The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Five): Justin Jamail [by Angela Ball]

Early April Subway

Again room fills up like leaf gutters
With attractive grouplets of the stubbornly
Coy and then everyone waits together
Like the pleasing skinny S-shaped
Trees that fill my enemy’s back yard,
A place of wet thoughts where forsythia
Is asked, cruelly, to be the weather
It foretells, but changes nothing:

It’s simply not the kind of yard
To turn an ordinary woman
Into the advancing giant, plunging
An arm into the lawn
And pulling out a bloody root.

Oh, parsley-flavored attitude! Comfortable
Shirt-tail atmosphere! Nice windiness!
Rare as a smart magazine and better
Than that and church coffee:

The room pulls away and I’m standing.
I’m standing and the room greets
The audience. I’m standing and newspapers
Open like folded pigeons, but I’m
Listening and I’m standing and my favorite
Citizens listen and I listen when I sit down
When the room fills with angry hip-hop,
When I’m happy as a screen door closing.

-Justin Jamail                                                               from  Exchangeable Bonds

 

Justin Jamail is the General Counsel of the New York Botanical Garden.  He is the author of Exchangeable Bonds (Hanging Loose, 2018).  He grew up in Houston, Texas, and graduated from Columbia University in New York City where he studied with Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi.   He later studied at the UMass Amherst Center for Poets and Writers, Waseda University in Tokyo, and Fordham University School of Law.  From 2009 until 2015 he practiced corporate law in Tokyo, specializing in cross-border M&A transactions.   He lives in Montclair, NJ with his wife, the playwright and community organizer Amber Reed.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Five): Justin Jamail

Justin Jamail ‘s poem, "Early April Subway," is a scintillant cocktail of utterance. Ashbery is in the mix, with his defamiliarizing of the quotidian; and French Surrealism, and maybe Latin American, and perhaps Martian, and perhaps other kinds, if they exist. The poem’s manic energy is O’Hara-like—an exuberance in which everything glimpsed or thought of seems a lucky find in need of sharing (“But I’m listening and I’m standing”). Throughout, we glimpse the famous, fabulous excitability of Kenneth Koch.

“Early April Subway” would be a good introduction to poetry, since it dances with language instead of using it to get somewhere. I love Moss Hart’s possibly obsolete dictum, “If you need to send a message, call Western Union!”

The title gives us a context. We ride a subway in a tender season, and we grasp that fact like a strap.

Reading, we recall John Ashbery’s affectionate parody of ordinary speech. The sentence that comprises stanza two parodies a familiar syntax and tone (low dudgeon?), but its nouns and verbs—particularly its plunging arm—discombobulate:

 

     It’s simply not the kind of yard

     To turn an ordinary woman

     Into the advancing giant, plunging

     An arm into the lawn

     And pulling out a bloody root.

 

It’s easy to forget, for a moment, that this is a poem about getting somewhere. By subway!

We are reading a distant descendent of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” with its “faces on a wet black bough.” Where Pound’s poem is distilled to a single metaphor, Jamail’s proliferates direct comparisons: “Rare as a smart magazine and better / Than that and church coffee.” What is “church coffee”? We don’t know, but can surely imagine, as we can imagine—even within the subway, “the pleasing skinny S-shaped / Trees that fill my enemy’s back yard.” Who is this enemy? We will never know. We enjoy the touch of noir.

The trick of making the ordinary exclamatory may, in part, descend from Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” where one of Gregor’s favorite pictures features a woman: “She sat erect, holding up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared.” (The exclamation mark is silent.)  We think of O’Hara’s habit of manic announcement, and, again, of the often-exclamatory Kenneth Koch: “Oh, parsley-flavored attitude! Comfortable / Shirt-tail atmosphere! Nice windiness! (And behind Koch, his early favorite, Percy Bysshe Shelly.)

The poem’s last stanza, entered at the invitation of a colon, gives us its strongest “subway” feeling—as opposed to thoughts or associations entertained there. How kinesthetically accurate, “The room pulls away and I’m standing.” We see the inhabitants of the car as an audience—along with us—as “. . . newspapers / Open like folded pigeons”—how surprising and perfect. And the poem enters a tailspin mélange of delight:

 

     . . .but I’m

     Listening and I’m standing and my favorite

     Citizens listen and I listen when I sit down

     When the room fills with angry hip-hop,

     When I’m happy as a screen door closing.

The last comparison suggests that the poet may be creating his own rural world in the midst of accidental music (“angry hip-hop,” an urban genre). The simile relies not just on sound, but on the sensation of closure, the sense of arrival, and/or safety, and/or nostalgia. Justin Jamail’s fascinating “Early April Subway” is an intricate, cubist impression of confined and intermittent urban travel as experienced by a broad imagination, a generosity that is our pleasure, for these moments, to join.

-Angela Ball                       

Comments

[Martin Stannard]

Excellent! Great poem from a great book, which I reviewed online back in 2018. You can find the review here, if you're interested: http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2018/07/poems-i-wish-id-written.html?view=flipcard

[David Lehman]

Excelent post! Thank you, Angela. And we appreciate the link Martin Stannard provided, connecting us to his review of Justin's book.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you, Martin. Glad to have the link to the review.
Thank you, David. Glad you enjoyed.

[Angela Ball]

Can't resist posting this excerpt from Martin Stannard's review:

Of late I have yearned and longed for a poet new to me to take my breath away. And I have been living with this air of longing and, as a result, also with an air of disappointment. And for a month or two I have had this book – well, PDF to be exact – sitting around waiting to be picked up and reviewed, and I usually like Hanging Loose books because it’s a New York press I know, and I know Bob Hershon who runs it with Mark Pawlak, and it’s almost always all good, then today I sat down and opened the book and it was “goodbye breath” –

[Nin Andrews]

Wow! I love this poem and these comments!