The Best American Poetry

At twilight the locusts begin [by Emma Trelles]

                                                   

         

The moment you put the blah-blah-blah on it, it destroys the whole thing. 

I am currently fixated with the late painter Joan Mitchell.

My obsessions with artists usually come courtesy of a documentary film, one I can record (let us now praise the power of the DVR!) and watch repetitively until I can quote, from memory, most of the declarations made by its subject.

My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields of...It's more like a poem, no? And that's what I want to paint.

This morning I saw Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter for the sixth time since I recorded it in May. I could explain away my compulsion by saying that I wanted to write about her today, and what better way to do so than with her rough and quick voice in my head, or to follow her slight frame as it moved among her lyric and hypnotic pictures.

I wanted to see the small town of Vétheuil where she lived and painted, just outside of Paris, and how she dissolved its light and trees.  

 

  I wanted to hear about her time in New York with Hans Hofmann and de Kooning and Pollock. I wanted to close the blinds against the glare of July, sit in a cool, dark room, and see with Mitchell's eyes: her dogs, her sky, the importance she placed on the "feeling of a dying sunflower."

Mitchell possessed much of the contradictions found in her work. She could be cutting and abrupt, but she was also  humble. She didn't think her work held light, for example. She didn't think many painters could contain what St. Augustine called the queen of all colors. She thought Franz Kline knew how, and of course, Matisse.

He has light as well as color. Oh, he's fabulous. Look at it! Come on, baby...

Open Window, 1905, by Henri Matisse

The road to knowing Mitchell's work is mapped with deep blues and yellows culled from the hot heart of summer. Her blacks are penetrating, her brushwork both fierce and fragile. Her mother was a poet, and when Mitchell was a girl, she also wrote poems. In the film, she recites the last line of one she remembers writing before her father pushed her to pick one art and master it.

...and bleakness comes through the trees without sound.

Mitchell went on to collaborate with several poets, among them James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and Nathan Kernan. But the title of this post comes from a recent poem by Mark Doty, and I would not want to be the one to dismiss ekphrasis as anything less than the meeting of two makers.

To Joan Mitchell, by Mark Doty

At twilight the locusts begin,

waves and waves,

nothing to do with lamentation...

...    like her great canvas

in four panels,

continuous field so charged

as to fill the room in which it hangs

with an inaudible humming...

Jet Blue and Brooklyn Ferry by Mark Doty

I'm writing from JFK, sitting at the gate at the Jet Blue terminal waiting for my plane to Ft Lauderdale. I spent all yesterday at Rutgers in New Brunswick, giving a talk on Whitman, meeting lots of students and faculty, and generally having a fine time.  My talk was called "Whitman in Tears," and the amazing graphics people at Rutgers had made one of the best posters ever: an image of Whitman in his guise as the "Good Gray Poet," long beard, long hair, crumpled wayfarer hat, crinkled eyes gazing directly at the viewer. It's a beautiful, complex image, and they'd printed it large, on a sepia field, with the title of the talk in cursive beneath the beard and then a smaller picture of yours truly off to the right. My head and Whitman's are tilted so that we seem to be giving each other the eye. The poster was everywhere, and in the room where I gave the talk, a whole bank of Walt Whitmans stood behind me -- consoling, challenging, full of presence. It felt a little like the startling passage in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" when Whitman says to his readers that he's thought of us "long and hard" before we were born, that he is speaking directly to us know. "How do you know," writes, "but that I am enjoying this?" 

And now I am going to Florida. Warmth and moist air sound like heaven, though in truth it was a pretty nice morning in New Jersey. 

Snow, New Books, and Fire by Mark Doty

Yesterday we had a thaw, and in the evening you could actually smell mud or moist earth on the air,
a sure sign of spring. It's one of those sensations you don't realize has been missing till it's back, and suddenly, ah, the smell of earth. And then when we woke up this morning it was snowing. Again.

I'm posting early today because early this afternoon I have my last class before spring break, and then we're driving home to NYC. I thought I'd just list a few great new books of poetry here, just to do my bit to shine a little more light on some terrific work.

James Hall's NOW YOU'RE THE ENEMY is new from the University of Arkansas Press. This is a first book by an amazing poet who takes the stuff of family narrative and turns it into myth, fable, and parable His poems are headlong and nervy, and hugely rewarding.

Sean Hill's BLOOD TIES AND BROWN LIQUOR is also a first book, this time from the University of Georgia
Press. Hill grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, and his book's a kind of ghosting and ventriloquizing of the voices of black Milledgeville throughout the 20th century. Much grace and formal strength combined here with an ear for talk, the particular cadences of local speech.

Marie Howe's new collecton, THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME, is fresh from Norton, and as rigorously made and as achingly alive as her last book, WHAT THE LIVING DO. Her great gift is to locate the transcendent -- the crisis and opportunity of being -- in the daily moment, in the web of relations between us.

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I finished this post and realized I'd forgotten to say that my own FIRE TO FIRE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS was published by HarperCollins on Tuesday.  It's a curious, interesting thing to do, to make a choice among one's own poems. More to say on that, but I'll have to save it for tomorrow.

Difficulty Part 2: reading Susan Howe by Mark Doty

Thinking about what's difficult in poetry makes me want to talk about a book I've been reading with
great pleasure, Susan Howe's SOULS OF THE LABADIE TRACT, which New Directions published in 2007.
The contexts of these poems are complex ones, but Howe's book artfully establishes the grounds of her inquiry. She begins with two bits of prose, the first describing the Puritan preacher and writer Jonathan Edwards, and how he'd ride through the wild country of Western Massachusetts thinking through his essays and sermons, and scribbling on scraps of paper which he'd pin to his clothes, using their location as a mnemonic device. It's a beautiful figure of the poet, wearing words in the wilderness, clothing the body in fragments of text. Then Howe offers a riveting ars poetica, a description of her research time in the library at Yale, the crumbling books of American language, fragments of history. Such dislocated bits of speech float up even through her prose.

"Often walking alone in the stacks,' she writes, "surrounded by the raw material paper afterlife, my spirits were shaken by the great ingathering of titles and languages. This may suggest vampirism because while I like to think I write for the dead, I also take my life as a poet from their lips, their vocalisms, their breath."

The vocalisms and breath of the dead are indeed present in the short poems that follow, each a small rectangle of text in the center of the page composed of six to eight lines. There's a strange and exhilarating feeling of space between words and phrases, as if these fragments had sifted out of those library stacks, out of the gathered words and yellowed books our ancestors have become. Howe's
especially interested in the Labadists, a group of 17th century utopians of whom almost nothing remains,
seeking the faint echoes of their presence, and her tracing of a kind of ancestry leads her to the doorstep of none other than Wallace Stevens -- who also was interested in tracing his ancestry, and who seems one of the most potent of the souls that ghost Howe's own poetics. A group of poems that bear Stevens' address as a title have the odd sense of being whispered,  half-overheard conversations with spirits of the past. And, as in Stevens' own poems, they try to worry out the nature of beauty. This poem might be spoken by Stevens in his study, or by Howe in her own study, or Howe looking into Wallace Stevens' window on Westerly Terrace in Hartford.

Face to the window I had

to know what ought to be

accomplished by precedecessors

in the same field of labor

because beauty is what is

What is said and what this

it -- it in itself insistent is 

Those last three lines are such a ringing esthetic credo. Like all Howe's work,  they ask for full engagement, inviting the reader work out the relations between these words and lines, relations which are not fully determined already but contain the possibilities for multiple meanings. But how rewarding this work is, and how startling that such a forceful and intelligent definition of beauty -- that old Romantic problem! -- is made here in 17 words, most of them tiny, and together they make an abstract and irresistible music:  "it -- it in itself insistent is" is music for ear and mind.

And these poems, of course, would be impossible without the poet's allegiance to her method:
her crabbed, curious, gnomic collecting, her cobbling of order in the detritus of time.

You don't read such a book straight through and be done with it; you don't expect each part to yield meaning right away, and some of it may never come clear. That's what it's like, listening to history: confusion and multiplcity, glimmers of clarity, waves of inscrutable speech. How's book part library, part forest, spaces in which an American woman is walking and thinking with words pinned to all of her clothes.

Poetry, Difficulty, and a Very Annoying Word, by Mark Doty

I've just gotten home from school (I'm a guest teacher at Cornell University in Ithaca this semester)
which means I've walked a bike-path through the woods, still ice-coated from this weekend's storm. It's amazing. When the wind blows the trees crackle, with a sound that's a bit like hissing oil in a skillet and a bit like the sound that that the highest lick of seawater makes as the tide comes in and sinks into dry sand. I like this walk and it's a good time to sort through the conversation and events of the workshop I've just taught.

Today we were looking at poems by Terrance Hayes from WIND IN A BOX. My workshop's centered on the poetic sequence, so we're interested in poems composed in groups, or longer poems in sections. I think my students were slightly frazzled by the daylight savings timeshift today, and I was feeling sort of spun-around myself, because right before class I'd been reading an essay by Charles Harper Webb in the current issue of THE WRITERS CHRONICLE. Webb's essay concerns difficulty in poetry, which he thinks there's too much of; I paraphrase here, but he seems to feel that many poets write for an elite group of other poets who appreciate coded gestures and opaque language that may be incomprehensible to the general reader. The thing that startled me about the article was that Webb says that such poetry has turned away from "natural human taste."

Whoa. It's clear that it's in the nature of human beings to make things, but as to calling what we make "natural"  or "artificial" -- well, that's a scary business. Webb feels that poems that are readily understood by the general reader (he cites Billy Collins and Sharon Olds as examples) are natural, and that more demanding work isn't; astonishingly, Webb identifies the general reader as someone who'd probably like A Prairie Home Companion.

I could talk about what I disagree with in this position for several weeks worth of blogging, but suffice to say that the presumption inherent in calling any kind of art "natural" is unnerving, because of course it implies that whatever the critic doesn't care for will go tumbling into the abyss of the other category. "Natural" has a long history of ugly usage. There are plenty of states remaining where I could be arrested, if the authorities so desired, for my private practice of "unnatural acts," and one doesn't have to look far back in time to find the ways in which what was presumed to be "natural" for women or for people of color was in fact simply an expression of the prejudices of the moment. "Natural," as they say, pushes my buttons.

I can only be grateful that poets refuse to take such a position seriously. The two greatest of American poets were, of course, practioners of disparate poetics practically incomprehensible in their own time; how long did it take Whitman and Dickinson to find their audience? Should they have attempted to speak to the "general reader"? (Whitman, of course, did so, as time went on, and not always with very happy results. His great poems are the demanding, uncompromising ones.)

What looks difficult to us is often merely different, and isn't it a pleasure to encounter what we don't know how to read yet? There ought to be room in the huge house of American poetry for all sorts of practice, from the plainspoken to the highly wrought, from the direct to the encoded, from the open to the secretive. And besides, if what we strive for is to be "natural" -- well, which to prefer, the artifice of the spider or of the bee, the termite or the paper wasp, all makers of intricate systems?  I am not convinced that nature is all that plainspoken.

Okay, enough rant. I was thinking about my class, and about how my dear and earnest Cornell students, who dwell in a culture that places great value upon intellectual achievement, on working hard
to find correct answers, seemed to struggle with finding their way in Terrance's poems. What I understood, after we talked about two pieces, was that they weren't quite hearing his tone; they hadn't found access to the voice that informs the work, the over-riding or indwelling current of feeling.
For them, the poems were emotionally difficult - which presents another, more interesting dimension
to Webb's argument. There are many sorts of difficulty, after all, and what "difficult" is depends on who's doing the reading.