October 2012

founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

October 2012

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cci • number 1 CONTENTS

October 2012

POEMS joshua mehigan 3 Down in the Valley The Cement Plant The Professor todd boss 6 Accounting laura kasischke 7 You’ve Come Back to Me The Second Death Ativan Game john poch 12 Good Year Elegy for a Suicide gail wronsky 14 Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers campbell mcgrath 15 Releasing the Sherpas Nox Borealis Pentatina for Five Vowels elizabeth seydel 18 September 2011 morgan The Span kathleen jamie 20 Moon The Stags from 100 years josephine miles 25 Heir paul goodman 26 “Dreams Are the Royal Road to the Unconscious” marie ponsot 27 A Visit Private and Profane sara teasdale 30 The Answer The Long Hill james laughlin 32 My Ambition edward dahlberg 34 From “Five Poems” michael donaghy 38 Machines Cage, louis macneice 40 Prognosis Obituary

comment christian wiman 45 Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century c.k. williams 63 Nature and Panic abigail deutsch 68 In the Penile Colony

contributors 75 back page 91 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio

cover art by bernard williams “Saw Horse Pegasus,” 2012

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Poetry • October 2012 • Volume 201 • Number 1

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joshua mehigan

Down in the Valley

It was her first time coming home from college. She headed downtown for a drink or two. Her girlfriend went home early. That was Christmas. Now, under sapling pine trees in the clearing, snowdrops are coming back to their old places. They had been gone a lifetime. Now they stand, poised like a choir on the verge of singing: Nature is just. There’s nothing left to fear. The worst thing that can happen happened here.

joshua mehigan 3 The Cement Plant

The cement plant was like a huge still nailed in gray corrugated panels and left out forty-five years ago in the null center of a meadow to tax itself to remorseless death near a black stream and briars, where from the moment it began to breathe, it began falling apart and burning. But it still went, and the men were paid.

The plant made dust. Impalpably fine, hung in a tawny alkaline cloud, swept into drifts against mill room piers, frozen by rain on silo ledges, dust was its first and its final cause. Pinups were traced on their car windshields. Dust gave them jobs, and killed some of them. Late into evening their teeth grated. Its product was dust, its problem dust.

The thing was blind to all its own ends but the one. Men’s ordinary lives, measured out on a scale alien to that on which its life was measured, were spent in crawling the junk machine, fitting new gaskets, screws, and bearings, deceiving it towards the mood required for it to avail and pay. Somehow it did. None cheered it. It sustained them.

41 POETRY The Professor

I get there early and I find a chair. I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod. I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod and second an opinion I don’t share. I think: whatever else I am, I’m there. Afterwards, I escape across the quad into fresh air, alone again, thank god. Nobody cares. They’re quite right not to care.

I can’t go home. Even my family is thoroughly contemptuous of me. I look bad. I’m exactly how I look. These days I never read, but no one does, and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was. Everything I know is from a book.

joshua mehigan 5 todd boss

Accounting

Its fine incisors grinding

my mother fed my father’s fledgling carpentry concern into her adding machine

as if its hunger could be satisfied

costs and savings spooling to our wooden kitchen floor and pooling

amounting to nothing

a shop tool’s shavings.

61 POETRY laura kasischke

You’ve Come Back to Me

For G A small thing crawling toward me across this dark lawn. Bright eyes the only thing I’m sure I see.

You’ve come back to me, haven’t you, my sweet? From long ago, and very far. Through crawling dark, my sweet, you’ve come back to me, have you? Even smaller this time than the stars.

laura kasischke 7 The Second Death

So like the slow moss encroaching, this dark anxiety. In the bricks by now and all along the shaded left side of the house.

And the statue, behind her knee. Her ankle, in the cool space between her breasts, spreading in the earliest hours of the morning.

Between her fingers. Her parted lips. That black-green whispering.

81 POETRY Ativan

That dream of a cricket in the dark of the night at the foot of the gallows tree.

Virtuous cricket. Little, hopeful heart- shaped face lit up by the moon.

Little, hopeful, insistent song about the future sung to a hanged man’s boots.

laura kasischke 9 Game

I thought we were playing a game in a forest that day. I ran as my mother chased me.

But she’d been stung by a bee. Or bitten by a snake. She shouted my name, which

even as a child I knew was not “Stop. Please. I’m dying.”

I ran deeper into the bright black trees happily as she chased me: How

lovely the little bits and pieces. The fingernails, the teeth. Even the bombed cathedrals being built inside of me.

How sweet the eye socket. The spine. The curious, distant possibility that God had given courage to human beings that we might suffer a little longer.

And by the time

I was willing to admit that all along all along I’d known it was no game

10P POETRY I was a grown woman, turning back, too late.

laura kasischke 11 john poch

Good Year

January. I pluck it, this feather flapping in the high mesquite only head-high, caught by the down, iridescent, turkey. Another feather hugging the ditch along the fence line and another ... A coyote somewhere naps happy, grinning like the feather evolved from a leaf. What luck.

Clouds lift above the field as if to swallow my eye into hunger. Good hunger. The greatest eye must behold me like an ember dropped into a finch nest, and I smoke at the mouth like a gun dreaming in a safe of a war it can win by virtue of its praise. I have lost the killer phrase I concocted on my country walk with the feather in my pocket. I cock it.

12P POETRY Elegy for a Suicide

She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact: there’s only so much you can do with friction and an intentional hand before the hand burns. The sound that scissors make in a child’s hand while crunching construction paper aches when she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style, that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk. Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that. We come down from bunk beds. We come down from the funky reds and yellows of the spring’s summer tanager gone in fall. We fail to see the most vivid birds high in the trees on the other side of leaves.

Where did those sad seeds come from or how take root? Her departure spun out of some samara down into a maple shadow that shadows well into night’s sweet syrup. O host, we don’t know the words for this country, and this country pretends we have no knife, no guns in the bedroom, no large car for escaping or crashing over hard hillsides or into houses. We stuff our faces, blank as pills, with pills. No one wants to open that book, but it’s a book.

john poch 13 gail wronsky

Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers

on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse

ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system — not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,

the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew

who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe

in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness

by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive,

correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching

out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy

me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see.

The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously

over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper? Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.

14P POETRY campbell mcgrath

Releasing the Sherpas

The last two sherpas were the strongest, faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled, streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield below the summit where we stopped to rest.

The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx- fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt, agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered, alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx.

The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty, furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain searching for some cairn or chasm to explain my decision to send them back without me.

Looking down from the next, ax-cleft serac I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid. Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied, whatever I was then, there was no turning back.

campbell mcgrath 15 Nox Borealis

If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly, if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion, if the wind can learn to read our minds and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket, surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.

Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming unimaginable dreams in hollow trees, even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.

Listen to me now: think of something you love but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us only what we can afford to lose.

16P POETRY Pentatina for Five Vowels

Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying. The past is a fox the hunters are flaying. Nothing unspoken goes without saying. Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing. The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying.

The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing. Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing. Love is a marriage of feeling and being. The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing. Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.

Nothing gets cloven except by dividing. The future is chosen by atoms colliding. The past’s an elision forever eliding. Today is a fog bank in which I am hiding. Love is a burn forever debriding.

Love’s an ascent forever plateauing. Nothing is granted except by bestowing. Today is an anthem the cuckoos are crowing. The future’s a convolute river onflowing. The past is a lawn the neighbor is mowing.

The past is an answer not worth pursuing, Nothing gets done except by the doing. The future’s a climax forever ensuing. Love is only won by wooing. Today is a truce between reaping and rueing.

campbell mcgrath 17 elizabeth seydel morgan

September 2011

It keeps on happening again and it will be forgotten again until it’s September. We’re in the tall building paying the bill

overdue to the city for gas to fuel our furnace. We’re thinking November — it keeps on happening again — and we’ll

need heat. Now it’s still summer, too hot until fall to turn off the ac. Consider that other cloudless day, paying the bill

in City Hall. It’s way too high now, still we pay it. Look at the line, at him, her — it keeps on happening again and it will.

Energy’s costly. We forget it can kill. Though some of our children can’t remember, we in the building paying the bill

look at the date, at the window sill, think of their choice between jump and tinder. It keeps on happening again and it will. We’re in the tall building, paying the bill.

18P POETRY The Span

From the old bridge we’d been stopped on, a little below us, it looked like a diving board. When the girl switched her sign from Stop to Slow I saw across the river three men standing like old- fashioned divers at its base, newsreels we’d seen of men in swim caps. “Hard hats,” you literal you.

You agreed with “like a diving board,” but no spring to it. Something below was holding it up, something concrete. It was the business of your life. Concrete — but for me the men were waiting their turn over there, each to compete for the best two-and-a-half gainer to knife the Tye River. They’d die, you said.

“That’s a fine span,” I learned, “a very long one — they didn’t make ’em like that back then.” Or us either, I thought as I almost saw the Hard Hat bounce at the tip, his one knee up to his waist. “Inspectors,” you said as we drove across, “lolly- gagging.” Whichever. Our span is ready.

elizabeth seydel morgan 19 kathleen jamie

Moon

Last night, when the moon slipped into my attic room as an oblong of light, I sensed she’d come to commiserate.

It was August. She traveled with a small valise of darkness, and the first few stars returning to the northern sky,

and my room, it seemed, had missed her. She pretended an interest in the bookcase while other objects

stirred, as in a rock pool, with unexpected life: strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed, the paper-crowded desk;

the books, too, appeared inclined to open and confess. Being sure the moon harbored some intention,

I waited; watched for an age her cool gaze shift first toward a flower sketch pinned on the far wall

then glide down to recline along the pinewood floor, before I’d had enough. Moon, I said, We’re both scarred now.

20P POETRY Are they quite beyond you, the simple words of love? Say them. You are not my mother; with my mother, I waited unto death.

kathleen jamie 21 The Stags

This is the multitude, the beasts you wanted to show me, drawing me upstream, all morning up through wind- scoured heather to the hillcrest. Below us, in the next glen, is the grave calm brotherhood, descended out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling like the signatories of a covenant; their weighty, antique-polished antlers rising above the vegetation like masts in a harbor, or city spires. We lie close together, and though the wind whips away our man-and-woman smell, every stag-face seems to look toward us, toward, but not to us: we’re held, and hold them, in civil regard. I suspect you’d hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight our shared country, lead me deeper into what you know, but loath to cause fear you’re already moving quietly away, sure I’ll go with you, as I would now, almost anywhere.

22P POETRY from 100 years In the course of reading poems to include in our recently published centennial anthology, we found ourselves appreciating more poems than could be included in the book. Throughout the year, we have featured selections from past issues that illuminate current content, but don’t appear in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine.

“Heir” by Josephine Miles. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press. “‘Dreams Are the Royal Road to the Unconscious’” by Paul Goodman. Reprinted by permission of Random House. “A Visit” and “Private and Profane” by Marie Ponsot. Reprinted by permission of Random House. “My Ambition” by James Laughlin. Reprinted by permission of New Directions. “From ‘Five Poems’” by Edward Dahlberg. Reprinted by permission of the Edward Dahlberg Estate. “Machines” and “Cage,” by Michael Donaghy. Reprinted by permission of Picador. “Prognosis” by Louis MacNeice. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, llc. josephine miles

Heir

This gray board fence turns blue in the evening light And the sycamores reign down upon it their diadems, And blue and green batter in wood and stems The stems of light Their green and golden gems.

At once, out of a million years of energy, All turn to flesh, — board, gate, and branch — With that quick sunset wrench Which seems like chance, Out of the fashion of an entropy.

If then the flesh is yours, as now it is, I have lost yard, sunset, and all Into a mild greeting, and I call The sunset to your thought, to tell it is Parent apparent to your rich apparel.

August 1954

josephine miles 25 paul goodman

“Dreams Are the Royal Road to the Unconscious”

— Freud

The King’s Highway to the Dare-Not-Know — but I beg my rides and oh I know these boring roads where hundreds and hundreds of cars fade by in hundred-hundreds of flashing windows too bright too fast to see my face. I am steadfast long hours o’ the morning, I am so sad. An old-time trap, an ancient sad horse and his farmer stop by the way, they’ll take me one mile on my way — out of my way — is this the Way? I used to think I used to be happy, but is it possible to be happy? What is it like? — like Plato oh we’ll copy it at large and oh plan a city where all the distances (where? where?) are walking distances.

June 1947

26P POETRY marie ponsot

A Visit

“Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance ...” — Djuna Barnes

Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch The sly very old woman wile away from her pious And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin. She pours big drinks. We think of what Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young, Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower, Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite, Collapsed to this keen dame moving among Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here My child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking finger Shows how hot the oven is.

(Also she is alive with hate. Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wish We might, illiberal, uncompassionate, Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.)

Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles. We manage to mean well. We endure, and more. We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure. We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin To any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us, Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure.

March 1958

marie ponsot 27 Private and Profane

From loss of the old and lack of the new From failure to make the right thing do Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. From words not the word, from a feckless voice From poetic distress and from careless choice Exclude our intellects, James Joyce. From genteel angels and apostles unappalled From hollywood visions as virgins shawled Guard our seeing, Grünewald. From calling a kettle an existential pot, From bodying the ghost of whatever is not, John save us, 0 most subtle Scot. From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod From eating the pease and rejecting the pod Wolfgang keep us, lover of God. Couperin come with your duple measure Alter our minds against banal pleasure. Dürer direct with strictness our vision Steady this flesh toward your made precision. Mistress of accurate minor pain, Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane. From pretending to own what we secretly seek, From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek, Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek. From ignorance of structural line and bone From passion not pointed on truth alone Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone. From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son; From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One; From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne. That zeal for free will get us in deep, That the chance to choose be the one we keep That free will steel self in us against self-defense That free will repeal in us our last pretense That free will heal us

28P POETRY Jeanne d’Arc, Job, Johnnie Skelton, Jehan de Beauce, composer Johann, Dark John Milton, Charter Oak John, Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt, Leap, leap between us and the easy out; Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go; Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.

June 1957

marie ponsot 29 sara teasdale

The Answer

When I go back to earth And all my joyous body Puts off the red and white That once had been so proud, If men should pass above With false and feeble pity, My dust will find a voice To answer them aloud:

“Be still, I am content, Take back your poor compassion — Joy was a flame in me Too steady to destroy. Lithe as a bending reed Loving the storm that sways her — I found more joy in sorrow Than you could find in joy.”

October 1915

30P POETRY The Long Hill

I must have passed the crest a while ago And now I am going down. Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know — But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.

All the morning I thought how proud it would be To stand there straight as a queen — Wrapped in the wind and the sun, with the world under me. But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.

It was nearly level along the beaten track And the brambles caught in my gown — But it’s no use now to think of turning back, The rest of the way will be only going down.

September 1919

sara teasdale 31 james laughlin

My Ambition

For Wade Hall

is to become a footnote in a learned work of the

22nd century not just a “cf” or a “see” but a sol-

id note such as Raby gives Walafrid Straho in Christ-

ian Latin Poetry or Ernst Robert Curtius (the most

erudite German who ever lived) devotes to Alber-

tino Mussato in his Euro- päische Literatur und La-

teinisches Mittelalter I hope the scholar of the

22nd will lick his schol- arly lips when he finds me

in some forgotten source (perhaps the Obloquies of

Dreadful Edward Dahlberg) and think here is an odd-

32P POETRY ball I would have liked, immortalizing me in six turgid lines of footnote.

October / November 1987

james laughlin 33 edward dahlberg

From “Five Poems”

He who has never tasted the grapes of Canaan can only view them from Pisgah.

I have my tides, O sea-foamed Venus, dearer than watercress, pipkins, thyme and clymene. You once held me by the cord of my navel, but I have not died to live in Mahomet’s paradise.

Would that I could gather up my love to me as one does one’s fate, or measure her nature as God does the sea.

We are a weary race that hates seedtime. Poor Persephone, who is Maying springtime, and the coming up of flowers! We remember only what we seed, and Persephone goes down into the earth after Spring and Summer vegetation only because Pluto gave her pome- granate seeds to remember him, but if the seed perish, Persephone will die, and memory shall pass from the earth.

A man of humble blood, with a soul of Kidron, needs a Rachel, but I labored for years in the weary fields for Leah.

34P POETRY ii

The world is a wound in my soul, and I have sought the living waters in meditation, and the angelical fountains in the desert of Beersheba for solitude, for what health there is in friendship comes when one is alone.

I shed tears on the Mount of Olives because people no longer care for each other, but my friends have lacked the character for the vigil. There is no Cana wine in human affections that are not always awake, for people who do not trouble about each other are foes.

It is humiliating being the lamb and bleating to each passerby, “Feed me!” What is the use of saying that men are stones when I know I am going to try to turn them into bread.

I am afraid to say that people are truthful. When a man tells me he is honest I press my hand close to my heart where I keep my miser- able wallet. If he says he has any goodness in him, I avoid him, for I trust nobody who has so little fear of the evils that grow and ripen in us while we imagine we have one virtuous trait. These demons lie in ambush in the thick, heady coverts of the blood, where hypocrisy and egoism fatten, waiting to mock or betray us in any moment of self-esteem.

I have no faith in a meek man, and regard anyone that shows a humble mien as one who is preparing to make an attack upon me, for there is some brutish, nether fault in starved vanity.

Yet once a friend leaned as gently on my coat as that disciple had on the bosom of the Saviour, and I went away, not knowing by his affection whether I was the John Christ was said to have loved most. I whispered thanks to my soul because he leaned upon me, for I shall never know who I am if I am not loved.

edward dahlberg 35 v

Much flesh walks upon the earth void of heart and warm liver, for it is the spirit that dies soonest.

Some men have marshland natures with mist and sea-water in their intellects, and are as sterile as the Florida earth which De Soto found in those meager, rough Indian settlements, and their tongues are fierce, reedy arrows. They wound and bleed the spirit, and their oaks and chestnut trees and acorns are wild, and a terrible, barren wind from the Atlantic blows through their blood as pitiless as the primitive rivers De Soto’s soldiers could not ford.

Do not attempt to cross these mad, tumid rivers, boreal and brackish, for water is unstable, and you cannot link yourself to it.

There are also inland, domestic men who are timid pulse and vetch, and though they may appear as stupid as poultry rooting in the mire, they are housed people, and they have orchards and good, tamed wine that makes men loving rather than predatory; go to them, and take little thought of their ignorance which brings forth good fruits, for here you may eat and not be on guard for the preservation of your soul.

People who have domestic animals are patient, for atheism and the stony heart are the result of traveling: sorrow never goes anywhere. Were we as content as our forefathers were with labor in the fallow, or as a fuller with his cloth, or a drayman with his horses and mules, we would stay where we are, and that is praying.

There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone, and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.

36P POETRY God forgive me for my pride; though I would relinquish my own birthright for that wretched pottage of lentils which is friendship, I mistrust every mortal.

Each day the alms I ask of heaven is not to have a new chagrin which is my daily bread.

December 1959

edward dahlberg 37 michael donaghy

Machines

Dearest, note how these two are alike: This harpsichord pavane by Purcell And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple. This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected To another of concentric gears, Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected, Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers. And in the playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there, Should work its effortless gadgetry of love, Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance, So much agility, desire, and feverish care, As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove,

Who only by moving can balance, Only by balancing move.

September 1988

38P POETRY Cage,

the composer, locked in a soundproof room in Harvard, Heard his heartbeat and the sound of Niagara Falls Produced by the operation of his nervous system, From which he derived a theory, no doubt.

Me, I heard a throaty click at the end of “wedlock.” And Niagara on the long distance line. I knew a couple once, went up there on their honeymoon. After a week, they said, you don’t even hear it.

June 1990

michael donaghy 39 louis macneice

Prognosis

Goodbye, Winter, The days are getting longer, The tea-leaf in the teacup Is herald of a stranger.

Will he bring me business Or will he bring me gladness Or will he come for cure Of his own sickness?

With a pedlar’s burden Walking up the garden Will he come to beg Or will he come to bargain?

Will he come to pester, To cringe or to bluster, A promise in his palm Or a gun in his holster?

Will his name be John Or will his name be Jonah Crying to repent On the island of Iona?

Will his name be Jason Looking for a seaman Or a mad crusader Without rhyme or reason?

What will be his message — War or work or marriage? News as new as dawn Or an old adage?

40P POETRY Will he give a champion Answer to my question Or will his words be dark And his ways evasion?

Will his name be Love And all his talk be crazy? Or will his name be Death And his message easy?

May 1940

louis macneice 41 Obituary

The dilatory prophet, flicking the ash On the Bokhara rug said “Maybe yes; When spring comes the markets will maybe crash, Only the Unknown God can get us out of this mess.

Mao is a political animal admittedly But, politics being incalculable, I shall With your permission pour myself another; I see Nothing for it but to be animal.”

And putting the weight of his doctorates aside Took three fingers of Scotch and a cube of ice And thought that, could he announce that he had died, And so was no longer an expert, it would be nice;

And drank till two, staring into the fire Seeing half-naked girls, and then having collected His courtesy and his hat, soft-pedaling desire Went out to find the world as bad as he expected.

Drunk and alone among the indifferent lights In stark unending streets of granite and glass He ducked his head to avoid illusory stalactites And fell, his brain ringing with the noise of brass

Captions; the groundswell of the pavement, steady As fate, rose up and caught him, rolled him below A truck — this ex-professor who had already Outlived his job of being in the know.

May 1940

42P POETRY COMMENT This essay is an edited version of the introduction to The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, published this month by the University of Chicago Press. christian wiman

Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century

One way to think of Modernism in poetry is of fragments anxious about their origins. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” wrote T. S. Eliot in (and of) The Waste Land in 1922. “I cannot make it cohere,” wrote Ezra Pound some fifty years later, at the end of his epic avalanche of allusions and music and madness, The Cantos. Poetry has changed a lot in the last hundred years, but it still lives with and within this tension. The best of it draws equal strength from both poles: the power of the fragment depends upon the pull of its original context; but also, the credibility of the unity that any part implies depends upon the integrity and lonely singularity of that part. There is some combination of mastery and mystery: language has been honed to unprecedented degrees of precision, but it exists within — and in some way acknowledges — some primal and nearly annihilating silence. “The beast that lives on silence,” as W.S. Graham put it, “takes / Its bite out of either side”:

I’ll give the beast a quick skelp And through Art you’ll hear it yelp.

•

Mastery and mystery: add a hundred years and you have an incredibly vital and seemingly unkillable movement, for Modernism remains stubbornly, strikingly persistent even in the work of those poets who react against it. It might be too much to argue that W.S. Di Piero’s 2009 poem “Big City Speech” wouldn’t even exist without Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” which appeared in Poetry ninety-six years earlier. But still, the radiant discreteness of Di Piero’s observations; the way they seem to float in some uncontainable space; the weird piercing clarity whose meaning is only (only!) its own electric existence and the real world that sparks alive within it: listen closely, and you can hear a whole century echoing:

your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist

christian wiman 45 Or, less obviously, take Don Paterson’s “The Lie.” With its regular rhymes, its careful but comfortably familiar meter, its form could fit easily in the nineteenth century, at least until the bomb of its subject — a child locked in a basement, a lie trapped in a mind — explodes:

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore: it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor. The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four. His straps and chains were all the things he wore. Knowing I could make him no reply I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door.

Part of the horror of this poem is its vertiginous inwardness, the way it feels ripped out of some original and unrecoverable reality. In this case the source is psychological and not historical, but the same Modernist dynamic of a present reality underpinned and under- mined by its missing source is at play.

•

Mastery and mystery: add an intrepid woman, Harriet Monroe, who wanted a magazine equal to the art and architecture she saw every- where around her in turn-of-the-century Chicago; add ninety years of persistence and poverty, a dozen editors feeding and herding poets like feral cats; add a 200-million-dollar windfall in 2002 from the reclusive Ruth Lilly, and you have a seemingly unkillable magazine. (I wanted to steal a line from a poem by Charles Bukowski that appeared in the magazine and call our centennial anthology “The Stupidity of Our Endurance,” but not everyone shared my suicidal sense of irony.) As A.R. Ammons once wrote: “The histories of modern poetry in America and of Poetry in America are almost inter- changeable, certainly inseparable.”

•

46P POETRY Almost. What an abyss of arguments and temperaments, masterpieces and missed opportunities, taste and the lack thereof open up in that word. Pretty much every post-Modernist poet of significance has published in Poetry, but not every poet has published his or her best poems there, and Don Share and I decided early on that in the anthology we would focus on poems, not names, that we would celebrate poetry, not Poetry. Thus we approached the archive just as we do the one hundred twenty thousand submissions that come into our offices each year, poem by poem, with an eye out for the unexpected — the one-off masterpiece that juts up like a mountain from the landscape you thought you knew:

The summer that my mother fell Into the hole that was herself, We children sat like china dolls Waiting mutely on a shelf For the horror to be done.

My father, who’d begun to drink Jasmine from a turquoise cup, Was practicing his yoga when That dark mood swallowed Mama up. His trance was not undone. — From A Child’s Garden of Gods by Belle Randall

The bizarre rhetorical shriek that history and fury seem to have con- spired to create:

“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card.” And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration of the enemy aggressor. No news medium troubled to put it in quotes. — From Of Late by George Starbuck

The little-known gem by the much-anthologized master:

christian wiman 47 Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. — From Tea at the Palaz of Hoon by Wallace Stevens

We have also aimed, as we always do, at an audience that is not comprised entirely of specialists, with Harriet Monroe’s first editorial firmly in mind:

We believe that there is a public for poetry, that it will grow, and that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative the work produced in this art will grow in power, in beauty, in significance.

•

A public for poetry. Now there’s a notion that’s been kicked around for a hundred years, especially the last twenty or so. I’ve contrib- uted to this myself at times — rather ignominiously, it now seems to me. The discussions always begin with the assumption that, because poetry is not present in the culture in the way that, say, movies are, or even some literary fiction that captures the country’s attention for a while — then poetry has no meaning for that culture, no effect on it. Never mind the fact that this is demonstrably untrue by some practical measurements — the circulation of Poetry is much higher than it’s ever been, the Poetry Foundation’s website has two million unique blah blah — that’s not really the point. Whenever I hear this negative sentiment now, I think of the argument that roiled American politics several years ago about whether we — America, I mean — should drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Why not? We need the oil. The place being considered was so remote that it might as well have been on the moon. And as for being the breeding ground of the porcupine caribou, what the hell is a porcupine caribou? Drill, baby, drill. The strongest argument against this action was never, to my knowledge, spoken, perhaps because it’s seemingly the weakest. It’s also completely apolitical. You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we

48P POETRY will never be able to fully articulate or understand — and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations. For many people, true, poetry will remain remote, inaccessible, and on the same plane of perception as that Arctic refuge. But who knows by what unconscious routes poetry is reaching into lives that seem to have nothing to do with it? Who knows what atomic energies are unleashed by a solitary man or woman quietly encountering some arrangement of language that gives their being — shunted aside by chores and fears and who knows what — back to them? This is why I regret adding to the clamor over poetry’s “relevance.” The reaction is defensive and misguided, not because there is no hope for elevating poetry’s importance, but because its power is already greater than any public attention can confer upon it.

•

In the American public imagination, though, poetry has a hothouse tinge to it. It’s tweedy, and tweet-y, and has little to do with the bill-paying, stock-checking, dirty-diaper lives lived by most people. Poets themselves have been partly responsible for this. We have argued over esoteric or territorial issues that no one outside of the poetry world could possibly care about. We have embalmed poems in sociology, have created a kind of machine-speak critical jargon that any sane person would simply laugh at. We have exalted poets whose verbal and associative skills are immense but who have, finally, not very much to say. H.G. Wells once famously described Henry James as a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. He meant it to be the severest of insults, but at least there was a pea. The tide is changing on all of this. Many contemporary poets are recognizing and reclaiming the primal power of the art they practice — and not simply on an abstract or spiritual level either. I think of Jacob Saenz’s poem “Sweeping the States,” which is about the rounding-up of illegal immigrants back in 2007:

christian wiman 49 they move in swift on the Swift Plants in six states & sift through the faces to separate the dark from the light

like meat & seat them in the back of vans packed tight

At the time newspapers were filled with accounts of the event. How many times have you thought of it since? What has happened to those people? Pound said that poetry is news that stays news. Thousands of people will come across this little poem now, with its deceptive lilt and tricky music, its playful way of leading us right into blindnesses we would rather not face, its skewering conclusion that connects huge and seemingly unstoppable events with decisions we all make in our daily lives; thousands of people will read this poem and it will be — if they are going to be — a thorn in their brains. I think, too, of Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” which hones in on one sound — a soft sound, paradoxically — through all sorts of playful and awful permutations, until it seems to become a sort of fist pounding the podium before an impenetrable audience. You’re the audience. And that silence ramifying around Ellis’s last line? That’s your life:

or reform or sore chorus. Or Electoral Corruption or important ports of Yoruba or worry

or Neighbor

or fear of ... of terror or border. Or all organized minorities.

•

Why are these poems so intricately wrought, so far from “normal” speech? Because, as Pound also said, “technique is the test of a man’s

50P POETRY sincerity.” Formal decisions are ethical decisions. The sound and form of the poem are everything; they buffet it against its hard jour- ney through time and indifference. Or, to change the metaphor, they enable it to insinuate itself into the hard carapace of our consciousness, so that the poem’s “message” — Look up from your insulated life, in these instances, Enlarge your idea of what it means to be human — won’t just bounce off the glaze of us. Craft matters because life matters. Craftless poetry is not only as perishable as the daily paper, it’s meretricious, disrespectful (of its subjects as well as its readers), and sometimes, as Pound implies, even unethical.

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The difficulty of modern poetry — that is, poetry written since Modernism — is taken by most people as a given. One need only glance at poems like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Rendezvous,” William Matthews’s “Mingus at the Showplace,” or any number of other poems in the anthology to reveal the fallacy of that assumption. But never mind: it is true that some of the poetry written during the past hundred years or so makes extreme demands of readers. Briggflatts, by Basil Bunting, which appeared in its entirety in Poetry in 1966 and which now seems obviously one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, is sometimes taken as an exemplar of this difficulty. If you are not very familiar with poetry, you will likely have some trouble figuring out exactly what is being described, which is fine, which is, in fact, exactly what he intended. Besides being “about” a man who realizes, way too late, that the most intense and defining experience of his life occurred during an adolescent love affair, Briggflatts is a palimpsest of history, nature, learning, loss. It is the testament and artifact of a man who has lived so thoroughly into the language, so thoroughly through the language, that it has become a purely expressive medium. Because of cadence and pacing, and the way sounds echo and intensify sense, the word is restored to a kind of primal relation with the world: language itself has taken on the textures and heft of things:

Under sacks on the stone two children lie, hear the horse stale, the mason whistle,

christian wiman 51 harness mutter to shaft, felloe to axle squeak, rut thud the rim, crushed grit.

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As a general rule, it’s safe to say that if you can paraphrase a poem, it’s not a poem. There’s no other way of saying what Bunting is saying in Briggflatts. The language is action. Great poetry is usually difficult in some way, and then clear in ways we would never expect (“It is easier to die than to remember.”) Its difficulty, you might say, makes new clarities possible in and for us. “I wanted to write a poem / that you would understand,” wrote William Carlos Williams,

for what good is it to me if you can’t understand it? But you got to try hard.

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Part of the enjoyment of poetry — an enormous part — is letting yourself experience things you do not understand, letting the textures and rhythms of verse take you to places in your consciousness — and unconciousness — that you could not have accessed otherwise. E.E. Cummings’s “what if a much of a which of a wind” is an obvious example: to have its rare near-clarities mean anything (“all nothing’s only our hugest home”) you have to let yourself be blown around in the word-wind for a while. But the example needn’t be so conspicu- ous: Denise Levertov’s “Our Bodies” is a little master class in free verse, and if you don’t read it the way its line breaks dictate — don’t feel its form happening viscerally in you — then its effect is not simply diminished but actually distorted. Take the opening three lines:

Our bodies, still young under the engraved anxiety of our faces ...

The mind naturally wants to read these lines like this:

52P POETRY Our bodies, still young under the engraved anxiety of our faces

But this completely changes the meaning and effect of the lines. It is one thing to say that a body is “still young,” quite another to say that it is “still young under.” The latter implies a history, a density of feeling and experience, whereas the former is simply a statement of fact. Similarly, the awkward pause at the end of the second line intensifies the sensation of anxiety being described, and that word “our” that’s stranded unnaturally there for a moment enhances one’s feeling for, and sensation of, the precarious marriage of loneliness and communion that marks any authentic love. The point here is not to go through every poem nitpicking technique, trying to find some obvious “reason” for every formal decision. No, the point is simply to be aware that what may seem like awkwardness or even randomness in poetry ( James Schuyler!) can be as formally severe and singular as any Bach fugue.

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Most poets I know read almost unconsciously at first, feeling the poem’s formal and linguistic dynamics as much as its “meaning” (in the end, there is no way to separate meaning from a poem’s form and sound). Meaning matters, of course, and most poems do have some bedrock denotative sense upon which the mind can rest. But still, some mystery usually remains. Poetry, like life, has its patches of pure black, its furthest interiors where meaning gleams darkly, and must remain in that darkness if it is to mean at all. You know a good poem by whether or not those irreducible dark spots are integral to your experience of the whole. “Our only obscurities ... should be those we are driven into,” Ruth Pitter once wrote, “then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.”

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“Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry.” That’s Bunting again. It’s a statement worth keeping in mind when reading every single poem you come across.

christian wiman 53 •

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems — and to people — without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be. The irony is that one of poetry’s powers is to reanimate a reality that has gone gray for us, or maybe not gray, maybe perfectly pleasant but ungraspable somehow, the days flashing past like images seen from a train. Time seems to accelerate as we get older because the brain becomes habituated to its circumstances and surroundings — the bills, the commutes, the kiss on the cheek goodnight — and part of it shuts down. Then you look up and a decade seems to have slipped right through your fingers. “And yet, the ways we miss our lives,” wrote Randall Jarrell, “are life.” Poetry cuts right into this glaze (like that line from Jarrell, for instance), in two ways. First, it simply gives us access to a new world and new experience (you might have been familiar with Northumbrian gravestone-making before Bunting, but I wasn’t); second, and more crucially, it enlivens the lives we thought we knew, it slows them down, or gives us eyes more capable of perceiving their passing. It makes us see the latent strangeness within — and feel our dormant spirits beneath — numb habit. Consider Craig Arnold, a forty-two-year-old poet who vanished three years ago while hiking a remote volcano in Japan. As fate would have it, Don and I read his poem “Meditation on a Grapefruit” the very day that he disappeared, and the poem so shocked us out of our own mental insulation that we immediately sent off the acceptance e-mail that Craig would never see. Such a tiny thing, “To come to the kitchen / and peel a little basketball / for breakfast” on a day like any other; to feel and smell “a cloud of oil / misting out of its pinprick pores / clean and sharp as pepper,” to adhere to this “discipline” that is “precisely pointless”:

a pause a little emptiness

each year harder to live within each year harder to live without

54P POETRY •

Why write poetry? I don’t mean just the “professional” poet (there is no such thing), the poet whose life is ineluctably bound up with, and confusingly shunted aside by, words — but also the undergraduate who finds herself spending more time on her creative writing assign- ments than anything else, the judge who scrawls a quatrain on the back of an envelope, the housewife who keeps a journal which she’d burn before showing to anyone. Why this obsession so widespread in our culture, and why is it found in every culture we know? Lisel Mueller has one answer, in a poem that appeared in Poetry in 1987. Stunned by the death of her mother, the speaker of this poem — an adolescent presumably, though the age is not speci- fied — wanders out to the “lovingly planted garden” where the “day lilies were as deaf / as the ears of drunken sleepers / and the roses curved inward.” Here is how the poem ends:

I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatiens and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me. — From When I Am Asked

Implicit in that last line is an assumption that language is a living thing, with a kind of consciousness, that it returns or reciprocates the attention that is turned toward it. Not just any attention, though, but only our fullest and most costly consciousness, only our whole selves honed by emotional extremity. Language has no life unless and until we give it ours:

Now in one year a book published and plumbing — took a lifetime to weep a deep trickle — From Three Poems by Lorine Niedecker

christian wiman 55 •

“The poetic gift won’t tolerate vanity,” writes Nadezhda Mandelstam. This might come as a surprise to anyone who has suffered through supper with some bloviating laureate, or even endured an ordinary open-mic night at any local bar. It’s important to point out, then, that what Mandelstam means has little to do with the poet as a public presence and everything to do with the solitary self that blindly senses its way toward — and very rarely joltingly suffers — his gift. Many poets go out into the world like cockeyed roosters (the masculine symbol is not accidental; women seem, in my experience, better at managing this dynamic) precisely because they feel the negligible control they have over the very thing for which they are praised; it is a compensatory gesture, and a protective one. And what is true of the consciousness of the artist, that it must be vulnerable, must remain open to a power that it can never own — “Think assailable thoughts,” writes Jane Hirshfield, “or be lonely” — is true of the work of art. It must be assailable in some sense. When Wallace Stevens argues against Christianity in his most famous poem “Sunday Morning,” which appeared in Poetry in November 1915; when he says that “Death is the mother of beauty” and Christianity is a flinch away from the beauty and integrity of a fully-lived life, it is crucial to the effect of the poem that he makes his argument in grand Biblical cadences that recall — and even confusingly reawaken — all the splendor of what he is ostensibly renouncing. Similarly, in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” which seems to be a straightforward celebration of the absolute power and self-sufficiency of the individual imagination, simply the fact that Stevens includes a “you” to dispute that assertion, and that the “you” sees the speaker’s self-sufficiency as utter loneliness, haunts — and paradoxically intensifies — the effect of his final claim: And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

•

Religion often seems a bit crude when thinking of poems — a dim- ming of energy, part of the critical intelligence, an encrustation. There is an animus, an élan vital, a force that moves through verse at the speed of God. To assert this — to assent to it — is not idolatry but humility. Religion is human; it’s what one does with intense spiritual experience; it’s necessary (for some) but secondary. There is in

56P POETRY poetry a power, a presence, coextensive with our earliest instincts, including those that drove us to create religions. That’s why even poems that seem to renounce religion can mysteriously restore one’s feeling for it, because without that original charge of heart and blood, without that first marriage of word and world, all that has emerged subsequently is merely intellectual, and lifeless. Most “devotional” poetry of the past hundred years is aimed at this ur-impulse, at sparking it back to life:

in words of need and hope striving to awaken the old keeper of the living and restore lasting melodies of his desire. — From Returning to Roots of First Feeling by Robert Duncan

This focus, I think, this primary fidelity, is why even the modern poems that deal with spiritual matters directly tend to avoid specific religions. T.S. Eliot’s late work is a marked exception, and powerful for being so. So is Mary Karr’s “Disgraceland,” though her fast-talk- ing confession and apparently flippant (it isn’t, really) tone reveal her uneasiness and ambivalence about assenting to the structure of given religion.

Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths, get stewed,

and sulk around. Christ always stood to one side with a glass of water. I swatted the sap away.

When my thirst got great enough to ask, a clear stream welled up inside, some jade wave buoyed me forward,

and I found myself upright in the instant, with a garden inside my own ribs aflourish.

I love how this poem’s scattershot proliferation of images, which mirrors the speaker’s lifelong confusion, gains focus near the end. Even the language slows down — “some jade wave buoyed me forward” —

christian wiman 57 as if the whole poem were concentrating on what came next. This, too, is the province of poetry, to reattach rituals to their sources, to make us feel the radical strangeness of actions we may have come to take for granted:

There, the arbor leafs. The vines push out plump grapes. You are loved, someone said. Take that

and eat it.

•

For the past century the emphasis in American poetry has been on the lyric, and when we talk about lyric poetry we tend to think of emotional inwardness, even when the details of a given poem may be completely external. James Wright’s “The Blessing” is a classic example: the details of the natural world are rendered with a kind of inner spiritual precision that enables the poet almost, but not quite, to transcend them:

Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.

But the lyric is not limited to inward experience. Thom Gunn’s “Lines for a Book” is a lyric poem, but there is no sense of inwardness at all, no mystery emanating off of it. Gunn had little patience with anything that smacked of Romantic effluvia. As it happens, I lived around the corner from him for a time in San Francisco. With his heroic height and Spartan crewcut, his motorcycle boots and black leather jacket, he would have been menacing had he not been so disconcertingly courteous — the impeccable English accent helped — and kind. But still, Gunn savored places most of us would fear to enter, and when he wrote about “toughs,” as he did frequently, he did so with the authority that comes from direct experience:

It’s better ...... To be insensitive, to steel the will,

58P POETRY Than sit irresolute all day at stool Inside the heart.

I don’t know who Gunn was referring to here, but it might have been the great German Modernist Rainer Maria Rilke (“Everything is disappearing inward”) or, more likely, the many American imitators who tamed his terrible Angels with teabag mysticism and predictable epiphanies. (To experienced readers, the end of “The Blessing” may seem a familiar move by this point, but it was shock- ing and radical when it was written — and the poem, for all its soft spots, retains an eerie, affecting power.) Gunn wanted to obliter- ate personality in his poetry; his great models were the poets of the English Renaissance. It was a directly opposite tack to that of the Confessional poets, whose perceptions had everything to do with the personalities from which they emanated. Sylvia Plath is thought of as one of the first Confessional poets, but this is not really accurate. With her extreme staginess, the blurred sense of self and speaker, the carefully projected hysteria, her work, in terms of how much personality is in play, actually has more in common with Gunn’s than with the Confessional poets she is thought to have spawned. James Wright’s “The Blessing,” on the other hand, for all of its apparent focus outward, is a poem in which you can not only feel a dis- tinct personality (tender-hearted, mystically inclined) but its absolute necessity to the effect of the poem. Others in the book include the William Matthews and Mary Karr poems I’ve already mentioned. The speakers of these latter poems are like lively, idiosyncratic, first-person narrators of good novels — with all the rewards and limitations thereof.

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A writer who grows up in a bookless culture — “the folk from whom all poetry flows,” as Lorine Niedecker puts it, “and dreadfully much else” — will always be torn by conflicting impulses. On one hand, the Culture she acquires — she will always think of it with a capital C — separates her from the culture in which she was raised. On the other, everything in her that might animate her intellectual acquisi- tions is rooted in the world she has left. The novelist and poet (and frequent Poetry contributor) Reynolds Price once spoke of the terrible risk a writer takes by uprooting herself from her native place. But

christian wiman 59 it’s also a risk not to leave, as it sometimes requires distance to clearly see the place — James Joyce’s Ireland, say — in which one came to consciousness. The anthology begins with a famous little poem by the consum- mate Modernist Ezra Pound, who left Hailey, Idaho at the age of eighteen and spent his life acquiring world culture with an assiduity that was as impressive as it was impossible, like a python trying to swallow a camel. The anthology ends with a late poem of W.B. Yeats, who certainly didn’t grow up in a bookless culture (his father was a famous painter) but nonetheless felt the tension between his literary aspirations and his geographical inspirations. Though he was a fixture in literary London for decades, and though his international voice and acclaim eventually brought him a Nobel Prize, Yeats remained staunchly connected and committed to Ireland, even if that Ireland was in part a dream. “The Fisherman,” one of the most beautiful poems Yeats ever wrote, captures all the simplicity and complexity of this relation:

Maybe a twelve-month since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face And gray Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark with froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream — A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”

Every poem in The Open Door is situated somewhere on this spec- trum between life and learning, between linguistic powers honed to surgical precisions and the messy living reality out of which all language, if it would stay alive, must be rooted.

60P POETRY •

For if it is true that the closer bound the artist is to his community the harder it is for him to see with a detached vision, it is also true that when he is too isolated, though he may see clearly enough what he does see, that dwindles in quantity and importance.

This authoritative quote from W.H. Auden is illuminating, useful, and wrong. It expresses (more succinctly) some of what I’ve said above, but it hasn’t (and how could it?) taken into account what the word “community” might mean and how our notions of that would change over the years. Adrian Blevins might not speak for a community bound by highways and mores, but the one she does speak for in “How To Cook a Wolf” — “the dumbstruck story of the American female” — is considerably larger. Rae Armantrout — whose entire work, by the way, might be read as an acerbic reaction to, or defiant expansion of, lyric poetry — also addresses or mirrors our worries of community, in this life and the next, and with a dash of weird and welcome humor that might make you underestimate her seriousness:

Hectic and flexible,

flames

are ideal

new bodies for us!

•

For all the canons and anthologies, for every rock-solid reputation and critical consensus, poetry is personal or it is nothing. That is, until a poem has been tested on your own pulse, to paraphrase John Keats, until you have made up your own mind and heart about where you stand in relation to it, and it to you — until this happens, all poetry is merely literature, all reading rote. It’s true that some people are better readers of poetry than others; that some people’s judgment matters (for the culture as a whole) more than others; that, just as with music or art, there are elements of craft and historical perspective

christian wiman 61 essential to being able to formulate a meaningful response. But still: poetry is made up of poems, and poems repulse and entice in unpre- dictable ways, and anyone who reads independently and spiritedly is going to carry an eccentric canon around in his head. This is half the fun of it all.

•

Reading through a hundred years of Poetry, week after week of issue after issue, some forty thousand poems in all, Don Share and I, when we weren’t rendered prone and moaning, jolted back and forth between elation and depression. Here’s a hundred pages of work by a Pulitzer Prize winner, whose poems, just a couple of decades after his death, feel ambered in a dead idiom. Here’s two hundred pages of poems that stirred contemporaries to comparisons of Shakespeare, without one moment now that seems fresh, necessary, worth saving. Here’s poet after poet whose names you’ve never even heard, some with lines that leap up out of poems like the limb of a prodded lab frog, then flop back down in the cold poems to which they are ineluctably bound. On the other hand, here’s Josephine Miles, whose work I’d never even paused over, and the irascible, irrepressible Paul Goodman, and James Laughlin with his wonderful winking ambition to be nothing more than a footnote, perhaps in “the Obloquies of // Dreadful Edward Dahlberg.” Or Dahlberg! How badly we wanted to include his weird prose piece titled — aggressively, no doubt — “Five Poems.” “My friendship with Dahlberg,” Fanny Howe writes in Poetry half a century later, after giving a heartbreaking sense of the man’s volatile intensity and prophetic authority, his absolute seriousness of purpose, “ended bitterly. He chased me around his apartment on Rivington Street with his pants down.” And that’s how it is, this life in poetry, the pathos mixed right in with the bathos, the heroic sense of purpose with the pathetic pull of circumstance. “What do you do,” asks the man on the airplane, and for a moment every American poet pauses as one, feeling that face-off between spiritual integrity and social insecurity. And that’s sort of what we feel too, Don and I, after being buried under a hundred years of poems. Humility, first: to think of all the lives behind this work, and the element of chance that has made us, for a moment, the judges of it. And pride: to be a part of it, to have our own lives so richly entangled.

62P POETRY c.k. williams

Nature and Panic

The first evidence we have of any human doings with nature other than utilitarian artifacts for hunting and fishing are the Paleolithic paintings in caves in France and Spain. These great works of art were created over a period of twenty thousand years, and then stopped; we don’t really know why they first began to be created or why they didn’t continue. I think most of us have been tempted to play the game of trying to intuit the vast number of individuals who were born and died during those uncountable millennia and to imagine what a single person’s life, a “first person” in both senses of the term, would really have been. For me, the daydream invariably leads me to picture my poor ancestor living in almost constant fear of threats to life and well-being: the predators, the droughts, the erratic cold that sometimes descended and stayed for thousands of years, and sometimes, for reasons we still don’t understand, didn’t. “Nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote the Hobbesian cliche. So, were those people really that much more anxious for themselves than we are? To return to the Paleolithic paintings: there’s little evidence of anguish or dread in their subject matter and execution. The creatures in them are depicted with accuracy and detail and with that breathlessly assured brushwork that could have been acquired through nothing but aesthetic dedication and love. There are almost no depictions of nature as threatening. In one painting there’s a lion, but she’s treated with a whimsical humor; in another two, someone seems to have been killed by a bison, the beginning of what some researchers suspect may have been a series of myths. The only truly malignant matters that are recorded in the caves are a few mysterious and so far uninterpreted recumbent human figures, riven with what seem to be spears: they were possibly murdered, perhaps even tortured. But generally, if the society in which these artists lived was fraught with fear, it certainly isn’t manifested in their work. Even their span of years, it turns out, wasn’t as short as was once thought: the most recent evidence suggests that people during these eras regularly lived to the age of fifty or sixty.

c.k. williams 63 At the same time, if we pull back a little and consider larger currents of human existence, there does seem to have been ample reason for anxiety. The climate, as I mentioned, often dramatically changed in those epochs. There were long droughts and, at some point, the almost total dying off of reindeer, which had been humans’ primary food — with what precise consequences we probably will never know, beyond that humans somehow adapted, and survived. And we also can’t possibly know whether any single person, or group, or group of generations would have been aware, and especially daunted, by these grim developments. Perhaps one year, winter came earlier; perhaps another year, the reindeer migrations arrived later, then not at all. Would there have been a history to contain these matters? We don’t know that either, but if there was, what would have been the emphasis of those who recorded it? Would they have been depressives, manic-depressives, optimists, pessimists? I’ll continue on a more personal note. Like many people I know, I often have a somewhat — no, a wholly — frightening vision of the future of humanity and of our earth. There are periods when I live in a state of acute anxiety, indeed, near panic, about what awaits our children and grandchildren. Last year, I realized one day that every poem I was writing, or attempting to write, had global warming and its consequences either as its overt or implied theme. Sometimes I’m depressed beyond writing or saying anything at all; I fall into a funk that threatens never to end. Given all the evidence that’s being accumulated about global warming and its ramifications, this seems a perfectly reasonable response to the only future in sight. However, I’ve also had to realize over the course of my life that I’m intrinsically somewhat of a de- pressive person, about much else besides the end of the world, and that my instinctive response to fear, or threat, or despair is to plunge deeper into the darkness that so readily takes me. It required a long time for me to notice that many people respond differently; some friends, for instance, who, when deeply concerned about large matters, can turn readily away from them to a relatively cheerful vision of existence, while I go on brooding, frightened, trembling. And certainly not unsensible public figures can manage to convey a bright vision that confounds personalities like mine. One of my favorite recent examples is Fred Kavli, a wealthy scientist philanthropist who recently established a program of million dollar prizes for scientists and who announced at the first presentation ceremony: “The future

64P POETRY is going to be more spectacular than we can ever imagine.” I hope with all my heart that he knows something I don’t. I’ve come to wonder lately what the implication of all this is for my life and work as an artist, a poet. Certainly the traditions of literature, particularly in the last century and a half, have had their fair share of dark personalities — more than mere pessimists, sometimes outrageous nihilists. One of my most enduring poetic influences has been Baudelaire, hardly a paragon of healthy thought. Don’t I have a right to express my own sadnesses? I have often enough, Lord knows, in the past, and I’m sure I will again, but at the same time, mightn’t there be some responsibility in my artistic endeavors I hadn’t suspected, hadn’t conceived of, until now? Surely the most extreme vision of the future in recent literature is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. McCarthy is a novelist of craft, with a powerful gift for verisimilitude, and in his book he puts all his talents at the service of the literally darkest non–science-fiction fate that has ever been conceived for human beings. The earth — land and sea — is black with soot and ash, utterly silent except for the wind, some mysterious intermittent explosions, and the several words, most of them threats, human beings still manage to pass between them, before, in many cases, they devour each other. Those of you who have read the book know that the word “grim” hardly begins to do justice to the sheer horror McCarthy inflicts on the planet, and on us, his readers. I use the word “inflict” intentionally. I’m not the only person I know who’s expressed regret at having ingested the book: I feel sometimes indignant that I have to have it in my consciousness. If there ever was a book that embodied the extremity of the emotion we call panic, this has to be it. I find it’s like having a piercing scream in my mind, one that, when the book comes to mind, which it does more often than I’d like, goes off like a siren. Another recent, much different, book that deals with the possible dark times ahead of us is Gretel Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice — also a book of premonition and dire prophecy. I’ll admit that when I began reading it, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go on. Ehrlich’s prog- nostications about the grim future in store for the world seemed mostly to consist of information I already possessed — reading it felt like watching an autopsy of a living body. As I went further into the book, though, I was taken with its intimacy, its presentation of an ac- tual person living a real life while at the same time reflecting on so

c.k. williams 65 much melting away, and I found the book finally inspiring, perhaps because it doesn’t manifest the kind of annihilating cosmic panic that McCarthy’s book does. It tells of the passions and sadnesses of expe- riencing, having to experience, the fear of knowing what may come to us, but all of that is tempered by the dailiness of the life and loves of the author. The Future of Ice contains its own epigraph, its own enduring motto: “Beauty saves me.” Until I went back to look for the phrase to quote, I had remembered it as “Beauty saves us,” and I’ve allowed myself to keep it that way. I find it a bit odd to be using the word “beauty” this way. I’ve never thought terribly hard about the concept, certainly not as a theoretician, which I’m emphatically not. We all, though, have ideas about what is beautiful and what isn’t, and generally we think we know why. And it is, or at least was, tempting, as a poet, to try to be an aesthetician rather than an artist: there’s an aura of immediate authority associated with the one that isn’t associated with the other. I know that at any moment I’ll be able to think and talk for five or ten minutes about beauty: I never know whether in the next five or ten minutes or five or ten years I’ll be able to create any. Beauty won’t save the world from the depredations with which it’s already been savaged, but it can save us from the enervating despair that is the outcome of panic, that paralysis that might keep us from doing what we can to confront what’s before us. We’ll never know how our ancestors, so put upon by the enormous unknown world in which they found themselves, persevered and survived, but we do know that they bequeathed to us, and probably infused into our genes, the conviction that the dream and execution of the beautiful made the world ours in a way nothing else could. However it happens — by whatever complex, forbiddingly impre- cise, dauntingly imperfect means — all over the world, if not every day then in every age, art is created and beauty manifested: beautiful paintings and poems and pieces of music and buildings are generated. One can almost imagine small flaring lights on the surface of the earth, like those seen in photos from space, though they are much sparser and more scattered than the illuminating devices that bespeckle our globe. And then over time these embodiments of the beautiful are harvested, amassed, collected in books, in museums, in concert halls, to be distributed into the lives of individual human beings, to become crucial elements of their existence. Often, our experience of beauty will be the first hint of what each of us at some point will

66P POETRY dare call our soul. For don’t those first stirrings of that eternally un- certain, barely grasped notion of something more than mere mind, mere thought, mere emotion usually first come to us in the line of a poem, a passage of music, or the unreal yet more than real image in a painting? And isn’t it also the case that beauty is the one true thing we can count on in a world of insufferable uncertainty, of obdurate, relent- less moral conflicts? I’ve wondered sometimes if humans invented gods not to tend to our moral or immoral selves but to have something appropriately sensitive and grand and wise enough to appreciate these miraculous modes of beauty that are so different in material and qual- ity from anything else in the world. Might gods have first been devised not to assuage our fears and hear our complaints and entreaties but for there to be identities sufficiently sublime to understand what those first painters and sculptors, and surely, though the words and tunes have been lost, those poets and singers had wrought? Perhaps this is why those first great art works were executed deep in caves, so as to be certain the divinities who were their audience wouldn’t be distracted by the wonder of the natural world, and so lose the concentration necessary to glory in, and be glorified by, these singular human creations that equaled and even surpassed what had been given by nature for meditation. And perhaps that’s why poets and painters, who may half-remember such matters, go off into what can look to others like solitary caverns, shadowed with loneliness, but which surely aren’t. Beauty saves us. Beauty will save us. The world, though, is still ours to cherish, and ours to protect.

c.k. williams 67 abigail deutsch

In the Penile Colony

Alien vs. Predator, by Michael Robbins. Penguin. $18.00.

“I translate the Bible into velociraptor,” Michael Robbins announces, and his debut collection provides an unholy mix of velocity and rapture, cutting from Ramadan to mama-sans, from Jay-Z to jizz. Its formal order barely contains its attention deficit disorder, and critics have taken note. When they hail Robbins as exciting and exacting, they’re right. “You shouldn’t drink diarrhea / unless you bring enough for everybody,” he instructs. “E. coli makes me plop / and fizz,” he explains. Diarrhea, too, is exciting; in its way, it constitutes a movement. But one usually prefers something more solid. So why all the fuss? To some, his work might seem the opposite of traditional verse. This poetry has dropped out of school and built up a record collection. It cultivates the scruffy look. It goes where more stereotypical stanzas fear to tread — the toilet stall, for instance — and steers clear of the usual joints: love, loss, the self, and the stars. For many people, admitting to a fondness for poetry is like admitting to a fondness for a mechanized floral armchair: it’s too pretty, and anyway, they don’t get how it works. But his speed, sarcasm, and strenuous contemporaneity rescue Robbins from that problem. Yet there’s more to it. Robbins brings talent to the toilet: whizzing wordplay, well-formed lines. And so we drop our jaws even as we hold our noses:

Erectile dysfunction in the nation’s pets is just the sort of grievance we petition to redress. I give my skinny prick a shake, to ask if there is some mistake. — From Dig Dug

While Frost stiffens with indignation, we melt with admiration: “pet” prepares us for “petition,” and the “skinny prick” — a perfect met- rical substitution for “harness bells,” which suddenly tinkle with a

68P POETRY new and troubling meaning — stands in for Frost’s horse, itself a pet. While we “redress,” the speaker undresses to pet himself, and with that “shake” critiques limpness on multiple levels: in our campaigns for issues such as pets’ sex lives, we leave bigger problems untouched, letting America go soft. However, Robbins’s grip is generally not so strong:

The moon moves from all to none of the above. The earth fills in that Scantron oval. I shoot first, ask questions later, the fastest titty-twister in Chernobyl. — From Pissing in One Hand

At first Robbins navigates expertly between the mechanical and the natural, the terrestrial and the celestial; “all to none” refers to phases of the moon and “the above” to the heavens, but both phrases also indicate the hellish conventions of examinations here on earth. Then, to our dismay, he crashes into his incoherent conclusion. If only he had asked more questions first. In Alien vs. Predator, such accidents occur with tragic frequency. “That elk is such a dick,” Robbins writes in his title poem. “He’s a space tree / making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.” “Your tribe’s Doritos are infested with a stegosaur,” he notes elsewhere. “That Forever 21 used to be a Virgin Megastore.” Often he invites us into his penile colony: “I stitched my penis, which I hate, / onto the face of my friend Kate.” “I rape the earth.” “I measure my pleasure in AMBER Alerts.” Well, at least someone’s enjoying himself. But what’s the point of these rushes of references, this reflexive unpleasantness? (Perhaps we should let Robbins explain: “Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.”) For another course of Robbins’s shock treatment, meet his poetic persona, who flickers with Whitman — but his Walt is wired, weird, and possibly delusional: “I set the controls, I pioneer / the seeding of the ionosphere,” he writes, and in another poem: “I’m speed and space, an Aztec princess.” This is poet as superhero, Robbins as Batman. And antihero too: “I ride the bus, / a loaded gun inside my purse,” to say nothing of “the device in my shoe that security missed.” This swollen tone reflects a swollen nation, flush with capi- talism and capital letters, from Bechtel to Paxil, from atv to ged to act. Here, even “my smoothie / comes with gps.”

abigail deutsch 69 While brands expand, everything else in Robbins’s America seems to go, well, limp. Even the stars — symbol for patriots and poets alike — are flagging. “The Learn’d Astronomer” whacks Whitman once again:

How long must we hymn the twinkling stars before we admit they are no more distant than the glow-in-the-dark stickers adorning the ceiling of my first girlfriend’s boudoir? ...... Even then, I knew the stars to be empty cans. There is the great Red Bull, watcher over fevered gamers.

With these cynical stanzas, Robbins declares himself anti-Romantic and anti-romantic (as though the penis jokes weren’t enough of a hint). Stars in the sky sink to stickers on ceilings — and merely the frst girlfriend’s ceiling. Then they descend to “empty cans.” Hardly the “mansions built by Nature’s hand,” as Wordsworth had it, Robbins’s stars are available for purchase, drained of power, empty as cant and full of bull. “Henry pitch his tone so low — / not on stars & sun,” he writes in an adaptation of John Berryman. Robbins doesn’t hymn the stars because, for him, they have permanently set. In strong poems like this one, Robbins parodies the vapid culture he critiques. The problem is that he more often parrots it. But since negativity in reviews quickly grows as dull as shock in poetry, let’s hold another gem to the light:

I up and drown a man who harmed hide nor hair of kittens or hurts a fly. Might could. Mite cold. My angel is the centerfold. I thank too much. I meet you such. I smoke too little. I speak in blurbs.

You’re noncommittal. We just squirm up on dry land. I want to ask if it’s not too much to ask your husband for your hand. I append an asterisk.

70P POETRY Twinkle, twinkle. I upend. I pile up and fender-bend. I up and drown. Bob up and down. And I believe — is not that strange? — I’d re- your very life arrange. — Hold Steady

Similarly skeptical of stars — “twinkle, twinkle” — this “rearranged” sonnet sticks a quatrain in its middle and “upends” words from beginning to end: “might could” turns into “mite cold,” “up and drown” into “up and down.” If the poem can’t talk straight, neither can the speaker, who communicates “in blurbs” (a blurb-like sum- mary of its writer’s style). Robbins buries a diamond in the rough of this “pile up”: “band” winks out of “husband,” and “twinkle, twinkle” glints like a precious stone. But precious little will actually happen: that “twinkle” refers to an asterisk, too, a fine hint of fine print. Robbins draws “Is not that strange?” from Much Ado About Nothing, which is perfectly appropriate: while the poem roils with ado, no one will say “I do.” As these lines suggest, the ado about Robbins is not for nothing: critics are right to find him fresh and funny, subtle and unsettling. But — at least for now — they should really append an asterisk.

Olives, by A.E. Stallings. Northwestern University Press. $16.95.

Those who question Robbins’s taste ought to sample A.E. Stallings’s Olives, a delectable volume of shades and shadows, of graves and gravity, of twins and betweens. A classicist by training, Stallings is Keats to Robbins’s King Kong. She stares at the stars. She tangles with time. And — virtuoso of versification, master of sapphics and sonnets — she does it all in perfect form. A merciless cartographer, Stallings maps our progress down the one-way street between life and death: “You can’t go back,” a villanelle insists, even as it adopts that warning as refrain, retreat- ing repeatedly to the promise of no retreat. This astonishing poem reveals the same desire and the same doom:

abigail deutsch 71 No longer can I just climb through — the time Is past for going back. But you are there Still conning books in Hebrew, right to left, Or moving little jars on the dresser top Like red and white pieces on a chessboard. Still You look up curiously at me when I pass As if you’d ask me something — maybe why I’ve kept you locked inside. I’d say because That is where I’d have reflections stay, In surfaces, where they cannot disquiet, Shallow, for all that they seem deep at bottom; Though it’s to you I look to set things right (The blouse askew, hair silvering here and here) Where everything reverses save for time. — Alice in the Looking Glass

A miracle of mirrorings, this looking glass of a poem reflects Alicia Stallings as Alice, and its middle — like the hinge in a compact — divides two inverted visions. As we move outward from the sonnet’s center, words of opposite meanings conclude each line: from “why” to “because,” from “pass” to “stay,” from “still” to “disquiet,” from “top” to “bottom.” Yet at the poem’s own top and bottom, “time” remains constant: “everything reverses save for time.” Meanwhile, subtler touches hide in the corners of the frames: “You’d ask,” for instance, becomes “askew.” Stallings orders words with a chess master’s control even as she remains a pawn of the years. A great self-elegist, Stallings mourns inclusively: in earlier books, she grieved for turtles and umbrellas and eccentric museums and childhood pets; like a cemetery tour guide, she took us to the grave of Rupert Brooke and the “Tomb of the Poet” at a Greek museum. She writes frequently about Persephone — queen of the hellish commute — and sometimes seems her double: a living soul who drifts among the dead. For Stallings, earth appears an upper suburb of the Underworld, a kind of Hades Hills. Olives brings us to the First Cemetery of Athens, where, as during our previous trips, the dead shade into the living:

I felt somebody watching and turned my head, And there a small girl stood, as at a loss, And looked at me, as if something I’d read

72P POETRY Aloud was too loud, as if she might toss Her curls and put her hands upon her hips, But pressed instead a finger to her lips

To say, “Don’t wake them,” and she seemed to smile To find herself and someone else alone Sharing a secret for a little while, Though I could walk away and she was stone. — From The Cenotaph

No mirror brightens this dark poem, but it might as well: the two solitary characters match each other as they watch each other, the speaker turning her head just as the girl might toss her curls. Stallings cuts a distinction between them, but it weathers away like the grave carvings she squints to read: the poet stands as still as a statue while the girl brims with motion and emotion. Rhyming couplets conclude each stanza, as if to recognize the kinship of this odd couple. “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,” the White Queen tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “but never jam today.” As with Alice, so with Alicia, for whom yesterday and tomorrow seem very important dates: all beauty is “borrowed from the grave // And belongs to the unborn,” she writes in “The Boatman to Psyche, on the River Styx.” For her part, young yet old, the cemetery statue symbolizes girlhood and girlhood gone, embodying her observer in past and future — preschool and postmortem. Stallings stitches such instants together in a moving meditation on motherhood that dresses up as a description of a wedding gown. Like all else, the garment belongs “to yesterday and to tomorrow” — to her own wedding, years ago, and perhaps to that of an unborn daughter. Yet even as the poet ponders such a celebration, the gown fades into a kind of shroud, “Disembodied now and ghostly pale, / Mummified in tissue easily torn.” As their Janus-faced writer looks backward and forward in time, so do these words point in various directions: “mummified” is pregnant with both maternity and mortality, and “torn tissue” folds in its length the images of paper, of aging flesh, and of skin sundering during childbirth. Stallings concludes:

One Saturday in May, you thought the blue Above your heads was yours to keep and new,

abigail deutsch 73 When really it was something old, to borrow. — From The Dress of One Occasion

The poet herself borrows an old adage and makes it new, granting us lines that we’ll want to keep for as long as we can. Stallings can be fun as well as funereal: a love for the things of this world infuses poems about balloons and babies, country drives and marital spats; her controlled lines about the wilds of social life recall the late Rachel Wetzsteon. Yet such moments are themselves Janus- faced, promising relief from sadness only to redouble it: they remind us what we stand to lose. Hence anguish seems to ripple just below the surface of “Sea Girls,” one of Stallings’s many fine poems about motherhood:

“Not gulls, girls.” You frown, and you insist — Between two languages, you work at words. (R’s and l’s, it’s hard to get them right.) We watch the heavens’ flotsam: garbage-white Above the island dump (just out of sight), Dirty, common, greedy — only birds. ok, I acquiesce, too tired to banter.

Somehow they’re not the same, though. See, they rise As though we glimpsed them through a torn disguise — Spellbound maidens, wild in flight, forsaken — Some metamorphosis that Ovid missed, With their pale breasts, their almost human cries. So maybe it is I who am mistaken; But you have changed them. You are the enchanter. — Sea Girls

Like “Alice in the Looking Glass” and “The Cenotaph,” this poem rehearses reversals: flotsam floats on the sky rather than the sea, garbage seems to hang above the dump, and the poet’s son turns into the poet, an “enchanter” who bests his mother and Ovid both. If “The Cenotaph” set Stallings wandering “between two dates, and earth and sky,” this sonnet finds her briefly bridging earth and sky, worlds and words, reality and myth, mortality and immortality — all thanks to the momentary magic of her son’s mistake, and to language’s everlasting enchantments.

74P POETRY contributors

todd boss’s latest poetry collection is Pitch (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the founding co-director of the poetry film production company Motionpoems (motionpoems.com). edward dahlberg’s (1900 – 1977) first appearance in Poetry was in January 1931: “We sat there under a hemlock tree, / The years in her but not in me.” abigail deutsch lives in New York and writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publica- tions. She was awarded Poetry’s Editors Prize for Reviewing in 2010. michael donaghy’s (1954 – 2004) “Machines,” reprinted in this issue, was his first appearance in Poetry. paul durica is a graduate student at the University of Chicago and the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and Reenactments. paul goodman (1911 – 1972) first appeared in Poetry in July 1940: “To undo the work of Creation, / returning from the 6th to the 1st Day!” He published over forty poems in the magazine. kathleen jamie was born in Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collec- tions include The Tree House (2004) and Jizzen (1999), both from Picador. She is chair of creative writing at the University of Stirling. laura kasischke received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her eighth collection of poetry, Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son. james laughlin’s (1914 – 1997) first appearance in Poetry was in March 1940 with “Easter in Pittsburgh”: “mother sent // me away from the table / when I wouldn’t eat my // lamb chops that was / ridiculous she said it // wasn’t the lamb of God.”

louis macneice (1907 – 1963) first appeared in Poetry in May 1940 with ten poems, among which were those reprinted in this issue.

campbell mcgrath’s most recent collection is Seven Notebooks (HarperCollins, 2009). He teaches in the creative writing depart- ment at Florida International University.

contributors 75 joshua mehigan is a recent nea Fellow. His essay “I Thought You Were a Poet” won Poetry’s 2011 Editors Prize and was reprinted by the German periodical Krachkultur, translated by Christophe Fricker. josephine miles (1911 – 1985) published over sixty poems in Poetry in thirty-three years: “Where is the world? Not about. / The world is in the heart / And the heart is clogged in the sea-lanes out of port.” elizabeth seydel morgan has four books with Louisiana State University Press, most recently Without a Philosophy (2007). Her new work is Spans: New and Selected Poems. She lives in Richmond, Virginia. john poch’s most recent book is Dolls (Orchises Press, 2009). He teaches at Texas Tech University and for ten years was the editor of 32 Poems magazine. marie ponsot first appeared in Poetry in June 1957: “Woman, you in the human city, the human / city, you. And I take the banded branches / brilliant from your hand.” sara teasdale (1884 – 1933) first appeared in Poetry in March 1914: “Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer, / Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing.” bernard williams* is a painter and sculptor living in Chicago. He holds an mfa from Northwestern University and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. c.k. williams will publish two books this fall; a poetry collection, Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and a book of essays, In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (University of Chicago Press).His essay in this issue appears in the latter volume and is printed here by permission of University of Chicago Press. gail wronsky* is the author of ten books of poetry, prose, and translations, including So Quick Bright Things (What Books, 2010), Poems for Infdels (Red Hen Press, 2004), and Dying for Beauty (Copper Canyon Press, 2000).

* First appearance in Poetry.

76P POETRY

The Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Congratulates Poetry

On its 100th Anniversary of uninterrupted monthly publishing and encouragement of generations of emerging and established poets.

Harriet Monroe’s founding vision, advanced through the years by a succession of dedicated editors, became a driving force in American literature. Balancing a concern for tradition with a commitment to innovation, Poetry continues to shape our nation’s life and letters. We are grateful for this achievement and extend our best wishes for another century of success.

The Tor House Foundation conducts its annual Jeffers Prize for Poetry as a living memorial to Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) and is a sponsor of National Poetry Month. Tor House Foundation, Box 2713, Carmel, CA 93921. Phone: 831-624-1813, Fax: 831-624-3696 www.torhouse.org Email: [email protected]

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Bewilderment Disposable Camera New Poems and Translations Janet Foxman David Ferry “The flashes from Janet Foxman’s “This powerful book accompanies Disposable Camera illuminate ver- its poems with fine translations bal events in which the drive to that reverberate its themes, and make it new collides with the need with moving responses to the verse to make it clear. All cameras are of a late colleague. Bewilderment is finally disposable; Foxman’s has the best work of a master whose yielded images that are not.” major theme has always been hu- Stephen Yenser man loneliness.” PaPer $18.00 Richard Wilbur PaPer $18.00

The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu A Volume in Celebration of Poetry’s Centennial

To celebrate the centennial of Poetry magazine, the magazine’s editors have assembled this stunning collection—a book not of the best or most familiar poems of the century, but one that uses Poetry’s long history and incomparable archives to reveal unexpected echoes and conversations across time, surprising juxtapositions and enduring themes, and, most of all, to show that poetry—and Poetry—remains a vibrant, important part of today’s cultural landscape. CloTh $20.00

The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu WINGBEATS: Exercises and Practice in Poetry Contributors: Tara Betts, Oliver de la Paz, Ellen Bass, Annie Finch, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, Harryette Mullen, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Kathleen Peirce, Ravi Shankar, Patricia Smith, Susan Terris, Lewis Turco, Afaa Michael Weaver, Matthew Zapruder, & 42 others “Wingbeats is a fabulous toolbox of innovative and practical ideas that literally every teacher of poetry workshops and at every level, from elementary poets-in-the-schools through the graduate MFA, will find indispensable.” — Cole Swensen 324 pages $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-09760051-9-3 eBook $13.95 ISBN-13: 978-09840399-0-6 m Dos Gatos Press m www.dosgatospress.org

The Great American Poetry Show www.tgaps.net

* Poetry is sound holier than silence. * Poetry is the craft of writing which creates the work of art called poem. * Poetry uses pointed words to make a fatuously petty point, a preeningly pithy point, or some other pointy point pointedly in between. * Poetry looks in the mirror and sees scantily-clad imaginations frolicking in the seas of time. * Poems are heart bombs exploding in the mind. * Poets are paraphrasers paraphrasingly paraphrasing the mysteriously mysterious mystery of timelessly timeless time. * Avant-garde poet-rebels are unruly artists in revolt undermining and overthrowing the literary status quo. News. Poetry.

Two words that rarely come together. So when NPR created “NewsPoet,” something original was born.

We ask poets to venture into the turmoil of our newsroom in Washington, DC. There, they follow us and our production process for the day. They attend editorial meetings. They observe as story ideas are shared, dissected, rejected, and accepted. And afterward, they reﬂect on the stories of the day, they describe what they saw in a poem, and they record it in their own voice.

All this, on a very short deadline… a news deadline. Not the usual pace for a poet. But the results are stunning reﬂections on news, on life, and on life in a newsroom.

NPR NewsPoets include Carmen Gimenez Smith, Robert Pinsky, Paisley Rekdal, Tracy K. Smith, Craig Morgan Teicher, Monica Youn, and Kevin Young.

You can read and listen to their readings of their own poems at npr.org/newspoet. The Rona Jaffe Foundation identifies and supports emerging women writers. Recipients receive awards of $30,000.

2012 winners Julia elliott rachel swearingen (fiction) (fiction) Christina nichol Kim Tingley (fiction) (nonfiction) Lauren Goodwin slaughter inara Verzemnieks (poetry) (nonfiction) www.ronajaffefoundation.org

Read Poetry annual subscription: $35.00 poetry, po box 421141 palm coast, fl 32142-1141 1.800.327.6976

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poetry ad 97.65 mm x 86 mm New! from Blue flute

One Hundred Leaves A new annotated translation of the Hyakunin Isshu “For any poetry lover or fan of Japanese culture, this is a beautiful book to add to a collection.”--Mouse Tales Press Blog

Excerpted in Issue 53 of Rosebud Magazine

Fragments Poetry: Ancient & Modern “Fragments: Poetry Ancient & Modern would make an outstanding addition to a poetry library, or a good first volume to begin one. Blue Flute shows not only where poetry has been, but just as importantly, where it can go.” --ForeWord Clarion, Rated 5 Stars

Available at: Amazon.com • BN.com • Other Retailers Visit Blue Flute’s blog at www.followtheblueflute.com

Elephant Water

Poems & ink paintings Dan Veach

“The joy of being in these pages is a rare note in current American poetry.” — Jane Hirshfield

Dan Veach, editor of Atlanta Review and winner of the Willis Barnstone Prize, has performed his poetry around the globe, from Oxford to Cairo to Beijing. In the pages of Elephant Water his poems and ink paintings play with each other in dazzling and delightful ways. Visit Dan at www.danveach.com Finishing Line Press. Print and Kindle editions at Amazon.com

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Fourth Edition Roland Greene, editor in chief

Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its ✓ More than 250 subject. Now this landmark work has been new entries thoroughly revised and updated for the ✓ Broader international twenty-first century. coverage Paper with French folds $49.50 978-0-691-15491-6 ✓ Fully indexed Cloth $150.00 978-0-691-13334-8

See our E-Books at press.princeton.edu centennial celebration With Anthology Release Party

Poetry magazine celebrates a century of continuous publication and the release of The Open Door: 100 Poems for 100 Years. Editors Christian Wiman and Don Share will introduce the book and welcome Museum of Contemporary Art curator Naomi Beckwith, St. Pauls United Church of Christ minister Matt Fitzgerald, and Pulitzer-prize winning Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich to read favorite selections. Composer Patricia Barber and musican Larry Kohut will perform. A reception and book signing follows. Free event co- sponsored with the University of Chicago Press. rsvp to (312) 787-7070.

thursday, october 4, 7:00pm 61 w superior st

poetryfoundation . o r g / e v e n t s poetry off the shelf “Poetry & Piano”

Celebrated pianist Inna Faliks explores the connections between music and words, with poets Valzhyna Mort and Vera Pavlova. Free event co-sponsored with PianoForte Foundation and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.

monday, october 22 , 7:00pm curtiss hall, fine arts building 410 s michigan ave

poetryfoundation.org/events

gallery exhibition “Poet Photos”

Comprised of snapshots sent in by contributors over the hundred-year history of Poetry, this exhibition includes unseen treasures from the archives of the magazine.

september 27– november 29 61 w superior st

poetryfoundation.org/events foundation events

“Translating Poetry”

Poet-translators Patrizia Cavalli, Geoffrey Brock, Clare Cavanagh, and Adam Zagajewski gather for readings and discussion of current approaches to translating Polish and Italian poetry. Friday, October 12, 7:00pm.

• “Open House Chicago”

Behind-the–scenes access to the Poetry Foundation, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Saturday & Sunday, October 13 & 14, 9:00am–7:00pm.

• “Mexican & American Writers”

A bilingual reading by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Álvaro Enrigue, Cristina Rivera-Garza, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez. Co-sponsored with MAKE Literary Productions and University of Iowa’s MFA in Spanish Creative Writing. Friday, October 26, 7:00pm.

•

all events are free, 61 w superior st poetryfoundation.org/events poetry day Reading by Seamus Heaney

Born in 1939 at his family’s farm in Northern Ireland, Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney published his frst collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, which won the Geoffrey Faber Prize and the Gregory Award. He has gone on to issue more than a dozen col- lections of verse, essays, and work in translation. The Nobel judges cited Heaney “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” Heaney has taught at Queen’s University, Harvard, and Oxford. He frst appeared in Poetry magazine in February 1972.

Inaugurated by Robert Frost in 1955, Poetry Day is one of the oldest and most distinguished reading series in the country. Past readers have included T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hass, and Derek Walcott. Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago. Free admission, tickets required. Call (312) 787-7070.

thursday, october 18, 6:00pm rubloff auditorium, art institute of chicago 159 e monroe st

poetryfoundation . o r g / e v e n t s back page

October 1947

In October 1917, on Poetry’s fifth anniversary, Harriet Monroe looked back at the founding of the magazine while acknowledging that the “second period of our history” had begun. The “five-year endowment” that had financed Poetry had run its course, and Monroe wondered if, in a time of war and economic upheaval, there was still a place for the magazine in American art and culture. “Poetry may not be a grand enough portal,” she wrote, “and the lamps that light it may burn dim in drifting winds; but until a nobler one is built it should stand, and its little lights should show the way as they can.” Of course, the magazine survived — on the tenth anniversary, Monroe was looking forward to finding “abler minds and even more liberal auspices” that could sustain it well into the future — and sub- sequent anniversaries have been marked in a variety of ways. The sixtieth anniversary issue, for example, focused on the first appear- ances of poets long associated with Poetry, including James Dickey, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. The most visually striking memorial can be found in the thirty-fifth anniversary issue, which contained a Poetry timeline paired with photographs of contributors and ending with the following image of the soon-to-be vacated Erie Street office. In the accompanying essay, “543 Cass Street,” co-editor Marion Strobel reflected upon how the office had become a museum to Monroe, who had died in 1936:

Work goes on at her desk; many of the same photographs, the “poets gallery” which she herself hung in the Cass Street office, pepper our present walls; her Louis xvi clock, accurate as ever, still ticks time, and still, as then, we pay no attention to it.

In Monroe’s time, as now, the editors knew that, as Strobel wrote, “yesterday’s poet, whom we love, is not the one we are looking for.”

Paul Durica