founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

May 2013

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE

volume ccii • number 2

CONTENTS

May 2013

P O E M S

david caplan 95 In a Hotel

linda gregerson 96 Sostenuto The Weavers

derek sheffield 100 Bye-bye

a.e. stallings 101 The Rosehead Nail Sestina: Like

michelle boisseau 104 The Fury That Breaks

peter cole 105 Song of the Shattering Vessels From “The Invention of Influence” Quatrains for a Calling

geoffrey brock 110 The Day

simon armitage 111 Avalon The Unthinkable An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

rick barot 114 Tarp On Gardens

peter spagnuolo 118 Hall of Records Artifice

jessica greenbaum 120 The Storm-struck Tree

kay ryan 121 Party Ship Album Still Start

james hoch 124 Round

RU T H l I l lY P O E T RY P R I z E P O RT F O l I O

127 Introduction

marie ponsot 130 Out of Water Pathetic Fallacies Are Bad Science But From “The First, at the Last” A Visit A Tale Told by Atheneus (Venus Callipygus) About My Birthday Among Women Old Mama Saturday Pourriture Noble Private and Profane Northampton Style

c O M M E N T

v. penelope pelizzon 145 Light Speaking: Notes on Poetry and Photography

amiri baraka 166 A Post-Racial Anthology?

letters to the editor 174

contributors 181

Editor

Senior Editor

Associate Editor

Managing Editor

Editorial Assistant

Consulting Editor

Art Direction

christian wiman

don share

fred sasaki

valerie jean johnson

lindsay garbutt

christina pugh

alex knowlton

cover art by sarah williamson“Saint James Place,” 2012

POETRYMAGAzINE.ORG

a publication of the

POETRY FOUNDATIONprinted by cadmus professional communications, us

Poetry • May 2013 • Volume 202 • Number 2

Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, po 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, po Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2013 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Indexed in “Access,” “Humanities International Complete,” “Book Review Index,” “The Index of American Periodical Verse,” “Poem Finder,” and “Popular Periodical Index.” Manuscripts cannot be returned and will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope, or by international reply coupons and a self-addressed envelope from writers living abroad. Copying done for other than personal or internal reference use without the expressed permission of the Poetry Foundation is prohibited. Requests for special permission or bulk orders should be addressed to the Poetry Foundation. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at jstor.org. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Source Interlink, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the uk.

POEMS

95DAvID cAPlAN

david caplan

In a Hotel

In a hotel, even prayer feels adulterous,the skyline smudged in light, a distraction just before dusk. In the lobby

a woman tells a stranger what she will dofor three hundred dollars, whatshe will do for four. Some have the custom

of opening a book randomly with a question in mind. Some have the custom of forgetting. At six my friend beat his father at chess,

beat his father’s friends so easily he wondered if they tried.At seven he shook the governor’s hand.

Don’t call it a failure; call it knowledge:the peculiar taste that filled his mouth as if he had bitten his cheek.

Whatever he risked did not matter, whatever he could imagine was already lost. Bored, the other boy coughed into his hands.

96 POETRY

linda gregerson

Sostenuto

Night. Or what

they have of it at altitudelike this, and filtered air, what was

in my lungs just an hour ago is now in yours, there’s only so much air to go

around. They’re makingmore people, my father would say,

but nobody’s making more land. When my daughterswere little and played in their bath,

they invented a game whose logic largely escaped me — something to do with the

dispositionof bubbles and plastic ducks — until I asked them what they called it. They

were two and four. The gamewas Oil Spill. Keeping the ducks alive, I think,

was what you were supposed to contrive, as long as you could make it last. Up here

in borrowed air,in borrowed bits of heat, in costly

97lINDA GREGERSON

cubic feet of steerage we’re a long

held note, as when the choir would seemto be more than human breath could manage. In

the third age, says the story, they divided up the earth. And that was when the goddess turned away from them.

98 POETRY

The Weavers

As sometimes, in the gentler months, the sunwill return before the rain has altogether stopped and through

this lightest of curtains the curve of it shineswith a thousand inclinations and so close is the one to the

one adjacent that you cannot tell where magentafor instance begins and where the all-but-magenta has ended and yet

you’d never mistake the blues for red, so these two,the girl and the goddess, with their earth-bred, grass- fed, kettle-dyed

wools, devised on their loomstransitions so subtle no hand could trace nor eye discern their increments,

yet the stories they told were perfectly clear.The gods in their heaven, the one proposed. The gods in heat, said the other.

And ludicrous too, with their pinions and swansdown,fins and hooves, their shepherds’ crooks and pizzles. Till mingling

99lINDA GREGERSON

with their darlings-for-a-day they madea progeny so motley it defied all sorting-out. It wasn’t the boasting

brought Arachne all her sorrownor even the knowing her craft so well. Once true

and twice attested.It was simply the logic she’d already taught us how to read.

100 POETRY

derek sheffield

Bye-bye

The animal of winter is dying, its white body everywhere in collapse and stabbed atby straws of light, a leaving to believe in as the air slowly fills with darkness and water drains from the tub where my daughter, watching it lower around her, feeling it go, says about the only thing she can as if it were a long-kept breath going with her blessing of dribble and fleck.Down it swirls a living drillvanishing toward a landwhere tomorrow already fixes its bright eye on a manmuttering his way into a crowd,saying about the only thinghe can before his bodygoes boom. And tomorrow, I will count more dark shapes tumbling from the sky, birds returning to scarcity, offering in their seesawing songs a kind of liquidity.

101A.E. STAllINGS

a.e. stallings

The Rosehead Nail

Blacksmithing demonstration, mountain arts and crafts fair, Monteagle, TN

“But can you forge a nail?” the blond boy asks,And the blacksmith shoves a length of iron rodDeep in the coal fire cherished by the bellowsUntil it glows volcanic. He was a godBefore anachronism, before the tasksThat had been craft were jobbed out to machine.By dint of hammer-song he makes his keen,Raw point, and crowns utility with rose:Quincunx of facets petaling its head.The breeze-made-visible sidewinds. The boy’sBlonde mother shifts and coughs. Once Work was wedTo Loveliness — sweat-faced, swarthy from soot, heReminds us with the old saw he employs(And doesn’t miss a beat): “Smoke follows beauty.”

102 POETRY

Sestina: LikeWith a nod to Jonah Winter

Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like,A semi-demi goddess, something likeA reality-tv star look-alike, Named Simile or Me Two. So we likeIn order to be liked. It isn’t likeThere’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike”

Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. LikeIs something you can quantify: each “like”You gather’s almost something money-like,Token of virtual support. “Please likeThis page to stamp out hunger.” And you’d likeTo end hunger and climate change alike,

But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. LikeJust twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like,So over him,” I overhear. “But, like,He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s likeIt’s all ok. Like I don’t even like

Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... ”Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alikeFlounder, agape, gesticulating likeA foreign film sans subtitles, fall likeDumb phones to mooted desuetude. UnlikeWith other crutches, um, when we use “like,”

103

We’re not just buying time on credit: LikeDisplaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like,Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click “like”If you’re against extinction!) Like is likeInvasive zebra mussels, or it’s likeThose nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike

Redundant fast food franchises, each like (More like) the next. Those poets who dislikeInversions, archaisms, who just likePlain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t “like”Their (literally) every other word? I’d likeUs just to admit that’s what real speech is like.

But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike,How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislikeCancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.

A.E. STAllINGS

104 POETRY

michelle boisseau

The Fury That Breaks

After César Vallejo

The fury that breaks a grown-up into kids,a kid into scattered birdsand a bird into limp eggs,the fury of the poortakes one part oil to two parts vinegar.

The fury that breaks a tree into leaves,a leaf into deranged flowersand a flower into wilting telescopes,the fury of the poorgushes two rivers against a hundred seas.

The fury that breaks the true into doubts,doubt into three matching archesand the arch into instant tombs,the fury of the poordraws a sharpening stone against two knives.

The fury that breaks the soul into bodies,the body into warped organs,and the organ into eight doctrines,the fury of the poorburns with one fire in two thousand craters.

105PETER cOlE

peter cole

Song of the Shattering Vessels

Either the world is coming together,or else the world is falling apart — here — now — along these letters, against the walls of every heart.

Today, tomorrow, within its weather,the end or beginning’s about to start — the world impossibly coming together or very possibly falling apart.

Now the lovers’ mouths are open —maybe the miracle’s about to start: the world within us coming together, because all around us it’s falling apart.

Even as they speak, he wonders,even as the fear departs: Is that the world coming together? Can they keep it from falling apart?

The image, gradually, is growing sharper;now the sound is like a dart: It seemed their world was coming together, but in fact it was falling apart.

That’s the nightmare, that’s the terror,that’s the Isaac of this art — which sees that the world might come together if only we’re willing to take it apart.

The dream, the lure, is the prayer’s answer,which can’t be plotted on any chart — as we know the world that’s coming together without our knowing is falling apart.

106 POETRY

From “The Invention of Influence”

Freud could never be certain, he said,in view of his wide and early reading,whether what seemed like a new creationmight not be the work insteadof hidden channels of memory leadingback to the notions of others absorbed, coming now anew into formhe’d almost known within him was growing. He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia. So we own and owe what we know.

107PETER cOlE

Quatrains for a Calling

Why are you here?Who have you come forand what would you gain?Where is your fear? Why are you here?

You’ve come so near,or so it would seem;you can see the grainin the paper — that’s clear.

But why are you here

when you could be elsewhere,earning a livingor actually learning?Why should we care

why you’re here?

Is that a tear?Yes, there’s pressure behind the eyes —and there are peers.

But why are you here?

At times it sears.The pressure and shameand the echoing pain.What do you hear

now that you’re here?

108 POETRY

The air’s so severe.It calls for equipment,which comes at a price.And you’ve volunteered.

Why? Are you here?

What will you wear?What will you doif it turns out you’ve failed?How will you fare?

Why are you here

when it could take yearsto find out — what?It’s all so slippery,and may not cohere. And yet, you’re here ...

Is it what you revere?How deep does that go?How do you know?Do you think you’re a seer?

Is that why you’re here?

Do you have a good ear?For praise or for verse?Can you handle a curse?Define persevere.

109PETER cOlE

Why are you here?

It could be a career.

1 10 POETRY

geoffrey brock

The Day

It hangs on its stem like a plumat the edge of a darkening thicket.

It’s swelling and blushing and ripeand I reach out a hand to pick it

but flesh moves slow through timeand evening comes on fast

and just when I think my fingersmight seize that sweetness at last

the gentlest of breezes risesand the plum lets go of the stem.

And now it’s my fingers ripeningand evening that’s reaching for them.

1 1 1SIMON ARMITAGE

simon armitage

Avalon

To the Metropolitan Police Force, London:the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undoneby wandering thoughts and the close study of maps.So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps,I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucesterby several million strides, having walked on water.

City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats,of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes,city of pelicans, fish bones and flaking paint,of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point ...I eat little — a beard of grass, a pinch of oats — let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out,but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikesand I straddle each earthquake, one foot either sideof the fault line, rocking the world’s seesaw.At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven’s seashore:I watch boats heading home with the day’s catch or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz,or I face west and let the Pacific slipin bloodshot glory over the planet’s lip,sense the waterfall at the end of the journey.

I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.

1 12 POETRY

The Unthinkable

A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work:the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmerhad slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son,who in turn had bulldozed both farm and familyover the cliff, except for the girl, who lived nowby the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach.

There was some plan to use the door as a jettyor landing-stage, but it was all bullshit, the usual idle talk.That’s when he left and never returned. Him I won’t name — not known for his big ideas or carpentry skills,a famous non-swimmer, but last seen sailing out,riding the current and rounding the point in a small boatwith tell-tale flashes of almost certainly purple paint.

1 13SIMON ARMITAGE

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Compiling this landmark anthology of poetry in Englishabout dogs and musical instruments is like swimming through bricks. To date, I have only, “On the Death of Mrs. McTuesday’s Pug,Killed by a Falling Piano,” a somewhat obvious choice. True, an Aeolian harp whispers alluringly in the background of the anonymous sonnet, “The Huntsman’s

Hound,” but beyond that — silence.

I should resist this degrading donkey-work in favor of my own writing,

wherein contentment surely lies. But A. Smith stares smugly from the reverse of the twenty pound

note, and when my bank manager guffaws, small particles of saliva stream like a meteor shower through the infinity of dark space between his world and mine.

1 14 POETRY

rick barot

Tarp

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpetsunder the trees, catching the rain

of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightnessof the one covering the bad roof

of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color inside the winter’s weeks. Another one

took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.Another flew off the back of a truck,

black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.I have seen the ones under bridges,

the forms they make of sleep. I could go onthis way until the end of the page, even though

what I have in my mind isn’t the thingitself, but the category of belief that sees the thing

as a shelter for what is beneath it.There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over

a wave. You cannot put a tarpover a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken

oil well miles under the ocean. There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind

that sits in a corner and shreds receiptsand newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,

whose only recourse is languageso approximate it hardly means what it means:

1 15RIck BAROT

He is not here. She is sick. She cannot rememberher name. He is old. He is ashamed.

1 16 POETRY

On Gardens

When I read about the gardendesigned to bloom only white flowers,I think about the Spanish friar who saw oneof my grandmothers, two hundred years removed, and fucked her. If you look at the word colony far enough, you see ittraveling back to the Latinof inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words

that would have meant somethingto the friar, walking among the village girlsas though in a field of flowers, knowingthat fucking was one way of havinga foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snowfalling, which means that everyangry thought is as short-lived as a match.The night is its own white garden:

snow on the fence, snow on the treestump, snow on the azalea bushes,their leaves hanging down like greenbats from the branches. I know it’s not fairto see qualities of injustice in the aestheticsof a garden, but somewhere betweenwhat the eye sees and what the mind thinks is the world, landscapes mangled

into sentences, one color read into rage.When the neighbors complainedthe roots of our cypress were bucklingtheir lot, my landlord cut the tree down.I didn’t know a living thing three stories highcould be so silent, until it was gone.Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the lightin the windows, as though every sheet

1 17RIck BAROT

of glass was having a migraine.When I think about that grandmother whose name I don’t even know, I think ofwhat it would mean to make a gardenthat blooms black: peonies and gladiolasof deepest purple, tulips like ravens.Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rockspoised on clean gravel. When the snow stops,

I walk to see the quiet that has colonizedeverything. The main street is asleep, exceptfor the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship. There are sheet cakes of snow on topof cars. In front of houses, each lawnis as clean as paper, except where the first cator raccoon has walked across, each tracklike a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

1 18 POETRY

peter spagnuolo

Hall of Records

There’s a clever thing, stabs at her handon every corner now, revising the screed. Watch her huff at the tiny screens that sendher chimpish copy up the line, to speedthe raising of the giddy, pixelled hall: cornerless, mirror-tiled, the gorging spherea fast-receding shell enclosing allwe say or see, never to disappear,bigger with each second, and the next,its facets auto-replicant, untilthe Record of what was — each fingered textand pic, the starry shards the hours distill —impounds what is, slaves us in its spell,sorting the diamonds in our dazzling cell.

1 19PETER SPAGNUOlO

Artifice

The plastic Great Horned Owl, stuck with glueon the stamped tin, corbelled cornice lipimpresses no one — not the starlings that dipand stitch, nor pigeons as they fluff and cooaround its feet. And vinyl siding’s tooregular — each molded, faux-grained stripidentical, but for dents, and that dripof bird shit from a sill. What if all youmight say speaks like crafted, ersatz things:mimicry in a tongue you barely know?Your owl signs death, the cornice stone, the fakeclapboard conjures farmhouse. While just belowthe ledge, a wren’s mindless gestures makean altar of twigs, in veneration of wings.

120 POETRY

jessica greenbaum

The Storm-struck Tree

As the storm-struck oak leaned closer to the house —The remaining six-story half of the tree listing toward the glass box Of the kitchen like someone in the first tilt of stumbling —The other half crashed into the neighbors’ yards, a massiveDiagonal for which we had no visual cue save for An antler dropped by a constellation —As the ragged half leaned nearer, the second storm of cloying snow Began pulling on the shocked, still-looming splitting, and its

branches dragged Lower like ripped hems it was tripping overUntil they rustled on the roof under which I Quickly made dinner, each noise a threat from a body under which

we so recently Said, Thank goodness for our tree, how it has accompanied us all

these years,Thank goodness for its recitation of the seasons out our windows

and overThe little lot of our yard, thank goodness for the birdsong and

squirrel games Which keep us from living alone, and for its proffered shade, the

crack of the batResounding through September when its dime-sized acorns Land on the tin awning next door. HaveMercy on us, you, the massively beautiful, now ravaged and chargedWith destruction.We did speak like that. As if from a book of psalmsBecause it took up the sky

121kAY RYAN

kay ryan

Party Ship

You are aland I can’t stand leavingand can’t not.My party shipis pulling out.We all havehats. I try totoot some notesyou’ll understandbut this was notour instrumentor plan.

122 POETRY

Album

Death has a lifeof its own. Seehow its albumhas grown ina year and howthe sharp blot of ithas softened till those couldalmost be shadowsbehind thecherry blossomsin this shot.In fact youcouldn’t provethey’re not.

123kAY RYAN

Still Start

As if engineparts could bewrenched outat random andthe car would still start andsound even,hearts can gowith chambersbroken open.

124 POETRY

james hoch

Round

Perhaps you covet something of its emptiness, its uselessness

in matters of yearning or feeling another’s yearn, that it can’t

know a damn thing, yet damns everything it touches: the water

it gathers along its passage, the air it pushes through,

swallow-like. It is no bird, though you envy the song

you hear only after it’s gone, even if it sings through paper,

a goat, the neck of a man wearing a scarf that tufts just as

the rest of him flies out of his shoes and collapses in dirt.

Or, how it is like the dirt receiving him, the privilege

of not knowing if he was kind or unkind, as you

chamber another, waiting for someone to come for his shoes.

RUTH lIllY POETRY PRIzE PORTFOlIO

Poems from Springing: New and Selected Poems by Marie Ponsot, copyright © 2002

by Marie Ponsot. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random

House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is pro-

hibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

Introduction

Marie Ponsot wrote many of the poems for which she will be remembered while raising seven children all by herself. If that sen-tence alone doesn’t cause you to pause in awe for a moment, then I’d wager you haven’t experienced the demands and decibels of the little darlings. Ponsot herself knew all too well the cost (“I seven months / Pregnant for the seventh time / Disappear”). The wonder is that she knew — and rendered, and rescued — the wonder (see “Out of Water”).

Of course, a writer’s circumstances are not really germane to our appreciation of the work itself. Poems either stand on their own merits, or fall away with the life that made them momentarily com-pelling. This, too, Ponsot knows:

Under the underof what I rememberwe are both twentyand except with each otherunderemployed.

It is summer.Under our butter, bread,summer’s hunger satisfied.

The elegiac exaltation of the passing instant: this is all that poetry can do, finally. It is not enough, and if it is made to seem enough then poetry becomes an actual diminishment of the life it tries to conse-crate — becomes, even, an obscenity. Once again this is no news for Ponsot. The wonderful sounds of those lines above, the sly humor of “underemployed,” the sadness veined with happiness, or happi-ness veined with sadness: all of this buoys the poem above its subject, which is the slow and anguishing death of an old lover.

That subject, though, has its specific and necessary gravity in Ponsot’s poems. There are no evasions in her work.

I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine-fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mineawash in unanswered unanswered song.And I cannot claim we are not desolate.

This is as stark as Larkin, and Ponsot’s poems, with their formal preci-sions and terrible clarities, can sometimes put one in mind of Larkin, though she is never above her subjects, never sneering: “We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag,” she writes near the end of her har-rowing, humorous poem, “A Visit.”

She is also more of a Modernist, which is to say a Classicist who has been through hell:

From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son;From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One;From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.

In these poems you can find Yeats’s “passionate syntax” (see the first lines of “A Visit”), or the unified sensibility that Eliot attributed to the Metaphysicals (and thereby cleverly claimed for himself). You can find something of the astringent intimacy of Marianne Moore, who once wrote, “Without / loneliness, I should be more / lonely, so I keep it.” “Maybe / it will empty me / too emptily,” answers Ponsot half-laughingly half a century later,

and keep me hereasleep, at seaunder the guilt quilt,under the you tree.

Even the pun — you/yew — echoes back through the centuries.But this is all just background to the inventive and idiosyncratic

music that Ponsot has managed to make — is still making, in fact, in her ninety-third year. When we were deliberating this year about the Lilly Prize, a very wise man in the office right next to mine told me that he tended to judge a book by considering how it might hold up if it were the only book he had with him for a month. “With Marie Ponsot,” said Don Share, “I think I’d be just fine.” It was a useful prompt for me, better than any criticism, and is a good place to begin understanding the work of Marie Ponsot, which in fact doesn’t

require understanding so much as inhabiting, and perhaps not even inhabiting so much as — simply, slowly — enjoying. So if you have a month on your hands, or a day, or an hour, you would do well to spend it with this woman, this mind, this singular and — I’d stake a lot of money on this — durable music. — cw

130 POETRY

marie ponsot

Out of Water

A new embroidery of flowers, canary color, dots the grass already dotty with aster-white and clover.

I warn, “They won’t last, out of water.”The children pick some anyway.

In or out of waterchildren don’t last either.

I watch them as they pick.Still free of what’s next and what was yesterdaythey pick today.

131MARIE PONSOT

Pathetic Fallacies Are Bad Science But

On reading Susanne K. Langer’s Mind

If leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed,reach for rock-bottom as you rakethe muck out. Let it slump dank,and dry fading, flat above the bank.Stand back. Watch the water vault ahead.Its thrust sweeps the surface clean, shores the debris,as it debrides its stone path to the lake,clarity carrying clarity.

To see clear, resist the drag of images.Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind.Act in events; touch what you name. Abhoreasy obverts of natural metaphor.Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridgesfrom mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.

Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush:In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-cleanlike the spring-water aired over sleeked rock)says she witnessed an August bird in shockwhen a hawk snatched its mate. It perched, rushednotes fluting two life-quotas in one flood,its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the keencalls, pumped out as the heart pumps blood,not in twilight or warning but noon & wrong,its old notes whistled too fast but accurate.

I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine-fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mineawash in unanswered unanswered song.And I cannot claim we are not desolate.

132 POETRY

From “The First, at the Last”

All he undertookgoes under, underthe undergrowth he rose fromfly-boy, lovelyin his day. All his clothes

— spruce suit & tie —are underclothesagainst ungrounded gray.All his studies understudyan unstudied play.

Under the underof what I rememberwe are both twentyand except with each otherunderemployed.

It is summer.Under our butter, bread,summer’s hunger satisfied.

133MARIE PONSOT

A Visit

Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance ...— Djuna Barnes

Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watchThe sly very old woman wile away from her piousAnd stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin.She pours big drinks. We think of whatHas crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh inAnd muddied her once tumbling blood that, young,Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower,Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite,Collapsed to this keen dame moving amongHerself. She hums, she plays with used brightGhosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come hereMy child, and feel it, dear. A crooking fingerShows how hot the oven is.

(Also she is alive with hate.Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wishWe might, illiberal, uncompassionate,Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.)

Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock stillThough aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles.We manage to mean well. We endure, and more.We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure.We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kinTo any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us,Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure.

Poetry, March 1958

134 POETRY

A Tale Told by Atheneus (Venus Callipygus)

Two sisters of ancient Greece both laid claimTo the finest, fairest rear of their time.Which tail forged ahead? Which bottom’s true fameTopped? Which back was in front, which terce most prime?A judge chose the elder girl’s back matter;Her finish was more fine and far matter.She got the prize, and his heart; soon they wed.

“But the younger’s sitter’s not a smatterLess meet; I’ll marry her,” his brother said.It went so well, their joys were so perfected,That after them a temple was erectedIn honor of Venus Callipygus.No other church — though I don’t know its rite —Could so, from head to epididymis,Move me with deep devotion to its site.

Translated from the French of Jean de La Fontaine, Contes, Part I, 6.

135MARIE PONSOT

About My Birthday

I’d like to assume from my April birthday,I quickened the wombon the 4th of July.

If you suffered as Ia sternly fought tendencyto endless dependencyyou’d know why.

136 POETRY

Among Women

What women wander?Not many. All. A few.Most would, now & then,& no wonder.Some, and I’m one,Wander sitting still.My small grandmotherBought from every peddlerLess for the ribbons and laceThan for their scentOf sleep where you will,Walk out when you want, chooseYour bread and your company.

She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”

She looked fragile but hadHigh blood, runner’s ankles,Could endure, endure.She loved her rooted garden, her Grand children, her onceWild once young man.Women wanderAs best they can.

137MARIE PONSOT

Old Mama Saturday

“Saturday’s child must work for a living.”

“I’m moving from Grief Street.Taxes are high herethough the mortgage’s cheap.

The house is well built.With stuff to protect, thatmattered to me,the security.

These things that I mind,you know, aren’t mine.I mind minding them.They weigh on my mind.

I don’t mind them well.I haven’t got the knackof kindly minding.I say Take them backbut you never do.

When I throw them outit may frighten youand maybe me too.

Maybeit will empty metoo emptily

and keep me hereasleep, at seaunder the guilt quilt,under the you tree.”

138 POETRY

Pourriture Noble

A moral tale, for Sauternes, the fungus cenaria, and the wild old

Never prophesy.You can’t. So don’t try.Lust, pride, and lethargymay cause us miseryor bliss.The meanest mistakehas a point to make.Hear this — what his vintner d’Eyquem saidonce the lord d’Eyquem was dead:

“The wine that year promised bad or none.He’d let it go too late.Rot had crawled through all the vines,greasy scum on every clusterdangling at the crotches of the leaves.Should have been long pickedbut he’d said, ‘No. Wait for me,’off to wait on a new woman,grapes on the verge of ripewhen he left. Coupling kept himtill rot wrapped the grapes like lace& by the time she’d kicked him outthe sun had got them, they hungshriveled in the blast.

Well, he rode home cocky& bullied the grapes into the vatsrot & all, spoiled grapes, too old,too soon squeezed dry. The wine makes.The wine makes thick, gold-colored,& pours like honey.We try it. Fantastic!

139MARIE PONSOT

not like honey, punchy,you’ve never drunk anything like it — refreshing, in a rushover a heat that slows your throat —wanting to keep that flavorstuck to the edge of your tonguewhere your taste is, keep itlike the best bouquet you can rememberof sundown summer & someone comingto you smiling. The taste has odorlike a new country, so fineat first you can’t take it init’s so strange. It’s beautiful& believe me you love to go slow.”

moral:

Age is notall dry rot.It’s never too late.Sweet is your real estate.

140 POETRY

Private and Profane

From loss of the old and lack of the newFrom failure to make the right thing doSave us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. From words not the word, from a feckless voice From poetic distress and from careless choice Exclude our intellects, James Joyce.From genteel angels and apostles unappalledFrom Hollywood visions as virgins shawledGuard our seeing, Grünewald. From calling a kettle an existential pot, From bodying the ghost of whatever is not, John save us, O most subtle Scot.From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shodFrom eating the pease and rejecting the podWolfgang keep us, lover of God. Couperin come with your duple measure Alter our minds against banal pleasure.Dürer direct with strictness our vision;Steady this flesh toward your made precision. Mistress of accurate minor pain, Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane.From pretending to own what we secretly seek,From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek,Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek. From ignorance of structural line and bone From passion not pointed on truth alone Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone. From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son; From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One; From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.That zeal for free will get us in deep,That the chance to choose be the one we keepThat free will steel self in us against self-defenseThat free will repeal in us our last pretenseThat free will heal us

141MARIE PONSOT

Jeanne d’Arc, Job, Johnnie Skelton, Jehan de Beauce, composer Johann, Dark John Milton, Charter Oak John,Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt;Leap, leap between us and the easy out;Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go;Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.

Poetry, June 1957

142 POETRY

Northampton Style

Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimerNorthampton-style, on the porch out back.Its voice touches and parts the air of summer,

as if it swam to time us down a riverwhere we dive and leave a single trackas evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer

that lets us wash our mix of dreams together.Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act;its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

When we disentangle you are not with herI am not with him. Redress calls for tact.Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer

still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stiras uneasy as we, while the woods go black;its voice touches and parts the air of summer

and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slackthough the player keeps up his plangent attack.Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer;its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

COMMENT

State hospital sequence, early seventies. Photo by Claudio Pelizzon.

145v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

v. penelope pelizzon

Light Speaking: Notes on Poetry and Photography

Other kids’ dads had hidden stashes of porn — we giggled and made sure not to get caught looking. My dad was a pornographer. He sup-plemented his income with freelance camera work, and in addition to shooting head shots for aspiring models, he took pictures of people having sex.

I discovered this sideline a few years ago when I inherited hundreds of negatives that had been in storage since his death in 1977. My dad had spent his life trying to succeed as a photographer. He’d had some early achievements as a filmmaker in Trieste after the war; his short documentary about that city won an award at the Venice Biennale. But after immigrating to the States in 1958, his artistic career stalled. Family needs — combined with quirky English — landed him in a series of low-wage jobs. He was a gardener, a fry cook in a hotel, then an audio-visual specialist in a state mental hospital, where his tasks included making educational films about psychiatric treatments. His freelance work allowed him some creativity behind the lens, though many of his negatives show predictably “marketable” scenes: win-some animals, lobster boats at anchor, New England woods in the snow. I vaguely remember one commercial triumph when he sold a photo to a pet food company and thereafter our kittens appeared on the twenty-five-pound bags of kibble.

Did he enjoy photographing cats? Was it aesthetically appealing? As appealing as snapping pictures of pussies? Or did freelance work really just add up to more money at the end of the week? I’ll never know. He died when I was ten; my memories of him are sweet and self-absorbed. Some days he’d bring me with him to his darkroom in the city. At Government Center we’d get take-away donuts and milky coffee. All I can recall about his workspace are surfaces cluttered with electrical cords and the air’s sinus-chilling chemical smell. He’d have to clear a spot so we could spread napkins below our breakfast. But that rich milk of odors — lactose plus fructose plus fixer — seeped into my brain and obsessed me with photographs.

•

146 POETRY

Here I’m in good company. Since the invention of the light-reactive photographic plate in 1839, poets have been tantalized by the camera’s images. This dawned on me almost two decades ago, when I’d begun reading about photographic history. Concurrently, as if sensitized by the new subject, I began noticing that almost every poet I picked up seemed to have something to say about photographs. I’d open Donald Justice, maybe, and there would be a poem responding to an image of a Depression-era mule team. Walker Evans’s stately docu-mentary shot is captured in Justice’s lines, which conclude as a shadow:

the last shade perhaps in all of Alabama — Stretches beneath the wagon, crookedly,

like a great scythe laid down there and forgotten. — From Mule Team and Poster

Or I’d be reading Wislawa Szymborska and come upon a poem using a baby picture as occasion to note the banality of evil:

And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?That’s tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers’ little boy! ........................................................Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?

— From Hitler’s First Photograph

Or I’d find poets using photographs figuratively, as in “Epilogue,” where Robert Lowell mourns that

sometimes everything I writewith the threadbare art of my eyeseems a snapshot,lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,heightened from life,yet paralyzed by fact.

Or, John Koethe announcing:

What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photographyOf the nerves, but what I like in photographyIs the poetry of literal pictures of the neighborhood.

— From Pictures of Little Letters

Adolf Hitler, circa 1890.

148 POETRY

Soon it seemed hard to open any volume of poems without light-ing on at least one photographically-inspired piece. In astonishing numbers, poets speak to photos, speak for photos, imagine the narra-tives of photographed subjects, and reconstruct the circumstances in which photographs were taken. Just sixteen years after its invention, Whitman celebrated “the camera and plate” and included “the lady [who] must sit for her daguerreotype” in the catalogue of “Song of Myself.” By 1857, the camera was so ubiquitous that Lewis Carroll could parody Longfellow by publishing a spoof about a photographer named Hiawatha. In the intervening years, is there any other tech-nology poetry has so deeply absorbed?

Inevitably, one photo poem I’m drawn to is Rilke’s “Portrait of My Father as a Young Man.” It’s easy to see why Rilke approached this subject; after all, what’s more evocative than images of these fugitive familiars before the defining feature of their lives — us — made them complete? My own father’s absence prompts me to adapt Diane Arbus’s adage: like a photograph, a parent is “a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

In the eyes: dream. The brow as if it could feelsomething far off. Around the lips, a greatfreshness — seductive, though there is no smile.Under the rows of ornamental braidon the slim Imperial officer’s uniform:the saber’s basket-hilt. Both hands stayfolded upon it, going nowhere, calmand now almost invisible, as if theywere the first to grasp the distance and dissolve.And all the rest so curtained with itself,so cloudy, that I cannot understandthis figure as it fades into the background — .

Oh quickly disappearing photographin my more slowly disappearing hand.

— Translated by Stephen Mitchell

By now the photo-of-parent poem has become a cliche, and we can trace some of its stock elements back to Rilke. Dreamily Papa gazes off toward the future. His clothing, once a sign of power and prestige, is quaintly dated. The picture’s begun to deteriorate: time

Claudio Pelizzon, near Trieste, wwii.

150 POETRY

is dividing the speaking son from the figured father he cannot under-stand. Only mortality unites them, the son’s decay slower but no less assured than the father’s.

Tenderly done ... but what stops me, what seems the great flaw in this translation, is that Mitchell has rendered as “photograph” the original’s “Daguerreotyp.” It’s a crucial misstep. If you’ve seen a daguerreotype, you know that it looks very different from other photos because this process, in use from 1839 until around 1860, pre-served the image on a reflective plate. Oliver Wendell Holmes called the daguerreotype a “mirror with a memory.” When looking at one, you see your own self reflected. The effect is almost like a double exposure; two moments meet on the daguerreotype’s surface. It’s integral to that final stanza to see that what the speaker is holding is a gleaming plate on which his own living face overlaps with that of his lost father.

Rilke’s poem dates from 1907–08. By then, daguerreotypes were not only outmoded but positively archaic compared to later advances in photography, including the point-and-shoot Brownie camera introduced by George Eastman in 1900. Unlike the long exposure required by the daguerreotype, the Brownie was literally a snap. As a 1903 ad campaign promised, with a Brownie, “Any school-boy or girl can make good pictures.” From the vantage of 1907, Rilke nostal-gizes not only his father but the aristocratic formality of basket-hilts, fancy braid, and a more complicated techne.

There’s another level of pathos if we stick closer to Rilke’s original word. Daguerreotypes, while vulnerable to scratching, are actually quite sturdy, more so than later images printed on paper. That’s why so many of them survive, glowing spookily in antique shops and at estate sales. Rilke’s speaker misunderstands the durability of flesh versus steel plate. “My more quickly disappearing hand” would be closer to the sad truth.

•

For a long time I regarded poems about photos as examples of ekph-rasis, that “verbal representation of visual representation” genre theorized by scholars like W.J.T. Mitchell. As Mitchell sees it, the relationship between verbal and visual arts is contentious. Verbal texts like poems are time-based, while visual arts such as painting and sculpture are primarily spatial. Poetry, like music, is dynamic; its

151v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

duration is essential to its effect. Painting and sculpture, on the other hand, are generally static. And so, ekphrastic writing often positions itself as a controlling voice that must speak for the silent art object. Keats’s Grecian urn, say, is beautiful, enigmatic, and mute; the poem masters, defines, and vivifies its stillness. In ekphrastic writing time and space confront each other, and the ways poets negotiate this con-test gives the genre its energy.

But I now think that photo-poems like Rilke’s “Portrait of My Father” are not really ekphrastic. Photographs don’t derive their es-sence from their spatial quality. They exist in space, of course. But a photograph, like a poem and unlike a painting, depends on time. A photo’s essence is that millisecond caught by the shutter, an instant that often gains power and meaning the further we move away from it. As Wright Morris puts it, the photo

authenticates, for us, time’s existence. Not the ruin of time, nor the crowded tombs of time, but the eternal present in time’s every moment. From this continuous film of time the camera snips the living tissue.

Roland Barthes is the prose poet of this spectrality. He coined the term “punctum” to describe the subjective, often-trivial details that in some photos “wound” a viewer by attesting to the actual instant caught there. For the viewer, the punctum triggers an existential realization of the life beyond that instant — a life that, in photos of our young parents, we know is already past even as it remains pres-ent in the image. This, I believe, is why we surround ourselves with photos: they’re so loaded with time that we must domesticate them, and thereby render them mundane, or we’ll be crushed.

I’m pointing at something that might seem flaky or fey; nonethe-less, it repeatedly startles me: photos are ghosts. And while most people condition themselves to ignore this, poets are honest about how freakish photographs really are. Ted Hughes, for instance, makes their uncanny essence explicit in his “Six Young Men.” After describing a snapshot of some soldiers, he details their wartime deaths. Then he insists that

That man’s not more alive whom you confront And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud,Than any of these six celluloid smiles are.

152 POETRY

At the same time, there’s no “prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead” than the pictured men. The photo’s aggressive co-existence of life and death is not only haunting; it’s potentially unhinging. Truly, “To regard this photograph might well dement,” Hughes continues, since

“Such contradictory permanent horrors here / Smile from the single exposure.” And the horrors won’t stay in the frame. They jostle us because, while the figures smile, they also “shoulder out / One’s own body from its instant and heat,” pushing us to confront our own contingency.

Poets have explored this uneasy situation at length. As a result, we have a veritable genre of its own that I’m going to christen the luci-phrastic. It’s an ungainly word, but it implies kinship with ekphrasis while shifting the focus to light, that marker of time. As a working definition, I think of luciphrasis as a verbal representation of a photo-graph that emphasizes the photo’s time-filled status. We have luciphrasis when a poet meditates on “The magic box / Whose simple click froze summer’s passing dream” (X.J. Kennedy), or looks at the photo of an old lover and tries to fathom “his day, it’s vivid shining stuff / Negated to matte slate / A riddle’s chalked on” (James Merrill), or muses over snapshots, thinking “I should set up some sort of shrine for these / Bouquets of time” (Baron Wormser). To put it another way, the luciphrastic poem is a time capsule containing a time capsule.

•

Is it odd that the pornography wasn’t surprising?Some people can’t live without making things. My dad was like

this. Before I could read chapter books, he taught me how to draw a skeleton properly and how to shape wire armatures for my clay sculptures. Depressed by American pasta, he let me help him squeeze potatoes through the ricer for gnocchi. He studied the Egyptians and built pyramid-shaped cardboard hats that he wanted the family to wear during supper to increase our mental powers. His metaphysi-cal streak was apt for a photographer, since, as Morris puts it, “the camera eye partakes of the supernatural, of the miraculous. It is no accident that it is a gift of light and that its alchemy takes place in darkness.” Meanwhile, in the world of lead, my dad was often frus-trated by the tedium and poor pay of his official jobs.

So when I say that the pornography didn’t come as a total sur-prise, what I mean is: it’s easy to see that making pictures of beautiful

153v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

people who were at least simulating pleasure must have gratified him. At least, I hope it gave him gratification — aesthetic gratification — as well as some extra cash.

Because my dad badly needed artistic satisfaction, and the older he got the harder it was to come by. As a young man in Italy, he’d been taken under the wing of his Uncle Vittorio. Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini (1881–1964) was something of a figure among the Futurists. Using the pen name “Farfa,” he published poems and plays, designed ceramics, painted, and made collages. He associated with F.T. Marinetti, and when Marinetti describes in his preface to the Futurist Manifesto how “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts,” I imagine Uncle V. beside him, exhaling benzene vapors and stroking the hood of a shark-like automobile.

V.’s poems exalt urban energy, speed, and inventions like the radio. One included in the recent FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry praises the experience of watching a train climb into a tun-nel; another celebrates zany Parisian cocktails. Even birds at daybreak, the stuff of aubades, are drafted as part of his industrial workforce (my translation):

The swallowsin ravishing black satin capestype out the wake-updictated by dawn

I suspect that Uncle V.’s technophile aesthetic influenced my dad’s desire to work with cameras. Both men shared fantasies of a machine that could convey pure thought without the hesitations of language. In the flyleaf of his book Marconia, sent to my dad in 1960, V. has quoted back a passage from one of my dad’s recent letters:

Thoughts run faster than rivers, one is never able to stop the thought with exact sentences.... There will come a day when, instead of a letter, you’ll send a reel of magnetic tape with your true thoughts inscribed on it, more or less developed.

Composed in Italian, the passage suggests how frustrated my dad was with his limping English. But it’s clear he means that even his

Farfa wearing a crown of aluminum laurels, circa 1959.

155v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

native language is too slow. Words themselves are the barrier to real communication. His sentiments echo those Uncle V. expresses in Marconia, and to emphasize this V. has underlined passages where their tongue-tied feelings overlap. It’s a moving gesture of kinship between an elderly worshipper of newness and his distant protégé.

What my dad longed for, it seems, was something like Koethe’s “abstract photography / Of the nerves,” and it was the film’s spool that came closest to inscribing his thoughts. Aptly then, the image I have in mind when I picture him leaving Trieste is cinematic. It’s the final scene of Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), where the young artist Moraldo, sickened by life among his provincial friends, boards the train for Rome. I keep these frames of hopeful promise in mind, even though I know that in another letter written a few years later my dad will dismiss his achievements by saying he’s “done nothing, by American standards.”

•

While Futurist writing demands “aggressive action, a feverish insom-nia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap,” the luciphrastic poem revels in the languors of the lyric mode. The lyric poem is often described as wanting to halt time; our pleasure in read-ing lyrics may come from the psychic pause they offer. David Baker suggests that “our survival instinct seems to depend on our reluc-tance to accept our mortality. We fantasize about time stopped, time eliminated…. Such is the dream of the lyric poem.” Similarly, Tess Gallagher describes how poems work as time machines that sustain us in a world where technology has reduced our sense of past and future to “an instantaneous ‘now.’” Poems offer the possibility of bringing past, present, and future together by creating a space where that “now” can expand. If all this is true, it may be that luciphras-tic poems abound because the lyric’s dream of an expanded “now” responds with particular intensity to the photograph’s paused instant.

Think of it this way: photographs are actual “spots of time” cap-tured chemically or digitally. Scholars have remarked that when Wordsworth named those formative instants that his memory caught and held fast for later lyric dilation, he seemed to anticipate the workings of the camera. (This isn’t as farfetched as it sounds. Optical precursors such as the Claude glass, which could be held up to frame and focus a panoramic view, were popular in Wordsworth’s day.)

156 POETRY

The key spots of time passages are strongly visual. For example, in the 1805 Prelude, the poet describes waiting in a field as a boy to be brought home from school:

Upon my right hand was a single sheep,A whistling hawthorn on my left, and there,With those companions at my side, I watched,Straining my eyes intensely as the mistGave intermitting prospect of the woodAnd plain beneath.

Soon after the boy’s return home, his father dies. That emotional stab intensifies his recollection of the field, and the poet remarks that in later life he would mentally revisit the sheep and tree as “spectacles” of an earlier time. Wordsworth had to rely on memory to revisit his evocative scenes. We (luckier?) later denizens need only gaze at our iPhone screens.

Rather than representing something merely past, a photograph is more truly what Geoff Dyer calls an “ongoing moment.” A dash of time is caught, held, and continues to generate energy that may in-tensify as more layers of time accrue around it.

Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mothersitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.The sun was shining. The dogswere sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,calm and unmoving as in all photographs.

— From A Summer Garden by Louise Glück

Both traditional printed photographs and digital pixels on a screen can crush us with the “calm and unmoving” ongoingness they hold.

•

It’s this insistent realism, this ongoingness, that made Baudelaire suspicious of photography; he felt that the new technology, “by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy.” Chiefly, he feared photos would lead people to prefer verisimilitude over imagination. As he vituperated in his “Salon of 1859”:

157v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another.... If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.... If it be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man’s soul, then it will be so much the worse for us!

By the time Baudelaire wrote this, scores of daguerreotype studios filled the Paris streets, serving the public who flocked to have their images made. Finally even the scoffer succumbed and had some grim portraits taken by his friend Nadar.

Philip Larkin, though as capable as Baudelaire of dyspeptic rage, responds more tenderly to photography’s banal realism. In his “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” he describes several captivat-ing pictures of a friend. She appears “in pigtails” in one and “Beneath a trellis” in another. The speaker then bursts out:

But o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! that recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes.

People have read these lines as disparaging of photography. I disagree. Larkin — an avid amateur shutterbug himself — is simply distinguish-ing apples from oranges. His friend’s pictures are not the works of a visionary inventor. Each is only a snapshot that “shows the cat as disinclined, and shades / A chin as doubled when it is.” But it’s just this plodding realism that draws from him a final apostrophe to pho-tography: “what grace / Your candour thus confers upon her face!” In context, this is the highest praise. Only the mundane is-ness of a photo could wound the speaker by insisting that here we have “a real girl in a real place.” The poem is one of the best examples in verse of someone experiencing Barthes’s punctum.

It’s also one of the best examples of a poem acknowledging that it can’t quite catch the ongoing moment the way a photo does. In the penultimate stanza, the speaker ruefully steps back from the album, acknowledging “The gap from eye to page,” from his own this-now to the snapshot’s that-then. Stare as he will, he can’t fully

State hospital sequence, early seventies. Photo by Claudio Pelizzon.

159v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

enter “a past that no one now can share” with the pictured girl. Larkin is characteristically crisp with this fact. Unlike the mistily-fading daguerreotype in Rilke’s hand, Larkin ends with the photo holding its subject “Unvariably lovely there, / Smaller and clearer as the years go by.” That grammatically odd “unvariably” kills me. Larkin has no doubt that our images do outlast us.

•

“History decomposes into images, not into narratives,” Walter Benjamin wrote. But how loudly images cry out for narrative. How temptingly these bits of time’s tissue lure. No wonder poets are drawn to vernacular photographs, those found images of ordinary people doing unremarkable things snapped by unknown cameras. Who hasn’t seen shoeboxes full of these pictures at flea markets or junk shops and felt an itch of curiosity? Often the photos seem bor-ing ... and yet, and yet ... once you start looking, you’re trapped. Who is this child (and who says there are no ugly babies)? What’s around that woman’s head? Are these this man’s actual teeth? On his neck — Adam’s apple or goiter? An hour later your palms are gray with dust and your Saturday reverie has been displaced by an electri-cal thrill at having grazed some deep-dwelling nerve at the core of existence or, conversely, by existential horror at the repetition and vacuity of all human endeavor.

Part of the vernacular photo’s appeal is what’s not there. No art, no masterly gaze, no decisive moment, no visual signature. Just a snip of time, compelling for making time visible. Glitches in technique can enhance this authenticity. Blurry pictures help us see time’s pas-sage because, as Morris remarks, they suggest “the transient role of humans among relatively stable objects.” And vernacular photos offer a reprieve from digital perfection. Today anyone with a camera phone can create thousands of gorgeous images; the result is what Teju Cole calls “A disaster of meaningless clarity.” Instead, vernacular photos give us tentative gestures, tenuous glimpses.

They also provide an instructive contrast to poems. A hasty snap-shot done with indifferent technique showing a mundane thing — a girl on a bike, a man crossing a street — can be arresting. The ver-nacular thrives in the photographic medium. But it doesn’t in poems. That is, there are plenty of thin poems in flat language showing dull scenes, but who wants to read them? On the other hand, a skilled

160 POETRY

poet might evoke the atmosphere of the vernacular photo. Donald Justice comes to mind again. How often he places us in an apparently banal setting: a boy is practicing the piano, or a man is leaving a wash-room, or we’re in a suburb where “The same crimson afternoons expire / Over the same few rooftops repeatedly.” But the poems aren’t dull. They just look easy, snapped in passing by an unfussy, unpreten-tious (yet technically perfect) eye.

•

“After the animal kingdom, the mechanical kingdom begins,” thun-dered the Futurist Manifesto. Thus the daguerreotype. Thus ambro-types, tintypes, lantern slides, dry plates, box cameras, Kodachrome, single lens reflex cameras, digital slrs, the iPhone. And now gad-gets like the photoBot, a device that uses sound to detect humans and photograph them. “This automation allows people to enjoy an occasion, such as a party, in the knowledge that the occasion is be-ing documented photographically without the need for them to do it themselves,” explains the promotional text. It reads like a satire of our self-obsession. Or it begs to be satirized, much as the Onion did a few years ago in praising Mark Zuckerberg, cia operative, for convincing us to engage in constant self-surveillance by publicizing our every move on Facebook.

Given these developments, the word “snapshot” will soon cease to connote privacy and forgettable spontaneity. Roughly ten percent of all photographs in existence were taken in the past year. Instead of yellowing gently in print albums, many zipped immediately through a satellite and onto the web; one Facebook engineer says that the site typically receives 200 million photo uploads per day. “Snapshot” was coined to echo the rapid click of the Brownie’s shutter. Today we probably need a new word for camera images whose defining feature is their availability for instantaneous digital dispersal.

But those of us who have inhabited the meat world long enough probably still think of a “snapshot” as an image made without too much planning, capturing a personal moment or something that briefly caught our eye. While a “photograph” might be artistic or historically significant, a “snapshot” is usually ephemeral and unassuming.

The snapshot’s low-key associations suggest a provocative contrast between ekphrasis and luciphrasis. How often the ekphrastic poem

161v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

announces the poet as a museum-goer who recognizes the impor-tance of a masterwork. Take Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Line by line the imagery of the broken yet transfixing sculpture ratchets up, until the stone, pulsing with virile power, sees you, the reader, and if, if, you are sensitive enough to hear it, utters that lightning-bolt command: you must change your life.

In contrast to this rhetorical grandeur, consider how often the luciphrastic poem includes the word “snapshot” in its title, as if insisting on the modesty and amateur nature of the work at hand. Recall the Brownie advertisement: any school child could make one of these pictures. Luciphrasis whispers of intimacy with the over-looked, the casual, the otherwise unknown.

•

Still, it would be misleading to say that all luciphrastic poems are about quiet pictures. Poets have responded to moments of trauma by writing about devastating public photos. It’s a risky gambit: such depictions could easily veer into sensationalism. But if the poem emphasizes the photograph’s ongoing moment, something moving can happen. Here, again, is Szymborska:

They jumped from the burning floors —one, two, a few more,higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,and now keeps themabove the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,with a particular faceand blood well hidden.

There’s enough timefor hair to come loose,for keys and coinsto fall from pockets.

Photo from September 11, 2001. By José Jimenez.

163v. PENElOPE PElIzzON

They’re still within the air’s reach,within the compass of placesthat have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them —describe this flightand not add a last line.

— Photograph from September 11

Szymborska evokes what Barthes calls the “anterior future,” that photographic tense in which we can see a photo of the deceased and say both “he is dead” and “he is going to die.” The awful has already happened, yet within the photo it’s held in abeyance.

We know what happened on September 11, and we saw — over and over again — photographs of people who fell from the buildings. How do we respond to such images? In an earlier age we might have asked, “Should we look at horror or turn away?” Now our technology forces the question, “If we can’t escape mediated images of horror, how can we resist being numbed by them?” I have no good answer. To empathize with someone in a September 11 photo, I imagine my-self in her place. Yet sitting in safety and pretending I can summon her experience feels grossly presumptuous. Meanwhile, my sympa-thy for mass suffering curdles into the mawkish; I pity individuals but am prone to sentimentalize groups. And to complicate things, when confronted by upsetting pictures, my mind tries to shield itself by translating the images into formal problems: that’s not a person but a pattern of lights and darks and lines. If this reactive muddle led me to write a poem about a 9/11 photo, the results would appall.

Szymborska instead responds with almost savant simplicity. As a witness, she must “describe this flight.” But she never lets us forget that it’s a photographed flight. Focusing on the single picture’s pause, its keeping each person “above the earth ... still complete / with a par-ticular face,” she creates an is-ness parallel to the photo’s. She doesn’t deny the ending that’s “well hidden” outside the frame. Neither photo nor poem can escape it. But her abrupt “not add[ing] a last line” echoes the pathos of the photograph’s temporal suspension. It’s a masterly way of resisting the hortatory or bathetic or platitudiniz-ing tones that deaden expressions of public mourning.

•

164 POETRY

How much is “enough time”?Not the length of a free fall. That is most definitely not enough

time. But ten years? Even if you were too young to remember the first

few, in that span couldn’t you learn all you needed about cats and pyramids and skeletons and wire and fathers and cameras? And if you had fifty-six years, like my dad — how could you think you had

“achieved nothing”? Such a wealth! Five decades of instants, spots, is-nesses, ongoings.

Some of them remain here in his photos. This one says that a hand is a star against the body’s moon. Here’s one considering how closely a wasp’s nest resembles the cells of a snake’s shed skin. This one shows that a child holding a chicken is a mild roundness containing an alert spikiness. And here a sail and a cloud take on the same bell-swell in an east wind.

To snip these tissues from time, my dad relied on the millisecond reflex of a shutter. But how strange inheritances are. The Futurist gene faltered. Unlike the swift passage of my dad’s thoughts, my perceptions depend on slow accruals of language. I jot lists, notate odd rhymes, pencil half lines that smudge to nothing. Recently I noticed how many phrases from early photography treatises I’ve scribbled in my notebooks over the years. “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow.”

“Memoire on the Heliographe.” “Mordançage.” Is there an aperture through which I might see a poem inspired by “the lens of Captain Linnaeus Tripe”? (Yes, it’s a real name.) And how I long to use a title adapted from Anna Atkins’s 1853 botanical collection, “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.” (Really, that might not be a single poem; the matter-of-fact unpoesyness of British Algae invites a whole book. How much time would be enough for that?)

We hope for enough time, knowing there is never enough time. Except, maybe, in poems — in writing them and reading them, far inside them where we lose account of minutes. Except, maybe, in photographs, where time sleeps but doesn’t close its eyes.

The author and her chicken, circa 1969. Photo by Claudio Pelizzon.

166 POETRY

amiri baraka

A Post-Racial Anthology?

Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, ed. by Charles Henry Rowell. W.W. Norton. $24.95.

This is a bizarre collection. It seems that it has been pulled together as a relentless “anti” to one thing: the Black Arts Movement. Charles Henry Rowell’s introduction and many of the quotes he gleans are aimed at rendering the Black Arts Movement as old school, back-ward, fundamentally artless. He calls his poets “literary,” i.e., Black Literary poets.

The blurb from the publisher W.W. Norton says that the book

is not just another poetry anthology. It is a gathering of poems that demonstrate what happens when writers in a marginalized community collectively turn from dedicating their writing to political, social, and economic struggles, and instead devote themselves, as artists, to the art of their poems and to the ideas they embody. These poets bear witness to the interior land-scape of their own individual selves or examine the private or personal worlds of invented personae and, therefore, of human beings living in our modern and postmodern worlds.

My God, what imbecilic garbage! You mean, forget the actual world, have nothing to do with the real world and real people ... invent it all! You can see how that would be some far-right instruction for

“a marginalized community,” especially one with the history of the Afro-American people: We don’t want to hear all that stuff ... make up a pleasanter group of beings with pleasanter, more literary lives than your-selves and then we will perhaps consider it art!

This embarrassing gobbledygook was probably a paraphrase of the editor’s personal gobble. But the copywriters might be given a tempo-rary pass because they know nothing about Afro-American literature; it is the Norton “suits” that could be looked at askance because of their ignorant hiring practices.

To get a closer view of where Rowell comes in, look at the quote

167AMIRI BARAkA

that he gives from the poet he constantly cites as poetic mentor and as an example of what great poetry should be. The quote is where Rowell got the title of the book, Angles of Ascent:

He strains, an awk-ward patsy, sweating strains leaping falling. Then —

silken rustling in the air, the angle of ascent achieved.

— From For a Young Artist, by Robert Hayden

Rowell says this is an image for the poet’s struggle and transcendence. But Lord, I never did see myself or the poets I admired and learned from as awkward patsies! In 1985, Rowell had Larry Neal on the cover of his literary magazine Callaloo, after Larry’s death from a heart at-tack at forty-three. You can look in the magazine and see that Larry Neal was no “awkward patsy.” Or that after leaping / falling we would not be glorified by some unidentified “silken rustling in the air, / the angle of ascent / achieved.” Actually it sounds like some kind of social climbing. Ascent to where, a tenured faculty position?

Rowell’s attempt to analyze and even compartmentalize Afro-American poetry is flawed from the jump. He has long lived as the continuing would-be yelp of a Robert Hayden canonization. Back in 1966 I was invited to Fisk University, where Hayden and Rowell taught. I had been invited by Nikki Giovanni, who was still a student at Fisk. Gwen Brooks was there. Hayden and I got into it when he said he was first an artist and then he was Black. I challenged that with the newly-emerging ideas that we had raised at the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem in 1965, just after Malcolm X’s assassination. We said the art we wanted to create should be iden-tifiably, culturally Black — like Duke Ellington’s or Billie Holiday’s. We wanted it to be a mass art, not hidden away on university cam-puses. We wanted an art that could function in the ghettos where we lived. And we wanted an art that would help liberate Black people. I remember that was really a hot debate, and probably helped put an ideological chip on Rowell’s shoulder.

I find the list of what Rowell calls “Precursors” quite flawed, but it predicts and even prefaces his explanations and choices. He lists

168 POETRY

Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin B. Tolson. But how can one exclude Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Margaret Walker, who are the major poets of the period after the Harlem Renaissance? This kind of cherry-picking reveals all too clearly what Rowell means by “literary” poets.

Brooks’s most penetrating works illuminate Black life and the “hood.” Langston, most people know, is the major voice of that pe-riod and what we mean when we talk about Afro-American poetry. What is distinctive about Rowell’s introduction is that just about ev-ery page mentions the “Black Arts Movement,” “the Black Aesthetic poets,” “the Black Power Movement” — all like some menacing political institutions. But that poetry was created in a different time, place, and condition from the verse that Rowell presents here as new revelation.

Rowell goes on:

In other words, the works of these new poets are the direct results of what such poets as Yusef Komunyakaa, Ai, Cyrus Cassells, Rita Dove, Thylias Moss, Toi Derricotte, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey — the first wave — dared write, which is whatever they wanted and in whatever forms and styles they desired, as the influence of the Black Arts Movement was first entering its decline.

But this is simply a list of poets Rowell likes. I cannot see any stylistic tendency that would render them a “movement” or a coherent aes-thetic. Perhaps their only commonality is their “resistance” to the Black Arts Movement. Komunyakaa says:

Growing up in the South, having closely observed what hatred does to the human spirit, how it corrupts and diminishes ... I unconsciously disavowed any direct association with the Black Arts Movement.

Are we being faulted for “hating” slavery, white supremacy, and rac-ism? For trying to fight back, just as the Deacons for Defense and Justice did by routing the Klan in Komunyakaa’s own hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana?

(Ironically, one of Komunyakaa’s early books was sent to me by a university publisher to ask my opinion if should it be published. My

169AMIRI BARAkA

colored patriotism bade me recommend it, though in truth I found it dull and academic.)

But Rita Dove does go on to say something that seems true:

By the time I started to write seriously, when I was I was eigh-teen or nineteen years old, the Black Arts Movement had gained momentum; notice had been taken. The time was ripe; all one had to do was walk up to the door they had been batter-ing at and squeeze through the breech.

Exactly! Dove spells out her separation from the Black Arts Movement

very honestly, in revealing class terms:

As I wrote more and more ... I realized that the blighted urban world inhabited by the poems of the Black Arts Movement was not mine. I had grown up in Ohio ... I enjoyed the gamut of middle class experience, in a comfy house with picket fences and rose bushes on a tree-lined street in West Akron.

But that is not the actual life of the Black majority, who have felt the direct torture and pain of national oppression, and that is what the Black Arts Movement was focusing on, transforming the lives of the Black majority! We wanted to aid in the liberation of the Afro-American people with our art, with our poetry. But the deeper we got into the reality of this task, the more overtly political we became.

The lynching of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks’s resistance, Dr. King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (the peoples’ resistance), the bombing of Dr. King’s home in Montgomery. The sit-ins, sclc, the Civil Rights Movement. The emergence of Robert F. Williams and his direct attack on the Klan. The emergence of Malcolm X. I went to Cuba on the first anniversary of the Cuban revolution. The rise and murder of Patrice Lumumba, the African Liberation Movement. I met poets like Askia M. Touré and Larry Neal in front of the un screaming our condemnation of the us, the un, Belgium, Rockefeller for murdering Lumumba and our support for Maya Angelou, Louise Meriwether, Rosa Guy, Abbey Lincoln (all great artists), running up into the un to defy Ralph Bunche. The March on Washington, the bombing 0f 16th St. Baptist Church and the murder of four little girls. JFK’s assassination, Watts, Malcolm’s assassination, Dr. King’s

170 POETRY

assassination, rebellions across America!All those major events we lived through. If we responded to them

as conscious Black intellectuals, we had to try to become soldiers ourselves. That is why we wrote the way we did, because we wanted to. We wanted to get away from the faux English academic straitjackets passed down to us by the Anglo-American literary world.

Rowell thinks the majority of Afro-American poets are mfa recip-ients or professors. Wrong again! Obviously the unity and struggle in the civil rights and Black Liberation movements have resulted in a slight wiggle of “integration” among the narrowest sector of the Afro-American people. Rowell gives us a generous helping of these university types, many co-sanctioned by the Cave Canem group, which has energized us poetry by claiming a space for Afro-American poetry, but at the same time presents a group portrait of Afro-American poets as mfa recipients.

Rowell organizes his view of Afro-American poetry like this: precursors, Modernists, 1940s–1960s; the black arts move-ment, The 1960s and Beyond. There’s me, Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, Bobb Hamilton, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Haki Madhubuti, Larry Neal, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, A.B. Spellman, and Edward S. Spriggs. Where is the great Henry Dumas or Amus Mor, who inspired a whole generation of us? Where are the Last Poets, whether the originals Gylan Kain, David Nelson, Felipe Luciano or the later incarnation Abiodun Oyewole, or Umar Bin Hassan? Most of the poets in the ground-shaking anthology that tried to sum up the Black Arts breakthrough, Black Fire, are nixed.

Of the group “Outside the Black Arts Movement,” Bob Kaufman and LeRoi Jones (Rowell omits Ted Joans) were called “the Black Beats” and had already formed, under the influence of William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and the surrealists, a united front against academic poetry with Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, the San Francisco school, O’Hara and the New York School, Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets. It was the murder of Malcolm X that sent me and other Black artists screaming out of the various Greenwich Villages to a variety of Harlems!

We saw poets like June Jordan as allies. Check her statement in this anthology: “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” Lucille Clifton and I were classmates at Howard, taught by the great Sterling Brown, as were Toni Morrison and A.B. Spellman. Brown’s fundamental insight on America flows through our works.

171AMIRI BARAkA

That Rowell can disconnect Etheridge Knight from the deep spirit of the Black Arts Movement is fraudulent. Sherley Anne Williams says in her blurb, “I remain, more firmly now than then, a proponent of Black consciousness, of ‘The Black Aesthetic’ and so I am a politi-cal writer.” You ever read Alice Walker’s marvelous poem “Each One Pull One”?

Because when we show what we see,they will discern the inevitable:We do not worship them

We do not worship them.We do not worship what they have made.We do not trust themwe do not believe what they say.

It is this spirit that aligns both of them with the Black Arts Movement. And certainly it is this same spirit of self-conscious resistance to American racial or gender craziness that puts Ntozake Shange in that number. The Black Arts spirit is old, it is historical, psychological, intellectual, cultural. It is the same as Black Abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet’s call in 1843 in his “Address to the Slaves of the United States”: “resistance, resistance, resistance.”

Jayne Cortez is obviously close to the spirit of the Black Arts Movement, in the content and force of her poetry, although Rowell stays away from her best known works. Lorenzo Thomas, who actually identified with the Black Arts Movement, is likewise dissed. It is the spirit of resistance, of unity and struggle that connects us. And where is the mighty Sekou Sundiata, whom I first met when he was sixteen at a meeting for those getting ready to go to the 6th Pan African Congress in Dar es Salaam? One of the finest poets of his generation, and not even a mention. Plus no mention of Marvin X, who founded Black Arts West in 1966 with Ed Bullins.

Gaston Neal, criminally underknown, was also director of the New School for Afro-American Thought in dc. His work has yet to be published in its collected version. If you don’t know Sun Ra’s music, it’s doubtful you know his own powerful verse. Other miss-ing significant: Arthur Pfister. Tom Mitchelson, Kalamu ya Salaam, Amina Baraka, Brian Gilmore, Mervyn Taylor, Lamont Steptoe, John Watusi Branch, Everett Hoagland, Devorah Major, Kenneth Carroll,

172 POETRY

DJ Renegade, Safiya Henderson-Holmes, Charlie Braxton. Where is Nikki Finney? Or the bard of Trenton, Doc Long?

“Outside the Black Arts Movement” (italics mine)? What the Black Arts Movement did was to set a paradigm for the Black artist to be an artist and a soldier. This is what I said at Louis Reyes Rivera’s funeral:

We must urge our artists and scholars ... our most advanced folks fighting for equal rights and self-determination ... to create an art and scholarship that is historically and culturally authentic, that is public and for the people, that is revolutionary.

A sharp class distinction has arisen, producing a mini-class of Blacks who benefited most by the civil rights and Black Liberation move-ments, thinking and acting as if our historic struggle has been won so that they can become as arrogant and ignorant as the worst examples of white America.

It is obvious, as well, looking through this book, that it has been little touched by the last twenty years of Afro-American life, since it shows little evidence of the appearance of spoken word and rap. E.G. Bailey, Jessica Care Moore, Ras Baraka, Ewuare X. Osayande, Zayid Muhammad, Taalam Acey, Rasim Allah, Black Thought, Daniel Beatty, Saul Williams, and Staceyann Chin are all missing. This “new American poetry” is mostly dull as a stick.

Rowell’s icy epilogue is too comic to be tragic, though it is both. It is a cold class dismissal by would-be mainstream Negroes on the path to mediocrity:

Without the fetters of narrow political and social demands that have nothing to do with the production of artistic texts, black American poets, since the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement, have created an extraordinary number of aesthetically deft poems that both challenge the concept of “the American poem” and extend the dimensions of American poetry.

This is poppycock at its poppiest and cockiest. You mean the strug-gle for our humanity is a fetter (to whom? Negroes seeking tenure in these white schools who dare not mumble a cross word?). Why is the struggle for equal rights and self-determination narrow? To whom? Racists? You think Fred Douglass was not one of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century because he kept demanding an end to slavery?

173AMIRI BARAkA

Bah, Humbug! As for the Black Power movement’s “death,” last I heard we

have an Afro-American president who has taught the Republicans the value of community organizing twice. But what Rowell proves is that the old Black-White dichotomy is in the past, at least on the surface. The struggle, as my wife Amina always says, is about whose side you’re on. Romney and them lost because they don’t even know what country they’re in. Neither does Charles Rowell.

174 POETRY

letters to the editor

Dear Editor,

Joshua Mehigan’s anatomy of dullness [“Make Make It New New,” March 2013] is pretty accurate, in its details; what it lacks is per-spective. Maybe reading “thousands of pages of new, unpublished poetry,” which sounds less like a “project” than something they make you do at a cia black site, is precisely what you should avoid before considering a poetic age. The majority of any era’s poetry, what pos-terity, with the uncharitable coldness of posterity, dismisses as dross, works a handful of techniques and effects to death. In 1913 most dross sounded like bad Tennyson, just as in 2013 most dross sounds like bad Ashbery. (Bad Ashbery being, in my experience, the same thing as Ashbery.) In our time, this natural phenomenon may be a little exaggerated, thanks to our peculiar system of sending each gener-ation of poets to school to learn from the generation immediately preceding its own; the most easily imitable tendencies, the glib-ness, the nonsequiturs, et cetera, are seized on just as pre-Modernist English poets seized on the abab quatrain and Guinevere or what-ever. But it doesn’t change the fact that America, at this point in time, has a crowd of major poets who don’t match this description, the talented Mehigan among them. No poetic moment is remembered, or judged, by its dross. And Pound has less to do with ours than we would think; the Modernist “revolution” was less a matter of ver-secraft than a massive expansion of cultural memory and historical reference: hence the introduction of Chinese, Sanskrit, Provençal, and a host of underrecognized traditions in Eliot and Pound alone (not to mention a surge of interest in forgotten aspects of the Western classical tradition; Pound has an homage to Sextus Propertius, too). That was the other Modernist contribution to this art, and if you consider the short historical memory, and somewhat narrow cultural focus, of contemporary American poets and critics, both the golden and the drossy, you will see we are less the heirs of the Modernists than of those other empire-builders, the Victorians.

amit majmudardublin, ohio

175lETTERS

Dear Editor,

I just finished reading Joshua Mehigan’s essay and I find myself won-dering what to do now that I’ve discovered that poetry is dead. I still seem to be enjoying poetry — does this mean I’m one of the pedantic masses who hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s no fun anymore?

timothy nancemurfreesboro, tennessee

Dear Editor,

Perhaps there are unseen depths to the statement, “Don’t write about being white” [“What It Is,” by Reginald Dwayne Betts, March 2013]. As it stands, however, it looks like a remarkably shallow line to place on the back cover of your most recent issue. What, if I may ask, is the attraction to the constant devaluation of the white race? Are poems about being a member of another race intrinsically more valuable? Do white people — or is it Caucasians? — not possess an identity just as tangible and beautiful as those of others?

steven michael antieauchicago, illinois

Reginald Dwayne Betts responds:

There has been a huge uproar about the line “Don’t write about being white” and so very little about my quotation of Louis Simpson:

Don’t believe the reviewer who wrote: “I am not sure it is pos-sible for a Negro to write well without making us aware he is a Negro; on the other hand, if being a Negro is the only subject, the writing is not important.”

I find it interesting that many white people are upset about being told not to write about being white, but generally silent on Simpson’s comments.

My point was to make white people begin to consider how absurd

176 POETRY

it is to be told that who you are, if it is your subject matter, inevitably weakens your writing. I was being ironic. Sort of: my point was also to suggest that what’s good for the goose ain’t good for the gander, so to speak. A better conversation would have been had if Steven Antieau had noticed my contradiction and interrogated it.

Dear Editor,

Please tell Vanessa Place that only the gods use “do not” and “no more” [“No More,” March 2013]. Teachers use “do.” We should write the poems that come to us, even if we are old and, like me, have thinning hair. We will be happier for it.

Schopenhauer said only the young should be poets; but didn’t he push his landlady down the stairs?

martha treichlerhammondsport, new york

Dear Editor,

When I read “Devotions” by Bruce Snider in this month’s issue [March 2013], my heart simply stopped. I am pressing this poem into the hands of my dearest friends.

c.p. mangelchapel hill, north carolina

Dear Editor,

I was delighted to find Sheila P. Donahue’s essay in the March issue [“Hayden Carruth”]. Carruth is, I think, one of the best, most diverse, and most undervalued contemporary American poets. How wonderful to get a very real, visceral image of him. Thank you!

jacqueline winter thomaspoetryfoundation.org

177lETTERS

Dear Editor,

Years before I met Hayden Carruth in Syracuse in the early nineties, I read his essay “The Formal Idea of Jazz.” Jazz interrupted by talk or noise irritated him. It irritates me. I knew we had that much in com-mon as we sat one night in a relatively quiet corner at a boisterous party, drinking, exchanging a few words, listening to a jazz cd played in another room. Some riff made him smile and he tried to talk about it, but I didn’t hear, couldn’t filter the jazz from the noise. The moment was lost. He grew quiet.

A small thing. One moment. One shared observation. I regret the loss. An appreciation of regret and its role in thought is something else I know we shared.

philp nastpoetryfoundation.org

Dear Editor,

What a wonderful piece about a poet I have always loved [“Philip Levine,” by Mark Levine, March 2013]; not just because I shared some of his cultural background but because I wanted to share his artistic sensibilities as well. This is also a wonderful piece about the twisted dynamics of writing seminars. I sat through many myself and remain ambivalent about what they did to affect my writing. However, they did expose me, with surprising intimacy, to some great artists, and I am grateful for those experiences if nothing else.

hillel levinpoetryfoundation.org

Dear Editor,

I, for one, am glad to read what Michael Robbins wrote about Swinburne in “Mimic Motion” [February 2013]. Not that I entirely agree with him. Robbins’s point of view is for the most part received and run of the mill. It reveals nothing new: the s&m, the windy impressionistic style, and, finally, Eliot’s perceptive yet strategic

178 POETRY

condescension. The only thing really new is that someone is writing about Swinburne at all!

It is little known today that Swinburne was also a prolific critic as well as a major poet. He rescued Blake from obscurity and was a fore-runner to the so-called new critics. He pioneered textual analysis and wrote numerous entries for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Swinburne was, indeed, a very interesting and tenacious charac-ter. I see him more like the badger in the John Clare poem, his brain fully intact. It is as easy to bait a dead Swinburne as a dead badger. But alive both are formidable. For all Robbins’s cleverly connecting Stevens and Swinburne, we are left with the same estimate that Laura Kasischke offered up for Stevens: a couple of poems pronounced as perfect or beautiful. Swinburne detested mental pygmies. I wonder how he would have reviewed Robbins.

mark esrigpoetryfoundation.org

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and phone number via e-mail

to editors@poetrymagazine.org. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We

regret that we cannot reply to every letter.

179cONTRIBUTORS

contributors

simon armitage* has published over a dozen collections of poetry including Seeing Stars (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (W.W. Norton, 2007).

amiri baraka’s most recent books include Razor: Revolutionary Art for Cultural Revolution (Third World Press, 2012) and Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of Cali-fornia Press, 2010).

rick barot has published two collections with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002) and Want (2008). He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and Warren Wilson College.

michelle boisseau’s most recent book of poetry is A Sunday in God-Years (University of Arkansas Press, 2009). She is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

geoffrey brock is the author of Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee, 2005) and the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). He lives in Arkansas.

david caplan’s most recent book is In the World He Created Accord-ing to His Will (University of Georgia Press, 2010). Rhyme’s Chal-lenge is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

peter cole’s new collection of poems, The Invention of Influence, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2014.

jessica greenbaum’s second book, The Two Yvonnes, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (2012). She is the poetry editor for the annual upstreet.

linda gregerson’s fifth book of poems, The Selvage, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

james hoch’s books are A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review Press, 2003) and Miscreants (W.W. Norton, 2007).

v. penelope pelizzon’s Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.

180 POETRY

She is also co-author of Tabloid, Inc: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives (Ohio State University Press, 2010).

marie ponsot has published six poetry collections, including Easy (2009), Springing (2002), and The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, all published by Alfred A. Knopf. With Rosemary Deen, Ponsot co-authored a guide to teach-ing writing, Beat Not the Poor Desk (1982). She has translated more than thirty books into English from the French for children and adults, including The Golden Book of Fairy Tales (1958).

kay ryan’s The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010) won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

derek sheffield’s book of poems is Through the Second Skin (Orchises, 2013). He is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.

peter spagnuolo is the author of the chapbook, The Return of the Son of Ten by Fourteen (Pocket Plunder, 2012) and the forthcoming Time’s Wiggy Chariot (2013). He works as an exculpatory narratolo-gist in New York City.

a.e. stallings’s most recent book is a verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things (Penguin, 2007). She is currently at work on a new Hesiod translation for Penguin Classics.

sarah williamson* lives in Brooklyn, New York. She studied illustration at Art Center College of Design and freelance illustrates for many clients, including the New York Times.

* First appearance in Poetry.

yale institute of sacred musicwelcomes to its faculty in fall 2013

christian wiman

poet and essayist

Appointed jointly with Yale Divinity School

Yale Institute of Sacred Music • New Haven, CT www.yale.edu/ism • 203.432.5180

POETRY FOUNDATIONEvENTs

Ars Poetica: Art Song

An evening of art song with contemporary poets, composers, and musicians, including Chicago com-poser Brian Baxter’s interpretation of 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellow Richie Hofmann’s poetry. String quartet Chicago Q Ensemble will perform. Free admission. Co-sponsored by Memorious.org and Singers On New Ground. Friday, May 10, 7:00pm.

•

Bodies of Work Festival

A reading by Jim Ferris, Leroy F. Moore, and Barry Silesky as part of the Bodies of Work Festival, which presents art and culture illuminating the disability experience. Free admission. Co-sponsored with the Bodies of Work Festival. Saturday, May 18, 6:00pm.

•

Harriet Reading Series

The Harriet Reading Series features presentations by poets who have appeared on Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation. This month poets Catherine Wagner and Dana Ward will read from their work. Free admission. Thursday, May 30, 7:00pm.

61 west superior street, chicagopoetryfoundation.org/events

MASTER OF ARTS/MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN

Creative Writing• Work closely with faculty through workshops and

individual mentoring.

• Take advantage of the best features of residential and low-residency programs.

• Choose from specializations in fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry.

• Refine your writing skills in convenient evening courses in Chicago and Evanston.

The fall quarter application deadline is July 15.www.scs.northwestern.edu/grad • 312-503-4682

RECENT AND CONTINUING FACULTY INCLUDE

Eula Biss Stuart Dybek Reginald GibbonsGoldie Goldbloom Cristina HenríquezMarya Hornbacher

Alex KotlowitzEd RobersonChristine SneedPatrick SomervilleS.L. Wisenberg

the Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a FishJoshua Weiner

“Recalls the stature and imagination of Hart Crane’s The Bridge and William Car-los Williams’s Paterson. These elegant, eru-dite meditations wander ‘from Frontier-land to Tomorrowland to Liberty Square’ unearthing the bedrock of our American landscape. As the first and last poems sug-gest, Joshua Weiner works with the focus of a one-eyed man ‘cutting a way through stone / to see what’s there.’ No other poet of his generation is writing this master-fully and mindfully.”—Terence Hayes

PaPer $18.00

thresherphobeMark halliday

“A totally original, quintessentially Ameri-can poet. Mark Halliday’s work is forever in the pleasure section of my reading life. Sad, very funny, thoughtful, honest, lyri-cally and formally adventurous, Halliday’s voice is whimsical-seeming and crazy-quilt on the surface; in fact, his poems tremble and reel in the fierce abrasive currents of being alive.”—Tony Hoagland

PaPer $18.00

The university of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu

“Surely, the history of American poetry is in this elegant commanding volume.”

—Washington Independent Review of Books

“If you need to be reminded of the incomparable poems that Poetry magazine published first in its pages, read excellent poetry

by an author you might not have discovered yet, or simply remember why poetry is worth loving, this is the book to turn to. You won’t

be disappointed.”—Emma Goldhammer, Paris Review

Cloth $20.00

The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu

Read Poetryannual subscription: $35.00

poetry, po box 421141palm coast, fl 32142-1141

1.800.327.6976

Notifi cation of change of address should includeold address, new address, and e≠ective date of change.

Please allow six weeks for processing.

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG

2012 iowa poetry prize

IOWA where great writing beginsUniversity of Iowa Press . www.uiowapress.org order toll-free 800.621.2736

“These fierce poems form a Darwinian compendium with speakers who empathically merge with everything feathered and furred. There’s an odd democracy here. The fresco swan on the Pompeii wall and the clamp of a falcon digging its talons into a glove both speak equally of mystery, fragility, and the future we stand to lose when we turn our backs on nature: ‘The weight of this / is more than you imagined.’ These poems have a Keatsian beauty to them, and a Keatsian truth. In other words, everything we need to know.”—Mary Jo Bang70 pages . $18.00 paperback

The Messenger by Stephanie Pippin

open the doorHow to ExcitE Young PEoPlE about PoEtrY

Edited byjared hawkley, susan rich,

and brian turner

The STrAnGeST of THeATreS

Edited byjesse nathan, dorothea lasky,

and dominic luxford

a collection of inspirational essays and practical advice, featuring Matthea Harvey, ron Padgett,

william Stafford, Eileen Myles, Theodore roethke, and many others

a vital collection of essays by poets who have traveled far from home, featuring work by Kazim ali,

nick Flynn, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many others

aVailablE now POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/INSTITUTE • STORE.mcSwEENEYS.NET

PoEtS writing acroSS bordErS

Two new books from the poetry foundation and mcsweeney’s

“Poets in the World” series editor: ilya KaminsKy, director of the harriet monroe Poetry institute

$17.95 paper

$16.95 paper $16.95 paper $16.95 paper

$19.95 paper $17.95 paper Subscribe today!1 year (4 issues) – $40.00

NEW FROMLSU PRESS

Available in bookstores or online at lsupress.org LSU PRESS

Find a Poem.Discover Poetry.

With the Poetry Foundation's POETRY mobile app,you can now take hundreds of poems by classic and

contemporary poets with you wherever you go.

Get it for free at the App Store or the Android Market. Find out more at: poetryfoundation.org/mobile

Find poems to fitany mood.

Listen tohundreds ofaudio poems.

Read Poetry magazineon your iPad.

PRIZES • 1st $750 • 2nd $250

Submit up to 3 poems (max 60 lines each)

Email them to: vallumcontest@gmail.com

or mail to: Vallum PO Box 598, Victoria Station Montreal, QC H3Z 2Y6 CANADA

Entry fee: $20 (payable by check or paypal)

Deadline: July 15, 2013

www.vallummag.com

AWARD FOR POETRY CONTEST 2013

Rise to the Challenge!