The Best American Poetry

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Sarah Paley

This week I’ve chosen to post “Spring, Central Park Zoo” by Sarah Paley (Barrow Street, Tenth Anniversary Issue, Winter 2008). Selecting a poem for this final post is a little sad, because there are so many poems we’ve published that I’d like to single out.

In my first post (on November 11, 2009), I said that I didn’t want to generalize about Barrow Street.  Instead, the poems I’d post would give readers a sense of what we’re looking for in poems. From the work I’ve posted over the last twelve weeks, I hope it’s evident that our only criteria are the strength of a poem; the pleasure it gives; and our sense that regardless of where we’d place it on the current aesthetic spectrum, it has a highly distinctive stamp.  I also hope it’s clear that poets who have published little or nothing are as welcome in our pages as are authors of many books.

SPRING, CENTRAL PARK ZOO

“I love my Love, and my Love loves me!”
A bird, a Lark, sings this.

Blissful tears are shed
By a Gentoo Penguin mid-plunge.

The fullness of his heart causes
A Suriname Toad to ascend to a higher plane.

Mary, Mother of God, appears
relieving a Red Panda of all anxiety and self-loathing.

“Rejoice!  Rejoice!  Rejoice!  All Men, Rejoice!”
barks a Harbor Seal as high as a kite.

and
The bats are just going crazy crazy
with happy happy happiness.

-- Sarah Paley

Every strong poet is a school of one.  Every strong poem is one of a kind, which is just as true whether a poem appears to embrace some form of tradition or allies itself instead  with specifically contemporary gestures. “Spring, Central  Park Zoo,” does both.  It begins with a line from a Coleridge poem (“Answer to a Child’s Question”): “I love my Love, and my Love loves me!” The line will sound familiar even to readers who’ve never read the Coleridge poem, partly because it’s often quoted, but also because the line looks back to centuries of poems in praise of spring. Yet this playfully over-the-top poem is completely contemporary and distinctively individual. It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard before. Through its wild exaggeration, it manages to parody its literary forebears, but also to enroll itself in their number.

The poem’s opening line is sung by “a Lark,” a poetically generic bird, warbling its way through the Coleridge poem and through seven centuries of poetry in English.  In the Paley poem, however, the generic lark gives way to very specific and (in spring poems) very unexpected creatures:  A Gentoo Penguin, a Suriname Toad, a Red Panda, a Harbor Seal, and bats. They do unexpected things, too. They’re no longer simply warbling.  “Blissful tears are shed / by a Gentoo Penguin mid-plunge.” The Suriname Toad “ascend[s] to a higher plane.” “Mary, Mother of God,” pops into the poem from nowhere, to relieve “a Red Panda of all anxiety and self-loathing.” The poem resembles nothing so much as the loopy, animated (in both senses) world of early Disney films, where animals, birds, humans, even flowers and trees, fired by spring, dance and sing with loony abandon. The creatures in this poem, and apparently the poet persona too, are all beside themselves with joy; and by the end the reader is too. I’ve read this poem a number of times. Each time I read it the final lines, rising to their peak of excess, made me laugh and – yes – made me happy, even if not quite as happy as the delirious bats.

-- Patricia Carlin

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Marie Ponsot

This week’s poem, “The End of the Beginning” by Marie Ponsot, appeared in Barrow Street, Winter 2004.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Those high New York windows show me
the horizon’s lit fog rim where
earth keeps in touch with sky.

In such mist, frayed ghosts of selves, my
lost selves, drowse.  Lately, some drift close
and watch me age.  A few of them flame up

taking on known shapes in known clothes.
This one, that one, were me once, are me.
In these clothes I walked, joked, worked

hurt, had a pipsqueak part to play
(paradiddle on the high hat):  I begin
to remember more, a deep breath taken.

They hum soft part-songs, hard to hear,
and now they’re singing.  They’ve come to stay.
It’s turning into a party.

I put out bread, plates, glasses, grapes,
apples, napkins, pretzels, Bleu des Causses.

They whistle old signals, use our name to recall
me to my selving.  I’ll propose a toast.

Why not.  It’s time to let go.
Out of the cellar I take, ripe,
the rest of the case of Clos de Vougeot.

-- Marie Ponsot

This haunting poem is a ghost story with attitude. In its opening lines, “high New York windows” show the poet (and the reader) “the horizon’s lit fog rim where / earth keeps in touch with sky.”  These lines call to mind a physical phenomenon.  In the fog, lit by the city lights, there’s no sharp line of demarcation between earth and sky.  Literally, then, the border is simply the horizon line, shrouded in mist.  But figuratively, it is the border between the worlds of the living and the dead, the earth-bound flesh-and-blood speaker, and the ghosts of her lost former selves, who materialize like so many ectoplasmic presences.

The whole poem is pitched at the “rim” of the two worlds, where the ghosts of former selves keep materializing out of the mist, intruding on the speaker’s psyche, and penetrating the solid material world of here and now: a world of “bread, plates, glasses, grapes, / apples, napkins, pretzels, Bleu des Causses.”  Pretzels, homely cocktail fare, have particular weight in tying the moment to something earthbound.

Music controls, to a large extent, the poem’s tone, and its effect on the reader; and it is the music of the poem – inseparable from an attitude – that marks the work as distinctively Ponsot’s. There’s a light staccato surface to the poem, shot through underneath with intricate interwoven sound echoes: consonance, assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, unobtrusive end rhyme.  To follow just a few of these, in the first two stanzas I hear the repeated vowel sounds of “high” and “sky,” and of “lit,” “rim,” “mist,” and the ‘d’, ‘s’, ‘r’, ‘f’, and long ‘o’ sounds in “frayed,” “selves” (repeated), “drowse,” “drift,” “close,” “ghosts,” “few,” and “flame.”

In a similar way, long ‘o’ sounds repeat, strikingly, at the poem’s conclusion: “old,” “toast,” “go,” “Clos,” “Vougeot.”  The alliteration of “case” and “Clos”, which for a moment distracts from the long ‘o’ sounds, emphasizes their final return in “Clos de Vougeot.”

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Nin Andrews

This week I’ve selected “Hoi Polloi” by Nin Andrews (Barrow Street, Winter 2009). The poem first appeared on line as part of the project “Starting Today: Poems for the First Hundred Days,” co-edited by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. Arielle and Rachel asked each of 100 poets to write a poem on an assigned date, a poem responding in some way to one of the first hundred days of the new administration.

HOI POLLOI

There were seven of us eating enchiladas at the Casa Romera when Tony Papadakis stood up in the middle of the restaurant, raised his fist and shouted, Obama is a man of the fucking hoi polloi! We all stopped and stared as he left, the door swinging behind him.

Who are the hoi polloi? Sarah asked. No one was sure. Three women thought the hoi polloi were the rich, sort of like the hotsy totsy, and three men said the hoi polloi were the poor. We all agreed that being a member of the hoi polloi was not a good thing.

Does that mean we love men to be rich and women to be poor? I asked.

No, Steve said.  It means it’s best to be neither-nor. We Americans love those who take the middle path. Sort of like Goldilocks, we want to find the bed or bank account that’s not too big or too small, like the bowl of porridge that’s not too hot or too cold.

But Goldilocks was a burglar and a thief, Molly argued. Which is something both the rich and the poor are accused of being from time to time. They’re always taking from others what doesn’t belong to them. Feeling entitled. Making themselves at home in a world that doesn’t love them.

Tom disagreed.  He said the hoi polloi are the average men and women, the kind no one wants to be. They’re the faceless masses, the passersby, like the extras on movie sets.  They’re designed to look so familiar that no one notices them. Their job is to be everyone in general and no one in particular so that the heroes and heroines can star in their own lives, forever enjoying the distant sound of our applause.

-- Nin Andrews

Like other poems in the 100 poems project, this poem exceeds its occasion, reflecting a complex stance toward our shared public reality.  The poem is consistently funny and interesting. I admire its pitch-perfect vernacular narration and dialog, its trenchant sociological commentary, and its surprising development. It moves from a casual anecdotal beginning (“There were seven of us eating enchiladas at the Casa Romero”), through the distilled debate in its middle section, to an unexpected final stanza, an almost existential description of what it’s like to be an “average” citizen in present-day America. How does the poem make the leap to its unexpected ending?

Looking closely at the last stanza, I see a shift from the conversational tone elsewhere in the poem, and also a shift from narration and dialog to simile. The “average men and women, the kind no one wants to be,” are “faceless masses,” “passersby, like the extras on movie sets. They’re designed to look so familiar that no one notices them.” The word “designed” implies a controlling maker, who has created the faceless masses to be extras, not full human beings. They are props to enhance the major players, the stars of the movie set that is America now: “those heroes and heroines” who “star in their own lives, forever enjoying the distant sound of our applause.” Earlier in the poem we heard a group conversation, snippets of dialog batted back and forth. Now, in the final stanza, conversation is replaced by Tom’s authoritative assertions, which go unanswered.

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Elaine Equi

For the first week of this new decade, I’ve chosen “A Woman of the Wrong Altitude” by Elaine Equi (Barrow Street, Summer 2007).  Among many other pleasures the poem offers, it’s an antidote to any misguided New-Year’s resolution for self-improvement.

A Woman of the Wrong Altitude

Turbulence.  Bad posture.
Air pressure falling
in the cabin’s head.

Islands lost somewhere.
Oily velour below.

Idle among
the industrial
music set to nonmusic.

Panic like a playing card
turned suddenly face-up.

-- Elaine Equi

There’s a music of the mind in this compressed and evocative poem, one filled with half tones, as phrases open into ripples of meaning.  A reader must actively complete, through speculation and imagination, what each fragment of the collage portrait suggests.  The title, for example, sets up the airplane trope that follows.  It also invites speculation: who is the woman, and what might “the wrong altitude” be?  The reader also hears the phrase “wrong attitude” lurking behind “wrong altitude” -– a phrase we associate with parental/social injunctions to improve.  “Bad posture,” too, may invoke a childhood world of parental admonishment. But in addition, a reader must wonder, and begin to imagine, what that bad posture might be in the wider sense of an attitude toward life. Perhaps, too, these phrases evoke a sense of resistance, the resistance we feel as children when told to improve our attitude or posture.

There’s so much going on in this minimalist portrait.  To choose another example, in stanza three, who is “idle” -– the woman being pictured, the poet or, by extension (as we read), the reader?  The word “industrial” conjures up (again in the sparest way) a contemporary scene, the world we live in, and also suggests “industrious” -– the hardworking inhabitants of that scene, who contrast with the “idle” one, the woman portrayed, with her “wrong” altitude/attitude. At the same time the words of the stanza convey the poem’s subtle aural music, fully original and fully of the moment -– an “industrial / music set to nonmusic.”  This music is resolutely non-lyrical.

No familiar pattern of either stresses or sound echoes shows up.  Vowel and consonant sounds do echo each other throughout the poem, but always unobtrusively, as in “posture,” “pressure,” “somewhere,” “velour.”  The poem's rhythms are abrupt, staccato, imitating the emotional mood of the piece.  Here mental and aural music merge.  Fragments of details appear abruptly: “Turbulence.  Bad posture.  / Air pressure falling / in the cabin’s head.”  The situation isn’t good.  The reader is caught up along with the woman in this distressing psychological flight through moments of a life.  The world is out there, but not much help.  Islands below are “lost somewhere”, and nothing can be seen but “oily velour.”  The poem ends as abruptly as it begins, with “Panic like a playing card / turned suddenly face-up.”  Aural music and the music of the mind merge.  Panic appears as suddenly in the poem as it does in life, as the ‘p’ sounds in the last stanza pop out at us.

I experience much pleasure in the wit and concision of this poem, even after several readings.

-- Patricia Carlin

Patricia Carlin Presents a Poem by Stephen Burt

For the last week of the old year, here is a kind of state-of-the-union message, as germane now as it was in Winter 2006 when this poem appeared in Barrow Street. The poem, “The Task,” is by Stephen Burt.

THE TASK

All children are changelings; that’s why skilled
Repairmen are always in demand.  But Rosie and her
Great ilk are moody these days,
Ready to head back into the past all
Grandparents share, when things
Seemed fairer and more solid, although
Poorer.  People ate
Indistinguishable taupe cubes;
For entertainment they watched flashing lights.

Yet these days every corridor is a flooded
Mangrove swamp, where ancient types despise
Our white-collar competition, our scandalous talk;
The person you expect to be next year
Is less heroic than you are, and more glum,
With fewer talismans.  He praises the day even so.
If this world has fallen together by chance
And evolution, she says, it is
A marvel, but if somebody
Designed it, yikes!
Dear shepherd: Do you have a staff?
Dear effortful ones: How far are you wandering home?
Do you prefer paper or plastic homes
For purchase?  Can you fit on the head of a match?

There’s a filter on our enjoyments: it kicks in
Between twilight and dearly
Beloved, but perhaps less respectable,
Dawn.  The sun shows that
We already owe too much.  And still hope prepares
Itself like a bread knife left in bread, like wooden
Models in the kitchen trap,
For the caustic gift of trying
To imagine how it would feel, or what you would
Do, if you were actually
In charge.  The enemies
Of the naiads remain on guard
Over 24 hours per day, archaic rules
And halberds at the ready:  You must
Listen to them.  You must not do as they say.

-- Stephen Burt

Between its authoritative opening and closing lines, “The Task” offers a witty, inventive description of how we live now, and also a prescription for dealing with it.  Not incidentally, it’s also a guide for a certain kind of poetics -- one which encapsulates our present psychic and social situation in the poetic means it uses to address that situation.

The situation may be a little grim – “The person you expect to be next year / Is less heroic than you are, and more glum.”  And yes, “There’s a filter on our enjoyments,” and “The sun shows that / We already owe too much”; but that doesn’t stop the poet and the reader from enjoying themselves as they skip along through the changes in this kinetic poem.

The succession of elements in the poem – jumps in thought, in language, in details, in who is speaking (“he,” “she,” “you,” “we,” “our”), in who is being spoken to (“Dear shepherd,” “Dear effortful ones”) -- continually surprise.  In part it’s because successive elements are original, in the sense that one element doesn’t originate from what precedes in any expected way.  To trace only the first part of the poem, children, changelings, repairmen, “ Rosie and her / Great ilk,” grandparents, taupe cubes, flashing lights, and a mangrove swamp pass in rapid succession.  The poem perpetually goes somewhere new.  On closer examination it can be seen that some phrases do proceed associatively – but they do so with a logic that can be understood only after the fact.

Has the world of the poem (and the world the poem reflects) “fallen together by chance / And evolution”?  If so, what  “A marvel.”  Or “has somebody / Designed it”?   If so, “Yikes!”  In either case, the poem offers much pleasure in the form of pervasive wit created through shifting, surprising jumps in language, imagery, tone.  But pleasure is not the poem’s only point.  There is “A Task” to be performed, and the final lines set it out.  “The enemies / Of the naiads remain on guard / Over 24 hours per day, archaic rules / And halberds at the ready.  You must / Listen to them.  You must not do as they say.”

“Archaic rules” and outdated weapons (the “halberds”) are poised at the ready, working overtime (“Over 24 hours per day”).  They are “on guard” against the naiads -- water spirits who suggest imagination and myth, flexible and shifting as the element they live in.

These lines are a prescription for how to live, and also, for how to write.  Readers and writers must “listen” to rigid outdated strategies (poetic as well as social and psychological), but not in order to obey them – instead, to oppose them.  “You must not do as they say.”

I particularly like the way the poem presumes to speak to and for a shared communal reality.  In this it hearkens back to the Augustan age, which assumed poetry spoke of and to a public world.  This stance reappeared in the twentieth century in, notably, Auden’s work, for one.  Here it reappears in a twenty-first-century version, where self and community are in a sense interchangeable, each being equally made up of multiple voices.

-- Pat Carlin

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Lyn Hejinian

This week’s poem is “from The Fatalist” by Lyn Hejinian (Barrow Street, Winter 2002).

from The Fatalist

People talk about the ineluctable character of the “lyric moment”
but it seems to me that it is an astonishingly sturdy and detailed moment
passing through the world as well as through dreams.
The party afterward was held among the exhibits
and I did finally figure out what an analyst does
with “embeddeds,” i.e., “all the equipment that we don’t call computers
but that use microchips,” e.g., streetlights. There might be a dramatic
  scene rambling there
of things observed and thoughts thought over the past few weeks
as the fog burns off over the hills
rising from the kitchen in Beethoven’s Great Fugue emotionally
from fragile sentimentality to robust ecstasy that bears all the arbitrary
              conflict between reality and unreality of any number (since
              numbers aren’t particularly “real” nor “unreal” after all)
but seem to have no relation to me
right on the beach built according to some architect’s fantasy. There was
              no front door
and M overcame her shock at the feeling of sand on her hands.
F suddenly drove into the surf wearing a heavy woolen jacket when this
              occurred
and I fell on the sand hauled to shore, still singing. Taken out of context, it
              must appear
that I ate an entire salmon at one sitting
from my hotel room. It does make a difference. But the problems are more
              lurking than actual, at this point, preoccupying, sufficiently
              shifting.
Let’s go to Australia as a duo without paragraph breaks – I’m not sure
              why.

-- Lyn Hejinian

The poem’s title, plus the word “ineluctable” – which stands out in line one – invite meditation on fate and fatalism. The Anglo-Saxon word for “fate” is “wyrd." Unlike “destiny,” “wyrd” doesn’t imply a fate marked out for a person or thing by some greater force. It simply means “that which happens.” And it is fate in this sense that the poem enacts.

The poem contains what the world contains –  thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sense experience, the things of the world which are outer and other including writing (the “lyric moment”), other people, and the self, which is both internal and a public creation completed by the other (“a duo without paragraph breaks”).

Inner and outer worlds mix in the poem.  The “world” and “dreams,” “reality” and “unreality,” “things observed and thoughts thought” switch places, each as “sturdy  and detailed” as the other.  As the poem unfolds, general reflection increasingly gives way to a mélange of specifics – a party, exhibits, an analyst, “all the equipment we don’t call computers,” streetlights, fog, Beethoven music, a kitchen, the beach, a front door, other people (“M” and “F”), sand, eating a salmon – the random miscellany of experience.  This “does make a difference” – but the problems of meaning – of why things happen as they happen – “are more lurking than actual.”  They may preoccupy us; but they are always “sufficiently shifting” so that caught in the succession of moments we move on.

The fatalist accepts all and keeps moving. There is no final stopping place in the poem, as in life. The movement of the poem is for me one of its most original and compelling features; and it is that movement which acts out the poem’s meanings. Like life, the unfolding of the poem moment by moment and line by line can only be experienced. It cannot be predicted ahead of time, or explained afterward. It just is.

The poem isn’t spoken in a void, but rather is addressed to an unknown other – in fact, as it turns out, the reader. At the end the reader joins with the speaker in that constant motion which characterizes the poem’s unfolding. The movement of the poem is acted out by unpredictable shifts and jumps within lines and from line to line, which we participate in as we read. This movement, the movement of both life and the poem, is inescapable (“ineluctable”) and also, in the end, inexplicable: “Let’s go to Australia as a duo without paragraph breaks – I’m not sure why."

-- Patricia Carlin

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Rachel Hadas

This week’s poem, “Daylight Saving” by Rachel Hadas, appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Barrow Street:

DAYLIGHT SAVING

It’s time to change the time.
I’ve set the clocks ahead–
all but one, antique,
haughty on a high shelf,
that doesn’t really run
but keeps its time to itself,
though it emits if touched
a crotchety, cracked chime.
My wristwatch will be last
to dutifully spring
forward–and we’re all set,
as they say in Vermont.
But wait:
My son is heading out.
Be home by one, I say.
And he replies: Okay,
one by the old time.

I wait in the slow zone
while he floats through another.
Is he an hour late?
Am I an hour ahead?
Either way, old mother,
it’s time to go to bed.
The sleepy-feeling pace
(I turn a page and yawn)
is an illusion:
Everyone’s time runs out
at a single rate.
Not early and not late,
my son’s abruptly back.

-- Rachel Hadas

“Daylight Saving” is a model for what meter and thyme can accomplish in the right hands.  I admire and take pleasure in the consummate craft of this poem, and in how lightly that craft is deployed to deliver meaning.  At the risk of weighting the poem down, I’ll mention just a few of its elements.

The poem’s base meter is iambic trimeter.  Regular meter is pleasing in itself and also appropriate to the poem’s subject: a meditation on time.  Fixed meter ticks on, as does clock time.  But the poet varies the meter with great skill: the pleasure of repetition fixed meter gives is leavened just enough with the pleasure of surprise in departure from that meter.  At times trochaic feet substitute for iambic feet (“haughty on a high shelf,”  “one by the old time,” to give a few examples).  At other times – key moments in the poem in terms of meaning – the poem departs altogether from trimeter lines (“But wait,” “is an illusion”).  Rhyme in the poem doesn’t operate like clockwork either.  End rhymes are few and don’t recur in any fixed pattern, so I’m pleasantly surprised whenever one appears.  The rhymes seem to chime through the poem like the “crotchety cracked chime” of the antique clock.

Both the mostly regular meter and the recurrence of rhyme subtly carry the poem’s message of time passing at a fixed rate.  In spite of variation the base meter ticks steadily away, and rhyme keeps coming back.  This effect is reinforced because certain rhyming words having to do with time’s ticking repeat: “time’ – “chime” – “time” in the first section, and “rate” – “late” – “rate” in the second section.  But none of this is intrusive: all is handled with the lightest of touches.

There’s life wisdom in the poem –an acceptance of time and generational difference running under the poem’s delightful surface. The poem works through a seemingly slight anecdote.  In the night of clock change a mother waits for her son to return.  Are we in the son’s expanded hour of old time, or in the mother’s foreshortened hour of daylight saving?  Is the mother early, or the son late? “Either way, old mother, / it’s time to go to bed.”  These two lines evoke, in the lightest possible way, generational change.

Meter and rhyme create a parallel to the anecdote.  While I read I experience moments of departure from the clock-work regularity of fixed meter and rhyme.  But as with the mother’s sense of suspended time (“a sleepy-feeling pace”), it’s a momentary “illusion.”  Like the son’s abrupt return, back come the iambs, and back come the rhymes.  For mother and son and the reader, time is ticking away “at a single rate.”

The poem is a meditation on time, delivered in the guise of a charming anecdote; and all elements serve to impart that meditation in an experiential way.  The light surface of the poem conceals its deep craft.

-- Patricia Carlin

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh

This week’s poem, “from 237 More Reasons to Have Sex,” is a collaboration between Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh.  We don’t publish long poems often, but we had more space in our double-size Tenth Anniversary Issue (Winter 2008).  Even so, because the original is chapbook size we asked Denise and Sandy to excerpt from the poem.  For this post I’ve excerpted even further, including just enough from the Barrow Street version to give you a feel for the original.

from 237 More Reasons to Have Sex

“Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but
now I found that there should be some added…”
—Cindy Meston, co-author of “Why Humans Have Sex,” Archives
of Sexual Behavior (Volume 36, Number 4, August 2007)

5. My vibrator was in the repair shop.
18. You were blocking the way to the refrigerator.\
20. You were my mayonnaise.
27. Because we’d put all our clothes in the washing machine.
42. Nin Andrews told me, “It always makes the corn
grow faster,” and I wanted to get into your Farmer’s
Almanac.
43. And I into your bales of hay.
44. I had a thing for Christian Bale in Velvet
Underground and The Prestige.
46. I’d just slurped my Moon Pie.
53. I had just seen Cicciolina in the Italian film
Monica: Il Vulcano di Piacere, and I was about to
erupt.
55. I was Bert the Cop in the remake of It’s a
Wonderful Life. After I see you float by I tell
George Bailey I’m going home “to see what the
wife is up to.”
59. I had these new grappling hooks I wanted to try
out.
62. I pretended you were Tom Cruise playing air
guitar in Risky Business.
63. I pretended I was Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s
couch.
64. I pretended I was the couch.
68. I felt nasty, guilty of appropriation, and sex made
me feel likable again.
71. As Karl Marx declared: “I’m the worst I ever had.”
82. It was because I liked to wink at our TV camera en
passant.
87. I’ve always had a thing for good boys in letter
sweaters.
88. I’ve always had a thing for letter carriers in blue
sweaters.
89. I was watching The Postman Always Rings Twice
on DVD when I heard the doorbell.
90. It was only me, but we enjoyed the serendipity, and
I gave you the ring I found in the Post Toasties box.
91. The palm reader foretold it all—the ring that
smelled like sugar, the chiming doorbell.
92. It was Tuesday and she knew we always did it on
Tuesday, and she liked to watch us from behind the
potted palm.
94. She found it more exciting as a simulcast.
109. There was an hour to go before curfew.
113. You promised me we could name our first
daughter Chastity, just like Sonny and Cher had.
123. Then you said, “Everything is about sex except sex,
which is actually about power and money,” making
me feel richly powerful.
127. Eating those apples, I felt young again.
142. I always got excited thinking of myself as Saint
Monica, who, as a young girl, was given in
marriage to a bad-tempered, adulterous pagan
named Patricius.
143. I think of you that way, too. Or at least I’d like to
get into the habit (if you know what I mean).
148. I also liked to play the other Monica—chubby
Monica of Beret-Humiliation, Hussy Monica,
Monica the Duped.
150. Sure I was a money-grubber, a gold-digger, but that
didn’t mean I didn’t love you.
176. Nin Andrews said, “We were cultivating one
another,” but I was cultivating Catholic guilt.
179. I was invested in making the right impression.
182. To celebrate the one-dollar win on the two-dollar
lottery ticket.
183. To celebrate our third place winner Sparky at the
track.
187. To celebrate the calibration between your orgasm
and mine.
188. To calibrate the leverage between your wants and
my abilities.
191. To conduct ourselves in a disrespectful manner.
193. I was going on intuition.
197. I was from the Kingdom of the Damaged.
198. I lived in a little shack just down the hill from you.
199. You were from the Kingdom of the Damaged.
200. Half way between the Kingdom of the Damaged
and the Hamlet of the Deranged.
201. You were as irresistible and complicated as a great
poem.
202. You were like a shimmering flower of eyes, hair
and petals.
211. I was wearing my new saddle shoes—and your
wingtips were all polished.
220. Still we sailed onward, navigating via bi-polarity.
225. How I longed to alphabetize your file cabinets.
231. “Ah, Monica!” gushed the ever-ardent Stanislav
Shmigegi. “I’ve found you at last!”
232. But was it too late? We weren’t as ferocious, even
though you were kind, ignoring my love handles.
233. And I admit: I’d changed, too. Same mask and
tightrope, one overshoe and my bicycle wheels on
backwards.
235. And then we remembered: that little place next to
the vibrator repair shop in line 5.

-- Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh

I like the poem’s inventiveness, its brio and its spirit of play, all of which depend to some extent on its extravagant length.  Taking off from the absurd pedantic epigraph, the poem rolls on, generating itself from line to line and seeming as inexhaustible as its subject.  I also like the way the poem moves, shifting nimbly as it embraces a grab bag of material including little film scenarios (invented and borrowed), miniature scripts for porn films and sex fantasies, word play, jokes, double entendres, tiny domestic scenes, and much much more.  As also fits the subject, the poem is having a very good time.

To see the complete original poem, you can go to
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/237-more-reasons-to-have-sex/5805819
If you are curious about which poet wrote what, andy’s part appears alone in Ernesta, in the Style of the Flamenco (forthcoming from Marsh Hawk Press, 2010).

-- Patricia Carlin

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Carl Phillips

Today I’m posting “Beautiful Dreamer” by Carl Phillips (Barrow Street, Summer 2005).  In the post-Thanksgiving lull there’s space to meditate on the poem, which does its own share of meditating.

Beautiful Dreamer

Here, the Missouri meets the Mississippi.  Two rivers:
one--in these parts, that’s called a marriage.  Sanctuary
makes the birds come closer, maybe -- don’t mistake
that for trust, when it’s only birds, egrets lately, the one
that hasn’t budged all day despite our shouting little
stasis-bird, fly, repeatedly at it; and the rest meanwhile

lifting their ghost majority suddenly up elsewhere, as if
with a shared indifference to chance and its convergences—
so ceremonial, all those wings departing, it can almost
look like privilege . . .

                                        This life, it’s one slow business of
erosion, he said softly.  What a thing to say.  The rivers
run like refrains from one of those hymns that both resist
and envy a bit the recklessness that any good spiritual
will sometimes give in to—Mine hour of bliss cometh
swift upon me, swift and silver, run the rivers, beside
the green ambivalence of trees that, by contrast, keep

going nowhere: cypress trees, the catalpa, its seedpods
hanging like shadow-icicles, they half-decorate, half
litter the light around them with punctuation that can
seem superfluous—and yet shadowless, what would
the light have done, for definition?  What did you think:
suffering

              ends here?  Or should?  Your wishes rise, take
their places in a line long and frangible, the line in turn
shifts like the particular oblivion that doomed cattle
equal—have always equaled.  You’d better wish again.

-- Carl Phillips

I admire the poem’s yoking of cool reflection to passages of extreme lyric beauty.  I’m also attracted to this poem’s discontinuities.  It moves between what is interior (emotion, meditation), and what is outside of human wishes and desires.  In the opening line, for example, there’s a seemingly objective description of a natural feature: “Here, the Missouri meets the Mississippi.”  But then description moves towards something less objective, more emotionally evocative.  “Two rivers: one” suggests human union.  The word “marriage” intensifies the suggestion that we’re dealing with human union, which the words “sanctuary”, “trust”, and “bliss” reinforce.  Yet the landscape and its creatures are also literal.  There are two rivers; and there are egrets, even though they lift up like a “ghost majority.”

The poem develops by way of metaphor; and throughout, it flirts with metaphor’s power to smooth out unbridgeable difference.  But ultimately, it resists that power.  Through the alchemy of metaphor the poem keeps almost making meanings; but it and we are balked in attempts to put the parts together in any finally neat or smooth way.

In the last section wishes rise like the egrets that lifted up in the poem’s opening stanza.  The line they rise in is “long and frangible,” and it “in turn / shifts like the particular oblivion that doomed cattle equal.”  One metaphor slips into another, like the flowing silver river; but all, like the “stasis-bird”, like the “green ambivalence of trees”, ”keep going nowhere.”  The world is not made in the shape of human desire.  “You’d better wish again.”

-- Patricia Carlin

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Jon Woodward

Today I’m posting “Salamander” (Barrow Street Winter 2005) by Jon Woodward.  The poem affects me strongly, and I wanted to try to figure out how it works.

Salamander

The janitor asked me how
to pronounce the creature’s name
& I said salamander for him.

He looked at it on the screen
and I looked at him.

Slide your legs into its tail I said.
I can’t he said as he did.
Dish your guts there into its cavity

of guts, I can’t he said (manifestly untrue
for he did so).  Mash the thing’s
name and yours I said together into

that irreversible hole I know you keep
And he did & it broke over his face

& flowed, water from the earth,
I can’t, I can’t, he said.

-- Jon Woodward

I admire Salamander’s economy of language and action, and the strategy of its development. So much happens, so surprisingly, in such a small space.

The title, the name of a garden-variety creature, sets me within a frame of natural reference; and the poem opens with a seemingly ordinary encounter.  A janitor asks a question of the speaker: “how to pronounce the creature’s name.”  So right away there’s a dialog between the janitor and the speaker, but also, between the salamander as a living, bodily creature, and its “name.”  And then it turns out it’s not a living creature – it’s a picture on a screen.  From there the poem rapidly morphs into a surreal fable, fraught with surprise and violence. 

The speaker knows something odd and terrifying about the janitor that the janitor himself doesn’t know –- “that irreversible hole I know you keep.” One reason the poem is so frightening is that we are in the janitor’s position, not the speaker’s. There’s an unusual reversal in the poem’s use of first and third person.  We would normally identify with a speaking “I” rather than with a more distanced “he” – but here we identify not with the coolly sinister speaker, but with the hapless janitor commanded to undertake a literally gut-wrenching action. The speaker orders the janitor to slide his legs into the creature’s tail, and “dish” his guts “there into its cavity // of guts” – a violence I feel in my own guts.  The speaker controls the narration, and also controls the janitor. 

Throughout the poem there’s tension – a ind of slipperiness – between animal creatureliness (including the janitor’s) and its opposite, the realm of signs: not an actual salamander, but its digital image; not the creature, but its name.  But neither nominalism nor virtual reality protects the janitor, who is violently merged with the salamander in a frighteningly physical way.  “Mash the thing’s / name and yours I said together”.  The impossible mashing occurs (“he did”), and it is not nominal but physical (“it broke over his face // and flowed, water from the earth”).  The poem ends with the unlucky janitor’s cries of protest -- his refusal to believe he can do what he is ordered to do and does do:  “I can’t, I can’t.”

I’ve pointed to a few poetic strategies.  But in the end, I feel the poem’s power remains mysterious – a little out of reach of any words but its own.

-- Patricia Carlin