Kicking the Gravel

More to Say McSweeney

2011-11-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

I suppose engagement with the necropastoral is something chronic: like hours of playing Snood the connections, implausible, become sustained even when you close your eyes.

Link to Joyelle McSweeney's latest, wonderful, post on bug-life and the poet. What I got most out of this was that our poetry is like the generations of bugs: die 150 plus times a year. Echos of Hugo: "we build our prison and earn parole each poem." In a hyperextended world (link : everything) our corpses may be everywhere, and with each new reading we are in a way animated only to die again. Who are you who got to this question mark -- ?

So why not write everywhere. Walls are for graffiti, threads can be tied onto thread. What it is is zombie-ness, but I think there's more optimism than just that. Not the world as dead and rotting (it is) but the world in language dead and reborn (it is).

Put economically, language of communication -- dead already. Language simply to communicate dies at the moment it communicates: self-destructing messages Chief Quimby can never get out of his coat in time. This kind of language eventually burns. Cynics say the new-speak begins and language rots. The poet plants eggs on the rot and is reborn a thousand times. The poet says new-speak and thinks up twenty nouns that are now verbs. (I'm roading it, I tonicked by gin, I Ricola'd my throat.)

Joyelle:

"I reject the so-called economy of corporate time, capitalist time, so called ‘linear’ time, triumphalist time, which is a golden lie anyway, and instead I recognize this tide of shit and waste, I recognize that that is where I live, if I live, on bug time, on bug time; in Indiana, in the necropastoral; I have no interest in myths of posterity, in a secured future, in the supposed future of literature or humans or anything else; the way I’m writing now is disposable; in disposible media and unsturdy genres; but it’s the most important thing in my milisecond life; that’s why I want to be wear my grave clothes now, ceremental, distressed, and yes, bug-eaten, moths in my hair, Miss Death-in-life, like PJ Harvey in her Mercury clothes, mercury poisoned, one part Miss Havisham, one part Gregor Samsa, with chitinous extensions shoving out from her brain through her cranium, her dura mater (tough mother), her pia mater (her little mother), her arachnoid mater (spider mother). Stabat, mater, my black pincers stabbed you in the eye, and now I’ll plant my eggs there, time flowing backwards, you carry the eggs again for me."

Take a text message, say "lets meet @4 Egan's."

Take a text message, say "sidled, slid, billiard boys I'm wasting my life."

Language slips back into the pocket of the reader, one way or the other. What happens in the world outside the language has always been anybody's guess but well known it is that you got to the end of this sentence and may turn around and read it again. Or hyperlink.

But that is urban. Go out to the pastoral and bring your urbanity with you, yes. Speak your new verbs to the plains, or hills. Or mountains. The only thing dead is the sound you just let carry. Nature isn't in a caring mood. Hyperlinks are not in place. Mountain time has no concept of linear, it is metamorphic or basalt. We know our searches inform the advertisements on the margins of our screen, we have been profiled by corporations and are a profile with a picture. This isn't about consuming, it is about producing on the consumption, and when we die of consumption (pun is there and I keep it there) we are born out of it again.

Joanna Klink and the Necropastoral

2011-09-21T06:25:00.000-07:00

To my friends I give many books, usually what I would consider good reads. It is usual, however, that when I pass on the poetry of Joanna Klink the receiver, upon reading, is usually left cold.

"It's just too lyrical," they say, which I suppose is fair. Klink is deeply rooted in the lyric pastoral, a pastoral that may be dated for the millennium.

There have been some new theorizing on the pastoral, mostly from the blog Montevidayo featuring Joyelle McSweeney and her concept of the Necropastoral. From what I can understand (and correct me if I'm wrong), the idea is something like this:

The pastoral has always been synonymous with a kind of wilderness that is itself an anachronism of city life. That is, the pastoral is the reflection of the city cast out into a space that is occult, a fable, a fantasy. It has been appreciated and celebrated for its "other-ness" but it merely reflects the city's own decay in a larger space, since it "contaminates" itself with a kind of past glory in the present tense. It is a death of itself in the making, always.

As readers of poetry, we've come to expect this in lyric pastoral; in fact, it is what we are anchored to. A.R. Ammons "Visit," in which the poet, inviting you the reader to his place in the woods, advises the reader to "treat yourself gently: the ascent thins both / mind and blood and you must / keep still a dense reserve / of silence we can poise against / conversation: there is little news . . ."

The celebration of an anachronism. The desire in present to be in a dead past.

Joanna Klink, however, is one of the few poets who still believes in the pastoral as pure and devoid of the city and its pushy homages. I don't think she repudiates the necropastoral, but she certainly complicates it. It is not nostalgia we find in her landscape, but ardor. A yearning that must reject itself and the city. If that's the case her poetry finds itself nowhere, it is a negative of a positive of a negative. Here is the poem that begins her latest book, Raptus (Penguin, 2010):

Some Feel Rain

Some feel rain. Some reel the beetle startle

in its ghost-part when the bark

slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against

each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.

When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air

drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of

snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,

a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer

you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl

it carries. Some feel sunlight

well up in blood-vessels below the skin

and wish there had been less to lose.

Knowing how it could have been, pale maples

drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments.

do I imagine there is any place so safe it can't be

snapped? Some feel the rivers shirt,

blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long

dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws

skim the ground in snow and showers.

The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until

the second they are plucked. You can wait

to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury

the early star underdraws the night and its blackest

districts. And wonder. Why others feel

through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet

star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.

Why the earth cannot make its way toward you.

Dream-state, death-state, beautiful annihilation. We are discouraged by her style because she will never offer us what we really desire, to die in a wilderness and awake inside our urban walls. If we die the door will open in a wilderness, but what we walk into is the unknown.

Poem as Prayer

2010-06-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

from Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo, 2004) by Ilya Kaminsky:

Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must leave

this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,

for an empty page is the white flag of surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge

of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without

touching furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?"

I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.

Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and

in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music

in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest

days must I praise.

Another way in which the poet engages the reader is through the act of "prayer," usually on the outset of a book. Kaminsky's prayer is a steadfast and painful one, as a survivor who must now "speak" on behalf of those that cannot. The poet's address is one to a higher sort of being, or a statement of purpose. Not only can it be construed as the guiding light of the text (the rest of the book), but it may also set the tone.

Here is another sort of prayer, this time from Dan Beachy-Quick, from his book Spell (Ahsahta, 2004). This is from the prologue of the book, and is untitled:

Editor,

Here are the lines my mind fathomed.

They are tar-dark. I wrote them on pages

Breathless and blank, as beneath water

Men's minds are blank but for needing

A next breath. Sir, turn

This page and the thick door opens

By growing thinner, ever thinner,

Until the last page turns and is turned

Into air. Don't knock. The ocean knocks

Ceaseless on my little craft, and I am

Asking you, Will my craft hold? I send me

To you on a paper-thin hull. Don't knock.

I'm in there. I breathe on one lunch

for both lungs' air; my hand is wet

With knocking my knuckle to wave, and

Though the wave opens, I am never

Let in. I promised you the deep wave

's inner chamber. I'm sorry.

Do you see, Sir--

How the creast of a book builds at the binding

And finally spills over on to no shore?

Don't knock. I will ask the water to open for you

If you'll stop. Don't knock, don't knock, Sir--

Oh, it is not you. My wife's at my study door

And knows the wood won't open from wanting

Wood to. I must seal this craft's las plank

In place, and voyage it over ocean to you.

"Come in." She's knocking. "Come in."

Her hand's on my wooden shore, door--

I go. Send word, send word. If you don't, I'll know.

This is the beginning of a very impressive book of poems that adapts the megalomaniac obsessions of Moby Dick. Unlike the Kaminsky prayer, which has the air of optimism in the face of the cynic (". . . whatever I say // is a kind of petition, and the darkest / days must I praise"), Beachy-Quick's speaker is in a dark obsessive place, deep within the human psyche so that he feels entirely at sea or under sea. The door to his study is his "wooden shore," whereupon his study must be the sea. The "tar-dark" lines "my mind fathomed" are what we, as readers, shall find in this book, but the initial poem is a supplication (to his editor and us) of the poet's self-consciousness in the face of what he's written. Ultimately, the speaker-poet's a desperate man: "I send me / To you on a paper-thin hull."

Just like the opening lines of a novel or the prologue of a non-fiction piece, the first poem in a poetry collection is usually meant as a signal to what the collection will be. Very conscientious poets -- such as Kaminksy and Beachy-Quick -- are sure to do this, usually in the form of prayer or supplication.

Connotations

2010-05-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a poem by Theodore Roethke, one of his most anthologized poems:

"My Papa's Waltz"

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I clung on like death:

Such waltzing is not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hands that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

"My Papa's Waltz" is an easy poem for any reader to understand, and its double meaning - that of a drunken waltz with the speaker's father, and that of the father beating the child - is easily seen. Violent language pervades: "hung on like death," "unfrown itself," "battered," "scraped," "beat." Yet inside it is a sentimental tendency allowed through the use of the past tense. This is not occurring at present, but in some sort of past, and the speaker is no doubt grown by now. The emotions are therefore convoluted: there is a love of the father beating time on the speaker's head "with a palm caked hard by dirt," which empathizes with the father, a sense of a harder life for the father; "then waltzed me off to bed" is lovely in its own love, an endearment, even while "clinging to your shirt" contains the violence of child abuse.

I have heard argument that Roethke was not careful enough with the language, and the double meaning should not be there: it is either one or the other, not both. I see no reason to believe this. Poetry must, in all cases, pay close attention to a word's connotation. A word can give a feeling that the poet must be careful toward, and a group of words creates an image that must be viewed from all sides. Interpretation is usually what people say when they, as readers, attend to a poem. Sometimes an interpretation can be made the poet was in no way expecting, and plenty of interviews confirm this (there are others, such as interviews with Bob Dylan, in which Dylan is quite perplexed at some of the interpretations his interviewer comes up with). But what should be understood, and what I try to continually express in these posts, is that the poet is also being careful to interpret and examine, and usually wants to be in control of the connotations. A reader, therefore, should allow themselves the opportunity to feel the connotations - how they react emotionally to the poem. This again, is an argument for breaking down the wall between poet and reader: inviting the reader to engage in the poem from the level of connotations. Once the reader feels free and courageous enough to react to their emotions, the reader is engaging at the level of the poet. If the poet is strong, the emotions will follow course.

Here is another poem in which the poet is careful to construe connotations on an emotional level, but in a more playful manner:

"I Knew I'd Sing" -- Heather McHugh

A few sashay, a few finangle,

Some make whoopee, some

make good. But most make

diddly-squat. I tell you this

is what I love about

America - the words it puts

in my mouth, the mouth where once

my mother rubbed

a word away with soap. The word

was cunt. She stuck that bar

of family-size in there

until there was no hole to speak of,

so she hoped. But still

I'm full of it -- the cunt,

the prick, short u, short i,

the words that stood

for her and him. I loved the thing

they must have done, the love they must

have made, to make

an example of me. After my lunch of Ivory I said

vagina for a day or two, but knew

from that day forth which word

struck home like sex itself. I knew

when I was big I'd sing

a song in praise of cunt -- I'd want

to keep my word, the one with teeth in it.

Forevermore (and even after I was raised) I swore

nothing -- but nothing -- would be beneath me.

The emotion that is driven home is comedy, a chance for us to laugh at the play of language and the situation. This is a very easy example of how connotation is chosen, how images are allowed for the sake of pun. This is at play in many poems, and is always a good starting point: allowing your own emotions to fall in or out of line with the poem's.

55 Versus 95

2010-05-21T06:20:00.000-07:00

In his essay "Statements of Faith," Richard Hugo muses on the qualities of self-reflection inherent within a poet, and how a poet harnesses that self reflection:

"Poets who fail (and by fail I mean fail themselves and never write a poem as good as they know they are capable of) are often poets who fail to accept feelings of personal worthlessness. They lack the self-criticism necessary to perfect the poem. They resist the role of a wrong thing in a right world and proclaim themselves the right thing in a wrong world . . ." (p. 70, my emphasis)

I find it continually useful to look to the poem and the poet through this eye of self-criticism. Some of the best American poetry in the 20th century comes out of this idea of wrong in a right world (Lowell: "my mind's not right" [Skunk Hour], Eliot: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling the floors of silent seas." [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]), but for this post I wanted to look specifically at John Berryman.

Briefly, Berryman published some minor poetry while he saw most of his peers (Bishop, Plath, Lowell, Schwartz) recognized and honored. An ambitious poet, he suffered from personal turmoil and the desire to be recognized by the literary community. He became a intense alcoholic. For eleven years he worked on a sequence of poems, 77 Dream Songs, which, when published, was awarded the Pulitzer in 1965. The poems are from the point of view of Henry, a character loosely (or not so loosely) based on Berryman himself; and another voice that sometimes breaks into Henry's thoughts in a black vernacular, referring to Henry as Mr. Bones, or Sir Bones. In total, Berryman, after the first 77, continued writing the Dream Song seequence, producing 385 Dream Songs in all.

The first 77 songs are meditations on self-loathing. The first line to the first poem is "Huffy Henry hid the day." Continually Henry finds himself in situations where he can only conclude that he is wrong in a right world, that "there ought to be a law against Henry." However, by the beginning of the other Dream Songs, we see a shift in Henry's perspective, a sense that Henry has more authority with his readers, and less personal hatred. I wonder how this shifts the poems, how do the quality of the poems morph?

Here are two dream songs, the 55th and the 95th - one in the first 77, and the other after. Note the similarities in personalities and action:

Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.

The architecture is far from reassuring.

I feel uneasy.

A pity, -the interview began so well:

I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away

and sloshed out a martini

strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters--

God's health, the vague hell of the Congo,

John's energy,

anti-matter matter. I felt fine.

Then a change came backward. A chill fell.

Talk slackened,

died, and he began to give me sideways looks.

'Christ,' I thought, 'what now?' and would have askt for another

but didn't dare.

I feel my application failing. It's growing dark,

some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:

'We betrayed me.'

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep

insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.

I'd asked him in my robe

& hospital gown in the elevator politely

why someone saw so many police around,

and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep

across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.

I saw the point of Loeb

at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,

baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound

attend while he is cooked

until with trembling hands hoist I my true

& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains--

it's the texture & the thought--

but I will like them now, spooning at you,

my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains

lose heart and the sun flames out.

In "55," we have Henry appealing to a person of authority, the one that can slosh out martinis. There is an "application" which fails. In 95 the authority figure is certainly more vague, but also its actions are to look at Henry (similar to Peter's action of the "sideways look"). The sense of worthlessness that Henry feels in 55 comes in gulps of straightforward language, a lack of ability to seek out metaphor or symbol because of the overwhelming sense of worthlessness. There is something concrete in Henry's summing up of the interview.

In 95, Henry is not in the least bit curious to explore his own feelings of self-worth. He sees himself as an "insect" in the eyes of the cop, however this is only the insult Henry believes the cop is capable of. Henry's duty to this authority figure denies any self-reflection, because it is a not a particular - like Peter - but a figure of a whole, a bureaucratic symbol. Easier to attack. The language here, instead of being subdued like in 55, is expansive, climaxing at the best of the poetry here: "until with trembling hands hoist I my true / & legal ax," the point of the execution of the cop, and Henry imagines spooning out the cop's brains. What? Are we, as readers, supposed to follow this fancy with Henry? Why is Henry in a hospital gown in the first place? What happened to his "nervous system some time ago wrecked?"

Not only is Henry a manic self-loather, he takes aim at people he can claim superiority to. The cop has nothing on Peter - Peter is allowed the enigmatic final words of Dream Song 55, whereas the cop is not allowed a voice, even as Henry dances around him delighting in the idea of spooning out his brains. The poems are much different stylistically, but that difference seems to draw itself out of the situation: in 55 the line is paralyzed into the situation and Henry doesn't have the confidence to move into an imaginative space, while 95 prances in degradation and psychotic language. The key to the difference comes out of Henry's attitude toward himself: when is the time to be wrong/right in a right/wrong world?

The level of language, in all of poetry, must come from the consciousness of the poet. Sure, a poet can manipulate feeling and sensibility in the reader, but inherent in all poetry is an attempt to make an ally of the reader. Can we align ourselves with the Henry of 95? Does Berryman understand our failing to do so? Does he expect it? Berryman, by the time he had won the Pulitzer, could act as courier from a position of poetic authority to us the reader. What was sacrificed in that shift? Would we ever have the same Henry who hid the day? Answer this question yourself: read the Dream Songs.

The Invitation Within the Poem

2010-03-17T12:30:00.001-07:00

Contrary to what is ingrained in our schooling, the poet is just a normal person. Somehow in our education, we come to see the poet as the "Poet," something almost mystical, which means the poet's words take on a (superfluous) double meaning - there is what is written, and there is what the reader thinks is being hidden from the reader, the real meaning that is a puzzle, a riddle. But don't be so fooled.

Instead, the poet - lower case "p," please - is usually inviting the reader to walk alongside her, to see through the word-images that she writes and be a companion. In almost any poem there is an invitation. Some poets are more complicated than others, and expect more from their companions. But they are not difficult once the reader reads the poet, and by that I do not mean reads into but simply falls into line with the poem's melody, its thinking, and its rhythm, just as you might with any new acquaintance.

Here are two poems that contrast in levels of difficulty, but both, in some way, invite:

Visit

A.R. Ammons

It is not far to my place:

you can come smallboat,

pausing under shade in the eddies

or going ashore

to rest, regard the leaves

or talk with birds and

shore weeds: hire a full grown man not

late in years to oar you

and choose a canoe-like thin ship:

(a dumb man is better and no

costlier; he will attract

the reflections and silences under leaves:)

travel light: a single book, some twine:

the river is muscled at rapids with trout

and a birch limb

will make a suitable spit: if you

leave in the forenoon, you will arrive

with plenty of light

the afternoon of the third day: I will

come down to the landing

(tell your man to look for it,

the dumb have clear sight and are free of

visions) to greet you with some made

wine and a special verse:

or you can come by shore:

choose the right: there the rocks

cascade less frequently, the grade more gradual:

treat yourself gently: the ascent thins both

mind and blood and you must

keep still a dense reserve

of silence we can poise against

conversation: there is little news:

I found last month a root with shape and

have heard a new sound among

the insects: come.

This poem has no sense of urgency, no secret underpinning. The best guide to the place where the poet is, is a dumb man "the dumb have clear sight and are free of / visions" and once you have found the poet he will "greet you with some made / wine and a special verse . . . you must / keep still a dense reserve // of silence we can poise against / conversation . . ." poetry is always inflected with silence - with pausing through the middle of language. It is important to remain free of visions.

Here is a more complicated poem, but lovely, and also invites:

As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat

John Ashbery

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight

Filters down, a little at a time,

Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,

As the yellows the green of the maple tree. . . .

So this was all, but obscurely

I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages

Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.

New sentences were starting up. But the summer

Was well along, not yet past the mid-point

But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,

That time when one can no longer wander away

And even the least attentive fall silent

To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

Did they notice me, this time, as I am,

Or is it postponed again? The children

Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift

Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate

As limpid, dense twilight comes.

Only in that tooting of a horn

Down there, for a moment, I thought

The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,

Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade

That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,

Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?

They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun

Long than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.

Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door

But it was only her come to ask once more

If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor

Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,

Finally involved with the business of darkness.

And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,

The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons

Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower

Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.

The summer demands and takes away too much,

But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

Similarly, there is no secret meaning in this poem, it is all there on the surface. The title might be misleading, if it were "One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat" a reader might expect the image of that to pervade the poem, but the title is a simile, a comparing (in the abstract), so it is "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat." Everything that is to be determined about what this poem is about is on the surface, in the words.

"A look of glass stops you / And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived? / Did they notice me, this time, as I am / Or is it postponed again?" Those lines may very well be the speaker's own anxiety of his poetry, of being understood - or postponed from that understanding. He offers this to the reader.

The poem itself is engaged in the act of writing: "I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free" is the attempt to write. Then there is the invitation for you, the reader: "You have slept in the sun / Longer than the sphinx and are none the wiser for it. / Come in."

And then, as Ashbery always does, he whirls away from that invitation - alighting on the idea before whirling away from it. Ammons wants to sip wine with the reader, Ashbery wants to waltz. What is lovely about this is that it is your right, as a reader, to decide which poet you will accept the invitation from. And nothing about that is restricting.

Srikanth Reddy and the "It" in Po-it-try.

2010-03-05T06:28:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's the title.

Here's a poem I read this morning and thought I could write about. It is from Srikanth Reddy's first book, Facts for Visitors.

"Evening with Stars"

It was light. Whoever it was
who left it under the gumtree last night
forgot to close the gate. This morning when I stepped
out on the breezeway I had to shoo off a she-pig
& three rag-pickers before I could tell
what it was they were carting away
through the leaves. I had the houseboy bear it
into the sunroom. After attending to my & my employer's
business, I returned sometime after midnight
to examine it. A pair of monkeys
were hoisting it over the threshold
toward a courtyard of fireflies. When I shook my fist
they dropped it & I settled down at last.
It was gilt. It was evening with stars.
Where a latch should have been, a latch
was painted on. Over the lid, a procession.
Chariot. Splintered tree. Chariot. Chariot.
In the lamplight the hollows
of the footsoldiers' eyes were guttering.
I'd say they looked happy.
Tired & happy. Their soil-flecked boots
sank down to the buckle in weeds
& lacquered nettles, six men to a burden.
It was light. I could see
in the middle distance a bone priest
picking his way through crop rows
toward the wreckage of an iron temple.
Scarlet clouds moving out. Jasper clouds moving in.
Here, on a cistern, a woman
keeps nursing her infant.
She is unwell.
The workmanship is astonishing.
You can pick out ever lesion on her breast.

Mostly, I am alone.

Twice in the poem the clause "it was light," is written. When we set down to read the poem, we imagine that "it was light" refers to the day - just becoming light, or near dawn. However, the second sentence throws us off. There is a neutral subject and object in the second sentence "whoever it was / who left it under the gumtree . . ." The vagueness of these objects is not without import in the poem itself. But more on that below.

By the third line we have had to adjust to a world that is perpetually without specifics. Was the "it" in "it was light" refer to the the "it" - the object in the second line? Does it really matter? Not so much. What is this object that seems to be making a fuss, not just for the speaker, but for the monkeys and rag-pickers and a pig? When the speaker finally sets down to study it, we learn "it was gilt. It was evening with stars," a beautiful line, one that could be an adjectival phrase or be the power of the object itself. While maintaining the neutral second we are torn from a reality within the poem: we may assume "it" is a box, but "it" could be anything and therefore "it" takes on the reality of the universe ("evening with stars").

Note how we have had until the speaker sits down with the poem no real focused understanding of the situation. The speaker is somebody's employee, but what he does, we're not sure. The monkeys are absurd and the image of them carrying the object out is startling only in its absurdity. Then, however, we have a scene melt before us, giving way to a scene painted on the whole of the box. It's beauty is what is painted on, not what is inside (the "it was light" may also refer to the box being empty - after all, there are no latches, only painted on latches).

What is even more startling, is that the scene painted on the box moves. The images are given movement through the participle phrases (the soldiers eyes' "guttering," the priest "picking his way," the woman "nursing") and a sort of moral judgment being made on the part of the speaker that we as readers trust.

This is ekphrasis, the dramatic description of a visual work. Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and the chapter in The Iliad of Achilles' shield are famous for their ekphrasis (the description in Homer is amazing). It is when the piece of art (that is still) is given dramatic life (and even consequence) as it is being described through words. What I enjoy most about "Evening with Stars" is how dull and two dimensional the world is before the speaker enters into the artwork surrounding this box and escapes into it. There is a history at work in the art that the speaker sees for himself and draws consequences about. There is also a history in the speaker's real world, but one he is less willing to see (to callously call most things with the neutral second is to not pay attention to life), and one renewed by this mystical workmanship.

It is easy to find a copy of Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," and here is a link to the part of chapter XVIII of the Iliad that refers to the making of Achilles' shield.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19926

Enjoy it! It's beautiful.

Volkman sonnets

2010-02-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

I think the first post on poetry should be something from Karen Volkman's Nomina, published by BOA Editions in 2008. The book is a sequence of Italian sonnets, although the appreciation of these sonnets does not come from understanding of what they are about, but rather how they sound, the language Volkman calls forth, often quite startling in its beauty. For the reader, Nomina is about allowing the line, the rhyme and meter, to have its play.

Here is one of my favorite sonnets from the sequence:

[One says none is nascent, noon is due]

One says none is nascent, noon is due

when two's bleak blinded hybrid twins the light.

None says no one numbers less than two,

the one who days, the one who darks all night.

Noon's cold name is cloven, frigid height,

a one-division in the random, fault

split in fusion's faction, no one's bright

eyeless acme arching - cohesive vault.

That one were none's skulled infant, second sight

of two's twained woes, and tangled toxic root,

near to nothing, nameless, sequent blight,

as two's black use slits mind a riven fruit.

These sumless parents, two and null, make one

Queen of Quotient, who adds her x to none.

Almost like the riddle of the sphinx. I have had multiple theories of what the subject is - which might have something to do with the clock between the hours of 10 and 2, but also just a working and a metaphysics of the mathematics between 0, 1 and 2 (which, I note, are the only numerals between the hours of 10 and 2). But although I have never been able to truly wrap my mind off the riddle of how "one says none is nascent, noon is due" (except in the anticipation of the 1 and 0 making ten o' clock, the 0 coming into existence for the first and only time in the hours of the day), but even without this I fall for the line break rhythm at "a one-division in the random, fault / split in fusion's faction . . ." the comma, the single accented syllable, and the line break creates a regular pause (like a tick-tock) that is fun to sound out. Likewise are the phrases "eyeless acme arcing" and "Queen of Quotient."

In my previous post, I quoted one of Shakespeare's sonnets and how schoolteachers ask their students to interpret rather than listen. For much of Shakespeare can be put into context with an interpretation. Even if the line "Let not the marriage of two minds admit / impediment" asks the reader to go over it again, it is eventually understood. But could we ask a high school student to take a Volkman sonnet and do the same? It would be best, instead, if we focused on music and let the student return to the line for its sound and not its meaning. After all, a rereading will always help improve a person's understanding of the poem.

I'll end this post with another Volkman sonnet, for fun.

[Now you nerve. Flurred, avid as the raw]

Now you nerve. Flurred, avid as the raw

worm in the bird's throat. It weirds the song.

The day die darkly in the ear all wrong -

all wreck, all riot - the maiden spins the straw,

the forest falters. Night is what she saw,

in opaque increments deafening the tongue.

Sleep bird, sleep body that the silence strung,

myrrh-moon, bright maudlin, weeping as you draw

white tears, pearl iris in a net of eyes.

The spinning maiden quickens her design.

Cold cut spooling, integument of awe,

a baby's breathing as a bird is wise

(the bird-bright heart that flutters like a law)

which eats the excess. The strangle in the shine.

Beginning Thoughts

2010-02-26T06:44:00.000-08:00

Well, here I go, I suppose.

Currently I am at work on a number of reviews of some poetry books I think people would like (particularly Joan Houlihan's The Us), so this first post is something of a mystery to me. A public record that everyone is keeping? Is that what a blog is? A public diary? That's interesting. So then a bit about me (rather than those interests, favorite music, and all that).

This is a blog about poetry and literature, specifically American poetry, my chief interest. While there are some depressing figures about the institution of poetry and the amount of people within that institution who incestuously work together - how many MFA blogs like this one are there? - I'm trying to think up ways in which the public can once again be interested in poetry. I suppose what this blog might be are just some thoughts on particular poems I've been reading, with the hope that those laymen who don't read poetry will take an interest.

Because the problem (I see) with the lack of poetry being read (while the amount of poetry being written is rocketing - the number of MFA programs has never been higher), is that 1) we are taught a classical poetry in school - Shakespeare, Tennyson, Frost is usually the farthest we go - and 2) we are asked as students to "interpret," rather than absorb. At least the school I went to was focused on the ideas buried within the line, not the line itself, not the music of the line. So when a student reads:

"and sable curls all silver'd o'er in white"

we are asked to interpret what the "sable curls" are and what the sonnet means for age and time and love, rather than focus on the beauty of the iamb and the ending stress of the "t" in "white." We are asked to write essays rather than look to the beauty of stanzas like this one from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"

"I have seen the riding seaward on the waves,
Combing the white hairs of the waves blown back,
When the wind blows the water white and black."

The stoicism of this teaching approach, the absolute puritanism of it which is called "appreciation," has damaged people so much that when they read a poem such as Hugo's "White Center," they say "It's nice . . . but I don't understand it." My theory is that the reader has been caught up in a line, in trying to "interpret" the line - because a poet to this reader has always been hiding meaning rather than giving it to the reader with tea and scones in the afternoon - and have read it with only half an ear, too caught up in meaning to hear the piece itself.

My posts will then be looking at poems for their beauty and not necessarily for their meaning, and hopefully those that follow along will be all the more enriched for it. And I, too, hope to gain some interesting information from others and engage in this strange dialogue that is the blog.