Low

It’s not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery.

It’s a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by
pines.
There’s a couple.

It’s a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is
walnut.
They used to lie down on the carpet

between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests had left.

The cups and saucers were still.

Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other’s face as a backdrop and sometimes

the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there
was an ending
in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,

in which they are walking.

It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a
brown rooftop
early in March. The ground hadn’t softened.

One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The
reflections in the windows

made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and
branches—
and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to
walk under branches.

-Arda Collins (from The New Yorker, June 2, 2008)

Mad Doctors

Even as children they always went too far.
What will happen, they kept thinking,
if I pull that switch, strike this match?
Maybe no one told them not to,
or explained, logically, what could go wrong.
Then they were playing with lightning,

wondering what they would do if they didn't
have to die. Consider Doctor Cyclops,
stuck in the middle of the jungle
with his radium, making things small.

It's 1940, five years before Hiroshima.
Even the science wasn't on our side.
In the movie, Dick Decker's
shaved head makes him monstrous
and impressive, and a little like a child.
Yet he seems to have no past--

no wife to bring back from the dead,
no motive for evil, nothing but research.
His eyes are bad and he hardly sleeps.
We should remember Doctor Cyclops

from time to time, and Doctor Frankenstein,
Doctor Jekyll, and Doctor X.
They were all deceived by ambition,
although they believed themselves
betrayed by the world.

Maybe no one ever told them
we don't live forever.
Maybe no one explained, exactly,
the logic of it.

-Lawrence Raab (published in Gulf Coast, Summer/ Fall '08)

It's the same for a boy or a girl,
The meaning of the world lies outside the world

-David Berman (from the Silver Jews' "People")

****

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in every intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experiences is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing in itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. ...Do what they will, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy."

-C.S. Lewis (from "The Weight of Glory")

****

Love Calls Us to the Things of this World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

-Richard Wilbur

"Try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose....Save yourself from general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty--describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place."

-Rainer Maria Rilke (letter to a young poet, February 17, 1903)

"It is the Wisdom of this World which demonstrates to us that the Wisdom of this World isn't enough."

-Randall Jarrell (speaking of Robert Frost's poem "Provide Provide")


"I know nothing--I have read nothing--and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, 'get learning--get understanding.' I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society--some with their wit--some with their benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humor on all they meet."

-John Keats (in a letter to John Taylor, April 24, 1818)

Reaching into the Future

It Still Moves

"In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia--the end of the Appalachians or the beginning, depending on your point of view--there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had it she could be difficult. Bryant had been known to slam her door on uninvited visitors, to demand a few "dead Presidents" for an interview, and to beat her manager with a purse for getting her onstage too late. Her nickname was borrowed rather than earned. It came from a song that her father, the blues guitarist Curley Weaver, wrote in 1928. Cora Mae was born two years earlier, but the lyrics were clearly about someone else: "I've got a gal, she's long and tall, every time she do the shimmie I holler, Hot Dog!"

This is the opening graph of a very fine piece by Burkhard Bilger published in the April 28th issue of The New Yorker. "The Last Verse: Is there any folk music still out there?" traces the history of field recording in the U.S. from the pre-War days of the Lomaxes to the folk-revivalist era of Harry Smith and right up to the north Georgia doorstep of Sweet Petunia Bryant, where "one morning in December" Lance Ledbetter and Art Rosenbaum showed up with microphones and a flash recorder.

Rosenbaum is a folklorist, painter, and professor of art at the University of Georgia who has "spent fifty of his sixty-nine years traveling around the South and the Midwest, recording folk musicians." Ledbetter is the man whose Atlanta label, Dust-to-Digital, released a four-CD retrospective of Rosenbaum's work last fall titled "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1."
In this edition of Out Loud, Bilger discusses his recent article and samples tracks from "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1," and Ledbetter's gospel collection "Goodbye, Babylon."

The Other Frost

I must confess, I grew up taking Robert Frost for granted. Recently, I sat down to read his poem "Directive," and that began to change. I've gone back to the poem every day since, and I can now say now that my respect for our grand ole' Yankee-Bard-from-North-of-Boston has grown.

If ever I reverenced Frost out of an assumed inheritance--an understanding that I must nod to this silver-headed saint of American letters in the same way I once nodded to Lincoln as the noblest of American presidents, because my elders said I should--then things are different now. Could one poem have such power? Suffice it to say that to read "Directive" was like walking into the Lincoln Memorial and, for the first time in my countless visits to the shrine, stepping past the towering statue of the late president that confronts every visitor coming up the stairs, and before which most everyone stops and stares then leaves the hall. To continue with the Lincoln analogy, it was like journeying off for the darker walls in the shadowy borders of the Memorial and reading Abe's King Jamesian prose of Solomonic wisdom written there in stone, exalted but half-hidden from my usual angle of view.

With better phrases than I could ever turn, Randall Jarrell summarizes the way in which I took Frost for granted. He also more ably nails what Frost's poetry generously offers.

"Besides the Frost that everybody knows," says Jarrell, "there is one whom no one even talks about. Everybody knows what the regular Frost is: the one living poet who has written good poems that ordinary readers like without any trouble and understand without any trouble; the conservative editorialist and self-made apothegm-joiner, full of dry wisdom and free, complacent Yankee enterprise; the Farmer-poet--this is an imposing private role perfected for public use, a sort of Olympian Will Rogers out of Tanglewood Tales; and, last or first of all, Frost is the standing, speaking reproach to any other good modern poet: 'If Frost can write poetry that's just as easy as Longfellow you can too--you do too.' It is this 'easy' side of Frost that is most attractive to academic readers, who are eager to canonize any modern poet who condemns in example the modern poetry which they condemn in precept; and it is this side that has helped to get him neglected or depreciated by intellectuals--the reader of Eliot or Auden usually dismisses Frost as something inconsequentially good that he knew all about long ago. Ordinary readers think Frost the greatest poet alive, and love some of his best poems almost as much as they love some of his worst ones. He seems to them a sensible, tender, humorous poet who knows all about trees and farms and folks in New England, and still has managed to get an individualistic, fairly optimistic, thoroughly American philosophy out of what he knows; there's something reassuring about his poetry, they feel--almost like prose. Certainly there's nothing hard or odd or gloomy about it.

"These views of Frost, it seems to me, come either from not knowing his poems well enough or from knowing the wrong poems too well. Frost's best-known poems, with a few exceptions, are not his best poems at all....It would be hard to make a novel list of Eliot's best poems, but one can make a list of ten or twelve of Frost's best poems that is likely to seem to anybody too new to be true....

"Nothing I say about these poems can make you see what they are like, or what the Frost that matters most is like; if you read them you will see. 'The Witch of Coos' is the best thing of its kind since Chaucer. 'Home Burial' and 'A Servant to Servants' are two of the most moving and appalling dramatic poems ever written; and how could lyrics be more ingeniously and conclusively merciless than 'Neither Out Far Nor In Deep' or 'Design'? or more grotesquely and subtly and mercilessly disenchanting than the tender 'An Old Man's Winter Night'? or more unsparingly truthful than 'Provide Provide'? And so far from being obvious, optimistic, orthodox, many of these poems are extraordinarily subtle and strange, poems which express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a flat and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying: It's so; and there's nothing you can do about it; and if there were, would you ever do it? The limits which existence approaches and falls back from have seldom been stated with such bare composure," (The Other Frost, University Press of Florida, 1953).

In this short interview with Curtis Fox (courtesy of the Poetry Foundation), the poet Kay Ryan picks up Jarrell's enthusiasm for Frost and carries it into a spirited discussion of Frost's mastery of metaphor. Ryan also touches on why today's fashion-conscious poetry readers are mistaken to overlook Frost. Ryan is, however, more forgiving than the harsh and exuberant Jarrell.

National Poetry Month May Be Over...

...But Jordan Davis doesn't see that as any reason to stop reading the stuff.

"Poets talk about the attention brought by National Poetry Month the way kids talk about food at summer camp--" says Davis, "it's terrible, and there's not enough of it. For the rest of the reading world, the initiative has all the appeal of a charity drive. While there's plenty of good poetry being written today, there's at least six times as much of the not-so-good variety. Take heart: Slate has winnowed the stack down to a manageable few."

To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire

Follow along as Steve Scafidi, a poet and cabinet maker living in West Virginia, reads his poem "To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire," courtesy of the audio archives of From the Fishouse.

Don't Talk About My Moms, Yo

In a recent Paste article titled The Nature of Mother, Brian Howe undertakes a decent discussion of the rolls moms play in the lyrics of rock and rap songs, offering up this insight:

"Mothers: They’re always reservoirs for ineffable longing. We talk about mothers as a means of indirectly talking about ourselves, our hopes, our fears, our insecurities and dreams, which seems to give our actual mothers short shrift. But as Smog implies in 'I Feel Like The Mother Of The World,' motherhood is a foundational concept from which everything else descends, and the urge to approach such an awesome concept in the abstract is understandable."


In his essay, "Mothers--Don't Give up," Pastor Randy Nabors shares this:

"Many of our moms put up with a lot of grief and disappointment, and yet they kept on loving us and kept taking us back in. In this they reflected the character of God and his ability to forgive and not treat us as our sins deserve....I want to say to all mothers, whatever the difficulties you face or the blessings you enjoy, God has called you to a noble task."

Louis Armstrong, trumpeter, collage-maker

According to a piece in the latest Paris Review, when Satchmo wasn't on stage or in the studio, he could be found spinning albums or constructing collages for their covers using things like photos, product labels, and letters:

Receptivity

Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury--let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey-bee like, buzzing here and there from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at. But let us open our leaves like a flower and be...receptive--budding patiently under the eyes of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favors us with a visit--sap will be given us for Meat and dew for drink.

-John Keats, Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Feb. 19, 1818

From Reznikoff to Public Enemy (to 44th St.)

Towards the tail end of a party last Saturday night in St. Elmo, I took a walk with Matt Allison. As if following a cue from the air's easy calm, we slipped off the crowded backyard deck where we'd been perched for the last couple hours and started off down the alley at the edge of the yard below. In a couple of minutes we were standing at the corner of Virginia Ave. and 44th Street watching the wind push shadows through the streetlight beam focused beneath our feet.

Distracted by our conversation, I hadn't realized the significance of this intersection until it was upon us. So I had the experience of being flooded all at once by the memories of my last visit there. This was a night two months earlier when Kiko and I witnessed the crash of a Mercury Cab into the garage five feet from where I now stood, the driver shot dead inside. I had relived that crash in my head countless times since, but none of these recollections had occurred here, at the scene of the crime. Now, standing on the same patch of pavement where I stood that night when I first saw the driver's head, holed and still, the memories returned with a new gravity.

As we rounded the corner and continued up the street, I recounted to Matt what I'd seen that night. He was familiar with the details of the crash because of an email I'd sent out the morning after. Still, I felt a need to recount the experience again, as if repeating the objective details we both knew might somehow get across the invisible emotional responses this violent scene had stirred within me. Yet I felt as if I was coming up against a wall. I felt a need to break free from the constraints journalistic reporting put upon my expression of the event. I had felt this same need the morning after the accident when I awoke early, grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote a poem about it. As I reflected later on what I'd written, I began to wonder if it was closer to journalism or poetry. I then wondered if this was a necessary distinction for me to make.

The American poet and translator Philip Metres takes up this question in a recent article published by The Poetry Foundation, From Reznikoff to Public Enemy: The Poet as Journalist, Historian, Agitator. Metres gives us these famous lines from the poem "Aspodel, That Greeny Flower," by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.

These lines "argue against viewing poetry as reported news," says Metres. "Yet Williams, most notably in Paterson, and many other 20th-century poets (from the Objectivists to hip-hop artists) have sought to marry poetry with the news. Drawing from the ballad tradition and from Modernist poets’ experiments with collage, these poets frequently employed documentary materials to give voice to stories of people and movements that the mass media tend to ignore or misrepresent. In this sense, they echo earlier lines in “Asphodel”: “my heart rouses / thinking to bring you news / of something // that concerns you / and concerns many men.”

According to Metres, "the successful documentary poem withstands the pressure of reality to remain a poem in its own right: its language and form cannot be reduced to an ephemeral poster, ready made for its moment but headed for the recycling bin....While it may be that such poems will not 'stand up' in a court of law, they testify to the often unheard voices of people struggling to survive in the face of unspeakable violence. In the words of C.D. Wright in One Big Self, “I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference / Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing / You could use. In a court of law.” These poems ride the ambiguity between a nothing and a something that can be used. Their power resides in their negotiation between language of evidence and language of transcendence."

Even before reading Metres on this subject, I had concluded that the disctinction between journalism and poetry is one that I should continue to make. But Metres' studied understanding deepens the discussion. He delineates that line and argues for a sort of resolution that "courts [its ] own collapse, testing a poem’s tensile boundaries in the face of what Wallace Stevens called 'the pressure of reality.'" In further drafts of my poem about the slain Mercury Cab driver, I'll seek a more confident "negotiation between language of evidence and language of transcendence." I imagine it'll be an "ambiguous" divide to "ride," but that's the thrill and the satisfaction of testimony.

To illustrate his definition of documentary poetry, Metres concludes his article with a list of ten poems by the likes of Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, Charles Reznikoff, and, of course, Public Enemy. Each poem is worth checking out if you haven't already.


<--Charles Reznikoff

A Good (Wo)Man is Hard to Find

"An' Ma ain't nobody you can push aroun', neither. I seen her beat the hell out of a tin peddler with a live chicken one time 'cause he give her a argument. She had the chicken in one han', an' the ax in the other, about to cut its head off. She aimed to go for that peddler with the ax, but she forgot which han' was which, an' she takes after him with the chicken. Couldn't even eat that chicken when she got done. They wasn't nothing but a pair of legs in her han'.

-Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath,