Via Negativa

In many ways, Campbell McGrath has picked the perfect subject for a book-length narrative poem: an historical figure embarked on an epic, nation-building adventure, who fortunately did not keep a diary of the period described, giving the poet plenty of imaginative space in which to roam. And this book is all about space and roaming. George Shannon was the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, just 17 or 18 when he got separated from the rest of the expedition, going after a couple of horses that had broken free. He wandered the high plains along the Missouri River for 16 days and nearly starved to death, since he had gone off with only five bullets in his pouch.

Bookended by passages from Clark’s diary, the poem is a dramatic monologue in Shannon’s voice, and since Shannon was one of the most educated members of the party, it doesn’t stretch credulity too much to have him expressing fairly lofty thoughts about God and destiny and evincing a scientific interest in Indian laws and customs and in natural history. He encounters his first prairie dog town, marvels at unending herds of buffalo, and flashes back to hunting and fishing expeditions with his brothers in Kentucky and Ohio. He’s a skilled marksman, frustrated by his lack of ammunition and experimenting with improvised bullets. Here’s how he expresses the book’s central irony:

In a land of plenty
I travel hungry.

In a country of herds
I wander alone.

On a journey of discovery
I am the lost.

Narrative poetry can be a good break from a steady diet of lyric poetry, especially when it’s as spare and descriptive as this is, mostly eschewing elaborate metaphors and leaps of insight. Though Shannon falls prey to starvation-induced delirium toward the end, the only true epiphany he describes is a remembered one from back east in Kentucky, a dogwood tree blooming alone in a bare woods and glowing in such a way that he didn’t recognize it at first and fell to his knees.

That was a true & terrible fear
& near as I ever came
Or will come to believing.

On the other hand, the book is all about discovery.

Shining so, in the autumn sun, the river
Is like my Mother’s silver necklace
Slipping across my fingers
Moving, jaunting, sparkling, restless
Coursing & entwining the many streams as one.

What if, beyond these mighty plains are plains
Even more magnificent
As this Dakota Country exceeds Ohio
In that regard, even
As heaven overshadows earth?

Even today, fenced in and bereft of buffalo, the high plains can intimidate by the vastness of their skies and the severity of their weather. Imagine being like Shannon, or Coronado centuries earlier, and not knowing if they would ever end.

Not a tree
On the horizon all day
Only buffalo herds
Unbroken some hours keeping pace.
All these grazing creatures fed upon
The grass of these plains
Is it not strange
To believe that I might feed
A host of nations
Upon my own heart, feeling it swell so?

Lonelier than he has ever been in his life, at night he talks to his brothers, the one who drowned in the Ohio as a boy and the one who didn’t get picked for the expedition:

is the day come, brother John?
are the stars come down to keep me, Thomas?

dewdrop, the source, fog of breath
& the river of light widening toward sunrise
this astonishment of grass, this extravagance

animals in the darkness all around me

huffing & lowing of the buffalo
sound of their lungs steaming into the light
I am not alone in the darkness

Even with the associations of death-by-drowning that the river has for him, he still prefers its company to the emptiness of the plains.

Empty is one way to put it, another
That they are overfull
But not in keeping with a man.
Too large in both emptiness & fullness
Is what I mean to say.
I have a conception of my soul
Being taken up in their austerity & solitude
To be devoured
By the stars
& I mind it no longer.

If you’ve ever wondered why, in the age of the novel, people still write long narrative poems, read Shannon. If it were prose, I’d have come to it with too many expectations: nothing worthy even of a short story really takes place. The narrative stops short of his reuniting with the expedition; the monologue ends with his premature will and testament. And yet I found it a fully satisfying read, with just enough narrative interest to keep me turning the pages, but not so much suspense that I skimmed impatiently. I was able to relax and enjoy the open spaces between the thoughts.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

Ah book without ISBN, uncharted territory! Ah sextant. I Odysseus was a crayon on the wall, I spidered my way onto the belly of a sheep and slept uncounted through a one-eyed giant’s dream. I watched nymphs and sibyls remake themselves in clay. Things always turn surreal in the retelling, don’t they, like bodies seen from the inside, pulsing with spirits of hunger. Take away the adventure story and what do you have?

In this case, I got my breath back. I lay among fresh-picked thyme and violets and listened to other people’s myths: Sita found at a construction site, a Norseman without a longboat, “a missionary who spikes trees,” and the giraffe woman counting “brush strokes on the ceiling.” Don’t make a haruspectacle of yourself, I told the neighbor’s cat, but it was too late. I knew better than to call the alien incubus a tumor, and so did the poet: “It is a thorny thing, a thing full of metal and holes./ It digs in — a hundred angry claws, and she is sick with it.” How can you tell arms from claws from tentacles if you don’t know their rightful owner? How can you tell the future anything? It never listens. “When she tells stories/ to herself, she is the color of mud, wants a space/ to write down her prophecies, a place to make them unknown.” As she should.

Things harder than syllables still rattle in my pouch and seed the heavens with hunters and their hounds. When Kalypso touches me, “her fingers are threads/ of pulled sugar,” and she lets me extract her crooked teeth like some kind of swashbuckling orthodontist. It’s not what I wanted, but O.K. Evidently my own “mouth/ will become wax, breaths/ numbered like eyelashes.” The poet mentions cicada shells, and I am reminded she’s probably too young to have seen the 17-year ones more than once. As for the other “Things of the Earth,” I am relieved to know about a seven-year drought in secrets out of the ground — I thought my hearing had gone. I was beginning to worry that we might have to surrender Ithaca to the psychoanalysts. Ah speech, ah mind: sisters running barefoot over the rocks.

For a straight review of this chapbook (which I loved), see The Scrapper Poet.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

It’s almost axiomatic that any poetry that relies too heavily on word-play for its effect can’t be translated. I remember my brother marveling at the elaborate double-meanings in Kalidasa when he was learning Sanskrit: lengthy passages could have two, completely different meanings depending on how one reads them. According to poet and translator John Balaban’s Introduction to Spring Essence, something similar is going on in the poems of the 18th-century Vietnamese courtesan Ho Xuan Huong (sorry, I’m not doing the diacritical marks!). Since a syllable in Vietnamese can have up to six different tones, each with a different meaning, the possibilities for imperfect puns are correspondingly large. And in Ho’s work, “These second meanings, and phrase reversals, or noi lai, are usually obscene.”

I think it’s very much to Balaban’s credit that he manages to convey something of these double entendres through a combination of suggestive imagery and informative endnotes. The resulting poems often feature panoramas of erotically charged natural imagery. I also thought the mountains in traditional East Asian landscape paintings looked phallic; evidently Ho thought so too.

A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,
showering a willow’s leaves with glistening drops.

Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary
and shaky in his knees, to mount once more?

The author herself was a fascinating figure, one of the most skillful poets of her day, who somehow got away with tackling forbidden subjects like sex and corruption in a repressive, Confucian society. In one especially risqué poem, “Swinging,” she capitalizes on the fact that the word for “swing” and the word for “copulate” are virtually identical — and the translator in turn gets to take advantage of the double meaning of “swinging” in American English.

A boy pumps, then arcs his back.
The shapely girl shoves up her hips.

Four pink trousers flapping hard,
two pairs of legs side by side.

Spring games. Who hasn’t known them?
Swingposts removed, the holes lie empty.

Not all the poems are about sex, though — or if they are, it wasn’t obvious to me. In almost all cases, Balaban makes the surface meanings appealing; what’s unusual is that he didn’t stop there. And the publisher matched his efforts with its own, getting special typefaces made to reproduce the two Vietnamese versions, one being the obsolete Nom writing system, which Balaban wanted because some of Ho’s puns are visual, relying on the similarities between the Chinese character-derived Nom graphemes.

What I’m trying to say is that the book is a treat for readers of every interest level, from the most casual to the most scholarly. Two or three of the Amazon customer reviews by people fluent in Vietnamese criticize the translations, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t. Even without the puns, accurately reproducing the complexities of highly formal verse in another language is a fool’s errand. None of the critics offers a specific example of a passage that they would translate differently.

In my response to Du Fu the other day, I suggested that it was no longer true that “the state goes to ruin, but mountains and rivers survive.” Writing during a similarly chaotic period of political upheavals a thousand years later, Ho Xuan Huong offers a very different estimation of what endures, and what other precious thing is fated to collapse:

A bell is tolling, tolling, fading
just like love. Only poetry remains.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

These poems are so good, they almost make me want to watch a baseball game. But why read a book of baseball poems if I’m not a fan of the sport? Well, for one thing, Maddox is a Central Pennsylvania poet, and I wanted to get to know her work better. And I’m interested in tightly focused poetry chapbooks, having just published one of my own. People who know little about tools claim to have enjoyed my tool odes, and I was curious to see if I’d find these baseball poems similarly engaging.

I found I did, largely because of the abundant word-music. I was hooked from the second line, “their limbs limber with summer.” And at least half the poems didn’t require more than a casual knowledge of the game, as in “Readying the Field,” which begins,

His tractor tugs dirt in a circle,
combs through clods as solid as baseballs,
then hoes the whole again,
signaling the mound a bull’s eye.
Only then does he tip
his stare to the square
diamond, smooth all earth
between home and first.

Maddox keeps things lively by varying the contents as much as possible, and her family connection to a pivotal event in baseball and civil rights history — her great-uncle was the Dodgers general manager who signed Jackie Robinson — adds an additional layer of interest. She also lives in Williamsport, home of the Little League World Series, so of course there’s a poem about that, too. Other unique takes on the sport include “Baseball at the Historical Village,” “The All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League,” “The Babe’s Babes,” and “Patron Saints of Baseball,” the opening poem, which assigns Catholic saints to the various positions. Maddox even captures the giddy anticipation of the season in “The Calm Before”:

Between hands, the shifting tip
of sky chatters, rattles, taps its bebop of a ball
into something large. There is nothing
to say that can’t wait for spectators
that may not come. These nights,
practice swings at our world
with a whoosh and misses
nothing.

The collection ends with the multi-part “Rules of the Game,” which lost me more often than not, though I was curious enough to look up the unfamiliar terms on Wikipedia. I had no idea, for example, that there were so many ways of, and reasons for, sliding into base. And I was captivated by the contrast between “The Pop-Up” and “The Sacrifice Bunt,” the first a “disastrous beauty,” the second a graceless yet gracious maneuver in which

humility makes the hero
squaring off to fail his own trail to base.
He entices the ball with his bat,
kills it with a tap,
shoves the coveted corpse
part way to first.

Of course, the real test of a book of poems on any specialized subject is whether it can draw out universal lessons without straining too hard or hitting the reader over the head. In poem after poem, When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name shows how to do it right, as in the closing stanzas of “The Pitch”:

Snap here for a fastball,
here for a curve,
cut your fingernails square
for a knuckler, that pigeon
flapping awkwardly
out the barn door of a hand.

Never let the eyes tell
the fingers’ deception,
the plans of the palm,
deep-secret mathematics
shooting great lengths
from arm to plate.

Sounds like good advice for poets, too, somehow.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

The ancestors have returned in their white skins to the New Guinea highlands and strain the rivers for the golden grains of their bones. Or perhaps these are descendents of the white-skinned giant who slept with his daughter and fled the land out of shame. They carry lightning in a stick. Reading this, I am reminded that I once was yang guezi, foreign devil, in the frightened eyes of a boy from a civilization centuries more sophisticated than my own.

I make a list of the words that are not here: primitive Stone Age heathen superstition, and the words that are: knife sorcerer taro mountain spear spirits pig. Worldviews blend and merge in the imagination of the missionaries’ boy, this Aaron who identifies with the smooth-talking Aaron in the Bible, who merely threw gold in the fire, he said, and out came bull. Myths from the desert mingle with myths from the forest. His father goes between two sides in a local conflict and tries to make men love their brothers, while he and the other boys play war with fern stalks for spears. “We kill, are killed, so often in these games.” A rusting cockpit suspended in a treetop, the Rising Sun still visible on its side, bears witness to wider, more brutal wars.

I read: “when the blade slits/ its throat and the pig’s blood is poured// into yours, rise and fill its shuddering flesh/ with your life.” I put the book down to start making supper and promptly slice open my thumb while peeling a potato. It’s a shallow cut, and I don’t feel like pausing to put on a bandage. I let blood drip into the stew — who will notice? But the cut burns when I touch it to the slab of venison.

It’s hard to believe this is the author’s first book. He writes with great delicacy and precision, leaves the obvious lessons implicit, and avoids melodrama and gratuitous exoticism. This vision of a very different culture seems natural, for whose childhood memories don’t become impossibly distant with age? And as children almost all of us believed in magic to some extent, so when, for instance, Aaron’s friend tells him that “evil sorcery brought up the bees” that stung him, that doesn’t seem so unfamiliar, and even the cure — caking him in mud to draw out the sting — is something I can imagine doing myself as a kid, especially when his friend takes it to an extreme and coats Aaron’s entire body with mud.

Meugle crouches,
amazed at the work of his hands

as the mudman dances, impervious to pain—

and I can’t tell if this is white or black magic,
his gestures to summon or ward me away.

On the other hand, this is not an extensively end-noted book, so unless you happen to be well versed in the ethnographic literature on New Guinea highlanders, some of it is bound to go over your head as it did over mine. But for me, this is like taking an intensive language class taught total-immersion style: just a thin thread of comprehension is enough. I reach into my right ear and extract a small round black hard thing.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)