Scott Hightower

The figure standing and raising a sword
between Babylon and the return

to Jerusalem was St. Michael,
protector of Abraham’s people;

Justice; Michael, field commander
of the army of “the one true God.”

*

In 1909, New York City
commissioned Frederick MacMonnies,

one of America’s most prominent
sculptors, to design a fountain

for the entry park of City Hall.
A monumental statue

was to rise heroically from
the center of a great stone basin.

It was to be the grandest ever
sculpted by an American;

to be carved from the largest
single block of marble hewn

since the days of Michaelangelo.
Many were disappointed

when CIVIC VIRTUE victoriously
rising over corruption actually

emerged as a stocky, naked
man with a sword cocked

over one of his marble shoulders.
He appears to have extricated

himself from the archaic clutches
of two wily sirens. Granted

venereal disease is a historic
urban hygiene issue. In 1941,

the much maligned monument
––so carefully carved

by the Piccirilli Brothers
(Feirrucio, Attilio, Furio,

Orazio, Masanielo, and Getulio)
of the Bronx––was banished

to Kew Gardens, Queens.
Recently, there have been

heated arguments as to whether
or not the neglected

monument should be lifted
from its odd destiny of disrepair.

Scott Hightower

(“Monsieur Lavoisier and his Wife,” Jacques-Louis David,
1788; The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 

It is the morning of May 8th;
Madame Lavoisier has just been
orphaned. Within a few more minutes
she, likewise, will be widowed;

the guillotine, oddly taking the name
of a man who did not invent it.

May 8th, thus invests itself,
not in the talent of one
of Jacques-Louis David’s
death warrants,
but in one set of his details,
which, today, beyond heroic,
feels meaningful and human:

a full white dress, a soft, luminous mass,
a cascade of curls, the elegant pale blue
bow and sash, and the oddly
prophetic red velvet table cloth.
The felicity of the shoe buckle and—
like a fine glass instrument in
a laboratory––the black silk stocking
covering Lavoisier’s extended leg
take on a luster from hues around them.

With a quill scratch,
Aristotle’s essences give way
to the emerging periodic table.

An example of what to do
with knowledge
if, indeed, it is the stuff
that actually makes us human.

In the next five years, the orderly
radiance will dissimulate
into the cruel fragrance of ideals!

The noble privilege of cataloging observations
will succumb to the emerging urgency
of the next elemental question,
“Who bears witness to the shimmering
unreason of this most deplorable single casualty?”

“Never forget; never forgive,” the dark
precision of the glinting tooth of class
and counter-class spell bounds.
The familiar weapon once used
for attack drops. “There
is no defense.”

Where is the beauty that hallowed
Death has erased so quickly
with the tip of his wing?

Scott Hightower

(Paved Paradise, John Kelly, 2009)

The first television program put
into re-runs was “The Lone Ranger.”
-a Snapple bottle top

A frame. Two keyboards, a bass,
a dulcimer, and five guitars
set the stage for “Dagmar Onassis.”
Kiss. Kiss. What? Has it been
sixteen years? What does
it matter that the roses upstage
on the grand piano are red?

If you have been asked
to wear the dream,
what difference does it matter
if the dress is white or blue
and the shoes shine red? We park
the day’s carousel
and heed whatever
falls out and captivates.

With ghosts—Damia? Hutch?
Jacques Brel? Judy
Garland?––shimmering
somewhere nearby–the evening
nears its end: John Kelly’s guitars
and Joni Mitchell’s plaintive
melodies about longing, sex,
our Frankenstein technologies,
science’s tunnel vision.
Tunnel vision.

The wingless moon floats
beyond the encapsulating
spotlight, and each one
in the theater must find
each’s own way home.

Scott Hightower

Bar Book, Julie Sheehan
Norton, 2010, 978-0-39-307217-4, $24.95
_____________________________________________________________________________

Bar Book, Julie Sheehan’s third title, is a concoction of poetry and prose. Sheehan centers the book around the voice of an American barmaid; and what unfolds is a narrative of lost comfort and security–both emotional and financial. Life does not always go as one planned.

More devastating is the barmaid’s sense of pain and struggle to hang on to giving focused love to her daughter while struggling with her own lacerated senses of self. Her sense of being worthy of love has taken (and rendered) a hit in an infantile divorce scramble. The poems, footnotes, charts, and prose passages fall into three cleverly titled sections: “Lunch Shift,” “Swing Shift,” and “Night Shift.”

Sheehan is artful. Sometimes poems are delivered in the voice of cocktails. The cocktails seem more successful with their boundaries than some of the help or clientele. The ingredients of lives behind and before the bar seem to fare better when more gently stirred than meanly shaken. Sober labor, ceremony, and privilege give way to entitlement, entrapment, and stealth.

And I’m like, sweet pea, homeboy,
listen up Queen Mab, you shush your lip
before Gabe rams a fist through those pearly white

fangs of yours. And he’s like, “Oooooh, you know
him?” Know him! Mother of Mailer, I’m meeting him
in twenty minutes at the Slaughterhouse.

(“Tom Collins” p. 22)

And here is another bar side dish:

And yet, I never heard a single call for Fernet-Branca,
though there was plenty of moaning about hangovers. It’s
in the sort of upscale bistro where I tended bar that you find
the kind of person who would order it: gallery owners,
executive directors of foundations, Brazilians on their
marathon holidays, Brits. Anyone who wears a Windsor
knot over a secret history of TV dinners.

(“How to Cure a Hangover,” p. 27)

In bar recipes, what’s mixed is not unmixed. And if a barmaid vigilantly does her side-work and stocking in advance, she does not have an erratic shift full of deficits and sideline surprises. But life’s recipe may be a bit trickier. The barmaid will have to bootstrap her way through to a more complex justice.

In “Swing Shift,” the second section of the collection, disappointment and lost possibility give over to bitterness, exposed desperations, and cruelties. But the rage is always hinged—and directed. After all, the barmaid has a daughter to ground her. Perhaps she recalls having read a famous question from Oscar Wilde: “Who, being loved, is poor?”

“Night Shift” roams all over the map. The barmaid even takes a literal swipe at ex-President Bush as the patriarchal warlord. Fierce, Sheehan makes it fit and stays inside of Bar Book’s frame. The collection is chocked full of wisdom for the spiritually thirsty: careful with the stout; careful with the sweet and oily froth of cream. Laying out a life takes foresight and trust: a little transport—and a careful sober look at investment and consequences.

“Do not confuse spiritual with spirituous.” The latter
means loaded with alcohol, the former with soulfulness,
which the latter, some say, instills, though the dictionary
seems keen to separate the two conditions, maintaining
distinction between distilling spirits and instilling spirit.
No semantic knot can be severed succinctly, just as no
drink can be unmixed.

(“Spirits” p. 35)

A Review by Scott Hightower

“The Last Skin” Barbara Ras
Penguin, 2010, 978-0-14-311697-4, $18.00
_______________________________________

The poems in Barbara Ras’s new book, The Last Skin are as fluid and graceful as those in her previous two collections: Bite Every Sorrow and One Hidden Stuff. The Last Skin is an extension of the metaphysics laid out in those first two books, and Ras’ poetic stance is that of someone who values life. Her long lines, long sentences, and artful syntax peel back the secret meanings of the diurnal, the life of the imagination, and the state of the soul.

The Last Skin is organized in three parts. The subject of the first part is the loss of a mother. In moving through the stations of grief and the misery of one’s own anxiety, Ras evokes wishing, love, and sorrow. Anxieties are expelled and poetic clarities are achieved:

All year, death, after death, after death.
Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky.
. . . . the moon turning half its body away,
holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen
until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief
breaks over you when you’ve already given all you’ve got
and hands you tools you don’t know how to use.
(“Dark Thirty”)

Dreaming, reverie, and death are frequent topics in poetry, but they are not subjects that lend themselves to easy success. Ras handles all with pitch-perfect dexterity. Avoiding romanticisms, she stretches and bends metaphor into teasing language, before breaking it open into poetic meaning:

Has anyone described the smell of wishbones drying
on the kitchen sill or the smell of glass, or the bucket of water
lifted from the well we go to when death takes the last thirst
from someone we love?
(“The Last Skin”)

The second section of the book is a short collection of poems based on Lake Titicaca. (The lake is on the border of Peru and Bolivia.) And while the subject of the section is a shift, the voice is ever tender toward existence:

… my camera captures the boy posing in front of his house,
thinking about this tourist lady, and what could she possibly know
beyond a door, the color of a little bit of heaven
with some darkness added, and the right amount of oil
to make it shine.
(“Blue Door”)

The final section returns to departure from the misery of one’s anxieties. Several different landscapes are employed. There are poems about irises in Krakow, an evening with vodka is glasses with waists, taking a drive in Texas, an oxcart and the aroma of hazelnuts, a palm reading, and a mysterious elephant. Without sugar-coating, Ras always turns the speaker and reader back to the realization that loss is connected to valuing something properly. When we lose something, it is because we fail to value it properly.

I’ve forgotten how we freed the falcon in your backyard
stuck between the fence and a bush.
Wasn’t it strangely easy, despite the bird’s desperate flapping,
how with no hesitation or wound, we helped it
fly away?
(“Dear C”)

Barbara Ras is one of the finest poets working today. Her third book is stellar and a welcome to the shelf. It is one of those books one buys in multiples and periodically slips into an envelope and sends to friends.

Scott Hightower

A Pilgrim into Silence, Tiger Bark Press, 2010

_________________________________________________________

Karen Swenson’s newest title, A Pilgrim into Silence, is divided into four sections. Each of the sections explores the life journey of an urban American woman—a woman of a generation and a class perhaps tinged with theatrical qualities of pomp and circumstance; a lady propelled by notions of religion and reason.

The privileges and joys of such a woman are no less real; her observations, no less driving and unremitting. Nor is her will spared in any way from the stifling rigidity of role expectations. Griefs are sedated and finally deadened with alcohol. The metaphysical places of beauty, desire, and love are dished out with heapings of loss on the long road to self-possession. Early on, love and despair become traveling companions in this collection.

Sonnets and villanelles are employed, and the lives of animals often serve as metaphors.  Sparrows are quarrelsome in spring:

But come a warm June evening, rancor gone,
brown pinstripes smooth, one holds the rail, his soft
throat feathers pulsing song, just as my wrist
beats my blood, in the mindlessness of beauty.

(“Sparrows”)

After an operatic evening out on the town, the voice of one of the poems drifts into an instant of third person disembodiment:

At intermission she [a neighbor] leaves in her mink. But
I know the score. While Violetta has
her last ecstatic moments, my ghost, home
alone, holds her pose before her claque of empties.

(“The Phantom at the Opera”)

In an unexpected leap in the section, in a food court somewhere in a more modern Teheran, girls giggle across tables at the close of a sonnet:

. . . even
a Tex-Mex. An isle of adolescent liberty,
where boys stroll by to look at faces that leaven
dreams, creating divine and political difficulty.
The essence of adolescence is invariably heathen
and totally in opposition to religion and reason.

(“Teheran, The Food Court”)

The second section of the collection is composed of poems that take place in or near Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute in Calcutta. Ironically, it is not only a home for the hopeless, and those with more privileged, languishing spirits also abide.  In their service, they find life among the death.

The poems oddly dovetail with the poems in the opening: the themes of need and an abandonment of maternal love; infantile—even animal—survival instincts; again love and despair. But even here there are small gestures of collegial cooperation in a world of almost Darwinesque competition and unrelenting denigrations. It arises between two foreign women volunteers:

In Holland
a psychiatric nurse, here she’s bemused,
as I am by how habit-forming
it is to wash the clothes and patients, their
skin crackled–sun parched, river mud.
We shop, lunch with our fellow foreigners
on meat, not dahl. We move with ease
from the Dead to the Oberoi Hotel
at night watch Rambo videos
or else read Indian philosophy.
Returning in morning air, sour with exhaust,

we find a white wrapped shape . . . The
nurse and I agree, it feels as if we almost
have a life here—a white-wrapped gift from Death.

(“Two Foreign Volunteers”)

In another, the will to live is animated:

. . . no, not pity, rather astonished admiration
for the sheer willfulness of life—a blind
and cornered cat slashing at Death’s dogs.

(“The Austrian”)

The third section is an account of the poet’s pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash—a holy mountain in the Himalayas. Still the journey of exploring will, sacrifice, and discovery.

Had this book ended with the third section, this reviewer would have set the collection down feeling the book’s promise fulfilled—the arc of a journey of discovery to the edge of self-possession. But the last section—poems returning to the themes of motherhood and urban scenery—made the collection feel less artful and more valedictorial and willed, an unnecessary bringing of things full circle. An outstanding sonnet about an aging mother’s demise, “Driving,” could have served as the sole closing poem for the book:

When she picked up the hitchhiker Death,
that beggar’s first demand was the alms of her eyes,
the cataracts were the blur of his breath,
his exhale shrinking her boundaries without reprise.
He shut her highways, lowered his border bar
till the only way out was on his road, in his car.

Scott Hightower

Let Me Open You a Swan, Elixir Press, 2010

____________________________________________

Upon reading Landscape with Silos, Deborah Bogen’s first award winning book, one could recognize authentic, accomplished poetics. In her new book, Let Me Open You a Swan, Bogen again lays out a moving constellation. The girl who once kicked a can down the road now reconstructs a landscape and lays out the architecture of a mind. In increments, Bogen’s poetry moves from images of the superstitious augury of animal parts to images of the scientific dissection of a body. All are in the metaphorical service of contemplating an enigmatic imagination.

The poems are divided into four sections. “Landscape,” the first section, introduces the harshness of Bogen’s beginning. Memory will be joyously referred to or suffered. Observations give rise to (and are the basis of) poetic creation. Hinging the concrete to the abstract is often the creation of metaphor.

Remembering meant hoisting into sight,
but the teacher said she was too distracted
— said she had a problem with distraction.

People must pay attention to many things at once,
harmonicas and lemons . . .

But her thoughts were a slow migration,
this way, they said, feel this.
And she had come to love her own words.

Bricky. Astromi. Desirening.

… the words lodged themselves in her chest between

the slickery heart and the milkrinous spine.

(“Special Ed Girl”)

The need for fuel fires the imagination in a depressed father’s suicide, a young girl’s escape out of a “two-horse” town, the car of an amorous man who has a fat wheel of pool-hall winnings stuffed in his jeans. This is the landscape of a restless Dakota child, of God-fearing generations, of butterflies pinned to a mat, and of a grandmother hanging sheets like sails that can’t catch the wind. Fuel has a connection to transport—and where there is transport, there is escape. Somewhere in a distance, a political monk strikes a match and fires a lethal protest. At the end of one of the poems, the poet evokes night skaters and croons:

. . . the fire gone out, the disappeared moon.

See how the world’s gone boney white,
a blistery storm full of hooks and hammers,
the brain a belfry of memory and shadows –

and yet we glide, and glide, and glide.

(“Asylum”)

The second section of the collection is “Religion.” The transport from locus (place) to logos (word) expands. Children making snow angels give way to a girl transported by a Hell’s Angel, give way to heavenly angels, the colicky messengers of God (and the announcers of resurrection). Escape gives way to eros and ethos and grief. In one poem in the section the poet evokes the lyric of a long-dead sister:

In Pittsburgh, the dark is never really dark which is the way
I am alone these days

…Nothing mine except the whistle of the same train leaving,
box cars empty,

… We used to whisper in the big bed
wondering what the grownups were really up to.

Was it sex?

Here’s what I know so far: God’s long division.

(“Poem For My Reader: A Long-dead Sister”)

 

“Migraine,” the third section, is a mixture of suffering pain and hosting transport:

… my temple,
tempering touch to make the Visions disperse
before Revelation claims me….

Understanding is best got beyond
some say,
but a one-eyed archer sits at the murder hole,
and already he’s taken aim.
God’s landscape is obscured by my high-jacked
brain cells, neural pathways wending
to a narrow widow’s walk, my head become electric
with suspense: seeing the two worlds.

(“Migraine With Aura”)

Is the archer aiming for “the swan?” And if struck, might the swan break into its final song? What sort of augury abides in this constellation, this collection, of poems?

In “Art,” the final section of Let Me Open You a Swan, the gentle adjuring of the poet “to allow her” to allow us to witness the autopsy—or dissection–in the title comes around full circle. But the poet, too, as witness, is auspiciously transformed by the rite:

It’s love that knuckles down, that struggles
to tell the tumor from the bright idea,
paring memory to bone and turning truth into
something better than monument.
There will be months and years when you can’t
see, a gauzy past in the air and no light.
Then one day, the flock lifts.

(“To See For Yourself”)

Scott Hightower

Birds of Hoboken, Orchises, 1995
Not Till We Are Lost, Louisiana State University Press, 2004

____________________________________________

Birds of Hoboken was published in 1995. Not Till We Are Lost, William Wenthe’s second collection, was published in 2004. The two books, end to end, read as a testament to craft and seasoned poetic vision.

Both books use birds as vehicles. Poetic flight has long fired somber divinations and lyric contemplations. In Birds of Hoboken the vehicles give way to soliloquies concerned with time and cause and effect on a human scale. Landscapes are expressions of human abandonment, passage, or remoteness. The artfully measured lines of these poems move from ornithological and fishing observations, (in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City) to Dante and more philosophical questions of love and god… from observations of the “remoteness we haven’t killed yet” to a choir of “ungainly voices positing an idea of harmony, in need of something large enough to embrace us all, imagined out of our stunted love.”

The notion of a balance between hope and time hovers near to the center of each poem. Oddly, in one poem about composing a wedding invitation, the moment is laced with a “spell of doom”:

Leafing through Shakespeare, we look for
phrases about love that have stayed.
Even so, the spell of doom
mutters behind the old comedies, the sentence of death
for young ones who would couple
with their own desire: So quick bright things
come to confusion. In the stories, such knowledge
gets pressed back by love, the faith
that faith itself will play the dramaturge,
making all, in the end, even.

(”Invitation to a Wedding”)

Wenthe is aware that along with philosophical and romantic bonding comes risk: there is no intellectual enterprise, no romantic journey, no physical ordeal without some possible encroachment of danger. Wenthe may be hopeful, but he is also an observer of the pattern of the physical world. One may faithfully pledge one day; but, another time, one may hopelessly surrender. One gate may be labeled RECOVERY, another DOOM.

{Dante] finally had to turn
to the earth to explain it: to a rose
that gives shape to Paradise,
to a river made of light;
and a hive of bees tumbling among blossoms––
angels ministering to souls.

But if we can translate in the other
direction, who, then are these leaves
riding the wind outside my house?
… Does this river, then,
run through heaven? Is it possible to save
these leaves from a doom of merely spinning?

… And what is the name of this gesture
the asters make in the wind?

…the gestures of the asters
inviting us into fictions––extended names
moving like angels or like bees.
(“Fictions”)

In Not Till We Are Lost Wenthe is subject to some dislocation. He departs from his familiarly labeled geographic landscapes and moves into the more austere terrain of West Texas. Lubbock, neither lush nor florid, has its own beauties. In the new landscape, there are new names he must learn for birds, flowers, and fish; and there are still the poet’s private reveries drawn from art inspired by picturesque landscapes and death daubed Audubon illustrations.

The voice of both of these collections, line by line, is quiet and observant–– elegant in every way. But the poems of Not Till We Are Lost are more clearly poems of aftermath. Self knowledge has been honed by several personal tragedies. The poet’s experiences are not simply romantic transforming energies, they are real events with physical consequences. No one escapes suffering. But the poet’s emotional precisions have been tempered:

Strong and simple,
universal yet bitingly
personal: why not
worship pain? Like spirit,

it goes beyond the limits
of body….
Maybe the Christian
punks I’ve lately noticed
around town know more
than I do: their skin needled

with crucifix tattoos, pierced
with metal studs…
(“Redbud”)

In one particularly beautiful poem in the collection, “Bluebird and Comet,” the poet departs from the self-deluding, self-destructive March hormones of a blue bird and cosmic mechanics to a meditation on the decline of his parents:

… barely a body between them
whole enough to keep a house, and still
they persist, keeping to their rounds
of chores, habitual as birds. . .

Lyrically, in the close of the poem, the poet both surrenders and launches out:

I’m drawn back to that maddening
blue flare, the brilliant
surrender giving way to song.

The book ends in an arresting crown of unrhymed sonnets. They, too, are about source, time, and writing:

When I arrive at the end of a line,
another kind of mystery emerges––
the rhythmic tug, the overlapping urges
of verse traversing back and forth in time:
the way syllabic repetitions rhyme
what’s gone with what is now, and prophesy
a future seeded in the present. A sorcery
of sorts, for time moves through the poem
as the poem moves through time.

(“The Mysteries”)

Scott Hightower

Persistent Voices, An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS, Alyson Books, 2010
Theory of Devolution, University of Illinois Press, 2002
______________________________________

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.

*

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”)