dearest,

they told me a surgeon sat down in the hospital morgue

next to your body.
He yelled at the aide to get out.

His two sons had been your students.

–me, too, little-knowing–

Anyhow.
I’m always, my young fathers,
out in the air, loving you.
Water to water.

____________________________________________

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book,Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, just out from Copper Canyon Press. Her previous collection, Little Boat was published by Wesleyan in 2007. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia.

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Holiday Special

In the Kingdom of Unmatched Shoes

Once I Walked Out

Once I walked out and the world
rushed to my side.  The willows bent

their willowy necks, tossed green hair hugely.
The hawk cried by the well.

The crows kept counting their kind.
Once I walked out and the sheep

bleated with sensitivity, touched
black muzzles to the grass.

I was followed by dogs, by flies,
by horses both curious and spiteful.

The field of beans worked its sums
under green, the corn licked the air to haze.

I said goodbye to the house
with its sagging porch, attic hung with bats.

Goodbye braided rug, rabbit hutch, corn popper, copper tub .
The green world greened around me—

Virginia creeper, crown vetch, thistle, mullein, sumac.
I was full in my limbs, my laugh, pinkish skin.

I swung my arms, pulled air into lungs—
pine pollen, dust mote, mold spore, atomized dew,

bright wheel of flame twisting in the heavens
flushing the eye with light.

______________________________________________

Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage which received the Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude, which was published in 2004 by Graywolf Press.  He teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont, and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

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Could Eros be kept

Photo

Everyone in it dead now––Dad,
three, in a skirt––and I see her

again, the unnamed woman.  She
is me.  No one to introduce us:

Hello, Me. Unruly eyebrow woman,
eyes sepia but blue––they must be;

hair pulled slant, frame bent
lensward, skeptical mouth

smiling––I know you.  How did you
leash your mind, when you

looked through the small window
or stared through water

at your veined hand?

_______________________________________

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James Schuyler is back from the dead with the lovely “Other Flowers”  a posthumous book of his unpublished, uncollected poems.  Everything I have come to know and love about Schuyler’s eye and heart is here in generous supply.  The poems are – like so many of the poems published in his lifetime – made from a kind of brilliance disguised as innocence; a sadness disguised as joy.  They feel closer to jazz and painting than to another kind of poetry.   And, like  they are peculiarly of their own time: still timeless as any poetry this indelible (though more in the sense of memorable than something held down or restricted by an era), but they are also poems that feel (somewhat like Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard and, later, Frank Bidart) almost immediately nostalgic.

The subject matter here is still the same as it’s always been:  New York, adventures in intimacy, pop culture, gossip, longing and traveling and most of them are famously brief in scope of time and how they fall upon the page.  In their brevity, they feel as important and quietly beautiful as leaves we use as summer bookmarkers.

What I find most fascinating about Schuyler’s poems (and probably one of the most interesting aspect of this collection is the fact that there are probably more not so good poems than in his other collections) is how slight they may appear and yet are not slight at all.  Like interpretive inkblots that use tea for color instead of ink, the poems are there and not there; emphatic, authoritative, but also whispered.  There’s confrontation and resistance – exemplified, in part, in “Vila Della Vite”, which tracks the desire to be a different kind of thinker than he already is:

I’m not happy
My spirits that lifted
me so high, went off like smoke
after a shot.  How can
I fear so many diverse things?
I want to think of other things.
Is it all
in how you think?
I want to think of a washing machine
in a basement….

Being a different kind of thinker than he is or wants to be is actually one of the aspects that makes Schuyler such a great poet, if that makes sense.  His intelligence is fixed in time but it is also mutable as the subjects it lands on, and rather than the heavy hand of the writer casting a shadow on the subject and/or cadence of the poem, the poem casts the shadow on the writer.  In this way, each poem is its style:

It darkens, brother
and your crutch-tip grinds
the gravel the deer stepped delicately along
one breakfast, you were a kid.
Mother says after thirty,
decades clip by
‘and then you have the sum’
or spent it.

(From “Coming Night”)

And each poem – especially this one – is stacked in terms of form – a way of making information happen by making each line take on a different subject – what Richard Hugo talks about in his book on poetics, “The Triggering Town”.  Here, each next line in that first stanza stands in unison and independently:  it darkens, there’s a crutch-tip, gravel and deer, breakfast, Mother, decades, the sum, and then “or spent it” – the culmination.

And while the eye in many of Schuyler poems is in a beautiful gaze about making the moment larger, the mind is also wondering what is really being seen, considered and what the stakes are.  Each poem in a way – whether it literally asks a question or not – is wondering who someone is, what something is.   Each poem is deceptively simple in that inquiry, but mysterious, too:

The mind dies down.
Nerves, unsheathed, stir.
Radios.  A water tap
Depart, flesh, trailed
by barbwire hair.  Sea salt
explores lips of lacerations
cut on you like a christening
nick.  A yellow light
in blue light.  Twilight
and hydrangeas watery
through hedges.  Was the hideous
lesson worth the pleasure?

(From “The Exchange”)

It’s so good to have these poems in the world now; to have James Schuyler back, uncollected, saluting the various field:  these other flowers.

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by heart

Sometimes when I happy get

___________________________________________

Liz Rosenberg is the author of the novel Home Repair and five books of poems, most recently The Lily Poems from Bright Hills Press and Demon Love from Mammoth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and elsewhere. She teaches English at the State U of NY at Binghamton.

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~
The way I see it, history as a subject reads best when it is both documented and re-imagined (In Cold Blood, Ragtime, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men come immediately to mind); when a literary revelation emerges as a result of source material from the scene and from the bigger world get all mixed up.  Artistic freedom applied to the narrative of seeing the world gives historical events a kind of literary sense beyond the mere recording of something that happened in time.

By nature, history is haphazard and at its core, personal.  And I can’t think of any American poet who knows that fact as deeply and successfully as C.D. Wright who has, in a number of books, combined poetry with other kinds of writing to make a history about prisoners in Louisiana (One Big Self:  An Investigation a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster), or America’s relationship with itself and the rest of the world (Rising, Falling, Hovering) or, in her most recent book, One With Others,  her own, even more familiar smalltown Arkansas and the civil rights movement in the late sixties.

_____It smells like home.  She said, dying.  And I, What’s that you smell, V.  And V, dying:  The faint cut of walnuts in the grass.  My husband’s work shirt on the railing.  The pulled-barbecued evening.  The turned dirt.  Even in this pitch I can see the vapor-lit pole, the crape myrtle not in shadow…

So begins this brilliant book of poems, prose, oral history, collection of historical records and eyewitness accounts about a group of blacks living in rural Arkansas and their ‘walk against fear’ in 1969 (most strongly felt as a response to King’s assassination the year before).  This account of second class citizenship (culminating at one point in a round up of the town’s black students into an emptied public swimming pool) is told from different points of view – most luminously revealed in the life of a woman known as “V” (Wright’s mentor and guide):

_____They drove her out of the town.  They drove her out of the state.  Until they burned up her car, she drove herself.  Burned her car right next to the police station.  She had just begun to drive, I mean she had just learned to drive and she had many miles to go.  Then, whoa, Gentle Reader, no more car.  The white man burned that MF to the struts.

While this is a book about memory (and how it mixes with politics to form a kind of seam against oppression) it is also a reminder of how the story of civil rights continually evolves with differing sets of explosive situations to set the next call to action in motion:

To act, just to act.  That was the glorious thing.

and

Walking we are just walking
Dead doe on the median
Whoever rides into the scene changes it
Pass a hickory dying on the inside
A black car that has not moved for years
Forever forward/backwards never

One With Others with it’s look back at the history of a march is also interlaced with looks into the future.  V, for instance, ends up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York – the place one senses, that names a location as much as a state of mind:

_____IN HELL’S KITCHEN:  Her apartment is smaller by half than the shotgun shacks that used to stubble the fields outside of Big Tree.  Stained from decades of nonstop smoking.  The world according to V was full of smoke and void of mirrors.

_____She was not an eccentric.  She was an original.  She was congenitally incapable of conforming.  She was resolutely resistant.

_____Her low-hanging fears no match for her contumacy

_____Grappling books in the mud leaf out in the mind

What gives this book it’s great heart and beauty is how it follows not only the force and fragmentary transcription of history and civil rights on a local level, but that it follows thinking itself:  a fixation on a memory, the confusion over time of who is who and the indelible way activism and art documents a time.  (Aside from the march and outcries, there is also a continuing devotion to literature, painting and music).

This feeling of the mind working in time is also drawn literally, typographically, with continuous placements of wide white spaces between lines and paragraphs and list items.  By the end, the book takes on the form of a list undulating into a paragraph followed by lines breaking away: the way, as if the past is a dream, we make ourselves remember it and piece it together:

_____Not the sound but the shape of the sound
_____Not the clouds rucked up over the clothesline
_____The copperhead in the coleus
_____Not the air hung with malathion
_____Not the boomerang of bad feelings
_____Not the stacks of poetry, long-playing albums, the visions of Goya and friends
_____Not to be resuscitated
_____and absolutely no priests, up on her elbows, the priests confound you and then they confound you again.  They only come clear when you’re on you deathbed.  We must speak by the card of equivocation will undo us.

_____Look in to the dark heart and you will see what the dark eats other than your heart.

One With Others is a masterpiece.

Almost every poem in Matthew Zapruder’s third book, Come On All You Ghosts (a statement that is both joke and plea) starts with the word today or implies it with a declaration involving an observation almost generic in sound and meaning:

“Today a ladybug flew through the window.  I was reading”

“Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway….”

“I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice”

“Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of”

“Today I read about the factory”

“This morning I rode my gray metal bike”

“Today I have the feeling that no matter”

“Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport”

Of course, that recurring intention of today gets predictable after a while, but Zapruder uses it to compose poems that sound like what the love child of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara by way of San Francisco rather than New York might sound like:  surreal, funny, dry, cynical and clever.  Like Ashbery, Zapruder makes maps of language, usually in one stanza, that speak directly to our virtual age in the somewhat disarming way many people have learned to speak to it:  with a quiet awe and a kind of increasing distraction.  Zapruder gives us a world made of incidents and images meant to enlarge living into a kind of sweet cartoon while making it feel close:  that short distance drawn between the experience and the effect of the experience:

This morning I made extra coffee
for the beloved and covered
the cup with a saucer.  Skelton
I thought, and stay

very still, whatever it was
will soon pass by and be gone.

Or a world that outlines the failure of memory:

Everything I know about birds
is I can’t remember plus
two of the four mourning
also known as rain
doves, the young ones
born in my back yard
just this April

The mind is constantly moving here, even when it is trying to be still (sorting out the past, dealing with his grief—exquisitely documented in the title poem—or revealing any saving grace the natural world has to offer).  Life is no bigger than one’s own autobiography and there’s an objectivity when one applies the pressure to its meaning.  Thoughts are things:

I like the word pocket.  It sounds a little safely
dangerous.  Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe

Zapruder reports on life as it is being lived, being chased, being failed at.  His past—in the poems where the past mostly only intersects with the present (though these poems never really follow a strict memory narrative tract)—is something that memory sifts and turns vague and general, even when it’s punctuated with subjects of clarity: children and violence, for example:

… I played
Santa in the Christmas play
which made sense.
One day Luis stabbed
another kid with a pencil
in the throat, he was also fine.
Another day i went to visit
a friendly girl and ran
straight through the plate glass
window in her apartment building
lobby and out the door
and home, my parents
never knew, I was as I would
now say unscathed.

And at the end:

I think once a parent dies
the absence in the mind
where new impressions would
have gone is clear, a kind
of space or vacuum related memories
pour into, which is good

In addition to beginning in today (which runs against Rilke’s dictum that poems should start on the turn), many poems in Come On All You Ghosts follow a speaker who is a reader as much as he is a writer and whose obsession with books is so complete that it makes living in the world seem like an interruption to reading:

Today a ladybug flew through my window.  I was reading
about a snowy plumage of the Willow Ptarmigan
and the song of the Nashville Warbler.  I was reading
the history of weather, how they agreed at last
to disagree on cloud categories.  I was reading a chronicle
of boredom that called itself The Great Loneliness
and caused a war

Perhaps Zapruder is making up the books as a way to document the imaginative mind, and it’s with that sense of invention and desire for having to know what what’s in a book that isn’t in the world that runs under all the poems sub texturally:  a kind of poetry which is a study in fixation, certainly, but also an expression of the willingness to change course, ideas, direction.  One senses Zapruder has only been thinking of his subjects only for as long as it takes him to write the poem: they’re happening, as opposed to happened and naturally they’re almost always in the present tense, beginning small with the speaker reading a book or looking at something move and ending up bigger than they were which is, in its organic way, everything one can hope for in poetry: the great and, in Zapruder’s style, always surprising enlargement of the world so we can see it.

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