect of mud daubers for solitude
trumps porch and colony. They leave
their tubes at night, provisioned with paralyzed spiders,
to sleep in the air. In the room of air.
First one has to become spacious enough
lying on the grass, for the grass to roll out in.
Plank of the body broad
inside the narrow nest spit laboriously
into place and crawled out of.

• • •

In the brush, spiders go on spinning the forest
new dogstar webs,
waiting the way parts of the self wait to break
in a way that enters into.

If the air were less direct
with the crashing waves of birds,
the creatures would misunderstand
the euphoric instruments.

* * * * *

TWELVE

A fine thread of rain steams the crumpled towel
of earth. In the fields cattle stand pulling grass
& nothing operates the concept of reality.
Is there any birth, any other splendor
than…the going on / the loneliness.

The good life, in principle, is a current one rides into,
disintegrating.

Song curries the horses in a trade Amyntas answered.
They ride together, two paints taking the hills
behind them step by step,
the proper order too small for their reasons.

She was following him at the moment.
Dialog turning over a question they had nursed.

~ Amy Wright’s chapbook, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, was just released from Apostrophe Press. Previous publications include American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and Grist. She is the Prose Editor of Zone 3 magazine and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.

Four Photos - Pam Morris

2009-05-17T20:06:00.004-07:00

~ Pamela Morris is a friend and client. She took these pictures during a 2005 trip to Colombia. She is a nurse by day (and night) who enjoys photography.

Bookforum - Liberal Mediation (Rae Armantrout)

2009-05-11T19:43:00.002-07:00

A great review of one of our best poets.

Liberal Mediation
By Tim Griffin

Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. Yet these meditations are often counterintuitive and sometimes downright absurd in their complexion, referencing cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote and Rainbow Frog), miming the standardized phrases of tabloid headlines and business transactions (“These temporary credits / will no longer be reflected / in your next billing period”), and rehearsing bits of dialogue rooted only in the vapid grammars of cultural cliché (“I think our incentives / are sexy and edgy”).

With such seeming self-contradiction, Armantrout is a special case even to the extent that she willingly turns a critical eye on her own poems, aware of the possibility that they risk mirroring a kind of commodity logic, merely fulfilling conventional expectations for poetry as an expressive medium. As she once put it pithily, “[Readers] want to identify with the speaker of the poem as one might identify with an action figure,” and so they might seek in poetry only a “confirmation of what they already feel (or wish they felt).” This observation explains much, in fact, underscoring Armantrout’s bond with her generation’s appropriation artists, who were similarly suspicious of traditional conceptions of expressivity. Better to draw from the well of the mass media and disrupt its modes of transmission than to remain locked up in romantic, prepackaged notions.

Armantrout’s writing in her latest volume, Versed, will thus be familiar to her longtime readers for its way of holding meaning (and identification) in uneasy suspension. Short lines in brief poems are polyvalent in both voicing and implication, inviting multiple readings. (In the context of what Armantrout has called her “faux-collage,” the bloodless billing statement quoted above easily assumes metaphysical import, for instance.) Her crystalline word selection underscores her motive for indexicality—“Any statement I issue, / if particular enough, // will prove / I was here,” she writes, as if words could be like hands with a firm grip on things—and yet her crisply pop vocabulary belongs also to the realm of high-definition television. Armantrout ably frames a highly mediated world using its own language, even as she deftly employs quotation marks and overly familiar diction to delineate those voices we “receive” in contemporary culture, leaving open and in perpetual play in her compositions the question of where the real begins and the (pre)fabricated ends, or where the poet emerges and where she disappears.

Indeed, the recurrence of already-known phrases and images seems to predicate an active desire—or Pavlovian impulse, as the case may be—among figures in the poems to locate themselves within that continuum. These are characters who want to be in character. A woman buying a gallon of vodka “may imagine herself as an actress playing an alcoholic / in a film,” Armantrout imagines. Elsewhere, an anonymous voice calls out, “Hey, / my avatar’s not working!,” while still another poem sounds a note of estrangement in the face of such media: “To be beautiful / and powerful enough / for someone / to want to break me / up // into syndicated ripples.” (Again, isolated, these lines are compelling enough, but their metaphoric value accrues only in context.) In this regard, Armantrout’s poetry might well have previously suggested that subjectivity today is in a dialectical embrace with the forces of media, looking for moments of cathexis or catharsis, but her very first poem here, the three-sectioned “Results,” implies that the ante has lately been upped, with media inviting participation from its consumers, so that their “expressed” voice is just the one given to them:

Click here to vote
on who’s ripe
for a makeover

or takeover

in this series pilot.

votes are registered
at the server
and sent back

as results.

As in Armantrout’s other work, it is in the space left open for the reader, who must navigate these voices, that the potential for alternatives resides. (The instability allows the reader to create his or her own meaning even while aware of any given poem’s constructedness. Of course, this meta-self-consciousness also gives rise to comic irony. Another fine line: “Symbolism as the party face of paranoia.”) But the second section of the book, “Dark Matter,” underscores a new sense of what’s at stake: Having recently dealt with cancer, Armantrout sets certain poems in the hospital and juxtaposes her witticisms with brutal lines about her sickness—with the science of cellular structures presenting in these poems a difficult extension of interpretative dilemmas in text. (Following the billing language above: “Metaphor / is ritual sacrifice. // It kills the look-alike.”) How do you, after all, mull matters of life and death when hearing the music pumping out at the local Starbucks? What space can you occupy then? A passage from the poem “Pleasure”:

Only distinctions can
matter.

(Canned matter.)

The irony cuts two ways, at once opening up and closing off possible experience, yet pleasure arises in contemplating both the options and the paradox.

Poetry Month - Thom Gunn

2009-04-30T13:58:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Katy Lederer

2009-04-30T07:19:00.001-07:00

That Everything's Inevitable
by Katy Lederer

That everything's inevitable.
That fate is whatever has already happened.
The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.
In this world, I am the surest thing.
Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.
Please insert your spare coins.
I am filling them up.
Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.
But yet, I am a vatic one.
As vatic as the Vatican.
In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum
I am waiting, like an animal,
For poetry.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Charles Wright

2009-04-29T14:57:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Jack Gilbert

2009-04-29T06:27:00.001-07:00

Jack Gilbert, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his last book, Refusing Heaven, is now in his mid-eighties, still celebrating and sorrowing to the fullest. He has returned with an elegiac collection in which he reconsiders, as the figure of Ovid says in one of the poems, "White stone in the sunlight…Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all."

****************************************

The Mistake

There is always the harrowing by mortality,
the strafing by age, he thinks. Always defeats.
Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alive
in the difficult way adults want to be alive.
It is worth having the heart broken,
a blessing to hurt for eighteen years
because a woman is dead. He thinks of long
before that, the summer he was with Gianna
and her sister in Apulia. Having outwitted
the General, their father, and driven south
to the estate of the Contessa. Like an opera.
The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.
Houses of the peasants burrowed into the walls
of the compound. A butler with white gloves
serving chicken in aspic. The pretty maid
in her uniform bringing his breakfast each
morning on a silver tray: toast both light
and dark, hot chocolate and tea both. A world
like Tosca. A feudal world crushed under
the weight of passion without feeling.
Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.
The young man wild with romance and appetite.
Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Sapphire

2009-04-28T05:07:00.001-07:00

A poem from the 1999 volume Black Wings & Blind Angels, by Sapphire, who is also a novelist. (Her novel Push has recently been made as a movie entitled "Precious," a winner at Sundance which will be released in November.)

****************************************

Some Different Kinda Books

I
She asks why we always
read books about black people.
(I spare her the news she is black.)
She wants something different.
Her own book is written in pencil.
She painstakingly goes back & corrects
the misspelled words.
We write each day.
Each day the words look like
a retarded hand from Mars
wrote them.
Each day she asks me how
do you spell: didn't, tomorrow, done
husband, son, learning, went, gone . . .
I can't think of all the words she can’t spell.
It’s easier to think of what she can spell:
MY NAME IS CARMEN LOPEZ.
I am sorry I was out teacher.
My husband was sick.
You know I never miss school.
In that other program
I wasn't learning nothing.
Here, I'm learning so I come.
What's wrong with my husband?
I don't know. He's in the hospital. He's real sick
I was almost out the room
when I hear the nurse ask him,
Do you do drugs?
He say yes.
I say what!
I don’t know nuthin' 'bout no drugs.
I'm going off in the hospital.
He's sick.
I'm mad.
Nobody tells you nuthin'!
I didn't hear that nurse
I wouldn't know
nuthin'.
Huh?
Condoms? No, teacher.
He's my husband.
I never been with another man.

II
I think he got AIDS
he still don't tell me.
I did teacher. I tried
to read the chart at the hospital
but I couldn't figure out those words.
Doctor don't say, he say privacy.
The nurse tell me.
She's Puerto Rican. She say your husband
got AIDS.
I go off in the hospital.
Nobody tells me nuthin'.
He come home.
He say it's not true,
he's fine.
He's so skinny without his clothes
he try to hide hisself nekkid
don't want me to look.
I say you got to use
one of those things.
He say nuthin's wrong.
with him.

III
He stop sayin' that.
Now he just say he's gonna die
all the time
all the time
dying.
I say STOP that talk,
the doctor say you could
live a long time
my sister-in-law say,
he got it so you got it
it's like that.
I say, I don't got it,
my kids don't got it either.
Teacher, I need a letter for welfare
that I'm coming to school
on a regular basis.

IV
He's in P.R.,
before that he started messing around
again.
Over the Christmas holidays
he died.
That's where I was at
in P.R.
I'm fine. Yeah, I'm sure teacher.
What do I wanna do teacher?
I just wanna read some different
kinda books.

~ Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Norma Cole

2009-04-27T06:54:00.001-07:00

We Address
by Norma Cole

…a lead pencil held between thumb and forefinger
of each hand forms a bridge upon which
two struggling figures, "blood all around"…

I was born in a city between colored wrappers

I was born in a city the color of steam, between two pillars, between pillars and curtains, it was up to me to pull the splinters out of the child's feet

I want to wake up and see you sea green and leaf green, the problem of ripeness. On Monday I wrote it out, grayed out. In that case spirit was terminology

In that case meant all we could do. Very slowly, brighter, difficult and darker. Very bright and slowly. Quietly lions or tigers on a black ground, here the sea is ice, wine is ice

I am in your state now. They compared white with red. So they hung the numbers and colors from upthrusting branches. The problem was light

Our friend arrived unexpectedly dressed in black and taller than we remembered. In the same sky ribbons and scales of bright balance

The problem and its history. Today a rose-colored sky. Greens vary from yellow to brown. Brighter than ink, the supposition tells the omission of an entire color

Which didn't have a musical equivalent. In those days the earth was blue, something to play. A person yearned to be stone

Clearly a lion or sphinx-like shape. The repetition of gesture is reiterated in the movement of ambient light on the windows, curtains, and on the facing wall, the problem

and its green ribbons. The hands almost always meet. Turquoise adrenaline illusions adjacent to memory, to mind. We address

memory, the senses, or pages on a double sheet, classical frontal framing. I want you to wake up now

~From the Academy of American Poets

New York Times Book Review - Poetry Chronicle

2009-04-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, it's not often the New York Times Book Review covers poetry, so this must be a poetry month gift to us readers, especially since one of the books covered is by my favorite poet, Charles Wright.

Poetry Chronicle

Reviews by JOEL BROUWER

Published: April 24, 2009

WHAT GOES ON
Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009.
By Stephen Dunn.
Norton, $24.95.

The speaker of Dunn’s recent poems is a regular guy cursed with an understanding of human nature more subtle than he’d prefer. A poem like “The Unsaid” succeeds not only because it nails its depiction of a couple stalled by miscommunication and reproach — “In the bedroom they undressed and dressed / and got into bed. The silence was what fills / a tunnel after a locomotive passes through” — but because the poem’s very existence squares its pathos: the speaker understands the problem perfectly but still can’t solve it. A typical Dunn poem opens up a basic human trouble — a body souring with age, a marriage souring with regret, a believer souring with doubt — meditates on it with equal parts seriousness and good humor, and finally offers not quite consolation but acceptance, a sense of having gained some measure of dignity simply by looking life in the eye. As is true of every other poet who ever lived, what’s best about Dunn is also what’s worst: in his case, a plainspoken, curlicue-free lucidity (I actually want to say “wisdom,” but fear it makes Dunn sound square or folksy, faults he’s too sharp and wry to be accused of), which is a tonic in small doses but can cause numbness if consumed in quantity. “Please Understand” ends “I’ve never been able to tell / what’s worth more — what I want or what I have.” “What Men Want” ends “After the power to choose / a man wants the power to erase.” “Nature” ends, “Gray, then, was the only truth in the world.” I trust the poet’s every nuanced ambivalence but eventually find myself wishing — against my better instincts, and his — that he’d burn a house down or get baptized or anything else definitive and audacious.
MERCURY DRESSING
Poems.
By J. D. McClatchy.
Knopf, $25.
Has your companion ever reported some wonderful thing you said in your sleep, like “snowflake operator” or “funky nectarine”? I regret to inform you that no matter how clever you may have thought your unconscious self, McClatchy probably has you beat: the first line of his “Poem Beginning With a Line Spoken, I Am Told, in My Sleep” — “The names of every place were once so cold” — is in iambic pentameter. Given McClatchy’s formal virtuosity, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he jots his grocery lists in terza rima, too. Such exquisiteness sometimes seems merely an end in itself, as in “Indonesia,” which cleverly compares, for 30 lines and no good reason, an epidermal rash to an archipelago. “The Seven Deadly Sins” possesses a relentless elegance of expression, but many of its ideas are banal (“Dogged voluptuaries usually make straight / For the very thing they over and over have had, / Then vomit up the greedily swallowed bait”), grandiloquent (“When Francis of Assisi ate, / Ashes were his only spice. / The condiments in plump Cockaigne / Disguise the taste to help explain / Why temperance is a sacrifice / The belly’s meant to palliate”) or nonsensical (“From alley to boardroom, in coffee cup or coffer, / Not to accumulate but to count, to compare, / Brings down both the beggar and the millionaire”). McClatchy is most engaging when he’s got a story to tell instead of an idea to fuss with. “Trees, Walking” is a powerful and wonderfully strange account of the speaker’s relationship with his father (among many other things), and “Sorrow in 1944,” a sonnet sequence imagining how life might have turned out for the son of Madama Butterfly, represents the collection’s most focused and indispensable moment.
ONE SECRET THING
By Sharon Olds.
Knopf, $26.95.
Admirers of Olds’s poems will find more of them in this, her ninth collection. Olds selects intense moments from her family romance — usually ones involving violence or sexuality or both — and then stretches them in opposite directions, rendering them in such obsessive detail that they seem utterly unique to her personal experience, while at the same time using metaphor to insist on their universality. The speaker of “Home Theater, 1955” spends the poem’s first nine lines — a full quarter of its total length — describing the skimpy animal-themed bedclothes she wore as a child, then tells the story of a night her father became so violent her sister had to call for police officers, one of whom the speaker remembers glancing at her bare legs. In its final lines, the poem switches in a blink from autobiography to myth: “Soon after our father had struck himself down, / there had risen up these bachelors / beside the sink and stove, and the tiny / mastodons, and bison, and elk, the / beasts on my front and back, began, / atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.” It’s a nifty move, but a pretty familiar one — Olds has been making it for almost 30 years — and in this book it’s too often too easy to see the epiphanies coming. When in the first lines of “Animal Dress” the poet’s daughter puts on her mother’s black sweater “with maroon creatures / knitted in,” you can tell you’re in for another Joseph Campbell moment in the poem’s final lines, and sure enough.
SESTETS
By Charles Wright.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.
Wright’s poems don’t bear down toward conclusions, they expand and evanesce as if in a valiant, impossible effort to comprehend and demonstrate Wittgenstein’s dictum that “the world is all that is the case.” Wright’s new collection of short poems is less a book unto itself than the next installment in a continuous poem he’s been writing for 40-odd years. “Description is expiation, / and not a place to hunker down in,” he writes. “It is a coming to terms with. / Or coming to terms without. / As though whatever we had to say could keep it real. / As though our words were flies, / and the dead meat kept reappearing.” These accounts of language as simultaneously a fond illusion and our only hope for a stable place to stake a claim on reality pose the problem Wright wisely resists pretending poetry can solve. Instead, he revels and finds a freedom in it: “Water remains immortal — / Poems can’t defile it, / the heron, immobile on one leg, / Stands in it, snipe stitch it, and heaven pillows its breast.” Trouble can arise when Wright’s open-endedness leads him to believe that any idea, no matter how ungainly or hackneyed, deserves a place in the poem, as in “Music for Midsummer’s Eve”: “Time is an untuned harmonium / That Muzaks our nights and days. / Sometimes it lasts for a little while, / sometimes it goes on forever.” I can swallow “Muzaks” with some effort, but those last two lines wouldn’t pass muster at Hallmark. Fortunately, few such clunkers disrupt Wright’s complex and contrary harmonies.
Joel Brouwer’s books of poems are “Exactly What Happened,” “Centuries” and, most recently, “And So.” He teaches at the University of Alabama.

Poetry Month - Carl Phillips

2009-04-26T08:53:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Taije Silverman

2009-04-26T08:51:00.001-07:00

Terezin
by Taije Silverman

—a transfer camp in the Czech Republic

We rode the bus out, past fields of sunflowers
that sloped for miles, hill after hill of them blooming.

The bus was filled with old people.
On their laps women held loaves of freshly baked bread.
Men slept in their seats wearing work clothes.

You stared out the window beside me. Your eyes
were so hard that you might have been watching the glass.

Fields and fields of sunflowers.

Arriving we slowed on the cobblestone walkway.
Graves looked like boxes, or houses from high up.

On a bench teenage lovers slouched in toward each other.
Their backs formed a shape like a seashell.
You didn't want to go inside.

But the rooms sang. Song like breath, blown
through spaces in skin.

The beds were wide boards stacked up high on the walls.
The glass on the door to the toilet was broken.
I imagined nothing.

You wore your black sweater and those dark sunglasses.
You didn't look at me.

The rooms were empty, and the courtyard was empty,
and the sunlight on cobblestone could have been water,
and I think even when we are here we are not here.

The courtyard was flooded with absence.
The tunnel was crowded with light.
Like a throat. Like a—

In a book I read how at its mouth they played music,
some last piece by Wagner or Mozart or Strauss.

I don't know why. I don't know
who walked through the tunnel or who played or what finally
they could have wanted. I don't know where the soul goes.

Your hair looked like wheat. It was gleaming.

Nearby on the hillside a gallows leaned slightly.
What has time asked of it? Nights. Windstorms.

Your hair looked like fire, or honey.
You didn't look at me.

Grass twisted up wild, lit gold all around us.
We could have been lost somewhere, in those funny hills.

And the ride back—I don't remember.
Why was I alone? It was night, then. It was still morning.

But the fields were filled with dead sunflowers.
Blooms darkened to brown, the stalks bowed.
And the tips dried to husks that for miles kept reaching.
Those dreamless sloped fields of traveling husks.

~ From The Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - John Hollander

2009-04-25T08:21:00.001-07:00

"Some Playthings," by the distinguished John Hollander, a poet for whom serious and light verse, the formal and the playful, flow forth in equal measure.

****************************************

Some Playthings

A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it “just” the wind

playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with

an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?

These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their

frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic

substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?

Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly

dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Adam Zagajewski

2009-04-24T17:49:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Joshua Beckman

2009-04-24T07:34:00.003-07:00

[In Colorado, In Oregon, upon]

by Joshua Beckman

In Colorado, In Oregon, upon
each beloved fork, a birthday is celebrated.
I miss each and every one of my friends.
I believe in getting something for nothing.
Push the chair, and what I can tell you
with almost complete certainty
is that the chair won't mind.
And beyond hope,
I expect it is like this everywhere.
Music soothing people.
Change rolling under tables.
The immaculate cutoff so that we may continue.
A particular pair of trees waking up against the window.
This partnership of mind, and always now
in want of forgiveness. That forgiveness be
the domain of the individual,
like music or personal investment.
Great forward-thinking people brought us
the newspaper, and look what we have done.
It is time for forgiveness. Dear ones,
unmistakable quality will soon be upon us.
Don't wait for anything else.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Jane Mayhall

2009-04-24T05:00:00.001-07:00

Today we remember the poet Jane Mayhall, who died a few weeks ago at the age of ninety, and who wrote remarkable poems on such subjects as "Wastebaskets" ("in all that / heaven and debris, a lot of / my first gut ideas / were right") or an obsolete subway token found in a shoulder bag, a symbol of the long-burnished imponderables in a New York life. Born in 1918 in Louisville, Kentucky, Mayhall attended Black Mountain College, where she met and married the maverick Leslie George Katz, and came to New York with him to found the Eakins Press, an important publisher of specialized books of photography, art, and fine writing. (Their friends and colleagues in the fertile mid-century period in New York City included Walker Evans, James Agee, and Arthur Miller.) Mayhall wrote several books during her long bohemian marriage to Katz ("our courtship had the grace of / infidelities, myriad moods—/ so many skies"), but it was only in 2004, at the age of 85, that she published a full-length volume of verse, Sleeping Late on Judgment Day, which gathers her frank poems of wisdom and long love—notably, the poems of mourning and abiding passion she wrote to her husband in an outpouring of new work after his death in 1997.

****************************************

Notes For Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary

Lofty, but not above it.
How could anything so rash happen?
The Baptist ice-cream, and a pitiful living room.
The pastor in seersucker, red-faced,
bewildered as icons.

It was a wild decision, youth and Mercury
at our heels. The Parish didn't even have a piano.
But wedding strains, coached to overdo (and love
is private). The greatest concentration
was defiance.

Silence was the marriage ring we chose.
The cake I recall was Tastee brand,
you barely took my hand.
No urge for bridal costumes, heaven opening up
the purgatorial rites. And we

all stepped forth, in faith.
The worst disasters were golden givers of advice:
sausage makers. We liked to think of
living without a Name. And quandaries besmote—
like Oxymorons.

Because we didn't believe in obligations,
we never thought about divorce.
And we were blessed. Going to sleep with
you at night, to welcome the strange, uncoercive
incense of another day.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Toi Derricotte

2009-04-23T07:31:00.001-07:00

In Knowledge of Young Boys
by Toi Derricotte

i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming,
a horrible brain in water.
i knew you when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle,
when you had no sustenance of metal
when you had no boat to travel
when you stayed in the same
place, treading the question;
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning, and the stars
blinked like a cat. we swam
in the last trickle of champagne
before we knew breastmilk—we
shared the night of the closet,
the parasitic
closing on our thumbprint,
we were smudged in a yellow book.

son, we were oak without
mouth, uncut, we were
brave before memory.

~ From the Academy of American Poetry

Poetry Month - Adam Zagajewksi

2009-04-23T07:25:00.001-07:00

Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief
by David Baker

The issue is not just that we grieve, nor when we grieve. The issue is not just why we grieve in poetry, nor how the beautiful song of poetry capitulates to or conspires with the task of weeping. These and more. I like to think of the sound of weeping, along with the sound of laughing, as among the first thoughtful articulations a human being ever made. More than growls or grunts, more than snarls or barks or howls, weeping and laughter indicate passional responses to experience, to a perception of circumstances not only in the present but in the past and—even more fascinating—the future. Nothing else cries or laughs the way we do. These two primary forms of vocalization evolve further into songs: ecstatic language, as it were, standing beside itself, speaking out of its head. It is no accident that the two fundamental modes of lyric poetry are precisely these, crying and laughing, the intonations of grief and pleasure. By this I mean, the elegy and the love poem. I want to consider the configuration of the elegy, with two particular examples from the American nineteenth century. At hand is the problematic of Walt Whitman's great poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," I want first to remind us of the complex narrative structure of Whitman's poem for his beloved deceased, and to unpack the poem's dense sets of images, stories, locations, and most important, its figures. As I intend the term, a figure is not just a body, a human figure; and not just a trope or metaphor, a figure of speech; but also a number, a mathematical figure. Next, I will relate this poem to another central nineteenth-century American elegy, Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death." Finally I will propose a paradigm shift in our thinking, and reading, about the American elegy. "Whitman's elegy, like his great song of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy" Strange things are afoot. A foot in Whitman's poetry is a different body part than in other poets' work. Whose body is before us in Whitman's lilac elegy? The literal circumstance of Whitman's great poem is the funeral procession following Abraham Lincoln's assassination and death on April 14, 1865. Good Friday indeed. Whitman's poem accompanies the death-train that slowly bore Lincoln's body from Washington, D.C., all the way to burial in Illinois. At least in its beginning, the poem abides by a conventional, ritualized manner of mourning. Surely this poem is forefather of The Waste Land, commencing as it does in April, the cruel month, and proceeding in a series of aggrieved stages, through the city, into nature, into death, toward something sounding like prayerful redemption. As Peter Sacks argues in The English Elegy, the performance of ritual—the mournful, often staid formulation of grieving—is an elegy's primary rhetorical gesture. Whitman's lilac elegy begins just so: 1. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love. 2. O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear'd—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul. In these first sections we hear a sober, then almost quietly sobbing voice of the poem, in radical contrast to Whitman's usually hortatory and encouraging profusions. This is, remember, the ur-poer of exuberance, cheerleader for democracy, the electrically charged poet of erotic contact and corporal intelligence. But note in section 1 the restraint, the underspoken dignity, as well as the formalized introduction of the poem's primary tropes, the triple image-into-symbol or, as he says, the "trinity sure to me you bring" that accompanies the poet's imagination through the odyssey of this poem. This trinity will evolve, eventually becoming the western star, or the planet Venus, which serves as a figure for Lincoln; the fragrant, plentiful, natural emblem of lilac; and, as a stand-in for Whitman, that hermit thrush with its doleful song. The particular curse of spring's eternal rebirth here, its immeasurable irony, lies in its perpetuating mementi mori, its blooming reminders of death. That is T. S. Eliot's terror in The Waste Land, and Whitman's, who not only mourns, but "yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring [italics mine]." But why Venus, the goddess of love, in an elegy? Why lilac? Why, for that matter, Lincoln? Section 2 sounds the poem's death knell and identifies the crisis at hand: how to face "the black murk that hides the star," how to accept that Death has taken the new democratic hero. Juxtaposed with the stasis of this seemingly insoluble problem is section 3, the "miracle" of the natural trope, a lilac growing by an old farmhouse with its human "heart-shaped" leaves and its perfume. In the odor of lilac—is there anything so sweet, so profuse? —lingers a touch of the poem's subversive power. Psychologists tell us the sense of smell is our most nostalgic sense, the one most capable of triggering memory. It is also our least articulable sense. That is, we have far fewer words to describe smell than any other sense. Another irony then: such bodily knowledge yet such intellectual stupor. But of course this is the romantic's ideal formulation. Section 4 activates another sense, the sound of the solitary thrush's song calling from deep within natures heart, from "the swamp," a place not quite water or land, or perhaps more meaningfully for Whitman a primordial place of both water and land. This solitary singer seems a strange figure for Whitman, usually so gregarious, hungry to situate himself among others and sing "over the roofs of the world," as he says in "Song of Myself." But again, so much about the lilac elegy is atypical. Whitman is not by any means an elegiac poet. Grief, sadness, pessimism are not the keys in which he typically plays. He is so energetically urban and hopeful, so enlivened by the prospect of crowds and bodily contact. But this will be one of the central trajectories of the poem: to move away from the city into the solitary, inhuman woods, in order to find his voice and regain his poetic vocation. The song he hears—always a necessary intonation in an elegy—is "deaths outlet song," and the singer, the bird, is literally his "brother." Notice the increasing archaic formality at the end of this section. "If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die" takes its diction from Quaker idiom. Whitman's mother was a devout Quaker, we may remember. Sections 5 and 6 find Whitman propelling his poem forward, making it move, as the train moves. Elegies rarely have momentum, preferring the mournful deportment of stasis, stillness. Here the natural images seem battle-scarred (the Civil War blue and gray of violets and debris, the "spears" of wheat and grain-"shrouds"), but also potentially healing as the world "springs back" to life. The gathered crowd of people in section 6 abide by Sacks's elegiac formula, becoming a country-wide funeral mass, listening to the poem's song, here still a "dirge." Notice at the end of this section how Whitman transplants the sprig of lilac that he broke off at the end of section 3 into the coffin of the president. Section 7 continues the gestures of enlargement and forward motion: "With loaded arms I come, pouring for you." Echoing the dark confessions of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"—which he first published in the great 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "The Sun-Down Poem" (note the westward-facing gesture)—where Whitman's desire for intimacy and human-sameness finds him admitting that not "you alone" are weak or blank or susceptible to pain, here the figure of the dead hero first becomes a trope for all the dead of the war: a figure, in fact, for Death itself, "O sane and sacred death." The "you" of the poem evolves, swelling past them all, to the very thought of death: "For you and the coffins all of you O death." Then in a gesture of quiet but fertile abundance, he hastens to cover death all "over" with bouquets of roses, lilies, and as he says, "mostly" lilacs. He seeks not just to adorn the coffin but literally to bury death. An aside about all these flowers. I mentioned earlier the immense, lush fragrance of the lilac. Why this flower, apart from its springtime significance? Imagine the body of Lincoln traveling, so slowly, for days and days across the country. Imagine the potential smell. We know that people heaped flowers on the railcar as it passed or as it stopped. They are paying tribute, but they are also covering the stench. Thus, for Whitman, the lilac provides a powerful aroma, not just a "scented ... remembrancer" but a natural air freshener, making the very air new. Whitman slows his momentum in section 8, at this point where he begins to discover his vision of transcendence. To be reborn, first he must die, or at least descend to an underworld. He calls it "the netherward black of the night." Thus Whitman's scheme for the elegy enlarges to include an epic trope. He himself walks into a dark wood, his Virgil the star, and commences his own journey to death. This is one of my central points: not just Lincoln, but also Whitman must die in this poem. His elegy, like his great song of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy. He asks for strength and direction in section 9, "lingering" in spiritual limbo in the swamp. He listens to the thrush; he begs for it to "Sing on." Like the bird, Whitman yearns to sing; it is his natural demeanor. But of course the second crisis of the poem is that the death of Lincoln has stifled or murdered Whitman's ability to sing and to praise. Such is the point of his awful doubts in section 10: O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love? Sea-winds blown from east and west, Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting, These and with these and the breath of my chant, I'll perfume the grave of him I love. These first three questions serve to ask how Whitman himself might assume the qualities of the poem's eternal constants—the star, the lilac, the thrush. How, he asks, can he "warble," how can he shine, what shall be his perfume? Immediately nature answers. Carried on the world's winds, a breath of inspiration floats to him from around the globe. He breathes-in (spiro is Latin for "I breathe," we might recall) the breath of the world and knows now that his simple expiration will be his song. To expire exercises both of its meanings: to breathe out and to die.