Levinity

Then today we got in the New Yorker, and there was Philip Levine’s “Pennsylvania Pastoral.”   I’ve always seemed to like Levine more in the abstract than the particular.  Love his common-sensical approach, but never all fired up about any particular work.  Now that’s changing.  As I recall, the last work I reviewed of his really banged the gong for me.  This one feels a little more like a comfortable old shoe.  No flash — he eschews the stuff as trash (sorry) but a scene and a theme you don’t much find in any other top dog poet.  He’s someone, as they say, familiar with factory work.  Having done my ten-hour days on the line back in the day, that appeals.  In this, it’s a moment when their car breaks down.  A common occurence, and he celebrates it as such — the immediate mystery, “It simply stopped // because it had to…” and the diagnosis as salt-of-the-earth types will deliver it, “he pops // the hood they discover the fan // belt has vanished…”  How many poets out there are uncomfortable identifying a fan belt, much less a missing one?  Wave your hands.  I love that he makes his machine “whimsical.”  I love that he understates the ending.  Just a good little flash of America, of anywhere in the world, really, and our commonality.

Still, I’m going to give best poem of the issue to “Lot’s Wife,” by Gary J. Whitehead.  There’s just enough flash “after the last strings of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air” and insight — the tension between a girl who has become something extraordinary, and the common folk around her, who “with chisel and knife…chipped at her violently.”  I’ll be honest, I think it’s only that I aim for a certain amount of flash and insight in my own work that makes me prefer this poem, and that just by a hair — both works are powerful in understatement, both very much worth reading and savoring.

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

 

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Played Threepenny on My Knee

The Threepenny Review came rolling home today, and I read the poems to my wife, for us to enjoy and see what we thought.  One that caught us up, wrinkled our brows, was “The Last Theorum,” by Georgia Tiffany.  I haven’t encountered her work before; this poem was interestingly complex, and I was especially glad to read a poem about mathematics that wasn’t a simpering thing, that took its theme seriously.  “My father being the one who chose // to slip out of the equation // one plus one equals three.”  There are various ways to take that line, each somewhat unsettling.  It’s a poem that deserves more than one quick read, so I intend to return to it. 

Andrea Cohen wrote “Hubcap,” a poem that quietly reveals sadness to its reader.  Kind of a movie poem, (actually a TV poem), with cuts and jumbles, but understated.  Beautiful.  “He didn’t even // own a car, his stunned son said…”  The line jolted me.

We both loved Leslie Elizabeth Adams’ “A Deconstruction: Instead, the Condemned House Becomes a Stand of Bur Oak.”  I know, I know, the title alone should condemn this to absurdity, but it actually works, in a freaky way.  There’s a note of hidden fun, maybe not so hidden, in this tale of a house becoming a forest again.  “Each day, the crack // of another blossom through spackle.”  And how about “tight pink commas of nascent mice” — boy, you can just see the little blind babies in their nest.  Great work.

Dean Y0ung delivers a brilliant poem, “Discharged Into Clouds,” the narrator having had (we assume) a heart transplant, now working his way back to health in the hospital: “never far // above the earthworms, never far // below the sky.”  I want to have written that line!  Makes the hair rise on my arms. 

Even so, Sandy and I still agree the best poem of the issue is “The Stairs,” by Michael Chitwood.  A woman, old now, navigating the stairs she has traveled since her children were very little.  “each step a rest, // each one a chance to catch her breath, // to steady and study ankle and wrist, // those necessary narrows…” An incantatory work, bringing forth the woman’s whole world to us, the struggle she has now.  Metaphors laid in carefully, carefully, flickers of illumination here and there.

See?  Poetry of weight and worthiness IS still being published in America, and The Threepenny is a big contributor to that.

Poetry Peace,

P M F Johnson

 

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Crazy Hazy Days Of Poesy

Went through the latest Crazy Horse magazine, then reread the poems again today.  I had a hard time getting into the poems, honestly.  Most are pretty academic — which let’s define as puzzle poems, written so as to make it difficult to figure them out, to give the reader the joy of doing so.  A strategy that allows them to be published in heavy-weight journals, and taken seriously by academics, but which may explain why few people read this stuff.  With that warning, onward:

Renee Ashley wrote “She Thinks about the Shapes Things Take,” using all the modern tools of the trade, starting with an offbeat metaphor, “She is her own apple her own worm and wax”; discarding puncuation except capital letters (so you know how the sentences divide); putting the leap (a jump to a completely different idea) up front rather than near the end of the poem; inserting borderline nonsense  sentences: “The idea you see is a place the logic of what had to be done”; and using words to make you scramble to the dictionary: “Not aleatoric but divined” — at least we get a cool word out of the deal; with a general summary sentence at the end (which I thought was kind of frowned on anymore).  The poet has won a Pushcart, an NEA fellowship, and the Robert Winner Award, among many other honors.  Well, this poem does show a mastery of technique out the wazoo…

Molly Bashaw won the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize for “There Were No Mirrors in That Farmhouse,” which starts, “Peacocks screamed us into ourselves.”  I’m thinking the ‘us’ here means the various farmhouses narrating the poem (not explained, but the poem doesn’t make much sense to me if that’s not the conceit).  “When the wind rose at night we heard the barn swallows gather and land inside us.”  This poem I liked, actually.  Some interesting images.  “the hay bale // we threw down…seemed weightless and full of light.”   And a good ending line.

Deborah Bogen wrote “Barbed Wire”  which starts out as an extended metaphor about barbed wire, with some thought-provoking images: “when the sun sinks : I’m your tiara” but then seems to sort of lose focus.  (Note that the author has colons divide lines in the first two stanzes, then abandons them, which seems like a senseless decision to me).   The poem drifts off into some ideas that are tangential at best: “I’m the electric ohm lighting up your bridgey // neurons” and ends with what seems to me an irrelevant, non-rhyming couplet.  If anyone can explain the decisions in the latter stanzas, please do.  I do not claim to be an expert on the latest academic stylings, and lacking a more learned exegesis, I admit having difficulties with the second half of this poem.

Peter Cooley contributes “The Fist.”   “I found the sky within my opened hand.  // It really wasn’t what I had hoped for.”  See, it’s always a good sign when a poems starts with a humorous, or at least wry, tone — it implies the poet doesn’t take himself too seriously.  And while this poem is not comic, it is very worth reading:  “and pain, awakening, tells us where we are.”  With an excellent epiphany at the ending.  My vote for the best poem of the issue.

Another peace of poetry,

P M F Johnson

 

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Done by Dunn

New Poetry Mag in the mail today, always a joy.  I have to admit I went through all the commentary first, which I am often fas’kinated by — gets me leaping up and down sometimes, always satisfying.  This is the 100th year anniversary issue, evidently.  Been a while since Harriet Monroe started something down there in Chi town.  ;->

Stephen Dunn starts out the issue with “In Love, His Grammar Grew,” kind of a strange little ditty, a stirring of metapoem into a love poem, and reasonably funny, all things considered.  “His grammar grew // rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell // madly from the sky like pheasants…”  Okay, amusing more than funny, but I liked it.  Though I’ve seen a lot more pheasants fly off into the sky than fall out of it, but then I never really was a good wing shot, humbling as that is to admit.  “Light a candle behind a sentence // named Sheila…” Which is a really cool little image, if you try to picture it, the glow appearing through the cut-out letters, or something.  It’s Sheila the love centers around, you see.  I like Dunn’s way of looking at things, honestly.

I enjoyed the Michelle Boisseau poems, “Among The Gorgons” and “Death Gets Into The Suburbs.”  The former talks about the relationship between the narrator and the sea.  “I loved it, // mostly,  the need, how I fed the frantic.  // I’d skipped into that sea.  Certainly not // a girl, but I could still turn a head…”  Then, “Hiss of a match // snuffed with spit.  The sea had trotted off. // I stood in the stink of flapping fish.”  There’s a sexy undertow to all this, which I am not conveying here, but adds some fun as well, and another layer is added when it is read as it were written by a gorgon.  The latter poem maybe I like most because of the title.  Kind of a “who by fire,” recitation of the ways you can buy it in the suburbs.  “It whirls in the egg whites…death by taxi, by blood clot…”

Michael Ryan has a poem worth reading, “Hard Times,” which centers around a poor kid eating tiny pigs-in-a-blanket and wanting to get away from his family.  “They’re doom and shame and dumb pig fate. // I tell my Mom I think they’re great.”  One strength of the poem is the dynamic between the young-boy tone and the formality structure of the rhyme, and the tug-of-war between a formal rhythm and a colloquial language.

And my fav of the A.E. Stallings poems here is “After a Greek Proverb,” a villanelle that sticks religiously to the formal structure and rhyme, and yet is rewarding to read as the repeated lines take on added resonances through the poem.  “Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.”  Very hard to do, having written my share of failed villanelles, let me tell you.

Brava

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.

Related blog posts:

The New Yorker – Aug 13, 18

The New Yorker – July 23, 18

Rattle 60 – Summer 2018

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Speculatin’ Rhymes

Read the poetry in the Feb ’12 version of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and found the three poems quiet different, but all worth reading.  Kendall Evans and David C. Kopaska-Merkel wrote the poem with a long, entertaining title: “SubMicro-Text Message 3V45129XZ: to My A.I. Valentine” which is sort of an uptight  narrator’s yearning for the burning.  Prufrock among the stars, if you will: “& yet I dream of you, drowsy afternoons, // Your only flesh composed of internet connections, // Or metal robots probing barren moons.”  Fun and a cast-a-wide-net use of the language.  And getting the character of the narrator into a poem is tricky and worth homage, in my view.

Joe Haldeman contributed a tercet, “future history” which I re-read a few times: “Never got to Mars.  Only left their names // there on the moon.”  Spooky, and sad.  Poetry that produces true emotion is rare and wondrous.  Bravo.

But my favorite poem of the issue, by a hair, was a sonnet by William John Watkins, “The Atom’s Lattice Could Such Beauty Yield.”  It just pulled me right in with the images, and the development: “inside the matrix stone some fire // raged out of sight and sent its telltale glow // up the clear prisms of the shafts.”  Wow.  What a bold image.  And the poem gets better from there, an elegaic use of the language right at the end.  Just a beautiful work.  Well worth reading this month, people mine.

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

 

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Double Mags

Kind of an interesting idea for a poem in this week’s New Yorker, “Horse Piano,” by Anna McDonald.  A gabby, what-if style, saying take three legs off a horse, weld them onto a piano, “and you hire a guy to play it on the hour, so that everybody // will know…”  What?  Well, read the poem, of course, but my takeaway is that McDonald tried to push her idea as far as she could, make every sentence interesting, surprising, with a summation that satisfies.  Did she do so?  She’s in the New Yorker, folks!  And her gabby style makes the poem comfy, not threatening, not a work to make me all distant, analytical and critical.  So kudos to McDonald for an interesting, even delightful poem.

Julia Mishkin has a poem, “Sir Isaac Newton On Ms and Alchemy,” which confuses the bejeebers out of me.  “the way departed souls // are beyond the world // redeeming light from inertia // digging and planting herbs //to turn the digestive track // luminous…”  I need my belly aglow?  I got phosphorescent microbes or something?  I don’t know Newton’s writings, honestly, so maybe something in there explains this.  Mishkin evidently tries to push poetry to include some of the scientific thinking that has gone on in this world, and I’m all for that.  And she definitely has an ear for a turn of phrase.  I very much like that ‘redeeming light from inertia.’  I think there has to be room in poetry for all sorts, and she is definitely stretching poetry off in her own direction, so more power to her.  She’s keeping it intriguing.

Sun Magazine also came across the transom this week, and Alison Luterman had a poem, “Rocking Chair,” that is much more grounded than the Mishkin poem.  A discussion of who her mother was.  “humming a thin, sweet thread of a song.”  Eassay-like, except for the last line, that someone once said Berryman defined as “the leap.”  So, after all these sentences describing her mother, the end is “sweetness and ruin, voice of thin // milk, voice of broken glass.  And the trees outside the windows, bare, black-twigged, // reaching.”  Kind of a standard trope now in poetry, to have a last image that has nothing to do with the rest of the poem.  Keeps it all from being boring, maybe?  I don’t know.  But in this case it sure put me into my head, the analytical poet/critic, rather than the reader in the moment.  Generally I like Luterman’s poetry; with this one, I think it’s going to be a case of whether the poem sticks in my head over time.  Sometimes that’s the only way I can tell how powerful a poem truly is.  Meanwhile, she seems to have a cool mother. ;->

Finally, with “Snowstorm,” byJohn Bargoswski, I have to say I don’t understand everything that happens in the poem, but I think it’s a poem about not always understanding what’s happening, and so it works on that double level.  On the surface, the poem is very clear by the way: “by noon // the clouds wrung dry, whipped away, // the sky so brilliant after the viewing // and graveside service for our youngest.”  Notice how ‘the viewing’ is dropped in there, and gets us ready for what is coming.  We understand the feeling in that moment, and so are more ready for the sadness of the next line.  Great foreshadowing.  I almost want to say it’s my favorite of the blog, but each poem this time has its strengths, and I guess I’m going to call it a four-way draw.

 

Pax in poetry,

P M F Johnson

 

 

 

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Styx Songs

Got River Styx 86 today, and found Amit Majmudar had three poems.  The one that leads off the magazine, “The Doll,” at first was hard to get into, but as I re-read it, the depths became apparent.  Hunting for internal rhymes brought me to the extra meanings — it’s about a boy making a doll.  For his mother, maybe?  For voodoo, maybe?  The uncertainty gives the power.  “Looks like my doll’s all tarted up.”  For a girlfriend who has cheated?  “She did like a poking. (All too well).” A lot to think on.  And I’m going to ruin the suspense and declare it my favorite poem of the issue.  But his second poem, “Water,” is also good; more Kay Ryan-esque than other work of his I have read.  “…this mysterious relaxation // of thinking that keeps // a body from sinking.”  Nice double-meaning there.

I really like George Bilgere’s poem about the difference between a first and second marriage:  “One Good Pork Chop.”   How much the narrator has learned.  It’s really more a little essay than a poem, but reads very smoothly — “One time we fought almost nonstop // for an entire week, beginning with a little dig…until we were drenched in metaphoric blood…” but has a great metaphor to end with, and wonderful pacing.  I would vote for the tiniest bit of pruning on his second one, though.  In “Eighty Yards,” he says “a couple of black kids are ambling down Lee Road.”  Again, it is essay-like, this time about how fast one of the two kids can run.  But for me, I could have lived without the adjective “black”, there.  What did it matter?  Of course, that may have been the whole post-ironic point of the poem, but if so, it was too subtle for me by half. 

Thre are a few life-sucks-and-he-was-a-jerk poems here, one of which seems to rise above the boring, “Petrified Fetus Found in Sixty-Year-Old Argentine Widow,” by Susan Elizabeth Howe, as it gives the sympathetic, slant point of view of the widow, considering her dead husband and child —  “This night he flares in dreams, // names me death cave, // charnel house.  Not so, // I am a shrine, a chapel // you will no longer enter // or defile…”  Amazing language.

Of the contest winners, I actually liked the third place poem best, “Octopus,” by Julie Hall.  Just a nice rhythm to the words.  “Maybe you are just too sad to love anyone here // in this fabricated universe..”

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

 

 

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Thinking Poetry

Got the latest American Scholar this week, and settled in to read the poems.  Fellow named Langdon Hammer wrote a little essay, “Hearing Mandelstam,”  on the author being translated , Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet who died as a victim of Stalin.  Hammer talks about the difficulties of translation, and the immediacies of living under the threat of death, as Mandelstam did.  And I agree that Christian Wiman, who did the translations, brings a perfect urgency to Mandelstam’s five poems.  It’s interesting to read the Mandelstam translations, and think how similar the language is to the sort of poems Wiman buys for Poetry.  (from the first poem, “Tristia”): “There is, I know, a science of separation // in night’s disheveled elegies, stifled laments, // the clockwork oxen jaws…”  Reminds me of some of Goldbarth’s work, the strange pairings of adjective and noun, the long sweep of the sentences, the need for the reader to pay close attention to the dense language to catch the reasons for each word:  “and the barn-warm oxen slowly eat each instant.”  Being from a town that in the winter is on average just slightly colder than Moscow, I focused on that “barn-warm oxen.”  I feel that in my skin, the warmth in the barn with the scent of hay and urine, the cats in the corner, the cold wind as the door shuts quickly, keeping the warm inside, and the feeling of the world narrowed down to only the act of eating, of life being chewed away in this slow, eternally-repeated scene.  That such could come out of just a few words is testament to the power of the translation and the original, both.  Wow.  That poem was from 1918.  So this poem and the next, “Night Song,” from 1913 would have been at times of great change and uncertainty, with the World War looming, then just ending, and the revolution causing great tragedy in the country, and perhaps some hope.  Night Song has the lines: “Wounds impossible to doctor.  // Joseph, by his own blood bartered // Off to Egypt, grieved for home no harder, //Unslaked sky.  Sleetlight of stars.”  And with that ‘grieved for home,’ originally I thought of Joseph grieving that he is lost and wants to return home, but given the circumstance of the poem, the added meaning of grieving for a home that is damaged beyond repair, lost to him and everyone, grieving for the sorrow IT is suffering, not himself, becomes primary.  ‘Sleetlight.’  What a wonderful, troublesome word.  And again, sleet does glow at night in certain lights.  And God a cruel master in that ‘unslaked sky.’  Tremendous essences here.

The last three poems are from 1933,35 and 37.  Hammer tells us Mandelstam died in 1938, a prisoner of Stalin,  so these are just before his death, and the urgency of his own personal danger looms larger in my mind.  “Nowhere Air” starts: “Like water trickling from the highest ice // its bracing ache, its brain-shard sweetness… So my sigh has lost its source.”  Taking the simplest of objects to him, ice water, and as its origins are lost, so too the origin of his sigh, what an incredible metaphor.  The ending of the poem brings the immediate danger, the simplicity of the danger, home to the reader.  He lives under the shadow of death, but has the world itself to turn to for comfort, as with “Black earth, “Earthcurds, wormdirt, worked to a rich tilth…brief, ringing kingdom — // These wet crumbs claim and proclaim my freedom.”  Life will go on, the earth will go on, the struggle against oppression.  Wiman has done such a marvelous job of getting out of the way of the words, bringing them forth, not making them cute beyond necessity, but stripped down, as bare as a winter’s branch: “War here is a word, work a world in which to dwell.”

And the final poem, called “The Poem,” Mandelstam’s declaration of belief in his own work, in what he was doing, in the power and importance of poetry:  “White meteorite, infinity’s orphan…Supplicants, tyrants, it doesn’t matter.  It IS matter…”

What a gift to be able to share in such a man’s life, through his poetry, what a reminder of our own blessings, to be past so much of that horror, what a reminder that we must continue the struggle, to avoid sliding back to those times.”

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.

Related blog posts:

Missouri Review – Winter 2017

The New Yorker – Jan 22 2018

Rattle 58 – Winter 2017

 

 

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Honeybee Poetry

An interesting triptych of poems in the New Yorker this week.  First, the second of the poetry twins, Michael Dickman, appears (the first brother, Matthew,  was in the mag a couple months ago) with his poem “My Honeybee.”  A very poetic poem, full of lots of white space and single words and swoops to something else.  “Crying in our arms // in the cosmos in our // arms // Missile static and afterburn in the petals”. Kind of reads like one of those exercises where you jumble two poems together to see what results.  Can’t really see what the line “Your white shoulders and white rump” are doing there, for instance, and some of it seems overcooked: “Sail on // Sail on”.  There are absolutely enough interesting lines and images to be worth a couple reads, though: “pinprick in the epileptic air”.  My guess is with a few more years, he’ll lose some of the cute stuff and focus more laserlike on the sense he’s aiming for.  Still, it’s not a bad thing for a young poet to coruscate a little, reaching for all the universe at once.  I see a lot of upside here.  Especially if he can keep doing such neat endings.

Then there’s one of my absolute favs, Charles Simic, with “One-Man Circus.”  A sort of Walter-Mitty poem, all these cool things going on in the narrator’s head, “Juggler of hats and live hand grenades.  Tumbler, contortionist…” while he’s walking down the street.  Dickman would do well to study this poem for its concentration, the lack of frivolous words and the power that arrives with that.   Makes the poem more readable for one, and gives depth to what remains.  Simic also does a great job of balancing the inner and outer worlds, and gives nothing away in his ending, either.

And the third poem (actually first in the mag) is W.S. Merwin, another fav of mine, with “The New Song,” sort of an extension of his recent concerns about getting older, and living in the moment.  “For some time I thought there was time // and that there would always be time”  Again, nothing cute, nothing tricky, just a straightforward, here it comes poem, the power in the ideas and in the way he grounds it, in the second (last) stanza, with immediate images: “the sound of rain at night // arriving unknown in the leaves…”  One trick he uses is to go from the general to the particular, the reverse of the old way of building a poem.  Again, as an older poet, he keeps it compact, like a pro boxer’s punch: short to the target.

Seems like many older poets get more dense as they go.  I don’t know if that differs from other arts.  I’ve read that the painter Titian worked in a looser and looser style as he got older, at last often working with his fingers.  Anyway, it’s very interesting to compare the younger with the older poets in this issue.  Give it a read.

Poetic peace,

P M F Johnson

My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.

Related blog posts:

The Missouri Review – Fall 2017

The New Yorker – Nov 20, 17

Hummingbird 27.2

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Drizzled Warm Poetry

The December Poetry is another Q & A issue.  I like the format, since it allows us as readers to get inside the heads of the poets.  Whether this is always to the benefit of the poet may be another matter.  ;->  But there are some good poems in this issue, as so often there are. 

Maxine Kumin’s “Whereof The Gift Is Small” did not strike me at first, in fact, until I read the interview with her, and realized it was an elegy to her horse.  So I trotted right back to the poem, re-read it, got it, and was way impressed.  This has happened to you on revisitation?  Not that it should have been a mystery.  “The honeybee in the bleeding heart // on my gelding’s grave while beetles swarm // him underground…”  It’s pretty obvious after the mulligan.  Modern poetry gets to the point, (well represented in this issue) where so high a percentage of every poem is symbolic, or consciously nonsense, or allegorical, or at the least a collage, that one can be surprised when a poem is about what it says it is about.  All I can say is oops.  Anyway, she chooses a shortened, or “curtal,” sonnet form (now I know what a curtal sonnet is).  And the language is restrained, elegant, with excellent rhyme choices.

David Yezzi’s sonnet sequence “Flatirons,” holds some truly chewy word combinations, “the angel enters, a twist in temperature,” and “to where the earth curls under // and the sky begins…”  The poem has to do, loosely, with mountain climbing, but there are shifts into other universes in the middle, then bumps back.  “As sandstone ends, the world of ghosts begins — // they sometimes rise up still in dreams, my love.”  See, when typing that last line, the words were so elegaic I didn’t need to go back to confirm I had them in the correct order.  They just fit right together.

Let me give a nod to Camille T. Dungy’s “From the First, the Body Was Dirt,” a shocking juxtaposition of images, and Fanny Howe’s “The Cenotaph,”  with its pun beginning (puns — or words/phrases with multiple meanings — give depth to a poem: “I want to leave this place // unremembered.”

But my favorites of the issue are the Dick Allen painter/Chinese cook poems (some people contributed several poems each).  Just wonderful, wonderful poems.  “Calligraphy Accompanied by the Mood of a // Calm but Definitive Sauce”  No, that’s the name of the poem, not a line from it.  Like the chapter headings of Fielding’s Tom Jones, just fun in themselves. “The strength of your hand // will give the stroke its bone.”  And I love the ending of this poem –which I won’t put down, but comes right after,  “and that you’ve left no footprints, not a single one…”  and matches that in tone and grandeur.  And the poem, “Almost Nowhere in the World, as Far as Anyone Can Tell,” which reminds me so much of Li Po, with his celebrations of the culinary and bibitive life.  “Is it not pleasant // to sip Tsingtao beer…” 

And the best poem of the issue for me, “With Drizzled Warm Butter, Intensely Rendered”  which is one of the shortest poems in the issue too, not by coincidence I would say.  Too short to quote.  Look it up.

Peace is poetry,

P M F Johnson

 

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