https://www.wypr.org/show/midday/2024-09-03/the-best-american-poetry-of-2024
Tom's guest is Mary Jo Salter, a Professor Emerita in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She has published nine volumes of poetry and has written essays, lyrics, and children’s books. This year, she’s been chosen as the guest editor of an anthology of verse called The Best American Poetry 2024.
Salter will discuss this new anthology this evening[(Setpember 3, 2024: our official pub date]at The Ivy Bookshop.
Erasers
As punishment, my father said, the nuns
would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day's erasers.
Punishment? The pounding symphony
of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm's length overhead
(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
was more than remedy, it was reward
for all the hours they'd sat
without a word (except for passing notes)
and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk
baton, the only one who got to talk.
Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,
poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn't spell
this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.
"Erasers" is from Open Shutter by Mary Jo Salter (2003). The poem was Terence Winch's "Pick of the Week" on June 13, 2021.
On Tuesday, February 13, 2024, the poet Joseph Harrison died at home in Baltimore, not quite five months after a diagnosis of brain cancer. He was 66 years old. Just days before the end, he had received an advance copy of his Collected Poems from Waywiser Press, and although he could no longer read, he was delighted to hold it in his hands.
He was a dear friend of mine, and in January I posted five of his poems and my short commentaries on them on the Best American Poetry blog . You can see them at the links below, or here:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/01/liberties-of-the-imagination-5-poems-by-joseph-harrison-with-commentary-by-mary-jo-salter.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/01/libnerties-of-the-imagination-poems-by-joseph-harrison-commentary-by-mary-jo-salter-part-2-of-5.html
Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and earned his B.A. in English at Yale—studying with Harold Bloom, who became one of the major admirers of his poetry. Joe became a Baltimorean when he went to Johns Hopkins for graduate work in English. He was the Senior American Editor of Waywiser Press and had directed its annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, ongoing since 2006. He published four volumes of poetry: Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare’s Horse (2015) and Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020).
Joe was the oldest of five children: all of his devoted siblings were with him at the end. He was a famous raconteur. He loved to tell long, elaborate stories, and often found the turns in his own plots so funny that he was incapacitated by laughter, and would have to start over. He was a statistics-equipped expert not only in literature but in baseball, football, film, and American politics. He was a marvelous, multitasking host, and grilled some of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten. That mid-twentieth-century taste in food extended, unapologetically, to his writing style. He wrote in rhyme, mostly, and meter, always, and when he was told his work had elements in common with Anthony Hecht or Richard Wilbur (true), he was delighted. That said, he loved helping to discover and nurture younger poets who wrote nothing like him. Joe had a nearly photographic memory and an awe-inspiring aural memory: he could quote passages at will by all of his favorite poets, who ranged from Horace to Shakespeare to Dickinson. When he gave his own poetry readings, he barely glanced at the page: he declaimed his lines by heart in a unique Southern accent—an amalgam of Virginia, Alabama, and I don’t know where else—while training his eyes directly on his audience.
When he received his shocking prognosis—twelve to eighteen months, which turned out to be far too optimistic—he made a point of telling people what he loved and admired about them. And he wanted, too, to spare us too much grief. Around the time he turned fifty, probably thinking he had three or even four more decades ahead, he wrote the following poem, “To My Friends.” I want to pass it on now, not only to memorialize Joe but to offer comfort to you, reader, the next time you experience a major loss.
TO MY FRIENDS
My good friends, when you’re under the illusion
That the common end of things has ended me,
Whether that end was sudden or wretchedly slow,
Peaceful or violent, untimely or, finally, wished for,
Don’t spend too much time grieving, as if I were gone
To some murky underground region of swampy water
And cavernous absence, metallic and silent and cold,
Or some plush resort in the stratosphere of our dreams
Pillowed with cumuli, graced by ethereal muzak,
Or some massive confusing impersonal processing center
With lines and obscure snafus and numbers not names,
Away from the sun and the sound of the wind in the trees,
But after a short ceremony, public or private,
Listen for the wings of the birds, and ask where we’re going,
Alabama or Delaware, Canada, Yucatan,
And wish me luck in the next life, who now have wings.
It’s my fifth and last day of presenting some of my favorite poems by Joseph Harrison. I can’t represent all of his signature themes or inspirations, but one of them is flight: there’s a satire on the U.S. military called “Runaway Blimp;” another political poem about Afghan kites; a funny poem, “Air Larry,” in which a real-life Larry went up in a lawn chair attached to balloons but didn’t know how to get down. Another theme of Harrison’s is how difficult it is to talk about visual art. He’s rightly suspicious, as he shows in a villanelle called “The Ekphrastic Poet,” of words that aspire to explicate or even supplant wordless images. Nevertheless his response to an early fourteenth-century masterpiece beautifully survives the transition from picture to poem.
GIOTTO IN PADUA
The Arena Chapel
A blue so blue it seems the radiant day
Has entered the room without the glittering
Sunlight, so deep, so soft the flittering
Angels look real as birds as they loop away
Above these curves of rediscovered mass,
Delineated body taking form
Beneath these robes (ground: flatness was the norm),
Fresco by fresco, here. It came to pass:
Clear narrative with spare embellishment,
Space structured to give character its feeling
(Faux marble frieze, faux chamber, vaulted ceiling),
And dazzling emissaries, heaven-sent…
Van Eyck stood right here, Leonardo, too,
Titian and Rubens, Turner, Klee, and Proust
Took tracings for eventual mots justes
Washed in this essence, this original blue.
If you’ve been reading Harrison’s poems this week, you’re not surprised by the apt rhymes, like Proust / mots justes, or the expert use of meter. A departure you may notice from the method of some of his ballads and sonnets is that most of the lines here are enjambed, flowing from one line to another, and one stanza to the next, in a graceful sweeping motion. How appropriate this choice is for a “structured space” (a chapel, or a poem) in which the angels look “real as birds,” so much so that they “loop away.” I love the sonorous list of Harrison’s precursors in the chapel, the great painters (and one great ekphrastic writer, Proust) who also witnessed Giotto’s marvels. And I love the fact that for all its flying from one idea to another, the poem comes down to roost by beginning with “A blue so blue” and ending with “original blue.”
-- Mary Jo Salter
:"Giotto in Padua" is from Sometimes I Dream I Am Not Walt Whitman, Waywiser Press (2020).
Today’s poem by Joseph Harrison employs one of the oldest poetic forms, the ballad, to take on the tragic subject of an early death by a beloved contemporary.
OH
When Love herself came to me
Framed by the classroom door
Her presence shot straight through me,
My heart dropped to the floor.
Nothing phantasmal slew me.
What eyes and hair and skin
Could do they did to do me,|
Helpless and hopeless, in.
Oh, when her news came to me
—Ovarian, forty-four—
Her absence echoed through me,
Ringing my hollowed core.
Ballads usually rhyme ABXB (with X indicating an unrhymed end word) or ABAB, but those actual rhyme sounds tend to change from quatrain to quatrain. As we saw in Wednesday’s sonnet, where Harrison upped the ante by rhyming fourteen lines with a single rhyme sound, he won’t allow strong feeling to weaken his commitment to difficult form. Here, in a three-stanza poem, only the middle stanza has a unique pair of rhyme sounds; the first and third stanzas sonically agree. Looking again, we see there is only one occasion in the entire poem, the center rhyme of “skin” and “in,” which doesn’t rhyme with “to me” or “door.” What this insistent repetition creates, if I’m not being too fanciful, is a closed system which connotes the inevitability of death. Or here’s another possibility: every line that rhymes with “to me” or “door” indicates what we might call the normal, expected health of the poem; cancer enters with the one freak rhyme of skin/in.
Another sound is essential to the poem’s emotional impact, and the clue comes in the very title, “Oh.” A surprise, or a lament, or both, are coming. The sound recurs at the beginning of stanza three: “Oh, when her news came to me/--Ovarian, forty-four…” Now the capitalized “O” of “ovarian” gains equal weight, as the clue to the poet’s misery. The word “cancer” need not be uttered, and the O in the “Love” of the first line returns to our memory. The two O’s in “forty-four” emphasize not only this new sound but also the other “or” sounds—door, floor, core. At the core of the words “core” and “hollowed” is an O, a hollowed core that is also a sigh.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"Oh" is from Shakespeare's Horse, Waywiser Press (2015)
Today I want to comment on the ingenuity of just one poem in Joseph Harrison’s crown of sonnets, “As If.” This one is the third in a series of… twenty-two sonnets! All of them speak of an unrealized love affair.
from "As If" (#3)
Look in my heart, what’s left of it, and write
The honest declarations that just might
Move you to love me, even for one night,
If I could only get the phrasing right?
If I could only get the phrasing right,
I’d hold your hand in candelabra light
And step by step ascend the spiral flight
Of marble stairs—or are they chrysolite?
Oh, I can never get the phrasing right!
There is no text, much less a copyright,
And all’s been said much better than I might.
I’ll sleep alone, like every other night.
Belaureled lovers hold their dreamgirls tight
And all I do is write.
The English majors among us will recognize in Harrison’s first line an adaptation of the first sonnet of Philip Sidney’s series of love poems, “Astrophil and Stella.” Sidney’s speaker is rationalizing and bemoaning his writer’s block when an impatient interjection on line fourteen chides him: “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’” And indeed, Harrison’s sonnet that directly precedes this one ends with these lines: “And I thought you were someone I could choose, //Not just be chosen by. ‘Fool,’ said my muse.” A rule of sonnet crowns is that the last line of a sonnet must recur as the first line of the next. Harrison has been clever in a different way: He has split Sidney’s final line in half, giving the first part as the conclusion to one Harrison sonnet and the second part to the beginning of the one that follows. In fact, with a switch of pronouns—“thy” to “my”—the poet establishes that he’s hoping his beloved will do the writing for him. Then Harrison tortures himself with another rule: he must write in an “A” rhyme scheme for fourteen lines in a row. Admittedly, he repeats himself with the phrase “If I could only get the phrasing right,” but that’s clever too, since we repeat ourselves when we’re trying to get out of a writing jam. Besides, the phrase is never really repeated verbatim, since its first iteration ends with a question mark, the next with a comma, and the last with an explanation mark. How fitting that the only rhyme sound Harrison employs is what goes with “write.” And of course the sonnet has to stop short of a full pentameter ending: “And all I do is write” suggests the poet really can’t complete his poem. Meanwhile, Harrison has aced it.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"As If", part 3 is from Someone Else's Name, Waywiser Press (2003)
Today’s poem by Joseph Harrison, the second of five favorites I’ve chosen, has a title that invites us to consider one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.
HAMLET
It’s quiet here. A stoic rectitude
Props up the weather-pummeled citizens,
Craggy yet almost cheerful. Uniform
Gray granite cottages, precipitous
And sturdy, make the most of things. The wind
Does all the talking hereabouts, and who
Would think to think about the universe?
Their certainties define them, not their doubts.
“Weather-pummeled”: yes, we say to ourselves, we’re in the rotten state of Denmark. It’s cold out there, and “The wind// Does all the talking hereabouts.” Clever, we think: Harrison must be referring to the early appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and the sentries’ questioning whether he’s really there and really speaking. Like that ghost, the poet speaks in iambic pentameter. “Precipitous”: that suggests the precipices of a high castle, as well as the danger Hamlet poses to Claudius, and vice-versa. Yet… when the poet asks “who// Would think to think about the universe?” we stop to question the implication. Hamlet does think about the universe, as does his friend Horatio; even pompous Polonius can claim credit for philosophizing.
The poem’s final line makes us doubt everything we’ve been thinking: “Their certainties define them, not their doubts.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the quintessence of doubt. The poem cannot be primarily about him or his environment, we understand now, but about a village, a little town, a hamlet, where nothing is large scale! We see “gray granite cottages,” “almost cheerful,” for what they are, not castles, and the inhabitants of the hamlet as provincial, limited souls who are defined by all they’re (probably wrongly) certain about. People in the hamlet are the unheroic opposite of Hamlet. The shortness of this poem makes the title that it shares with Shakespeare’s longest play a wry comment in itself. Brevity is the soul of wit.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"Hamlet" is from Shakespeare's Horse by Joseph Harrison, Waywiser Press (2015).
Tomorrow's piece today: click here.
Liberties of the Imagination: 5 poems by Joseph Harrison, with commentary by Mary Jo Salter (pictured left).
Joseph Harrison (b.1957) has many admirers, but I’ve always felt that his works deserve a wider audience. Harrison, who lives in Baltimore, is the author of the forthcoming Collected Poems (2024). He is also the American editor of the Waywiser Press, founded in England by Philip Hoy. A signal goal of the press is to publish winners of the Anthony Hecht Prize, given for a distinguished first or second collection of poetry. Hecht, an important influence on Harrison, wrote an introduction for Harrison’s first book, Someone Else’s Name, published in 2003 J
As Hecht wrote, Harrison is “alive to the liberties and limits of form and imagination.” Liberties and limits—the alliterative phrase links the similar sounds of two words seemingly opposite in meaning. But as Harrison’s poems illustrate, the limits of form often make possible the liberties of imagination. Harrison is about as formal as contemporary poets come, a writer who delights not just in sonnets but longer perfections like sonnet crowns and sestinas. His meter is pitch-perfect, and rhyme, when he uses it, is almost always exact. That said, he uses such conventions to highlight unresolvable ambiguities, disparities, mysteries.
Someone Else’s Name was followed in 2008 by Identity Theft, whose similar title highlights one of Harrison’s themes: who am I? Am I the person others take me for? Love poems, and notably Harrison’s, often ask whether our true selves have been read properly by the loved one. It’s not only his love poems, though, that profit from biographical elements, and often the lives described or narrated are of other writers: Horace, Samuel Johnson, Dickens; most of all Shakespeare. In fact, Shakespeare’s Horse is the title of Harrison’s volume of 2015, and it was succeeded in 2020 by Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman, which includes deft homages to Whitman as well as Dickinson. The challenges of naming and of being named are as old as Adam, but Harrison continually does new things with the abstraction of identity and with how we name those conceptions.
To show at least some of what I mean, I’m going to write every day for five days a brief comment on one poem by Harrison among my favorites.
Let me start with the very first poem in Joseph Harrison’s first book. In retrospect, it’s highly characteristic of his poems to follow, diverse in manner as they are. It’s written in rhyme (couplets) and meter (iambic, though with lines of varying length). Consistent with Harrison’s lifelong devotion to Shakespeare, it mentions several of the Bard’s characters, and places us in woods that call up the Forest of Arden. I’ll say more after you read it.
ALL THAT’S LEFT
Will someone tell me, please,
Who carved these trees
With someone else’s name?
These woods won’t be the same,
For I thought, all along,
Mine was the only signature among
These pale textures of bark
Rising out of the dark
Underworld of the forest floor.
But who was here before?
Who chiseled each new line
On everything I thought was mine,
Initialing all these
Purely imaginary trees
Deep in the forest of my mind?
No Orlando, mad for Rosalind;
These cuttings, even when crude,
Speak only out of solitude,
The signs of a single heart
That gave its love to art
And wore that on its sleeve,
Having come to believe
It was the necessary sacrifice,
And paid the price.
If someone else could see
These careful lines, would he,
Underneath their curlicue and flair,
Hear the real pathos there,
The note of the ultimate cost
When feeling itself is lost
And all that’s left is the mark
Of absence against the dark?
I said at first that the poem is in couplets, but that’s a tricky assertion. The poem actually begins with a one-line stanza and ends with a one-line stanza. Furthermore, the first line, “Will someone tell me, please,” rhymes with the end word, “trees,” of the first line of the second stanza, at which point a rhyme for the next couplet—broken by the space between stanzas—is introduced and seems to be dropped. The rhymes are always immediately heard, yes, but the visual effect if you were only to read one rhyme-staggered stanza at a time would be that nothing rhymes. The stand-alone first and last lines of the poem also serve to illustrate the theme: the poet can only write if he can be alone with his imagination. Yet he learns as time passes that other poets (symbolized by those who write their “signature,” or their “lines,” on trees) have been here in the forest before him.
Harrison’s rhyme scheme enacts that delay, that indebtedness to the past. In a further twist, lovers write their joined names on trees, but the poet gives his primary love to art itself. I take the last lines “all that’s left is the mark// Of absence against the dark” as deliberately ambiguous. “Absence” may mean that most poets never make a mark that endures, like Shakespeare’s. Or it may mean that the poet’s mark on a tree—on a poem, that is—only highlights his physical absence after death. Or maybe Harrison intends both readings. The “real pathos” for me is that he sets down in especially skillful lines the doubt of all poets as to whether they’ve made their mark.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"All That's Left" is from Someone Else's Name, Waywiser Press (2003). For tomorrow post today (part two), click here. For part 3, click here.
Mr. X
By the time you're forty, you've met so many people
their features fit together as little bits
from other people, like the Identi-Kits
that victims piece together with the police.
The felon is memory, which takes a face
and slices up what once was very simple.
People you loved, the waiter you saw every week
without seeing, arresting strangers re-assemble
years later in other faces and belong
convincingly there, as if they were unique,
and innocent of how they make you tremble
with remembering or forgetting. I was wrong,
Mr. X—you whose cheekbones I recall
from somewhere, and that funny, slightly cross-
eyed, quizzical look you shot me on the single
occasion we met—to assume you must have lost
someone who looked like me. And yet I stared
longingly at you, as you disappeared.
-- Mary Jo Salter
from A Kiss in Space, Alfred A Knopf, 1999
Mary Jo Salter on W. H. Auden in Literary Matters
What is the secret meaning of the last line of "Epitaph on a Tyrant":
"And when he cried, the little children died in the street"?
To what extent does "New Year Letter" owe its greatness to Auden's mastery of the tetrameter line?
"Poetry might be defined as". . .
complete the sentence with a six-word formulation derived from Auiden.
David Lehman thinks "Caliban to the Audience" is Auden's greatest prose poem. What would Mary Jo Salter say?
To get the answers to these and other fascinating questions related to the great W. H. Auden read Mary Jo Salter's essay in the new issue of Literary Matters, edited by Ryan Wilson. Salter reviewed the two new volumes of Auden's collected poetry edited by Edward Mendelson, with elaborate annonations, published in 202 by Princeton UP.
An excerpt:
<<<
One could spend years tracing such unwitting rehearsals and deliberate rethinkings. In Another Time’s “XXIX. Song,” whose manuscript Mendelson dates from September 1939, Auden writes “Silence invades the breathing wood” although he has already written, in January of that year, the famous line of the Yeats elegy, “Silence invaded the suburbs.” Maybe he didn’t remember. I prefer the line from the Yeats elegy, not because of the difference between a wood and a suburb, but because the past tense, “invaded,” makes you wonder what comes after the silence. In “X. Brussels in Winter,” I prefer the arresting 1966 revision “And fifty franks will earn a stranger right / To take the shuddering city in his arms” to the milder 1938 original, “And fifty franks will earn the stranger right / To warm the heartless city in his arms.” In “Music is International” (1947), Auden writes that “we may some day need very much to / Remember when we were happy,” which is fine, but it’s not as delightful as the ending to “Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno” (1958) : “…though one cannot always / Remember exactly why one has been happy, / There is no forgetting that one was.” Auden was often wrong-headed to ditch his earlier poems, but it’s a pleasure to see him, late in his career, writing better versions of similar material, either in revised poems or wholly new ones. He also recasts ideas from prose into poetry, or the reverse. Among many examples, in “Vespers” (1954) from Horae Canonicae, he writes, “In my Eden our only source of political news is gossip”; in a section of his essay “Reading,” he lists the attributes of his “personal Eden”, and one of them is “Sources of Public Information: Gossip.”
And there’s yet another pleasure in store for the reader who plans to peruse these two volumes—as I do—for the rest of life itself, studying just a few pages in detail at a time. You can never overestimate Auden’s technical ingenuity. [Edward] Mendelson alerts us to some of the most winning bits: for instance, a note says that Auden told Malcolm Cowley that the eleven-syllable line used in both “Miranda” (in “The Sea and the Mirror”) and “Lullaby” (in “For the Time Being”) “comes from Ireland—there has to be a caesura after the fifth syllable.” In another note, we learn that Auden proposes (insanely?) to Theodore Spencer, whose writing course at Harvard he will be visiting, “What about making your class write a drapa?” If you don’t know, and I didn’t, this is a Medieval Icelandic form, a death-lament or dirge, with a very long list of undergraduate-unfriendly requirements like this: “the odd lines contain an internal assonance, the second of which falls on the penultimate syllable.”
>>>
And there many other great things in the issue.
https://www.literarymatters.org/15-2-our-auden/
LAST WORDS
by Mary Jo Salter
Forgive me for not writing sober,
I mean sooner, but I almost don’t
dare see what I write, I keep mating mistakes,
I mean making, and I’m wandering
if I’ve inherited what
my father’s got.
I first understood it when he tried
to introduce me to somebunny:
“This is my doctor,” he said,
then didn’t say more, “my daughter.”
The man kindly nodded
out the door.
I thought: is this dimension
what I’m headed for?
I mean dementia.|
Not Autheimer’s, but that kind he has,
possessive aphasia: oh that’s good,
I meant to say progressive.
Talk about euthanasia!
I mean euphemasia,
nice words inside your head not there,
and it’s not progress at all.
No, he’s up against the boil
after years now of a sad, slow wall
and he’s so hungry,
I mean angry.
Me too. I need to get my rhymes in
while I still mean. I mean can.
from Zoom Rooms by Mary Jo Salter ( Knopf, 2022).
Mary Jo Salter (photo right) concludes two weeks of presenting “The Death of Argos” by Nicholas Pierce.
What new thing can be done with old forms like the sonnet? One answer comes from a new poet. In Nicholas Pierce’s first book, In Transit, he invents an especially devilish rhyme scheme for an eleven-sonnet sequence, “The Death of Argos.” The sequence is also an elegant narrative, an affecting love story set in contemporary Greece, while calling up The Odyssey. Inspired by a blank verse sonnet sequence by the late Claudia Emerson, which unspools as two tercets, a central couplet, and two more tercets, Pierce goes Emerson one better by rhyming aba, bdb, bb, dbd, ebe, every time. Yes, that’s six b’s per fourteen lines. And a rhyming couplet “turn” in the dead center, another radical move. -- MJS
The epilogue brings Pierce’s eleven-sonnet sequence to a ramifying close. In it, the poet’s lover—and we readers—can be seen as both scarred and “kissed” by experience.
1.
A few key seconds haven’t yet come back,
if they ever were recorded. Who can say
why the dogs didn’t, finally, attack,
much less what would’ve happened if they did?
On foot, defenseless, we were easy prey
to start with—then my cousin and I slid
into a ditch, scrambling to get away.
The footage skips ahead when I replay
this moment, picking back up with his leg
already broken and the dogs at bay—
or nowhere to be seen, at least. Less vague
is what came afterward: the brief but none-
too-gentle ambulance ride, the X-ray
revealing that the break was a clean one.
2.
The incident put me in mind of S.,
whom I’d been trying not to think about
for a few months, not wanting to address
how cruel I’d been when I abruptly stopped
texting and calling her back; stopped without
so much as an excuse, letting her opt
both of us out. Of course, our falling out
wasn’t what I reflected on en route
to the hospital. Rather, it was her own
encounter with a dog, which left no doubt
a deeper scar than the two running down
her chin, down from the edges of her smile.
She told me that she didn’t run or shout;
was, when the pit bull lunged, still in denial.
3.
Still in shock, sleep all but impossible,
I read the journal from my trip to Greece
after returning from the hospital;
read long into the night, about the night
when, meeting for a drink, we found release
from loneliness; about how S., despite
knowing me all of an hour, felt at ease
enough to share how many surgeries
she’d had to have in the last year, her face
still not quite hers; about the binding lease
that forced her to recover in the place
next door to where the pit bull went on living;
about its owner, who refused her pleas
to see the dog put down; about surviving.
4.
May 28th—Watching from the top deck
as Paros shrinks on the horizon, then,
in an instant, vanishes; as each new speck
becomes an island, looms, recedes from view.
On my way back to Athens, once again
on my own, though we plan to rendezvous,
and I, just as soon as she gets in.
It’s strange how quickly things can happen when
abroad, that we could meet and fall in love
(is there a faster-acting medicine?)
on the same day; that I, at this remove,
perhaps because of it, could know we had.
Stranger still, that the scarring on her chin
should be what drew me to her, though I’m glad
5.
it did. We met on a bus taking her
to Naousa (rhymes with “wowza”), where I’d been
the day before, and taking me, as per
my host’s advice, to drafty Golden Beach.
We chatted till she disembarked, within
those few short minutes managing to reach
the same conclusion. With this very pen,
on a scrap of paper torn from this Moleskin,
she jotted down her number. Pausing here,
I flipped to the back pocket, where the ten
digits had lived for almost half a year;
though I had no intention, not that night,
of calling her, no clue how I’d begin
to explain myself. “I’m sorry” sounded trite.
6.
Memories of the trip came flooding back:
I rendezvoused with S. in Nafplio
after the ferry ride, first losing track
of time, then of myself, as I explored
her body with my own, getting to know
each corner more each night, what she adored
and didn’t, taking things both fast and slow.
I learned, as well, where she was born (Bordeaux)
and worked (at a high school in Athens), that
she taught biology and had done so
in Cairo during the youth coup d’état—
but not her age. I never learned her age,
which was, since she had both an olive glow
and graying hair, impossible to gauge.
7.
June 3rd—This morning I was moved to tears
by a brief passage in the Odyssey,
in which Odysseus, some twenty years
after he sailed for Troy, comes home to find
his old dog Argos cast out like debris
on a dunghill, by freeloaders inclined
to think this king disguised as nobody
had died an early death somewhere at sea.
I read it on the bus to Corinth, S.
asleep on my left shoulder, probably
for one of the last times, as we have less
than two whole days together, till my flight
departs from Athens and this fantasy
concludes—as I don’t think we’ll reunite.
8.
“Did Argos see the true Odysseus
or recognize beneath his beggar’s clothes
the man he used to be, was previous
to leaving Ithaca?” I asked myself
while flipping through the epic, as the rose-
red light of dawn enveloped the bookshelf.
My hope was that the passage would disclose—
I don’t know what. An answer, I suppose.
What fell out, rather, was a Polaroid
I’d put there for safe keeping, one of those
I’d taken while in Greece, of a deep void
near Corinth, a canal that ran as far
as S. and I—while standing on our toes—
could see, which even then recalled a scar.
9.
Early that morning, I got on the road
to see my cousin, straining to recall,
while driving, that lost moment, to decode
a scrambled memory (if there was one)
of our assailants and the sudden fall
that fractured time before it broke his bone.
Again, I saw two shadows—that was all—
come crashing through the nonexistent wall
around their yard, the wall we hoped was there,
and then keep running, with intent to maul
or kill or both, giving us such a scare
that we could do little but retreat—retreat
into a ditch as deep as we were tall
and, on a dark night, painfully discreet.
10.
Those few key seconds never did come back,
not on the drive there, nor in the time since—
time that I’ve wasted trying to unpack
that night, believing (wanting to believe
yet in the end unable to convince
myself) that if I simply could retrieve
the missing footage, I’d find evidence
that no such thing as a coincidence
existed, that there was a reason why
I’d had my own near-death experience
just three months after learning, by and by,
how S. had come to have her scars, and thus
that we were meant to meet, that providence
had shone its light on, of all people, us.
EPILOGUE
One memory that has come back, and does
so often, is of the stray dogs we met
at that canal near Corinth, where, because
we’d missed our bus and had some time to kill,
we took turns photographing the sunset
dissolving in the water like a pill.
It was at the station, though, when we were set
to leave, that the odd couple—a briquette-
black mastiff and his wiry, pint-sized friend—
entered the picture. Both affectionate
and filthy, they proceeded to offend
most everyone there, all except for S.,
who seemed, for one brief moment, to forget
her scars, letting each dog give her a kiss.
Nicholas Pierce is pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Utah. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and Subtropics, among other journals. His first book, In Transit, won the 2021 New Criterion Poetry Prize. “The Death of Argos” appeared in that volume, published by Criterion Book
For the next two weeks, Monday through Friday, we will be publishing daily, piece by piece, the sonnet sequence “The Death of Argos” by Nicholas Pierce (Photo), presented below by Mary Jo Salter.
What new thing can be done with old forms like the sonnet? One answer comes from a new poet. In his first book, In Transit, Nicholas Pierce invents an especially devilish rhyme scheme for an eleven-sonnet sequence, “The Death of Argos.” The sequence is also an elegant narrative, an affecting love story set in contemporary Greece, while calling up The Odyssey. Inspired by a blank verse sonnet sequence by the late Claudia Emerson, which unspools as two tercets, a central couplet, and two more tercets, Pierce goes Emerson one better by rhyming aba, cbc, bb, dbd, ebe. Yes, that’s six b’s per fourteen lines. And a rhyming couplet “turn” in the dead center, another radical move. -- MJS
Here's the first mysterious sonnet, in which the speaker assembles a memory of being attacked by dogs. We’ll be adding the second sonnet the next day, and so on, until the final day.
1.
A few key seconds haven’t yet come back,
if they ever were recorded. Who can say
why the dogs didn’t, finally, attack,
much less what would’ve happened if they did?
On foot, defenseless, we were easy prey
to start with—then my cousin and I slid
into a ditch, scrambling to get away.
The footage skips ahead when I replay
this moment, picking back up with his leg
already broken and the dogs at bay—
or nowhere to be seen, at least. Less vague
is what came afterward: the brief but none-
too-gentle ambulance ride, the X-ray
revealing that the break was a clean one.
Nicholas Pierce is pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Utah. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and Subtropics, among other journals. His first book, In Transit, won the 2021 New Criterion Poetry Prize. “The Death of Argos” appeared in that volume, published by Criterion Books.
Click here for the full poem as posted on March 4, 2022.
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2022/03/mary-jo-salter-presents-the-death-of-argos-a-sonnet-sequence-by-nicholas-pierce-day-10.html
<<< Stephen Kampa writes brilliantly about the movies, and his favorite period seems to be the Forties. He loves the lingo—the “vah-vah-voom!”—and the flirtatious, but not explicit, sexuality. Here’s his tribute to Barbara Stanwyck [pictured left] that rises to the level of her wisecrack wit, and adds a curvaceous stanza shape and rhyme scheme we might find in Donne. (Kampa’s “dancing mistress of my soul” is a nod, though, to Shakespeare’s “master-mistress of my passion” in the sonnets.) >>>
-- Mary Jo Salter
Upon First Viewing Ball of Fire
Oh, Barbara Stanwyck, strike
My fancy, stoke my fire
With one fell stroke revoke my self control—
Come be the dancing mistress of my soul!
I’ll never meet your like
Now that most flicks require
Two topless shots for every minor role;
You couched your sex appeal
In what you could conceal,
A trick that wildly trumps
Modern celebutantes’.
Your smirk and three dry words could flood a room
With oomph! with awww! with vah-vah-voom!,
To quote those Forties chumps.
I guess a real man wants
The panoramic rack and nipple-zoom;
I want the wit, the verve,
And every subtle curve
Of your elaborate con-
versation. Steal my heart,
Toy with it, torch it; mesmerize me; come,
Your slim hips swinging like a pendulum;
And once—no, now—you’ve gone,
Let me play Krupa’s part,
Tapping “Drum Boogie” on a matchbox-drum
With (greatest of his tricks)
A pair of matchstick-sticks.
<<< Stephen Kampa writes brilliantly about the movies, and his favorite period seems to be the Forties. He loves the lingo—the “vah-vah-voom!”—and the flirtatious, but not explicit, sexuality. Here’s his tribute to Barbara Stanwyck that rises to the level of her wisecrack wit, and adds a curvaceous stanza shape and rhyme scheme we might find in Donne. (Kampa’s “dancing mistress of my soul” is a nod, though, to Shakespeare’s “master-mistress of my passion” in the sonnets.) >>> -- Mary Jo Salter
<< A number of Stephen Kampa’s recent poems dare to look straight at our culture’s complacency about gun violence, and especially our inability to protect children’s lives. Kampa’s poem “PSA for the NRA” (that is, Public Service Announcement for the National Rifle Association) is a seamless work of craftsmanship, a single-sentence poem with just two rhyme sounds employed over four tercets. The poet’s technical mastery only underscores the skill of the Viking hero called the “children’s man”—saluted by his culture for a rare choice not to slaughter children. >> -- Mary Jo Salter
PSA for the NRA
The sagas tell of one man known as ‘the children’s man’. . .
—Peter Ackroyd
And lastly, let us glance
At a medieval tale
In which the hero’s stance,
Not his war-warped stunts,
Will tell us how to feel.
A Viking warrior once
Was called “the children’s man”
When, for the commonweal,
He broke ranks with his clan,
Spearheading this advance:
He chose not to impale
Children on his lance.
Can we have our cake and eat it too? The best poets are able to take such common expressions, even clichés, and make us marvel at a fresh, new application. Stephen Kampa does this constantly, and in this poem about the ultimate threat to our planet—nuclear war—he manages to recast disaster as a birthday party. “Tearing sky-blue paper,” the bombs “in due time” reduce a “branchless tree” to a toothpick we might place in the mud, like a cake, “to see if/ finally the world is done.” It’s done, and it isn’t: because we’re eating up this poem. -- Mary Jo Salter
Have It, Eat It
What I expect
to see at the end
isn’t the moon
gray as a dusty plate
or red as
a party balloon let go
because its holder
just couldn’t wait to open
her first gift,
tearing sky-blue paper the way
the sky itself
will be torn to celebrate
in due time
with apt atmospherics the day
we all were
born, nor dune upon dune
of radioactive sand
blowing in a staticky hiss
like a radio
tuned to all the news
we’ll miss once
the party’s over and everyone’s
gone, but this:
one bare, branchless tree, straight
as the barrel
of an enormous gun, stuck
like a toothpick
in the cakey, sun-warmed mud
to see if
finally the world is done.
In “The Night I Finished Auden,” Stephen Kampa pays tribute to a favorite poet [W. H. Auden, pictured left] in the most elegant way—by not just alluding to several of Auden’s poems but also writing in imitation of his distinctive manner. The rhymed trimeters, iambic but often starting with a stressed syllable, are signature Auden, as are the buried serious jokes. In Kampa’s final stanza, “I felt like one who’s wandered” calls up Keats’ lines about Homer (“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies”). And in imagining “a form that could contain/ An elegy for oceans, /An epitaph for rain” Kampa not only updates Auden’s world as our climate-changed one, but fulfills Auden’s stated wish in his “Letter to Lord Byron:” “I want a form that’s large enough to swim in.” -- Mary Jo Salter
The Night I Finished Auden
The night I finished Auden
Was much like any night:
A palatable meal had
Appeased my appetite,
A sweating green-glass bottle
Provided company
For Auden, in absentia,
And absentminded me.
I like the later poems,
Mannered and talkative
With doctrinaire digressions,
For posing how to live
Gracefully with the knowledge
That even the most wry,
Intelligent, and gentle
Among us, too, must die.
Wystan, you mastered meters
For which I know no names
And thanked the god who gave us
Our grammar and our games,
Then selflessly accomplished—
A born iconoclast—
Your corpse, but left your corpus,
Of which I’ve read the last.
I feel like one who’s wandered
Through hitherto unseen
Landscapes, equipped with nothing
But compass and canteen
And tasked by ghosts with finding
A form that could contain
An elegy for oceans,
An epitaph for rain.
For the next two weeks, we will be publishing poems by Stephen Kampa [pictured left] chosen and presented by Mary Jo Salter. Out of nostalgia for the course catalogue of old, we are scheduling the six pieces for "M., W., F., at 10." -- DL
In “Homer at Home,” Stephen Kampa packs in so much wordplay about The Iliad and The Odyssey that even those who find the epic poet incurably unfunny will have to give up and laugh. Kampa paints Homer’s married life (“his Achilles’ heel”) and writing life (“his job, what job?”) as one of unending “hectoring.” Look too how Kampa’s rhyme scheme is as hard-won as the noblest battle: tercets that rhyme aab, bcc in sequence, so that they effectively wed as six-line stanzas. A game for a poetry workshop: how many hilarious puns can you find? And yet the way Kampa’s poem ends is no joke: with “Rage.” -- Mary Jo Salter
Homer at Home
He couldn’t, after all, be said to dwell in
A kingly castle when she gave him hell in
Every regard. Her tirades left him shaking:
She’d launch into the thousand hardships making
Their match a disappointment—him a slob,
And all the drinking, and his job, what job?—
Until she ran him down and drove him mad.
The years of hectoring, the ill he had
To suffer—all of it now made him feel
That getting hitched was his Achilles’ heel.
Not that she hadn’t been worn down by his
Unbroken strings of broken promises,
The winding yarns he spun in his defense;
Not that she didn’t harbor a looming sense
That somewhere, somehow, both their ships had sunk
(The weaving home at three A.M. dead drunk)
And bitters were the sea they now must swim in
(His frank entanglements with foreign women)—
So she admired the clean audacity
Of her old schoolgirl friend Penelope
Who, with a new man, knew no end to hope:
Penny had found it in her to elope
And now sent postcards (“What’ve you got to lose?”)
From ports (“To die for!”) on her wedding cruise.
Homer, meanwhile, grew derelict with age.
One word. One word. To ward off the blank page,
He started with the most instinctive: Rage.
Stephen Kampa holds a BA in English Literature from Carleton College and an MFA in Poetry from The Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Cracks in the Invisible, won the 2010 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and the 2011 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards. His second book, Bachelor Pad (2014), and his third, Articulate as Rain (2018), appeared from The Waywiser Press. Kampa has been playing harmonica for twenty years and was named the 2012 Florida Harmonica Championships Overall Champion. He has worked as the harmonica player for a variety of bands, including Robert “Top” Thomas & the Swamp Kings, Victor Wainwright & the WildRoots, and the Old Kings. His session work appears most recently on Wildroots Sessions, Vol. 1. He teaches English at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
