Month: January 2019

“Exchanges” by Theodore Enslin

· Leave a comment ·

It is not
            cold fire
I see
     in you
            not
gem-like flame
which is silver
and spot cash.
It is more
            difficult:
exchange of gold
                        and warmer.
I do not call it poem
or you its poet
                   but
I have found your mouth
delighted
                   by its lack of speaking.

seriph
       fine-honed
changeling
       one for
another
       and the other
flourish
       by one
length
       changing
not changed
       the difference

—

I found this Theodore Enslin chapbook from 1964 in the John K. King bookstore in Detroit, where bad books go to rot by the thousand. Enslin is ripping off William Carlos Williams so hard it’ll make your head spin, but with different intentions. Enslin is an old-fashioned Romantic, featuring high diction, “flowers / and stallions / unicorns / and / white geese.” There’s nothing modernist in his poems, no distrust of the lyric impulse.

This poem is at the center of the book, along the gutter; it’s the first poem if you read if you let the book fall open. I was charmed by the spondee of “spot cash”, a metrical anchor for the sinewy lines that surround it. I also thought “changing / not changed / the difference” was a wonderful ending.

“Deadout” by Forrest Gander

· Leave a comment ·

I.

Gets out his dab rig and shatter
At once at its mercy and in control of it

The bull snake lifted from the terrarium cover
About three feet six from snout to vent

Youngbloods memorizing death
What kind of clue do they have

Her scent: vinegar, zinc oxide, and hinoki cypress
He dreamed of it awake dreams of it

Watching another season of Spanky Wankers
Only made his fillings ache

So now he’s got reptile dysfunction
Me too, says the dust.

Motorcycle parked in the handicapped spot
He regards the forest of standing dead snags

II.

Youngbloods memorizing death
Only made his fillings ache

The bull snake lifted the terrarium cover
He dreamed of it awake dreams of it

Gets out his dab rig and shatter
Me too, says the dust

About three feet six from snout to vent
So now he’s got reptile dysfunction

Her scent: vinegar, zinc oxide, and hinoki cypress
At once at its mercy and in control of it

What kind of clue do they have
He regards the forest of standing dead snags

Watching another season of Spanky Wankers
Motorcycle parked in the handicapped spot

“Carrion Comfort” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

·

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With some darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

“Dying So a Scene May Be Repeated” by Marni Ludwig

·

If it’s four, it’s six.
We’ve not slept. 
What I would say now would be
too clear for this light.

The streets we walk
lose half their shade
with morning.

This won’t be settled. 
Still, when night comes
we bend

like railwaymen pitching
sand toward the last
blood of a jumper.

—

Marni, I miss you. Not that I’ve seen you in three years. Not that we had any sort of special relationship besides teacher and student, but I loved you—all your students loved you. You were one of the saddest people I knew, and yet it seemed like against all odds, with so little in your favor, you might make it out. When I first met you, it had only been three years. You told all your classes about your love, and how he died, and your best friend, and how she died just a few days after, and how after that it was just you in the world, alone. You told our class what a gun in your mouth felt like—the taste of cold steel, as you said. You said this all with so much panache our class laughed, and you laughed with us. 

And poetry. We didn’t exactly see eye to eye on poetry because you assigned only two kinds: (1) heart-wrenching poetry of trauma and (2) poetry by your friends. Now I see that’s a lovely way to teach. We had few substantive discussions of craft, that was the best part about your class. You let us write whatever and told us it was good. That was your job and you loved it, and you told us that you loved it all the time.

I was thinking on the train before I found out that I should email you and see how you were doing. I’ve had you on my list of people to email for months. Of course, it was with the intention of asking you for something: another recommendation, a next step, advice. Marni, I’m sorry all this shit happened to you. There’s nothing I could have done to help, but I could have been kinder. Could have reached out from St. Louis, could have had a drink with you when I was in NY (or, could have made plans to have drinks and both flaked). It wouldn’t have meant anything, I know that, so many students come and go. 

Where are you now? I don’t know. Nowhere, gone, I believe, but the same way I let myself think all cats and dogs go to heaven, maybe where you are is a house on Long Island with Jonathan, with a baby or two if that’s what you wanted, working on your poems. Maybe in heaven you get divorced and write a book that’s a cry of grief, but the kind of grief that’s bearable because the person still exists, they’re just not yours. Maybe in heaven Columbia gives you a real professorship and you never have to go to the bar again. Who knows. I hope wherever you are, you’re laughing.

from “The Lichtenberg Figures” by Ben Lerner

· Leave a comment ·

We must retract our offerings, burnt as they are.
We must recall our lines of verse like faulty tires.
We must flay the curatoriat, invest our sackcloth,

and enter the Academy single file.

Poetry has yet to emerge.
The image is no substitute. The image is an anecdote
in the mouth of a stillborn. And not reflection,
with its bad infinitude, nor religion, with its eighth of mushrooms,
can bring orgasm to orgasm like poetry. As a policy,

we are generally sorry. But sorry doesn’t cut it.
We must ask you to remove your shoes, your lenses, your teeth.
We must ask you to sob openly.

If it is any consolation, we admire the early work of John Ashbery.
If it is any consolation, you won’t feel a thing.

“The Phantom Ship” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

·

In Mather’s Magnalia Christi,
Of the old colonial time,
May be found in prose the legend
That is here set down in rhyme.
A ship sailed from New Haven,
And the keen and frosty airs,
That filled her sails at parting,
Were heavy with good men’s prayers.
“O Lord! if it be thy pleasure”–
Thus prayed the old divine–
“To bury our friends in the ocean,
Take them, for they are thine!”
But Master Lamberton muttered,
And under his breath said he,
“This ship is so crank and walty
I fear our grave she will be!”
And the ships that came from England,
When the winter months were gone,
Brought no tidings of this vessel
Nor of Master Lamberton.
This put the people to praying
That the Lord would let them hear
What in his greater wisdom
He had done with friends so dear.
And at last their prayers were answered:
It was in the month of June,
An hour before the sunset
Of a windy afternoon,
When, steadily steering landward,
A ship was seen below,
And they knew it was Lamberton, Master,
Who sailed so long ago.
On she came, with a cloud of canvas,
Right against the wind that blew,
Until the eye could distinguish
The faces of the crew.
Then fell her straining topmasts,
Hanging tangled in the shrouds,
And her sails were loosened and lifted,
And blown away like clouds.
And the masts, with all their rigging,
Fell slowly, one by one,
And the hulk dilated and vanished,
As a sea-mist in the sun!
And the people who saw this marvel
Each said unto his friend,
That this was the mould of their vessel,
And thus her tragic end.
And the pastor of the village
Gave thanks to God in prayer,
That, to quiet their troubled spirits,
He had sent this Ship of Air.

—

This one and I go back a long way. When I was a kid my grandparents had few books that were interesting to me, though I did get to read the Bill Clinton memoir and Philip Roth very early. Upstairs in an old cabinet they had a collection of books they had inherited from my grandfather’s parents, each with an Ex Libris stamp that thrillingly bore our last name. I had heard somewhere that you were supposed to memorize poetry, and doesn’t this one just get stuck in your craw? “Then fell her straining topmasts, / Hanging tangled in the shrouds, / And her sails were loosened and lifted, / And blown away like clouds.”

Tri-State (I)

·

When I was young I rode the train to know
speed, and sleep, which we didn’t have at home,
not me, not any of us, and for no particular reason,
just the vague shapes in grass John sees these days
more menacingly: the shredded fawn, its inevitable
rhyme with our old way of looking at things, the lawns
quilted out like plots, like holes to disappear a little body in,
and trust in the benign stranger was good, and I believe
in random nature, I do, that there had been a hawk
and a weaker creature, because nothing clawed
in our neighborhood beside the birds, and we
did not pray then.

The reason you can’t write erotica (the state of (your) writing, part 1)

·

The reason you can’t write erotica is because no matter what you do, it comes out as flat, factual, and sort of creepy, even if you think it’s hot and romantic while you’re working on it. This is a shame because your sole career aspiration by the end of high school was to become Anaïs Nin. Unfortunately the best you can achieve at present is a weird, cold voyeuristic tone.

The problem is that you are a literal person to the point of rigidity. You may love to read figurative language, the more florid and rococo the better, but when you sit down, you have enough trouble just getting the idea onto the fucking page. Also, your eye for metaphor is terrible. For about a week you’ve been trying to describe the way the sun comes through train tracks on an overpass, how the light checkers when a train goes by, and “like a glittering snake” is all you’ve come up with. It’s bad. Don’t write it.

You have to play to your strengths in this life. If you’re not witty or even necessarily “creative” you can still write powerfully. Just describe the thing honestly, in as much detail as possible, until it becomes as strange as a repeated word in your mouth. That’s the whole concept of defamiliarization, a trick you didn’t really learn until your MFA because they don’t want the academics and hobbyists to know about it. Everything is interesting. Everyone is interesting. All you have to do is describe.

You’ve been spending a lot of time in crowdfunding Facebook groups, traveling back through people’s public profiles as they chart years of homelessness, parenthood, illness, kink, substance abuse, whatever. That’s the kind of writing that feels urgent right now. If you’re being fully honest, it’s the kind of writing you’ve always loved.

Posting on the internet is closer to poetry than any other genre of writing. Posting is fragmented, encoded, as much about style as content, and it’s impossible to talk about. But studying poetry didn’t make you a good poster lol, and it certainly didn’t help you write more or better. You’re still liable to say just a little too much, to ruin whole sentences by appending redundant clauses. Every time you sit down to work on a piece of prose, you trim the previous day’s writing by a hundred words—you can’t stop yourself. You systematically remove adverbs and gerunds, and what you’re left with reads suspiciously like a police report.

You don’t touch the poems, though. Your poems are flourishes, conceived and completed almost instantaneously. If a poem “needs revision” you might spend months on it, but inevitably you will chuck it in the trash. Even though you know better, you believe that the good ones come out perfectly formed the first time, and in all honesty, everything you’ve published has followed that rule. Anything that needs tinkering, sinks.

Your poems aren’t very long. They never have been. You can’t control when they occur to you. If you’re lucky, you might get two a month. That’s 24 in a year at best. Maybe thirty words each. Is that enough writing to produce and still consider yourself as a writer (aka your excuse for not doing things like exercising, volunteering, and working hard at your day job)? No… you can always start a blog, though. On it you can write about anything you want.