The Best American Poetry

Larkin, Uncensored (On Human Bondage)

Larkin wrote this poem -- which he characterized as a "cri du cock" -- in 1943, when he was 21:

I would give all I possess
(money, keep, wallet, personal effects, and articles of dress)
To stick my tool
Up the prettiest girl in Warwick King's High School.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Happy 25th Birthday Best American Poetry: Save the Dates for Launch Readings in Boston and NYC

Available for pre-order:

 Launch readings hosted by David Lehman and Robert Pinsky and featuring poets included in this volume:

April 4, 6:00 PM:  Metcalf Building, George Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Avenue, Second Floor, Boston, MA. With  Robert Pinsky, David Lehman, Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips, Lloyd Schwartz, Charles Simic, Rosanna Warren, and Franz Wright.   Details here.

April 11, 7:00 PM:  Tishman Auditorium, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY. With Robert Pinsky, David Lehman,  Mark Doty, Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard, Marie Howe, Major Jackson, Lawrence Joseph, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sarah Manguso, J.D. McClatchy, Paul Muldoon, Meghan O'Rourke, Tom Sleigh, Susan Wheeler, and C. K. Williams. Details here.

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from Donna Seaman's review in Booklist:

Each year a new volume in the Best American Poetry series, founded by poet Lehman, appears, each edited by a distinguished American poet, the likes of A. R. Ammons and Amy Gerstler. To celebrate the series' twenty-fifth anniversary, Lehman asked former poet laureate Pinsky to select 100 "best of the best." The result is a concentrated, high-caliber, and exhilarating overview of the intensity and artistry that have made American poetry so splendidly varied and vital since 1988. . . . Pinsky, an inspired poetry advocate, explains that his criteria were "ear, imagination, and urgency". . .Given the depth of Lehman's and Pinsky's opening essays and the concise poet biographies and the poet's original statements about the writing of the poems, this is an anthology of broad scope, serious pleasure, and invaluable illumination.
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-- sdh

Ammons 5: Speaking [by Roger Gilbert]

For my last post on Ammons, I thought I’d discuss the textual history of one of his very late poems, “Speaking.”  Our genial host here at The Best American Poetry blog, David Lehman, arranged for this poem to be published in The New Yorker a few months after Ammons’s death in February of 2001.  He also included it in the excellent selection of Ammons’s poems that he edited in 2006 for the Library of America.  Extremely attentive readers may have noticed a small but significant textual discrepancy between the poem’s two published versions.  Here is the poem as it appeared in The New Yorker:

Speaking

 

There will be rains I’ll need

no shelter from; cold winds

no walls need broach the chill of for me:

 

when fire splits seams

out of the ground, I won’t

need the warmth at all; lone, ever,

 

when you who have given

your days to me, when you

come close, I won’t sense

 

that last approach: not

knowing how to speak,

I’ll say nothing.

And here is the poem as it appeared in the Library of America Selected Poems:

Speaking

 

There will be rains I’ll need

no shelter from; cold winds

no walls need brook the chill of for me:

 

when fire splits seams

out of the ground, I won’t

need the warmth at all; love, even,

 

when you who have given

your days to me, when you

come close, I won’t sense

 

that last approach: not

knowing how to speak,

I’ll say nothing.

The variable phrase occurs at the end of the sixth line: “lone, ever” or “love, even.”  (The substitution of “brook” for “broach” is a more straightforward correction of a typist’s error.)  Three drafts of the poem exist: two manuscripts and one typescript with handwritten emendations.  In both manuscripts the phrase is ambiguous and could be interpreted either as “lone, ever” or “love, even,” though in one it looks more like the first and in one more like the second.  What initially tipped the balance in favor of “lone, ever” is the fact that the typescript contains that phrase.  For various reasons I won’t go into, I’m quite certain that the typescript was made not by Ammons himself but by an assistant; however, the fact that he made other changes to the typescript but allowed the phrase to stand would seem to suggest that he meant it to be part of the poem. 

 

This may in fact be a case of a typo establishing itself in the poet’s own mind as superior to the original phrase; the most famous instance is Yeats’s acceptance of “soldier Aristotle” in place of “solider Aristotle” in “Among School Children.”  After discussing the line several times, however, David and I eventually concluded that “love, even” was in fact what Ammons must have meant when he first wrote the poem.  Though “lone, ever” undeniably resonates with Ammons’s abiding sense of solitude (see my post on the hermit lark), “love, even” performs a more integral function in the poem, completing its catalogue of forces to which the dead speaker will be immune: rains, winds, fire, even love. 

 

The poem’s last line also underwent significant change.  In one manuscript it appears as “I won’t have anything to say”; in the other Ammons changed it to “I will have nothing to say”; and in the typescript he crossed that line out and substituted “I’ll say nothing.”  In general his revisions moved toward greater economy, and I believe that this last version would have been his final choice.  But in the absence of an authorized text, editors must make their own choices, based on the evidence at their disposal and their knowledge of the author’s work and mind.  The fact that this poem foretells its author’s withdrawal into the silence of death makes more poignant the necessity of choosing his words for him.

 

(ed note: this post first appeared on June 21, 2008)

Related articles

Ammons 2: Ezra and Elbert [by Roger Gilbert]

Archie Ammons and the Poetry of Hymns [by Roger Gilbert]

Ammons 3: Mechanism [by Roger Gilbert]

Ammons 4: The Hermit Lark [by Roger Gilbert]

Larkin, Uncensored (On Donald Davie)

To the tune of "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do," this 1974 epistle (unsent) to Professsor Donald Davie:

Davie, Davie,
Give me a bad review;
That's your gravy,
Telling chaps what to do.
Forget about style and passion,
As long as it's in the fashion --
But let's be fair, it's got you a chair,
Whcih was all it was meant to do.

The last lines are the poem's weak link and Larkin 's friend Kingsey Amis suggested that he change them to "But it's got you a chair, hich, let's be fair, / Was the most that you had in view."

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

The Quotidian, Notebooks, Diaries, and Journals by Elaine Fletcher Chapman

When at home, I arrive at my desk at the appointed time, search for my fountain pen, locate my notebook and begin with date, location, the time of day, and sometimes the weather. Often I read my last entry: It feels like spring even though everything is dead or this morning the word, Selah or Chanel Le Veverns: 483 Vendetta or in Ghent where I raised my children.

 A few weeks ago Miriam O’Neal sent me a card from The Writer’s Series, on the front, “Dear Ella,” a pastel by Deborah DeWit Marchant, 1994. For several days after reading and rereading her note, I cut the card in half and taped it to the front and back of my notebook. The image of a desk, paper, lamp, and an unmade bed in the corner, blues against my purple notebook.  On the back a quote by Thoreau, “The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”

 Most writers I know work from notebooks. I carry mine with me, as Jason Shinder was known to advise, along with a folder of poems I am currently revising. Even on my shorter commutes, I carry the pair. They remind me of my heart’s desire no matter what I am doing or where I am going. Is there a difference between a writer’s notebook, a journal, a commonplace book or a diary? I really don’t think so unless the intent is so named. They address the everyday, the quotidian. They may record lists of books read and unread, grocery lists, quotes, receipts, reviews, found objects, letters, beginnings of poems, lines of fiction, descriptions of art, memories, arguments with lovers, photographss, the flow of tides, phases of the moon, words and their origins, and often momentos.

I keep a notebook of found objects. It begins with the poem Quarantine by Eavan Boland, then a reflection on the house fire, a collage of words, then Keats, I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination, then poems by Mary Oliver and Charles Simic, an email from Stephan Sandy, a photo of The Gates in NYC, an eucalyptus leaf from California... ending with photographs of Three Ridges Wilderness.

 On my desk this very moment is Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary edited by her husband, Leonard Woolf and published by Harcourt Brace & Company originally in 1954, 1953. My copy is worn, dog-eared and marked. There are many pages bookmarked with odd scrapes of papers. On Tuesday, September 18^th Virginia wrote, a thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing. On Tuesday, December 20^th she wrote, We are in the black heart of a terrific frost. And at the heart of all journals: On Saturday, February 27^th she records, Who am I, what am I, and so on; these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact- a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. Woolf as touchstone as, diviner, as sister.

 Alexander Johnson has written two extraordinary books: The Hidden Writer Within: Diaries and the Creative Life published in1997 by Doubleday and Leaving a Trace: On Keeping A Journal published in 2001 Little Brown. The first book gives an historical survey of seven different women and the second a practical guide. The bibliographies are extensive. I began reading about women’s lives as recorded in their notebooks early on. These confessions, reflections and musings have continuously informed my writing life and helped me adjust to feeling other.

 Anne Doolittle, Miriam O'Neal and I started rotating a notebook five years ago. Collage, letters, poems, favorite quotes. They have been waiting it's return for two years.

Journal of Solitude by May Sarton opens with Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple…I read and realize, I am home. A handbook, a guide. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And this has been a bad week. I have accomplished next to nothing, wasted time… and been depressed. A luncheon on Wednesday did not help. Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the mornings work.  I often write in my notebook, begin again, begin here.

March 22, 2013, Onancock, 6:25am. A heavy frost. The sun is barely risen. On my desk, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Douglas Crase's AMERIFIL.TXT: A Commonplace Book, The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Kafka, unopened. Downstairs in the kitchen my husband as started breakfast. The dog has been walked and fed. Today, I'm traveling across the bay, returning by evening. In my wallet is Mary Oliver's poem, Messanger, which I read this week at the Lenton Service: My work is loving the world...

Ammons 4: The Hermit Lark [by Roger Gilbert]

          Yesterday I wrote about Ammons’s poem “Mechanism,” an exploration of the inner workings of a goldfinch.  Ammons wrote about many other birds as well, including blue jays, swallows, terns, and grackles.  One bird seems to have captured his imagination with special force.  In a 1983 interview he responded to a question about the function of the poet by saying “I think of the hermit lark, a shy bird with an unlocatable, indescribable sound.  I identify with that in myself and in the poets I read, too.” The hermit lark appears in several Ammons poems, including one simply called “Hermit Lark”:

Shy lark! I'll bet it took a while to get you

perfect, your song quintessential, hermit lark,

just back from wherever you winter: I learn my real

and ideal self from you, the right to sing

alone without shame!

water over stone makes useless brook music; your

music unbearably clear after rain

drops water breaking through air, the dusk air

like shaded brookwater, substanced clarity!

I learn from you and lose the edginess I speak of

to one other only, my mate, my long beloved, and

make a shield not so much against the world,

 

though against its hardest usages, as

for tenderness's small leeways: how

hard to find the bird in the song! the music

breaks in from any height or depth of the spiral

and whirling up or down, jamming, where does it

leave off: shy bird, welcome home, I love your

 

song and keep my distance: hold, as I know you

won't, through the summer this early close visitation

behind the garage and in the nearby brush:

 

you will pair off and hiding find deeper

shyness yet: be what you must and will be:

I listen and look to found your like in me.

The same bird also makes a cameo appearance in one of Ammons’s most touching lyrics, “Poverty”:

I'm walking home from, what,

a thousandth walk this year

along the same macadam's edge

(pebbly) the ragweed rank

but not blooming yet,

a rose cloud passed to the

east that against sundown would be

blue-gray, the moon up nearly

full, splintering

through the tips of street pine,

and the hermit lark downhill

in a long glade cutting

spirals of musical ice, and I

realize that it is not the same for

me as for others, that

being here to be here

with others is for others.

In both these poems Ammons identifies strongly with the hermit lark’s solitary nature.  He often said that he felt his poetic calling was to reach out to readers as isolated as he was, to share his solitude with them.  The hermit lark thus becomes an emblem of poetic vocation for Ammons, singing at a distance yet audible to passersby. 
          There’s just one small problem with all this: no bird called the hermit lark exists.  Google the term and the only references you’ll find are to Ammons’s poems.  Feeling the need for an avian alter ego, Ammons invented the hermit lark.  (He might easily have invoked the hermit thrush instead, as Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot had done before him, but he probably felt that doing so would read as literary allusion rather than empirical reference.)  In a curious way the hermit lark acts as a natural counterpart to Ezra, the human persona Ammons created in his early poems.  He may have really believed such a bird existed, or he may have known it was a fabrication; it’s hard to tell.  What’s clear is that the hermit lark filled a crucial place in Ammons’s poetic cosmos, allowing him to project his loneliness onto the natural world and to find a kind of fellowship there that he rarely experienced among people.   

 

(ed note:  This post originally appeared on June 19, 2008)

A Season of Midrash by Elaine Fletcher Chapman

Most days my study doubles as zendo, as temple, as sanctuary each time I enter after I may or may not burn the incense. Bare feet on the floor, follow my breath, accept my mind as is: wild with thoughts, messages, grievances, and perhaps a moment or two of clarity. My robin-egg blue notebook open on my desk contains the date, time of day, a few words: gleanings from attempted stillness. Several months ago I began a season of Midrash, commentary on sacred text. This time, not the writing reflections on the first Buddhist nuns, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, not the Bhagavad-Gita. No, this time I chose The Psalms, read randomly. The Psalms of the Monastic: said, sung and chanted. And back to Thomas Merton as guide, using his published pamphlet, Praying the Psalms. In preparation I searched for books to illuminate and inspire my imagination. I found several but the one I kept coming back to was Poets on the Psalms edited by Lynn Domina published by Trinity Press in 2008. Domina decided after reading an anthology of essays by contemporary writers who had addressed one chapter of the bible to compile a book of essays written by poets about the Psalms. She invited poets to respond.  She was astonished by the variety of responses and reactions. The range of experiences and reactions to the text astonished me, as well. Alicia Ostriker, Carl Phillips, Pattiann Rodgers among a few, write meaningful essays of discovery, both personal and scholarly, regarding the Psalms and it's influences. Diane Glancy's essay, Upon The Floods, tells of her driving for thousands of miles while listening to the Psalms, as part of her migration. She writes, I wanted strength for the unknown journey ahead.  She discovered dislocation and disturbance. Her landscape transformed by what she heard as well as what she saw. I became more fascinated by what other poets expressed about the Psalms then the Psalms themselves. I kept feeling a lacking within myself. I downloaded a recording so I could listen to them during my weekly commute over the Chesapeake Bay and back. I repeatedly forgot to begin the recording, choosing silence for the journey over the bay. And there was the small problem of translations. I kept searching for a standard, a translation that I could enter and remain for an extended time. I discovered The Poet’s Book Of Psalms: The Complete Psalter as Rendered by Twenty-Five Poets from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries edited by Laurance Weider published by Oxford University Press. This enchanting book even includes Upon the Translation of the Psalms by John Donne. Now I read different translations and a few lines from a particular Psalm began to enter my poems here and there. I maintained a preference for King James as opposed to Christopher Smart, John Milton,or Thomas Wyatt. Sometimes I enjoyed a translation by Mary Sidney Herbert, perhaps because she was the only feminine voice. I experienced the intense range of emotions: rage, anger, love, grief and sorrow. I was looking for the expression of love and found praise. Throughout my reading, I kept asking myself, where was my faith beyond the love of the poetry? What about devotion? My purpose was to live the text. Nothing less than obsession. I cannot say I have been successful, but I haven't given up. I still read the Psalms weekly. Perhaps I am midway in this season of Midrash, not yet fully immersed.

I raise the window so I can hear rain drops landing on the sill. The house I live in is made of solid brick and keeps weather at bay and bird sounds distant. I’m accustomed to wood and ill fitting windows. I lift the window. It’s good to expose one’s self to weather. Let the heat, dampness or cold in. Feel the breeze, if there is one. It is necessary. Today, Psalm 7. Am I not trying to leave despair behind? My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope… For my days are a breath. I take a deep breath. And a moment before was reminded that Buddha tells us to embrace our suffering. It is in the fullness of a life where we are happy, returning to loved ones with a gentleness of spirit. I want hope. I believe in a church of trees, a church of ocean, the human condition. Bird call. Hands folded at heart center. Simplicity. Psalms as prayer. Poems as prayer. 

Related articles

Psalms

Psalm 23...He Refreshes and Restores My Life

Psalm 35 - Let Them Be Turned Back

My Psalm 121

Larkin, Uncensored (On Love and Marriage)

 Love

Not Love you? Dear, I'd pay ten quid for you:
Five down, and five when I got rid of you.

Marriage

'My wife and I -- we're pals. Marriage is fun.'
Yes: two can live as stupidly as one.

Editor Archie Burnett dates these to December 1953 and January 1954, so no allusion is intended to the Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn standard "Love and Marriage," which it pre-dates.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Will the real Frank Sinatra please stand up?

Match the singer with the his name:

Frank Sinatra        Dino Paul Crocetti
Bobby Darin          Vito Farinola
Tony Bennett         Roberto Cassotto
Perry Como           Nick Perido
Vic Damone           Antonio Benedetto
Dean Martin           Frank Sinatra

Extra credit: Who suggested that Sinatra change his name to Frankie Satin and how did our boy reply?

Ammons 3: Mechanism [by Roger Gilbert]

          Ammons is probably best known for two stylistic innovations:  his eccentric use of the colon and his liberal incorporation of scientific language in his poems.  Both of these devices are on full display in a poem called “Mechanism.” The poem falls into two parts, a short introduction to his general concept followed by a long, thickly layered description of a goldfinch.  Here are the first four stanzas:

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

      morality: any working order,

    animate or inanimate: it

 

 

has managed directed balance,

      the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,

    some energy left to the mechanism,

 

 

some ash, enough energy held

      to maintain the order in repair,

    assure further consumption of entropy,

 

 

expending energy to strengthen order:

      honor the persisting reactor,

    the container of change, the moderator:

What Ammons calls in the title and in line six a “mechanism” is called by the simpler name “going thing” in the first line.  Both names refer to a wide array of phenomena, as the little list in the first stanza implies: “goldfinch, corporation, tree, / morality.”  What characteristics could these four things possibly have in common?  Goldfinches and trees are both living organisms, but corporations and morality?  There’s an unlikely pairing.  Yet for Ammons all these things exemplify what he calls a “working order,” any dynamic system that takes in and puts out energy, that organizes and repairs itself, that staves off entropy and chaos.  Living creatures, businesses, and abstract value systems all possess these features.  Notice that the poem begins with an imperative; we are being instructed to “honor” all these mechanisms, not because they are all equally beautiful or good, but because they all work, they all have achieved a kind of self-sustaining balance.  (Ammons was working as a sales executive at a glass manufacturer when he wrote this poem, so he would have been especially aware of the importance of balancing what comes in and what goes out for a corporation.)

Literary Letter Writing, Lives of Letters by Elaine Fletcher Chapman

Yesterday in the mail a large envelope arrived, return address American Academy of Poets. I had eagerly been awaiting the arrival of the new poster to mark National Poetry Month in April. Amazingly,one only has to request the poster (www.poets.org) in order to receive it. The subject of the poster: writing letters. It's beauty lies in the printed blue and beige stationary, envelopes, postmarks, pens and instructions printed off to the side: Write, about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful from the book Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joan M. Burnham. Copyright 2000 by New World Library with permission to reprint. What poet or writer has not read these letters, taken seriously the advice given? I'm partial to Stephen Mitchell's translation and forward of Rilke's letters to Franz Xaver Kappus. I was pleased because reading letters written by writers has aways been part of my study. And at this moment in the side pocket of my notebook there are two slips of paper, each with a name and address written clearly, I am to write two letters this week, one to each person named. I will take my time and find the right stationary, write my note, then add a beautiful stamp. I may put a quote on the envelope. Each letter will by handwritten in ink.

Every other week I meet with a small group of writers I have been working with for more than five years. This season we are reading Letters to Olga by Vaclav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson, embracing the personal and the particular.  We draw each others names, then in turn write letters to one another, mostly handwritten on cards, small slips of paper, and formal stationary. Our intention is to follow the human impulse longing for connection and share the personal. Our letters honor the written word, our processes and our shared experience of our writing lives. Last week Betty wrote, When Julie reads her work, I hear mountains calling my name. When Diane reads I can sense the Red Sea parting. I wonder what people hear when I’m reading?  Ruth writes, A week lived has no tidy line ruled straight between one day and the next.  Diana writes, It’s a stuck in molasses grey day but I see a few brilliant yellow daffodils brightening things up. Vaclav Havel writes to his wife Olga, writing letters is a small ceremony. Yes, each letter, a small ceremony. Yes, and the reading of letters, ceremonial, as well. Among my favorite books of letters: One Art: Elizabeth Bishop, Letters selected and edited by Robert Giroux and A Wild Perfection: the selected letters of James Wright edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley with Jonathan Blunk both published by Farrar, Strays and Giroux. I like particularly the literary connections between writers: James Wright's letters to James Dickey, Robert Bly and Donald Hall. His letters are newsy, full of literary discourse and struggles. He always locates himself in his surroundings. Bishop is in conversation with Robert Lowell who was her most important literary friend and colleague, Randall Jarrell and Marianne Moore. Letters put her life and her work in context. 

There is another small collection of books along side Keats, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Plath's Letter's Home, Dickinson, Larkin, Chekhov, and Marianne Moore. These books are dedicated to a particular correspondence:The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, Leslie Marmon Silco and James Wright edited by Anne Wright published by Graywolf Press in 1986, The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams edited by Christpher MacGowan, published by New Direction Books in 1998  and a beautiful limited edition,The Letters of D. H. Lawrance and Amy Lowell:1914-1925 edited by E. Claire Healey & Keith Cushman published by Black Sparrow Press in 1985. Each of these books reveals the intimate literary friendships developed and recorded through the act and art of letter writing. Lawrence wrote Lowell, we'll keep  a bit of decent kindness at the bottom of our hearts. Silko and Wright exchanged work, discussed the difficulty of writing when besieged by personal turmoil, and about triumphs. In Silko's last letter to James Wright, she wrote,... no matter if written words are seldom, because we know, Jim, we know. The correspondance between Levertov and Williams began with discussions about their poetry.Often they were in argument. Williams urged her ...to write, to begin., not to sit and wait. Levertov's letters to Williams were all handwritten. I'm waiting patiently for the April 2 release so that I can add Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Thomas Transtromer, an addition to my small collection.

I replace my ink cartage with blue-blank ink. I locate the G. Lalo paper from Paris, Blanc/White.  I retrieve the address from the back of my notebook. I write today's date and my location at the top of the paper, look to the window and then back to the paper again and begin my letter...Dear Julie. I'm hoping I will have the courage to write the truth. 

 

Related articles

More writing insight from Rainer Maria Rilke: Mine the art of your life

Larkin, Uncensored (On Barbara Pym)

Larkin had a flair for limericks. He had a high regard for Barbara Pym's writing, but that didn't prevent him from composing these lines:

The chances are certainly slim
Of finding in Barbara Pym
      (I speak with all deference)
      The faintest of reference
To what in our youth we called quim --

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Ammons 2: Ezra and Elbert [by Roger Gilbert]

Archie Ammons's much-loved poem "Easter Morning" begins with an oblique reference to one of the formative events of his childhood:

 

I have a life that did not become,

that turned aside and stopped,

astonished:

I hold it in me like a pregnancy or

as on my lap a child

not to grow or grow old but dwell on

 

 

When Ammons was four years old, his younger brother Elbert died.  In an autobiographical essay he wrote “I have images of him lying in his cradle covered with a veil, and I saw his coffin being made, and I watched as he was taken away, his coffin astraddle the open rumble seat of a Model A.  I see my mother leaning against the porch between the huge blue hydrangeas as she wept and prayed.”  One image left an especially deep impression on Ammons, as he recalled in a 1989 interview: 

The most powerful image of my emotional life is something I had repressed and one of my sisters lately reminded me of.  It was when my little brother, who was two and a half years younger than I, died at eighteen months.  My mother some days later found his footprint in the yard and tried to build something over it to keep the wind from blowing it away.  That’s the most powerful image I’ve ever known. 

One would be hard-pressed to find an image that more poignantly captures the perennial conflict between transience, embodied so often for Ammons by the action of wind on sand or dust, and the human need to preserve fragments of its own existence and of those it has loved.  Not surprisingly, the wind becomes a ubiquitous presence in Ammons’s early poetry, sometimes acting as an adversary, sometimes as a friend and even a guide.

In 1950 Ammons’s mother died, and that fall he enrolled as a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley.  Ammons had been writing poetry since his time in the Navy, most of it extremely derivative and sentimental.  Then in January of 1951, while in Berkeley, he had a breakthrough.  Virtually overnight, he began to write in the assured, oracular style that characterizes his early poetry.  The poem that announced this inception became the opening poem of Ommateum, “So I Said I Am Ezra,” which stages a stark, elemental encounter between a solitary speaker and a hostile environment:

So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
      over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
      I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
      in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost themselves oceanward
      Over the bleached and broken fields
I moved my feet and turning from the wind
      that ripped sheets of sand
      from the beach and threw them
      like seamists across the dunes
swayed as if the wind were taking me away
and said
      I am Ezra
As a word too much repeated
falls out of being
so I Ezra went out into the night
like a drift of sand
and splashed among the windy oats
that clutch the dunes
of unremembered seas

The poem’s central act is the repeated enunciation of the name Ezra, an attempt to inscribe identity in a medium that refuses to hold it.  Commentators have associated the name both with the Biblical prophet and with Ezra Pound, but in a letter to his early mentor Josephine Miles Ammons provided a more personal gloss:

The name Ezra is one of those private associations which poets would be much kinder to leave out.  I take it from the name of a classmate in elementary school.  His name was Ezra Smith, like me a country boy in a wooden school.  I think he was killed in the war.  But, to me, anybody with the name Ezra would never do anything but wander.  I think of the character as wiry, evaporated, leathern, a desert creature, much soul and bone, little flesh.  Too, the word itself is just a little twisted, restless, but soft and mystical to the ear. 

I’d like to suggest that another name lies behind “Ezra.”  That name is Elbert.  Like Ezra Smith, Elbert Ammons was a dead childhood playmate, long evaporated into spirit.  (In fact my research indicates that Ezra Smith of Whiteville NC was not killed in World War II but lived until 1984.  The fact that Ammons felt the need to posit his premature death only strengthens the connection with Elbert.)   While the names “Elbert” and “Ezra” share initial letters and trochaic rhythms, their resonances are clearly quite distinct.  There’s nothing twisted, restless or mystical about the name Elbert; it evokes no Sumerian vistas or prophetic thunder.  It’s easy to see why Ammons chose not to begin his poetic career with the line “So I said I am Elbert” (though it’s not quite as jarring as “So I said I am Archie” would have been). The substitution of Ezra for Elbert allowed Ammons to superimpose myth and autobiography, universal and particular levels of reference.  But the act of assuming the identity of a dead companion gains both poignancy and power when the life is that of the little brother who died, the primordial lost other.  My biographical hypothesis is that Ammons became a poet by identifying himself with his dead brother, and by reenacting his mother’s futile attempt to keep the mark of his being intact before the wind. 

 

(ed note: this post first appeared on June 17, 2008)

 

Morning Rain, Hiking, Haibun and Basho by Elaine Fletcher Chapman

A slight drizzle began a few minutes ago and birds arriving for spring settle here and there on the grass and next to the early daffodils blooming in a circle on the side yard. For many years I began my morning writing practice with haiku, three or four maybe five.  Lately I’ve abandoned haiku for prose, a few lines about weather. Every day it is my intention to return.  It is how I begin. Begin with nature, noticing what surrounds me, waking up my senses, embracing my mood. Most days I burn the rosewood incense brought home from Zen Mountain Monastery years ago. Let go of laundry, dishes in the sink, the puppy hopefully napping in the next room, bills unpaid, phone calls unanswered, family far away. Haiku brings me to the moment, this moment. I like the weaving: of season, of moon, of tides, of birds, of plants blooming or not, of feeling.  I like counting syllables: 5-7-5.  I fancy myself a formalist It’s a warming up, a settling down and in.  It announces my arrival at my desk once again. Notebook open, pen in hand.  I pause, revel in the solitude, stillness.  Contemplation. I may or may not turn to one of my favorite books close by: Haiku- the sacred art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines by Margaret D. McGee, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa edited by Robert Hass, Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey by Clark Strand, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho translated by Lucien Stryk and of course, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior and other Writings translated by Sam Hamill, my bible of sorts.

Today I open Narrow Road to the Interior.  Its form, haibun, a combination of haiku and prose. I reread: The sun and moon are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.  He leaves a verse by the door: 

Even this grass hut

may be transformed

into a doll’s house. 

 And then: Spring passes

and the birds cry out- tears

in the eyes of fishes.

Another pause, remembering my own note by the door before hiking Three Ridges Wilderness section of the Appalachian Trail several years ago:

Even this seaside room

may be transformed into a

temple of warm tears

This marked the beginning of hiking the same trail in different seasons after the tradition of Basho. It was a trail I hiked over three decades at different stages of my life: as a young woman, as a mother with her children, with friends, alone. Lauren Artress writes to be pilgrims walking on a path, we need to participate in the dance between silence and image, ear and eye, inner and outer. We need to change our seeking into discovery, our drifting into Pilgrimage. Whenever I hiked Three Ridges I established a rhythm, a placement of feet,the carrying of weight, packing in and packing out, miles covered, movement to my own heartbeat. I remember the pleasure of reaching a summit, the sway of the switchback, steepness, the misstep, the blazed trail, momentary confusion. The mountain as devotion. The walk as meditation. Once again I reread Basho; I pack no provisions for my long journey-entering emptiness under the moonnight moon. The voice of the wind was oddly cold.

Weather-beaten bones,

I'll leave your heart exposed

to cold, piercing winds

And so today I begin again the practice of haiku, the practice of haibun, returning as if finding my footing, picking back up the trail after veering off:

A slight drizzle on

the circle of daffodils

spring birds here and there.

 The last few nights of the crescent moon and stars bright. Travelers return to the Shore. Our life together still unsettled with transitions, dreamed and not dreamed. Many years since we walked one step than another, before love, when only friendship passed between us.

Related articles

The Līgo Haībun Challenge ~ Prompt "Bouquet"/"Bouquet of Flowers"/"Flower"

Larkin, Uncensored (On Frank Kermode)

Philip Larkin in private was a frank curmudgeon, as these lines show:

If I could talk, I'd be a worthless prof
Every other year off
Just a jetset egghead, TLS toff
Not old toad: Frank Kermode.

The poem dates from 1978. Editor Archie Burnett recommends reading this poem alongside one beginning "A Lecturer in drip-dry shirt arrayed" with its sardonic view of jet-setting professors teaching creative writing in the States.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

The Dog Man Nasko Hooten (by Mitch Sisskind)

The hard biting type dog like
Grandpa Munster and Coco Clops
And the wrestler type dog
Like Snuffy and Black Eyed Pete --
Those are the main types of dogs.

The hard biting dog likes to bite,
He says, 'I don't care if I win or lose
'I want to get it done with, I don't want
'To spend more time than I have to,
'Fuck all y’all, I will bite your ass!'

But a wrestler type dog like Snuffy
Will take his time, he will meander
About the pit like it's Old Home Week.
When a hard biting dog tries to bite him,
Snuffy will turn it into a wrestling match.

Rickey Ratliff, when he had Snuffy,
He matched into Axa who had a dog
That could bite named Red Nose Jack.
Nasko Hooten from down Alabamy way
Happened to be present at the convention.

As the fight commenced and Snuffy
Was the bottom dog Nasko Hooten
Said to Rickey Ratliff, 'Hey, let's go
‘To the Red Lobster restaurant or
‘Let’s go out to Walt Disney Land

‘Because nothing much will happen here,
‘Rickey, not for a couple of hours at least,’
Said Nasko Hooten, drawling out his words
In that Southern drawl of his, the burly man,
One of the burlier men among the dog men.

He said, ‘Yes, Snuffy will be the bottom dog
‘For a couple of more hours but he will up
‘And win the fight eventually on account
‘Of a real good wrestling dog like Snuffy
‘Will always beat the hard biting dog!’

Becoming more riled up and warming
To his subject Nasko Hooten continued,
‘People are enamored of a hard biting dog
‘But give me a wrestling dog like Snuffy
‘And I will beat your old hard biting dog!’

On and on he went like a man possessed,
‘If the weights are anywhere near equal
‘My money will be on the wrestling dog
‘Like Snuffy, I will bet my last dollar
‘On the Snuffy wrestling dog! Fuck all y’all!’

Archie Ammons and the Poetry of Hymns [by Roger Gilbert]

       I’m writing a critical biography of the late Archie Ammons, who edited The Best American Poetry 1996.  Since there’s been lots of talk about songs on this blog, I thought I’d write my first post on Ammons’s own favorite songs.  When asked to name his influences, he invariably began by citing the hymns he heard and sang as a boy.  In 1997 he declared in a note for an anthology that “I’ve been influenced by everything and everybody, especially by the only poetry I knew as a child, hymns.  The mixture of song, form, and meaning became the basis of flow for me, as well as most of the content I have engaged.”  Ammons’s early love of hymns was strengthened by the fact that he had an unusually fine singing voice.  In a draft version of an autobiographical note, he reports “I could carry a tune from an early age […]  I had a high, clear voice and was sent around when I was in the second grade to sing for the other classes.”  Singing evidently gave Ammons enormous pleasure, since he continued to perform hymns, popular standards, and folk songs as an adult for his own amusement.  He even expressed an occasional wish that he had pursued a singing career, telling one interviewer in 1990 “I think if I could’ve been anything, I would like to have been a gospel singer—or else a country music singer, one or the other.”
       Group song allowed Ammons to experience a fleeting sense of community that he otherwise found elusive, even within his own family.  In an autobiographical draft he wrote “I remember that my sisters, one two years and one six years older than myself, and I sang hymns sometimes in the evening for our parents.”  In 1958 Ammons drafted a poem on this subject that he tinkered with several times over the years but never included in a book.  Originally called “Gospel Singing,” it finally appeared in a small magazine in 1969 under the title “Chinaberry”:

       Out in the edge of the yard at evening
       under the reaching chinaberry tree
       in the belled, gray country silence
       mother and father
       sitting in the cool on the washbench,
       the black iron washpot
       three-legged and belly burnt
       the other side of the path circling the yard,
       under the outer arms of the chinaberry umbrella,
       the wooden wide bench, soapslick dry,
       galvanized tubs upside down,
       cold to touch in the summer dusk,
       contained, exact in inner dreams—
       we stand in our diagonal of height,
       Mona singing her clear, gospel-singing, happy soprano,
       devotional gems, songs of deliverance, glory
       trains and royal telephones,
       Vida, her thin-faced pale alto self-taught
       coming like whippoorwills weary with sleep, next
       in height, and I, shortest,
       too young to more than keep the tune,
       singing together, together to the sandhill fields,
       to whatever moves in with night over the pines,
       coming from where in the west the far great
       cherry on the ditchbank stands, standing out black
       against the farther, lower pines,
       together to the tired, song-starved mother,
       My Friend is the King
       to the father of three, three gray faces under
       the darkening tree, three here, three in graves,
       together to the sleeping coops and quiet barns
       Oh where is my wandering boy tonight?
       On the top of Mt. Zion is a City
       three singing in the deep-lying Carolina country
       far from town
       “prettiest thing I ever heard”
       eyes lost in the green blood of night’s tears
       of old inherited sorrows, grainy & wasted as the land,
       beautiful, wasted as the years in
       the mother’s face, in the father’s hands.

Rural Virginia, Grief, and Let Evening Come, by Jane Kenyon / Elaine Fletcher Chapman

I live in a small rural town on the Eastern Shore of Virginia between sea and bay,only seven miles wide, mostly farm. My husband is the pastor of a fairly large church for the Eastern Shore. On any given Sunday there may be three or four generations of family members scattered about, sitting on pews together or singing in the choir. In the few years he has served this church, he has conducted over forty funerals. Actually, he has become known for his funerals. He poured creek water in the baptismal font, read poetry along with scriptures, and kneeled at every grave. He is accustomed to death while I am accustomed to attending to the grieving, my own and others.

This past July, my father died. He lived across the bay, near the York River. We drove and then took the Surry Ferry to the rural cemetery where we stood in summer heat with cricket song singing the only hymns. By default, my husband ended up leading the service. Yet another funeral. All but one of my four brother’s spoke. I chose to read Jane Kenyon’s Let Evening Come. I needed poetry. When the time came to read, I lost my bearings and my husband walked toward me, extending his hand to mine. He gently led me to the podium. I held the thin volume of poems in my hands, looked to the few attending. No need for a marker, the book opened naturally to page 69. I read, holding back a thousand tears.

The poem concludes with "God does not leave us comfortless" and I want it to be true. Sometimes I believe Jane, sometimes not. I do know I depend on poetry, especially Kenyon's clear images and felt words.

Several months after my father’s death, a church member died unexpectantly of a heart attack. He was a waterman from Deep Creek who made his living catching crabs. Many times in the last few years we sat at his family’s kitchen table eating his soft shell crabs, a seasonal speciality. A day before Butch's funeral my husband asked, “Would you please read the poem you read at your father's funeral for Linda?” I hesitated. Yes, I had read this beloved poem many times to myself, in poetry workshops, at poetry readings and with others who were grieving, but never at a service in this small rural town. With reservation, I agreed. 

The sun that day was intense but there was a cold wind. A graveside service, one day before Christmas Eve. We hurridly left the house and I forgot my coat. I stood off to the side, cold and shaking slightly from the chill and nervousness. It was unlikely that people attending had heard the poem before. Did they even want a poem? But as the time came closer to read, I knew I could trust the crisp images, light passing through them. I knew the particulars would resonate with everyone. Yes, I see in the faces. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned / in long grass.Yes, heads slightly bent, intently listening for what comes next.  When I came to the last stanza I could barely hold back all my unshed tears since my father’s death and the last time I read these words. Looking straight at Linda, I read the last stanza.

Twice in the last months I needed Jane Kenyon’s volume of poem’s Let Evening Come.  Each time I walked, not in a rush, but slowly to the bookshelf, taking my time. I knew exactly where to find the book. Between a hard copy of Jackson’s Hoops and Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares.  Let Evening Come, the volume of poems published by Graywolf Press in 1990. The cover’s colors, muted. The title, bold across the top. Edward Hopper’s “New York, New Haven and Harford," the cover art. The book opens naturally to the last pages. Found on page 69, Let Evening Come, the title poem of the book, my faithful companion, my comfort.

Related articles

On Depression: One

How to Read a Poem

"Stay Put": Musing on Jane Kenyon's "Happiness"

Tonight at KGB: Monica Ferrell and Arisa White

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Monica Ferrell + Arisa White

 

Monday, March 18th, 2013

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by David Lehman and Star Black

Monica Ferrell is the author of a collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was published by Sarabande Books, as well as of a novel, The Answer Is Always Yes (The Dial Press/Random House), which was named a Borders Original Voices Selection and one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of 2008.  Her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Tin House, Slate, and many other journals and anthologies.  A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and “Discovery”/ The Nation prizewinner, she directs the creative writing program at Purchase College and lives in Brooklyn.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of the poetry collections Hurrah's Nest and A Penny Saved. Her debut collection, Hurrah's Nest, has been nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Award. Co-editor of HER KIND, the official blog of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and the editorial manager for Dance Studio Life magazine, Arisa has received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, her poetry has been widely published and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her partner and is currently working on adapting her chapbook, Post Pardon, into an opera.

 

Upcoming, Spring 2013

  

Mar 25   Daisy Fried + Idra Novey 

Apr 1     Adam Fitzgerald + Jackie Clark   

Apr 8     Major Jackson + Heather Christle       

Apr 15   Lynn Melnick + Yona Harvey  

Apr 22   Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman   

Apr 29   Michael Klein + Will Schutt       

May 6    Glyn Maxwell + Louis Jenkins         

May 13  TBA + TBA  

May 20  Eileen Myles + Rebecca Wolff + Season Finale Party  

          

Larkin, Uncensored (On Robert Lowell)

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.