founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

September 2011

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cxcviii t number 5 CONTENTS

September 2011

POEMS mary ruefle 415 White Buttons Women in Labor Shalimar kevin young 422 Pietà sharon olds 423 The Flurry peter gizzi 424 Apocrypha reginald dwayne betts 426 “For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers” scott cairns 427 Draw Near robert wrigley 428 Soundings Anatomy of Melancholy robin robertson 432 Under Beinn Ruadhainn brenda shaughnessy 434 Head Handed Card 19: The Sun Visitor dan howell 438 Piano

UNC O LLE C TED HEC HT david yezzi 441 Introduction anthony hecht 445 The Plate A Friend Killed in the War Mathematics Considered as a Vice An O≠ering for Patricia The Fountain Dilemma C OMMENT fanny howe 463 Outremer peter campion 471 Self-Starter beverley bie brahic 478 Cluttered and Clean letters to the editor 486 contributors 493 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 brian cronin Untitled, 2010

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Poetry t September 2011 t Volume 198 t Number 5

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mary ruefle

White Buttons

Having been blown away by a book I am in the gutter at the end of the street in little pieces like the alphabet (mother do not worry letters are not flesh though there’s meaning in them but not when they are mean my letters to you were mean I found them after you died and read them and tore them up and fed them to the wind thank you for intruding I love you now leave) Also at the end of the street there is a magnolia tree the white kind that tatters after it blooms so the tree winds up in the street Our naked shivering bodies must be at some distance missing us come back come back they cry come home put down that book whenever you read you drift away on a raft you like your parrot more than you like me and stu≠ like that (dear father

MARY RUEFLE 415 you always were a bore but I loved you more than interesting things and in your honor I’ve felt the same about myself and everyone I’ve ever met) I like to read in tree houses whenever I can which is seldom and sometimes never The book that blew me away held all the problems of the world and those of being alive under my nose but I felt far away from them at the same time reading is like that (I am sorry I did not go to your funeral but like you said on the phone an insect cannot crawl to China) Here at the end of the street the insects go on living under the dome of the pacific sky If Mary and Joseph had walked the sixty miles to Bethlehem vertically they would have found themselves floating in the outer pitch of space it would have been cold no inns

416 POETRY a long night in the dark endless and when they began to cry the whole world would think something had just been born I like to read into things as I am continually borne forward in time by the winds like the snow (dear sister you were perfect in every way like a baby please tell brother the only reason we never spoke was out of our great love for each other which made a big wind that blew us apart) I think I am coming back I feel shoulders where a parrot could land though a tree would be as good a place as any You cannot teach a tree to talk Trees can say it is spring but not though bright sunlight can also be very sad have you noticed?

MARY RUEFLE 417 Women in Labor

Women who lie alone at midnight because there is no one else to lie to

Women who lie alone at midnight at noon in the laundromat destroying their own socks

Women who lie alone at midnight: Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates

Women who lie alone at midnight as the first furl of starlight pearls the moon with nacre

Women who lie alone at midnight sending a postcard bearing the face of a bawling infant who cries “I am for the new”

Women who lie alone at midnight reciting the names of shoes

Women who lie alone at midnight spurting unjustified tears, the kind that run sideways never reaching the mouth, the kind you cannot swallow

Women who lie alone at midnight singing breast away the burden of my tender and afterwards burp

418 POETRY Women who lie alone at midnight obeying the laws of physics Women who let their dreams curl at the end Women in a monastery of flamingos

Women who die alone at midnight contributing to the end, to lost time, to the rain and flies, seeing the bird they saw trapped in the airport surviving by the water fountain

What’s more, try it sometime It works

MARY RUEFLE 419 Shalimar

God put his finger on my sacrum and he lifted me, he set me in the center of the universe, the curious desire of my chronically lonely life.

It was cold and dark and lonely and I was scared.

There were no accessories. I burst into tears over nothing.

What would J immy Schuyler do? wwjsd?

And as quietly as the sound of Kleenex being pulled from a box, I sneezed.

And morning, that goddess, as if she were slightly deaf, barely lifted her head o≠ the horizon before laying back down.

And a rose opened her portals and the scent ran up an elephant’s trunk, or tried to.

Such a long way for everything to travel!

From here I look like a front moving in

An icy purple light a poet would say belonged to a perfume stopper belonging to his mother.

420 POETRY When it was her nipple.

You know, neither in the past or in the future.

MARY RUEFLE 421 kevin young

Pietà

I hunted heaven for him.

No dice.

Too uppity, it was. Not enough

music, or dark dirt.

I begged the earth empty of him. Death

believes in us whether we believe

or not. For a long while I watch the sound

of a boy bouncing a ball down the block

take its time to reach me. Father,

find me when you want. I’ll wait.

422 POETRY sharon olds

The Flurry

When we talk about when to tell the kids, we are so together, so concentrated. I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m the killer” — taking my wrist — he says, holding it. He is sitting on the couch, the old indigo chintz around him, rich as a night sea with jellies, I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him, as if within some chamber of matedness, some dust I carry around me. Tonight, to breathe its Magellanic field is less painful, maybe because he is drinking a wine grown where I was born — fog, eucalyptus, sempervirens — and I’m sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch my cold,” he says, “ — oh that’s right, you want to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that, I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life. He says he loves me as the mother of our children, and new troupes of tears mount to the acrobat platforms of my ducts and do their burning leaps. Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a moment, I imagine a flurry of tears like a whirra of knives thrown at a figure, to outline it — a heart’s spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod to it, it is my hope.

SHARON OLDS 423 peter gizzi

Apocrypha

Wisdom is a kindly spirit but does it love me? And righteousness? There’s nothing in it. 1. To poetry I leave my senses, my deregulation, custodial duties, and to be a janitor is a great consolation. 2. It gave me my mother back through all her years. 3. To love these children, so full of neurons and consciousness. What joy to clean up and put a shine on their mess. 4. To my mother I leave my veil, my wing, the window and time. I, artifact. In this age the hand is a voice. 5. I leave the voice, the wonder, the mirror, and my lens, bent and beholden to the worm, leaf-work in wrought iron, eerie illuminations and deep-sea vision. 6. I’ve seen the Eurostar, the drunken boat, and Davy Jones’ Locker. I’ve seen Spanish galleons and the H.S. Mauberley covered in brine. 7. There is this line from cloud dander to the solo bulb of mourn- ing, a string through common prayer. 8. I like it when the gray-green shadows suddenly dayglo over the rushes. The wind in my head. 9. To write is an equal and opposite reaction my comrade, com- munard, my friendo. 10. What is it finally thinking what in winter’s dusty alcove, the body tocks. The day was cloudy. The light muddy, dreary when they took it down. 11. To Times Roman I give my stammer, my sullenness, my new world violence, form and all that, forms, and all that paper, gusts. Little buttress. 12. I send love and weapons to everyone possessed with night visions. 13. When those green lights flash and blink, is that it? When the “it” continues strangely for a bit, then falls into a line, is it over? 14. I quantified daily the wonder in the grain. 15. I found I was over and singular yet many, the many and the singular, the many and the evolutionary, the many in the grain. Many more. 16. Who in hell am I writing for?

424 POETRY 17. This vision is silly, teenage, and mine, a spot on the negative, a hole in composition. I quantify, I loaf, I wonder, I find, I rev. 18. Here the days’ mud, night is a satellite, and anger, my cleft, my birthmark and star. 19. Anger might be a better way to say “I love you,” truer than “how are you in space”? Are you cold, can I get you a blanket? 20. To the polestar I leave my alien regalia, my o≠-world headdress. I leave acoustic forms in time, blooming, sudsy, inconsolable. 21. If you are unsatisfied, then welcome. 22. Here there are people working every corner of every inch of grass. The meticulously arranged outside reminds me of ocean and feels old. 23. In space the letterforms “I love” oscillate in waves. 24. I lose myself in waves speaking the half of me that forgot to say “goodbye” when I meant to say “how come.” 25. Memory continues to bloom. More songs about death and dying, songs of inexperience. 26. More songs about being and loss, being in loss, more songs about seeing and feeling. 27. If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misun- derstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever. 28. To mercy I leave whatever.

PETER GIZZI 425 reginald dwayne betts

“For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers”

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers, green roses, chrysanthemums, lilies: retrophilia, philocaly, philomath, sarcophilous — all this love, of the past, of beauty, of knowledge, of flesh; this is catalogue & counter: philalethist, negrophile, neophile. A negro man walks down the street, taps Newport out against a brick wall & stares at you. Love that: lygophilia, lithophilous. Be amongst stones, amongst darkness. We are glass house. Philopornist, philotechnical. Why not worship the demimonde? Love that — a corner room, whatever is not there, all the clutter you keep secret. Palaeophile, ornithophilous: you, antiquarian, pollinated by birds. All this a way to dream green rose petals on the bed you love; petrophilous, stigmatophilia: live near rocks, tattoo hurt; for you topophilia: what place do you love? All these words for love (for you), all these ways to say believe in symphily, to say let us live near each other.

426 POETRY scott cairns

Draw Near

ɎɏɍɐɚɉɅɂɒɂ

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye a more than common sense of what lay flickering just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then that time’s neat artifice fell in and made for us a figure for when time would slip free altogether. I have no sense of what this means to you, so little sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.

SCOTT CAIRNS 427 robert wrigley

Soundings

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post of the shack. Two holes at the top — near where the stem was, for a thong of leather to hang it by, which long ago broke — are now the fingerholes of the mournful wind instrument it’s become. The broad round bowl of it makes a sort of birdly basso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post, the floor joists and walls in two notes: a slightly sharp D and an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner, which explains why all my thinking these days is in B-flat, a di∞cult key for all but the clarinet and this sudden covey of nuthatches, whose collective woe makes it a minor chord I am in the middle of. Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the lu≠ of limbs and needles suggests, and sail on, the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chattering like a gull, and the mountain’s last drift of snow resembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging, Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-goo and doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers, by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdness of the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once, this nowhere we shall not be returning from. Draw the lines! Assume the crow’s nest, Pip. This ship sails on music and wind, and away with birds.

428 POETRY Anatomy of Melancholy

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee and informed the seven of us in his charge his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man he never knew, had been possessed, as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother, born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said, along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair, we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.

As we should also always remember to call him only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive, and never, he warned, by his given nor surname, least of all with the title “Mister” attached, which would remind him of that same most hated father and plunge him therefore into a mood he could not promise he would, he said, “behave appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job, unlike the social di∞culties attached thereto, was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.

Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness, this meant not only beer cans and bottles, all manner of cast-o≠ paper and plastics, but also the occasional condom too, as well as the festering roadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry, or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed into the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselves rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.

ROBERT WRIGLEY 429 Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston, sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident, in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch of wall we could see through the open door was plastered with fold-outs and pages from every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazine he had ever found among the wreckage there. Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.

Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known, by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once, while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22 from the rack beside his door and popped with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us, then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out, and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.

As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom and Lucy had no use for, on the truck’s dash all that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a tome he said he’d read already eleven times, this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way, it might have had to do with something like the gallery Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title meaning something to us, the last nothing at all. There were things about men we might be unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.

430 POETRY And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat, fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats. The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it, and rats were more common than hares and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed, as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity — the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance of rats the very earth o≠ered up like a plague,

the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump, whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox, seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire. Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam, one, after medical school, would hang himself from a beam in his parents’ basement, the others merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory. Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump would spend his last twenty years in prison, having shot Lucy — one slender, flattening .22 slug

through the forehead — as he stood fifty feet away, balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer, arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump, whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheri≠ himself, was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers, in order to o≠er his only yet most sincere defense, that Lucifer — Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted — had told him to.

ROBERT WRIGLEY 431 robin robertson

Under Beinn Ruadhainn

For Andrew O’Hagan

Three moons in the sky the night they found him drowned in Sawtan’s Bog; just his cap, sitting there and his wee fat hands poking out. It was no loss to the village, I told them next morning, and the villagers agreed. Horn-daft, he was, havering and glaikit and scaring the children. I mind that time he picked up a mouse and ate it, quick, in two mouthfuls; set the tail aside on the ground like a cocktail stick.

I used her well, after that, his Jennie, still in her widow’s weeds, gilping into her whenever I could, in the barn or the boathouse or o≠ in the fields. She slipped two or three out at least, and sank each one in a lobster creel. Her head was away by the end, as mad as her man and no good to me. She sleeps now

432 POETRY under Beinn Ruadhainn, her face covered in ivy, scab, and sticky-willow.

The dreams came then. Last night, the burning loch, so full of bairns they bobbed to the surface with their hair on fire; black snow; fingers coming through the floorboards; rain like razor blades; the foosty-faced man, there at every corner, hands furred with grey-mould. And her, as always, star-naked, hatching in the herring-nets. The last I remember was my body being driven with sticks through the town to Sawtan’s Brae, and hanged.

I broke from sleep and sat up sweating, dream-fleyed in the dark. I groped around for the matches and the matches were put in my hand.

Beinn Ruadhainn: (Gaelic) “summit of the red place” — “Ruadhainn” pronounced “riven,” anglicised as “Ruthven”; horn-daft: quite mad; havering: babbling, speaking nonsense; glaikit: vacant, idiotic; gilping: spurting, spilling; foosty: mouldy, gone bad; fleyed: frightened.

ROBIN ROBERTSON 433 brenda shaughnessy

Head Handed

Stop belonging to me so much, face-head. Leave me to my child and my flowers.

I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that. It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead

and no talent for creatures. No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s.

Don’t you have a place to go, face-head? Deep into the brick basement of another life?

To kill some time, I mean. That furnace light could take a shine to you.

There are always places, none of them mine. And always time — rainbow sugar show

of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky — but that stu≠’s extra, it’s never in supply.

“Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it.

All those prodigal particles, flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment

of glitches. The chorus just more us. But nowhere bare and slippery have I

got a prayer. If I had two hands to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.

434 POETRY Card 19: The Sun

When you show yourself to the woman you love, you don’t know your fear is not fear, itself. You have never been good, but now you are so good, who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin that bathes the world for you, or her face, captured like a she-lion in your own flesh?

This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring upon ring of wedding, the kind that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind with no contract, the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light. Cloud covers and lifts, and sleep and night and soon enough, love’s big fire laughs at a terrible burn, but only (only!) because pain absorbs excess joy and you shouldn’t flaunt your treasures in front of all day’s eyes.

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY 435 Visitor

I am dreaming of a house just like this one

but larger and opener to the trees, nighter

than day and higher than noon, and you,

visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy

milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like.

For each night is a long drink in a short glass.

A drink of blacksound water, such a rush

and fall of lonesome no form can contain it.

And if it isn’t night yet, though I seem to

recall that it is, then it is not for everyone.

Did you receive my invitation? It is not

for everyone. Please come to my house

lit by leaf light. It’s like a book with bright

pages filled with flocks and glens and groves

and overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyr

in whom the fish is also cooked. A book that

took too long to read but minutes to unread —

that is — to forget. Strange are the pages

436 POETRY thus. Nothing but the hope of company.

I made too much pie in expectation. I was hoping to sit with you in a tree house in a nightgown in a real way. Did you receive my invitation? Written in haste, before leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed.

An idea like a storm cloud that does not spill or arrive but moves silently in a direction.

Like a dark book in a long life with a vague hope in a wood house with an open door.

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY 437 dan howell

Piano

Her wattled fingers can’t stroke the keys with much grace or assurance anymore, and the tempo is always rubato, halting, but still that sound — notes quivering and clear in their singularity, filing down the hallway — aches with pure intention, the melody somehow prettier as a remnant than whatever it used to be.

438 POETRY UNCOLLECTED HECHT

Introduction

Do poets, as Auden wrote of Yeats, become their readers when they die? In one sense, it’s unavoidable: the work, if it continues to attract readers, remains and is “modified in the guts of the living.” Poems are often modified for the living by the clarifying light cast on them by archival material — the poet’s worksheets, letters, notebooks, and uncollected poems. It is rare that these supplementary works contain lost masterpieces, but they do frequently round out our appreciation. That said, some uncollected work stands with a poet’s best. “Omissions are not accidents,” Marianne Moore insisted in an epigraph to her Complete Poems. Yet every poet — unless particu- larly assiduous with the shredder — leaves behind work of value that, for whatever reason, did not find its way into published collections. What follows in this portfolio is a selection of poems — all uncol- lected, some previously unpublished — by Anthony Hecht. They are striking in their own right and even more so for the resonances they share with Hecht’s signature poems of love and death, wit and melancholy. A selection of archival photographs has also been made available by Hecht’s estate and by the poet’s widow, Helen Hecht. When Anthony Hecht died in 2004, at the age of eighty-one, his Collected Later Poems had been out from Knopf for three years. Along with his Collected Earlier Poems (1990), the volume consti- tutes all of the work that Hecht chose to keep in print. Missing from the two volumes are a number of poems from his debut collection, A Summoning of Stones (1954). (These poems fell away when Hecht’s editor, Harry Ford, appended half of them to Hecht’s second book, The Hard Hours [1967].) J.D. McClatchy’s new edition of Hecht’s Selected Poems places the poems from Stones back in chronological order, and presumably a Complete Poems will restore the entire text. Much has been written about Hecht’s experience as an infantry- man in wwii, both in combat and at the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp. “The place, the su≠ering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension,” Hecht said of the camp, an annex of Buchenwald, in an interview with Philip Hoy. “For years after I would wake shrieking.” The survivors were naked, skel- etal, their yellowed skin stretched over bony frames; contemporary

ANTHONY HECHT 441 reports note that the smell was unbearable. Hecht explained to Hoy how he let go completely any illusions of heroism when on another occasion he saw American soldiers mow down a group of women and children who were attempting to surrender. Hecht’s war poems are among his finest — “‘More Light! More Light!’,” “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.’,” “The Book of Yolek,” “Persistences,” and the third section of “Sacrifice.” The war poems here provide background music to these well-known works, adding notes of visionary intensity to Hecht’s often understated de- piction of horror. “The Plate” is taken from an undated typescript and refers to the silver-like metal plates (of tantalum, most likely) that were used as prostheses to repair severe head wounds during the war. In the fire that burns the body into extinction, one hears the wordplay on gunfire. The poem ends with the word alive, an oxy- moron, since it is the fire of death that exhibits such vitality. (The humorous ri≠ on Wordsworth, a bit of spirit-bolstering from Hecht’s early days in the Army, is touching given how di∞cult Hecht’s war experience would prove.) The subject of “A Friend Killed in the War” (which appeared in the Spring 1948 number of Reed Whittemore’s Furioso) has not been identified. Hecht saw a number of friends and fellow soldiers die in combat. The description of the opening wound and the heavy ban- doleers recalls the account in section three of “The Venetian Vespers” of a death Hecht witnessed:

He haunts me here, that seeker after law In a lawless world, in rainsoaked combat boots, Oil-stained fatigues and heavy bandoleers. He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire. His helmet had fallen o≠. They had sheared away The top of his cranium like a soft-boiled egg, And there he crouched, huddled over his weapon, His brains wet in the chalice of his skull.

“Mathematics Considered as a Vice” describes L’Âne qui veille, the upright figure of a donkey playing the lyre on a buttress of Chartres Cathedral. The significance of the figure is the subject of wide specu- lation. Hecht suggests it is the donkey that Jesus rode, placed there to sing his story. By alluding to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Hecht points readers to Erasmus’s adage: asinus ad lyram (an ass to the lyre),

442 POETRY which correlates roughly with “pearls before swine.” Hecht also nods to Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whom we hear echoed in “man is but an ass.” For Hecht, the ideal signs of math- ematics are ill-suited to describe our contingent world. This unpub- lished poem was enclosed in a letter from Ischia, where Hecht first met W.H. Auden, to Hecht’s younger brother, Roger (also a poet), in November 1950. “An O≠ering for Patricia” is a bittersweet poem from Hecht’s first marriage to Patricia Harris, which lasted from 1954 to 1961. Hecht later described the marriage as an unhappy one. This poem, which exists in typescript in the Hecht archive at Emory University, and (according to Jonathan F.S. Post) likely dates from 1955 describes the couple’s time together in Italy, before Pat returned by herself to the us. In a letter from June 1955, Hecht asks his father to be supportive of her:

Please try to be gentle with Pat when you see her. She is very sick and she knows it, but tries hard to forget it most of the time. I hope she will want to try to do something about it.

(The entire letter appears in Post’s edition of Hecht’s correspondence forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press.) Though “An O≠ering” suggests perhaps a happier time together, its undercurrent of melancholy is palpable throughout. Also in the archive at Emory is the typescript of one of Hecht’s early attempts to translate Baudelaire’s “Le Jet d’eau.” He ultimately preferred the version (under the French title) that appears in his last volume, The Darkness and the Light (2001). As Hecht wrote to his son Evan, in a letter dated April 2, 1998:

The original is a poem that has haunted me since the time I was a college undergraduate, and I have tried time and again to produce some English version that captured some of the magic, beauty and pathos of the French.

“The Fountain” is the only record remaining of those earlier attempts. “Dilemma” came out of Hecht’s long collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin. Two collaborations between them appear in the col- lected poems — “The Seven Deadly Sins” from The Hard Hours and “The Presumptions of Death” from Flight Among the Tombs (1996).

ANTHONY HECHT 443 “Dilemma” was intended to accompany a Baskin woodcut in their Gehenna Florilegium, but was ultimately dropped. “I’m aware of course,” Hecht wrote to Baskin in October 1997,

that the columbine poem is something of a cheat, but I found it a stumbling-block, its name supposedly derived from a “cluster of five doves, which the blossom is thought to resemble.”

Columbine’s charming dilemma, in which she eats her cake and has it too, employs Hecht’s wry mastery, at once “dark and amusing.” I have heard from people who knew Hecht well that he had seemed to them initially intimidating — perhaps because of his impressive achievement and authority as a poet, perhaps due to a quiet mel- ancholy of his own. But those I have spoken with also shared the experience I had, when meeting Hecht late in his life, of a wit that admitted glints of mischief and of a thoughtful and patient generosity.

— David Yezzi

444 POETRY anthony hecht

The Plate

Now he has silver in him. When sometime Death shall boil down unnecessary fat To reach the nub of our identity, When in the run of crime The skull is rifled for the gold in teeth, And chemistry has eaten from the spine Superfluous life and vigor, why then he Will show a richness to be wondered at, And shall be thought a mine Whose claim and stake are stone and floral wreath.

The body burns away, and burning gives Light to the eye and moisture to the lip And warmth to our desires, but it burns Whatever body lives Into extinction though it wear a plate Of armor in it: therefore do we thrive In fear of fire, in terror of the ship That carries us to fire. A soldier learns To bear the silver weight Where in his head the fire is most alive.

ANTHONY HECHT 445 The beginning of a letter from Hecht to his parents during his first week in the army, dated July 26, 1943, courtesy of Emory University.

446 POETRY A Friend Killed in the War

Night, the fat serpent, slipped among the plants, Intent upon the apples of his eyes; A heavy bandoleer hung like a prize Around his neck, and tropical red ants Mounted his body, and he heard advance, Little by little, the thin female cries Of mortar shells. He thought of Paradise. Such is the vision that extremity grants.

In the clean brightness of magnesium Flares, there were seven angels by a tree. Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt They were not really from Elysium. And his flesh opened like a peony, Red at the heart, white petals furling out.

ANTHONY HECHT 447 Third Platoon, C Company, 386th Infantry Regiment, Ninety-seventh Division. Hecht is pictured standing, third from the left.

448 POETRY Mathematics Considered as a Vice

I would invoke that man Who chipped for all posterity an ass (The one that Jesus rode) Out of hard stone, and set its either wing Among the wings of the most saintly clan On Chartres Cathedral, and that it might sing The praise to all who pass Of its unearthly load, Hung from its neck a harp-like instrument. I would invoke that man To aid my argument.

The ass smiles on us all, Being astonished that an ass might rise To such sure eminence Not merely among asses but mankind, Simpers, almost, upon the western wall In praise of folly, who midst sow and kine, Saw with its foolish eyes Gold, Myrrh, and Frankincense Enter the stable door, against all odds. The ass smiles on us all. Our butt at last is God’s.

That man is but an ass — More perfectly, that ass is but a man Who struggles to describe Our rich, contingent and substantial world In ideal signs: the dunged and pagan grass, Misted in summer, or the mother-of-pearled Home of the bachelor-clam. A cold and toothless tribe Has he for brothers, who would coldly think. That man is but an ass Who smells not his own stink.

ANTHONY HECHT 449 For all his abstract style Speaks not to our humanity, and shows Neither the purity Of heaven, nor the impurity beneath, And cannot see the feasted crocodile Ringed with St. Francis’ birds to pick its teeth, Nor can his thought disclose To normal intimacy, Siamese twins, the double-beasted back, For all his abstract style Utters our chiefest lack.

Despite his abstract style, Pickerel will dawdle in their summer pools Lit by the flitterings Of light dashing the gusty surfaces, Or lie suspended among shades of bile And lime in fluent shift, for all he says. And all the grey-haired mules, Simple and neuter things, Will bray hosannas, blessing harp and wing. For all his abstract style, The ass will learn to sing.

450 POETRY Daniel Bernstein’s drawing of Hecht from 1951, made on the island Ischia.

ANTHONY HECHT 451 Hecht and his first wife, Patricia.

452 POETRY The work has been going forward with the greatest di∞culty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more di∞cult than it has ever been before.

From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome.

ANTHONY HECHT 453 An O≠ering for Patricia

Hardly enough for me that the pail of water Alive with the wrinkling light Brings clearness home and whiter Than mind conceives the walls mature to white, Or that the washed tomatoes whose name is given To love fulfill their bowl And the Roman sea is woven Together by threading fish and made most whole.

I delight in each of these, delight moreover In the dark skill of those hands Closer to wise than clever Of our blind Italian landlady who stands Her shoes fouled with the lustful blood of rabbit Lightly dispatched and dressed Fixing it to the gibbet Of the clothesline where the laundry sails to rest.

These textures solicit of us our instant homage But are disparate senseless things Unless a reigning image Bring them to purpose as your presence brings The world in o≠ering, like a chaplet worn In Aphrodite’s name, The furious unicorn Come to the virgin’s lap tethered and tame.

And thus it is as you stand in this morning’s shadows Where ancient chamber pots Are grown to little meadows Of mint and parsley; surely it’s love unknots The winds for Ulysses and recalls to man A summer without cease; Sprung from the same dishpan Onion and lily work their primal peace.

454 POETRY The Fountain

My dear, your eyes are weary; Rest them a little while. Assume the languid posture Of pleasure mixed with guile. Outside the talkative fountain Continues night and day Repeating my warm passion In whatever it has to say.

The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears.

Thus your soul ignited By pleasure’s lusts and needs Sprays into heaven’s reaches And dreams of fiery deeds. Then it brims over, dying, And languorous, apart, Drains down some slope and enters The dark well of my heart.

The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears.

O you, whom night enhances, How sweet here at your breasts To hear the eternal sadness

ANTHONY HECHT 455 Of water that never rests. O moon, o singing fountain, O leaf-thronged night above, You are the faultless mirrors Of my sweet, bitter love.

The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears.

— Charles Baudelaire

456 POETRY A photo from Kenyon College, where Hecht studied with John Crowe Ransom after the war. His first published poems appeared in the Kenyon Review in 1947.

ANTHONY HECHT 457 Dilemma

“Dark and amusing he is, this handsome gallant, Of chamois-polished charm, Athlete and dancer of uncommon talent — Is there cause for alarm In his smooth demeanor, the proud tilt of his chin, This cavaliere servente, this Harlequin?

“Gentle and kindly this other, ardent but shy, With an intelligence Who would not glory to be guided by — And would it not make sense To trust in someone so devoted, so Worshipful as this tender, pale Pierrot?

“Since both of them delight, if I must choose I win a matchless mate, But by that very winning choice I lose — I pause, I hesitate, Putting decision o≠,” says Columbine, “And while I hesitate, they both are mine.”

458 POETRY The cover and a plate from The Gehenna Florilegium, with woodcuts by Leonard Baskin and poems by Hecht, for which “Dilemma” was intended but never used. By permission of the Estate of Leonard Baskin. © Estate of Leonard Baskin.

ANTHONY HECHT 459

COMMENT

fanny howe

Outremer

Some people wish to leave this earth. They don’t plan to commit suicide. They only want to wander out of sight without the luggage of ego.

Once I was given such an opportunity, and what did I find? Mist between mountains, the monotonous buzz of farm machinery, cornstalks brown and flopping and earthen furrows preparing to receive seeds for next year’s harvest.

A castle, half ruined by a recent earthquake, still highly functional. Computers, copying machines and cars. It was once a monastery and home for a family continually at war. Cypress trees and chestnut and walnut trees. A swing hanging from a high bough where paths circle down, impeding quick escapes by armies or thieves.

I was assigned the monastic wing that later became a granary. Brick-red flagstones, small windows with hinged casements and twelve squares of glass inside worn frames. From the moment I entered the long strange space, I foresaw an otherworldly light taking shape.

I had come without a plan, empty-handed except for my notebooks from preceding days. This was a deliberate choice: to see what would be revealed to me by circumstances. Scorpions lived in the cracks of the walls.

I took long walks that multiplied my body into companionable parts. Down dusty roads and alongside meadows, and pausing to look at the mountains and clouds, I talked to myself.

FANNY HOWE 463 Mysticism “provides a path for those who ask the way to get lost. It teaches how not to return,” wrote Michel de Certeau.

š

I was at the age when much of my past, or those choices I remembered making, seemed flawed, and irresponsible. I had made big mistakes and, worst of all, disappointed those who cared for me and only because of choices.

Those acts I had not chosen, but which had chosen me, brought greater peace than any I worked out on my own through reasonable deductions.

Only one vow had protected me from further errors.

When I looked at my notebooks, I wondered if their hastily scratched marks (so much like sketching) put down on one specific day, in one place and mood, were a far more accurate reflection of the content of that time and place than any revision of it.

I must have been questioning the relationship between revelation and reason, as Aristotle did, and many, many others since.

Inspiration is usually a coincidence. You enter a room where the light slants across the floor in geometric squares and you step into one of the squares and are given the next line or note or chord in the work you are doing. The natural world has set aside its usual indi≠erence and come down into your path to illuminate a step. But inspiration is mercurial. You have to hold it in and savor it and get it down before it’s gone.

š

464 POETRY One day I had the sense that there were two boys accompanying me everywhere I went. I could not identify the boy on the left, but the one on the right was someone I knew and loved. The other one was very powerful in his personality, an enigma and a delight. His spirit seemed to spread into the roads and weather. Silver olive trees and prim vineyards. Now a rain has whitened the morning sky but every single leaf holds a little water and glitter.

š

There has been a phenomenon, known only to a few, in certain high mountains, called the Brocken Specter. It shows the magnified form of a person woven into lower mists. This voluminous human figure takes on a trinitarian shape, and the head of it is surrounded by glory, a rain halo. The figure looms in the sky, moves forward towards you and then evaporates and is gone. It bears an astonishing resemblance to visions of the Christ. But it can all be explained by sun streaks shooting towards an anti-solar spot, and the projection of your own shadow upon the mist. Your shadow is the looming figure, and the sun forms the halo in the soft rain.

I think the supernatural is all the more wonderful when it is natural; it can be analyzed from so many angles.

š

Everywhere I glance, with my two boys beside me, I see a world that is still forming. The frescoes in Assisi confirm my idea that angels were shed like snake skins on walls then pressed flat. Francis is often called “the other Christ.”

FANNY HOWE 465 You could walk with each one of them on either side. But Christ speaks in parables and metaphors, and Francis speaks directly of the world as it is.

š

The six missing months from the life of Saint Francis came after his visit to meet the Sultan of Egypt. It was at the time of the Crusades early in the thirteenth century and during a temporary truce. Francis left the encampment of soldiers on one side of the Nile and crossed over in hopes of achieving a lasting peace agreement. He ended up staying for awhile, safely and in good company with the Sufi Muslims.

The Sultan was a Kurd, and he loved poetry, as did Francis who heard there, for the first time, the 99 names of Allah recited, and the Call to Prayer. The mother of Francis was French. Thanks to her, he loved the troubadours and their poetry and music. He was also a soul brother of the visionary Cathars who were exterminated by Pope Innocent for their views on women, equality, non-violence, and chastity.

Rumors grew up around this visit of Francis to the Sultan, much laughter and snide comments about him and women, rumors of a reclining houri, Francis lying on a bed of coals stark naked and o≠ering to walk through fire to prove that God loved him. Francis and the Sultan became friends, though peace was not established between their armies.

When Francis crossed back, he disappeared. Jerusalem was in ruins. He couldn’t go there. But he kept out of sight, as if he had left this earth.

He may have studied the Koran while gone, because he referred to verses from it later on.

466 POETRY He stayed away as long as he could. He was already disillusioned by the politics of popes, warriors, and friars, but finally he had to return home to deal with squabbles among members of his own Order and to resign from being their leader.

As I was learning these things about Francis, by chance I was also reading The Road to Mecca by Muhammad Asad, and one passage seemed to merge the two stories into one.

Asad wrote:

The urge to wander that has made me so restless for the greater part of my life ... and lures me again and again into all manner of hazards and encounters, does not stem so much from a thirst for adventure as from a longing to find my own restful place in the world — to arrive at a point where I could correlate all that might happen to me with all that I might think and feel and desire.

For Asad, as for Francis, the urge to fuse the outer with the inner life was the great drive, for if they did fuse, there was meaning. Asad left his European roots and went east to Islam.

For Francis, there are no others, no inner, no outer. There is being-with. This is why he addresses fire as “you.”

š

What is the subconscious? The clutter in the room around you, a door opening, friends coming in, a scorpion on a counter, tea you spill and paper blowing near a fan. It is halos, wings, swords, spears, helmets, horses, a buried cross that then comes out of a mouth somewhere else, thousands of dromedaries galloping forward,

FANNY HOWE 467 tribal banners and white garbs blowing on gold, typewriter keys and a radio dial.

It is the movie, The Flowers of St. Francis, frame by frame, made in 1950 by Rossellini, spontaneously, a series of vignettes with monks from an actual monastery taking the parts of the friars who followed Francis. It is the Canticle of the Sun, the poem Francis wrote when he was dying, and the Beatitudes in Pasolini’s movie on the Gospel According to Matthew.

The subconscious is the real world, its surface and its inches. A wild-eyed man who spat at me. The cauterizing of blind eyes in the thirteenth century. Leprosy that Francis died with, and his vision of a six-winged seraph attached to a crucified Christ plunging through the clouds over Mount Alverna where he spent his last months as a hermit, and the agonizing stigmata it left on his body.

The subconscious was exposed by Francis in all the times he stripped naked and lay down on the ground, or cried on his face or spoke to the birds. When he was dying naked he covered the wound in his side, as if embarrassed that he had received such a mark, and probably looked for the sky. He was said to seek the sky with his eyes wherever he was. There were old friends arguing around him, and the end of his hope for a world without money, dedicated to peace.

Like Sappho’s poems, his life is full of holes and erasures. His life was a poem of many spaces. What was so special about him? His compassion, his laughter, his tears, his commitment to an idea, and his friendship with nature.

468 POETRY You can only understand why he mortified himself and renounced all pleasures if you have lived a long time and want to kill your ego.

š

Mirror neurons experience the su≠ering that they see. A forest thick with rust and gold that doesn’t rust. A friend entered my studio and cried out, “The Diary of a Country Priest!” because it was such a monastic space, and the light in the window solidified for a minute.

“What does it matter?” the young priest asks at the end of that film. “Everything is grace.” I saw a painting where the infant Jesus was lying on his back on the floor at the feet of Mary and his halo was still attached to his head. And another painting where there were about forty baby cherubs all wearing golden halos. Gold represents the sun as the sun represents God. Outside wild boars are still roaming the hills. Maize, sunflowers, honey, thyme, beans, stones, olives, and tomatoes. Rush hour in the two-lane highway. Oak tree leaves curled into caramel balls.

A Franciscan monk sat on a floor reciting the rosary, a concept borrowed from Islamic prayer beads centuries before. Figs, bread, pasta, wine, and cheese. These are not the subconscious, but necessities.

People want to be poets for reasons that have little to do with language. It is the life of the poet that they want, I think. Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation. To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine. Noetic monasticism.

FANNY HOWE 469 Some people’s lives are more poetic than a poem, and Francis is the proof of this. I know, because he walked at my side for a short time.

Civitella Ranieri, fall 2009

Watch Outreamer, a video collaboration by Fanny Howe and artist Maceno Senna, at http://vimeo.com/16145484.

470 POETRY peter campion

Self-Starter

The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan. Ed. by Michael Boughn & Victor Coleman. University of California Press. $49.95.

If you’re an English teacher, you’ll know a certain type of student, one whose intellectual curiosity, whose sheer imaginative ambi- tion, eclipses simpler things, like turning in papers. The essay that was due last week hasn’t appeared, not because of any lack of e≠ort, but because the assignment to explicate one short lyric has somehow conjured up pages of notes on Greek etymology, Egyptian myth, the latest issue of Scientific American, the Albigensian Crusade, and symbology in the Oz books of L. Frank Baum. You start to wonder if the men with butterfly nets are fast approaching. At the same time, you feel admiration for the student, gratitude even, for his literary overflow. So the questions linger: Will this excitement ever balance out? Will this enthusiasm ever find a form? What will happen to this person in the world? Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book o≠ers one triumphant answer to such doubts, one justification of the errant imagination. The book discovers its source, as a matter of fact, in the answering and honor- ing of teachers. Asked for a short tribute to the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) on the occasion of her seventy-fourth birthday in 1960, Duncan began a prose work he would revise for years. Growing from a meditation on the importance of H.D., it branched into six much wider-ranging essays, and then a series of divagations in notebook form. The whole thing, reaching nearly seven hundred pages, has now been published, in definitive form, by the University of California Press. At the beginning of the book, Duncan tells of the first time he encountered H.D.’s poem, “Heat,” as read aloud by his teacher, Miss Keough, in her high school classroom in Bakersfield, California. The tribute to Miss Keough (I wish the otherwise expert editors had found her first name for us) is more than a sen- timental lead-in: the whole book has at its heart a tale of origins, the growth of the poet’s mind, as fostered by teachers, friends, and great writers of the past. H.D.’s “Heat,” though actually created by anthologists who cut it

PETER CAMPION 471 from a longer sequence called “Garden,” stands itself as a testament to the urgency, the entangled yearning and uneasiness, of any process of growth. Here are the lines Duncan remembers Miss Keough read- ing, over “the hum and buzz of student voices and the whirr of water sprinklers” from outside the classroom window:

O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop through this thick air — fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat — plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.

You can see, and hear, why the poem would appeal to an alert seven- teen year old. The action of the poem is literally “incipient,” about to fall from ripeness into some new state, whether life or death. The basic, phrasal lineation holds back the stronger verbal force of the invocation and command, while phrases themselves veil more dis- ruptive meanings: “rend open the heat” is only one letter short of “rend open the heart,” and the “the points of pears” just shy of “the points of spears.” Something passionate or violent, or both, bursts at the seams of this poem. Duncan traces the drama of containment and release as it devel- ops into various forms in H.D.’s mature work, in Helen in Egypt and Trilogy. But he also follows the process of growth in his own life and work. This is what makes The H.D. Book so valuable. Reading it, you examine a poet’s sensibility from the inside out. Sex, politics, religion, memories of college friends, arguments with other poets, the entire history of art — all these swirl in the alembic of the poet’s mind as he concocts his poems of the future. “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,” T.S. Eliot wrote of great art, “which

472 POETRY is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” This is the modification that Duncan wants to a≠ect. But it may seem odd to quote Eliot here, since as he reconfigures those monuments left by his immediate predecessors, as he writes, in fact, a whole new history of modernism, Duncan tries to cut down Eliot himself a notch or two. It’s not only that Duncan resents what he sees as the older poet’s “pervading concern for respectability,” his comfort in his role as the Archbishop of Modern Letters. Duncan reads The Waste Land as “the monumental artifice of a ruin, a ruin with an outline.” The poem seems too didactic, it provides “very us- able attitudes and conclusions.” Those conclusions tended at the time toward a fashionable world-weariness, one that found a comfortable home in academia; Duncan agrees with William Carlos Williams’s claim in his Autobiography that “Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom.” Duncan paints an image of the “new young men in the Universities” at mid century, who were “haunted by a world they had come from where their people had not read Kyd or Webster.” Genuine anger simmers behind that humor. After all, those followers of Eliot were the same poet-critics who cut H.D. from the antholo- gies, and who turned away from Duncan himself after the appearance of his 1944 essay, “The Homosexual in Society.” You don’t have to agree entirely with Duncan’s objections to Eliot to understand the value of the alternative he o≠ers, both for his sec- ond generation of modernists, and for all poets since then. I mean that there’s still germane power in Duncan’s image of the lyric self, his idea of how a poem both portrays and embodies personal experi- ence, his belief that the poem is always bound up with the growth of the person. In this way, Duncan proves an unabashed Romantic. Remembering that first encounter with “Heat,” he writes of H.D.’s lines that “such a shaping was the directive of all simple urgen- cies — toward the pear, toward the poem, toward the person of a man.” Against the regnant doctrines of impersonality, Duncan wants poems with greater creaturely heat, and greater expressive capacity. Surprisingly, he finds this in the imagist lyrics of the nineteen-teens: “the idea of this being a perfect lyric, an ecstatic, a memorably shaped, moment, drew us away from recognition of the opening and closing address of the poem that cried out for release from such perfection.” Modernist poetry moved on from the imagist lyric, and Duncan him- self was certainly never an epigrammatist. But his best work grew

PETER CAMPION 473 from this early glimpse of the poem as both a holding and a releasing of the lyric self. Reading The H.D. Book seemed, to me at least, a good excuse to return to those poems of Duncan’s. His work stands on its own mer- its, but dipping into it again, I also wondered if it could have tonic value for contemporary poetry. Against those seemingly innovative writers who attempt to razor the traditional, subjective “I” from their poems because they suspect it of being an illusory construct, Duncan stands as a reminder of the primal, even anarchic, power of the lyric self. But his poems are not mere containers for expression either. Against poets who content themselves with the presentation of a personality, the retailing of anecdote, and the bantering of sensi- bility, Duncan o≠ers a more expansive vision. In a 1971 letter to Denise Levertov, he claims that “the hidden and life-creative and destructive ID-entity underlying and overriding the conveniences of personal identity is what makes the di≠erence between mere craft ... and significant craft.” Anyone delving into the self must go deeper than “personal identity,” just as anyone creating true art must go deeper than technical e≠ect. For Duncan, the self is both a source and a potential adversary. It’s no wonder then that, like Pound, Duncan saw Robert Browning as the great precursor of modernist po- ets. In his historical and fictional monologues, Browning developed what Duncan calls “a form for the poet’s dramatic participation in other personalities in other times.” Duncan sees this form translating in the twentieth century into the modernist use of masks or personae, and even into surrealist methods of dream work, all of which reveal “that there is, back of poetry, some collective poetic unconscious.” Duncan’s own major work begins when the fusion of the individual lyric self and that “collective poetic unconscious” reach high octane, in his 1960 collection The Opening of the Field. Here he begins “The Structure of Rime,” the first of his two, magnificent open-form po- ems — the other, “Passages,” first appears in 1968 in Bending the Bow. The discrete, numbered sections of these poems are meant to exist as apertures through which the poet and reader view a larger structure, occurring endlessly through time and space. Even the poems not in these series, when they’re at their best, work to reconcile human life with some vision of the eternal. Take, for example, the first sentence from the first poem in The Opening of the Field. The poem unfolds from its title, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”:

474 POETRY as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Duncan’s passion to understand both the individual and this struc- ture much larger than the individual gleams in the very syllables here. The near rhyme of “mind” and “not mine” in the first two lines sounds e≠ective to me, and poignant, because of its incompletion. It enacts a very human slip, a near miss. Even the mind is not a posses- sion; it’s out on loan. The individual mind participates in “the mind,” a collective or even transcendent consciousness. But transcendence here means also to remain embedded on earth. When vital making occurs — the making of life, of love, of art — the resulting forms don’t rise, they “fall.” Duncan picks up on that word and repeats it in the next sentence. Here is the rest of the poem:

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun’s going down

whose secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos,

PETER CAMPION 475 that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.

With the entrance into this dreamy plateau of being, the high- est cosmic orders are revealed, and yet these are movingly mirrored, and held for a moment, in a children’s game. The connection to the ethereal must be grounded. However open the form becomes (and Duncan certainly wrote many fine prose poems, for example) it must remain a measure: “certain bounds hold against chaos.” Duncan talk- ed and wrote often of what his free verse predecessor, Ezra Pound, called “the tone leading of vowels.” He meant those shapes created by lines of assonance and by the abandonment of those lines — shapes which occur within and across the verse line itself. This may sound technical or esoteric, but say the poem above out loud, and you’ll hear it: the chains of interior rhymes and the breaking of those chains dynamize, at the micro-sonic level, the counterpoint of pattern and openness. Another grounding force in Duncan’s best poems turns out to be, very simply, other people. I love, for example, when Duncan moves in his poem “The Dance” from a highfalutin, neo-Platonic reverie to the memory of a summer job he had sweeping up a dance hall in the early morning, and then to the dance instructor there, a woman he admired, named Friedl. In “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” the “Queen Under The Hill” may seem like a misty figure dreamed up by Peter Jackson for one of his Lord of the Rings films. But this figure pops up in many guises throughout Duncan’s work, and here, if she becomes ethereal, she also takes the form of a woman who, at the time the poem was written, was very much on earth. I mean H.D. herself. You don’t have to hear the allusion to appreciate the poem, but the line “whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words” looks to me like a clear nod to the opening tercet of Helen in Egypt:

Do not despair, the hosts surging beneath the Walls (no more than I) are ghosts.

Helen becomes half ghost here, because in H.D.’s telling she has been taken to Egypt: the warriors in Troy are killing each other for a phan- tom. The “hosts,” who rhyme with the “ghosts,” are the absent, yet

476 POETRY very real, crowds of warriors and victims across the sea. As Duncan plays with this word and image, he casts the “hosts” as words them- selves. The actual material of the poem, language, turns out to be an unruly system of human contingencies, which can both kill and give life. Conjuring an image of crowds, “hosts” suggests the way that others, both living and dead, inhabit our language and our conscious- ness. H.D.’s words sound within Duncan’s words here, in the very allusion: “whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words.” And if in “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” the al- lusion comes across as a wink, in The H.D. Book the process of po- etic indebtedness becomes explicit. At times this process becomes a “disturbance” in the pejorative sense: we are indebted, bound to, those with whom we quarrel, as Duncan quarrels with Eliot, and even with poets he admires much more, such as Williams and Pound. Influence can be a disturbance in this case, the hosts morphing into the swarm of received opinions, of period styles and voices, out of which we must find our way. But the hosts can also be something like the “Heavenly Hosts.” Although Duncan does employ Christian imagery in his poems, for him this angelic visitation arrives more often as a Dionysian disrup- tion, from below. So much of the pleasure of reading The H.D. Book comes from following these bursts, up from the subconscious, as they lead in all sorts of directions. We move, for example, from a memory of the poet’s Aunt Fay, through a string of etymologies, to a discus- sion of the homophobic use of “fairy,” and then to W.B. Yeats and Madame Blavatsky. Or we start with a magazine article about schizo- phrenia by the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and then wend our way from an exploration of shamanism to several remarks about William Blake. At times, in Duncan’s poems, this meandering can feel compulsive or self-indulgent: as if every association that passes through the mind of Robert Duncan needs to be rhapsodized for the reason that it’s an association passing through the mind of Robert Duncan. But in the best poems, and throughout The H.D. Book, the errant flights work to uncover a large and gorgeous structure: noth- ing less than the growth of a poet’s being. It’s rare to get so close to how an artist actually puts together, through self-making, the world that he or she imagines. This book o≠ers such an opportunity, along with its wealth of argument and insight, and its engaging cameos of people important to the poet. These include, of course, Miss Keough of Bakersfield, California.

PETER CAMPION 477 beverley bie brahic

Cluttered and Clean

Into These Knots, by Ashley Anna McHugh. Ivan R. Dee. $22.50.

The best poems in Ashley Anna McHugh’s first book have a startling freshness and emotional pounce. “Cairns,” a seventeen-part sequence, is her centerpiece; its poems, many of them rhymed sonnets, weave several strands, but the most taut and powerful of these dramatize an incident between “Jake” and his laid-o≠ father that turns into a bitter fight about shame and control:

His father glared him in the eye, and held

the armchair hard. “Let me take care of May.” “And I told you I didn’t want your pay.

You hear me, boy?” “Just let me get this month. Don’t be so goddamn dense.” “You watch your mouth.”

He should have just shut up. “Quit being proud, Dad —” “Pride’s the only thing I’ve got.” Rain pounded.

Into These Knots won the New Criterion Prize, for a manuscript “of poems that pay close attention to form,” which it does, but unob- trusively, allowing rhymes to fall like a pat of butter on meat-and- potatoes monosyllables like “here” and “clear,” “one” and “gun,” and half-rhymes like “month” and “mouth.” Stanza forms vary, but there are stanzas: couplets, tercets, quatrains, some longer forms, such as the sonnets in “Cairns.” McHugh doesn’t overreach: not much time travel, few identity changes that a thousand years of English poetry haven’t set us up for, little Coup-de-dés-ish juggling with the visuals. There are signs she’s been reading Larkin (whose “long slide” turns

478 POETRY up in an airplane poem) and Frost. What these poems do, movingly, is enact, in simple language, the pain of a narrow range of universal human situations — death, love, despair — without overlooking, in small ways (rhythm, level of diction), their potential for comedy and thus tonal range. The book begins with a hunting accident involving a deer, an apple tree, and, yes, a father, followed by a poem voiced by an “I” and a “she,” whose repetitions enact despondency’s circular ruminations:

I say, Without a God there is no hell. There’s only this — . She rustles for her keys. The apple tree sheds petal after petal.

She says, Let’s take you to the hospital. The petals spin like sparks. I close my eyes And say, Without a God there is no hell. — From Into These Knots

One of the best, also longest, poems is the Frostian “One Important and Elegant Proof,” a fusion of narration, dramatic and interior monologue, and dialogue staged in a therapist’s o∞ce. Not all of it works; the portentously italicized ticking of “the clock” and the unconvincingly unresolved finale, for example. Thoughts and speech however are perfectly pitched. The subject wants and doesn’t want to be there (“‘This isn’t something that I thought I’d do. / People just kept on telling me I should.’”) and the therapist’s silence isn’t helping:

“I grew up Christian, thinking things made sense. You know? To someone. God? If not to me.” She thought that he might ask a question. No. She sat up straighter in the silence. Swallowed. “My father’s Protestant, my mother’s Catholic. But neither practices. I’m not religious, not really — but one time, when I was living in Vermont ... ”

Me too, I gulped reading this, impressed by McHugh’s command of speech rhythms and withheld emotion — and then laughed, wryly,

BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC 479 when “A Song for the Suicidal” revisits (presumably) the doctor’s o∞ce and provides a noirish checklist of ways to end it all:

Testing his nerves she told him, “Sure, I’ve wanted to die — .” And the doctor interrupted, Asking her “How?” (Not “Why?”)

Straight razors in the bathtub. Falling. Pawn-shop gun. Wrong way on the freeway — . Taking every last one

Of the sedatives in her bathroom. Plunging from bridge ...

McHugh pulls o≠ a hard thing: she peels back layer after layer of a tense situation until the reader, implicated, flinches. The best poems are stripped down, gleaming raw wood. They have this in common with Larkin (though without Larkin’s layers of ironic self-commentary and prismatic refractions of diction) and also with Frost’s funny, pain- ful, factual, disabused dissections of human nature. True, some things are less successful. There are so many epigraphs I decided they must be intertextual strategy: if so I don’t buy it; these poems don’t need those crutches, even when it’s easy to sympathize with the urge to foreground potent quotes from impeccable sources like Dante and Proverbs. McHugh’s unemphatic wisdom about human relation- ships sends shivers down my back in a number of the overtly personal narratives and narrative-lyrics, but other lyrics feel like exercises, their imagery (“lilacs,” “a wave’s white lash,” “the thunder-prowled horizon”) shopworn, the reason for the poem’s getting written un- clear. Maybe this has something to do with poem placement: an early seven-line lyric called “Ars Poetica,” despite its “shells sea-worn” and “blood-rushed ear,” feels like the perfect bridge between the poems on either side of it. But for me, the big successes of McHugh’s book come when the poems have the grace to be awkward. They sound like no one has ever spoken quite like that before.

480 POETRY Radial Symmetry, by Katherine Larson. Yale University Press. $18.00.

Am I the only person who reads poetry books from back to front, and gripes when a collection makes me read it left to right like an essay or a memoir? Katherine Larson, happily, lends herself to being read a poem at a time, page thirty-five or page twelve, and going o≠ to chop parsley while her special e≠ects seep in. Radial Symmetry, the most recent winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and the last of eight selections by Louise Glück (much praised by the winners for her generous attention to the final product), is a first collection atten- tive to externals (“always the dialectic of inside/outside — ” Larson puts it), except as the things that catch Larson’s attention reflect the poet — modestly, attractively — back to us. Here’s part of “Low Tide Evening”:

She knows that south of Galway, where they strayed

through terraced shales and grey-blue limestones searching for fossils, the sea licks pale lichens o≠ the rocks

and everywhere the spirits are hungry. Say you leave a crust of bread on your plate. A hundred of them could last for weeks on this.

A woman reticent about herself, you would say, but perceptually and ethically involved in the world. I don’t know if Larson is a scientist — “Love at Thirty-two Degrees” finds “I” at a lab bench dissecting a squid — but she has a natural- ist’s objective, though hardly dispassionate eye: less rambunctious than Marianne Moore’s gusto, but with the same precise attention to word-as-almost-thing (think of Moore’s “The Fish”); indeed at times she ventures into the territory of language qua language, say in the “Ghost Nets” sequence (named, with an ecologist’s passion, for “lost or discarded gill nets ... for the way they continue to indis- criminately trap and kill organisms from seabirds to porpoises”):

BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC 481 Memory. The invention of meaning. Our minds with deeps where only symbols creep.

Her syntax curls out like a tentacle — preposition, article, noun — liquid, pellucid, tentative, meditative:

We stay and make a temple for him

of pink anemones. We drink the leftover wine. And we stand, still at odds with the world, like distinguished topiaries. — From Of the Beachcombers Under Airplane’s X

Lines, long and short, are orderly (I’ve always pictured Moore’s cupboards as neat, Bishop’s full of clutter and half-drunk whisky bottles; this is Moore territory) with mostly crisply functional line ends and wind-chiming sonorities (“their reds a requiem for bone,” “oyster crates / in estuaries” and “trilobites and trembling lotus”). Diction and syntax are what you’d call lyrical (with a dash of the biotechnical; e.g., “dinoflagellates”) in the vowel-transparent, liquid- consonantal, Petrarchan tradition, sometimes crossing the line into the too-delicate, -pretty, -polished, though Larson, alive to the risk, reprimands herself in “Ghost Nets”: “Not perfection ... but original- ity” and elsewhere comments: “If there’s anything a coast imparts, it’s patience / with imperfect lines.” Her rare forays into earthier diction (“We bury our shit like surgeons / in the cold sand of the dunes”) can make what’s described sound precious — though, with a quick stroke, she’s capable of satisfying our thirst for the quotidian with a shot of context: “Early that morning, I watched the postman on his bicycle delivering letters,” or “I look at the sea and eat my toast.” A traveler — Africa, the Galapagos, Italy — Larson is not free of poster poverty, as in, “The sanctuary with / its silver o≠ering bowls, the lepers singing” (“Lake of Little Birds”); overall, however, her ethics of vision respects di≠erence and maintains distance — or di∞dence — occasionally yielding to the temptation to round things o≠ with a resonant, though not unchallengeable, statement, such as, “Each time the intimacy becomes greater, the vocabulary less” and “Either everything’s sublime or nothing is.” Is this true? Is it profound? I don’t know, though it sounds nice. Sly touches of humor ru±e sober tones:

482 POETRY Death and I are shopping for emicungwa at night, in the market...... The street children are out stealing watches again — From The Oranges in Uganda

Radial Symmetry keeps messy human relationships at bay — but not always: “Yes, Paul, I spend too much money. / I cheat on every- one I love” (“The Gardens in Tunisia”). Throughout the collection a reticent speaker is variously denoted as “I,” “she,” or “you,” and, like the floating pronouns in Arthur Sze’s work, Larson’s give a frag- mented, deconstructed idea of the poet/speaker, portrayed as just one more element in the natural world her poems inhabit, a human observer no more central to the overall argument than “freeze-dried seahorses.” Occasionally, however, a speakerly “I” who sounds like a psychologically delineated character with the usual nightmares and guilt emerges; then I’m less beguiled, because Radial Symmetry is, it seems to me, only glancingly a book about human relationships. Katherine Larson’s poems are on the whole finely balanced be- tween subjective and objective, perception, emotion, and intellect. Her language is precise, and delicate as watercolor, or the print of jellyfish from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) that decorates her cover. Wallace Stevens (“The imperfect is our paradise”), another poet of elegant linguistic surfaces, words and lines, roughed them up, in part via rapidity of execution and the ludic. The carefully tended but also troubled surfaces of Radial Symmetry make it an impressive collection, with hints of depths and broader developments in store.

The Eternal City, by Kathleen Graber. Princeton University Press. $16.95.

Propped on the printer, a book open to a still life crammed with objects: a jar of olives, wine glasses, figs, some disquietingly amor- phous loaf-shapes, a knife. My favorite Chardin — The Silver Goblet — its composition stripped to a few resonant essentials, I can’t bear to look at for long: it’s too numinous. Katherine Larson’s poems

BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC 483 resemble it; Kathleen Graber’s world, rich in clutter, is like Chardin’s Jar of Olives: a canvas that celebrates excess. A finalist for last year’s National Book Award, The Eternal City is a study in how much a poem can hold (no accident, those suitcases in her poems), as one item or thought yields, metonymically, to the next:

Sometimes we are asked to prove who we are. Just this morning at the library I had to open my passport & ask a stranger to vouch for me so that I could take home a book. If you live long enough, you realize that you are not the person you were. Here in this kitchen — a kitchen I might in conversation call mine — I own exactly one sharp knife & the wooden spoon I use to stir the sauce. A greasy tin kettle, pulled from the back of a cabinet, soaks in warm water. The days are like no days I have ever known. Would I like things to be better? Yes. But what does it matter? Intent seems so small a part.

This is roughly half of “The Festival at Nikko,” a relatively short poem with a typically heady mixture of the concrete and the specula- tive, as well as of Graber’s formal tendencies: door-like shapes, long lines, paratactic and un-paragraphed, because where and why does one stop digressing when everything leads, as in a book by Sebald, to everything else, the wooden spoons unabashedly sidling up to the eternal questions, and all of it “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and,’” as Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her somewhat more traditionally co- herent but also encyclopedic poem, “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.” What holds these poems together? Why don’t we get bored (I didn’t get bored)? The character of the speaker, for one thing: down-to-earth but bigger than life, a hoarder of stu≠ and thoughts. We want to cor- relate her responses, explicit and implicit, to the conditions of life at the end of — how many? — millennia of human history. She doesn’t just mop the floor and soak greasy pots; she reads — and books, seri- ous books (movies, art), are jumping o≠ places for poems. So Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations provoke reflections on everything and the kitchen sink; not hard to see her a∞nity for Walter Benjamin, another

484 POETRY Great Accumulator, to whom three poems are dedicated. Augustine, Issa ... there’s even a spot of product placement: Pepperidge Farm and Ziploc. As to formal glue, although these poems have only the loosest organization, as if to demonstrate that chaos is woman’s natu- ral condition, sonics usefully grease the paratactic machinery: modu- lation of vowel and consonant sounds, syntax and rhythm (print a poem out as prose, it doesn’t work; the lineation works with and against syntax, and is integral). Modulations of time, too, through adverbials and tense shifts:

In three weeks I will be gone. Already my suitcase stands overloaded at the door. I’ve packed, unpacked, & repacked it, ...... I wept all morning — From What I Meant to Say

Less successful is the device of beginning each new poem in the title sequence with the last line of the previous one: feels gimmicky. Nor, when Graber tries her hand at stanzas, do I buy it; maybe because her hyperbolic world seems more one of inclusiveness rather than of divisions and hierarchies, the line ends, white space, and two-steps-forward-one-step-back style of poems like “Un Chien Andalou” don’t (yet) work, for me, as well as the du≠el-bag-holds-all style. Closure? Seems unlikely. It can however be suggested when a seemingly lost poem circles back to the clump of trees it set o≠ from: “Book Six” of the title poem begins and ends with dreams; the ques- tion in “What I Meant to Say” is whether to pack or not to pack The Complete Shakespeare, and in the end Shakespeare makes the cut because “There are tragedies I haven’t read.” True, some poems feel a little baggy; more often, however, Graber imposes enough formal restraint on a long wandering poem to keep it from being totally centrifugal, and her jumbles and juxtapositions produce new ways of seeing things and purposeful, delightful, comic exposures of life’s rummage sale side. Chardin’s heteroclite objects are a reflection upon the relationship between multiplicity and unity, the editor of Chardin says, while the more simplified composition of his late Silver Goblet posits “the existence of an ideal order.” Graber probably has no more than fleeting nostalgia for an ideal order, but she has some defi- nite ideas about the riches of the everyday, and an aesthetic to match.

BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC 485 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Dear Editor,

My copy of the June issue of Poetry has just arrived, and I went imme- diately and joyfully to the translation of a poem I’ve known and loved for many years, Lorca’s “La casada infiel.” But what a disappointment: it has several glaring and important errors. The original doesn’t say that the speaker was “certain that she was still a virgin,” but that he “believed she was single.” The words for “virgin” are “virgen” and “doncella.” The word “mozuela,” used in the original, means “young girl” or “lass.” The lines translated here as “it dawned out there / to leave my lip bitten” are peculiar, and nothing like the original lines, which mean “common sense taught me to be reserved.” As for the final eight lines, they are entirely wrong: the speaker describes himself as a “legitimate gypsy” or “true gypsy,” which he thinks of as a motive for pride; he is not condemning himself as a “blackguard.” He is proud of the present he “gave,” not “o≠ered,” to his one-night stand, and that present was a “costurero,” a sewing bas- ket, not a creel, which is “nasa” in Spanish, and is used by fishermen. And the most serious inaccuracy of all comes at the end, where the original says, “I had no wish to fall in love with her, because she had a husband, although she told me she was single.” This story is about a woman who lied, and a man who gave a gift and extricated himself from a situation that could have led to a mortal encounter with her husband. It’s not about a man who is bragging about deflowering someone else’s oddly still-virgin wife. What the speaker is bragging about, to a degree, is his common sense, and the handsomeness of the gift that sealed the incident, the generous gift of a “true gypsy.”

rhina p. espaillat newburyport, massachusetts

486 POETRY Dear Editor,

Conor O’Callaghan’s rendering of “La casada infiel” is unfaithful to what was almost for sure Lorca’s intent in the original Spanish, and is hardly an improvement on Langston Hughes’s version, which O’Callaghan’s lengthy commentary fails to mention. Hughes did his first pass at a translation of Romancero gitano — Lorca’s most popular book, which launched his international career — in Spain, during the Civil War, at a meeting of writers (Alianza de Escritores) in consul- tation with Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, and other friends of Lorca’s. He revised it later, with help from Lorca’s brother Francisco, at Columbia University, before publishing it in the Fall 1951 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal.

mike schneider pittsburgh, pennsylvania

Conor O’Callaghan responds:

I’m really glad of both Rhina P. Espaillat’s and Mike Schneider’s responses to my version of Lorca’s “La Casada Infiel.” I mean that. I kind of expected it too. Lorca once described how the poem’s “pop- ularity [had] a desperation” that made him stop reading it in public. My version does intentionally take some liberties with the original, mainly at the end, a fact that I perhaps should have flagged more clearly to the editors and in my note. When I wrote, “I really wanted to be faithful to Lorca’s version of infidelity,” I meant to imply the fundamental impossibility of that desire. “Creel” does indeed imply fish, but there are fish in the poem. Words, like things, get put to uses other than what they were origi- nally intended for. Perhaps I overlooked the symbolism of the sewing basket: is he telling her to mend her ways? I don’t know the Langston Hughes version and still can’t find it. I’d be really grateful if Schneider could send it on. I’ve gone back through my notes around “mozuela,” and the origi- nal seems more ambiguous than Espaillat suggests. The Gili version I worked from translates “mozuela” as “maiden.” The Leonard Cohen song uses “virgin.” In his note on the poem in his transla- tion of Gypsy Ballad, R.G. Havard writes: “we know little about the

LETTERS 487 woman, except that: she lied when she said she was mozuela, an unmarried lass or virgin.” Less immediately relevant, but with an interesting proximity, is Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s play Lizagón. In his study The Theatre of Valle-Inclán (Cambridge University Press, 1983) John Lyon writes:

There are four characters in Lizagón ...: an old procuress (La Raposa), an innkeeper and her daughter (La Ventera and La Mozuela) and an itinerant knifegrinder (El Afilador). The mother and procuress scheme jointly to sell the daughter to a rich Jew. Their e≠orts to appeal to her acquisitive instincts fail and the Mozuela (‘virgin’), determined to follow her natural inclina- tion, o≠ers herself to El Afilador who happens to be passing by.

Lizagón opened in December 1926. The composition of “La Casada Infiel” is generally dated at 1927.

Dear Editor,

Temple Grandin, who has revolutionized the slaughterhouses of America, believes that it is natural for humans to eat other animals, but, in her words, “we owe them some respect.” Considering that poets are meat for critics, I think her principle ought to apply to us. I refer to David Orr’s answer to a letter in your June issue in which he repeats (with a dash more pique and a further distortion of meaning) his ad hominem remarks from an earlier review, in response to a reader’s let- ter in defense of honesty and uncertainty in poetry. I must inform Orr that I injured my shoulder some time ago walk- ing a large dog, and so am incapable of patting myself on the back. Yes, I am the case in point, and though with snarky reviews, as we all know, what you can do is suck it up; still, I think that seeing the same snark published twice entitles you to say: Enough. Silence would seem cowardice, and though I am generally cowardly — if I were the only one left conscious in an airplane, I would not take the controls and try to land it, but would fall, weeping, to my death with my fel- low passengers — even so, enough of letting things go because it is unseemly to speak out on one’s own behalf. A reader challenged Orr’s original accusation [April 2011] that you can’t say (in my poem “Back Then, We Called It ‘The War,’”)

488 POETRY that you don’t understand the mass violence of war, because whatev- er you think of “our violent tendencies ... you do have to understand them.” In reiterating this view, he argues that poets “are obligated to at least attempt to have some sort of relation to those behaviors.” Yet it is exactly that relationship to war and atrocity that is the subject to which the book’s title alludes, and is the concern of most of the poems in the first half of the volume — poems whose “bruised” subject matter and its treatment he found not to his taste. Taste is one thing; ignoring meaning and context is quite another. Whether a critic likes what a poem says or not, he is obligated to read it, and not to quote out of context to deform its meaning. For instance, the “nevertheless, I do not understand” comes, not only in the larger context described above, and after “though I have looked in my own heart, / and knowing myself no better than most, and worse than many,” but also at the end of a stanza which mentions a lifetime of trying to understand — listing the many disciplines and sciences, the philosophers and writers consulted, who had a serious go at the problem of mass violence and atrocity against our own kind. Clearly, these too many, often conflicting “answers” are over-determined; their accretion of competing explanations suggest finally the inability of the subject to submit to understanding or preventive explanation. A design flaw in the species? ¿Quién sabe? Speaking of taking lines out of context in order to disregard their sense, I suppose that if the little girl at the end of the poem were not standing in the rubble our air strike had made of her home — the context Orr neglected to mention — she might not have had such a hopeless urge toward reconstruction. In critiquing her gesture, while ignoring the context of ruin, he says: “More likely, that little girl is picking up stones in order to peg them at her brother. Kids are mean.” This is beyond irrelevance; it is parody.

eleanor wilner philadelphia, pennsylvania

David Orr responds:

It’s di∞cult to respond to a letter that directly invokes a pointed criticism without exposing the subject of the criticism (in this case, Eleanor Wilner’s book) to yet more criticism. I’m sorry for that; it

LETTERS 489 wasn’t my wish to give Wilner a hard time twice, and I regret not making that clearer in my reply to Andrew David King. As for the rest, I will say only that the context provided in my review was more than adequate, and the commentary on the poem in question was more than fair.

Dear Editor,

As a veteran high school English teacher, I truly value Poetry. As a resource for my poetry unit and as a source for poems simply to share with my colleagues, the magazine has been invaluable and helpful. In the midst of online postings, where anyone can write anything and call it poetry, it is refreshing to know that Poetry is still publishing the best poetry around — poetry that inspires with its ideas and chal- lenges with its questions. My students recently read and discussed the poems in your April issue and truly enjoyed them; as I did not make the activity into a structured lesson, the students were able to read the poems that interested them and discuss what they liked and noticed in them. To my surprise, quite a few enjoyed the poems and asked me further questions about them. Thank you for providing this opportunity to young people, who will become future readers of poetry.

brendan nelson danville, california

Editor’s note:

We o≠er free copies of Poetry to reading groups and classes every April for National Poetry Month. Please visit our website for more details: poetryfoundation.org/npm.

490 POETRY Dear Editor,

Several years ago, writing in the Nation, Meghan O’Rourke stated:

In 1981 Carolyn Forché published a slim collection of verse.... some critics saw Forché’s attempt to fuse poetry and politics as damaging to the integrity of both.... Some twenty years later, it’s hard to imagine that Forché’s book was attacked as it was. We are, of course, at a di≠erent place in the history of taste: After September 11 and fifteen years of reading Eastern European po- ets like Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zagajewski, Americans are more comfortable with poets shifting between the personal and political in their work.

Hard to imagine, in our age and day, O’Rourke says. Perhaps not — for it is with a sense of sadness that I read in the July/August issue of Poetry these words by Michael Hudson:

her idea of “witness” struck me as yet another call for poetry to do something, and that poetry of witness requires appropriate credentials, namely some overwhelming historical-political trag- ic backstory. Under editorial questioning, Forché conceded ...

Seriously? Did you tie her to a chair and demand confession? It is hardly an appropriate tone to discuss any poetics — but especially the sort of poetics that has survived the test of time and now, exactly thirty years after the first publication of The Country Between Us (which is still very much in print, by the way) seems as relevant, and as necessary, as ever.

ilya kaminsky san diego, california

Dear Editor,

It was a great pleasure to read Carolyn Forché’s “Reading the Living Archives” and the accompanying Q &A [May 2011]. In the context of a literary conversation that can seem at times consumed with frivolity, one is grateful for the sense these pieces give of a voice

LETTERS 491 returning urgently to first things and a serious consideration of the sources of literary making, among them the condition of spiritual extremity that Dickinson calls “soul at the white heat.” Forché is careful to allow a broad interpretation of “witness,” clar- ifying that she intends by the term both “awareness of the radical contingency of all human life” and, following Levinas, recognition of “our infinite and inexhaustible responsibility for the ‘Other.’” Reading these thoughts, it was hard not to think that “witness,” as used by Forché and the philosophers she discusses, resembles a great deal what might in another philosophical tradition be called “love,” understood as the almost impossible task of recognizing that others (or the Other) have precisely the same claim to existence as oneself. Although Forché also makes clear that, in this broad sense, “wit- ness” is not a term she applies exclusively to poetry arising from political extremity, it is this poetry that has been her primary focus for three decades. In the context of this body of work, it seems fair to claim that implicit in her discussion of witness as a face-to-face encounter with the Other in the “aftermath” of catastrophe is a claim about a possible role for the literary imagination in determining the nature of this encounter. (“Literary imagination” may perhaps best be understood here as the richly engaged acknowledgment of another’s existence.) If “witness,” which entails a radical recognition of the Other, is one possible response to atrocity, it seems to me that its pre- cise opposite may be “retribution,” which entails his annihilation. Understood this way, Forché makes the sort of robustly ethical claim for literature that has frequently come under attack. There are of course good reasons to protect poetry from allegiances of all sorts, including allegiance to any proscriptive ethical regime. But Forché, by insisting that the poet she envisions writes from a “hovering and receptive state of consciousness without intention,” makes clear that this is not the sort of engagement she finds in the poetry she admires. Instead, following thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, and in a way that I find both challenging and di∞cult to dispute, she presents a power- ful argument for the central role of the literary imagination in what we might, in this context, call works of love.

garth greenwell sofia, bulgaria

492 POETRY CONTRIBUTORS

reginald dwayne betts * is author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Avery, 2009) and the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010). He is a 2010 Soros Justice Fel- low and 2011 Radcli≠e Fellow. beverley bie brahic’s work includes the poetry collection Against Gravity (Worple Press, 2006) and a selection of Apollinaire transla- tions, My Little Auto, forthcoming from CB editions. scott cairns is Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri. His most recent poetry collection is Compass of A≠ection (Paraclete Press, 2006). peter campion is the author of Other People (2005) and The Lions (2009), both from the University of Chicago Press. He is a Guggen- heim Fellow, and teaches at the University of Minnesota. brian cronin * lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited in the us and Europe, including a one-man show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. peter gizzi’s new book, Threshold Songs, is forthcoming in October from Wesleyan University Press. He works at the University of Mas- sachusetts, Amherst, and this year was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. anthony hecht (1923 – 2004) wrote seven books of poetry, including The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967), which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968. His several volumes of criticism include The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1993). He received the Bollingen Prize (1983), the Wallace Stevens Award (1997), the Robert Frost Medal (2000), and the National Medal of the Arts (2004). fanny howe’s newest poetry collection is Come and See (Graywolf Press, 2011). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She teaches at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

CONTRIBUTORS 493 dan howell’s collection of poems, Lost Country (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. He teaches at the University of Kentucky. sharon olds teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University. Her next book, Stag’s Leap, will come out in fall 2012. robin robertson is from the northeast coast of Scotland. His fourth collection, The Wrecking Light, has just been published by Houghton Mi±in Harcourt. mary ruefle’s latest book is Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010). A collection of her lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, will be pub- lished by Wave next year. brenda shaughnessy* is most recently the author of Human Dark with Sugar (2008) and the forthcoming Our Andromeda (2012), both published by Copper Canyon Press. robert wrigley’s most recent collection is Beautiful Country (Pen- guin, 2010). A former Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Idaho. david yezzi is the author of The Hidden Model (TriQuarterly Books, 2003) and Azores (Swallow Press, 2008). He is the editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009) and executive editor of the New Criterion. kevin young is the author of seven collections of poetry and editor of six others. The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, is forthcoming in spring 2012.

* First appearance in Poetry.

494 POETRY Southwest Review 2011Ê œÀ̜˜Ê >ÀÀ *œiÌÀÞÊ*Àˆâi

First Place – $1,000 Second Place – $500 publication in Southwest Review accompanies both prizes UÊ"«i˜Ê̜ÊÜÀˆÌiÀÃÊÜ œÊ >ÛiʘœÌÊÞiÌÊ«ÕLˆÃ i`Ê>ÊÊ LœœŽÊœvÊ«œiÌÀÞ° UÊ-ÕL“ˆÃȜ˜ÊœvʘœÊ“œÀiÊÌ >˜ÊÈÝ]Ê«ÀiۈœÕÏÞÊÊ Õ˜«ÕLˆÃ i`]Ê«œi“Ãʈ˜Ê>ʺÌÀ>`ˆÌˆœ˜>»ÊvœÀ“ÊÊ ­i°}°]Êܘ˜iÌ]ÊÃiÃ̈˜>]Êۈ>˜ii]ÊÀ ޓi`ÊÃÌ>˜â>Ã]Ê L>˜ŽÊÛiÀÃi]ÊiÌÊ>°®° UÊ*œi“ÃÊà œÕ`ÊLiÊ«Àˆ˜Ìi`ÊL>˜ŽÊÜˆÌ Ê˜>“iÊ>˜`ÊÊ >``ÀiÃÃʈ˜vœÀ“>̈œ˜Êœ˜Þʜ˜Ê>ÊVœÛiÀÊà iiÌʜÀʏiÌÌiÀ° UÊ$5.00Ê«iÀÊ«œi“Êi˜ÌÀÞÉ >˜`ˆ˜}Êvii° UÊ *œÃ̓>ÀŽi`Ê`i>`ˆ˜iÊvœÀÊi˜ÌÀÞʈÃÊ-i«Ìi“LiÀÊ30, 2011. UÊ-ÕL“ˆÃȜ˜ÃÊ܈Ê˜œÌÊLiÊÀiÌÕÀ˜i`°ÊœÀʘœÌˆwV>̈œ˜ÊÊ œvÊ܈˜˜ˆ˜}Ê«œi“Ã]ʈ˜VÕ`iÊ>Êsase. UÊ >ˆÊi˜ÌÀÞÊ̜\Ê/ iÊ œÀ̜˜Ê >ÀÀÊ*œiÌÀÞÊ*Àˆâi] Ê -œÕÌ ÜiÃÌÊ,iۈiÜ]Ê*°"°Ê œÝÊ750374]Ê >>Ã]Ê/8Ê 75275-0374 www.smu.edu/southwestreview POETRY FOUNDATION

Library Open House The Poetry Foundation Library hosts an Open House celebrating its thirty- thousand-volume, non-circulating collection, now available to the public. Visitors may browse the collection, record a public domain poem for the archives, and enjoy complimentary hors d’oeuvres. wednesday, september 7, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm

š Poetry on Stage: Meet Mr. Yeats Actors bring the dramatic biography of William Butler Yeats to the stage. Directed by Bernard Sahlins, Meet Mr. Yeats makes for a fascinating dramatic study of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. sunday & monday, september 18 & 19, 7:00 pm š Exhibit: The Alternative Press Poetry Postcards Project A small Detroit letterpress printing house called the Alternative Press created a series of poetry postcards over a period of thirty years. One side of a postcard would have original artwork, while the other side featured a letterpress poem. The exhibit is presented concurrently with a multimedia feature about the Alternative Press Poetry Postcards Project on poetryfoundation.org. wednesday, september 21 – sunday, november 4 opening reception thursday, september 22, 7:00 pm

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE a 61 WEST SUPERIOR STREET a CHICAGO SEPTEMBER EVENTS

Harriet Reading Series: Douglas Kearney Poet, performer, and librettist Douglas Kearney inaugurates the new Harriet Reading Series. The series features readings and presenta- tions by “Craft Work” and “Open Door” writers from the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet. friday, september 23, 7:00 pm

š Poetry Off the Shelf: Adonis & Khaled Mattawa Bilingual reading featuring Arab poet, translator, editor, and theorist Adonis and his translator, poet Khaled Mattawa. Adonis: Selected Poems, tranlated by Mattawa, was published last year by Yale University Press. This event is co-sponsored with the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute as part of the International Poets in Conversation consortium tour. tuesday, september 27, 7:00 pm

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/EVENTS

poetryfoundation.org/harriet

HARRIET POETRY NEWS THAT STAYS NEWS

Harriet is the Poetry Foundation’s news blog, dedicated to featuring the vibrant poetry & poetics discussions from around the web. POETRY DISCUSSION GUIDE

Every month the Poetry Foundation publishes a free discussion guide to the current issue of Poetry magazine. Visit our website for this month’s guide, and to sign up for a half-price student subscription.

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/DISCUSSIONGUIDES Taken Somehow by Surprise David Clewell “Clewell is an exuberant, inexhaustible poet. . . . His unstoppable narrative energy and his multi-layered curiosity are almost enough to drive this poet out to the far right side of the page.” —Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate Paper $16.95, e-book $9.99 Last Seen Jacqueline Jones LaMon Inspired by case histories of missing African American children, this provocative and heartrending collection evokes the experience of what it means to be among the missing in America. Paper $14.95, e-book $9.99 Wait Alison Stine On the outskirts of town, someone is waiting. Part fairy tale and part gothic ballad, Wait chronicles the year before a young woman’s marriage. Paper $14.95, e-book $9.99 At booksellers, or visit uwpress.wisc.edu 0/%429 !2#()6% ",/''%23 2%6)%73 /& 2%!$).'3 0/%429 &/5.$!4)/. .%73 "//+ !243 &%!452%3 !5$)/ /. 0/%429 0/%429&/5.$!4)/./2' /. #5,452% 0/%429 4//, %33!93 0/%43 .%73 !24)#,%3 ",/''%23 %6%.43 #!24//.3 1! 0(/4/'2!0(3 !24)#,%3 $)30!4#(%3 "//+ 0)#+3 05",)3().' .%73 !2/5.$ 4(% 7%" '5)$%"//+3 0/%429 !2#()6% 1! &/5.$!4)/. .%73 %6%.43 0/%-3 0/%429&/5.$!4)/./2' ")/'2!0()%3 0/%429 -!'!:).% !2#()6% !5$)/ /. 0/%429 %33!93 &%!452% !24)#,%3 /. 0/%43 ",/''%23 0/%- /& 4(% $!9 !2/5.$ 4(% 7%" '5)$%"//+3 2%6)%73 /& 2%!$).'3 0/%43 ",/''%23 !24)#,%3 0/%429 "%343%,,%2 ,)34 05",)3().' .%73 %33!93 "//+ 0)#+3 0/%4294//, !5$)/ 0/%429 !2#()6% &/5.$!4)/. .%73 0(/4/'2!0(3 ")/'2!0()%3 ,%44%23 4/ 4(% %$)4/2 $)30!4#(%3 #!24//.3 .%73 0(/4/'2!0(3 !5$)/ 2%6)%73 /& 2%!$).'3 !2/5.$ 4(% 7%" 0/%429&/5.$!4)/./2' 0/%429 -!'!:).% !2#()6% ",/''%23 #!24//.3 !2/5.$ 4(% 7%" %6%.43 !5$)/ %33!93 0/%429 /. 0/%43 "//+ !243 0(/4/'2!0(3 $)30!4#(%3 "//+ 0)#+3 05",)3().' .%73 0/%429 !2#()6% 0/%429&/5.$!4)/./2' &/5.$!4)/. .%73 ")/'2!0()%3 0/%429 -!'!:).% !2#()6% !5$)/ /. #5,452% 0/%- /& 4(% $!9 &%!452%3 1! 0/%429 -!'!:).% !2#()6% 2%6)%73 /& 2%!$).'3 ",/''%23 0(/4/'2!0(3 0/%429 "%343%,,%2 ,)34 2%6)%73 /& 2%!$).'3 0/%43 ",/''%23 !24)#,%3 05",)3().' .%73 !5$)/ 0/%429 &/5.$!4)/.

Readings in Contemporary Poetry Co-organized by poet and author Vincent Katz and Dia curator Yasmil Raymond

Anselm Berrigan and John Godfrey Thursday, September 22, 2011, 6:30 pm Rae Armantrout and Lisa Jarnot Thursday, October 27, 2011, 6:30 pm Alice Notley and Brenda Coultas Thursday, November 10, 2011, 6:30 pm Tony Towle and Jennifer Moxley Thursday, December 15, 2011, 6:30 pm

For reservations email [email protected]

Admission $6 general, $3 for Dia members, students, and seniors

Dia Art Foundation 535 West 22nd Street 5th Floor New York City www.diaart.org 212 989 5566