Val and I leave tonight for Sydney, Australia to visit her sister, sister’s husband, and our new baby nephew. As a friend and fellow bereaved father pointed out, there is more to this adventure than just a holiday down under. Though I have held one very special little girl since the passing of our son, meeting James’s male cousin, who shares some of his genetics, does seem like another milestone in my journey from grief to hope.
I disciplined myself to take just one book of poems from the shelves that line the walls of our small cottage. I am taking Marvin Bell’s Nightworks. His strong voice and piquant musings are a comfort to me on long trips. If there were something like a break room for great philosophers, where they could congregate, sip coffee, and chat, Bell’s poems capture bits of what we might overhear. This book seemed like the perfect companion with which to cross the dark Pacific.
Between friends, family, and marsupials, I don’t know how much I will be blogging in the next two weeks. But watch out for photos on Flickr, and I’ll be back in the Northern Hemisphere again soon.
Thanks to the Southbank Centre Poetry Library’s ongoing digitization project, funded by the Arts Council England, three of my poems published in Iota less than eight months ago are now available as part of this excellent website.
The first poem, “The Language of Birds” is a kind of love poem to my wife; the second, “To Friends Not Knowing What to Say“, is dedicated to the memory of our son; and the third poem, “Yellow“, explores the subterranean, and can also be heard read aloud on this website.
Besides my delight that these poems can now reach a wider audience through the web, this project to round up the disparate poetry journals of the past two centuries and archive their contents for posterity seems, beyond noble, absolutely necessary. Twenty-first century publishing is a fragmentary mess. Who needs barbarian hordes to burn your libraries to the ground? These days, a single mis-click of the mouse can obliterate whole swathes of our literary heritage.
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In his most recent collection, Next to Nothing, Chris Agee fuses voracious verbal intelligence with well-tuned musicality. But this is not why I am compelled to re-read this book. Written in the years following the death of his four-year-old daughter, Agee’s elegies ring with veracity, transcending reportage of paternal grief even as it details, in quiet and careful ways, sentiments and sensibilities I know from my own experience of loss to be true beyond true beyond achingly true.
One poem in particular, from the “Heartscapes” series, stopped me on the page:
Your Face
swims
in the window
where I wave
at the childminder’s
new child
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When I ordered Abby Murray‘s new chapbook, “Me & Coyote,” I initially forgot that it came as part of the Lost Horse Press New Poets Series, the fourth in a series of book-length collections made up of three chapbooks by three different authors. The other two poets in this book, Jesse Fourmy and Karen Holman–also fellow students from the Pacific University MFA program–are both poets of distinctive voice and character. Their work deserves its own attention and careful reading.
But tonight I want to write about Abby’s poetry, because reading Abby Murray makes me want to be a better poet. By “better” I mean more wild, fierce, and free. Life can drive you crazy, if you let it. Health problems in the family and pressures at work have been leading me up to the brink. How refreshing, then, to read poems that regularly swan-dive off the edge, with such panache.
A poem like “Barnacle’s Son” convinces me, completely, that even if a man can’t be born from a rough sea creature, it ought to be possible. And within the language of the poem, it is. Equally convincing is the poem “How I Love You,” whose lines taper down and down, constricting on the final phrase, in all its tough rightness: “I love you more than / an iron fence / loves her / house.” And when “They Took Her Away in a Birdcage,” my face wanted to smile and frown all at once.
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“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.”
-Alexander Nikonov
I have Kit Stolz to thank for turning me on to Vera Pavlova. I devoured her first collection in English, aptly titled If There is Something to Desire. Keen, startling, and erotic–poems of such love and longing have not made as deep an impression on me as since I first discovered Pablo Neruda. And it occurred to me: I have been attending the erotic in poetry with shyness and apprehension. For example, although I love and support the Artists’ Union Gallery, each year when their erotic poetry fundraiser reading rolls around, there is always some good reason I cannot attend.
Toward the end of my study in the Pacific MFA program, the poet Marvin Bell suggested in one of his lectures that instead of writing so many elegies to the dead, we might do well to write more love poems to the living. It occurred to me in that moment that I could be rightly accused of giving too much attention to Thanatos, at the expense of Eros. My recent reading of Vera Pavlova only added evidence to the prosecution. In fact, she might be speaking directly to me when she writes, in poem 15, in her characteristically direct manner:
Do you know what you lacked?
That dose of contempt without which
you cannot flip a woman on her back
to make her flounder like a turtle,
to make the heartless fool realize:
she cannot flip back on her own.
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