Poems I’ve Loved: May 2019

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
—Faulkner, Light in August

Isnt there something jean valentine.PNG
“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine, from her collection Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press.

“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine is a poet whose work I came to (and who I had the good fortune of meeting) in grad school; but I was younger then, and silence outside my own bothered me more. As I age, I’m finding I’m more comfortable with less said, and though I sometimes lean toward (or on) her more traditional (narrative, explicable, punctuated) poems, I’ve come to love her work. It’s an earned love, entered into with mutual respect and trust over time; to leave so much to the imagination, so much possibility, for the reader, so much space for our subconsciouses to fill in and potentially drown her sharp-quiet thoughts on the page, is certainly an act of respect and trust.

But this isn’t to say these poems are without a dramatic pulse. To the contrary. In a world of jeering, a whisper can be twice as terrifying as a scream, and there is much more in less but an honest-less than in confident hyperbole.

This poem is a little bit more “accessible” than the typical Valentine, even in Shirt in Heaven, a book about memory and grief, and how we never really leave either, but maybe it’s because there’s a comfort in the company.

This elegy doesn’t reveal itself as an elegy until the last stanza. Before, it’s about mis-belonging, about trying to figure out or locate the parts of the self (the parts “like dogs,” “like trains leaving,” “like a gun”). What is a self, a person, made of? And if we’re made of all these parts that only appear at night, or that leave, or that threaten or protect (or both), all these parts that change, how do we keep a hold on ourselves? How do we keep it together?

This poem begins with questions, maybe rhetorical, maybe wanting affirmation from this person who, we later learn, has died. “Am I this? Am I that? Aren’t I like this and this and part that?” The speaker using “Isn’t” instead of “Is” makes for leading questions; a belief that there is indeed something in her like a gun. (It’s the difference between someone asking you “Do you think it’s rude to …?” and “Don’t you think it’s rude to … ?” The “not” implies that the person asking expects you to agree.)

At any rate, the speaker’s sure what kind of person she wants to be but isn’t: the loud squirrel that begs at the porch. And I wonder, what is it about that squirrel’s existence that’s desirable? That its desire is so out-in-the-open?

And here, where she might lose me (and also maybe because I tire of repeated words joined by an ampersand, which seems a little Literary for me), she does the oddest, most beautiful thing. It’s not just us creatures (the speaker, the dogs, the squirrel, bees) who want something (wanting having a double meaning of desiring and lacking); even the inanimate objects might: “wooden planks, / wanting something.” But what could wooden planks want? “To go back into / a tree?”

These two lines contain all the magical thinking of a great grief or great children’s book–a depth and humor and achy longing that have kept me renewing this book to re-read this poem. Here is where the speaker reveals herself and the poem turns: It’s about wanting to return to a place and time that are gone, about being without a path back.

Except in art, where we can hold on, keep the dead living. In this way, the poem is an ars poetica (a poem about poetry), which I usually despise, because they’re often highfalutin and either don’t make much sense to me or, conversely, they oversimplistically overstate how poetry changes the world. Yet, I like Valentine’s message here because it isn’t so hopeful as resurrection. It’s sad, like being the last customer to leave the bar is sad, like waiting for a phone call is sad; an unwillingness to say goodbye. But every miracle is part sad. And yes, this is miraculous, too, that there’s a place available to meet our dead, to grow our planks back into trees that the hungry dogs of us can look to or lie under.

Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats^

This one’s also a poem about memory saves us or about how the false stories we tell ourselves about future possibility save us from the “pavements grey.” I’ve been reading it often to my belly button/kiddo in utero, in hopes they’ll like it when they move out (of my uterus). It feels good to read out loud, especially the part about “the bee-loud glade.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite songs, “Tall Pines,” a bluegrass tune about the memory of home, leaving it, and returning to die, which also is bucolic and recalls the sound of bees, almost as though written from the perspective of Yeats’ speaker if he did return as an older man: “I’ll never forget the morning I left / The hum of the bees in the hay: / The farther I walked, the louder they talked— / How silent it seems here today.” The bee sounds aren’t there; the trees are taller; there’s a gravestone meant for the singer.

Valentine and Yeats don’t attempt what the bluegrass musicians do, or not quite as fully. They aren’t ready for death themselves, despite what they might imply; or ready or not, they go on living. They don’t return to their Lake Isles; they can’t return to their person yet except for in poetry, the writing of which is an embrace of life. (In something as musical as “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the repetition of the poem aloud does this, underscores its vivacity.)

Yeats doesn’t attempt to force the plank into tree; rather, he remains on the pavement, the musicality what allows the memory to dwell so that he can “hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Still, the poet behind the speaker hints to us that this place isn’t real, or isn’t real in the way memory or hope presents it: at noon, the sky is purple, for instance.

Valentine is more outwardly self-aware, she knows she’s clinging, but in her acknowledgement of clinging of distance, isn’t she closer to obtaining the object of her affection, this lost person, through that person’s own words?

Yeats’ speaker embraces memory (and its sister nostalgia) without questioning its illogic; Valentine’s embraces memory despite its illogic, as a means to an end.

And what is it about loss and bees?* Isn’t there something?

If you enjoyed this postsign up for my monthly letter, and get essays on the creative process, plus some sweet jams, poems I like, and other tasty tidbits. Order my poetry collection, Rodeo in Reverse, here.

^Hear Yeats read it himself here. (And you can listen to scholars talk about the poem, and “kill it” to understand it, which, sigh, scholarship.)

*Coincidental: Plath wanted her bee poems to be the last in Ariel, though they’re realer (less bucolic) than the bees of the others here; her hives having swarms and stings, unlike Yeats’.

 

Poems I’ve Loved This Month: September 2017

Photo of the back of a cream-colored brick building with a gray door. The diagonal wrought-iron (cream, rusting) of the fire escape and balcony extend as diagonal shadows on the wall.

After working on my own manuscript in what seemed like in total solitude the past several years, I realize I need to get back to reading more poems. Now that my book’s getting published, the whir of excitement was quickly followed by the clunk of recognition: It’s time to return to reading new poetry. I miss it. I don’t recognize it (in a nice way). I’m starting this monthly post in an effort to read more and think more deeply about new poems, and also to share ones that I find especially resonant.

Selection from Rosalie Moffett’s Nervous System

I’ve enjoyed collecting the bits and pieces of this longer work as I’ve seen it spin out and out over the past year or so (more?) in journals. This piece features a spider dream that the speaker interprets to being about her mother and her mother’s health. As the mother’s health deteriorates, doesn’t some part of the speaker?

         … the idea of a spider the brain holds

like a lit match, a little request
for venom, a little
like my mother: her blue arm, her self

which held my self, an idea
of me, until I was real.

Facticity holds this poem (and its speaker) together: spider facts, Google-able dream interpretation facts, dog agility facts. It moves between a tender honesty, a searching frankness, a speaker who wants to be told how it really is while maybe avoiding how it really is if how it really is is too bad. I love this poem, in all its pieces, especially this one. (Also, I cannot get the lineation right on this (Coding!), so please do read the whole poem as it’s written.)

Read the rest here at Beloit Poetry Journal.

If you like it, buy her collection June in Eden.

*Rosi is a friend, but isn’t it great when you can admire a friend’s work?

Allison C. Rollins’ “Word of Mouth”

This floored me. I read it in the print issue on a Friday night after seeing someone on Twitter hyping it. (See? Twitter is not a total waste.) It tells the history of America and a life through teeth, beginning with George Washington’s (the facts about his false teeth are incredible), and takes us (where else?) but to memory and to the library, where the speaker tracks changes and thinks of faces as abacuses, of her mother and grandmother, of the future through the past. This poem sews together beauty and ugliness or rather, just refuses to separate them, which is one of the best (truest) things maybe an artist can do. “The darkening of fractures is rather curious,” the speaker says, and I’m still thinking about the fractures in my understanding of history and the fractures in this poem—the two places where it stops to begin a new section.

… The forgetting makes the
present tense possible. Memory is the gravity
of the mind. All the icebergs have started to
melt, milky objects left hanging by a
string, the doorknobs means to an end.

Read the rest at Poetry.

Erika Sanchez’s “Saudade”

For my own learning purposes, I’m especially interested (though haven’t yet parsed out) how this poem builds and moves. This sensual stunner begins in ordinary (if synesthetic) moments in “the republic of flowers”—rain sounds, hanging clothes—and ends with this marvel of language and texture and image:

… sealed honey never spoils
won’t crystallize I saw myself snapping
a swan’s neck I needed to air out
my eyes the droplets on a spiderweb
and the grace they held who gave me
permission to be this person to drag
my misfortune on this leash made of gold

I first read the word saudade, a Portuguese word without a direct translation into English, in a note almost 10 years ago. (It actually appears a few times in my forthcoming book.) Since, I’ve been drawn to it wherever I hear or see it.

Read the rest at Poets.org.

Lessons on Expulsion is headed to my mailbox stat. Take my money.

Katie Condon’s “On the Seventh Day God Says: What You’ve Got Is Virgin Charm & a Knife in Your Pocket.”

When I read this poem I laughed, gasped, and sighed. It was a really weird noise. Appropriate, as this is a poem of great weirdness. The speaker has the kind of intimacy with God that allows for irreverence, but still, at the end of the day, if only half-heartedly, haphazardly, but maybe with a little wishing, still telling God what you want—maybe just in case. Haphazardly because, well, God never gets it right. Or God does but a little too. This poem, maybe also like “Saudade,” and maybe not, is about the nostalgia for something that never was or at least that won’t be again. How nostalgia (both looking forward and back, as Rollins’ poem reminds me “Memory is about the future, not the past“) is inherently sensual, corporeal, and a little lonely.

God says, Thou shalt not kill.
& I’m like, But what about with my eyes.

I never asked for the capacity to love
ugly things, but here I am.

I say, I like my men smooth & far away, reticent
as a bookshelf.

& God butts in: I can do that for you.

Read all of this poem at BOAAT.

*Katie is also a friend. Here, too, grateful to be in the position of admiring a friend’s work.

Selection from Wendell Berry’s “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer”

Here’s one of my great-aunt’s favorite poems and now one of mine. The last year has been a bit rough, and this is one that I might as well get tattooed on the back of my eyelids, except it’s small enough to learn by heart quickly and big enough to fill it.

When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.