Poems I’ve Loved: December 2017

It’s the end of a year and fittingly and by happenstance, I loved (short,) end-stopped poems this month.

“[Remarkable the litter of birds]” by Emily Skaja

From the start I was told I was a powerful speaker I was told when & how I should speak
It’s true I made a feast of my own misery after all I was 29
I’d had a narrow escape from becoming Julian of Norwich

This poem transmutes again and again, but bookending in flight—the deathly flight of the city birds at the beginning, the bees stopped mid-pollination to be consumed—and disappearing acts—the “special crew” of people who sweep away evidence of violence, of failure, the beautification. I’ve been thinking a lot about disappearing acts over the last year, mainly women’s (which is touched on in this poem—the speaker asking “Is it antifeminist to starve myself over a boy?”); but this erasure of violence, male or natural or bureaucratic—the assistance in disappearing, the poem dawned that on me. Yes, dawned with a direct object.

The constant in the poem is the form, its stability and confidence, even with the punctuation erased. The lack of punctuation and longer lines is in tension with how the entire poem is end-stopped, which adds authority; it allows the pace to build, release, build, release, each line break a gasp for breath between punches. I love a poem about uncertainty and anxiety written with authority.

Meanwhile, the poet is doing something spectacular with tone: the outlook is bleak, it’s pretty much Handmaid’s Tale, yet, she inserts flowers, she has perspective and humor: understanding the reality of falling apart around 30 and how young 30 is and therefore how hilarious, in retrospect. (It makes me think of a conversation I had with a friend about someone so young he didn’t even realize he was young. That.) She does this swiftly–in the three lines above, saving her former self from the threat of Julian of Norwichdom (a state of being a highly literate writer nun). The poem confesses how writers “feast” on their miseries.

The speaker offers a sort-of epithalamium to marriages who watch her with bees in her mouth. The violence still happens, the hurt still happens, but it’s pretty. I wonder about this in a poem about the coexistence of love and violence; I wonder if maybe the only way people who are brutalized can control violence is through beautification or acknowledgement, sweeping the streets or opening a mouth full of a bees. Can one read a contemporary poem with bees in it and not think of Plath? Inserting that ghost into a poem and the poem still standing on its own is a miracle and a testament to the work its writer has done. Praise be for this one.

Read it in its entirety (it’s short) here, and start the New Year wondering whether you’d live your life over.

“Spell Against Gods” by Patrick Phillips

Let them be vain.
Let them be jealous.

Let them, on their own earth,
await their own heaven.


And when they call out
in prayers, in the terrible dark,

let us be present, and watching,
and silent as stars.

If you read my last post, you know how I came to Phillips’ poetry. But it’s not the poem that was most affecting that was my favorite this month. Instead, it’s another, more lyric poem from his same collection Elegy for a Broken Machine.

This near-litany shows the power of anaphora when used sparingly, when inverted. “Let them” repeats itself throughout the poem, syntax shifts to enhance its musicality, so the rhythm exists but isn’t tiresome. Like a bass guitar, it always comes in on time, heavy, but sparingly. “Let them” puts the stank on this poem. (Apologies to this poem.) I’m trying to learn to love anaphora again because I learned over the last decade of my life not to trust it: Its musicality can hide nonsense, unoriginal conceits, all number of ills. Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean its good. But in poetry, in my opinion, if it doesn’t sound good, it ain’t good either. “Spell Against Gods” meets the mark.

The conceit isn’t totally original: “What if gods had to deal with being human and we got to play god?” The gods in this poem are watching us passively like a TV, and so maybe they deserve our cruelty. The word “let” is a passive one, but of course, sometimes it’s the thoughtlessness, the casual cruelties, that cause the most pain.

I love what this poem does to stars, too. Often an image used as a sentimental symbol, “Spell Against Gods” is disgusted with them, how they stare down at us, with their heavens hunkered there, not helping. The description given is not what the stars are but an absence of what they could be, a profound disappointment: they don’t speak. A human might want to disappoint as the stars do, glinting like the tips of faraway knives.

Read the whole poem here.

“Too Anxious for Rivers” by Robert Frost

The truth is the river flows into the canyon
Of Ceasing-to-Question-What-Doesn’t-Concern-Us,
As sooner or later we have to cease to be somewhere.
No place to get lost like too far in the distance.
It may be a mercy the dark closes round us
So broodingly soon in every direction.

Grateful to Mario Chard for sharing this poem on Facebook. To be honest, I have not thought about why I love this poem at all. I just do, and plan on memorizing it in the New Year. Hope you’re 2017 “’twas the effort, the essay of love.”

Read it here.

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Elegy for 2017: Right Poem, Right Time

My view during this instance of right poem, right time, and elegy

On my last day off, I was doing one of my favorite things: reflecting on the past year and planning for the coming one — essentially, writing. (In the third grade I created homework for myself. This is who I am.) The radio was on — some background music, the tea was hot, a chance of snow that never came; it was a woo-woo person’s cozy dream. I sat with my head tilted like a confused dog and stared; wrote and wrote. The radio program changed to Fresh Air, and I turned the sound down so I could remain focused. Yet.

I didn’t recognize the name of the guest, Patrick Phillips, immediately, but I did recognize the book he’d written, Blood at the Root. Terry Gross and Phillips talked about Forsyth County, Georgia, its history of racist violence, and Phillips’ upbringing there. I drifted in and out of the conversation, in and out of my writing. Specifically, I was reflecting on my father’s heart attack and open heart surgery.

Gross typically lands transitions (I take notes as someone who’s not), but in a bit of a stretch, in what felt like out of nowhere, she asked Phillips about his father’s open heart surgery. My head shot up. What?

She asked him to read the poem he wrote about it.

I hadn’t made the connection he was the poet Patrick Phillips. I had never heard this poem. This episode was a re-run, and what an odd coincidence it aired on the same day, at the same moment, I had been writing about my own father.

Writing is powerful in that it makes us pay attention: Phillips’ poem changed me, if only for an afternoon; my own writing put me in the place (literally) to hear his poem.

I sat at the dining room table, staring into the radio’s yellow fog — ON — and the feelings came.

This is the first sentence from the poem he read, “Elegy outside the ICU,” as it appears in his collection Elegy for a Broken Machine:

They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest

then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,

which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students

took turns cranking
a tiny metal jig
that split his ribs

just enough for them
to fish the heart out —
lungs inflating

and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines

as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries

with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg.

To me, this poem shows strength in its willingness to observe, its looking at and saying what is. Like most courageous acts, this poem is evidence of vulnerability. (What he does with syntax is worth another post for another day.)

I did not witness any of this in my family’s experience. I saw my dad the night before his surgery and hours after — waiting, not watching, being my chief role.

*

In my family, someone cracking her knuckles who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone crying who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone missing an earring is an emergency. Painting a room only hours before guests arrive is an emergency. An actual emergency, however, is anything but.

Shortly after I found out my dad was having a “heart event” (his words), I learned from my sister that he had talked with her to make sure she could stop by and feed the dog dinner. In the same way in which he might if he were working late. It wasn’t until they told him he would need a procedure that he decided to alert us.

Certain members of my family would tell you this sort of stoicism is a show of strength; they loathe criers and huggers and direct conversation, and after three years of art school, I can’t blame them. But often stoicism isn’t stoic — a radical acceptance of reality — at all; instead, it feels like denial, the opposite of strength. Our weaknesses may be what allow us to weather a crisis. Weakness (if unconfessed) may be one sort of salvation.

Once doctors determined my dad would need open heart surgery, my sister leveled with me that it would not be overreacting to come home.

There, the situation was far from humorless: For instance, the night before the surgery, my dad had a second “heart event” much more painful than the first. (Not the funny part, I’m getting there.) As the nurse rushed to her computer coordinating with a doctor, checking whatever nurses check in these situations, my dad’s roommate kept calling for the nurse — not his nurse, using the call button, the nurse trying to stop my dad’s “heart event.” She told him time again to use his call button. Finally, peeved, she said, “What do you want?”

“Could you, uh, get me a Heath bar and some apple juice?”

*

After my dad’s surgery, it took me a while before I wanted to walk into the ICU to see him. My mom had warned us: He won’t look like himself. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. (He was unable to speak, and for the most part, he was asleep anyway.) When I walked into the ICU, I was nervous. He would be in Room 1. Room 1 was just inside the automatic doors. I looked to my right. There, my father, hair shocked gray, face gray-brown, swaddled in a bud of blue blankets. My eyes opened wide and welled with tears, made hopeless eye contact with the nurse, who whispered, “Your dad’s in Room 7.”

Oh.

The sight of my dad was still humbling — intubated, like a submarine full of portholes, swimming through what? the man who had carried me until I was too big to carry lying drugged on a bed, waiting to make certain small gestures as a sign of maturation, of health. But after Room 1, what a relief. He was the basic peach of many white people — not his colors, tanned leather and red, but a color of the living.

*

By the time my dad was moved out of ICU, my immediate family was exhausted and on each other’s nerves. One edgy, irritable, unable to stifle any comment or let any errant noise go; one traditional and a bit of a martyr; one cruel because she is the most fragile of us all. At one point I used pantomimes for eating cheeseburgers when my dad tried to blame my mom for his dietary habits. We are not people whose great strength reveals itself in times of trouble. But we are people who show up for one another. We sit in waiting rooms and endure rude doctors and frantically demand nurses switching shifts give showers pre-op and work our ways through mazes to find bathrooms and then attempt to relay directions. We drink and eat like gluttons because we are gluttons and know we will not eat like this again for a long time. Food has been there for us. For me, so has poetry. My dad’s life restored to us, given, gifted, like this poem was to me, except I would have never known the difference if the poem hadn’t arrived in my little house. This revelation, a paper dressing gown, leaves much to be desired, some embarrassment, more questions than answers — EKG, meter, heart, syntax, morphine, mystery. Enjambment for now instead of end-stop.

Phillips’ elegy for a father still living is really an elegy for a moment, a certain understanding of self and relation to mortality and parents. An elegy more like a notch nicked into a tree trunk or a glance at a watch — realization at the time it is: incredible and brutal and here already. It’s usually our understanding of time, our marking of it, that adds meaning and heartache. But an elegy isn’t just mourning loss, it’s freeing space for what is and what is to come. One year passes and another, like a lizard tail ripped off and growing back, comes to take its place. One view of the self passes and another, like skin over a scab, grows over. I love my family newly now; I love writing newly, too; love a never-ending autotomy; the elegy for what once was opens, like a cavity in a chest, like ribs, “just enough … to fish the heart out.”

You can listen to the full episode of Fresh Air with Patrick Phillips here.

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