Michael McFee: Long Time to be Gone

As an undergrad, I sought out courses taught by visiting instructors whenever I could—they typically did not grade as harshly as the tenured faculty. That was partly my motivation for taking a poetry seminar with Michael McFee. I was not familiar with the name—he had only one book at the time—but he was on a temporary gig, visiting from North Carolina (a pedigree that made him right at home at Cornell, which listed Archie Ammons and Robert Morgan on the poetry roster). It turned out to be one of the most memorable and influential course I ever took.

McFee was an astute and generous reader (although our poetry probably did not merit such attentiveness). He challenged and inspired us, and instilled a bit of his poetic sensibility without eclipsing our own.

Since then, I’ve followed his work with consistent admiration. I’m happy to report that he recently released a new collection, A Long Time to Be Gone. If you’ve never read his work before, this is a great place to begin. And if you’re familiar with his work, you’ll find everything you love—magnified.

McFee has a distinctive voice, marked by a sense of compassionate bemusement at the human condition. He as a knack for noticing the gesture or word that reveals something we didn’t know we knew about ourselves. He approaches language like a curious scientist, seeking to take it apart and reverse engineer it. An offhand comment can set him off on a grand philosophic or philologic expedition.

Like many current poetry books, this one is arranged into thematic sections. The first is perhaps the most elegiac, with poems inspired by the recent or soon-to-be deceased—a group that includes the poet himself. The first poem, “Brother Ass,” sets the tone, with a meditation that likens his aging body to a stubborn mule that just keep going, a thing of the earth, bearing its burden, the poet’s soul and spirit (a more concrete version of Yeats, “fastened to a dying animal”). “I mortified my body for half a century / by simply ignoring it,” he writes, no doubt hearing the root for “death” in “mortified.” And in “In Memory of My Niece,” he looks out of “the last window you looked out of” to see a bird perched on a branch, its tail dipping every time it sings, and he imagines her ghost pressing it down, as though it were a lever on a toy—a wonderful image, which evokes both her childish wonder and the sound of her song, which survives her. So long lives this.

The second section focuses on the days of Covid lockdown. I suspect every poet has penned an obligatory Covid poem or two; these, I think, will outlast our memory of the pandemic itself. They display his typical sense of whimsy or bemusement, along with his penchant for dissecting language. But mostly, they focus on how the lockdown reduced us all to our purest human components, like an acid bath. Faced with something new and unknown, he looks at it through the lens of language—which renders it less threatening, more playful and approachable. “The Word,” for example, notes that “pandemic is framed by the word panic.” Of course it is—but it’s only obvious after he points it out. In “No,” he laments the ironic oxymoron of the ballpark “closed on Opening Day.” And in “Will These Hands Ne’er Be Clean?” he sees his hands beneath the faucet as “two lovers appreciating each other, / their slippery ups and downs and ins and outs.” A wonderful, sensual image—but one that is undercut, because he notes that they are in fact not like lovers, but rather like forensic detectives, probing every crevice not for pleasure but for evidence of the unclean. The human urge for contact is internally curtailed by Big Brother or the morality police.

The final section mostly comprises portraits, after a fashion. Most intriguing is his focus, in several poems, on the autograph. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a discourse on the topic, though McFee shows it’s an intriguing concept. On the one hand, it exemplifies our desire to have a connection to fame, even if it isn’t our own. It suggest that we can learn a lot about ourselves by looking at how we idolize. And it begs the question of what distinguishes an autograph from simple graffiti? Is it the medium? The prestige of the writer? The value imposed by the receiver? Ultimately, of course, every poem is an autograph, the inimitable signature of the poet. 

I could dote on every poem in this collection, but let me wrap up with a section of “A Grudge,” in which his linguistic sensibilities are on full display. He considers the sound and feel of the word, and in just a few lines, give us “growling…grumble…aggrieved…grousing…trudging…ridges…grump…gruesome…sludge…judging…drudge…grunting.” A stanza of infinite echoes. If you’ve ever pondered the relationship between playfulness and mastery, this will certainly give you more food for thought.

As a title, A Long Time to Be Gone can be viewed as a modernization—or syncopation—of the Latin axiom, “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Here is art that will endure.

Ada Limón: Bright Dead Things

We have a new national poet laureate: Ada Limón. I was familiar with the name, but could not recall reading any poems—at least nothing that stuck with me. So I grabbed a copy of Bright Dead Things. It’s not her most recent collection, but it was well received (finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award). And though she apparently does not live in California anymore, she spent her formative years here, and I’m always happy to promote our local talent. 

The poems are all free verse, with considerable variation in terms of line length, lineation, and stanzas. Skinny poems appear opposite prose poems. The language is simple and unadorned—as though you were sitting down with a good friend for a cup of coffee on a lazy afternoon. That’s not to say that Limón is deaf to the sensuality of language. Many poems display a subtle gift for alliteration and echolalia, with lines like  “I’m cold in my heart, coal-hard,” “Witness the wet dead snake,” or “A bat cracks in the flickering background.” But in general, the diction is distinctly unpoetic, as evidenced by these first lines, selected mostly at random: “Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire,” “I lied about the whales,” “Last night we killed a possum,” and “My ex got hit by a bus.” 

Landscape and locale often figure prominently, though Limón is by no means a Nature poet. Rather, what comes across is a sense of place, of belonging or of longing to belong. In “The Last Move,” she laments about “how south we were, far away in the outskirts,” further noting, “This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.” This general theme, of location and dislocation, is most prominent in the first section of the book, though it also informs the remaining sections. 

If Limón has a spirit animal, it must be the horse. Growing up near Sonoma, she would’ve encountered lots of them. She finds them, too, near her new home in Kentucky, though there they are not the farm workhorses or riding breeds but rather racing thoroughbreds. Are they symbolic in some way? I think it’s more accurate to say that they represent something in the liminal space between wild and domestic, which would certainly appeal to a poet with a somewhat rural upbringing. They further convey a sense of joy and exuberance at simply being alive and fully inhabiting your own body. My favorite poem in the collection, “The Wild Divine,” starts in the rush and fumble of teenage lust, in the “luck of a first love and a first full-fledged fuck,” and shifts to focus on “a wandering / madrone-skinned horse from the neighbor’s garden.” The energy of the first part of the poem, packed with description and very little punctuation, is essentially tamed in the second part, where that “wise, hoofed, grizzled, equine elder” lumbers in with a saddlebag of commas. In this way, the form echoes the brief passion and lazy afterglow that is presented in the narrative. Note, too, that wonderful adjective, “madrone-skinned,” which carries extra nuance, coming from a poet of Mexican heritage.

Still, it might be obvious by now that I am not entirely enamored of this book. While I find much to admire, it checks off too many items on my list of poetic turn-offs. For example, the use of “so” as an adverb: “so many people,” “I made the house so clean,” “It’s so small,” “so many different ways.” You can’t get much more lazy as a poet. In a genre built upon the notion that every word is essential, it’s inexcusable to use filler words. No serious poet would use the word “very”; the word “so” falls in the same category. 

Many poems address an unnamed “you.” For example, “I think of you, home / with the dog,” or “your mother said she wasn’t sure / if one of your ancestors died in childbirth.” “You stopped at a friend’s / body shop to talk about a buddy.” ”You’ve gone to get us gas-station coffee.” “I decide, / someday, to name a kid Levon, and you / agree.” Every time I encounter this construction, I think, “Sorry, I think you’re confusing me with somebody else. We’ve never actually met.” A poem can be a love letter to life, but it should not be a letter to your lover.   

Similarly, Limón often makes reference to people that the reader can’t be expected to know: “He’s betting / in the living room, / which T calls / the drinks room.” “It’s been exactly two months since / C died.” “I think of that walk in the Valley where J said, You don’t believe in God?” “I ran into T, and we decided we needed / to drink.” Is this a poem, or a redacted FBI dossier? 

I’m also no fan of parentheses in poems: “(All the new bugs.)” “thinking this pain will / go on forever (even though it won’t).” “The mistake // I made was getting out of the car / (you told me not to).” “They gave her a goat to take to the outhouse // (not for protection but for offering).” “We both know they crack, / (Don’t we?)” A phrase or concept is either needed or it’s not; there’s no reason to be coy. 

Then of course there’s the easy reliance on non sequitur. I understand this is popular nowadays, and one could argue it’s a reflection of the era, in which linear thinking seems reactionary and reality itself seems disjointed. But to me it just feels timid—a way to avoid contemplating difficult ideas or engaging the reader. It essentially says, “I probably can’t hold your attention with my line of thought, so I’ll try to hold it by confusing you.” Take these first lines from “Home Fires,” for example:

Six lines in, and I defy anyone to explain what this poem is about.

The conversational tone is ultimately a problem for me, too. Frank O’Hara made it work most of the time, but I can’t think of many other poets who could. Art should rise above the commonplace, the ordinary, and make use of those techniques the are unique to the genre. I’m not saying all poetry should invoke “high diction,” but if it sounds like that woman at the next table talking on the phone, it just makes me want to sit somewhere else.

Doug Ramspeck: Black Flowers

Recently, I picked up a book by a poet whom I’ve admired for many years—Doug Ramspeck. Previously, I had only encountered his work in journals, which is to say, one or two at a time. With his book, Black Flowers, in hand, I am reminded how your sense and appreciation of a poet can change when you start to read them in depth.

For example, I had not considered him with respect to the rural tradition. This is a genre that I associate with Southern poets—but the locales in this book are near the Great Lakes—Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula, Ohio. Nonetheless, the poems in this book have a distinctly “Southern” feel to them–but without the overt biblical references. 

Nature, writ large, is a brooding and impassive force in these poems. There’s plenty of mud, muck, and loam, and often it proffers the delicate skull of a small animal, bleached and moony. And the moon itself is a constant feature—it’s a rare poem in this collection that does not mention the moon in some manner. There are birds, too, of course. Herons, which typically assume a godly stature, and crows and grackles, which are vaguely associated with the poet’s mother. 

In general, the tone is wistful and nostalgic, but largely unsentimental. The lineation is often sparse, with unrhymed couplets the preferred style. Though the language is mostly plain-spun, Ramspeck is clearly enamored by the sound, the physicality, of words. At times, the phrasing can be wonderfully surprising:  “a clemency of clouds,” “alluvial darkness,” “the silage of stars,” “the cuneiform / tangles of your hair.” This is a poet who loves alliteration, and uses it to great effect.

I typically read poetry books in a desultory manner, but this one displays a thematic arc from start to finish. The poems in the first section (Conjuring) look back upon the poet’s childhood, or rather, adolescence—that transitional phase between childish longing and adult desire. We get a glimpse into a troubled homelife, and the parents’ eventual divorce. In “Notes on Beauty: The Skull,” the father finds a woodchuck’s skull buried in the dirt, cleans it off, and presents it to the mother “for their final / anniversary.” Such a wonderful image, as you’re not sure whether the gift was an honest gesture of love, or an assertion that their love is dead and buried. If it’s the first, then the father is (tragically?) unaware of their impending separation; if it’s the second, he’s handing over the divorce papers. 

In the middle section (Claiming), the poet is in his prime—he experiences love and marriage, haunted initially by a miscarriage but redeemed eventually by a child. This brief section is replete with primordial ooze—even in the titles, which include words like “Dust,” “Mud,” “Stones,” and of course “Moon.”

The final section (Burying) reflects on the final stages of life. Here we see the parents, no longer the hale and earthy creatures of the first section, but now wispy and shrunken with age. Death, and impending death, are the overriding themes. This section contains one of my favorite poems in the book, “Paper Skin.” While it focuses on an elderly neighbor, its real subject is the pragmatic and dutiful father, who “commanded” the poet “to mow her grass in summer and shovel her driveway in winter.” And while it seems that the father is driven by a sense of decency and courtesy, of noblesse oblige, he nonetheless tells the son to filch some useful tools from the lady’s basement after she’d died, before her relatives could come and claim them.

In fact, this is not the first we’ve seen of the elderly neighbor in these poems. Like many poets with an obsessive fascination with the past, Ramspeck replays and recasts scenes throughout the book. We see the elderly neighbor more than once, along with her granddaughter, an early subject of the poet’s gaze and desire. We see young lovers carrying blankets to the river’s edge again and again. We encounter the boy who drowned in the river more than once. As a young man, he lived across the street from a funeral home (is there a better place for an emerging poet to live?), which becomes another recurring theme. In fact, we occasionally get some variation of “formaldehyde” (e.g., “the stars // grew slowly mired in their jar of formalin”), which may be a direct result of his proximity to the embalmer’s workshop. He’ll often try different ways of executing the same idea—so for instance, to describe the color of sunrise or sunset, we get “the dusk sky / slitting the throats of the clouds” in one poem, and in another, “dawn / would slip its necklace / of blood over // the horizon’s neck.” On the other hand, the recasting and reviewing sometimes comes across as too much reliance on phrases or images that have worked in the past. The adjective “low-slung,” for example, sets a tone the first time it appears, but by the third time, it just draws attention to itself. And, as mentioned, the force of the moon as objective correlative gets diluted with repeated use.

Ultimately, what I love about Ramspeck is his joy in language and his ability to tweak and extend a phrase into something unexpected and beautiful. For example, these lines from “Ars Poetica with Heron and Dance”:

Ramspeck also has a new book out from Cloudbank Books and another forthcoming from WordWorks. I look forward to checking them out, too.

Jack Wiler: Divina is Divina

Like many, I look back on the Covid era and think (with a nod to James Wright), “I have wasted my life.” Or more specifically, I have squandered my time. My self-reproach is all the more acute because I have been reading the final, posthumous collection by Jack Wiler, Divina is Divina, a book tinged throughout by the sad transience of life. It’s a remarkable collection by a man whose life all but demanded to be set down in poems.

For starters, Wiler worked for many years as a pest exterminator, and his experience in the field often inspires or informs these poems. He reveals an unexpected sympathy, or at least pity, for the creatures he’s paid to eradicate. They seem to be, in his view, unfairly demonized for trying to eke out a life, which, in their view, has nothing to do with us. In this, they become foils for the humans they plague, people trying to survive while the whole world seems bent on their destruction, people often on the margins, who could easily “fall through the cracks” as we say (a phrase all the more pungent when thinking about roaches, mites, and bedbugs).”Cherish your mice, your rats, your roaches, your bedbugs!” he writes in “Praises for the Insect and Mammalian Dead,” a poem with overtones of the Sermon on the Mount, “They are your poorest children / They have no other home but yours.” In his affinity for the uncouth, and in his sparse deadpan lines, Wiler seems very much like the Bukowski of Jersey City—except that Wiler lacks Bukowski’s overriding misanthropy and fundamental meanness. (I also doubt he ever achieved the celebrity that Bukowski enjoyed before his death).

Another defining trait—which presumably led to Wiler’s relatively early death—was his battle with HIV. His declining health influences many (maybe all?) of the poems in this collection, imbuing them with a mixture of fatalism, sadness, and awe. Many poems chronicle the vicissitudes of the disease, from bleeding gums to low platelet counts to neuropathic pain. Others come face to face with the inevitable: “I’m in a house with five other people, all infected with HIV. / One or the other of us could die, either sooner or later,” he writes in “On Death and Dying.” On the one hand, he expresses an acceptance of death, maybe even a readiness. But this is undercut by poems that convey a desire to keep going, even under miserable conditions. “Why I go to Work” recounts the dreary duties of his job, concluding with his desire

And while many poems do convey a sense of anger and regret, perhaps a hint of self-pity, most seem to arise from a sense of love, the kind that comes from knowing that all desire ends in loss. Even the vermin are beautiful, and largely emblematic of the world itself, in which the collective goes on despite countless individual deaths.

But Wiler’s “love” is not merely an abstract love of the world, but of a particular individual–Johanna, whom he describes as “a gorgeous transsexual from El Salvador.” Johanna appears throughout the book, often providing the prompts that inspire the poems–most notably, “The Love Poem Johanna Asks For,” which again praises the ordinariness of their life together, the appreciation of the simplest moments. It is Johanna who allows him to make peace with the world, and stirs his desire not to leave it. Johanna is not alone—she brings a friend and fellow trans into their lives—Divina, who, in the title poem, dies:

In fact, the preceding poem, “Futbol and Gowns,” is ultimately a eulogy for Divina, portrayed as an exasperating, melancholic, and unforgettable person. It ends with a sentiment that might well describes Wiler’s basic worldview:

Danez Smith: Homie

Months ago, I was planning to write this post. But everything changed when the Covid nation attacked!

One of the wonderful things about poetry is that it invites you (and in some cases requires you) to view the world through someone else’s eyes, to embody a lifetime of accreted experiences. And it’s even more sublime when that perspective is one you might never enter on your own.

That’s partly why I loved reading Homie, by Danez Smith. The brief bio on the back jacket says that Smith is “a Black, Queer, Poz writer.” I have never experienced life though any one of these lenses, let alone all three. In fact, I am old enough to remember when being HIV positive was a death sentence. Nowadays, it’s just one of many defining characteristics. That still leaves me flabbergasted.

I went to see Smith at the California African American museum in LA, back when public gatherings were not anathema. I had read the name, but was unfamiliar with the poetry. In fact, one of my goals for the evening was to learn how to pronounce Danez (two syllables, accent on the second). Smith read along with Fatimah Asghar, as I recall. They had a close rapport.

And more importantly, they knew how to work a (poetry) crowd. Sure, there was the banter, the humor. But more specifically, there was a sense of inclusion, of intimacy, as though everyone in the audience was a close, personal friend of the poets.

As for the work itself, it was performative, and not surprisingly rooted in identity politics. But it often leapt far beyond that. So I was eager to see how the work would translate to the printed page (which is in itself extraordinary—usually, it’s the other way around).

I was pleasantly surprised. There’s a lot more to this poetry than meets the ear—and that’s saying a lot. Though very much a performance poet, Smith writes with structure, if not outright form. And interestingly, some poems are “concrete” in that they need to be seen on the page to be fully appreciated. That includes poems that I first heard at the live event: “jumped.” “saw a video….” “rose.” “dogs!” “for Andrew.”

As for general tone, the first word that comes to mind is “ebullient.” Maybe that comes from being HIV poz, feeling that you’re living on borrowed time—much the way the ancient Greeks espoused Epicureanism as a counterpoint to fatalism. Or in other words, we all sit beneath the sword of Damocles, but some can see the cord actively fraying. Or perhaps it’s a lust for life that makes one more susceptible to HIV? The second word that comes to mind is “attitude.” These poems are often suffused with the defiant (dismissive?) posture of one who has almost convinced himself he has nothing to prove to the world, and no patience for those who are not quite on-board.

As for style, the book is nouveau Confessional—just about every poem is written in the first person, and there’s no mistaking that the poet is the speaker, but without the grandiose self-recriminations. Sometimes, though, it’s a bit too personal, as in “trees,” with its long litany of names, all of whom presumably have some connection to the writer but no meaning for the reader.

One wonders whether Smith appreciates his debt to Ginsburg, another unabashedly gay man (at a time when such openness was still shocking) writing effusive, unfettered verse. Smith draws upon Whitman’s self-celebration, of course (even the day-glow color of the book screams “Look at me! I’m electric!”), but seems more aligned with Ginsberg’s edgy and polemical stance.

Oddly, Smith owes another debt—to Tennyson, for much of this book was written “in memorium,” prompted by the suicide of a close friend (perhaps the homie/nig of the title?) I’m guessing this is the heart of “for Andrew,” a poem in several parts that seem to have arisen independently. The genius (yes, I said it) of this poem lies in the fact that many lines are crossed out, using that Microsoft Word format that, until now, never seemed to serve any useful purpose. They are not quite palimpsest, because the words are plainly visible, not quite early draft, because they survive into the final version, not quite erasure, because they are still clearly legible. You can’t help read them, but then question how you are supposed to consider them with regard to the lines that have not been canceled out. In the context of elegy, they suggest a persistence of a life that may be gone, but can never be unwritten. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I hope I have praised this book enough to allow a final niggle. According to the foreword, the title is actually “My Nig,” but Smith explains, “I don’t want non-black people to say ‘my nig’ out loud.” That seems to me a bit of a cop-out, and a missed opportunity, because what could be more subversive and instructive than to force liberal-minded white people (these are poetry fans, after all) to say “my nig?” Unless, as with “for Andrew,” a goal is to emphasize by apparent retraction?

Regardless of the moniker you choose, you’ll find this book rewards your close attention.

Robert Cording: Only So Far

A friend recently dropped off a small trove of poetry books—names that I recognized, for the most part, though I was not necessarily familiar with the work. One book really stood out for me: Robert Cording‘s Only So Far.

Like Logan, Cording apparently divides his time between Florida and colder climes (at least during the writing of this book). But while he shares Logan’s stylistic reserve, his references are not so esoteric, and will probably be familiar to anyone with a Catholic upbringing. Cording’s work is plain-spun and meditative, and frequently elegiac. Indeed, the elegy seems to be his default setting, which might just be a function of age—these are mature poems, and what they lack in youthful energy, they more than make up for in grace and wisdom.

Great examples include “Belated Elegy, January 1, 2011,” and “Elegy for an Idea” (inspired by Philippe Petit, who also made an appearance in my first book). There’s also “Last Day,” “Words,” and “Fall Cleaning, Windows Mostly,” which is a curiously moving elegy for a mouse. But of course, the elegy to his father, “Still Listening,” sets the standard. It’s written as a sequence detailing the period just before and after his father’s death. The first part, in particular, shows remarkable formal flourish; it portrays the family gathered with the ailing father in hospice, improvising a “Jumble” (like the sort typically found in the funny pages of the newspaper) to pass the time and keep his flagging spirits up. It’s written as a series of couplets, and the last words of the couplets are themselves word jumbles: read and dear, life and file, lamp and palm, etc.

Anything can be a form, but the form should arise from and reinforce the content. In this case, the form is a foil to the father’s mental state, as he struggles to make sense of his impending exit from the world, no longer able to solve even simple mental puzzles. And at the end of it, life remains a puzzle that he has never quite managed to solve. We also see him, in other poems in the book, buried behind his morning newspaper—and the fact that he has here set it down becomes emblematic of his letting go of life, of relinquishing the daily facts of the world, of surrendering his authority.

The final part of the sequence recounts the poet fiddling with his father’s hearing aids, which have been kept like relics in a drawer. It is an odd bridge to his dead father, one that brings him close but ultimately can not bring him back:

The title, “Still Listening,” takes on added resonance, as it carries two very different connotations, based on which preposition follows. Listening “to” implies an active engagement, an understanding, a communication. Listening “for” implies an anticipation, an unmet expectation, a lonely silence. This distinction gains even greater significance with regard to a line halfway through the poem, “God is still speaking, but we’re not listening.” Is Cording expectantly (but fruitlessly) listening for God to speak? Or is he still listening to God as he speaks, with uncertain comprehension? Is the voice of God any more audible than the voice of his dead father?

It should be noted that the phrase “I am still listening” also appears in the elegy, “Words,” so there’s something in the phrase or act that carries some deep meaning for the poet.

Cording is an astute observer of both the natural world and human nature. We find a lot of ocean sunsets, local flora and fauna (manatees, pelicans, alligators), and walks in the wild. In fact, many of the poems exhibit a meditative, melancholy state that was apparently induced by a solitary walk. But there’s also the grit of what I think describes a childhood and coming of age in New Jersey: the conveyor belts of “Evolution,” the dilapidated porno theaters in “A Beginning,” the sky “tinged with green” in “1964.” Even the father listening to Sinatra in “Still Listening” conjures images of Hoboken or a similar town.

I’ll end with a quick look at the poems that bookend the collection. “Kafka’s Fence,” which occurs just before the first of four numbered sections of the book, can be viewed as the apologia. The tone of quiet frustration and complaint reaches its peak in the line, “Haven’t we / always known we’d reach and end we couldn’t complete?” It’s a take on the ars longa vita brevis theme, except in this case, it’s lamenting the fact that life is often too short to create a lasting work of art–or anything, for that matter. That stands in stark contrast to the final poem, “No-Name Pond,” which concedes, by its title, that even enduring works of nature are ultimately anonymous, much like great artists over time. Nevertheless, it concludes,

Those final lines may be deceptively simple, perhaps underwhelming, but they hold an acceptance, a resignation, that the poet has been driving toward throughout the course of the entire book. It is a quiet ending to what is often a quiet book, more elegiac than nostalgic, from a poet less intent on making himself heard than on listening to what the universe might have to say.