POETRY In Which We Wonder In The Inching Sun How It Was Known
Monday, November 9, 2009 at 3:39AM 
Poems Newly Appeared: Some Are Dun-Colored
The journal Conduit is many things. By its own accounting, it is “Words & visions for minds on fire.” It is also “An international magazine of poetry, art, fiction, non-fiction, non sequiturs, and interviews.” Not least, it is “The only magazine that risks annihilation.” That is a lot of slogan to appear in the first few pages. And, without meaning to do any disservice, we wonder if annihilation is really necessary for such an interesting magazine.
The current issue, No. 20, has as its theme “Humans ‘n’ Nature.” What is suggested is that we, humans, have a complex relationship with everything else. And in particular, with volcanoes. The first poem in the issue begins:
At the stairs to the top of the volcano,
you warn me, “Secrets are small fires.
Let’s be more primitive. Let’s tie ourselves up.
Let’s wait for the monster.”
Written by Carley Moore, the poem, “The Match,” expresses the volatility of the speaker’s bedroom activities, with the volcano used to express how love can force a young woman to sacrifice important things, not mentioned.
It should be clear: by the metaphoric use of the volcano. For poets, as for anyone, the difference between figurative and actual peril is important to keep in mind. Especially in the matter of volcanoes.
We had this particular natural phenomenon in mind already following the death of Craig Arnold (see Poems Newly Appeared, Oct. 13). A talented poet, Arnold was last heard from while blogging from the volcanoes of Japan. After Moore’s poem in Conduit, with its vivid evocation of standing at a fiery precipice, it came as a shock to see there was also a poem, cautiously positioned at the back, by Craig Arnold. His piece here is called “asunder,” and it would have appeared in print right around the time of his disappearance. “Now I write / without hope of answer,” he writes.
Conduit is printed biannually. In lieu of bios, contributors are listed only with city of residence and email address. Carley Moore of Brooklyn, New York, can be reached at carley.moore@nyu.edu. Craig Arnold, formerly of Laramie, Wyoming, is listed with the email address greatdarkman@yahoo.com.
* * *
When reading a poet who has died early, a certain optical illusion occurs. Lines that were more or less harmless when they were written now seem full of omen. The poet titles a book Made Flesh, and the old phrase takes on a glow of ironic premonition when he goes missing a few months later.
Sometimes, though, the sequence is reversed. Instead of writing unwittingly about what is to come, a poet writes unwittingly about what has already happened. This, at least, seems to be the case with Derek Walcott’s poems in the Nov. 19 New York Review of Books.
Earlier this year, Walcott was campaigning to be the next University of Oxford Professor of Poetry. But he dropped out of the election, despite leading in the polls, due to a smear campaign that focused on his sometimes unprofessional manner with female students. Instead, poet Ruth Padel was elected to the position. That seemed to be the end of it, until, nine days later, Padel herself resigned when it was revealed that she had slandered Walcott in emails to journalists. “I do think I was very silly to send those emails,” she explained.
And here we are now, with all that nastiness behind us, though not by much. The first line of one Walcott poem in the New York Review reads: “There was no ‘affair,’ it was all one-sided.” With this, it would appear that Walcott is about to offer his version of l’affaire Walcott and his related affairs. And how could he not be referring to the Oxford drama?
But he is not. Or, it seems, not wittingly. The poem is ostensibly about a simple, distant love interest. It takes place in “Siracusa,” where he is squinting into the sunlight:
I wondered in the inching sun how it was known
to the ferry’s horn, the pines, the Bay’s azure hills
and the jeering screaming girls that I would lose her.
Who is “her”? Perhaps it does not matter. The “affair” mentioned in the first line may in fact be a simple love interest. Like so many poets before him, Walcott is alone in Italy, forlorn and full of words, looking for truth beside a fountain he refers to, unironically, as “the cool dark well sacred to Arethusa.”
Then we move to the second poem, and our suspicions revive. It includes the lines:
I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating.
Now it does seem to matter who “her” is. True, our baser nature reveals itself by making an immediate association with Padel. And perhaps Walcott has not made the association himself. The whole poem is a little confusing. If we are being asked to read it at face value—about a love affair—then we decline. If, on the other hand, Walcott is referring to the Oxford event, then he is being oblique indeed.
We seek clarity. Any readers who have seen recent poems by Ruth Padel in journals are encouraged to contact us.
* * *
Literary journals enjoy themes. Since a journal may appear only quarterly, biannually, or, like a high school prom, annually, a good theme provides some useful context. To compare with the theme “Humans ‘n’ Nature,” see past installments of Poems Newly Appeared, which looked at journals focusing on “Noir” and “Dread,” for example.
The model of all themed journals is probably Granta, having been around, off and on, since 1889, and almost never missing an opportunity for a theme. The current issue focuses on “Chicago.” Each of the fiction and reportage pieces has a perfectly evident connection with the city. Indeed, the word “Chicago” is usually used in the first paragraph, as though by a pupil careful to make sure he is answering the assignment.
Not so the poems in the issue, which are two, one each by James Schuyler and Anne Winters. We thought Schuyler was a member of the “New York School.” We know that he lived, worked, and died in Manhattan, and wrote poignantly about the city as a complex habitat for friends and art. The poem included here by Schuyler, “Coming Night,” does not mention “Chicago,” nor does Winters’s “Knight with Lady.”
“Coming Night” appears here in print for the first time, and we are delighted to have it. But we are unable to find even a circumstantial connection with the city in question. The poem conjures up “willows” and “sumac”—not the background flora one normally associates with the hog butcher for the world.
Leaving butchers aside, Winters’s poem communicates her first experience of seeing a penis, which was her father’s:
—how could I have known?
Long dun-colored unaware
Dodona bough it seemed to me,
—pale hornbeam suckering and sprawled.
Indifferent, it had the quality
of Fact; of old, seamed, Entity:
I was called to a lifetime of study.
We, too, have looked, but we have not found “Chicago.” In any case, we think we discovered the reason for these poets’ inclusion in Granta No. 108. Schuyler was born in Chicago, and in fact today would have been his 86th birthday. Anne Winters, born in New York City and for whom New York is a “primary subject” of her poetry, currently lives in Evanston, Illinois.
—T.K.
T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.
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