Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Malleable heart, mouth open to the sky and rain,
my discipline is to learn your one singing note—
to fish it out of the depths of a fountain like a penny
someone tossed there long ago, or like the sun
in hiding. Not so easy to twirl the simple
wooden mallet, learn how the wrist must circle
lightly around the rim; or when it comes, how to loft
its brassy bangle, let it eddy across the grass.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Last April when I blogged about the similarly titled book of poetry We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, by Nick Lantz, I mentioned that Lantz wasn’t the first poet to use that Donald Rumsfeld quote for a title, and lamented that I hadn’t read Matt Mason’s 2006 book. A few months later, Mason saw my post and promptly sent me a copy, complete with a friendly inscription, which of course endeared me to the book right away. On second reading today, I still find much to admire. I don’t usually pay much attention to publishers’ descriptions, but this one happens to be spot-on: “More entertaining than you’d think a book of poetry should be and more poetic than you’d think an entertaining book can be.”
I gather Mason is a regular on the poetry slam circuit. Many of the poems in this volume must be very effective for live audiences, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t work on the page as well. I was pretty sleep-deprived today, and moreover short on time to read since I was also shopping, and Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know proved to be a good companion. It’s much more of a miscellany than the Lantz book, and we don’t even get to the aftermath of 9/11 until page 59, but by that point we’ve been well prepared by poems about Stonewall Jackson, the ghost dancers, the Strategic Air Command Museum, and the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, built by the heir of the Winchester repeating rifle fortune to try to fend off the malicious spirits of those killed by the rifle:
With Dad off work for the weekend, families pay
and tour the stairways to nowhere,
doors to brick walls, the thirteen bathrooms,
ghost-driven sprawl
cracking and spiraling for fear
of all those killed by her husband’s creation,
“the gun that won
the west” fattening the skies with those angry dead…
“Ghost-driven sprawl” is a nice example of Mason’s gift for succinct phrases which are at once humorous and accurate, with a dash of pathos. I must say that, much as I enjoy good light verse, it’s also nice to see free-verse poetry that takes humor a bit more seriously. A poem called “Navigation,” for example, ponders the poet’s approach to his art in tongue-in-cheek fashion, and pines for “moonlight that shows everything/ more mystically, slower.” And then the closing stanza leaves us with a quite indelible image:
But the best I can find tonight is refrigerator light,
that shows everything
too bright, giving the illusion of cold
calm, as if nothing is slowly molding or souring,
as if everything stays okay if
observed in the right wattage.
Mason’s love poems are hit or miss with me, but the subject he seems to know and love the best is driving — not surprising for a poet from Nebraska, I suppose. One poem is titled “I May Not Know Where I’m Going, But I’m Making Damn Good Time,” which is kind of the U.S.A. in a nutshell, I think.
Why do I keep shoving
fries in my mouth, trying
to find the one bit of deep-
fried potato shrapnel that finally satisfies?
Another poem, “The Thin Line of What I Know,” not only anticipates the Rumsfeld meme later in the book, but really captures the experience of interstate driving and the shallow sort of familiarity with the landscape it imparts:
I never go farther off the interstate
than the Have a Nice Day water tower smiling from Adair,
never go past the gas stations,
never put my fingers
in the skin of the East
or West Nishnatoba Rivers,
never slow at mile 71,
where that pond, always flat and still no matter how windy,
stretches two drowning elms like bony arms
clinging onto the sky.
Though Mason is a humorist and not a comedian, he has that essential streak of self-deprecation common to both on display in poems such as “The Funny Poet Renounces Funny Poetry and Concentrates On Making the World a Better, More Beautiful Place (In Which He Has Sex More Often)” and “How I Love You (the John Ashcroft Remix)”:
My job
is just to keep you laughing, keep you listening
to the funny poem
so you won’t stray too much,
pay more attention to that stream-of-consciousness ramble some
other poet’s reading: that
sloppy poem, that overuses-the-word-“revolution”-too-much poem, that
heartfelt poem, cast-your-vote-with-a-stone poem,
that register-your-sad-ass-to-actually-vote poem,
that get-out-of-bed-on-election-day, put-down-the-gordita-and-actually-go-to-a-polling-place-and-vote poem,
because
I
have accepted John Ashcroft
as my personal
savior.
But don’t let him fool you. He’s also capable of writing lines like these, pondering the age-old connection between food and love in “More”:
I’ve spent years
casing menus for your touch,
searching under grocery store fluorescents;I’ve shrunk so thin,
I can only hold a measured shock,
the lemon water of small kissesbuilding me back
from bones to flesh,
smoke to mountain to sky.
In the prose-poem “Wood,” Mason’s lament for the gradual dwindling of things made from trees in our domestic surroundings struck a chord:
It is in us somewhere, if only in the chipped ringlets of a fingernail: the maple, the eucalyptus, those crooked little bushes that lead us to forsake that damned formica paneling and lay down solid, processed oak on our counters as the primeval brain within us screeches and tries to recall the feel of branches in paws, winds and leaves stroking and scratching fur as we pull ourselves upward, inward and bare yellowed teeth at the dirt. So we bend ourselves onto the counter, open the cabinet and push aside the soup, the flour, the paprika, and climb inside: baring our teeth at the linoleum below, not minding the maple syrup bottle pushing into spine, close the dark, brown door and feel like Jesus, so much pain to finally be rejoined with wood.
I totally didn’t see that crucifixion reference coming! And you know, in poetry, surprise is surprise: it doesn’t matter how solemn or humorous the delivery system might be. There are enough surprises in this book to keep me coming back for more.
Oh, and Rumsfeld? Mason nails his ass in a five-word apothegm in the poem “Code Orange”:
Sometimes the wolf
cries wolf.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
This is the third of four books that Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I are encouraging others to also read and blog about this month. (You can order from the publisher before the end of the month and receive 15% off.) Send me the link to your blog post and I’ll update to include it. Posts so far include:
Rachel Barenblat @ Velveteen Rabbi: “Ren Powell’s Mercy Island”
Carolee Sherwood: “reading mercy island by ren powell”
Writing Our Way Home blog: “An interview with poet Ren Powell”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott: “Holy Week Readings of ‘Mercy Island’ by Ren Powell”
Deb Scott @ Stoney Moss: “Reading Mercy Island”
Dorothee Lang @ Daily s-Press: “Mercy Island – Ren Powell (Phoenicia)”
What follows is most emphatically not a review; some of these lines relate only tangentially to Ren’s poems (which is why I don’t name the poems). But obviously it isn’t every book that so moves me to write and to remember.
(p. 1) The head of state, polished to a high sheen, is not the kind of god to submit to questioning.
(2) I remember $24.95 in saved allowance, dimes & quarters stacked on the counter of the camera store in exchange for that black box, my Instamatic! And taking a photo of my shadow beside the pigs.
(3) Grandma had a slingshot she used on the guinea fowl, those perpetually agitated gray commas.
(4) When Elvis died, I knew it was because he had maligned the innocent hounds.
(6) Going home from the pet store, the goldfish on the back seat beside me vibrated in its plastic bag of water. Three days later, it died of loneliness.
(7) The brutal screwing of Muscovy ducks in a muddy ditch was my introduction to reproduction: The enormous male crushing the female, pushing her head under the water, threading her with a white rope.
(8-9) I hated everything about shooting groundhogs, especially when their big soft bodies slid off the shovel or when, wounded, they escaped a second shot.
(11) Starting to drown in the ocean, that second or two of great silence under the waves — yet another project I didn’t finish.
(12) Out of all the days I’ve lived in blessed doubt, the two when I flirted with certainty were enough to make me burn forever.
(13) Behind the barn, behind the barn! The place where chicken-killing dogs were shot. There alone we could curse to our heart’s content.
(15) I measure my life in generations of 17-year cicadas, Brood X. I was 9 the first time. In a jar at the back of a drawer, I still have one or two of those transparent shells with exit wounds in lieu of wings.
(16) Clowning in the lunch room, he pulled the neck of a turtleneck shirt up over his head & in a matter of moments earned the nickname that would follow him to the grave.
(18) My brother yelled “copperhead!” when my foot was in mid-air & I launched into flight. That evening we found the reason why it couldn’t move, its shed skin.
(20) I once paid a statue to talk. She was loud with rust.
(21) In one well we had what we called a mudpuppy, but it was only a newt.
(22) Whoever invented the kaleidoscope must’ve had a childhood like mine: no TV, no visits to amusement parks, plenty of time to look at each odd thing from every angle.
(23) In the 4th Grade I learned that the body is made up of rooms too small to see. I was a city! And there were whole districts that never slept.
(24) We brought one runner sled, red as a red wagon, down with us from Maine in our red VW bus. In summer, we built mazes of tunnels through the tall grass.
(26) Our sky was narrow but dark then. I used to feel sorry for the light of distant stars that had been traveling so long just to enter my eye.
(27) The only thing about highways I didn’t hate was the shimmering water that wasn’t there, what it taught me about thirst.
(28) We had roosters, so our breakfast eggs were always fertile. I dreamt of chicks hatching in my stomach.
(29) Escaped garden plants have taken over half the forest. A curse is nothing but a blessing turned feral.
(30) If a bachelor dreams hard enough, he can give birth to a migraine.
(32) She left a letter with the stain of a dead centipede & several promises.
(34) Ah, romance. I remember corn silk, the wet trail of a slug.
(35) I remember scraping the roosts, nostrils burning with ammonia, and that big black rubber tub bulging with chickenshit.
(36) Feathers falling from the sky are commonplace. What seems incredible now is that Grandpa actually took up arms against a hawk. But Bontas must’ve all been like that once. We drank, we gambled, we owned other human beings, we shot hawks out of the sky.
(41) I was a gardener of little faith. When seedlings came up, I was astonished. I couldn’t bear to thin.
(43) The back of a shy man’s neck is red from scratching. You wouldn’t guess how I know.
(44) We keep calling them mountains, these hills, in the hope they’ll outgrow us.
(46) Birds from the tropics fly here every year to sing. Also to make new birds, yes — & teach them the songs they never sing in the tropics.
(47) Surely the near eradication of lice and fleas on humans has done our species a great disservice. Books & scrolls are a poor substitute for that daily close reading of each other’s primary texts.
(49) I learned early how to hold my breath: at the conference about my unruly behavior, the exophthalmic teacher waiting for me to speak. Strapped in for the orthodontist whose fat fingers tasted like garlic.
(52) Missing for most of my life, I remember being stoned and present for a mother who placed my hand on her child’s bare belly to feel the sickness — blood flukes, perhaps? — like a burl on a tree. I showed her my wallet, already emptied for other mendicants, & said nothing about the belt full of bills against my skin.
(53) We just can’t help stealing each other’s souls.
(54) No sane person looks forward to a trip. I look forward to having traveled.
(55) I miss the two or three male friends I used to open up to, our shared vulnerability over open beers, the layers of blue smoke that wreathed our heads.
(57) You might not believe it, but the part of a woman’s body I most miss touching is the back, below the shoulder blades & above the hips, that flat pastureland with its single ridge.
(58) Tiger beetles anywhere in the world turn my older brother into a predatory beast, one who stiffens, crouches, springs.
(60) That the wind signed its name on our fingertips before we were born — well, I call it wind. Some impersonal force random enough to convey uniqueness.
(63) The idea of the Sahara: not the shadow of civilization but its impact crater.
(64) I used to trace veins of quartz in the local bedrock; now it’s threads of moss that draw my eye. I have left off believing in heaven even as a metaphor. I am homesick for earth.
(65) Night/soil.
(66) Only nonsense can save us now.
(67-68) Garlic & mint, mint & garlic: I would join any church that had that for a catechism.
(69) The trailer where we went one by one for IQ testing at the age of six smelled of new machines & fear. I remember being told I could watch myself on television — a closed-circuit TV, but I didn’t know that. The dim realization that fun was being had at my expense.
(70) The Flavored Nuts sign — conveniently posted at shoulder level — remained a site for teenaged pilgrimage long after the factory closed and cloying smells stopped emanating from its windows.
(75) Like a single Roman letter stretching into a cursive sentence, the great blue heron launched into flight.
(76) Do peaches float? I feel I should know this, I who once publicly embarrassed the author of a book called Stones Don’t Float with a piece of pumice.
(77) A mother grouse doing the injured-wing act led me to the edge of a near-cliff. I wanted to see just what malice she harbored in her speckled breast.
(79) There’s a desert under my floor where rain hasn’t fallen in 150 years — it’s dry as the Atacama. A strange hairy people live there. I hear them thumping rhythmically and moaning now & then.
(80) Grandma was the only person I’ve ever helped bury. She was anti-religious & unsentimental and wanted to be cremated. It still felt awkward to tamp down the soil, hopping on her grave in tight funeral shoes.
(83) Across the gulf of puberty I catch only the faintest echo now of my childhood misery. I wonder though if my frequent, public self-baring wasn’t essential training for the vocation of poet.
(86-87) In a world with lichen in it, nothing is lost. The fungi are farmers, pioneering the most desolate faces of rock.
I see a trace of moon yet, though morning
is fully on its way. What flutters through
the screens of bamboo as if on the strains
of a highland flute? I love those times
when the body has not completely left
what embraced it last; when coming
down the stairs it glances back at the bed
where it lay, reviewing the rousing
and the gathering up of things, the lingering
farewell; unlatching doors, going out
and walking past the jasmine bushes just
starting to put out their little stars.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Like a bird swallowing pebbles to add to its bag of teeth, I am taking my dosage, a series of small disasters. The imbricated scales of a woman with the skin of a snake whisper against my fur, my lucky foot. I must save her from the clay-thick blade of the hoe. Her tongue is a verb, her belly is a burial mound, her knuckles are soft as the heads of plush dolls. She sets a trap for the sun, which wants nothing more than an eyelid it can close. Any jar will do and any minced knob of ginger. Rain from the nearest cloud. No honey, or the buds will burst into leaf, and what would you do then, oh walking stick?
“I hope you find some poems you like in here,” Steve wrote on the cover letter when he sent me the book last November (he’d read a few of the poems on the Woodrat Podcast the previous March and knew of my interest). I quote this because I fancy it says something about his ambitions for his poetry: not necessarily to please all the people (or at least the small subset of people who read poetry) all the time. It might also be a good strategy in general for poets sending out review copies to lower the expectations of reviewers. It worked for me: for every poem that made me say “Huh?” there were at least two others that found me penciling underlines or exclamation points.
It might be interesting sometime to do a comparative study of bestselling novelists’ poetry. I suspect quite a few would choose, as Sherrill has in many of these poems, to regularly confound readers’ expectations with fractured clichés, inconsistent punctuation, willfully obscure references and abundant blasphemy and absurdism. Who but a novelist would write “Our attempts at omniscience comfort me” (“Real Estate”) or “In the Book of Hours/ this moment is denied” (“Why He Wants to Paint the Gate Red”)?
The ordinary reader wants to know what a book is about. Another reviewer resorted to arithmetic to show that Sherrill’s main subject is desire:
The poems in Steven Sherrill’s Ersatz Anatomy use the words “want,” “need,” “desire,” “longing,” and “yearn” 74 times. Those words appear at least once in 36 of the volume’s 74 poems, clearly suggesting that desire is the primary subject of this poetic inquiry.
I’m not going to count them, but I’ll bet there are almost as many references to faith, religion, or God. Like many professed atheists, Sherrill never seems to get tired of arguing with God. His “Psalm of the Malcontent,” for example, contains these memorable lines:
God of the taut larynx, taught— homonym. God
of all that bids me to speak. My question is this:
is it possible that God on the Seventh Day did not
rest, that God instead broke down— terrified?
Even poems not explicitly about religion seem to have been infiltrated by a certain Biblical consciousness — must be Sherrill’s Southern upbringing. Allow me to quote a favorite poem in its entirety:
Hocus Pocus
Deuteroscopy: a thing seen only
on second glance. Take for instance
the dung beetle charading as his heart.
See how the hard gray shell goes red
and pulses softly for your sake.Some days he can eat the whole Sunday paper
one letter at a time. Other days
the paper eats him. Here is the secret
he cannot let slip: there is an abacus
where his soul should be.
Put your ear to his belly. The incessant
Tick tick ticking will drive you mad.
Replacing the heart with a gold dung beetle was part of the funerary rites of the ancient Egyptians. I didn’t pick up on the allusion until my second reading, appropriately enough.
Somewhere in these 120 pages — I’ve lost the reference — Sherrill (or his narrator) claims not to like nature poetry. If true, I’d say he dislikes it the same way he dislikes religion: the book is chock-full of evocations of nature and landscape. Picking a few almost at random:
Like
the rapture of okra once you succumb
Like the mud dauber’s spastic black dance.
(“Literalist at the Altar”)
Above stratus, above nimbus
Maker and made are the same
Birth, death, and all the other little ecstasies
Occur between wing beats
(“Geese at 9000 Feet”)
I mourn for the alewives
Dead or foundered by the thousands
Scattered in the sand like forgotten parentheses
Rung from the belly of Lake Michigan
Rung by the incessant honesty of Spring
I mourn for their spines at the shore the sun
Climbing nowhere
(“Mosaic”)
Bird delineates its day
with bush, fence line, branch and stone.
How obvious my thick snout
my muddy hooves must appear.
Of your penciled nights’ endlessblack acres, I know little.
(“Preamble to the Treatise on Desire”)
The leaves are falling in Pennsylvania
Rothko’s color fields, those luminous
prayers, are fading. My sweet daughter grows.
The bowl is a vessel; fill it or not
Listen. I have nine syllables left
I offer them all to the mountain.
(“Anatomy Lessons”)
Yeah, so I’m finding a lot to like here. Lines that seemed obscure on first reading are revealing a method to their madness. Song-like elements are beginning to emerge from poems I initially read as deranged prose. I don’t personally resonate with Sherrill’s intense and obsessive exploration of sexual desire — not like I did with Diane Lockward’s poems of culinary desire, for example — but I found something to admire on almost every page. I mean, how can you not love a poem titled “Treatise on Desire” that features a grackle flying over a snowy field? It concludes with a seeming aside to the slumming novelist, the storyteller who has done his best to untell stories:
Black
flies the grackle over snowy ground
Tell me a story of the air
between them: glacial, pernicious, buoyant
Who ordered rain? Who ordered tea?
Order ham and croissants, bubbly with cheese.
Order sheets of fondant. Practice French.
Say tuileries, say pamplemousse.
Tuck your hair behind your ear, pick up
your fork, don your bib. Pick up the hot
crust with your fingers. Don’t eat like a bird.
Don’t you love ribs? Hand me a plum.
What’s that wrapped in paper?
Who heard? The leaves are buzzing
with news of the world.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Luisa A. Igloria, currently a daily contributor to Via Negativa, joins me and Kristin Berkey-Abbott as our second guest in Via Negativa’s informal Poetry Month book club for a discussion of (among other things) her next-to-most recent volume, Trill & Mordent — see response posts by Kristin, Dale Favier, and Rachel Barenblat, as well as my own.
Luisa’s presence on the web is a little diffuse, but do check out her official website (especially the page, “Why Lizards?” — a topic which Kristin and I tragically forgot to ask about), her Blogspot blog, her photo blog, and her Twitter stream, as well as her Wikipedia page and the page for ODU’s MFA Creative Writing program, which she administers.
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Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).
At a Mexican taqueria with my ten-year-old for lunch: the walls are vivid maize and papaya slashed with green. A family of clay lizards slithers cobalt and lime up the walls: What is poetry? I ask them, because a student has just come to me confessing he has discovered, after all, his poet’s heart. For a while, he was unsure about this territory. They don’t say anything, of course; they merely suspend against the stucco, cool in the noonday haze. If a petal from the forsythia in bloom at the edge of the woods drifts into the dog dish on the porch, what is its first country? In Latin, territorium means land of jurisdiction; with roots possibly deriving from terrere, to frighten. Somewhere the forsythia erupts in arches of yellow flame. Somewhere just beyond the border of my hearing, birds spar in the language of trills. Which one is the homely sibling? There is beauty, and there is work. When the sentinels look away, there is the catch in the throat, an opening yielding words that flutter like flags of secret or undiscovered countries.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.