In Which We're Obtained And Preserved By The Artifice Of Rhyme

Poems Newly Appeared: Nonstop Gases

The end of the world is coming. You already knew this, but did you know that the apocalypse can be a useful generative device? Now that the end of days is more or less in the offing, it is no longer the exclusive property of theology, and literary authors are responding accordingly. It turns out there is plenty of human interest to be found amidst pandemics and nuclear winters. The most recent novels by Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood both take place on imperiled planets. How exactly the planet got to such a state is mostly left unclear, but it seems to have come about through the fallibility of mankind, oft noted.

Recent poetry has also been toying with the idea of our destruction. In the current issue of the Paris Review (cf. Poems Newly Appeared last week), Timothy Donnelly has a poem entitled “Globus Hystericus.” This is an energetic work (that is, its sentences run on) which is deeply upset about the “massive factories” that are “havocking loved waterways.” The speaker wanders around one of these “ghost run factories” while suffering, like the world, from a nervous disorder. Besides that, he has an unhealthy appetite for cream-filled cakes. These cakes, which he guiltily buys from vending machines, are mentioned several times throughout the poem, and the sugar clearly has an effect. His metaphors grow jittery (“the flaming peccary of a comet”) and his indignation rises. In poetry as in anything, there is a threshold of feeling beyond which one must use expletives, and it happens here about two thirds of the way through:

     we squandered that very earth and shat on it …

     emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production.

Gases and factories: were there ever any good ones?  In any event, the poem develops into a vividly bleak and intriguing work. It concludes when there is “no music left” and the speaker buries his head in his hands—a perfectly understandable reaction to climate change.

Now we turn to another journal, and zip even further into the future. Armageddon came to pass, but we got over that. Something called “The Age of Failed Cures” happened, and also the sun disappeared permanently from the sky (another mess up of ours), yet still life goes on. The only real difference is that now we get our light from animals. Such is the premise of an untitled poem by Matthea Harvey in the current issue of Tin House. The poem presents the charming picture of what daily life will be like once rabbits and elephants become phosphorescent. “In the malls,” for example, “lit / sparrows flit along, guiding the shoppers’ way.” It all sounds cozy and neat, with the unpleasant business of losing the sun now totally behind us. When people want to go to sleep, they just “shoo the dog from the bedroom,” and they are back in the dark. It seems like an agreeable arrangement, until the poet, in her last line, slyly turns the dimmer down on hopefulness: “In our / heads we can still see the moon.”

Tin House can be purchased online for $17.00, or you can subscribe at $24.95 and receive four issues. The current issue, No. 41, is divided into two sections, under the themes of “Hope” and “Dread.” The above mentioned poem by Harvey is included in “Hope.”

* * *

Good form. This is an occasional series that will remark on recent examples of formal poetry, this being the first entry. Traditional poetic forms are many and various, but in journals they appear infrequently enough that we can fairly lump them into the single category of all verse not free.

We begin with rhyme. The distinctness of English verse is “obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme,” wrote Dr. Johnson a couple centuries ago, and the dictum still has currency. Paul Muldoon, an Irish poet living in New Jersey, is one of the most recognized practitioners of rhyme, having been linking words like “slab” and “Ballymacnab” for decades, usually with a dexterity that leaves the reader in awe and slightly dazed.

But Muldoon is not only a poet; he is also a poetry editor. Two years ago he took over Alice Quinn’s post at the New Yorker, and his chiming influence can easily be felt. “Au Revoir” is a poem by Maureen N. McLane in the current issue, and it sticks out its rhymes with frisky high/low match ups:

     Did Fisher-Price furnish our minds

     with a transportable imaginaire?

     George Bush the first said he liked pork rinds.

     My name not Mary my self contrary.

Minds and rinds: this we can handle, and might even laugh at. But the poet is having a laugh herself when she rhymes imaginaire/contrary, and repeats the joke later on with monsieur/seer. It is a joke that shifts the poem’s voice, or maybe your voice. Surely there is a challenge here: do you drop your French pronunciation to keep the rhyme scheme alive, or do you snub the poem by rolling your r’s? There is no right answer, although you probably do not want to be allied with the “feckless tourism” that she scolds for “hubris misregarding itself as gumption.” But who can say for sure? The target of her satire seems subtle, but is probably broad. Not that it matters. The main point of the poem is surely that McLane is brilliantly in command of her form, and that the form itself still pleases.

—T.K.         

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently available in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared at gmail dot com.

Paul Muldoon with his band Radiohead.

In Which This Is All We're Going to Say About It

Poems Newly Appeared: You Were the Chicken

“Evening Man” is a poem in the current issue of the Paris Review, but it does not appear in the table of contents. Properly speaking, it was not even selected by the editors. The poem is instead given to us by the poet himself, Frederick Seidel, in a bout of aloofness toward his interviewer, who cannot help bothering with questions like “what does that mean?” and “where did that come from?”. Seidel stops the interview to deliver the 24 rhyming lines of “Evening Man” and then states: “That’s the poem, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

Good, but what has he said? The second stanza begins:

     This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,

     Who does the things most people only dream about.

     He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.

The lines are frankly consistent with the Seidel elsewhere depicted in the interview. This is a poet who is well known for collecting Italian motorcycles. He is independently wealthy and shops on Savile Row. A smooth 73 years old, he is photographed here while surrounded by attractive young women (“friends” in the caption). He jaws on about meeting Pound (“We got on very well”) and Lowell (“We hit it off”), and though he is demure on Eliot’s obvious influence, he did meet the man (“We had a rollicking, wonderful time, roaring with laughter”). Aloof even in regard to consistency, he explains how he discovered his poetic vocation upon reading part of the Pisan Cantos in Time magazine; then, some ten pages later, tells how he refused to publish his own work in Time, “a vulgar place to bring a poem out.”

This makes the beginning of “Evening Man” somewhat unpromising. To use verse as a medium for self-regard would not seem worthy of the man—and, besides that, would seem a belabored point, not at all an admirable range of expression.

But the poem changes tack. The speaker of “Evening Man” suddenly comes forward with “An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair / That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey,” and before it is over, he is waking up “on a slab, beheaded,” with his hands chopped off into the bargain. Occasionally, lines of poetry are printed that make one sorry ever to have heard the name of Sigmund Freud, but here the imagery is essential, and indeed makes this an astonishing poem, for it transforms the speaker into someone vulnerable, challenged by life, and perilously aware. “It ends like this” is how the poem ends, and it could not sound more depleted.

* * *

In the field of genre fiction, there are plenty of authors who publish heavily, reach a wide popular audience, and enjoy nice financial returns. In the field of genre poetry, not so. With the possible exception of the “cowboy poetry” of American West, whatever that might actually be, who out there is keeping alive the practice of niche verse?

For a small but brave effort, turn to the noir-themed current issue of Black Clock, a literary review published out of the California Institute of the Arts. Only two poems are included, but they are both distinctly moody with crime and debauch. One is “Oracle Bones” by Alison Turner. This short piece of free-form noir starts off intriguingly enough, but soon careens into a fateful metaphor:

     Meaning if you were the chicken

                                   boiled down for this

     Would you ever mean the truth again?

If that leaves you craving a rye and soda with a Chesterfield, flip over to the other poem, “Witness to a Murder”:

     She saw a murder.

     She bought all the papers.

     She pocketed the murdered woman’s earrings.

     She called the police.

     She smoked a cigarette.

     She told her story and was not believed.

Gripping, and we have not even met the “suave Englishman” yet, or the mysterious Mr. Peabody who is sequestered in the drawing room. “Witness to a Murder” is by David Lehman, whose staccato lines recreate the suspense of a not too innocent young lady caught in a web of something or other. Regrettably, Lehman breaks form in the second half of the poem, dispensing with the usual resolution of a gun shot and replacing it with something vague, suggestive, and poetic. By the last line, one would give up half the works of Shakespeare to find out who Mr. Peabody is, but no luck.

Issue No. 10 of Black Clock is purchasable online, as are selected back issues, including No. 7 (sex), No. 8 (travel), No. 9 (politics).  No. 6 (poetry), however, is sold out. Issue No. 11, which takes on “forsaken cities and blasted landscapes,” hits newsstands soon. Submissions for Issue No. 12 are being accepted through October 31, though no theme has been announced. Instead, authors are encouraged to read past issues.

—T.K.         

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently available in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.

Just Jack - Embers (mp3)

Noah and The Whale - Love of an Orchestra (mp3)

In Which Our New Poetry Column Soothes and Delights

Poems Newly Appeared: Relevant Ravines

How do you excerpt from a 1,000 page manuscript that contains no complete sentences? The answer, if you are Kenneth Goldsmith, editor of the series Publishing the Unpublishable, is you don’t. The work in question is Human / Nature by Stephen Ratcliffe, and Goldsmith has generously made it available online, in its entirety and free of charge, as a PDF (1.2 MB) and as an MP3 (12 hours).

But you do—you do excerpt—if you are the editors of Bomb, a quarterly magazine. In the world of paper, ink, advertisers, and readerships, there is a dreary sort of economy at play that evidently allows only four poems of Human / Nature to appear at one time. Those selected for the current issue of First Proof, Bomb’s literary supplement, are “6.23”, “6.24”, “6.26”, and “6.27”. The images in these poems line up against sparse punctuation, presenting themselves with a sureness and clarity that is almost analytical, but without judgment, as in “6.24”:

                                                                 man in maroon

     sweatshirt walking across room in dark, man on couch

     noting “she was snoring so loud I couldn’t take it”

                                                                             woman

     on phone recalling hospice on Long Island Sound, the average

     length of stay a day and a half

The simple, unresolved flow of these dependent clauses carries the reader along and compels him to turn the page, or at least press “page down”.

But, just as the mortal overtones begin to mount, the sequence is interrupted and we are sent directly to “6.26”. What happens in “6.25”? And why did the editors feel the need expunge it? For this, you will need to browser over to the unabridged PDF, scroll down a little (p. 252), and search in “6.25” for the offending lines, which it seems were likely either “Arafat claiming, ‘Sharon cannot forget his defeat in front / of me in 1982,’” or  “orange disk of sun behind blue- / grey haze”.

* * *

The mysterious disappearance of Craig Arnold, last seen walking along the edge of a Japanese volcano, continues to be deeply felt in the poetry community. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, includes a reminiscence in the October issue describing how energetic a reader Arnold was, while adding the thoughtful observation that he was “the only poet I have known personally—the only good poet, I should say—who seemed completely at ease with being a poet.”

One is also left to assume that “Meditation on a Grapefruit,” included in this issue, is also the last poem by Arnold that will appear in Poetry. Beginning as a piece of descriptive whimsy (“To come to the kitchen / and peel a little basketball”), and presented with the careful joy of domestic routine that is perhaps the calling card of mainstream American poetry, the piece ends with a simple, destabilizing couplet, “a little emptiness” that is

     every year harder to live within

     every year harder to live without

When a talented poet dies early, it is difficult not to read his work without squinting your eyes and seeing something entirely unintended.

* * *

For a healthy load of verse in a more experimental style, look to the journal The Agriculture Reader, but look only once a year. The third installment of this “arts annual” has just appeared, being harvest time, and that is all for this turn of the seasons.

And it must have been some effort to bring together: cleverly illustrated, expertly laid out, and with a table of contents that includes many compelling writers, difficult to categorize but somehow easily suited to each other: Christian Hawkey, Noelle Kocot, Eileen Myles, Tony Towle, Matthew Zapruder, among others.

Difficult to categorize—but one wonders if Jerome Sala, in his poem “The Stoners” is facing down that difficulty. It is tempting to interpret this poem in all kinds of ways—a poem that features “Stone Age hipsters” who

                                                     likewise said “no”

     to the tool-loving utilitarians who pounded their age into shape—

     creating rocky igloo prisons they called “the hearth” in grunt language—

     preferring instead to huddle in ravines of irrelevance.

To purchase The Agriculture Reader, No. 3, go here. To submit to The Agriculture Reader, No. 4, email here, but note this challenge from the editors: “We don’t generally take unsolicited submissions, but that doesn’t mean we won’t.”

—T.K.         

Beginning today, T.K. will offer a weekly commentary on some poems currently available in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.