Robert Creely and John Ashbery

After reading Creely’s poems, I couldn’t help but love the dude. I’m not sure I can distill exactly what it was about Creely or his poems that I loved so much… the more I try, the more I fail, but at this point in the semester I feel like that’s a good sign that I enjoyed the poetry. I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a more vague or un-critical method for judging poetry? Probably not.

I found Creely’s poems delightful in a William Carlos Williams way: they are elegantly spare– minimalistic, but intimate at the same time. Like Williams, Creely’s poems affirm the beauty of everyday “common” speech. I was a bit disappointed when I heard the audio of Williams’ reading, so I hesitated to even listen to Creely’s recording. I’m so glad I did. Creely’s reading was its own experience, and I enjoyed listening to him just as much as I enjoyed reading his poems on the page. I might have listened to “I Know a Man” a dozen or so times… (there are several different readings of this poem on the Penn Sound page, so it was kind of cool to compare them).

Again, I really don’t know what it is about “I Know a Man” that I found so delightful. Paradoxically, I found it slightly heartbreaking, especially when I heard the audio. Creely departs from Williams in the haltering, trembling voice of the speaker. He reads nearly all of the line breaks aloud, regardless of enjambment. My favorite was line 5:

 “. . . the darkness sur- / rounds us . . .”

Some critics find this break melodramatic, but it may have been my favorite moment in the poem. When Creely reads it aloud, his quavering voice emphasizes the broken up syllables, underscoring the line’s emotional force. The nervous speaker (who is always talking), terrified of the existential darkness closing in on him, is then jerked back to reality by his “friend” (who is called John, although that is not his name) in the last stanza. Apparently, the speaker is driving a car, and all his chatter about his inner fears might be distracting him from the task at hand (operating a motor vehicle). Even though the friend might be a little exasperated with the poem's speaker (henceforth referred to as Bob), I’m glad he’s there with him, because it’s probably not a good idea for Bob to be alone when he’s in such a state. Also, Bob needs help getting out of his own head, and don’t we all need help with this from time to time?

John Ashbery is another poet who seems less concerned with “making sense,” as he does with the fact that the world signifies to us at all– at least when we are paying attention. In “Some Trees,” the speaker sees beauty in (yep) “some trees” on an ordinary winter morning:  

Some Trees
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

I love how in the second stanza, you and I “are suddenly what the trees try / To tell us we are: / That their merely being there / Means something . . .” And later, the notion that we didn't invent "such comeliness" reminds us to pay attention; the world is worth puzzling over.

In Ashbery’s poem, we are surrounded not by darkness, but by a "silence already filled with noises..." Like the trees that give their “still performance” in the first stanza, the world speaks in a language we can’t always understand. But Ashbery reminds us that the fact the world even speaks at all is astonishing. The act of interpretation doesn’t have to paralyze us! Perhaps the “still performance” that is hiding in plain sight is an invitation to something amazing.

Adrienne Rich and Eavan Boland

In “Diving into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich plunges into an unknown world, recalling the “Eurydice” of H.D.’s poem when Rich's speaker describes the journey downward:

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

Like the speaker in “Eurydice,” Rich’s speaker learns that she can survive in a place she has been taught to distrust. In the poem’s first stanza, Rich’s speaker sets aside a book of myths, a loaded camera and a knife, diving into an unexplored world to “explore the wreck.” Unlike the speaker in “Eurydice,” who learns to embrace and find power in the dark underworld she’s cursed to inhabit, the diver in Rich’s poem consciously chooses to make the plunge. She (or he) has a goal:

The thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth 

But how does Rich’s speaker avoid the problem of telling a story of the wreck? Isn’t that exactly what he or she is doing? In this poem, I read “the thing itself” as a blurry, unknown form. I’m not satisfied with the secondary criticism that claims the wreck is some sort of feminine fantasy. Perhaps that is part of it, but I’m far more interested in the story of the wreck than whatever “the thing itself” might be. I am curious about the speaker, who moves from the first person singular to the plural pronoun, and from the feminine to masculine form in lines 72-77: “And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams black, the merman in his armored body / We circle silently / about the wreck . . . ”

In one of Rich’s earlier poems, “Shooting Script,” the speaker writes: “I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat. / In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.” Something about the sea as uncharted, unexplored, and perhaps forbidden territory makes Rich’s poetry intense and alive for the reader. We are invited to come along for the journey, but we are also aware of the risk.

In “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground,” Eavan Boland offers her readers a similar experience. Boland’s speaker, however, addresses us directly:  

A famous battle happened in this valley.   

                     You never understood the nature poem.   

Till now. Till this moment—if these statements   

                     seem separate, unrelated, follow this   

silence to its edge and you will hear   

                     the history of air: the crispness of a fern   

or the upward cut and turn around of   

                     a fieldfare or thrush written on it.   

The other history is silent: The estuary   

                     is over there. The issue was decided here:   

Two kings prepared to give no quarter.   

                     Then one king and one dead tradition.   

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds   

                     wait for language, for a different truth:   

When you see the silk of the willow   

                     and the wider edge of the river turn   

and grow dark and then darker, then   

                     you will know that the nature poem   

is not the action nor its end: it is   

                     this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,   

                     on the steering wheel shaft: it is   

an aftermath, an overlay and even in   

                     its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with   

                     sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen   

And as I write valley straw, metal   

                     blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.   

Silence spreads slowly from these words   

                     to those ilex trees half in, half out   

of shadows falling on the shallow ford   

                     of the south bank beside Yellow Island   

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion   

                     begins to be complete: what we see   

is what the poem says:   

                     evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and whin bushes and a change of weather   

                     about to change them all: what we see is how

the place and the torment of the place are   

                     for this moment free of one another.

I love how Boland uses enjambment: "If these statements / seem separate..." "...follow this / silence..." etc. The reader is invited (maybe even forced) to examine the process of reading the poem, and ultimately offered a chance to participate in the creative act. 

The speakers of both poems self-consciously recognize something elusive and fleeting in “the thing itself,” but almost paradoxically, they each give us a moment where we are freed from even worrying about distinguishing “the thing itself” from the story about the thing, or the place from “the torment of the place.” Rather, Rich and Boland demonstrate that poetry can usher us into a space where we might contemplate “the wreck” for ourselves, without resorting to a narrative that wishes to smother the pursuit.

Langston Hughes and Sherman Alexie

If “Let America Be America Again” was published in 2016 instead of 1936, I can only imagine Donald Trump’s response. The word “again” takes an implicit historical position in both the Langston Hughes’ poem and in Trump’s campaign promise to “Make America Great Again!” Hughes poem begins with:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

But that’s about as far as we can get comparing the two men, because following the first stanza, the speaker reveals his true position:

(America never was America to me.)

The narrator of Hughes poem is excluded from an optimistic historical perspective, reduced to a brief parenthetical statement. The formal rhyme scheme of the first stanza (ABAB) is thrown off by this insertion, however marginal it appears, only to pick up the same pattern in the following stanza. But the speaker’s parenthetical opposition becomes the dominant voice with the introduction of the I the “self” of the speaker who turns out to be selves:

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

“Let America Be America Again” criticizes the hypocrisy of a “homeland of the free” that never was, in verse that protests and laments at the same time.

O, let America be America again-
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

There may be no such thing as the America in this poem, but that doesn’t mean he can’t yearn for it.

Sherman Alexie’s poem “Evolution” also channels the tension between dominant and marginal narratives, but from a Native American perspective. Blurring the line of history and myth, “Evolution” re-imagines Buffalo Bill as a pawn shop owner on an Indian reservation:   

Buffalo Bill opens up a pawn shop on the reservation
Right across the border from the liquor store
And he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

and the Indians come running in with jewelry
television sets, a VCR, a full-length beaded buckskin outfit
it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill 

takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it

all catalogued and filed in a storage room. The Indians

pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn

their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin

and when the last Indian has pawned everything
but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks

closes up the pawn shop, paints a new sign over the old
calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES
charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter. 

Alexie’s Buffalo Bill is a leech that sucks the life out of a people only to “preserve” Native American culture for his own profit. “Evolution,” like “Let America Be America Again,” is a title steeped in irony.     

Claude McKay and Terrance Hayes

We’ve been talking a lot about the relationship between form and content lately, and Claude McKay’s poetry adds a rich and complex layer to the conversation. From a young age, McKay read British literature and learned to imitate traditional form in his own poetry. But his relationship with these received forms was a dynamic one. Cary Nelson writes about how McKay transformed the sonnet– a “centuries-long tradition”– in his introduction to McKay’s poetry: “McKay would take the romance and the consolations of the historical sonnet and replace them with a hand grenade of protest.”

The metaphor of “hand grenade” rings true for my reading of McKay. Powerful just doesn’t seem to cut it. The sonnet is a form that has pretty strong associations with a European (and mostly white) tradition, and part of McKay’s protest is by using and redefining a tradition that has largely excluded him. In “Mulatto,” the speaker embodies the complicated relationship with an inheritance that is neither black nor white, but both:

Because I am the white man’s son– his own,
Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face,
I will dispute his title to his throne,
Forever fight him for my rightful place.

The speaker has to fight for his inheritance, which parallels to the project of McKay’s “protest sonnets.” The poem suggests violence because something needs to die in order for the speaker to achieve freedom, as witnessed in the final couplet: “Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife / To gain the utmost freedom that is life.” Sonnets often reflect a sort of thinking process, beginning with a problem and working it through to some sort of resolution in the final verses.

Terrance Hayes is a poet who also uses the traditional forms for his own purposes. In “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” however, Hayes is responding directly to a white poet who was contemporaries with McKay. Wallace Stevens was a modernist poet whose rhetorical invention is part of a literary inheritance Hayes identifies with. However, Hayes also recognizes the complicated relationship he has, as a black writer, with a poet whose work includes poems like, “Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” Like McKay, Hayes rejects the racism that fuels the attitudes of his literary antecedents. But Hayes also reveals admiration for and affinity with Stevens, when the speaker asks: “How, with pipes of winter / lining his cognition, does someone learn / to bring a sentence to his knees?” He follows this question through, ultimately reaching a different kind of resolution than McKay:

Who is not more than his limitations,
who is not the blood in a wine barrel
and the wine as well? I too, having lost faith
in language have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. 

Hayes poem is a complex, complicated sort of tribute to Stevens. But his resolution can’t wholly be summarized as “love without forgiveness.” The poem ends with an insight that Stevens couldn't make: 

This song is for my foe,
the clean shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.

What is most brilliant to me about "Snow for Wallace Stevens" is how it questions the idea that the received poetic tradition is a purely white one. Stevens may have been blind to the “blueness” in his body made of snow, but Hayes isn’t, and his poem challenges any reader who is.

William Carlos Williams and Joseph Hutchison

            What depends upon a red wheelbarrow? So much. I’ve loved this modest, beautiful poem for years, and this week I was excited to hear the poet himself read “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the recording posted. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed. I listened again, hoping it was fluke, and my disappointment was confirmed. The disappointment soon turned into an… I don’t know, irritation? The thing was, I had this annoying voice in my head telling me I couldn’t possibly “like” the poem if I didn’t enjoy it when THE POET HIMSELF read it.

            I went back to the words on the page, and realized that a huge reason why I love the poem is because it speaks to me visually. The odd lineation –Williams’ use of enjambment– cause me to slow down. Of course, wheelbarrow is one word. But what happens when “wheel” has a big blank space next to it? Although “barrow” follows, it gets its own line. So even though “barrow” is clearly connected to “wheel,” in this poem it also stands alone. The same is true for “rain / water” and “white / chickens.” In all fairness to Williams (as if he needs my fairness) I don’t think there is a way to read that sense audibly. It has to be seen. Audibly hearing, “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow…” is simply not the same thing as reading and seeing the words as they are arranged on the page.

            The red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, sits beside white chickens. But Williams gives “barrow”, “water”, and “chickens” space to exist apart from the words that modify them. Even still, “so much depends,” somehow, on the image of the entire scene. The poem can’t be reduced to “chickens” (or any other word for that matter). Without the first two lines, the poem would read more like a list. But “so much depends / upon” each of the ordinary objects that make up this vivid scene.   

            Speaking of brief, Joseph Hutchinson goes about the task of transforming an ordinary object in his one-line poem:

“Artichoke”

O heart weighed down by so many wings

            Like Williams and his red wheelbarrow, Hutchinson makes me pause over something as mundane as an artichoke. The poem’s brevity, and even its lack of punctuation, contribute to the notion that paying attention only requires a moment. Whether its a leafy artichoke, or the rainwater glistening in a wheelbarrow, both are made significant upon closer look.

T.S. Eliot and Jorie Graham

I love “Burnt Norton” because it reads like music feels. It’s the experience of time I guess, as it moves through the poem. The movement is what makes it beautiful, because it kind of carries you into awareness of the present.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Consciousness doesn’t last longer than a moment, and maybe that’s a good thing. Without the limitations of time, at least in these mortal bodies, I think we would be crushed. Eliot is gesturing towards a paradox: immediate experience can’t be divorced from the past or the future. Even in my imminent frame, I can’t deny the pressure of transcendence bearing down on the moment.

But there is relief in the still point. These lines from “Burnt Norton” are some of my favorite lines in poetry:

And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Jorie Graham is another poet who is like, hyper-aware of the present. Sometimes it gives me anxiety. There’s a sense that the speaker of the poem desperately wants to bear the reality Eliot’s bird said humans can’t handle. She really wants to know it. I was binging on Jorie Graham poems for way too long, and then I stumbled across an interview she gave in the Paris Review. Anyway, she talks about this profound experience she had in a tiny little chapel in Italy. Something about that experience, and wanting to distill it into a poem, keyed her in to her own “desire-for-belief” –a huger for presence. This hunger links her to Eliot for me. I think she has his capacity for presence, but it seems to torment her more. It's almost as if she wants to be freed of it.

From “Covenant”

O sweet conversation: protozoa, air: how long have you been speaking?
The engine [of the most] is passing now.
At peak: the mesmerization of here, this me here, this me
passing now.
So as to leave what behind?
We, who can now be neither wholly here nor disappear?
And to have it come so close and yet not know it:
how in time you do not move on:
how there is no "other" side:
how the instant is very wide and bright and we cannot
                                                                     ever
get away with it--the instant--what holds the "know"

Graham’s poetry is stunning because it presses the limits of language and presence. Her hunger is loud, and far from being satisfied. 

T.S. Eliot and Billy Collins

Perhaps in an (indirect?) nod to Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot uses titles to disrupt typical expectations in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Love Song will do something like this this to the reader of his poem-- and Eliot appears to be aligning this poem with all those other poems in the history of Western poems about love. Before reading the translation, even the poem’s epigraph (in the “romance language” of Italian) seems to enforce this idea. The third moment where the reader’s expectation is brought to its height is in the poem’s opening couplet:

“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky”

only to come crashing down on the next line:

“Like a patient etherized upon a table.” 

Formally, Eliot is aligning himself with the poetic conventions of end-rhyme (I and sky) setting himself up to make the perfect love-song metaphor. Unfortunately, comparing the evening to a numb human body kind of ruins the mood.

What follows is perhaps more depressing, but a lot more interesting than a typical love poem. Prufrock is paralyzed with self-consciousness. The poor guy can’t make a decision to save his life, and that’s because he’s sort of talking to himself, Hamlet style, about how pointless it is to try to articulate or realize his internal desire. I think Prufrock wants to disturb the universe, but he’s scared. In the end, he can’t even claim Hamlet's greatness because he’s “Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous . . .” Prufrock’s Love song ends with death:  “till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

Billy Collins writes another unconventional love poem, but in a slightly less dramatic register. “Litany” begins with an epigraph from Belgian poet Jacques Crickillon:

 “You are the bread and the knife, / The crystal goblet and the wine.” 

The first stanza continues to use this model, comparing the beloved next to the morning dew and then to the sun. The speaker begins to run out of steam in stanza 2, when he seems to become disturbed by all the things his beloved cannot be compared to.

“However, you are not the wind in the orchard… and you are certainly not the pine-scented air, / There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.”

His digression (very Prufrock) eventually leads into a profession of his own identity: “It might interest you to know, / speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, / that I am the sound of the rain on the roof.” In the last stanza he finally brings the poem full circle, wandering back to the initial object of the poem. “But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife. / You are still the bread and the knife.”