The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Three: Joseph Richie [by Angela Ball]

Dewpoint

Hold this that has grown
It takes to your hand
As if learning in the ways of tension
Through the acolytes of water
But since the sodden beams
Can for you resume
Overwhelm them
With your fastness
In mass grounding
Of friction.
                 -Joseph Richie

Joseph Richie (b. 1990) is a freelance editor, music critic, translator, and interpreter.  His poetry and translations have appeared in Cimarron Review, La Traductière, Minetta Review, and Maximalist.  He is the author of four chapbooks, including Nothing Left Open Can Keep You from Factory Hollow Press, and Fathom from Gnosis Press, from which this poem is excerpted.  Also from Gnosis is a forthcoming full-length collection, Species of Thirst.  He lives on Long Island, NY.

Photo by Lena Zycinsky

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Three: Joseph Richie

Joseph Richie’s “Dewpoint” is supremely engaging. The poem’s brevity, its compactness, makes it our true intimate. With it at its “point”—its moment of greatest saturation--we see and hear it all at once.

It begins with a command. We are to hold something “that has grown”—that Is, arrived from nothing. We don’t take it. It “takes to” us, like a newborn to its mother or a duck to its imprint.

What is an acolyte? Someone who assists in a service.  Perhaps I’m an acolyte for this poem. Perhaps every reader is. A useful celebrant. A proponent of mysteries. The speaker is instructional, the poem’s brief duration made durable with strong stresses. It supports only two adjectives: “sodden” and “mass”—the second seeming already halfway to nounhood.

We find ourselves “acolytes of water.” Whelming is done by water—to “Overwhelm” is to do water one better.

Every day there’s the question, what are we to do? Perhaps the answer is to help in the furtherance of something.

It might be useful to revisit the poem’s occasion, the moment of change its title announces. In Kenneth Koch, the boiling point is serious for water. For William Carlos Williams, in Spring and All, spring begins when things “grip down.” What we witness and join is a crisis, an arrival.

What are the poem’s “sodden beams”?  Disintegrating architecture? Strands of light after rain? Why must we resist them? Perhaps because it’s imperative is to keep living, to resist the passive, the “sodden.”

We may think of the forces we learned in grade school—the teeter-totter lever, the planetary tether ball--thinking to leave them behind with Dick, Jane, and Spot in their world where everything has one career.

This poem is not a goodbye but a “mass grounding.”  This poem doesn’t fan out at the end. It clenches.

What is our fastness? Most often it is a thing of mountains.

Hold fast, we are sometimes told. How can a static gesture be “fast”?

Friction is the poem running counter to the usual motive of language, to provide intelligence.  The poem frustrates expectation so as to arrive at something more interesting. It is not obfuscation to resist paraphrase, the way a sky diver might resist a parachute.

We are invited to think of the elemental, how water is urgent when we die, when we give birth.

Friction seems a mechanical thing, happening when machinery needs oil. But it is first of all natural: the shrug of one tectonic plate against another.

At the end of Joseph Richie’s fascinating poem, we not only have our instructions, but feel the power to implement them. With friction as ally, who can lose?  We can be glad to have this poem as our teacher, demonstrating mystery and meaning.

At the dew point, humidity is 100%. Water in the air liquifies onto the ground, onto plant life, windows, car hoods. It becomes what an old song calls “the foggy foggy dew.” The internet tells us that “Foggy Dew" or "Foggy, Foggy Dew" is an English folk song that migrated from the South of England to the Southern United States. On all that it touches, dew leaves a silvery sheen. I think the song does, too. And this poem, dew itself. -- Angela Ball

Comments

[annette c. boehm]

Lovely poem, lovely post!

[Angela Ball]

Thank you so much, Annette. Very glad you enjoyed!

[Laury Magnus]

Beautiful and powerful work Joey, and beautiful explication, Angela!!

[Angela Ball]

Thanks so much, Laury Magnus!

[David Schloss]

This reads to me as a poem about male masturbation. Friction being the final tip off... Maybe it's just me. I always enjoy Angela's fanciful yet precise explications.

[Angela Ball]

Thanks for your reading, David, and for the additional metaphor.