FIELD, Issue 69, Fall 2003

FIELD CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS NUMBER 69 FALL 2003 OBERLIN COLLEGE PRESS EDITORS Pamela Alexander Martha Collins David Walker David Young MANAGING Linda Slocum EDITOR EDITORIAL Jacob Bacharach ASSISTANTS Katie Hubbard Rebecca Silverman DESIGN Steve Farkas www.oberlin.edu/~ocpress Ohio Arts Council A STATE AGENCY THAT SUPPORTS PUBLIC PROGRAMS IN THE ARTS FIELD gratefully acknowledges support from the Ohio Arts Council. Published twice yearly by Oberlin College. Subscriptions and manuscripts should be sent to FIELD, 10 North Professor Street, Oberlin, Ohio 44074. Manuscripts will not be re¬ turned unless accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope. Subscriptions $14.00 a year/$24.00 for two years / single issues $7.00 postpaid. Please add $4.00 per year for Canadian addresses and $7.00 for all other countries. Back issues: $12.00 each. Contact us about availability. FIELD is indexed in The American Humanities Index. Copyright © 2003 by Oberlin College. ISSN: 0015-0657 This issue is dedicated to the memory of Alberta Turner (1919-2003) one of the founding editors of FIELD and a passionate advocate of contemporary poetry for decades CONTENTS 9 James Wright: A Symposium David Young 12 "As 1 Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, 1 Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor": Eocation, Location, Location Gail Mazur 20 "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota": View from a Hammock Angie Estes 23 "The Last Pietd, in Florence": Where Stone Doesn't Belong Stephen Kuusisto 30 "A Lament for the Shadows in the Ditches": The Impossible Light of Day Sue Standing 33 "The Vestal in the Forum": Ravishing Ruins Bruce Beasley 37 " Venice": Feeding the Glass Swan: James Wright's Lyric Antilyricism Mark Irwin 42 "Yes, But": Journey with Affirmation and Shadow * * * James Haug 46 Diorama 47 Martina in the Badlands 48 Root Beer Jennifer Atkinson 49 Under the Sign of Virgo 50 Rossignols, Persian Nightingales 5 Christopher Howell 51 Gaze Sarah Maclay 52 The Marina, Early Evening Linda Bierds 53 Time and Space 54 The Monarchs Ellen Wehle 55 To Live 56 Triptych in Bed Christopher Buckley 58 Poem After Lu Yu Bronislaw Maj 60 Five Poems Elizabeth Antalek 65 Obaasan Alone Grace Paley 66 Yes 67 Story Shir a Dentz 68 Spoke Kurt S. Olsson 69 My Bad Name Carol Potter 70 Comfort Zone 71 Serenade on Three Strings Betsy Sholl 72 Reading 73 Back with the Quakers Lisa Beskin 74 Self Portrait with Fuseli's Imp Nance Van Winkel 75 Lest You Forget: The Cake Comes Before the Prayers 77 Seme and Semaphore 78 Decked Out Lenore Mayhew 79 Rabbit 80 Almost Eighty Laurie Blauner 81 In the Distance, How Can I Tell? Charles O. Hartman 82 from Morning Noon and Night D. Nurkse 84 Grand Bal du Nord 85 Two Small Empires 6 Marianne Boruch 87 Double Double 88 Little Fugue Jonah Winter 89 Redemption 90 The Moment 91 The Garden of Crows Helen Cotikling 92 1933 93 I Knew an Eccentric Denver Butson 94 Late Afternoon in the Library 95 Incidental Birds Nancy White 96 Your Mother Starts Talking 97 Eve (Reprise) Erica Hoivsare 98 Woodbook Christopher Davis 101 Incest 102 A History of the Only War Radmila Lazic 103 Ma Soeur 104 Contributors 7 JAMES WRIGHT A FIELD SYMPOSIUM JAMES WRIGHT: A FIELD SYMPOSIUM It is now exactly forty years since James Wright, in The Branch Will Not Break (1963), reinvented himself as a poet and in the process helped American poetry discover a dazzling new set of possibilities. Although Wright's first two books, The Green Wall (1957) and Saint Judas (1959), manifest the musicality and the enormous compassion for the poor and dispossessed that were to characterize his whole career, their almost dutiful adherence to rhyming iambics signals his apprenticeship to poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson and Thomas Hardy. But the laconic free- verse line in which he began to compose in the Sixties, coupled with the visionary intensity that he and his friend Robert Bly were absorbing through their translation of such poets as Pablo Neruda and Georg Trakl, allowed him to break through into a strikingly distinctive voice and vision. Its influence was so per¬ vasive that it can be a bit difficult to recognize now just how rev¬ olutionary this work was. The anniversary seems an appropriate moment to reassess Wright's achievement as measured by the generation of poets who followed him. In our usual practice, we have invited a number of poets to choose a favorite poem for commentary. Strikingly, most of them opted to discuss, not the poems of the 1960s that remain Wright's best-known work, but poems from the last three books. Two Citi¬ zens (1973), To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977), and This Journey (1982). In various ways, these essays demonstrate that binary ways of classifying and understanding Wright's work simply don't do justice to their complex nuances and ambiguities. As several point out, in the final decade of his life the Ohio of steel mills and high school football is intercut with the Italy of the pi¬ azza and the olive grove — and, as Angie Estes says, each equal¬ ly becomes the occasion for rapturous transfiguration. Wright's late work is often his most personal, achieving an almost weight¬ less sense of simplicity and transparence — and at the same time it resonates with a profoundly metaphysical vision. More than two decades after his death, James Wright's poetry remains a re¬ markable achievement, acutely alert to the possibilities of human feeling and intelligence in a world both sweet and suffering. 11 AS I STEP OVER A PUDDLE AT THE END OF WINTER, I THINK OF AN ANCIENT CHINESE GOVERNOR And how can /, born in evil days And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate? —Written A.D. 819 Po Chu-i, balding old politician, What's the use? I think of you. Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze, When you were being towed up the rapids Toward some political job or other In the city of Chungshou. You made it, I guess. By dark. But it is 1960, it is almost spring again, And the tall rocks of Minneapolis Build me my own black twilight Of bamboo ropes and waters. Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved? Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter. Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains? Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope For a thousand years? 12 David Young LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION I have chosen the opening poem from The Branch Will Not Break because what was most important to me about this book and James Wright's other book from the Sixties, Shall We Gather at the River, I now realize, was the way they began to fill in the big blank map of Middle America. They mentioned places I had been, and places I knew about, and places I could imagine and might visit. They tended to be specific about the seasons, and they sometimes mentioned the year. And that particularity of ref¬ erence, which I now can see was drawn mainly from the Chinese tradition, helped reverse an aversion to regionalism that had dominated American poetry in the Fifties. It made the Midwest seem like an authentic place for poets and poems, an area where newness was possible and even welcome. New England and New York had been written about. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Quaker graveyard in Nantucket; and Frank O'Hara has just learned that Lana Turner has collapsed.) Florida had had some attention, ditto the West Coast. But who had ever located a poem in Fargo, North Dakota, or Martins Ferry, Ohio, or Moundsville, West Virginia? Wright did not do this single-handedly, of course. Robert Bly was matching him, as they exchanged poems in Minnesota, an echo of the friendship Po Chu-i had with Yuan Chen. Theodore Roethke, Wright's sometime teacher and colleague, had already written his Michigan greenhouse poems, and was producing his North American sequence out in Washington. William Stafford was writing about Kansas, where he grew up, and Oregon, where he had gone to teach. Philip Levine was starting to write about his years in Detroit. It was an exciting time for a poet in the Mid¬ west, or from the Midwest. A number of these poets were better known for their experi¬ ments with "deep images." These were supposed to surface pow¬ erfully from the unconscious and to consolidate the work of sur¬ realists and expressionists in other countries (Spain, Germany, Chile, France). They carried a certain abstractness with them (since the unconscious was thought to be a collective well of im¬ ages and archetypes, a spiritus mundi of the human species). They 13 could be powerful, but they could also, as in the second poem in The Branch Will Not Break, feel arbitrary and a little dislocated: Mother of roots, you have not seeded The tall ashes of loneliness For me. Therefore, Now I go. If I knew the name, Your name, all trellises of vineyards and old fire Would quicken to shake terribly my Earth, mother of spiraling searches, terrible Fable of calcium, girl. ("Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium") I suspect I'm not the only person who finds this a little preten¬ tious and hollow by now. It created excitement at the time, but by itself it was too disconnected from everyday experience to achieve a lasting value.

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