Review of '“… White of Forgetfulness, White of Safety”' by Robert Hass

I’m preparing for my final doctoral exam (big yippee-yay there) which is this week, and I have been looking for poems that not only feature free-associating narrators, but passionate ones as well. (In what I read at least, I find more speakers who embrace confusion than who embrace outright joy.) Here’s a Robert Hass poem that some don’t like because they feel the associations flit by too quickly, but I find that all the images are connected to an impassioned speaker.

“… White of Forgetfulness, White of Safety”

by Robert Hass from Time and Materials

My mother was burning in a closet.

Creek water wrinkling over stones.

Sister Damien, in fifth grade, loved teaching mathematics.

Her full white sleeve, when she wrote on the board,

Swayed like the slow movement of a hunting bird,

Egret in the tidal flats,

Swam paddling in a pond.

Let A equal the distance between x and y.

The doves in the desert,

Their cinnamon coverts when they flew.

People made arguments. They had reasons for their appetites.

A child could see it wasn’t true.

In the picture of the Last Supper on the classroom wall,

All the apostles had beautiful pastel robes,

Each one the color of a flavor of sherbet.

A line is the distance between two points.

A point is indivisible.

Not a statement of fact; a definition.

It took you a second to understand the difference,

And then you loved it, loved reason,

Moving as a swan moves in a mill stream.

I would not have betrayed the Lord

Before the cock crowed thrice,

But I was a child, what could I do

When they came for him?

Ticking heat, the scent of sage,

Of pennyroyal. The structure of every living thing

Was praying for rain.

The first three stanzas can appear disconnected on first read. Why are we moving from a mother burning in a closet, to creek water, and then to Sister Damien teaching mathematics? It all comes together when the speaker says that he had an epiphany in math class about how a point is not divisible. “Not a statement of fact; a definition. // It look you a second to understand the difference, / and then you loved it, loved reason…”

Here is the passion; Hass is explicitly saying that he loved something. No confusion, no evasion, outright: “And then you loved it.”

Fine, you might say. The speaker loves learning. But what are these first two stanzas doing? What’s the connection? Hass has taken away explicit transitions and simply makes the leaps without transitioning for us. For example, the speaker never delineates who is speaking or where we are; we simply move to a memory and then to image such as the line “Let A equal” where we have Sister Damien teaching math and the speaker then imagining “the doves in the desert.” All of this is free association, but also relates to how Hass considers image.

He writes that image for him is the “sensation of clarity and sensation of perceiving it.” In other words, an image is not only showing us a moment of clarity, but the moment when we receive that clarity. And I would add that when you first understand something, there is a sense of absence. Think of an impressionistic painting and the lines that distinguish water lily from water. If you try to pinpoint that place where the two separate, you will touch nothing—not the water nor the lily. Simply color. And I suppose that is what I mean by absence here. This sense of absence informs the stanzas as they move from one to the next without explicit transitions made for us.

This is a poem about “sensation of clarity and sensation of perceiving it,” and around those moments, we have an absence designated by the white space on the page. Well, now I fear I just offered a very overwrought reading. Let me simply say that clearly what we do have is an impassioned speaker who shares with us moments of insight. What precedes and follows are images associated with these moments of quiet epiphany presented without transitions—which is often the way epiphanies arrive.

Review of "Cloud" by Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan, current U.S. Poet Laureate, is reading at my university next week. Known for her short lines (rarely no more than four words), slant and perfect rhymes that startle in a similar manner to an unexpected image, and avoidance of first-person, she is a poet who sets trends instead of following them. Here’s a new poem just published in this month’s issue of Poetry. (When doesn’t Kay Ryan have a poem in Poetry though?)

Cloud by Kay Ryan

A blue stain

creeps across

the deep pile

of the evergreens.

From inside the

forest it seems

like an interior

matter, something

wholly to do

with trees, a color

passed from one

to another, a

requirement

to which they

submit unflinchingly

like soldiers or

brave people

getting older.

Then the sun

comes back and

it’s totally over.

What we see here is fairly typical of Ryan’s work: compression, lasered focus, and an impressive ability to take on cargo in such a small amount of space. (This idea of cargo—what some might call a deepening—is something I think Jack Gilbert does better than anyone, but that will be another blog). In this poem, the deepening for me occurs with the lines “brave people / getting older.” Once I read that simile about aging, the description of the cloud takes on greater depth. In fact, this simile informs the entire poem as I re-read and associate the idea of aging to many other lines: “passed from one / to another;” “a requirement / to which they / submit unflinchingly;” “it seems like an interior matter;” and of course the ending line of “it’s totally over.” I think I just quoted the entire poem—which is my point. Nothing is wasted here. Nothing is ever wasted with her. Here is another example of a poem that takes on cargo.

The Niagara River

(from Kay Ryan’s collection The Niagara River)

As though

the river were

a floor, we position

our table and chairs

upon it, eat, and

have conversation.

As it moves along,

we notice—as

calmly as though

dining room paintings

were being replaced—

the changing scenes

along the shore. We

do know, we do

know this is the

Niagara River but

it is hard to remember

what that means.

This is one of my favorite poems by Kay Ryan. Sometimes short poems are like the quiet kid reading in the corner of your classroom. You are aware of the kid’s presence, but you can’t say exactly what he’s doing. With all the other loud demands, the quiet ones can get overlooked. “The Niagara River,” however, does not allow this. It’s eerie from the beginning with its factual set-up of a group dining on a boat but delivered in a way that makes this everyday experience sound surreal. And then we have the repetition of “we do know,” and the longing of the “o” sounds that surround like an incantation. But the repentant incantation does not end with a clear epiphany—which is part of this poem’s power. What does the group know? Well, that’s not explicitly stated which becomes part of the poem’s tension. What we are left with is a sense of struggle.

I would like to make a second (and third) link between Kay Ryan and Jack Gilbert’s work. One link is tone—which is not devoid of emotion, but distanced to allow for clarity and insight. And this is important because often what Gilbert and Ryan discuss are emotions, yet these emotions are latched onto a specific object, moment, place, or image.

Also, Kay Ryan’s poems often move in a similar way to Jack Gilbert’s poems. These two poets will often use the rhetorical movements of a sonnet. We will have the introduction of the problem/issue, followed by the complication, sometimes another complication, and a turn that happens off the page that then allows for the conclusion. Let me divide up “The Niagara River” to show this:

{As though

the river were

a floor, we position

our table and chairs

upon it, eat, and

have conversation.} .......INTRODUCTION OF ISSUE

{As it moves along,

we notice—as

calmly as though

dining room paintings

were being replaced—

the changing scenes

along the shore.} {We ......COMPLICATION

do know, we do

know this is the

Niagara River} {but} ......MORE COMPLICATION followed by TURN

{it is hard to remember

what that means.} .............CONCLUSION

Two other great links that describe her background and her craft include:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80608

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate_current.html

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.

Thinking about New Year’s Eve Poems….The classic “The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy and the not-so-classic “Ode to Waffle House” by Dave Smith

The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

There’s a lot to admire with this poem written on the last day of the century in 1899, but one aspect that I appreciate is the complexity of nature. Nature is not simply one thing: neither innocent nor directive, neither pure nor spiritual, neither benevolent nor malevolent. The speaker notices natural details that his pessimistic mood assigns to gloomy descriptions such as the “specter-gray” frost and all that follows in the first two stanzas. But that does not mean that nature reflects his feelings or is one with man, not in the Wordsworthian sense. Instead, the speaker only notices the happy bird because it is so loud. It’s not that nature is teaching, but more a backdrop for the poet to teach himself. The poet corrects his own mistake in thinking that nature was reflecting his inner state.

And another poem that I came across in the latest issue of Five Points isn’t really about New Year’s Eve but that is where many of us have ended up on this night. It’s “Ode to Waffle House” by Dave Smith. Great idea for a poem and love the title, here is an excerpt of it:

This is the South, kingdom of interstates,
warehouses, guns, journeys, and the Waffle House,

so we get in our cars and our trucks,
we wave our hands this way,
vigorously as if to someone who is dead.
down here there is always one
fifteen miles or less
either way….