SCRATCH PEGASIS by Stephen Kessler

 

 

SCRATCH PEGASIS by Stephen Kessler  Swan Scythe Press, 2013

We live in a world that dismisses older people and is focused on the moment with Iphones, Ipods and more. But this wonderful book is all about time, honoring the years we accumulate with grace, and where memories rise up from his poems with all of their poignancy, love and humor. Stephen Kessler also finds wonder in our everyday lives and as we read through his book, we meet people with their charm and as well as with their flaws who become part of our own lives. To read this book is to awaken to all that surrounds us and to move beyond ourselves. 

In the poem Thrift Shop the stories of the owners of what was left after their deaths come alive and envelope us. 

 It came and it went

and here’s the evidence,

endless shelves stretching deathlessly,

knitting cities with this network of used suitcases

and scratched furniture where families

ate and sat, travelers packed their stuff,

old women read books and lovers slept entangled.

Another poem that ponders time is The Spanish Tile Table where he reflects on his mother and her lover’s death, and on our impermanence, “Yet, I can touch the table/and feel the painterly light,/ its perfect warmth spilling/ into my lap this afternoon.”

We live in a society that is fearful of death and aging as if we all didn’t age and die. Yet Stephen Kessler writes about aging and what it feels like to lose friends, and become old. His poem Mal de Terre is a quip of the French word mal de mer or seasickness as he feels his world move beneath him and the passing years seem to drown him. However many of his poems herald the imponderable way that loss and eternity co-exist and how memories have their own lives and persist.

This amazing book shows us the many ways of considering time. In Skateboard Sonnet, he watches young people whiz by “as I can see them through my own quick past,/It was on days like this, under such a sky,/ my summer flowered without my knowing how/ fleeting it was…..” 

In the section of Kessler’s book entitled Teachers, we learn that what we gain in our long years is understanding of our own life and that of so many others’, an appreciation of experiences that have several seemingly incompatible identities. The poem William Wilson, about a man who helped in so many ways in his home, was a soldier in World War II, and whom he revered, also had a long criminal record. In many of the poems in this section, Kessler ponders the multiples of our being, that our paths are not straight as we would like but meander in different directions. One of my favorite poems in this section is Jesus Chavarria who lectures his students on the many difficulties of life, to young Americans who are oblivious of the harsh lives in other countries, concluding “so, there will be no talking in this class.”  Kessler has a wonderful sense of humor. I remember a similar lecture from a Spanish professor I had who talked to us as if we were ignorant of the problems in this world and indeed we were. 

In the section called Wild Men the poem Mustafa reveals how a man who tried to befriend him was really a thief.  A most touching poem, My Best Friend, celebrates all the miseries of his friend’s bout with cancer, troubles at work, lack of money and how instead of wanting pity, he reached out and helped everyone he could. This poem once again breaks a silence in our conversations and in our social media. The ill are not invisible, are not weak, pitiful, but emotionally strong. Their suffering has brought them to new heights of understanding and an ability to reach out to all those in need. 

The last section of the book Scratch Pegasus presents us with the holiness and eternity of art. Poem I Can’t Decipher on a Stone brings us the calligraphy on that smooth stone quarried/ from an ancient mountain/….to speak in sweet ambiguities/ swirls of darkness moving/ through fields of daylight caught/ in landscapes concise enough/  to fill  your palm and be/held in your ignorant fingers./  For a man who has written almost 20 books of poetry, prose and amazing translations of Latin American as well as Spanish poets,  Kessler is more than humble. He writes about Van Gogh, compares that painter’s life with the dailiness around him including a baseball game, and concludes “That Vincent’s tears will outlast the winner’s fame.” He also reflects on the transient next to what remains, writing about the artist Edward Hopper:/ the artist’s truth transcending his success./ reminding us to honor the artists’ exceptional visions. 

This wonderful book is not only joy to read with its unique images that touch our lives, but is a lesson on how to live not in pursuit of fame but rather with the joy of relating to others on their own terms and seeing the world with clear eyes. 

By Marguerite Guzman Bouvard

The Poem as Song in Ernest Hilbert’s second book of sonnets

Ernest Hilbert

 

The Poem as Song in Ernest Hilbert’s second book of sonnets

AOYOTGE (ALL OF YOU ON THE GOOD EARTH)

by Michael Todd Steffen

Ernest Hilbert displays craftiness in his signature rime scheme with the most rewritten form in all of English poetry, prompting categorization beside the Petrarchan and the English sonnets; the Hilbert sonnet: ABC ABC DEF DEF GG. Avoiding bracket or alternating rime schemes in the traditional octet of the sonnets prevents our easy detection of the scheme, persuading our allowance for the language’s unaffectedness. It is not obviously predicated by the echo-chamber. There is much in Hilbert’s specific word choice relating detail caught by a good eye for observation as well as literary and cultural reference in the poems to convince us that he writes both from experience and from an impressively educated memory, as is evident in the poem titled ‘Times Literary Supplement’:

    We sifted through his room at the museum,
    Opened it like a tomb; sorted, emptied,
    Claimed its small treasures: coins, copper sculptures,
    Maps of an Augustan mausoleum,
    Tripods, stalled watches, stiff river reed,
    Nicked reading glasses, vivid fishing lures.
    Stubbornly, the TLS still came,
    Week after week, as the excavation
    Ended and boxes thumped into the trash,
    Reports of books newly born, wild or tame,
    Jacketed, crated, and shipped by the ton.
    Reviewers plough on, as careers rise and crash—
    Few are prized, most pulped, conveyed to landfills,
    Compacted like coal, toppled timber, great fossils.


Page to page, however, some resistance by the poet to the worsening situations of the experiences giving rise to his poems, some notion of transformation, how the dilemma inspiring these lines might evolve, struck me as missing. It is as though Hilbert makes himself the object of a determined victimization—also betraying a good-natured virtue of acceptance, at moments to the point of resignation, a feeling conveyed by his willing access to a harsher vernacular:

    The city is cat piss and dog shit. It stinks,
    And the humid air smells like mold. I lie in bed,
    Too hot to move, slick with sweat, wait for dark.
    Blue flies eddy over the cluttered sink.
    I’m broke. The change dish is exhausted.
    A Western Union stub is my bookmark…

On one hand, in the midst of the persistence of memory, designating a love of bygone times as Odysseus’s nursing sorceress Kalypso, the past can only be the past, perhaps even consigned to myth, beyond our control or effort to change. The poem’s purpose then becomes the song of that loss, its melody on the heartstrings, imagined by Hilbert in the second half of the sonnet as a vaporous, elusive, perhaps even delusional memory:

    You never knew me. You’re in a Victorian
    Sea home, slicing, to taste, a sweet chilled peach,
    As an ocean wind lifts your long light hair.
    Your songs are old, your dresses empyrean.
    The view is vast over the empty beach.
    You pause, as long as you like on the stair.
    Memories sink and compel me to bear
    One last thought: that you were never there.

Form (we have all come across this definition) is the fulfillment of expectations proposed. Persevering with the sonnet, while evoking the hero-wanderer of epic, Hilbert reserves his promise to sing the songs of, as Seamus Heaney phrased it, “single things,” of the poet’s dilemma as it is, without agonizing much in the modal auxiliaries of ‘may’, ‘might’ or ‘should’, without elaborating a story or theme beyond focal situations. He is unbothered by the potential influence of his example—

        …I’m struggling to play a record,
    But my fingers quiver and the needle
    Shrieks like scraped chalk through the speakers. I turn
    It up, and up, and up. I’m lit like a war
    With pills, lines, so many drinks I can’t feel.
    I find two women shooting heroin
    In my bed…

—without sparing us the consequences of this abandon:

        I’m coming up so hard I puke.
    O Christ the summer is stunned with lilacs!
    Someone gets kicked in the nose…

By now anonymous readers or Puritans lingering in these pages may be just ready to close them and set Hilbert back on the shelf. Yet part of the punch of these poems relies on their innocent audacity, evocative of a prior generation that made its mark during Vietnam trapped in Cold War politics , that rebellion of youth fueled by social protest and ‘Drugs, Sex and Rock ’n’ Roll’. The movement came to its summit and tipping point in 1968, which Hilbert in the preface to this book calls “the annus horribilus, a year that saw tragedy and civil unrest around the globe.” This was also the year when

the Apollo 8 space mission successfully circumnavigated Earth’s moon…
On Christmas Eve, the crew observed the Earth rising for the first time over
the moon’s horizon. Commander Frank Borman later described the Earth-rise
as “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent
of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me.” He signed off:
“Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—
all of you on the good Earth.”

So with the title and the prefatory note on its origin, we might read the sonnets of AOYOTGE as a captain’s log of Hilbert’s personal moon-orbit voyage, and the poems make recognizable allusions to Homer’s hero of The Odyssey, whose correlative in the culture of the late 60s would be Kubrick’s
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. The decadence of Hilbert’s content (the drugs and booze and women shooting heroin in his bed) though not astonishing to our culture, does run against a rather prominent Restoration current these days advocating recovery, medical and health awareness, moderation,
No Smoking signs and security cameras everywhere you turn. Awareness of or reference to this new sense of caution and prudence surface not in the least in the sonnets, which keeps the purpose of the poet’s rebellion tacit and subconsciously more poignant and convincing. Out and out, meanwhile, Hilbert echoing Larkin is going to argue the anti-heroic argument of the failure of ideals to satisfy us:

    Why must we love? Perhaps as Plato thought,
    Zeus hacked jealous man into two parts,
    So we struggle, our whole lives, to reunite;
    Or Shakespeare’s lovers—struck through with stars, caught
    In a love that promises doom—who find their hearts
    Seared like coals and drown them in endless night.
    But this is too much for us! We are not
    Useful myths, nor mere characters undone
    On a stage; yet our two strengths are as great
    As these and other stories we are taught.

A few weeks back (on Thursday, November 13) I had the good fortune of making it to a reading at the Cambridge Public Library featuring Ernest Hilbert and Daniel Tobin, another poet who is making his difference in our time by writing in recognizably poetic language (lines seasoned with symbolic amplitude, scansion, and deliberate prosody, even sometime rime) while maintaining a probable contemporary idiom. Hilbert especially grabbed my attention that evening, because this was my first encounter with him, yet also because he is an excellent live reader, mindful of delivery, projecting his voice in units of sense and breath, in the pauses of his lines, lines I could not help but think were written with their vocal presentation in mind. It was not surprising for me to discover, in the Biographical Note to his new book, that along with poetry, Hilbert “supplies libretti and song texts for contemporary composers Stella Sung, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Christopher LaRosa.”

Back on the page, Hilbert’s poems are good enough to choose virtues that run somewhat against the grain of present society. He portrays a remarkably witty and cool character on the downhill slide thrust upon our humanity by heartbreak and grief. At the same time, the presence of mind demonstrated by the composition of the poems and of Hilbert’s physical presence as a reader, affable and measured, reassure us of his survival, aplomb and fruition from that time of fire and rain.


AOYOTGE
ALL OF YOU ON THE GOOD EARTH
poems by Ernest Hilbert
is available for $16.95
from Red Hen Press
in Pasadena, California
www.redhen.org

Other books by Ernest Hilbert include
‘Sixty Sonnets’ and ‘Aim Your Arrows at the Sun’

Mary: A Life In Verse By Patricia Monaghan

Mary: A Life In Verse

By Patricia Monaghan

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-939929-08-2

73 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Spring sparkled in every year with Mary’s especial procession around Hawthorne Boulevard in my hometown of Salem Massachusetts, culminating in this mythical woman’s crowning as “Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.” As a prelude to summer these festivities offered a fresh air escape from glum classrooms and prickly nuns. Even Father McCarthy, our pastor, emerging from one of his deep seasonal depressions, flickered an odd strangled grin here and there. Our school, after all, was named St. Mary’s Grammar School, and our church The Immaculate Conception. The Roman Catholic religion and our grade school education seemed only appendixes to a powerful Marian cult/ subculture redolent of feminine fertility and revolution.

Patricia Monaghan’s posthumous collection of poems, Mary: A Life In Verse, humanizes the mother of Jesus Christ in provocative and very engaging ways. She takes the awe and ceremony (May processions included) that many of her fellow religionists were brought up with and grounds them in the universality of ordinary life. Monghan’s Mary experiences life as a young Jewish peasant woman in Galilea. She carries all the sensitivities of her gender, her adolescence, and her place in time. Certainly there is a bit of naiveté in Monaghan’s Mary, but opportunity and ambition also drive her. In the collection’s opening poem, The Annunciation, Monaghan explains,

… there was a moment when I

hesitated. I remember a wild desire

to be left alone, to be obscure again

and safe—I wanted the angel to leave,

to find some other girl for his strange

invitation. I was frightened. I heard

a sound like a fabric rending or

the tearing of flesh or a great tree

falling. And yet: I answered.

I leaned towards the angel

and, with a sound like wings,

the future was born in me.

These conflicting passions inherent in a young woman’s pride and sexuality give the poem its metaphorical underpinnings.

Early on in the book the poet spins out her own version of The Magnificat, the ancient Christian canticle in which Mary, now pregnant, details her transformative power to her cousin Elizabeth (also pregnant with John the Baptist). Mary’s faith or transcendent delusion magnifies and exalts her humble ordinariness into a subconscious (or perhaps, devotional) position of power. The poem entitled simply Magnificat puts it this way,

… greatest of all: there are times

when I am whole, when I dance

with each breath and each word,

when my consciousness dwells in all

my parts at once. When this happens,

I am earth, I am stars, I am incarnate god.

The poet intersperses many wonder filled and intriguing illustrations throughout the text. Henry Ossawa Tanner’s oil on canvas entitled The Annunciation absolutely hypnotizes, while an Old Woman from Tajikistan, a Steve Evans’ photograph, complements the airiness and timelessness of the verse composition. In addition Monaghan breaks up the continuity of free verse pieces with what amounts to prose poems. “Prose” does not do them justice since some of them truly soar poetically. Here is the opening of my favorite prose section,

I COULD HAVE BEEN ONE who suffers little joy,

little pain, one who redeems nothing, is guilty of nothing.

Except for that instant when I felt power spread through

My body.

It was in my flesh, not in my soul, that the miracle took

place. Life shone through my body. At the moment I

agreed, I embodied love and power. Rivers rose in flood

with my tears, the sea grew hot with my lust, the wind bat-

tered in fury when I raged.

I became the world. I had no doubts that this child was

intended by every power I knew.

Oh, angels toy with us so!

After the death of her son, Mary struggles with her grief and has, seemingly, lost her faith. She goes to the temple seeking comfort and understanding—perhaps. She finds rage. A well- dressed kohl-eyed woman laughs at Mary and mocks her to a companion. Mary responds in Monaghan’s poem The Rich Woman Despises My Tears with the hatred of all humanity. She says,

… My arm,

before my face, froze.

What would he

say to that woman,

to her companion?

He would say,

forgive, forgive,

they too are in pain.

They are small

and helpless. He

would say, forgive.

I say, may your

children die …

Mary does recover her faith, a faith that sorrow has changed profoundly. She understands the river of grace and the purpose of a conscience in a world of ignorance and cruelty. Her original naiveté she wills into a universal canniness, an all-seeing, but not quite religious, wisdom. Monaghan relates a bit of Mary’s spirit in her poem Alleluia. Here Mary shares a sublime moment,

… another gift came to me:

a man walked by, playing a flute.

It was late summer, and leaves

Had fallen from the palm

Beside the house, and one leaf

leapt up as he passed, leapt up

just as the melody piped sharply

higher, and held a high note,

and the sun winked at that moment,

from behind a cloud, and a sharp

scent of new figs filled the air,

and I was song, suddenly song,

I remembered in my deepest soul

something I  had always known:

that our only purpose is to live,

to be the eyes of god watching

this world…

The meek will inherit the earth, the son of Mary of Nazareth once proclaimed. Patricia Monaghan (named at birth Mary Patricia Monaghan) clearly agrees. Her book magnifies a simple naïve young woman into a goddess of secular goodness and the preternatural hope of mankind. Blessed be the legend of Mary. And blessed be the muse of Mary Patricia Monaghan. 

" Youth Arts Arise" at the Somerville Arts Armory.

In the fall of 2014 Arts at the Armory launched a free arts education program for 11- to 19-year-olds called Youth Arts Arise.

This FREE program is a great opportunity the youth to  explore their creativity in a wide range of artistic mediums.

Workshop themes encourage self-exploration through investigation of the participants’ individual and cultural identity and exploration of other cultures, traditions, and diversity.

Youth ages 15-19 who are interested in pursuing a career in art will have an opportunity to become peer leaders and receive a stipend to assist the artist instructors on a rotating basis. Peer leadership will be an integral component of the program; it not only builds self-esteem in the older youth, but also creates role models for the younger participants.

Bridget Galway artist/arts educator, program coordinator will provide support for portfolio development for participants who want to submit to college art departments.

 Join us at the Armory on Monday, Dec. 22 from 6-8pm for the Fall Showcase: you can view all their work and celebrate their achievements!

Big thanks to The Boston Foundation for supporting Youth Arts Arise through a Vision Fund grant, Without  their support, it would be a shadow of what it is today, and what we hope to grow it to by the end of the year.

Arts at the Armory would also like to thank  Boulter Lumber, Somerville, Stanhope Framers in Union, The Beautiful Stuff project Somerville, and Rugg Road Paper for generously donating materials that supported various art projects and the showcase.

Also  to Whole Foods, Q’s Nuts, Shaw’s, Redbones, and JP Licks for generously donating refreshments for the showcase!

Current and Upcoming Youth Arts Arise Programs

This fall marked the beginning of our after-school workshops, and it has been a huge success! The classes have been running on Tuesdays from 3:30-5:00 pm, and the participants have been creating fantastic artwork. We are excited to announce the beginning of our Winter Semester registration! Winter workshops will run from January to March on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 3:30-5:00pm. Tuesday and Wednesday workshops will be different, so you may register for one or both of those days. The deadline for winter registration is December 16. More information about registration can be found below.

Registration

Registration is per semester for all workshops. To view Youth Arts Arise program description go to www.artsatthearmory.org, click on “ Learn”. You can see the description of the program and Download a registration form there, or pick one up in person at 191 Highland Ave., Suite 1A, Somerville, MA. If you miss the deadline and still wish to register, contact us via phone or email.

To view the line-up of artistic workshops posted so far for the winter semester, go to the website and click on “Events”, then education, type  Youth Arts Arise in search box.

Elizabeth Gordon McKim: A Poet of the poem. A poet of the people.

Elizabeth Gordon McKim

Elizabeth McKim: A Poet of the poem. A poet of the people.

Interview by Doug Holder

Elizabeth Gordon  McKim is not just about getting her own work out there. A respected educator, poet and influential member of the Expressive Arts Movement, McKim engages the community, other artists, and students, so they too can realize their creative potential. As the poet, and McKim's partner Etheridge Knight said:" You must be a poet of the poem, and the people". McKim is the embodiment of this.

Elizabeth Gordon McKim has published five books of poetry, the latest being The Red Thread (Leapfrog Press). She is a teacher, performance poet, spoken word artist, and has been an adjunct professor for forty years in the department of Creative Arts in Learning at Lesley University. McKim is the poet laureate of the European Graduate School, and the Jazz Poet of Lynn where she lives, in a renovated shoe factory. She is included with four others in the new anthology, Wild Women of Lynn, published by Blaine Hebbel and The Ring of Bone Press.

I had the pleasure to interview her on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: You were intimately connected with the famed prisoner poet and civil rights activist Etheridge Knight. Can you tell us about your life and times with him?

Elizabeth McKim: I knew him in the last decade of his life. He died in 1991. I met him through a poet in Worcester, Mass., Fran Quinn. We were both going down to work in the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was in the late 70s. Fran thought we should stop in Memphis where he was living. He was married at the time to a woman from Worcester, Mass. And here, I heard him read his poetry. And that was very important for me because he was one of the best readers of poetry I have heard. I never got bored, even when I heard the same work over and over again. He had a major belief in the poet, the poem and the people. He reminded me never to forget your people when you are reading or they will forget you. When I teach children I tell them not to forget their people—speak up and speak out!

There were a lot of things that were connected with music that Etheridge knew about. At Goddard College, where I got my Maste'sr Degree, I learned so much about movement, breath and song. This went well with Etheridge and his work. He did have an amazing message for black men, but it really did spread out from there. The manuscript I am now working on now has several essays about him, interviews, and poems. I have a lot of his papers and eventually I plan to put them in a university archive. I did spend a year and half in Indianapolis where his family lived—it was a wonderful community of artists. Here I learned how community can be so important to making art. I learned how people inspire each other—painters with poets, etc…

Etheridge, when he was first in prison, at Michigan City—wrote his first book of poetry. He was published by the Broadside Press—a very important press for Black poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, etc…, all of whom were published there.

DH: You have been described as a pioneer of the Expressive Arts Movement. What is that movement exactly—as you understand it?

EM:  The Expressive Arts Movement, more or less started in Cambridge, Mass. at Lesley University. A man named Shawn McNiff , who was an expressive therapist at Danvers State was an instrumental figure here. He believed that language, paintings, movement, etc… all inform one another, especially working with the healthy side of people. Creativity is the important thing. They named discipline at Lesley “The Expressive Arts Therapy.” Antioch College in Ohio, and Goddard had small programs at that time, but now there are centers across the country and the world. Appalachia St. University has one, there is a center in Toronto, another fine one in San Diego—to name just a few. I always think of Allen Ginsberg’s, who said “ All I wanted to do was to get back to the body where I was born.” In some ways that’s what the expressive arts are all about. We now train students to get out in the community and work with conflict resolution in the community. They are in rehab centers, prisons, etc..

DH: Tell me about this organization “Troubadour” that you are involved with?

EM: It is a consortium of singer/songwriters, poets, writers, going out and working in the schools. They engage the students through different art forms. They work to increase literacy—they try to turn the kids on. We make partnerships with the schools, get funding etc…

DH: You are the Poet Laureate of the European Graduate School in Switzerland. What is that about?

EM: The people, who started this, were the people who started out at Lesley University. Folks like Paolo J. Knill, Steve Levine, and Sally Atkins. They started the school there. It is between Geneva and Zurich. We stay in an inn—and believe it not the innkeeper built the school for us. In addition we have a partnership with New York University. We help people work in the community with others. We have visiting artists, lectures—there is a PhD program—we even have a small school in South Korea.  We need all this in these times of deadening violence. The arts are crucial in all the different aspects of living. We teach compassion. We ask students to think about what’s like to be another person? And hopefully the other person will learn to ask what it is like to be in the “other's” shoes. It is important to think outside of yourself.

DH: Tell me about this “ Wild Women of Lynn” anthology you are involved with. How are you guys wild?

EM: Blaine Hebbel was a major force behind this. We are wild and mild. Inside every person who is creative, there is that wild, creative storm.




November 21,2014


All the leaves are gone
Away/ and gone to glitten
Where are my mittens?

Brilliant chilly-wind
Stirring my remembrances
On the way no where
Give the love...
The lasting pleasure.
Give it in full measure.
Find the fruit. Be at
The special spot. Beat the drum.
Be here. Be there. Be where?
Again and once again.
Bear it. Wear it. We are it!
What else do we have?
We do desire it!

--Elizabeth  Gordon  McKim

Molly Lynn Watt's "On Wings of Song" flies high

Molly Lynn Watt's "On Wings of Song" flies high

 Review by Bert Stern

 To order go to  Wings of Song

 "On Wings of Song" ( Ibbetson Street Press) is a clear-eyed account of racial oppression in the US and of the people, black and white, who struggled to end it. What gives the book its special authenticity is the point of view, which is intimate – a positioning of the narrator’s eye gained by Watt’s own lifelong efforts in the struggle.

 While the book is historical, it is also lyrical. “Crayola World begins:

 Robin draws sky-blue arches
 burnt orange sun sepia earth sprouts
 maroon father strums raw-umber guitar
 bittersweet mother hold pink flower
 purple sister suck plum thumb.

 And it ends when the child-artist

 . . . picks up black
 draws herself in the center
 that’s me
 the most beautifulest.

 Bushels full of poems have been written about Billy Holiday, but Watt’s “Billy Holiday Sings “Strange Fruit” tops them all. It begins with a close-up picture of Billy herself, and ends, in an astonishing shift, with a first-hand account of an observer’s experience at a lynching.

 "On Wings of Song" is canonic. It restores for all of us the beating heart of an evolving conscience that may never be complete.

-- Bert Stern, author of Silk," "Steerage," and "Winter in China".

Franz Wright Reading Wednesday November 19th

 
Franz Wright Reading Wednesday November 19th

by Michael Todd Steffen, co-organizer of the Hastings Room Reading Series

This Wednesday, the 19th of November, at 7:00 pm Franz Wright will be reading in the Hastings Room at First Church Congregationalist, 11 Garden Street near the Harvard Square Sheraton Commander Hotel. Franz will be joined by Mary Buchinger-Bodwell and George Kalogeris. I believe this will be the first reading Wright has given in public for a some time. It’s going to be a special occasion, and gives me the space here to make some observations on his poetry.

One of the powerful virtues of Franz Wright’s poetry is its raw intelligence. Through his translations, references in his own poems and in interviews, he has impressed us with a wide-ranging and eclectic literary culture, while often expressing scorn for scholarship and convention, maybe partly for the sake of a mythos he has built about himself as a 21st century Romantic confronting the demons of child abuse, abandonment and addiction, leading his meditations anagogically to the themes of self-destruction and death, yet also to the therapy of speaking about these, recovery, and to a faith in and ultimate reliance on God and a life to come. These make for an interesting, distinctly American combination of derision for tradition and sophistication with a surrendering and humble faith in a redeeming God.

Wright has championed a bold, edgy, tell-all vernacular that warrants disregard for the second part of Emily Dickinson’s advice to tell all the truth (But tell it slant). His poems are edited (most notably in Walking to Martha’s Vineyard) less for content than for effects of counterpoint and silence.

In his 2013 collection F (Knopf), on the Christmas page, page 25, the poet comes to a statement of culmination echoing the subject of his meditation, mortality, an acknowledgment of an end itself:

    But I’ve said all that
    I had to say.
    In writing.
    I signed my name.
    It’s death’s move now.

It is a semantic notation in the music of acceptance of the inevitable: not that any of us are convinced that Franz Wright has exhausted his meaning or his means with poetry. Except to say that it’s okay with him in case.

The strophe is the second of four in a poem titled CRUMPLED-UP NOTE BLOWING AWAY, the title itself making an acronymic suggestion (C B A) of an order in reverse to its zero being, where the order starts back again.

The title also makes a poignant correlative image perhaps for how any of us can be made to feel on not so good a day: like a waded up piece of paper in the wind. Yet in our time of superabundant “pages” available and sent to us in every sort of binding, envelope or electronic mail, perhaps the note on the crumpled piece of paper we just happen to pick up and unfold, thanks to the unique path it has taken to get to us, becomes the most intimate, deliberate and meaningful scrap of reading we’ve had in a long time.

In a different way we notice the strophe’s last line, “It’s death’s move,” appealing less to our personal anticipation than to our curiosity about this game of chess the poet has been playing against Death. It is interesting and disinteresting at the same time, because it is a game neither Franz nor any one of us can finally win, though we have played it our whole lives with every hope and earnestness. This explains the next line and the ecstatic vision, wholly American in character, concluding the poem:

    It can have mine, too.
    It’s a perfect June morning,
    and I just turned eighteen;
    I can’t even believe
    what I feel like today.

    Here am I, Lord,
    sitting on a suitcase,
    waiting for my train.
    The sun is shining.
    I’m never coming back.

How explain the transformation that takes place between feeling as useless and random as a neglected piece of paper and as thrilled and hopeful as a teenager running away from home?

Centuries ago, the English poet John Donne made a similar pronouncement on his disinterest with the board game of mortality: Death be not proud… Donne is pertinent, perhaps questionable in this context, referring to the opening stanza of Wright’s poem. This is a variation on the old speculative question, If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does the tree make a sound? By applying the line of thought to the sun and its light and our vision, Wright significantly exaggerates the futility of the question, still with the purpose of evoking a subjective annihilation. In a much lighter complaint from a lover, Donne chided the sun:

        Busy old fool, unruly sun,
        Why dost thou thus
    Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
    Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
        Saucy pedantic wretch… (“The Sun Rising”)

Wright will echo one word from this passage perhaps for reference, while making his dismissive reply bespeaking the obvious solution to the dark, irresolute question he has been asking himself building up to writing the poem:

    Were no one
    here to witness it,
    could the sun be
    said to shine? Clearly,
    you pedantic fool.

Lucky Bones By Peter Meinke

Peter Meinke

Lucky Bones

By Peter Meinke

University of Pittsburgh Press

Pittsburgh, PA

www.upress.pitt.edu

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6310-3

82 Pages

$15.95

Review by Dennis Daly

Passion trumps this frivolous world of detail—Belgian chocolates, Coppertone lotion, dry martinis, bright ribbons, doubles tennis, and, heaven help us, sonnets. Peter Meinke in his new collection of poems, Lucky Bones, quantifies the passionate nature of interior intensity and hell-bent fervor by poking fun at himself and humorously (or not) eviscerating a chosen set of targets inhabiting this vale of tears that we call life. Many of his poetic commentaries Meinke delivers in formalist verse with a cunning dry wit that both elucidates and cautions.

The poet begins ominously with his first sectional poem entitled Drive-By Shootings. Here he sets up his backdrop and shades it with bitters. Meinke says,

        …People pedal on bikes drop

  Some money in the hole stick in their arms get a shot and wobble away

     Sometimes getting hit by cars the same needle all afternoon

             That’s the kind of world we live in

Civilization masks bloody-mindedness and boiling lust. Meinke’s piece Cassandra in the Library alludes to ancient Troy while the poet simultaneously conjures up modern academia and contemporary office life. Here’s the unpleasant heart of the poem,

            Poetry no wisdom withstands the test

               of blood: when mind and body clash

         the mind’s the one whose opposition’s rash

                        Killing liquid work’s dust

         Our craving for passion quenched by a crimson lust

           What can an office offer but a cursed

                 routine an inane trivial bore?

           A water cooler doesn’t slake the thirst

              of blood that rages for a taste of war

       a horde of disappointed men have dreams

    fired by bursting flares and female screams

The rhymes lighten the content thereby creating an odd but interesting counterpoint. I very much like this poem.

Skewing the Roman Catholic papacy can get old quickly and is not my cup of tea. However when a bit of compressed wit like the poem Habemus Papum nudges me I can’t resist. Habemus Papum, as announced by a cardinal from St. Peter’s Basilica after a papal election concludes, means “we have a pope.” Meinke appears to have tired of Vatican officialdom and its moribund language. He celebrates/laments in this part of the piece,

                        O goodum! Habemus papum

                             who’ll soon intone

                               the usual crapum

                        and the poor poor will weepum

Athletes and poets have a lot in common up to and including their need to be loved and appreciated in their own time. Unfortunately, the gods of sport and art operate on a different timeframe. In Meinke’s title poem, Lucky Bones, a tennis player of 78 years makes a great shot during a doubles game. He looks to his wife for approval as he had done as a younger man. But time has passed. Meinke concludes with pathos,

…his wife

who used to toss car keys

that flashed through light

like lucky bones crying Hey

         big fella think fast!

 And he thinks That’s

just past in my head

     like a re-eyed crow

and he’s thinking Christ he

could still catch them if she

   were still there to throw

Armed with talent enough to cause the doubling up in laughter of bards and bad reviewers everywhere, Meinke takes on the sonnet in his piece Front-Rhymed Easter Anti-Sonnet. His faux attack doesn’t miss a beat. Bucking revered tradition he even removes the end rhyme scheme and transplants it at the line beginnings. The untraditional cur! Consider these pretty funny lines,

    … Bad enough you have to use

  words without sinking the buggers in fourteen

  lines O Shakespeare Milton what made you

  choose them? O Formalist can’t you read the

signs? O Meinke why are you writing another?

            Who’s sick of sonnets?  Iamb  Iamb 

For Emily Dickinson it’s all about repressed sex and mannered poetry in Meinke’s excellent parody of that poet entitled Emily Dickinson Thinks about Buying a Ribbon. There’s something about Dickinson that invites quality parody. I’m thinking of X.J. Kennedy’s Emily Dickinson in Southern California. In Meinke’s poem Dickinson debates the color of her prospective ribbon almost to the point of indecency which, of course, is the point in this astonishingly deep piece,

I would like to get red—

Vermillion

       But father would disapprove

  A serious Blue—then—worn loose

  Like a Lover’s knot

        A decent one could strangle

  With it—I’d have wine

       Not the barrell’d rum of Father’s

  Then—let him come—

Meinke takes great pleasure in self-deprecation. He gets away with it because he is that good. His poem On Completing My PHD reads like an ongoing gag, but carries with in some quite serious undertones and unasked questions. The poet concludes by rattling off his educational symptoms,

And I who’ve developed

  a twitch a tic a cough

 can’t tell if I am finished

    or only finished off

    I learned Byron had a clubfoot

      Nietzsche’s health was drastic

         Poe was a dipsomaniac

        And I’m already spastic

 I learned that Shakespeare really lived

        so scholars have decided

   Though quite a few have studied me

       they’re not as sure that I did

The poet again summons up academia in a villanelle entitled The Old Professor. Keeping their eyes on Professor Warren’s nicotine-stained teeth as he enlightens his students on New England’s luminaries can prove a didactically sound methodology. Meinke explains,

                                                … Transfixed we

            watched you grind your nubby teeth to stumps

            waiting for you to spur us through our jumps

               from Cotton Mather up through Emily

                        Is every pilgrim happy on the bus?

             We never were sure when you were serious

                   chaining your Camels unpuritanically

                grinding your browning teeth to nubby stumps

              and tossing questions far from the syllabus:

                 Would you rather live on Broad or Beacon Street?

                        Are Smith and Bradford riding the same bus?

Peter Menke has been writing good, sometimes great poems for a long time. Whatever he has for breakfast I want to try. This poet’s in top form.


*** originally appeared in the Fox Chase Review