jubilat has had
the great good fortune to have work included in The Best American Poetry a number of times -- a coup for the
magazine, and a great affirmation for the poets. In fact, I'm happy to say that
the very first poem we accepted was our first poem in the anthology, which I
still find hard to believe! Here it is:
MY ONE
and only: money
minus one. No noun
like a pronoun! -- best of all
the jealous kind. Come, come,
company doll, cide with a coin,
one moan, one
more, honey
bunch.
Of course, such lexical wizardry could come only from
Heather McHugh. She was one of my teachers -- many years ago I audited her
seminar at the University of Washington.
And what a seminar! I read poets like Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Michael Palmer,
and Yannis Ritsos for the first time, and looked at poems like Elizabeth
Bishop's "At the Filling Station" and James Merrill's "Charles
on Fire" in new ways, thanks to Heather’s brilliant readings. (I still
have her handout of poems, tucked away in the top shelf of my closet for
safekeeping.) Heather’s own poems are brilliant, and it’s amazing to see in
"My One" how much she makes of so little said, in a darkly swervy
take on the beloved -- multiple meanings included.
I thought by way of contrast I'd also include Sarah
Manguso's "Address to Winnie in Paris,"
from our third issue, which Robert Creeley picked for the 2002 Best American Poetry. If Heather's poem
creates the intricate workings of a tiny but momentously and mysteriously important
machine, Sarah's poem lays out in seemingly straightforward prose the logic of
its address -- but with enough accruing layers to infuse it with lyric power.
It is the kind of poem I believed in completely, word for word, the first time
I read it -- and I still do. And though it speaks at a distance from its
subject (and its subject's object), its take on love is as internal, and as
psychically and philosophically evocative, as that of the poem above.
ADDRESS TO WINNIE IN PARIS
Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He
loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris,
but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.
The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is
real. The Eiffel Tower
is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real.
None are necessary to your life.
Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a
thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing
to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.
The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing
that it has already happened.
Diderot wrote that the word is not the thing, but a flash in
whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined
with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern
society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.
In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of
further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell
for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in
betraying. These hells constitute the world.
A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and
it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My
teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a
little. In Bulfinch’s, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind
us that we live underwater.
Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and
their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us
for the one crime we all commit.
It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously
misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far
beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?
If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life,
it would be the one where the jailer says to Socrates I can see that you are a
good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.
These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from
loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.
Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the heart of everything that
is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has
no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.
What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.
