November 2013

founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

November 2013

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cciii • number 2 CONTENTS

November 2013

POEMS aimee nezhukumatathil 107 Two Moths tiffany higgins 108 Samba in the Sky Medusa on Sansome and Pine daniel tiffany 112 How Many Days Can You Live on Vicodin and Frosty? dilruba ahmed 114 Snake Oil, Snake Bite wong may 115 Buying Camels in Dresden szilárd borbély 120 The Matyó Embroidery Translated by Ottilie Mulzet todd boss 123 Rocket Bravery fady joudah 126 Tell Life

ruth lilly poetry fellows hannah sanghee park 137 And a Lie Norroway in February The Fox Bead in May matthew nienow 140 Bad Year Anthem In the Year of “No Work” phillip b. williams 144 Speak Do-rag Homan and Chicago Ave. Of Darker Ceremonies natalie shapero 151 Thirty Going You Look Like I Feel Not Horses harmony holiday 154 Gazelle Lost in Watts Niggas in Raincoats Reprise Motown Philly Back Again Do any black children grow up casual?

comment tom sleigh 187 To Be Incarnational

contributors 207 Editor don share Art Director fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Assistant Editor lindsay garbutt Editorial Assistant holly amos Consulting Editor christina pugh Design alexander knowlton

cover art by stephen eichhorn “Cactus Cluster i,” 2011

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Poetry • November 2013 • Volume 203 • Number 2

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aimee nezhukumatathil

Two Moths

Some girls on the other side of this planet

will never know the loveliness

of walking in a crepe silk sari. Instead, they will spend their days on their backs

for a parade of men who could be their uncles

in another life. These girls memorize

each slight wobble of fan blade as it cuts

through the stale tea air and auto-rickshaw

exhaust, thick as egg curry.

Men shove greasy rupees at the door

for one hour in a room

with a twelve-year-old. One hour — One hour —

One hour. And if she cries afterward,

her older sister will cover it up. Will rim

the waterline of her eyes with kohl pencil

until it looks like two silk moths

have stopped to rest on her exquisite face.

aimee nezhukumatathil 107 tiffany higgins

Samba in the Sky

The poor have the best views, Views sloping down to sea.

A green and yellow planet, A blue band, rung with stars.

The poor have the best views. You have to walk to get there.

Up three flights, narrow paths, Houses rising steeply side to side.

No, no space for a car. When the flag lifts, you see the coast:

Yellow curve of sand, Framed by reaching branches.

Little humpbacked islands, Soon they will drill for oil there,

Deep underwater. Once microscopic Diatoms swarmed in salt, danced, died.

Fell to the bottom of fathoms, became black Slick hid in shale. They drill down miles ...

(Police arriving at the edge Of the mind.)

Are you thirsty? Something to drink? Please sit down. Yes, the game is on.

We built that room by hand. I lie In bed at night dreaming of a new room,

108O POETRY One jutting into sky. The eldest Daughter’s in university. Economics,

But she switched to Environment.

Out the door, the flag lifts, reveals. (Curve of Rio.) Ordem e progresso.

The poor have the best views, Samba in the sky.

tiffany higgins 109 Medusa on Sansome and Pine

The woman is daft. Invented her own sect. Has upside-down sex. With alternate species.

You see her on the street. Corner of Sansome and Pine: Morning rev up of sf financial types. Instead, there she is, beneath a gigantic hat.

Hair wild, in coils, like a rattle- Snake. Smiles like she’s got the shakes. Every cell in her seems to vibrate. Psst! Could you turn that to low ?

The gray-suited, heads bent to cement, pass. Edges of her sleeves are threads; Her clothes mismatch. The shoes Are not a pair. She stands as you stare,

Or better yet, ignore. You ask Her if she’s fine, and she replies, Fan- Tastic! As if this were the day She’d finally learned to levitate,

And her eyes are the doors To a holographic universe,

And she looks right through you, As if you too had won the lottery of the soul. And you look down at your shiny, perfectly symmetrical shoes, Like, Man, that’s more than I wanted to know.

And — Didn’t anyone tell you you need a reason — A house you own, matching clothes,

110O POETRY Translucent skin, sheen of fashion, A pulsing bank account, like our galaxy always expanding —

To feel so friggin’ over the moon? Who are you? How do you justify you? What made you you? What context gave you you? And on the curb you kick, swing, scuff your shoes.

The woman is daft. Invented her own sect. Probably has no sex, or too much. With any species.

She hasn’t yet learned That happiness is contingent — It depends upon The things aforelisted.

She’s just riding on the being of being. Hedonist. On her hand, a rock As if, eons ago, the glacier had swung by and deposited A boulder on her finger. The elemental pinned to her.

The woman is daft, I tell you. Adrift. Steer clear. The glint In her — shield your eyes. Downcast. Don’t let it get to you. She will die

Alone — while you, you’ll have — Have — Resist. Do not, I say, do not Long for that magic.

tiffany higgins 111 daniel tiffany

How Many Days Can You Live on Vicodin and Frosty?

Poor thing, she holds him on her lap, the godless hidden god,

causing the lips of those that sleep to speak.

Cold shadow of the white acanthus in its tiptoe dance.

Buy the truth and sell it not.

A lion is in the streets, there is a lion in the way.

My niece, the little siren, taught her the slang:

mad married fancée.

Dido has a quiver, she wears a spotted lynx

skin and a belt. My undefiled is not herself

tonight, but one thing’s forever: I just saw the video explaining

the neighborhood applause, a book of anthems where sirens

plunge into the gold of the initials at that karaoke party for her

112O POETRY boyfriend. We cooked up all the goodies and fauns came through the windows. That’s her thing.

“I like this path to darkness” she keeps saying.

Whatever party fame is doing to her chances for a quick trial. Even Barbarella, my inner child, can’t touch her goldilocks.

By dawn you’d know if she was going to be back or not.

daniel tiffany 113 dilruba ahmed

Snake Oil, Snake Bite

They staunched the wound with a stone. They drew blue venom from his blood until there was none. When his veins ran true his face remained lifeless and all the mothers of the village wept and pounded their chests until the sky had little choice but to grant their supplications. God made the boy breathe again.

God breathes life into us, it is said, only once. But this case was an exception. God drew back in a giant gust and blew life into the boy and like a stranded fish, he shuddered, oceanless.

It was true: the boy lived. He lived for a very long time. The toxins were an oil slick: contaminated, cleaned. But just as soon as the women kissed redness back into his cheeks the boy began to die again. He continued to die for the rest of his life. The dying took place slowly, sweetly. The dying took a very long time.

114O POETRY wong may

Buying Camels in Dresden

Like all great rivers The Elbe is familiar at first sight. The barges spic & span as the front parlors Of model homes in Saxony — The steam paddle-wheelers & other vessels, No less impeccable — all run With a near soporific efficiency. You lean out & the land starts up: The parcels of pastures & castles Bearing with them trees & cows & cattle-grids the crowned heads of daisies Little knots of human habitations, Cigarette factory & garrisons Floodplains, sheet pilings Run All run, As if by an engine, Some cement breaker from under the river torn turfs all Bob up & down, Brown like bears in bear gardens The cupolas, cavaliers Their ruinous sandstone reflections alongside. Whether this is the famous effect Of the Balcony of Europe Cork coasters chasing gilt coronets Maps loosely adrift on a map So many teacups clicking, Large balconies colliding Breaking up into smaller ones Valley & vineyards

wong may 115 Mines, bridges, sugar-beet fields, villas, Museum corridors A Procession of Princes Chimera of Chinese porcelain palaces Cargoes of homeland & meadows, Other Municipalities, the beer & beer mats, Coal, forestry, History atop Geography atop History Flags roll unroll — coalesce Black — red — yellow Yellow Black Red Runs

White Sunk trains with passengers Trains sunk April ’45 Bergen-Belsen

Run Elbe Run

I pulled away. I have come this day to the bank of the Elbe To write a few postcards In a tearoom.

On the steps up From street level to the Old Albertinum Museum some way from the tearoom A man too is minding his business On his lap a glass case For keyboard

116O POETRY 2 rows of colored sand in test tubes Raspberry /burnt sienna /turquoise /Prussian blue /lavender /ochre Or neutral — just sand. Into a beer bottle he tips a little color & before you know Our man has tossed one up in the air like a baby & caught it roundly by the heels too, Le voilà, not one grain escapes It is shockproof, waterproof, A world like a Swiss watch, & time-proof — You count three camels It looks like 4, — any number could have been packed in the bottle Which, when turned slowly in the palm An orderly procession, : Camels against a horizon of low sun An irradiated sky, Palm tree, undulating dunes A strata of deep watermelon subsiding to honey halva The silhouette of a tent, hint of A sandstorm in the air. Grit under eyelids & should you prefer From the array of bottles you could take home one with A full sun, an Egyptian sun-disk & you have his word, — no fear, each hermetically sealed, Will travel.

As if to say not all the grains Are sand, our man also works With rice. He’s a jeweler. He will encrypt

wong may 117 On a grain of rice a word, Enclosed in a colored phial of water again hermetically For all time Like the camels. A jewel, he said, The word a ruby, an emerald Of water Should you forget, here his English broke off But you understand Yes, there is closure. As I watched, a lady at my elbow Like one at a séance, asked For the name “Christine,” her grand daughter, she said. & he, our scribe, answered he was from Iran, — not that anyone inquired. Iranian, then — Hence the camels Though here in Dresden He had looked Mexican A second before. I looked again & saw that he could be from anywhere, It depends on where you stand. This man has for good or ill the face of the world, Which he bears sadly With some mirth.

I pulled away. Another moment I would have To come up with a name, a word, Another world.

118O POETRY I was happy with my purchase of camels On the Elbe. Back home it holds Dresden & the Elbe for me in a bottle. It runs for so long as anyone would care to look, Not a drop more. I would have liked to write a card to the bottler Addressing sands sands of the world thereof My migrant, errant friend I wish you all the grains whatever you had set out for, & always Sands enough to take you, just where you stand Waiting for your No. 28 sunsets, No. 20, The watermelon sunrise & no end of camels.

wong may 119 szilárd borbély

The Matyó Embroidery

On the platter set out in the center of the Matyó-embroidered tablecloth was the syringe. And around it was silence. My father gazed at my mother, and she back at him. Slowly, faltering, he began to speak. I was seized by an unusual shuddering. I recall that he used the word fate, and that if I consented to the injected dose, we could all fall asleep. We would stay together for all time. And evade the uncertainty in mortifying desperation. A fifteen-year-old’s desire to live cried out in me: “No!” To which my father stated: “If you want to live, then we too must keep on living, because we can’t leave you by yourself.” My father was the village doctor. I grew up with no siblings. My mother’s sister lived next door, with her husband and two children, Nelly and Gyurika. In the evenings I prayed: “Merciful Lord of mine, My eyes have closed, but thine, yet still are open, father mine, Watch over me as I recline.” Then this: “In one God I believe, in one homeland I believe, in the eternal divine truth I believe, in Hungary’s re- surrection I believe. Amen.” Gyuri could not study in Pest, he went to Brünn. Later, not even there. Then the family sent him to Toulouse. My mind could not comprehend. Then one of uncle Vilmos’s servants murdered him with six ax-blows. He screamed crazed into the courtyard: “That’s what the stinking Jew deserved!” I found him, his head smashed open. I ran to my father, who didn’t even believe it. And one after the other, the horrors came. Nelly lived in Újvidék with her husband. Uncle Erno˝ was in the middle of shaving when Hungarians broke into the flat. They were looking for the family. The nanny quickly threw a quilt onto six-month-old Tomika, they didn’t notice him. Peterke was out with Nelly. Uncle Erno˝ was executed on the ice of the Danube. Nelly did not recover. She knitted pullovers, each more beautiful than the next, so as not

120O POETRY to feel the pain. She went to Pest to learn a trade, so she could support her children. That’s how it was when nineteen-forty-four came. On March 15, one of my teachers said, “You remain seated,” while the class sang the Anthem, “and be quiet.” On the day of the nineteenth, the Germans invaded. From then on, it was obligatory to wear the star. Through the intervention of the medical officer and the Lord Lieutenant, my father could have stayed out. I had to move to the ghetto with my mother. My father said “The family should stay together.” All up and down our street they stood, to bid farewell. Father acknowledged them, but already he was just waiting for the end. He had aged by decades. Then the injection, the one I already spoke of, turned up on the table with the Matyó embroidery. We sat in the evening underneath the open sky before being loaded onto the freight cars. The doctor from the next village drank mercury chloride with his wife. Despite my father’s stomach lavage, they succumbed by the morning. There were eighty of us in the wagon. An expectant mother gave birth on the way. But with no water, my father could not save them. There were those who went mad in the freight cars. My father taught me always to say “Ich will arbeiten.” On the seventh of July the train stopped. Father read the plaque, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and said, “We are lost!” Megaphones blared, “Leave your packages in the wagons, they will be brought to you later. Special vehicles are coming for the sick and the elderly, just remain sitting,” they repeated, “everything will be fine. Men exit the wagon to the left, women to the right.” As farewell, my papa said, “Always be my clever, my obedient, my good

szilárd borbély 121 little girl ... ” That is how we parted for eternity. Tomika and Peterke were squeezing my hand tightly, but my mother said, “Don’t you want to sit down? We can walk. Come ... ” We moved forward in a column of five rows. The bulbs of the searchlights blinded us in the eyes. A German officer, legs wide apart. He stood there somewhere far away. Sent us to the right. Had to get undressed in a room. Then they sent us into another, and the iron door slammed, bolted shut. Screaming, I pounded on it again and again. We truly were lost, as last I understood.... Turning around, the others already shaved bald. I didn’t recognize anyone. They stood there like sheep. Upon their skin, the writing of goose- flesh.

Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

122O POETRY todd boss

Rocket

Despite that you wrote your name and number on its fuselage in magic marker neither your quiet hours at the kitchen table assembling it with glue nor your choice of paint and lacquer nor your seemingly equally perfect choice of a seemingly breezeless day for the launch of your ambition nor the thrill of its swift ignition nor the heights it streaks nor the dancing way you chase beneath its dot across that seemingly endless

todd boss 123 childhood field

will ever be restored to you

by the people in the topmost branches of whose trees

unseen

it may yet from its plastic chute on thin white string

still swing.

124O POETRY Bravery

A rung’s come broken in the ladder to the mow and so one hesitates to clamber up there just to bomb a cow with dung or bother swallows from their rafter cakes. It takes a new footing somewhere in the ribs’ treads, about heart- height, to climb it now. A new gap’s in the smile that smiles from the limed barn floor. There seems to come a break in the war. But soon, one of a neighbor’s sons, too young to know it was otherwise once, braves it, and soon, even with a sweater- swaddled kitten or a BB gun, all the kids can do it again, nearly at a run, like pros, and so it goes, as before.

todd boss 125 fady joudah

Tell Life

For Ghassan Zaqtan 1

I now release from my blood the bird of thirty she wasted that’s how wars crumble us

I now tell those who are exhausted from the expense of children the secret of happiness and happiness itself

from what is arrived at but doesn’t come from the language of balance

defeat has the taste of being shrouded with another’s banner while your enemies chant your names

Some music some shelling will strike our dead who flew off in the early raids have you seen them return from their flying?

They stayed behind hanging by the thread of their surprise and by their women’s hair

We will dance in the wreckage drink the coffee our dead left brewing we will open our tombs to windows for the sea in order for the sea to remain besieged

Right here right here a corpse shook its trunk in the earth a corpse snapped God’s ropes houses gathered then hid what’s easy to interpret of people’s speech

Which mourners ebbed and turned the sea to tombstones for our dead which poem was said and revived us?

126O POETRY And that huge rose of ours our only bewilderment our offense on earth our balcony on the kingdom of heaven the grandfather’s house a hand that gestures farewell in the roar of the massacre a white hand like old time a free hand like death after death

Tell my love space has been plucked tell her to sleep on disaffection’s stone

fady joudah 127 2

Two raids three raids a whole morning a year of long bombardment over your going

Did you forget a newspaper of palm fronds a time of white dawn some hay from last season’s siege a brief greeting like a mumbling on mornings of slow advance

a suitcase a rug a palm with which you touched the evening of shelling into a meaning for a people kind and assured and silent?

Whenever glass shook you would shriek kid I pluck your death’s anemone and eat it

Each land has its people each time has its folks and time for a while now has been standing on our throats

As if we don’t love or hate as if we’ve seen the land only as a bracelet a house a dress a poem left filled with those who were killed without war

128O POETRY 3

Memory shrinks until it fits in a fist memory shrinks without forgetting a boy in a farm a chicken on a roof a dot on the planet mysterious and intuitive like parents or a tree for a hat with prairies for a dictionary and days like sleeves short in summer cotton in winter they resist when squeezed between our knees

A not so First World rains on a calm boy torn apart like a tattered tent

The lily of words enters his heart takes a wedding by the horns a well-trained bulbul by the scandalous fruit rush of the river

His return will be washed shrouded a field’s first flower guarded by dirt

Coffee coffee for the beautiful one whose heart’s a tambourine this morning while war shouts cold on slopes

fady joudah 129 4

In the saddles grass grows warmth matures in oleander the river pours in your absence everything will happen

I exchanged half of my books to sit near you flung my hand so that it may see you then retrieved it to touch what it saw

We slept like sponges near the river butterflies descended from the ribs of shadow then left behind a mirror pitched like a house of jinn

130O POETRY 5

It’ll be difficult that you go before you choose a grave fit for sleep

It’ll be difficult that you die before you choose a grave fit for running for flood swimming for dense reeds by irrigation channels for bird snares for the lettuce garden in the backyard for old dry thatch on mud roofs for jujube shrubs for climbing on trucks and holding on to vegetable boxes for the diffusion of secrets loading and unloading in the big market

A grave fit for you to see Jericho light up through the windows as a neon garden the refugee camps by the marshes touch

A grave fit for you to see Jericho’s convent toss grass liquor our way fir for some arches where oleander wilts near Bedouin tents

And their watchdogs will dig and dig and dig and dig and you won’t come

fady joudah 131 6

And the mules in the junkyards does anyone feed their loneliness when they cry?

Or has anyone quenched their oneness or washed their dead necks or visited them to remember how they blackened in their sleep?

The mules the movie extras who fold their torsos in the packed air as lineage floats on light an icon of wondrous dust and riddles

132O POETRY 7

And our neighbor the one whose voice fenced us with reeds all day and all night

She would forget her rings in our hands two boys who used to dance for her

fady joudah 133

Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellows

Through the generosity of Ruth Lilly, the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine award five annual fellowships of $15,000 each to young writers. For more information, please visit poetry foundation.org.

hannah sanghee park

And a Lie

The asking was askance. And the tell all told. So then, in tandem,

Anathema, and anthem. The truth was on hold, Seeking too tasking.

And the wool was pulled Over as cover. No eyes were kept peeled.

My iris I missed The truth, now mistrust All things seen, and this

Distrust, the sounded distress signal Called and called and culled from your damsel.

hannah sanghee park 137 Norroway in February

The glassy hill I clomb for thee

For surefooted step, hooves behoove the haver. The sky redid blue, the woman wavered,

and the black bull (the vanquisher), vanished. She called out to nothing, and in vain shed

tears until she reached the glass hill’s impasse. Served her standard fairy tale penance, passim,

served her seven to be given iron shoes to — at last — scale the hill, the earned

neared end. Each step conquered territory, at last, the sleeping prince-once-bull, torrid tearing

of clothes, tearing on one’s clothes, three nights of this until the prince awakes. How she, exhausted,

must have felt in the at long last, the ever after. Happily, I guess, but a long time until laughter.

138O POETRY The Fox Bead in May

The kiss is, strictly speaking, a passing of of twice: a bead from her mouth to his, then back, ad nauseam, and the boys who lived and died for it. The lovely girl amassing

ninety-nine spirits, and in high spirits for consuming her highest amount. Once the hundredth boy arrived she starts her hunt in her haunt, a hill’s field filled with fitting

Artemisia absinthium. And every day they kissed to swap the bead and for a month he waned and wans

and when he learned the truth about her tongue, he downed the bead: her true form a nine-tailed fox who could have turned human, had he kissed on.

hannah sanghee park 139 matthew nienow

Bad Year Anthem

Who can face the sea and not inherit its loneliness? — Olin Ivory

Gray sky, gray sea — gray mind, the man thinks. He thinks: To grow old with it and kicks a stone into the water.

He mucks at the seam and it crumbles below him.

A sea gull beaks a crab, flights vertically and drops it to the rocks. The man cracks with laughter,

tossing a stone to a stone.

Working alone means the voice must grow louder, for who can stand to think quietly all through the day’s calculations?

I cannot. I let the voice grow loud. I let the voice hum outside my body in distinguishable phrasings, and count

the increments as I set the fence according to the blade. All day

I stand before a blade and push things into its path.

I stand aside as what is removed is whisked alongside me. The smallest particles of what is removed thicken the air,

making a dream inside which one cannot live. All day the voice is learning how to be outside of the body.

140O POETRY iii

A man is not a beach, nor is he stone, though he collects their entirety in a single thought. He works alone and his thoughts begin to smack of stone. His teeth clatter with their collection.

A man can hold a secret between his teeth, and it will never leave his mouth, for who would listen to his wavering tune of so sad and how hard and hear anything original? He is that he is — the errand and the fool running to himself over and over only to find that even he is tired of telling about it. To grow old with it was the task, and the question always: would he last?

A man can believe in the body and have no one, as though he were ghost or stone, nothing to speak at or be heard from.

All work, no pay makes a body bray. Though he may bray —

Though he may bray and bray, forgive him the bit. If he tells you his secret, he will have no secret. This is how one sings a sentence into stone.

matthew nienow 141 In the Year of “No Work”

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stake my spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the ice bucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring, to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick, the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmering with the scales of the dead while the line whined free from the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal current on a point in view of the town where I lived,

where I had become a man with no money, suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouths and I had helped to make them —

The eddy swirled, kept my line taut, my whole body taut though a man a few down the row laughed, sitting back on his bucket while he pulled in more fish than he could take.

I hated the other men, hated the ones who caught nothing, who crossed lines or hooked gulls, who plucked even birds from the sky and slowly drew them in while they struggled and looked away, even, finally, in the hands of the man who only wanted them free.

I climbed the breakwater and fished and spoke to no one.

I baited my line and thought of a woman who would carry my body over the threshold of our small white house simply with her eyes because I had brought something home, for her, for us, our boys at my side while one fish was divided and indeed did feed many —

(Now to sift the facts for truth):

142O POETRY I reeked of the sea and had nothing to show for it.

Darkling saltwater for a dream and no other place to be.

matthew nienow 143 phillip b. williams

Speak

A storm and so a gift. Its swift approach lifts gravel from the road. A fence is flattened in the course of the storm’s worse attempt at language — thunder’s umbrage. A tree is torn apart, blown upward through a bedroom window. A boy winnows through the pile of shards for the sharpest parts from the blown-apart glass. He has a bag that holds found edges jagged as a stag’s horns or smooth as a single pane smashed into smaller panes that he sticks his hand into to make blood web across his ache-less skin flexing like fish gills O-lipped for a scream it cannot make. He wants to feel what his friends have felt, the slant of fear on their faces he could never recreate, his body configured without pain. When his skin’s pouting welts don’t rake a whimper from his mouth, he runs outside, arms up

144O POETRY for the storm, aluminum baseball bat held out to the sky until lightning with an electric tongue makes his viscera luminescent; the boy’s first word for pain is the light’s new word for home.

phillip b. williams 145 Do-rag

O darling, the moon did not disrobe you. You fell asleep that way, nude and capsized by our wine, our Bump

‘n’ Grind shenanigans. Blame it on whatever you like; my bed welcomes whomever you decide to be: thug-

mistress, poinsettia, John Doe in the alcove of my dreams. You can quote verbatim an entire album

of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony with your ass in the air. There’s nothing wrong with that. They mince syllables

as you call me yours. You don’t like me but still invite me to your home when your homies aren’t near

enough to hear us crash into each other like hours. Some men have killed their lovers because they loved them

so much in secret that the secret kept coming out: wife gouging her husband with suspicion, churches sneering

when an usher enters. Never mind that. The sickle moon turns the sky into a man’s mouth slapped sideways

to keep him from spilling what no one would understand: you call me God when it gets good though I do not exist to you

146O POETRY outside this room. Be yourself or no one else here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned and stuffed into my mouth.

phillip b. williams 147 Homan and Chicago Ave.

Cross the blood that quilts your busted lip with the tender tip of your tongue. That lip’s blood is brackish and white meat flares from the black swell. You crossed your mama’s mind so call her sometimes. She dreams your dead daddy still puts his hands on her waist. She calls his name then crosses herself, calls the police then crosses her fingers. Cross me and get cut across your cheek, its fat bag full of bad words and cheap liquor you hide from your badass kids. Make a wish for bad weather when the hoodlums get to shooting in a good summer’s heat. Cross the territory between two gangs and feel eyes stare and cross in a blur of crosshairs. When a shot man lands in the garden of trash the block flares up like an appetite spurred on by the sight of prey, by the slurred prayer of a man so death-close he sees buzzards burrow their bladed beaks into his entry wound. Tune the trumpets. Make way through dusk’s clutter. After death

148O POETRY the dead cross over into song, their bones tuning-forked into vibrancy. Cross your lips, mutiny against all speech when a corpse starts singing despite its leaded larynx. Don’t say miracle when butterflies break from a death-gaped skull, rout the sky, and scatter.

phillip b. williams 149 Of Darker Ceremonies

After “E. 1999 Eternal” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony

Dear god of armed robberies and puff-puff-pass, a chalk outline unpeels from the street, smashes every windshield, and leaves florid temples of crack on porches. Burnt-black pleats of joint-pressed lips prophesied your return. Please accept these nickel bags as offerings. Brick bastions of piss-stench thresholds and boarded windows require a weekly sacrifice. Is there a Tarot card called “The Corner,” a shrike shown lifting a corpse from the pike of a middle finger? Children speak to their murdered brothers with a cereal box and construction paper cut into a Ouija’s tongue that licks yes when asked if liquor could polish a skull in a way pleasing to the dead, licks no when asked for a name.

150O POETRY natalie shapero

Thirty Going

on seventeen, I come from hearty straw. My grandpa wore a gallon hat. My grandma, like a shogun, bun and shawl. For their honeymoon, they went to the movies. No one knows what they saw.

You arrive with licorice, cigarettes, the documentary on Woody Allen. Don’t feign a passion for his start

in tv, or his clarinets, or Love and Death. Just skip to the Soon- Yi part.

natalie shapero 151 You Look Like I Feel

Dirt on my chin and I wonder: am I already in the ground? Like a toy turned real, I cannot shed the sense that I have died. The German word

for Heaven’s the same

as the German word for sky. On hearing a cruel prince was in danger, I prayed for him to thrive, not for his own sake, but for the concubines,

sure to end up buried

along. To my real face, a man once crowed i ruined you, and though he did, the joke’s on him: he ruined me only for this world,

and this world is not long

for itself. The Earth, that ever-loving but distrustful kin, keeps leaving us just a little pocket money when it dies, never the land —

152O POETRY Not Horses

What I adore is not horses, with their modern domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore is a bug that lives only one day, especially if it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day when no one thinks of anything else, least of all that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, and even that won’t keep me alive. I share my home not with horses, but with a little dog who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps, makes her muscle known to every statue. I wish she could have a single day of language, so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid — our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.

natalie shapero 153 harmony holiday

Gazelle Lost in Watts

I saw you painted on a ghetto wall last summer and thought don’t sub- mit to this medium ... everybody’s running into the wall or running into each other and plagiarizing our future like mummies and nukes, I watched you hug the Mona Lisa. I wanna use the word pariah until it shrugs for us and even their disguises go limp as a fire tumbling down a hillside into the playfulness in my heart, acres and acres of a lean, almost spiritual vibe afraid of its own momentum and then not afraid again

154O POETRY Niggas in Raincoats Reprise

Even alleged militants blame the vanishing of the summer sea ice on “Ghosts” (short version) by Albert Ayler. He disappeared while he was getting his sound together. No one knows what happened but the water high in increments like a crown around his cries and glass is a liquid and you have to forgive your parents for whatever it is and they have to forgive themselves

I would like to use this craft to fly with him

I feel that saddle the morning after and try — again — warm in the habit of our warning and yearning for more of them until

We finally need to see this reckoning

But when it’s time I’m not ready and when I’m ready it’s not time — that’s fate. And blind in the halo of so-what, so-what, we make it a future

I say, I don’t know who you are. I say, It don’t matter at this point, I do it all for you anyways (long run) — gorgeous photographs of industrial ruins so lush you want to lick them, be them, become a trend. Crushed under the debris, an instrument is so tender it breaks and mends in the same note. Becoming men is like that, degrading, uplifting, denial, lazily caving in Isis and ice until all of our guesses are obsolete we can’t see nobody who isn’t disappearing

harmony holiday 155 Motown Philly Back Again

We’re all pagans and shamans and clap your hands now we won’t stop the beat

We believe in divine healing and we hate to see that evening sun go down

We know when the sight of our women dressed in white each ritual night, is touching, hypnotizes

The animals blush and split for us as revival, as revealed to themselves

These are triumphant women.

Even Sister Fame hiding out in the alley turning tricks and singing verses from the undid scripture, is touching

Thank you jesus, thank you jesus, that you jesus, baby, is that you, she mutters up high between rocks and lace — his eagerness — it was all night long

Sometimes he’d interrupt a recording session to tell us about his early Motown days or expand on his views of Heaven and Hell

One time he was saying how important it was to love one’s father.

Do you love yours? I asked him

Why don’t you tell him

Why don’t you tell your father, he said

I will if you do

You go first

156O POETRY Do any black children grow up casual?

And that other time after we got carjacked in L.A. on the way home from Spago. Like a scene outta that movie I don’t like about those hoes I don’t love. It is hard out there for a pimp. A white woman and her brown babies /brown babies in a fancy car with unlocked doors. Most everything is semi-automatic. Two black men hopped into the front row seats and started waving guns like pom-poms. We made it! We made it! Right against the rim of her porcelain brain. All they wanted was the car and the color. The car was white like her. She saved our lives. Then the penguins came over with a book full of photos of black men, so serious like kings in their mugging, and they asked us to pick which two it was. I was five but I could feel the shrugged evil of it so true and impossible to touch as I pretended to recognize us. We closed our eyes and pointed at you, and said, I don’t know that man. Je ne connais pas cet homme. We saved our lives. We tugged at the flashlight looking for bruises and found you awake, and found a way.

harmony holiday 157 the gorgeous nothings

jen bervin

Studies in Scale

an introduction

The following portfolio represents a small selection of works from The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems (Christine Burgin /New Dirctions in association with Granary Books, 2013). The “gorgeous nothings” is an excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s manuscript A 821; in choosing it as the title for this project with Marta Werner, I was thinking of Dickinson’s own definition for nothing in a letter: “By homely | gifts and | hindered Words | The human | heart is told | Of nothing – | ‘Nothing’ is | the force | That renovates | the World – ” and her definition for no: “the wildest | word we consign | to Language.” These “gorgeous nothings” are that kind of nothing. These manuscripts are sometimes still referred to as “scraps” within Dickinson scholarship. Rather, one might think of them as the sort of “small fabric” Dickinson writes of in one corner of the large envelope interior, A 636 /636a: “Excuse | Emily and | her Atoms | The North | Star is | of small | fabric | but it | implies | much | presides | yet.” The writing is small in relation to the compositional space, floating in its firmament. This poem exemplifies Dickinson’s relationship to scale so perfectly. When we say small, we often mean less. When Dickinson says small, she means fabric, Atoms, the North Star. The concept of the “atom” emerges in ancient Greek philosophy as the idea of the smallest hypothetical body. At the outset of the nineteenth century, modern atomic theory recasts the atom in chemical terms. In 1830 Emily Dickinson is born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is thirty-four years old when the Civil War ends and Johann Josef Loschmidt first measures the size of a molecule of air. In the range of philosophic, scientific, and popular definitions foratom in the Oxford English Dictionary, we also find a dust mote, the smallest medieval measure of time, “the twinkling of an eye,” and this apt, obsolete meaning too: “At home.” This enigmatic poet who signs letters “Jumbo” or “Your ‘Rascal’” or “Your Scholar” is petite by physical standards, but vast by all others. “My little Force explodes –” she writes to her future editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in 1862 during a stretch when she

jen bervin 161 is writing on average three hundred poems a year. Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest American poets, wrote approximately 1,800 distinct poems within 2,357 poem drafts and at least 1,150 letters and prose fragments — a total of 3,507 pieces before her death at the age of fifty-five. On the triangular flap of the envelope seal A 252, we find this fleeting message inscribed in lines winnowing down to a single word at the tip: “In this short Life | that only [merely] lasts an hour | How much – how | little – is | within our | power.” Dickinson’s writing materials might best be described as epistolary. Everything she wrote — poems, letters, and drafts, in fascicles, on folios, individual sheets, envelopes, and fragments — was predominantly composed on plain, machine-made stationery. “Preserve the backs of old letters to write upon,” wrote Lydia Maria Child in The Frugal Housewife, a book Dickinson’s father obtained for her mother when Emily was born. It opens: “The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time as well as materials.” Dickinson’s envelope writings convey a sense of New England thrift and her relationship to the larger household economy of paper, but they also disclose private spaces within that household: the line “we should respect | the seals of | others – ” inscribed next to the gummed seal of A 842 resounds. Dickinson’s poems and correspondence attest to the considerable care she gave to the ritual act of opening a letter. These envelopes have been opened well beyond the point needed to merely extract a letter; they have been torn, cut, and opened out completely flat, rendered into new shapes. To understand how forcefully Dickinson is manipulating the form of the page itself, take a simple household envelope and see how many of these forms you can re-create. You will quickly find that what looks simple, simply is not. There is not one instance here of an envelope reopened out into its die-cut shape. Look with care: what may look like a whole envelope is only one face of it, slit open. Where do those cuts fall and what shape do they prefigure when the space is opened out? How are some cut edges so surgically clean? At Amherst College Library, Margaret Dakin has acquired what is believed to be Emily Dickinson’s lap desk; its painted wooden surface is positively riddled with myriad fine cuts. Though the written compositions may show considerable speed of thought and hand, Dickinson was not blindly grabbing scraps in a rush of inspiration, as is most often supposed, but rather reaching for

162O POETRY writing surfaces that were most likely collected and cut in advance, prepared for the velocity of mind. When Dickinson approached her compositional space to write, she was reading and responding to her materials, angling the page to write in concert with the light rule and laid lines in the paper, using internal surface divisions, such as overlapping planes of paper, to compose in a number of directional fields. Sometimes Dickinson’s writing fills the space of the envelope like water in a vessel or funnels into the triangular shape of the flap. Often she invents columns, typically two, to further divide the space, demonstrating a propensity to break poem lines shorter and shorter. She draws additional line seg- ments or arcs to further divide the compositional space. One would think that such a space would feel carved up, crammed, but it doesn’t. The page feels bigger yet, as if there has been an insertion of space. “These manuscripts should be understood as visual productions,” writes Susan Howe in The Birth-mark. In assembling The Gorgeous Nothings we were guided by this directive and specifically selected work that foregrounds Dickinson’s experiments with visual form and variants on the page. We have favored this understanding in our presentation of manuscript facsimiles; in the book, each is reproduced actual size, front and back, accompanied by a transcription. The gathering of manuscripts there presents all the works composed on envelopes or postal wrappers that Marta Werner has been able to trace to date.” The envelope writings are not a series or discrete body of works. Each envelope has its own complex constellation of affiliations with manuscript drafts that one can trace through sources. These envelopes, spanning the years 1864 through 1886, are culled from 1,414 contemporaneous poem drafts and 887 letter drafts. We often gauge a writer’s intentions by her published work, or by work she submitted for publication during her lifetime, but Dickinson offers no such certainties. Dickinson rejected print publication of her poems. In a letter to Higginson, she explains:

I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish” — that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. — If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her — if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase — and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me — then — My Barefoot-Rank is better —

jen bervin 163 Yet she was not secretive about the fact that she was writing poems; she sent more than three hundred poems to recipients in letters — letters that were often indistinguishable from poetry. In Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, Jerome McGann writes, “Dickinson’s scripts cannot be read as if they were ‘printer’s copy’ manuscripts, or as if they were composed with an eye toward some state beyond their handcrafted textual condition.” He continues,

Emily Dickinson’s poetry was not written for a print medium, even though it was written in an age of print. When we come to edit her work for bookish presentation, therefore, we must accommodate our typographical conventions to her work, not the other way round.

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, editors have painstakingly brought that work to the public for the most part “the other way round.” Even in the most trusted scholarly editions, editors have restructured Dickinson’s poems for print in opposition to the manuscripts, consistently overriding her line breaks, system- atically deconstructing (or in reading editions, omitting) her formal construction of variant words and punctuation. Without manuscripts present, the reader cannot know how those editorial omissions and decisions have affected meaning. Dickinson’s manuscripts themselves, and the forms and experiments borne out in them, are the most authentic register of her intentions. Of the 3,507 poems, letters, drafts, and fragments Dickinson wrote, approximately a third of the manuscripts have been published in facsimile thus far. The first substantial view of these appeared in 1981 in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Edition, two volumes that include 1,147 poem facsimiles — the “fascicles,” forty discrete packets of poems Dickinson assembled and tied with a stitch, as well as unbound sets. In 1995 Marta Werner published a new array of strikingly different visionary late works — forty manuscripts in Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing — followed in 2007 by Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886, an extensive digital archive bringing forth one hundred and thirty-two more manuscripts. Werner’s pioneering diplomatic transcriptions were the first to accurately reflect Dickinson’s manuscripts typographically in book form.

164O POETRY To represent a Dickinson poem accurately in print, to “accommodate our typographic conventions to her work,” is quite a demand- ing task. Dickinson’s manipulation of textual space is elastic in the manuscripts: her sprawling headlong letterforms, ambiguous capital- ization, gestural punctuation, scale shifts in variant words, extremely short lines, and expansive spatial placement of words on the page trouble even a visually-minded transcription. These new transcriptions were created with the aim of a clean, legible text to act as a key into — not a replacement for — the manuscripts. If our interpreta- tion of Dickinson’s script errs, each manuscript is present to make its own determinations and ambiguities known. The Century Gothic transcription offers readers a typographic “map” to consult while reading the manuscript facsimile. Dickinson’s upper- and lower-case letterforms, punctuation, and markings are expressive and open to multiple readings. The typographic inter- pretation reflects our scholarly engagement with her scribal practice but in no way claims definitiveness, given such ambiguities. The size of the transcriptions — 50% relative to the envelopes — reflects our belief that Dickinson’s manuscript is the primary space to read her work and is the highest authority on all questions. Though it is finally impossible to represent all the spatial dynamics of Dickinson’s hand- written documents, attempts were made (using InDesign) to reflect them through placement, kerning, leading, spacing, and type-point size within the line drawing of the envelope. Ultimately, it was our hope to keep the transcriptions as legible as possible, and gesture back toward the “bright Orthography” of Dickinson’s manuscripts. Dickinson’s early manuscripts are predominantly written in ink; from 1864 to 1865 they are mostly in pencil, and thereafter both pen and pencil are used until the year 1878, when “the pen is almost en- tirely discarded.” All of the envelope poems are written in pencil. Unlike a fountain pen, a pencil stub, especially a very small one, fits neatly, at the ready, in the pocket of a dress. In an early letter to her brother, Austin, she wrote “This is truly extempore, Austin — I have no notes in my pocket,” suggesting that there were typically jottings accumulating there. Dickinson’s one surviving dress has a large ex- ternal pocket on the right side, where her hand would fall easily at rest. The economy of the pocket is worth considering. An envelope is a pocket. An envelope refolds discreetly, privately, even after it has been sliced completely open. Emily Dickinson sent this minus- cule two-inch-long pencil (pictured below) in a letter to the Bowles,

jen bervin 165 “If it had no pencil, | Would it try mine – ” wryly nudging them to write. It was enveloped in a letter folded into thirds horizontally, pinned closed at each side.

Note: Envelope images in this portfolio are 50% of actual size.

166O POETRY emily dickinson

— Transcribed by Jen Bervin COMMENT

tom sleigh

To Be Incarnational

I was talking with friends after I got back from Mogadishu, Somalia, where I had been finishing up an article about the lives of Somali refugees in East Africa. I’d just returned from seeing a famine first- hand, and one of them asked me how I felt after seeing so many starving people: it’s difficult to answer a question like that coher- ently. The statistics — more than 250,000 dead, the majority of them children — mean nothing because nobody is moved by a statistic. Plus, it’s an experience so at a tangent to most American’s ordinary lives, that I did what I usually do — I avoided the question by saying something about being divided between here and there. The bright sun and red earth and drifting dust and deep-rutted dirt roads left by Toyota Land Cruisers; and the computer buzz and hum of surfing the web to find mention of some British tourist shot to death by Somali pirates, or an article about how the dress of Somali women has changed in a generation because of conservative imams, or a trea- tise on the prophet’s hadiths — sayings and injunctions about what is and isn’t proper for a Muslim to do. But then my friend pressed me and said he hadn’t asked what I thought, but what I felt — and insisted that I answer him. And hon- estly, I felt enraged — on the surface, a petty, cliched rage having to do with our cars and comforts. But underneath that, a rage with more substance, less stupidly self-involved: by watching people starving to death, not in a once-in-a-lifetime famine, but the fourth famine in a decade, you see why hunger is so degrading: a hungry person will do anything. If you’re a mother walking with your two children to a refugee camp and one of the children weighs less than the other, you might have to leave the heavier one to die in the desert, because to try to carry both means to lose both and die yourself of exhaustion. Or if you’re a man, and a bandit, you might push your fellow country- woman, a refugee like yourself (at least until you became a bandit), off the top of one of the alarmingly overcrowded buses making its way to Dadaab, the biggest refugee camp in the world in the arid plain that Somalia shares with northeast Kenya, and, while your fellow ban- dits are stealing goats or chickens, you carefully search through the woman’s little bundles for money or jewelry or a cell phone. And if

tom sleigh 187 the woman isn’t dead, you and your mates might drag her off into the bush and rape her as part of the bargain. We have all seen hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures of starving people. What do we learn from such pictures except to deflect them? We superimpose an image of Christ on the cross, or see juxtaposed, on the same page or screen, a starving body next to a female model in a bathing suit thrusting her breasts at us, or a male model flaunt- ing his waxed, perfectly hairless chest. This confounding mixture affected a whole generation of Israeli boys born after wwii, who were said by the Israeli filmmaker Ari Libsker to have had their first sexual awakening by looking at Holocaust pictures of naked Jewish women lining up before the showers to be gassed, or by reading the genre of Holocaust fiction called “Stalags,” in which sex-crazed, female Nazi guards sexually humiliate Allied pows. Some will think Libsker is crazy, or anti-Semitic, or indulging in bad taste. But in grade school, I too watched in history class a film the Nazis took of naked Jews lining up, the film jerky in that old movie way, the black and white grainy as the cliche of an old porno film — and I was shocked and aroused by what I knew I shouldn’t see, but couldn’t look away from. Or if pictures of the starving have lost their frisson, then maybe all you do is shrug with a kind of worldliness about how wearying it is to note the definition of the ribs, finely carved against the skin, always brown or black. Unless it’s Bobby Sands, the Irish hunger striker, in the Maze Prison — and then the skin is white, and made even whiter by the glare of the news cameras, the face collaborating with the cam- era to make itself seem like a mask floating free from the man, a giant mask the size of a billboard that dwarfs the physically shrinking Bobby Sands, like in the old movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. To become a symbol of resistance that, in thirty years time, nobody will recognize, becomes the revolutionary’s compensation, since his face belongs to him again, and is anonymous as it was when he was a boy or just born. So I said to my friend that I didn’t know what to do with such feelings and perceptions, that they weren’t exactly useful. If people are starving there, they aren’t starving here — or if they are, they aren’t dying in the hundreds of thousands — and news photos of starving kids felt, to me at least, like a kind of disaster porn, and my rage was just part of that — a defense against a deeper lassitude, even despair. But I wasn’t going to give up my car and comforts, and my rage felt, and feels, like a kind of cant: ptsd lite, you could call it.

188O POETRY And the only way I could adequately talk about what I felt was to describe a two-year-old boy sitting in his mother’s lap. His eyes had the famine-gawk of the dying, that curious sidelong stare of a bird that, perched on your windowsill, suddenly catches your eye, its stare meeting your stare, or seeming to. His head lolled in his mother’s lap, and he seemed listless, on the verge of coma, or the apathetic drowse that precedes it. But his mother had been given, by one of the matrons of the feeding station in downtown Mog, as the old hands call it, a nutritional biscuit made of vitamin-fortified peanut slurry called Plumpy’Nut. And as she carefully unwrapped it, whether from the smell or some inner alarm built into the species, he roused himself. She gave it to him, his eyes suddenly focused, and he began to eat. After a few bites, as the sugars hit his bloodstream, his whole body gathered strength, and he sat up, suddenly alert. He ate the biscuit slowly, and by the time he’d finished, he was taking in his surround- ings, particularly the shiny silver foil that the biscuit had come in. And he took the foil from his mother, and began throwing it up in the air, playing with it, recovering in a few moments, because of the sugars, the instinct to play. What good was my rage, then? This boy had shown me something about the starving and the dying that I hadn’t known until that moment: that up until they lapse from consciousness, they’re still part of their world, deeply rooted in their own attachments — they don’t shed who they are, and easy pity won’t help you see their individual fates and quirks of character. Nobody, until the very end at least, turns into the sharply defined ribs and swollen bellies of the news photos.

•

David Jones, the great English/Welsh/Cockney painter and poet, the author of In Parenthesis, in part about his experiences in wwi, once said that he wanted poetry to be “incarnational.” He means that lit- erally — dressing the spirit in flesh. So the Word becomes the words that bring the war not only into focus, but make it so physically immediate that abstractions evaporate. The terrible physicality of the war registers in our senses before lodging in the understanding. But when it finally does lodge there, the outrage and irony and despair are so finely etched that any form of overt moralizing seems superfluous, if not a spiritual vulgarity. Unlike his fellow great war poet

tom sleigh 189 Wilfred Owen, Jones never attempts to come at war from an overt position of moral outrage. All of that emerges from the material, his mixture of Cockney, Welsh, and foot-soldier slang, disjunct Army jargon, weapons terminology, Welsh myth and legend, bringing the war itself up close — but the war as a collective phenomenon, no high-ground attitudinizing, no personal anguish outside the ordinary fears of ordinary soldiers. As a somewhat bumbling, incompetent infantryman, a self- described “knocker-over of piles, a parade’s despair,” Jones ranges himself against the Brass and the Staff. His is the only war poem that I know of in which class consciousness is a basis for solidarity with the enemy. This, too, is not an overt position, but a natural extension of fellow feeling toward young men like himself, caught up in the murderous logic of trench warfare. The Christmas truce — a sponta- neous uprising among the enlisted men, and often against their officers’ wishes, in which both sides freely fraternized in no-man’s-land, playing football and exchanging gifts and singing carols — partially exemplifies what I mean. Although there are no Christmas truces in Jones’s poem, the end of the poem’s dedicatory page reads: “and to the enemy front-fighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure.” By contrast, Owen represents the enlightened officer class, the kind father and older brother to “his men.” Lest anyone mistake the risks of junior field officers like Owen, their average life expectan- cy was about six weeks once they’d reached the front. But Owen’s war and Jones’s war occur over a class divide as wide as the distance between the bells of Magdalen Tower in Oxford, and those of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, where a true Cockney lives within hearing distance of them. By focusing so intensely on the sights and sounds of the war, on the look and feel and texture of its kit, its weaponry, its ambiance of trench domesticity, like boiling water for tea, the day-to-day sense of no-man’s-land as a place of “sudden violences and ... long still- nesses, the sharp contours and unformed voids” begin to take on a “mysterious existence” that becomes, in Jones’s words, “a place of enchantment.” But enchantment meant in the sense that Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur uses it, such that the landscape becomes one of doomed fatality and dread. Some malign power has placed it under a spell so that the shattered greenery speaks, as in Malory, “with a grimly voice.”

190O POETRY In describing the interior of a thicket fringed by “scarred saplings,” Private Ball, the poet’s alter ego, registers how blasted-to-bits foliage and barbwire coalesce into a new version of nature:

There between the thinning uprights at the margin straggle tangled oak and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile birch whose silver queenery is draggled and ungraced and June shoots lopt and fresh stalks bled runs the Jerry trench. And cork-screw stapled trip-wire to snare among the briars and iron warp with bramble weft with meadow-sweet and lady-smock for a fair camouflage.

This new, hybrid nature of briars and “cork-screw stapled trip-wire” that warp and weft together with lady-smock and meadow-sweet shows how radically different are the poetic conventions that oper- ate in Jones’s war, as opposed to Owen’s war. In Jones, there are no Keatsian sound effects, no lushness of orchestration as in Owen’s “Spring Offensive,” in which the soldiers experience the traditional enchantments of pastoral:

Marveling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge, For though the summer oozed into their veins Like an injected drug for their bodies’ pains, Sharp on their souls hung the imminent ridge of grass, Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.

Even in Owen’s syntax, natural imagery and war imagery are kept separate, as if the old categories of pastoral and chivalric combat needed to be quarantined off from Jones’s version of the war. So the drama in Owen’s poems is the drama of a mind fending off the dehumanization of mechanized slaughter, while searching for some form of consolation and spiritual mystery in chivalric feeling, if not chivalric ritual. But Jones’s soldiers feel mystery in a different key: the mystery of

tom sleigh 191 scientific killing revealed through the ordinary soldier’s interaction with technology. Nature in Owen’s poems is still capable of blazing forth with immanence, at one still with the pantheism of Keats and Wordsworth. But nature in Jones’s war is under the same spell that Jones’s soldiers are under — a utilitarian day-to-day reckoning with trauma and mass death in which Nature and barbwire have fused, in which:

The inorganic earth where your body presses seems itself to pulse deep down with your heart’s acceleration ... but you go on living, lying with your face bedded in neatly folded, red- piped, greatcoat and yet no cold cleaving thing drives in between expectant shoulder-blades, so you get to your feet, and the sun-lit chalk is everywhere absorbing fresh stains. Dark gobbets stiffen skewered to revetment-hurdles.

The earth is nothing but unfeeling rock, and if it pulses, that pulse is only the soldier’s heartbeat as it speeds up from the adrenaline rush of fear, from the physical effort of combat. In Keats and Wordsworth, there would have been no qualification about the cause of the earth’s palpitations: it would have been assumed that the earth was in cos- mic sympathy with human beings, that the pantheistic reciprocity between all things, animate and inanimate, human and divine, was still available as a mode of feeling — in an Owen poem, summer can still ooze into a soldier’s veins; but in a Jones poem, “dark gobbets” of bodies, or body parts, are oozing out blood staining torn uniforms of dead soldiers skewered to barbwire supports. Summer oozing into veins, even figured as a drug, belongs to a lyric tradition that for Jones is out of bounds, if not inconceivable. Instead, Jones’s soldier is ex- pecting at every second to feel shrapnel rip into his back, and his senses are so hyper-vigilant that he notices in obsessive detail the red piping on his greatcoat, and thinks in the specialist language of an infantryman: revetment-hurdles, and the more poetic “dark gobbets,” fuse in a fresh linguistic amalgam, a diction both mongrel and yet dedicated to precise observation. It’s as if the humanist assumptions that condition Owen’s relation to war, and his vocabulary for it, are not only inoperative, but ir- relevant to the men in the ranks. Owen’s deeply felt understanding of what he famously called the pity of war, and the poetry that is in the pity, seems at best, at least in Jones’s war, to be nothing but

192O POETRY heroic posturing in an anti-heroic guise. And at worst, the truly great- hearted, empathic identification that Owen makes with his own soldiers seems like a form of unconscious class condescension. That said, no one can love Owen and his poems more than I do. The dissonance of his slant rhymes have their own kind of daring, while his eroticized depictions of violence powerfully clash with his moral revulsion. Owen’s poems, written during the war itself, and well before the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land or Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, used the poetic conventions that were available to him — conventions that he handled with great originality. By contrast, Eliot and Pound offered Jones a wider set of conventions than the ones available to Owen. And In Parenthesis represented a retrospective understanding of Jones’s war experiences, since it wasn’t published until 1937 — almost twenty years after Owen’s death in 1918. So why do I appear to be knocking Owen? And with a concept as slippery as class? Didn’t a critic as acute as Paul Fussell knock Jones for trying to “rationalize and even validate” the Battle of the Somme — a battle that was nothing but a “bloody balls-up,” to quote Robert Graves, in which twenty thousand British soldiers died on the first day alone, one twentieth of England’s total fighting force. Fussell accuses Jones of trying to recover “motifs and values of medieval chivalric romance” by linking the heroic Welsh mythic heroes to the enlisted men in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers that Jones served with. Fussell’s implication is that Jones is trying to glorify the ordinary soldier’s sacrifice. But isn’t a word like “sacrifice” precisely the problem? In a battle that lasted about four months, with over a million killed and wounded, a word like “sacrifice” loses all meaning. Jones describes his and his fellows’ advance at a walk across no-man’s-land as “small, drab, bundled pawns severally make effort / moved in tenuous line.” In this description, cool and distanced, there are no sacrificial, sym- bolic lambs, only the sheep of the ordinary enlisted men, British and German, who find themselves in that grimly speaking landscape through “misadventure.” And the use of Welsh legend is opposed to the “official blasphemies” hallooed by one Private Watcyn when he takes with “blameless technique” the First Objective — the blandi- fied language that glosses over taking an enemy trench as ordered by the Brass. But it’s not Private Watcyn who is to blame, it’s the Brass and their professionalized sanctioning of killing.

tom sleigh 193 What Fussell misses is how the Queen of the Wood “has cut bright boughs,” not only for the officers, but ordinary soldiers on both sides, with nicknames like Fatty; or as in the case of a Welsh and German soldier who have killed each other, “Hansel with Gronwy share dog- violets for a palm, where they lie in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod.” The tripod here is a trench mortar tripod, not the tripod of the Sibyl. And the palm for both is made of dog-violets: about as far as you can get from a wreath of laurel. Also, the melding of satire and memorial, of homoerotic suggestion and the well-worn trope of war fostering love among comrades as well as combatants, levels the elegiac hierarchies of Owen, in which the poet soldier both mourns and deplores the death of the ordinary, inarticulate soldier. But Jones expands the range of elegiac speech to include lower class slang and utilitarian turns of phrase, such that the voiceless soldiers that Owen gives voice to have voices of their own — and voices that speak independent of a poetic persona like Owen’s. Regardless of his estrangement from patriotic pieties, there’s no doubt that Owen thought of his poetry as speaking to, and for, his countrymen — that there might be a way to incorporate their speech on a level with his own forms no part of his technique, no matter how well adapted to his own moral and aesthetic purposes. By contrast, in another part of the same passage about the Queen of the Wood, a Major nicknamed Lillywhite has been killed by a shell-wrecked tree falling on him. He is granted that most prosaic of flowers, daisies, by the Queen of the Wood — much to the increduli- ty and disgust of the anonymous narrator: “That swine Lillywhite has daisies to his chain — you’d hardly credit it.” That register of speech, and the mixed emotions of the narrator, are more or less foreclosed to Owen — unless Owen is appropriating an ordinary soldier’s speech in order to express his own outrage. Just as Jones’s use of Cockney accomplishes on a linguistic level the leveling of the ranks, so his use of the Queen of the Wood transforms heroic Welsh tradition so that she no longer recognizes distinctions among rank or combatant by observing the “official blasphemies.” Throughout this passage, in which the Queen of the Wood confers her honors on the dead, the seesawing back and forth between mock- ery and rage, sorrow and sincere feeling, makes the ritual of myth and legend responsive to the anonymous narrator’s fluctuations of feeling as opposed to a tradition that, in Fussell’s blinkered view, regulates such feeling. But tradition operates in far more complex ways than

194O POETRY Fussell’s account of it, in which myths and legends devoted to kings and princes must always refer to kings and princes, or can’t be used in fresh ways, or turned against their own class-bound associations. In a letter to H.S. Ede, Jones notes that in an English hunting song, the “huntsmen meet to hunt the fox, they hunt a fox, and they kill a fox.” But in a Welsh hunting song, when the Welshmen see the fox, “the thing hunted turns out to be a ‘ship a-sailing’ which turns out to be the moon, which turns out to be made of cheese.” Huntsmen kill fox is Fussell’s version of tradition, in this context anyway. But in Jones’s version of tradition, nothing is taken for granted, everything can be powerfully transformed to unexpected substances and purposes. In this same letter Jones also notes that “names have power to bind and loose material things.” This is radically different from Saussure’s idea of sign and signifier as a system of difference. Jones’s relation to words is the relation of a conjuror to what he conjures up out of “the vasty deep.” But rather than spirits, Jones conjures Fatty, Lillywhite, and Private Watcyn. He conjures gun emplacements and machine guns and duck-boards. By the same token, the solidity of Jones’s feelings, the visceral experiences of dread and fear of death, can’t be vaporized into notions of sacrifice. Such notions are way too abstract for what the narrator experiences; and the wild tonal shifts between elegy and irony reflect the narrator’s inability to reach the level of abstract consideration necessary to feel “patriotism,” “dulce et decorum,” and all the other noble-sounding notions of the officer class. Even using these notions as targets of moral outrage or satire, the way Owen does, would still be to credit them — and Jones is beyond the reach of those abstractions because he’s an ordinary soldier concerned with surviving: the “deeper meanings” can be left to the commissioned officers. So while Owen is deeply ambivalent about the nature of sacrifice, sacrifice is still an operative concept for him. In fact, the ordinary soldier’s death is a sacrament for Owen, even when that death is presented with irony. In that sense, sacrifice permeates Owen’s poems — the most notable sacrifice, in an irony he would have been sure to appreciate, being he himself. But for a soldier like Jones, all that’s above his head — the war, above all, is a fact of the body. I’m not sure how far I want to press this next point. It goes past Jones and Owen, though it’s more closely related to Jones’s understanding of how to represent, not war so much, as what Seamus Heaney once called “the music of what happens.” Jones said that he

tom sleigh 195 didn’t intend In Parenthesis to be a “War Book” — only that it “happens to be concerned with war.” That distinction seems essential — when he says, “We find ourselves privates in foot regiments. We search how we may see formal goodness in a life singularly inimi- cal, hateful, to us,” he is stating a basic human problem — how to find formal goodness in a hateful life. So he isn’t setting up shop as a war poet, or a political poet, or any kind of poet. He isn’t moti- vated by Justice, his poem doesn’t require sponsorship by any of the “Monumental certainties that go perpetually by, perpetually on time,” to quote Randall Jarrell. Which can’t be said of a lot of the poetry being written today about politically charged abstractions, like war, poverty, racism, and other forms of injustice. About seven years ago I became restless with my own use of these abstractions — and began doing journalism in places where everything’s all right until it’s not all right and then it’s too late — and discovered that this kind of risk, the taking of calculated chances, settled me down. I want to say this tentatively now, but one reason why I was attracted to poetry is because I’ve always wanted more than just my own dailiness. And I’ve always gone to art, and now my experiences as a journalist, to find that something more. But if the pursuit of justice has become part of that search, it’s a secondary pursuit that I’ve learned along the way, not something that I started out with. However, as a contradictory part of that pursuit, I’ve found that my politics and biases in writing about politically charged subject matter are fairly useless in writing poetry. If I’m dealing with such material, I want to discover my subject as I write, and not have it arise from some prefab stance, or hell of opinions that I simply populate with more opinions. Jones’s use of clashing vocabularies and tones, melding of Welsh myth with the everyday concerns of the infantryman, his elided categories, like pastoral combined with detailed observation of barbwire, achieves a music that can express the difference between what you ought to feel and what you do feel — not iron smashing against iron, but the difference between exploring a political emotion, say, rather than a political conviction. A political conviction weaves no web, traps no chaotically buzzing flies — it’s hygienic, and easily put aside when the moment of outrage or conversational animus has passed. A political emotion is recalcitrant, contradictory, and involves you with silver wrappers and nutritional biscuits with odd names like Plumpy’Nut. And that involvement with the material world weaves an ever more responsive web of circumstance and contingency.

196O POETRY To be faithful to a political emotion you have to keep yourself open to lots of different frequencies so that whatever ethical state- ment you arrive at comes as part of the texture of whatever form is driving your language forward. And it’s this language as it arrives that relieves you of having to stand guard over your own opinions and convictions, and gives you access to reaches of thought and feeling you might not otherwise imagine. Which is risky, unpredictable, and not always easy to reconcile with your day-to-day political, emotional, or intellectual entanglements. And because of this unpredictability, I feel a little aphasic in front of a word like “sacrifice” — or more buzzwordy concepts like “race,” “class,” “gender,” even “politics.” The more I think about what I saw in the refugee camps in Kenya and Mogadishu, the flimsier such words seem. I’ve always had a tenuous grip on these concepts, and the way they gravitate toward a word like “community” — nowadays, the idea of someone speaking for a “community” feels almost repel- lent to me: is that because journalists unconsciously assume this is their right — their so-called “community of readers”? And isn’t one of the roles that we’re told political poetry is supposed to fulfill is to speak up against oppression, to speak truth to power — and all the other high-minded slogans? But Jones shies away from taking a position by trying to be responsive to all positions at once. The overt expression of positions, as I said before, at least in my ears, sounds like iron smashing against iron. This conviction came home to me partly because of my time in Mogadishu. There I was, acting like a journalist, dressed in my clown- suit legitimacy conferred by my baby blue unhrc helmet and flak jacket, or riding in an armored vehicle with amisom soldiers from Burundi and Cameroon, the soldiers manning a .50 caliber machine gun in front, and two .30 calibers in back, all three guns mounted on an old, roofless Casspir, the armored vehicle of choice for harassing South African protesters back in the days of P.W. Botha, but that here in Mogadishu now provided some protection from running over ieds, since the bottom is shaped like a V to deflect exploding nails and shrapnel, while at the same time being the perfect container for anyone who wants to blow us outsiders to bits by simply lobbing in a hand grenade whose fragments would ricochet and maim us in ways that our battered, steel bathtub on wheels would make impossible to escape. Under such conditions, I confess that Owen’s desire to tell home truths to a home audience feels a little alien to me. It’s as if my

tom sleigh 197 time in East Africa has made my own country exotic to me — or if exotic is a suspect word, then a place that I can’t see without also seeing, even if it’s just an intermittent flickering under whatever immediate task daily life presents me, that starving boy, the silver wrapper fluttering through the air. I can’t say for sure if this is because of observing, in a very limited way, what starvation does to people; or maybe this double vision is the result of the heightened intensity of putting yourself in harm’s way, even if that harm is calculated to pretty good odds that you’ll be ok. Maybe the real question is what home truths can satisfy if you feel unaffiliated from the place that gave you birth — unlike Owen, who, despite describing himself with great accuracy as a “conscientious ob- jector with a very seared conscience,” always assumes that his audience, whether or not they will listen, are his fellow countrymen. But as to Mogadishu, no matter if I spent years there, I’d always be an outsider to what, for Somalis, is an intimate history of killing, based on clan reprisals, the colonial interventions of last century, and in recent months, the hopeful assertion of business instincts over inter- necine ones. And yet there’s something that I can’t deny feels familiar about Mogadishu — the quality of the sunlight over the intensely blue sea, in which the use of the word “azure” finally seems accurate, as opposed to a well-placed poeticism like Lowell’s “Azure day / makes my agonized blue window bleaker.” In Mogadishu I had the momen- tary illusion that this might be home ground, like that beach where I went surfing as a teenager, near San Clemente and Nixon’s house, and where I saw, up close for the first time, a decommissioned tank rusting in the sand. This juxtaposition, at least in Jones’s terms of putting your body where the mouth of your ideology is, makes a kind of nerve-sense. And no matter how much of a cultural outsider I might be, my body for that moment belonged to the low coastal hills and barbwire and shell holes pocking the city walls. The holes come in three sizes: thumb size for ak-47s, fist size for .20 caliber, and both fists for .50 caliber. I sometimes think it would be consoling to see that tank as conso- nant with the Casspir, a form of Army-junk pastoral, and to feel that the lyric compact was still unbroken, so I could say with Owen “murmurous with wasp and midge.” But outside the bounds of Owen’s poem, such formulations go dead on me. It’s as if the language of Owen, in which his political commitments begin to swamp his political

198O POETRY emotions, were foreclosed to me, except as a beautiful, untouchable, infinitely precious historical curiosity. And so what’s left? If you’re talking to a man in a refugee camp market who sells camels or goats, and he tells you how many wives he has, and how many children, and how many members of his family have been tortured, or shot down in the front room of his own home, or burned alive in a church, or how he hasn’t seen his parents in eight years because a militia attacked his village one night, and his parents ran one way and he ran another to escape being hacked to pieces by a panga (the Kenyan version of a machete), if, as you’re talking to this man, the complete deadpan with which he tells you about his suffering makes anything you could say sound superfluous — well, that’s exactly how I feel now when I read poems that overtly declare themselves as speaking for others. I feel a respect for the effort but often growing impatience with the result, even a ripple of disgust, unfair perhaps, if the poem turns out (like most poems of this kind do) to be only what it seemed to be on first reading: alibis for thought, a lot of word-masquerading, a rhetorical jumping up and down and waving of hands and yelling and shouting to get someone to pay attention. The marks on the page have less permanence, and less vividness of effect, than the henna staining the camel and goat seller’s beard. Given the mental brownout I suffer when confronted with abstractions like “race,” “class,” “gender,” “politics,” I’ve become ever more skeptical that poets can speak for communities: they can speak to what they think the community is — they can assume com- monalities — they can, in a limited way, propose certain shared values as if they actually existed, as Whitman did — but somehow, some way, they need to signal that they’re aware of the limitations of their singular, subjective viewpoint. And as for a poet addressing posterity, in our current rising sea- level, four hundred parts of carbon dioxide per million eco-disaster mode, it’s impossible for any poet to know in the moment of writing if there’s even going to be a posterity to write for or to. Not that posterity was anything but a fantasy made popular by Romantic notions of the artist as representative sufferer — a notion that in our era seems as doomed as Owen’s status as an officer, machine-gunned just a week before the Armistice. A black joke, you might say, given the heroic depth and sincerity of purpose in his suffering. But his stance now seems like a holdover from another geopolitical and informational

tom sleigh 199 era, no matter that his poems are here to stay. Unlike Owen’s hieratic and hierarchic understanding of soldiers, and how and why they die, Jones’s soldiers in their official capaci- ties have been turned by the Army into human extensions of their rifles, their big guns, their routinized and bureaucratized Army lingo of “Pass up message from officer in rear — Message from in front sir — they’ve halted sir — to right of road sir — road blocked, sir.” The flatness of such language, its purely British Expeditionary Force utilitarian nature, marks one boundary of Jones’s language. But on the other hand, the soldiers, with a Cockney genius for entertaining, linguistically inventive grumbling, resist all that. As Jones says,

I am surprised to find how much Cockney influences have de- termined the form; but as Latin is to the Church, so is Cockney to the Army, no matter what name the regiment bears. It is difficult to dissociate any word of command, any monosyllable re- membered, coming at you on dark duck-board track, from the Great Bell of Bow.

This emphasis on Cockney over Latin, and equating the two, shows exactly what I mean by using class not as a stick or a piety or an attempt to establish “authenticity,” but as a formally integrated understanding that needs no comment from the poet — except after the fact, perhaps, in an author’s preface. And what’s more, the unselfconscious distance and neutrality of Jones’s stance toward this language, his refusal to self-dramatize, to lament or attitudinize or conflate his viewpoint with any sort of implied moral understand- ings, feels radically new: the voices assume their place in the poem, as if some magnetic force beyond the poet’s will were driving a pattern into iron filings. And so the ironies that emerge aren’t the well-worn ones contrast- ing dulce et decorum with “gloom’s last dregs,” or self-dramatizing agonies of witnessing: “Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean, / I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.” Jones’s poem doesn’t claim special linguistic privileges, doesn’t make language into a private code, and insist on its exemption from ordinary usage. And yet the comprehensiveness of what Jones calls his cultural “deposits” gives his language the hallucinatory clarity of intermittent flashes of artillery fire and flares lighting up the darkness. By using so many different linguistic registers at once to talk about the materiel of war and

200O POETRY its effect on landscape and the human body, Jones creates an archeol- ogy of war more complete than any ever written. It’s no exaggeration to say that if all the millions of pages and photographs and drawings and paintings about the war were somehow lost, and all that was left was Jones’s poem, the physical experience of the ordinary trench soldier would be wholly intact. As Jones says, toward the end of Part 2, in an inadvertent ars poetica:

John Ball ... stood fixed and alone in the little yard — his senses highly alert, his body incapable of movement or response. The exact disposition of small things — the precise shapes of trees, the tilt of a bucket, the movement of a straw, the disappearing right boot of Sergeant Snell — all minute noises, separate and distinct, in a stillness charged through with some approaching violence — registered not by the ear nor any single faculty — an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed, millesimal — of calculated velocity, some mean chemist’s contrivance, a stinking physicist’s de- stroying toy.

This passage, at least until the shift to the incoming shell, describes exactly the quality of attentiveness to detail that saturates In Parenthesis. No one has ever registered the minutiae of war, and the processes of perceiving that minutiae, as accurately or as fully as Jones. Like a ptsd nightmare, every detail is registered in the complete stop-time of trauma, but without the emotional overlay of professional trauma-speak. If I say “shell shock,” you know the physical cause of the mental suffering — Jones himself suffered re- current bouts of shell shock throughout his life, bouts that made it impossible for him to work on his quite extraordinary paintings and drawings for many months at a time. But if I say “post-traumatic stress disorder,” you can see how suffering needs to be swept out of sight, reduced to a professionalized abstraction totally divorced from its material/materiel causes. Or if you prefer something tonier to my ptsd comparison, then Proust’s notion of the memoire involontaire, the memory of texture that lies beyond the anti-remembrance of dates and the facticity of “this happened, that happened,” would also be the quality of unwilled, but helplessly focused attentiveness that characterizes the poem. Jones is not a poet who has a design upon the reader. He is a poet in the grip of a design that Cockney accents

tom sleigh 201 underwrite, as well as Le Morte d’Arthur:

Good night china — there’s some dryish wood under fire- step — in cubby-hole — good night. Cushy — cushy enough — cushy, good night.

This exchange occurs between soldiers going up the line to the front to relieve those coming down from the forward trenches. In this passage, “china” is abbreviated, rhyming Cockney slang for “mate,” the complete phrase being “china plate.” And “cushy” is simply slang for comfortable, as well as being the adjective to describe a much-desired wound in the hand or foot, disabling you from combat, but not disabling you for life. But as we’ve already seen in the earlier quotation about the wrecked foliage, Jones’s other idioms are wildly at variance from the Cockney. In a combination of Latinate borrowings, over-the-top Atticisms, pa- rodic scientific precision, elaborately involved Hopkins-like syntax, and first-rate reportage, Jones uses a whole other register of speech that the poem deploys as skillfully as Cockney — a register that plays with the mock heroic, but transcends it by its fidelity to the shock experience, and slowing down of time, of sudden trauma:

He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin spilled at his feet. Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came — bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo’s up-piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through — all taking-out of vents — all barrier- breaking — all unmaking. Pernitric begetting — the dissolving and splitting of solid things. In which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up his mess-tin and hurried within; ashen, huddled, waited in the dismal straw. Behind “E” Battery, fifty yards down the road, a great many mangolds, uprooted, pulped, congealed with chemical earth, spattered and made slippery the rigid boards leading to the emplacement. The sap of vegetables slobbered the spotless breech-block of No. 3 gun.

By hovering at the edge of parody with that anti-heroic mess tin, Jones illustrates what Thom Gunn meant by the phrase, “a strength

202O POETRY so lavish she can limit it.” The use of “Pandoran” to contrast with the later “Pernitric,” a Greek myth of disaster balanced against a Greek-derived scientific term for an explosive acid, the words fatally linked by alliterative stress, shows just how sophisticated and original and flexibly various is Jones’s diction, range of reference, and musi- cal understanding. The final image of the “sap of vegetables” slob- bering “the spotless breech-block of No. 3 gun” is, in it’s humble, eccentric rightness, one of the best pieces of description in all of lit- erature — it’s as if Hopkins’s harsh, impacted music for inward states of spiritual torment in his late sonnets had been turned inside out in Jones’s “slobbered the spotless breech-block,” and applied to the physical torments of the war. The eye-witness brilliance of it, while keeping a cool-eyed distance from any overt moralizing, occurs in another linguistic universe from Owen’s description of an exploding shell as the “hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge.” And the anti- climax, after the explosion of the shell, of John Ball picking up his mess-tin and hurrying inside a barn for cover, reveals a sensibility that refuses to slight one form of experience for another, but insists on getting all of it in, and in whatever style or idiom the moment of perception demands. And that flexibility and strangeness and originality of perception is exactly what the conventions of news photos of starving people lack. To actually see someone starving to death, and accurately describe it, and not simply use words or images as a way to deflect your attention, may require a counter-intuitive stylistic procedure, a process of defamiliarization. Jones writes, “If you would draw a smith’s arm think of the twisted blackthorn bough — get at some remove from your subject.” And his source of remove is, paradoxically, to get closer and closer to immediate physical sensations, so close in fact that a kind of poetic kinesthesia of the body takes over. It’s as if Jones instinctively recognizes that, as R.P. Blackmur once said, “Style is the quality of the act of perception” — which means that style is in part the hardwiring of how you perceive, in all your individual quirks, your personal histories, your borrowings and burgeonings from whatever cultural deposits you draw on and spring from. Registering that peculiarity of perception is what style is — which rescues the notion of style from mere decoration, or spurious individuality, or the affiliation with whatever school of poetry you subscribe to. If, as Jones does, you take the notion of style seriously as based on bodily experience of the world, then it’s obvious that you need to

tom sleigh 203 find formal ways to capture unique experiences, ideology is unvary- ing, while bodily perception is always changing, so the two won’t lie easily in the same bed. This is why Jones’s range of styles is so wildly at variance, and yet utterly right for the diversity of experiences he’s trying to recreate in all their physical and spiritual and intellectual immediacy. Here is a passage about men climbing out of their trench and ad- vancing toward the enemy that shows what Jones means by getting “at some remove from your subject”:

Mr. Jenkins half inclined his head to them — he walked just barely in advance of his platoon and immediately to the left of Private Ball. He makes the conventional sign and there is the deeply inward effort of spent men who would make response for him, and take it at the double. He sinks on one knee and now on the other, his upper body tilts in rigid inclination this way and back; weighted lanyard runs out to full tether, swings like a pendulum and the clock run down. Lurched over, jerked iron saucer over tilted brow, clampt unkindly over lip and chin nor no ventaille to this darkening and masked face lifts to grope the air and so disconsolate; enfeebled fingering at a paltry strap — buckle holds, holds him blind against the morning. Then stretch still where weeds pattern the chalk predella — where it rises to his wire — and Sergeant T. Quilter takes over.

Not until the final two lines does it become clear that most of this passage chronicles a man’s death. And this is because the death occurs in slo-mo, as an ongoing process instead of a noted fact. The technical specificity of the lanyard image, the clinical cool of the

204O POETRY observation, the way the “iron saucer” of Jenkins’s helmet slides over his entire face, the way Jones omits the “he” in “Then stretch still where weeds pattern the chalk predella,” as if Jenkins, because he is dead, has been reduced to a thing, rendering the pronoun superfluous — well you can see how far this is from the usual poeticizing and atrocity-speak. And the freedom with which Jones moves between prose and free verse — the verse breaking the process of the slo-mo fall into smaller perceptual increments, the prose providing context for the process — tracks Jenkins sinking to his knees, collapsing face forward with his helmet over his face, his fingers trying to loosen the strap and failing, so that the last thing he sees is the dark inside his helmet, but without any metaphysical overtones, shows what Jones means by getting at “some remove from your subject.” Never have I read a more accurate and heartbreaking description of a man’s death — and accomplished without any of the usual stylistic or emo- tive maneuvering. And when you see how sustained Jones’s poem is in carrying off these effects, you see that his work is a vast unmined resource for poets interested in doing more than what Derek Walcott once called “the standard elegiac.” And perhaps that’s why Jones means so much to me now: he goes beyond the elegy to the body’s physical reality, and in the process in- corporates many different bodies, and the particulars of their speech coming from their lungs — speech recorded in his poem originating from all registers, and all ranks. He mentions how profanity, and its repetition, conditioned “the whole shape of our discourse,” and that sometimes the proper juxtaposition of profanity “in a sentence, and when expressed under poignant circumstances, reached real poetry.” And in more normal circumstances, “the ‘Bugger! Bugger!’ of a man detailed, had often about it the ‘Fiat! Fiat!’ of the Saints.” As I said, Jones is not a war poet. He isn’t interested in setting up shop as a professional elegist. He speaks for no community, but let’s a community develop through the multiplicity of voices that the poem accumulates. Above all, he is no village explainer, or self-righteous ranter: he has no message to impart, no agenda to advance. Instead, he says that the poem “has to do with some things I saw, felt, & was part of.” In the modesty of his claim, I can find my own way into the war. I can see the place in Mametz Wood, that I visited years before I’d read Jones, where he was wounded in the leg — not exactly a cushy wound, but cushy enough to get him away from the front for a few months.

tom sleigh 205 Most of all I can see, not mass slaughter, but this little vignette of vital and electrifying substantiation of one man’s limited experience. A German soldier throws a stick bomb at Private Ball, Private Ball lobs a grenade back, and kills his fellow soldier — and rather than talk about his sense of guilt or pity or rage, or indulge in journalistic or humanist or philosophical or psychological expostulation, he simply notes two things: that he liked the colored label on the handle of the stick-bomb as it flew towards him; and after his grenade explodes, he notes how “you scramble forward and pretend not to see, / but ruby drops from young beech-sprigs — / are bright your hands and face.” And in that awful brightness Jones shows how poetic problems are, as such, problems of perception. That the artist is necessarily empirical rather than speculative. That the question for the artist, according to Jones, is always “‘Does it?’ rather than ‘Ought it?’” And that perception can’t be faked because it is important to be “anthropomorphic, to deal through and in the things we understand as [women and] men — to be incarnational.”

206O POETRY contributors

dilruba ahmed * is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press 2011), winner of the Bakeless Literary Prize. jen bervin’s * recent artist books include The Gorgeous Nothings (2012), The Dickinson Composites (2010), and The Desert (2008), all from Granary Books. szilárd borbély * is widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. He has worked in a wide variety of genres, including essay, drama, and short fiction. todd boss’s recent collections are Pitch (2012) and Yellowrocket (2008), both from W.W. Norton. He is the founding executive and artistic director of Motionpoems, a poetry film initiative. emily dickinson * (1830–1886) was born and died in Amherst, Massachusetts. After her death, family members discovered her hand-sewn books, or “fascicles,” containing nearly 1,800 poems. stephen eichhorn * lives and works in Chicago. His work has been included in numerous national solo and group exhibitions. tiffany higgins * is the author of And Aeneas Stares into Her Hel- met (Carolina Wren Press, 2009), chosen by Evie Shockley for the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Prize. harmony holiday’s * first book is Negro League Baseball (Fence Books, 2011). Her second, Go Find Your Father /A Famous Blues (Rico- chet Editions, 2013) is a “dos-à-dos” book of poems, letters, and essays. fady joudah’s new book is Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. wong may first appeared in Poetry in September 1969. Her new book is Picasso’s Tears (Octopus Books, 2014). May lives in Dublin, where she writes and paints. ottilie mulzet * translates from the Hungarian and Mongolian. Her translation of Borbély’s Berlin-Hamlet has been excerpted in the American Reader, and was published by Fra in 2008.

contributors 207 aimee nezhukumatathil* is the author of three books of poetry from Tupelo Press, most recently Lucky Fish (2011). She is a profes- sor of English at suny-Fredonia. matthew nienow is the author, most recently, of The End of the Folded Map (Codhill Press, 2011) and The Smallest Working Pieces (Toadlily Press, 2009). hannah sanghee park * is the author of a chapbook, Ode Days Ode (Catenary Press, 2011). natalie shapero’s poetry has appeared recently in the Believer, the New Republic, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection, No Object, was published by Saturnalia Books this year. tom sleigh’s many books of poetry include Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011) and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007). He teaches in Hunter College’s mfa program. daniel tiffany’s * new collection of poetry is Neptune Park (Om- nidawn, 2013). His fifth book of criticism is My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). phillip b. williams * is the author of the chapbooks Burn (YesYes Books, 2013) and Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011). He is a Cave Canem graduate and the poetry editor of Vinyl Poetry.

* First appearance in Poetry.

208O POETRY

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Poetry off the Shelf SIJO POETRY WITH DAVID MCCANN Saturday, November 16, 3 pm poetry foundation Free admission

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