founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

October 2011

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cxcix t number 1 CONTENTS

October 2011

POEMS spencer reece 3 The Road to Emmaus dan beachy-quick 18 Poem (External Scene) Poem (Internal Scene) kay ryan 20 Blast Pinhole ange mlinko 22 Cantata for Lynette Roberts gerald stern 28 The Name Leaves d.a. powell 30 Boonies bryan d. dietrich 32 Gotham Wanes rae armantrout 33 Spent Transactions melanie braverman 36 “The pond is sheathed in ice” “No longer if we’ll get cancer but when” “I used to love the run-up to a storm” “I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal” T HE V IEW FROM HERE lili taylor 43 Out There leopold froehlich 45 One-Track Mind xeni jardin 47 Everything Moves to Live jerry boyle 50 Debris michaelanne petrella 52 Like, a Noticeable Amount of Pee

C OMMENT michael hofmann 57 Big Les! abigail deutsch 68 Three Books

contributors 78 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio

cover art by tatsuro kiuchi “Matchstick,” 2009

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Poetry t October 2011 t Volume 199 t Number 1

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spencer reece

The Road to Emmaus

For Nathan Gebert

i

The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew. I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan. In her small o∞ce, at the Cenacle Retreat House, right o≠ Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida, I began my story — it was an interview, much of life is an interview. She said I did not need to pay her, but donations, yes, donations were appreciated: they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelope that she could take back to the cloister. She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper. She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife. My meetings with her went on for a few years.

I had come to speak about Durell. I did not know how to end sentences about Durell. He had taught me — what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror? What? There were so many ways to end my sentence. He was an unlikely candidate for so many things. Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer. I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact, but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own, which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly. Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things.

Sister Ann’s face was open, fragile — parts were chipped like on a recovered fresco. Above her gray head, a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene,

SPENCER REECE 3 the colors o≠, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading — the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity. There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame. It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples, one named Cleopas, the other anonymous, forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them, the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger. They were on their way to that town, Emmaus, seven miles out from Jerusalem, gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing — they argued about whether to believe what they had seen; they were restless, back and forth the debate went — when there is estrangement there is little peace.

ii

Every time we met, Sister Ann prayed first. At times, my recollections blurred or a presumption would reverse. Sister Ann told me Durell was with me still, in a more intimate way than when he lived. She frequently lost her equilibrium, as older people sometimes do, before settling into her worn-out chair where she listened to me, week after week.

The day I met Durell, I said, the morning light was clear, startling the town with ornament. The steeple of Christ Church held the horizon in place, or so I imagined, as if it had been painted first with confident amounts of titanium white before the rest was added. Trees clattered. The reiterating brick puzzle of Cambridge brightened — Mass Avenue, Mount Auburn, Dunster, Holyoke —

4 POETRY proclaimed a new September, and new students trudged the streets. Every blood-warm structure was defined in relief.

Hours before, while the moon’s neck wobbled on the Charles like a gira≠e’s, or the ghost of a gira≠e’s neck, I imagined Durell labored, having slept only a few hours, caged in his worries of doctor bills, no money, and running out of people to ask for it: mulling over mistakes, broken love a≠airs — a hospital orderly, a man upstairs, he probably mumbled unkind epithets about blacks and Jews, even though the men he loved were blacks and Jews. Some of his blasphemies, if you want to call them that, embarrassed me in front of Sister Ann, but she seemed unflappably tolerant.

At sixty, he was unemployable. He had taught school and guarded buildings, each job ending worse than the last. His refrain was always: “It is not easy being an impoverished aristocrat.” He spoke with the old Harvard accent, I can still hear it, I will probably always hear it, with New York City, the North Shore and the Army mixed in, the a’s broadened, the r’s were flat, the t’s snapped — so a sentence would calibrate to a confident close, like “My dee-ah boy, that is that.” He lived on 19 Garden Street in a rent-controlled studio on the second floor, number 25; he said the “25” reminded him of Christmas.

At eleven o’clock, he probably pulled on his support hose, increasing the circulation in his legs, blotched green and black. Next, he would have locked the door with his gold key

SPENCER REECE 5 and moved deliberately, his smile beleaguered. Bowing to Miss Littlefield in the landlord’s o∞ce at the building’s dark cubbyhole of an entrance: they probably spoke of Queen Elizabeth ii, her disappointments, for Miss Littlefield and he were Royalists both. Then Durell began to move towards me, entering the Square. Breathing heavily, he might have passed the Brattle advertising Judgment at Nuremberg — inside the shut black theatrical box where the world repeated the past, Maximilian Schell interrogated Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift; Marlene Dietrich let the phone ring and ring. Maybe he passed the Store 24 sign, bright orange, passed Nini’s Corner where sex magazines were stacked like a cli≠. Maybe, maybe. But, maybe not. Maybe he went another way.

Then I recalled how the t shook that place, the subway grates pushing up the scent of rat-life and all things fallen, mixing with Leavitt & Peirce exuding its masculine snu≠. Down Plympton Street he might have gone, past the Grolier, which I always remembered, for some reason, as closed, gilded with spines of poetry books for its reredos. Yes, he probably, most likely, certainly, did that. Sister Ann wondered if I thought he paused. I thought not — poetry o≠ered him no solutions.

At twelve o’clock, the chairperson called our aa meeting to order. We called ourselves “The Loony Nooners,” and met in a Lutheran church basement. We ate salads out of Tupperware,

6 POETRY shaking the contents like dice to mix the dressing. Some knitted. Schizophrenics lit multiple cigarettes. Acne-pocked Kate wanted to be a model, Electroshock Mike read paperbacks, and an Irish professor named Tom, welcomed Tellus, who could not get over Nam. Darkened figures in the poor light, we looked like the burghers of Calais, and smelled of brewed co≠ee, smoke, perfume, urine, human brine. We were aristocrats of time: “I have twenty-one years,” “I have one week,” “I have one day.” I have often thought we were like first-century Christians — a strident, hidden throng, electrified by a message. Or, another way of thinking of us, is that we were inconvenient obstacles momentarily removed, much to the city’s relief. From each window well, high heels and business shoes hurried. Durell H., as he was known to us, took his place, his thick hair fixed as the waves of an 1800s nautical painting (perhaps he kept it set with hair spray?), his Ti≠any ring polished to a brilliance, he set himself apart in his metal folding chair. He had the clotted girth of Hermann Göring. What was he thinking about? Was he thinking about blood clots and possible aneurysms? Imperious, behind prism-like trifocals, quietly he said to me, “I’ve grown as fat as Elizabeth Taylor.”

iii

The meeting ended and Durell folded his metal chair. He hated his Christian name — “Durell,” he said, “Who names their child Durell?”

SPENCER REECE 7 Moving among the crowd, listening to success and failure, he passed out meeting lists, literature, leaflets. Durell sponsored men, he referred to them as “pigeons.” I met him that day. I was his last.

After that, every day we spoke on rotary phones. I was young and spoke as if my story was the only one. I told him I had underlined key passages in Plato’s Symposium, told him I had been graded unfairly on Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, told him my schedule might not allow for the Paradiso. He matched my telling with listening, advising, and more listening, mostly over the phone, and the more he listened the more he was alone. “Why was that?” Sister Ann asked. It was some sort of o≠ering, perhaps. At times it seemed he needed to guarantee a pardon, that old Catholic idea of indulgences lurked somewhere there unspoken, as if he believed a larger o≠ering might guarantee a larger pardon. Such a task demanded his increased singleness. Yes, that was true. Or was it? I had trouble settling on the right words with Sister Ann. Many of my words were not exactly right, the syntax awkward. I kept having trouble translating Durell, so much I guessed. How to know? (Why hadn’t I asked him more questions? He wasn’t the sort that invited questions, I do remember that.) Another way of saying it was that when he was with me, on the phone, then and only then, did he seem to move in truth and in his truths, reprimanding and hard, he was made more singular. Maybe that was it. Whatever the case, he listened, he listened to me. I missed his listening. Listening, Sister Ann said, is a memorable form of love.

8 POETRY After the meeting, he gave me his calling card. The cards were placed inside his compulsively polished silver card case, the black capitals raised on their ecru background, containing his name, bracketed by a “Mr.” and a “Jr.” — the “Mr.” denoting lost civility, the “Jr.” tallying a lineage that did not bridge. As we walked down Church Street, the bells of St. John the Evangelist rang. The road was bright, the road full. Behind the brown gate with the thick black rusted latch, the monks sang, “It is well, it is well, with my soul, with my soul.” We peered in at bookshop clerks locating titles, watch repairmen bent over lit ocular devices, fixing movements, florists, hands wet, arranging stems and branches broken. We saw ourselves reflected. I laughed with deference, the way a student laughs before a teacher. His skin was flecked with milk-blues, lead-whites, earthen reds. In dress and demeanor he was as rigid as a toy soldier, for he was a part of a republic with standards, atrophied, devoted to order.

Everyone found him impossible, including, at times, me. Of queers, his word for what he was but could not admit to, he said, “You know in the army they could never be trusted.” I mentioned romantic love. In profile, a silhouette, he paused. He said, “It has been very vexing, indeed.” By his tone, I knew never to ask again. A decorum of opprobrium kept him whole, and so he guarded himself with intensity. Maybe, Sister Ann suggested, he was guarding me.

SPENCER REECE 9 Durell said, “I’ve whittled my world down to no one, Spencer, with the possible exception of you.”

iv

“What happened then?” Sister Ann asked. He excused himself with a handshake, his palms soft as bread dough from all the Jergens he had slathered on, and then he probably returned to his ambry of a studio, a place where I would be one of his only visitors. Although he handed out his number, he did not always answer. I remember... (What do I remember?) ... I was free to turn away but the moment I looked back, Durell would come back to me, waiting for me. It seems to me now, after all this time, few things have as much fidelity as the past.

I remember he had nailed memorabilia above his head as one would place stones to fortify a castle: a photograph of him in the army, liberating people, undoing Russian codes; a framed marriage license from England (although the marriage failed, he often mumbled her name); his framed diploma, Harvard, and over the corner hung his graduation cap’s faded black tassel. Next to his pill bottles, an Edward viii coronation mug he doted on, commemorating an event that never took place. Maybe he made a bread and baloney sandwich. Maybe he stepped over the rolled-up tag-sale carpet and drew the shades. By late evening, he might have jotted down notes about God,

10 POETRY obedient as he was to the twelve steps of aa. He might have written in his tightly-looped feminine penmanship, informed by the Palmer Method, and later repeated a phrase or two to me over the phone. Or maybe he read from his Twenty-Four Hours a Day book to find a rule maybe, or to search for a sanctuary. Or maybe he listened to the Reverend Peter Gomes on the radio, The Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard, for he often mentioned how he loved the preacher’s parallel constructions, yes, maybe he did that, maybe, possibly, he did that.

And then, perhaps, he slept a bit before the whole routine began once more with the support hose, the hair spray, Miss Littlefield, the sex magazines, the Grolier, the folding chair, the meeting, the calling card. How crazy America was, he said, how he wanted to leave, but he never left town, except jolting trips to the hospital in an ambulance down all those brick roads.

v

I lived in Cambridge two years. After that, wherever I moved, we spoke, daily, over the phone, on landlines — talking and listening, listening and talking, for fifteen years: “You alright?” “Yes. You?” In all that time, I saw him only once more, and by then he was nearly blind. In all that time, we barely touched one another. Why our relationship required its rood screen, I could not fully explain to Sister Ann, indeed, I can never seem to properly explain it to anyone.

SPENCER REECE 11 But I have tried, and I will probably always keep trying. But if I get nothing right, I must try to get a nuance of our friendship and his sponsorship right — we were bound, bound by a vow, a vow of attention (there are many causes for attention, among them redemption). Our attention concerned the spirit, although that sounds pious and we were not so pious, we were more selfish, more human than pious. What else can I say? I needed a liberator and liberators can come in some unexpected guises. I may never wholly explain the two of us. Perhaps the spirit defies the human mind, even after all my time with Sister Ann.

Finally, from a hospital, came the report of Durell’s last day. A charge nurse said: “I touched the gangrene leg, pink flesh was coming back.” His compliments had increased the more his life failed. In the final week, he quoted Cole Porter songs to me — You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you’re Mickey Mouse ... I did not repeat the rhymes to Sister Ann. Who Durell was and why he did what he did and why he hid what he hid I kept asking her. Sister Ann quoted from Deuteronomy: “I set before you life and death ... choose life.”

Old pigeon flying back, when I arrived at the hospital his body was gone. The formalities were few, for he had become a ward of the state. The sta≠ gave me a brown grocery bag of his things: a roll of dimes, a pair of shoes, a belt buckle, an Einstein quote, something about mediocre minds.

12 POETRY Afterwards, I went through Cambridge and found the meeting gone. Night was coming. Blindness worked on the people, shops, churches, streets. No one knew me. People said: “Where will we go?” and “What will we eat?” I thought I recognized this or that face, but no, no, too much time had passed. On Church Street, restaurants had replaced bookstores. Windows on Mass Avenue shone with chandeliers. Someone backed up photographing with a flash. “Hold still,” they said, “hold still.” A new set of homeless people pleaded, coins rattled inside the used co≠ee cups they shook. Everyone moved with packages, briefcases, textbooks, flash cards, cell phones, flowers. The Charles advanced, determined as a hearse, its dark waters gathering up every unattached thing. An umber, granular dusk-light fell on the elms over Harvard Yard as they swayed dark and slow like the chords in the waltz from Copeland’s Rodeo. There I stood, unsure of which way to go. The light had more ghosts in it as it must have had that day in Emmaus.

vi

Suddenly, Sister Ann announced our last meeting. Down the linoleum hallway, Sister Katherine and Sister Ruth moved and prayed. Their numbers had dropped from seven to six, and the nuns decided the Retreat House would close. Soon, the chapel and o∞ces would be leveled and replaced with condominiums.

SPENCER REECE 13 In the halls, the swoosh-snap of duct tape yanked, pulled and cut, straps tightened, vans bleating, and backing up into the back, weather reports exchanged with the movers. Sister Ann told me about herself that final time: parents dead, alcoholic brother dead, the brother embarrassed she had been a nun. She opened her Bible on the shipping box between us, leaned in, her hearing aids on, her silver crucifix knocking on her chest. Above her head, a nail where the Emmaus scene had hung.

I asked: “What caused him to remain?” Why did he want freedom for me? Sister Ann spoke then of the Gospel of John and the Samaritan woman at the well, the one married nearly as many times as Elizabeth Taylor, and how when Christ listened to her she became the first evangelist. It was Christ’s longest conversation with anyone Sister Ann said. The Samaritan woman’s life changed because Christ listened to her.

John K., from the meetings, dead now too, once said: “Oh, I knew Durell. He was odd. But we’re all odd you know.” All I know now is the more he loved me the more I loved the world.

vii

I lost track of Sister Ann. I have often thought about her and all the time she spent with me. I have wanted to tell her now for some time that not long after the cloister closed, Durell’s sister located me, leaving a message on my answering machine,

14 POETRY (it was still the time of answering machines), inviting me to her winter house in Boynton Beach.

Durell’s sister gave me directions. She was quite close to me, as it turned out. She had some of Durell’s belongings that she wanted me to have. “There isn’t much,” she said. “But still, I think you should have what’s here.” Durell spoke of his sister often, but I did not know his family. However, when we met, we recognized each other as one sometimes recognizes what one has never seen before.

I said to her: “He knew me better than anyone.” The sentence surprised us. We sat by the pool in her gated country club. The Florida evening was a watercolor in the making, colors bleeding into striking mistakes. After all the members withdrew, she said, “There are many things you do not know about my brother.” A worker folded terry cloth towels under a bamboo hut. Her voice halted as voices halt when words have been withheld. “They called him names,” she said, “A nancy boy, a priss, a sissy, a fairy ...” The pool’s tempos ceased until the silence about us was the silence in a palace.

Light disappeared everywhere. The sun fell. She looked away, said that he’d been to the army language school, learned German and Russian, played the organ in his spare time, mentioned he’d taken music with Copland at Harvard (he had received a “gentleman’s ‘C’” —

SPENCER REECE 15 the “C” stood for Copland she said he always said — which made us laugh and seemed to beckon him to us). He had hoped for an army career, she went on, and then she mumbled something about a little German town, I think she said it was in Schleswig-Holstein, near Lübeck, where he was stationed while borders were being redrawn, the letters stopping, the army, the men, something, the drink ... and then her words fell and sank into subtle variations of all that goes unsaid.

We heard the distant sound of a train on its track, crossing the Florida map going brown then black. He became di∞cult, isolated — she spoke softly then like the penitent. He was always asking for money. As his requests persisted she began to screen her calls. “It became easier to tell him I had not been home,” she said. His behavior was a≠ecting her marriage. She chose never to introduce her children to Durell. Perhaps he had a mental illness, perhaps he invented — perhaps, perhaps, perhaps — but no, she pressed on, perhaps it was his sexuality, he was too sensitive ... “People can be cruel,” she said. She felt he had never adjusted to cruelty as if cruelty was something that one needed to adjust to. Later, he was picked up for charges of soliciting sex. And the more she told me, the less I knew. All about us, a stillness began to displace the light and Durell was there, and no longer there, staining that stillness. After an estrangement ends there comes a great stillness, the greater the estrangement the greater the stillness. Across the parking lot, a gate rattled.

16 POETRY I told her he often said his life had been a failure, I tried to convince him otherwise, but he never believed me. Half a century ago, she broke o≠ contact. Her protracted estrangement made her look ill. “Please, please,” she said. Her voice trailed o≠, although what she was pleading for was not clear. No, no, she did not want her grandchildren to know. Subtle variations of Florida evening light withdrew with finality. The pool brightened with moonlight, the color of snow. The pool was still. There we were, a man and a woman sitting in cushioned lounge chairs, as if the world would always be an endless pair of separated things. We did not touch each other. We were still a long time.

SPENCER REECE 17 dan beachy-quick

Poem (External Scene)

The field blank in snow. But I mean this page. Now print mars the surface to make surface Seen. Sheen only error brings. Perfect rage So the sun rises. Rage is your slow practice That makes of every day another day In whose gathering promise the shy sparrows Shiver instead of sing. I want to go away. See these footsteps? These black shapes in the snow? If there is a word for them, it’s no word I know. Pursuit?, no. Proof?, no. Don’t call it fear. Could I cross this white sheet if I were coward, Edge to edge, margin to margin, never Referring to anything outside itself ? — Stop that. Stop pointing to the photo on the shelf.

18 POETRY Poem (Internal Scene)

To make beauty out of pain, it damns the eyes — No, dams the eyes. See how they overflow? No damns them, damns them, and so they cry. What shape can I swallow to make me whole? Baby’s bird-shaped block, blue-painted wood That fits in the bird-hole of the painted wood box? The skeleton leaf ? The skeleton key? Loud Knock when the shape won’t unlock any locks. I hear it through the static in the baby’s room When the monitor clicks on and o≠, sound Of sea-ice cracking against the jagged sea-rocks, Laughing gull in the gale. What is it dives down Past sight, down there dark with the other blocks? It can’t be seen, only heard. A kind of curse, This kind curse. Forgive me. Blessing that hurts.

DAN BEACHY-QUICK 19 kay ryan

Blast

The holes have almost left the sky and the blanks the paths — the patches next to natural, corroborated by the incidental sounds of practical activities and crows, themselves exhibiting many of the earmarks of the actual. This must have happened many times before, we must suppose. Almost a pulse if we could speed it up: the repeated seeking of our several senses toward each other, fibers trying to reach across the gap as fast as possible, following a blast.

20 POETRY Pinhole

We say pinhole. A pin hole of light. We can’t imagine how bright more of it could be, the way this much defeats night. It almost isn’t fair, whoever poked this, with such a small act to vanquish blackness.

KAY RYAN 21 ange mlinko

Cantata for Lynette Roberts

Lynette, the stars are kerned so far apart — Through a herniated zodiac I almost see your waled skylanes, your shocked Capricorn and Cancer. In the hundred and two years since you were born, and the sixteen since your heart failed, and the nearly sixty since you gave up poetry, it seems we can’t navigate by the same star chart. I’d like to think we were fated to work the same coracle: you steering with one hand, grasping your corner of the seine while I grasp mine; together sweeping the weirs.

Lynette saw the sky made wide-waled corduroy by the flight paths of fighter jets. Corde du roi — “Cloth of the king.” (“A baseless assertion,” states the oed.) A fireman from the Midlands nfs said the raids on Swansea were worse than on Birmingham, where a ten-year-old Roy Fisher gaped at the garden where his cousins were slaughtered, and later wrote, It was like a burst pod filled with clay.

Last night, Lynette, my son thought he saw his father in the jumbo jet roaring over Cherryhurst: the weather softer, flight paths altered. Three weeks now his father gone.

š

Insofar as Moses came to in a coracle, it wasn’t a Welsh one-o≠ ; it wasn’t a hapax of vessels. Insofar as it’s kind of a kiddie boat, not a kayak, not the royal barge the Makah sent William Blake, aka Johnny Depp, with into the northern Pacific; not even the Viking ship, its carved prow like an uncial; insofar as it is calico wrapped up in tar, insofar as it is swaddled willow whippets.

š

22 POETRY “Pastoral ding-dong is out,” Lynette wrote, and no wonder — bombs hidden on the glossy knolls. In the sorrel. In the tormentil. I thought she was perhaps the closest I could get to my grandmother. While Lynette was writing “Displaced Persons” —

Neither from the frosted leaf nor from The grey hard ground could they find Relief

— Lydia was migrating, on foot, a thousand miles from Minsk to Hanover through the German lines in a di≠erent tongue. I only have this tongue, so I adopt Lynette’s epic as a stand-in. She slipped back to childhood in Buenos Aires, garrulous in her dying, her children spiriting a Spanish dictionary into the facil with them on visits. I would see again São Paolo, she wrote (my mother would be reared there): the co≠ee-colored house with its tarmac roof. I can imagine myself down the same funnel reverting to Portuguese and the small pure word-hoard shared between child and grandparent: suja, limpo, bom, mau, com fome, cansado. Porcaria. Disgraçada! Let my children bring the dictionary too.

Lynette was ardent for penillions, and “experimented with a poem on Rain by using all words which had long thin letters....” Maybe you thrill to such things when English isn’t fully naturalized. Hers was a poetry full of metals and alloys; air raids they were, ear raids ...

š

ANGE MLINKO 23 I’m not so much crusted with parasangs, or dipped in leagues, as fried in miles of a journey resembling the arc between Cleo and asp. The jacuzzi, on a timer, sank a quarter-hour in froth on a fifty-degree afternoon. There were sight lines to windy breakers, heaving palms; we floated like epiphytes grown from pond scum, flowers of the abyss.

The meliorative, moist air was soft around a gigantic neon cross. And it’s true I found it hard to think of you with the hardness I thought of myself. Since it took hundreds and hundreds of dollars of posters to adorn the walls of that apartment (Pillsbury dough kitsch; an art deco cigar teetering on a stiletto; a wall plaque of a trilobite fossil; photo of the Sydney Opera House at night; a three-foot geode with its own spotlight on the end of what looked like a colonoscope —) since it took all that to match the bric-a-brac on the beach, the beach that stretched to fill the picture window, I thought it took many waves to round the facts; an asp to soften geometric Cleopatra; and that giant cross was earth’s axis extracted — tendering foliage over all of Florida.

š

I’m in the backyard weeding cotyledons. Croton. It’s spring. There’s larvae noodling in the soil. “I was rendering a ‘whipping’ stitch,” Lynette wrote, on a silk-and- georgette petticoat, the utility of which would be tested in Dover, where Keidrych had been called up to man the anti- aircraft guns. Had his Conscientious Objector status been approved on appeal, no end to their Arcadia.

24 POETRY Dylan read Rabelais, drank with Keidrych; Lynette visited with Caitlin. Household talk. Debts. Children. Insofar as Croton is rank with cotyledons, insofar as weeding is gleeful, insofar as the seed case still caps their tips, I am revising the look of spring on the face of the village. Insofar as Moses slips through the reeds in his coracle. With new beaks scissoring the air.

š

Lynette’s village, Llanybri, is pronounced clan-ubree. Even the l’s turn into c’s where modern warfare enters the poem as discord: clinic air. St. Cadoc and curlews versus confervoid; cranch-crake versus ceraunic clouds; into Euclidian cubes grid air is planed. Where did she get the nerve?

I pencil in her age where various dates are given: 32 when she began Gods with Stainless Ears; 36 when she had her first child, 37 when she had the second; 39 or 40 when she divorced. The nervous breakdown came at 47. Jehovah’s Witness thereafter. Lynette, if you were here, I’d ask you the one salient question for a woman at the midpoint of life: How not to harden?

š

In Little Sparta, Ian Hamilton Finlay made an image of an Oerlikon gun and inscribed:

To Apollo: His Music His Missiles His Muses

ANGE MLINKO 25 Like Lynette he observed the swarm-like behavior of fighter jets. He saw “flame-bearing honey” in the gasoline leaked by immolated warships. He commemorated the Flower Class Corvette, each a small naval vessel named for a blossom. Alyssum. Loosestrife. The fragility of men in battle. The Loosestrife had eight mounts for each two-pound pom-pom anti-aircraft gun. This was no Arcadian ding-dong either, as the corduroy bridge Finlay built on a stream had a line from Heraclitus on each plank: That which joins and that which divides is one and the same. Lynette says: He, of Bethlehem treading a campaign....

š

It’s the nickel in my cheap wedding ring that brings on this rash that starts at the corners of my lips. The ring bought at age twenty-one, paid for with the tips from Buddy’s Crabs and Ribs. Which I now paint religiously with clear nail polish on the inner band, across the names, the ampersand, where the graving bit exposed the nickel.

Out of this hard. Out of this sheet of zinc. ... We, he and I ran On to a steel escalator, the white Electric sun drilling down on the cubed ice; Our cyanite flesh chilled on aluminum

Rail.

26 POETRY The tin Madonnas of warplanes, writ small and annular in marriages, hammered out in Lynette’s ear raids.

š

My library is wreathed in double staircases climbing to a glass dome. I imagine birds trapped at the top, a cucucurrucued curricula, forming and dissolving figures ad hoc. Insofar that these are books that were ernes, atom-wise, in former eons.

The abbess of Streoneshall, Caedmon’s abbess, Hilda, was announced to her mother in a pregnancy dream: “a most valuable jewel” delivered from under her garments. She wrote one of the books in this aerie, this library, wreathed in double staircases; lodged also in subdural interfaces. Insofar as we’re just pre-ceviche, pre-cadavers-reinterpreting-flan, Lynette, let’s research articles, with babies at our feet: on Welsh architecture, the potato tax, coracles ... I see you floating out to sea in your coracle, the spirit of the Makah accompanying you as far as the Azores: halfway from a kitchen garden in Llanybri, halfway to a quinta in Buenos Aires.

ANGE MLINKO 27 gerald stern

The Name

Having outlived Allen I am the one who has to su≠er New York all by myself and eat my soup alone in Poland although sometimes I sit with Linda he met in Berkeley or San Francisco when he met Jack, the bread just coarse enough, the noodles soft but not thin and wasted, and not too salty the way the Chinese further down sometimes make them, the name still on my mind whatever the reason for mystery, or avoidance, though rat Netanyahu and pig that swings from a needle or lives in some huge incubator, they do darkness where there was light, the name hates them, the name in hiding, the name with a beard, and Linda she loves the name though she invokes her Christ as Jack her lover and tormentor did and taught her to do though it is too easy, that, it troubles me but what can I say, what should I say while we walk north on the right hand side, past the pork store and the hardware store, me lecturing on Logos (my God) and what not Hebrews and Greeks where Allen and I once kissed, Jack in the sun now.

28 POETRY Leaves

He was cleaning leaves for one at a time was what he needed and a minute before the two brown poodles walked by he looked at the stripped-down trees from one more point of view and thought they were part of a system in which the dappled was foreign for he had arrived at his own conclusion and that was for him a relief even if he was separated, even if his hands were frozen, even if the wind knocked him down, even if his cat went into her helpless mode inside the green and sheltering Japanese yew tree.

GERALD STERN 29 d.a. powell

Boonies

Where we could be boys together. This region of want: the campestrial flat. The adolescents roving across the plat. Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither.

Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttes that mammillate the valley right where it needs to bust.

And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me on the inflorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles; upon the grassland’s ra∞sh plaits. And he could roll me in coyote brush: I who was banished to the barren could come back into his fold, and I would let him lay me down on the cold, cold ground.

Clouds, above, lenticular, the spreading fundament, a glorious breech among the thunderheads and in their midst, a great white heron magnifies the day. We’d keep together, he and I, and we’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursue each other through the crush of darkling rifts. Climb into each other’s precipitous coombes.

Where would it end, this brush and bush, this brome and blazing star? There is always some new way to flex a limb and find its secret drupe.

Not only the hope of nature; the nature of hope:

so long as culverts carry us, so long as we stay ripe to one another’s lips, and welcoming to hands, as long as we extend our spans, to tangle them, as spinning insects do their glistered floss.

30 POETRY This is not a time to think the trumpet vine is sullen. Rather: the trumpet’s bell is but a prelude. It says we all are beautiful at least once. And, if you’d watch over me, we can be beautiful again.

D.A. POWELL 31 bryan d. dietrich

Gotham Wanes

The mask? Because we were never ugly enough. Because our ugliness was epic. Because we were given to it, because we were so misgiven. You wear one. I wear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had them fabricated, poured out in gold and beaten. Most wore them to the grave. In Mexico the living wear them, not to scare the dead away, but as invitation. They leave candy on the mounds of those they mourn. New Orleans? Women wear them in order to bare everything else. Men wear them in order to watch. I can remember, back before it all grows grim, making one out of the news, trying to paste it together. I remember my mother helping me. I don’t really remember my father. Something like a face, like the man in the moon. I understand we’re hardwired this way, to make faces before anything else. It’s why we see the Madonna in mold, alien architecture in Martian crater creep. We keep looking for those first faces, first familia. Every culture, every eon. Witness the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, one hundred seventy centuries gone. They call him Sorcerer. They call me Knight. We have always lived in the dark.

32 POETRY rae armantrout

Spent

Su≠er as in allow.

List as in want.

Listless as in transcending desire, or not rising to greet it.

To list is to lean, dangerously, to one side.

Have you forgotten?

Spent as in exhausted.

RAE ARMANTROUT 33 Transactions

1

What do we like best about ourselves?

Our inability to be content.

We might see this restlessness

as a chip not yet cashed in.

2

You appear because you’re lonely

maybe. You would not say that.

You come to tell me you’re saving money by cooking for yourself.

You’ve figured out what units you’ll need

to exchange for units if you intend

I know I mustn’t interrupt

34 POETRY 3

Hectic and flexible,

flames are ideal new bodies for us!

RAE ARMANTROUT 35 melanie braverman

“The pond is sheathed in ice”

The pond is sheathed in ice, a duck troubles the reeds, the air around us still enough to hear the baby stir, but we don’t know where it is yet. By the force of our longing it is getting made for us, as thrilled people, palms full of seed, long for the chickadees to light, and they do. Light.

36 POETRY “No longer if we’ll get cancer but when”

No longer if we’ll get cancer but when, the doctor said. Now questions accrete around the irritant like pearl: Not when but how? Not how but whom? And then why. And then why not. I take a can of ashes to the beach and empty them into the wind. Outside the trash man collects bottles like a miser rattling his jewels, tossing them onto the growing heap.

MELANIE BRAVERMAN 37 “I used to love the run-up to a storm”

I used to love the run-up to a storm, watching from the porch as the grown-ups hurried to bring things in, my mother rum- maging through drawers for a flashlight, cursing: nothing was where it was supposed to be in our house. It can’t be so, but the only people I ever remember huddled in the basement were my mother and me, suspended in that eerie half-light like bats. We’ve just spent a week like this, my mother perched in a chair above the water keeping watch for the next bad thing. We were happy so sometimes she’d let the vigil rest, the sentry of her shoulders easing to a more receptive pose, a quarter moon, until something called her back to the watch, mother first no longer but this white, foremost light. You can read by it. You can see.

38 POETRY “I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal”

I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal, silver fur agleam against the sand like a coin thrown down in a losing bet. What left this bounty of meat on the beach to rot? I watched the neighbor’s small boys skirt the dead seal the way sandpipers tease them- selves in the surf, dodging up and back along the body’s shore. “It’s dead,” I told their father as he ambled behind them up the beach. He called to the little boys, his voice borne toward them on the mild breeze. “Boys, come back,” he said, and they did not.

MELANIE BRAVERMAN 39

THE V IEW FROM HERE

“The View from Here” is an occasional feature in which people from various fields comment on their experience of poetry. This is the ninth installment of the series.

lili taylor

Out There

I was su≠ering from Weltschmerz one day (translation: woe for the world). My chest was hurting. I call my dear friend, Marie (the poet Marie Howe). “Marie, my heart hurts.” “You have Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, right? There’s a poem at the beginning. I can’t remember the name. The first line is something like, ‘sorrow everywhere.’ Read it to me.”

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. — From A Brief for the Defense

I finish reading the poem. Neither one of us says anything for a moment. Breathe. I look up. I see a tree through the window. I hear a robin singing. I see the sky. Clouds gently moving. A poet told me that the job description of the poet is to say the unsayable. Another poet said no matter which way you cut it poems are about emotion. They are about deep emotion. My work (acting) involves emotions. How do I translate the emo- tions into something actable? How do I sort through them? Specify and name them? A poet once told me that originally the poet’s job was to name things of this world. In a way, I am trying to name things with my emotions. When I begin work on a script I go from the beginning and distill each scene down to its essence. And then I try to name each scene with a word or two or more. It’s almost as if I’m trying to write a poem for each scene; articulating the inchoate, indescribable, un- knowable. So, I go through the script and I go through and through it, with my mind and without it. Much the same way as when I’m read- ing a poem. And then I put the script down when the play or movie begins. Good acting, like a good poem, remains mysterious to me. I couldn’t tell you what it means, but I know it. I used to try so hard to understand a poem. I was being vigilant

LILI TAYLOR 43 instead of receptive. If the poem is saying the unsayable, I don’t need to articulate it back to myself with words. The poet has done that for me. If poems are about emotions, then that is the language I need to use when I’m reading them. Poetry has helped me become more versed, so to speak, in the language of emotion. I would be thrilled if I could be as “out there” with my acting as poets are with their poems. Leaping toward that stu≠ which is bub- bling around us, unseen but felt. It’s uncharted and raw — a kind of pure undiluted matter brought back for those who want it:

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have I described it, I can’t, somehow, I never will.

How is it that I didn’t spend my whole life being happy, loving other human beings’ faces.

And wave after wave, the ocean smells like lilacs in late August. — From Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, by Franz Wright

44 POETRY leopold froehlich

One-Track Mind

My job as a magazine editor requires a fair amount of travel. I console myself during these trips by listening to an iPod. From the moment I hail a cab until the moment I approach a hotel desk, the iPod plays constantly. I use it to shut out the world. During the course of these travels, I have developed a compul- sion of listening over and over to one track. I played Darrell Scott’s “This Beggar’s Heart” fifty times in a row. There is a character in one of Thomas Bernhard’s novels who listens incessantly to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the phonograph arm returning throughout the night to the beginning of the record. I’ve done that. I’ve listened to Hans Knappertsbusch conducting the Marcia funebre again and again on a flight somewhere. This is a form of madness, yet I prefer to believe that song flour- ishes on refrain. We hear things in a thirtieth listen that were not there during the first twenty-nine. There is comfort in familiarity, in knowing exactly which note will play next. And there are many glo- rious moments worth hearing a thousand times, like Oumar Sow’s guitar solo, which rises unexpectedly three and a half minutes into Cheikh Lô’s “N’Dawsile.” Which brings me to my point. My friend Amy gave me The Caedmon Poetry Collection: three cds of poets reading their own work, which I loaded on my iPod. I am always glad when a poem plays. William Carlos Williams shows up on shu±e at Sea-Tac, reading “The Seafarer,” or Gertrude Stein appears out of the blue in Pittsburgh, declaiming “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” After one ridiculous trip to Los Angeles, I flew back to Chicago — a three-and-a-half-hour journey — listening to Joseph Brodsky read George Kline’s translation of his “Nature Morte.” The poem clocks in at 4:17, so it must have been repeated fifty times as the plane crawled across the continent. I will admit to some confusion about the poet’s words. Brodsky described his English as “better for reading and listening than for speaking.” What I heard in his weary threnody was song: I was com- pelled by the sound of his voice. I found his Russian accent familiar and soothing. I was moved by the cadence and lilt of his recitation.

LEOPOLD FROEHLICH 45 When I got home I dug out my volume of Brodsky and read the poem. I discovered that I had misheard a number of phrases, and the text clarified a few of my uncertainties.* But that mattered little. To hear “Nature Morte” is to hear song, a song as old and im- mutable as blind Homer. “The song was there before the story,” said Brodsky, who was indeed a singer. I am dismayed when I hear questions about the utility of poetry. How do you use poetry, and what is it good for? This is odd. Poetry is song. No one asks, What use is song? What use are birds? Poetry has no use. It matters because of its inutility. “Poetry is not a form of entertainment,” wrote Brodsky, “and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but our anthropological, genetic goal, our linguistic, evolutionary beacon.” People go out of their way to ignore this beacon today, but they do so at their own peril. “By failing to read or listen to poets,” Brodsky wrote in “An Immodest Proposal,” “a society dooms itself to infe- rior modes of articulation — of the politician, or the salesman, or the charlatan — in short, to its own.” Maybe Brodsky had this right, and this is the highest purpose of poetry, or song: It keeps us from listening to fools.

*Isaiah Berlin tells of a 1990 lecture Brodsky gave at the British Academy: “No one understood a thing ... nor did I. He was speaking English quickly, swallowing his words. And I couldn’t catch it, couldn’t quite understand what he was saying. Lis- tening to him was enjoyable, because he was animated, but I didn’t understand until afterwards, when I read [the text].”

46 POETRY xeni jardin

Everything Moves To Live

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world. — Alpha 60, the ibm mainframe villain, Alphaville

Alphaville is my favorite film. It has become more of a personal totem than a favorite film, really. It’s a code I carry around with me, like the encryption strings my hacker friends store on usb key fobs and wear around their necks. I first saw it in the early nineties, around the same time I started working with computers. I grew up in a family of painters, poets, and musicians, so aligning with machines felt like a thrilling “fuck you” to my family at the time. But Alphaville merged those seemingly opposing realms in a way that mirrors my life now, and the way I have come to understand what life is: there is poetry in the network. There is math in music. Metal dreams of becoming a spaceship. And the spaceship dreams of flying toward stars. The film follows the tale of Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a hard-boiled, trench-coat-wearing film noir detective sent to the city of Alphaville to rescue its citizens (many of whom, conveniently, happen to be total babes) from the techno-totalitarian clutches of an evil ibm mainframe computer. Love is illegal in the dictatorship of Alpha 60. Expressing grief, desire, or tenderness, even reading poetry, these are all crimes punishable by death — specifically, staged executions in which prisoners are lined up and shot on the edge of a swimming pool filled with with synchronized Busby Berkeley-style bathing beauties. “What transforms darkness into light?” Alpha 60 asks Lemmy Caution during a grim interrogation scene. “La poésie,” he answers. In Alphaville, poetry is emotional code that unlocks freedom. Throughout, Jean-Luc Godard references the work of Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges and his contemporary, the French surrealist Paul Éluard. The film’s opening line, referenced above, was inspired by Borges’s essay “Forms of a Legend.”

XENI JARDIN 47 Éluard’s 1926 collection Capital of Pain is the book that an under- ground poet-friend passes in secret to Caution, a book that Caution in turn passes on to Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina), the beautiful daughter of the evil scientist who designed and programmed Alpha 60. In what I have always believed is the film’s most transcendent and beautiful scene, Natacha clutches Éluard’s book to her chest. She is delivering a dream-soliloquy which I understand is from Éluard’s 1924 work, “Mourir de ne pas mourir” (“Dying Of Not Dying”):

Because I love you, everything moves We must advance to live Aim straight ahead toward those you love

I went toward you, endlessly toward the light If you smile, it enfolds me all the better The rays of your arms pierce the mist

I have played this film and read selections from those Éluard col- lections for each person I’ve fallen in love with over the last twenty years (not that there have been so many of them). They express for me, better than my own words can, what it means to submit to the vulnerability that love requires. They capture what it means to ac- cept that control and order are illusion, never mind what technology promises; chaos and chance are the magic in intimacy. They remind me of the eventuality of pain that any deep bond with another per- son entails, no matter how rich and blissful the sweet parts are. The last guy who sat through Alphaville with me, who tolerated me reading Éluard stanzas over Skype in bad French, who received my copy-pasted Borges passages over im late at night — he was the first who really understood them. And, I think, the first who really understood me. I didn’t intend the Godard-Éluard Test as a test, but I suppose it ended up being one. Because he really is a keeper. I am not a poet. I am a blogger. We bloggers su≠er less and earn more than poets. We are more vain, and less patient. The work we produce may yield quick rewards and praise, but our output fades just as quickly into the infinitely-expanding black hole of Google. What poets produce is less easily found, but endures the fickle flow of mediums, each eclipsing the last. My creative mentor, the poet who adopted me as a teen and taught me all I know about writing, tells me this: “Poetry is not adornment.

48 POETRY Poetry is the truth.” Poetry is, you might say, the command-line prompt of the human operating system, a stream of characters that calls forth action, that elicits response. Lemmy Caution knew this, when he recited Borges to hack Alpha 60 and win the heart of his chosen babe.

XENI JARDIN 49 jerry boyle

Debris

Law is considered a scholarly profession, so we lawyers consider ourselves scholars. Worse, those of us who concentrate on litigating trials and appeals consider ourselves polymaths. A litigator’s exper- tise is process, not substance, so we take any case that walks in the door, assuming we can master the substantive law with our schol- arly erudition. It’s no wonder we’re notorious know-it-alls. And on no subject is our conceit more apparent than literature. We trade in words, so some of us fancy ourselves writers and, yes, even poets. I have a friend I met as an adversary — we tried a case together, on opposite sides. Flaubert presumably intended the pejorative con- notation of “every notary bears within him the debris of a poet” for lawyers like my friend — he always wants to talk about literature, and I oblige him. But while my former adversary has forgiven me for besting him in the courtroom, he will never forgive me for admitting that, no, I don’t love literature for its own sake, but rather because it sharpens my persuasive rhetoric. He contends I’m abusing my “cre- ative talents” by practicing law, but I’m quite certain he’s projecting. I am a lawyer first, foremost, and always. For me, literature serves the law, not the other way around. As I see it, Flaubert couldn’t cut it in law school anyway and dropped out, leaving lawyers to resolve the denotation of his poetic debris. We take out the poet’s trash. Poets have the luxury of posing questions because the consequences of poetic equivocation are abstract. But lawyers are compelled to pose answers, because lawsuits result in unequivocal judgments which deprive our clients of life, liberty, or property. T.S. Eliot, a banker, was presumably familiar with the Golden Rule: if you have the gold, you make the rules. Bankers draft their documents with a relentless precision designed to reserve every advantage to the lender. But the lender’s advantage is often purloined by the borrower’s lawyer in litigation. In one case, I focused on an errant comma, resulting in a dangling modifying clause, upon which the whole case hung. Judges and juries don’t give “maybe” for an answer, so I argued the doctrine of the last antecedent, and that dangling clause fell to earth with a crushing blow on the bank’s position.

50 POETRY I suspect it was experiences like that which induced banker Eliot to bemoan “the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.” I know it was poet Eliot who taught me that you can never really be sure what the meaning of “is” is:

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. — From Burnt Norton

Lawyers have a lot to learn from poets. I credit the Oulipian Raymond Queneau for my appreciation and, more important, com- prehension of what is perhaps the longest sentence in the legal canon, Section 341(e) of the Internal Revenue Code. Try making sense of a sentence with 435 words preceding the main verb without a perverse appreciation for arbitrary constraints. That’s a dare, in case you were wondering. Or try convincing a tribunal that it’s all right for a raunchy maga- zine to publish long-forgotten salacious photos of a now-famous actress without her permission. Well, the photos previously appeared in another (albeit less vulgar) magazine, so republication hardly invaded her privacy. And the text appended to the photos, while sug- gestive, was hardly libelous. Wallace Stevens cut right to the heart of the case:

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. — From Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Unlike Flaubert, Stevens graduated from law school, and practiced law. He fairly presented both sides of the dispute, but surely knew, deep in his dark lawyer’s heart, that the only choice is, precisely, both. So do I. Sometimes the clients are just wrong, and there’s not much we can do. We’re not poets, so we know we can’t win every time. All we can do is dispose of the poet’s debris.

JERRY BOYLE 51 michaelanne petrella

Like, A Noticeable Amount of Pee

My poetry experience has always been confined to a scholastic atmosphere, with one exception. My dad made me memorize Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Time to Rise” when I was ten. It was a very hilarious inside joke that he and my mom had about shaming me into waking up before noon. Beyond that, elementary school introduced me to a whole world of poems that rhymed with cat and bat. Most of the poems that I wrote at that time were either scary or funny, and nothing in between. I wrote a poem once called “It.” I believe it went something like, “It lay on the ground, it does not make a sound.” I remember thinking how scary it would be to give as little informa- tion as possible so that the reader’s imagination would fill in the gaps. So, by that point, poetry, for me, was either a series of ominous ter- ror “images” or rhyming poems making fun of school lunch meat. It wasn’t until college that my legitimate poetry experience began. I hadn’t been looking forward to my poetry classes at first, but by being forced to take them I found that certain kinds of poetry were in sync with my own writing sensibilities. For instance, haiku class was one of my favorites because it allowed for strange wording. We could write whatever we wanted within the standard haiku form. We were encouraged to mimic the greats like Buson or Bashō, and invoke natural images and subtle wisdom. I remember liking haiku quite a bit, but not necessarily for its content. I liked the sound of translation. When it was translated, it sounded almost Jedi-like. There was this famous haiku by Issa:

Don’t kill that fly! Look — it’s wringing its hands, wringing its feet.

I remember thinking that I wanted everything I wrote to sound like that; I liked the idea of making poems sound as though they were translated. I wanted my poems to have a Björk-like lyric quality, where everything was so oddly specific, but at the same time, inap- propriately funny.

52 POETRY Many of my haikus went like this:

Baby in the yard. Where is the baby’s holder? Holding the cell phone.

Or:

Mashed cantaloupe soup It does not taste like you’d think Unfortunately

Or:

There is a stupid Stupidly stupid stupid Stupid stupid horse.

Often I would get a laugh from one or more students, and almost always a laugh from the professor (of course, not without obligatory head shaking that signified fake admonishment). I found that most people actually appreciated humor in poems. There was a willing au- dience, eager to hear something that didn’t make them sad or bored. Most of the students’ poems were about death, grandma, grandma’s death, rain, or questions about life, all of which were overwrought, indulging in cliches and dramatic description. It was odd that these college-level English majors didn’t have the ability to show without telling. Many poems were thinly-veiled confessions or metaphors by way of rain or wound imagery. Sometimes it rained directly inside of the wounds. Sometimes the rain was hurtful. Sometimes the wound itself rained blood onto their cheekbones, which implied eye blood, I guess. I think it was for lack of practice in some instances, but I couldn’t help but feel that some of it was just unbridled therapy. In our most emotional moments, we don’t tend to edit. I found that funny poetry worked well because it was all about editing and timing. Much of my time was spent whittling down the exact joke, or emotion, that I was trying to convey. The best moment from class was when I read a particularly short poem that ended with the lines, “When my dog Pepper peed in the pool. Like, a noticeable amount of pee.” It got a

MICHAELANNE PETRELLA 53 laugh, but the laughter felt like a big sigh of relief, as it was the last poem read aloud during a day of dead grandma poems, but more than that, it became a classroom example of solid editing. My professor pointed to various parts of my poem where I could have elaborated and how that would have basically killed the punch line. She said that in its simplicity, the emotion was stronger, and as a result, the reaction greater. After that, we had a group discus- sion about editing, timing, and the word “pee.” Learning to make poetry funny gave me some invaluable editing experience. I found an ally in poetry, and although I don’t write po- etry professionally, I know that my experience with it helps to inform my editing process, and hopefully makes me a funnier writer along the way. Polonius said it best, during his ironically rambling preface in Hamlet, that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Or, as my incisive profes- sor would say, “Brevity = Wit.” So keeping that wisdom in mind, I’ll end this in the same way: Good poetry = Edited poetry.

54 POETRY COMMENT

michael hofmann

Big Les!

Taller When Prone, by Les Murray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24.00.

Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression, by Les Murray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $13.00.

In the beginning was speed, celerity, swiftness of thought. A poet who gabbled his poems like an auctioneer or a racing commentator, because that was the speed of his thought (how did his hand, taking dictation, keep up, even with the special make of pen my son likes to call an “autopilot”?). Adapting, as Joseph Brodsky liked to do, “bird” to “bard,” Murray truly is the original “High-speed Bard,” the pen- dant to the stunned — and stunning — kingfisher in his poem, with its “gold under-eye whiskers” and “beak closing in recovery.” We, listening, managed to follow between one- and three-fifths of the action. (It was enough, thanks, it was plenty.) Speed begat range, sweep, domain. At the far end of range, there was still a full tank. A big and a great poem like “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever” arrives at the end of its rousingly uncon- ventional new idyll without even breaking sweat:

Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants has essentially achieved them, long pants, which have themselves been underwear repeatedly, and underground more than once, it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,

to moderate grim vigour with the knobble of bare knees, to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water, slapping flies with a book on solar wind or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,

to be walking meditatively among green timber, through the grassy forest

MICHAEL HOFMANN 57 towards a calm sea and looking across to more of that great island and the further topics.

Further topics, you think? (It’s not tropics, though you do the double-take each time.) At the end of eighty-two majestic and exhaustive lines on the cultural and historical implications of wearing shorts? Whatever next? Connection-making. Will and imagination, two escaped convicts armed with machetes not much caring whether they followed the Queen’s Highway or yomped across country. A man who knows. A Continental poet. (The continent in question is “that great island,” Terra Australis.) Then there were delicacy (“Roman Cage Cups” on the frailest and most improbably enduring of glass artifacts), whimsy (“Homage to the Launching-Place”: a poem about bed), silliness, the love of a giggle, a poem that was always ready to cross a busy street for a joke (“Lunch & Counter Lunch,” the title of a book — thanks, I’ll eat it here — from 1974). An absurdly small turning circle, the sixpence of yore. Writing that seemed not to care if it was followed or not. That made sense in its own mind. Even when (as he put it) “driv- ing a pen,” Murray is still much faster and defter than the rest of us, unencumbered, reading him. (This is why, for all his pained noise to the contrary, he remains helplessly and unalterably an elitist; it is his mind that condemns him to that status. The author of “First Essay on Interest” — “Not usury, but interest” — isn’t about to be flavor of the month anywhere. Someone with a serious interest in interest?!) Then there was coverage. He wrote a zoo (it was called Translations from the Natural World). He wrote a history of the first half of the twentieth century (it was a page-turner called Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse). He wrote anguished, eminently “confessional” auto- biography (it was called Subhuman Redneck Poems). As befits a gifted, energetic, and sprawling poet now into his seventies, Murray has a publishing history to match, with at least three selected poems and two collecteds (any and all of them are worth snapping up when met with). Taller When Prone — both a good-humored “fat” joke and a sort of indomitably rebellious (and quasi-scriptural) Beatitude — is accounted his twelfth individual vol- ume, but I don’t think anyone’s seriously counting. Killing the Black Dog is a sort of further “selected,” pairing a 1996 talk on the poet’s —

58 POETRY on the face of it, highly surprising — struggle with depression and a cull of twenty-five of his previously published poems on or from or out of the subject. The books — the books in general — are maybe more à thèse than they were once, when they seemed to be just gloriously unpredictable and wildly compendious, anything and everything, prolific, equable, and dazzling encounters with city/coun- try, narrative/image, sound/vision, past/present, domestic/abroad, personal/essayistic, experiential/speculative, but that’s at least in part because of late the poet has been alarmingly stalked by his subject mat- ter: the “stormy” volume (his word) Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) was “so called in honour of my social class,” a subject that roused again perhaps unexpectedly fierce passions in the poet; Conscious and Verbal (2001) related his terrifying brush with a near-fatal liver condition, described with Murray’s typical, cool, inimitable brio:

Some accident had released flora

who live in us and will eat us when we stop feeding them the earth. I’d rehearsed the private o∞ce of the grave, ceased excreting, made corpse gases. — From Travels with John Hunter

Some of the subsequent books accordingly had something remedial, convalescent, narrow-gauge about them: Poems the Size of Photographs (2003), The Biplane Houses (2007). I wonder just how much this has to do with the forsaking of large-scale formats (perhaps a residual fatigue from Fredy Neptune), long, wide, sprawling poems, typically of two or three pages, a loping, accommodating rhythm; and the writ- ing of shorter poems in shorter stanzas and shorter lines, often fussily rhymed, and rather sharper or even shriller in tone. The big books of the eighties — The Vernacular Republic, The People’s Otherworld, The Daylight Moon — o≠ered one exuberant scintillating master- piece after another in sequence in their tables of contents: for instance, “The Powerline Incarnation,” “The Returnees,” “Employment for the Castes in Abeyance,” and “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle.” Or: “1980 in a Street of Federation Houses,” “The Butter Factory,” “Bats’ Ultrasound,” and “Roman Cage Cups.” Or again: “The Quality of Sprawl,” “Shower,” “Two Poems in Memory of my Mother,” and “Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman.” (There

MICHAEL HOFMANN 59 is pleasure in merely quoting such idiosyncratic titles — like going through great historic team-sheets from memory — even without their evocative appeal to the instructed reader.) The inescapable and true conclusion is that for ten or twenty years around the turn of the millennium there was no better poet writing in English than Les Murray. Murray remains a phenomenal poet, and if the new poems are less striking and maybe a tad less wonderful than the older ones, then it is either that we, his older readers, have long had it too good; or that he is writing smaller, though just as well; or that the new poems need a little time to unfurl in our minds before they can rival the status of their predecessors, simply because such bold and mannered things always take time to acquire resonance and familiarity — and probably all three. Contemporaries of G.M. Hopkins, reading his poems as they emerged, would have had cause to feel the same way. Certainly for new readers the imperative remains: start immediately, and start anywhere; and wonder, not where Murray has been — because for the last quarter century at least he has been waiting to be found, like an undiscovered continent — but where you have been, yourselves. The thing about Murray is that he needs little or nothing to run on. He is a poetical perpetual motion machine. He doesn’t need, therefore, intense experience, or its mental/intellectual equivalent, something to prove — a bee in his bonnet — a cause — to write great poetry. He takes no ball, and runs with it. He doesn’t actually need the Taj Mahal (with which Taller When Prone begins — “From a Tourist Journal”), though there is of course no one one would rather have writing about it: “In a precinct of liver stone, high / on its dais, the Taj seems bloc hail.” It remains the case, though: the way there is just as good, or even a little better, “over honking roads / being built under us, past baby wheat / and undoomed beasts and walking people.” The smiling attentiveness, the respect for the blur of other beings and becomings, are pure, best Murray. Taller When Prone is like a book of late Rilke, stray personal dedi- cations, handwritten improvisations, travel notes, set topics, and young ladies’ poetry album poems (Albumblätter), but then tipped or armed or inflected with a memory of the reliable magic of the New Poems of 1907. It is indeed “further topics”: brown suits and bastardy (united in the person of the former Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke); an ancient pear tree that after more than a century continues to bear fruit; a pork sandwich, its paper wrapper

60 POETRY scrunched up in — typical Murray-ism, two parts oxymoron to one of surrealism! — a “greaseproof rose”; another retelling of the trag- edy of his father and his Uncle Archie; the poet’s strange mute cat. The book celebrates “Cherries from Young”:

One lip-teased drupe or whole sweet gallop poured out of cardboard

and “Eucalypts in Exile”:

Their suits are neater abroad, of denser drape, un-nibbled: they’ve left their parasites at home.

It keeps a weather eye out for the police — always a bête bleu of Murray’s — (in “Croc”), and, in a splendid blizzard of estuary Saxon, proposes, Marianne Moore-style, an unlikely new name for London’s fourth airport: “so savour this name: London Sexburga Airport.” It hymns the new fast metaphysics of motorways (“I’ll ride a slow vehicle / / before cars are slow / as country was slow” — the “slow vehicle” is Murray’s hearse-to-be), and recalls an ingenious way of getting across (boiling-hot) tarred roads relatively unscathed during “the barefoot age” (“The Filo Soles”). Like the Neue Gedichte, the poems average out at around sonnet- length and sonnet-punch. The cobbler’s widow in “Winding Up at the Bootmaker’s” (“Kneeling up in Mediterranean black, / reaching down the numbered parcels / as if returning all their wedding gifts”) has something of Rilke’s notes on life at the Rodins’, or his Paris poem “The Blind Man,” where a blind beggar is described as extend- ing his hand “almost formally, as if in marriage.” A poem like “The Suspect Corpse,” fourteen lines from

The dead man lay, nibbled, between dark carriages of a rocky river,

a curled load of himself, in cheap clothes crusted in dried water,

MICHAEL HOFMANN 61 down to its denouement: “After three months, he could only / gen- eralise, and had started smiling” seems to me to be very evidently in communion with Rilke’s “Washing the Corpse,” at the end of which “one without a name / lay there, bare and clean, and gave orders.” “Generalise” — a refusal to incriminate anyone or himself under the torture that is forensics — is unexpected and funny and canny, and “smiling” — the skull’s grin — is grimly sweet. Truly, in both cases, dead men talk. As with Rilke, physical laws change direction, gestures and appearances acquire a di≠erent meaning, and power is vested in unexpected quarters. The delicate pastry makes an impermeable layering for tender feet in “The Filo Soles.” “Midi” begins with a cloudscape of exceptional firmness, “Muscles and torsoes of cloud / ascended over the mountains,” and ends (by agency of the blue herb, itself described as “a strange maize / deeply planted as mass javelins”) as an even more solid wonder: “sweet walling breath / under far-up gables of the lavender.” “The Farm Terraces” celebrates these wonders of (no pun intended) terrifying human persistence and anonymous, collective labor (“at the orders of hunger / or a pointing lord”), a form of planetary home improvement, visible, if I’m not mistaken, even from space, “baskets of rich made soil / boosted up poor by the poor.” Everywhere there are these little, or not so little, wonders, whether they meet with Murray’s approval or not: “A full moon always rises at sunset / and a person is taller when prone” and the drolly conservative musing “Soldiers now can get in the family way” are both taken from “The Conversations.” There is the blind man who says to the poet, over the phone, “I can hear you smiling,” or the mute cat, “A charcoal Russian / he opens his mouth like other cats / and mimes a greeting mew.” The language knots, bulges, scintillates. Everywhere organic matter is being pressed to coal, or coal to diamonds. The e≠ect can be silly (I can see and hear Murray’s cracked giggle) — “Raj-time uniforms,” “plum Crimean fig,” “the drunk heir-splitting / of work- ing for parents” — but it is never arch, and it is sometimes sublime: “as bees summarise the garden,” or

Chefs’ knives peeled green islands as the climate turned bohemian over Woop Woop of the wind farms and the bloodshot television

62 POETRY (I’ll confess I don’t understand the “bloodshot television” — perhaps the turbines interfere with the reception?). “Infinite Anthology” celebrates a sort of folk poetry close to Murray’s heart, wonderfully resourceful anonymous linguistic inventions that add, often slyly or disrespectfully, to the gaiety of things: “daylight — second placeget- ter when winner is very superior to field,” “dandru≠ acting — the sti≠est kind of Thespian art,” “Baptist Boilermaker — co≠ee and soda (an imagined Puritan cocktail),” “limo — limousin cattle / proud — castrated but still interested.”

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A surprise in Killing the Black Dog is Murray’s prose: he can really write it, and not like Lowell, say, in 91 Revere Street or Near the Unbalanced Aquarium, like the poetry, only more so — thicker impasto of adjectives, more proper names, the same furtive emblems, the same wounding, pivotal scenes — but as its own thing, with the clarity and good order and communicativeness of prose. Murray doesn’t a≠ect to like prose — in this he is like Ted Hughes, who thought writing so much of it (the seven hundred pages of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being) was bad for him, and even ultimately hastened his death — but he is undeniably good at it — plain, brave sentences, descriptive, not overly luxuriant language, logical connections, pur- poseful paragraphs, e≠ective pacing:

Every day, though, sometimes more than once a day, sometimes all day, a coppery taste in my mouth, which I termed intense insipidity, heralded a sense of helpless, bottomless misery in which I would lie curled in a foetal position on the sofa with tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stu≠ not worth calling thought or imagery: it was more like shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain. During and after such attacks, I would be prostrate with inertia, as if all my energy had gone into a black hole.

Murray gives an impressively clear account of his condition, its sudden and unexpected onset — return, really — following “a well- attended poetry reading at the bowling club” in 1988, at the end of which one of the audience “cheerfully recalled to me one of the nick- names [a former schoolmate] had bestowed on me thirty-odd years

MICHAEL HOFMANN 63 previously, and within a day or two I began to come apart”; its roots in the physical and sexual humiliations he was daily o≠ered at school (“erocide” is Murray’s term for it, “destruction of sexual morale”); and the early death of his mother and the guilt of the two grief- stricken survivors:

From just on puberty, I lived in funeral: mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead, we’d boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden. Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle. — From Burning Want

The boiling of the “sweat-brown cloth” is especially bleak: here are two monks, Brother Les and Brother Cecil, the last of an order. Australia (the “tall poppy syndrome”), and Australian womanhood in particular, reflexive left-wing politics (encoded as “1968” or the culture of “the demo”), fashion, hippies, Nazism, “the Totalitarian Age” of privilege, atheism, feminism, cosmopolitan chic — all got whirled up together into a sort of enemy maelstrom of desire- to-hurt. Their presence as words is always a bad sign in Murray’s poems — Taller When Prone has a poem called “The 41st Year of 1968,” dedicated to the memory of the “173 dead in the Victorian fires of 2009” — because the reader knows he is in for a dull blast of stodgy fury. “The worst way to have chronic depression,” Murray writes in Killing the Black Dog, “is to have it unconsciously, to be in a burning rage and not know you are angry.” Prose — not the prose here, other, more polemical, occasional prose — cops most of the blame, for being “more liable than poetry to be infiltrated with the colours of confusion and obsession,” but it is a strange and terrifying thing to see Murray the poet as well — a generous, charming, equable, and accommodating soul, who gives equal rights and equal time to nature as feather, flower, scale, and rock, (and to the human counterparts of these things as well) — become vicious, embattled, humorless, and vengeful. Perhaps none of the poems in Killing the Black Dog are really among Murray’s best: they are too “hot,” too emotional, too determinedly therapeutic. They let the dogs out. The e≠ect is a little like having Charles Bukowski, say — some hero of Beat autobiography — re-written by Marianne Moore: it’s a waste of both of them, especially Moore. (Although I read them as proof that this too — the rawly personal —

64 POETRY is among Murray’s gifts.) There are poems in which he writes about depression, rather as Lowell writes about mania, from outside, from memory, from afterward:

Those years trapped in a middling cream town where full-grown children hold clear views and can tell from his neck he’s really barefoot though each day he endures shoes,

he’s what their parents escaped, the legend of dogchained babies on Starve Gut Creek; be friends with him and you will never be shaved or uplifted, cool or chic.

He blusters shyly — poverty can’t a≠ord instincts. Nothing protects him, and no one. He must be suppressed, for modernity, for youth, for speed, for sexual fun. — From A Torturer’s Apprenticeship

This is a disturbingly lucid account of bullying, and the poten- tial for the further, downward transmission of more bullying (“this one might have made dark news”) that Murray found in himself. “A Hindenburg of vast rage / rots, though, above your life” — though “rots,” as if the thing had been not a blimp but a marrow, is terrify- ing — somehow still stacks up alongside Lowell’s coolly and amiably apologetic “when I have one head / again, not many, like a bunch of grapes.” “Performance” builds on Malcolm Lowry’s eight-liner “After Publication of Under the Volcano”:

I starred last night, I shone: I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot darkness with a parasol of brilliants and a peewee descant on a flung bit; I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding to mantle and aurora from a crown, I was fouettés, falls of blazing paint, para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,

MICHAEL HOFMANN 65 loose gold o≠ fierce toeholds of white, a finale red-tongued as a haka leap: that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was of course inconsolable.

But I don’t know that I know anything like “Rock Music” (“Sex is a Nazi”) or “A Stage in Gentrification” (“Most Culture has been an East German plastic bag / pulled over our heads”) or “Demo”(“go choke on these quatrain tablets. / I grant you no claim ever”) — or at least if I do, then, it’s like gra∞ti or heckles or green vitriol, unsigned. These are poems Yeats might have theorized or promulgated in dreams but didn’t write, sour outbursts of loathing and unquenchable aggression. Writing not about but squarely out of his victimhood, Murray is too hard on others, too easy on himself. Poetry here shrivels to gifted labeling and sloganeering. Things normally played with and toyed with are here handled in deadly earnest, as weapons. All superiority disappears, except a desperate need to be superior in close combat. It was surely to punish and forestall just such writing that Yeats delivered his stricture on arguments with others mak- ing for “rhetoric.” The sense of the poet as embattled and opposed acquires an unhealthy prominence, a centrality even. It was one part of Murray’s hope that he might be able to write “the dog” out of his system; another — as witness the title of the pres- ent volume — that it might have failed to survive its host’s near-fatal liver disorder in 1996. It was in that same year that he wrote the bulk of what was originally given as a talk, and with it, the sober makings of a happy ending:

My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment. I no longer wear only stretch-knit clothes and drawstring pants. I no longer come down with bouts of weeping or reasonless exhaustion.… If I have a regret, in the sudden youth and health of my mind in its fifty-eighth year, it is that I’ve got well so late in my life.

In a brief Afterword from 2009, Murray concedes he was over- optimistic: “I know now that you can’t kill the Dog, and that thus my earlier account has the wrong title: it should be called Learning

66 POETRY the Black Dog.” Still, he sounds a little easier, on himself and with the rest of us, and with them (his real and imagined enemies). One feels for him, and with him, in his last sentence:

What I still do mourn is the terrible waste of energy the Dog has exacted from me, over my lifetime and especially in my twenty horror years, and how much more I might have achieved if I’d owned a single, healthy mind working on my side.

Poetry, in Murray’s admirable practice of it, has been a function of health, of wholesome excess, a margin of clear profit. He is not some sort of John Berryman, luridly and misguidedly asking for “the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him”; rather I see him as a grease monkey fiddling and tooling with language and perception, making idiosyncratic memorial word-machines. Murray’s crisis nar- rowed and crabbed his focus, and turned him in on himself — a shame in one who sees so levelly and far, and who writes so abundantly, and with such generosity and fullness. The poems and prose here are accordingly — cutely, aptly — dedicated, not like his other books, “to the glory of God,” but “to the need of God.” Murray has shown amazing, prodigious strength of character and discipline and bravery and faith, that he allowed neither himself nor his gift to be broken, but that they fought the Dog together, if not to victory — “wer spricht von Sieg,” says Rilke — at least to a standstill.

MICHAEL HOFMANN 67 abigail deutsch

Three Books

Thread, by Michael Palmer. New Directions. $15.95.

Like a library, Michael Palmer’s Thread prioritizes silence. Within its passages, words fall out of circulation, singers swallow their songs, and Orpheus performs without a sound. Even as these poems un- spool, expression itself seems to hang on by a thread. Yet Palmer’s work argues that art — like fireworks — is designed for an explosive finish, for an extermination that doubles as actual- ization. A singer performs while aflame; a dancer splits in two, and both halves continue dancing. When the mystical Master of Shadows announces, “you must commit your verses to the flames,” his dic- tion double-deals: flames signal destruction, but “commit” hints at perpetuation. Thread illuminates the uneasy interdependence of sur- viving and succumbing, knitting them together as intimately as the warp and weft of a textile. Palmer’s most astonishing poems do function like fireworks, seemingly innocuous until they burst out with brilliant implications. A particularly charged example is “Poem Against War”:

She raises both arms to free the clasps binding her hair.

Initially, the two-armed poem seems to embrace a simple argument, pitting the intimacies of the domestic against the hostilities of battle. (One would be forgiven for yawning, even for letting down one’s hair.) But like a document in triplicate, this woman o≠ers three over- lapping readings. In the most obvious, she lifts her hands to free her hair. In another — permitted by a pun on “arms” — she raises weap- ons in a declaration of war. And in the third, which clashes with the second, she adopts a posture of defeat. Here, as throughout Thread, vitality and weakness unite within a single gesture. The second line seems to banish all doubt, assuring us that this poem is merely a hair piece. Yet the vocabulary of combat — words like “free,” “clasps,” and “binding” — break through that line,

68 POETRY suggesting how subtly war invades domestic enclaves. Rarely in war poetry does the personal grow so artfully political. Even as it explores grand questions — war and peace, life and death, the paradoxes of it all — Thread, which is stitched through with lyrics, also comments on what some might consider a less con- sequential concern: the possibilities of the short poem. Some brief works, such as “Poem Against War,” “Move,” and “Di≠erence,” share what we might call the firecracker principle: while tiny, they threaten detonation. They’re quick reads that slow us down, as if to freeze time. (From the non-Palmer canon, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” — influenced, like Palmer’s sparer work, by haiku — exemplifies this phenomenon.) Here’s “Move,” which takes cessa- tion as its subject:

Move that barn a little to the left if you would

and that memory of a barn a little to the right

until they coincide. That’s good.

Palmer’s casual phrasing belies the momentousness of his request. He responds to a common conundrum — the realization that noth- ing is quite as one remembers it — by urging memory and reality to merge. Such a union would prove that age has warped neither his mind nor the barn. The assonance of “right” and “coincide,” like the rhyme of “would” and “good,” emphasizes his desire to liken unlike items, and thereby stop time. And in a way he does, though mostly because he doesn’t: the unacknowledged impossibility of this request grants the poem an emotional richness that takes time to savor. Other short poems take only an instant to appreciate: their gift is to be simple. Listen to “Coloring Song”:

I’d like a life

of cobalt blue, very

ABIGAIL DEUTSCH 69 dark, very deep blue.

What does this mean,

what does it mean?

Nothing at all, nothing

at all. And you?

You can’t hike deep into this poem and lose yourself on its forking paths: the lines are too straightforward. It’s fitting that some little poems should demand little of us, particularly when they take noth- ingness as their subject. Such works speed along with the hours; rather than argue with time, they enforce time’s argument. But the quickness of “Coloring Song” — indeed, perhaps the quickness of any poem — depends partly on its forgettability, which may or may not be intended: Palmer o≠ers plenty of fizzles along with his fireworks. Frequently weaving in fire, shadows, and death — to say nothing of that Master of Shadows character, whose name suggests either Vermeer or vampire — Thread can feel as predictably creepy as a haunted house. Unless you’ve had the experience described below, perhaps you’ll join me in giggling at the prospect:

Say that a spider with a death’s-head crawls into your bed and o≠ers to make love. — From Say (5)

At its best, however, Thread induces tears rather than giggles (and, perhaps, a faint curiosity regarding human/insect interaction). “It is the role of the lovers to set fire to the book” confronts the major paradox that anchors this volume — the inextricability of living and dying, for art and for us:

70 POETRY In the palm garden at night they set fire to the book and read by the light of the book. …...... It is the role of the lovers to be figures of the book.

In the palm garden — a likely pun on Palmer’s name, and a sug- gestion that these lovers loll in his garden of verses — the light of comprehension mingles with the light of destruction: the lovers burn the book in order to read it. In the process, they become literally absorbed in their reading. As “figures of the book,” they might rep- resent the volume, or they might serve as its characters. While they read, they “change” “as the music of the book / ... / instructs,” “now tearing at throat and vein, / then splayfoot, then winged, then ember.” On one level, this poem advances a simple and unsettling argu- ment: we’re just as mortal as the art that moves us. But this garden doubles as a forge; the lovers aren’t exactly dying, but “changing” from flat-footed to fleet to fiery. They transform at last into ember, a dying thing that nonetheless glows with life, reflecting at once time’s slowness and its speed. So, perhaps, goes art, and so do we.

All This Could Be Yours, by Joshua Trotter. Biblioasis. $15.95.

Joshua Trotter’s All This Could Be Yours, a miracle of meter and me- teorology, teems with rollicking weather reports. In “The Soloist,” a siren’s song brews storms as well as other kinds of trouble. The speaker, who evidently runs a kingdom by the sea, notes of his com- panions:

It’s not with sweat their clothes are wet, nor rain. Her song slides down the sides of their bowed brains. I listen to the drips, the drops and trickles. My kingdom drowns.

Like a siren, this debut poet o≠ers mesmerizing music that can set us at sea, inducing a pleasurable madness drawn largely from sound, not sense. Aswim in the drips and drops of assonance, alliteration, and other sonic e≠ects, his poems at their most enchanting nearly register as songs without words.

ABIGAIL DEUTSCH 71 In “Hearing,” as in “The Soloist,” words turn literally to water:

Mornings after we gave up words, we still loved to lie and graze the day awake watching our old chit-chat thatch the street like rain.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon now the dead grow sound limbs to stand upon nourished by discourse we once loved.

In their sodden crypts they sigh awake solitary, listening to the rain heartened by our lost and rousing homilies — the rain

engaging vacant brains it falls upon until everyone we love or once loved is dying tonight or lying still awake

listening, for our sake, as rain rains the dead awake. There’s something diplomatic about rain strewing phrase upon phrase upon ...

But here I pray that none whom once I loved hold words they love from rain. I’m held awake by heavy sentences the rain might lay upon them.

Wooed by acoustics, we accept Trotter’s premise that conversation has condensed into precipitation — partly because the poem enacts that very e≠ect. Like raindrops hitting a roof, words and sounds strike and resound: “lie,” “sigh,” “dying,” “lying,” “I.” Several terms refract into multiple meanings: “morning” hints at “mourning”; “watch” and “awake” suggest “wake”; “sound” and “here” — a homo- phone for “hear” — enforce the poem’s appreciation for verbal music. “Hearing” echoes another poem, “Rain” by the wwi soldier Edward Thomas. For Thomas, rain signified not company but con- demnation:

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die.

72 POETRY Trotter’s revision permits Thomas an exquisite consolation: If rain and words are the same, then Thomas, hearing rain, was really hear- ing poems — as he was, in a way, since the rain inspired him to write a poem — and thus the company of fellow poets eased his isolation. Similarly Trotter, hearing rain, detected Thomas’s poem, and let it leak into “Hearing.” The poem’s pretty but perplexing coda might give us pause. Trotter has not hinted at the significance of keeping words from rain, nor has rain seemed punitive, so what are we to make of his prayer that “none whom once I loved / hold words they love from rain” and his fear of “heavy sentences the rain might lay upon them”? Such mild confusions trickle through All This Could Be Yours, and they exert odd e≠ects. On the one hand they break Trotter’s spells, indicting him of pursuing mood at the expense of meaning. Yet even as our frustration mounts, we notice the poem winking at us from its island perch. It hisses that meaning might not matter after all: if that line doesn’t make sense, neither do a lot of the great things in life, like string cheese, or love. Stop thinking and just listen! Let go! Fall in! (Whether you drop into the waves or cling to the mast depends on your attitude toward meaning, which I confess I’ve always liked.) Like us, Trotter seems at once flummoxed and fascinated by the non- sensical. Recalling e≠orts by Keats, Hardy, and principally Frost, the fledgling poet continues poetry’s long (and, one fears, unreciprocated) love a≠air with birds, which produce an unparsable verse of their own:

Decode the cries of birds, is why I came at dawn to press record on each machine. Oscilloscopes and spectrographs and hoists grew hot then moist then rust I stayed so long unknown among my future-perfect hosts. I stayed so long and never heard them sing a theme I couldn’t transfer note for note to satellites that thronged above unsung repeating birdcall bleep for bleep — but not, I told myself — restating what they sang. I’d caught the pitch, the point remained unclear. Dead air, I said, as I prepared to leave for they, like me, had little to declare so I declared and made myself believe. — Turing World

ABIGAIL DEUTSCH 73 This poem dovetails with Robert Frost’s “Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same,” which describes Eve’s voice weaving into bird- song, infusing “an oversound, / Her tone of meaning but without the words.” Trotter’s speaker is interested not in tone, but in mean- ing: like an augur, he believes the birds carry messages for him. Yet his many machines serve only to record and repeat the pitches they detect, transforming cheeps into bleeps. When he catches the pitch but not the point, he fails to understand that, in birdsong — as, perhaps, in Trotter poems — the pitch is the point. In the end, he declares this medley “dead air,” an expression bor- rowed from that mechanical means of music production, the radio. But his phrase also suggests the birds are singing dead airs, useless songs — and that the poet, who similarly has “little to declare,” is doing the same. That suspicion could trouble us, too, for some of Trotter’s choices, here as in “Hearing,” prove di∞cult to “decode”: Why, for instance, does Trotter toss in a baseball metaphor (“caught the pitch”)? What’s the sense of the tense pun (“future-perfect”)? How heavily are we to weigh his words? The poem’s conclusion might tip the scales in his favor. “So I declared and made myself believe” suggests, among other possibili- ties, that Trotter “declared” something — anything (note the lack of object) — and thereby created belief: even when words o≠er little content, they can produce emotion, just like Trotter’s poetry at its most elegant and indecipherable. Yet in response to Trotter’s flirtations with sense, meaning mavens like myself can’t help but wish for something more, well, meaningful. His many strengths, however, keep us listening and wanting to un- derstand. He makes us, if not birders, then worders, hoping his lovely and peculiar songs will eventually yield secrets worth knowing.

Money Shot, by Rae Armantrout. Wesleyan University Press. $22.95.

Poetic peekaboo is Rae Armantrout’s game. Emotional appeals appear and disappear; speakers flutter in and out like moths; scenes materialize only for moments. Her restraint renders her disclosures both moving and brief, as when a shy person suddenly mentions his secret love a≠air, only to blush and hush up. And it sensitizes us to the undercurrent of feeling that courses through even her most

74 POETRY objective e≠orts. Take “Spin,” which argues (peekaboo!) that we ourselves are barely here:

That we are composed of dimensionless points

which nonetheless spin,

which nonetheless exist in space,

which is a mapping of dimensions.

So intellectual as to feel nearly cold, the lines above might leave us cold if not for the repetition of “nonetheless,” which gestures vaguely — lifting, perhaps, just one index finger — toward amazement. The very subtlety of the move invites us to stare, until the speaker’s amazement, like an a≠ective balloon, seems to pu≠ up beyond its original scale. This poem about the strangeness of size considers the paradoxical mathematics of our existence, which calculates our presence as the sum of our many absences. And it doubles as a sly statement of poetics, explaining how Armantrout often “composes” her own work out of points — near-dimensionless notions whose pithiness comple- ments the brevity of her lines and stanzas. Her purposes emerge, like pointillist images, only when we consider her observations in rela- tionship to one another. Armantout’s points “spin” in various directions and to various e≠ects: sometimes, signifying a change of mood or mode, they choreo- graph poetic turns. Sometimes they tell stories — “spin tales” — and sometimes they add spin to received accounts. And quite often, as in the haunting, haunted “Second Person,” they whirl us around, making us dizzy:

You are known for your voluptuous retreat,

for leaving your absence on the air,

ABIGAIL DEUTSCH 75 illicit, thin.

I know you think I wonder if you think of me.

This reflection spins,

a bead on a string.

I can take it with me.

If sentiment lurks within the severity of “Spin,” “Second Person” declares its openness (“You are known”) only to close itself o≠. Armantrout’s addressee is pointedly dimensionless: she remains absent not only from the speaker, but also from the poem, which o≠ers no description of her. Only her departure maintains staying power, lingering in the air like a whi≠ of perfume. That withdrawal invites uninformative adjectives: her retreat is “voluptuous,” and her absence “illicit, thin” — inappropriate and conflicting descriptors that serve only to limit our insight into her (who might, for all we know, be a “him”). Armantrout tries to undo us, similarly, with this cognitive knot: “I know / you think / I wonder / if you think / of me.” The two halves of this “reflection” function as mirror images, symmetrically balancing first- and second-person pronouns, as well as the word “think.” Like a “bead on a string” — like a “dimensionless point” — that stanza “spins” disorientingly, a circus of “I”s and “you”s that nearly dis- guises the speaker’s reticence: rather eloquently, she has said hardly anything. Yet her statement insinuates that speaker and addressee have toured one another’s mental landscapes, and understand the terrain. How else could you know what someone thinks, or wonders, or thinks you wonder? Like a good therapist, “Second Person” feels intimate without sharing anything we want to know. The “I” in the poem is as vague as the “you,” a vacancy that permits readers to project our personalities onto speaker and addressee alike, transforming them into reflections

76 POETRY of us and of each other. The profoundly stirring achievement of this personal poem is to share nothing personal at all. We don’t merely learn about absence; we experience it for ourselves. Armantrout is far from the only contemporary poet to use distance as a means or end, and yet few others do it to such immediate e≠ect. As we continue our spin through Money Shot, Armantrout’s speakers excuse themselves from her poems in ever more inventive ways. In “Autobiography: Urn Burial,” she writes:

I might hazard that my life’s course has been somewhat unusual. When I say that, I hear both an eager claim and a sentence that attempts to distance itself by adopting the style of a 19th-century English gentleman. The failed authority of such sentences is soothing, like watching Masterpiece Theatre.

Here, the speaker appears to talk about herself while sharing nothing of substance: she might hazard that her life’s course has been some- what unusual (but would she hazard, and how unusual?). Rather than clarify, she analyzes her own sentence, o≠ers two conflicting read- ings, evaluates their combined e≠ect, and compares it to a relevant cultural landmark. As with “Second Person,” we might feel distanced and displaced: If this speaker is her own best critic, then readers and reviewers need not attempt interpretation. Yet we readers and reviewers are an incorrigible bunch. The speaker’s statement, designed to prevent us from thinking, merely makes us think about her wish for us not to think. Just as Armantrout revises the traditional lyric by seemingly stripping it of feeling, this speaker tries to reform the traditional reader, telling us we needn’t engage with poetry as we long have. The e≠ect is a wash of loss and sadness that refutes her goal. Even when she declares intellectual- ism, Armantrout gives us a strained, strange emotionalism; even as she alienates us, she suggests we are all — like the wheels of a tandem bicycle — spinning in sympathy nonetheless.

ABIGAIL DEUTSCH 77 CONTRIBUTORS

rae armantrout’s most recent book, Money Shot, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2011. Her book Versed won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Armantrout teaches at UC San Diego. dan beachy-quick is the author, most recently, of Circle’s Appren- tice (Tupelo Press, 2011). In the spring of 2012, Milkweed Editions will publish a collection of essays, meditations, and tales, Wonderful Investigations. He teaches in the mfa Writing Program at Colorado State University. jerry boyle * works with Alvin Block & Associates in Chicago try- ing cases and arguing appeals. He hales from a large family of Irish lawyers. melanie braverman’s * most recent book is Red (Perugia Press, 2002), winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Award. The poems appearing here are from a book-length manuscript called “The World With Us in It.” She is a poet-in-residence at Brandeis University. bryan d. dietrich is the author of six books of poems, including Prime Directive (Needfire, 2011) and The Assumption (WordFarm, 2011). He is a Professor of English at Newman University. abigail deutsch, the winner of Poetry magazine’s 2010 Editors Prize for Reviewing, lives in New York. leopold froehlich * lives in Chicago, where he works as manag- ing editor of Playboy magazine. michael hofmann’s translation of Joseph Roth’s letters are coming out in January with W. W. Norton; his Gottfried Benn trans- lations (Impromptus) are with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. xeni jardin * is founding partner and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, and executive producer and host of Webby-honored “Boing Boing Video.” She is a frequently-sought tech expert in tv news.

78 POETRY tatsuro kiuchi, born in Tokyo, Japan, is an award-winning illustrator. His recent projects include Rain Po Po Po published by Kumon Publishing, cover illustrations for the Tia Lola series pub- lished by Random House, and a series of art prints for 20x200. ange mlinko’s most recent book of poetry is Shoulder Season (Cof- fee House Press, 2010). She teaches at the University of Houston. michaelanne petrella * is co-author of the children’s book Recipe (McSweeney’s, 2012) and is a regular contributor to McSweeney’s publications. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. d.a. powell received a Guggenheim Fellowship this year in poetry. He lives in San Francisco. spencer reece is an Episcopal priest. He was ordained by Bishop Leopold Frade on October 2 at Iglesia Catedral del Redentor in Ma- drid, Spain, where he now works and lives. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale (Houghton Mi±in, 2004). kay ryan’s most recent book is Odd Blocks, Selected and New Poems, published in England this year by Carcanet. gerald stern will be publishing a memoir called Stealing History, in February 2012, with Trinity Universtity Press. A new book of poems called In Beauty Bright will be coming out with W. W. Norton in the spring of 2012. lili taylor * is a stage and screen actress.

* First appearance in Poetry.

CONTRIBUTORS 79 POETRY DISCUSSION GUIDE

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Raúl Zurita Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, a founder of the art collective “Colectivo de Accion de Arte,” reads from his work. Co-sponsored with the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute as part of the International Poets in Conversation consortium tour. (This event replaces the Adonis and Khaled Mattawa reading.) tuesday, september 27, 7:00 pm š A Literary Exchange: Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Li-Young Lee, Xi Chuan & Zhou Zan Two of China’s leading poets join American writers for an evening of bilingual readings and cross-cultural engagement. Co-sponsored by Copper Canyon Press, National Endowment for the Arts, and China’s General Administration for Press and Publication. tuesday, october 4, 7:00 pm š Terrance Hayes One of the most compelling voices in American poetry reads from his work. Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry, including Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry. thursday, october 20, 7:00 pm š Women’s Voices from Ireland: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Leontia Flynn, Rita Ann Higgins & Caitríona O’Reilly The Poetry Foundation hosts a stop on a national tour of four Irish poets. Co-sponsored with Wake Forest University Press and Culture Ireland. wednesday, october 26, 7:00 pm

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