Two poets at Faulkner's pad (C. Dungy and Major Jackson in Oxford, MS)

As I feared when I packed my life into boxes this spring, plenty is still lost to the inside of paper-walled containers.  My copy of Flight to Canada must still be boxed up in cardboard, also my third-favorite terrycloth robe.  Did I leave my good black bra in the old building’s washer, and where in laurels’ name is my signed copy of Native Guard?  I can’t even locate the sheet of return address labels my insurance agent sent.  Why would I bother to lose something as useless as that?  The husband asks where our checkbooks are, and I panic.  He asks where I’ve hidden his favorite sugar dispenser, and I tell him his guess is as good as mine.  I’m pretty sure the box of his baby pictures my mother-in-law keeps asking after is buried in that incredibly dusty storage closet.  Which means I’ll soon be back in the closet, stirring up dirt from the past.  Consider the possibility of having permanently misplaced your husband’s baby pictures.  Now write a poem.

Many of my friends are professionally inclined toward the psychological arts.  They’ve spent the summer assuring me that moving is considered one of the top three stressors in any person’s life.  They tell me that it’s normal to be out of sorts when you move from a familiar place into a new one.  Being ambitious, I earn little solace from hearing I am normal.  Faulkner, who most of us can agree was exceptional, disliked living and writing anywhere but at home in Mississippi.  I derive some comfort from that.  But it’s paltry comfort, for I must observe that, in direct opposition to Faulkner’s sojourn in California, in terms of the provenance of my childhood, here, in California, I’m already home.  Plus, Faulkner owned that big house from the porch of which his wife could declare fruitful phrases like, “There’s something about the light in August,” whereas the hubby and I are in transition, just renting this flat for awhile.   No use comparing myself to Faulkner, I suppose.

I have moved plenty of times in my relatively short life and, with rare exception, there are always months of writing-related blues while I recalibrate the flow between my body, heart, and mind.  The physical and psychic input of one house, always different from the input of the next house, make my poems happen very differently in each new place, when they happen at all.  Think of the way subtle shifts in the water in each new town defines the volume of your hair, the amount of money you give each year to Brita, the bulk of your arm muscles from scrubbing the lime stains in your tub.  Consider how much longer you spend in the new house producing a good lather while shampooing.  Consider how much longer you spend scrubbing the tub tiles after you finish shampooing.  Consider all the steps you must take before you drink a glass of water to refresh yourself after washing your hair and also your tub. Now write a poem.

Throughout my three years in the last apartment, I lived in a state of constant foreboding owing in large part to the fact that hardly an hour passed with no fire truck, ambulance, or police car siren.  My study was directly above the apartment building’s main entrance, so I overheard the buzz whenever an outsider was permitted to enter the complex.  Writing this, I realize that I’ve now lived over two months without once hearing San Francisco’s outdoor emergency broadcasting system’s weekly Tuesday noon test siren.  My internal forebodings had a place to hang their panic with all those sirens and security buzzers.  When was the last time I could say, when my stomach jumped in its regular schedule of panic, “Oh, that’s only the outdoor emergency broadcasting system’s Tuesday noon test siren”?  This is the sort of recalibration I’m talking about.  It will be months before I can identify the most convenient hangers for my anxieties in this new place.

In my old house, and in each old house before it, I eventually identified the right place to hang my coats.  Now, though, the designated coat closet feels wrong.  When I walk into this house, I toss my coat off wherever seems good at the time.   There’s no semblance of order. But I’m a poet with a penchant for sonneteering.  I’m a lover of order.  I take my coats off in thoughtless locations, but then, when it’s time to set out again, I have a hard time finding what I need.  Consider how such circumstances might conclude with the poet walking about with the wrong coat or no coat at all.   Is the poet roused to action by some alarm or slow to get going because of a strange and stultifying silence? Consider how these circumstances could conclude with the poet being freed or with the poet freezing. Now write a poem.

To spur the “write a poem” part of my day, I am, as ever, reading.  Eclectic summer reading.  The sort that has nothing to do with class assignments or research or editing jobs.  Summer reading of my own, ecumenical, choice. I find, especially in a new place with new windows and, therefore, new vantage points through which the world can see me, that revealing the reading I do entirely of my own accord can be awkward.  In one new town, where I had no friends and also no television, I decided to reread all of The Divine Comedy.  This led me to reread all of The Chronicles of Narnia.  This was long before those blockbuster movies were released but years after that “Aslan is on the move” bumper sticker craze.  Like Dante and the children in Narnia, I suppose I felt a bit like a stranger touring marvelous, and sometimes horrifying, new lands, and so I found myself mesmerized by both Dante and Lewis.  My literary interests, and what they revealed about me, made for stilted cocktail party conversation, I’ll admit.  All the same, because I have already written about losing my best black bra and misplacing my husband’s childhood photos and also his sugar, I see no reason why I should not continue the revelations by sharing some of what I’m reading in my new house this month.

Here’s what I read in July, listed in the order of digestion (though I have not included some terrific articles like one I read on gray whales returning to their breeding ground off the Baja Peninsula, and one on a diamond thief reliving his biggest heist, or more in that neighborhood):

1) Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry, edited and translated by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover.

2) Having finished reading Black Dog, Black Night, and having appreciated the experience of being introduced to the book’s 22 contemporary Vietnamese poets whose work, with the exception of Linh Dinh, Troung Tran and Mông-Lan, I must confess I had not hitherto known, I decided to reach back to the familiar.  Thus, I reread Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

3) When that book was finished, I picked up the copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, that I‘ve kept at the ready, unread, since its release. Perhaps not the perkiest book with which to battle the blues.

4) When I finished The Road I thought I’d take my desolation in smaller chunks, namely the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, from a new translation by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover released last fall.  What to do with the fact that two of the poems that moved me most in the book were titled, I wish I were fabricating for effect, “The Departed” and “Half of Life”?

5) Maybe this dislocation was an issue of translation, I considered.  Perhaps the question of desolation had something to do with genres I’d been reading, poems being so brief and novels so long.  So I looked to another shelf entirely to find my next book, and I started into Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Days/365 Plays, though what I found myself most drawn to was her eleven-play series called, with variations, ”Father Comes Home From the Wars,”  and so I could not help but acknowledge the through line that was there all along, a through line in my reading that helped me realize I have been missing outdoor emergency sirens and have been busy constructing internal alarms of my own.

Consider the way choices reflect anxieties.  Or, consider the way anxieties reflect choices.  Is there any difference between the two?  Now write a poem.

A Man Returning Home

He is home from That
His wife cries all night, his kids are confused all day
Home from That
when he walks through the door, his friends’ faces are ashen
Home from That
he feels an itch on the back of his head
in the midst of a crowd
as if someone is watching

One year later, he suddenly chokes during a party
Two years later, he sweats from his nightmares
Three years later, he feels pity for a lizard
Years later, he has the habit of sitting alone in darkness

Some days he feels a stranger’s penetrating stare
Some nights, an aimless voice asks questions
He jumps
at a touch to his shoulder

–Hoàng Hung, from Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry

I placed this poem in my Admired Poems file because I was enamored of its use of the list.  I love the way the discomforts of this man’s life seem to simultaneously increase and decrease in magnitude.  The “aimless voice ask[ing] questions” might have seemed less daunting had it come earlier in the poem, next to the mention of his kids for instance.  But here at the end of the poem, when we find that physical comforts like “a touch to his shoulder” frighten him so, this voice becomes incredibly worrisome.  What is the voice asking him to do?  The line break after jumps is particularly effective given that the line “He jumps” comes in such proximity to the menace of those questions.  Now the idea of the man jumping seems terribly alarming, and though we ought to be calmed by the fact that he’s jumped at such a little thing, in the end the menace of the “touch to his shoulder” increases rather than dissipates. I also love the nonspecific word “That,” and how, in this version of the poem, the word is presented capitalized and in italics. Hoàng Hung allows the reader to decide what it is this man has returned from.  I have conjectures, but the specific answer to what “That” might be is significantly less interesting than the answers we get to what “That” has done to the man.  As with the details accumulated in the poem, the horror of what “That” might be accrues weight as the poem progresses.

Consider the way choices reflect anxieties.  Or, consider the way anxieties reflect choices.  Is there any difference between the two?  Now write a poem.

With the exception of an occasional cameo appearance, this will be my final post on Harriet.  I have enjoyed the opportunity to post on the blog for a number of reasons, not the least of which has been the opportunity to share news about writing that moves me.  Moreover, I have appreciated the opportunity to articulate for others, and thus clarify for myself, what it is that draws me to the work I care about.  For over a decade, I have kept a reading journal, recording for each book I read at least one page of reflections.  This has been a useful act for me as a writer and as a teacher as it forces me to more carefully articulate ideas that I might otherwise gloss over.  Though you might recall I was resistant to the concept of blogging when I first joined company with Harriet, the act of blogging has pushed me even further than my reading journal could, bringing me more rapidly to insights I would have eventually come to, but which I might have mulled over, in private, for a much longer time.  It’s July 31st, for instance.  Now that I’ve written this blog, now that I’ve identified some of what I’m missing in this new house, and now that I’ve told all of you what I’ve been looking to find based on what I’m reading, perhaps I can start looking for something different.  Maybe in August I’ll reread Frank Baum, discovering in the Wizard of Oz how I could have been happy, even at home, all along.

I’ll close with a C. P. Cavafy poem that seems to speak directly to how I might manage the concerns revealed in this post:

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

–C.P. Cavafy, Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

Consider how these circumstances could conclude with the poet being frozen or with the poet being freed. Now write a poem.

Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09 (photo: C. Dungy)

The street sweepers have passed, and the crowd control fences have been carried away.  Pride, for some, is over and done.  But for many, the persistent resistance that Pride weekend celebrates still thrives.  Thank goodness. In honor of Pride and, moreover, in honor of the spirit of resistance and persistence of the Stonewall rebellion and the movements it spawned, (and also in a sort of answer to a question Catherine Halley posed some time ago), I’m going to share a few poems by a small sample of writers from the West Coast LBGT community.

Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho, connects her love of the poet Sappho to a very contemporary, daily existence.  Our lingering fascination with the poet from Lesbos is filtered through this book’s witty, sometimes heartbreaking perspectives.  In the poem, “How Much Can I Have of Sappho?” she grapples with what it means to be denied the right to claim the poet.  Here are the final two sections of the four-section piece:

III

I live with the anger that Sappho and I
are denied each other.
She’s a word like “aunt,” I’m a word like “quaint,”
we’re always off-rhyme,
two words like “ain’t.”

People say to me, “You know, she didn’t have to be
a lesbian.  You know nothing
is proven, right?”

A one-size-fits-all meaning of the word lesbian
is one I don’t even ask for.

“What would Sappho think?”
I ask myself.  She would think, “Who’s that
new girl?”

IV

People just can’t find
a way to let me
have her.

And why not?
What would they
lose then?

Maybe people just feel a need
to put me in my place,
to set me straight.

What attracts me to this poem is its plain spokeness, and also its light touch (“What would Sappho think?” / I ask myself.  She would think, “Who’s that / new girl?”)  These belie a turbulent emotional undercurrent.  The poem keeps up a calm face even as there is a great deal of emotion, intention, complexity of purpose contained therein.  It feels like an apt statement of a sort of committed resistance that must carry on daily, that cannot risk expending overmuch energy at every turn because there is going to be another struggle to undertake the next day and there must be energy kept in reserve.

A complaint that is often waged against poets writing from marginalized communities (I hate that phrase, pardon my use of it here for expedience’s sake) is that they are not angry enough, that their poems are not direct enough in their articulations of resistance.  I, personally, love a poem that expresses a kind of restraint while it makes clear that the speaker is not going to roll over and hush up anytime soon.  There is a certain kind of staying power a poem like this suggests, that the speaker’s resilience is not going to sputter out overnight. This is a good thing, since, as her poems suggests (read some more here), there is still plenty of work to be done.

This poetic conservation of energy, even when circumstances might suggest appropriate conditions for immoderate rage, seems to be one of the key factors tying together the poets I am looking at today.  D. A. Powell’s new book, Chronic, is full of poems that play a number of emotional registers, backing away from all out rage much of the time and employing, instead, sarcasm, sideways references (which in poetics speak we call allusion), understatement, dry wit, feigned indifference.  Poems like “centerfold” and “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song ‘good times’ by chic” overlook what’s at their core, if by overlook we can simultaneously mean to willfully look beyond as well as to carefully survey.  When the matter at the core of the poems has to do with chronic disease, the degradation of civilization as we know it, and love’s ever-dissolving potential, it might be best to take a step back every now and again to gain a fresh perspective, to rest the spirit for the inevitable struggles ahead.

This post owes a debt to Cole Krawitz and Griselda Suarez, the two San Francisco Bay Area writers who organized a reading for the 2009 National Queer Arts Festival.  I was familiar with the work of most of the poets reading at the event: D. A. Powell, Eloise Klein Healy, Jewelle Gomez, Elana Dykewomon, Ching-In Chen, the magnificent Dorothy Allison, and the multi-genre force, Rigoberto González.  Only one poet was completely new to me: Ely Shipley.

Shipley’s work fits into this idea of persistent resistance beautifully.  The poems take on ways of looking, and chip away slowly, often delicately, at the perceptions they initially suggest:

Boy with Flowers

My aunt loved me, asked me:
will you be the flower
girl at my wedding?  But I’m not
a girl, I argued, and she persuaded me:
you’ll get to throw rose petals

onto the aisle, walk before me, both of us
crushing them beneath our feet, my gown
dragging over them.  I agreed.  I wanted
nothing but chivalry.

At the church, my mother and I
waited in the small room.  She brushed
my aunt’s hair until the dress arrived.
Isn’t it beautiful?  And I agreed until they tried
to put me in it.  I’d seen my father

and uncle earlier, standing in a circle
of other men, smoke hovering over their heads, a halo
and their voices kind, quiet, and deep.  I told my aunt—
I want to wear a suit like them!  She promised

if I wore the dress I could wear anything
I wanted after: army pants, a sheriff
badge, cowboy hat, and pistols.  My mother shot her
a look in the mirror where we posed, both of them
angelic in white, and me not yet

dressed.  Today I wake from another dream
in which I have a beard, no breasts,
and am about to go skinny-dipping
on a foreign beach with four other men.

I’m afraid to undress, won’t take off my shorts,
so they gab me, one at each ankle, the other two
by each wrist.  I am a starfish hardening.
The sun hovers above, a hot
mirror where I search for my reflection.

I close my eyes.  It’s too intense.  The light
where my lover is tracing fingertips
around two long incisions in my chest.  Each sewn tight
with stitches, each naked stem, flaring with thorns.

The turns in this poem, intensified by the line breaks and also the leaps from one situation to the next, amplify the sense of long struggle.  The poem is about now and also about always, and its pace, slow and steady but also, somehow, accelerated, seems just right for a situation in which everything happens at once and, also, situations unravel over long periods of time. “Boy with Flowers,” the title poem of Shipley’s collection, reveals in increments and, with each revelation, suggests plenty more that’s gone unsaid.

Speaking of plenty more going unsaid, there are a slew of other writers whose work I’d love to address here: Charles Flowers, C. Dale Young, Toni Mirosevich, Troung Tran, Eileen Myles, Jericho Brown, and Elizabeth Bradfield spring immediately to mind.  I’ll close, though, by writing briefly about the inimitable Rebecca Brown, whose earthshaking works of fiction and nonfiction are go-to books for me when I want to think about how to use language most evocatively. This is so partly because Brown’s books are so amazing in the manners in which they manage to be simultaneously direct and indirect.  I’m thinking, for instance, of her phenomenal story “What I Did” in the short story collection The Terrible Girls.  In “What I Did” the speaker narrates, in gruesome detail, the specifics of carrying some very clearly referenced thing, but she fails to ever, directly, state what that thing actually is.  It’s a brilliant deployment of abstraction in the midst of clarity, so the story works as allegory and testimony all at once.  This idea of staying power that I’ve been working around in this post seems to come forward throughout Brown’s many volumes of prose.  Each time she tackles a subject in her books, be it her mother’s death, a progression from young lesbian to elder figure, caring for those afflicted with AIDS, grappling with identity, or learning to play war with the kids on the block, Brown does so in an unflinching manner that demands you stay with her for the long haul.

Brown’s work, like the work of all the writers I’ve written about today, bears little resemblance to the glitzy weekend my city’s just celebrated, with its corporate sponsorship and its start-on-time-end-on-time-kindly-police-escorted parade.  This work bears more in common with the dangerous confrontations at the Stonewall Inn, and before, and after, and on and on for the years and years, the decades of struggle and progress and tide turns and surprises (pleasant and unpleasant) and constant persistent celebration and resistance some of us have made note of only on occasion ever since and some of us, thank goodness, are alert to most days.

Once or twice a year I shut off my cell phone and computer and spend a stretch of time in the great wide open.  Or in some approximation of the great wide open.  I always get plenty of juice out there, and I come back refreshed and full of ideas.  That’s where I’ve been the last couple weeks, Harriet, running out in the great wide open.  (Cue sound clip for open breeze.) This summer’s trip took me to the Monterey Bay, site of North American’s largest underwater canyon (think the Grand Canyon, submarine style), the Monterey Bay Aquarium, more Steinbeck placards than even I, an avid placard reader, could read, and a fish or two. All the fish, fishers, and fishing boats got me to thinking of my favorite fish poems.  Now that I’m plugged in again, I thought I’d share a few.  As ever, I’d love to hear what fish poems strike you, too.

First, of course, there’s Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.”  Rarely do I hear the word “rainbow” without thinking of the way Bishop’s poem streams towards its last lines.  I love nearly everything about this poem, the flowing description of the “tremendous” fish caught by the speaker and held “half out of water” beside her boat; the skin that “hung in strips/like ancient wallpaper” (not the way I think of fish at all, and yet (yes!) I see it when Bishop describes it so; the barnacles and “fine rosettes of lime”; even the “tiny white sea-lice.” I see the gills “breathing in/ the terrible oxygen,” the fear she describes the fish registering, and I love the way, just at the moment she gives the fish feelings, she reminds us how tasty it might be thanks to its “coarse white flesh/ packed in like feathers.”  And then, as if to shame me for feeling greedy in this way, proprietary of this fish, Bishop takes me back to its resignation, and its fight, the “sullen eye” and then the description of all the struggles it has hitherto endured such that we witness, with Bishop, because of Bishop, the remains, “grim, wet, and weaponlike,” of “five old/ pieces of fish-line… with all their five big hooks/grown firmly in his mouth….Like medals with their ribbons/frayed and wavering,/ a five-haired beard of wisdom/
trailing from his aching jaw.”  And then this ending, an ending that knocks me out every time:

…I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels–until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

I can’t see a picture of a trophy fish without thinking of Bishop’s poem, and never do I see that pool of bilge one sometimes sees around water without hearkening back to Bishop’s description.  Here’s a poem that has rewritten the way I see the world.  What a tremendous fish, indeed.

My favorite creatures at the aquarium, creatures that changed the way I think about life on earth, were the leafy sea dragon and the brown sea nettle, but I don’t know any poems about them.  And I loved the blue fin tuna and the yellowfin.  Also the octopus.  (Martin, your recipe, if you ever send it, will reach me too late. I’ve officially sworn off eating octopus.  Hate to eat any animal that might beat me at chess.)  My husband was enchanted by the schools of sardines, and they were lovely, all silver streak and forward-rushing flash.  But every few mentions of sardines made me think of Toi Derricotte’s poem “My Dad & Sardines.”  And every time we walked past another placard reminding us of the history of the place where we stood, the millions of tons of canned sardines that passed across conveyor belts on cannery row, I thought it must have been to feed people like Derricotte’s father who “loved/ sardines– right before bed—with/ onions & mustard.”  Of course, the war effort, and fish feed, and the European and Asian markets helped deplete the Monterey Bay’s stock of sardines too, but, still, there must have been more than a few men like Derricotte’s father who relished the taste of canned sardines before bed.

For awhile, it seemed there would be plenty of the luminescent schools of sardines to keep all of these appetites satisfied. In the 1930’s, when the sardine factories in Monterey were operating at their peak, nearly three-quarters of a million tons of sardines were processed annually.  (If my unplugged-placard-reading-recollection serves me, the quota these days is set at about 80,000 tons a year).    All sorts of things drove the increase in sardine catches, one of them being a new style of fishing boat called the purse-seine.

I just love it when I’m geeking out on placards and run across some word or line or phrase that makes me think of a poem.  In this particular case, I thought, standing there in the absolutely wonderful (and rhyme-ful) Monterey Bay Aquarium, “Gee, they ought to post Roberson Jeffers’s “The Purse-Seine” here to give folks an idea of what such an enormous fish haul might have looked like.  Of course, the aquarium did not (despite all the lovely rhyming placards they had in the children’s section to make sure the kids— and their parents— carried their new knowledge home). For one thing, Jeffers’s poem is fairly long.  And a fair portion of it has nothing to do with sardines and the purse seine fishing technique at all.  I forget, sometimes, how Jeffers’s poem swings out wide, taking its lens beyond the ocean and its netted fish and sighing sea lions and up to a mountaintop, the better to look down on the city dwellers who depend on the fishermen’s catch and so much more without even realizing their dependence.  It’s a fascinating, telescoping poem, half lyric half preachy, part wistful part vengeful, a little bit melancholy and a little bit holier-than-thou.  The poem intrigues me, and also startles me a little, and that’s part of why I like it so much.

The aquarium did not include a copy of the Jeffers poem with its description of the purse-seine fishing fleet, but I will (adding here the caveat that Harriet’s blog software doesn’t allow me to indent at will and so Jeffers’s ragged margins cannot be repeated in this post, lo siento).  Since Jeffers has so much to say on the subjects of fish, fishermen, and the eaters of fish, I’ll let him have the final words:

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net,
unable to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting
Santa Cruz; off New Year’s Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color
light on the sea’s night-purple; he points,
and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the
gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great
labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,
then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall
to the other of their closing destiny the
phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body
sheeted with flame, like a live rocket
A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside
the narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up
to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls
of night
Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:
how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how
beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet
they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we
and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all
powers–or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls–or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.
These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,
splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are
quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew
that cultures decay, and life’s end is death.

I was talking to a friend today about one-sentence poems I love.

By one-sentence poems I don’t mean very short poems like the one-line poems Michael McFee discussed in his Feb. 2008 article in the AWP Writer’s Chronicle.  McFee has written a whole book made up of monostich (The Smallest Talk), and so he is likely much interested in the form and its function.  That is an interesting line of inquiry (pardon the pun), but not what I’m talking about when I mention one-sentence poems here.

I’m talking about poems of a greater length that are only one sentence long. Not poems without punctuation, but poems that employ the standard rules of grammar and flow.  When pulled off well, the simultaneity of loose constructions and rigid attention to details that a lengthy single-sentence poem requires puts me in mind of the most stirring music: what I receive appears spontaneous and wildly free even while I understand that it seems this way only because of careful practice and intense focus on the part of the maker.

Dissidence

in memoriam Thelonious Monk

You have to be able to hear past the pain, the obvious
minor-thirds and major-sevenths, the merely beautiful

ninths; you have to grow deaf to what you imagine
are the sounds of loneliness; you have to learn indifference

to static, and welcome noise like rain, acclimate
to another kind of silence; you have to be able to sleep

in the city, taxis and trucks careening through your dreams
and back again, hearing the whines and sirens and shrieks

as music; you must be a mathematician, a magician
of algebra, overtone and acoustics, mapping the splintered

intervals of time, tempo, harmony, stalking or sluicing blues
scales; you have to be unafraid of redundance, and aware

that dissonance-driven explorations of dissonance
may circle back to the crowded room of resolution;

you have to disagree with everything except the piano, black
and white keys marking the path you must climb step

by half-step with no compass but the blues, no company
but your distrust of the journey, of all that you hear, of arrival.

–Anthony Walton

The play between different types of resistance to norms in this poem speaks to what I like about a good one-sentence poem.  The poem resists the simple structures set up by the culture of grammar.  Sure, Walton could have easily used periods in place of semi-colons, but phooey on the period, he was going to push his poem as far as he could. Long-sentence poems are dissenters, resisting the rule of law, the brevity we tend to desire of highly-communicative language. The effect of this dissent could play as a kind of dissonance upon a certain, rule-abiding ear.  But the beauty of the best one-sentence poems is that they manage their dissidence largely unnoticed.  The poems flow along, like imbedded soldiers of the resistance, following most of the rules that sentence is supposed to follow, so that the less observant reader might overlook rebellions against the full stop.

Every time I recognize the fact that a poem is executed using only one sentence, it takes my breath away.  There is a lot to manage: the deployment of proper grammar, the pacing of the sentence and its thoughts, the ability to string the reader along without exasperating her, the deft control of subject, tense, case, number…  These are sentences that make me think of my jr. high school English teacher, (Ms./Miss/Mrs.?) Nichols.  M. Nichols was the last of a breed of English teachers who might have been married, partnered, spinsters for all we knew.  We weren’t worried about her personal life, we were just worried she might go back in time a few years and use her ruler to whack us over the knuckles if we didn’t diagram our sentences correctly.  That may sound as if I am disrespecting M. Nichols, but actually, I am quite glad my path crossed hers.  I have an expanded capacity to love a well-wrought sentence thanks to her.

Steve Scafidi’s unhinged rant, “To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire,” became all the more compelling when I realized all eight cinquains create one long, wild sentence.  John Keats’ “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art” feels all the more full of longing given that it is one long wistful sentence.  And Carl Phillips’ “The Grackle” seems to hesitate mid-flight since the thirteen-stanza poem turns out to be an extended, grammatically-correct phrase, completed not with a period but a dash.

What about you, Harriet readers?  Do you have any favorite one-sentence poems, 14 lines or longer?

I’ll end with one more, a poem that catches me up in the rapturous, lawless wanderings of a mind in love. From Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems:

XIII

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years … we’re driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear—
neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung
but a woman’s voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

One of my favorite poems in the collection reads as a transcription of that terrified and terror-inducing back seat driver most of us have had the eventful misfortune of sharing a car with at least once.  This poem ramps up to a frothy fear as it rolls along the border between Detroit and Windsor:

See how there’s no one going to Windsor,
only everyone coming from?
Maybe they’ve been evacuated,
maybe there’s nuclear war,
maybe when we get there we’ll be the only ones.
See all those trucks coming toward us,
why else would there be rush hour on the 401
on a Thursday at nine o’clock in the evening?
I counted 200 trucks and 300 cars
and that’s just since London.
See that strange light in the sky over Detroit,
see how dark it is over Windsor?
You know how people keep disappearing,
you know how organ thieves follow tourists
on the highway and grab them at night
on the motel turnoffs,
you know they’re staging those big highway accidents
to increase the number of organ donors?
My brother knew one of the guys paid to do it,
$100,000 for twenty bodies
but only if the livers were good.
See that car that’s been following us for the last hour,
see the pink glow of its headlights in the mirror?
That’s how you know.
Maybe we should turn around,
maybe we should duck so they can’t see us,
maybe it’s too late,
maybe we’re already dead,
maybe the war is over,
maybe we’re the only ones alive.

(Di Brant, from “Zone: <le Détroit>” in Now You Care)

This book is full of long, wonderful riffs.  The twelve section “Songs for a Divorce” is one of the most intriguing perspectives on the subject in awhile, and the twenty seven section “Heart” shifts between heartbreak and elation, covering most emotions in between. “Interspecies communication” is the most graceful poem about the collapse of the bee colonies I’ve come across thus far:

And then everything goes bee,
sun exploding into green,
the mad sky dive
through shards of diamond light,
earth veering left, then right,
then left, sweet scented,
the honing in,
the buzz,
the yes no dance,
the quantum leap into
open swoon of calendula,
yellow orange delphinium starflower,
ultraviolet milkweed forget-me-not,
caress of corolla carpel calyx….

(Di Brant, from “Interspecies Communication” in Now You Care)

I love how the language in this poem grows more complex as the ecosystem surrounding the bees appears.  At first the details of their “yes no dance” come easily off the tongue, but then we get to the “open swoon of calendula” and the “caress of corolla carpel calyx” and suddenly everything is more intricate than we had presumed it to be.

Equally applicable to this talk about women poets living in Canada and writing with an eye for the details of the natural world is Elise Partridge’s book Fielder’s Choice.  I’m struck by Partridge’s attention to the specific components of each of her subjects, which you can read in this online example of her recent work.

Rachel Rose’s Notes on Arrival and Departure has several poems I’ve come to enjoy revisiting.  One is “The New GRE,” riddled with Rose’s particular brand of sly wit and insight:

1. Write an essay on why the most popular TV channel during Christmas is the picture of the Yule log burning.

2.  North American adults replace their dining-room table on average as often as they replace their spouse—1.5 times in a lifetime.  Discuss….

7.  The average worker bee gathers a thimbleful of honey in her lifetime.  The most precious Persian carpets were a life’s work for the girls imprisoned their entire lives to hook a single carpet.

a) Express the value of the carpet in an inverse ratio to the value of the girls.

b) Calculate the weight of each girl to the nearest thimbleful of honey.

(Rachel Rose, from “The New GRE” in Notes on Arrival and Departure)

Throughout Notes on Arrival and Departure and Rose’s other book, Giving My Body To Science, you’ll find Rose’s mixture of common and esoteric knowledge woven throughout poems written in a variety of forms.  One of my favorites is “Sestina of the Geographic Tongue” which begins with an epigraph from the New American Dictionary which describes the “geographic tongue” as “One with raised areas due to thickening of the surface cells, giving the appearance of a map.”  Rose takes this tidbit and runs.  And oh how she runs!

I would be remiss to close any post about Canadian ecologically-minded women poets without mentioning Erin Mouré ‘s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person or Stephanie Bolster’s Pavillion or White Stone: The Alice Poems. I could go on for quite some time discussing these three engaging books.  In fact, I would like to go on further, but I’m in Canada, after all, and rather than sitting inside writing about women poets whose writing engages the natural world I’d like to go outside and be a woman poet who engages with the natural world.  Thanks for obliging me.

It was on ABC, the spelling bee, shoving aside Grey’s Anatomy.  A prime time slot for a spelling bee! The prelims were on ESPN, for heaven’s sake. Large swaths of America were, apparently, for awhile at least, deeply interested in words. The guy at my Sprint store watched it too, and several of the Sprint store customers as well.  We talked, today, about some of our favorite words and word-related incidents.  The National Spelling Bee was a major event.  Young people spelling big words drew national attention.  The Vice President’s wife was in the audience to watch young people who cared about word derivations and parts of speech.  So what if many of the folks who watched the Bee could only spell words that had to do with food, there was a general interest in language on national television.  That made me pretty excited.

When the end game came and only one of those amazing young people could go home with the prize, I couldn’t help but think about A. Van Jordan’s moving book, MacNolia.  Based on the life of MacNolia Cox, a finalist in the National Spelling Bee in 1936, the book traces the experience of being the first African American to make it to the National Spelling Bee and what became of her in the years after her loss.  Cox’s was a sadder outcome than what I hope for the young people we saw on stage last night, but the book, with its attention to characters attentive to words, is worth a read.

Kudos to all the spelling bee contestants.  Your accomplishments have not gone unnoticed.

1. “I believe fervently that the poet’s first obligation is to his own voice—to find it and use it. And one’s ‘voice’ does not only speak in the often slipshod imprecise vocabulary with which one buys the groceries but with all of the resources of one’s life whatever they may be, no matter whether they are ‘American’ or of another cultures, so long as they are truly one’s own and not faked.”
—Denise Levertov

2. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.
—Pablo Neruda

3. “The most important thing is to find a way to embody on the page meaning as it comes to you….You have to find a way to enact on the page the medium through which you apprehend significance.”

—Frank Bidart

4. “I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”
–Audre Lorde

5. “And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear…”
–Aimé Césaire, from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

6. “The essence of poetry is the unique view—the unguessed relationship, suddenly manifest. Poetry’s eye is always aslant, oblique.”
—Josephine Jacobsen, “One Poet’s Poetry”

Once I took a nap at the tremendous Casa Libre de la Solana in Tuscon, AZ.  I was there with Heriberto Yépez and Richard Siken to read at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.  It was hot in Tuscon, and the day had been busy, thus the nap.

I like to nap when I am able.  I find it refreshes my brain and, afterward, I write very well.

A midday walk has much the same effect.  But for best results I do what I did in Tuscon that day: a midday walk, then a nap.  When I woke, I wrote fiercely until we were called to dinner.

At dinner I told the group about my dream.  It was a long, windy, story dream.  One person said something to another, got into a car which had a correlative (albeit in a less interesting color palette) in the real world, drove somewhere, said something else…  One thing led to another, fade out, fade in, another thing led to another thing…

Richard Siken listened, incredulous.  He said if he dreamed at all it would be in, say, a color.  The idea that I dreamed in stories was shocking to him.

Heriberto Yépez said his dreams were all over the map.  Sometimes maybe they’d come as a story, then maybe as an image, then maybe a song, an impression of touch.

We got to thinking about this.  Did our dreams say anything about who were were as writers?

Of the three of us, Heriberto wrote most consistently in a variety of genres.  In any one day he might write in any number of genres.

I was in the midst of writing my forthcoming collection, Suck on the Marrow, a series of historically-influenced narratives.  The poems I worked on after my nap were linked narratives, wherein one story led into the next and the next.  Things were life-like and also a bit more colorful than we might notice them to be in real life.  The poems I was writing were not unlike the mode of the dream I’d described.

And Siken, who said if he could describe his dreams at all he could only describe them in terms of a mood, or a color,  “It was a blue dream,” for instance,  “That dream was red,”  Siken was busy touring with his moody, tone-rich book, Crush.

I don’t know.  It’s been a long time since that conversation.  My dreams have changed.  So have my poems.  I’m still wondering if and how the two are related.

I know plenty of poets turn their dreams into poems, all three of us in the conversation had done that, but that’s not really what were were trying to define.  We were  interested in something a little different.  How did the manner of dreaming influence our approaches to writing?

I’m interested in hearing what the Harriet community has to say about how a dreamer’s mode of  dreaming might influence the dreamer’s writing style.

Boston (well, actually, Somerville) is the first city I lived in after receiving my poetic license.  Here again now, enjoying the sun off the Charles and the good food at Toro and the many offerings at the American Literature Association Annual Conference, I’m wondering what it means to be a publishing poet.

I went on a walk of nostalgia today. I remembered how much I prefer the Red Line to the Green Line.  I remembered how amazing the selection is at the Wine and Cheese Cask. I felt bad about not calling my old friends (apologies to everyone, I promise to call ahead on my next visit, the excuses are myriad, call and I’ll spill). I even remembered (when I snuck out of the conference for a short visit to my old neighborhood—highlights pictured above) the man we called Tony the Tiger.

Tony lived across the street from me. I remember my elation upon receiving notice about an early poem’s acceptance to a journal I was quite excited to be published in.  Tony, I recall, scoffed, wondering when I would publish in a journal he’d actually heard of.

Oh, to be an American poet.

I remember meeting Maya Lin, the vision behind the Vietnam Memorial on the DC Mall.  Her brother is a poet. But when I asked her what she thought of Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” arguably one of the most anthologized poems by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, she’d didn’t know what I was talking about.

The odds are against our poems, and our poetry publications, gaining a major audience.

Tony the Tiger is likely never to hear about most of the places where I publish my work.

So, returning from my trip to the little alley where Tony questioned me about my publication record, I was already thinking about these things when, while on the T (the steady Red Line, not that lurchy Green), I stumbled on a blog post in which the poet Timothy Green compares submission acceptance rates to baseball’s Batting Average on Balls in Play.

I don’t know what more to say about this other than that, with the sun glinting off the Charles, the MIT sailing team out for afternoon drills, my guilt over not calling Steve or Eloise or Tom or David or Victor or Amanda or Lynne or …. in high gear, and my nostalgia about myself as a young poet eager to publish and not sure where or whether or if ever enough all ramped up, Green’s post put it all into a kind of perspective I can live with for awhile.

My life is a life of boxes. It’s temporary, I trust. The hope, when one puts her whole life into boxes, is that, soon, her whole life will be out of boxes.  But my parents speak, sometimes, of the as yet unpacked boxes they packed when they moved into their current house (that move happened in 1986) and so I fear, each time I pack another box, that I will never encounter its contents again. So, as I tried to think  about what poems I wanted to share this week, I could only think, with much trepidation, of boxes.

First, I thought of a poem from Kyle Dargan’s first book, The Listening.  The poem is both uplifting and daunting, describing all the gems a student discovers, searching through his mentor’s boxed archives:

Search for Robert Hayden
for Charles Rowell

The garage has not been allowed to breathe
for months now. The smell of moving,
uprooting, cures in the arid Texas heat—
scents that cannot be romanticized, but must be
handled carefully so that no boxes topple.
We are looking for “The Middle Passage,”
first we must clear a walking path.
Books yelp like kennel pups through holes in their crates,
books that are no longer books
but sub-headings in chimeras of collected poems.
Next, Copacetic Victims of the Latest Dance Craze—
all originals baring signatures
like birth certificates. Clifton, no grey.
Komunyakaa, w/beard. Eady,
looking young as the lost member of New Edition.
Most out of print and born before I was pressed
in flesh. The past presented, Hayden is still hiding somewhere.
Putting an ear to the walls doesn’t help, this year-old house
barely knows its own nooks and stashes.
Hell, round them all up—in minutes
we’ll be standing knee deep in
the unselected poems of black literature.
This is how we will find him:
on our hands and knees
combing over flailed books—sea shells
beneath a forgotten tide.
Occasionally we’ll wrench something up,
not what we are looking for, and read it anyway.

This poem reminds me there’s hope, when the time for unpacking comes, of discovering more than I bargained for. For a poet, finding more than one bargained for is an exciting prospect.  Thinking that way puts me in mind of Hart Crane’s lovely poem “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.” I love the start of Crane’s poem:

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow….

The description of these letters that have been packed into the attic is such a splendid blend of permanence and ephemerality.  Elizabeth’s letters take on such importance, importance perhaps even greater, and certainly different, than whatever importance they once held for Elizabeth herself.  And yet they are so delicate.  Any little mishap could destroy everything they are and were and could ever be.

When one’s life is in boxes everything takes on different, and I believe greater, proportions.  Perhaps it’s all the packing material that doubles the weight and heft of these material representations of me.  When my life is in boxes I want to clear everything out, trim down, throw out, but these poems make me wonder what could be discovered if I left my boxes alone for the remainder of my days.  What could someone else find if I simply stored my life away without overmuch culling?

But, of course, I think I need all the things I have in these boxes.  Which is, I’m sure, not true.

Not long ago I had lunch with Jerry W. Ward, a critic and writer who lives in New Orleans.  His new book, The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery, documents his experience in the aftermath of the storm and flood that destroyed his home and enormous library.  Ward claims that, having lost everything, he was free to think again.  To think for himself, without having to refer to all the books at his back that he’d thought, all those years, he needed.  This put me in mind of a poem by Miller Williams in the voice of a curator at The Hermitage during the war, when all the paintings had been removed for safety but people still came to tour the museum.  The thing is, the tours were all the more wonderful for the absence of the paintings.  Here’s a snippet from the poem:

…We pointed to more details about the paintings,
I venture to say, than if we had had them there,
some unexpected use of line or light,
balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces
the same way we’d done it every morning
before the war, but then we didn’t pay
so much attention to what we talked about.
People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact
we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned
out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention
to everything—the simple differences
between the first and post-impressionists,
romantic and heroic, shade and shadow…

(from “The Curator” by Miller Williams in Adjusting to the Light)

Ward and Williams remind me that I might be holding on too tightly to the wrong things.  Crane and Dargan remind me there is plenty that the boxes might, one day, reveal.  They are helpful, these poems.  So, as I watch the men haul my possessions away, worried they will break them, worried I haven’t packed them correctly, these objects that represent the things I hold dear, and worried I have packed too many of the objects that represent the things I hold dear and that, therefore, I will never be able to unwrap and access all of these objects again, my mind turns to poetry.

Of course, this is the sort of thing we poets think about, what will become of all the things we’ve put in boxes.  Just last year there were two interesting posts here on Harriet about the stuff we stuff in boxes.  Check out the links here and here.

Even as I watch the men haul my possessions away and can’t help hauling one or two precious items myself, I think of a poem by Eliot Khalil Wilson, author of The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go.  In my case it’s always the house plants I insist on dragging about on my own, and the little bookshelf I got back in graduate school and have hauled around the country ever since, painting it to meet each new home’s décor.  That bookshelf and those houseplants are inexplicably precious to me.  I guess, if I were to say it most honestly, my refusal to let anyone else haul them is something like a refusal to let anyone else be responsible for hauling some part of my heart around. In the end, though, they are only some plants and a bookshelf, I understand. The gravitas in Wilson’s four-part poem is a little greater.  The poem describes moving day for a navy widow whose possessions are being moved from the couple’s old home into a storage unit:

… The last to be moved was the barber’s chair.
It sat in the den, an enameled anchor.
Her husband’s chair from his father’s will.

IV.   She seemed to want to carry it alone.
She had tipped it on its side and pulled it,
all wrong, with her arms and it left a long
gash in the polished hardwood floor.
Next she hooked her fingers under the headrest
and pulled the weight against her chest
as one rows a boat or pulls a fishing net
until the blood in her arms and legs drained
and she dropped the chair heavily down…

(from “Last Day with Mayflower” by Eliot Khalil Wilson)

The weight of loss in this poem snaps me out of my own mourning.  I’m only leaving one habitation for another, after all.  These boxes, for me, have nothing to do with an eviction, a natural disaster, the death of someone I love.  Thanks to these poems and their measured views on loss and recovery I have the perspective to return to my boxes.

It’s the end of the school year.  From all the “for rent” and “for sale” signs I see, I know I’m not the only one packing my life into boxes.  Do any of you Harriet readers have any other good moving/packing/boxing poems to share?  Perhaps they’ll help get someone else through too.