Red Letter Poem #198
Three Short-form Poems
––Andrea Cohen
Regarding My Delay
I’ve been trying
on coffins
and can’t
find one
with a big
enough dance floor.
Volunteers
A cavalry
of flowers
rides in––
We were bored
to tears, breaking
thermometers open,
letting the silver
drops spill and scatter and
reassemble in our hands.
We didn’t understand
how dangerous that was––
our hands, I mean, meaning
to hold anything.
Because much of American poetry has such deep roots in old European traditions, it’s remarkable how quickly a relative newcomer took hold of our literary imagination. The arrival of short-form poems from Asia––brought over (with varying degrees of success) from French and German translations––only began in the late nineteenth century. But the rise of Ezra Pound’s Imagist movement in 1912––heavily influenced by his readings of the Chinese and Japanese masters––became the driving force of Modernism, and thus an influence on all the schools that grew from or in response to it. It brought to our poetic landscape a new emphasis on closely-observed moments portrayed with clarity, linguistic compression, and the alluring power of what’s strategically left unsaid. This new sensibility cross-pollinated with our Twentieth Century impulses and invigorated the work of poets as varied as Gary Snyder, George Oppen, Robert Sund; Mary Oliver, Rae Armantrout, and today’s Red Letter contributor, Andrea Cohen.
I’ve long admired how much Andrea achieves with so little. All muscle, no flab, her poems accomplish their magical transformations before the rest of us literary-conjurers have even dusted off our top hats or raised our magic wands. In The Sorrow Apartments––her eighth collection, just published by Four Way Books––the dominant strain in her work is of pithy, playfully-explosive poems where, in just a few lines, she manages to tease unimagined worlds into existence. Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at the MacDowell Colony. Andrea currently teaches at Boston University and, since 1982, she’s been involved with the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, becoming its director in 2002.
A common comparison connects Andrea’s poetry with that of James Tate––a prominent figure whose sly surrealism had a pronounced effect on our literary environment, especially here in New England. But to my mind, I feel a kinship between her work and that of Lorine Niedecker, a less well-known figure but one revered by other poets. In both cases, running beneath their wry declarations and unexpected turns, is a vulnerability, a tenderness, that lets us know we are being guided by writers comfortable feeling their way in the dark. But they are equally committed to those pinhole openings where light penetrates and reveals the substance of our topsy-turvy lives. In “Regarding My Delay”, how quickly did you catch your breath between the anomalous “trying/ on coffins” and the humorous-turned-bittersweet “big/ enough dance floor”? The startled mind suddenly makes sense of this strange situation: why shouldn’t we be interrogating the suitability of our end-of- (or after-) life? And, as the ancient Etruscans once did, why not imagine having enough wherewithal for a continuing celebration? In the second poem, just as we begin conceiving of the calamity for which “A cavalry/ of flowers” might swoop in to rescue us, that long em-dash cuts us off mid-thought, leaves us hanging. That’s a lot of implication embodied in a punctuation mark! And it would require another whole essay to adequately consider the curious narrative within “Mercurial”. I think every one of us remembers a time in childhood, “bored/ to tears”––and more than a few of us will admit to attempting some fascinating and wildly-dangerous act as a remedy. But here, those “tears” seem almost to morph into the droplets of mercury––and who could resist those dazzling quicksilver temptations we encountered, seemingly with minds of their own? Because we intuited that wanting and having were part of the essential language of the body––and that possessing even a bit of the world made us feel part of something larger than ourselves––to grasp seemed an a priori ‘good’, which even our eventual suffering could not undo. And things were no less precarious whether we used hands, thoughts, or even lines of inky verse to claim our desires. If Frost is correct that “poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom”, Andrea’s poems often arrive brazen with delight; the wisdom, when it comes, is of a shyer disposition, confided to us in a whisper.
Red Letters 3.0
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