The Italians

I was recently mailed a copy of Dennis Barone's New Hungers For Old, an anthology of Italian American poetry. While I don't know how many poems about grandfathers' butcher shops any one person needs, I was moved by a Gregory Corso poem I'd not seen before.


Italian Extravaganza

Mrs. Lombardi’s month-old son is dead.
I saw it in Rizzo’s funeral parlor,
a small purplish wrinkled head.

They’ve just finished having high mass for it;
They’re coming out now
…wow, such a small coffin!
And ten black cadillacs to haul it in.


This shows you the special power that comes about through a poem's compression, in this case the bringing together of big and small images. The compaction of the language causes a buildup of energy, like the latent energy in a compressed spring. And boom, when the energy's released. I'm not aware of any other art form that can pull off this feat.

Returning home

The dictionary says the word nostalgia is rooted in the Greek for homesickness, and though often it has taken on a negative pallor I marvel at poems that take me back.
Like this one by Thomas Lux, which I found while re-reading the story "Winky" by George Saunders, which appeared in The New Yorker. Lux's poem appeared in the middle of it.

Refrigerator, 1957


More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.


The thing is, the Perillos had that same jar of cherries.

Vogelsang

There's much to read in this world, and I've finally allowed myself to accept my tastes in poetry, which are somewhat old-fashioned and perhaps put too much emphasis on intelligibility--instead of making myself feel compelled to pursue the vogue. I've read somewhere that someone, perhaps Billy Collins, suggested that the word "accessible" be laid aside in favor of "hospitable"--now this would be an appalling switch. Though "accessible" has become tainted, the uncoolest adjective among the uncool,it usually connotes what Marianne Moore called "plain old English that dogs and cats could understand." Hospitable, on the other hand, carries the whiff of wanting to be liked, to make nice, to not ruffle any feathers. In my own work I do want to talk to the dogs and cats but I want them to be ruffled.

The book that's given me the most pleasure recently is Arthur Vogelsang's collected poems, Expedition. The language is plain, or plain-ish, and yet the poems are at the same time quite loopy and weird. Here is one:

Help

Lay down beside me I signaled to my wolf
Three pats of the sofa in the early morn
Then two pats of the heart to say why.
He did it silently, no reply when one does
What's to do. I must rest my hand on you
For a while for the usual reasons. This
Is easy to say between wolves or wolves and people
And difficult between people. For instance
A person might not want to absorb by touch another's pain
Then. The wolf loves to. The person might say
Oh all right, but clearly a burden to ease another's pain.
If you keep a wolf, there isn't much more they do
But they are specially good at it
Like the surf loves to be splashed with a whole bottle of poison water,
Try that and see if the waves don't turn over embracing without end,
Try that and see if you can find any poison after two seconds,
Or slowly slide your fingers through the first layer
Of your wolf's coat to the second layer and move fingers
Head to tail, tail to head, slower than slowly.
Anything could have happened to you yesterday
And you'd soon be okay. But first get a wolf.

The Public Common

It's easy to be nostalgic for the past, of which we have relatively little data, if we're trying to picture life before the formation of our own brains.

Lately I've been thinking of Emily Dickinson: her biographers report that she read the newspapers and that the newspapers printed poetry. Dickinson even submitted poems for consideration, once, I believe. She was rejected and turned her back on all that. There came the famous poem about publication being the auction of the mind.

Oddly, there were poems in the newspaper (New York Times) last Sunday. The theme was: poems of the season. Were the editorial writers on vacation, so they dispatched the student intern to dig up some poetry?

My favorite was by Sarah Lindsay, a copy editor by day, whose poems normally are third-person, fantastical, a combination of research and wildly detailed invention. So I was surprised to see this straightforward first person elegy, built on the platform of an extended metaphor. In technical terms, the poem is all vehicle (ha ha); the ground of the metaphor, the real death, is stated but not dwelt on. I found it haunting because it is so directly stated, the scene so vivid.

THE DRIVER

Twice we watched him leave us:
Once when the car loaded with us died
and rolled to the side of a highway into Nashville
in boiling August; later with cancer.
Empty jug in one hand, he walked away
step by step on a strip of pavement
about as wide as his shoulders,
hot wind of traffic panting on his left.
He would find help. He would attract it. Slowly
the rippling heat from the asphalt dissolved him,
his shrinking back looked like anyone’s —
he was gone before it disappeared.
We stood staring anyway
by the highway barrier wall
with mimosa tree-tips reaching over
as the other cars rushed by us
toward their accidents at a hundred miles an hour.

Speed

High speed internet has recently come into my life, and with that Youtube. So I post a clip of John Berryman reading Dream Song 29:


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.




The body language in the clip is fascinating, especially Berryman's conducting of the poem with his long index finger. The liquid quality of his body (is he drunk?) and the angles at which he sets his chin.

The ending is justly famous, and now, looking at it again, I see how the whole poem works to point a finger at that secret guilt that some of us (all of us?) are hobbled by. That we have committed an irremediable wrong, and yet we don't know what is is; there is no evidence. And yet, inside, we are wrung. The heart is squashed.

Somewhere Robert Pinsky makes a distinction between guilt and shame, but he doesn't quite articulate the qualities of the difference. Berryman, I suppose, is talking about guilt, as the ending makes clear. But I can't tell which of these I feel. Perhaps both.

I'm back, we'll see

Two nights ago, I went to see the movie "Under the Salish Sea," which consisted entirely of footage of the undersea life of Puget Sound, of the Salish Sea. Among the amazing footage was the hunt of a gray whale by orcas. They exhaust the larger whale by chasing it, they lie on its head to drown it.

Coincidentally, I'd just been made aware of this poem by James Dickey, which is a style of poem that I'd not been exposed to before: the poem as thriller (like the movie "Jaws.") It makes the heart race, and it's impressive how Dickey gets from the southern U.S. to the arctic, via his boy-reading of the explorers.

Pursuit from Under

---

by James Dickey

Often, in these blue meadows,
I hear what passes for the bark of seals

And on August week ends the cold of a personal ice age
Comes up through my bare feet
Which are trying to walk like a boy's again
So that nothing on earth can have changed
On the ground where I was raised.

The dark grass here is like
The pads of mukluks going on and on

Because I once burned kerosene to read
Myself near the North Pole
In the journal of Arctic explorers
Found, years after death, preserved
In a tent, part of whose canvas they had eaten

Before the last entry.
All over my father's land

The seal holes sigh like an organ,
And one entry carries more terror
Than the blank page that signified death
In 1912, on the icecap.
It says that, under the ice,

The killer whale darts and distorts,
Cut down by the flawing glass

To a weasel's shadow,
And when, through his ceiling, he sees
Anything darker than snow
He falls away
To gather more and more force

From the iron depths of cold water,
His shadow dwindling

Almost to nothing at all, then charges
Straight up, looms up at the ice and smashes
Into it with his forehead
To splinter the roof, to isolate seal or man
On a drifting piece of the floe

Which he can overturn.
If you run, he will follow you

Under the frozen pane,
Turning as you do, zigzagging,
And at the most uncertain of your ground
Will shatter through, and lean,
And breathe frankly in your face

An enormous breath smelling of fish.
With the lungs staining your air

You know the unsaid recognition
Of which the explorers died:
They had been given an image
Of how the downed dead pursue us.
They knew, as they starved to death,

That not only in the snow
But in the family field

The small shadow moves,
And under the bare feet in the summer:
That somewhere the turf will heave,
And the outraged breath of the dead,
So long held, will form

Unbreathably around the living.
The cows low oddly here

As I pass, a small bidden shape
Going with me, trembling like foxfire
Under my heels and their hooves.
I shall write this by kerosene,
Pitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.

Report: that I have been making progress when it comes to memorization: "Richard Cory" by Robinson, "Pied Beauty" by Hopkins, "Casabianca" by Bishop, "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" by Hopkins, "The Voice" by Hardy, "Three Moves" by John Logan, "Of Mere Being" by Stevens, "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Most of these have rhyme to help me along, except for "Of Mere Being," which was difficult, because it lacked this mnemonic device.

Recently I discovered James Schuyler, one of the New York poets who also qualifies as a nature poet, who puts nature off kilter enough to rouse the skeptical. This poem is one that's been an the back of my mind; now to bring it into the fore.


Salute

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.