Scott Hightower

Persistent Voices, An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS, Alyson Books, 2010
Theory of Devolution, University of Illinois Press, 2002
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Philip Clark and David Groff have just joined forces and edited an anthology of poems by poets lost to AIDS. The collection is entitled Persistent Voices and has been published by Alyson Books. Some of the forty artists featured are Tory Dent, Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Essex Hemphill, Leland Hickman, David Matias, Paul Schmidt, Karl Tierney, and Assotto Saint. The span of voices is smart and exhilarating.

Eight years ago Groff’s own first book of poetry received one of the National Poetry Series awards (selected by Mark Doty) and was published by University of Illinois Press. Groff’s Theory of Devolution appeared at a time when poetry was finding its expressive way beyond being elegiac or politically shrill. The finding was of something that resisted erasure. It was equally of something that would access vitality. Groff’s collection hit the right note, and for those who might not have picked it up I offer a few observations.

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From Fire Island and the tide waters of Baltimore to facing east into the Pacific near Big Sur, the ocean certainly makes ebbing and flowing look easy: easy come, easy go. David Groff’s Theory of Devolution is a collection of meditations that run the poetic scale from molecules of sweat to exploding stars. The poet is searching for an original elementalism beyond guises and formulaic schemas of fact: vegetable, bestial; races, nationalisms, clothes; the living and the lost. Each individual seems rapt in a borrowed body: a calf’s placenta, a discarded umbilical cord, delicate bodied crabs, a kicked open pumpkin, a miscarried brother, the unharvested eggs of a lesbian friend with cancer, fish. And how can one who seems oneself to be a tenant be “possessed” by another?

What a grandiose and fearful puss I am.
The dead belong to the living blah blah blah.
It’s the kind of ownership an adolescent
possesses over Bobby Sherman in the dark.

(“Ron’s Been Dead Four Years”)

In human gambles and adventures, none seems higher risk than that of human affection. For Groff, such attempt at coupling is the “jet propelled elastic band of Wile E. Coyote.” Human beings collide and are locked together as mysteriously as oceans. But it is not how particles of an element mysteriously lock together that is at the center of Groff’s attention in this collection.

This is a mediation on later…when an element is unlocked and set adrift. Either, cut off—as in cut off and adrift beyond escape, or as a reveler cut off full of grief and adrift with inescape.

His body’s as gone as bodies can be,
steel-casketed in some Ohio cemetery
I will never make a point to visit,
though I like the way graveyards level you,
let you feel a part of something bigger,
like gay volleyball.

(“Ron’s Been Dead Four Years”)

Drifting is everywhere. There is smoke, carcasses of horses in a flooded river, a dream of drowning, a floppy penis beneath a hospital gown, a glide that turns to bobbing, falling, the religious calling of a father, and the romantic reverie and grief of a someone who finds it strange to be calling himself a man:

…all we can do is
Admit how small we are in scale, admire
The coast and maybe wade past it,
Or sit in the rocky sand and finally
Lean back and fall asleep in an outsized landscape
Under a close sun. Maybe life in fact if not in deed
Lasts longer here, thanks to the beauty
That may in fact rub off on us, making the dull
Progress of the body primary, the sun
A name for a kind of contentment…

(“Facing East Near Big Sur”)

There is real human terror and inspection of the beloved as carrion. One poem is about what function to find for a death mask stored face-down on the speaker’s nightstand. Also in these poems are brave passes of the angst of reaching for the lost element. And there is sadness:

No holiday wonder I awake with the edge of sadness that—silly me—
I think is mine alone, my private port wine stain.

(“Laundry”)

But Groff is neither provincial nor maudlin. A poem about laundry—the small demand routinely met–is one of the strongest in the book. His universal mind is also one that gives voice to wit and comfort:

…you hear the subway’s regular purr
and bluejays who aren’t tiny Isaiahs screaming
but just the usual Brooklyn cantata,
the kind of music you could hum to a friend.
There, now. Are you better now?

(“Terror”)

Scott Hightower

 

 

The Raft, Dutton, 1989
Moving and St Rage, University of North Texas Press, 1999
The Charm, Zoo Press, 2002
Lip, Eastern Washington University Press, 2009

 

Kathy Fagan’s Lip is great new addition to anyone who has a growing Fagan shelf in their library–or is a great find for the newly reading. The poems in Lip take a lot of their energy from the Drama of Poetic stance–not Rhetorical stance, but Poetic stance. Fagan is a sure-footed poet. Poetry is her place in the world and she has a lot to say.

In 1989, The Raft, Kathy Fagan’s first collection of poems, was a National Poetry Series selection. It was then published by Dutton.

In 1999, Moving and St Rage, Fagan’s second book, won the Vassar Miller Prize. I was asked to review Moving and St Rage for “Barrow Street,” and in my review postulated: “Fagan not only moves sights and historical events around; she moves sounds and temperatures around as well. The artful choice and use of the images serve the soft burn of the poet’s keeness. The poems are musical, refined, and highly sophisticated without being arch or flexing. . . . Rather than our eyes and ears growing used to the world, art–like the songs of unseen birds–actually serves to take us beyond the schemas of our meaning that inure us to life. Fagan sifts for consolation . . . . “

*

In 2002, Fagan’s third collection The Charm stood out in its celebration of the rational and the irrational.

After all, aren’t those both valences that can find their home in poetry? Rather than our eyes and ears growing used to the world, Fagan’s art serves to take us beyond our usual rubrics, beyond the linguistic zones of diurnal comfort. Her poetry draws at a turn from the language of historical fact and the language of faith. Consider these three examples of the former from poems in The Charm, the world of the character who can type 65 wmp and eats a soft-boiled egg from a cup:

When Elvis Presley died in 1977, for example
there were 48 professional Elvis impersonators.
… by the year 2012,
one person in every four will be an Elvis impersonator.

9/1/14: Martha,
the last passenger pigeon,
dies at the Cincinnati Zoo.

In 1906 the owners of Luna Park
… electrocuted one of their herd of working elephants.
It took ten seconds.

But Fagan, in the latter language of faith, is equally arresting. In her “Visitation,” the divine visitor does not come in white or brocade and does not unfurl in a late Vermeer March––rather, “Tuesday, mid-November—sunstruck clouds with winter in them”––and it is not a winged angel that sets the world into a tumult, but the surprise of birds paddling into trees:

The charm of finches lifting from a ditch
can surprise you with a sound like
horselips, and paddle toward the trees
beautifully, small,
brown, forgettable as seeds,
but they, too, must sing on earth unto the bitter death––

(The poem ends expansively with a double dash. Not a period.) Fagan weaves in and out of science and rational communication. She almost irrationally folds in a gesture of mystical evocation or an arresting numinous encounter. The poetry swims with the marvelous and the murderous; praise and awe are intertwined with the rascalous joy of an invective list or a set of “misfortune” cookies. The Charm is lively. Its poems call us both to the things of this world and—with an ear and inner eye for the poetic––to the worlds that might be found inside of the world. Fagan excavates within the possession of language and poetry itself for a strategy that demands a kind of testing and a kind of wakefulness. Poetry, sometimes jolting forward and sometimes prayerfully turning back on itself, does not “nail down,” it lives, keeps thought moving. The train cars jolt and jostle. The ride is exhilarating.

 

 

In 2009, we have Lip, Fagan’s new book. While it extends the themes and strategies established in the first books, it artfully pushes the relief of the images against the artful resignation of the poet’s maturing stance and voice:

Bears bed below my window,
as do the doe and her stiff stiff fawn.
At dawn their ginger ears flick off the dew,
the sun. They look me in the eye
as if I’d drawn a gun, and then do lumber,
and then do canter, but never
do they wonder.
Never.

(“Lament”)

 

The terrain of Lip is more chiseled. The voice is still void of romantic histrionics and is clear. The stance of the poet is modest, ruthless, and courageously ordinated — still offering lip-service to the world. Sometimes there are glints of Baudelaire, Mother Courage, Medea, Stein. To close one’s mind does not improve one’s faith. . . . it goes the other way.  Her coronation is a ceremony of one out walking among maple and beach trees toward a row of leafy mayapples:

In that rare atmosphere,
I will walk a path like powder underfoot
Through leafy mayapples—those excellent witnesses—
A cardinal ahead, the three queen mothers, my subjects’ limber
Backs, lovely hair, a roar that dies down dies down,
And in awful light, I will accept
My scepter. The usual
Fanfare, the pink embellishments. Bells, trumpets.
Then will I be anointed by no one,
And serve him well.

(“Diadem”)

Fagan steps forward to balance the fastidious parsings and theatricalites inherent to speaking with a plain authenticity not found often today. Genuine, distilled poetic observations artfully delivered up. Fundamental, modern observations. The stage is set, Lip is in the light—the awful light.

In the poem “Postmodern Penelope at Her Loom Pantoum” Fagan ventriloquizes Penelope:

. . . . Not that I own a TV.
But in a way, I am TV.
All stance & no (sub)stance.
Nothing to feel & everything to comment on.

Jack Paar, Jack Kennedy, Michael Jackson,
Jack Off, a box of boredom with a toy
surprise,,, ~:>)
Which returns me, always, to poetry.

This is not a pantoum.
It may only be a shroud.
A Stein is a Stein is a
white space around the box

& the ______that is the sea
raveling, unraveling.

In another poem, after cataloging a long list of the plastic and mylar things at a cheap roadside memorial, the poet concludes:

This crap from Wal-Mart could outlast us all,
which in our grief is no small com-
fort, since death lasts so much longer, and has no form.

(“Road Memorial”)

Scott Hightower

Day Mark
Lee Briccetti, Four Way Books, 2005
1-884800-67-X, $14.95, 92 pages

New York City is presently sighing with relief as Poets House, after a long sojourn in boxes, is unpacking and setting up shop again to serve writers and lovers of poetry. Manhattan is fortunate to host this institution. The new facility–now located at 10 River Terrace–is architecturally full of space and light and, though shiny and new, still retains a smile of welcome.

Lee Briccetti is the director. She is a grounded, affable woman; herself, a remarkable poet. With much of the focus being on the new, one also takes a moment to reflect on what New York City and the people dreaming in the city have experienced. The new Poets House is actually a stone’s throw away from the site of the September eleventh attack on the World Trade Center. A few years back Briccetti—one of those dreamers— published her own love letter to the resilient city she lives and works in.

______________________________________________________

“DAY MARK”–One’s Wondrous and Terrible Worlds

Lee Briccetti’s first book, Day Mark, awaits–and deserves–lengthy and subtle reviews. The aphoristic glints of the poems’ images resist category and corral––but what they do give is poetic pause and shimmer.

The opening epigraph is from The Tempest. (Peter Greenaway making a movie out of “Day Mark” is an interesting notion to entertain.) At the end of the book, the poet notes:

I still love the Egyptian Museum in Torino, where shards
and sarcophagi are not labeled or even exhibited but set in
open shelves which extend

to the limit of (visible) ceiling

(“Index to the Collection”)

Day Mark brims with physical and literal aphorisms of Western Culture. There are parts of cities. Rome conjures the idea of the wondrous and the terrible. (It is, among other things, the location of the death of the great and venerated English poet John Keats.) New York City conjures the idea of the concrete and imaginary wilderness, of walking in the western night. Both Rome and New York––like Herculaneum and Pompeii––are cities of promise . . . and ruin.

Day Mark is also an elegy. Angels arrive from the Old World and terrorist commandeered airplanes arrive in the New. In one of the poems, a poetic footnote is employed:

At the Protestant cemetery, we enter my language. Violets
surround the poet’s nameless stone, “whose name was writ
in water.”
But it’s the adjacent stone and destiny of the friend who
held the dying poet in his arms that consecrates a grief.
To be so true.
Years.
A lifetime.
He took the ambassadorship so he could die in Rome
and give back the name: “Here lies Severn, friend of John Keats.”

(“The Reign of Good Emperors”)

Day Mark is a literary celebration. H.D.–eyeing domestic kitchen implements hanging in bombed out London apartments–and Djuna Barnes are spiritual mothers of Day Mark. Briccetti herself evokes Marie Ponsot in one of the epigraphs. She also evokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Hopkins, and George Eliot. From Americans, she elects to evoke Melville, Dickinson, and Robert DeNiro. She veers into Italian poetry for Pasolini.

Day Mark is also a book about dreams. There is the Stendhalian dream from the Old World–that love is about seeing and being seen:

A few weeks after we were married, I dreamt we lived
in Rome, on the edge of the Barbarini Gardens

green into green, imagination opening:

We believed we had two countries (a fertile alienation),
our love would make the margins verdant,

flowering

*
…my Rome collection…

became my photo albums of street stalls where white plastic
replicas slant against the real stadium’s fantastic bowl. I love
the open souvenir trailers’ tiered shelves, the curated
installations of sodas, rosary beads, hats

but this is important: some rim of marble or ancient paving
stone must appear in each frame,

us: our buttery light

(“Collector”)

Like the Egyptian museum in Torino, Day Mark “extends…to the limit of a (visible) ceiling.” The conglomeration is conceived to be greater than any one poem. Curiosity, patience, and introspection have amassed a personally charged and eccentric collection. The shelves are open. Reward awaits the willing visitor.

Scott Hightower

Weapons Grade
Terese Svoboda, University of Arkansas Press, 2009
1-55728-906-9, $16, 96 pages

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“WEAPONS GRADE”–Notes from a 21st Century Sybil

The Oracle and the Sybil are moments somewhere along the way in history that mark institutional attempts at the preservation of the tradition of wisdom and truth telling. Neither is directly transparent. In 2009, Terese Svoboda’s throws a new set of her poems, Weapons Grade, into the mix.

The book is divided into four parts. The poems in the first section are overtly political, very dark, and very impressive. In one, there is a convoy of body bags. In another the litany of O’s weave from Suzie Wong’s nipples to nooses—but in fact are the zeros of records of African-American GI’s secretly executed by American Forces in occupied Japan—assumedly for the crime of rape. There is a conflation of history. King Henry’s dogs tracking in the blood of hanged men balances with the white gloves of American GI MP’s. The gloves are as white as the record of executions is blank.

In another poem, “Code Name: 731” Svoboda spells the connection between the almost unbelievably, horrible Japanese science experiments of WWII and the Tokyo lab, which in the 1990’s distributed AIDS-laden blood for the transfusions of unknowing patients. Our darkest corners are not mirages; they are gruesome historical facts. The poem begins with a land developer unearthing one of the grizzly WWII 731 labs. Files follow. At the close of the poem, the notions of secrecy and the horrible nature of things buried away hitting the light of day are jarringly simple: How much cold can a body take? / How little liver? / The boys’ bones turn up in the Tokyo lot.

Svobda splices a line: Say Can You See? what the century is made of.

In the first section of Svoboda’s book heartland patriotism and bravado are flaunted by a provincial adolescence. It is a macabre song of misguided innocence:

…Those horns-of-dilemmas
re: you vs. them
will soon be blown
until they’re scarcely heard—
that Vietnam. The band
puts out its collective foot
and the wind [of a Sousa march is]…
taking off…with lunch’s
doubledecker detritus flipping
in its wake, in the doubletime

that the majorette kicks to,
a Whoopee, let’s march together at last
into the adult arms of death,
death, death until no one’s left.

(“Sousa at Seventeen”)

In another poem, the tone is more prayerful, more plaintive:

Oh Mothra, so Mother, so monster,
your wings over the egg—
save us too.

(“Secret Executions of Black GI’s
in Occupied Japan”)

And in yet another, the tone becomes abject:

Impotence is not in any animal’s genes,
it has to be earned. Forget the rocket’s
red glare you so dearly love

and tear down that bright banner blood.
We can’t be moths attracted by light,
we must—boy–chew at the fuse.

(“An Old War”)

The poems of Sections II, III, and IV shift away from the military themes of stealth, abuse, and fear and into a question of balance as set into a personal landscape, or as Svoboda references it—to the glen of the heart. In Section II, the theater is marriage. There are tracks in the snow and messages in the camp ashes. Intimacy get misplaced and recovered in the balancing of the equation of X and Y; the day’s / global position ratchets / into place with a purse click. The balance of power languidly dreams while the colonial teapot gleams and steams.

The poems in Section III shift to domestic issues of the nuclear family—the mystery is love not fear. Grief, damage, and fear, as a kind of death, re-surface in this section. In one poem, a woman loves her beater. The kitchen and abuse conflate. Things appear—and disappear. “The fury and majesty of a mind’s death” is featured in “the loss” of a brother. It is only the people with navels (“evolutions blind trajectory”) that have issues:

Mom, a palindrome
soon enough on stone.
In the fairy tale she grows
fur and claws, and tries to eat us.
In nomine matri.
Sweet, sweet, she says, caramel foaming.

She’s not even hungry.
Tomorrow we’ll throw open the doors
and invite everyone to the screening,

every frame forgiveness
but with subtitles too light to read.
You, we, I—it’s all too intimate.

(“Woman with Navel Showing”)

The winnowed take a stiff drink, Lethe’s.
After this first death, there is no other.

(“To My Brother, One the Occasion
of his Second Breakdown”)

And in Section IV, grand design and doom join hands. In one poem fluid massing on the lungs appears as a warning of what is to come. In Section IV, there is a path, a widow, an evening of sailing on a lake, a glacier, and a bargaining:

To get anywhere,
I must appease,
offer salve,
pet the burnt orange and sooty
cows. They gasp, the ones not roasted
or poisoned, carrion-proof

for they have swallowed the dust.
The problem devolves
to the animals, splayed belly-first
in the hopeless state,
the pride of.
I’m thinking who what
where like a journalist,
I’m still trying to see the glacier
a-glitter, saved.

There is also a road taken by two bicyclists who are overtaken by a car driven by Death. It hits–and disappears.

Svoboda’s poems are rewarding. She is brave–but the road she travels is not easy or for the faint of heart.

Scott Hightower

Tennessee Williams knew how
to mine the kinetics of cruelty.

Not the inverted and demure,
“I’ll roll over, and let you

ravish me, you he-man man, you!”
Forget Stella. No. It’s Stanley,

the shrieking infantile god,
who’s vicious; who’s had enough

of just “whistling Dixie;”
who finally succumbs

to being topped
by Stella’s transvestite

brother, who, in turn,
has had enough

of railroad Johns,
and of turning

hotel tricks
in the magical

and occupying
glow of paper

and red
glass lanterns

Scott Hightower

The architect of our party cuts
the pringá, is himself a directory
of pasos. On the wall behind him,
a mirror features a giddy Bavarian
floating in a deafening jar of beer.
He smiles in the froth. His chin floats;
likewise, his feathered green felt
hat. “¡Tome su copa con pajarito!”

Like being in Cadiz
and correlating Puerto Rico.
Or being in Granada
and thinking of Baghdad
or being in another point in Andalucía
and thinking of Texas.
We just as easily could be
in “The Quarter” of New Orleans;
but, of course, when friends
raise their glasses at Codornices,
they are in Seville.