American Life in Poetry: Column 224

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

When we’re young, it seems there are endless possibilities for lives we might lead, and then as we grow older and the opportunities get fewer we begin to realize that the life we’ve been given is the only one we’re likely to get. Here’s Jean Nordhaus, of the Washington, D.C. area, exploring this process.

I Was Always Leaving

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

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 (c)2008 by Jean Nordhaus, whose most recent book of poems is “Innocence,” Ohio State University Press, 2006. Poem reprinted from “The Gettysburg Review,” Vol. 21, no. 4, Winter, 2008, by permission of Jean Nordhaus and the publisher. Introduction copyright (c)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.

Into the Wild

The collective voice of children and beasts in Bhanu Kapil’s poetry.

By Laynie Brown
Poetry Media Services

Humanimal: a Project for Future Children, by Bhanu Kapil. Kelsey Street Press. $17.95

How does the voice of a writer enter one’s being and create an intimate space where a reader may travel safely through the text? Bhanu Kapil, a poet raised in London who currently teaches at Naropa University and Goddard College, does so by writing from multiple perspectives. In her newest book, Humanimal: a Project for Future Children, Kapil explores liminal identity, turning to research and documentary to create a mosaic-like account based on the true story of two girls found living with wolves in the Bengal region of India in 1920. Kapil’s source material for the text is the diary of the Indian missionary Reverend Joseph Singh, published in 1945. Kapil also traveled to Midnapure with the French filmmaking company Mona Lisa Production as part of a documentary on human-wolf contacts, and was filmed as she went about her research on the two wolf girls, Kamala and Amala.

In choosing this subject, she poses questions about female identity. What does it mean to be civilized? How is the body a culprit? What are the historical and narrative circumstances that create a feral existence? How is the story of the feral child a metaphor for violence and neglect of those who experience themselves as outside, primal, territorial?

The reader must continually ask of the voice of the narrator, “Is she of one form or another? Human or wolf?”

I want to stand up but I can’t do that here. They would know I am a wolf by my sore hips, the look in my eyes. At the edge of the garden was a line of blue chalk. My mother was crouching there, waiting for me in her dark coat. In the dream I walk towards her and she stands up. She opens up her coat like two wings and I step into her cloth heart, her cleft of matted fur.

Her voices’ sympathies are never singular, and they are spoken in a space between boundaries, localities known and unknown: the space of the unescorted. And yet, her voice escorts us. The poet-detective traces a line, and we are compelled to follow. In the jungle we learn that the notion that history moves in one direction is a myth. Culture is beyond time, a learned mechanism of being. We become caught within the questions of the Humanimal.

What is the opposite of feral? Feral: “Latin, from ‘fera’ a wild beast. Relating to, or having the nature of, a wild beast; uncultivated; undomesticated; barbarous; wild.” The question is deliberately not answered. Would one say civilized? Hardly, considering that the violent treatment of the two feral girls by the “civilized” is not at all civil:

A girl is a dot arising in space, and then the girl after that, and the next. Viral, schizophrenic, the two girls shook in the garden, and then in their beds like photographs. In the first days of their captivity, they screamed for their mother, then stopped. Dehydrated, they sucked tea from rags. Accepting nourishment like this was a primary act of human culture. Hopeful, their Father brought them home. No. They were home and then they got sick, unable to tolerate the food they were given.

This book gives voice to “monsters”—to those who are unnamed, uncounted, unclothed, unemployed, uninsured, represented only in the margins—and provides another way to approach subjects often explored only under the guise of anonymity. Kapil searches out voices not often heard, because of either invisibility or the opposite—a type of gawking that is not seeing at all, as if at an animal. Of the feral girls she writes,

For a few minutes a day, Joseph’s wife, the Home’s Mother let them [spectators] in and they swarmed to the room where the youngest girl was failing. They watched her fade and jerk in her cot, the spittle coming down over her chin.

The girl is captured from the jungle and placed upon a cot in full view of the civilized. The civilized and domesticated have unintentionally made the feral child ill. The “civilized” cannot understand or aid but wish to watch her decline. A revelatory cruelty exists in the story of Humanimal. Through Kapil’s deft interweaving of perspectives, we can almost hear the breath of the wolf-girl in protest. It is beyond language.

Each of Kapil’s books presents poetry as journey, social document and investigation. Her voice is a roadmap and an inquisitor revising the probable. Kapil elegantly and dramatically carves out a space for the unutterable. She writes beyond singular personhood, in an intimate voice rooted in a listening empathy.

Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include The Scented Fox and Daily Sonnets. This article first appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Laynie Browne. All rights reserved.

Poet laureate to read at Dahl

A couple of South Dakota poetry items have been sitting on the back burner while I’ve been tending to my real life.

First, state poet laureate David Allan Evans, will give a lecture and reading on Friday, July 10, at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City. His appearance will be at the opening of the “Images of Place” exhibit, which features Evans’ poems and the paintings of Lead artist Gary Steinley. Evans’ presentation begins at 7 p.m. The Rapid City Journal article about the readings is here.

Also worth reading is an article about Francie Davis, the new editor at Pasque Petals. It’s right here.

American Life in Poetry: Column 223

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

There’s lots of literature about the loss of innocence, because we all share in that loss and literature is about what we share. Here’s a poem by Alexandra Teague, a San Franciscan, in which a child’s awakening to the alphabet coincides with another awakening: the unsettling knowledge that all of us don’t see things in the same way.

Language Lessons

The carpet in the kindergarten room
was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting on bright, primary letters. On the shelf sat that week’s inflatable sound. The “th”
was shaped like a tooth. We sang
about brushing up and down, practiced
exhaling while touching our tongues
to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U
like an upside-down umbrella; the rest
of the alphabet deflated. Some days,
we saw parents through the windows
to the hallway sky. “Look, a fat lady,”
a boy beside me giggled. Until then
I’d only known my mother as beautiful.

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 (c)2008 by Alexandra Teague, whose first book, “Mortal Geography,” winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize, is forthcoming in 2010 from Persea Books. Reprinted from “Third Coast,” Fall 2008, by permission of Alexandra Teague and the publisher. Introduction copyright (c)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.

Going Negative

Why poetry reviews should be more skeptical.

Jason Guriel
Poetry Media Services

Two Men Fighting with a Knife, Story Line Press. $14.95.

The negative review is a curiosity, unique to anxious enclaves like the poetry world. It’s not that people who review movies don’t say harsh things—they do. But when a book of poetry receives a tough verdict we often label the review “negative” and speculate about the reviewer’s motives, the agenda behind the takedown. Indeed, behind words like “negative” and “agenda” and “takedown” lurks the sense that the reviewer is the one making the trouble, and the book of poetry—whether it deserved a kicking or not—is being bullied.

Maybe poetry is so marginal, so fragile a commodity, we worry about kicking it when it’s already pretty clearly down. Whatever the reason for our anxiety, the negative review is often more of an event than it ought to be. But negativity, I’m starting to think, needs to be the poetry reviewer’s natural posture, the default position she assumes before scanning a single line. Because really, approaching every new book with an open mind is as well-meaning but ultimately exhausting as approaching every stranger on the street with open arms; you’ll meet some nice people, sure, but your charming generosity won’t be reciprocated most of the time. When braving any new book of poems—particularly by an author you’re not too familiar with—it’s best to brace yourself and expect the worst. This needn’t involve cynicism. Indeed, you probably shouldn’t be opening the book in the first place if you aren’t, on some deep level, already hoping for the best—that is, the discovery of a great poem. But hope should remain on that deep level, well-protected, until the shell that shields it is genuinely jarred.

If you’re frequently having the top of your head taken off—Emily Dickinson’s description of what authentic poetry does—I’m glad for you. But you’re reading better books than I am. And Emily, too. After all, the gist of her metaphor, it seems, is that such head injuries are by definition exceptional.

John Poch’s second collection contains the sort of poetry that confronts most reviewers most often: poetry that’s not especially bad but not especially good either—poetry, in other words, that should be guarded against at all costs.

And yet: there are some fine moments in Two Men Fighting with a Knife, and if I have reservations with the bulk of the book—and I do—they aren’t meant to mitigate my praise. The opening sonnet, “The Ghost Town,” appeared in the Paris Review and probably deserved to, which surely can’t be said of most poems composed in any given quarter:

It need not be a desiccated
wreck of boards, completely uninhabited,
adobe bricks regressed to mud, hay. Heck,
It might be verdant and jackrabbited.

The wind might not lament; the gift shop door
could jingle bells, the jasmine candles wafting.
Beyond some seniors at the convenience store,
you might observe a fisherman shoplifting.

But say it’s vacant and bunch grass gray. Then torch
an image, scent, or song from your present life
to reconstruct the step, the stairs, the porch,
the house, town, two men fighting with a knife.

Much like the architecture of a sonnet:
a step, and suddenly you die upon it.

The robust alliteration (”hay. Heck”) and chewy imagery (”bunch grass gray”) offer instant pleasures, but the self-reflexive payoff—a risky move for a formal poem—succeeds in running the reader through on its final line.

Most of Poch’s poems, though, aren’t up to these standards. There are no out-and-out disasters; Poch’s commitment to craft—to ensuring that his lines scan and rhyme—guarantees that the slightest of his works are always readable, even enjoyable (an advantage that mediocre formal verse has over mediocre free verse). However, it’s this same commitment to craft, to satisfying a pre-imposed pattern, that can lead Poch’s verse into subtle but costly contortions. The resulting limbo never falls on its face but nevertheless looks awkward, as demonstrated by the opening of “John Poch”:

A smaller Jackson Pollock, my polar blues
in cursive curse and scratch. A wasted fire
to write myself lies scribbled, smolders. Moods
instead of house-high flames’ emotion mire
a vision. Ink, they lie.

Frost’s great innovation—a voice so natural you don’t notice the iambs—remains much impersonated but, as Poch proves, rarely possessed. Poch simply doesn’t make it look easy.

But finally, the real failing of Two Men Fighting with a Knife—a failing, to be fair, shared by most of the collections which smart, well-meaning editors, even now, are FedExing to their rosters of reviewers—is the lack of game-changing metaphors. Pan the verse of John Poch long enough and you’ll uncover glints of gold like his description of a fork lying in “the shadow of a napkin’s knee.” But in the absence of such brilliant images, Poch’s clever quatrains are just that—clever:

Dear Doctor, don’t get me wrong. I adore my wife,
but you looked inside me. Maybe it’s the morphine
talking, but love abounds in the surgeon’s knife.
Expect a card on February Fourteen.

Certainly Poch’s subjects—desiccated Americana, the stepladder at the Strand Bookstore, spinal surgery—brim with potential, but his actual language—”I’m dead / yet want to open, close, and surprise / like a heart or sunset”—is business as usual.

“I sometimes think there is no good news about translation, ever,” wrote Michael Hofmann recently. I sometimes think there is no good news about poetry, ever. Or today, anyway. That’s negative, maybe, but that’s how I know poetry exists: when I’m least expecting it, when everything’s dross, when I’ve given up hope and have my head down—that’s when the real stuff, like so much low-hanging plumbing, clocks me. Or takes the top of my head off. Or whatever poetry does to us, those rare, rare times we run into it. Stay positive.

Jason Guriel’s new collection of poems is Pure Product (Véhicule Press). He lives in Toronto. This article first appeared in Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Jason Guriel. All rights reserved.

Why poetry reviews should be more skeptical. Jason Guriel Poetry Media Services Two Men Fighting with a Knife, Story Line Press. $14.95. The negative review is a curiosity, unique to anxious enclaves like the poetry world. It’s not that people who review movies don’t say harsh things—they do. But when a book of poetry receives a tough verdict we often label the review “negative” and speculate about the reviewer’s motives, the agenda behind the takedown. Indeed, behind words like “negative” and “agenda” and “takedown” lurks the sense that the reviewer is the one making the trouble, and the book of poetry—whether it deserved a kicking or not—is being bullied. Maybe poetry is so marginal, so fragile a commodity, we worry about kicking it when it’s already pretty clearly down. Whatever the reason for our anxiety, the negative review is often more of an event than it ought to be. But negativity, I’m starting to think, needs to be the poetry reviewer’s natural posture, the default position she assumes before scanning a single line. Because really, approaching every new book with an open mind is as well-meaning but ultimately exhausting as approaching every stranger on the street with open arms; you’ll meet some nice people, sure, but your charming generosity won’t be reciprocated most of the time. When braving any new book of poems—particularly by an author you’re not too familiar with—it’s best to brace yourself and expect the worst. This needn’t involve cynicism. Indeed, you probably shouldn’t be opening the book in the first place if you aren’t, on some deep level, already hoping for the best—that is, the discovery of a great poem. But hope should remain on that deep level, well-protected, until the shell that shields it is genuinely jarred. If you’re frequently having the top of your head taken off—Emily Dickinson’s description of what authentic poetry does—I’m glad for you. But you’re reading better books than I am. And Emily, too. After all, the gist of her metaphor, it seems, is that such head injuries are by definition exceptional. John Poch’s second collection contains the sort of poetry that confronts most reviewers most often: poetry that’s not especially bad but not especially good either—poetry, in other words, that should be guarded against at all costs. And yet: there are some fine moments in Two Men Fighting with a Knife, and if I have reservations with the bulk of the book—and I do—they aren’t meant to mitigate my praise. The opening sonnet, “The Ghost Town,” appeared in the Paris Review and probably deserved to, which surely can’t be said of most poems composed in any given quarter: It need not be a desiccated wreck of boards, completely uninhabited, adobe bricks regressed to mud, hay. Heck, It might be verdant and jackrabbited. The wind might not lament; the gift shop door could jingle bells, the jasmine candles wafting. Beyond some seniors at the convenience store, you might observe a fisherman shoplifting. But say it’s vacant and bunch grass gray. Then torch an image, scent, or song from your present life to reconstruct the step, the stairs, the porch, the house, town, two men fighting with a knife. Much like the architecture of a sonnet: a step, and suddenly you die upon it. The robust alliteration (”hay. Heck”) and chewy imagery (”bunch grass gray”) offer instant pleasures, but the self-reflexive payoff—a risky move for a formal poem—succeeds in running the reader through on its final line. Most of Poch’s poems, though, aren’t up to these standards. There are no out-and-out disasters; Poch’s commitment to craft—to ensuring that his lines scan and rhyme—guarantees that the slightest of his works are always readable, even enjoyable (an advantage that mediocre formal verse has over mediocre free verse). However, it’s this same commitment to craft, to satisfying a pre-imposed pattern, that can lead Poch’s verse into subtle but costly contortions. The resulting limbo never falls on its face but nevertheless looks awkward, as demonstrated by the opening of “John Poch”: A smaller Jackson Pollock, my polar blues in cursive curse and scratch. A wasted fire to write myself lies scribbled, smolders. Moods instead of house-high flames’ emotion mire a vision. Ink, they lie. Frost’s great innovation—a voice so natural you don’t notice the iambs—remains much impersonated but, as Poch proves, rarely possessed. Poch simply doesn’t make it look easy. But finally, the real failing of Two Men Fighting with a Knife—a failing, to be fair, shared by most of the collections which smart, well-meaning editors, even now, are FedExing to their rosters of reviewers—is the lack of game-changing metaphors. Pan the verse of John Poch long enough and you’ll uncover glints of gold like his description of a fork lying in “the shadow of a napkin’s knee.” But in the absence of such brilliant images, Poch’s clever quatrains are just that—clever: Dear Doctor, don’t get me wrong. I adore my wife, but you looked inside me. Maybe it’s the morphine talking, but love abounds in the surgeon’s knife. Expect a card on February Fourteen. Certainly Poch’s subjects—desiccated Americana, the stepladder at the Strand Bookstore, spinal surgery—brim with potential, but his actual language—”I’m dead / yet want to open, close, and surprise / like a heart or sunset”—is business as usual. “I sometimes think there is no good news about translation, ever,” wrote Michael Hofmann recently. I sometimes think there is no good news about poetry, ever. Or today, anyway. That’s negative, maybe, but that’s how I know poetry exists: when I’m least expecting it, when everything’s dross, when I’ve given up hope and have my head down—that’s when the real stuff, like so much low-hanging plumbing, clocks me. Or takes the top of my head off. Or whatever poetry does to us, those rare, rare times we run into it. Stay positive. Jason Guriel’s new collection of poems is Pure Product (Véhicule Press). He lives in Toronto. This article first appeared in Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org. © 2009 by Jason Guriel. All rights reserved.

DOWNLOAD PDF The Poetry Media Service, a service of Poetry Foundation, offers free content about poetry to newspapers and online publications. Its book reviews, profiles, interviews, and poetry columnists will engage a general readership in poetry. New releases, approximately 750 words each, will be posted weekly. Media Partners and Programs Media Service Archives 06.23.09: ELEMENTAL MEDICINE In his debut collection, poet Fady Joudah combines rich imagery with his experiences working for Doctors Without Borders. 06.16.09: IN PURSUIT OF AN ECHO Todd Boss’s new poetry collection depends on rhythmic invention. 06.09.09: THE MASTERY OF THE THING A rereading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great poem, “The Windhover.” 06.02.09: THE ORIGINAL CONFESSIONAL (ALMOST) TELLS ALL An interview with W.D. Snodgrass. 05.26.09: WHO NEEDS TO HEAR A QUAGGA’S VOICE? Poet Sarah Lindsay tells us what we didn’t know we were missing. 05.19.09: A MIND IN ACTION Frank Bidart’s poetry embodies its thought process. 05.12.09: REBUILDING ARCHETYPES Eavan Boland reinvented Irish poetry to make room for female poets. 05.05.09: BOUNCE AND REBOUND The whip-crack language and zig-zag reality of a young poet from Belarus. 04.28.09: THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME Marie Howe’s conversational and intimate poems address the daily and the divine. 04.21.09: THE ART OF DEFLECTION Marianne Boruch’s newest poetry collection defers the usual allurements. 04.14.09: AN AROMA OF MEANING A review of Irish poet Medbh McGuckian’s disjointed and dreamy new book of poems. COMPLETE ARCHIVE »

American Life in Poetry: Column 222

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

Coleman Barks, who lives in Georgia, is not only the English language’s foremost translator of the poems of the 13th century poet, Rumi, but he’s also a loving grandfather, and for me that’s even more important. His poems about his granddaughter, Briny, are brim full of joy. Here’s one:

Glad

In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer
field her team, the Gladiators, is losing

ten to zip. She never loses interest in
the roughhouse one-on-one that comes

every half a minute. She sticks her leg
in danger and comes out the other side running.

Later a clump of opponents on the street is chant-
ing, WE WON, WE WON, WE . . . She stands up

on the convertible seat holding to the wind-
shield. WE LOST, WE LOST BIGTIME, TEN TO

NOTHING, WE LOST, WE LOST. Fist pumping
air. The other team quiet, abashed, chastened.

Good losers don’t laugh last; they laugh
continuously, all the way home so glad.

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 (c)2001 by Coleman Barks, from his most recent book of poems, “Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008,” University of Georgia Press, 2008, and reprinted by permission of Coleman Barks and the publisher. Introduction copyright (c)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.

Elemental Medicine

In his debut collection, poet Fady Joudah combines rich imagery with his experiences working for Doctors Without Borders.

By Averill Curdy
Poetry Media Services

The Earth in the Attic, by Fady Joudah. Yale University Press. $16.00.

Fady Joudah’s book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. While reliance upon image is rooted in early traditions of Arabic poetry, the use of image in Joudah’s work feels reminiscent of the Deep Image poetry of the ’60s, where it acted as an enlarging gesture intended to resonate from the silence of the pages’ white spaces. Similarly, his images can be tinged with surrealism, which is apt given that the landscapes he writes about are those of exile, loss, and peril, in which the experience is one of disorientation and displacement.

Though never specifically named, the poems’ landscapes suggest Darfur, where Joudah practiced medicine as a member of Doctors Without Borders, and the landscapes of his own exile as a Palestinian American, whether nostalgic or alienating. Sometimes this refusal registers as a kind of frustrating decorum, but when combined with his gift for image (which can also be read as a form of tact), Joudah’s best poems reach for and achieve a mythic quality in which the elemental is revealed below the ordinary details, as in these lines from “Atlas”:

Let me tell you a fable:

Why the road is lunar
Goes back to the days when strangers
Sealed a bid from the despot to build
The only path that courses through
The desert of the people.

The tyrant secretly sent
His men to mix hand grenades
With asphalt and gravel,
Then hid the button
That would detonate the road.

These are villages and these are trees
A thousand years old,
Or the souls of trees,
Their high branches axed and dangled

Like lynched men flanking the wadis.

The poem concludes: “If you believe the hoopoe / Is good omen, // The driver says, / Then you are one of us.”

As admirable as these poems are, they can feel circumscribed in their technical means. Even reading the book for the first time, I found myself longing for greater variety of tone, music, rhythm, and syntax. What some readers will call incantatory began to feel, at times, somewhat repetitive, making me appreciate those moments when a more colloquial voice, usually another speaker, was introduced in a poem, as in “An Idea of Return.” This juxtaposition provides a revivifying counterpoint to the more interior, lyrical voice of the poet. I also found that the dreamlike quality of Joudah’s images can seem random or obscure, the associative link lost through imprecise grammar or syntax, as in these lines, also from “Atlas”:

the dust gnaws
At your nostrils like a locust cloud
Or a helicopter thrashing the earth,
Wheat grains peppering the sky.

I sorted it out, but my first couple of reads left me with the image of nostrils thrashed by a helicopter.

My intention here isn’t to nitpick—neither dream nor myth necessarily release their meanings easily. At times, however, I felt abruptly thrust from the world of the poem when, rather than deepening the experience, an image called attention to itself and to the poet’s image-generating capacity. And while no language is off-limits to poetry, Joudah sometimes makes use of a medical lexicon that is natural to him as a doctor, but that doesn’t always feel fully naturalized to the poems. These occlusions reduce the power of his work, which needs to be received whole and unadulterated, viscerally, relying as it does on the sensuous and intuitive mode of image rather than, say, argument.

Joudah’s poetry—courageous, yet constricted by limits either real or imagined—reveals the difficulties of writing poetry during a time when the imagination and its works are opposed by various fundamentalisms: economic, which reduces art to what it earns; political, which scorns its lack of utility; and religious, which fears its ambiguities. And while the poet finds a way around these challenges, the significant sacrifices—of intensity, of rhetorical flexibility and depth—suggest that these are indeed the poems for our distracted, balkanized, and lonely time.

The poems of 2007 NEA Grant recipient Averill Curdy have been published widely, including in Pushcart Prizes 2007. This article first appeared in Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Averill Curdy. All rights reserved.

American Life in Poetry: Column 221

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

Sometimes, it’s merely the sound of a child’s voice in a nearby room that makes a parent feel immensely lucky. To celebrate Father’s Day, here’s a joyful poem of fatherhood by Todd Boss, who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

This Morning in a Morning Voice

to beat the froggiest
of morning voices,
my son gets out of bed
and takes a lumpish song
along–a little lyric
learned in kindergarten,
something about a
boat. He’s found it in
the bog of his throat
before his feet have hit
the ground, follows
its wonky melody down
the hall and into the loo
as if it were the most
natural thing for a little
boy to do, and lets it
loose awhile in there
to a tinkling sound while
I lie still in bed, alive
like I’ve never been, in
love again with life,
afraid they’ll find me
drowned here, drowned
in more than my fair
share of joy.

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 (c)2008 by Todd Boss, whose most recent book of poems is “Yellowrocket,” W. W. Norton & Co., 2008. Poem reprinted from “Poetry,” December 2008, by permission of Todd Boss and the publisher. Introduction copyright (c)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.

In Pursuit of an Echo

Todd Boss’s new poetry collection depends on rhythmic invention.

By Nate Klug
Poetry Media Services

Yellowrocket, by Todd Boss. W.W. Norton & Company. $23.95.

Early in his first book, in the midst of comparing the sound of an incoming cyclone to the sound of a nearing commuter train, Todd Boss reflects on his quotidian approach to terror:

Queer,

to compare a work of nature to so
tame a thing as steel wheels riding parallel rails,
but isn’t that how terror assails us: by masquerading
its powers as everyday things, spinning clouds

into funnels, towers into tunnels?

—From “Not Crash, Nor Roar”

The queerness of the comparison stands only if we accept the comfort of the everyday, if we really feel at home on our morning commute. Personally, I can’t believe that any imagination jarred by art could uphold the dialectic between domesticity and disaster very long—even for the sake of art. Happily, Boss’s best poems present a more nuanced view of daily life, where terror doesn’t lurk behind every curtain but inheres with the passage of time:

One can even miss

the basso boom
of the ocean’s
rumpus room

and its rhythm.

A man can leave
this earth

and take nothing
—not even

longing—along
with him.

—From “One Can Miss Mountains”

The way this poem simultaneously celebrates existence and mourns its insufficiency brings to mind Randall Jarrell’s observation that “The ways we miss our lives are life.” Boss’s elegy expresses loss most sharply through its various delights, from the word “rumpus” to that final, quirky rhyme. As with the colors and cadences of the world itself, the poem’s pleasures remind us how much we have to lose.

About half of the poems in Yellowrocket contain the acoustical energy and plain-spoken wisdom of “One Can Miss Mountains” (I would be remiss not to suggest the primary influence of Kay Ryan). Many of the other poems, however, filled with flat stanzas like—

God wrote a poem about me,
which should have been flattering,
but He let me read it,
and it was awful

—From “Worst Work”

—should have been omitted from the book. The longish title poem, “Yellowrocket,” a recounting of Boss’s family history on a Wisconsin farm, stands out as an impressive mixture of narrative and lyric compression. At the end of the poem, the speaker’s emotional ambivalence about his family’s history is enacted through the discovery of an off rhyme, which—like the uprooting of a beautiful weed—pleases and unsettles in equal measure:

Call it love,
but if you call it love,
call it a love that
persisted, that

stained the palms
and reeked when
you pulled it,
like yellowrocket.

Precisely because of its compression, poetry like this demands constant rhythmic invention to avoid sounding overdetermined, like a nursery rhyme. To my ear, “Yellowrocket” is almost spoiled in the preceding three stanzas when Boss’s rhyme-generated syntax becomes pat:

the otherwordly lull
of the breeze in our

break of white pines,
5-wire fences posted
in good straight lines,
the easy spirals
of the golden eagles

that nested in our
hardwoods’ crowns,
the kind of sky
in which a small boy
drowns.

The line breaks don’t stop us from noticing the way every clause here ends in a thump, as if Boss’s phrase-maker suddenly jammed. Deterministic rhyme also compromises what else is going on in the poem. Pursuit of an echo leads Boss to a clichéd sentiment—”the kind of sky / in which a small boy / drowns”—which contradicts the more restrained nostalgia in the poem’s ending quoted above.

When sound isn’t the driving force, Boss’s poems suffer from his less developed rhetorical talents. He is not, for example, a great crafter of analogies. His poems about his wife and children demand metaphors that transcend, rather than reiterate, the quotidian—instead, Boss gives us, “our better days like lighter weather,” “the clogged pipe / of our marriage,” “a neglected / load of regrets on his clothesline.” Nor do Boss’s attempts at humor do much to enliven his narratives, as in this encounter with a supermarket cashier:

“It’s your diction,”
she says softly.

I check my fly before
signing my name.

—From “She Rings Me Up”

A different poem succeeds, however, when its vivid descriptions of a household—

Crusty screws
affix the soap dish

Spack of caulk
slops a crack of tile

—From “Six Nights in a Hotel”

—imply the similar disrepair of human relationships within.

To my mind, Yellowrocket can be divided into three sections of nearly equal size: poems that shouldn’t have made the cut, poems that display glimpses of Boss’s gift, and Todd Boss poems. Of this last category, “The Hush of the Very Good,” “Ere We Are Aware,” “Nocturne,” “Constellations,” “One Can Miss Mountains,” and “How Smokes the Smolder” demonstrate his knack for the short, domestic lyric. All these poems share the syntactical intelligence that close attention to sound provides. Listen to the way momentum builds as rhymes rub against each other, as sound unwinds to pitch-perfect sense at the end of “Nocturne”:

Somehow
the regular

click and chime
of passing time,

like water, turns
a waterwheel

that turns a gear
that turns a stone

that turns upon
another stone

and fine and
finer in between

our dreams like grain
are ground.

Nate Klug’s poems have appeared in Poetry and are forthcoming in Literary Imagination and The Yale Review. This article first appeared in Poetry magazine. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Todd Boss, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Nate Klug. All rights reserved.

American Life in Poetry: Column 220

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

One of the privileges of being U.S. Poet Laureate was to choose two poets each year to receive a $10,000 fellowship, funded by the Witter Bynner Foundation. Joseph Stroud, who lives in California, was one of my choices. This poem is representative of his clear-eyed, imaginative poetry.

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun–
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

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 (c)2009 by Joseph Stroud, and reprinted from his recent book of poems, “Of This World: New and Selected Poems 1966-2006,” Copper Canyon Press, 2009, by permission of the author and publisher. Introduction copyright (c)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.