Review of Frank Stanford's title poem "You"

“When a writer dies, he or she dies two deaths and leaves two bodies behind, their physical body and their body of written work,” Greg Bacher writes on his blog dedicated to Frank Stanford, a poet who too few readers know. In 1978 at age twenty-nine, Stanford shot himself three times in the heart, leaving behind seven volumes of poetry. Within a year, two more volumes were published posthumously. In the past few years, a small group of poets have started to aggressively promote his work as can be seen with the 2008 Frank Stanford Festival, the University of Arkansas Press keeping in print his selected works The Light the Dead See, and Lost Roads (a small press started by Stanford with C.D. Wright) reissuing Stanford's epic poem The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You (2000) and two earlier collections, You and The Singing Knives (2009).

I’m going to post a short poem here, one from his book You listed as one of the best books from the last decade. When I last checked, Amazon only had one copy—used and selling for $998.00.

You by Frank Stanford

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

First, I have to say how that ending continues to kick me in the gut, even now when I’m expecting it. And to render any effect on the reader in such a short poem is tough. So, what’s Stanford doing here?

This poem works in “3s” for me in a few different ways. First, rhetorically I can divide the poem in three sections—or what some might call movements or leaps. (And by “rhetorically” I mean the argumentative structure of the poem such as how a Shakespearean sonnet has five moves: introduction of issue, complication, more complication, the turn, and conclusion.) Each section in “You” surprises because it refuses a clear, direct, and expected link to the previous section. Here is how I see the movements:

First:

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

Second:

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Third:

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

The first movement is the speaker dreaming of touching another woman and then waking up. Fine. Got it. Now, after this section, the common movement in a contemporary lyric would be to push the poem to the present. So, for example, if someone is thinking about another woman, the question will be “Why? What is happening now that makes one recall this?” I love how this poem refuses such a linearity. Instead, once “we wake up” we move into another memory, another dream-world. Nighttime links us to this second movement of the poem that describes the three-storied house of our childhood.

The last movement of this poem is unresolved, operating on a tonal, emotional level. This sense of irresolution occurs in a few different ways, but the more obvious way is that Stanford refuses to give us a complete sentence at the end of this poem. Instead, we have a fragment—and I love this fragment. Stanford writes, “Whatever we remember” and then does not bring this sentence back to the “we” coupled with an action verb. “Whatever we remember” and the fragment that follows damns whatever specific memory one may have to silliness. For whatever one remembers, the sense of darkness remains. Therefore, specific memory or a resolution is beside the point. The darkness is inescapable and all-encompassing.

Also, we end with a three-lined descent into darkness, recalling the tradition of Dante’s descent into hell with the triadic line. Stanford repeats “Darkest” three times which most poets would claim is unwise to do within a span of fifteen words. But his repetition lends a quality of fate to it all—a dark fate.

In this short poem, we can see what Stanford is often praised for: his use of diction, image, unique voice, idiom, wit, metaphor, and imaginative leaps. It is his leaps that I appreciate the most given to us straight-on in a conversational manner even though what follows is anything but straight-on. In a review of Stanford’s epic poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, reviewer Philip Jenks describes the poem in a way I find fitting to all of Stanford’s works: “Stanford provides a wild ride on this sailorless ship.”

Review of C.D. Wright’s “Like the Sun Down There” from Rising, Falling, Hovering

C.D. Wright’s thirteenth book is a collection of poems that addresses the concerns of the Bush years: Iraq, global trade, immigration, the “occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania” themselves, Hurricane Katrina, consumerism, and relationships. Each poem in this collection links together, repeating characters, refrains, and scenes. Sometimes Wright even repeats poems in almost their entirety. The following is one of my favorite poems from Rising, Falling, Hovering. Granted, this book features two long poems (one thirty-three pages and another twenty pages), so the blog-space prevents the inclusion of those beauties.

Like the Sun Down There

By C.D. Wright from Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

(*Note: These lines are double-spaced in her book.)

Early in the day they were driving past the small vineyard.

They were looking forward to walking around in another town.

They could find a wrought-iron bench in a garden of splashy flowers.

They might find a swimming hole.

Just beyond the vineyard they passed a dog standing against the body of a dog.

They passed a number of one-story houses sprouting rebar from the rooftops.

A man balancing bundles on his handlebars.

Plastic bags caught in organ cactus.

The town was twisted and steep.

The streets cobbled and shops full of punched tin.

They sat on a wall and watched children play in the dust.

At the waterworks women were washing mounds of colored clothing.

A man walking his hog by a length of hemp knocked on a door in an exterior wall and was let in.

They walked down some steps into a candlelit room.

The closeness, the warmth, the voices of people eating together.

The sound of plates slowly being stacked and a bird in the kitchen.

The disconsolate strain of a traditional song.

The full and weary ride home.

Just before the vineyard

the lights of the car picked out the standing dog, the body of the other one.

With this poem’s listing method and sparse lines, I feel compelled to do away with long paragraphs and list what I admired about the poem.

*I adore the details. Nothing is overwritten. It is stated. Unbeautified. Quirky. Wright gives the detail and steps out of the way such as this complete stanza composed of only six words: “Plastic bags caught in organ cactus.”

*The effect of these details is partly created from the lack of editorializing. (There is great restraint in these long lines—which is an unusual coupling. Long lines seem to encourage the dumping of exposition.) In the beginning, we know “they were looking forward” to exploring this new town. And then the only other bit of editorializing comes at the end with the song described as “disconsolate” and the ride home described as “full and weary”. That is all.

*The details (and poem) work on many levels, but tone is key and partly created from this lack of editorializing and singular stanzas. Loneliness is what I feel. Loneliness while among other people specifically. That sense of emptiness as the couple travels, looking for meaning, for experience, for the exotic…. With this tone, their travel leaves the aftertaste of yet another type of consumerism that leaves one empty.

*And speaking of that emptiness, some key word choices that would be crossed out in a workshop work beautifully here. For example, the steps are “some” steps, making it all seem a bit disconnected from the couple, like this is just another staircase that they will climb and forget. But the best moment of vague wording comes at the end when the image of the dog is repeated. On first reference, the dog is presented like this: “Passed a dog standing against the body of a dog”. Then the poem closes with: “The standing dog, the body of the other one.” Someone might say, “Why say ‘of the other one’? That’s abstract. Not specific.” This second description of the dog is much more threatening, making me think the dog is dead. With the word choice of “standing,” it references the cliché of “the last man standing.” But also what makes me feel that the image is much darker the second time around is how this dog is no longer called a dog. Now it is “the body of another” which is a phrasing used to distance ourselves from someone’s death. It is also one of those many glossy phrases of wartime that Wright calls our attention to throughout the book such as dead soldiers called “forever young” on the news. Also, “a” dog is now “the” dog which does tell us this is the same set of dogs the couple saw. But it looks different to them now.

Review of "Last Call" from Beth Bachmann's first book

Temper by Beth Bachmann won the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in poetry and is a solid debut. The poems in this collection chronicle her sister’s murder from the perspective of an outsider—meaning the one left to wonder where is the sister, what happened, and why?

The poem “Last Call” arrives early in the collection and speaks directly to this unknowing. As the title suggests, the poem focuses on the sister’s last phone call. It’s interesting how one can sense the grasping for answers by the speaker’s latching onto seemingly irrelevant details: what her dad wore when he answered the phone, his truck’s gear shift, the cigarette machine. In this poem, we see what this speaker’s perspective will render and what it can’t: this actual story is unknowable, unsolvable, yet the attempt to understand has no end.

“Last Call” by Beth Bachmann

Come get me. A father in his nightshirt, a daughter on the end of the line
calling for a pickup.

A father in his nightshirt, in his stick shift, switches gears; the pickup
pulls up to the train station.

His stick shift switches gears. She’s not there; he pulls up to the train station
bar, the cigarette machine, pay phone.

She’s not there; he drops change at the bar, the cigarette machine, payphone.
In the freight yard, a body

drops. Change crosses over a face in the freight yard. A body’s
last words

cross over a face: a daughter at the end of the line calling last words,
Come get me.

In an interview online, Bachmann says that she is interested in lyric repetition and boundaries. This makes perfect sense considering the book’s subject matter constantly fights with the boundaries given (life/death; facts/mystery; grief/solace). What I’m interested in is how content and form (and by form I mean the structure the poet chooses, be it received or open) inform one another. Form should never simply be an adherence to a plan but a complement to the emotional concerns of the poem. And that is what I admire about this poem and its lyric repetition.

On first read, one barely notices the intense repetition, but simply feels caught in a worry-loop: where is she? where is she? where is she…? The obvious repetition is the refrain come get me—chilling because of the change in meaning it takes from beginning to end. The first use is a daughter not asking, but demanding Dad who is in for the night to “come get me”. By the end, it has turned into a plead—and avoids being overly dramatic because it is actually the last words the father hears. That repetition is the easy one to latch onto. But a lot more is going on.

Below I’ve put in bold how each stanza repeats phrases in a specific pattern; stanzas one and two are united, three and four, and so on:

“Last Call” by Beth Bachmann

Come get me. A father in his nightshirt, a daughter on the end of the line
calling for a pickup.

A father in his nightshirt, in his stickshift, switches gears; the pickup
pulls up to the train station.

His stick shift switches gears. She’s not there; he pulls up to the train station
bar, the cigarette machine, pay phone.

She’s not there; he drops change at the bar, the cigarette machine, payphone.
In the freight yard, a body

drops. Change crosses over a face in the freight yard. A body’s
last words

cross over a face: a daughter at the end of the line calling last words,
Come get me.

There is even more repetition beyond stanzas numbered 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6; repetition also occurs within the stanzas numbered 6-1, 2-3, 4-5. (All these stanzas are adjacent, too, which creates an even greater sense of repetition, obsession—and I would also suggest terror in the sense of being caught in something that cannot be escaped.)

Come get me. A father in his nightshirt, a daughter on the end of the line
calling for a pickup.

A father in his nightshirt, in his stickshift, switches gears; the pickup
pulls up to the train station.

His stick shift switches gears. She’s not there; he pulls up to the train station
bar, the cigarette machine, pay phone.

She’s not there; he drops change at the bar, the cigarette machine, payphone.
In the freight yard, a body

drops. Change crosses over a face in the freight yard. A body’s
last words

cross over a face: a daughter at the end of the line calling last words,
Come get me.

I’m highlighting this repetition to emphasize how much is being repeated—yet when one reads the poem, it feels seamless—conversational almost. What’s more, this pattern is not simply a pattern, but one that reinforces the tone and argument of the piece—a narrative without an end, an unanswerable dilemma of what happened and why, a narrator replaying the same pieces of known information hoping for something: insight, knowledge, consolation. No elegy, or perhaps I should say no American elegy, operates without a sense of hope. The hope may seem far buried here, but the hopefulness is found in the attempt to understand, in the attempt to communicate, and in the belief—reinforced with the repetition—that answers or consolation will come if one keeps trying.

For more on Beth Bachmann, check out her Web site at: www.bethbachmann.com
(“Last Call” was first published in Prairie Schooner)

Changing Up the Blog (which is similar to that impulse when you shake Boggle)

For the past four years, I have been reading the old stuff, starting with Beowulf and bulldozing onward. Cramming it in. Analyzing it. Call it overcoming a crappy education. Call it inferiority complex. Call it the “historical sense” as T.S. Eliot does. I would agree with the Old Eliot here and say the historical sense was my motivation. Once I decided to really turn my life over to writing poetry, I wanted to know exactly what has come before, why, and what beget what. That Adam and Eve thing we can’t quite shake. Genesis of everything. Eliot describes it a bit more formally: “… the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his country has simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” It’s been a wonderful endeavor to say the least. But now that my two exams in poetry are over--one over the entire genre since Beowulf and the other on the 19th century (all those Romantics and Victorian poets that the Modernists and our contemporaries respond to)--I feel like I’ve earned the right to say, Good Job. Now, I can go back to my old love of reading contemporary work with the same vibrato. (It’s not like I ever stopped reading it, but to read all the old greats…. Well, time is time. And I can’t manipulate that bitch no matter what Red Bull tells me.) And it’s not like I will stop re-reading the older works, especially since there is still a lot out there to read, re-read, and discover. But yeah, it’s time to change up the ratio again. And in celebration of this, I’m changing up the blog. Each week I will review a contemporary poem or song. Just one. By focusing on one poem a week, I can slow down this blitz-stream of information we have whizzing by us all the time and give one poem some old-fashioned quality time. I hope you enjoy it with me.