Keeping Bright Company - Guest Review by Karen Lee Lewis

NB: Reading poetry is as much about how it makes you feel as it is about the meaning of the words. Sometimes, the emotion is even more important than the definitions. This review embraces that stance; it's something I hope more readers can learn to embrace. - JT

BOA Editions (2010)

Keetje Kuipers' book of poetry, Beautiful inthe Mouth, is sculpted with various bodies in mind. She has pressed them for us like flowers into her book. She grounds the work in a tangible physicality, giving the reader many different hands to hold throughout. Kuipers begins and ends with the body, and is particularly interested in its placement in the world. Her eyes paint the concrete with just enough abstraction to create layered landscapes that transform and surprise. The collection, set out in five sections, is a trail guide to light and shadow, and she pinpoints it where ever possible inside the poems, inside lit cigarettes and lamplights, inside fading paper roses and the hulls of boats. We follow the speaker as she attempts to locate a place where the light never sleeps inside her, a place where she can keep bright company, where she feels at once both alone and held together by a body that is not her own.

"Diving Into the Wreck" - Commentary by Don Raymond, Jr.

... and I tried to explain to her last night that we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and - in spite of True Romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.

                        -- Hunter S. Thompson

There is a poem which has haunted me since I first read it, twenty years ago. In “Diving Into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich describes an explorer preparing for her mission. The first stanza begins with a check-list of scuba equipment, then ends with a sudden, almost bitter turn:

I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

This contrast runs through the remainder of the poem: loneliness versus teamwork, darkness and light. This contrast has also run through my own life: there is no one else. I have to do this alone ... no help is coming, and none can be expected.  But for all that we might wish to be a part of Cousteau’s “assiduous team,” there is also a certain rebellious streak of pride in the solitary challenge of the lone diver.  After all, that’s what poets, explorers, scientists, do – go off alone into the wordless places and bring back something that might be the truth.  And there is a price to be paid for that.

What Is It About That Wheelbarrow?

Poetry is a mystery to most people, and poems like this one don’t help matters:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

-William Carlos Williams


Nothing happens in this poem. There are no people who might converse about or use the wheelbarrow. There is only the wheelbarrow itself, some chickens, and recent rain. And yet, the poets insist, it’s a great poem. But why?

Kay Ryan – Terrible Portents: Guest Post by Don Raymond, Jr.

That Vase of Lilacs & Blue China Doorknob

Poetry is a highly personal thing.  Every once in a while, you find a poem that clicks, and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck; you get that strange feeling like someone’s just walked across your grave, like the poet “sat behind a million pair of eyes and told them how they saw” as David Bowie said about Bob Dylan.  It’s exhilarating, that connection between two strangers.  It can also be a little frightening.

The first time I read “That Vase of Lilacs,” I got a world-class case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.  Kay Ryan frightens the heck out of me in ways that Stephen King can only dream of.

All in the Friedman Family

Working In Flour

Jeff Friedman

(Carnegie Mellon, 2011)

Jeff Friedman has created a community of characters, some modern, some ancient, but all of them family. Each of them speaks distinctly, even the animals. What they tell us is that Friedman has a gift for both the quotidian and the surreal. In fact, this book reads like a collection of family stories, some that are trotted out at every family reunion, others which are never spoken of again.

Take, for example, Poem for Ross Gay. ("Do you remember the time Ross ate that book by Larry Levis?") Ross is a character, all right. He has a huge appetite, the kind found in growing teenagers everywhere and he's apparently over for lunch. But Ross is poetic family, so in addition to melon and hummus, the speaker offers him a volume of Larry Levis poems, which Ross promptly eats. Friedman leaves no doubt that he means physical ingestion, which makes for a fresh alternative to the mundane mental 'devouring' of books that poets must do. It's the first indication that this poem, already skirting the edges of reality, won't be contained. When Ross, apropos of nothing, throws a kettle bell through the speaker's roof and it explodes into gold nougat, it seems at once to be perfectly fantastic (as in fantasy) and perfectly believable. It's both a wonderful tribute to a fellow poet and a celebration of what can be achieved in the form.

But Friedman has dark characters, too. The Binding is spoken by Isaac. This family story (as a Jew, Friedman can claim Abraham and Isaac as ancestors) is the opposite side of the codified story from the Torah. In Friedman's version, Isaac is strangely self-possessed and doesn't seem to realize that the wind is God's presence. Instead, Isaac sees his father as "a sad procrastinator." Taken with the line, "for the worst to happen. My father" from the first stanza, this is a damning portrait of the first patriarch. It's at once surprising and believable: surprising because the Abraham of the Old Testament never shrinks from God's will nor does he have second thoughts about being tested so cruelly; believable because children and parents are continually misreading each other, rejecting what they perceive to be weakness.

In the middle of these two extremes are the rest of Friedman's characters, some arguing in a diner, some offering contradictory advice, some up on a political soapbox, but all of them related to you, somehow. By way of introduction, here is the title poem. 

A Challenge For Readers

The Lifeguard, by James Dickey
from: Poems: 1957-1967 (Wesleyan University Press, 1967)

It’s my hope that as readers stay with Architrave, their poetic sensibilities will sharpen and they’ll be game for more challenging reads. This is just such a poem. It will resist its reader for a time, but ultimately rewards patient re-reading. This process is one of the things I love about reading poetry: how the nuances of the poem’s idea materialize out of repeated readings.

The first time through The Lifeguard, there are only the barest contours of a story: a child has drowned and the lifeguard on duty has slunk away to nurse the shame of his failure. What is meant by all the other language, all the images, exists as a fog. Slowly, then, maybe after five or six reads, the fanciful elements begin to separate themselves from the actual. I love how the mundane (boats, children, fish, lakes) is combined with the sublime ("sole upon silver," "my steep body flashed," "the ghost of a snowfield in summer"). The former provides a firm place to stand, something for the reader to grasp while the poem takes off into the latter.

I have never been a lifeguard, but I can identify with what he’s going through. I have certainly failed in spectacular, public fashion. And even though no one died, I still relived these failures privately, entering the realm of magical thinking where I can say or un-say, do or undo the essential thing, to will myself from failure into success. Just like in the world, the poem's language of magical thinking intersects seamlessly with the language of the everyday: "I wash the black mud from my hands" sits right next to "On a light given off by the grave/ I kneel in the quick of the moon." Just as in life, the border is present, but porous.

            
And therein lies this poem's greatness: its verisimilitude includes the surreal leaps a human mind can make in the face of failure. Like the lifeguard, I am always left with arms full of only water (or air, or a pillow as the case may be). This poem breaks my heart every time I read it. Mostly, though, I'm comforted to know I'm not alone in my magical leaps, which is why, twenty years after I first encountered it, I continue to read it.

A Book About Divorce & Death You'll Want To Read More Than Once?! Really?! Really.

Claudia Emerson's Late Wife (LSU, 2005)


Rereading Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife, I was struck by how warmly it welcomes its readers. Emerson’s “I” maintains a consistent identity, so much so that the book gains a narrator. That’s an unusual element for a poetry collection; in this case it offers the habitual reader of fiction or memoir something familiar, even as the book remains within the boundaries of poetry. There are metrical and formal virtuosities to spare, should a reader wish to look for them, but what inspires that second look is how the single lens of the “I” threads the poems together.

In Second Bearing, 1919, the narrator recounts her father’s boyhood story of how the family curing barn burned to the ground with an entire year’s tobacco crop inside. Frantic and trying to save something, anything, the family kept dousing a nearby peach tree in the hope it might survive. It did, and “in the late fall, the tree/ broke into bloom, perhaps having/ misunderstood the fire to be/ some brief, backward winter.” Even as it provides a glimpse of family history, this echoes two poems from the book’s first, more recent, section. In The Last Christmas, her soon to be ex-husband insists he rose from his sickbed to see her, outside chopping firewood, “small, mute beneath the window frame,/ [his] breath forming, freezing on the panes/ until [he] could not see [her].” In Chimney Fire, the couple’s “breathing had turned to ice” and one night when “the fire would not/ be kept; the chimney caught it, and we watched,/ heard it pour up into the tree.” But that’s not to say this book is all destruction. The winter returns in the penultimate poem, Leave No Trace, in the form of a frozen fog that “had left perfect white stockings on the trees.” 

The lens of the narrator joins all of these various iterations into a single, complex experience. Winter is what it is, but depending upon your circumstances, it can represent any number of states. In The Last Christmas  and Chimney Fire, winter’s death is foregrounded and threatens to consume the couple on their way to divorce. In Second Bearing, 1919, fire tricks the peach tree into spring production, but the missing winter means the fruit lacks a seed, at once “infertile, and endless somehow.” Winter, then, is a necessity for new growth. And last, in Leave No Trace, the winter is beautiful, putting its “opalescent sheen on every surface” while the new couple enjoys a picnic. But the season’s teeth are still there, just held at bay by the narrator’s state of mind. Near where the couple sits to eat, “A narrow stream/ still moved beneath its own freezing like the barest/ pulse that persists a while after the breathing goes.” 

That all sounds pretty depressing, but it’s not. The beauty of these poems is their joy of discovery, how the narrator pieces together an understanding of heartbreak as a simultaneously inevitable but impermanent state. It’s hard won, and makes the epigraph, by Theodore Roethke, perfectly apropos: “What else to say?/ We end in joy.”

On the Application of Poetry - Guest Post by Don Raymond, Jr.

Sarah Lindsay’s What All It Takes

from Primate Behavior (Knopf, 1997)

November, 2007: the last phone call of the last hour of the day before leaving for Thanksgiving was my doctor telling me I had been diagnosed with diabetes. 

            Over the following weeks of measuring-cup starvation, I looked for ways to assign meaning to what had happened. I didn’t need an answer to the existential “why.”  I knew “why” – sugar was not one of the four food groups, no matter how much I wanted it to be.  Ditto for coffee, cholesterol, and cigarettes. What I needed was a way to give this meaning, to help me feel this was more than simply a struggle for continued existence.

            I found myself reciting Sarah Linday’s “What All It Takes,” over and over again. Sometimes in the morning, to brace myself for another day of measured almonds and banana snacks; sometimes in the midst of a panic attack brought on by too much exercise. And far too often, murmured under my breath in anger at the world.

            As the glucose meter read too high one moment, too low the next, I would mutter: “Up and down its red and blue chutes / my defective blood bumps / Oreos and gumballs one hour, / famished soap bubbles the next.” Describing red blood cells as “Oreos and gumballs” made the sickness tolerable.  If she could laugh at it, could sum it up in such words, the least I could do was survive. The least I could do was marvel at the mounds of pharmaceutical junk I was producing - the twice-daily blood sugar readings, the lancets for drawing blood, special strips for reading sugar levels, a mountain of biologically hazardous garbage, all to prop up my continued existence. I had become a medical cottage industry. All this stuff … “Christmas survived, / I find with the special sugarless candy’s / mild laxative effect time to wonder / at what all it takes to keep me up.”

I had been hurt, in ways that would not heal. I had reached the time of my life where ready access to hospitals was a major lifestyle decision. Though I’d always lived within walking distance of a liquor store, the pipe dream of rugged self-sufficiency was gone for good. “… in an Ice Age cave I’d be dead. / In a Roman villa with household gods and servants / I’d be dead. In a Gothic wheatfield town, / even before the plague came I’d be dead.”

            I made it through, and in no large part because someone else had before me. Someone had faced the same thing, and won, and Sarah Lindsay told me about it in language so vital, so heartbreakingly true, that it had to be true for me, as well.


For more on Sarah Lindsey, check out her page at the Poetry Foundation.

For more about Don Raymond, Jr., visit his work for Architrave.

If Basho Were Alive Now, As A Woman...

Jane Hirshfield's Come, Thief

(Knopf, 2011)

“What in this unpleated world isn't someone's seduction?”

There it is, right on page one, the poet stating her intent: this will be a seduction. But because it's orchestrated by Jane Hirshfield, it will revel in imperfection and impermanence. Readers familiar with Hirshfield's work will recognize her strong Eastern lean here. There is an aphoristic quality that suggests the haiku master Basho. Living in Seventeenth Century Japan, he wrote “Even in Kyoto—/ Hearing the cuckoo’s cry—/ I long for Kyoto.”* Had he been a Twenty-First Century American woman, he might have written “Stay, leaf./ It reddened,/ embarrassed for me and itself.” (22) That same poem (The Promise) ends with “Stay, I said to my loves./ Each answered,/ Always.” Hirshfield and Basho are kindred spirits, understanding all too well the ephermeral nature of our existence and the exquisite heartbreak of being born to die. Both masters write the kind of poems mimicked by less experienced poets because they appear simple. But while the images and metaphors are straightforward, they haven't been simplified.

Take the title piece. It uses familiar images of a window, a path leading to a door, and a fire. The poet compares the window to a lax guard; she makes the path an accomplice of the titular thief (i.e. time); she links the fire to birth and love; it’s all very predictable and plain. In less accomplished hands this poem would be a lament that nothing lasts, but Hirshfield warmly courts the thief, saying, "Dear one, enter." It's a difficult stance for an American poet; not only do we like to think that love conquers all, we cling to it as if its absence were a form of death. The speaker of this poem knows better and says so. All things subject to time must end, therefore an ephemeral being must embrace both love and the absence of love. We must welcome the thief, knowing he will take everything. It feels like a much larger piece of writing that has been carefully honed down to its essential 8 lines, instead of writing that was born small and never grew beyond its initial idea.

Very few of the poems in Come,Thief are longer than a page and many are much shorter. It makes for a satisfying afternoon—poems that can be grasped on an initial reading that also inspire (and reward) multiple readings. In the time it takes to finish, the light will have changed from the bright glare of day to the softer, more forgiving tones of early evening. And the poems will stay with you. Late at night you might think of them again, how their embrace of impermanence is full of joy, like master Basho: “It would melt/ in my hand—/ the autumn frost.”*

*Translations of Basho by Robert Haas