Hands on Stanzas 2008-2009

I'm thrilled to once again be teaching as a poet-in-residence through the Poetry Center of Chicago's Hands on Stanzas program. This year, I'll be returning to three schools: McPherson, Solomon, and Shields Elementary. I start at Shields next week, and the other two follow shortly.

Be sure to check each school's blog weekly for updates. Links are above. Student poetry will be posted soon!

The Poetry Center recently re-launched its web site; go here and take a peek. Snazzy, eh?

I'm lucky to be a participant in the Hands on Stanzas program, and specifically to be working in these incredible schools.

More to come...

Mega Reading

Hope you can make it out to this aptly-named event. See below for approximate reading times, including yours truly's. I'll be reading all new poems.

Tentative Schedule for Mega Reading on August 9th:

1) Vittorio Carli (2:00-2:10)
2) Tom Henkey (2:10-2:20)
3) Articulite (2:20-2:30)
4) Buddha 309 (2:30-2:40)
5) Count Leonard DeMontbrun (2:40-2:50)
6) Donnie Byron (2:50-3:00)
7) Jason L. Ammerman (3:00-3:10)
8) Joe Carli (3:10-3:20)
9) Maureen Tolman Flannery (3:20-3:30)
10) Katie Schaag (3:30-3:40)
11) Lee Groban (3:40-3:50)
12) Dr. Groove/Geoffrey Watts (3:50-4:00)
13) Jessica Guzales (4:00-4:10)
13) Ditch Pigs with Miss Lady J. and Suzy Sunshine (4:10-4:20)
14) Kim Berez (4:20-4:30)
15) Janet Kuypers (4:30-4:40)
16) Yolanda Yo Jackson aka Poetic Flow (4:40-4:50)
17) Bob Lawrence (4:50-5:00)
18) Laura Lionello (5:00-5:10)
19) Ixta J. Menchaca (5:10-5:20)
20) Dena Pope (5:20-5:30)
21) Blonde Lesbians from Outer Space (5:30-5:40)
22) Jesus Sains (5:40-5:50)
23) Cathleen Schandelmeier-Bartels (5:50-6:00)
24) Shag (6:00-6:10)
25) Earline Strickand (6:10-6:20)
26) Larry O. Dean (6:20-6:30)
27) Vincent (6:30-6:40)
28) Erika Mikkalo (6:40-6:50)
30) Cynthia Walker (6:50-7:00)
31) Ivan Petryshyn (7:00-7:10)
31) Jennifer Watman (7:10-7:20)
32) Valya Woodstock (7:20-7:30)

Mercury Cafe
1505 W. Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
(312) 455-9924

Hope to see you there!

Steve Orlen's The Elephant's Child

I first became familiar with Steve Orlen through Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Here's the poem, “Monkey Mind,” in its entirety:

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision,
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.
I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows
At every minute of every hour that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

“Monkey Mind” isn't among the sixteen new poems in Orlen's The Elephant's Child, which also collects work from 1978-2005; it's from his 2001 book, This Particular Eternity. By far, my favorite, and I'd argue the best poems here are from the last ten years, and even Orlen (or his publisher) agrees, since earlier books, from 1978, 1981, and 1992, are represented by four, four, and seven poems, respectively. He seems to hit his stride – and by 'stride' I mean come into a comfortable and recognizable style – in Kisses (1997), a book that also addresses Orlen's Jewishness. (An earlier poem collected here, “The Pripet Marshes,” has the Holocaust as its theme, but its voice is more reportorial.) Which doesn't mean there's no discernible style or voice in the thirty-year-old poems by Orlen; if I picked up the aptly-named Permission to Speak, chances are I'd recognize right away a poet whose work talks to me, whose words I really hear. The best thing is, his poetry has both improved with age, as well as become better, more incisive and personal over time, reflecting a fine tuning of Orlen's work and obsessions.

One of Orlen's great subjects is sex, which he approaches unflinchingly. “In Praise of Beverly,” from Permission to Speak, is the first chronologically in this collection, if not sequentially. What he exhibits here, as well as in later works, such as “Poem for Women and for Men,” and “Nature Rarely Confides in Me,” is not just 'honesty' but a rejection of sentimentality. As a poet grows older, the inclination for them is to mellow with age; the same is certainly true, and perhaps more evident in contemporary music. But while the not-necessarily-well-fed rock and roller loses their bite as well as their bile – meaning 'success' is neither the measuring stick, nor the impetus for toning down the barbaric yawp that came naturally early on – the poet, already a creature of isolation and introspection, should be immune to such a dwindling of character, or at least an extreme case of it. Orlen's work here, especially the most recent, shows no sign of wimping out.

Back to “Monkey Mind” for a moment. What I admire about this poem – and what grabbed me right away – is Orlen's deft mental maneuvering through a minefield pocked with memories and emotions. For him, crass lust is on a par with stupidity, is equal to childhood fears, measures up alongside love and forgiveness; he doesn't prioritize these all too human failings and feelings, creating a rhetorical argument for one, and against another. That so much baggage apparently at odds with itself can coexist in one poem is a laudable already, but Orlen makes it appear natural, leads the reader by the hand without drawing attention to the disparateness around them. As to style, he doesn't give eyes a workout by letting lines meander or zigzag across the page, but employs instinctive breaks between sentences and stanzas, breaks that are not uniform yet which both inform the text as well as allow it to move gracefully. Notice the shortest line in “Monkey Mind” –

I'm a slow learner

– how it says what it says by saying as well as showing. Great craft, great poems.

Tom Carey's Desire

I'm not exactly sure where I read about Tom Carey's Desire. I'm a big list-maker and an inveterate jotter, specifically in the pages of my trusty At-A-Glance appointment book, where I know nothing escapes my scrutiny for long. If it's worth remembering, pondering, vetting, analyzing, dissecting, it winds up there. Those items that do are ritually moved to later pages if not dealt with in a timely fashion, and as I'm transitioning from an elder planner to a neophyte edition, I make one final pass of the former's pages, just in case something fell through the proverbial cracks. Cary's book found its way into my At-A-Glance, and after some shuffling and juggling, I finally got myself a copy.

Carey is a native left-coaster – specifically, a southern Californian – who grew up in the shadow of Hollywood. IMDB only lists one screen credit, but his bio notes a role as well in Day of the Locust (one of the best book-to-screen adaptions ever), which is apt because of its poison pen attitude toward Tinseltown. He studied acting seriously, and seems to have continued with it after a move to New York in the late '70s. However, in 1988, he became a Franciscan brother in the Society of St. Francis, a religious order in the Episcopal Church – “men who live under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience,” according to their web site. It continues, “In addition to the work of prayer, most of the Brothers are engaged in work outside the friary.” Indeed.

Desire bears the subtitle, Poems: 1986-1996. Does Carey write or, more specifically, publish anymore? The book is ten-plus years old, and the only other publication credit I can find is as co-editor of James Schuyler's Collected Poems (Desire is dedicated to Schuyler); a poem about Joe Brainard appeared in Jacket, in 2002. That's it, based on a cursory search. It's not the selected work of a longstanding writer; Desire instead seems to be a compendium of poems written during a decade, including some overlap with Carey's entry into the Franciscan order.

Carey ain't no Thomas Merton. He's obviously influenced by the New York School, and writes in a cosmopolitan, chatty, yet often world-weary style about people and places in bohemian New York; his poetry isn't universal, but it also doesn't feel hermetic, like the worst graduates from that particular alma mater. Unlike the NY poets, though, many of Carey's poems are confessional, written by a mind on the cusp of being both gay man and religious acolyte. He doesn't appear to be torn about the religiosity, in fact relishes the rituals of his chosen vocation. But it's an unusual blend, to say the least, these poems of longing and lust, death and dying, life and living.

Terrance Hayes' Wind in a Box

Terrance Hayes displays an astonishing versatility in Wind in a Box. I'd use the old cliché – that these poems seem as if they'd been written by a legion of bards, instead of a lone legionnaire – but Hayes' voice comes through, whatever form his poems take: persona, prose, list; “variations” on blue; as well as multiple renditions using the collection's title, each quite different from the previous incarnation. The stylistic mix works here, doesn't feel either desperate, or forced; if anything, it posits him as an avidly open poet, who's not merely willing to try anything for trial's sake, so much as he is restless.

Hayes is erudite, but also necessarily rageful; he tackles race relations, most tenuously among African-Americans, peeling skin color away to get at the beating heart beneath. But there's bones and gristle too between the outer and inner parts of these poems, and Hayes doesn't neglect the physical – body image, sexual congress both consensual and not; see "Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)" for an example of the former, and "A Girl in the Woods" for the latter. He's smart, which can be a crutch with some writers, but he handles his smarts like a hot coal, tossing it from hand to hand so he doesn't get burnt.

His persona poems are not what one might normally expect. Hayes is oblique when naming (re)sources; readers need to dig deeper below the surface from the start. The title, “MJ Fan Letter” imparts that the poem is voiced by a fan, to Michael Jackson; the addressee is K.O.P., or Jackson's once ubiquitous title, King of Pop. But the language suggests otherwise. So is Jackson, then, writing to himself, and by extension, talking to himself? The poem's genesis is the song “Man in the Mirror,” which he references in its first few lines:

...for the first dozen years of my life
I never looked at myself. I believed mirrors
bore no true social significance partly because
they hung on walls.

The banality of that comment – “because they hung on walls” – is offset by the perversity of what readers know: that Jackson has such an unhealthy relationship with self-image that he would literally reconstruct his face through myriad plastic surgeries until he stopped looking remotely like himself; even sadder, until he no longer resembled a black man. Hayes has found in Jackson's self-mutilation a symbol of the much greater problems and issues that continue to haunt African-Americans.

"MJ Fan Letter," like many poems in Wind in a Box, requires multiple readings to get to all its levels. Sometimes I see this as a deficit, if the poet is working overtime to obfuscate what otherwise would benefit from being clearly stated; clarity is not easy to achieve, whereas willful obscurity is. Hayes' command of language is exemplary, and his poetry is often demanding, but once you get to a point of resolution the struggle has been worth it.

David Kirby's The House on Boulevard St.

David Kirby is a contemporary poet with a deceptively light, deft touch, and plenty of smarts. When plumbing the cultural depths – something he does a lot, but in a very offhand manner – Kirby's subjects run along a more meat and potatoes vein: Gomer Pyle, Rat Scabies, Richard Pryor, Karl Wallenda, Roman Polanski, and Little Richard are merely a handful of names that pop up in The House on Boulevard St., alongside major league poetry peeps Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore. Perhaps he says it best in “Meetings with Remarkable Men”:

My own heroes are not Andrew Jackson or John Bunyan
or Cervantes but people I already know,
like Officer John Moore, the little skinny yellow-eyed guy
who used to be what was called a “prize fighter”
(if you asked him, he'd think about it for a while and then say
his biggest match was for $10,000 in 1947 against
Wild Bill Kelly) and who now writes parking tickets
for the football players who leave their Broncos
in the handicapped spaces outside the Williams Building
everyday so they don't have to walk far
to the desks where they'll drowse through
my Contemporary Poetry Class...

Here, Kirby reveals (and revels in) his everyman poetics, displays ready wit, and a love of pop culture. He also writes in a step-line form that zigzags across the page, hugging the margins and giving the appearance of a dense and inscrutable field of text – that is, until one begins reading, and finds the writing breezy as well as accessible. Kirby uses this form exclusively nowadays (unlike his earlier poetry, which was more formal and blander; I'd say it had a lot less personality), and it succinctly echoes the twists and turns both his mind and narrative takes.

The House on Boulevard St. is a “new and selected poems” (emphasis Kirby), but reordered from its original chronological publication, broken down into three sections which are “organized around the periods of time the poems explore rather than their dates of publication,” according to the preface. This is an interesting way to sequence the book, with poems about friendship, teaching and academia together; poems written on sabbatical, in Paris, Scotland and Italy; and poems about family. Kirby employs a compositional similarity from poem to poem, akin to a great ocean into which the reader jumps and thrashes giddily, yet each develops its own distinct personality and seems less of a piece than part of an engrossing obsession. It's no surprise, then, that he is also an expert essayist; I've read both What Is a Book? (with contents divided under subjects, What Is a Reader?, What Is a Writer?, What Is a Critic?, and finally, the titular topic), as well as Ultra-Talk, which finds Kirby considering a dizzying array of matters culled from the great (un)washed, and would recommend both readily.

Freelancers Union

The Great Poetry E-Book Free-For-All!

The mission of the Poetry Super Highway is to expose as many people to as many other people's poetry as possible. To that end, Rick Lupert at PSH has come up with a crazy project in which poetry e-books will be freely available to all interested humans on Earth for a 24 hour period.

Throughout April he collected e-books from poets and writers interested in participating -- including yours truly. Then on May 1st, for a 24 hour period, a special website will go live with links to all of the e-books. For 24 hours anyone will be free to download, for free, as many of these e-books as they like ... a poetry e-book free-for-all.

On May 1st at Midnight (the evening of April 30), Poetry Super Highway will distribute a special e-mail letting people know the location of the web page with links to all of the e-book files. People will be free to download any or all of the titles, electronically, travelling all over the world. This web page will go off line 24 hours later at Midnight on May 2nd.

PSH will also list e-book descriptions on this web page along with links to the authors' websites.

When it's over, PSH will produce a list of how many copies of each book were downloaded for no reason other than you may find it interesting.

Check out the e-book site today, and forward this information to anyone else who may be interested.

Oh, and let me know what you think of Used Poems: 1985-2004.

Thanks!

Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott"

Tennyson's poem, “The Lady of Shalott” is a brilliant piece of populist writing, displaying vibrant language and beautiful musicality. Part of its power, and continued readability comes from Tennyson's sense of what to leave out of the story.

Unlike “The Palace of Art,” which throws in every detail and then some, as well as the kitchen sink, “The Lady of Shalott” moves with the allure and excitement of a fairy tale, albeit one with a tragic ending. Consider its first verse:

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road run by
To many-towered Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

The reader knows right away this is a fantasy – if not by the evocation of mythic Camelot, through Tennyson's “once upon a time”-like scene setting: the river, the elemental grains that “clothe the wold and meet the sky,” the road through the field where travelers “[gaze] where the lilies blow” at the Isle of Shalott. More importantly, Tennyson hesitates to heap adjective upon adjective, leaving it to the reader to imagine the minutiae of the scene and contributing to the poem's universality. Compare this to the first eight lines of “The Palace of Art”:

I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,
Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.
I said, “O Soul, make merry and carouse,
Dear soul, for all is well.”

A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnished brass
I chose. The rangèd ramparts bright
From level meadow-bases of deep grass
Suddenly scaled the light.

Even though its four line stanzas are more compact, Tennyson's language – and eventual relentless cataloging – clogs and chokes the poem: “crag-platform,” “burnished brass,” and “deep grass” are not the worse offenders, but a far cry from the minimalist lines that begin and run throughout “Shalott.”

The tone of the language is also completely different. Whereas “Shalott” is conversational, “Palace” is grandiloquent and mannered. The approach in each instance is stylistically sound, and provides both poems with their own distinct personality, but the breathing room in “Shalott” imbues it with an urgency that the other poem lacks. For example,

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.

Does the Lady sleep? Where does her magic emanate from? What colors? Whose whisper? Why a curse? Why is she forbidden from viewing Camelot? The power here is not so much in the answers – which we as readers do not, and never will know – as in the implicit questions.

Tennyson's portrait in language of “The Lady of Shalott” is that much more vivid in its opaqueness; in fact, we never get any description of how the Lady looks, aside from being “robed in snowy white,” and Lancelot's comment, “She has a lovely face.” Lovely in what way? What color are her eyes, her hair? Is she pale or dark skinned? The reader fills this in, creating their own vision of The Lady. This is part of Tennyson's mastery in relating the story of the poem. By keeping his language clean and simple, Tennyson makes his poem appreciable to everyone, including the knights, burghers, lords and dames; abbots, shepherds, pages and reapers who populate it. That's no different today, where some poetry requires footnotes, and/or Byzantine knowledge to fully comprehend the Poet's Message, obfuscated as it is in tangles of rarefied and bloated language.

over-Its entirety could be dissected, and a series of questions posed from reading between the lines of the text, but “The Lady of Shalott” is not a poem that lends itself to pomo intellectualizing, surging forward instead on the weight of its emotions. It is those emotions – loneliness and want of love – that provide the core of the poem's power. Who has never been lonely, or unloved? We identify with the Lady's feelings because we have all felt them, and Tennyson elicits these character traits without resorting to bluntly spelling it out for the reader. On the other hand, emotion is on hold in “The Palace of Art,” whose protagonist only hints at feelings in its final four lines:

"Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built:
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt."

Guilt is a more intellectual emotion than loneliness or lovelessness, and predicated on action or reaction; “The Lady of Shalott” may dwell in a world of shadows, but she is more in touch with herself, and her feelings, than the sybaritic voice of “The Palace of Art.” Her selflessness is intrinsically more appealing than selfishness, and lends her pathos, even as an enigma.

There are a few explicit questions in the poem:

But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?

And

Who is this? And what is here?

Lines uttered by onlookers as the Lady floats, dead, along the river to Camelot. Tennyson knows it is better to let them linger than to diminish them with concrete answers. It also strengthens the mythic qualities of the poem, and in turn its heroine, to leave them unanswered. The rules are the same, whether the questions are spoken, or implied: the inherent power of “The Lady of Shalott” lies in its omissions. Rather than wallop readers with the wholesale image-mongering technique of “The Palace of Art,” this quieter and more elusive poem gets under the skin and remains there, a poignant and mysterious masterpiece of understatement.

Robert Browning and Dramatic Monologue

Critics have nominated Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess” and “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church” as 'perfect' dramatic monologues. I would agree that each is a stellar example of the genre on its own terms. Both draw the reader in from the first line or two:

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. [Duchess]

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back? [Bishop]

So, too, does “Fra Lippo Lippi”:

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.

Browning begins these poems in the midst of implied action – the Duke pointing out the Duchess' portrait to the unwary envoy; the Bishop speaking to his 'sons/nephews' gathered at the foot of his death bed; Fra Lippo, apologizing to, then remonstrating gendarmes questioning him on the street. He also offers immediate details about each speaker or situation: the Duchess is dead, the Bishop is paranoid or delusional, and Lippi isn't just any poor schmuck caught out after curfew. This is a masterful and visceral poetic technique for ensnaring readers, particularly well suited to dramatic monologues, where a single voice is trying to suck them into a whirlpool of subjectivity. We know this isn't Browning speaking as Browning, but as a character, each with an apparent agenda demonstrated within their first utterances. In all three poems, we're hooked from the get go and primed for more.

Cornelia Pearsall argues in her essay on the subject that the essence of the dramatic monologue is the speaker's desire to achieve some purpose or goal. Even if that goal is simply bending our ear, that's true enough. “My Last Duchess” and “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” are tidy little packages achieving that essence, “Duchess” tidiest at a mere 56 lines. (“The Bishop” doubles that.) However, by definition, a monologue is a prolonged talk or discourse by a single speaker, especially one dominating or monopolizing a conversation. While not improved merely by lengthening, a more loquacious monologue provides time for the character to define him or herself by their thoughts, actions and deeds. “Fra Lippo Lippi,” at 392 lines, is three times as long as “The Bishop,” compelling readers by virtue of its sureness of voice and complexity of character and theme; likewise, it is never flat or prosaic. “Fra Lippo Lippi”'s ambitions as a monologue are grander, its stakes higher; it achieves its ends magnificently, almost transparently as we become like eavesdroppers on Lippi's conversation. The ego takes the wheel; the trip begins.

Another element that elevates “Fra Lippo Lippi” to, if not perfection, than a higher state of accomplishment than the other poems, is that of the unguarded moment. When the Duke begins his monologue, he is ostensibly in control of the situation. So, too, is the Bishop, who apparently has requested this gathering. Lippi is accosted by the guards, wrests control away from them, and begins pontificating on a variety of issues on his mind – the nature of art, freedom of choice, fate, and circumstance. This sounds today like real and, even considering its antiquated terms, modern speech and ideas. The portrait Lippi paints in words is as vivid as the art he is famous for, and as human – ironically, also at odds with the rarefied painting endorsed by the church that “makes [people] forget there's such a thing as flesh.” Yet he wouldn't have engaged in this philosophical diatribe if not for being accosted after midnight “at an alley's end / Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar.” Less likely embarrassed or merely guilty, Lippi is surprised by the intrusion, but quickly regains his composure:

Aha, you know your betters! Then, you'll take
Your hand away that's fiddling on my throat.
And please to know me likewise. Who am I?
Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend
Three streets off – he's a certain...how d'ye call?
Master – a...Cosimo of the Medici.

It doesn't take Lippi long to drop Medici's name, further elevating his station in the guard's eyes. From there, his story unfolds at a breathless clip – the orphanage, his natural artistic talent discovered and exploited, the church's admonishment of the liberties he takes painting “the beauty and the wonder and the power” of the world. While he has asserted a dominant role in the poem, his monologue has an air of the confessional to it. Sometimes we will be painfully honest about ourselves or our situations to complete strangers, whereas we cannot always trust the confidence of our best friends and family. It is that schism that also lends “Fra Lippo Lippi” its rare poignancy and power.

These three poems are each brilliant, in their own way. “Duchess” and “Bishop” are earlier works – 1842 and 1845, respectively – whereas “Lippi” was written in 1855, the same year Browning wrote “Love Among the Ruins,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “The Statue and the Bust,” and more. Would he go on to write a more fully realized dramatic monologue than “Lippi?” No. Despite the pleasures inherent in much of his work, it remains a masterpiece of tone, control and character unique among his poems, if not perfect than the nearest thing to it.

Tennyson's "In Memoriam"

Many people consider Alfred Tennyson's “In Memoriam” to be his masterpiece. In fact, it is many things: emotionally draining, exhilarating, philosophically curious, solipsistic, exhausting (and exhaustive), dogmatic, and demanding. One constant, however, is Tennyson's poetic music. Throughout its 131 sections, prologue, and epilogue of equal form (isometric stanzas comprised of iambic tetrameter quatrains with the rhyme scheme ABBA), Tennyson maintains his regimented rhyme scheme with an ease that is startling in its ability to reinvent itself. While the poem as a whole may, at times, stagger under its own weight, the stanzas move with the same organic tide flow as the ocean bearing Tennyson's close friend, and the inspiration behind "In Memoriam," Arthur Hallam's body home to England from Vienna.

It would be cynical to dismiss this achievement by sheer fact of the time involved in completing “In Memoriam” – Tennyson devoted seventeen years to it. However, it was composed not as a whole, but as a series of separate poems, many of which were likely edited and/or adapted to fit the uniquely self-enclosed quatrain form that it employs, since Tennyson reportedly had no intention of combining the disparate poems together until it appeared in print in 1850. I would imagine that writing “In Memoriam” amounted to a type of psychotherapy for Tennyson, and doubt that while purging himself of his immense grief over the sudden and untimely death of his best friend, he fretted over the poetic form his exorcism was taking.

As examples of Tennyson's masterful control of language, I am going to randomly choose a few stanzas from “In Memoriam,” since I might be predisposed to defer to those that I find particularly persuasive otherwise.

The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
(LXXVIII, Stanza two)

This is the form Tennyson never diverts from: eight syllables per line, and the enclosed rhyme scheme that, in effect, posits each stanza as a stand-alone entity. The choice to limit each line to eight syllables is both brilliant and foolish – brilliant since ultimately he pulls it off (without drawing attention to itself), foolish because he risks stagnancy by limiting each line to a mere eight beats. Yet the lines never feel mechanical, or sound stilted. Notice, in the example above, how mellifluous the long and short “O” sound is in yule-clog, frost, region, brooding, something, and lost; and the “I” sound with keen, wing, wind, region, things, quiet, and something; and how naturally the lines speak and breathe individually as well as in concert. Both sounds allude to the tone of the verse as well – melancholy and hushed.

The stern were mild when thou wert by,
The flippant put himself to school
And heard thee, and the brazen fool
Was softened, and he knew not why...
(CX, Stanza three)

We again get echoes of the “I” and “O” sounds from the prior stanza, in addition to “E” in stern, wert, himself, heard, thee, brazen, he, and knew – a terser, more bitter sound. By alternating short with multi syllabic (or visually elongated) words, Tennyson creates the illusion of a less severe score for his poetic music. The brevity of the lines is further disguised by indenting the second and third of each stanza, which cumulatively gives “In Memoriam” the appearance of a flowing steam or river undulating down the page, and helps to enjoin all its myriad stanzas into an ultimately unified whole.

Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey
By each cold hearth, and sadness flings
Her shadow on the blaze of kings:
And yet myself have heard him say...
(XCVIII, Stanza five)

Unlike the prior two selections, this stanza begins in mid-sentence and ends with a pause, via a comma. However, it doesn't sound or feel sliced out of context, even if it makes less immediate sense as four lines on their own. This is a tribute to Tennyson's facility with language: even in a truncated context, his lines sing, and flow. Here, he chooses an overriding “A” sound – gnarr, prey, hearth, sadness, shadow, blaze, and, have, heard, say – within the confines of the stanza, lending it a more guttural music that directly plays on the themes of death and disgust within the section.

The use of enclosed rhyme in each verse creates a seemingly contradictory motion within “In Memoriam.” It renders each four lines as a complete thought unto itself, as if Tennyson were having difficulty coming to terms with, and moving onward from Hallam's death. It also conveys the hesitancy with which the poet is absorbing all the information on both intellectual and emotional levels. However, by choosing the ABBA rhyme scheme, and alternating rhymes from verse to verse, instead of locking into an established aural rhythm, the poem moves in a slow but steady progression toward its ultimately celebratory conclusion – the marriage of Tennyson's sister. The music inherent in each stanza also works in this way, as the listener's ear is naturally drawn to each variation on the theme, wonders and cannot possibly guess what awaits in the next quatrain.

Pilcrow Lit Fest: Five with...

I'll be a panelist at the Pilcrow Lit Fest next month. Amy Guth, the irascible and endearing brains behind same, mailed me a questionnaire to be completed beforehand.

Here's my answers to Ms. Guth's probing inquiries.

Amy, thanks for asking!

The Haystack in the Floods

I went through a Victorian reading jag a short while ago. That doesn't mean I donned my frock coat and scarf and took to the streets reciting The Bab Ballads; but because of a recent self-medicating dose of Robert Browning's work, I found myself wondering what other writing was out there I had missed (or misunderstood) from that era.

One such overlooked poet is William Morris. Morris was a painter and a Socialist as well. “The Haystack in the Floods” is a surprisingly 'modern' poem, one with an immediate impact that resonates in the mind (and gut) long after it has been read. Unlike Tennyson's idylls, beautifully written yet with their Spielbergized approximation of Arthurian times, Morris' view of the medieval goes beyond castles, heroic quests, and moats, delving into psychologically deeper recesses and addressing, to quote Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann, the banality of evil.

Set in 1356, after the defeat of the French at Poitiers by Edward the Black Prince, an English knight, Sir Robert de Marny is traveling through France with his mistress Jehane, heading for the English-controlled safety of Gascony when they are suddenly surrounded by French enemy, Godmar and his troops. The opening five lines of the poem establish a fatalistic tone:

Had she come all the way for this,
To part at last without a kiss?
Yea, had she borne the dirt and rain
That her own eyes might see him slain
Beside the haystack in the floods?

Morris' poetry sounds like pulp fiction, a hundred years ahead of its time. You can almost imagine a narrator reading those same lines, with minor vernacular changes, in the opening minutes of a poverty row film noir – Jehane the femme fatale, Robert the fall guy, and Godmar the heavy – filmed in stark black and white. All the elements are there: passion, filth, rain, self-pity, existential angst and, of course, murder. The mood continues:

Along the dripping leafless woods,
The stirrup touching either shoe,
She rode astride as troopers do;
With kirtle kilted to her knee,
To which the mud splash'd wretchedly;
And the wet dripp'd from every tree
Upon her head and heavy hair,
And on her eyelids broad and fair;
The tears and rain ran down her face.

This is an incredibly vivid passage, rich with details: the wet, naked trees; muddy ground; Jehane's matted hair and face streaked with rain and tears. Morris writes with terrific restraint and simplicity, creating tension and dread even before Godmar has arrived on the scene. These are desperate people, not even bothering to put up false facades of hope or joviality. The landscape is dark, dreary, and wretched; they are driven by a basic instinct to survive, and little else.

Robert is either headstrong, or stupid, or a fatal combination of both:

By fits and starts they rode apace,
And very often was his place
Far off from her

Answering to “a murmuring from his men,” Robert “turn[s] back with promises” (or is it sudden false bravado?) that they are close to safety at Gascony. Approaching the “old soak'd hay” of the title, “that Judas” Godmar appears, accompanied by thirty of his men. Robert tries to soothe fears among his own ranks by evoking the English victory at Poitiers, even though they are outnumbered nearly two-to-one. His troops are somber and silent, offering no resistance as Robert is pulled from his horse.

Godmar speaks matter-of-factly when Jehane refuses to “yield ... as [his] paramour”:

Jehane, on yonder hill there stands
My castle, guarding well my lands:
What hinders me from taking you,
And doing that I list to do
To your fair willful body, while
Your knight lies dead?

This necrophiliac scenario of rape and murder doesn't quiet Jehane. She threatens to kill Godmar while he sleeps, by strangling him or biting through his throat. Godmar explicates the French peoples' reaction to a returning, treasonous Jehane:

'Jehane the brown! Jehane the brown!
Give us Jehane to burn or drown!' –
Eh – gag me Robert! – sweet my friend,
This were indeed a piteous end
For those long fingers, and long feet,
And long neck, and smooth shoulders sweet;
An end that few men would forget
That saw it – So, an hour yet:
Consider, Jehane, which to take
Of life or death!

Godmar's leering description of Jehane’s “long” fingers, feet and neck, and “smooth” “sweet” shoulders is the speech of a sociopath and sadist. Jehane dismounts, “totter[s] some yards” and “with her face/ Turn'd upward to the sky,” falls into a dreamless sleep (or is it faints?). Awakening, she reiterates, in a “strangely childlike” fashion – or state of shock – that she will not go with Godmar. “With a start” he acts, and she observes

The long bright blade without a flaw
Glide out from Godmar's sheath, his hand
In Robert's hair, she saw him bend
Back Robert's head; she saw him send
The thin steel down; the blow told well,
Right backward the knight Robert fell,
And moaned as dogs do, being half dead,
Unwitting, as I deem: so then
Godmar turn'd grinning to his men,
Who ran, some five or six, and beat
His head to pieces at their feet.

This gruesome climax has been foretold from the beginning. Morris' language is vivid and kinetic – the flawless “long bright blade” coming down to sever Robert's head; Robert moaning “as dogs do,” half-dead; Godmar's men rushing in to smash the head “to pieces at their feet” in a febrile frenzy. Jehane, hands cold, smiling ruefully and perhaps driven mad, is off to prison in Paris to be burned or drowned as a traitor. An incredibly nihilistic conclusion, the hopelessness of which is hammered home with the final two, perversely plainspoken lines:

This was the parting that they had
Beside the haystack in the floods.

Morris casts a cold, clear eye on his characters. He eschews affection toward them, and is not afraid to see them as they are. Even if our sympathies go out instinctively toward Robert and Jehane, the ostensible victims in the poem, that feeling is artificially enhanced when compared to the cruelty and Darwinian drive of Godmar. There are no larger-than-life heroes, no stereotyped villains here. There is no need to look for motivations, hows or whys; things just happen. “Had she come all the way for this?” The answer is yes, in Morris’ pitiless universe of cause and effect.

Musical Natural Selections

OK, I lied ... here's a few songs from various outfits in which I've rocked/currently roll.















Thanks for listening!

Fixx Reading Series

I'll be reading tonight at this terrific series, hosted by the indefatigable Amy Guth, along with Cris Mazza and Laura van Prooyen.

Hope to see you there!

The Mercy Seat

I’m more than two-thirds through The Mercy Seat, Norman Dubie’s collected & new poems. I was looking forward to reading Dubie more closely, being somewhat familiar with his work beforehand, from stray poems read in magazines and/or anthologies. Perhaps it’s because of my tendency to get deeper and deeper into a writer all at once, however, that I’m somewhat disappointed. Or rather, that Dubie disappoints me.

Reading myriad poems in one mental gulp dilutes their impact, and points out certain stylistic drawbacks that he exhibits, especially in work up through 1990. (I’m not beyond that point yet.) One thing I noticed almost immediately is the annoying tendency he has to end his poems with a final, stand-alone line. I’m not talking about what the line is saying, by itself or in context with each poem as a whole, but Dubie’s laziness in repeatedly opting toward that stylistic decision. (I just randomly opened the book, and counted. Out of twenty-five consecutive poems, eight ended that way; that’s a third.) This is, perhaps, not the most damning of criticisms, but as I digested these poems in large doses, the pattern not only distracted me, but cumulatively, and repeatedly took me out of the work. The Mercy Seat’s poems aren’t noted as being in their original sequence, and instead are grouped according to years; I assume they may be ordered differently than upon first publication. Nevertheless, placing them together in this omnibus edition puts them in a new light, and under cumulative scrutiny this stylistic tic of Dubie’s bothers me. Asked why, I’d say, generally, that I see numerous instances here where that last, lone line could be absorbed by the preceding stanza without diminishing its power, or drastically altering its meaning. In fact, I see only how such absorption would improve the poems, by not drawing attention, again and again, to the last line, as if that were the poem’s, and Dubie’s point.

I do admire the craft of these poems, and Dubie's grasp of voice, even if the voice doesn't waver much, if at all from poem to poem; differentiation, for him, appears to be in the particular details of each persona. One other criticism would be the poems' utter lack of humor. Sure, humor is hard, and maybe Norman isn’t much of a chuckler – at least in print; he could be a hoot-and-a-half at parties. But the dearth of any comedy, even black, made these poems not just "heavy" but heavy.

Real Sofistikashun

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Real Sofistikashun, Tony Hoagland's swell collection of essays on poetry and craft. Some chapters are giving me a sense of déjà vu, and while I can't confirm it – being, by necessity, less of a pack rat since our move to smaller digs two years ago, I'm unable to keep as many piles of periodicals around for casual perusal as I'd prefer – I'm confident I may have eyeballed them previously in APR or The Writer's Chronicle.

Reading Hoagland's essays in big gulps is doable, but not recommended. I drove my special lady to an appointment with her “aesthetician” recently. It was a snowy night, streets slick with ice and slush, and she eschews being behind the wheel of her trusty Toyota on such occasions if she can avoid it. Since it was not a teaching day for me, but a 'work' day, I offered to chauffeur her. Recently purchased, I brought Real Sofistikashun along for the ride as well. While my gal was off being coiffed, I parked my ass on the salon's semi-comfortable sofa and dug into the opening essay, "Altitudes: a Homemade Taxonomy." It establishes the tone Hoagland is to maintain for the duration, which he describes in his foreword as “neither academic nor exactly for the reader off the street.” True enough: you need to come to these essays prepared, but whether that preparation involves cases of canned meats, flashlights, first aid kit, batteries and water, or just a few candy bars, is up to individual discretion. If opting for the latter, however, you are likely to waste time traipsing to the corner store, stocking up on little things that could easily be tucked away in advance for emergencies. Hoagland's style is breezy yet rigorous – he gives you examples and cites to follow his train of thought or theoretical point, but after five or six chapters, the sheer ambition of each argument begins to weigh heavily upon the reader's brain. So it was as I slumped there, flanked by spritzers, shampoos, the tremor of trimmers, hiss of curling irons and incessant clipping of shears. Giving my noggin a much needed break, I closed the book, and switched to lighter reading – this month's Italian Vogue.

Be that as it may, I especially enjoyed Hoagland's thoughts on “the slipperiness of metaphor.” As he says, “Effective metaphors are always more complicated than we suppose,” and his essay on the subject is less an argument for any approach or school of thought than it is an examination of metaphor's metaness. While I don't agree with every point he makes – for example, Laura Kasischke's “A Long Commute” effectively illustrating “the fantastic elasticity” of metaphor – I don't have to: these essays sink or float by virtue of the overall thrust of Hoagland's thinking, and not sundry examples.

Here's hoping Hoagland's thoughts on “fear of narrative” and the power of meanness measure up to my expectations – entertaining as writing, useful and practical while writing.

The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

Denis Johnson’s latest book, Tree of Smoke, a Vietnam novel more than a decade in the writing, won the National Book Award last year. I knew of Johnson from Jesus' Son (the movie, not the book, though I was aware of the latter before the former), and had read a lot about him, though nothing by him. He keeps a low profile, and is not the most prolific writer. I had an idea what the poems in his collected and new edition, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (published in 1995) might be like, and I was right, though my preconceived notions may have been somewhat undercooked.

Johnson's poetry has a lot of sadness in it, mixed with ennui – to me, an odd combination, or perhaps difficult to make interesting. I found him very easy to read, which here is a good thing. (In a different poet, this wouldn't necessarily be the case.) His language flows smoothly and easily, but I was sometimes taken out of the poems by his use of the lowercase “i” instead of “I,” which, this side of e.e. cummings smacks of affectation. (Come to think of it, it does in Cummings, too; this disappears in the later poems.) I also admit to being biased against poems about poetry, or poems that talk about poetry in an outright way, such as “Falling,” which begins,

There is a part
of this poem where you must
say it with me, so
be ready, together we will make
it truthful...

Poetry as the subject of a poem is, to me, as difficult to make work as movies about movies, or songs about songs. I have no qualms with songs about movies, or poems about songs, but when I'm inside a poem I like to get lost in it, and not be reminded of where I am – a kind of willful abandon. Johnson certainly doesn't go overboard here, but I believe jettisoning all the references to POEM or POETRY would not detract from the core of whatever Johnson is trying to get at.

In the end, I enjoyed The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly and would look forward to reading more of Johnson's poetry. He's also been a playwright, so even considering the massive critical success of Tree of Smoke, one can hope he returns to his apparent first love as a writer.

David Breskin's Fresh Kills

As someone who has been referred to as a “renaissance man” before in print, I read David Breskin's Fresh Kills with interest. Here's someone who, like myself, has a few pokers in the fire, and some of them rather closely parallel my own fire pokers (music producer, journalist). Perhaps this is less unusual nowadays in our 21st century multitasking mode, but most books of poetry I grab off the shelves have biographical notes limited to the realm of literature, and academic credits. Breskin obviously gets around, and I like that right off the bat.

But I'm not as convinced by his poetry once I get into the book. Some of the earlier poems in Fresh Kills have a quasi-hipster, staccato style that feels forced to me:

The maid spanks her lord like clockwork.
Bring me the sweat of Scottie Pippen, bankers
and brokers, meter maids. Analyze skin
for its content of wind. Excuse me, while
I kiss the skull.

That last line is especially painful, being a pun on a lyric from Jimi Hendrix's “Foxy Lady.” I don't like it for what it is, and I don't like it for what it's trying to be.

Of course, my main gripe when reading poetry reviews is that they can excerpt what they want, and use that slice of writing to promote or demote the poet. It's a trick that works both ways. But with Breskin, and most of the poems in part one, I find this tendency of his to be annoying. To his credit, by part two things improve, which tells me (a) he had a definite theme in mind for each part of Fresh Kills, which I can respect even if I feel it fails him at times, and (b) that he is a poet I would like to continue to read. When he turns away from a more fragmented style that appears to address – urban alienation? Upper class complacency? – and toward more direct and emotive poems, I feel him, and I feel for him.

On Robert Frost

I had read very little Frost prior to a twofer I just picked up, including A Boy's Will and North of Boston. Certainly, the classic poems are unavoidable – “Acquainted with the Night,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken” – but considering my own development as a poet, I had made some kind of shadowy and half-thought-out pact with myself early on not to pay Frost that much attention. (Even though I went to the University of Michigan with a blood relative, Gordon Jay Frost.) Somewhere along the line, however, I decided that I needed to revamp that pact, and look more closely at his work. This was due to a combination of reading about Frost (the man as well as the poet) and discussions with fellow poets and/or readers.

Most recently, it was Paul Muldoon's essay on “The Mountain,” in The End of the Poem that got my juices flowing. Muldoon's book is pretty daunting, both in heft as well as depth of analysis; despite the chatty nature of these collected lectures, Muldoon hits his topics at various angles, drawing on myriad, sometimes disparate sources. I admire the approach, but I'm barely a quarter of the way through the book, which was a gift two Christmases ago. This is because I like taking my time and enjoying the writing, which I return to between other bouts with books, magazines or periodicals, and also because I must take my time. Ordinarily, I'm a fast reader, and have to make myself slow down, but here I am literally forced to read slower, owing to the incredible amount of information and opinion Muldoon packs into each piece.

Without dragging myself back into the fascinating mire that is Muldoon's essay, let me just say that it was reading the reprinting of “The Mountain” preceding it that really grabbed me. I knew some, but not all of the poems Muldoon chose to address, which was part of what attracted me to the book; and for those I didn't know, I read them right before getting into the essays themselves, rather than ahead of time. I was stunned by “The Mountain,” which struck me, perhaps initially in the context of collected lectures on topic, as quite unlike the Frost I (thought I) knew.

A Boy's Will was more 'that' Frost, the one I 'knew' when I made my earnest, if short-sighted pact to sidestep him in my own development. (I'd gotten into Williams by then, and he seemed a more stylistically as well as philosophically valuable replacement.) These poems sound to my ears anachronistic, even for 1913, whereas, for example, Arnold's “Dover Beach” sounds like a 20th century, rather than a 19th century poem. What amazes me, though, is how much of a step forward North of Boston seems, published only a year later. Perhaps it's the length of many of the poems that initially sets them apart, physically, from the prior volume's, but of course it's more than that. There's something kind of precious and quaint about A Boy's Will, that North of Boston completely eschews – as if Frost had undergone some kind of physical change that in turn underpinned the topics and even tone of his writing at the time. I know this is very elementary thinking, but it comes from the gut too and I look forward to delving more deeply into these two books, as well as more of Frost's work.