Tangled Rope

Chris Lott has kicked off National Poetry Month in a beautiful way, by posting some of his favorite poems as handwritten notes. There’s a brilliant elegance to that simple act that I really appreciate.

Chris and I have reviewed Best American Poetry anthologies for a few years now, typically as an end-of-year activity in December. We didn’t in 2011, so I was glad when Chris agreed to add that to his month’s activities.

In his BAP11/12 kick-off post, Chris mentioned how odd it is to read poetry from 2010 in a “Best of 2011″ anthology in the year 2012. It doesn’t really matter, I guess, since the date range itself is not typically meaningful or significant, but I actually recognized one of the poems in BAP11 this time around.

Before I get to the poem, I need to both lament and celebrate that statement, because it is unusual.

First, it means I don’t read a lot of poetry, period. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I read poetry when I can, when I get around to it, between fiction and non-fiction, which themselves are crammed between work, travel, and family. So, yeah.

Second, I don’t read a lot of contemporary poetry. Probably 3/4 of the poetry I read is over 5 years old, and at least half of it is over 40 years old.

It should be no surprise, then, that I can read through most of an anthology such as this and not recognize more than one poem. There is the possibility that I’ve read more than one of the poems in this year’s BAP, but, if so, they weren’t memorable enough to trigger a reaction.

And yet I don’t find this to be necessarily indicative of either the vulgarity of my lifestyle, or of the general quality of contemporary poetry. Rather, it reminds me of the wealth of writing that is available to me, if only I were to reach out and touch it. I can’t guess whether the US is producing more poetry than ever before, but I would guess it’s producing about as much per year as ever. And maybe the general reading public is ignoring poetry more and more, in favor of more accessible entertainment and sources of enlightenment.

So, as I begin NaPoMo12, and I dive into BAP11 (and, hopefully, some additional work in the craft) I’m not entirely sure of my surroundings, and, as Chris also expressed, nowadays I feel less certain of my own ability to read, understand, and appreciate poetry than perhaps ever before. But unlike Chris, who seems to have been reading more than ever, I’ve been reading less than ever, and I planned to blame my weaknesses on that. But diving back in I feel that this place in general feels right; it feels more open and richer in opportunities than the places for poetry that I’ve either dwelt or built in the past.

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.

I enjoyed posting on select poems from The Best American Poetry 2009 last December, and planned to do the same this year. We’re clearly a week into December with no posts or poems, which says a lot about how I follow-through with Good Ideas. Chris mentioned he might record selected poems from BAP 2010 and post them with commentary; I think that’s a great way to reinvest myself in podcasting literature, personalize this year’s BAP reading, and save myself the trouble of retyping the poem accurately.

Before I begin (or, really, because I haven’t begun) I want to share my first-pass shortlist of dog-eared poems from BAP 2010:

Todd Boss – My Dog Has No Nose
Anne Carson – Wildly Constant
> David Clewell – This Poem Had Better Be about the World We Actually Live In
> Billy Collins – Grave
Peter Davis – Four “Addresses”
Lynn Emanuel – Dear Final Journey,
> Vievee Francis – Smoke under the Bale
Sonia Greenfield – Passing the Barnyard Graveyard
Corinne Lee – Six from “Birds of Self-Knowledge”
> Hailey Leithauser – The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon
> Jeffrey McDaniel – The Grudge
W.S. Merwin – Identity
> James Richardson – Vectors 2.3: 50 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
Charles Simic -Carrying on like a Crow
David Trinidad – Black Telephone
Derek Walcott – 21
> Catherine Wing – The Darker Sooner
Mark Wunderlich – Coyote, with Mange

> Indicates a poem that was also on Chris’s first-pass list.

There’s not a chance that I’ll cover all of these poems this month–I’ll be lucky to hit my five favorites. But for one reason or another I found these poems noteworthy enough to take a second or third look at, and it is likely from this pool that I’ll release some totally unauthorized audio recordings.

I broke my promise to write poems only in meter this year for the following cathartic/medicinal, and unfortunately melodramatic entry, partly inspired by the practice (though let’s not compare products!) of Lehman’s Journal in Poetry concept.

Friday, Five Fifteen PM

As the sun sets I say I've worked,
and then I look for proof
---easier to do some days than others--
harder, I admit, in this job than in that
one which I'd once sworn lifeblood to.
Work in the library bindery was done by hand
resulting, each day, in a heavy stack
(some volumes very slim, some tomes,
some simply stitched sections)
evidence I'd solved the hours.
                                                       But that
didn't work out, I didn't persist;
I moved, I went to school, I fell in love, I vowed
to keep it as a hobby.

Today at five I made a list
of things I'd done at work:
I met, I talked, I read, replied,
I wrote, I lied. My boss reminded me
to check my tasks before I left.
It'd grown quite long, this chain of things to do,
but not to fault my trying.
Instead, I think, it testifies of
my value to the firm,
the things they need of me
today, tomorrow, and beyond.

Strange how when I worked with books
I passed into the outside world both full and hungry.
Nowadays when I walk home
inside I'm dense and empty,
hard, compressed, yet of such stuff
that's light enough to drift away
beyond the amber glowing clouds
like a pale balloon whose final path
will not be seen, whose rubber skin
will fall,
fit for fish to choke on.

An early, but not unwelcome, arrival. I haven’t had time this past summer for many of the literary endeavors that I strive for and enjoy, but autumn may give me a chance to read and write about The Best American Poetry 2010′s selections (as Chris and I did in last year’s BAP09 project).

I must admit I wasn’t familiar with the name and work of Sir William Topaz Mcgonagall (though I presumably read him in my occasional ego-sustaining forays into Very Bad Poetry) until I happened upon Anthony Daniel’s article, “Knight of the White Elephant”, recently published in The New Criterion.

I’ll let the article stand for itself, and simply comment that the most troublesome aspect of the story of McGonagall is not his delusions of genius, nor the cruelty of his audiences, but rather his humanity, his fallibility, his very similarity to each of us. I see my own writing in McGonagall’s poor poetry. I see my own longing for a life imbued with culture in his self-styled commitment as “Poet and Tragedian”. I see myself, I see others, too, and I try not to wince.

Perhaps most devastating in the McGonagall biography is the utter futility of his efforts despite an impossible commitment to his art. McGonagall earned neither satisfactory remuneration or praise for his work during his life, nor fame and respect for his aesthetics after his death. And yet he battled (with “psychological armor-plating”) to fulfill this dream and capitalize on what he clearly saw as a supreme talent. Daniel, comparing the memory of McGonagall to the fellow Scot and better poet Hamish Henderson, remarks that “a cruel posterity does not always distribute fame among writers according to literary merit”–suggesting that though we may remember McGonagall as “the worst poet of the English language” at least we remember him.

If I may say so without malice, to be a poet as McGonagall I’d rather be forgotten.

This narrative poem, sent to me via an e-mail, deserves attention and dissemination.

Of the Parrat and Other Birds that Can Speake

Nick Lantz, We Don't Know We Don't Know.  Graywolf Press, 2010.

It is for certain knowne that they have died
for very anger and griefe that they could not
learn to pronounce some hard words.
—Pliny the Elder


When you buy the bird for your mother
you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass
before it does anything except pluck the bars
with its beak. Then one day it says, “infect.”

 Your mother tells you this on the phone,
and you drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought for her last week sweating
on the countertop. “In fact,” she says

in answer to your question, “I have been
eating,” and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can, the spotless dishes, that you
realize the bird is only saying, “in fact,”

that this is now the preamble to all
of your mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says,
“I have been paying the bills,” and you
believe her until you find a cache

of unopened envelopes in the freezer.
More things are showing up where
they shouldn’t. Looking out the back
window one evening you see craters

in her yard. While she’s watching TV,
you go out with a trowel and excavate
picture frames, flatware that looks like
the silver bones of some exquisite

animal. You worry when you arrive
one day and see the open, empty cage
that you will find the bird dead, stuffed
in an oven mitt and left in a drawer,

but you find it sitting on her shoulder
in the kitchen. “In fact,” she says,
“he learned to open the cage himself.”
The bird learns new words. You learn

which lies you can ignore. The stroke
that kills her gives no warning, not—
the doctor assures you—that anyone
can predict such things. When you

drive home that night with the cage
belted into the passenger seat, the bird
makes a sound that is not a word
but that you immediately recognize

as the sound of your mother’s phone
ringing, and you know it is the sound
of you calling her again and again,
the sound of her not answering.

Part II of this poem “Guide” is ottava rima:

II

My muscles locked, my lungs devoid of air,
I struggle to my knees, do all I can
to grapple with my guide's chimeric stare.
Though fierce, its eyes suggest an honest man's;
despite its tarnished scales, its clotted hair,
the fecal stench its winged panting fans,
I realize that here is native brawn
so, answering its crouching, I climb on.

Note: I felt a bad taste in my mouth as I finished this, so sour was its working. Well, it’s effort, it’s practice.

I like short poems best, probably because I’m lazy or rushed, but possibly because their succinctness requires that the poem maximizes the language, and that impresses me. It also may be that in their brevity are easily digested, and in a single, whole chunk they can be stored in memory. Though his explanation is often oversimplified or misunderstood, Poe does a better job of targeting the effectiveness of short bursts of poetry in “The Philosophy of Composition” wherein he argues:

What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.

Poe’s definition of a “brief” poem is longer than mine–for Poe the effect of a poem derived from a “unity of impression” that he believed was disrupted by breaking off from and returning to a poem. So “long” to him, though relative, was defined by the need for multiple sittings. I count a short poem as one half-a-page or less, and blame a short attention span for this preference. I do enjoy long poems, but I wonder at the pleasure I derive from short poems (sually when I’m reading a long poem and my mind wanders, or I wonder if I didn’t pay close enough attention to a stanza that I should have, and if either of these will prevent me from being astonished in the end).

This brings me to “Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry”, a fine anthology of contemporary poems based on Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 project. Though I had “finished” with this book some time ago, I added this book to my Sunday stack because I couldn’t remember more than a couple poems from the anthology, and wanted to review it and consider why more poem’s didn’t stick. It turned out not to be any fault with the anthology, which I found still awfully strong, but rather a failure of my own brain, for even with the book closed I saw dozens of dog-eared pages gaping at me, like a playful pop waiting for me to return. As I worked through these marked poems, it was instantly obvious that most were what I’ve termed “short”. Here are three that quite pierced me, that I would have no excuse for not remembering again:

"White Towels"
Richard Jones

I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.

"Only One of My Deaths"
Dean Young

Because it seems the only way to save the roses
is to pluck the Japanese beetles out of
their convoluted paradise
and kill them, I think for a moment,
instead of crushing them in the driveway,
of impaling them on the thorns.
Perhaps they'd prefer that.

"Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?"
Robert Hershon

Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
DId you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand

I could include more short poems from this anthology, though now I’m more curious to open up other anthologies and check my dog-eared poems’ lengths. I don’t recall ever studying the length of poems in school, but I’m sure there’s good stuff written on the subject which I’ll probably never get around to uncovering. The best thing I can say about my own preference to short poems that doesn’t indict myself is that short poems are harder than long poems, elegant, compact, imbued, necessary. A poet can take as long as s/he wants to explain the point, to tell the story. But how much can you cut away? Rather, how much can be more efficiently substituted without sacrificing aesthetic?

P. S. In customizable card games, as in many subjects, one is always aiming for the shortest, most efficient route to success. Because every turn allows only limited actions, advantage is held by the player who can maximize those actions, and much of that maximization comes from the design of one’s deck. Last night, after several games of Lord of the Rings with my friend Gavin, I immersed my mind in possibilities for a new deck, considering card choices by recognizing in each the balance between cost, effect, permanence, and reusability, and looking for whatever relative advantage might be hidden in each. As I did so my mind turned to poetry, and I was pleased to find a real aesthetic satisfaction in the design and construction of a deck of cards, though less intense, lasting, and meaningful than that I find in poetry.

I don’t quite have it in me this month to spend the hours necessary writing a review of one last poem from Best American Poetry 2009. I thought I would, and pushed my intention two weeks into the new year, but one has to let somethings go. There are books to read, letters to write, poems to finish, fiction to thresh, teaching to do, presentations to plan, children to play with, a house to keep up, films to watch, panic to wrestle with, sleep to catch up on, friends to visit, cards to organize, etc., etc.

But I will list a handful of notable poems from BAP 09 that I either thought about or planned to review before the year was out (from top to bottom):

1. J. D. McClatchey, “Lingering Doubts” (p 84). Incredibly dense and curious. I’m still several readings from comprehending this one, but I want to.
2. Pattiann Rogers, “A Blind Astronomer in the Age of Stars” (p 108). A moving, human poem that uses language to explore, in and out, as well as describe.
3. P. Hurshell, “In Winter” (p 60). Because it is winter, and beacuse it cuts so sharply from image to image while maintaining its theme.
4. Jeanne Murray Walker, “Holding Action” (p 137). It may be sentimental, simplistic, or just another metapoem, but I liked the collection of imagery all tied to the potential of letters (ambiguity intended, I think) to preserve that which we love.
5. Christine Marshall, “Sweat” (p 80). Because unlike the man in the introductory quote, I’m OK (and more) with a sweating girl.
6. Phillis Levin, “Open Field” (p 70). I didn’t have enough time to decipher it, but I still like it.
7. Mitch Sisskind, “Like a Monkey” (p 117). After too many mediocre Adam/Eve/Eden poems I rashly dismissed this amusing and poignant postmodern love poem on first read.
8. Sarah Lindsay, “Tell the Bees” (p 74). Leads an intimate, enigmatic path through a local environment that is both alien and familiar.
9. Albert Goldbarth, “Zones” (p 31). Bizarre and memorable imagery.
10. Denise Duhamel, “How It Will End” (p 24). I didn’t want it to, but this poem stuck with me for weeks.

There may be a couple on this list that I’d cut on another reading, but there are probably a couple from BAP 09 that I missed, either from failed memory or misunderstanding. Until BAP10 in December…