THINK A Journal of Poetry, criticism, and reviews

spring 2015 Volume 5.2 THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Reviews, and Criticism think was founded in 2008 by Christine Yurick, who published ten issues across four volumes, with the last, Vol. 4.1, appearing in 2011.

In 2013, Western State Colorado University acquired the journal. It is now housed at Western and is affiliated with Western’s graduate pro- gram in Creative Writing. Issues began in Fall 2014 with Volume 5.1.

In keeping with its original mission, think publishes poems that empha- size craft and clarity. We are looking for metered, rhymed poems, in received or nonce forms, or free verse with a clear organizing principle. The language we admire in poetry and in prose is both intellectually precise and emotionally rich. We welcome work from both established and emerging poets.

Staff David J. Rothman, Editor Susan Spear, Managing Editor Laura E. Anderson, Editorial Assistant Christin Oberman, Student Intern

Western State Colorado University Graduate Program in Creative Writing, Poetry Concentration Advisory Board Peter Bridges, Dana Gioia, Enid Holden, David Mason, Marilyn Taylor

Advisory Editors Ernest Hilbert, Mark Todd, David Yezzi submissions: Submit only previously unpublished poems via submittable.com. Please include a brief bio and all contact informa- tion, including mailing address. Payment is one copy of the journal. The rights revert to the poet on publication. Query the editors about book reviews and critical essays. subscriptions: conundrum-press.com/think-journal/ think is printed and distributed by conundrum press, a division of Sam- izdat Publishing Group, PO Box 1353, Golden, Colorado 80402. Table of Contents

From the Editors 7 featured poet: bruce bennett Ex Cathedra 15

Recurrent Things 16

POETRY Rhina P. Espaillat Three Missives 21

Luke Bauerline Offering 22

Jan Schreiber At the Edge of the Woods 23

Brett Mertins Short Song for a Stomped Cricket 24

Robert Boliek Lines Written on an I Ching Text 25

Wendy Videlock The Poem As 26

Mark J. Mitchell The Art of the Fugue 27

Matt Tordoff The Russian Soprano Anna Netrebko, a Portrait in Three Scenes 28

Bethany Pope Electric Erasure 30 T. S. Kerrigan A Page from the Devil’s Notebooks 33 Matriarch 34

Burt Myers Taste 35 Acute 36

James Matthew Wilson Stations of Divorce 37

Gail White If She Comes Back 38

James McKee The Exes 39

Jennifer Fandel Coming to Shore 42

Jere Paulmeno Petition Addressed to Myself 43

SPECIAL FEATURE: LYRIC, NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND PEDAGOGY Christopher Norris A Plain Man Looks at the Angel of History 47

Frederick Turner Lyric and the Content of Poetry 69

ESSAYS Jan Schreiber The Phoenix Line: History of a Style 85

Kyle Harvey Fractal: The Wallace Stevens Centos 99 reviews Sisters and Courtesans 104 Anna M. Evans Reviewed by Dick Davis

Survivor’s Picnic: Poems 108 Debra Bruce Reviewed by Marilyn L. Taylor

CONTRIBUTORS 111

From the Editors

A journal worth its pulp does not exist primarily to speak to people, but rather for them. Each issue can become a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a specific and focused conversation. If successful, it weaves together a community, however frayed and far-flung. Other- wise, especially given the time and effort, why bother? When Christine Yurick founded THINK it was clear from the first that she had the ability to bring together people who would enjoy conversing with each other in print and in person. That is why she succeeded. She carefully sought out writers (and readers) with particular interests and engaged them. Many first learned of the journal when she wrote out of the blue and invited a submission. She would speak of the journal’s mission to emphasize clarity and craft, though never at the expense of feeling. She had an unerring sense for readers and writers who shared such interests, and she fulfilled her promise to bring them together. You hold the results in your hands. In a time when far too many poets and critics muddy the waters merely to make them appear deep, THINK’s mission remains vital. Even the most exuberant, Dionysian, and intense subjects and themes can be orderly. If anything, they cry out for stays against their own confusion; this is one of the purposes of art. It is why we read poems at funerals. King Lear is ink. Serious consideration of that work alone (so disturbing at first it was only performed in Nahum Tate’s bastardized happiness for over 125 years)

7 suggests that anyone who argues disordered times and feelings call for disordered art has not read enough, or deeply enough. Passion and confusion do not oppose lucidity and precision; they require it. In this, the second issue since THINK came to Western State Colorado University, Christine’s original vision is very much alive, and I am particularly struck by the vitality of the work we publish here, and how such a far-flung group of writers has come together in the name of an art that emphasizes clarity, craft and feeling, in both poetry and prose. The current issue has many strengths, but several bear emphasiz- ing. First, we have two poems from our featured poet, Bruce Bennett. Bennett, who taught at Wells College for many decades, is the recip- ient of the first annual Writing the Rockies Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Creative Writing, awarded at Western State Colorado University in July 2015 during the annual conference that concludes the summer residency of our Graduate Program in Creative Writing. As far as we know, this is the only national award for teaching creative writing, and Bennett is a fitting inaugural recipient. Not only a gifted poet with scores of books and chapbooks, he is a gentle and kind man who has passed on his own skill to generations of students. The contemporary teaching of “cre- ative writing” is riven with all kinds of controversy, as it should be, if it is to matter. And that is exactly why we should recognize those who have given so much to it and done it so well. Bennett’s poems in this issue find him in his lighter mode, but the poems are, as always, crafted like diamonds. Those interested in his more somber moods could read his most recent chapbook, Swimming in a Watering Can (Foothills Publishing, 2014), whose title poem exemplifies his ability to convey astonishingly precise, powerful, complex, resonant feelings without having to describe them:

8 Something was stuck. I thought it was some leaves, so I poured out the water from the top. There was this lump. I saw it was a mouse. He must have tried to drink and lost his balance. I stood there staring. Just a little lump wet on the wet ground. Nothing could have saved him. Who could have heard? Who would have heard a mouse swimming? And it was outside, in the dark. I don’t know why the thought of that upsets me. Maybe it’s all the other stuff. It’s just that awful image: paddling in the water, helpless and desperate, nothing to catch hold of, feeling your strength fail, little by little by little, paddling and paddling, sinking, all alone.

Notice how the “lump” becomes “you”; it is a sonnet after all. What might have been maudlin becomes empathic, with no clues, and none needed, about “all the other stuff.” It really is the mouse who is “helpless and desperate,” not the speaker, but he can under- stand. This is a skill that comes in time only to those who master both art and themselves. The issue’s special feature on “Lyric, Narrative, History and Pedagogy” covers enough territory, and yet the authors here, Chris- topher Norris and Frederick Turner, arrive prepared. We have placed their work side by side in hopes that the issue might burst into flame in your hands. We were astonished to receive Norris’s lengthy poem, “A Plain Man Looks at the Angel of History.” Norris is a noted British phi- losopher and scholar, especially of deconstruction and post-struc- turalism, whose many books include titles such as The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory After Deconstruction and Quantum

9 Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics. His poem, a response to the Klee painting Angelus Novus reproduced on this issue’s cover and Walter Benjamin’s commentary on it in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is an extended meditation not only on both of those works, but also on the tragic vision of history Klee’s canvas has come to represent because of Benjamin’s brilliant if extravagant interpretation of it. The poem is certainly not easily accessible. Norris apparently did not get that memo about there being no ideas except in things. For Norris, ideas matter in and of themselves, and he navigates them at will. And yet, without fully grasping Norris’s argument at first, I was attracted to a certain elegant music and syntax, as with, among others, Stevens in his longer works. The meditation on allegory and its beauties and impossibilities is deliciously managed in highly-wrought pentameter ABBA BAAB octets, and unapologetically stands in the tradition of the most ambitious overtly philosophical poems of Pope, Auden, and Stevens. How refreshing on our current scene to encounter such a voice meditating so thoughtfully on weighty subjects, even if it does appear to conclude that allegory is a fool’s game. In contrast, Turner’s erudite essay is astonishingly clear from the first, and is a trenchant explanation and critique of the dominance of lyric in contemporary poetry and its ultimate weakness. Where Norris turns away from lyric to dialectic and critique, Turner turns to epic, arguing that we should reverse the Virgilian rota and teach it first to rejuvenate the power of poetry to connect us socially, morally and politically with each other in language. Although there are many points of friction, one link between Norris and Turner’s work becomes clear in the passage where Turner points out that both the logic of modern totalitarian regimes and of liberal capitalist regimes has led to lyric’s dominance:

In many parts of the world, as the state hypertrophied

10 into its twentieth-century giantism, overwhelming the civil societies out of which it grew, the realm of inner personal freedom shrank until it reached its final fall-back positions, one of which was the lyric poem. This phe- nomenon is obvious in the totalitarian countries, where lyric poets were the last holdouts against the hegemony of the state . . . Morally we recognize that individual rights must be the foundation of any ethical system and political consti- tution. The self has rightfully achieved its true dignity and valuation, and the lyric poem is the celebration of that self. The question we will have to face is whether the individual self, cut loose from its communal and past foundations, is worth celebrating.

At one point, Turner rightly asks where all the poetic genres other than lyric have gone, including “poetic essays.” I hope he will be intrigued to discover one next door, although its point of departure seems so different from his own. There is much more to say, but I would rather you read the issue than this introduction. Pace Turner, we do publish many carefully made and passionate lyric poems, which suggest that individual cre- ative sensibilities can rise like the phoenix from their historical ashes, given enough cunning and craft. We also offer a highly original essay on metrics by Jan Schreiber and a delightful essay by Kyle Harvey about centos in Steven’s work that almost appear to write themselves. Dick Davis and Marilyn Taylor offer tightly written reviews of sub- stantial new books by Anna Evans and Debra Bruce. In the end, I keep returning to the sparks that fly from Turner and Norris’s pieces, raising questions of what it means to tell a story, to make a poem, to interpret art and the world, to live in history.

11 What matters most in poetry and how should we teach it? What is the past and how can we understand it? How do thought and narra- tive, allegory and history, poetry and the individual, communicate? Such conversations matter. Join us.

—David J. Rothman, Editor

*** In the introduction to his Anthology of the World’s Best Poems, Edwin Markham asks how we can rightly judge the worth of a poem. He answers his own question: “In two ways—by its great lines and by its total impression.” This issue of THINK offers poems composed of finely crafted lines that create lasting impressions. From the short poems, such as Robert Boliek’s “Lines Written on a I Ching Text” and Jere Paulmeno’s “Petition Addressed to Myself,” to poems com- posed in several sections such as Rhina P. Espaillat’s “Three Mis- sives,” Matt Tordoff’s “The Russian Soprano,” and Bethany Pope’s “Electric Erasure,” to Christopher Norris’s lengthy philosophical and ekphrastic “A Plain Man Looks at the Angel of History,” these poems are works of art built line by line. Markham continues, “We can learn to detect great poetry by forming a taste for it . . .” in the same way that we form a palette for fine wine or expertly prepared and seasoned foods. We hope you read these poems not once, but repeatedly. Read them for pleasure and reread them to delight in the artful impressions that worthy poems afford us.

—Susan D. Spear, Managing Editor

12 featured poet: bruce bennett

Ex Cathedra It would be fun to be the Pope and exercise dominion. I wouldn’t have to guess or grope. Just offer an opinion

And I’d be right! No stress, no fuss. I’d speak, and that would end it. I wouldn’t have to fight, like us, to argue and defend it.

I wouldn’t have to get all hot and bothered and debate it. I’d simply have to think what’s not acceptable, and state it.

15 Recurrent Things

. . .Time itself never repeats, but things in nature persist and natural events recur . . . —Emily Grosholz

Time never does repeat, but things persist, recur. It is a one-way street. Time never does repeat. Yet as you go you meet again the things that were. Time never does repeat, but things persist, recur.

Which means, the things that were still are, since they repeat. But wait! Since they recur (which means, the things that were still are), Time won’t inter them. They’ll be there to greet, which means, the things that were still are, since they repeat.

So, what about that street? Are we then to infer Time does, in fact, repeat (unlike a one-way street), since we again will meet whatever things recur?

16 So, what about that street? What must we then infer?

Recurrent things recur? It’s boring to repeat, but what must one infer? Recurrent things recur. And therefore I aver Time’s not a one-way street. Recurrent things recur? That’s boring to repeat!

17

POETRY

Rhina P. Espaillat

Three Missives

I Soldiers, or holy men you never knew, scholars, or fishermen you moved among: Yeshua ben Yusef, who can speak for you, who spoke for all of us, and died so young?

II Michael, Archangel, while the grownups prayed I saw you trample Satan, raise your sword too near the altar, over which the Lord hung meek and bleeding. And I was afraid.

III Think, Saul, how fearlessly we would today construe the voice that struck you dumb and blind with guilty zeal, if you had looked to find Damascus by some common, bloodless way.

21 Luke Bauerline

Offering Take from me this part of me that is not me and will not shake the day clean off its back. Show me what I’m still to be- come for Christ’s sake and the will I lack. For thinking I could be good again, for copper pennies turning green in a thin, green rain, for everything I want that to mean and won’t—I give this in its place: a dark room, unheated, without air and in some unlit corner of the space, a match beneath a chair, and no one there.

22 Jan Schreiber

At the Edge of the Woods Stillness of late summer, sunlight on gangly stalks; in random gusts leaves tremble, quick, on impassive oaks.

High poplar boughs are swaying but firs and pines betray only a subtle motion, a half-deflected sigh.

Bees weave a steady humming. Crows cry across the field. The crunch of tires on gravel encroaches on this world.

Such unlooked-for reminders of lives that thrust and churn revive old plans and purpose after a pause to mourn.

23 Brett Mertins

Short Song for a Stomped Cricket Few who hear your rhymes can bear the rub of wing on wing—a blurry black bow mating a trembling string; a record’s needle skating groove after groove—in an odd slide at love. Your two long days at work behind our hub, our quaking office copier—duplicating chirp over tonered chirp, anticipating your fair return—returned the classic drub.

Today, you’re crushed not far from your sad shrub— bent staples stemming a balled brush of dust— where yesterday you squatted, serenading.

Who lured you out? Did Beatrice, our olive— skinned temp, wear white? Was it for you, you guessed, blonde Laura, in line to copy, was waiting?

24 Robert Boliek

Lines Written on an I Ching Text So go and stalk the tortoise now, and learn the map upon his back: learn it fully, learn it well; each pale streak, each weathered joint and crack, is but a sign, and may well teach— if not the why—the when, the how.

25 Wendy Videlock

The Poem As The poem as hurdy, gurdy, infomercial, heart of pearl and snapping turtle, florist, tourist, spicy mustard, mortar, knuckle, ghost buster, lizard, laser, fuck of cluster, peasant, crescent, feather duster.

26 Mark J. Mitchell

The Art of the Fugue It’s a precise measure, a pattern cut in time. It’s sound made pure, made clean, made whole. It’s a door, once opened, that can’t be shut.

It’s nothing neat, not a thing you can put in a closed box. It’s a wild bell that tolls in a precise measure. Its clapper cuts.

It must clothe some meaning, you can’t say what, exactly, because that will slam it closed and this door, once opened, just won’t be shut.

Your ear practices, tries to follow but gets stuck, trapped by notes that are trained to roll precisely, measured, a pattern. It cuts right through you, troubles you. If you could just decode it; you could walk into its soul through a door you’ll open but you can’t shut.

It’s a language like any other, but unspeakable. Just allow notes their flow in their precise measured pattern. They’ll cut a door that opens once, never to be shut.

27 Matt Tordoff

The Russian Soprano Anna Netrebko, a Portrait in Three Scenes

1.“Working as a Janitress at the Marisky Opera Theatre 1991” поют, русская девушка, sing Russian girl,* dream of Vienna, the Met, the Garnier, your voice dark gold on velvet, smooth pearl, поют русская девушка, sing Russian girl. Sing soprano while you give your mop a twirl, Gergiev will hear and take your cleaning tools away. поют, русская девушка, sing Russian girl, dream of Vienna, the Met, the Garnier.

2. “As Lucia, Mad Scene, Lucia di Lammermoor, Metropolitan Opera NYC” Send the sweetness off to madness, sing Il doce suono, in a bloodied white dress, play the frenzied bride. Grip Arturo’s dagger, you crazy mad soprano, send sweetness off to madness, sing Il doce suono, make the hah hah ah ah of your high notes echo the flutes, the glass harmonica, Donizetti’s pride. Send sweetness off to madness, sing Il doce suono in a bloodied white dress, play the frenzied bride.

3. “Singing ‘Sempre Libera,’ La Traviata, Salzburg Festival” She paints vivid pictures singing Verdi so clearly we see that party girl Violetta: sharp notes in C show the drunken glee.

28 Then she paints a different picture singing Verdi: a quick switch to coloratura, vocal leaps in key that sound the soon coming of that girl’s regret. She paints vivid pictures singing Verdi so clearly we see that party girl Violetta.

*poya-russhka debuska

29 Bethany Pope

Electric Erasure for A.C.

1. The Ballerina Everyone is born with an electric mind; Very few hold the charge. When you were a child, Eager to dance (without fear of injury), Refused the front row on stage, the bright myth (Yearning gives birth to genius) bathed you in light. Sweet seven-year-old, you spun into dark. A picture of you: a body, blooming already. Dark curls, small, pink point-shoes that remained in the box.

2. The Basketball Star This sport was a better fit. Girls (tall, dark) Organized themselves across the court. Your mind, Radiant with strategy, blazed harsh light. You took the ball and dodged around the child That tried to block the net. You lived a myth: Royal Warrior—felled by foul injury. As your knee knitted, the charge of small fame faded from your brain. Your hidden hell-mouth gaped. You fell in, deep.

30 3. The Injury Athletes do not take to rest. Your injury (Cracked tendons) refused to heal in the dark. Escape called out from books—treasure-hoards of myths Sewn together with images. Your mind Thundered, Thor-hammered. You swooped like a child, Head-first, into a land that crackled with light. Basketball betrayed you: poetry called. Verse wove a thread-trail out of your mind-maze. You re-learned to walk.

4. The Mabinogion Everyone should be so lucky. The light Looks so different in Wales. Your injury Ached, but Pembrokeshire called. You came like a child. Remember the salt-sting of wind, the dark Gathering clouds, the horses on the cliff? Mind Encases everything—shrines it into a myth. When you returned, you’d found your vocation: publishing poets. When despair snuffed hope, poetry flared bright.

5. The Pit Regaining the weight, relinquishing myth, Observing your veins up close—brought to light Under a razor’s fierce auspices—your mind

31 Tore itself apart. This vast injury (Life) has one known cure. The gathering dark Is far kinder. Slowly, you became Death’s child. Hospital: six months. Hospital: eight months. Accumulating a pattern of scars and dead synapses.

6. Erasure No one warned you that you’d be reborn, a child. Everyone said it felt like a flash. The myth Of Electro-shock promises pain, dark Fatal thunder. Lying in this room, so light And clean, that ancient draining injury (More mental, now) slips, like memories, from you mind. First, you lost your time in Wales. Yesterday, you lost several friends. Now childhood is wiped from fading pages.

7. Remains You might have years before you, child. The myth That led you proved fatal. Your injured mind Held you in darkness. Now, try the blank light.

32 T. S. Kerrigan

A Page from the Devil’s Notebooks While all good children rightly mourn The deaths of that exacting pair Without whom they’d have not been born,

Has any orphan felt the urge When grown to full maturity To see his parents re-emerge?

Each generation born on earth By nature’s old, unchanging rules Supplants the one that gave it birth.

That couple, though they nurtured you And gave you certain keys to life Were they not often meddlers too?

The time will shortly come around When each of you, relieved of guilt, Prefer your parents underground.

33 Matriarch for Elizabeth Thompson on her 80th birthday

You speak of them, your frieze of fallen men, Your father, brothers, lovers, husbands, son, So vividly, they seem alive again. By twelve o’clock, the house is overrun With guests. Connecting every face and name. You smile at each of them and take their hands, Then blow out all the eighty candle flames. Your daughters whisper manifold commands. The birthday gifts are opened, put away. As neighbor children scuffle on the floor, You contemplate the closing of the day. The house grown still, describe for us once more, Your father, brothers, lovers, husbands, son, The strength it took to bury every one.

34 Burt Myers

Taste Grief wells up from the earth, metallic, black and acrid, salt sour and pooling, sacred and heavy in her mouth.

Two attendants deliver a spray of roses. She lays them out across his worsted wool suit, as old friends palaver, each mirroring the next’s wistful viscid stance in some flat-footed dance they imagine resurrects an era gone. They telescope the restive, formal tension in some elemental misapprehension to hope beyond hope.

She turns away and swallows hard, the thin skin of bonhomie is stripped to awkward reverie in the hearse to the graveyard, the first of many dissembled days, her life now lost to epilogue, appetite to bilious fog, truth to facile, fatuous praise.

35 Acute Vacancy’s pulsing V trains its nadir hard on the setting sun’s alizarin arpeggio. Inside, the neon’s thin staccato glow bleeds across my austere room, where Thelonious Monk spins thick fists of piano, angular and graceless, bop-hard, as Rollins’ tenor stabs, a jagged shard in Brilliant Corners. What inharmonic twists provoked my wanderlust, my dazed ricochet into this blank slate gray noir neighborhood? I’m blowing solo, sorrowful mad flood miasmal blues gone muse-sick cabaret, beating, off time, to Roach’s brisk high-hat, eyes on the deadbolt, knees tucked to my chest. The day is too far gone for getting dressed. Monk, and Well You Needn’t, squares with that.

36 James Matthew Wilson

Stations of Divorce The train runs, carrying her amongst her things, A bag upon her lap like a dull child To whom her emptied throat will never sing. All songs forgot amid this eastward travel, Whose record rests in snatched accouterments Rattling with neither end nor denouement

For station after station. Velvetine And rustic rusting brown adorn the coach. Its torn, high seats endure the heedless stream Of every modern man and law’s approach, Ignore the whispering faces at every border, And bear the weight of strict, collapsing orders.

She might have stayed a businessman’s bruised wife, Or screeched, a mad crone in the Sligo square, Every word a litany against this life Of sacrifice. For just three hours more, Each station seems a bullet waiting for her, A cheering crowd in every doddering porter.

37 Gail White

If She Comes Back It won’t be like Persephone returning, bringing fertility, the grass, the grain, but just our old disasters back again, the conversations that were so like burning yourself with cigarettes, until you find the places that were burned have lost sensation, the everyday reminders that the mind has marshes, tarns, depths beyond revelation.

Why do I feel enduring so much grief is just a privilege I gained by living with someone shining like a lost belief with love she seemed just on the verge of giving—

Unendingly she haunts my heart, my head. Unlike Persephone, she isn’t dead.

38 James McKee

The Exes Once more, my love, Let us two take The measure of Each one’s mistake.

Yours was an ass Who hoped a string Of sneers could pass For husbanding.

Mine generated So much shrill drama, She incarnated Some vengeful karma.

To yours, a wife Must know she is Fortunate life Has made her his.

No wife, mine thought, Wived it enough, If not distraught And breaking stuff.

For all the snide Belittlement Yours used to hide His self-contempt,

39 Marriage to him Would soon disclose The small boy in A grown man’s clothes.

Though mine thought I Could never be Unanguished by My cuckoldry,

Her strayings staled With time, attrition, The voids they veiled, And repetition.

Granted, they were Suffering too: I provoked her, He failed at you.

Now, to all those Who think to judge us: If this ode grows Acrid with grudges,

Know that we weigh The wrongs we bore Less than each day We stayed for more.

From the twinned sources Of our joint grief, Matching divorces Brought us relief

40 By severing ties We sometimes miss, As butterflies Their chrysalis.

41 Jennifer Fandel

Coming to Shore You are responsible for your wake. Gather your nets and take your journey slow. Let your look linger on the darkening lake.

Throw back the small ones, at least half your take. Then grab the paddles. You will need to row when you’re responsible for your wake.

Daily prayer makes your swollen knuckles ache. You admit to everything you did not know. Let your look linger on the darkening lake.

Do you cry for others, or for your own sake? Have you watched the sky amass with sparrows? To be responsible for your wake you must understand that promises break. Hold in your hands each thing you must let go. Nearing shore, turn back to the darkening lake and listen to the hymned waves you have made. Think of that sound surrounding you below. You are responsible for your wake. Take one last look at the darkening lake.

42 Jere Paulmeno

Petition Addressed to Myself Lord of the estate within, please let me find what is mine. Let me through the iron gate to dig the damp earth of my birthplace.

43

SPECIAL FEATURE: LYRIC, NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND PEDAGOGY

Christopher Norris

A Plain Man Looks at the Angel of History

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly con- templating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana 1971), pp. 253-64; pp. 257-8.

‘Creative licence’ and all that, but still It’s clear enough, at any rate to my Sub-Benjaminian subtlety of eye And intellect, that no degree of skill

In eking out a limited supply Of visual cues could possibly distil, From the Klee drawing, everything that will, In his last text, elude all those who try

47 To grasp it or communicate its gist In terms that go along with this or that Choice hermeneutic slant. I’d say it’s flat Impossible, but then perhaps I’ve missed

The picture’s point just as the arcane chat Of commentators manages to twist His words into some view of things that’s grist To any meaning-mill they’re grinding at,

Whether they take the Brechtian line and rate His Kabbalistic ventures something best Paused over briefly with a sigh then pressed Into materialist service, or translate

His Marxist talk as just the manifest And vulgar form of what we’d desecrate If we gave such mere fads of his the weight Of Benjaminian scripture. So the test

Is one that catches them, the exegetes Of either party, in an awkward spot Since his idea of history’s master-plot Was an unending pile-up of defeats

Whose import, to the angel’s eye, was not The kind of tragic uplift that completes Soul’s odyssey nor yet the kind that meets The standard bunch of requisites for what

Should count as a last-act redemptive turn, For some the promised end that signified God’s covenant, for others that which tied Their thought in dialectic knots to learn

48 How a materialist reading might provide Them with a better optic to discern Truths less occult in kind. Thus they’d adjourn The end-days so intently prophesied

By readers of a messianic bent (Albeit, as the cautious ones require, Just ‘weakly messianic’) and aspire So shrewdly to translate or reinvent

His Talmudic motifs that their entire Text-centred eschatology seemed meant To herald not so much a non-event That still, perversely, set some minds afire

With god-intoxicated thoughts but now Its secular equivalent that placed An unillusioned faith in what embraced Such thoughts with a good Brechtian grasp of how

Their valid kernel might not go to waste Once shot of its old shell. So they allow, Like him, that history may perchance endow Ideas long since abandoned or outpaced

By the brisk march of progress with a sense That their time’s come around at last, or their Presumed attachment to some derrière- Garde movement stuck in the pluperfect tense

At last been found to signal, au contraire, How they had just the genius to condense Futurity by holding in suspense Those rules that drew a cordon sanitaire

49 Between what falls within our rear-view scope Of reckoning and what lies so far beyond Our present grasp that these could ‘correspond’ Only in Baudelaire’s sense. Thus shattered hope

Re-constellates to form a fragile bond Of trans-world correspondences that cope With all that debris through a will to trope The stubborn literality of monde

Quotidienne and thereby show a way To keep the whole catastrophe in view Yet from an angle so far out of true, By all the optic codes, as to convey

How such a slant perspective might imbue The angel’s vision of a groundhog day Nightmarishly transformed with that which Klee Perhaps meant its beholders to construe

In terms less dire or ominously fraught Than Benjamin supplied. No doubting its Compulsive power to exercise our wits By thwarting all the methods we’ve been taught

To try till we come up with one that fits And so dispels our fear of being brought Up short by an odd piece like this or caught, Like shell-shocked angels, in the endless blitz

Of meanings driven by a wind that blows From some lost hermeneutic paradise Where the diviner’s art could still suffice To bring us peace. The text might then disclose

50 All kinds of deep enigma to entice Our curious minds yet free us from the throes Of doubt at last, not lead us by the nose Until we find some recondite device

By use of which to make his cartoon out The very image of apocalypse Or raise the genre-stakes till fancy tips The scales that way. More evidence, no doubt,

Of inability to see what grips The eyes and minds of those who talk about Klee’s angel-sketch like this, or like to tout Its lines and planes as shot through with the chips

Of messianic time that Benjamin Conceived as lying close concealed through all The debris-strewn millennia in thrall To a mystique of progress that had been

(Or so he read those remnants that appal The angel) an infernal wind-machine Whose wrecking powers are most distinctly seen By those who know the worst that can befall

Their lives or work. That’s why he’d have us shun That false idea of homogeneous time, Or history so conceived, as apt to chime All too thought-numbingly with every one

Of those cyclic catastrophes whose prime Role—as the victors saw it—was to stun Hope’s vestiges by stressing the long-run Sad chronicle of falls by all who’d climb

51 To heights where they could spare themselves the sight Of that bad history and so lose touch With history full-stop. Else they’d take such A Whiggish vantage-point as to invite

His charge of falling back into the clutch Of crass triumphalists whose heirs would write Them out of every history-book despite Their having for so long now done so much

To help secure the apostolic line Of victors. Let’s allow, since it resounds Throughout his work, that what exceeds the bounds Of literal sense will often prove a mine

Where the best digger’s one who best expounds Not only subtle details that refine Our textual grasp but truths we should assign To the Derridean hors-texte. This confounds

All efforts to establish just where tact Or good procedure should have fixed thenon Plus ultra beyond which the text alone, If not in some way adequately backed

By extra-textual sources, formed its own Self-referential world that clearly lacked Firm anchorage in the territory of fact Whatever its cross-linkage in the zone

Of intra-textual sense. Let’s further yield The point to those who say that, in the case Of thinkers such as Benjamin, the space Presumed to separate life and text is sealed

52 Against the very doctrines that would base Their separation on the truths revealed By lives that, unlike his, lay unconcealed Or not at every stage compelled to face

Such threats of inward or external source As otherwise would drive him to the brink Of terminal despair. Still those who think To see prefigured in his texts the course

His life took in its last few weeks, and link His life-text to Klee’s image, may endorse No less an error than the strict divorce Insisted on by purist types who’d shrink

The hedgehog text secure within its rolled- Up prickly tenement and then enjoy An unrestricted freedom to employ Those same techniques to shrink and then enfold

The world safe in the text lest it destroy Their fine-tuned instruments. Yet readers sold On life-and-times and captive to the hold Of Klee’s mesmeric angel should alloy

The elements that go to allegorize Those last death-haunted weeks by turning back To ask if Klee’s creation might not lack, Judged simply on what’s there before one’s eyes,

The sorts of quality whose sum could stack Up close to what he’d have us recognise In its blank gaze. More likely this supplies The exegetes with just sufficient slack

53 To compensate the angel’s deficit With value-added features that might lend Themselves, thus amply viewed, to the chief end These readers have in mind of bringing it

And Benjamin’s life-history to blend By text-osmosis. Should it not submit At first attempt, the very lack of fit Between Klee’s image and the fragments penned

By Benjamin about it goes to make More working space for just that hybrid mode Of commentary whose aim is to decode, Through every mazy detour it might take,

The language of analogies he showed, In Baudelaire, to link the wide-awake Of consciousness with images that break Through from oneiric regions and explode

All the codes and conventions we perceive To constitute the real. Still we’d do well Not to fall quite so much beneath the spell Of Klee’s beguiling image, but take leave

To query some of what they have to tell, Those dreamworld-emissaries, and retrieve Only some select part of what they weave From history’s stray threads. Else we may dwell

Too fixedly upon it and become, Ourselves, so many angels left behind Yet driven forward by some brute impulse blind To past and future, or possessed by some

54 Resistless drive that leaves the reeling mind Deprived of motive or intent to plumb Its own inchoate depths and therefore dumb To give their dumbstruck angel voice or find

Some apter idiom to convey what’s past Its gobsmacked power to tell. Just look once more At Klee’s ange de nos jours and then, if you’re Still one by whom image and text are cast

In co-star roles, then by all means ignore This (you’ll think) vain endeavour to contrast The two by striving—as he’d say—to blast A hole in that too intimate rapport

Between the two. If, on the other hand, Your inclinations run contre Saint-Beuve For something like Proust’s reasons, it may serve To help you more resolvedly withstand

The knack they have of touching a raw nerve, Those reading-protocols that take a bland Or rough-hewn image linked to an unplanned Event or chance catastrophe, then swerve

Into a realm of figural excess Where last days and late writings each assume The sense of some far-back prefigured doom That no such graven image could express

Unless one so unformed that you could zoom Right in yet be no better placed to guess What the thing signified, which points to stress, Or even—like some garbled code—for whom

55 It’s meant. My point is, Benjamin was far Ahead of his interpreters in just The ways and means required if we’re to trust The subtle exegete, while there’s a bar

(Or should be) on our craving to encrust Those texts and images that bear the scar Of lives destroyed or ruined with what are, In truth, projections of a kind we must

Put down to our own wishes rather than Project onto the author’s vouloir-dire Or vie hors-texte. This might apply if we’re So eminently well-equipped to scan

Their import that there’s no life/text frontier To cross or need for us to heed the ban On any misplaced notion that we can, By gift of divination or by sheer

Telepathy, gain insight such as struck A note of charlatanry with the likes Of ‘old’ New Critics, and more lately strikes The same false note to those who’ll have no truck

With an echt-Heideggerian turn that hikes Its self-ascribed ability to pluck Deep meanings out while others remain stuck With surface sense, till some gross error spikes

Its hermeneutic guns. For it’s the mix Of life-historic truth with allegory’s Long-licensed swerves from it that render his Example not the best by which to fix

56 Our working notion of how history’s Or life’s demands might stipulate what ticks The vital boxes, rather than the tricks Of n-fold exegesis that some whiz

Life-allegorist might make out to contain, In nuce, every episode of note Which their close-reading skills may then promote By textual magic to a higher plane.

A far cry, this, from what the Brechtians wrote In their Marx-tutored efforts to restrain The angel’s flight by hitting on the vein Of plumpes Denken aptest to connote

Their message that, wherever fancy’s bred, Its offspring yield their secrets only when Pressed to reveal, beyond the author’s ken, Such meanings as could properly be read

By good materialists alone, and then Just those of them not prone to be misled By each new allegoric go-ahead To that deceiving elf. Compare again

Klee’s image with the commentary it drew From this most rapt and erudite among The many who’ve been drawn, enticed, or stung To write about it and you’ll get a clue

As to why some brave exegetes have clung To literal sense against the larger crew Of intertextual lemon-squeezers who, From ancient times, habitually flung

57 Such hermeneutic caution to the wild Shape-shifting winds that tangle all the codes, Mix up historical and fictive modes Of discourse, and—through meaning-strata piled

Heaven-high—ensure that pious labour loads Each rift with sacred lore. The Fathers styled Their four-fold method that which reconciled Our tongues post-Babel through God-granted nodes

Of mutual comprehension that relieved, From time to time, the cacophonic din And promised to undo old Adam’s sin (Plus the tower-building exploit that so peeved

A jealous God) by speech-events akin To those that Benjamin himself conceived As bearers of the one gift that reprieved Our fallen language-state. They helped us win,

Like his authentic poet-allegorist, A post-Edenic glimpse of how things stood Back then when no tight bonds of nationhood Or speech-community contrived to twist

Our meanings out of true. Since now there could, He thought, be no sound method to assist Translators in attaining what they missed Nine times in ten, and brought off only should

Some miracle permit, the task they had In Benjamin’s hard teaching was to pass Through and beyond the sense-refracting glass Of language, like the magic writing-pad

58 Of Freud’s analogy, and—what they’d class, Those Brechtians, just another quirk to add On his Talmudic debit side or fad Picked up from Scholem’s company, alas­—

By that means come as near as we’re allowed, Us post-lapsarians, to the language-game That Adam played. This gave each beast a name By which it stood distinct amongst the crowd,

Since name and nature signified the same Divine intent that all things be endowed With just that haeccitas that did them proud By showing how their nomination came

Through God’s decree and not—pace the rule That holds for mortal languages—as laid Down by those proto-structuralists who made It an entry-condition for their school

That one maintain no sense can be conveyed Except by use of that all-purpose tool, The arbitrary sign. This way the pool Of communal-linguistic usage paid

Its debt to structures far outside the reach Of conscious grasp or way beyond the pale Of what might figure in the fictive tale Contrived by those who far preferred to teach

(Like him at times) a mysticism stale Through centuries of abuse. Adamic speech, As Benjamin conceived it, rendered each Of structuralism’s tenets sure to fail

59 The test of language-faith which said that no Mere act of meaning-transference across Two languages, however small the loss Of literal sense involved, could ever show

That third dimension shadowed by the gloss The allegorist supplies. Such claims may go, For scholars, way beyond what’s apropos But for text-gleaners separate the dross

Of literal gist from the rare gleam of pure Or pre-discursive language that reveals, To souls attuned, a sense that sense conceals Since the forked tongues of men work to obscure

What so exceeds their compass or repeals The law of plain intent. That helped assure Loquacious mortals—when the talking cure Misfired—that good communication heals

The wounds of fractured sense without the least Assistance from those peddlers of abstruse Hermetic doctrine who might so seduce Our waking minds that all the bits we’d pieced

Together in some roughly fit-for-use Communicative order promptly ceased To signify at all when some off-piste Interpretation or some fast-and-loose

Analogy drove thought clean off the tracks And into a lost-soul-frequented maze Of allegoric meanings. These might craze The seeker’s wits or else so greatly tax

60 Their hermeneutic skills that every phrase Becomes one more inscription in the wax That holds, as in Freud’s writing-pad, the stacks Of past inscriptions that our minds erase

Yet whose material traces still engrave The archive of what memory retains At some unconscious level. Here the brain’s Ancestral wiring bids it always save

For future use whatever it disdains To memorise or even seeks to stave Off at all costs where the occurrence gave So great a shock that now it too much pains

Remembrance to record. That’s why I say, Or said way back when this thing started out, That probably the best, most useful route (U.S. pronunciation) to essay

Such questions is by taking leave to doubt, Contra the commentators, whether Klee In any real sense managed to display The tiniest part of what his deep-devout

Ekphrastic Uebersetzer sought to parse In terms so eloquent that they provoked, In turn, the kind of meta-gloss that yoked Its speculative compass to the stars

Of some remote sense-constellation cloaked In figural deep space. This firmly bars The way for those whose 20/20 mars Their chance of having egos nicely stroked

61 By coming up with an eccentric slant On meanings or appearances that makes Of their strabismic gaze just what it takes To see things clear or, like his angel, grant

A visionary power to raise the stakes Of exegetic faith. Thus they implant, In the more literal-minded—those who can’t Quite get their eyes or heads around what breaks

With all the rules—a notion that it’s their Defect of brain or vision that’s the cause Of this, or some endemic range of flaws On their part that must shoulder the main share

Of blame. Yet if one thought should give us pause In saying this, or bid us take more care Before we heirs of Benjamin declare On his side of the question, it’s that clause

In all such mystical or cryptic creeds That makes a watchword, then a shibboleth Of what, if known, becomes the very breath Of life but, if unknown, sends him who reads

In ignorance straight off to dusty death, Or (less dramatically) for special-needs Sense-ampliative training which then breeds, In some, such devious spells as drove Macbeth

To that conclusion. Let’s ourselves conclude, More hopefully, that there’s room to extend Our critical horizons and suspend Those cautionary maxims that obtrude

62 Too much on our ambitions to transcend The commonplace without things getting skewed To such a point that only ultra-clued- Up allegorists can hope to comprehend

What’s going on. Then all the rest are lumped, Like the unclued-up types who, Jesus said, Lacked ears to hear, with those who lose the thread Of some soul-saving parable that stumped

Their feeble intellects since poorly read, Or read in ignorance of that which trumped The overt gist and so cast those who plumped For literal sense amongst the living dead

Of cloth-eared infidels. It’s this that throws A sharper light on Benjamin’s wire-drawn Klee-commentary and how it’s apt to spawn Yet wilder flights of fantasy from those

Who think that understanding starts to dawn Only at that far point where reading goes Beyond the utmost limits of plain-prose Interpretation and becomes a pawn

In some text-game more erudite by half Than any trial of wits that might result From sights fixed wisely short of those occult Meaning-coordinates way off the graph

Of shared intent. So, rather than exult In getting the last anagogic laugh Or writing literal sense’s epitaph, These thinkers tend more often to consult,

63 If not the ‘common reader’, then her near Relation who reads closely and in full Cognizance of how words sometimes can pull New wonders up from thought’s unconscious sphere,

Yet also of how this can pull the wool Over the eyes of allegorists who’d peer Asquint or upside-down at texts for fear Of acting like the hermeneutic bull

In meaning’s china-shop. What may have done Its share to pile sky-high the wreckage hurled At the angel’s feet, to keep its wings unfurled, And give the wind called ‘progress’ power to stun

Or mesmerise its gaze is what lay curled, Like agenbite of inwit, in each one Of those choice texts whose eisogetes had spun Around them such an intertextual world

Of gloss and commentary that nothing seemed Revision-proof enough to stand against The blitz of meaning-fragments that commenced Its sense-unravelling work each time they dreamed

Of some transcendent vision that dispensed With modes of discourse so obliquely themed As further to fragment the mass that streamed From paradise. So if he finds condensed

In Klee’s unheimlich angel such a deal Of pent significance, perhaps that’s less Because the thing has such power to compress Multum in parvo, but in hopes that he’ll

64 Have some small chance to parlay the distress That comes of knowing this Glasperlenspiel A game forever lost with no appeal To any saving vision that might bless

Us finally by showing how the storm Of progress must at some point cease to rage Or, by some very marvel of backstage Plot-fixing, grant intelligible form

To that mere piling-up of age-on-age Calamities that constitutes the norm As viewed from any place within the swarm Of tempest-driven debris. Let us gauge

How deep it was, that allegory that held Him fascinated like the death’s-head tropes Of Trauerspiel, by seeing how he copes Not only with such life-events as spelled

Defeat for all his dearest private hopes But also with the history that compelled His angel to a Rückwärtsblick that quelled Even the flickering faith of one who gropes

For long-range consolation. What he shared With the skull-gazers whose unhinged pursuit Of vengeance left them and their victims mute, By the last act, to say why we’d been spared

No devilish atrocity en route To that denouement is the thought that there’d Be something fake about a plot that squared With just desert or turned out to commute

65 Our final verdict on the bloody farce To a more meaningful since tragic sort Of moral uplift. Though this might comport More readily with sentiments that pass

For truly human it would so distort The moribund revenger’s coup de grâce That we’d have just a Beckett-type impasse Of failed apocalypse that fell far short

Of such redemptive power. The angel’s curse, It then appears, is that which figures all Our lives and histories as one long-haul Deluded odyssey from bad to worse,

A message more than likely to appal Those thinkers temperamentally averse To such gloom-mongering but which some rehearse, As if apotropaically, to stall

Catastrophe and turn the thing around At last. Then a few fragments might be snatched From chaos and, by patient sifting, matched With a few others so as to propound

A view of things not too securely latched To hope’s rickety wagon nor yet bound, By gloomy predilection, to confound All thoughts of progress with a doctrine hatched

By Kulturpessimismus from the wreck Of the old Europe Pound once called ‘a bitch Gone in the teeth.’ So if he chose to ditch Its cherished values as not up to spec

66 And, at the Spanish frontier, unhitch His own life-burdened wagon where the trek Ran into one last fatal border-check, Then it’s Klee’s mute apocalypse to which

We dwellers in the aftermath had best Direct our not too sharply focused gaze If we’re to grasp why such communiqués As his and Benjamin’s are not addressed

To expert eyes well practised in the ways Of eisogesis but to those unblessed With any special skill save that expressed By everything about it that betrays

The angel’s having nothing to impart Like news of virgin births or other themes In arch-seraphic style. Rather than streams Of light celestial tricked out by art

Into some true epiphany that seems To find its way to every viewer’s heart, Klee simply says: no vision here apart From an angel-shaped thing that neither screams,

Like Munch’s shocker, nor assumes a look Of rapture whether sacred or profane, Nor, like a Buddha-face, seems to contain All these brave opposites since it can brook

Their discord undisturbed. More it’s the plain Uncomprehending blankness that so shook Klee’s expert draughtsmanship and left the book Of life, for Benjamin, a text-domain

67 Where allegory contrived to cock a snook At any symbol-seer who hoped to gain Such insight as the angel sought in vain Through every tropic twist the storm-path took.

68 Frederick Turner

Lyric and the Content of Poetry

This paper was occasioned by the sense that the battle for poetic form has been largely won, at least in principle. The Grande Armée of poetic formlessness is still on its way to Moscow, but it has en- countered its Borodino, is mortally wounded, and winter is coming on. Now comes the battle for poetic content. It might appear that poetry is in a fine state of health. A whole industry has sprung up to help people to be poets. Perhaps twenty thousand authentically published poets are now writing in the Unit- ed States. The production of poetry has never been greater, and its presence in the academy and as an ideal in the popular imagination has never been more dominant—or rather, it would be better to say that the production and presence of lyric poetry have never been more so. But judging by the print-runs of most major poetry collections, there may not be more than ten thousand readers of contemporary poetry in the United States. Could the decline in absolute readership of new poetry be di- rectly linked to the increasing hegemony of the lyric poem? Indeed, as the lyric poem expanded in writership, poetry in general shrank in readership. What do I mean by ‘lyric’? The hallmark of lyric as against any other kind of poetry is the presence of the self of the poet. That self is dominant both in the content and in the form of a lyric poem. Lyric is in the first person singular. Even when a lyric poem does not directly describe or express the emotions of the poet, its point of view is distinctively subjective, marinated with the poet’s feelings and intentions. The lyric mode has certainly overwhelmed all the other genres

69 of poetry, as a glance at almost any literary periodical will show. The poetry workshop is almost always devoted to the articulation and branding of the poet’s individual lyric voice; almost never to science, history, statecraft, other arts, technology, economics, war, or any of the other subjects that poets have graced with their insights over the last six thousand years. Where are the satires, poetic dramas, prayers, epics, poetic essays, riddles, work-songs, paeans, poetic explorations of science (think of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura or Goethe’s ‘Metamorphose des Pflanzen’), the pastorals, poetic fables, historical commemorations, epitaphs that once flourished around the lyric? Arts once considered integral to poetry, such as rhetoric, logic, and grammar, are no longer taught to beginning poets, since lyric poetry does not seem to demand them, indeed often explicitly seems to reject them as artifices and obstacles to the open flow of imagery. How did this lyric dominance come about? Perhaps the most positive and encouraging reason is that the individual has become increasingly important over the last two hundred years. Romanticism clearly began the trend. At the beginning of Wordsworth’s Prelude the poet casts about for a heroic subject for his epic, only to settle upon the poet’s own self as its best subject. Paradoxically, to make a lyric in epic form, and so to raise the status of lyric, is to herald the replacement of epic by lyric altogether as the master-form of poetry. A further reason for the lyric’s ideological dominance may be political. In many parts of the world, as the state hypertrophied into its twentieth-century giantism, overwhelming the civil societies out of which it grew, the realm of inner personal freedom shrank until it reached its final fall-back positions, one of which was the lyric poem. This phenomenon is obvious in the totalitarian countries, where lyric poets were the last holdouts against the hegemony of the state. Their heroic defense of the free person makes a grand litany—Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, Celan,

70 Radnóti, József, Babits, Milosz, Bei Dao come to mind. But much had to be sacrificed in this last stand. Poets came to mistrust any of the techniques that had served the national or ideological anthems of the totalitarians who would have stolen their souls—heroic and elevated language; the ‘sentimental’ and moral emotions of sympathy, pathos, respect, patriotism, loyalty, gratitude to benefactors, honor and so on; allegorical meanings; depictions of exemplary actions; logical suasion; and the devices of rhyme, meter and trope. The to- talitarian nation-state had appropriated to itself epic, poetic drama, hymn, and even satire; all that remained was lyric. Even in more liberal regimes, lyric was selected, as evolutionists put it, over other forms. The lyric is a celebration of the individual. Democratic polity and free market economy need individuals, as voters, workers, consumers and shareholders, rather than groups such as guilds, clans, religious communities or hereditary aristocra- cies. The democratic vote turns the individual into the sovereign. Progress in arts, sciences, technology and business relies on indi- vidual giftedness and innovation rather than collective traditional custom. Morally we recognize that individual rights must be the foundation of any ethical system and political constitution. The self has rightfully achieved its true dignity and valuation, and the lyric poem is the celebration of that self. The question we will have to face is whether the individual self, cut loose from its communal and past foundations, is worth celebrating. How did we arrive at the present situation? Poe, Wilde, Baude- laire, and Rilke essentially dismissed poetic narrative, history, the longer poetic forms, logical and empirical argument, rhetorical per- suasion, and objective, useful and informative content as having no place in poetry. Poetry, they argued, should be an absolutely original and subjective reverie; its purity and full force could only be found in its lyric integrity, unique imaginative vision, and personal interiority.

71 It was from these sources that contemporary lyric has flowed. At first the lyric had the clear logic of a Petrarch or a Shakespeare, a Ronsard or a Donne, and used traditional rhetorical and discursive devices to make its point. A second stage in the ascendancy of lyric began when such poets as Mallarmé insisted that such argumentative and public devices were obstacles to true subjective insight, and what lyric poetry gave up in terms of discursive rationality, it must make up in terms of music. The state of poetic dreaminess needed an acoustic narcotic. Verlaine is a formidable metricist, as are Swinburne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Rossetti, all major contributors to the new ideal of poetry as paradigmatically lyrical. But with the advent of the twentieth century, vers libre and free verse began to dominate. If argument, plot, informative substance, dramatic mimesis and so on were all deemed obstacles to the free flow of subjective self-expression, surely the tricky artificial business of rhyme, meter, stanza and so on were just as obstructive. Why should not they too be discarded? Even grammar itself increasingly came to be discarded, as imag- ists sought to eliminate anything in the way of conjunction, articles, syntagmata and prepositions that might impede the flow of verbs and nouns. But this notion of poetic economy may be a huge mistake. Neu- roscience has now begun to investigate the nature of the self. Instead of taking the self as given and then trying to describe its character- istics, neuroscience carefully examines and describes the brain. The brain is a wildly complex feedback system in which the word “self” ineluctably reappears in its other meaning, that of the simple reflex- ive pronoun—self-transforming, self-generating, self-organizing, self-calibrating, self-monitoring. The brain, we know now, wires itself up in the womb, transforms itself by its attention to sensory inputs, prunes its own connections according to its own experience

72 and its own actions, assesses the results of its own activity, changes its own bath of neurochemicals and thus its mood, and can even turn on or off the operations of the genes that generate it. For the neuroscientist, the brain may not necessarily contain a self, or even be a self; rather, and unmistakably, the brain “selfs.” The recursiveness of human grammar models the brain’s self-monitoring and its modeling and monitoring of its own self-mon- itoring. Unlike other animals, humans can use quotation marks, interrogate ourselves, ask ourselves “am I over-analyzing?” or even “is it going to ruin my spontaneity if I worry too much about whether I am over-analyzing?” Perhaps the mystery of subjective time, or Henri Bergson’s “duration,” our sense of the present moment, is in fact the limit of manageable difficulty when several iterations of self-monitoring pile up. It is this activity, I take it, that the lyric poem is designed to describe and elicit. To eliminate grammar from poetry is to eliminate the self and its time. The third stage of the conquest of poetry by the lyric was the realization that without the need for scholarship, technical mastery, and syntactical expertise, and requiring only deep personal feeling, anyone could write poetry. If lyric needed only a human self, and po- etry was lyric poetry, everybody was a potential poet. So here we are. All this may suggest that the lyric’s success may be a part of its problem. In re-defining poetry as exclusively lyrical (“lyrical” now meaning “critical of social customs and tradition”) poetry’s friends stripped it of all the ways in which it might find common cause with the rest of civil society. Poetry’s very medium is the common coin of language. To alienate oneself from the rich vernacular fund of associations and values that civil society generates through idiom, jargon, craft terminology, historical memory, popular science and so on—even if in the search for a truly authentic and unique personal language—is to dry up the sources of imagery and symbol. It was

73 Shakespeare who said that all his best was dressing old words new; he recognized his dependency upon the mother tongue and understood the subtle fallacies of originality. As lyric came to dominate poetry, the realm of poetry itself shrank, leaving to other media poetry’s old functions—folk history, prayer, work-song, spiritual advice, entertainment, philosophical ex- planation, reasoned suasion, jokes, myth-making, biography, science, battle-hymn, and so on. The specialization of poetry as lyric deprived society itself of the glue by which it finds its higher unity. Of course I except the poetry of the popular and commercial world—pop song lyrics, musical theater, folk, blues, rap, and so on - which has retained a mass audience, has never given up its formal meters and rhyme, and never abandoned the pleasures of narrative, pathos, poetic justice and identification with the central character in the story. The reader might take these reflections as an attack on the lyric poem. This is very far from my intention. In the context of all the other genres and forms and functions and modes of poetry, lyric does indeed merit the high praise it has been given in the last two hundred years. For perhaps of all things in the world that are the most marvelous, the human self takes the prize. Of the genres that specifically celebrate it—comedy, tragedy, and lyric—lyric takes the most direct, searching, and immediate path to the mystery of selfhood. But take away all the other genres by which the self is nourished into true selfhood, the soil in which lyric grows, and lyric must begin to wither. I remember that my first impulse toward becoming a poet—I was about nine years old—was to express and describe the aston- ishing miracle that I had just noticed, my own consciousness, my own power to represent the outside natural world in my inner self. The exploration of the self has been one of the greatest triumphs of western civilization, leading to the recognition of the primary

74 value of freedom and the great political institutions of democracy. Montaigne, Descartes, Shakespeare, Donne, Rembrandt, Whitman, Freud all helped to recognize, articulate, and construct that marvel. But if the lyric’s domination of poetry has not benefited either the lyric or poetry, what is it that the lyric has lost in the process, and what steps might be taken to begin to restore the lyric to its vital human and spiritual role? The crisis of the lyric is at bottom some deep-rooted crisis of the self. The dominance of the lyric may fundamentally reflect the need to replace the structures that had formerly maintained the self’s integrity. Or rather, perhaps, to compensate for their loss by more and more heroic acts of self-revelation - until only the dregs of a boneless self remain to be sifted over. What were those structures? Paradoxically, I believe, they are the things in a human being that make one capable of sacrifice, tragedy and comedy—capable, in Shakespeare’s words, of one’s own distress, of one’s own shame. The grandeur of the traditional lyric poem resided in the fact that the self that was revealed in it came complete with unbreakable rules—of honor, prejudice, loyalty, passion, duty, submission, family solidarity, duende, blessing and curse, commitment, chivalry, scientific honesty, professional integrity. Lyric rose to dominance as those structures decayed; it was an increasingly desperate attempt to assert the value of an entity—the self—whose vital functions were shutting down. It would be easy enough to find culprits for the decay of the conception of the self. The autonomy of the self, its freedom and self-determination, its ability to go to heaven or to hell, have been under attack for at least two hundred years. The soul became de- tached from the self, and was then declared a fable; but without the awful and steely bones of the soul, the self begins to lose its struc- ture. At first, it was the hard sciences that seemed to put a limit to the ‘heft’, as Emily Dickinson puts it, of the human soul. But in the

75 last 30 years neuroscience has been rapidly recovering, in different terms certainly, the weight and force and self-determination of the human psyche. But alas, it was the humanities and the human and social sciences that more insidiously challenged its writ. When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he knew that he was leaving in the language a huge, God-shaped hole that would have to be filled. Though Freud was one of the great heroes of the drama of the self, he could also be read as an explainer-away of the self as a mere scar-tissue protecting the id from the superego. Marx and Engels dismissed the bourgeois self as sentimentality, false consciousness, manipulated by class interest. Humanistic psychology declared the self to be a collection of survival and reproductive drives. And with Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, the self degenerates into a function of social power.

Three major events helped reduce the self to triviality: the carnage of the trenches in the First World War, the systematic regime of lies perpetrated by totalitarian state socialism, and, most import- ant of all, the Holocaust.1 The humane interiority of Anne Frank, Anna Akhmatova or Miklós Radnóti disappears into the black hole of grotesque meaninglessness. What is left is the horrible, aimless, picaresque storylessness of the darkest Holocaust narratives like Kosinsky’s The Painted Bird—one senseless event after another. A purely imagist world. We are living in the aftermath of all this, but the contemporary lyric, which of all things one might call upon as the medicine, the pharmakon, of the wounded self, offers no healing. And its audience has largely given up on serious poetic lyric, turning to the poetry of

1 I owe this insight to my colleague Zsuzanna Ozsváth, herself a Holo- caust survivor.

76 music video or the classical past when it can, but shepherdless when it comes to the major intellectual, moral and spiritual issues of our time. When one reads a lyric poem by Donne or Hopkins or Goethe or Radnóti or Borges (or Du Fu or Basho or Hafez), one is encoun- tering a self that is capable of making a religious confession, dying in childbirth, fighting a duel, pursuing for years an unrequited love, enduring torture and martyrdom, vowing (and keeping) celibacy in holy orders, accepting military discipline, laughing itself senseless, sacrificing itself in battle, going blind with scholarship, feeling the guilt of ruining a woman, devoting oneself to the republic of letters, creating a great business corporation, giving itself to the care of one’s children, spending decades in pursuit of a scientific question, risking itself on repeated dangerous sea voyages, serving a liege lord, speaking in prayer to God, keeping up an epistolary friendship, facing un-medicated surgery and death, taking up the authority of a mother or father, and ruining itself for the sake of a principle. When such a self reveals itself, it is as if a great athlete were to unveil his or her body. But if a person who has never had to fight or submit, or even struggle with the limits of rhyme and meter, were to strip, who would want to see? Of course there are exceptions. Whatever one thinks of Plath or Sexton or Rich, their selves burn pretty brightly in their poems. But in these days it is indeed a burning. Poets who have through good or bad luck inherited a grand and dignifying curse such as member- ship of an oppressed group can only exorcise it once, in a first slim volume, and unless by then they have formed an inner skeleton of authority and commitment, are then condemned to a lifetime of self-plagiarism, playing over and over the worn grooves of pain or grievance. Technology, medicine, and the urge toward social justice are rapidly erasing the difference between the male and female con- dition, and so also the female advantage as regards existential dignity.

77 Race, too, is less of a heroic stigma. Whether one’s election by pain is as a member of a racial minority, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, or a shunned homosexual, the same problem, of the second book, always arises. To write good lyric poetry, one must have a self worth writing about. Our society feels the loss of such a self in poetry though it does not know it. In moments of great stress and emotion ordinary people seek for the appropriate form of words, for the true poetic phrase. Popular and commercial poetry can and does go some way to fill- ing the need. The future of lyric is not totally bleak. In the last few years I see a gradual recovery of the dignity of the self and thus the effectiveness and interest of the lyric poem. The New Formalist and New Narrative movements in poetry provided a body of practice and expertise, at least, in the ancient techniques of meter, form, poetic storytelling and architectonic structure. There has been a renewal among younger poets of the ideals of craft and virtuosity. But these ‘in-house’ improvements will be ineffective without deeper changes in the culture at large. A new literate culture is emerg- ing, based on electronic text, in which epistolary friendship and the intellectual salon are undergoing a revival, and a new conception of the public as a viable and honest human space is being created: the electronic coffee-house that can topple dictatorships and make a poem go viral. Poets must seize the new media. Samizdat is his- torically the norm for the publication of poetry—partly because it is so easy to memorize when formally composed. Think of the circulated hand-copied manuscripts of Horace, Petrarch, Du Fu, Ronsard, Donne. The internet is the ideal medium for this mode of dissemination. Of course one can’t monetize it—but is this a problem? What can the academy do to help reclaim the authority of the lyric self? The following pedagogical suggestion is not meant entirely

78 seriously—the opposition to it would be overwhelming!—but it may make a good thought experiment. The education of the poet has classically been conceived in terms of the mastery of a succession of poetic genres: first lyric, then pasto- ral poetry, then comedy and tragedy, and finally epic. Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe go through their own versions of this progression. What this sequence relied on, as now becomes obvious, was that the native youthful self of the poet was in fact already deeply imbued with the structures, disciplines, and moral spine inherited from one’s collective customary culture and from the existential and technolog- ical constraints of one’s world. The poet was already a formed being. Part of his or her poetic education was indeed a liberation from those structures and limits as new, more spiritual, spontaneous, individuated and internalized disciplines took their place. But such a given youthful self can no longer be assumed. The contemporary poet’s constraints and disciplines are few. Any kind of structure in the new poet’s character or personality cannot be assumed. My modest proposal is that the poetic education of such a person may in fact compensate for all the missing disciplines in his cultural upbringing. Let it be an ordeal—a delightful ordeal, certainly—in which instruction becomes in-struction, the internal- ization of structure. If this is the case, then the sequence of genres in the poetic education needs to be reversed. It should start with epic, with the forgetfulness of self that comes from the absorption in the adven- tures of a hero or heroine. Here training in meter and form are absolutely essential, in order to preserve the poetic integrity of the long narrative and the memorability of the plot points. A formida- ble scholarship, in history, natural science, and political, economic and military philosophy, would be needed in order to body forth

79 the world of the protagonist. The more ‘dialogic’ world of tragedy should follow, in which subjective partisanship must be abandoned if the characters are to speak with any true life, and in which a variety of metrical forms are needed to express the varying dialects of the dramatis personae. Here a passionate curiosity about the human heart is demanded, one that may be permitted to extend to the poet’s own. Comedy, where the conflict of character comes to be experienced as funny and delightful (rather than threatening and vexing, as it is to the egocentric), should succeed tragedy. Then pastoral, in which the poet’s self, now partly formed and disciplined, should take its first shy and modest steps in informing the fable and inspiriting the conventional figures. Only now will the poet be ready for the lyric—when the hard- ships of her poetic experience will meld with the hardships of her adulthood; when he has grown a self with crevices, hardpoints, intri- cacies, resistances and habits that will make his subjectivity interesting to a reader. The vale of soul-making—the valley of the shadow of death—will have begun to do its necessary work. Only now will she have a sense of the self that will make her valuable to her culture. This sequence is not as counter-intuitive as it sounds. It may well recapitulate the actual historical emergence of poetry, in which the human species apprenticed itself to its own poetic vocation. It parallels the education of a traditional shaman, in which the strange schitzy youth is taught to build his own drum, to submit herself to the myths of the tribe that she may the more richly transcend them on her witchy flying journeys to the underworld and upperworld. Such a course of study would certainly discourage many people who should not be poets—and some who, in rejecting its constraints and defining a counter-stance to it, find in the storm and stress of their rebellion the hardening discipline they need to make great lyric poetry. So let’s begin our poetic curriculum with epic. Epic has been

80 largely ignored by the literary profession for over a hundred years, disdained by the advocates of the novel, vitiated by cultural con- servatives who claimed it as the refined and exclusive possession of Western Civilization, ironically rejected by post-colonialists as imperialist propaganda, despised as sexist boys’ adventure stories, condemned by theorists as hegemonic grand narrative. Folklorists dismissed literary epic, cultural elitists dismissed oral folk epic. Yet the monster won’t stay dead. It is coming back among the young; anthropologists are finding epics in every human culture capable of building the equivalent of a city, translators have given us the Sagas, the Popol Vuh, the Mahabharata, The Journey to the West, the Heike, the Mwindo Epic of the Congo. And we are learning to read Genesis and Exodus as epic poems. Why do people who have transcended the clan and the tribe write epics? What is epic, anyway? Albert Lord and Milman Parry showed us how oral epic is composed; but Gilgamesh was already a literary epic four thousand years ago. Epic is not just a technique of memorable oral composition; epic poets find whatever medium is most likely to be passed down through the generations, and cultures find the best ways, including writing and print, to pass them down. The real question is: what content is so important that it needs to be remembered by society? (Or even, more provocatively: why do cultures without an epic tend to fade away?) My own answer is that epic is the inside story of human evolution. It tells the story of how we became human: How we as a species used stories, and the micro-story of gram- mar, to speak the world into being; How we recognized, in figures like Enkidu, Adam, Polyphemus, Grendel, and Monkey, the fact that we are animals but not animals; How we became clever and self-aware and thus got into trouble and technology, and our expanding brains caused pain in childbirth,

81 long infancies, concealed ovulation and kinship systems, and comical or murderous in-law situations; How we encountered personal death in the underworld journey and collective death in in the flood story; How we became the best walkers in the animal kingdom, and walked all over the earth (all epics contain journeys); How we invented—by a marvelous combination of biological and social runaway feedback—the human individual, personified in the Hero who both represents human personal existence and challenges it to change; And how we built cities, founded law and political order, created currency, devised in succession oral mnemonics, writing, print, and now new media.

So let us start out by teaching epic first. Lyric may then blossom out of it.

82 ESSAYS Jan Schreiber and Frederick Turner first presented their essays pub- lished in this issue of THINK at The Critical Path, Western State Colorado University’s annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism, which takes place during the conference Writing the Rockies, over the last long weekend of July.

Introduction

Since 2010, Western State Colorado University has hosted an annual symposium called “The Critical Path,” devoted to poetry criticism and analysis. Eight scholars or critics who are also poets convene each July to present papers and engage in spirited discussion with their peers and with the audience, many of whom are participants in the university’s low-residency Graduate Program in Creative Writing. (In 2014 we also introduced several sessions for those who teach poetry to secondary school students.) Over the years the resulting articles, ranging from discussions of works by neglected poets to inquiries into the effect of sound and rhythm on readers’ perceptions of poetry, have appeared in various journals, in both print and electronic form. As a contribution to the important work of bringing this on-going discussion before the public, each issue of THINK will carry at least two of the articles generated by the symposium. Readers who are intrigued, stimulated, or provoked are encouraged to join us at the Symposium, part of the annual Writing the Rockies Conference

83 at Western State Colorado University, which takes place each year during the final weekend of July. —Jan Schreiber and David J. Rothman, Co-Directors

Past Symposium participants have included: Kim Bridgford, Thomas Cable, Natalie Gerber, Emily Grosholz, Ernest Hilbert, Joan Houlihan, Simon Jarvis, Marilyn Krysl, David Mason, David J. Rothman, Jan Schreiber, Marilyn L. Taylor, Frederick Turner, James Matthew Wilson, and David Yezzi.

84 Jan Schreiber

The Phoenix Line: History of a Style

It is dangerous to make too much of an association between a metri- cal pattern and the substance of the matter it conveys. For a proper balance of caution and impudence I will invoke a remark by Simon Jarvis from a recent paper: “The devices of verse have no fixed effects, but readers are seduced into conjecturing effects with them, as they notice poets sinking the most powerful thoughts and feelings into even the most abject little phonetic and printed bits and pieces. 1 I wish to look at several examples, spanning four centuries, of something perhaps a little more than abject—the headless iambic tetrameter line, sometimes called a truncated or catalectic trochaic line, that is, a trochaic tetrameter lacking a final unstressed syllable. It is a line of seven syllables starting and ending with a stress and alternating between stressed and unstressed syllables:

ʹ ̮ ʹ ̮ ʹ ̮ ʹ

For illustration, take a line from Yeats:

Irish poets, learn your trade.

What makes the meter worth studying is that whole poems have been written in it, though infrequently, over the entire stretch of literature in modern English, and that, as I hope to show here, the poems in this meter have more character, if not thematic content, in common than mere chance would account for. In short, it is a metrical style that often, though not always, brings with it a characteristic set of emotions, a characteristic tonality. Our earliest example comes from Fulke Greville. Like his good

1 “For a Poetics of Verse,” PMLA, 125: 4 (2010), p. 931.

85 friend Philip Sidney, Greville was a tireless metrical experimenter. We do not know what led him to the catalectic tetrameter line, which pervades the fifty-sixth poem in hisCaelica collection, better known by its first line: “All my senses, like beacon’s flame.” Thom Gunn characterizes this rhythm (not shared by the first line) as “a difficult metre that tends to stiffness because of the rather heavy emphasis given to the first syllable,” but, as he also notes, “it is used here with great flexibility.” 2 Part of that flexibility results from the poet’s willingness to vary the meter with lines having an unstressed first syllable:

Up I start believing well To see if Cynthia were awake; Wonders I saw, who can tell? And thus unto myself I spake:

The second and fourth lines here are complete iambic tetrameters and mitigate the poem’s tendency to become a chant. As he nears the end of his discourse Greville takes full advantage of his meter’s suitability for pronouncements:

He that lets his Cynthia lie, Naked on a bed of play To say prayers ere she die Teacheth time to run away. Let no love-desiring heart In the stars go seek his fate, Love is only nature’s art, Wonder hinders love and hate.

Note the disyllabic “prayers” in the third line and the imperative mood at the start of the last quatrain quoted. We shall see that mood

2 Introduction to Selected Poems of Fulke Greville (London, 1968), p. 26.

86 recur often as we trace the applications of this meter. We do not know whether he picked it up from Greville, but we do know that Shakespeare made use of the meter in his late plays. Probably the most famous instance is in The Tempest, in Ariel’s song:

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell. Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

The first line, of course, is standard iambic tetrameter, fuzzed with alliteration. The remaining lines all start with a stressed syllable, and all except the last one are seven syllables in length. The last line has eight: it’s a standard iambic tetrameter line with a trochaic first foot—but the second and third syllables, unstressed, have elided vowels that almost fuse together, making the line all but indistin- guishable metrically from the preceding ones. Shakespeare’s longest and most decisive use of this distinctive line occurs in “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” a poem that begins in the imperative mood, a grammatical gesture in which phrases often take a trochaic pattern in English and often lack a final unstressed syllable. (“Pass the salt.” “Follow me.” “Stay between the lines.” “Don’t believe a word he says.” “Call me Ishmael.”):

Let the bird of loudest lay, On the sole Arabian tree, Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey.

87 Both the grammatical mood and the four-stress, seven-syllable verse line are sustained throughout the five introductory stanzas, in which the community of birds celebrating the two protagonists is called together. Even when the imperative mood is abandoned for the descrip- tive indicative, the meter is maintained with remarkable rigor. The only exceptions occur in the eighth stanza, where unstressed final syllables are admitted in the two outer lines; the eleventh, where all four lines are complete (acatalectic) trochaic tetrameters; and the last line of the thirteenth stanza, which is in iambic tetrameter but so imbued with the tonality of the preceding lines that the deviation is scarcely noticed. For the Threnos, Shakespeare shifts to a three-line stanza in which all three end-words rhyme. The catalectic trochaic pattern is sternly maintained. The penultimate tercet makes a pronouncement of fact of the sort that might be carved on a monument:

Truth may seem, but cannot be: Beauty brag, but ’tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be.

And the final tercet reverts to the imperative mood to solemnize the obsequy.

To this urn let those repair That are either true or fair; For these dead birds sigh a prayer.3

Note that the last line, consisting entirely of monosyllables, hews to the prevailing pattern by what we might call the force of habit. In normal speech “these” would receive more stress than “For” and 3 See Nicholas Myklebust’s discussion of prototypes and priming in “John Lydgate’s Memory Machine: A Study of Reading Habits” (forthcoming in Texas Studies of Literature and Language) for a fuller explanation of this phenom-enon.

88 “birds” than “dead”—

For these dead birds we’ll sigh a prayer

—but of course Shakespeare did not write the line that way, and so strong is the trochaic rhythm in our minds that we say, in conformity with the preceding lines,

For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

A meter this distinctive demands a distinctive name. Rather than the awkward “catalectic trochaic (or headless iambic) tetrameter” I propose to call it the phoenix line, both because it is used so scru- pulously throughout “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and because it rises suddenly, after long dormant stretches, in the history of poetry in English.

That Ben Jonson was well versed in such measures we need have no doubt, both from his reference (in The Staple of News, IV.i) to “My egg-chin’d laureate”

With dimeters, and trimeters, tetrameters, Pentameters, hexameters, catalectics, His hyper and his brachy-catalectics, His pyrrhics, epitrites, and choriambics . . . and from his graceful use of the line in his “Hymn to Diana”:

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep: Hesperus entreats thy light, Goddess excellently bright.

89 Here too we see the imperative used, but now in the context of a paean suitable for a monarch.

Two hundred years after Shakespeare and Jonson, after a long pe- riod in which poets worked to perfect the heroic couplet, William Blake adapts the phoenix line to a very different sort of poem, mar- ginally less opaque than “The Phoenix and the Turtle” but equally monumental. Set not in the imperative mood but entirely in the interrogative, “The Tyger” is a tour-de-force that avoids statements altogether, consisting instead of nothing but rhetorical questions.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?

(Note that “fire” needs two syllables in line six above, but only one in line eight.) Like Shakespeare in the songs, Blake relaxes the trochaic rhythm at points—for example in the fourth line of the first stanza, which is straight iambic tetrameter. This is obviously deliberate. He might have written:

What immortal hand or eye Framed thy fearful symmetry?

—but he presumably wanted the auxiliary “Could” which would

90 be answered by “Dare” in the repetition of the stanza at the end of the poem. Unlike commands in English, questions do not so easily fit the trochaic pattern. The typical question starting with an interrogative word like “what” throws the stress onto the following noun, as in “What child is this?” So Blake starts some of his lines with a conjunc- tion capable of bearing the stress; alternatively, as in the second and third lines below, he simply admits an iambic tetrameter line; or, as in the lines that follow, he interposes an unstressed adjective or article so that the words on either side of it exhibit relatively more stress.

And what shoulder, & what art. Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

The elliptical questions shortened to fit the meter (in lieu of “What was the hammer? what was the chain?”) contribute to the oracular quality of the poem overall and give it an air of mystery—all the stronger because no attempt is made to answer them. In short, the line’s tendency to become a chant is exactly what we infer Blake is after in these verses.

Blake is often considered a proto-Romantic, but the true Romantic poets were more directly concerned with the liberation of the spirit from perceived social or intellectual straits. When Keats tries his hand

91 at the phoenix line, in “Fancy,” he writes a paean to the imagination; but he too chooses the imperative mood, at least for his opening line:

Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain pelteth; Then let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door, She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar. O sweet Fancy! let her loose; Summer’s joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming;

And even though the poem proceeds through a description of cozy rustic comforts while the poet urges the freeing of the imagina- tion, the imperative mood recurs frequently in the lines I have itali- cized. The tone of the poem, however, is notably different. Gone is the oracular manner, which is not congenial to Keats; present instead is the description—not seen so far in this meter, of abundant natural detail. As we see in the passage quoted above, unstressed final syllables add a trochaic leavening to the meter, even while other lines make the categorical pronouncements (“Summer’s joys are spoilt by use”) that we’ve come to associate with this style of writing. The thrust of the poem is summed up in the final couplet, which recapitulates the opening lines:

Let the wingèd Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.

In tone “Fancy” represents a considerable departure from the

92 poems we’ve looked at so far, in that it is less oracular, less incanta- tory, more inclined to celebrate the pleasures of home and hearth even while paradoxically extolling the unfettered imagination. To a large extent this quality reflects Keats’s own predilections and his times, but in spite of these tonal differences the frequent resort to the imperative mood and the gnomic utterance, both illustrated in the summary couplet just quoted, link the poem to the others we have been surveying.

W. B. Yeats, who in old age revives the phoenix that had burned with the youthful Keats, gives us “Under Ben Bulben”—a poem that, like many of its predecessors, begins in the imperative mood:

Swear by what the sages spoke Round the Mareotic Lake That the Witch of Atlas knew, Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

It is interesting that Yeats adopts this meter for his final testa- ment as poet and Irish patriot. It has something of the monumental quality he evidently thought appropriate to the occasion, and he uses it to issue proclamations that take full advantage of the meter’s decisive tone. The poem, in six parts, does not hew strictly to the meter set out in the four lines quoted above. Aphoristic in tone, stating what Yeats took to be general truths, it disparages the fear of death, maintains that violence clarifies the mind, and urges the importance of artistic creation. In doing so it offers an eccentric synopsis of western art since the Renaissance and enjoins Irish poets, in particular, to cele- brate their history and their people in well-crafted verse. The verse makes no attempt at metrical orthodoxy: unstressed

93 first syllables occur frequently, though not so often as to destroy the overall trochaic drone. But by the sixth section Yeats has so far departed from the metrical template that only two lines, the first and fifth, conform to the seven-syllable trochaic pattern, while the rest are in regular iambics, except for an anapestic fourth foot in line six:

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

The concluding epitaph is, of course, in iambic dimeter with standard trochaic substitutions.

We might expect the phoenix line, uncommon even in the days when “metrical poetry” was a redundancy, to have dropped from sight upon Yeats’s death, but the outnumbered twentieth-century conservators of the metrical tradition decreed otherwise. W. H. Auden makes effective use of the line in “Lullaby”:

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave

94 Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.

Unsurprisingly, the poem begins in the imperative mood and proceeds, in lines three through six, to the statement of general truths or sententiae. The final four lines of the stanza are once again in the imperative mood but imbued for all that with a feeling of deep affection. Only one line in the stanza, the iambic seventh, violates the metrical template. The final stanza, entirely in the prevailing meter, begins almost as if it were an extension of “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: “Beauty, midnight, vision dies.” But once again it descends from the universal to the immediate human situation, while reverting to the imperative mood: “Let the winds . . . show”; “Find the mortal world enough.” Two final injunctions, also having the force of imperatives, close the poem: “Noons of dryness find you fed”; “Nights of insult let you pass.” The poem, which flirts with but does not succumb to senti- mentality, is probably more successful than any since Greville’s work at marrying universal observations with depictions of human desire.4

My final and most recent example of the phoenix line in successful use comes from America. Gwendolyn Brooks in her mock epic “The Anniad” employs the line throughout, infusing it with a slightly satirical tone nicely captured in her first stanza, which in describing her heroine begins to no one’s surprise in the imperative mood: 4 I note parenthetically that Auden’s title, “Lullaby” is also Shakespeare’s refrain in the fairies’ song from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.ii), a song likewise cast in this meter and largely in the imperative mood. The refrain goes “Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby.”

95 Think of sweet and chocolate, Left to folly or to fate, Whom the higher gods forgot, Whom the lower gods berate; Physical and underfed Fancying on the featherbed What was never and is not.

The poem follows Brooks’s heroine, the eponymous Annie, a rather naïve young woman, from her youthful longing for a dashing and decisive man, through her encounters with a flawed avatar who is plucked up and sent off to war, to her attempts to rebuild a life with him on his return, and on to her final disillusion. Brooks sets herself the difficult task of adhering closely to the phoenix line (she only occasionally admits an unstressed syllable at the line’s start or finish) while narrating significant events (thus departing much of the time from the imperative mood or the aphoristic statement) and at the same time maintaining a satirical tone that is at once amused, ironic, and sympathetic. Although the mode of epic—even mock epic—is narrative, the phoenix line is better suited to summary than to the detailing of progressive action. So the movement in this poem proceeds mainly by recapitulating the various stages attained by the protagonists. Thus, near the end of the poem, as the denouement approaches, we have this stanza:

But the culprit magics fade. Stoical the retrograde. And no music plays at all In the inner, hasty hall Which compulsion cut from shade— Frees her lover. Drops her hands.

96 Shorn and taciturn she stands.

Note how in the sixth line of this stanza the meter requires the poet to drop subject pronouns from her sentences. The effect is a bit like that of the caption frame in a silent film. The actions of Annie’s lover at this stage are narrated through imperatives:

—Close your fables and fatigues; Kill that fanged flamingo foam And the fictive gold that mocks; Shut your rhetorics in a box; Pack compunction and go home.

The last two stanzas of the poem are introduced by the formula —in the imperative mood—that opened it: “Think of tweaked and twenty-four” and “Think of almost thoroughly / Derelict and dim and done.” The poem ends with its heroine “Kissing in her kitchenette / The minuets of memory.” Only the final line receives a softening unstressed first syllable.

Odd though it is, neither quite trochaic nor quite iambic, the phoenix line is remarkably persistent through the long course of English verse. Yet most poets would agree it is not for all markets. While, as we have seen, it can be employed in a diverse range of contexts—from song to narrative to philosophical musing to satire—it brings with it affinities with certain inherent stress patterns of English speech, specifically a preference for the imperative mood and the emphatic statement of general maxims. It blends with other lines—both iambic and trochaic—and thus allows poets with a strong command of their

97 craft to modulate the tone and extend the emotional range of the works in which it appears. Fundamentally, however, it seems best suited to commands and to contexts in which a persistent, infectious rhythm is important. The meter can capture the magical, the mythical, and the mysterious, as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Blake demonstrate. “Fancy” may roam in its precincts, as Keats would have it. It can issue proclamations (with Yeats) or caption significant moments (with Brooks). In combination with more usual iambic meters it can have a soothing and restorative effect, as Auden demonstrates. But offered straight, without the softening effect of unstressed syllables before or after, it is capable of dispelling illusions when summoned by realists like Fulke Greville, who employed it when he counseled:

None can well behold with eyes But what underneath him lies.

98 Kyle Harvey

Fractal: The Wallace Stevens Centos

Every so often, we are fortunate to read a line of poetry that changes the way we look at the world. This was my experience the first time I read the third line—the last line of the third stanza—in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

After returning to this poem dozens of times over the last few years, I stumbled onto a fascinating discovery regarding the lines of this particular work. Like so many young poets, I often mistakenly search for some big, red bow to tie up the end of a poem. Looking at this line, I wondered how Stevens had managed to go on and write another five stanzas, three lines each, for a total of fifteen more bril- liant lines. I compared my favorite line to the last line of the poem:

In which being there together is enough.

Another amazing line. Curious, and perhaps curiously, I began to read the last lines of each stanza, in reverse, starting with the last line of the poem: In which being there together is enough. How high that highest candle lights the dark. A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. A light, a power, the miraculous influence. Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: The world imagined is the ultimate good.

The sound and rhythm of these lines, read in this newly discov-

99 ered order, gave me chills. I read the lines from the poem this way another four or five times and then wrote them down, altering the end-stops slightly, so that the poem read a bit more fluidly:

In which being there together is enough— How high that highest candle lights the dark, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, A light, a power, the miraculous influence, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: The world imagined is the ultimate good.

I was profoundly moved. These stanza-ending six lines, read in reverse—a cento—quickly became one of my favorite things to read aloud to anyone willing to listen. Obsessed with my new treasure, I began to read through Stevens’s collected works, similarly extracting the last lines of each stanza, eliminating the remaining lines, and reading the lines in reverse as centos. I found that many of these curations read with a similar beauty. I began to ask questions. Was this intentional? Is it the integrity of his lines that allows for such effortless rearrangement? Is his poetry quantum in nature? The idea of poetry being somewhat quantum-mechanical has certainly been widely discussed, particularly in regards to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Further, Charles Olson advanced the idea of quantum poetics in his manifesto “Projective Verse” under the heavy influence of Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as his disdain for any responsibility, on the poet’s behalf, to chronology, which he often discussed when riffing on history, Herodotus and his use of the word ‘istorin as a verb. Could Stevens’s poetic discourse have led him to a similar revelation? In a letter to Barbara Church in August 1951, Stevens writes,

100 “The quantum theory to which he [Jean Paulhan] refers is not a thing to be assimilated offhand,” and later goes on to say, “The philosophy of the sciences is not opposed to poetry any more than the philosophy of mathematics is opposed.” This is to say, Stevens was absolutely thinking about physics, quantum theory and science of poetry, though how many of his thoughts about quantum theory found their way into his poetry we will never know. Appropriately, Stevens seems to acknowledge, and perhaps favor, the argument and paradox in “Adagia” when he writes, “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” In another letter written to Barbara Church that October 1951, Stevens writes that his chief deduction is, “. . . that poetry is supreme over philosophy because we owe the idea of God to poetry.” Had Stevens, at this point, worked past any ideas of quantum-me- chanical poetry? Perhaps his work is similar to that of Jackson Pollack, Hokusai and Leonardo da Vinci—fractal in nature—defying logic, while seem- ingly creating and holding form subconsciously. His work seems to naturally lend itself to being perceived from any and all angles, not unlike a crystal or a drop of water. Once again, in “Adagia,” Stevens deepens this mystery with his aphorism, “Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.” It isn’t the answers to these questions that matter most to me, but the beauty of these centos. The following are some of my favorites:

From “A Postcard From the Volcano” Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun a spirit storming in blank walls will speak our speech and never know, and what we said of it became beyond our gate and the windy sky,

101 the look of things left what we felt. These had a being, breathing frost as quick as foxes on the hill.

From “The Poem That Took The Place of a Moun- tain” Recognize his unique and solitary home [he] would discover, at last , the view toward which they had edged, where he would be complete in an unexplained comple- tion: Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, a place to go to in his own direction, even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table, the poem that took the place of a mountain.

From “Vacancy in the Park” Under its mattresses of vines come back to see a certain house by a woman, who has forgotten it from a shore at night and disappeared, someone looking for he knows not what.

From “The Irish Cliffs of Moher” Of sea and air, it is as he was of poetry, the wet, green grass above the real at the head of the past, shadows like winds at the spirit’s base.

102 From “Debris Of Life And Mind” Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while and feel that her color is a meditation. Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves. She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line that a bright red woman will be rising, that it is as if we had never been young. It is as if we were never children.

From “The Woman In Sunshine” Invisibly clear, the only love bearing the odors of the summer fields more definite for what she is- burns us with brushings of her dress. Nor the beginning nor end of a form: the warmth and movement of a woman.

“Nor the beginning nor the end of” my questions, I turn the work of Stevens over in my mind. I continue studying the lines, pulling them apart, piecing them back together. I am “someone looking for he knows not what.” In the end, I realize Stevens had already explained to me what was most important to remember: “The world imagined is the ultimate good.”

103 reviews Sisters and Courtesans Anna M. Evans White Violet Press, 2014. Reviewed by Dick Davis

As a form, the sonnet enters English through Wyatt’s translations of a number of Petrarch’s sonnets, and it has tended, in its English incarnation, to retain at least a whiff, an intimation, of the Petrarchan project about it, no matter what other vagaries of experience it has subsequently taken as its subject matter. Petrarch’s rhetoric is ide- alizing; it implies that the highest, the most spiritual, of our mind’s thoughts and inclinations are devoted to its causes—the beloved is perfect, carnal desire is volatilized into spiritual adoration, nothing gross can obtrude, and the diction is passionate but, in general, re- lentlessly elevated. This elevation is still present when the sonnet is used to focus on other matters than Eros—as in Donne’s or Milton’s religious sonnets, or in sonnets of friendship (Milton again, but also Gray, and a whole flourishing sub-genre throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Even when the form is used for politics, the elevation of Petrarchan rhetoric and sentiment is still there; is there a more famous political sonnet in English than that inscribed at the base of the statue of liberty, one of the most movingly effective uses of elevated, self-consciously noble, rhetoric in American literature?

104 But what has this all this historical chit-chat to do with a really splendid sonnet sequence published in 2014, Anna Evans’s Sisters and Courtesans? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. The sonnets in the book are all spoken by women who are based on historical prototypes, either as individuals or as examples of a generic occupation or status, and the poems alternate between monologues by women who have devoted themselves to the religious life, and those who live off their sexuality as courtesans. So, half the sonnets, we might think, are given over to the spiritual, the elevat- ed, what we might loosely call the Petrarchan notion of volatilized adoration (in this case for God), while half stay with the mundane, with flesh and blood, the carnal, and nothing physical is volatilized into anything spiritual. This is true, up to a point, but when we look at the actual poems, things are much more complicated, and much more interesting, than this simple formula of alternating opposites suggests. The first poem, for example, “My Life as a Vestal Virgin,” is about someone devoted to the religious life. But there is a twist; she has been devoted to this life by others, while a child, while not knowing what her apparent vocation meant; she has broken her vow of chastity, slept with a lover, and will be buried alive. So in a sense she is both the spiritual individual and the carnal individual. The second poem is about a “porne” in ancient Greece (“porne” is Greek for “whore”), but one who has bought her freedom and who is looking for those who “like good conversation / With one who’s learned philosophy and tact.” She’s moving up in the world; her life is still bodily, but it begins to partake of the life of the mind too. The vestal moves from the spiritual to the carnal; the porne is reaching from the carnal towards the “philosophical” (even if we may suspect, perhaps unfairly, that it’s “philosophy” on a fairly banal level). The third poem, “My Life as a Docta Puella” (i.e. an educated girl), is

105 about a poet’s mistress. Her poet-lover writes idealizing (Petrarchan) poems to her:

but poetry, alas, won’t buy me bread or put denarii inside my purse.

She’s reduced to selling her body to “rich old men / who paw me and have problems getting hard.” As she complains in her last line, “I didn’t study Plato to stay poor.” The poem contains idealization (the speaker’s friend’s poems), the carnal (the speaker’s faute de mieux trade), the educated (the speaker herself) and philosophy in the person of Plato, the first idealist philosopher, the thinker whom we can say made Petrarchanism and the whole notion of the spiritualization of desire possible and respectable, but whom, it turns out, is not much use when it comes to getting on in mundane reality. And so the book goes on; those devoted to the religious life are implicated in the physical world whether they want to be or not, while those who live by the body live also in the penumbra of the world of the spirit, wanting it, or rejecting it, or haunted by it. Many, most, of the poems work marvelously just as discrete, highly evocative portraits, but together they also add up to a moving multifarious essay, we might say a meditation, on the complexities of lives—by implication any lives—that are irreducibly both carnal and spiritual no matter how much they may wish to be, or see themselves, as wholly one and not the other. And though the poems never preach, they also insistently suggest that morality too is not simply a matter of either /or; there is evil in the world of the spirit just as there is nobility in the world of the body. None of this would matter much if the poems weren’t also wonderfully well written, but they are: the meter is sure but also rhythmically various and witty, the diction of the speakers’ voices is beautifully modulated between high and low, aspiring and despairing,

106 self-consciously educated and aggressively colloquial; the poems make serious points lightly and memorably, often with telling wit. Sisters and Courtesans is a really fine achievement by a poet with a droll, clever, interesting and—for all the witty deflationary hi-jinx, I sense fundamentally serious—mind. Her book is a delight and an education.

107 Survivor’s Picnic: Poems Debra Bruce Word Press, 2012. 64 pages. Reviewed by Marilyn L. Taylor

Survivors Picnic is a splendid new collection from the accomplished poet and scholar Debra Bruce. More feast than picnic, it presents to the reader three groups of graceful, courageous poems that confront some of the most daunting challenges that can befall a contemporary woman. Case in point: over an extended and volatile period of time, Bruce has survived not one, but three potentially devastating life crises, any one of which might have completely daunted a more fragile artist—and they certainly qualify her for first-class “survivor” status. They include (1) a breast cancer diagnosis and a subsequent mastectomy; (2) the abrupt departure of her husband after many years of marriage; and (3) the difficult challenge of guiding her sen- sitive teenage son through these shattering upheavals. Rather than caving in, Bruce writes of these adversities in a voice that reflects confidence, optimism, and amazing invincibility. Concerning the cancer, for example, she advises (in a poem titled “Living With Your Diagnosis: a Few Tips”):

Pretend it isn’t even on your radar. Don’t encourage it with direct attention

108 any more than you’d chat with an oncoming storm, especially one with tendencies toward rotation.

The dissolution of Bruce’s marriage is also confronted unflinch- ingly. At one point she resurrects wives from the past who, famously, also suffered the fallout of spousal estrangement, including Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves. Her own personal pain is most evi- dent, however, in a devastating short poem called “The Magician,” which begins as follows:

You wouldn’t believe it! One minute he’s just my husband, soaping a dish, but when he turns to me, lifting a towel, I have something to tell you—presto! My chest is a cavity filling with crushed ice, the air a shattered windshield I haven’t even hit . . .

Perhaps most moving of all are Bruce’s gallant poems about the emotional anguish that her young son underwent at the time of her divorce and after. One searing example, excerpted from a heartbreaking series called “Custody Haiku”:

Mouthful of gravel, rock dropped in a hole, his Mom squeezing his hand hard as if to get tears out of him. He wouldn’t play any of their games.

For all of these dark moments, though, Survivor’s Picnic is not necessarily a somber book. Working against the gloom is Bruce’s

109 precision of language, her large and polished but always accessible vocabulary, and the occasional jolt of unexpected wit. She is among that small cadre of poets who are able to render highly personal events and experiences—many of them painful—without a trace of the melodrama we often associate with “confessional” poetry. Rather, her poems arrive on the page entirely unencumbered by the overworked language of lament and self-absorption. They certainly move the reader in many ways, but the effect is due in large part to her penchant for admirable restraint. One can’t close a discussion of Debra Bruce’s work without mentioning her outstanding grasp of traditional poetic forms. This volume alone features several rhymed quatrains, sonnets, haiku, a ballade, a triolet, a villanelle, pantoums, a ghazal, dipodic meter, plus a number of free verse poems that reflect the poet’s mastery of rhythm, even in the absence of regular meter. Her prosodic skills are virtually impeccable, and she uses them wisely and almost im- perceptibly, which is as it should be. Survivor’s Picnic is highly recommended reading for anyone who might doubt that intense personal emotion can be communicated in poetry with control as well as insight. It will prove them wrong.

110 CONTRIBUTORS

Luke Bauerlein’s poems appear in or are forthcoming from Rattle, Unsplendid, B O D Y, Angle, and elsewhere. He currently resides in southeastern Pennsylvania and writes songs and performs with the band, The Late Greats.

Bruce Bennett is the author of nine books of poetry and more than 25 poetry chapbooks. His most recent chapbooks are The Wither’d Sedge (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Swimming in a Watering Can (FootHills Publishing, 2014), and his most recent full-length col- lection is Subway Figure (Orchises Press, 2009). He was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 2012 for a villanelle, “The Thing’s Impossible,” published in Ploughshares. In June 2014 he retired from Wells College, where he had directed the Creative Writing Program and the Visiting Writers Series since 1973 and is now Emeritus Professor of English.

Robert Boliek earns a living practicing law and has an MFA degree in writing from Alabama and has published in such magazines as Gargoyle, The Formalist, New Orleans Review, RE:AL, Hellas, and The MacGuffin, among others.

Dick Davis is Professor Emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University, where he was chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, 2002-2012. He has written scholarly works on both

111 English and Persian literature, as well as eight volumes of his own poetry, and been the recipient of numerous academic and literary awards, including both the Ingram Merrill and Heinemann awards for poetry. His publications include volumes of poetry and verse translation chosen as books of the year by the Sunday Times (UK) 1989; the Daily Telegraph (UK) 1989; the Economist (UK) 2002; the Washington Post 2010, and the Times Literary Supplement (UK) 2013. He has published numerous book-length verse translations from medieval Persian, most recently, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (2012). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been called, by the Times Literary Supplement, “our finest translator from Persian.”

Rhina P. Espaillat has published nine full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays and short stories, in both En- glish and her native Spanish, and translations of the work of Rich- ard Wilbur and Robert Frost. Her original work and translations from and into Spanish appear in numerous journals, over seventy anthologies, and dozens of websites, and have earned national and international awards.

Jennifer Fandel’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Sequestrum, Poecology, Measure, museum of americana, RHINO, The Baltimore Review, and Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. In 2014, she was an artist in residence at Homestead Na- tional Monument (part of the National Park Service) in Nebraska. She lives in St. Louis and works in publishing.

Kyle Harvey is the editor of Fruita Pulp, an online poetry journal. He was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award Hyacinth( , Lithic Press, 2013), and won the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize. His poems

112 have recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Life in Poetry, Electric Cereal, Heavy Feather Review, HOUSEGUEST, Pilgrimage, SHAMPOO, and the Wallace Stevens Journal. Lithic Press recently published his serial poems July and Farewell Materials.

T.S. (Thomas Sherman) Kerrigan is an American poet with dual Irish citizenship. He was born in Los Angeles where he continues to live. He practiced law until his retirement in 2008. The bulk of his poetry, first published in important journals on both sides of the Atlantic, is collected in My Dark People (Central Avenue Press, 2008), and in the forthcoming A Homecoming in the Next Parish Over, due out from Central Avenue Press later this year, and in two smaller earlier collections The Shadow Sonnets (2004) and Another Bloomsday at Molly Malone’s Pub (1999). His poetry has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems (Penguin, 2006) and Literature and its Writers (Bedford/St. Martins, 2008). He has authored two plays, Branches among the Stars and A Thorn in the Heart.

James McKee and his wife live in New York City, where they each work as educators. After studying English and philosophy at the University of Virginia, he held a number of jobs before spending over a decade as a teacher and administrator at a small progressive high school in Manhattan. He currently works as a private tutor and spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

Brett Mertins lives with his wife Becky and two sons, Joe and Will, in Omaha, Nebraska, where he teaches writing and literature classes at Metropolitan Community College.

113 Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at University of California—Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock, and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty-five years, as well as the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. He has been nominated for Push- cart Prizes and The Best of the Net. Two full-length collections are in the works: Lent 1999 is forthcoming from Leaf Garden Press, and This Twilight World will be published by Popcorn Press. His chapbook Three Visitors has recently been published by Negative Capability Press. Artifacts and Relics is forthcoming from Folded Word, and his novel Knight Prisoner was recently published by Vagabondage Press. Another novel, A Book of Lost Songs, is coming soon from Wild Child Publishing. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster.

Burt Myers has recent work published or forthcoming in Measure, The Raintown Review, First Things, Stone Canoe and Tar River Poetry. He works as an art director in Binghamton, New York.

Christopher Norris is Distinguished Research Professor in Philos- ophy at the University of Cardiff, Wales. He has written more than thirty books on aspects of philosophy and literary theory, among them The Deconstructive Turn, The Truth About Postmodernism, Ba- diou’s Being and Event: A Reader’s Guide, and Re-Thinking the Cogito: Naturalism, Reason and the Venture of Thought. His latest book is Philosophy Outside-In: A Critique of Academic Reason. A volume of his verse-essays, The Cardinal’s Dog and Other Poems, was published in 2013, and The Winnowing Fan: Verse-Essays in Creative Criticism will appear from Bloomsbury in 2016.

114 Jere Paulmeno lives in the Denver area, belongs to the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and has published poetry in Wazee Journal and Don’t Just Sit There.

Bethany W. Pope is an award-winning author. She received her PhD from Aberystwyth University’s Creative Writing program and her MA from the University of Wales Trinity St. David. She has published several collections of poetry: A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012) Crown of Thorns, (Oneiros Books, 2013), The Gospel of Flies (Writing Knights Press 2014), and Undisturbed Circles (Lapwing, 2014). Her first novel,Masque, is forthcoming from Seren in 2016.

Jan Schreiber’s most recent book of poetry is Peccadilloes. He has also published two books of poetry in translation. His poems and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies over four decades. His critical book on contemporary poetry is Sparring with the Sun. He is a co-founder, with David J. Rothman, of Western State Colorado University’s annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism.

Marilyn L.Taylor, former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin (2009-2010) and of Milwaukee (2004-2005), is the author of six collections of poetry. Her award-winning poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Poetry, American Scholar, and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” online column. Marilyn taught poetry and poetics for fifteen years at the University of Wiscon- sin-Milwaukee and currently serves as a board member for several writers’ organizations.

Matt Tordoff was born and raised in Minnesota but now lives in England. His poetry has previously appeared in Midwestern Gothic and is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry and a number of other journals.

115 Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, was educated at Oxford University. A poet, critic, interdisciplinary scholar, public intellectual, translator, and former editor of The Kenyon Review, he has authored over thirty books, including Shakespeare and the Nature of Time, Genesis: an Epic Poem, Beauty: The Value of Values, The Culture of Hope, Hadean Eclogues, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics, Paradise: Selected Poems 1990-2003, Two Ghost Poems, and Epic: Form, Content, and History. Turner’s many honors include the Levinson prize for poetry and the Milan Fust Prize, Hungary’s highest literary honor.

Wendy Videlock’s work has appeared widely, most notably in Poetry, Hudson Review, The New Criterion, Hopkins Review, and Rattle. Her books, Nevertheless, The Dark Gnu, and Slinghots and Love Plums, are available from Able Muse Press and other outlets.

Gail White’s new book Asperity Street will be published by Able Muse Press in summer 2015.

James Matthew Wilson is the author of five books, including, most recently, “Some Permanent Things” and “The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry” (Wiseblood Books, 2014). An Associate Professor of Religion and Literature and Villanova University, his es- says, reviews, and poems can be found at jamesmatthewwilson.com.

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