founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

February 2014

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cciii • number 5 CONTENTS

February 2014

POEMS larry levis 405 Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings Twelve Thirty One Nineteen Ninety Nine Ocean Park #17, 1968: Homage to Diebenkorn a.e. stallings 410 Whethering The Companions of Odysseus in Hades franz wright 412 Boardinghouse with No Visible Address Akechi’s Wife The Break troy jollimore 418 Homer julia shipley 420 The Archaeologists nance van winckel 422 Been About jamaal may 423 There Are Birds Here Per Fumum k. silem mohammad 426 From “The Sonnagrams” ocean vuong 428 DetoNation Aubade with Burning City laura kasischke 432 Recall the Carousel portfolio matthea harvey 435 Telettrofono

comment mark ford 473 Joan Murray and the Bats of Wisdom

contributors 489 Editor don share Art Director fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Assistant Editor lindsay garbutt Editorial Assistant holly amos Consulting Editor christina pugh Design alexander knowlton

cover art by rebecca shore “Untitled #08,” 2013

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Poetry • February 2014 • Volume 203 • Number 5

Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, po 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, po Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2014 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Please visit poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/submissions for submission guidelines and to access the magazine’s online submission system. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at jstor.org. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Source Interlink, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the uk. POEMS

larry levis

Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings

So that the truant boy may go steady with the State, So that in his spine a memory of wings Will make his shoulders tense & bend Like a thing already flown When the bracelets of another school of love Are fastened to his wrists, Make a law that doesn’t have to wait Long until someone comes along to break it.

So that in jail he will have the time to read How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode The king’s wrist died of a common cold, And learn that chivalry persists, And what first felt like an insult to the flesh Was the blank ‘o’ of love. Put the fun back into punishment. Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.

So that no empty court will make a judge recall Ice fishing on some overcast bay, Shivering in the cold beside his father, it ought To be an interesting law, The kind of thing that no one can obey, A law that whispers “Break me.” Let the crows roost & caw. A good judge is an example to us all.

So that the patrolman can still whistle “The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teeth And even show some faint gesture of respect While he cuffs the suspect, Not ungently, & says things like ok, That’s it, relax, It’ll go better for you if you don’t resist, Lean back just a little, against me.

larry levis 405 Twelve Thirty One Nineteen Ninety Nine

First Architect of the jungle & Author of pastel slums, Patron Saint of rust, You have become too famous to be read.

I let the book fall behind me until it becomes A book again. Cloth, thread, & the infinite wood.

Don’t worry. Don’t worry. In the future, everyone, simply everyone, Will be hung in effigy. The crepe paper in the high school gym will be Black & pink & feathery,

Rainbow trout & a dog’s tongue. In effigy. This,

For example, was written in memory of ...

But of whom? Brecht gasping for air in the street? Truman dancing alone with his daughter?

Goodbye, little century. Goodbye, riderless black horse that trots From one side of the street to the other, Trying to find its way Out of the parade.

Forgive me for saluting you With a hand still cold, sweating, And resembling, as I hold it up & a heavy sleep Fills it, the body of someone

Curled in sleep as the procession passes.

Excuse me, but at the end of our complete belief, Which is what you required of us, don’t we deserve

406O POETRY A good belly laugh? Don’t we deserve

A shout in the street?

And this confetti on which our history is being written, Smaller & smaller, less clear every moment,

And subject to endless revision?

Under the circumstances, & because It can imagine no other life, doesn’t the hand,

Held up there for hours,

Deserve it?

No? No hunh? No.

larry levis 407 Ocean Park #17, 1968: Homage to Diebenkorn

What I remember is a carhop on Pico hurrying Toward a blue Chevy,

A crucifix dangling from its rearview mirror That jiggled as the driver brushed

A revolver against it, in passing, before tucking it Behind his back & beginning to joke with her.

What I remember Is the smooth arc the gun made & the way

Jesus shimmied to the rhythm.

•

Someday I’ll go back to the place depicted By the painting, boarded over by the layers of paint

And abandoned,

And beneath the pastel yellows I’ll find The Bayside Motel & the little room

With the thin, rumpled coverlet,

And sit down, drinking nothing but the night air By the window, & wait for her to finish

Dressing, one earring, then another,

And wait until the objects in the room take back Their shapes in the dawn,

And wait until

408O POETRY Each rumpled crease in the sheets & pillowcase Is as clear as a gift again, & wait —

At a certain moment, that room, then all the rooms Of the empty Bayside,

Will turn completely into light.

•

I place a cup on the sill & listen for the faint Tock of china on wood, & ...

That moment of light is already this one — Sweet, fickle, oblivious, & gone:

My hand hurrying across the page to get there On time, that place

Of undoing —

•

Where the shriek of the carhop’s laugh, And the complete faith of the martyr, as he spins & shimmies in the light,

And the inextricable candor of doubt by which Diebenkorn, One afternoon, made his presence known

In the yellow pastels, then wiped his knuckles with a rag —

Are one — are the salt, the nowhere & the cold —

The entwined limbs of lovers & the cold wave’s sprawl.

larry levis 409 a.e. stallings

Whethering

The rain is haunted; I had forgotten. My children are two hours abed And yet I rise Hearing behind the typing of the rain,

Its abacus and digits, A voice calling me again, Softer, clearer. The kids lie buried under duvets, sound Asleep. It isn’t them I hear, it’s

Something formless that fidgets Beyond the window’s benighted mirror, Where a negative develops, where reflection Holds up a glass of spirits. White noise

Precipitates. Rain is a kind of recollection. Much has been shed, Hissing indignantly into the ground. It is the listening

Belates, Haunted by these fingertaps and sighs Behind the beaded-curtain glistening, As though by choices that we didn’t make and never wanted, As though by the dead and misbegotten.

410O POETRY The Companions of Odysseus in Hades

After Seferis

Since we still had a little Of the rusk left, what fools To eat, against the rules, The Sun’s slow-moving cattle,

Each ox huge as a tank — A wall you’d have to siege For forty years to reach A star, a hero’s rank.

We starved on the back of the earth, But when we’d stuffed ourselves, We tumbled to these delves, Numbskulls, fed up with dearth.

a.e. stallings 411 franz wright

Boardinghouse with No Visible Address

So, I thought, as the door was unlocked and the landlord disappeared (no, he actually disappeared) and I got to examine the room unobserved. There it stood in its gray corner: the narrow bed, sheets the color of old aspirin. Maybe all this had occurred somewhere inside me already, or was just about to. Is there a choice? Is there even a difference? Familiar, familiar but not yet remembered ... The small narrow bed. I had often wondered where I would find it, and what it would look like. Don’t you? It was so awful I couldn’t speak. Then maybe you ought to lie down for a minute, I heard myself thinking. I mean if you are having that much trouble functioning. And when was the last time with genuine sorrow and longing to change you got on your knees? I could get some work done

412O POETRY here, I shrugged; I had done it before. I would work without cease. Oh, I would stay awake if only from horror at the thought of waking up here. Ma, a voice spoke from the darkness in the back seat where a long thin man lay, arms crossed on his chest, while they cruised slowly up and down straining to make out the numbers over unlighted doors, the midnight doctor’s; in his hurt mind he was already merging with a black Mississippi of mercy, the sweat pouring off him as though he’d been doused with a bucket of ice water as he lay sleeping. “I saw the light,” they kept screaming. “Do I saw the light!” Ma — there ain’t no light I don’t see no light.

— Dayton, Ohio

franz wright 413 Akechi’s Wife

On one occasion Yūgen of Ise Province was offering to share, for a night or two, the comforts of his home with me when a distant, bemused expression came over his face as though at the recollection of a joke told him earlier that day; then, to a degree I would not have thought possible in one whose normal manner was so formal, that studiedly dour professorial expression gave way for an instant to one that positively beamed, illuminated from within by the sound of a beloved voice. So worn out, not even sure I was on the right road, I forgot myself awhile watching in weary amazement as his wife came and went, the two of them giving the impression of having long per- fected some grave and complex dance known only to them, one of accord and the affection of two people moving hand-in-hand in the same direction, both possessed by desire while knowing themselves to be the source of that desire. But I am so tired, I heard my own voice say, one of them, that startlingly cruel, intrusive voice I hate, darkening everything, how sick I am of listening to it, and of hav- ing to go on! But after some time had passed once again I forgot all about it as I sat there, the witness of this marvel that brought peace to my heart or, perhaps, a hidden joy of my own, one I had so long considered extinct. When Yūgen fell on hard times and was dragged down into the most humiliating poverty, his wife made up her mind one day to have her long beautiful hair cut short so that she could sell it and he could afford to invite all their friends to an evening of laughter and drinking, renga competitions, and the conversation of those who have known one another for a long time, the kind look and humorous word that make it seem possible to live again. I think of her sometimes.

Moon, come down and come alone. I have to tell you all about Akechi’s wife.

— Bashō, translated by Franz Wright

414O POETRY The Break

Then he stopped dead on the sidewalk astounded to overhear himself say quite distinctly I quit, in his own words — be glad you weren’t there. Pandemonium in the cerebral combs, unprecedented mass desertions, solar flare-ups. It said itself actually; the lips moved not, no thought was taken. With massive finality and apropos of absolutely nothing it came, a cruel blessing, the ultimate low note of an organ made of ice or a passing night train of black holes. He kept lying there — what else was he supposed to do? — with watch pressed to one ear, emitting a molecular hum. (Ever wonder how they fit a whole hive inside one of them?) Minute

franz wright 415 hand starting to disappear, such was its speed by now; on his face an expression of guarded rapture. No one could do a thing for him now. They’d stop, gaze down in disgust and concern, a moment before they hurried on or, without looking, adroitly moved around him, the way you would dog shit. Invariably in such cases there is a line that no one crosses. You know what I’m getting at. Mainly everyone just stands around and waits for the arrival of the ambulance; the mind simply stops, nothing, silence. Then the most silver, the tiniest sound of a fracture like that of an ice cube dropped in vodka can be heard around the world; people freeze at whatever they’re doing, and bow their minds, those persistent illusions in pain,

416O POETRY or shame. But all is soon forgotten, the sunlight appears all at once like a great shadow and floats with the gas-like hush throughout the twelve spokes, the brilliant yellow darkness of the twelve candlelit hallways forever abandoned, forever emanating out from the one central hexagonal chamber so much larger than all the rest, in which the young queen lies dreaming, amazed, eyes open wide inside her lead-lined matchbox rocking bed, tits up dead, immovable sow, maggot in color.

franz wright 417 troy jollimore

Homer

Schliemann is outside, digging. He’s not not calling a spade a spade. The stadium where the Greeks once played used to stand on this very spot.

Each night, Penelope, operating in mythical time, unspools the light gray orb Schliemann has just unearthed. Come daylight, her hands will restitch it. The suitors sigh, waiting.

And each night I’d watch as my hero curled himself round home plate, as if he were going to bat for me. And I’d hold my breath, knowing a strong enough shot might be heard round the world.

One must imagine Penelope. One must imagine Penelope happy. One must imagine Schliemann excavating the dugouts and outfields of Troy, carbon-dating

the box score stats and the ticket stubs he pulls from the lurid dirt. He rubs the remains of Achilles’s rage on his shirt. What does not kill you can still hurt.

Penelope’s suitors are striking out, one after another. Their sad swings and misses. They can’t even get to first base. She’ll cut the stitches once more, then blow them all kisses.

Odysseus won’t care that the orb is undone. He’ll take a swing at it with all his might. The ball takes flight. Odysseus takes flight. It feels to Penelope like he’s been gone

418O POETRY since the dawn of mankind, but he’s already zoomed round third and flies like an arrow toward home, as the unearthly orb trails its guts in the air — the yarn fanning out like Penelope’s hair — not knowing yet whether to fall foul or fair.

troy jollimore 419 julia shipley

The Archaeologists

found pins by the millions while meticulously stripping a portion of Manhattan worked over by women who mended between appointments: the harlot’s artifacts include extracts of old wax paper wrappers filled with pin after pin, — imagine all sixteenths spilled from the inch ruler; imagine each a singular spoke of tin, each one fell stroke in a ledger; less than a cent of metal total, a dowry. Her nicks of time, dropped stitches,

420O POETRY poke-throughs taken in, how each man may have fit against the satin hem of her memory.

julia shipley 421 nance van winckel

Been About

The rat traps emptied, the grain troughs filled. The distance between sheep shed and my own ice-melt dripping on the mat equals the diameter of moonlight squared on his face as he looks up and finds me again. Says he’s sure I’d been swallowed by the elements, says he’d been about to come looking. I step into the warm. Two baas from out back where I’d worked. Two tufts of wool he lifts from my hair. In just such a manner are sleek blue words slyly acquired by a wispy whiter-than-snow page. He’s seen it happen. Seen a tear of mine, then two, well up and slip loose as the little boat of orgasm veers into the vortex.

422O POETRY jamaal may

There Are Birds Here

For Detroit

There are birds here, so many birds here is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girl’s hands tear and toss like confetti. No, I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can’t stop smiling about and no his smile isn’t much like a skeleton at all. And no his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-dance as anything else, but they won’t stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in that birdless city.

jamaal may 423 Per Fumum

(through smoke)

My mother became an ornithologist when the grackle tumbled through barbecue smoke and fell at her feet. Soon she learned why singers cage birds; it can take weeks to memorize a melody — the first days lost as they mope and warble a friendless note, the same tone every animal memorizes hours into breathing. It’s a note a cologne would emit if the bottle was struck while something mystical was aligned with something even more mystical but farther away. My father was an astronomer for forty minutes in a row the first time a bus took us so far from streetlights he could point out constellations that may or may not have been Draco, Orion, Aquila, or Crux. When they faded I resented the sun’s excess, a combination of fires I couldn’t smell. The first chemist was a perfumer whose combinations, brushed against pulse points, were unlocked by quickening blood. From stolen perfumes I concocted my personal toxin. It was no more deadly than as much water to any creature the size of a roach. I grew suspicious of my plate and lighter Bunsen burner, the tiny vials accumulating in my closet. I was a chemist for months before I learned the difference between poisoned and drowned.

424O POETRY When my bed caught fire it smelled like a garden.

jamaal may 425 k. silem mohammad

From “The Sonnagrams”

on thoth’s tits From Sonnet 75 (“So are you to my thoughts as food to life”)

A groovy day, a fish fillet, an elf hair, A cosmonaut, a microdot, a hoedown, A trusty door, the finest whore on welfare, A neocon who’s keeping on the lowdown,

A purple fist, a Federalist, a sunspot, A bird that’s got a big big butt to study, A guy named Toots, ten dumb galoots, a gunshot, Die Fledermaus by good ol’ Strauss (my buddy),

A grinning troll, a real a-hole, a smiler, A dude who knows a gushing hose is funny, An underdressed (no tie, no vest) John Tyler, A sexy flirt, a cowboy shirt — oh honey!

I’ll flip you for a dinosaur, my sweeties, When Uncle Pete lets Usher eat our Wheaties.

426O POETRY uh huh: hi, hula tooth From Sonnet 135 (“Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will”)

Will refried catnip addicts find a cure? Will daytime televangelists go broke? Will Algorithmic Horses go on tour? Will nineteen shekels buy one thin, thin Coke?

Will innovative inverts be reported? Will weasel-human hybrids rent a maid? Will hesitating oxen get aborted? Will analysts of real estate get laid?

Will hoochie-coochie nuns remove their mink? Will enemies of hotness shut it down? Will tame aphasic mynahs learn to think? Will Hi-Ho hunt the hound in Ho-Ho town?

Will Willy Loman eat a thousand ants? Will Willa Cather do that nasty dance?

Note: My process for composing sonnagrams is as follows: I feed one of Shake- speare’s sonnets into an internet anagram engine, generating fourteen lines of text that is quantitatively equivalent to Shakespeare’s poem at the level of the letter. I then rearrange this text, clicking and dragging letter by letter until I have a new English sonnet. All leftover letters are used to make up a title.

k. silem mohammad 427 ocean vuong

DetoNation

There’s a joke that ends with — huh? It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside your lungs. Look how lighter

the earth is — afterward. To even write the word father

is to carve a portion of the day out of a bomb-bright page.

There’s enough light to drown in but never enough to enter the bones

& stay. Don’t stay here, he said, my boy broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry

anymore. So I ran into the night. The night: my shadow growing

toward my father.

428O POETRY Aubade with Burning City

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

Milkflower petals on the street like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips. Open, he says. She opens. Outside, a soldier spits out his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all your Christmases be white as the traffic guard unstraps his holster.

His hand running the hem of her white dress. His black eyes. Her black hair. A single candle. Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs crushed into the shine of a white Christmas.

On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard for the first time.

ocean vuong 429 The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola. A palm-sized photo of his father soaking beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow. A white ... A white ... I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

falling from her shoulders.

Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded

with gunfire. Red sky. Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls. A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

The city so white it is ready for ink.

The radio saying run run run. Milkflower petals on a black dog like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks beneath them. The bed a field of ice cracking.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens their faces, my brothers have won the war and tomorrow ... The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ... to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...

430O POETRY In the square below: a nun, on fire, runs silently toward her god —

Open, he says. She opens.

ocean vuong 431 laura kasischke

Recall the Carousel

Recall the carousel. Its round and round. Its pink lights blinking off and on. The children’s faces painted garish colors against an institutional wall. And the genetics. The We won’t be here too long ... Do not step off ... The carousel? Do you recall? As if we were our own young parents suffering again after so many hundreds of hours of bliss. And even the startling fact that what had always been feared might come to pass: A familiar sweater in a garbage can. A surgeon bent over our baby, wearing a mask. But surely you recall how happily and for how long we watched our pretty hostages go round. They waved at us too many times to count. Their dancing foals. Their lacquered mares. Even a blue-eyed hunting hound was still allowed back then.

432O POETRY portfolio Telettrofono Cross-Section matthea harvey

Telettrofono

preset instruction mode Hello? Please turn off all twenty-first-century gadgets, as they will interfere with the delicate instrument you are holding in your hand.

preset antonio meucci monologue mode It looks plastic and unbeautiful, no? But oh if you filleted this telettro- fono, the wonders you would see. Two tubes lined with fish scales and mercury, sparks of electricity tripping up tiny gold stairs, a spirit level stitched into a swimbladder, a microphone made of minimol- luscs, and, floating in a small stoppered vial, one petticoat snippet, one mermaid tear, and a cell from the gill of an electric eel. You are holding in your hand “the telephone which I invented and which I first made known and which, as you know, was stolen from me.”

florence

preset verifiable fact mode Whereas inventor Antonio Meucci is born in 1808 in Florence, Italy. Whereas in 1833 he begins work as a stagehand at the Teatro della Pergola where he meets his future wife, Esterre Mochi, born 1815, a seamstress who is rumored to have been a mermaid. Whereas all primary sources for the previous intimation have gone missing, but murmurs persist in the sounds of the sea, and what is the sea if not primary?

preset stage direction mode Listen for the audience settling into their seats — coughs bouncing between balconies, ladies tucking their toes under their petticoats, low murmurs between lovers, handkerchiefs shaken out and folded back into pockets, the hushed voices of ushers, violinists plucking strings, twisting their tuning pegs ... As the sound decrescendos (you’ll know it when it happens) — now — let the first backdrop fall, then slowly pull on the cord that raises the curtain.

matthea harvey 435 preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) Look up. The clouds are a pod of belugas, the sun, a bloom of jellyfish fluorescing a few fathoms up, or no, make it nighttime — the light underwater was never this bright. That was once my life. I moved through it smoothly, too smoothly — sometimes just to feel something, I’d take — between my thumb and forefinger — one of the many hooks that were hunting underwater and give it a tug. Hello, I mouthed underwater, hello?

preset verifiable fact mode The name Esterre means “star.” Antonio means “worthy of praise.”

preset fairy tale mode Once upon a time in the time of once upon a time, there was a mermaid who longed for sound — not for whale songs moodily bumping for miles along the ocean floor or the soft swish of tiny fish gills pulsing in and out, but for what she heard when her ears broke through the water’s surface. Crack of thunder. Waves walloping the rocks.

preset patent mode Patent 122477 “improvements in long-distance listening” (imagined) (Esterre wants her ears closer to the clouds, wants them to stretch over the water so she can hear the opposite shore. You give her one thing, she wants more. I bring her a hare after a long day of hunting and she cries and strokes its long ears.)

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) Humans, let me tell you something. Mermaids, sirens, shipwreckers, whatever you call us on a particular day, we don’t abandon the sea

436O POETRY for love or legs — we fling ourselves onto the shore for sound. I mooned around for years waiting for the carp’s accordion gills to wheeze out a tune, for a deafening chorus from those wide-mouthed anemones. Monday was muffled. Tuesday mute, until Sunday I smashed my head through the barrier between sea and sky and there was the two-ton wave timpani, the puffin’s claws click-click-clicking as it skidded to a stop on the cliff’s edge, rain spanking the sea until it wailed. I clapped my hands and the claps echoed back like an answer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Between the third and fourth yes, my tail split in two, sprouted knees and feet, toes.

preset patent mode Patent 122478 “improvement in the manufacture of effervescent drinks from fruits” (approved) Esterre: Louder please. Antonio: How’s this? Esterre: Still not loud enough. Esterre: Can you make it louder? (Esterre is disappointed that the fizz isn’t louder.)

preset math problem mode A mermaid swims from the Mediterranean into the Ligurian Sea and up the Arno river. She climbs onto the riverbank at 7:02 pm and, drawn by a far-off aria, makes her way to an opera house 1.7 kilome- ters away at an average rate of four kilometers per hour (accounting for her wobbly new legs). Starting at 6:00 pm and ending at 12:00 pm, a stagehand climbs up and down the theater scaffolding twelve times, averaging a distance of twenty meters on each journey at an average rate of five kilometers per hour, and goes down the backstage stairs (an extra twelve meters) at 7:30 pm, 8:50 pm, and 9:40 pm. Will the mermaid and the stagehand meet on the stairs? If so, what distance will they each have travelled and what time will it be? If the opera be- gins at 8:00 pm and the stage notes call for thunder at 8:20 pm, rain at 8:22 pm, and lightning at 10:12 pm, what sound, if any, will be in the background when the mermaid and the stagehand meet?

matthea harvey 437 No. 122478 Effervescent Drinks preset instruction mode If you find one, pick up a shell. See if it purrs when you scratch it.

preset antonio meucci monologue mode I heard her before I saw her — the costumes she designed were all about sound — the whisper-swish-catch of gauze against raw satin, corsets ringed with tiny bells, shoes with metal plates on the toes and suede on the heels, clack-shuffling across the stage. She must have seen me listening, because a few nights later, when I put my ear to the speaking tube I’d made for the director to talk to the stagehands perched in the trellises, there was only one word waiting, Meucci, Meucci, over and over, as if she were calling for a pet cat, followed by a giggle that sounded like water running down steps of glass.

preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Once, a large square mammal with a wide mouth of black and white teeth floated up out of a shipwreck. It’s true, we swam away. We’d never seen a piano before.

preset patent mode Patent 122479 wave metronome (imagined)

preset main telettrofono mode Hello Antonio? Last night I dreamt that giant white mountains came crashing down on me.

preset verifiable fact mode When she lived in Staten Island, Esterre had a cat called Lillina who had a total of twenty-four kittens and then those kittens had kittens ... Their descendants are everywhere.

matthea harvey 439 No. 122479 Wave Metronome preset patent mode Patent 122480 giant stone piano (imagined) (I spent a whole night lugging the stone keys into place, but when the whole octave was there on the sand and I tried to play it — hitting the keys with rocks and bits of driftwood — it wasn’t at all as I’d imagined. No thunder. No music of the gods. Instead, a sad little thud sonata. A dud étude. Go ahead. Try it out. Esterre didn’t like it either.)

preset instruction mode Keep your eyes open for mermaids.

preset antonio meucci monologue mode Her sharpest, brightest needle — her piccolo delfno or little dolphin — was always diving in and out of the seas of fabric on her lap. Weeks later she’d show me the curse stitched inside the belt of the cranky tenor that made him crack on his high C. At the time, my magic was minimal — turn the crank and watch the cardboard waves roll, pound the sheet of metal for thunder ... She gave me scraps of white cotton and muslin for my snow cradle — we suspended the bag above the stage and a man in each wing shook the strings gently, gently so the snow-cloth sifted through the holes in the bag and drifted down onto the singers. That snow scene was the only silent thing that ever made her smile. The lights worked wonders though — the night I brought her onto the stage and lit the candles, each with a mirror angled behind it and a sheet of blue glass in front, she stamped her new feet with delight and said, “Daylight!”

preset verifiable fact mode Esterre never learned to read or write. She signed documents with an x, like a cross-stitch.

matthea harvey 441 No. 122480 Giant Stone Piano preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Your human’s brain sounds like an octopus. He needs a fin to guide him.

havana

preset verifiable fact mode Whereas Antonio Meucci and Esterre Mochi marry on August 7, 1834, at the church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Whereas in 1835 Esterre and Antonio sail to Havana (with seventy-nine other mem- bers of the Italian Opera Company and thiry-five tons of props and equipment) to work at the Gran Teatro Tacon, a new Cuban opera house. Whereas Antonio is appointed superintendent of mechanism, Esterre head of the tailoring department. Whereas Antonio devises a water filtering system for Havana, diverts a river under the opera house to improve its acoustics, and is commissioned to set up an electroplating factory by the Cuban army. Whereas Antonio, while experimenting with electric shock therapy, discovers that electricity can allow sound to travel along a wire. Whereas one of the operas performed in the Gran Teatro Tacon is Ernani by Verdi. Act One begins in the mountains of Aragon.

preset patent mode Patent 183062 “improvement in hygrometers, for measuring humidity” (approved) “I prefer for general use to give all the parts an ornamental appearance, imitating the person of a weather-prophet or some other significant device.” (Esterre thought it should have been a mermaid and stitched a revision onto my handkerchief. She did recommend the whalebone after all.)

preset antonio meucci monologue mode The mountains are crumbling in the ship’s hold. There’s no mold — from my experiments I knew enough to remind the scene painters to mix clove oil into the papier-mâché — but sea air is stringent stuff and though we wedged the mountains between trunks and packed

matthea harvey 443 No. 125444 Purring Shell their peaks with blankets, when the waves toss our ship like a toy and forks go flying in the mess hall, I can feel the fissures forming. Aneto, the largest mountain, has already cracked in two, and bits of it are sifting like salt into the floorboards. All the carefully painted shadows and ridges, the line of firs, even the tiny path (a folly, since you couldn’t see it from the first row) have peeled off. Just yesterday, Esterre found a mountain hut stuck to the heel of my shoe.

preset stage direction mode For the best tempest, attach a drum or drums to a roll of canvas. If you do not have an electrostatic lightning machine (truly, these are the best, though they can malfunction in humid weather), cut two pieces of wood with forked edges so that when they are fit together, no light can get through. Place these in front of a very bright chande- lier. When it is time for lightning, separate and close. Repeat.

preset patent mode Device for indicating the position of ships in fog (patent never fled)

preset patent mode Bleaching process to turn red coral pink (patent never fled) (Esterre prefers the pink. Some men will do anything for their wives, I think.)

preset verifiable fact mode /meucci deposition “A man in my employment at one time, somewhere around 1849, complained of being sick, and I thought to try electricity on him. He was placed in one room and, the end of the wire being in circuit two rooms beyond his, I went there wishing to know how strong a cur- rent I was using, and I had a duplicate of this instrument with me. I called to him to put the copper part of his instrument in his mouth. I did this because I had read that disease could be cured [told] by electricity. The man, while he had the copper in his mouth, cried out from the effects of the shock. I thought I heard this sound more distinctly than natural. I then put this copper of my instrument to my ear, and I heard the sound of his voice through the wire. This was my

matthea harvey 445 No. 122970 Fog Apparatus first impression, and the origin of my idea of the transmission of the human voice by electricity.”

preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Perhaps you should not have told him that we use electric eels to shock away our headaches.

preset instruction mode Keep your eyes peeled for pianos. They are everywhere, too.

preset antonio meucci monologue mode Sometimes I sit in the square and score the rainstorms — this one starts with two boxes of Esterre’s pins dropped one at a time onto the drums, starting from a height of approximately five centimeters then over the course of three minutes increasing both the number of pins and the distance between the pins and the drumhead. Soon the rain morphs into a clatter of pencils in the wings, then three men running up and down the backstage stairs in heavy shoes. I don’t think the audience will even hear the pins, but they may feel the neck-prickle of a coming downpour. One day I will make an onstage rainstorm so perfectly real that a woman in the audience will forget where she is and open her umbrella, a bright red flower blooming in the dark field of the opera house.

preset verifiable fact mode cross question no. 339: Why didn’t you patent your speaking telegraph in 1860? answer no. 339: Because nobody wanted to believe it was true what I said.

matthea harvey 447 No. 122973 Bleaching Process preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) Humans, do you not all breathe the same air? Yet you curtsy to that one, kick the other. Some feet are slippered in pink satin and carried over puddles, others bare. When we arrived, they gave us a man to serve us, as if he were a pebble. The theater is full of invisible rules. White ladies may eat ice cream on the right side of the patio. Chinese workers, mulattoes, and blacks sit way up high, where the chandelier blocks your view, but Chinese tourists sit with middle class whites. Only the aristocracy is allowed in the boxes. God knows where they’d put me if they knew.

preset stage direction mode Wheel in the mountains for Act One. Don’t forget to oil them before every performance — we don’t want them squeaking like mice.

preset antonio meucci monologue mode “When my telettrofono is in operation the parties should remain alone in their respective rooms and every practicable precaution should be taken to have the surroundings perfectly quiet. The closed mouth utensil or trumpet and enclosing the persons also in a room alone both tend to prevent undue publicity to the communication. I think it will be easy by these means to prevent the communication being understood by any but the proper persons.”

preset patent mode Patent 46607 process for making wicks out of vegetable fber (approved) (According to Esterre, there can never be enough candles.)

preset patent mode Patent 36192 smokeless kerosene lamp using two electrifed platinum plates to embrace the flame. “The flame obtains a great brilliance, more than the gas, and puts in combustion all the oil that is brought to the wick, and does not make any smoke” (approved) (I tease her, calling her my queen of kerosene and she frowns,

matthea harvey 449 Transmission of Sound through Wires saying, “I don’t like queens.” Yet there she sits, a circle of lamps like courtiers about her at all times.)

preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Have you ever heard of an impoverished mermaid? Pearls? We have shellsfull. Treasure chests, etc., spiral down in slow motion, bump softly onto the ocean floor and spill their treasures. We don’t know what to use them all for, so we crown the crabs, hand the octopus the scepter.

preset main telettrofono mode Antonio, will you bring me some seaweed but please squeeze all the seawater out of it?

preset fairy tale mode Once upon a time, in the time of once upon a time, there was a mermaid who loved sound and light. At the opera, she was drunk on arias and candelabras. But soon, as fairy tales often do, the story would turn stormy.

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) At first, in Havana, it seemed I’d brought the luck of the sea with me. Those divas I sewed for were always winking and tucking jewels (secondhand, from their admirers at the stage doors) into my pockets, certain I’d make their costumes the prettiest. People lined up outside Antonio’s laboratory to have their candelabras, buttons, and swords silvered. But that was while I was still standing. The minute I took to my bed it all slipped away. Of so much gold nothing is left us.

matthea harvey 451 No. 36192 Smokeless Kerosene Lamp preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Look at them now. They might as well have minus signs on their foreheads.

preset verifiable fact mode From 1838 to 1857 the Havana theaters produced 108 operas, 1,108 tragedies, and forty-eight operettas, using 211 sets and 13,787 cos- tumes. If the Meuccis arrived in 1835 and departed in 1850, what percentage of these costumes and sets were they responsible for?

staten island

preset verifiable fact mode Whereas in 1850 Antonio and Esterre Meucci sail from Havana to New York and settle in Clifton, Staten Island. Whereas Esterre’s so- called arthritis becomes increasingly severe and she is mostly confined to their second-floor bedroom. Whereas Antonio installs a telettro- fono that runs from his workshop to Esterre’s bedroom, making a total of twenty-five different models. Whereas neighbor children call the Meuccis’ home the Devil’s House because they know about the machine that lets voices travel unnatural distances. Whereas the Meuccis, not knowing how to speak English, are swindled out of their savings by a series of scoundrels, and Antonio’s various ventures, including a candle factory and a brewery, all fail.

preset main telettrofono mode Hello Antonio? I need more candles. It’s underwater dark up here.

preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Esterre, be realistic. You know mermaids live to at least three hundred and humans are lucky to make it to eighty and then with awful turtle-wrinkles.

present patent mode Piano with glass keys (patent never fled) Shhh. Listen. I made that glass piano back when Esterre still loved sound, but

matthea harvey 453 No. 170654 Music Box last week, in secret, I sold it to a friend. His daughter practices her scales almost every afternoon, though not for long enough if you ask me. She’s good at the major scales and a mess at minor. Most afternoons I wander by to hear the slight crunch of the low F (I left the edges a little rough on purpose). I made the piano base from the roots of grapevines. Each note tastes like a cold green grape.

preset stage direction mode Switch the sky backdrop behind the houses from day to night.

preset patent mode Staircase piano — part soprano, part sea canary (imagined)

preset main telettrofono mode antonio: Esterre, are you cross with me? esterre: No one wants for anything in the sea.

preset antonio meucci monologue mode Sometimes I carry her up here for the quiet. My poor Esterre, who once delighted in each wheel-clang of the Havana train, who clapped with the applause of a whole balcony, winces now if I close a door carelessly, if I sneeze. I tiptoe around the house, but the slightest sound pains her — she feels the clank of a cup in a saucer (from one story up) as a knife to the knee. The tick of my watch makes her wince. Someone teach me how to muffle a factory, how to hush the horses clattering by. This is the only place where she will unwrap her ears, and then only when I signal to her that I have stopped breathing heavily from the climb up the hill.

matthea harvey 455 No. 168273 Lactometer preset patent mode Indicator to know where is to be found the ship, whether s. n. e. w. ( found in Meucci’s notebooks, patent never fled)

preset main telettrofono mode Antonio, I’m lonely.

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) Like his ideas, the wires are everywhere — threading across the yard, into the basement window, up through an unused heating pipe, swimming round the stair banister, seaweeding in through the window.

preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Your human needs an anchor.

preset patent mode Patent 168273 “improvement in methods of testing milk” (approved) (Esterre requires that the milk be precisely as creamy as when it came from the cow — for her cats, that is, and, if there’s any left, for our morning coffee.)

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) For weeks now, I’ve dreamt about a silent theater. No softisti chattering from up in the trellises, so it’s not the Teatro della Pergola, and it can’t be the Gran Teatro Tacon because the chairs are covered in velvet. Mold bloomed so quickly in that climate — a hover of green fuzz that only I found lovely ... It’s no theater I’ve seen before. Each light is brighter

matthea harvey 457 No. 369000 Marine Telephone even than the araña chandelier in Havana, and that had several hundred candles. These lights have round flames and wires snake from them into strange face-holes in the wall. What trickery or forecast is this? Where is Antonio?

preset main telettrofono mode Antonio, the cats are hungry.

preset fairy tale mode Once upon a time in the time of once upon a time, there was an inventor who loved a mermaid and would do anything to please her. Because she loved sound, he invented a megaphone, a telettrofono, and a drink that fizzed with the tiny effervescent fireworks of fermented fruit. Because she loved light, he invented smokeless wicks and built a candle factory. Because she was over-fond of candles, he invented flame retardant paint. Because she loved her cats, he came up with a way to carefully quantify the amount of cream in their milk. Because she missed her sisters’ voices he made a marine telephone. Because her bones were not made for this loud human world, they began to crack and ache and crumble. Because she needed quiet he tried to hush the trains, the carriage, even the gulls. Because she could no longer climb up or down the stairs, he carried her.

preset verifiable fact mode (House Resolution 269, June 11, 2002) Whereas Antonio Meucci, the great Italian inventor, had a career that was both extraordinary and tragic. Whereas Meucci was unable to raise sufficient funds to pay his way through the patent application process, and thus had to settle for a caveat, a one year renewable notice of an impending patent, which was first filed on December 28, 1871.

matthea harvey 459 No. 169876 Bone Xylophone Whereas Meucci later learned that the Western Union affiliate lab- oratory reportedly lost his working models, and Meucci, who was at this point living on public assistance, was unable to renew the caveat after 1874. Whereas in March 1876 Alexander Graham Bell, who conducted experiments in the same laboratory where Meucci’s materials had been stored, was granted a patent and was thereafter credited with inventing the telephone.

preset patent mode Marine telephone: way for those that work underwater called divers helped by the telephone to speak above water (patent still pending at time of death)

preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) Calling us “divers” is probably a good idea.

preset patent mode Method to render incombustible the wood of house, canvas, ropes, starch sifters, paper, etc. Its cost is very small so that every person can buy it and make use of it also in underwear, when it is washed in starching it with starch mixed with said composition in order to prevent it taking fre in case of a fre, or any other cases (patent never fled) (Esterre is always leaning too close to the flames.)

preset main telettrofono mode esterre: Antonio, how are you? antonio: Will I make you some spaghetti?

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) Of all the mammals, cats move the most like fish. I love their fur, soft as seagrass, their trilling purrs. With my last bolt of velvet, I made fins for my school of twenty-five felines. I cut out fifty triangles, laid them out on the floor, sewed them together, stuffed them with sawdust. Three of the cats bit me and bolted before

matthea harvey 461 No. 370983 Noise Prevention System (Fabric) I could buckle the fins on. Lillina, the old white one, and Segreto, the shy one, hid under the bed, but still, today I sent a school of twenty sharks swimming down the stairs to surprise my sweet Antonio.

preset math problem mode If a man living in Havana makes $30,000 (the equivalent of $500,000 today) electroplating buttons and swords and candelabras (spends $10,000 on failed experiments in human petrification, lends $200 to a friend) and his wife makes $13,000, then they move to Staten Island, where he opens a salami factory, a candle factory, and a brewery, which all fail, then receives an offer of $10,000 to start a paper mill using his newly patented papermaking process but is only paid $75 when the paper mill goes bankrupt, then takes a job at another paper plant for the sum of $20 a week and works there for six months, files more than twenty patents and caveats for various inventions including the first telephone, but is routinely swindled by his business partners, and while he is gravely ill his wife sells his telettrofono models to a junk shop for $6, what is the probability that this man will be bankrupt on his deathbed?

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) My fingers might as well be claws. Yesterday, for half an hour, I tried to thread the wrong end of the needle. I saved up for the handkerchief — (even five cents is a hard sum to spare, and I could afford only cotton, not linen), wanting to embroider his other darling — the telettrofono — onto it for his birthday. But my stitches make me sick. They look like the work of a drunkard or a child.

preset main telettrofono mode Antonio, my legs are hurting me.

matthea harvey 463 No. 370983 Noise Prevention System (Rosemary) preset verifiable fact mode (Nov 14, 1855, letter to his brother) “All I can tell you is that I am in very poor circumstances and perhaps I have to run away. All that I owned has gone, and all that I have left is the house and the ground and the candle factory. But it is idle to talk about candles, as nobody wants them. I have now started making pianos, but this business is not doing well either. As you can see, I have no luck and everything I start seems bound to fail.”

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) See that rock cluster there? There. I used to hide behind one just like it and listen to their strangely immobile babies, plump as scallops, screaming and slapping the glassy sand. A hundred hermit crabs waved from the reeds. A human stomped by in very tall shoes and the crunch of his feet was a symphony. But my bones weren’t made for this world and now each sound is a knife to the knee.

preset patent mode Noise prevention system for use on the elevated rail (rejected) (I tried it out in miniature — swaddling toy trains in cloth, planting thick rows of rosemary along the tiny tracks to muffle the sound.)

preset verifiable fact mode Deposition of William Rider (Bell / Globe trial) cross question no. 151: He was inventing something or other all the time, was he not? answer no. 151: I think he was; there is not question about that. cross question no. 152: You considered him a genius, did you not? answer no. 152: I considered him a genius at first, but afterward I considered him rather an impractical genius.

matthea harvey 465 No. 369881 Snowcoat with Matching Muff preset patent mode Marine telegraph — for use on ships; the instrument would signal ships upon the water so that vessels would not collide in fog and storm (rejected)

preset mermaid monologue mode (esterre meucci) The experiments exhaust me. He smuggles me down to the shore at night and packs my aching legs in sand or little mountains of salt (no more electric shocks for me), and though he looks at me hopefully, we both know I’m not long for land.

preset verifiable fact mode On March 16, 1881, the Meuccis’ cottage was moved across the street. Esterre was quoted in the Richmond County Gazette, saying, “If it tumbles down I shall die with it.”

preset marine telephone mode (mermaid chorus) We know you hear what the sea is saying: Come back or you’ll crumble.

preset math problem mode In the case of the United States Government versus American Bell Telephone Co. and Alexander Graham Bell, which took twelve years and ended without a decision, there were five thousand pages for the government’s preliminary proceeding, 6,600 pages of evidence presented by the defense, 365 pages of government replies and six thousand exhibit documents. What is the total number of typed pages for the trial?

preset antonio meucci monologue mode If I could make her anything? A staircase piano where each step sings out a sound that is part soprano, part sea canary, or a stairquarium filled with phosphorescent fish. Coral fusilli with clam sauce. Opera glasses that peer into the future and under doors. A xylophone made

matthea harvey 467 of our creditors’ bones. A cat made of limelight. A needle that can sew through water, light, and stone, the strongest seaweed thread. A snowcoat to enclose her in snowquiet with matching muffling muff. A shell that purrs when you scratch it. A music box with tiny spinning chandelier complete with functional candles. A wave metronome with interior surging ocean. New legs. New legs. New legs.

preset stage direction mode Start cranking the waves. Rattle the tinsel wires for a slight smattering of rain. Tilt the mirrors so that light hits the stooped bearded figure carrying a woman wrapped in a blanket to the water’s edge. Seagull cry three beats later, followed by flap of wings. When I kiss Esterre on her lips, then on each cheek, dim the lights, so the audience can only just see her slip back into the sea. Close the trapdoor quietly as the actress slips under the stage. Curtain.

468O POETRY Meucci House, Staten Island

COMMENT

mark ford

Joan Murray and the Bats of Wisdom

W.H. Auden spent much of the summer of 1946 in a beach house he shared with his friends James and Tania Stern in Cherry Grove on Fire Island, just south of Long Island. He was at work on his long poem The Age of Anxiety that would be published the following year; he had also recently been appointed editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, taking over from Archibald MacLeish, whose multifarious commitments had meant he could devote little time to rigorous perusal of the manuscripts of first volumes of poems sent on to him by Yale University Press. Auden, then at the height of his prestige, was the first choice of the Yale committee that met on May 6 to decide MacLeish’s successor. He accepted in a letter of May 10, characteristically observing: “I am not at all sure that a poet is the best judge of his contemporaries, but I’m willing to have a shot at it if you are.” In any event he would edit the series through 1959, and launch the careers of a number of the most important poets of the post-war era: Adrienne Rich (1951), W.S. Merwin (1952), John Ashbery (1956), James Wright (1957), and John Hollander (1958) all had their first books chosen by Auden for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. None of the ten manuscripts that Auden took with him to Fire Island in the summer of 1946, however, seemed to him worthy of the accolade. Accordingly he wrote to Eugene Davidson, the Yale University Press editor in charge of the series, with a suggestion of his own: “I have just heard that the poems of Joan Murray which I told you about are available and, in my opinion, they are the best we have. May I have your permission to choose them? She died in 1942 at the age of 23” (she was in fact 24). Auden knew about Murray’s work because she had been a student of his at the New School some six years earlier. Although it must have struck Davidson and his fel- low Yale editors as rather odd to make the award, which was intended to promote “such verse as seems to give the fairest promise for the future of American poetry,” to quote from the statement of purpose included in early volumes in the series, to a dead poet born in London of Canadian parents, no one at the press demurred. Poems by Joan Murray, 1917–1942, was duly published in May of 1947, attracting

mark ford 473 reviews in papers and journals such as Poetry, the Saturday Review, the New York Times Book Review, and the New Yorker. William Meredith, who had himself received the prize in 1944 for his first collection, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, acclaimed Murray’s “powerful and distinctive voice” in Poetry, but reported himself puzzled by her “abrupt transitions from image to image,” transitions “too quick and often too irrational for this reader.” Milton Crane in the New York Times rather more harshly described the poems as giving “the impres- sion of being unborn.” The volume came with a foreword by Auden and an editor’s note by Grant Code, a writer and lecturer on theatre and dance, and founder and manager of the Brooklyn Museum Dance Center that ran from 1935 to 1938. Code had not known the dead poet person- ally, but he was a friend of Murray’s mother, who was a diseuse and moved in theatrical circles, and he was an occasional dabbler in verse himself (his work is featured alongside that of Malcolm Cowley and John Brooks Wheelwright in the anthology Eight More Harvard Poets of 1923). In his negotiations with Yale, Auden declared himself uncomfortable with the notion that each book he selected should be introduced by the editor of the series, complaining:

These introductions always sound awful, and the whole idea that a new poet should be introduced by an older one as if he were a debutante or a new face cream, deplorable and false.

In his very brief (it runs to a mere page and a half) foreword to his initial selection he makes exactly this point in his opening paragraph, revealing that his own “personal reaction” to a book of poems with an introduction by an older writer “is a suspicion that the publishers are afraid that the poems are not very good and want reassurance.” Auden, as would become his wont in these introductions, pretty much evades the duty of making a case for Murray’s work, limiting himself to a single sentence that attempts to articulate its distinctive qualities: “in Miss Murray’s poetry,” he observes (and it’s not an observation that gets us very far),

the dominant emotion is, I think, a feeling of isolation, and her characteristic images tactile shapes which reassure her that “Here” and “There” are both real and related to each other.

474O POETRY This could surely be applied to any number of volumes of poetry published since the Romantics. The editor’s note by Grant Code would have indicated to purchas- ers of the book back in 1947 a rather stronger sense of the unusual nature of Murray’s poetry; the only other poet mentioned in Code’s note is Emily Dickinson, and his discussion of his task as Murray’s editor inevitably recalls the controversy attending editorial attempts to standardize Dickinson’s work. Murray’s manuscripts, which were handed over to him by Murray’s mother (known as Peggy, her full name being Florence Margaret Toaps Murray) were, he reports, in a state of “confusion, pages of prose mixed with pages of verse and scarcely two pages of anything together that belonged together”: many poems existed in different versions, Murray’s spelling was “capricious,” few of the poems were titled, and fewer properly punctuated. Some words were clearly “makeshift” choices that she intended later to revise, and some downright ungrammatical. He tried to fix most of these, although the book does include the odd verbal peculiarity, such as the last line of “Sleep, Whose Hour Has Come” that makes a verb into an adjective: “And sleep is still retribute.” On occasion Code took the liberty of substituting a choice of his own in place of what Murray had written, as when he altered “connubial” to “convivial” in line seventeen of “Believe Me, My Fears Are Ancient,” on the grounds that the effect of “connubial” is “disturbing.” I rather regret this particular editorial decision, since the poem, like a number of Murray’s, is about what one might call the procreative urge, “the burst into spring,” and the lines in question depict the human mind casting off gloom and doubts, “conglomerate mourners,” and rejoic- ing in the desire “to slip over and be connubial,” or as Code would have it “convivial.” It surely takes an exceptionally sensitive reader to be disturbed by Murray’s original choice, which hardly plunges us into the territory of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Code’s task in sorting through the material he was given and mak- ing from these drafts a publishable book was clearly a formidable one, though we don’t know quite how formidable. The trunk containing all of Murray’s original manuscripts was lost by removal men, or so it was thought, when her mother sold her daughter’s papers, along with her own much more voluminous archives, to Smith College in 1968. (My inquiries to the current Smith archivist about this lost trunk stimulated a search for it, and I am delighted to report that it has now been found.) Code evidently smoothed and regularized; he

mark ford 475 added the word “Trees” off his own bat to a poem, without telling us which one (my guess is stanza four of “Spring”: “Sap flies high to the head of tall / Trees in a leaping drunk”). He adjusted her syn- tax and added the occasional “colorless connective” where he felt it was needed. For titles he normally used the first line, in the mode of Auden’s Poems of 1930, but sometimes came up with a descriptive title of his own. It is easy to deride what John Ashbery has called, in a short piece on Murray published in the Poetry Project Newsletter of October / November 2003, these “ministrations of a well-meaning but somewhat heavy-handed editor.” Code also got increasingly on Auden’s wick as work on the book proceeded, although not as much as Peggy, about whom Auden wrote to Davidson at Yale with a word to the wise: “From what I know of Mama, I would advise you confiden- tially to deal with her through Mr. Code.” Indeed, Auden also told Davidson that Mrs. Murray had once written him a letter accusing him of having killed her daughter. Possibly Murray mère attributed her daughter’s early death in January of 1942 not to complications deriving from a rheumatic heart condition, but to the compositional fever that her attendance of Auden’s lectures on “Poetry and Culture” at the New School in 1940 had inspired. (Much of her oeuvre, it seems, was written in the sixteen months left to her after she began taking Auden’s course.) Code omitted from the book forty poems that he decided were “incomplete, fragmentary, or immature,” but he refused to grant Auden’s pleas that he cull still further. He also wanted to include as an appendix a biographical sketch he titled “A Faun Surmising,” made up partly of his observations and specula- tions, and partly of passages from Murray’s letters and diaries. A copy of this survives in the Smith Archives, and I would dearly love to read it. He apparently compiled notes for the poems too. Confronted by this editorial apparatus, Auden firmly drew the line: he instructed Davidson that Code’s notes and “A Faun Surmising” were not to ap- pear in the book “because — entre nous — they make me very sick.” In his foreword he sternly insists on the importance of not being “distracted by sentimental speculation” about the author’s life and early death, or what she might have gone on to write. Code may well have been “heavy-handed” on occasion, but I would like to speak up briefly on his arrangement of the volume into seven books “grouped,” in his words, “by subject.” Within these books individual pieces are carefully ordered so as to create, where

476O POETRY possible, a sense of “sequence and development of thought running through several poems.” Murray’s idiom can seem, as the reviews by William Meredith and Milton Crane testify, so mobile, so resistant to attempts to parse it into prose sense, that one can lose sight of the poem’s “subject.” Code, it strikes me, thought long and hard about the best way to bring to the fore Murray’s thematic concerns, and his arrangements are both effective and helpful in getting a grip on the volume as a whole. This coherence is stronger in some books than in others: many of the poems in book one are urban and verging on the satirical, while those in three deal with nature and rural life (mainly in Vermont); most of those in the short book four approach religious issues, whereas those in six are predominantly concerned with conquest, empire, and exile; and those in seven with mythologi- cal figures, from Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess, to Penelope, Ulysses, and Orpheus. Two and five have less distinctive characters, but one gets runs of poems on topics such as art, sleep, and the sea. I wouldn’t deny that many of Murray’s poems veer hither and thither in all manner of competing directions, skipping from image to image with electrical speed and insouciance, but beneath their hectic sur- faces one can often discern a shadowy but purposeful progression of thought and argument. Among the items listed in her section of the Murray archives at Smith is an edition of J.B. Leishman’s 1941 Hogarth Press edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Selected Poems. If Auden was evidently the primary and fundamental catalyst for Murray’s sudden and startling poetic “burst into spring,” it was the Rilke-influenced strand of Auden found throughout Poems, and in parts of The Orators (1932) and Look, Stranger! (1936), rather than the political, journalistic, camp, comic, or moralistic aspects of his work, that Murray appro- priated and developed into a medium of her own. Auden’s influence, it’s worth stressing at this point, was everywhere in the poetry that was being written in the late thirties and early forties both in Britain and America, from Philip Larkin to John Berryman, from Stephen Spender to Delmore Schwartz, from Nicholas Moore to Elizabeth Bishop and Randall Jarrell. Murray homed in on the cryptic, ellipti- cal idiom that dominates Auden’s first Faber collection, as the first piece in her own Poems rather too graphically demonstrates. It con- sists of three abab rhyming quatrains:

mark ford 477 If, here in the city, lights glare from various source, Look out of the window, thin-faced man. Three portent cities repeat the pattern and the course That history ran.

Three slender veins, clotted and ambiguous, Are those inlocked hands. Three startled cries now rise incredulous, Where once sprang barren sands.

Give back night to receding sky. Let stars (the things that remain) Orbit their quiet to the lie That is here city and various city pain. — If Here in the City

The noun “portent” in line three has been weirdly wrenched into use as an adjective, as if the course of history were insisting that there wasn’t time for the –ous to be added to it, or for a more meaning- ful word to be found. A similar kind of radical compression appears to be at work in the omissions of the final line, making the poem feel like a bathysphere that has ventured too deep into the ocean for its hull to withstand the steadily building pressure. From Auden, Murray derives terms and means for communicating in shorthand or code a sense of the panoramic sweep of evolution, which is surely the force exerting the pressure, and she also borrows his cinematic technique of cutting from human distress to the indifference of the universe: “startled cries,” “barren sands,” “various city pain,” “re- ceding sky,” and “stars” in orbit. Auden’s vision of the innate treach- ery of civilization is activated by her use of the word “lie,” rhyming with its cosmic antithesis “sky,” and as in early Auden, authority of delivery is fused with the opacity of the message: why three cities, three veins, three cries? How can “slender,” “clotted” veins also be “inlocked [another nonce word] hands”? Are these hands meant to suggest that the three cities represent intertwined civilizations ris- ing from the barren sands in some system-based reading, like that propounded by Yeats in A Vision, of human history? How odd to describe “barren sands” as having “sprang”! Might it, one begins to wonder, be as pointless to try to interpret such a poem as it is one by, say, Ern Malley, the fictitious Australian poet created by

478O POETRY James McAuley and Harold Stewart in 1944 as a means of satirizing the obscurity of modern verse? By 1946 of course, when he decided to award Murray’s manu- script the prize, Auden had moved decisively away from the idiom that his pupil sets about reanimating in a poem such as “If Here in the City”; and Auden would in later life often cast a pretty cold eye on the more vatic aspects of his early work, regretting in particular the influence of Rilke, whom he felt had lured him into writing too much “Poetry with a capital P.” Yet it was precisely this poetry with a capital P that Murray, and then, to cite the most obvious example, John Ashbery after her, found at once as invigorating as catnip and, despite its originator’s qualms, an eminently viable way for poetry to happen. It is surely a testimony to Auden’s eye for talent, what- ever form that talent took, that he selected for the Yale series first Murray’s Poems and later Ashbery’s Some Trees, for both make exten- sive use of a poetic mode that, although he had himself invented it, he had since come to mistrust. “If Here in the City” is, I think, at once too derivative and too baf- fling to be classed as one of Murray’s stronger efforts, but by placing it at the head of her collection, which contains seventy-six pieces in all, Code allowed her to acknowledge the Audenesque as the portal through which she entered the poetic realms that follow. Most of the volume it inaugurates consists of shortish lyrics, of which about twenty turn the page. Book three and book seven conclude with Murray’s two longest and, in my opinion, two finest works: “An Epithalamium,” which occupies five pages, and “Orpheus. Three Eclogues,” which runs to nine. While the bleak urgency of the book’s opening salvo subliminally reflects the era in which Murray’s oeuvre was composed, one finds in her work few specific historical references. An exception to this rule is “The Coming of Strange People,” which is subtitled “Written on the day of Holland’s invasion,” allowing us to date it to May 10, 1940. But this poem, like “If Here in the City,” is concerned to view the events of history from a dauntingly wide-angled perspective. Certainly it laments the casualties of the invasion (“So many bodies flat upon the stir of spring,” it begins) and the return of “old war chanting,” and condemns the “hate” fueling the invaders, who, curi- ously, are never named but simply called “strange people,” as if the speaker were an anthropologist scrupulously adopting the terminol- ogy for outsiders of a tribe under scrutiny. But the poem also moves

mark ford 479 spectacularly beyond the “bewildered age” she inhabits, contrasting the chaos of the present with nature’s powers of recuperation:

From this land we see the valleys and the banners. The hollow places will hold ruins for a time; Then the sides of the mountain will green and flower, Even women shall bear trees and know the leaves for children.

One is reminded of the attempts of Wallace Stevens to create adequate space for the soldier in his conjugations of the relationship between reality and imagination in his poetry of the war years, in particular of the mixture of human carnage and the irrepressible, ex- otic energies of nature intertwined in the jungle of “Asides on the Oboe” of 1940, with its “jasmine haunted forests” in which the poet hears the central man “chanting for those buried in their blood.” My guess is that Murray closely read Stevens — about the value of whose work, incidentally, Auden was deeply skeptical; and, if I’m right in this, more incidentally still, by fusing these two antithetical influ- ences she again anticipates the processes that shaped the development of Ashbery. While Stevens tends to reach, in his meditations on the issues raised by war, toward a delicate balance between the ideal and the real, with self-conscious pointers to the paradigmatic role that poetry can play in negotiations between them, Murray’s “The Coming of Strange People” concludes with a resonant delineation of evolution- ary harshness and the crisis of the moment:

Earth, there is no gentle shaping of the clay. Time, no building in the hour. Things come and the sea is sea without us. All is brash and shrill, with bone to fallow on, And bitter of mouth are we who taste the green this spring.

The gentle pathos of Wilfred Owen’s “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” is firmly set aside by the unsparing rigor of the historical con- sciousness these lines purvey. Things come, they don’t even fall apart, and whatever epithet we apply to the sea, from Homer’s “wine-dark” to Stevens’s “tragic-gestured,” affects the sea itself not at all. The only concession to sentiment lies in acknowledging the bitterness of the taste of the spring in May of 1940, with the bones of the dead

480O POETRY dispersed like nutrient, lying fallow in its lap. “The Coming of Strange People” is the opening poem of book six, and a number of other pieces in this section explore, or re- flect upon, the will to conquest. In “Ahab the Supermonomaniac” Murray succinctly sums up the corrosive emotions driving Melville’s obsessed hero: “Sought all life damned. / Pain chanted imaginings.” The three poems that follow are all set in England, which is presented by Murray as already in the throes of post-imperial diminishment, as an “island-once-kingdom.” “We were Empire and now we are dead or Mayflower” she observes in the longest of these, a line which might be said to compact into ten words Auden’s compendious diagnoses of his mother country, which culminated in his decision to follow in the footsteps of the pilgrim fathers to America, rather than col- lapse, as he feared he otherwise would, to what he calls in “Consider” “a classic fatigue.” It can plausibly be argued that Auden is Britain’s first post-imperial poet, and something of the historical guilt and fear of lassitude or failure that drives so much of his thirties poetry infil- trates Murray’s depictions of England too: “Then know what it is to have the sins of the father!” she exclaims in “Empire Now Dead and Mayflower” — Code presumably quarried the poem’s title from the line quoted above. “On Looking at Left Fields” (“left” here meaning “abandoned”) enjoins us to note how in “the old fields the old corn tangles,” and the “sleek weed twists and strangles,” ruining “lands” that once were “green.” In this poem, another set of three quatrains rhyming abab, Murray shifts from a sense of national inertia and inadequacy to an image of herself as a Londoner, one who knows from the inside the symptoms of the national malaise:

Dried leaves like lizard scales over the land And the slow blink down to winter. Father of shivering times, crazed by each spring’s demand, Why would you know your daughter?

It is this London they will never know — Something of must, stale bread and spring, The fattened dog, the thinning child and Rotten Row. To be born a Londoner, as I, gives meaning to the thing.

Are the “they,” one can’t help wondering, her transatlantic relations? This poem is followed by “London,” a wonderful piece of urban

mark ford 481 description that I much regret not including in my anthology London: A History in Verse. “London sits with her hands cupped,” it begins. What is the personified city waiting for? Pigeons, sparrows, a “fat-flanked mare,” and “slim weeds of ivy” animate its streets and buildings, along with Easter lilies, only for all to be suddenly obliter- ated by the capricious spring weather:

a cool breeze speaks out of some darker street, Clouds shuffle up with restless intrepidity, and spill Their whole river of abundance at her feet, The whole clean wide river, and wrap her in one river of sleet, Her sides in one wet sheet.

As such lines demonstrate, Murray’s poetry is adept, perhaps too relentlessly for some, at making the strange familiar and the famil- iar strange. Rhyme often plays a distinctive role in her creation of oblique angles and surprising twists, as in the chiming here of street /

feet / sleet / s sheet. She frequently makes superb use of off-rhyme too, as well as of variable line lengths, whose effect in her work is memo- rably described by Ashbery as “suggestive of waves washing up on a beach, with every so often an unusually long one, like the wave that surprises you when you’re walking by the ocean, making you run to escape it.” For all their whimsy and wanderings, Murray’s poems come in carefully structured shapes and sizes; her curious swoops and zigzags develop within elastic but recognizable stanza patterns, often al- lowing an energizing tension between impulse and rigor to emerge. “What will the wish, what will the dance do?” inquires Auden at the end of his short poem “Orpheus” of 1937, and while not ex- actly a formalist, Murray shows herself insistently aware of how the dance can liberate the wish. Indeed a number of her poems proffer as an image of the maker not an inspired bard but a toiling archi- tect. The second half of book one consists of six poems in a row that develop architectural themes as a means of foregrounding the rela- tionship between the fluidity of the imagination and the structures that seem in opposition to its freedoms. “It is the action of water that is the nearest thing to man,” exclaim the young in the open- ing lines of “The Builder,” to which a “sullen cry,” which I take to be that of the builder himself, responds that there is “no time to stop in the work and the job, only time to breathe, / And breathe in

482O POETRY your own fine sweat.” A fairly standard antithesis seems set up here, but the poem goes on to complicate it in a range of intriguing ways. Appealing as the indolent young’s resistance to work and order may seem, how far, the poem asks, can one take the romantic ideal of the imagination as formless and insatiable? “I want to wander over the hills” enthuses its Orphic speaker:

and down to the water, And if there is sea I want to pack it up in my arms, And let the blue globe of all the wide water fill my mouth Till my jaw hangs loose, and come piling into me, Fill up my head, my chest, and the sea-filled loins to burst in me.

The builder may be sullen, and his constructions doomed, but as the poem’s last stanza makes clear, he is more aware than the absurdly wa- ter-inflated speaker of what he is doing. “We’re building,” he explains:

towers of Babel that will crumble down before dawn, Like the falling of water down and down to the sea, And we’d die making towers of Babel while they tumble down to the sea.

This may not achieve quite the defiant splendor of Yeats’s “All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay”; nevertheless, the extravagant, almost parodic terms in which Murray stages this dialogue between romantic impulse and classical form indicate a high degree of self-consciousness about her own procedures, and suggest the need to move beyond the high rheto- ric of Modernism toward more indeterminate and flexible styles of approach to the relationship between desire and convention. Murray’s conjugations of the figure of the architect in these poems connect with the overall vision that the book presents of the history of civilization and its culmination in the modern city. In the first in the series the Gothic is celebrated for its power to incorporate into its facades architecture’s seeming opposite, the “passions of night,” in the gargoyle shape of a chuckling “slippery imp” or “a fangy slit- eyed creature of no race.” A “little architect” is rocked to sleep in another that Murray — or Code — called “Lullaby,” which is about a mother and child rather than the fickle lovers presented in Auden’s poem of the same name. As in the last stanza of Auden’s love poem,

mark ford 483 Murray’s “Lullaby” delicately dreams a happy future for its addressee, imagining the future structures that she will one day build fusing as successfully as Gothic cathedrals the organic and irrational with the “dead” stone of which they are made:

The grass will not be so insignificant, the stone so dead. You will spiral up the mansions we have sown. Drop your lids, little architect. Admit the bats of wisdom into your head.

The looping parabolas made by bats offer a useful way of figur- ing Murray’s poetic imagination as a whole. No doubt the kinds of wisdom it conveys may seem to some a little skittish or elusive — although she is by no means averse to accumulating series of proposi- tions that appear to be aiming at the lapidary or epigrammatic. The short poem “Men and Women Have Meaning Only As Man and Woman” consists entirely of such propositions, but ones that man- age to combine the self-evident and the unfathomable, or at the very least, unverifiable, like a miscellany of mistranslated koans or a set of philosophical exempla that one can’t quite follow:

Men and women have meaning only as man and woman. The moon is itself and it is lost among stars. The days are individual, and in the passage The nights are each sleep, but the dreams vary. A repeated action is upon its own feet. We who have spoken there speak here.

It is not easy to take issue with such statements; their wisdom lies in the sense they communicate of a kind of false bottom to our uses of language. Like Auden, Murray is not afraid of giving full reign to the urge to define and categorize, yet the seemingly systematic processes of assertion and illustration that inform her poems tend to register as subtly but irretrievably askew, as “makeshift,” to adopt Code’s term, despite the authoritative tones in which they are delivered. “Men and Women ... ” concludes:

The timing of independent objects Permits them to live and move and admit their space

484O POETRY And entity and various attitudes of life. All things are cool in themselves and complete.

If the “cool” tone reminds one of Wittgenstein’s dispassionate chains of logic in the Tractatus, the lacunae that open up between each of the poem’s sentences suggest a mind pursuing certainties where none exist. It is lack of completion, however, that drives her two longest pieces, “An Epithalamium” and “Orpheus. Three Eclogues,” which both explore relationships between men and women, or man and woman. “An Epithalamium” is subtitled “Or Marriage Day in a Little-Known Country / A Marriage Poem for an Age,” and is in the form of a dialogue between “The Young Women” and “The Young Men” of this little-known country. The ceremonial aspect of the epithalamium tradition is honored, up to a point, in the poem’s formal properties: the first four alternating speeches are thirteen lines long, as is the sixth, which is spoken by The Young Men; the fifth, and the conclud- ing seventh, both spoken by The Young Women, are seventeen lines long. Perhaps, in this little-known country, this is the form taken by all epithalamiums. The poem attempts, rather like Auden’s very early charade Paid on Both Sides, which developed out of his reading of Icelandic sagas, to use the archaic and immemorial to delineate a radically modern sen- sibility. Both are anatomies of late adolescence, of its fantasies and uncertainties and trembling fascination with new kinds of linguis- tic and empirical possibility, but while Auden’s charade harks back to the japes of a public school Junior Common Room or the rituals of Officer Training Corps, Murray’s young women and young men float free of any particular social context. In numerous passages the influence of Rilke, especially of the Duino Elegies, is strong, but not, I think, overpowering:

On the hill we see a child plucking flowers: The round face of the day is seeded with infinities. In our minds the children stamp, the strict parent frowns, the infant cowers Behind random clusters, the flower-symbol, to smother laughter. Compact and kneeling, we smoothe the wet grass to one side, Learning to touch the earth with consideration, Knowing that we must be less militant and young to stroke the things that hide.

mark ford 485 Even the bright dew weeps from the stem at our inept and thoughtless touch.

The novelty and the clumsiness of awakening sexual consciousness are beautifully captured in such lines. The pastoral tradition, which dominates book three in Code’s arrangement, is elegantly and boldly reconfigured throughout these seven monologues, which interact with each other in an oblique but effective way, rather in the manner of the speeches by the four characters of Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (a poem subtitled a “A Baroque Eclogue”) on which he was at work during the summer that he selected Murray’s poems for the Yale prize. “An Epithalamium” is Murray’s fullest exploration of what I called in relation to “Believe Me, My Fears Are Ancient” the procreative urge. At many moments the writing turns frankly erotic: “Come, O come to us,” urge The Young Women in the final section, “so that we shall know more of the pine against the hill.” Whatever her health problems, Murray was as capable as, say, the Keats of “The Eve of St. Agnes” of imagining the coming together of lovers and their mutual transformation by this act of blending into new identities that move beyond the scope or reach of the poem: “And they are gone — ay, ages long ago / These lovers fled away into the storm,” observes Keats in his final stanza; “Lovers may touch,” “An Epithalamium” concludes, “but the marriage bond is a link without distraction.” Except, of course, when one of the lovers dies. In “Orpheus. Three Eclogues,” the volume’s last poem, Murray bravely picks up the myth that Rilke had made spectacularly his own, first in “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” and then in Sonnets to Orpheus. Murray’s poem has a wider cast list, including Orpheus’s mother Calliope, Charon, who punts him across the Acheron, as well as the Beasts that Orpheus enchants and the Shades of Hades, who are both given a choric role. If “An Epithalamium” recreates the vivid pulse of dawning sexual- ity that animates Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Murray’s Eurydice comes to resemble the mournful knight of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” hollowed out by the failure of love, stranded, by Orpheus’s sudden change of mind, in the world of the Shades. As they proceed on the path up from Hades, Eurydice gradually recovers her sensuality and humanity, imagining, like a convalescent taking her first totter- ing steps out of bed, the life she is about to recover:

486O POETRY I will lean myself to the wind and nibble the sensation, Passionately grasp the oval bowls of wine, Taste and tamper, have precise delight in the minutest tilt of inclination.

Much of the poem, with the exception of the choric passages, makes cleverly unobtrusive use of Murray’s favoured abab rhyme scheme, although this breaks down in the two lines that Eurydice utters as Orpheus turns, the most affecting lines, to my mind, in her entire oeuvre:

In my palms lie these two clear efforts of my eyes, The very essence of this tormented moment.

As “An Epithalamium” found a complex but ceremonial language in which to translate The Young Women’s and The Young Men’s approach to sexual union, so this decisive moment of sundering is conveyed in a calm, uplifting, almost metaphysical image. Orpheus’s decision to turn to look at his wife and thus condemn her to return to Pluto is made no more explicable by Murray than the sudden onset of a deadly illness, while the choric summation by the Shades, which brings the poem, and the volume as a whole, to a close, returns us to the remorseless cosmic perspectives of the opening piece, “If Here in the City”:

Birds and beasts, rocks and fish of the sea, Watch how the lidless pools absorb to themselves The improbable adventure without a ripple.

Death quietly claims Eurydice, however frantically Orpheus clutches her vanishing image, and then afterward laments her loss. The poem is clear that never again will the border between death and life prove porous: “Leave what may be the absolute of death to us, the proper dead.” Murray’s book seems to me a startling achievement for a poet who died at an even younger age than Keats, a month short of her twenty- fifth birthday. It is surprising, particularly after John Ashbery’s eloquent praise of her work in 2003, that she has attracted so little critical attention, by which I actually mean none: this essay is, as far as I can tell, the first ever written on her oeuvre. The improbable

mark ford 487 poetic adventures her Poems offers have slipped into oblivion, like Eurydice, almost without a ripple, although she does make cameo ap- pearances in David Lehman’s The Oxford Book of American Poetry of 2006 and Evan Jones’s and Todd Swift’s Modern Canadian Poets of 2010. Auden ends his short foreword by recommending four pieces to a casual browser of Poems in a bookstore: “You Talk of Art,” “An Epithalamium,” “Even the Gulls of the Cool Atlantic,” and “Orpheus.” “I am confident,” he adds, “that, if he is a true judge and lover of poetry, he will neither leave the store without taking the volume with him, nor ever regret his purchase.” It can take a while to tune in to the “fluctuant,” to borrow one of her favorite adjectives, maneuvers that Murray’s poems perform, but Auden is surely right to suggest that those who make the effort will not regret it. “Admit,” as the mother advises her little architect in “Lullaby,” “the bats of wisdom into your head.”

488O POETRY contributors

mark ford’s Selected Poems will be published by Coffee House Press in April. He lives in London. matthea harvey’s * next book of poems is If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? (Graywolf Press, 2014). Telettrofono was originally created as a soundwalk with sound artist Justin Bennett for stillspot- ting nyc: staten island, a Guggenheim Museum project. The audio version can be heard at www.poetryfoundation.org/telettrofono. troy jollimore is the author of At Lake Scugog (Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory (MARGIE / Intuit House, 2006). laura kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her most recent book, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). larry levis (1946–1996) published five books during his lifetime and two have appeared posthumously. The work in this issue is from The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2015), edited by David St. John. jamaal may’s first book,Hum (2013), won the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. He is founding editor of the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series. k. silem mohammad is the author of several books of poetry including The Front (Roof Books, 2009), Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises Press, 2003). julia shipley* is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Planet Jr. (Flyway/Iowa State, 2012) and Herd (Sheltering Pines Press, 2010). rebecca shore* studied with the Chicago Imagists and is partic- ularly interested in form invention and interpretation. She teaches painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. a.e. stallings has lived in Greece since 1999. Her latest collection is Olives (TriQuarterly Books, 2012). She is working on a translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days.

contributors 489 nance van winckel’s sixth book of poems, Pacifc Walkers (Uni- versity of Washington Press), and her fourth collection of stories, Boneland (Univeristy of Oklahoma Press), were published in 2013. ocean vuong* is a recipient of a 2013 Pushcart Prize and fellow- ships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. franz wright is about to finish a new book, POEMS 2010–2013 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).

* First appearance in Poetry.

490O POETRY BOOk PRIZE SERIES

PRIZES $3,000 and publication through the University of Nebraska Press for one book of short fiction and one book of poetry.

ELIGIBILITY The Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series welcomes manuscripts from all writers, 2012 Winners including non-U.S. citizens writing in English, and those who have previously published vol- umes of short fiction and poetry. No past or present paid employee of Prairie Schooner or the University of Nebraska Press or cur- rent faculty or students at the University of Nebraska will be eligible for the prizes.

JUDGING Semi-finalists will be chosen by members of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series National Advisory Board. Final manu- scripts will be chosen by the Editor-in-Chief, Kwame Dawes.

HOW TO SEND We accept electronic submis- sions alongside hard copy submissions.

WHEN TO SEND Submissions will be accepted between January 15 and March 15, 2014.

. For submission guidelines or to submit online, visit prairieschooner.unl.edu. El Dorado Peter Campion “Campion’s gifts for controlling yet spinning the illusion of lost control in a poem are prodigious.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Paper $18.00

The Accounts Katie Peterson “Peterson’s is a careful, serious poetry, difficult in the way that real life is difficult, but clear and chilly as a long-held regret.” —Publishers Weekly Paper $18.00

Thirty Years of Phoenix Poets, 1983 to 2012 An E-Sampler Selected by University of The Chicago Press Staff University of Free E-book . . . Go to Chicago Press http://bit.ly/Poets30 www.press.uchicago.edu for your copy! Now in Paperback!

“If you need to be reminded of the incomparable poems that Poetry magazine published first in its pages, read excellent poetry by an author you might not have discovered yet, or simply remember why poetry is worth loving, this is the book to turn to. You won’t be disappointed.” —Emma Goldhammer, Paris Review “A high-wire anthology of electric resonance.”—Booklist PaPer $15.00 The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu 2014 — 28th Year New York State Summer Writers Institute June 30 - July 11 (session one) July 14 - July 25 (session two)

TEACHING FACULTY PoETrY FrANk BIdArT • HENrI CoLE • rosANNA WArrEN CAmPBELL mCGrATH • PEG BoYErs FICTIoN AmY HEmPEL • rICk moodY • PAUL HArdING CrIsTINA GArCIA • VICTorIA rEdEL JoANNA sCoTT • HoWArd NormAN dANzY sENNA • JIm sHEPArd ELIzABETH BENEdICT • AdAm BrAVEr NoN-FICTIoN PHILLIP LoPATE • JAmEs mILLEr

VIsITING FACULTY

rUssELL BANks • JoYCE CAroL oATEs roBErT PINskY • mArILYNNE roBINsoN PAUL AUsTEr • LoUIsE GLüCk WILLIAm kENNEdY • JAmAICA kINCAId HoNor moorE • CArL dENNIs FrANCINE ProsE • sIrI HUsTVEdT CHArLEs sImIC • Tom HEALY JANE sHorE

For more information and to apply, please visit: www.skidmore.edu/summer or write: NYSSWI • Special Programs Skidmore College • Saratoga Springs, NY 12866