POEM IN CURRENT ISSUE OF 32 POEMS

I am very pleased to say that my poem, "Louise Bruns Recalls the Dust Bowl Cattle Slaughter, Guymon, OK, 1934" appears in the current issue of 32 Poems.

You can also read my commentary (at the 32 Poems Blog) on another poem from the same issue, Joanna Pearson's "The Arsonists in Love."

Review: The Lady Victory by Jane Vincent Taylor

The Lady Victory, by Jane Vincent Taylor, 80 pp. Turning Point, 2012. $18.00

           

            Commentators on contemporary poetry often contrapose narrative and lyric, attempting to trace trends in which one approach may be said to dominate over the other. One could, to be sure, see a certain reassertion of narrative in the new formalism and “expansive” poetry of the eighties and nineties, just as one could argue that the renewed interest in French surrealism via John Ashbery’s influence has lead poets away from narrative in the past decade. Whether this trend away from narrative results in a more “pure” form of the lyric, is, however, a matter of opinion.  But perhaps the point is moot, for Jane Vincent Taylor’s The lady Victory – like Eliot’s Prufrock or Yeats’ poems from Irish legend – makes nonsense of the distinction between lyrical and narrative approaches to poetry.

            In The Lady Victory, Taylor recounts the experiences of young women who are hidden away at the Our Lady of Victory, a home for unwed mothers. She tells also of the emotional life of the nuns who serve there. The narrative is fragmentary and elusive, and the reader’s inability to grasp fully these lives renders the poetry all the more poignant, as if we are privy only to the images and impressions that, by virtue of their emotional force, remain long after the particular framework of individual lives on which they hung is gone. The effect is somewhat like reading Sappho’s fragments or Spenser’s unfinished book of the Faerie Queene: one is struck by the simultaneity of absence and presence.  This impression is strengthened by the way each poem seems to stand alone and yet resonates powerfully with the other poems around it. For instance, “Friday Nights on the Road” conveys the young women’s frustration with their confinement by describing the way they would dream of automobile rides while cruising up and down the hallway in wheelchairs, “popping wheelies down the hall / on our little trip to nowhere.” The image is engaging and emotionally effective, but it is amplified by the very next poem, “A Votive Light,” in which an actual automobile trip is described as the narrator is taken to the hospital to give birth. The wheelies of the previous poem are echoed in the way the “station wagon hits all / the 23^rd street pot holes.” Taylor masterfully creates overtones and echoes that keep the reader emotionally engaged.

            The best poem of the book’s first section is certainly “A Kind of Food,” in which Taylor’s elusive narrator informs us that “Banana is the food of charities / always on the table in plastic bowls / day old, week old, blackened.” She goes on to vividly describe “the dried up stems curled like nuns’ / arthritic fingers, eternal crooks.” The image is so effective not just because it is exceedingly clear but also because it carries so much of the young narrator’s feelings about her benefactors/captors. As the poem progresses we see these feelings turn inward:

                        we will know each other

                        when we meet in the real world

                        someday – the post office, supermarket,

                        cleaners – by the lingering odor

                        oozing under our skin, old oily shame.

To work so much emotional impact, so much emotional complexity, out of a banana is surely the feat of a very gifted poet.

            Even more affecting are the epistolary poems which make up the second section of the book, poems written in the voice of a nun placed in charge of the infants in the nursery. These letters to one of the children formerly in her care are tender and vivid, an exquisite evocation of love and longing. They are poems about our desire to belong to someone, but, in a powerful reversal, it is the nun’s desire to belong to the child that is so moving in these poems. She writes

                        You were a meteor falling into a cold furnace, your

                        mother’s sobs receding hour by hour, your new

                        ghost ancestors a huddle of dutiful nuns.

                        It fell to us to finally break the crusty cord. That

                        moment you were freed, untethered, floating with

                        the other beautiful sad babies bedded down in the

                        infant nursery. Except that you weren’t sad. We

                        were never sad, were we little falling star?

The suggestion of separation in the image of the broken cord is powerfully, because desperately, contradicted by the we urgently repeated in the last two lines. We see also, in the sister’s description of herself as a ghost, the longing to be made solid by belonging to someone. This deep longing is demonstrated also in the nun’s wild and tender variations in how she addresses the child: “Dear little flame,” “Dear flower fist,” “Dear birthday candle,” Dear little chirp,” “Little ear, dear angel drum,” “Dear little wind behind the rain,” just to name a few. These letters are so sweetly sorrowful, I recommend against reading them in public, as you are likely to embarrass yourself as I did trying to cry inconspicuously while waiting for my daughter’s swimming lesson to end.

            The book ends with a third section of three brief and lovely lyrics. These final three poems find a common grace in the human voice, in our ability to sing our sorrows:

                        I would make some everlasting blues

                        from the sound my baby must have made

                        to her new mother when she saw her, saved

                        from the orphanage, the pity of those nuns’

                        soft-singing world.

                        A song for nuns. A song

                                                            for the long sobriety.

Contemporary poets rarely get this mixture of sadness and sweetness so right, so close to the tone of Feste’s final song in Twelfth Night or the final stanza of Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Angus.” As the book ends, the narrator – perhaps many years later, perhaps seeking spiritual rest in a convent retreat—listens “to the sisters singing alleluia into silence.” The line sums up well the experience of reading this book, its play between song and silence, its affirmation of life even when the living is difficult. The Lady Victory is fine poetry because it is well-executed but also because it is well-felt. Regardless of the facts, the emotions ring true. Isn’t that at least one of the things we look for in good poetry?

Spots of Time: A Review of Kathleen Johnson's Subterranean Red

Kathleen Johnson, SubterraneanRed (Mongrel Empire Press, 2012)

Kathleen Johnson’s Subterranean Red treats of memory in the form of murmur and of snapshot. Like a character in a gothic novel held captive by a ghostly lover, the poet is haunted by a past she would rather escape and yet, despite herself, courts in her imagination. This past is often evoked visibly in the series of family photos that accompany the text, a technique reminiscent of Jeanetta Calhoun Mish’s very successful Work is Love Made Visible. Rather than bringing back the past, however, these pictures and the poems which they accompany serve to remind the reader that what time has broken can never again be made whole, that memory is always a matter of arranging and rearranging the fragments. Remembering is imagining.

The theme of the past’s constant murmuring in the consciousness of the poet is established in the collection’s first poem, “The Apothecary of Minerva Best.” As throughout the book, memory presents itself as both desirable and painful:

                        I’m left with an ache as faint

                        and elusive as the sound in

                        a conch put to my ear.

                        The ebb and flow now

                        no more than a murmur

                        or a memory.

The image of the conch summarizes well the way in which memory is sought as a pleasure yet remains elusive and painful. Johnson adds to this theme by the use of internal and occasional rhymes throughout the book. The faint rhyming becomes a form of echo, of murmur. Take for example these lines from “Three Generations of Cherokee Women: A Portrait,” in which she describes her great-grandmother:

                        She’s seen them come and seen them

                        go. The stories she could tell

                        I’ll never know. But her hands look like

                        they’ve wrung a thousand chicken necks.

There is enough ghost of the iamb in these lines to accent the rhyme of go and know, but the line breaks skillfully work to half bury the rhyme. This effect is even more powerful in the beautifully evocative “Wild Sand Plums”:

                        Roadside sunflowers face the sun,

                        sway in the wind.

                        Near the cornfield, I bend

                        to pick up a mottled feather.

The rhyme is of course both aural (wind and bend) and visual, the figure in the poem bending in rhyme with the top-heavy sunflowers. Enacting the way imagination constructs the past, the poem builds itself from echoes and murmurs. Johnson’s poems are this carefully constructed throughout Subterranean Red.

Many of the poems in this volume are written in the psychologically frank fashion we have for over half a century now referred to as “confessional,” but these poems nevertheless recognize, as does the best work of Robert Lowell, the role of imagination in framing and shaping memory. The accompanying photos rather than representing proof of a definitive past are offered rather as self-conscious constructions of family history. At times, the photos, like the poems, represent an effort to remake that history, as in “Granddad Scott”:

                        On my wall I keep a picture

                        so I won’t remember him just as a cruel man:

                        in a white dress and turned-up cap,

                        he is a blue-eyed baby

                        grinning

                        on his daddy’s lap.

At other times they are emblems of something more like negative versions of Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” as in “Father’s Day”:

                        And I realize that the line from my dream

                        has something to do with

                        this picture, that even in sleep I cannot

                        rest, but must forever watch

                        him falling off that fence,

                        falling to pieces.

In both versions, be it dream or wakeful and willed effort, the photo represents the activity of the poet’s imagination. The pictures, like the poems, don’t capture the past: they shape it. As Johnson says in “Following the Red Hills Home,” “the imagined is as real as the rest of it.” It is Johnson’s sharp imagination, along with her artistic presentation and self-consciousness, that keeps the poems about, for instance, her father’s philandering from descending into the sort of cheap latter-day confessional poetry that relies on shock and attitude rather than on craft and rumination.

In “Raven Mocker” Johnson gives us the raven as an image of, among other things, poetic inspiration, something beautiful but also dark and dangerous. Such a bird is a fitting mascot for these poems, alive to the point of tense contact with death itself, earthly scavengers yet transcendent in flight. Subterranean Red is a poignant, powerful book of poems that will be reread for many years to come.

My poem "Li Po and Du Fu Jump out of a Cake" appears in the new issue of Devil's Lake.

Four Great Titles From New York Quarterly Books

My second book, Lapse Americana, is due out from New York Quarterly Books on February 2. In the meantime, here are four of my favorite titles already out from NYQ Books:

The Plumber’s Apprentice by Joe Weil (NYQ Books, 2009).     

These poems are simultaneously tough-minded and tender-hearted. For example, check out the opening lines of “A Typical Day 31 Years Ago”:

                        was watching my mother die.

                        Part of the tumor that would

                        eventually strangle her

                        came out of her mouth

                        like a cheap party trick,

                        just in time for the feast

                        of the epiphany.

Weil’s Catholicism (see his brilliant two-part essay on that topic on The The Poetry Blog) leads him to a poetics that emphasizes the sacramental and the incarnated. The poems abound with physical detail, real images of real life that point to the paradoxical dignity we find in bearing the indignity of humanity. The poems are direct and smart. This may just be the best book of poetry I have read this year.

After the Ark by Luke Johnson (NYQ Books, 2011).

This book makes me think of C.S. Lewis’s observation that the sonnet sequences of the 16^th century were not narrative but rather “symphonic.” I think what Lewis meant is that the background story (whether Shakespeare’s love triangle with the “Dark Lady” and “Young Man” or Sidney as Astrophel in love with Stella) is felt rather than followed. That symphonic effect is certainly evident in After the Ark, which has as its background story the marital dissolution of the poet’s parents and the death of his mother. Johnson doesn’t give us a blow by blow account of the end of that marriage or of the end of his mother’s life; rather he invites us into the emotional landscape of a family’s collapse. The result of this technique is that we are moved along with the poet. He doesn’t dictate to us what he felt; he invites us along for the emotional ride. Much of this emotion is conveyed through powerful images, doing much to revive Eliot’s concept of the “objective correlative.” Consider the last two lines of “Pageant, Christmas Eve”: “Houselights snuffed, the dark became an empty / ribcage, the tree our flickering heart.” Wow! Another very effective image is that at the end of “Flood” in which, sitting beneath a tin roof listening to the rain, the mourners for Johnson’s mother “put her shoes outside and watched them fill.” That is a powerful image of absence and loss.

Oz at Night by Amanda J. Bradley (NYQ Books, 2011).

Maybe I should declare up front that Amanda Bradley is a friend of mine from graduate school. But then again, so what? I have lots of friends whose books I don’t like, and I simply avoid reviewing them. Amanda has saved me a lot of awkwardness by writing a very good book. The best description of this book is probably its title, which captures well the unique blend of the harrowing and the whimsical that one finds throughout Oz at Night. A great example is “To Thomas Pynchon Regarding The Crying of Lot 49,” which would seem to inaugurate a new kind of poem: the academic confessional. Recalling the agony of digging through Pynchon’s book, she says, “Was that on purpose? I want to punch / your reclusive face. Where are you, Pynchon?” The poem is funny, especially to anyone who has struggled with the intellectual demands of academic work, but it is also very personal. Finding herself lost in a maze of critical theory and interpretation, she ends with the confession that “by page 111, I couldn’t believe myself.”  This is a witty poem on the academic life, but it is also a very brave poem about self-doubt. In some ways it reminded me of Ginsberg’s “America,” and I wanted to add “It occurs to me that I am Thomas Pynchon./ I am talking to myself again.” Other poems in the collection wrestle with the same issues of identity and self-doubt. In “I am not what I would like to be nor what I will become,” she says “I am not Matt Damon, nor someone who carries an alligator purse.” This is a very striking way of addressing identity and the painful process of deriving it by means of negation. The poems in Oz at Night are not confessional in the Plath, Sexton, Lowell mode, but they do leave one with the impression that Oz is an internal landscape, as simultaneously alien and familiar as the depths of our own minds revealed in dreams.

The Early Death of Men by Clint Margrave (NYQ Books, 2012).

Margrave offers something rarely seen in contemporary poetry: wit. It’s not just that the book is often funny, though it is. I mean “wit” in the seventeenth-century sense, the play of intellect. “Perishable” is a good example of this quality.  Margrave begins the poem with a description of cleaning out his recently deceased father’s refrigerator and ends with the observation that “a man is more perishable than his food.” The poem has certain Donne-like qualities, the witty conceit and the memento mori. Indeed, memento mori – the medieval and Renaissance trope of calling to mind one’s impending death – is the unifying theme of this book. Margrave treats this theme with humor and genuine pathos.

I will most likely recommend more from NYQ Books in the months ahead. In the meantime, if you want to get a better sense of the philosophy behind the operation, see me review of editor Raymond Hammond’sbook, Poetic Amusement. Or, better yet, buy a copy of Poetic Amusement and read it yourself.