The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-One): Chris Nealon [by Angela Ball]

WAIT A MINUTE

Clear pink sky at 7 a.m.—or mostly clear—

You can’t rush spring but your body has big plans

Hey now, get back in here!

All your senses mobbing their gates like children pressing against a fence

Thin high clouds indifferent and alluring

Just the other morning they were thick and definitional—and that got you all
          excited, too

The sky—its rhetoric—it reaches and reaches and becomes poetics

To call Ontario “blue,” just the right way—it does more than state the obvious—

It gives you a channel for your excitement,

Is that what patience is?

The C&O Canal—

Me and Rob and Nico and heading down to see if we can get a glimpse of the
          painted bunting improbably wintering in Maryland

That was fun—to seek, to find—climbing boulders, chatting with birders,
          getting the gossip—

All of us arrayed below the road, at the bottom of a steep grade, when he finally
          appeared, shining out tropically from under dormant vines,

A ripple running through us all—

A bald eagle coasted low over the road above us—I mean really low—and
          everyone was like whatever

What is it about awaiting arrivals—alert at the gate with your tail wagging

Or setting the picnic table on a warm June day with Hölderlin, hoping the
          Olympian gods will show up

When they finally do it’s September and they’re Valkyries

Imagine the pulse sounding out like a terrible announcement at the beginning
          of the Modeselektor remix of “The Dull Flame of Desire,”

Actually just listen to the whole thing, I can wait

Everything in that sound says leave the car running, we are not fucking around

Which makes it all the more astonishing that when their spaceship lands
          they speak to you in the language of Sappho 16

I mean they coo to each other: I love this about you, dear, also this—but this—

Now that’s love

Metallized but porous, running fingertips over the mortal world, exhaling on the
          cheeks and foreheads of the slain

When they leave you slump exhausted in your seat, feeling vaguely swanlike and
          ungendered

Something about that extra minute or two—the club version instead of the radio edit—
          you start to notice clouds in motion,

They have big plans—this bank of feathered cirrus—it’s like they voted to say
          forget the Coriolis effect, let’s move west to east

The DJ playing “Precious Box” at the Powerhouse, a song about crushing
          loneliness and captivity to mass media with lyrics so wending they feel
         Jamesian—

Moving entirely opposite the energy of the men in those rooms

The Powerhouse was naughty

Or that moment when you realize that the club’s been throbbing to a song about
          the Fates

“So tell me how do you do? / Finally I meet you . . .”

Well you have your playlist now, what should we call it?

That part of us that feels connected, to life, to world—it’s slower to rouse—
          has further to travel—and it always steps aside for bossy dopamine—

Like some deep-sea turtle that could save us all

Oh! To be unruled by fight-or-flight—to get behind political dread and this
          terrible what is it catalepsy—

It seems like the project of a million lifetimes,

At least until you live them all at once

Why is it so humanizing to be able to wait,

And why are epithets so beautiful?

“Patience—the incinerator—

of all the torment in the heart . . .”

-Chris Nealon                               from All About You, forthcoming from Wave Books, 2023

Chris Nealon is John Dewey Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020), The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014), as well as three books of literary criticism. He lives in Washington, DC.

Photo by Rachel Roze

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-One): Chris Nealon 

Chris Nealon’s “Wait a Minute” plunges us into cognitive and bodily immediacy that combines elements of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara--Ashbery’s controlled but at the same time irrepressible meditation; O’Hara’s fidelity to the phenomenology of event and response—with a particular loose-hinged immediacy:

     Clear pink sky at 7 a.m.—or mostly clear—
     You can’t rush spring but your body has big plans
     Hey, now—Get back in here!
     All your senses mobbing their gates like children pressing against a fence

The lines are end-stopped—each a message—with leaps in between, like stride piano.  No full stops (periods). The “you” simultaneously speaker and listener.

The poem turns its excitement to “Thin high clouds indifferent and alluring,” celebrating their permutations: “Just the other morning they were thick and definitional—and that got you all excited, too.”

“The sky, its rhetoric” we’re told, “reaches and reaches and becomes poetics”—how beautiful is that! Are you listening, Cloud Society?

Even reading this poem against season, we can feel the intensity of its—we now know—Canadian blue: “It gives you a channel for your excitement, / Is that what patience is.” A quality is redefined, beautifully but provisionally—and the provisional is here a primary source of delight.

The shift to the personal--“Me and Rob and Nico”—places us among friends, no need to know who or how known. The “painted bunting”—passerina cirus—almost a cloud, is a patchwork of dazzling colors. We are watchers, we clamber over boulders “getting the gossip” till the sudden bird appears: “shining out tropically from under dormant vines, / A ripple running through us all”—a communal experience akin to Frank O’Hara and friends’ at the end of “The Day Lady Day Died,” when Billie Holiday “whispers a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron.” Then a bald eagle, that icon, shows up in a shameless bid for attention and comically fails.

We realize we’re been thinking about arrivals all along, and so we get some more: Hölderlin, possible “Olympian Gods,” “Valkyries,” a remix of “The Dull Flame of Desire” we are urged toward by the poet, who breaks stride to speak to us with art-challenging directness: “Actually just listen to the whole thing. I can wait.” While it plays, aliens arrive who magically know the magically surviving love lyric, “Sappho 16.” They are passerines, they “coo to each other"; and love, like patience, gets freshly defined—it is song, and redirects us to the clouds, now rebels against Coriolis, and we are further immersed in muchness.

Next at the “naughty” “Powerhouse,” we hear “Precious Box,” song “with lyrics so wending it’s Jamesian” and realize not for the first time that cultural categories are made to be broken and that our speaker is an ambassador of unlikeness—the Fates are at the club, where problems become art and past and present, recombinant. They renew each another, and “that part of us that feels connected, to life, to world—it’s slower to rouse— / has further to travel.” How lovely this comparison: “Like some deep-sea turtle that could save us all.”

Yet “bossy dopamine” has the power to push everything else to one side, and “. . .To be unruled by fight-or-flight—to get behind political dread and this  / terrible what is it catalepsy . . . seems like the project of a million lifetimes / At least till you live them all at once.”

Which is what we have been doing in reading Chris Nealon’s “Wait a Minute,” a paean to patience, its rush of discontinuous encounters ending with its earliest, Sappho, who can only exemplify, not answer, “Why is it so humanizing to be able to wait,  / And why are epithets so beautiful?”—Sappho, who waits from beyond the ragged edges of centuries for love and her words to reach us.

–Angela Ball

Comments

[Rivkah Rubinstein]

This series of essays persuades me that the aesthetics of the New York School "diaspora" is a major force in American poetry. Thank you.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you for your generous comment--this is so good to hear.