Eric Nelson: Some Wonder

Wonderful surprise! I was looking through one of my bookshelves for a particular collection when I stumbled across a small book of poetry that I swear I had never seen before and had no recollection of buying. I opened it up and scanned a page or two and instantly saw why I bought it. The book, Some Wonder by Eric Nelson, is, well, wonderful! It’s engaging, amusing, thought-provoking, witty…

These are poems of shrewd and bemused observation. Consider these lines from “Fair Road”:

In the strip mall more stores

Have closed but one
Like Jesus
Is always coming soon.

How can you not love such wry wit? But of course it’s more than just tongue-in-cheek humor. In very few words, Nelson paints a picture of a corner of the world where (although he doesn’t explicitly say so) life is slower, opportunities scarcer. It’s not necessarily the South, but it kind of feels that way. The Southern landscape and mindset are often on display. Poems such as “Inside Georgia,” “Georgia Sunset,” and “The Guitars” mention Georgia directly, while many others couldn’t take place anywhere but the Atlantic south. Egrets, dogwoods, pecans, wisteria, frogs, hog-nosed snakes—all play a part as subject or backdrop to these poems. As do guns: “Gun on the Table,” “The Gun Show,” Women and Guns.” But what’s striking—and distressing—is that guns are not portrayed as a menace but as a routine commodity, like a loaf of bread. Nelson also has an affinity for dogs, though again, not your inner city junkyard dogs, but the companionable hounds that follow you around the yard, strangely intent on inhaling life’s least pleasant smells.

And then there’s chickens. Nelson has a soft spot for farmyard fowl. They feature in “Better Angels,” in which their simple, hardscrabble existence becomes a foil for the speaker’s unobtainable desires. In “I Love Chickens,” he playfully reflects on the virtues of these awkward birds, and in so doing presents a subtle commentary on human nature, needs, and priorities. The poem relies on anaphora, with each phrase completing the sentiment started in the title, “I Love Chickens”:

…Because they are flappable.

Because every night they return to their coop
And every morning they walk the plank into their day.

Because like us they brood, follow a pecking order, desire
A nest egg. Because even their shit is useful.

Nelson smoothly succeeds in what I often try to do: describe a subject in literal terms that can also be understood metaphorically. So yes, chickens literally walk along a plank to leave the coop, but for humans, “walking the plank” conjures images of pirates forcing their captives to topple overboard to their death. And the fact that they do it “every morning” like us suggests that every day when we leave the house and head to work, we are metaphorically trudging toward a kind of death. While we both may “brood,” the verb has vastly different connotations depending on the subject. Then there’s the unapologetic revelry in language. “Flappable?!?!” Well, if someone can be unflappable, it certainly follows that someone can be flappable—and who more so than chickens? Great poetry often points a lens at the absurd but grammatically valid quirks of our language.

There is a sort of deadpan comedy on display throughout the book. “Our Wars,” for example, starts out:

He was a nerd before their were nerds
But one thing you had to say for Mark—
The guy knew how to die.

The sentence is a bit shocking at first, but reading further, it becomes clear that it’s a game—young boys playing soldier, mimicking those overwrought scenes from World War II movies. Of course, we know from other poems that Nelson came of age in the Viet Nam era (and would later take part in the draft lottery), so a description of a kid pretending to get shot can’t help but suggest a real boy—probably still a teen—dying in a real war. 

An elegiac streak also runs through this book, in which that wry humor turns a bit more sardonic. Several poems seem to ruminate on the untimely death of a faculty colleague in the English/writing program where Nelson teaches. In “Visiting Writer,” the poet imagines looking up from his work

To see you standing at the lectern,
Introducing the visiting writer. All that time
None of us knew you were the one visiting.

Suddenly, the title takes on a new object and meaning. “In another year” seems to be about the same person. In it, Nelson observes:

In another year the building will be filled
with students who know you
as a scholarship fund

Ouch! That’s absolutely devastating in its matter-of-fact summary. It also uses end breaks to great effect (“load every rift with ore!”). It goes on to say 

Whenever they wanted explanation
You told them instead to observe

That could in fact serve as the motto of this book. It’s only natural to want reasons for the nonsensical aspects of life, but in the end, the world—no matter how predictable it can sometimes seem—is governed by random chance. True understanding is impossible—the best we can do is to observe and appreciate. Building on that, the random nature of the universe, the crazy improbability of any of it being here at all, engenders a profound sense of wonder. That’s emphasized in the title of the book, which in turn comes from the final line in “Twenty-Five O’Clock” (which is a bit more elliptical than most poems in the book—I think it refers to the “extra hour” we get from Daylight Saving each fall). The poem ends: “Some wonder what I mean. Some wonder is what.” 

Interestingly, I found that I kept misstating the title of the book as “Small Wonder,” as in the phrase meaning “it’s obvious, it’s understandable.” It would be an apt title, as the phrase could be interpreted in different ways—and that’s a hallmark of Nelson’s style. In fact, the book ends with a poem called “Small Wonders” (the plural allows only one meaning), which is essentially a series of haiku-like poems that accentuate the mandate to observe the world to derive a set of truths (explanation being impossible). Our hunger for meaning may ultimately go unsatisfied, but we can marvel in the small miracles of life (as a guidepost to the large miracle of Life). My favorite:

Dogs know what to do
With the dead—
Roll in them.

Yes, those dogs always have a lesson to teach, but like Zen masters, they enlighten without saying a word.

Do yourself a favor: track down this book and spend some time reveling in its wise perspective. As the poem “Feeders” suggests: “Where you reflect, you will feed / Your hunger for wonder.” These last eight-or-so years have insidiously replaced our sense of wonder with a sense of cynicism; but I believe, underneath it all, we do still hunger for wonder.

Gregory Emilio: Kitchen Apocrypha

Recently, I had the opportunity to give my first Zoom reading. It was an interesting experience. On the one hand, it was great to be able to look directly at the work I was reading, yet still appear to be looking at the audience. Also, the real-time discussion in the chat was downright rollicking, and something that really wouldn’t be feasible in a regular reading. On the other hand, even with the feedback, the event lacked that interpersonal element (and obviously, no book signings).

One of my fellow readers (and Able Muse author) was Gregory Emilio, whose new book, Kitchen Apocrypha, manages to combine two of my deepest passions: poetry and cooking. You might think that writing a book in which every poem pertains to cooking or eating would be limiting. In fact, food is such a fundamental aspect of our lives (and always has been), that it lends itself to commentary on a whole host of subjects: sex, love, art, war, language, religion, sickness, death, and more.

Viewing the world through the lens of food delivers some remarkable imagery and turns of phrase. Consider: “the moon proofing like a loaf of bread,” “the night melting like sautéed onions,” “the moon drifting over the earth like a chipped dinner plate.” And Emilio’s palette is broad: oysters, mushrooms, octopus, tamales, risotto, fennel, waffles—every morsel becomes literal food for thought. And poetry.

Of course, there’s plenty of bread and wine. A presumably Catholic upbringing informs many of these poems. Biblical references abound, with Jesus making numerous appearances—sometimes directly, as in “Jesus as a Jaded Lover,” sometime more obliquely, as in “Whenever You Eat This.” One of my favorites in this vein is “First Food,” which recasts Eve from the Garden of Eden as a randy teenager. She describes herself, with Adam,

You’ve only to look at the vast diversity of life to understand that sex is a communication (no pun intended) that predates human speech, and even among humans, it’s arguably the one universal language (Maybe that’s why Babel had to fall?). This version of Genesis needs no serpent; Eve simply “walked to a tree called / ‘No’ and plucked a soft-bellied bulb / of fruit, nude as the moon.” I love that imagery—and I love how the lofty “forbidden fruit” is pared down to a single, palpable utterance: “No.” In some examinations, the forbidden fruit represents the knowledge of good and evil; here, it’s exactly what it was for all of us: unchecked carnal hormone-fueled desire. The description of tasting that fruit also hits home:

As this passage suggests, “hunger” for Emilio is not merely the body signaling depletion, it is a visceral craving to ingest life itself, to be fully alive (by consuming what is dead).

Many poems draw upon Emilio’s career in food service—he was evidently a waiter, and perhaps a cook. It’s that perspective that allows him to look on DaVinci’s “Last Supper” and ponder what no one else has (as far as I know): the serving staff. The painting is largely about what is to come—and for most viewers, that means the betrayal, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For Emilio, it’s the woman who’ll have to clean up the mess after everyone leaves, just as she does every night, regardless of whether Christ comes back with a satchel of eternity. And though the Bible is mum on the subject, I’d bet the disciples were not great tippers. (In fact, you have to wonder who paid for that dinner in the first place.)

I tend to be somewhat withdrawn from the poetry world; still, it’s slightly remarkable that Emilio and I have never met in person—judging by his poetry, we must’ve crossed paths, though not in real time. He has a poem dedicated to Chris Abani; he and I read together when brick-and-mortar bookstores were still a thing. There’s also a poem about B.H. Fairchild at a restaurant in Riverside—I once had lunch with him at a restaurant in Riverside. There are also references to San Luis Obispo, Southern California, not to mention Atlanta (though long after I spent any time there).

There is heartache in this book—allusions to a lover who abandoned the author, references to someone paralyzed in a tragic accident, divorced parents, bombings, anorexia—but overall, the tone is ebullient, rapturous. Food is a broad and universal topic, and Emilio manages to distill it all in a feast that delights every sense, like a perfect port-wine reduction. The book is clever, too, in its assembly. It starts with a poetic amuse bouche entitled “Rapture,” and ends with “Revelation,” which begins: “To begin with rapture and leave you in / a matter of seconds…” The Biblical references are totally on brand—but more importantly, what a wonderful Easter Egg for the reader!

As one of my favorite philosophers wrote, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” You can take any of these approaches with Kitchen Apocrypha, which will leave you feeling both sated and hungry for more.

Austin Smith: Flyover Country

In my last missive, I noted that I picked up several books from The Strand. One of these is Flyover Country, by Austin Smith. I’ve been parsing through it over and again, with growing admiration each time.

The title of the book is a reference to Smith’s upbringing on a farm in the rural upper midwest. Many of the most distinctive poems are situated there, but their allure lies not only in the way he portrays the landscape but in how he conveys a sense of awe at the natural world, along with his touching and complicated (though never quite resolved) relationship with his father. These include poems such as “The Windbreak,” “Hired Hands,” “Water Witching,” and “The Vampire,” (this last an intriguing revisionist history of a childhood episode or memory). Nonetheless, Dorothy leaves Kansas at some point to become rather cosmopolitan, traipsing through Barcelona, Lourdes, Amsterdam, and Asheville.

Though distinctive, the poems in this book seemed remarkably referential, with styles or themes reminding me of other works. For example, the introductory poem, “Lena,” is a sort of epistolary narrative explaining how to reach a particular town—or perhaps, an imagined state or remembered past. It’s hard to read it without thinking of Frost’s “Directive.” Similarly, the title “Country Things” seems a direct nod to Frost’s “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Many poems also eschew punctuation, and though they do not fall within the Deep Image or Surrealist mode, they nonetheless display the influence of Merwin. “White Lie” describes the poet’s father spreading hay on Christmas Eve, a ruse to fool the young children into believing that reindeer had stopped in the night; the sense of childlike wonder and the desire to believe (or let others believe) in miracles brought me back to Hardy’s “The Oxen.” Then of course, “Film of the Building of a Coffin Viewed in Reverse” seems to take a cue from Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five.

Smith has an uncanny knack for metaphor and simile, often piling one atop another. What impresses is not simply the aptness of the comparison but the unexpectedness. He sees a dead tree and notes “the tambourines / of its dry leaves.” In another poem, he notices an old man’s hands “shaking with the loaded dice of age.” A living-statue street performer opens her eyelids “like the wings / of a housefly who’s flown into paint.” A psychological wound (PTSD?) is described, “drifting around inside his body, bouncing / under his skin like a man swimming under ice, / Desperate to find the place where he fell through.” The arc of metaphor reaches its apogee in “Break in the Weather,” which describes worms on the sidewalk after a rain without ever actually using the word “worm.” Instead, we get “hieroglyphics / scrawled pinkly on the walk,” “marks / of punctuation in some lost lexicon,” passers-by “mashing this exquisite language / into pink pulp.”

The book is divided into sections, though I was unable to determine the sorting criteria, other than to note that the middle section contains most of the political poems. In this section, Smith grapples with a problem common to all modern poets—how to be political without being polemical (OK, many American poets seem quite happy with the polemical, but I generally find such poems rather artless). He succeeds, I believe, by remaining oblique. Many were apparently written during or in response to the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, though they are more broadly relevant. “The Bombing of Hospitals,” casts a disparaging eye at indiscriminate bombing by suggesting a time when even nations at war could agree on certain humanitarian terms of engagement. The poem is even more timely right now, in light of Israel’s efforts to root out Hamas command centers in Palestine. There’s “Swatting Flies,” which is, I suspect, a reference to G. W. Bush’s single-minded intention to invade Iraq, because he was, according to Condi Rice, “tired of swatting at flies.” Then there’s “That Particular Village,” assembled from actual quotes from DefSec Rumsfeld about the unintentional destruction of an entire village. “The Witness Tree” (which bears some tonal similarities to Merwin’s “The Last One”) engages with the “enhanced interrogation” practices in the GWOT. “We Defy Augury” deals with more recent current events, and is an attempt to come to grips with the election of Trump in 2016. The title is a reference to Hamlet, but it is appropriate both because the Trump campaign was just so damned defiant and dismissive of conventional wisdom (and the rules of good taste) and did indeed prove many pollsters to be dead wrong.

This last poem brings me to something else I love about Smith’s poetry—his deft use of enjambement and line breaks. Here, the birds of augury would start

“The Only Tavern in Hyde, Wisconsin” begins:

In “Three Radios,” a man milking cows listens a new report, and hears:

In all these instances, note how the meaning of the last word in a line changes abruptly based on the first word of the next line. There are wonderful instances of this throughout the book.

Smith also has a capacious store of history, and introduces figures both famous and not, such as Claude Eatherly, who gave the all-clear for the bombing of Hiroshima; Rachel Carson, the groundbreaking environmentalist; and Chekhov and Nietzsche, who are perhaps formative influences in his work. There are endnotes, but I confess I had to do a bit of background reading to fully grasp the details.

Perhaps my favorite poem in the book is “The Spider,” which begins as a light-hearted (though dark-themed) musing on the loneliness of life from a spider’s perspective. The spider is delighted when something snags in its web, and rushes over “as if to help” before spinning it round in its silk cocoon until its cries are completely muffled. Then comes the fabulous conclusion, with the spider sighing, “Then I am lonely again, / A poet between poems.” I have to wonder if the entire poem was conceived as a metaphor for writing, or whether that ending was an unplanned invention. Genius either way.

There is a great deal to admire in this book. My only critique is that it is fairly long—there are nearly 60 poems in this collection. And while they all had something to recommend them—a great image, unusual metaphor, engaging language—there were some that left me scratching my head. I believe a few could have been removed to let the others shine all the brighter. A minor quibble, after all—I’m essentially saying Smith has given us too much of a good thing!

Deborah Pope: Take Nothing

While in New York recently, I visited the Strand Bookstore, which is akin to the hajj for bibliophiles—everyone should do it at least once in their life. It’s encouraging to see the venerable seller of new and used books has survived not only the global shift to online shopping but creeping gentrification as well (I remember when Union Square was a very dicey area).

I came home with a few treasures, both from poets I knew and poets who were new to me. One of those is Take Nothing, by Deborah Pope. It’s part of the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, which has been issuing a remarkably strong slate of books every year since its inception more than 20 years ago. Pope has three previous collections, which somehow never made it onto my radar—which is surprising, considering the immediate affinity I felt. 

I don’t know if she’d consider herself a Nature poet, but she’s at her best when she turns her keen powers of observation and metaphor upon the natural world. In “Encounter,” for example, she comes home to find a red-tailed hawk on a lawn chair, which “cocked the copper curve / of its head, sharpening / the profile of the black, sickle beak.” Its calm self-assurance and power leaves her, “there’s no other word for it— / raptured.” How could you not love that self-reflexive joy of finding the perfect word—one that both clearly defines the emotion and brings a clever pun as well?

One of my favorite pieces in the book, “Snapping Turtle,” tells of a similar encounter. She finds the turtle of the title in the middle of the road, and stops to coax it across before another car comes and runs it over. The image of a woman hunched over, wiggling a finger in front of a massive snapping turtle is fabulously absurd—but what’s even more absurd is that it actually seems to work. The turtle, though, is not moved by an understanding of her benign intentions, but from an instinctive violence, evident in “the concentrated menace of its advance.” There’s a hint of Bishop in these lines. I’m thinking most specifically of “The Fish,” which also portrays an ancient, prehuman sensibility, and a suspicion of violence behind every rainbow. 

Pope carries it further in “Currents,” which presents a great blue heron on a river bank. She watches as it takes “a delicate, stately step / on impossibly thin legs, / hinged like the ribs of a folding umbrella.” What a perfect simile! In some ways, her work is reminiscent of another of my favorites, Mary Oliver—but while Oliver more typically portrays a detached wonder and reflection in stillness, Pope more actively engages with her subjects.

I could go on about the force of Nature in her work, but let me jump to “At the Next Congregation for the Causes of Saints.” The final stanza is a floral compendium, with talk of purslane, mulleins, burdocks, teasels, cat-tails, fleabane, and Scotch broom. I’m sure these are not just names she pulled out of a hat, but flowers she genuinely recognizes by sight. I am reminded of yet another of my favorite writers, Isaac Babel, who recalls an old mentor pointing at all the trees and birds that he would see every day and ask what they were. To his chagrin, he did not know. The old man concludes with, “And you presume to write?… A man who does not live in nature as a bird or an animal lives in it will never write two worthwhile lines in all his life.”

I don’t know if Pope has read Babel, but I suspect she would agree with that sentiment. Perhaps that’s why she can give us such fabulous descriptive metaphors: a cluster of tadpoles “still a nova of apple seeds,” a rusted out bridge a “steel cat’s cradle” (I hope younger readers know what that is), a rat snake “black as a shredded tire.”

What i find great about Nature poets is when they consider people and society with the same sense of curiosity and wonder. That’s exactly what Pope does in the first section of the book, which focuses on childhood memories of a troubled family that is at times harmonious, at times unhappy in its own way. It’s clear she gets her affinity for the natural world from her father, who seemed far more at home alone in a fishing boat than driving a station wagon full of kids through town. Some of these poems have the tone of an adult trying to peel away the unreliable accretions of memory to get at the actual facts and understand them from a grown-up perspective, rather than just accept them from a child’s view. Others display a willful desire to do the opposite: “I refuse to remember / the details,” she writes. We learn of her father’s drinking, gambling, and fatal cancer, and her mother’s failed attempts to leave him, all of which remain confusing for an adult, incomprehensible for a child. And yet there seems to have been genuine love and affection in the family. Hence, the sense of poignancy and wistfulness.

I mentioned Pope’s penchant for finding the perfect word. One in particular will always stay with me: in “Too Close to See,” she concludes by describing “grief” as “unanswerable.” In all our vast language, I can think of no better word.

Many of the poems in this collection appear in journals that I often read, so it’s not surprising that I’m drawn her work—though all the more surprising that I have not encountered it before.

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.