The Best American Poetry

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Rodney Jones

Okay, face it: the academic year is about to begin.  This ain’t no party.  This ain’t no disco.  This ain’t no fooling around.  Put away the sunscreen, dump all those plans you had for the Summer of Continuous Industry and Focus out back with the compost.  For many of us reading this blog, the creative writing workshop is heading straight at us, whether we’ll be teaching or taking one.  So I can think of no more appropriate poem to post today than this beauty by Rodney Jones, the tongue-in-cheek raconteur I am always eager to read, because just as you start to think you’re having way too much fun to be reading a serious poem, he plunges into the depths of something.   “The Ante” first appeared in New Ohio Review 10, Fall 2011.

 

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THE ANTE

First Workshop

 

A few sonnets about nature and the Greek gods.

Many free-verse poems in all lowercase letters.

Huey wrote of madness, Maddox of possums.

John played the sadness of empty stadiums.

Two berets, one silver-tipped cane, tweedy blazers.

In most Natalie poems, she took off her clothes.

The year of the Tet offensive.  Wallace in Montgomery.

We read James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Anne Sexton.

One Friday an ex-guidance counselor from Jasper

leapt through the window of a cafeteria, shouting

“I am the son of Jesus Christ!  Behold the rapture!”

But nothing much happened in Poetry Writing 301

until Walter C. Avery wrote that a black swan,

born in the infralapsarian brain of a garbage dump,

would crack the codes of the Southern Baptists.

And for this jack-surreal, mildly apocalyptic truffle

was taken for near genius material, practically

a second Edgar Allan Poe, until Sam Maisel

submitted his “Poem for The Worksheet Typist,”

which made everyone consider how scandalous

it must have seemed for her, a local woman,

a seamstress, and mother of Christian athletes,

to run across “I know you think you’ve seen it all before,

but this is duck rape, feathered love.”   And some

in the critique afterward, praised the line-endings;

one person even mentioned “The Second Coming,”

which, admittedly, made me blanch with envy,

so I had wanted to say something about how

sometimes the subject is not what you think

or the ones you imagine you are talking about

stand abruptly and begin to talk back to you,

but spring was bearing down on the workshop,

ripping out pages, grinding the opinions to nubs.

So much energy in the streets—demonstrations,

happenings, awakenings—so many instances

of sudden and involuntary enlightenment,

though mostly my friends and I spent our nights

on Sixth Street drinking beer at The Chukkar

or crouched in a huddle around a record player.

By the time I thought of Sam’s duck again,

May had slipped into June and June into July,

and what is poetry in a copper tubing factory?

A cloud would fan out around the tubes

as the crane lifted them from the soaping vats

after they had softened in the furnace.

My job was to crimp a point on each of them.

Then the next man would carefully run them

through a die.  Down the line I could see

the process repeating:  the furnace, the point,

the die—the tubes and men diminishing.

All night the saws screeched and whined.

The pointers clattered.  The press roared.

That was the beauty of it.  You could sing.

No one would hear.  You could say anything.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Some forty-five years later, the workshop Jones describes sounds very familiar, though I don’t see many berets these days.  The idea of poetry, “the beauty of it,” and I think Whitman would agree, is supposed to be our liberation from the phrase “supposed to be.”  You’re supposed to be freed of all those rules – social, idiomatic, topical – enough to say what you need to say.  Yet if we’re not careful the creative writing workshop becomes like any organized group of people, fraught with sidelong looks, with political and aesthetic pressures.  Is he allowed to say that?  Can she get away with that metaphor? Self-consciousness naturally interferes with pure expression, and writers can be pigeonholed even if only one or two of their poems memorably mentioned possums or nakedness.  Well, what is poetry in a copper tubing factory?  For the speaker in this poem, at this moment, perhaps it’s a relief to be away from people grouped about a table civilizing, judging, taming each other and imposing their views on what’s important to him.   We write in order to be read, sure.  But also, and maybe foremost, to sound our barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Rodney Jones has published nine books of poetry, the most recent being Imaginary Logic, which appeared last fall from Houghton Mifflin.  He has been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the Kingsley-Tufts Award.  He is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed -- thanks for the opportunity, David! -- presenting these poems from New Ohio Review all summer long, and I hope you’ll seek out the other good poems we publish. Meet you up on the roof.

--JAR

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Julie Hanson

“A Mile In” was selected by 2011 judge Nancy Eimers as the winner of our annual New Ohio Review Poetry Contest, and was published Fall 2011, in New Ohio Review 10.  What grabs me about this poem is the non-event it describes: a sudden and inexplicable hyper-awareness, prompted by an inherently insignificant announcement.

A Mile In

The snow had been with us for awhile
and was dingy and not well lit.
But the sun promised to come out.
The light fog lifting
against the skinny tree trunks
and the grounded limbs they’d lost
and the thick, half-detached vines
would lift off,
dissolved, by the end of our walk.
We’d taken the footbridge
across the creek and followed the bend
away from traffic and toward the west ridge.
We’d gone a mile in,
to where usually I begin to listen to
our progress in the twigs and gravel of the path,
and past this, and past my own
periodic reminders to the dog
to the short, uncomplicated songs
of winter birds.  And there,
near the spill of rocks in the creek
where the fog was still passing through branches
and a little farther and to the right 
where a stretch of tall grasses
received a wide gift
of sunlight and several cows,
the air that stood still
between the trees and shimmered
over the grasses filled with sound—
a big voice moving through 
a hundred thousand habitats—
and it said, “Attention in this area.
The following is a regular monthly
test of the Outdoor Warning System . . .”
It spoke from the west first,
sounding closer than it could be.
And it spoke from the southeast next.
This is a test,” it said, “only a . . . 
“This is a test . . ." it began again
from somewhere else.
The dog returned to me, cowering.
I’d wondered before 
without much curiosity,
where were those speakers housed,
were they towered, did they revolve?
Ordinarily heard in the yard
while I stood pinning laundry to the line,
the broadcast soon plunged and sank
into the noise of passing cars
and blown and rolling garbage cans
and faded like the little ringing
that emanates from construction sites.
But here, it seemed full minutes long
before my breath was back again in my chest,
and my dog’s breath, 
steady and rough, was back in hers
when the voice had left the air
between the trees, as had the fog.
At last a bird sounded from a twig.
At last a squirrel came down
and sent the dog.  And then,
made up of other sounds
I could not have singled out,
a normalcy rolled in.
Infinitesimal bits is all it was
 —quick beaks breaking up the peat,
the slow collision of a leaf landing, scooting
half an inch along a big flat rock,
a splat of excrement in white,
a flinch, a flap, a flick. But as it came it felt
to be a counter-vigilance.  Or like
the sound of consciousness.  The is.

> - - - - - - -

Those announcements, heard in the context of routine from the safety of the speaker’s backyard, were merely part of life’s backdrop, sound coming from a single direction.  But on this day she hears them “a mile in,” so deep into her walk that she has left the cluttered multi-tasking zone behind and reached a focused and meditative state. The first twelve lines are what I like to think of as gray language: words in the monosensual service of describing literal fact, every detail flat and purely visual.  Once we pass the point of her “beginning” to listen, released from the duty of reprimand or “reminder” – beyond civilization with its traffic and garbage cans as well as its expectations of comportment – the language lifts onto a more lyrical plane: we hear about “the spill of rocks”; “a wide gift/of sunlight”; the shimmering air; and the sudden imaginative perception of those “hundred thousand habitats.”  In this second state, her ears are alert to the several directions from which the announcements emanate and reverberate, and despite the announcement’s semantic reassurance, animal instincts kick in.  Both the speaker and her dog are alarmed to the point of breathlessness, suspended for an indeterminate pause.  Once signs of normalcy return, the world picks up where it had left off, but the speaker has arrived at a third level of awareness. We are privy again to multi-sensual details of natural events at an almost excruciating pitch of awareness.  She not only hears whisper-soft sounds distinguished as flinches, flaps, flicks; now she can make out the “sound of consciousness.”  The announcements have functioned here in the woods as an annunciation, delivering to the hearer a kind of transcendent alertness. Nothing in the usual sense of the word has happened in this poem. The speaker hears a sound she has heard many times before, and yet this time she feels changed by it. She recognizes only "infinitesimal bits” of some altered perception of the world.

   I admire the modulated gait of this poem, how it saunters casually into “the test,” freezes, and then emerges into a more deliberate movement, “a counter-vigilance.”  What exactly is meant by this?  Certainly not casual indifference, which would be the reverse of vigilance, but a progression beyond fearfulness toward a purity of focus and awareness per se.   It calls to mind “The Great Figure” by William Carlos Williams, in which a similar momentousness is achieved by the urban passing of a fire engine, a common enough occurrence.  There too, we feel the excitement of the witness and his sudden sense of urgency to find significance in the “unheeded” golden figure 5 clanging past. (The painter Charles Demuth also tried to capture that feeling, inspired by Williams’ poem, in his work The Figure Five in Gold.  It’s hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. )

    Robert Frost also has more than one poem about non-events; notable among them are “The Most of It,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” and “For Once, Then, Something.”  In each case the speaker reaches a heightened watchfulness, leaving us with ambiguity concerning the actual thing learnt or seen.  Emily Dickinson, in “There’s a Certain Slant of Light,” discovers “internal difference, where the Meanings Are” – which is a statement simultaneously, maddeningly, vague and precise.  That is, it feels precise, but upon examining what’s been illuminated, we have gained only questions.   When the light leaves, we are left feeling shaken as after a long journey; our values have shifted like the contents of an airplane’s overhead bin.

   The pleasures in Hanson’s poem sneak up on you – that description of the “little ringing/that emanates from construction sites” is superb, as is the line “quick beaks breaking up the peat” – and they leave me hyper-aware of the sounds and shapes of the place I’m now reading in, giving new meaning to the phrase living room.

   Julie Hanson’s first collection, Unbeknownst, won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2010 and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011.  I’m going to be watching for more of her work.

   See you next week, when if you just close your eyes and focus, you’ll be able to hear everywhere around you the little ringing of Back-to-School cash registers.  – JAR 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Lawrence Raab

Last week’s posting of Kevin Prufer's “A Giant Bird” put me in mind of “Little Bird” by Lawrence Raab, which first appeared in New Ohio Review 4, Fall 2008.  “Little Bird” has a deceptively straightforward movement, yet the steps taken are in effect stationary – that is, if a poem is a walk (as A.R. Ammons has eloquently argued), then this one’s a moonwalk.  Those two clouds passing unsuggestively, literally, passionlessly, seem to be props in a kind of still-life video that, by poem’s end, has turned itself inside out.  The speaker of the poem splits in two (just as a single cloud may have produced the two in the first line) and the reader is left wondering which one now has the floor.

- - - - - - - -

Little Bird

One cloud was following another
across a blue and passionless sky.
It was the middle of summer, far enough
from December for a man to feel indifferent
to the memories of cold, not yet close
enough to autumn to be caught up
in all its folderol about death.
Neither cloud looked like a whale
or a weasel, or any kind of fanciful beast.
All morning I’d felt my life dragging me down.
The view from my window refused to lift my heart.
The sight of a blank piece of paper
filled me with sadness.  I wanted to set
my life down in a comfortable chair, tell it
to take a long nap, and walk away as if
I were somebody else, somebody without a house
or a family or a job, but somebody who might
soon feel with a pang precisely the absence
of everything I had.  A cool breeze lifted
the curtains in the room where I was sitting.
A bird was singing.  Had it been singing for long?
Far off there were mountains, but I didn’t
wish to go there.  Nor did I yearn
to be standing by a lake, or walking
beside the tumult of the sea.
The little bird kept repeating itself.
I filled a glass with water and watched it tremble.

- - - - -

This has to be one of the best descriptions of depression, and coming out of it (more or less), in contemporary poetry.  Elizabeth Bishop’s “Five Flights Up” also narrates that fragile emergence beautifully – also while looking out a window.  In Raab’s poem, everything is weighted down, and most of the motion is directed downward, until the turn: the breeze lifts the curtains, a bird sings, mountains rise in the distance, the glass fills.  Has the “I” of the first half of the poem in fact left the building?  Is the speaker who becomes gradually conscious of his contentment (can we call it that?) none other than the “life” that has been patronised, set down in a comfortable chair?  Has the restless spirit left the second speaker behind to sit and take small pleasures in quotidian ordinariness?  Is the repetition of birdsong an irritant or a reassurance? Is the trembling of the water beautiful, or does he stare at it in a kind of drugged and apprehensive paralysis?  Or does the trembling merely suggest the instability of this mood, this identity?  I love that I can’t answer any of these questions definitively, but I also love that I believe I’m on the right track.  A good poem will make you feel that without giving you the satisfaction of absolutely knowing it.

Lawrence Raab is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including What We Don’t Know About Each Other (1993), selected for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award; Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems (2003); and The History of Forgetting (2009). He collaborated with Stephen Dunn on a chapbook of poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea (1999).  His poems have appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.

Till next week, when it will still -- thank Heaven -- be August.  –JAR 

 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Kevin Prufer

Today’s poem is an eerie parable, fairly characteristic of Kevin Prufer’s recent work.  His poems are haunting because they are genuinely and fascinatingly haunted. His speakers don’t seem to be thinly disguised versions of Prufer –  rather, they seem to express different moods of a postmodern Tiresias, emoting with a stunned but mutedly down-to-earth credibility.  They speak with a dual awareness of their isolation and the fact that their feelings and impressions must also represent those of others. Perhaps the best introduction to my favorite kind of Prufer voice is to imagine a Greek play’s chorus collapsed into a single omni-reflective persona, placed in the context of a recently collapsed political/cultural system, in an alternately snowy or sooty landscape stripped of natural fertility and even stability on the geological, planetary level.  I could go on – but I’d rather you just read the following poem, which appeared in New Ohio Review 8, Fall 2010. 

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A Giant Bird

Its great heart pounded like the distant sea
wounding itself against the cliffs.

+

We lived in its shade. 

Sometimes, my daughter ran her fingers along that part of the breast
that swagged low over our camp. 

 

It’s beautiful, she said, smoothing a feather’s twig-like barbs,
gazing past our mountain toward the burning cities.

 +

What kind of bird is it?
                                  Some feathers were tawny, others tinged a perfect white.
Is it a sparrow?         
                      It may be a sparrow.
Is it an owl?
                  I can’t see its face.
An eagle? I think it’s an eagle.
                                           We often played this game.

 +

The breezes made trails of the smoke
that rose from the distant burning cities.

Those people worshipped golden eagles.
We saw the statues winking on their plazas in the sunset. 

+

Sometimes, it would soar beyond the mountains to the sea,
its black shadow slipping over the valleys.

But always it returned by evening, settling gently over us again. 

+

I knew it was an eagle
from the talons curling beneath its down, 

and the set of its enormous wings.

 +

I’d become accustomed to the fingers of smoke
that rose on windless summer days. 

What are they doing?
                            They’re killing each other.
Why are they killing each other?
The bird shifted on blood-stained talons, resettled itself.
Why are they killing each other?
Their golden eagles glistened in the sun. 

+

Sometimes, one city had acquired all the golden eagles. 
Sometimes another city had them, or a third.
Sometimes, the golden eagles were distributed evenly among them all. 

+

Those days,
         we did not worry about the rain, nor the heat of the sun,
except when the bird rose from our cliffs
and vanished in the direction of the sea
where, we knew, it ate.

 +

Later,
           we learned it fed on men who fished in boats along the shore.
Later,
           it ate captured soldiers
chained to highly decorated rafts and set adrift. 

+

You will have predicted by now
that one day the bird did not return.

 

+ 

All month, the cities in the valley had been quiet,
as if they’d forged a peace. 

The weather, too, was sultry and unshifting.

Then up from the distant cliffs that tumbled toward the sea,
a lighter plume of smoke arose,

and when the sea winds turned, we smelled upon them burning flesh.

 +

 After they’d devoured it—
                                          after they’d stripped the meat from its bones,
after they’d fed cubes of its heart to their dogs,
after they’d hung its talons from the doorways
of their holy places—
                                    they built from its bones a scaffolding,
then fastened to it feathers made of worn-out sails. 

+

Its beak they built from the bound-together hulls
of two wrecked ships. 

+

These days,
        there’s peace in the newly gentle cities,
and freedom I had not expected.

The valley is cool when the winds rise up from the sea. 

Sometimes I walk the long path from my house near the east gate,
down the ravine and up the other side, 

where I come across what remains of our home.
It towers over me, its canvas ragged and whipping in the breeze, 

its lashed-together bones grown white and creaking.

 +

You people with your fancies and distractions
don’t remember how it brooded over this valley,

how lovely it must have been, talons outstretched,
diving seawards in your afternoons.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - 

Spooky and serene at once, Prufer’s speaker seems simultaneously to be trapped inside the circumstances and distanced from them.  It’s got some of the dreamy narrative aggression of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” but with a quasi-futuristic chill. 

Once again, I couldn’t get the lineation to behave within the blog template, so if you’d like to see the poem lineated as Prufer intended, please visit New Ohio Review’s website and click on issue 8 (www.ohio.edu/nor).  You can also hear him read it on our NORaudio page.

Kevin Prufer is the author of five books of poetry and the editor of four anthologies, the most recent of which are In a Beautiful Country (Four Way Books, 2011), National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008), New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; with Wayne Miller) and Dunstan Thompson: on the Life and Work of a Lost American Master (Unsung Masters Series, 2010; w/ D. A. Powell).  Prufer is also Editor-at-Large of Pleiades, and Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

See you next week, you people with your fancies and distractions.  – JAR 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Steven Cramer

The following poem by Steven Cramer first appeared in New Ohio Review 6, Fall 2009.

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                    Bad

 It got bad; pretty bad; then not
so bad; very bad; then back to bad.
Jesus, let’s let things not get even worse. 

A weird fall. Nearly ninety
one day, leaf mold making our house
all red eyes and throats.  Don’t think 

about Thanksgiving, but hope
for a decent Halloween.  Everywhere
gas-powered leaf-blowers growling— 

Christ, let’s let things not get even worse.

 

- - - - - - - -

The first stanza demonstrates what I feel to be the semicolon’s natural tendency to drain drama out of any expression. The semicolon always seems to need a lift, maybe a cup of coffee, or Zoloft.  Whatever the mood may be, a semicolon stunts it, patiently, by increments.  It's so drably un-final, just an incomplete full stop without any conviction. It tells you something more needs to be said, but not urgently.  Just wait; there’s more; I’ll get there, it seems to say. Maybe I’ve changed my mind, it dithers. Enough of my antipathy toward a perfectly useful punctuation mark, but you must admit that first stanza’s failed efforts at precision feel dispirited, as though the speaker is so worn out by the relentless nuances of badness (“not so bad” is as good as it gets) that he can’t muster the energy to come up with another negative word.  And of course we expect something momentous: genocide, icecaps melting, famine…   Whereas the only example revealed to the reader is a few bad cases of hayfever.  I like being surprised by the mundanity of the condition that worsens.  Surely that’s not the only “it” referred to earlier? Maybe; maybe not; but the other accruing bads are probably just as pedestrian.  It’s the accumulation without full respite that overwhelms.

   The increasing intensity (however wan, however enervated) of the speaker’s dread is marked by the progression of “Jesus” in the third line to “Christ” in the final line, as we move from the figure as man to the figure as deity.  Are both names taken in vain? I don’t think so – there’s palpable, prayerful misery behind each utterance, reinforced by the faintly biblical echo in the use of “let” in both lines.  Then there’s the lovely low parade of growling w’s in the penultimate line that helps to augur the apparently inevitable worse.  But the clincher that makes this poem memorable for me is Cramer’s exquisite syntax in “let’s let things not get even worse” as opposed to the more idiomatic “let’s not let things get even worse.”  The latter suggests we have agency; whereas the poem’s syntax reminds us that we have little if any control; all we can do is let things happen and hope for, well – not the worst. Maybe we can’t fully engage in true Thanksgiving, but at least we can have a decent Halloween, scaring ourselves with things that are more dreadful even than our semicoloned lives.

   Is this a downer of a poem?  Not to my mind: its playfully hyperbolized teeth-gritting has a tonic effect.  The tone attained here, in a very short space, reminds me somewhat of Samuel Beckett; of Steven Wright; of Eeyore on a good day. 

   Steven Cramer is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande, 2004).  He directs the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Lesley University.

   See you next week, which let’s let be better!  --JAR

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Denise Duhamel

The poem I’m presenting today is by Denise Duhamel, one of America’s most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry.  I love the way she’ll grab hold of a thought that looks straightforward, then turns into an ornery comet – the way she’ll hang on while it whips her all over the place, into Barbie-littered playrooms, thumping down escalators, into classrooms, through ditches, careening along the waxed floors of hospitals, whizzing past billboards, and swooping back into the bathroom where she’s quietly washing her father’s hair.  These veerings appear at first digressive, but Duhamel always finds, and finely renders, their harmony.  She hands over the uncensored workings of her mind with a fidelity to truth that is every bit as hard on her as it is, finally, redemptive.  Here she contemplates the transcendence of love over its invariable – well, in some cases – most cases – surely not mine – ephemerality.

- - - - - - - - -

OLD LOVE POEMS

 

I can burn the pictures, but not the poems

since I published them in books, which are on shelves

in libraries and in people’s homes.  Once my cousin told me

not to write anything down because the words would be there forever

to remind me of the fool I once was.  My cousin

was the little dog on the Tarot card, barking at the Fool’s heels

as I headed right towards the cliff.

                                                 When James Taylor and Carly Simon

broke up, I was shocked.  Taylor’s drug use or not,

couldn’t they work it out?  I was in college

and, though I didn’t really believe in marriage,

I believed in them. How could they part

having written those love songs?  And how could they go on

singing those love songs after the divorce?

                                                                        But now, I know.

After time, when they reached for those notes,

there wasn’t really a beloved there anymore,

just a strand of hair each left behind

on the other’s scarf or pillow, a cologne trigger that transcended

into something more real than they were,

the lovers themselves ephemeral muses.

                                                                            It’s still hard

for me to accept the notion of love outliving the lovers—

a notion so romantic, it’s unromantic.  Hard to accept

that those big lumps of affection

would find alternate places to stick,

that Simon and Taylor would be swept away and marry

others.  That need is not so much a deficit

                                                                          as an asset,

like a wallet that keeps manufacturing its own dollar bills

even after it’s been robbed of everything.

Or to say it another way: the plant that will bloom

despite being uprooted.  The new seedling that will pop up.

It’s hard to believe when you are down to your last penny,

when the soil is dry and rocky and full of weeds,

                                                                                     when your love

is freeze-dried into a metallic pouch and you are full of snarky rage.

You look back at a love poem you wrote and ask:

did I really feel this way?  Even if you no longer remember tenderness,

even if the verse was simply artifice, your idea of love, a subspecies

you made up to tag and define that one poor sap, you read the poem

again, grateful, holding the words in your hands like a bunch of flowers.

- - - - - - - -

Two moves in this poem I could not have predicted: instead of grumbling about what went wrong with the love she began by mentioning, she turns to marvel that love can be so portable – that it is the desire for attachment that compels us, not the love object, and that this desire is what ultimately survives, making the love in effect still true – “so romantic that it’s unromantic.”  We have to agree, it’s disappointing, until the comet yanks her a bit farther so she lands on the inexhaustible aspect of that compulsion to love, a compulsion so thrillingly fertile and pleasurable, she gives us two or three metaphors for it.  This need is so deep and powerful that it multiplies itself even as we describe it.    

This poem appeared in New Ohio Review 11, our most recent issue (Spring 2012), but until today I hadn’t recognized the allusion in its last line, which adds to its poignancy.  Certainly Carly Simon wrote many songs addressed to her husband, James Taylor, but the song alluded to, “Loving You’s the Right Thing to Do,” is unabashedly autobiographical.  The song acknowledges that the woman’s beloved is a songwriter who has had trouble with women before – they drove you or you drove them crazy – so it’s clear she is perfectly aware of his faults and the likelihood of problems ahead.  But Simon’s rich, yearning-drenched alto is so insistent that he’s “the one,” she seems to be successfully convincing herself.  

            Hold me in your hands like a bunch of flowers. 

            Set me moving to your sweetest song.

            And I know what I think I’ve known all along:

            Loving you’s the right thing to do. 

So, tell me again, why do fools fall in love?  There ought to be a book that would explain it: Being a Fool for Dummies.  I don’t mean you, of course.  Everyone falls in love.  The fools are just the ones that write it down. 

 Denise Duhamel is the author of numerous collections of poetry; among the most recent are Kaching! (2009) and Queen for a Day: New and Selected Poems (2001).  Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry volumes several times. 

 See you next Sunday. (JAR)

 

 

P.S. My efforts to lineate this poem correctly were defeated by the blog’s narrow format.  If you want to see Duhamel's "Old Love Songs" proper-like, you can always order the issue or view it on the website of New Ohio Review:   http://www.ohio.edu/nor

 

 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Laura Read

The Associated Press just reported that so far during the year 2012, more soldiers have committed suicide than have been killed in combat.  I can’t think of anything more depressing than that. Reading this fact reminded me of a poem by Laura Read we published in the Fall 2010 issue of New Ohio Review:

- - - - - - - - -

                  How to Be Sad

You’ll be heavier in the mornings, waterlogged.

Don’t try to put on anything from the upside down

clean clothes basket.  Just wear yesterday’s pants.

There’s no need to bring in the paper.  Or sweep

the dead bees from the windowseat.  When

the doctor asks for your pain number, stick

with 2—it’s best to leave everything as it was.

Wish again that you could live in that prefab

house you tour at the fair. It doesn’t matter

what it’s made of.  You love the vacuum stripes

in the carpet, which is taupe, always difficult

to describe.  There’s a plasma television,

a microfiber sectional, and in the kitchen plastic

steaks on each plate at the table, covered in fake

hollandaise sauce.  After you eat, you’ll still

have dinner for tomorrow, and you can just

go to bed where there’s a book already chosen

for you on the woman’s side.  Apparently, you like

romance.  And if you’re not tired, the fair’s always

there.  You love the ferris wheel, the funnel cakes,

and especially the goldfish man, but you never

thought you’d win one of those bags with the small

fish swimming inside it, his life hanging

in the balance of your hands.  And there’s no

bowl back at the house.   So you’ll have to stay up

all night holding him, in case he panics.

- - - - - - - - -

 

Only after reading the whole poem did I become fully conscious of those unsettling line breaks – the phrases seem to turn away abruptly and scoot to the other side, like fish seeking egress from their bowl.  Or bag.  This poem is utterly convincing in its rhetorically instructional description of a woman so overwhelmed with despondency she can’t muster the energy or motivation to do anything, make food, change into clean clothes (they’re clean, she managed that, but only to dump them, as if she’d collapsed before the Herculean prospect of putting them away); she can’t make any decisions, decide how much pain she’s in, even choose what kind of person she is, which book she might like.  “Apparently, you like / romance.”  The forced cheeriness of the fantasy is devastating: “And if you’re not tired, the fair’s always there.”  It brings to mind that awful Petula Clark song, “Downtown.”  When you’re alone, and life is making you lonely, you can always go… Downtown! The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, and go DOWNtown!  I first heard this song as a child of six or seven, and I remember thinking how odd grownups were, if bright lights and traffic sounds could make them forget their misery.  In Laura Read’s poem, the prefab house is appealing for its orderly, controlled, vacuum-striped and stable environment.  The idea that even a small fish might have to rely on the speaker for anything is terrifying to her, so naturally she deflects her imminent panic onto the fish.  A delightfully depressing poem.

   When I typed this poem to post it – I always type the poems rather than go hunting for the original Word document we must have received in the New Ohio Review office years ago, partly because I hate to bother Damien Cowger, my already overworked Managing Editor, partly because good poems are fun to type up – I had my own little moment of panic.  What could I say about Laura Read’s work?  Our contributor’s note from Fall 2010 says she teaches at Spokane Falls Community College, and has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review and Floating Bridge Review, but surely that must be outdated, and I hadn’t enough time left to try to contact her and get an update. So I saddled up the ol’ search engine and discovered to my delight that she won the 2011 Donald Hall Prize of the AWP Award Series in Poetry for her book Instructions for my Mother’s Funeral (coming out this fall from Univ. of Pittsburgh Press), selected by Dorianne Laux.   I’m so glad to learn this!  I look forward to reading more of her work.

   And to seeing you, dear Reader, next Sunday.  (JAR)

 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Angie Estes

When I was a child, I often searched the sky for rainbows and the meadows for 4-leaf clover, two things that never satisfied me – the former were never as bright as I had anticipated, the latter never showed up.  Now I don’t hunt for the transcendent, preferring to be ambushed by my thrills, like the kind evoked so vividly in the poem I’m presenting today: the sight of birds gathered by the hundreds, even thousands, swooping in rapturous patterns that alter with a speed and beauty that make you catch your breath.  Angie Estes’ poem “I Want to Talk About You” alludes to John Coltrane’s performance of that Billy Eckstine song (there are several recordings of live performances by Coltrane of that tune; you can find some on YouTube).  What I love about this poem, which first appeared in New Ohio Review 7, Spring 2010, is not only its apt comparison of the birds’ manic patterning and Coltrane’s transcendently changeable melodic and extramelodic flights, but also Estes’ gorgeous linguistic swelling and ebbing, mimetic of Coltrane’s cadenza.  She is one of the few contemporary poets whose lines make you glad to be a native English speaker.  Think of how many poets “adore Hopkins” but whose work shows no evidence of loving the language!  His poems insist we do.  As for the starlings, though one can’t be certain they are at play, there is an abandon in their flight-jamming that truly makes them look, as a jazz musician would say, “real gone.”

- - - - - - - -  

I WANT TO TALK ABOUT YOU 

 

when starlings swell over Otmoor, east of Oxford, as the afternoon
light starts to fade. Fifty flocks of fifteen to twenty starlings, riffraff

who have spent the day foraging in fields and gardens suddenly rise
like a blanket tossed into the sky, a revelling that molts sorrows to roost 

rows, roost rows to sorrows as they soar through aerial corridors and swerve
into the shape of a cowl that lengthens to a woolen scarf wrapping

and wrapping, nothing at the center but throat: thousands of single black notes
surge into a memory called melody, the lovers damned but driven on

by violent winds in the cold season when starlings’ wings bear them
along in broad and crowded ranks, extended cadenzas to pieces that 

never get played, brochure for the flared tip that begins with the tongue
and lips of the embouchure wrapping the saxophone’s slurred 

howl, scrawled signature of the sky. Thousands fly but never collide
in their pre-roost ritual, Dante’s long list of God’s works excited 

raked left and right over leafless branches of trees until they
drop like the bodies of suicides, draped on thorns of the wild

thickets their cast-off souls become, unable to rise the way a wave
nearing shore will crest, something on the tip of its tongue 

thrown back before it breaks and splays, starlings laid down
like the wave’s rain of sand or words falling

out of a sentence: art slings, we called them, grass lint, snarl gist, gnarls
sit. Art slings them this way, last grins, art slings swell, rove 

over, red rover, red rover, send artlings right over, artlings
rove, moor to swell, write Otmoor all over

 

                                                                          after John Coltrane

- - - - - - - - 

The complicated emotional swings in this poem veer swiftly from rapturous (“reveling that molts sorrows”) to nearly suicidal.   Perhaps it will help to give some context to the italicized line after “lovers damned but driven on/by violent winds”: here is the passage from Dante’s Inferno that contains it, which Estes appears to have drawn from Allen Mandelbaum’s translation: 

And as, in the cold season, starlings’ wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks,
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:
now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
There is no hope that ever comforts them –
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.
And just as cranes in flight will chant their lays,
arraying their long file across the air,
so did the shades I saw approaching, borne
by that assailing wind, lament and moan. . . (Inf. V, 40-49)

 

   Angie Estes is the author of four books, most recently Tryst (Oberlin Univ. Press, 2009) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Her earlier poetry collections are Chez Nous (2005), and Voice-Over (2002), and The Uses of Passion (1995).  She teaches at Oklahoma State University.

   See you next week with another gem from the archives of this young magazine.  (JAR) 

 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Mark Kraushaar

Perhaps the hardest thing to do when on a roll is to get off it with panache.  I’ve read work by so many poets who can beautifully deliver a riveting description of something occurring between humans, without knowing quite how to make an exit, and stick their landing. The following poem by Mark Kraushaar does so beautifully.  It originally appeared in New Ohio Review 7, Spring 2010. 

- - - - - - - - 

                     Cake 

 

She’s in the first booth left of the planters.

She’s been waiting an hour now.

She’s been waiting at the Watertown Family Buffet

with her little girl who’s dreamed up

some kind of a costume:

giant glasses, backwards cap, taffeta gown

which is clearly for him, for Al who’s

just now arriving, finally, and now

he’s seen them, and now

he’s walking over, and now

he’s standing there, standing there,

husband and father, or boyfriend and father,

or boyfriend and father figure, except

he’s way too late,

he’s too late times two and the party’s over

thank-you, and, no, they’re not having,

not the grin, not the story, not the hug.

 

The woman gets up, and then, face baggy with patience,

she nods to the girl who scoots out too,

and they exit together.

So over the chips and spilt dip,

over the drained Pepsi and big white cake

with “AL” in caps and quotes

he watches them go,

looks out at the parking lot,

opens his book.

Here’s the waitress with her pad and pen.

And what in hell is he reading?

- - - - - - -

These details evoke far more backstory than you’d think possible in a mere 28 lines.  I feel I know this Al, this long-suffering woman and her keen-to-please daughter, and I can guess how many times Al’s pulled this sort of thing before.  What interests me in particular is the way the final line suddenly foregrounds the speaker and his emotional involvement without going so far as to detract from the power of the scene itself. This has also been done brilliantly by Thomas Hardy and C.K. Williams (several in Flesh and Blood come to mind).  We see that Al is not opening the book to save face, because he has not been glancing self-consciously at the people around him in the restaurant, but rather looking out at the parking lot.  Apparently he really is able to reenter his book after such an event, with such a cake still sitting there.  Is he so callous as that, or is the book that good?  Is the speaker judging him, or envious?  I admire the open-endedness of the final line as much as I do the casual richness of description that precedes it.

     Mark Kraushaar’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry as well as Poetry Daily. His first collection, Falling Brick Kills Local Man, was published in 2009 by University of Wisconsin Press, and a new collection, The Uncertainty Principle, appeared from Waywiser Press this year as winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize.  

    Till next week, fellow aficionados of the lyric moment!  (JAR) 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Alex Green

Alex Green’s poem “Blue Door Option” was first published in New Ohio Review 6, Fall 2009.  It’s wonderfully paced and narrated with an authenticity of weirdness that I find terrifically appealing.  When students ask how to know if one’s poem should be lineated or in prose format, I invariably say a lot of words that amount to a mystified shrug.   What I want to do is point to a poem like this one and say, See?  When it is a prose poem it just IS one. Prose poems aren’t distinguished just by the primacy of narrative, though certainly that’s part of it. They tend to create a headlong momentum and upwelling, an unstoppable sweep, which is a bit more difficult to achieve in lines. The very act of lineating can promote a sense of decelerating deliberation -- a somehow more measured effect.  (Of course it’s foolish to generalize, therefore I’m compelled to do it.) 

   I love the fear expressed in this poem that an unwell magician might leave a trick un-undoable; and the idea of a magician’s falsetto “you could feel across your shoulders,” as if he could palpably throw his voice.  If that’s true, then surely Roy Orbison was a magician too.  Actually, I thought immediately of Andy Kaufman when I first read this poem, so it was gratifying for me to learn today that Kaufman also went by the name of Nathan McCoy. 

Here’s Alex Green’s poem. 

Blue Door Option

Everybody knew the magician was dying and this would be his last party. And it was too bad because all of his ex-girlfriends were there—even Stacey Mitchell, the news anchor who he had lived with on a houseboat when he held his breath for the whole summer.  He was taking requests. He would do whatever we wanted. He would make birds explode from his chest, steal wallets from anyone in the room, build a house of cards on the back of his hand—all we had to do was ask. But no one did, because everyone was sure he would crack in the middle, fall to the floor and leave something suspended they could never fix. So instead of magic, he sang an old Nathan McCoy song about losing something in Hawaii. He had a falsetto you could feel across your shoulders. His hands were thin, he hadn’t slept in two months, and you were the only one who knew a few weeks earlier he had parked his car somewhere and never saw it again. When he was too sick to come out for his own garage sale, he told you to give everything away. You watched people take his couch, his television, his doves, and you felt like you were officiating a robbery. If you’re a decent magician, he once told you, when you die people will miss you. But if you’re a really great magician, they’ll always think you’re alive and in the middle of the best trick of all time. Even though you watched him fade in front of a machine, heard his breathing disappear like a radio station slipping off the air, you still look for him. In the eyes of the teller at the bank, in the stands at minor league baseball games, in the credits of independent movies from Iceland—you suspect everyone. He was that good.

- - - - -
Alex Green is the editor of the online music magazine www.caughtinthecarousel.com and the author of The Stone Roses (Continuum), which is a cultural and political examination of the legendary Manchester band's debut album. His collection of poems “The Wide Gates Of The Lowlands” has just been completed, and he recently collaborated with director Tom DiCillo (Living In Oblivion, When You're Strange) on a screenplay called Years Of Summers.

--  Be virtually seeing you next week!  (JAR)