To Let You Pass

Remembering Craig Arnold.

By Christian Wiman
Poetry Media Service

It is now seven months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at 41 a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register.

I first met Craig about 10 years ago at a little college in Virginia, where he was part of a symposium of young poets I had organized. Tall, lean, and with his head shaved, clad in black leather pants and tight white T-shirt, he didn’t “read” his poems: he performed them, strutting elastically about as if he were on stage, whipsawing lines and limbs in precise, rehearsed ways, electrifying that quaint little lecture hall as if it were the Moulin Rouge. I tend to be allergic to this kind of self-dramatization in poetry, but I loved it. All of it: the flair that seemed to arise naturally out of his character rather than being appliquéd on; the mercurial and protean nature of his subjects (and, I would learn, his own life); the hell-bent hungers and raptures kept in check—or at least kept intact, intelligible—by the tough-minded conscience and craft that ran through the poems like a spine.

Those were the poems of Shells, Craig’s first book, which had been selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1998 (published in 1999). The poems hold up, to say the least. In fact, what strikes me when reading them now is how little they need any embellishment of drama or gesture, how absolute their integrity is on the page. “Hot,” a long, tightly wrought narrative that is emblematic of the book as a whole, is about—besides life and death and art, I mean—two friends who share a passion, of a sort, for ever-hotter peppers:

I called in sick
next morning, said I’d like to take

time off. She thinks I’ve hit the bottle.
The high those peppers gave me is more subtle—

I’m lucid, I remember my full name,
my parents’ birthdays, how to win a game

of chess in seven moves, why which and that
mean different things. But what we eat,

why, what it means, it’s all been explained
—Take this curry, this fine-tuned

balance of humors, coconut liquor thinned
by broth, sour pulp of tamarind

cut through by salt, set off by fragrant
galangal, ginger, basil, cilantro, mint,

the warp and woof of texture, aubergines
that barely hold their shape, snap beans

heaped on jasmine, basmati rice
—it’s a lie, all of it—pretext—artifice

—ornament—sugar-coating—for . . .

For what? Well, that’s the whole heart of “Hot,” the whole heart of Craig, really, who seems to me as powerfully present in these poems as when I first heard him perform them all those years ago—and as teasingly elusive.

Nine years would pass between the publication of Shells and the appearance of Craig’s next book, Made Flesh, nine years in which Craig lived in Rome and Bogotá and Wyoming and Utah and I don’t know where else. It was in some ways the typical 21st-century up-and-coming American poet’s life—the pickup jobs and the scramble for publishers, the fellowships and relationships (for the past six years of his life, Craig was very happily partnered with another poet, Rebecca Lindenberg), the constant effort to find a way of staying alive without allowing one’s lifeblood to congeal into a career.

And yet it wasn’t so typical, too: Craig was perhaps the only poet I have known personally—the only good poet, I should say—who seemed completely at ease with being a poet. Don’t get me wrong: Craig had all of the existential friction and psychic disquiet we’ve come to expect from post-Romantic poets—an excess of it, actually. You don’t have to read his poems autobiographically—and they’re too cunningly, winningly imagined to do that—to get a hint of the tempest that was their source. But he also had, right down to his soul (I guess it was his soul), a calm and clarifying equanimity about his purpose on this earth, and always over the years when I would encounter him—a few days in Virginia again, a dinner in San Francisco, a breakfast in Chicago—I would discover my own bristling insecurities melting away in his presence, and would feel my own relationship with poetry renewed. This wasn’t because Craig had achieved some sort of monkish calm with regard to ambition (ha!), and it certainly wasn’t because he was placidly and brainlessly open to everything he encountered (in fact, he could be quite sudden and sharp in his opinions). No, what Craig had, besides his endless and endlessly inclusive charisma, was a capacity to be at once absolutely grounded in the physical world, and in his own body, and yet utterly, mysteriously permeable. I’m not sure how this played out in his daily life, but I know it affected mine, and for the better. I also know that this quality gives the concrete things of his poetry, and especially his later poetry, a powerful sense of being more themselves by being more than themselves:

Here is a small café
opening for breakfast
a zinc counter catching the light
at every angle in bright rings of glitter
A cup of black coffee is placed before you
brimming with rainbow-colored foam
a packet of sugar   a pat of butter
a split roll of bread
scored and toasted and still warm
The butter is just soft enough to spread
the coffee hot and sugared to perfect sweetness
the bread grilled to the palest brown
crisp but not quite dry
You tear it neatly into pieces
eat them slowly    when you finish
you are exactly full

Here are bread butter and coffee
Here you are     your own body
eating and drinking what you are given
as one day you in turn will be devoured
and that is all     You were never the lord
of a lightless kingdom     any more
than she has ever been its queen
and the world you talked into a prison
suddenly seems to be made of glass
and your eyes see clear to the horizon
and you feel the molecules of air
part like a curtain     as if to let you pass
—From “Couple From Hell”

This is from Made Flesh, which is a different sort of book from Shells. Shells is often about the immediacy of experience, but there is just as often a detachment to the poems, a very palpable (and altogether successful) sense of artifice, of talent that is in some way distancing a world even as it brings that world wildly alive. In Made Flesh that distance is gone. The language is sparer, all irony is obliterated, the poems are less obviously “formal,” and their raptures are at once quieter and more complete. There is something both precise and encompassing about these poems, something at the same time piercing and liberating. Time abrades talent. Some poets don’t seem to notice this and continue to make the same ever-thinning sound right on into oblivion. Others lapse into embittered silence. In some, though, the abrasions bloom:

On the fire escape of your rented room
we sat and felt the empty city
sweat and fret     we passed a cigarette
back and forth     as once we passed
words like these between us      without
hope of keeping
Now I write
without hope of answer     to say
that what we gave each other nakedly
was too much and not enough
To say that since we last touched
I am not empty     I hear you named
and my heart starts     the pieces of your voice
you left     are interleaved with mine

and to this quick spark in the emptiness
to say Yes     I miss how love
may make us otherwise
—From “Asunder”

The bracing, rule-breaking (show, then tell), completely convincing move from detail to abstraction, from sensation to realization; the space-ghosted form of the lines so apt for their subject; the careful, graceful assurance of the poem as it charts an entirely new route through a minefield of emotional and poetic clichés: it takes an enormous amount of skill to speak one’s pain in this way, and it takes a rare, clear heart.

I last saw Craig back in February, when he came into town for the AWP conference. He showed up at the Poetry offices one afternoon and practically lifted me off the floor in a hug. As always, the twitchy intelligence, the solar flares of his energy, surprised me—and, as always, surprised a happiness in me I hadn’t known was there. We locked him in an office all afternoon in hopes that he would write the long-overdue prose note to the translation he had done for our April issue, and for hours he sat there (weird: how suddenly still he could become, how creaturely focused), finally emerging near dusk with a single brilliant and self-revealing page on a poet he had recently met while living in Colombia (“to hit upon such an image requires an intimate acquaintance with all the flavors of pain and persistence and hopelessness—here, I thought, was a conscience to reckon with”). The next day he led—with great kindness, and much to my surprise—a reading he’d shaped as a celebration of the magazine. He’d given up the extravagant reading style of years before because, he said, he began to think it was actually deflecting people’s attention and detracting from the work. Still, even understated (as if that word could ever be used for Craig!), he was searing, mesmerizing, unforgettable.

Craig stayed with my wife and me that week, and somehow in between the dozens of friends he was seeing, or tending to, or shuttling to and from the airport, we found time to talk. I remember most clearly his last morning here, when he made us migas for breakfast, and the conversation turned to something he and I had talked of many times over the years: the necessary but destabilizing intensities of poetry, and the life that one risks by cultivating those intensities, and the life that—in some cases, our cases, we both felt—poetry also rescues. Out in the front yard he gave me another of his no-holds-barred hugs and promised to be back in August. Only as he drove off did I realize I’d forgotten to get him to sign our copy of Made Flesh, which is a shame, since the inscription he wrote for me on Shells all those years ago is a gem. Filling the entire page, and linking quotations from Fight Club and Baudelaire with a self-consciously absurd smiley face, it’s Craig all over. “I hope this stays with you,” he scrawled on the very last bit of space at the end of the page. “I certainly will.”

Christian Wiman is the author of three books, most recently Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. A new book of poetry, Every Riven Thing, is forthcoming in 2011. He has edited Poetry magazine since 2003. This essay originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Christian Wiman. All rights reserved.

Interview With a Poet: Wayne Miller

I was one of the last people to arrive for Wayne Miller’s morning presentation at last month’s South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. He hadn’t started reading yet, and looking back, I’m glad I didn’t miss a minute of his presentation. His poems live well on the page, but as is so often the case, hearing the poet read his own work adds a dimension of emotion that otherwise does not resonate.

After his reading in Deadwood, Miller asked me if I knew where he could get a good breakfast in Deadwood. But being not so familiar with the town, I couldn’t give him any advice. Later, I overheard him telling another one of the festival poets how dreadful his hotel breakfast was. Sorry, Wayne. Deadwood’s just not a real breakfasty sort of place.

Had I read Miller’s “The Book of Props,” though, I would have tried much harder to make sure he got a decent meal. Anyway, Miller’s bio:

Wayne Miller is the author of two collections of poems, The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), which received the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He is also translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2007) and editor (with Kevin Prufer and 22 regional editors) of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). The recipient of the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award (in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

AFTER LONG BUSYNESS: Who do you consider to be the biggest influences on your poetry?

WAYNE MILLER: Like most writers, I’m pretty much continually reading, and what I read affects what I write. Which is to say that, at different moments in my writing life, different poets have been important to me.

The first poet whose work I really fell in love with—back in what I believe was my sophomore year of college—was James Wright. I’d read poetry before; in fact, I’d had an excellent high school teacher in Cincinnati who’d brought contemporary poetry into the classroom, and I owned a copy of Leaves of Grass. My dad was an English professor, and I remember flipping around in his collected William Carlos Williams when I visited him.

But James Wright opened up doors for me. He was writing about Ohio, where I was from, in ways that made the Midwestern landscape feel charged with poetic possibility. And his work was deeply affected by contact with the works of non-American poets such as Lorca, Vallejo, Rilke and Trakl—something that, ironically, allowed him to write more directly and effectively about the American landscape.

Partially inspired by Wright, and aided by the fact that I attended Oberlin College, where all the poetry professors were also translators, I found myself very early on reading non-English language poets in translation—and it was then that I first discovered Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work (though I still can only read it in translation) has been perhaps the most enduringly important to me of any poet’s.

The other poet I go back to more than any other is Wallace Stevens, whose sense of music and rhythm is extraordinary and who, like Rilke, is interested in (among other things) the phenomenological complications of our experience of the physical world.

At this point, I feel compelled to list off the names of all the other poets I admire—whose work I go back to at least semi-regularly. But rather than miss folks and feel guilty later, perhaps I should end my answer there.

ALB: How much revision do your poems usually go through?

WM: I know some poets whose first drafts emerge pretty close to the poems’ finished versions, but I’m definitely not one of them. When my first book, Only the Senses Sleep, came out, a student of mine asked how much I’d had to revise the poems in it, so I went back through my drafts and looked at when the poems began, when I published them in magazines, and when they arrived at their final, in-the-book versions (which sometimes included significant revision after magazine publication). There wasn’t one poem in the book I’d worked on for less than six months—and many of them I’d worked on for several years.

Of course, that was also my first book. In the room of every new poem, I find myself stumbling around in the dark, but in those early poems the rooms were often pitch black. I’m a more experienced poet now, and though I still do quite a lot of revision, it’s somewhat more rare that my poems need the truly radical revisions that my earlier poems often did. These days I tend to spend several months off-and-on-again revising.

ALB: Your most recent collection, “The Book of Props,” has a sequence of 23 poems called “What the Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse),” which sketches out a screenplay for a film. How did you arrive at the idea of using a screenplay as a device to frame your poems?

WM: “What Night Says to the Empty Boat” began with a couple drafty lyric poems that were failing because they were too sentimental and/or could too easily be read as autobiographical. In each of them, I found myself wanting to distance the speaker from the emotional content, so I switched from first to third person. But then I found that a random “he” in a poem didn’t seem particularly distanced—a reader could quite easily still read that “he” as me. So I switched one of the poems to “she.”

At that point, I thought, hmm, what if those “he’s” and that “she” know each other; in other words, what if they’re characters.

Then I decided that if pronouns without antecedents are annoying in prose, they’re probably at least as annoying in poetry (T.S Eliot notwithstanding), so I gave them names—based loosely on three particular people I knew.

I’d also, at the time, been trying (miserably) to write some fiction, and I think the resulting interest in narrative and character propelled my desire to allow a background storyline to accrue across these poems. I liked the visual, image-based nature of film, but I didn’t want to have a full “film in verse,” because that would require me to construct a complete narrative, and I was much more interested in the poems being lyrics. So “notes for a film” seemed to make sense—it further distanced those early failing poems and, in the process, added a fourth character—the filmmaker talking to himself about the film he envisions making.

At this point I think I had four or five poems. Then summer hit and I moved back to Houston to live with my girlfriend, who’d been there finishing up school while I’d been in Missouri in my first year of teaching.

That summer, when she left for work each day I found myself alone in her cramped apartment, with my laptop, little money and nothing to do—in a kind of limbo between my life in Missouri and my former life in Houston. Writing into a developing sequence seemed a perfectly good way to spend my time—which meant I gave myself more leeway to “play around” than I otherwise might have. And the experience of being reunited with my girlfriend after a year apart colored the overall themes and content of the sequence. In my mind, it’s all really one big love poem.

ALB: I assume that, as an editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, you spend a good amount of time reading poetry by a wide range of poets. How is the state of the art these days?

WM: Every six months, it seems, someone or other is decrying some aspect of the state of contemporary poetry—whether it’s John Barr, Ron Silliman, or someone in between. From my Stylite’s perch atop the Pleiades slush pile, however, the state of poetry looks pretty good; the best work showing up in our mailbox is consistently varied and strong.

There was a time in the mid-1980s when what seemed to matter most about much of the poetry that was being published was that it was TRUE—that an uncle really had been mean to the poet, or that the poet’s grandmother really had been dying, or that the poet really did feel bad about failing as a parent, or that the poet really had fought off cancer. Form seemed less important than content, in other words, and content seemed primarily ad misericordium.

In the mid-1990s, a lot of interesting poets started resisting that baldly autobiographical impulse, and many of the poetic strains getting press these days are various versions of that pushback against post-confessionalism. For example, we have Steven Burt’s injection of confessionalism with aspects of Language poetics (“elliptical” poetry), a return to the Objectivists (what Burt calls the “new thing”) and other Modernists, a renewed interest in the New York School poets, neoformalism, a focus on personas and dramatic monologues (e.g., Maurice Manning and my colleague Kevin Prufer), a turn toward European surrealism and/or classicism, etc.

In my mind, all these diverse approaches to keeping form and content, technique and raw emotion, in balance are good for the art. And Pleiades has pretty consistently received—and enjoyed receiving—the work of many good poets mining these various aesthetic veins.

American Life in Poetry: Column 241

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I love poems in which the central metaphors are fresh and original, and here’s a marvelous, coiny description of autumn by Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck, who lives in Illinois.

Like Coins, November

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold
as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees

were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold
and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes:

some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now
and then, the shock of one so steeled with frost

it glittered like a dime. The autumn boughs
and blackened branches wore a somber gloss

that whispered tails to me, not heads. I read
memorial columns in their trunks; their leaves

spelled UNUM, cent; and yours, the only head . . .
in penny profile, Lincoln-like (one sleeve,

one eye) but even it was turning tails
as russet leaves lay spent across the trails.

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck. Reprinted from The Spoon River Poetry Review, Vol. XXXIII, no. 1, 2008, by permission of Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck and the publisher. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

 

Poetry, Daily

Brenda Starr makes way for Rumi, Neruda, and Merwin.

By Mary Schmich
Poetry Media Service

I write a news column at the Chicago Tribune, and at the beginning of baseball season this year one of my editors phoned with a tough assignment, something, he said, that called for special skills.

Was I being asked to investigate a doping scandal? conduct an exclusive interview? throw out the first pitch?

“Can you write us a poem about opening day?” he asked.

He and I both knew that by “poem” he meant doggerel—silly verse written with a wink—and I obliged:

Yes, baseball’s back, at last, at last
To bat away the blues
The games arrive like sunshine
In the bleepin’ gloomy news.

Blagojevich indicted!
The economy’s a mess!
Plus parking, potholes, crooks and crimes!
We need some anti-stress!
—From An Ode to Opening Day

It ran on the front page, embroidered with old-fashioned bunting that signaled that rhyming verse, like baseball itself, was a relic of a quainter time.

I’ve always felt slightly sheepish about the pleasure I get from my occasional forays into doggerel. The enjoyment some columnists get from their political fulminations, I get from rhyming “spinach” and “Kucinich.”

I feel only slightly less sheepish about how often I exploit the poems of real poets to make a serious point. Poetry and journalism are like peanut butter and baloney: coupling them is not to everyone’s taste.

But I can’t help myself. Poetry isn’t just a way of writing, it’s a way of thinking, and I’ve been thinking that way since at least sixth grade.

At Alexander School IV in Macon, Georgia, Miss Lois Birch, who seemed as old as God, made us memorize poems. The two I remember spring to mind as often as the faces of old friends. I keep them in my head the way you might keep worry beads in your pocket, reaching reflexively in times of stress for their meaning, rhythm, sound.

One is by John Masefield: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” The other is by William Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.

Whenever I can, I sneak poems into my newspaper column.

After terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, I instinctively flipped through my most dog-eared book of poems, Wislawa Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand, and plucked a few verses from “Hatred”:

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape—
our century’s hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

Her poem gave my prose a power it wouldn’t otherwise have had.

When W.S. Merwin won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, I used the occasion as an excuse to quote from “Rain Light,” about a mother’s death. I put a link to the entire poem in my column, and hundreds of readers sought it out.

I’ve bolstered my own summer musings with Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” whose last line electrocutes me every time I read it: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

In autumn, I’ve quoted from Pablo Neruda’s “October Fullness,” though it’s about October as a time of life more than a time of year:

Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.

The response to the columns in which I quote good poems is always strong, which is another reason to feel sheepish: even with full attribution, I’m reaping credit for someone else’s genius.

Poetry also creeps into Brenda Starr, the soap-opera comic strip I’ve written for 24 years. Our heroine, Brenda, quotes poetry and muses on it. Heroes and villains alike use it to woo her.

Recently, a mysterious, dashing man named Ringo, from the fictitious country of Kazookistan, dazzled her with verse:

Ringo didn’t conquer Brenda, but he did seduce many comics readers who were grateful to discover Rumi and Hafiz.

Newspaper columns, comic strips, and poems may not seem like related literary forms, but they’re less different than they look. In their own ways, each of them seeks the same thing: to make meaning in a space whose power lies in always being just a little too short.

Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and writes the Brenda Starr comic strip. This essay first appeared in the September 2009 issue of Poetry magazine and is available at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Mary Schmich. All rights reserved.

American Life in Poetry: Column 240

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

We haven’t shown you many poems in which the poet enters another person and speaks through him or her, but it is, of course, an effective and respected way of writing. Here Philip Memmer of Deansboro, N.Y., enters the persona of a young woman having an unpleasant experience with a blind date.

The Paleontologist’s Blind Date

You have such lovely bones, he says,
holding my face in his hands,

and although I can almost feel
the stone and the sand

sifting away, his fingers
like the softest of brushes,

I realize after this touch
he would know me

years from now, even
in the dark, even

without my skin.
Thank you, I smile—

then I close the door
and never call him again.

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Philip Memmer, whose most recent book of poetry is Lucifer: A Hagiography, Lost Horse Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from Threat of Pleasure, Word Press, 2008, by permission of Philip Memmer and the publisher. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

 

Para Rumbiar

Robert Creeley in the outfield.

By Fernando Perez
Poetry Media Service

I write from Caracas, the murder capital of the world, where I’ve been employed by the Leones to score runs and prevent balls from falling in the outfield. At the ankles of the Ávila Mountain amongst a patch of dusky high-rises, the downtown grounds of el Estadio Universitario packed beyond capacity are ripe for a full-bodied poem. A mere pitching change is an occasion para rumbiar, and the pursed-lipped riot squad is always on the move with their spanking machetes swinging from their hips. The game isn’t paced necessarily by innings or score. It’s marked by the pulsating bass drums of the samba band that trails bright, scantily clad, headdressed goddesses strutting about the mezzanine. The young fireworks crew stands mere feet from flares that don’t always set out vertically, sometimes landing in the outfield still aflame. “The wave” includes heaving drinks into the sky.

In earning my stripes as a professional baseball player, I’ve been through many cities and have stared out of hotel windows all over the Americas. Ballplayers are mercenaries, taking assignments indiscriminately. Throughout the minor leagues you’ll find yourself slouched on a bus, watching small towns roll by matter-of-factly like stock market tickers, on your back in a new nondescript room, or “shopping for images” (Allen Ginsberg) in a Wal-Mart, hunched over a cart in no rush.

Like poetry, baseball is a kind of counterculture. The (optional) isolation from the outside world (which I often opt for); the idleness about which—and out of which—so many poems are written or sung: I see this state of mind as a blessing. Sometimes, in fact, when I haven’t turned on a television or touched a newspaper for months, freed from the corporate bombast, poetry is the only dialect I recognize.

Long ago Robert Creeley confirmed my suspicion that words strung even sparingly together can be as aurally powerful as anything else we have. He has been my most important poet, because I can take him anywhere, like oranges—even reduced to nothing in both physical and mental exhaustion, nauseous and half asleep busing from a red-eye.

One of my first managers always preached separation from the game for the sake of our own health, and for the sake of our performance. The game can be maddening, and we ought to corner ourselves in this trade only so far. I’m in love with baseball, but eventually my prime will end, and she’ll slowly break my heart. Baseball has remained remarkably impervious to modernity, but is, like any modern industry, highly alienating. I turn to poetry because it is less susceptible to circumstance. I’m not especially touched when a poet deals with a ball game; I’m not especially interested in having one world endear itself to the other. Right now I need them apart; right now I’m after displacement, contrast. The thick wilderness of, say, late Ashbery can wrangle with the narrowness of competition.

Fernando Perez is an outfielder for the Tampa Bay Rays. He received a degree in American studies and completed the creative writing program at Columbia University in New York City, where he lives in the off-season. This essay originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Poetry magazine, and is available at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Fernando Perez. All rights reserved

American Life in Poetry: Column 239

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

It’s likely that if you found the original handwritten manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, “The Waste Land,” you wouldn’t be able to trade it for a candy bar at the Quick Shop on your corner. Here’s a poem by David Lee Garrison of Ohio about how unsuccessfully classical music fits into a subway.

Bach in the DC Subway

As an experiment,
The Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sang to the station
about why we should bother
to live.

A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by David Lee Garrison, whose most recent book of poems is Sweeping the Cemetery: New and Selected Poems, Browser Books Publishing, 2007. Poem reprinted from Rattle, Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 2008, by permission of David Lee Garrison and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

An Albino Herring

Does Billy Collins’s latest poetry collection leave readers laughing or frowning?

By William Logan
Poetry Media Service

Ballistics by Billy Collins. Random House, $24.00

Billy Collins is funny, everyone agrees. The birds agree, the bees agree, even the fish in the sea agree: Billy Collins is funny. Yet why do I feel, half an hour after closing a Billy Collins book, a sharp grinding in my stomach, as if I’ve eaten some fruit cake past its sell-by date? His wry, self-mocking poems wouldn’t hurt a fly—but they couldn’t kill a fly, either, even if they tried. Readers who have whetted their appetites for drollery on previous books may open Ballistics and be puzzled. Our Norman Rockwell of sly winks, and elbowing good humor, and straw-hatted, flannel-shirted American whimsy is no longer funny. Worse, some of his new poems take place in Paris.

Billy Collins’s method has been to borrow a dry nugget of fact or some mildly absurd observation and see how far he can go. Say you read that the people of Barcelona once owned an albino gorilla, or remember that Robert Frost said, “I have envied the four-moon planet,” or find yourself talking to a dog about the future of America. Why, the poem would almost write itself! Collins’s gift was to make the poem a little odder than you expected. The problem with his new book is that the ideas are still there, but the poems have lost their sense of humor. Here’s what happens to that gorilla:

These locals called him Snowflake,
and here he has been mentioned again in print

in the hope of keeping his pallid flame alive
and helping him, despite his name, to endure
in this poem where he has found another cage.

Oh, Snowflake,
I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—

no, you were the reason
I kept my light on late into the night
turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.

There must be a lot of comic things to say about albino gorillas, things that don’t require sentimental guff with a twitch of self-pity.

Say you recall the day Lassie died, when, after you finished your farm chores and ate your oatmeal, you drove to town and scanned the books in Olsen’s Emporium—and what books they were! An anthology of the Cavalier poets, The Pictorial History of Eton College, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po. Why, who knew? This is a send-up of Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”—the book titles mock his purchase of New World Writing (as he said, “to see what the poets/ in Ghana are doing”). But then what?

I’m leaning on the barn door back home
while my own collie, who looks a lot like her,
lies curled outside in a sunny patch
and all you can hear as the morning warms up
is the sound of the cows’ heavy breathing.

And that’s it. This labored parody of O’Hara’s famous ending (“I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of/ leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT/ while she whispered a song along the keyboard/ to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”) isn’t side-splitting at all. The premise has become just another excuse for softheaded mush—Collins doesn’t even get round to mentioning (SPOILER ALERT!) that Lassie was played by any number of dogs, that she was male (because males have glossier coats), and that, besides, Lassie is immortal and can’t ever die.

Collins has managed to be what he rarely was in the past—dull. The ending in many of these new poems falls flat, the speaker gazing at the moon or listening to a bird in hopes of revelation. If Billy Collins can’t joke about death, for example, well, who can? When he pokes fun at writers’ guides (“Never use the word suddenly just to create tension”), or of teachers who ask, “What is the poet trying to say?” he’s still our best poet at piercing the pretensions of the whole literary shebang. Get him off the subject, however, and the poems are suffused with mild gloom and misanthropy.

When comedians stop being funny, they must invent themselves anew or retire for good. A number of poems here mention divorce in a roundabout way, reason enough for a man to take off his rose-colored glasses and book a flight to Paris. Indeed, the most hilarious poem in the book is titled “Divorce,” and it’s also the shortest:

Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.

If Collins can become the bitter philosopher of such lines, there’s hope yet. Otherwise, Poetry must do what Poetry does when a poet runs out of gas, or screws the pooch, or jumps the shark—give him a Pulitzer and show him the door.

William Logan’s most recent book of criticism is Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue.  His new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, appeared last fall. This review first appeared in The New Criterion. Read more about Billy Collins, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by William Logan. All rights reserved.

American Life in Poetry: Column 238

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Though some teacher may have made you think that all poetry is deadly serious, chock full of coded meanings and obscure symbols, poems, like other works of art, can be delightfully playful. Here Bruce Guernsey, who divides his time between Illinois and Maine, plays with a common yam.

Yam

The potato that ate all its carrots,
can see in the dark like a mole,

its eyes the scars
from centuries of shovels, tines.

May spelled backwards
because it hates the light,

pawing its way, paddling along,
there in the catacombs.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Bruce Guernsey. Reprinted from New England Primer by Bruce Guernsey, Cherry Grove Collections, 2008, by permission of Bruce Guernsey and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Saga and Circus

Lyn Hejinian’s latest poetry collection sets two different moods. By Joyelle McSweeney Poetry Media Service Saga/Circus, by Lyn Hejinian. Omnidawn, $15.95 In Lyn Hejinian’s latest book, two long poems (but they hardly feel long) make short work of narrative and dismantle genre with an alert and damaging wit. First comes “Circus” or “Lola.” This prose piece, with its attention to rings, battles, payers and players, moves characters through a tightening, finally dismaying cycle of events. Next comes “Saga,” also titled “The Distance,” which applies pressure to two figures of continuity: the first–person speaker and the sea voyage. Together, these texts form a contrast of cyclicality and stasis and test the limits of writing as vehicle and vessel of both violence and knowledge. “Lola” begins as a pitch–perfect homage to the work of Gertrude Stein, advancing in short prose sections from “Chapter One” to “Chapter Two,” titles she repeats until we do not know where we are. Eventually, we arrive at “Chapter If It’s True,” “Chapter Between Two and Three,” “Chapter Supplied,” “Chapter To View.” This recalls Stein’s delighted, flattening disregard for textual hierarchy, which produces the incandescent waywardness of such works as Four Saints in Three Acts. By the second page of “Lola,” chapters seem literally to have come loose from the structural framework of narrative: “chapters in a mood, mid–air, in plumes.” Such recklessness is potentially hazardous for the characters who people “Lola,” characters inasmuch as they recur and have proper names. The sisters Hertha! Drew! Nina! Abdul Tommy Ahmed! Trish O’Reilly! Kurt Krakauer! Ludmilla Kaipa! And Sue! It is not just with that final “Sue,” but in the very peopledness of these lines, that we hear Stein’s “Susie Asado” et al. The first sentence marshals its many nouns like a marching band around the goal posts “are” and “are.” The declarative energy of that nominative “players” is undone by the duplicity of the word itself, referring as it does to those who act with agency, seriously; those who act in a drama, falsely; those who play games, literally; and those who play games figuratively, bending the rules like Hejinian and Stein. Thanks to its writerliness (and its writer), many delightful, unabashed set pieces grace “Lola,” including epigrams, metaphors, and extended images. These are often serious and dubious at the same time, such as “one wants to visit a town before buying a house there or burning it down,” or, of greyhounds and, by implication, the Wal–Mart employees who allegedly own them, “they don’t run from tyrants but for them.” In an unexpectedly comic turn, “Lyn Hejinian” enters the text and is disparaged as a minor writer; a paper on her work is given a “C.” Where “Lola” most pointedly departs from its Steinian model is the entrance of violence into this merry, convivial text. At this point the cyclicality of the text appears less marvelous and more like a trap for its characters, who are victim to whatever fusillade or battle enters the sentences and who cannot escape violence except by disappearance from the text. The prose turns tense, then gloomy: “The chapters do but are never done;” “Grief takes time, they say—it takes it all.” Hejinian’s sentences, and her characters, cannot help but be interested in violence. It is 2009 already, and, as the truism goes, you may not be interested in violence, but violence is interested in you. If there is one ultra–narrative (and ultraviolent) poetic genre, it is the saga, the Northern European form given to armed struggle, sea voyage, and obsessive genealogical accounting. As its title suggests, the mood of Hejinian’s saga, “The Distance,” is not one of action but of meditative stasis. Unlike a conventional saga, there is no historical or geographical GPS at work here; the speaking voice is simply at sea, shipbound, in motion but adrift. . . . I won’t pretend To be an historian, how could I, when I have no idea Of today’s date. Though I know we embarked one morning early In May, I have no idea how long ago that was And I don’t care. I breathe, I twist my hair. I watch The sea. At times it resembles an eye But it isn’t watching me. Lineageless, battleless, the female speaker shrugs off the patriarchal requirements of saga even while her free verse is gathered up in a rhythmic, graceful full rhyme (“me,” “sea”), which stands in for ancient, songlike sound structures. As with “Lola,” here genre itself is at once medium, material, and subject, the pliant, immersive sea in which craft sails. In “The Distance,” genre’s mutability and capacity is figured by the literal sea. The impossible relationship of writing to knowledge spurs the quest, but it is a quest of betweenness, not of arrival or departure. The same theme is restated elsewhere: “I want to understand / What I have seen and understand / That nothing I have seen explains what I have seen. Like that.” In this version, that gestural “Like that” underscores language’s excess to its own project, the way it adds to and even doubles the world it would describe, thereby constantly extending its own task. “The Distance” is so busy with ars poetica that it is implicitly a more optimistic work than “Lola.” Like My Life, which the author is constantly reworking and (happily) extending, the possibilities within Hejinian’s ouevre are inexhaustible, her working and reworking of writing’s generic and epistemological potentials and capabilities is unending. Joyelle McSweeney’s poetry collections include The Commandrine and Other Poems and The Red Bird, and her reviews appears widely. She is co-editor of Action Books and a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. This article first appeared in the Boston Review. Learn more about Lyn Hejinian, and her poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org. © 2009 by Joyelle McSweeney. All rights reserved.