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## Little Brown Baby
Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes,
Come to yo' pappy an' set on his knee.
What you been doin', suh — makin' san' pies?
Look at dat bib — you's es du'ty ez me.
Look at dat mouf — dat's merlasses, I bet;
Come hyeah, Maria, an' wipe off his han's.
Bees gwine to ketch you an' eat you up yit,
Bein' so sticky an sweet — goodness lan's!
Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes,
Who's pappy's darlin' an' who's pappy's chile?
Who is it all de day nevah once tries
Fu' to be cross, er once loses dat smile?
Whah did you git dem teef? My, you's a scamp!
Whah did dat dimple come f'om in yo' chin?
Pappy do' know you — I b'lieves you's a tramp;
Mammy, dis hyeah's some ol' straggler got in!
Let's th'ow him outen de do' in de san',
We do' want stragglers a-layin' 'roun' hyeah;
Let's gin him 'way to de big buggah-man;
I know he's hidin' erroun' hyeah right neah.
Buggah-man, buggah-man, come in de do',
Hyeah's a bad boy you kin have fu' to eat.
Mammy an' pappy do' want him no mo',
Swaller him down f'om his haid to his feet!
Dah, now, I t'ought dat you'd hug me up close.
Go back, ol' buggah, you sha'n't have dis boy.
He ain't no tramp, ner no straggler, of co'se;
He's pappy's pa'dner an' play-mate an' joy.
Come to you' pallet now — go to yo' res';
Wisht you could allus know ease an' cleah skies;
Wisht you could stay jes' a chile on my breas'—
Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes!
—Paul Laurence Dunbar
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| My name is Afaa Michael Weaver, and I will be reading “Little Brown Baby” by
Paul Laurence Dunbar.
I am always inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work. He had such a struggle—he
wrote under censorship and under the pressure of the popular tastes of the
day—and when I think about the evolution of the identity of African Americans,
I think about this poem in terms of the period in which it was written: the
period of blackface minstrelsy, and how the American character was an
imposition on the African American, but also in that interface between the two
larger cultures. It was much more than that, much more diverse, but there are
these central questions of self-representation. And in the need to write
according to plantation dialect—things that were really popular in that day—in
this particular poem, I find the treasure of the love of the father for the
child, and I think of African American men and their evolution as men in the
context of the racial history of this country.
So it does, for me, deepen and complicate conventional notions of identity
inasmuch as I’d say that we still have these issues happening. Is the struggle
with English—American English, as African Americans writing poetry—and the
struggle, in a very large way, with what we call hip hop culture and
representation, self-representation? Mimicry from the larger society on to the
African American, and in many ways exportation of African American culture?
And the push and the drive for resilience that still comes from inside African
American culture—when we look at hip hop, we look at the interface between
Latino/Latina American culture and African American, which makes it much more
complex.
I relate to the speaker in the poem as an African American father and someone
who comes from inside the poor working class structure inside African American
culture (which is a very large piece of it historically), and what it means to
represent myself to my son, and to my brother, and to also represent to my
father and my relationship with him. This evolution around language—my family
came from Virginia and North Carolina, and in my home, the ethos was Southern,
and that is a complex issue and representation of poetry. I find inspiration
in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s courage and his integrity.
And so, he was a great poet, and I think we should revisit the pressures of
the time and understand that some of those pressures are still very much with
us: self-representation, the ability to tell one’s story in one’s own way, and
what that means for the larger evolution of American culture. Thank you, Paul
Laurence Dunbar.
|
## The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—Emma Lazarus
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”
proclaims the Mother of Exiles, in words that reverberate today as a
definition of what America offers to the world. The poem was written by the
American-Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, as a donation to an auction of art and
literary works intended to raise money to build a pedestal for the colossal
statue just given by France to the United States—“Of Liberty Enlightening the
World,” as the Statue of Liberty was originally named. Initially Lazarus was
not interested in contributing a poem, but a friend convinced her that the
statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor.
This was a crucial, new idea.
The statue was originally intended as a monument to international
republicanism and friendship between the United States and France. But Emma
Lazarus, in the 1880s, was deeply engaged in advocating for the flood of
destitute Jewish immigrants fleeing anti-Semitic violence in Russia and
throughout Eastern Europe, and so she wrote a poem that succeeded, surely
beyond her wildest dreams, in changing the meaning of the statue and the
meaning of the United States of America.
“The New Colossus” was the only entry read at the exhibits opening but was
forgotten and played no role at the opening of the statue in 1886. Lazarus
died young, in 1887, of cancer. But in 1903, a plaque bearing the text of the
poem was mounted on the inner wall of the statue’s pedestal. You can read it
there today.
It is an amazing poem. It claims that we represent not war and conquest but
freedom, enlightenment, and compassion. The brazen giant of Greek fame was the
Colossus of Rhodes, once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. A monument to
military might.
Instead of warrior-like pride, here is a mighty woman whose torch is
imprisoned lighting, a beautiful phrase implying technological innovation. I’m
thinking of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity here. Naming this
woman “Mother of Exiles,” calling her eyes “mild yet commanding,” and
announcing that she stands for “worldwide welcome” is a stroke of radical
insight into what America was and could become. And the words Lazarus has this
figure cry “with silent lips” still bring tears to my own eyes, tears of
admiration and gratitude.
For me, this poem’s beauty cannot be separated from my family’s history. All
my grandparents came to this country in the 1880s, at just the moment that
inspired the poem. They were escaping poverty and pogroms. To them as Jews,
America was the land of opportunity, of hope for the hopeless. None of them
ever became rich, but they survived. For them the rejection of the old world
of monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, and the dream of a new world of freedom and
safety, came true. I was taught this dream by my parents, taught that I should
be proud of being American, not because we were “the greatest,” whatever that
means, but because we were the melting pot. We were a democracy that gave hope
to the little people. We were a land of refuge. We were the land where
prejudice and hatred might one day be eliminated.
Millions and millions of American families coming from every corner of the
globe have experienced that hope. Of course, there exist Americans whose own
families came here as immigrants and have reaped the benefit of that lamp
lifted beside the golden door, who now wish to deny the chance of others to
breathe free. But we do have a choice. We can keep the gates open. We can
choose generosity, compassion, and openness to the strangers in our midst,
rather than self-protection and fear.
As an American poet, I’ve written about my immigrant grandparents and second
generation parents and their struggles. I belong to a tradition of openness
that includes Walt Whitman, who celebrated America’s variousness, and in my
own time I have had the good fortune to be the countrywoman of William Carlos
Williams, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Silvia Plath,
Galway Kinnell, Paul Muldoon, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Li-
Young Lee, to name only a few. All deeply American. All immigrants or children
of immigrants.
I am proud that American poetry is becoming more open in our time to writers
of every background and that American culture altogether is a hybrid
phenomenon. For while we are remembering how much America has meant to its
immigrants, let’s remember also what the talent of its immigrants, the talent
and energy of its immigrants, has done for America. Our art, our music, our
fiction, our movies, our science and technology, our leadership is a
magnificent mix of ethnicities. Native-born and immigrants breathing free,
bouncing off each other, making America the cultural wonder of the world. May
we remain so. May the mean spirited among us slink back to their corners. May
the Mother of Exiles prevail.
|
## WILD BEASTS
In the front all the weapons were
loaded. We sat there in the dark with
not so much as a whisper. We could hear
sounds outside—skirrs, rasps, the occasional
yap, ting. We were alert, perhaps, too
alert. Ready to shoot a fly for just
being a fly. When you don’t sleep you
start to hallucinate and that’s not good.
One night this crazy notion started to
possess me: I said, “Who are our enemies
anyhow? We don’t have any enemies. What
are we doing here? We should be with our
families doing what families do. I’m laying
down this gun and I’m leaving right now.”
I knew there was a chance that one of them
might shoot me. Instead they all laid down
their guns and we walked right out into the moon-
lit night, frightened, now, only of ourselves.
—James Tate
### __Rights & Access
“Wild Beasts” James Tate from _State of the Union: 50 Political Poems_.
Wave Books, 2008.
By permission of the author.
| This is a poem by James Tate, entitled “Wild Beasts”. I found it in an
anthology called _State of The Union: 50 Political Poems_ , which was
published by Wave Books. The reader is Amy Gerstler.
So that’s the poem. We’ve been asked to contribute a little commentary. I know
this project is related to the fluctuating idea of an American identity. One
of the many things that moves me about this poem is it does not limit the idea
of American identity to being American. America is, as we were all taught in
elementary school, a melting pot. There are no countries named in this poem,
there are no religious groups named in this poem. The speaker is a kind of
everyman, every-citizen, who’s suffering for being a soldier and eventually
lays down his weapon, and—in a kind of domino effect—everyone lays down their
weapons. He’s thinking about the value of individual life and about the
different kinds of fears we have and how it’s scary enough to be a human and
to try and live and survive and lead a decent life. We don’t need to construct
the added fears of trying to kill each other. So that’s _my_ commentary.
That’s the great James Tate poem “Wild Beasts.”
|
## Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
1
Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you
are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home,
are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me,
and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
2
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day;
The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme—myself disintegrated,
every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme:
The similitudes of the past, and those of the future;
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings—
on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river;
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;
The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights
of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an
hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will
see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back
to the sea of the ebb-tide.
3
It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so
many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how
it is.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow,
I was refresh'd;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current,
I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem'd
pipes of steamboats, I look'd.
I too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air,
floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest
in strong shadow,
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.
I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head
in the sun-lit water,
Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,
Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine
pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests
and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite
store-houses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd on each
side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high
and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over
the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.
—Walt Whitman
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was published in 1856 as the “Sun-
Down Poem” in the second edition of _Leaves of Grass_ and had its present
title in 1860. The poem relates to the theme of migration but cannot be
contained by it. In nine sections, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” enacts Whitman’s
challenge to and unification with, the reader. Just as the ferry travels from
Manhattan to Brooklyn and closes the gap, Whitman’s poem closes the gap
between poet and reader. The poet’s speaker asserts his identity through
physicality. I too received identity by my body and the crowd on the ferry
soon becomes everyone who has ever traveled, anyone who has ever gone home,
anyone who will ever go home.
Walt Whitman is a quintessential American poet—but the speaker reaches out,
not just to all Americans, but to all people across the globe as he observes
the flags of all nations. And in ferrying across water, one inevitably thins
of Kharon transporting souls across the river Styx after death. In the rocking
motion of the lines which mimic, the flood tide and ebb tide, the speaker
unites all people in their common experience of life. The speaker’s intimate
yet insistent form of address for the reader dissolves boundaries and
eventually individual parts dissolve into a whole. The simple, compact, well-
joined esteem, myself disintegrated—everyone disintegrated, yet part of the
scheme.
In the eighth section, the speaker brings back the river and sunset and
scalloped edge waves of flood tide, accomplishes his union with the reader,
and the identities of “I” and “you” flow into “we”.
Now that union is accomplished and the tensions of the poem, light and dark,
speaker and reader, life and death, past and future, are resolved.
The speaker, in the final section, in a catalogue of exuberant exhortations
calls on time and life. “Flow on river,” he says and brings back, yet again
the tide, waves, clouds, seagulls, and other key images as appearances
envelope the soul.
Walt Whitman’s poetry has been important to my evolution as a poet. In my late
thirties, I reached a stage where I wanted to break apart the conception of a
poem as a well-wrought urn, so that more of the world could enter into my
poetry. I was interested in developing complex sequences where several
narratives could be spun together. For awhile, juxtapositions could create
dramatic tensions and also explore the relation between part and whole, where
the poem’s unfolding, was not linear but involved succession and simultaneity,
and where Asian as well as Western aesthetics could be forged into something
new.
In American Literature, I read and reread Whitman’s great sequences. “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry” was, and continues to be, a source of inspiration and these
brief comments cannot do justice to the magnificence of this poem. It needs to
be read again and again.
|
## Heaved from the Earth
after the tornado, a dead moccasin
nailed to the pole
boards scattered across a pasture
lying fierce crosses
jagged in mud
had flung itself
nail and wood
the square-head animal
hurled also in air
or as it raced in weeds
water flowing, water falling
impaled
both the snake and timber
went flying through with wind
coiled, made a coil ( they do
immediately from danger or when hurt
and died in a coil
bit itself
in pain of its own defense the poison
birds
hurled into yard
fences
one with feet tangled gripping
the open wire, a big Jay
struggling from the water
throwing its fanged head
high at the lightning, silent
in all that thunder
to die by its own mouth
pushing the fire thorns in
—Besmilr Brigham
### __Rights & Access
“Heaved from the Earth” Besmilr Brigham from _Run Through Rock: Selected Short
Poems of Besmilr Brigham_. Lost Roads Press, 2000.
Reprinted by permission of Heloise Brigham Wilson.
| Besmilr Brigham was born in Mississippi in 1913 and died in New Mexico in
2000. She lived most of her life, when she was not roaming and camping, with
her husband Roy and her daughter Heloise in Southwestern Arkansas, outside the
small town of Horatio.
Besmilr Brigham was a writer from childhood, and her writing is an
idiosyncratic record of her life as an inevitable cause for singular
expression. Her strongest affinity is with the creature-world. Her attention
to the peopled-world is likewise profound, though with the tensions of a
strong willed individual laid in and confined mostly to immediate family.
Poems in series were a common part of her practice but the solitary poem was a
way of tuning to her daily environment. She was an acquaintance and
correspondent with other writers, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan,
John Gould Fletcher, and her son-in-law, Keith Wilson, but she was a confirmed
loner.
Though she received one of the early grants for the National Endowment for the
Arts, published in premier commercial and literary magazines, and published a
full-length collection with Random House, she remained an obscure poet, un-
pin-down-able in every sense of the word. In fact, just to find her house, our
small team working on the Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas, in
1994, had to meet the mail carrier at a filling station on a Sunday to be led
to the Brigham’s homestead.
Brigham was a fearless, unsentimental writer. This poem, in sentence
fragments, and terse strophes, chronicles the aftermath of a tornado. She was
the exact right person to testify to a moccasin suicide. Brigham insistently
used a closing parenthesis with no opening parenthesis. She drives into her
poem at an unexpected angle—exits without explanation. She gives the reader
ample space to expand and elaborate on her intentions. This is stubborn,
backcountry matter—predators and prey. The sky above and the ground into which
the house is sinking, the black snake sleeping under the porch step, the books
kept dry in a decommissioned freezer are enough to secure her place in the
American rural South and her poems inscribed, each and every one, along their
own edge, are enough to secure her increased and enduring visibility in the
years to come.
|
## Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory
— _for Margaret Walker and Molly Means_
Fri., July 2, 7:07 PM
“Eat, the stones a poor man breaks,”
Fri., July 2, 7:18 PM
Still stale as they were
when Memaw died
Half-mad on working-class
hunger; plumpness thinned
to a chip of lamb’s bone,
legs decayed, necrotic.
Fri., July 2, 7:26 PM
Running is a game
for the young. Women
of a certain age, root.
Fri., July 2, 9:09 PM
Some rot gashing cane
with dull machetes. Sinking in
clay around 10-foot stalks when
all the while they could have been
coal-eyed peacocks, lean deep-water
ghosts, spunforce bladefeathers,
fear itself.
Fri., July 2, 9:11 PM
Can you believe I still carry
the knife my husband gave me?
I gut, hollow and scrape
soft spoil from cavities, but
what’s dead is pretty well empty.
Fri., July 2, 9:21 PM
Good on you. Makes for easy work.
My people are steel-clad nomads
at the full-metal brink. None
know what’s in the chamber,
staring down our barrels.
Fri., July 2, 9:32 PM
There’s 2 ways to terrify men:
tell them what’s coming,
don’t tell them what’s next . . .
Fri., July 2, 9:55 PM
(2/2) deathbed—herons,
black merlins, white-necked
ravens, mute Cygnus, Impundulu—
Fri., July 2, 9:54 PM
(1/2) Pales lower as light approaches.
Memaw felt all kinds of birds
hovering near her
Fri., July 2, 10:07 PM
What did Impundulu want?
Fri., July 2, 10:10 PM
Wondered myself. She named
ancestors and gods I’d never
met—
limbs of Osiris in Brooks Brothers,
Isis in Fredrick’s of Hollywood,
Jesus in torn polyester.
Fri., July 2, 10:12 PM
Ah, the birds wanted them then.
Fri., July 2, 10:17 PM
No. She said: _They waitin’ . . .
for you._
Then she died,
eyes wide,
fixed on me.
Fri., July 2, 10:28 PM
Dinn, dinn, dinn—
Dying’s last words
mean nothing. What wants you
dead would have your head.
Fri., July 2, 10:29 PM
LOL! But I’m not dead, huh?
Fri., July 2, 11:21 PM
I’m not dead, right?
Sat., July 3, 3:00 AM
Anne? I’m not, right?
—Airea D. Matthews
### __Rights & Access
“Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory” from _Simulacra_.
© 2017 by Airea D. Matthews.
Published by Yale University Press. Used by permission.
| My name is Camille T. Dungy, and I am going to read a poem by Airea D.
Matthews from her new book, _Simulacra_. The poem is called “Sexton Texts
Tituba from a Bird Conservatory.”
There’s so much about this poem that just delights and astounds me, and truly
makes me believe in the possibility of what American poetry can be, and who an
American poet can be.
To begin with, I’m fascinated by the fact that Airea D. Matthews decided to
set the poem as a text conversation, so that we’re moving back and forth
between Anne Sexton and Tituba on separate columns, as they speak back and
forth out of . . . _what_ world? And the poem speaks into the future in this
way, using the text message form, which just seems like such an American thing
to do, to kind of think forward into the future, but also into the
past—speaking through Tituba, who happened to be the first person who died in
the Salem Witch Trials. She was a West Indian woman who was accused of
witchcraft, for her practice, her use of her own cultural practices in that
very puritanical space. Tituba—this kind of first black American victim of
intolerant violence, essentially—having a conversation with Anne Sexton, who,
herself, as an American woman poet, suffered from a lack of understanding of
who she was and what her potential could be. And in some ways, we could think
that her potential as a poet was _clipped_ , in a sense, because it was too
much about something that was not necessarily fully understood.
Another thing that’s interesting to me about this poem is how compelling it is
as a textual object, as something that you read on the page. And so looking at
the poem on the page gives me layers of meaning and potential and possibility
that are different than the layers of potential that just come sonically when
I’m hearing the poem out loud, or speaking the poem out loud. So that’s
another gift that the poem gives to me, is potential for extra layers of
experience with it. And the line breaks: they’re amazing; there are these
wonderful spaces; like, she named ancestors and gods I’d never met, so we just
have these moments where the language of these two word-women _pops_ forward
and becomes magical and full of multiple possibilities, also through time and
space and potential, so that’s pretty great.
And then, the poem doesn’t even stop there; it communicates with Margaret
Walker, and her own characters out of the book that won Margaret Walker the
Yale Younger Prize. Molly Means is the character who I’m speaking of. Margaret
Walker is the only other black woman to have won the Yale Younger Prize for
Poetry before Airea Matthews won it, and so that communication through time
and over poetry . . . and we can’t forget the fact that the poem ties in
multiple times Arthur Rimbaud who, writing out of a different country, has fed
what American poetry can be. And so, the kind of multiplicity of identities
within the poem, right, of bodies and people and voices and dreams and
visions. . . .
With humor, with joy, the birds that are mentioned, right, are birds in
themselves, but all also carry with them these other potentials of thoughts
and ideas; the Impundulu being a South African bird that has within all kinds
of omens of death and future prognoses and things like this. The Cygnus, the
swan, and all our ideas of what the swan could be in poetry, right? It’s just,
the poem just keeps giving and giving, in just this kind of rich, exciting,
fun, but haunting, (and haunted) way. I just can’t imagine a poem that could
give me such a robust representation of multiplicity and possibility and
potential. And so: yay for this poem, is what I have to say.
|
## I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined
around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary
in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.
—Walt Whitman
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| I chose that poem because of how striking it was for me, as a gay writer, to
find that in the 19th century a poet like Walt Whitman was already
celebrating, not only love and the need for it, but same-sex love in
particular—what he calls manly love, which I think of as same-sex love, but
also of camaraderie among men. And what I am particularly struck by is how, so
early in our country’s history, he is making, or trying to make, a space for
difference by showing how much we have in common, mainly, the need for love,
the need for company and companionship, whoever we are. And by that image of
twining the twig with the moss, taking that image of the natural world as a
way of representing what he’s talking about, this manly love, Whitman seems to
be suggesting that that kind of love is as instinctive and natural as what
happens in the vegetal world and, if that’s the case, how can any of it be
wrong?
|
## Rosebud
There is a place in Montana where the grass stands up two feet,
Yellow grass, white grass, the wind
On it like locust wings & the same shine.
Facing what I think was south, I could see a broad valley
& river, miles into the valley, that looked black & then trees.
To the west was more prairie, darker
Than where we stood, because the clouds
Covered it; a long shadow, like the edge of rain, racing towards us.
We had been driving all day, & the day before through South Dakota
Along the Rosebud, where the Sioux
Are now farmers, & go to school, & look like everyone.
In the reservation town there was a Sioux museum
& 'trading post', some implements inside: a longbow
Of shined wood that lay in its glass case, reflecting light.
The walls were covered with framed photographs.
The Oglala posed in fine dress in front of a few huts,
Some horses nearby: a feeling, even in those photographs
The size of a book, of spaciousness.
I wanted to ask about a Sioux holy man, whose life
I had recently read, & whose vision had gone on hopelessly
Past its time: I believed then that only a great loss
Could make us feel small enough to begin again.
The woman behind the counter
Talked endlessly on; there was no difference I could see
Between us, so I never asked.
The place in Montana
Was the _Greasy Grass_ where Custer & the Seventh Cavalry fell,
A last important victory for the tribes. We had been driving
All day, hypnotized, & when we got out to enter
The small, flat American tourist center we began to argue.
And later, walking between the dry grass & reading plaques,
My wife made an ironic comment: I believe it hurt the land, not
Intentionally; it was only meant to hold us apart.
Later I read of Benteen & Ross & those who escaped,
But what I felt then was final: lying down, face
Against the warm side of a horse & feeling the lulls endlessly,
The silences just before death. The place might stand for death,
Every loss rejoined in a wide place;
Or it is rest, as it was after the long drive,
Nothing for miles but grass, a long valley to the south
& living in history. Or it is just a way of living
Gone, like our own, every moment.
Because what I have to do daily & what is done to me
Are a number of small indignities, I have to trust that
Many things we say to each other are not intentional,
That every indirect word will accumulate
Over the earth, & now, when we may be approaching
Something final, it seems important not to hurt the land.
—Jon Anderson
### __Rights & Access
“Rosebud” from _In Sepia_ , by Jon Anderson. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Copyright © 1974 by Jon Anderson.
Used by permission of Bodi Orlen Anderson.
| This is Carol Muske-Dukes reading “Rosebud” by Jon Anderson.
The poem “Rosebud” by the late poet Jon Anderson seems both filled with hurt
and despair at the same time as it seems wide in scope; a hymn to history. It
seems he is speaking to the land: in this case, one place in Montana. But this
is not just any place in Montana—this is the site of the Battle of Little
Bighorn, where on June 26th, 1876 General Custer and the 7th Cavalry were
outnumbered and vanquished by Sitting Bull and the Sioux warriors.
This poem is about history and identity in that it is about, as Jon Anderson
says, the “last important victory” of the tribes, for the tribes, and also
about living in history. Or just about living, he says, how our own lives are
gone, disappearing minute by minute. This poem lives in—as the poet says—two
landscapes at once; or he implies that it is interior, the exterior, and he
seeks to understand each one.
He longs to enter what he calls the “difference”—all difference, but can find
no evidence of such, as the Sioux now seem entirely assimilated. The speaker
is a white man, but he wants to feel the identity of the Sioux warrior as well
as Custer. But he’s—more than anything, he wants to grasp the intent of the
land itself as a vision: the vision of the holy man, whose life he’d been
reading as he traveled, a holy man whose vision went on hopelessly past its
time. The holy man may be Sitting Bull, who saw two great visions prior to the
victory at Greasy Grass, as the Sioux called Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull and
the Native Americans honored the land and the sky; revered them as the
embodiments of the Great Spirit. The speaker of the poem feels this is forever
and still alive as he and his wife walk in the grass and read plaques outside
the Flag American Tour Center.
But she says something ironic to him, something that separates them in
argument. And he says it hurts the land. The vision enters the poet again; he
grasps at last that the Native American sense of oneness, of the holiness of
the one, connects human nature to Earth, and is final as death. He does not
dwell on his wife’s alienation from him, but rather imagines how each soldier
and warrior died: their, in a sense, comforting last moments lying against the
warm side of fallen horses as it breathes its last in the lulls, the silences
before death. But the breathing before death, in a sense, is like our daily
respiration. And the identity here is the history we share, and living
together. Not an alienation. But thus, in his last lines, it now seems so
important for us all not to hurt the land.
|
## II. _
_ from _Amelia_
Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her first job—
in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma’am, oh, so anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blonde hair hanging about her shoulders,
“knocking up” for Mary and Sadie, the stitchers
(“knocking up” is counting books and stacking them in piles to be
taken away).
There were twenty wire-stitching machines on the floor, worked by a
shaft that ran under the table;
as each stitcher put her work through the machine,
she threw it on the table. The books were piling up fast
and some slid to the floor
(the forelady had said, Keep the work off the floor!);
and Amelia stooped to pick up the books—
three or four had fallen under the table
between the boards nailed against the legs.
She felt her hair caught gently;
put her hand up and felt the shaft going round and round
and her hair caught on it, wound and winding around it,
until the scalp was jerked from her head,
and the blood was coming down all over her face and waist.
—Charles Reznikoff
### __Rights & Access
“Amelia” from _The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918–1975_ , edited by Seamus
Cooney
Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine,
Publisher, Inc.
Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Charles Reznikoff
| Charles Reznikoff was born in New York City in 1894. He lived there all of his
life and died in 1976. He’s often associated with the American Objectivist
poets, including his friend from New York, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen,
Lorine Niedecker.
One of Reznikoff’s great works is called _Testimony_ , one of the great epic
poems of the 1930s. It’s taken entirely from legal documents of the last part
of the 19th century. He takes these legal documents and he turns them into
short events and stories that put us in direct touch with the violence that is
perhaps the essential fabric that holds Americans together. His attention to
the disregarded and the overlooked, the dispossessed, those unprotected by
labor laws, those subjected to capricious violence by authorities, by people
in their community.
This particular poem looks at a common factory, a scene with workers in a
sweatshop, probably unprotected by labor laws. He took the legal story of
Amelia, which no doubt went on for pages and pages and pages, and he
eliminated anything that was not necessary to experience the event. One of the
main stylistic and formal concerns of Reznikoff was to do away with symbolism,
literary ornamentation, literary diction. He follows in this, Williams Carlos
Williams. In some ways the poems seem almost anti-poetic, until you see how
they transform the relation of you when you’re reading or hearing the poem to
what it is that is being enacted. There’s a kind of next-ness or closeness as
you hear Amelia’s story, in which you feel adjacent to the poem, next to the
poem, so that when her hair gets caught into the machine, it almost feels as
if your own body is being jerked and pulled through that sudden violence.
Reznikoff would say that he wanted poems that had the same constraint that a
witness in court had: that you would tell what happened but you wouldn’t
comment or editorialize on it. So one of the most striking things about all
the poems in _Testimony_ as well as this poem, “Amelia,” is that he doesn’t
have a moral lesson, its not didactic. He doesn’t tell you what to think, he
doesn’t condemn or praise, but rather lets you experience the stark, harsh
fact of this event.
The theme for these set of poems is labor and industry and labor and industry
has always been a struggle in the United States. Reznikoff documents that
struggle—not by giving policy advice, not by propagandizing, but by
articulating the human circumstances of everyday people living through the
forging of this great country. When you read Reznikoff’s work, you never
forget the price that was paid and who paid that price.
He charts a kind of poetry that’s quite different than the mainstream
poetry—both on the left, with its moralizing, and traditional literary poetry,
with its greater concern for images, ornamentation, traditional form. It’s
also starkly different than contemporary post-war poetry that places its
emphasis on personal storytelling, on lyric expression of the individual
poet’s feeling, because this work of Reznikoff (as so many of his works) is
entirely taken from found and received sources. But Reznikoff believed that by
searching our history, looking at the documents of American history—especially
the documents of violence against the people with the least power—that we
would found ourselves and in this founding, we will find who we are as a
people.
|
## El Zapato
Not the wooden spoon,
primordial source
of sweetness and pain,
flying across the kitchen—
I barely bothered to duck.
Not my father undoing his belt—
I would be gone before he’d whack
the tabletop in a sample _nalgada_ ,
but my mother’s shoe, El Zapato:
its black leather soft as the mouth
of an old, toothless dog, black laces
crisscrossing its long tongue
all the way up, heavy sole and thick
square high heel. Shoe from a special
old lady store, shoe from olden days,
puritanical shoe, _bruja_ shoe, peasant
shoe, Gypsy shoe, shoe for _zapateo_
on the grave of your enemy, shoe
for dance the twisted, bent
over dance of _los viejitos_.
Not the pain, humiliating clunk
of leather striking upside my head,
but her aim, the way I knew that even
if I ran out the kitchen door,
down the back stairs and leapt
the fence, when I glanced over my
shoulder El Zapato, prototype
of the smart bomb, would be there,
its primitive but infallible radar
honed in on my back. Not the shoe
for suicidal anger of come out of hiding
or I’ll throw myself out the window.
Not the shoe for carpet-chewing
Hitler anger—the throwing herself
down, taking an edge of rug
between her teeth anger. But the shoe
for everyday justice she could unlace,
whip off and throw faster than Paladin
draws his gun, shoe that could hunt
me down like the Texas Rangers,
even if it took years, even if she died
while she was throwing her shoe,
even if she managed to throw it
from the ramparts of heaven, the way
she threw it from a third story window
while I stood half a block away, laughing
at her with my friends, thinking,
it could never hit me from this far,
until I stood suddenly alone,
abandoned by my cowardly friends,
alone in the frozen cross-eyed knowledge
that El Zapato, black, smoking with righteousness,
was slowly, inevitably spinning toward my forehead.
—Richard Garcia
### __Rights & Access
“El Zapato,” by Richard Garcia, _Rancho Notorious_.
BOA Editions, Ltd., 2001.
By permission of the author.
| Richard Garcia’s “El Zapato” speaks eloquently about immigration into the US
while never mentioning the subject, let alone the word. I love the casual way
in which Garcia uses Spanish, as if—though he was born in San Francisco and
grew up speaking English—it’s the most natural thing in the world. To him, of
course, with a Mexican mother and Puerto Rican father, it is. With its
_nalgada_ , _bruja_ , _zapateo_ , and dance of _los viajitos_ , “El Zapato”
reminds me of how my own father echoed his parents’ working-class Yorkshire
vernacular. When I was slovenly he would call me a buck-navvy; when I was
dirty he’d command, “Draw that bath.” Yet, “El Zapato” never preens over its
Latino-ness, it doesn’t divide the world into _us_ and _them_. It shows the
speaker to be 100% human, 100% American, although his forbearers came—as even
Native Americans did—from somewhere else.
The poem invites me, and anyone of any ethnicity, to enter the world of the
fearsome shoe. Just because my mother didn’t throw shoes at me—her weapon of
choice was the hairbrush—and wouldn’t have called them _zapatos_ if she had,
doesn’t mean I can’t relate. I love the comedy of this poem, a comedy that
rises out of the mother’s very real, intense, and probably justified anger—not
just at her son, and also out of the grim truth that conflict between
generations and individuals seems an unavoidable part of the human condition.
Yet I love, too, the child’s sense of his parents’ omnipotence. “How did she
know?” I used to think when my own mother caught me in same kind of
misbehavior I’d taken pains to hide. “El Zapato” makes me yearn for that time
when I was watched over by seemingly all-powerful adults who punished but also
could protect, and did both out of what I knew even then was their sense of
duty, care, and love.
“El Zapato” brims full of energy and humanity. It inspires me to mine my own
cultural background for poems. It reinforces my belief in the effectiveness of
narrative and humor in poetry, as well as my belief in the importance of a
strong central image. Richard Garcia has made “El Zapato” live as vividly in
my mind as if it had been hurled at me. I see it now, the black, old lady’s
shoe, launched by my own inequity, spinning through the air unerringly,
hunting me down.
|
## Bury Me in a Free Land
Make me a grave where'er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth's humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.
I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother's shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.
I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.
I'd shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.
If I saw young girls from their mother's arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.
I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.
I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
—Frances E. W. Harper
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| Hi. This is D. A. Powell. And this is The Poetry of America. Today is the 15th
day of January, 2013, anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
visionary American, spiritual leader, and civil rights advocate and organizer.
If Dr. King had lived in continued good health he would be 84 years old today.
His courageous campaign for political and social justice is part of the legacy
of American identity—our continued journey toward liberty, equality, and
freedom in all its noblest articulations. Not only did the United States have
to win its independence from the British crown, but it has had to continue
that fight internally and externally to protect the rights of all its citizens
and to enact laws to preserve those ideals. Dr. King is perhaps the most
notable example of moral courage in the face of adversity and the struggle to
gain and defend those rights. In his speeches, King recalled the figure of
Moses: “I just want to do God’s will,” King says, “and he has allowed me to go
up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I have seen the Promised Land.”
King wasn’t the first advocate of freedom and equality to invoke the leader
who brought the slaved Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. The song “Go Down
Moses” attributed to Nat Turner was in all likelihood composed by a black
slave and its popularity among abolitionists and captives bound in servitude
attest to the spiritual power of Moses’ story. Underground Railroad conductor
Harriett Tubman was nicknamed Moses and the tale of Moses delivering his
people from captivity appeared in numerous African American stories and poems.
It is this emancipating Moses whose voice Frances E. W. Harper summons in her
poem “Bury Me in a Free Land.”
Born Frances Watkins, Frances was the child of free black parents living in
Baltimore. Following the death of her mother, Harper lived with her maternal
aunt and uncle. The uncle, a clergyman, ran a school for black children and it
was there that Harper learned to read, write, and sew. But more importantly,
she learned the importance of civil rights and she became a life-long advocate
and worker for social reforms. After moving to Ohio, she became the first
woman teacher at the Union Seminary and she joined the American Anti-Slavery
Society for whom she became a popular orator. Frances Harper’s first book of
poems was published at the age of 20, but it is her later poems on
miscellaneous subjects that enjoyed wide-spread popularity, going through 20
printings, and included the popular poem “Bury Me in a Free Land.” After her
death in 1911, Harper herself was buried in the Eden Cemetery in Collingdale,
outside Philadelphia. The cemetery was originally a potters’ field, but it was
converted to a burial place for African Americans who wanted a space where
they could honor their dead with funerals that incorporated customs and
traditions brought from Africa. A place where markers could be placed in
respect of their generations who came here in chains and who fought for the
rights and freedoms of their descendants, and indeed of all Americans. A
tireless suffragist and abolitionist, Harper saw the transformation of this
country from a land of inequality to a place of promise and hope. “Bury Me in
a Free Land” reminds us that America includes many kinds of journeys out of
oppression, captivity, exploitation, and tyranny. And that we still have so
very far to go to protect our rights and freedoms for all.
|
## The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.
And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.
The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.
“Blessed be God! for he created Death!”
The mourners said, “and Death is rest and peace;”
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
“And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease.”
Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.
Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.
How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea—that desert desolate—
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?
They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.
All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.
Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.
Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where’er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.
For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.
And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.
But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| This is Dana Gioia. The poem I would like to read is “The Jewish Cemetery at
New Port” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This is not a very well-known poem
these days, but I consider it one of the great elegies in American literature
and also one of the few great 19th century poems that’s really about the
burden of immigration.
This is, I think, an extraordinary poem. When Longfellow visited New Port,
Rhode Island in 1852, the seaport town was already on its way to becoming a
sort of fancy summer resort. But during this visit, he discovered an old
Jewish cemetery that dated back to pre-revolutionary days for the city’s
small, and already long vanished, Sephardic Jewish community. The cemetery was
associated with the nearby Touro Synagogue, the oldest surviving Jewish
synagogue in the United States—and, in fact, all of North America. Longfellow
uses this experience of seeing the cemetery and seeing the gravestones for a
long, historic elegy, a meditation on the history of the Jews.
This is an unusual poem for Longfellow. The language is more dense than his
typical poem. It is also studded with allusions to Jewish history and
religion. The elegiac tone, though, is actually quite characteristic for
Longfellow. It is the same tone we hear in many poems such as the gorgeous
opening lines of “Evangeline”: “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring
pines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct
in the twilight.” It’s this kind of lyric sad music that he had a particular
genius for. But in the Jewish cemetery at New Port, Longfellow uses this
elegiac music to articulate a tragic vision of Jewish history: a history of
persecution, expulsion, and Diaspora. Longfellow’s humane and sympathetic
meditation on this Jewish cemetery—which is has been oddly preserved in a
Protestant New England seaport, which no longer has a Jewish
community—reflects a remarkably open and inclusive vision of America for the
19th century, full of compassion for the oppressed and marginalized. And this
is at least one reason to admire this fine poem. You know, Longfellow uses
these Sephardic family names on the tombstones—Avares, Rivera, names that
reflect the Portuguese and Spanish origins of these Sephardic immigrants as a
tiny gesture to suggest centuries of Jewish Diaspora as well as a history of
persecution, expulsion, and immigration. And the sheer compassion of
Longfellow’s vision suffuses the poem with an emotion, an emotional music that
is quite powerful. And that is what makes this poem matter most to me
personally: the strange beauty and evocative power of its language and its
imagery that draw a special resonance from Jewish cultural history. Let me
give you one example toward the end of the poem: Longfellow imagines the dead
in their graves literally trapped in history, and he uses the fact that
Hebrew, unlike English, is written from right to left and that Hebrew books
advance from back to front as a metaphor for Jewish historical consciousness
that never forgets its ancient Biblical origins:
And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.
There is of course an irony in Longfellow’s powerful lines. It must have
seemed impossible even to a progressive idealist such as Longfellow that the
Jewish people would ever again have a homeland. That the very backward gaze on
ancient history that he celebrates that categorizes race and its long Diaspora
also proved to be the political passion that led to the recreation of Israel—a
future that Longfellow could not foretell as one of the many dead nations that
in modern history rose again.
|
## Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways
—i pull the hate
on a rope ladder to the resting zone…
H
H
H
pull the A on down.
A
A
A
Put that sick A to bed. Get well, A. Pinched
fire. Bring the T down now
T
T
T
Roman cross before the Christian thing.
Bump bump. Put that T to bed. Put
that Garamond T
to bed before we kill someone with it. Such as:
Whack-whack. Weapon contractors in Virginia.
Whack. Get well T. Won’t kill with you.
Now. Being
able to breathe for the E,
breathe into the prongs. Slide on its back.
E
E
E
Put the E to bed. Get well, E.
Weird shapes around campfires
below the mind.
Tiny fires with hurt earth spirits
as in Aeschylus. Resting letters now
so they can live—
—Brenda Hillman
### __Rights & Access
“Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways” from _Seasonal Works with Letters on
Fire_ © 2013 by Brenda Hillman.
Published by Wesleyan University Press.
Used by permission.
| Brenda Hillman is one of America’s crucial contemporary poets, a braider of
diverse strands of the American literary tradition. Firstly, there is her
fiery spiritual engagement, a trait we find initially in the passionate
sermons of early American religious writers and then in the work of her fellow
eccentric seeker Emily Dickinson. “Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways”
also aligns with American Modernist E. E. Cummings, who winks behind “Autumn
Ritual”’s exuberant typographical play. Indeed, such play is natural to a book
called _Seasonal Work with Letters on Fire_ , from which “Autumn Ritual”
comes. In this poem, Hillman draws on the linguistic mysticism of Kabbalah,
from the mystic branch of Judaism, where letters and words have agency in and
of themselves because they are made of God’s holy fire. In “Autumn Ritual with
Hate Turned Sideways,” the letter-play is the thing, with Hillman dismantling
the word “hate” and putting each letter, one by one, to bed. She sends each
off with a heartfelt “Get well” and nudges them to get some rest “so they can
live” beyond the hate they once composed.
It is old spell-magic, to dismantle a word in order to dismantle the thing it
conjures into being. Spell-magic requires a mind geared toward the hidden and
fantastical, and in this regard “Autumn Ritual” recalls the seventeenth-
century British Metaphysical poets John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and especially
George Herbert, some of whose poems take the shape of altars and angel wings.
Personification, as we can also see in “Autumn Ritual,” is a significant tool
in Hillman’s hands—whether engaging letters of the alphabet as beings worthy
of empathy and rest, or asserting (as she does elsewhere in _Seasonal Works_ )
that vowels, panicles, and California grasses “are made of fire,” is to argue
for the inspiring spark in everything: Gaia sentience. Hillman, in addition to
being one of America’s great spiritual poets, is one of our great writers
about the Environment, particularly chronicling our passage through the
Anthropocene era. In her hands, personification does important animating (even
animistic) work for a book about a world going up in smoke.
Brenda Hillman, as a poet-citizen of America’s “New World,” reminds us that
one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified,
inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, she has a
particularly American genius. She Barnums up the language, coaxing from it
boggling feats. She tells tall tales about the alphabet and electrons and
stars. She stanches our dark democracy-wound of Senate hearings and oil spills
and drone strikes with eelgrass and original flame. Her generosity of spirit
and capacious embrace of the things of this world make me think of American
poet-fathers Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: her work is large, and contains
multitudes.
|
## 508 (I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs –)
I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs –
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading – too –
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, Of Grace –
Unto supremest name –
Called to my Full – The Crescent dropped –
Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one – small Diadem.
My second Rank – too small the first –
Crowned – Crowing – on my Father’s breast –
A half unconscious Queen –
But this time – Adequate – Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown –
— Emily Dickinson
### __Rights & Access
THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin,
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright ©
1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by
Martha Dickinson Bianchi.
Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
| It’s said that many of Dickinson’s poems begin where most poems end, in the
“white heat,” and that is the case here. Rather than finding her way to a
radical lift-off at the poem’s conclusion, she _begins_ there—“I’m ceded—”—she
declares—"I’ve stopped being Theirs—.” She is ceded, as land is ceded, as
property is ceded. In this poem the question of who owns this speaker is
suspended and then dramatically revealed in the final stanza.
“I _am_ ceded”—the poem begins in that scorching present tense—and “I’ve
stopped being Theirs.” _Who is this “They”?_ we wonder, and we are left to
consider Them as we move into the body of the poem. “The name they dropped
upon my face with water, in the country church, is finished using now,” she
writes, and how nearly-violent, I think, to _drop_ a name upon a face,
especially, one imagines, on an infant’s face, and how clever to set this
baptism in a country church, an image of quaint innocence that will be
supported later by the dolls and string of spools and the conventionally-
gendered childhood she is also leaving behind.
The name they dropped upon her face “Is finished using, now.” An odd
syntactical move. Is she finished with the name or is it finished using her?
Is she booting the name or is the name booting her? Is she ceded by them, or
seceding from them? Resonant questions in 1862 when this poem arrived, as
America itself was splitting in half, both ceding and seceding, and less than
one hundred years from when the nation’s origins were imagined within the very
act of shoving off from one reality in order to create another. To self-name,
one must first peel oneself away from the given name and step, for a time,
into an existential void. That process is what revolution is all about.
In the middle stanza we learn that there has been a second baptism. The
speaker had no choice in the matter the first time, but this time she is
conscious; she chooses. This is not the last time she will reference
consciousness in this short poem. She comes to her “supremest name” via
choice, consciousness, and Grace— _that_ holy trinity. Her name is not dropped
upon her face by Grace but is _of_ Grace. I take this to mean that Grace is
its origin. “Called to my Full,” she writes—full name? Full identity? Yes and
yes, and Dickinson uses the metaphor of the moon, that most female of cosmic
bodies, rather than the sun to expose that fullness. “The crescent dropped”
like a mask, a disguise of partiality lowered to reveal the wholeness that’s
been there all along. Existence’s “whole arc” is filled with “one small
diadem”—and here I experience Dickinson’s use of smallness as a kind of
witticism. Here I am with my tiny diadem filling up the whole arc of
Existence. I’m just a girl wearing just a crown.
She completes stanza two with that double-edged smallness, and begins the
final stanza with smallness’s other dimension: “My second Rank—too small the
first,” she writes, using what was then the male realm of the military to
describe her rejection of ascribed identity, itscorseting—dolls, spools,
girlhood. In her first birth she was “crowned,” she “crowed” upon her Father’s
breast, she was a queen, but “half unconscious.” I don’t put it past her to be
playing with the double-meaning of “crowned”—the crowning of the infant in
birth—who is crowing, only half-conscious, on her _Father’s_ breast. God the
Father? Patriarchal power? The power to baptize and name? Where, in this
birth, is Mother? The first birth seems akin to Athena’s, who emerges not from
her mother’s body but from her father’s head.
But this time, in this second birth, in this new Rank, post-doll, post-spool,
having rejected baptism by _Them,_ our speaker is not only Adequate but
_Erect—_ no girliness there _—_ a soldier of selfhood, with “Will to choose,
or to reject.” Free Will. A very American notion of self-rule. And what does
she choose? _“Just_ a crown,” she tells us. That’s all. This poem turns out to
be more psychological and political than theological; baptism is metaphor
rather than the poem’s ultimate subject. Sylvia Plath, a hundred years later,
would write, similarly, in her poem “Stings” from her bee sequence, “I/Have a
self to recover, a queen.” Both poets toss off patriarchal signifiers and land
at a queendom of one, Plath from a cold, London flat, Dickinson from her
father’s house in Amherst. There is no mention, in Dickinson, of the war that
raged around her, nor of the human beings whose enslavement distorts and
complicates any statement of American self-ownership. If those subjects enter
her work, they do so through slanted inference only. There is much unspoken in
Dickinson’s white space. Her poems, indeed, emerged from white spaces, from a
small white woman wearing a white dress. If one could dissect those Dickinson
dashes, what untouched subjects would we discover?
Still, yet, for a woman writing from the middle of the 1800s, a woman who
rarely ventured from her father’s house, the self-claiming in this and so many
of her poems is extraordinary, and strikes me as quintessentially American, at
least as Americans dream themselves to be.
When I was a child I sought salvation at every turn. I was saved in a range of
country churches at least seven times. Whatever salvation I was seeking never
seemed to take. Unlike Dickinson’s speaker, but like Dickinson herself, I was
never baptized. I was afraid to put my head underwater, and our churches
demanded full immersion. Like Dickinson’s speaker, at some point I stepped
away from that path, and tossed away my dolls, too. The queendom I finally
came to was Poetry. That is the realm Emily found, too.
|
## We Are Not Responsible
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.
We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.
We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.
In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.
Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.
If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.
In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.
Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle
your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we
are unable to find the key to your legal case.
You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.
You are not presumed to be innocent if the police
have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.
It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.
It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.
Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.
You have no rights we are bound to respect.
Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible
for what happens to you.
—Harryette Mullen
### __Rights & Access
Mullen, Harryette, “We Are Not Responsible,” _Sleeping with the Dictionary_. ©
2002 by the Regents of the University of California.
Published by the University of California Press.
| Hello there. This is Douglas Kearney, and I am reading Harryette Mullen’s “We
Are Not Responsible.”
Well, first of all, I love Harryette Mullen. Her work is oftentimes engaged in
what I think of as like a super serious kind of play, whether she’s using tons
of puns or a lot of signifying techniques. Harryette Mullen goes in and
addresses language, as language is a tool for power, and because it’s a tool
for power it can be a tool for oppression. So Harryette Mullen oftentimes
engages language as a kind of a plaything, but is always aware that it’s
volatile, like somebody juggling nitroglycerin.
For me, one of the things that I really love about this poem is how it takes
official language, or officious language—you know, the first line, “We are not
responsible for your lost or stolen relatives,” riffs off of “We are not
responsible for your lost or stolen items.” Which is, when you think about it
as a sign that might be placed in a place of business, or a parking lot or
something like that, is kind of an audacious thing to say: that even though
you are here, under our auspices, it is not our responsibility if something
bad happens to you. And there’s something about that that just strikes me, and
it’s always stricken me as, well, a kind of passing on of the need to care for
each other. “I am not responsible for what happens to you.” And, of course,
Harryette Mullen amplifies that by overlapping that language that’s oftentimes
about property—you know, your lost and stolen items—with humans. Relatives.
Now, of course, the history of the United States of America includes several
dark centuries in which a number of people’s relatives _were_ someone else’s
items. And so, in that moment, we have this collision between these two
languages: the language of a kind of passing off of responsibility and,
subtly, a language that is pointing at responsibility in that same line.
From there, the poem moves from a more kind of passed off hostility to these
constant threats—“We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our
instructions” —all the way to “Please remain calm, or we can’t be held
responsible for what happens to you.” It reminds me about what happens when,
say, a person is shot by an officer, and that officer is not guilty of murder.
It’s sort of like, well, apparently this person didn’t die, or wasn’t killed?
Or something happened…because a kind of official language, a state language,
protects itself. And because this is also the same language that creates laws
and authorizes power, that protection is sort of self-circular, self-serving,
or just a kind of a logic that is not airtight, but airless; it doesn’t allow
for certain life to happen. And seeing that move between the kind of
historical language to the language of “Your insurance was cancelled because
we can no longer handle your frightful claims,” really just demonstrates how
this same speech in many ways is just extraordinarily banal; you know, it’s
like this sort of dull bureaucratic language. But what happens when dull,
airless language takes charge of blood and bone, flesh, and peoples’ lives?
What happens when, you know, a kind of antipathy, or an unnatural attempt at
neutrality, is there to weigh in on actual human suffering?
So what the poem does, in my estimation, is sort of demonstrates how inhuman
that language is, which—when you think about how oftentimes power dehumanizes
those it oppresses—to think of that power as inhuman becomes, in that way, a
reversal; a kind of radical reversal.
And one of the ways that Harryette Mullen’s work influences me is in how it
uses these different registers of language; how it can take language from
supermarket advertising (in the case of collections like _S*PeRM**K*T_ , or
even _Trimmings_ , or in a collection like _Muse and Drudge_ , where it can
range from everything from TV theme song language to old folk songs), and
blend them all together into this kind of volatile and oftentimes deeply
pleasurable, even, when sometimes it becomes deeply disturbing sort of play
with language. And in this way, I mean, in many ways it resembles, I guess we
could say, the diversity of American expression. It’s not that the writing is
subject to a kind of flow of pop culture that it’s not controlling; like,
Harryette Mullen’s definitely holding the remote control and is definitely
changing the channels and lingering here and sticking here. She’s turning the
dial on her radio station, and occasionally listening to a jingle, and maybe
occasionally listening to a verse from an old song. But that kind of volatile
mix that doesn’t hold together necessarily—but still, through just this kind
of force of personality of it holds together, strikes me in some ways as a
very American way of working—a very _African_ American way of working—and, so,
a very American way of working in that regard.
|
## To Elsie
XVIII
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags—succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she’ll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs—
some doctor’s family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
—William Carlos Williams
### __Rights & Access
“To Elsie” by William Carlos Williams, from _THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I,
1909-1939_ , copyright ©1938
New Directions Publishing Corp.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
| My name is Edward Hirsch and I’m reading a poem by William Carlos Williams
called “To Elsie”.
This poem was untitled when William Carlos Williams first published it. It was
“Poem Number 18” in _Spring and All_ , which he published in 1923. It was only
until when he published a later _Collected Poems_ that he gave the poem the
title “To Elsie”. In its relationship it’s about (or uses) Elsie Borden, who
was a mentally handicapped nursemaid from the state orphanage who came to work
for the Williams family. And the odd thing about the poem, or one of the odd
things about the poem, is it’s called “To Elsie” but it doesn’t really . .
.it’s not really addressed to Elsie, she isn’t spoken to. It’s really kind of
toward Elsie. And Elsie becomes both a particular person and an embodiment, a
representative of some kind of suffering in the culture. Because there is a
moment in the poem—it’s about a third of the way through the poem, almost
halfway—where she’s sent out. He’s describing her as someone who’s so
desolate, hemmed out, the kind of family she grew up in so surrounded by
disease and murder, that she was sent out to an agency at the age of fifteen
and then farmed out to work for the Williamses, “some hard-pressed house in
the suburbs;” the Williams family, “some doctor’s family,” which Williams
Carlos Williams was a doctor; “some Elsie.” So it’s not . . . she’s both a
person and she’s a representative who’s there to express the truth about us.
And the poem becomes a kind of diagnosis of the American situation. And we’re
a new country, in this diagnosis, but the people have lost contact with
peasant traditions, with European traditions, with something that’s come
before. And this lack of continuity with anything that’s come before, with any
folk traditions from the old country, has left Americans lost. And it’s left
them in some kind of situation, from the mountain folk of Kentucky or in
Jersey, in New Jersey where William Carlos Williams lived, surrounded by these
young guys who work and get drunk all of week and take out these girls who
then are in danger of getting pregnant and passing on disease and so forth.
And Williams doesn’t exactly give us the solution, but it seems to be the
imagination needs contact with earth under our feet. And there’s a beautiful
line in this poem:
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Contact was an important word for Williams, and so in place of these ancient
traditions what we have in America are people who need contact with the earth,
with the natural world, with a new culture that we can create. And “To
Elsie”—actually the whole book _Spring and All_ —is the about the difficult
birth, of the difficulty of birth, the struggle it is to be born, and here to
make a new culture. So Williams gives us a kind of diagnosis of a situation in
America in 1923 (and America afterwards as well), and a kind of solution: we
need contact with the earth.
|
## The Bridge
That there are things that can never be the same about
my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the
sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious
but also lacking in courage,
That from this yard I have been composing a great speech,
that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look
like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child,
that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides,
that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky,
That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows
the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds
and sparrows from the sky,
That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not
the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization,
that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself
beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had,
That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding
on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of
sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind
my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters,
and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke
from the chimney of the trees where I was small,
That in January, I met him in a bar, we went
home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard,
and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed,
That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was
the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars,
fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky,
O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still
these assignments in the night, to remember the texture
of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the
moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills,
That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of
crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen,
the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark,
blue, green, with shards of the Pacific,
That I do not know the dreams from which I have come,
sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the
willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside
the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the
sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house,
mammalian, no bigger than the herd,
That I wrote the history of the war waged between the
Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through
shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been
driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the
ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks,
beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having
grown up near the ocean.
—Lisa Jarnot
### __Rights & Access
Lisa Jarnot, "The Bridge" from _Ring of Fire_. Copyright © 2003 by Lisa
Jarnot. Reprinted by permission of Salt Publishing.
| I love this poem. I love its curiousness: the things that it finds curious and
the fact that it moves with such curiosity through the world.
It seems to me a deeply American poem in a lot of ways, though what
Americanness is is not easy to say, and the instability of that meaning seems
to me an important part of it.
I think what’s American about the poem has to do with its stance, which
includes an almost overwhelming ambition for greatness, and a profound
humility and fear of not being up for the labors that the poet, like an
ancient hero, has been called to do. It’s the way the poem inhabits its
vulnerability and still goes on to reach for something beyond it. The way it
wants to feel something both intimate and collective, to belong to something
and someone and at the same time to maintain the clarity and authority of
self-determination.
All of this is happening in the context of these spectacularly commonplace
points of contact: someone sneezing in a garden, two people kissing on the
street, a flock of birds, the zoo, things that are broken or falling or
trapped. It’s not an ideal world. But there’s an intimacy that’s shared with
the reader, that opens onto something marvelous about the experience of being
human.
There’s an underlying imperative here to fulfill the immense potential of the
poem. And the poet isn’t given the space to do this, she has to make the world
of the poem, to say the thing that only she can say, to fulfill the assignment
that she has been given in the night, as if her life depends on it, as I think
it does. And that assignment seems to touch on every aspect of relation, of
social and domestic life, of the history of poetry and the history of this
country, which is still being written, and which like that of the
Peloponnesians who appear at the end of the poem, is at war, with the world
and with itself.
The poem is considering what survives and what is momentary, what lasts and
what the poem has the opportunity or responsibility to represent.
There are relational patterns that survive, there is poetry that survives, but
also a history of violence, which means, among other things, that the task of
the poet, to create something counter to that history, is undiminished.
The poem is looking at all these forms of relation, how we think of ourselves
among others, or in relation to a significant other, within history, among
other species, under the sky in which one person might see the kind of god
that counts the sparrows and others the seven sisters of the Pleiades.
I think this is a poem about being in the middle of a larger narrative
account, including the fact that any understanding of our place comes from the
accounts of others and that, in some sense, what we experience as reality is
always being bridged in this way. It’s as if we’ve arrived in the middle of an
argument or treatise with all those “that…” clauses—but those clauses deliver
is completely personal and non-legalistic and slippery and true… that there
are things that can never be the same.
We begin in the middle of this human situation of living here in a body that’s
time-bound among materials that are time bound, with the knowledge that
everything, even our selves, our domestic and biological environment is
constantly changing, mutable, unstable. And next to this is placed the fact
that there are things that don’t change and that we are powerless over,
including the circumstances of birth, the imperfect and unfinished scrawl of
our lives, all our capacities as well as our limits.
I love the way Lincoln appears unexpectedly in a way that undoes the
oversimplified heroics of national history. What does it mean to look at the
fear and failure that are obscured by mythology—and to do so without giving up
on the concept of a social good? What does it mean to look at all of history
past and present as part of the same erroneous and flawed composition?
I think “The Bridge” is saying something about American identity and what it
means to be an individual within a work in progress, which is what any nation
or coalition or relationship is, and what it means to be an artist in this
culture, fully alive to the complexities and disappointments and possibilities
of what that might mean.
The poet herself is a kind of bridge figure, mercurial, moving between visible
and invisible realms, past and present, curious and elusive and alive, not the
first or the last of her kind. She’s making a bridge of words that begins on
one shore and ends on another, from Oakland to ancient Greece, writing and
rewriting these layered histories in a declaration of love and of allegiance,
to something that is both smaller and larger than the national.
|
## The Acts of Youth
And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night
What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs
to dull the senses, what little I have left,
what more can be taken away?
The fear of travelling, of the future without hope
or buoy. I must get away from this place and see
that there is no fear without me: that it is within
unless it be some sudden act or calamity
to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without
memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If
I could just get out of the country. Some place
where one can eat the lotus in peace.
For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or
am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson
or experience to those young who would trod
the same path, without God
unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance
on the acts committed while young under un-
due influence or circumstance. Oh I have
always seen my life as drama, patterned
after those who met with disaster or doom.
Is my mind being taken away me.
I have been over the abyss before. What
is that ringing in my ears that tells me
all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind.
Woe to those homeless who are out on this night.
Woe to those crimes committed from which we
can walk away unharmed.
So I turn on the light
And smoke rings rise in the air.
Do not think of the future; there is none.
But the formula all great art is made of.
Pain and suffering. Give me the strength
to bear it, to enter those places where the
great animals are caged. And we can live
at peace by their side. A bride to the burden
that no god imposes but knows we have the means
to sustain its force unto the end of our days.
For that is what we are made for; for that
we are created. Until the dark hours are done.
And we rise again in the dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshipped in the pitches of the night.
—John Wieners
### __Rights & Access
From _Selected Poems, 1958-1984_ by John Weiners, edited by Raymond Foye.
Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine,
Publisher, Inc.
Copyright © 1986 by John Weiners.
| I don’t think this poet would mind having a woman read his work aloud anymore
than this woman would mind a man reading my poetry aloud. John Wieners’ poems
are the means by which he rescues himself. The poems relieve his anguish as
they offer rhythm in the ritual of writing that echoes a lyrical way of
thinking. His lines carry contradictions and loops, which he lets stand. The
poem is the answer to the questions it asks, but has no resting place. The
poem is homeless. There’s no expectation of a sympathetic reader out there to
nod with him or of a room full of inquiring poets or critics who will sigh.
Wieners is entirely private, inward: a person whose loneliness amounts to the
only presence he can recognize. To delineate the outlines of this loneliness
is to see it as something embodied in darkness, as itself shedding bits of
light. He lays himself bare in order to hear his own hearing clearly.
What he hears is not just himself but those outside who are helpless and
tossed. He speaks for the failures in this country, and out of a Catholic
identity that’s mysterious to people who don’t understand its codes. Out of
insomnia comes self-damnation and fear. What have I done to myself, and what
will be done to me? Because of the acts of his youth, the poet is damaged, but
will he also be punished for it? Will a hospital—or worse yet, prison—be his
destination? As he writes: “For in this country its terror, poverty awaits; or
/ am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson / or experience to those young who
would trod / the same path, without God.” These questions consistently lead
him outward towards others, to the poor he prefers. “Woe to the homeless who
are out on this night.” They are the ones who trigger the ontological
questions he carries with him from poem to poem. In America there is such a
thing as a middle class that lasts like a thick glass, but he isn’t of it.
Wieners includes God in his poems as the knower, not the one who acts as
judge, avenger, priest or helper. The knower is present and inactive, as is
the figure of loneliness, who is taking notes on the sidelines. God and
loneliness are one form and one force. “God . . . knows we have the means to
sustain its force unto the end of our days.” This force is always suffering
and is also, thanks to the peculiarity of his sentencing, “a bride to the
burden.” A Catholic’s final identity is the one writing the Wieners poems.
It’s an identity of mystics, accomplished through degradation and lowliness,
and winding up as a “particle of the divine sun, now/ worshipped in the
pitches of the night.” It is blindingly material.
|
## _from_ The Sri Lankan Loxodrome
in this fundamental sense
I am Mahayana & of Africa
both Sri Lankan & non-Sri Lankan
in that
I am of a newly elected “Radial” width
comprehending my projection of rays
like faceless chromium at twilight
an absence
like “intergalactic hydrogen”
perhaps a complex of gravitons & lightning
I learned to speak when my solar journal first commenced
then I was magnetized at the age of 12 to a psychic form of fatherhood
& now I sail
never eating for days consumed by scalar neutrinos
I’ve been reported as expired at Jaffna
& have been burned in effigy for interminable wanderings
for the crime of emitting vertigo by movement
for inflicting the human spirit with a parallel genetic engenderment
comparable to a sun which erupts from the voice of the afterlife
a wanderer in a zone of fluctuating kelvins
breathing unknown dice within my schisms
****
perhaps for me
a Nubian catacomb in the nameless
a concealed adventure in the tourmaline
a powerful spectra of intangible chondrites
maybe as darkened transition
I’ll speak an aqua-Chinese
or as an Afro-Gujarati I’ll have a voice in Batticaloa
alive in Madagascar
as a combusted lemur sage
I develop moment after moment
with intensity as aloofness
allowing each destroyed symmetry
each ulterior symbology
to ignite its hazeless unicorns
to unbury spells amidst “black widow pulsars”
wafting
between equilibria & equilibria
aleatoric & unblemished
like a moonless endurance
within a “grazing occultation”
& each fire that I build
vanishes
each clause of interregnums
detractable
amidst the rural dominations
of “Istar Terra”
& the “anomaly over Beta Regio”
like a brimstone fire
at the source of the instantaneous
—Will Alexander
### __Rights & Access
“The Sri Lankan Loxodrome” Will Alexander from _The Sri Lankan Loxodrome_. New
Directions, 2009.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
| Will Alexander’s “The Sri Lankan Loxodrome” imagines the journey of a Sri
Lankan sailor across the Indian Ocean. The sailor, making contact with various
transplanted African communities, is an immigrant from restrictive
constructions of nationality and certainty. For him, migration is a mode and
means of identification with others, and so, of self-discovery. At the same
time, Alexander’s poem is about migration at a cellular level—the migration of
cancer cells through a body. And it was written as the author struggled to
survive his own life-threatening illness.
|
## The Tusks of Blood
My chant must enclose hell
And yet here leave behind
Myself of touch and vow;
My hour has come when gales—
The brief song of Greek—
Have found the inner teeth alone.
Here listen, someone is calling—
Why the ugly praise and fate?
Shall I be a joiner to this
And leave here the good hope?
Not to prank the lucky star
I’ll apologize, wait until
The great way works for woe!
Woe? never, you Parsifal;
Never—and by the trait of love’s
Light shell, sneering outpour.
Not to blame—wait, a travel
For an excuse; a good life lay
In the real actions, the pomped
Horn, and the pardons of a door.
What interfering, cloaked love
Rules my thoughts!
Shall I write: O anger, hast thou
Not treated thy refuging forbear?
Perhaps I can walk a bit
To my truthful veins and relate
The sport of the steeds that trot
The stirring muscles of an earthly
Gait and my hearted glow.
O worm, worm-heated soil,
Peal sad mereing folds
Where cometh a home afar;
And again a slow fainting ghost
Gliding over a path easily seen. . .
God! some voices disturb me
From the inner room;
I catch the subject: Death!
Death, what a careless value
To such aged spirits. Again
A sad remark. Life not valued
By such retired souls, who
Should be apart to believe
Justice . . . Ah, man, not thy boast!
He was a marked lad
Who poorly helped himself.
What should this mean?
Fill your pockets—I’ll let
You know the grass of a grave.
O the pillars of silk and good tea,
Confusion of women, the bare bust—
Embarrassment, carnal filth
Of its justice lacks environment;
O creaking earth, necessity; hell,
No more wise; then the next child—
What can he give?
You pallid stork, gazing—
Who gazed before you, cooled
The summer spray?
Very bad for an apartment Jew to claim
Everlasting renaissance.
What a delivery was this,
Sucked by secret gilded creatures
Who slew gold for a membrane!
O tear, sped into the basin
Of sparkling night aghast in silence,
And the pipes’ swift pain
Of the boiling steam shocks uplifting
You, endless wretch of silver!
—Samuel Greenberg
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| I’m going to read a poem today about a mostly unknown poet named Samuel
Greenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1893 and died, twenty-three years later,
in 1917. The poem—aside from being fascinating and brilliant, perhaps a great
poem—is illustrative, also in its way, of the huge wave of immigration coming
from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. And I’m
using it as an illustration of that—particularly of Jewish immigration in the
Lower East Side into America, but mostly Jews who settled in New York City in
the Lower East Side, which of course by this time was well-known for movies
and stories and so on. There, of course, were Italian immigrants and Russian
and Polish and Lithuanian and Hungarian, and so on—immigrants as well, and
their experiences are not to be ignored. And I suspect—I know, in some
respects—almost identical to the Jewish experience.
Between 1881 and 1910, over a million and a half Jews came from Poland,
Russia, and other areas in eastern Europe, and they settled in their ghetto in
the Lower East Side—it wasn’t defined by the government as a ghetto, but it
was a self-imposed ghetto—coming mostly out of limited opportunities and
poverty. There in the ghetto they worked in sweatshops—as we all know,
pushcarts were in the street; as we all know, the streets themselves were
swarming with people as we’ve seen in the movies. The flats they lived in have
been somewhat romanticized because of very, very famous singers, actors,
writers, artists of various types—grew up in that ghetto. The rooms
themselves, the apartments, were dark, smelly coldwater flats, known by the
famous name of “tenement.” Ironically, in the last fifteen years, the Lower
East Side has been gentrified—even large buildings, small skyscrapers, are
being built there. It’s ironic beyond belief.
But Samuel Greenberg was a genius of sorts and, strangely odd in his way, he
both painted and he wrote poetry. He would probably have died unknown, except
that Hart Crane—the great Hart Crane, the great American poet, born in
1898—discovered his poetry somehow and was madly obsessed with it—by the
language, the imagination, the irrational images of Greenberg. And he went so
far as even to . . . well, I’ll use the word copy, I’ll use the word
plagiarize, one poem from Greenberg. Greenberg’s poem is called “Conduct,” and
Crane’s poem is called “Emblems of Conduct.” It is not a major poem of Hart
Crane, and I’m not—how shall I say—putting him down or attacking him for this.
He was overwhelmingly inspired by Greenberg. Of course, Crane’s inspiration
extended beyond Samuel Greenberg, I must say.
At any rate, to get back to him: he fell in love with America in his way, and
he lived in poverty in his early youth. His father was an embroidery worker in
gold and silver and made a decent living, but somehow one of the panics—one of
the depressions or other—he lost everything, and so Samuel was on his own from
the age of sixteen or seventeen on. He got a job in a leather factory. He may
have gone to the seventh or eighth grade, I’m not sure exactly how long—fell
in love with baseball. The family lived at the corner of Suffolk and Grand, a
place then that was . . . he described in one of his prose memoirs as “an
insult of poverty, an insult of life.” He developed, as many others did,
tuberculosis at an early age; spent half of his life, really, in wards and
tuberculosis sanatoriums. Indeed, his last two years he was helpless and died
in such a sanatorium.
As far as poetry is concerned, his chief influences were Keats, Shelley,
and—more than anybody else—Emerson. He did have access to Palgrave’s _Golden
Treasury_ and somehow, as it does to original, isolated poets—like Dickinson,
like Blake, Chatterton—as they somehow get the information—mystically,
magically—it’s theirs. And there is, in his poetry, a rush of sound and image.
He filled seventeen notebooks with drawings and poems, mostly in pencil, and
it took weeks and months, even years, to decipher some of these. Maybe twenty
to thirty percent of the work has been published. And it was for the
work—through the praise and discovery of him—by the well-known poet and critic
Allen Tate, that Greenberg’s work became available. Tate said, among other
things, that no history of the 20th century, of 20th century poetry, would be
complete without reference to Greenberg.
There are so many things to say about him, but I’m going to read one poem and
then I’m going to say a few words about his strange and unique and beautiful
autobiography that he wrote of about eighteen pages. I’m going to read a few
words from that. So we go to the poem itself, “Tusks of Blood.” As far as I
can decipher it, the poem, which is written in alternate three- and four-
stressed lines, is an awareness—an experience—of a birth in one of those flats
that I discovered next door.
And the ending, “endless wretch of silver,” probably refers to the steam
radiators, though it may refer to the silver—the child may have been
emblematic—or it may have been the symbol of the child or the silver nitrate
that was poured into his eyes, I don’t know. But I want to say that in the
autobiography—I’m just sort of explaining it in his strange and innocent
language—I’m going to read one or two short passages.
> We often found our father laboring over a frame of gold, a real axel easily
> remembered, some working maidens at his side, and perhaps even our mother
> took part in the exquisite handling of thread and stitch. Some pure, Hebrew
> atmosphere gathered between our doors, rabbi and priest, Negro and Greek,
> such fathoms of character sprang up between the embroidery tasks.
And then his mother’s death—
> Life was now a spongy condition. Our mother gradually became ill. Ear
> trouble, germ trouble, nose trouble, skull trouble, death trouble, resulted
> and the family buried her, somewhere on Long Island, where a cemetery called
> Washington was the grave for many poor victims, as our un-praised love was
> settled. We returned to a café near the dune place, where gathered a party
> of thirty or more, ate cheese and eggs, with a schooner of beer and coffee.
> The rituals of the Jewish religion demand that one remain seated for seven
> days upon the floor. Well, we sat on soft cushions.
And finally, finally at the very end he says—
> And it happened again that the old story of weakness [and he’s referring,
> here, to tuberculosis] returned. I was taken to the hospital of descending
> charity, where things became a careful selection through sanitation and
> rest. Where was school? Oh, what I would give for the knowledge of
> grammatical truth. But I saw that science is perfection, as long as the
> world exists”
And so, I’m going to end with that. Thank you. ****
|
## Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)
Well he saw man created according
to the motion of the elements. He located
the soul: in the blood. Retired
at last––to a house where he paid
window-tax (for increasing the light!).
Lived simply. Gardened. Saw visions.
Nothing for supper but tea.
Now he saw the soul from his “Pray,
what is matter” leave for the touchy
––heavens!––blue rose kind of thing.
Strange––he did grow a blue rose,
you know.
*
I lost you to water, summer
when the young girls swim,
to the hot shore
to little peet-tweet-
pert girls.
Now it’s cold your bright knock
––Orion’s with his dog after him––
at my door, boy
on a winter
wave ride.
*
I married
in the world’s black night
for warmth
if not repose.
At the close––
someone.
I hid with him
from the long range guns.
We lay leg
in the cupboard, head
in closet.
A slit of light
at no bird dawn––
Untaught
I thought
he drank
too much.
I say
I married
and lived unburied.
I thought––
*
You see here
the influence
of inference
Moon on rippled
stream
“Except as
and unless”
*
Your erudition
the elegant flower
of which
my blue chicory
at scrub end
of ditch
illuminates
*
Alone
a still state hard
as sard
then again whisper-talk
preserved in chalk
At last no (TV) gun
no more coats than one
no hair lightener
Sweethearts of the whiter
walls
*
Why can’t I be happy
in my sorrow
my drinking man
today
my quiet
tomorrow
*
And what you liked
or did––
no matter
once the moon
dipped down
and fish rose
from under
*
Cleaned all surfaces
and behind all solids
and righted leaning things
Considered then, becurtained
the metaphysics
of flight from housecleanings
*
Young in Fall I said: the birds
are at their highest thoughts
of leaving
Middle life said nothing––
grounded
to a livelihood
Old age––a high gabbling gathering
before goodbye
of all we know
—Lorine Niedecker
### __Rights & Access
Lorine Niedecker, “Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)” from Collected Works.
Copyright © 2004 by Lorine Niedecker. University of California Press.
Reprinted by permission of Bob Arnold, literary executor.
| Lorine Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903, and died on December 31, 1970. She
lived most of her life in a rural landscape on Black Hawk Island near Fort
Atkinson, Wisconsin. It wouldn’t be out of line to say that she had two homes
in her life: the one by water (“The Brontës had their moors, I have my
marshes,” she once wrote), and the avant-garde poetry scene birthed in 1931 in
the Objectivist issue of _Poetry_ magazine, which she read. Almost immediately
thereafter Niedecker began a correspondence with Louis Zukofsky that was to
last the rest of her life. At this point in her writing she veered away from
earlier influences of the Imagists and Surrealists. She began sending her work
to _Poetry_ , where it was accepted. Eventually she became a central member of
the Objectivists, the only female poet in the group.
Letters were a crucial companion, and no doubt sustaining to her art, and to
the art of those she wrote. Among her epistolary friends were Marianne Moore,
William Carlos Williams, Cid Corman, and Clayton Eshelman.
She wrote ground-breaking work, addressing subject matters of gender, work,
sexual politics, social politics, marriage, and domesticity long before
others. She developed a lyric that was both clear and complicated, ever-alive
to eccentricities and shifts of American vernacular, sounding vowels and
consonants alongside the intricate movements of the natural world. She never
quite left Surrealism in that there was an ever-abiding interest in the
subconscious. While her experimentation was cosmopolitan, and her range of
reference global and century-spanning, her idiom was of the folk.
I’ll read an excerpt from her poem “Tradition,” written in 1965. This section
of the poem is subtitled “Swedenborg,” referring to the 18th century Swedish
scientist, philosopher and mystic.
|
## Drum-Taps
**Beat! Beat! Drums!**
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep
in those beds,
No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
**Cavalry Crossing a Ford**
A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical
clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent
rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.
**Bivouac on a Mountain Side**
I see before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the mountain,
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,
And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, Studded, breaking out, the
eternal stars.
**Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night**
When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,
One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding
kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-
wind,
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,
Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,
Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a
tear, not a word,
Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
Faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,
Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,
And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-
dug grave I deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,
I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.
**Look Down, Fair Moon**
Look down, fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple;
On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.
—Walt Whitman
### __Rights & Access
These poems are in the public domain.
| This is J. D. McClatchy, and I’m recording this on June the 11th, 2012, in the
midst of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. These four years the country
is commemorating the terrible events of those days so long ago, and on June
the 11th, 1862, the South was enjoying a series of stinging victories. And I
have in front of me a copy of a letter that General Lee wrote to Stonewall
Jackson saying,
> General, your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in
> this army as well as in the country. The admiration excited by your skill
> and boldness has been constantly mingled with solicitude for your situation.
> The practicality of reinforcing you has been the subject of earnest
> consideration. It has been determined to do so at the expense of weakening
> this army.
And so on and so forth, as General Lee planned his great campaign.
The Civil War remains the most cataclysmic and tragic event in our history.
Behind the struggle, driving its purpose and passions, loomed the greatest of
issues: the fate of a country and the rights of its people. Hateful decisions
were at the heart of the conflict. A Northern sense of justice and a Southern
sense of honor, moral principle and emotional pride, drove men to their deaths
amid the terrors of war—the deafening noise, the blinding smoke, the ground
slick with blood, the cries of the fallen. Over 620,000 soldiers died during
those four years, nearly as many as in all of America’s other wars combined.
Proud cities were put to the torch, civilian populations were brutalized,
fertile countryside was reduced to wasteland, brother fought against brother,
and there was not a household in the land that did not have a loss to mourn.
The very names of the fearsome battles and valiant commanders ring in people’s
memories with the force of myth. The grandeur and pathos of the two shredded
armies never failed to thrill. In the end, slavery would be abolished,
succession defeated, and a new nation born in fire, blood, and sorrow. And
each side in the conflict would discover its tragic hero: for the South,
Robert E. Lee, whom I just quoted—the model Virginia gentlemen who fought for
the lost cause with audacious skill and relentless determination; for the
North, Abraham Lincoln, the martyred redeemer president who spoke for American
democracy with an eloquence unmatched in our history. It is such stuff as
epics are made on. And yet, it seems strange that no one great sweeping poem,
no American Iliad, ever emerged from this most momentous event in the lives
and imaginations of Americans.
Individual poets did write, of course, and we have as our substitute for an
epic poem marvelous lyric takes and moral meditations by Herman Melville and,
above all, Walt Whitman, whose collection in 1867 called _Drum Taps_ brought
together the poems he had written, both in the field and back in Washington,
about episodes in the Civil War, in which he worked tirelessly as a nurse in
the field hospitals.
|
## The Other Side of the River
Easter again, and a small rain falls
On the mockingbird and the housefly,
on the Chevrolet
In its purple joy
And the TV antennas huddled across the hillside—
Easter again, and the palm trees hunch
Deeper beneath their burden,
The dark puddles take in
Whatever is given them,
And nothing rises more than halfway out of itself—
Easter with all its little mouths open in the rain.
_____________
There is no metaphor for the spring’s disgrace,
No matter how much the rose leaves look like bronze dove
hearts,
No matter how much the plum trees preen in the wind.
For weeks I’ve thought about the Savannah River,
For no reason,
and the winter fields around Garnett, South Carolina
My brother and I used to hunt
At Christmas,
Princess and Buddy working the millet stands
And the vine-lipped face of the pine woods
In their languorous zig-zags,
The quail, when they flushed, bursting like shrapnel points
Between the trees and the leggy shrubs
into the undergrowth,
Everything else in motion as though under water,
My brother and I, the guns, their reports tolling from far away
Through the aqueous, limb-filtered light,
December sun like a single tropical fish
Uninterested anyway,
Suspended and holding still
In the coral stems of the pearl-dusked and distant trees . . .
There is no metaphor for any of this,
Or the meta-weather of April,
The vinca blossoms like deep bruises among the green.
_____________
It’s linkage I’m talking about,
and harmonies and structures
And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
Something infinite behind everything appears,
and then disappears.
It’s all a matter of how
you narrow the surfaces.
It’s all a matter of how you fit in the sky.
_____________
Often, at night, when the stars seem as close as they do now,
and as full,
And the trees balloon and subside in the way they do
when the wind is right,
As they do now after the rain,
the sea way off with its false sheen,
And the sky that slick black of wet rubber,
I’m 15 again, and back on Mt. Anne in North Carolina
Repairing the fire tower,
Nobody else around but the horse I packed in with,
and five days to finish the job.
Those nights were the longest night I ever remember,
The lake and pavilion 3,000 feet below
as though modeled in tinfoil,
And even more distant than that,
The last fire out, the after-reflection of Lake Llewellyn
Aluminum glare in the sponged dark,
Lightning bugs everywhere,
the plump stars
Dangling and falling near on their black strings.
These nights are like that,
The silvery alphabet of the sea
increasingly difficult to transcribe,
And larger each year, everything farther away, and less clear,
Than I want it to be,
not enough time to do the job,
And faint thunks in the earth,
As though somewhere nearby a horse was nervously pawing
the ground.
I want to sit by the bank of the river,
in the shade of the evergreen tree,
And look in the face of whatever,
the whatever that’s waiting for me.
_____________
There comes a point when everything starts to dust away
More quickly than it appears,
when what we have to comfort the dark
Is just that dust, and just its going away.
25 years I used to sit on this jut of rocks
As the sun went down like an offering through the glaze
And backfires of Monterey Bay,
And anything I could think of was mine because it was there
in front of me, numinously everywhere,
Appearing and piling up . . .
So to have come to this,
remembering what I did do, and what I
didn’t do,
The gulls whimpering over the boathouse,
the monarch butterflies
Cruising the flower beds,
And all the soft hairs of spring thrusting up through the wind,
And the sun, as it always does,
dropping into its slot without a click,
Is a short life of trouble.
—Charles Wright
### __Rights & Access
“The Other Side of the River” Charles Wright from _The World of Ten Thousand
Things: Poems, 1980-1990_. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1991.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
| This is James Tate reading “The Other Side of the River” by Charles Wright.
[Did this poem deepen or complicate conventional notions of American
identity?]
Well, I … I mean obviously I’m going to say yes, just because it has many
elements throughout it, throughout the poem, that might sound familiar to most
readers of American poetry—it’s its place and youth and specific memories, and
so on. But then for him to arrive at the incredible last line in the poem, “Is
a short life of trouble,” I mean, that’s pretty shocking and it jolts you to
think back on the whole poem and wonder how you got there and so on. And the
poem holds up to such scrutiny.
[How do you relate to this, the speaker in this poem, or as Charles Wright?]
I guess I’d like to go hunting with him, you know, hunting quail. There are
such beautiful memories, and so on, of childhood in the South, in the fire
tower, and hunting with his brother, and things like that. Yeah, he’s a
familiar guy and somebody I feel I care about.
[How has this poem informed your work, specifically in terms of identity?]
It hasn’t.
Well, I’ll speak about Charles Wright particularly. He spent most of his life
detailing subjects centered, always, around him and his world and … I mean,
there are no imaginary flights, supposedly, though of course there are in
language—language is the great conveyor of both his subject and his poetics,
you know? And so he seems like he’s locked into some very narrow thing, namely
the self, but in truth, it gets very large and wide thanks to his great use of
language, and his love of language, and the rhythm, and things of that sort.
|
## XIII (Dedications)
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
As the underground train loses momentum and before
running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something,
torn between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing
else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
—Adrienne Rich
### __Rights & Access
Part XIII “(Dedications)” from “An Atlas of the Difficult World”. Copyright ©
2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.
Copyright © 1991 by Adrienne Rich, from COLLECTED POEMS: 1950-2012 by Adrienne
Rich.
Used by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Audio recording use by
permission of The Frances Goldin Literary Agency.
| I'm Jane Hirshfield, reading “(Dedications),” by Adrienne Rich.
“(Dedications)” is the final section of Adrienne Rich's thirteen-part “An
Atlas of the Difficult World.” The full poem is a work of stocktaking, an
inventory both personal and cultural. It was finished almost thirty years ago,
in 1991: the year of the first Gulf War, of Rodney King's beating and Anita
Hill's disregarded testimony, the year of the break-up of the Soviet Union, of
CNN and the 24 hour news cycle, of the unstoppable, rising death toll of HIV-
AIDS. Read decades after its writing, “An Atlas of the Difficult World”
remains a startlingly relevant map of unsolved griefs.
“(Dedications),” the poem's closing section, offers what also abides: its
relevant solace. The poem is a litany of community-summoning and blessing. It
holds an album of lives, and of longings, recognized and unrecognized both.
The poem creates, too, in the way that art's outward looking makes almost
always also a mirror, a self-portrait of its author. Rich's own longing,
fears, and hope are here, and her fierce, lifelong, unrelenting desire to
write words that might serve.
Rich was a poet of political awareness, ecological awareness, social
awareness, eros awareness, and language awareness. She wrote from and of the
inseparability of these ways of seeing and feeling, and she wrote of shared
lives and shared fates. One of this poem's central intentions and gifts is the
way it enacts and expands our sense of what and who we might mean when we say
the word “we.” She described poetry as “a liberative language, connecting us
to others like and unlike ourselves.” The definition of liberation as
connection—with not only the like but the unlike—was for Rich a foundational
value. The same contract is at the core of any genuinely democratic self-
governance, and at the core of a working literature, a working relationship, a
working compassion.
Rich sets into “(Dedications)” both our necessary solitudes and our necessary
ties. Each person described here stands or sits inside one moment alone
(inside the reader's necessary and focusing solitude, inside the inner life),
and at the same time is in a world among and with others. The figures resemble
those in the separate windows of a painting by Edward Hopper. Yet the central,
great sleight of tongue in this poem is the way its shape-shifting,
transformative second-person “you” makes of separate lives the felt experience
of a communal whole. We see the lives in the windows and we step inside them,
inside the continuous world we also live in.
It's worth pausing to look more closely at the way this experience is made.
The “you” addressed in each sentence is singular, local, specific—a person
young or old, in love, in exhaustion, in grief or hope or desperation, each of
them reaching back for these words from within their own distinct place in the
difficult world. And yet each uttered “you” cannot help but also be heard by
the person now reading the poem as himself, as herself. We read that simple,
acknowledging phrase, “and you too are thirsty,” and, each time, “I am” comes
as answer.
To change one into many and many into one is one of the alchemical
possibilities of the second-person pronoun in English. It's also, in a larger
way, one of the alchemies of poetry itself: whatever comes into awareness
while reading a poem becomes subjective. We read poems as we see: from the
inside. And we read poems as we feel and understand anything: with the heart-
mind’s unboundaried capacity for empathy.
This poem is propelled by empathy. The poem is also propelled by its craft of
music and structure. It moves on the twin devices of list and anaphora's
parallel structure, the way each sentence begins with the same set of words.
Any American poet reading “(Dedications)” cannot help but hear in it also some
trace of the earlier voice of Walt Whitman, who set out to define a still-new
country in part by his own many lists. Any poem with a list of a certain
length signals “more”—that the list could go on without end. Whitman summoned
our American awareness of a vast and shared country by naming its almost
infinite parts and labors, its lives and places. He founded an understanding
of American poetry as one that takes up (in some of its poems, by no means
all) that larger task: the creation of a shared, unconfining definition of the
country's nature, not by generalization but by an embrace of the actual
topography of the real, in our lives and in the lives of others. Whitman set
out to create and strengthen the warmly affectionate “we” of “ _E Pluribus
Unum”_ — “from many one.” “(Dedications)” takes up that task in turn.
Both Whitman and Rich wrote, too, in the grief of America's still-
incompletion—grief that this great “we” remains fragile, in progress,
imperiled. Both Rich and Whitman are poets unblinded to our profound
imperfection, yet hopeful: they set out to make with their words the country
they hoped might exist. Rich was a poet and an activist of inclusion. No one
was abandoned by her gaze or by the rigor of her compassion even in judgment.
Dignity and the fullness of being were for her both words' and life's measure.
Rich knew well that her work was part of a longer historical arc. But her
“wild patience”—the phrase comes from another book's title, _A Wild Patience
Has Taken Me This Far_ —meant she could not simply wait and hope that the rest
of the country would someday join her. “Poetry,” she said in one interview,
“can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that
there is no alternative.” She was in this work of possibility-addition for the
long run. However dark her poems' vision could at times be, Rich meant to
counter despair. She meant to increase our hunger for justice, for dignity,
for a sane politics, sane relationships, and a sane ecological ethic. Her
steady, life-saving envisioning of what she found present, what she saw
missing, cut windows into the walls of our separation, doors into the silences
of our ignorance, complacency, inattention. Reading Rich can feel as if each
poem were the conjuring of a password into a life more awake, alert, and
unguarded. That is my experience reading this poem, in which she imagines and
summons her readers, her plural, singular, thirsty, companions: You _._ I. We.
|
## American Coma
I believe in the burned field,
the sailboat on the sill
of a desert farmhouse.
That stars on the undersides of our skulls
can spell the way home
even when the lights have gone out,
the maps again erased.
The fray of a rope. Chafe of my hands.
Black horses broken loose
over a trampled dawn—your body
beneath the tin of a bent truck grating.
Footprints at the edge of the earth
where they found you. Magdalena
I believe you became the clouds,
the Sangre de Cristos’ pink rim of morning,
the musk of your blood on my t-shirt as I drive away,
all smoke and sooty desert in my rearview.
It’s not the fantasy of a land that survives
but its rocks, redwoods, ghosts,
armadillos crushed in roadside gutters through Texas—
I believe their blood can stay with you
six hundred miles to the Mexican gulf,
that you can use their remains
to bind bear claws, cowrie shells,
something to dance with.
That when you awake you will not remember
any of this: the sirens, sticky
tubes they cocooned around you
the way you looked at me from behind the in-patient door,
eyes empty boats dozing on the edge
and I on the rocks peering into waves
piecing together fins out of crushed armadillos
picked up from the roadsides I traveled to find you
where Chevy appendages, cigarette-butts,
the birdfood of petrified Wonderbread crusts
are the songs of detached, mechanical wings.
I believe
when America awakes
she will not remember any of this:
you smashed over the precipice—
a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root.
Your pages flapping, tar-stained,
blown into shadows of buttes.
I gather you like kindling,
set you on fire, the fugue of black
horses drowning in the surf.
—Jennifer Elise Foerster
### __Rights & Access
"American Coma" Jennifer Elise Foerster from _Leaving Tulsa_. University of
Arizona Press, 2013.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
| This poem, “American Coma”, is from a book by young, Muskogee Creek poet
Jennifer Elise Foerster called _Leaving Tulsa_. It’s a beautiful book, a new
book of poems, and they really remind me of the urgent vision fueling
Kerouac’s _On the Road_ and, for Muskogee people, we’ve been on the road for
quite a while, from the Southeastern part of the United States and a long walk
from there to Oklahoma. And the book is … and this poem is … I feel like this
poem, it’s … the whole book is embedded in this poem, is a young Muskogee
woman carrying that walk in her and leaving for other places in America, like
the Southwest, like the Bay Area, and the road is demanding, you know, the
road to becoming a human being, the road to acknowledging the story or the
historical trauma that marks everyone in this country, every American, every
American has to deal with the effects of colonization. And the outcome here of
this, you know, is the damage inflicted, inflicted by America—America the
person, America the being, America the hungry beast.
She begins with “I believe in the burned field,” and that last stanza is
startling: “I gather you like kindling,/ set you on fire, the fugue of black/
horses drowning in the surf.” Fire is the transformer. Fire makes ashes. Fire
is spirit and it takes every … it transforms us to the most basic part of
ourselves. And then, of course, the appearance of these black horses—these
horses that represent, in so many of our poems, in indigenous writers and
American writers, too, I believe, they represent, in a sense, that spirit, the
spirit of the free America, the America of multicultural ideas and energy. So
in this poem, she’s putting the story of a broken people back together; she’s
making a road home, maybe even cleaning the road home for the people, for the
person in this story who’s been broken, and for her own brokenness and the
brokenness of a whole country.
A coma suggests that the body is here, and the spirit is out roaming around
and is unsettled and doesn’t really feel ready to come back and take on this
particular life. But the poem is hopeful because, as Foerster says, “I
believe/ when America awakes/ she will not remember any of this:/ you smashed
over the precipice—/ a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root.” So
Foerster in this poem and this book of poems is really … exemplifies the next
generation of young indigenous poets who are overlapping my generation—a
generation that came up through indigenous movements, indigenous rights
movements. And I know, I’d been looking, many of us had been looking, to see
who was out there and who was coming up, and here they are, and here is
Jennifer with this very powerful voice.
|
## Making Peace
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
—Denise Levertov
### __Rights & Access
Denise Levertov, “Making Peace” from _Breathing the Water_.
Copyright © 1987 by Denise Levertov.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
| Hello, this is Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States 2015 to
2017. I want to read you a poem by one of favorite poets, Denise Levertov. It
is titled “Making Peace” from her book _Breathing the Water,_ published in
1997 by New Directions Press.
So now we look at the poem a little bit. Think about it a little bit. I’ve
always loved Denise Levertov, her writing, her position as a poet, her
relentless giving of her poems to the people, to this thing we call “social
reality” that many have struggled with, to deal with. _Is it real? Is it
perception? Is it just atomic particles?_ Denise, maybe she includes all that
in here. But really, she’s in _it._ Let me just say that. Even though she was
called, her poetry was called sentimentalist, her poetry was called not
poetry. But it was something like, the term “pamphleteering.” It’s a pamphlet,
it’s a small broadside, it’s a piece of a newspaper. So she received a lot of
criticism. Kind of literary bullying. But you know that’s what Denise is made
of, she responds to a bigger picture. She continued talking about, writing
about the Detroit riots, about Vietnam, about women’s position in society,
writing essays, writing about poetry and writing about everything that’s in
this poem. The indescribable. _What is that voice? What is that darkness? What
is that absence of war? Do we know what that is?_ It sounds easy. Four words:
the absence of war.
I don’t think we need any ornamentalist layering and refiguring and
emulsifying – that in itself is a key question that this poem offers. And she
converts it to a poem. That piece like a poem is “not there ahead of itself,”
she says. Ahead of itself. Peace is not ahead of itself. That’s another
insight, that is another insight. You and I, the reader, has to deal with
that. _What is this thing called that not be ahead of itself? Can we be not
ahead of ourselves? Can our life be not ahead of itself?_ And when we are
that, we are closer to peace. We are closer to the raw, full imagination of
what peace is. If we are conjuring forward, it’s fantasy perhaps. It’s a plan
perhaps. It’s an agenda perhaps. But it is not now where peace happens, can’t
happen and most of all can be made. And I really enjoy how she speaks about
the poem, its materials, its elements and how peace is like that. And most of
all, how it’s all threaded and structured as, she says, in our lives, in our
life, stuff. She talks about rhythm, she talks about restructuring “the
sentence our lives are making,” she says, “Revoked its reaffirmation of profit
and power.” That is something that we can do, that we must do in this poem
called peace, in making this poem called peace making, “Making Peace” as she
talks about loooong pauses, “until we begin to utter its metaphors, / learning
them as we speak,” she says. And then later on, allowing the long pauses.
And that’s another key in this poem – there is the making of things and then
there is the long pause and pauses, inside and perhaps outside the making. And
that is a paradox – making and not-making, being and not-being, being ahead
and being here in the now and the cadence of it and the balance of it. And the
energy of it. She says, “an energy field more intense than war,” the cadence
of peace. You tell me if this is simplistic. You tell me if this is
sentimentalist. And she goes on stanza by stanza into the world. As we make
peace, as we make our lives in the present, outside profit and power, outside
the “imagination of disaster,” as she says. We are in the act of living. And I
think this was Denise Levertov, writing about Vietnam, writing about the
Detroit riots, writing about women’s life in society and the power grid,
writing about the inside and the outside. And herself being kind of an
outsider, born in England and growing up becoming a bigger poet here in the
United States. An outsider and an insider. She spoke in her essays _Light up
the Cave,_ around the same decade or so when _Breathing the Water_ came out
about the outscape and the inscape of the poem, writing about what’s out there
and writing about our interiority and how they’re both related, interrelated.
And in a way this poem does that too, talking about war and profit and power
and talking about each act of living. And the ending of the poem, each word,
she says, “a vibration of light—facets / of the forming crystal.” Here is this
new universe and it begins with these crystals. And these crystals have facets
and these facets are acts of living. I know this sounds like I’m reading these
big pieces of thick wood or pasting them together and creating a statement
about her writing, about this poem. That’s not really it. These are just the
materials of this poem that you and I have to address and reflect on and find
what being is, find what presence is, find what the absence of war is, find
what making our lives is all about, and find what making peace is.
So let us thank Denise Levertov for a wonderful life, for incredible poetry
and for being concerned with the big questions, of war and peace, being,
humanity, and how it can be made with our own life.
|
## Come to the Stone. . .
The child saw the bombers skate like stones across the fields
As he trudged down the ways the summer strewed
With its reluctant foliage; how many giants
Rose and peered down and vanished, by the road
The ants had littered with their crumbs and dead.
“That man is white and red like my clown doll,”
He says to his mother, who has gone away.
“I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.”
In the sky the planes are angry like the wind.
The people are punishing the people—why?
He answers easily, his foolish eyes
Brightening at that long simile, the world.
The angels sway about his story like balloons.
A child makes everything—except his death—a child’s.
_Come to the stone and tell me why I died._
—Randall Jarrell
### __Rights & Access
"Come to the Stone..." by Randall Jarrell from _The Complete Poems_.
Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1971.
Used by permission of the publisher.
| I locate the intense experience this poem offers me in the plain speech of the
lines. “The people are punishing the people, why?” It’s such plain speech. The
line isn’t in quotation marks. It’s the poem’s speaker or the poet who asks
why, not the child, isn’t it? Still, the line is phrased like a child’s
observation and question. It is a puzzle, a riddle, and a stark fact, like
man’s inhumanity to man, like violence—especially against the innocent, which
is unthinkable suffering that’s imposed by choice. The statements in question
are either desperate or offhanded or both. To encounter it at the center of
this little song is like hearing a human voice in a room in which you thought
you were alone.
Owen Barfield says in his book _Poetic Diction_ that the appreciation of a
poem involves a felt change of consciousness. This is such a moment for me. In
this line my own mind merges with that of the poet and that of the child in a
terrible triangle containing a oneness. This isn’t the commonplace strategy of
showing adults how silly their behavior is by showing it to us through the
eyes of a child. This is merging of consciousnesses: “The people are punishing
the people—why?” Robert Lowell called Randall Jarrell the most heartbreaking
poet of our time. I would say that this is his most heartbreaking poem, and
the line I cite the most heartbreaking of lines.
“Come to the Stone . . . ” was first published in 1945 when no one would need
to be told what was happening in the poem. That it could as easily be speaking
to events in our decade is somehow more of a shock than it should be, given
human history. Randall Jarrell despised power politics, the ants it makes of
human beings. The death of this child, coming to him from the sky, is a horror
of course. “’I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.’”
But, does the poem exist because the poet can’t let the mechanical distance of
the bombers dehumanize the child? Does Jarrell attempt to get back the child’s
voice to let him show us himself the thing we’ve done? The child answers our
question with “his foolish eyes,” which are of course infinitely more
knowledgeable than our own. The poet grants the child the last word here on
death. When it comes to death, this child, the “long simile” of the world has
killed, this child is now more knowing than any living adult can be.
Jarrell, who was a pilot instructor during WWII, was implicated in the deaths
of children from the sky. This poem pours out of that dark hole in his sky. In
“Come to the Stone . . . ” the poet labors—vainly of course—to return the
child’s voice to the world in the poem. He tries to show us that he himself is
a human dealing in these deaths. It’s no good. No poem is ever worth a child.
The poem means nothing to the child who has been killed, and in this line “The
angels sway above his story like balloons” the poet acknowledges the useless
and silly grandiose gift of a poem to a dead child.
Still, thinking of Jarrell’s encounter here with the child he perhaps himself,
helped to kill, I think about the poem a drone could never write. The guilted
drone would never suffer. Does that matter? “Come to the stone and tell me why
I died.” The child doesn’t ask this favor of us because it matters any longer
to him.
|
## Poem out of Childhood
I
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry :
Not Angles, angels : and the magnificent past
shot deep illuminations into high-school.
I opened the door into the concert-hall
and a rush of triumphant violins answered me
while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face
intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident
the girl’s brother was killed, but her father had just died :
she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,
dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?” and
I went into the corridor for a drink of water.
These bandages of image wrap my head
when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds.
We sat on the steps of the unrented house
raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold,
creating again how they removed his glasses
and philosophically slit his throat.
They who manipulated and misused our youth,
smearing those centuries upon our hands,
trapping us in a welter of dead names,
snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth . . . .
We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil
the bough’s gold shade advancing forever with us,
entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms;
Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters,
weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing
the temples’ ardent fruit :
Not Sappho, Sacco.
Rebellion pioneered among our lives,
viewing from far-off many-branching deltas,
innumerable seas.
II
In adolescence I knew travellers
speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,
bearing the unequivocal sunny word.
Prinzip’s year bore us : see us turning at breast
quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo
after the mechanic laugh of that bullet.
How could they know what sinister knowledge finds
its way among our brains’ wet palpitance,
what words would nudge and giggle at our spine,
what murders dance?
These horrors have approached the growing child;
now that the factory is sealed-up brick
the kids throw stones, smashing the windows,
membranes of uselessness in desolation.
We grew older quickly, watching the father shave
and the splatter of lather hardening on the glass,
playing in sandboxes to escape paralysis,
being victimized by fataller sly things.
“Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “what will you be?”
“Maybe : something : like : Joan : of : Arc . . . .”
Allies Advance, we see
Six Miles South to Soissons. And we beat the drums.
Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax,
the leafy years all somber with foreign war.
How could we know what exposed guts resembled?
A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins
from Asia to Far Rockaway spiralling
among clocks in its four-dimensional circles.
Disturbed by war we pedalled bicycles
breakneck down the decline, until the treads
conquered our speed and pulled our feet behind them,
and pulled our heads.
We never knew the war, standing so small
looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching
the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth;
see Galahad unaided by puberty.
Ratat a drum uppon the armistice,
Kodak As You Go : photo : they danced late,
and we were a generation of grim children
leaning over the bedroom sills, watching
the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,
laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night
wide out from cover.
The child’s curls blow in a forgotten wind,
immortal ivy trembles on the wall:
the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall
shadows remember time cannot rescind.
III
Organize the full results of that rich past
open the windows : potent catalyst,
harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles
crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain,
inexorable sun and wind and natural thought.
Dialectically our youth unfolds :
the pale child walking to the river, passional
in ignorance in loneliness demanding
its habitation for the leaping dream, kissing
quick air, the vibrations of transient light,
not knowing substance or reserve, walking
in valvular air, each person in the street
conceived surrounded by his life and pain,
fixed against time, subtly by these impaled :
death and that shapeless war. Listening at dead doors,
our youth assumes a thousand differing flesh
summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade,
knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant,
telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready
for the affirmative clap of truth
ricochetting from thought to thought among
the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travellers.
—Muriel Rukeyser
### __Rights & Access
“Poem Out of Childhood” by Muriel Rukeyser.
Copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser.
Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners.
| My name is Linda Gregerson and I’m going to be reading “Poem Out of Childhood”
by Muriel Rukeyser.
In _The Life of Poetry_ , Muriel Rukeyser describes the “first public day” she
remembers: crowds of people filling the streets of New York, confetti and
crying, kissing and noise. Which prompted young Muriel to take out her drum
and beat it. The day was April 28, 1918. False Armistice Day. “The war was not
yet over.”
“Poem Out of Childhood” is the very first poem in Rukeyser’s first book,
_Theory of Flight_ , and it features, front and center, the political
manifesto from which she would never depart. “Not Angles, angels,” “Not
Sappho, Sacco.” Rukeyser had no patience for the artificial sequestrations of
poetry and politics, private imagination and collective history. She was six
months old when Gavrilo Prinzip shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo;
she always considered herself to have been born under the sign of war. We are
creatures of history, she believed; we take it in as we take in air and milk.
And, although there is ignorance aplenty, some of it deadly, there is no such
thing as perfect innocence, if to be innocent means to be untouched. Rukeyser
was fierce in her insistence that the world was one: a tsunami born in Asia
moves across the waters to North America; a shooting in Sarajevo means
slaughtered millions from the Caucasus to France; the dividends paid to
pensioners by Union Carbide are just a little larger because miners in West
Virginia have been allowed to die of silicosis.
“Not Angles, angels”: a musical logic, and one that appears on the surface to
be choosing the life of the spirit. But the phrase derives from a famous story
told by the Venerable Bede. When Pope Gregory, writes Bede, observed a
consignment of fair-skinned, fair-haired slaves in the market in Rome one day,
he asked his companion who they were. “Angles,” said his companion. “ _Non
Angli, sed angeli_ ,” replied the Pope. Not Angles, angels. A story the
English construed for centuries as a sign that they were a chosen people. The
lovely, bell-like echoes of a pun are taken to reflect the stamp of heavenly
favor, beneath which lies – just barely beneath – a double-sided story of
enslavement and racial privilege.
“Not Sappho, Sacco.” The notorious trials and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
played out for seven years of Rukeyser’s early life, calling into question the
very foundations of justice and political tolerance in America, throwing a
harsh light on class and ethnic divisions. So when the poet, fresh out of her
privileged education at Vassar, claims a muse, she refuses to stay within the
proper, decorous lyric boundaries.
And yet. The “not” in Rukeyser’s alliterative formulations has to be taken
with a grain of salt, I think: the wit and the music rely upon the yoking of
terms, after all, not upon the occlusion of one by the other. “Not only” is
how I hear it. Not only Sappho, but also Sacco. There is no such thing as a
separate realm of the aesthetic.
“See us turning at breast,” she writes, and the “throbbing” over Sarajevo
keeps time with the milky rhythms of a nursing child. The brain’s “wet
palpitance” is ripe for the insinuations of “sinister knowledge.” The tenors
and textures of our era make us what we are. No “membrane” of innocence
separates the home front from the battlefront: the factories are boarded up;
the kids throw stones. Polio lurks outside the sandbox.
Rukeyser was only twenty-one when _Theory of Flight_ won the Yale Younger
Poets Prize, but her artistry was as fully formed as was her moral and
political sensibility. Take, for example, the indented four stanzas that
constitute the bulk of section two in “Poem Out of Childhood.” A flexible
pentameter is repeatedly cut off at the knees in the seventh line of an eleven
line stanza. The joyful alliterations of a child’s early lessons in reading
harden into wartime headlines: Six Miles South to Soissons. The seductive
unfoldings of image and phrase give way to intimations of in-the-wings or in-
the-margins violence. A fugitive end rhyme (finds/spine, palpitance/dance,
glass/paralysis) settles into something firmer (be/see, circles/bicycles,
treads/heads, over/cover, wall/tall) and suggests a system of sinister
concordances that history’s children cannot escape and time cannot “rescind.”
The fourth of these stanzas begins with the regressive rhythms of tin drum and
advertising jingle, then modulates into something so tempered with
disillusionment (“a generation of grim children”) that the reader, or this
reader in any case, comes to think she can trust the new, more comprehensive
momentums (“the music and the shoulders and how the war was over”) until these
too come up against the shock of new violence: “the blow on the mouth broke
night / wide out from cover.” I don’t know to what extent that blow on the
mouth is meant to suggest a “merely” domestic cruelty and to what extent it is
meant as a reference to the crushing revelation that news of the armistice had
been mistaken: its ability to resonate on both the larger and the smaller
scale is surely part of its power. In the ordinary way of thinking, night is
something that provides cover. But here it is the ghastly, underlying reality
that hides under cover of the ordinary and is always about to break out.
The child who “breathes-in experience” is born not merely into death, as all
that lives is born into mortality, but also into the surfeit of death that
human beings visit upon one another. Throughout the course of her poetic
career, with passion and unflinching acuity, Rukeyser would document the
infinite varieties this surfeit assumes: death-by-violence, death-by-poverty,
death-by-indifference, death-by-greed. And precisely because she refuses to
“edit out” the ghastliness and the systems that sustain it, she writes the
most life-affirming poetry I know.
|
## Backwater Blues
When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night
When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night
Then trouble's takin' place in the lowlands at night
I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door
I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door
There's been enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go
Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond
Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond
I packed all my clothes, throwed them in and they rowed me along
When it thunders and lightnin’ and when the wind begins to blow
When it thunders and lightnin’ and the wind begins to blow
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go
Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
Then looked down on the house were I used to live
Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go
Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go
’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more
Mmm, I can’t move no more
Mmm, I can’t move no more
There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go
—Bessie Smith
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the pubic domain.
| Bessie Smith recorded “Backwater Blues” in 1927, and it became an anthem for
one of the most devastating national disasters in US history. The Mississippi
River flood of 1927 was horrific. About a thousand people lost their lives.
Almost half a million homes were destroyed. Almost a million people became
homeless for a time. Entire black neighborhoods were wiped out. This incident
gave birth to an important blues era, now known as the Delta Blues era. The
blues artists who wrote and sang in this era there are famous names in this
era such as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, and of course, Bessie
Smith, who is one of my favorites.
Bessie actually wrote “Backwater Blues” for the Cumberland River flood that
hit Nashville on Christmas morning 1926. Nonetheless, when she recorded it in
1927 “Backwater Blues” became an anthem for the great Mississippi River Flood.
The flood was a devastating ordeal. There were reports that officials behaved
in a discriminatory fashion. They relocated the white folks in an expedient
manner but corralled the black folks into abysmal camps. There was evidence of
lynchings and unspeakable killings and terrible acts against the black
community. Let’s look at this poem closely. I mean, first, it sets up a
terrible storm when it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night,
when it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night. But the second
strophe, the second stanza, we turn inward, and it’s about personal disaster:
I woke up this morning can’t even get out of my door, I woke up this morning
can’t _even_ get out of my door. The poem moves to personal depression. I
think in the best identity poems that the self represents something much
larger than the self. The scene is set with the terrific storm by the female
speaker, so depressed that she can’t even get out of the door. This personal
depression by extension is about the depression of an entire people,
marginalized in the back waters, stricken with poverty, homelessness,
suffering social injustice, discrimination, and now hit with this catastrophic
natural disaster. The despair is deep, is deeply personal, but it is also
metaphorical and speaks to the despair of an entire community. Of course, we
Americans have historical amnesia. Most of us don’t remember the great
Mississippi River Flood of 1927, but when I read this poem a few years ago
during a gathering on the behalf of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the same
issues resounded—neighborhoods destroyed, slow government response, the
African American neighborhoods were hit the hardest. Terrible images came
across the television screen and recently with global warming and continuous
flooding and natural disasters this poem survives the test of time and can
speak to a variety of incidents and international dislocated peoples.
Let’s look at the blues poem as a form. The first two lines are of almost
equal length. The first line sets the scene, the second line repeats the first
for emphasis. The third line either comments or reverses the first two lines.
There is one integral line throughout the stanza. The “a” rhyme glues the
three-line stanza together. “Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my
things and go, / Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go, /
'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more.” This is a song
poem. The best song poems, I believe, can live on the pages as well as in the
ear. The blues poems remind us that the American poetic tradition can be
traced to African American oral tradition; that great art, great poems come
from deep suffering that is personal, historical, and political and could be
read on the page as well as sung out loud. I can’t do justice to this poem, to
“Backwater Blues,” by just reciting it myself. Please download this song,
preferably the original 1927 recording by Bessie Smith, and listen to her
amazing singing. There’s this rich toughness in her voice that tells us this
girl and her people are going to get through this calamity. Her voice is
subversive, defiant despite all odds against her.
I love writing blues poems. As a poet who writes in English I know that every
time I write a sonnet I pay homage to the high European tradition and to
master poets like Shakespeare, Dunn, Keats, Petrarch. I see myself as an
activist Chinese American poet, and I want to show the multiple sides of my
literary inheritance. I make it a point to learn the African American poetic
tradition. The blues poems was more here on American soil, and so I study the
blues poems closely and write blues poems to pay homage to all those African
American blues masters. Of course, I learn so much from the Bessie Smith’s
blues poems. I have her strong voice in my ear at all times. Thank you
|
## A Cowboy’s Prayer
_(Written for Mother)_
Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches
grow.
I love creation better as it stood
That day You finished it so long ago
And looked upon Your work and called it
good.
I know that others find You in the light
That’s sifted down through tinted window
panes,
And yet I seem to feel You near tonight
In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.
I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,
That You have made my freedom so com-
plete;
That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,
Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
And give me work that’s open to the sky;
Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,
And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.
Let me be easy on the man that’s down;
Let me be square and generous with all.
I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in
town,
But never let ‘em say I’m mean or small!
Make me as big and open as the plains,
As honest as the hawse between my knees,
Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,
Free as the hawk that circles down the
breeze!
Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.
You know about the reasons that are hid.
You understand the things that gall and fret;
You know me better than my mother did.
Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said
And right me, sometimes, when I turn
aside,
And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead
That stretches upward toward the Great
Divide.
—Badger Clark
### __Rights & Access
This poem is in the public domain.
| This is Marilyn Nelson, reading “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Badger Clark.
That was “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Charles Badger Clark. This poem was first
published in 1906, but it was published many times as anonymous. It had a life
of its own without the name of its author. Badger Clark was so charmed by this
that he had a collection of anonymous publications of his poems. He collected
them—he had sixty copies of poems that had been—or, at times, that this poem
had been published anonymously.
Badger Clark’s dates are 1883 to 1957. He was, and is, one of the classic
cowboy poets and made a major contribution to the literature of the west. He
was the first poet laureate of South Dakota. He was named poet laureate in
1937 and served, I think, 20 years as poet laureate of South Dakota. He lived
alone in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or telephone, on land
that is now a state park. He travelled as a young man, however, and this poem,
“A Cowboy’s Prayer,” was written during the time he was living in Arizona. I
think you can hear the “Westernness” of this poem. Badger Clark wrote poems
that were very popular during his lifetime. One of his poems was recorded by
the singing cowboy star Tex Ritter. Another was set to music and recorded by
the Fred Waring chorus. Bob Dylan recorded one of Badger Clark’s songs or
poems as a song. And Johnny Cash recorded a version of this poem, “A Cowboy’s
Prayer.”
I think that to really appreciate this poem, we may have to set aside
political correctness and ethnic sensitivity. This poem was published in 1906
during the ascendance of the American myth which, of course we know, refused
to confront for many years America’s history of genocide. This was the myth of
an America which is big, open, honest, clean, and free. I think this poem is
related to Woody Guthrie’s song, which we all know and love, “This Land is
Your Land, This Land is My Land.” Like that song, this poem expresses a
reverence which is evoked by the land. It’s an ecological poem, I suppose one
might say . . . one might say it’s a green poem. It’s a poem about loving
America as _a land_. As a landscape. I think it has something also in common
with Emily Dickinson’s poem, 236, which begins “Some keep the Sabbath going to
church / I keep it staying at home.” It is easy to think, because of Emily
Dickinson’s life, that when she said “at home” she meant _indoors_ , but a
close reading of the poems makes it clear that she meant _out of doors_. At
home, she’s at home in an orchard. It’s a poem that takes place in an orchard
with a bobolink as a preacher. So it’s a poem also about land reverence,
nature reverence. Loving the land. Loving the landscape.
I first encountered Badger Clark’s poem in a tourist gift shop, somewhere on a
highway—probably Route 66. My family stopped at, somewhere out West, on one of
several cross-country driving trips we made during the 1950s. I remember
picking up the poem as a postcard in a postcard rack, and I believe it was
identified as being anonymous. I remember reading this poem and being deeply
moved by it. I must have been maybe nine. I begged my parents to buy it for me
and for years I kept it in my box of childhood treasures. I liked then, and
still like, the poet’s sense of reverence without dogma. The fact that this is
not a poem that takes you to any particular religion. I liked its simple
ethical values. Its hope to be clean and honest, sort of, Boy Scout
values/Girl Scout values. And I also liked its humility. Its confession of
failures, of faults. And I also loved—as a child, I loved the speaker of this
poem as I loved all those painfully honest, tough but gentle, big, open,
honest, clean and free movie and television cowboys, who populated America’s
dream of herself when I was a child during that first half of this last
century.
|
## Howl, Part III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the
actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal
it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from
its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist
revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living
human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing
the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the
United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes
roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital
illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside
O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory
forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across
America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
—Allen Ginsberg
### __Rights & Access
From "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, from _Collected Poems: 1947-1997_ by Allen
Ginsberg. Copyright © 1956, 2006 by Allen Ginsberg, LLC, used by permission of
The Wylie Agency LLC.
| It’s sometimes interesting to look at poetry through the lens of history. In
1955, the year 29-year-old Allen Ginsberg wrote the poem he titled “Howl,”
Marian Anderson became the first African American singer to perform with the
71-year-old metropolitan opera company in New York City. That same year, 1955,
rock ‘n’ roll debuted in a film called “Blackboard Jungle,” an adaptation of a
novel by Evan Hunter about inner-city teaching. The movie featured the song
“Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. When the film was
screened, teenage audiences began dancing in the aisles. Steve Jobs was born
in 1955, the visionary entrepreneur who would introduce the personal computer
and desktop publishing to the world, and set in motion a global, technical
revolution. In November of 1955, America increased its military involvement in
the conflict between North and South Vietnam. Having just won their struggle
for independence from France, the two had decided to go to war against one
another.
It’s rare that a single event results in permanent social change, and more
rare, yet, when that single event is the publication of a poem. “Howl” is one
of those few poems. Dedicated to Carl Solomon, a man Ginsberg met when he was
visiting his mother in a mental hospital, “Howl” famously begins, “I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked
. . .” It goes on from there to become a sustained, high-energy complaint
about social hypocrisy. The poem’s essential argument is that America in 1955
had so narrow an idea of what is considered “normal,” that there was no room
for any diversity or creativity. For a man, “normal” in 1955 was someone with
a nine-to-five job who intended to marry, or had already married, a woman who
wore short-waist dresses and high heels. Homosexuals like Ginsberg risked not
just social alienation, but imprisonment. In every state of the union, sex
between consenting adults of the same sex was punishable by a jail or prison
sentence.
In “Howl,” Ginsberg celebrates all of those whose lives fell outside what was
considered mainstream. He celebrates those who are marginalized because of
their sexuality, or their race, or because their political ideas were
considered radical, or because they were artists or musicians, or because they
were drug addicts. He registers his objection to the fact of their social
outcast status, and highlights the contradiction between a country that says
it welcomes difference but then fails to protect the rights of those who are
different.
The poem, written in long lines, has four parts—the last of which is titled
“Footnote for Howl.” The long-line free verse form was first used 100 years
earlier by another American poet, Walt Whitman. In Whitman’s poem “Song of
Myself,” those long lines celebrate Whitman’s individuality, and invite all
readers to likewise celebrate theirs. Whitman’s argument is that we all belong
in the same universe. Because both poems are written in long lines, the music
of the two poems is in some way similar, and yet is also very different. Both
poets use a poetic strategy called “anaphora,” where the poet creates a sound
pattern based on repeating one or more words at the beginning of several
consecutive lines. In Whitman’s poem, the use of anaphora gives the poem an
expansive, oracular quality similar to Protestant sermons in the King James
Bible. In Ginsberg’s poem, the use of anaphora also has echoes of a sermon,
but the sound is more like a sermon delivered by a zealous, ecstatic, almost
manic revival tent preacher.
In spite of the tonal difference, both poets are widely inclusive, folding
into the poem anything and everything American, and of their moment: Whitman’s
vast pastoral landscape becomes Ginsberg’s mean-city streets. While Whitman
slyly gestured toward both homosexual and heterosexual practices, Ginsberg’s
sexual references are explicit, slang-based, and sometimes graphic. While both
poems argue for freedom, and for belonging, Ginsberg’s poem is much more
confrontational. There’s a persistent sense in “Howl” of an explosive charge
about to be detonated, as if the narrow confines of 1955 were so narrow they
were bound to give way.
After the poem was published in 1956 by City Lights Books, the publisher,
poet, and City Lights bookstore owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested and
charged with disseminating obscene literature. The “Howl” obscenity trial came
down to the question of who has the right to speak, and who has a right to
read that speech. Academics were called to the witness stand, with some
speaking for, and others against, the poem’s literary merits. The deciding
judge, Clayton Horne, found that the poem was not obscene. He wrote this in
his decision:
> The authors of the first amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas
> might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which
> they believed essential if vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over
> slothful ignorance.
He went on to say:
> I do not believe that “Howl” is without redeeming social importance. The
> first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second
> part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive to the
> best qualities of human nature—such elements are predominately identified as
> materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war; the third
> part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of
> what the author conceives of as a general condition; “Footnote to Howl”
> seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including
> parts of the body by name—it ends in a plea for holy living.
“Howl,” fueled by the publicity from the trial, became one of the most famous
poems of the 20th century. It’s the artifact of a moment when the young poet
Allen Ginsberg decided to take a stand to support and protect the freedom that
democracy promises. There was no poem like “Howl.” He invented it out of his
youthful desire to be rebellious, both in his life and in his poetry.
Rebellion is part of the American identity, and “Howl” embodies rebellion. It
calls into question limits on sexuality, and on art.
By reprising Whitman’s long poetic line, Ginsberg linked his poem to existing
poetic tradition, but he shifted the focus and revved the speed to make it
better represent his own historical moment. In doing so, he ushered in a new
music in poetry, just as the music of rock ‘n’ roll was being born, and racial
barriers were coming down, and the contentious Vietnam War was beginning. The
continual effort to reinvent the past for one’s own era is very American.
We’re charmed by changes in fashion, cars, and architecture. We tell time by
evolving styles. “Howl” defines a certain moment when the beat generation
refused to behave, but its greatness lies in the fact that it is timeless in
its concerns, and the way it takes its stand for lasting principles. That’s
what makes it a great poem—and a great American poem.
|
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