I've been reading a book of movie reviews by Pauline Kael and she's making me feel stupid. I am impressed by her ability hitch a variety of data to the ox-cart of some grand critical claim. I doubt most grand critical claims can hold up under scrutiny, but still I am envious of those writers who are fearless enough to nail their collars to the whim of the moment. My thinking is generally too gauzy for that: I nail it but the fabric rips loose every time I turn my head.



Reading Kael brought me to the question: how come the poetry in the New Yorker (which Kael wrote for) is hardly ever good? Usually I find it prettty namby-pamby, and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way. You would think that an outfit that pays pretty well would have its pick of all the poems in the universe. But I bet the flood of incoming mail can clog the gears of the editorial machine.



So here is a New Yorker poem that I thought was pretty good. The writers name is Dan Chiasson. I realize there's a style of poem I like that is not lyrical, is not song, is not suited to memory and repetition. More likely the poem is an essay that blooms from the general root of narrative. We don't have a word for it exactly. Here's one: Narrexpozyric.



My Ravine



How will you know what my poem is like

until you've gone down my ravine and seen



the box springs, mattresses, bookcases, and desks

the neighboring women's college dumps each year,



somebody's hair dryer, someone's Herodotus

a poem's dream landscape, one half Latin and



one half shit, the neighboring women's college shit?

Wheelbarrow upon wheelbarrow, a humpbacked



custodian hauls old dormitory furniture down

and launches it, watching it roll into the pile.



You won't know how my poem decides what's in,

what's out, what decorum means and doesn't mean,



until you follow him home after work, and see him

going wild all night imagining those girls' old beds.



You won't know what I'm trying for until you hear

how every fall in my back yard a swarm of deer



materializes, scavenging where the raspberries touched

the radishes, now plowed under, itching the lawn



for dandelions, stare at each other and wander

bewildered down my ravine and turn into skeletons.

Lines from this poem by John Berryman often come back to me, especially: "Do me glory, come the whole way across town." The poem foreshadows the poet's suicide, and so I have always wanted to know the history of it--was it a suicide note delivered in the form of a sonnet? Will anyone stumble on the blog with the answer?



Of course Berryman is known for his dream songs, whose form is sort of a variant, extended sonnet. I think I can easily commit this one to memory, but it scares me. Is this a poem I want in my head? I do love it, but loving it is part of the problem. It delights in its own nihilistic urge.



THE POET'S FINAL INSTRUCTIONS



Dog-tired, suisired, will now my body down

near Cedar Avenue in Minneap,

when my crime comes. I am blazing with hope.

Do me glory, come the whole way across town.



I couldn't rest from hell just anywhere,

in commonplaces. Choiring and strange my pall!

I might not lie still in the waste of St. Paul

or buy DAD's root beer; good signs I forgive.



Drop here, with honour due, my trunk and brain

among the passioning of my countrymen

unable to read, rich, proud of their tags

and proud of me. Assemble all my bags!

Bury me in a hole, and give a cheer,

near Cedar on Lake Street, where the used cars live.

I contracted some sort of voodoo staph infection, perhaps in Hawaii, and last week it took hold of me and brought me closer than I perhaps want to brought to issues of mortality. The inescapable subject is the body, and it is oppressive to be brought to the body again and again. You try to think "Freedom" and hear in response "Body!" You try to think "Art" and hear "No, Body!" You try to think "Love" and get "Body" and that is the real zinger, eh. That even love has to be tainted.



So here is a poem I treasure on the subject. It's by May Swenson, about whom I know not much but that she was from Utah and is somewhat recently deceased. Not to grieve, though--she did live to be quite old.



Question



Body my house

my horse my hound

what will I do

when you are fallen



Where will I sleep

How will I ride

What will I hunt



Where can I go

without my mount

all eager and quick

How will I Know

in thicket ahead

is danger or treasure

when Body my good

bright dog is dead



How will it be

to lie in the sky

without roof or door

and wind for an eye



With cloud for shift

how will I hide?

This is a poem I want to remember by heart: John Logan's "Three Moves." It will appear in an anthology of un-anthologized poetry that will come out soon from University of Illinois Press, and I wrote an intro about Logan, who I suppose was a drunk. He was the first poet I ever saw give a reading, so his work is resonant for me.



I am very interested in the teeter-totter of the historical record, and why some (few) writers will flop into the lot of what will be remembered forever, while everybody else flops into the dustbin--what forces conspire to allow the few to join the record? I have a hunch it depends on which writers anticipate the aesthetic of the era to follow...but my theories are unformed, stay turned. Logan will be forgotten, I assume. But he did write this one great poem (which actually does turn up in a few anthologies.)



THREE MOVES



Three moves in six months and I remain

the same.

Two homes made two friends.

The third leaves me with myself again.

(We hardly speak.)

Here I am with tame ducks

and my neighbors' boats,

only this electric heat

against the April damp.

I have a friend named Frank--

the only one who ever dares to call

and ask me "How's your soul?"

I hadn't thought about it for a while,

and was ashamed to say I didn't know.

I have no priest for now.

Who

will forgive me then. Will you?

Tame birds and my neighbors' boats.

The ducks honk about the floats...

They walk dead drunk onto the land and grounds,

iridescent blue and black and green and brown.

They live on swill

our aged houseboats spill.

But still they are beautiful.

Look! The duck with the unlikely beak

has stopped to pick

and pull

at the potted daffodil.

Then again they sway home

to dream

bright gardens of fish in the early night.

Oh these ducks are all right.

They will survive.

But I am sorry I do not often see them climb

Poor sons-of-bitching ducks.

You're all fucked up.

What do you do that for?

Why don't you hover near the sun anymore?

Afraid you'll melt?

These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt,

and so all their multi-thousand-mile range

is too short for the hope of change.

I do believe in the weird synchronicity of the universe. For a few years I'd been thinking idly of this poet William Carpenter, who had a poem in one of the Best American Poetry volumes years back now--it was about a girl in a painting come to life and pulling off a heist. I had also seen some collaborations he did with an artist in the Beloit Poetry Journal. His second book was published by Northeastern University Press (they did my first book a few years later--so this seemed synchronous as well,) but when I called the press to obtain a copy they said is was out of print; no copies left. I looked on the Alibris site, and Amazon, but nothing.



So it was rather magical last week when I did my customary sweep of the used book store down the street to see what was new in the poetry section. On a low shelf was Carpenter's book, Rain, which I'd been looking for all these years! Supernormal forces must have drawn me into the book store that night:I don't know if Carpenter is still alive even, as I have not seen his poems for some years now and fear the cause of his silence. I suppose I could try to find him through his academic affiliation, but now he and I have the kind of paranormal connection I suspect I should just leave alone.



His work is characterized by parables told in plain speech, usually about doing something in the woods of New England, though the narratives are also illustrative of/run parallel with meditations on various sorts of human connections, mainly love in all its prickly forms. I thought I'd type out a copy of his poem "The Ice House." My blog won't do italics so you will have to envision them as needed.



THE ICE HOUSE



On Lincoln's Birthday we walk counterclockwise

around Mink Lake, watching the ice retreat,

though one ice-fishing shack is still out there,

which a man with a blue truck and a hat that

says International Harvester is trying to push

to shore, but his tires keep skidding, so he

ties a rope to the house with the idea

that he might pull it if it will not push.

We clap when the ice house moves, fall silent

when the rope breaks and he stands there crushed.

You ask what I am doing with myself these days.

I say writing, which is not exactly what you meant.

You ask, who do I see? By now the man is on

a cracked island of ice, he is pushing again

with the blue truck against the ice house, which

begins to slide. We clap again. It echoes off

Dog Mountain as if thousands of couples stood

watching like trees around the lake. I don't see

anyone. I have been stone blind for a year.

Oh, has it been a year? We ought to celebrate.

Out on the ice, the truck makes a sharp lunge

that thrusts the ice floe backward, opening

a black space so that the shack falls through

and a tidal wave travels beneath the ice,

a wave the size and shape of a small house

which breaks over our feet. The man stares

into the hole where his house was. He lies flat

on his stomach with his face in the cold lake,

trying to understand. On our way back, two

or three crows fly from a limb, so you, also,

begin flapping your arms like crow wings

and run over the snowy road, shrieking caw

caw and in your black jacket, black feathery hair,

as you run faster you transform into a crow,

sweetheart, you rise right off the ground and fly

through a cluster of white pines, over Mink Lake

where a man slowly pilots his blue truck across

the ice, where he looks up to feel the wind shifting

and a woman flying around and around his head

who is still beautiful, but the man thinks

only of the lost ice house, sinking in dark

water, in the deepest part of the lake, how

he will never retrieve it, how it had a stove,

two candles and a rocking chair, and on the wall

a calendar of twelve girls in their bathing suits,

one girl for each month, who are even now being

swallowed by deep pickerel, by huge rainbow trout.

I had an idea that I would start with a poem by Vassar Miller, who died some years ago in the mid-1990's. Miller was born with cerebral palsy, and her parents were told she would never have a functional life; her intellect, however, was not scathed by the CP (I don't know her physical limitations) and she went on to publish maybe a dozen books.



Some of Miller's work is oppressively formal. Her subject matter was religious, which has also shoved her to the margins of the canonized poetic world. Her stance was agnostic though--in her life Miller was a Baptist but only because she liked the social atmosphere of that particular church (a liberal congregation in Houston.) She also was an erotic poet, which made her a particularly strange brew.



Here's what I believe is her best poem. She's pretty much gone from poetic memory, if she ever had a place there, but I think a street in Houston was named after her.





ON A WEEKEND IN SEPTEMBER



Come God

be man woman child old one

bread breast of the world and water

for that matter

lamb stretched down and down down to the meanest grub

struggling to swim on concrete



merged into mortal stuff

Ancient of Days of Seas

mirroring

hauled to your hard wood

Creator brought to creature



here where I remember Lee Palmer

who 80-odd years ago

prayed by no book but that terrible book of the deeps

on a weekend in September

I quickly skimmed



Dear Jesus

make the waters recede

and give us a pleasant day tomorrow to play

and save my little dog Youno



nobody remembers Lee Palmer now

why would they

he would be an old man now

dying maybe senile maybe

nobody would like him and would wish to hell he'd hurry



still I hope

Lee Palmer

swept out from Galveston in l900

was swept up to you on the Gulf's gray tongue



because were one lapped

and loved in the very body of the beloved

that were not bedding deep enough for one to know

and be known back



when each should tremble

cradled in the other's memory

shifting

such risky ocean



Open Sea

whose sides

eye cannot touch