by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
“Unacknowledged Legislators” 2015
For some people, it’s the favor of free books in perpetuity; for others, it’s the half-sentence of acknowledgment in somebody else’s back pages; but for me, the best fringe benefit of a couple of decades’ work in literary publishing is that I have friends who are poets – real live called-to-the-role poets.
Three such are in full poetic flower this week. There’s Cecily Parks in The New Yorker, MFA’d, Ph.D’d, prize-published, fitting herself into the morning suit of the doctor’s wife:
Inside
the coughing man’s lung the surgeons
found a fir tree. The dark interior
of a lung or a leaf bud, imagined
long enough, becomes a wilderness.
Your mind can do this
in the morning when you don’t have
a body. Wilderness isn’t paradise.
There’s Rowan Ricardo Phillips, down at McNally Jackson with Tracy K. Smith, doubtless reading new poems about heaven, such as one this comes from:
Even Heaven has its dream of being
Paris. A flawed Paris in a flawed light.
A proper Paris. You arive there by
Accident: like Narcissus to his pond.
Cecily
and Rowan have new books – O'Night
and Heaven – and I
hope to post a fresh piece about each of them.
Lawrence Joseph, meanwhile, is between books, as the saying goes, but each of his new poems has a greater density and singularity of expression than most poets’ whole books. Here are a few lines from “Visions of Labour,” behind the paywall in the London Review of Books:
Static model,
dynamic model, alternate contract environments,
enterprise size and labour market functions,
equilibrium characterisation, elasticity of response
to productivity shocks: the question in this Third
Industrial Revolution is who owns and controls
the data. That’s what we’re looking at …
Larry invokes Blake at the beginning of the poem, and against heavy odds the poem makes good on the invocation: “Visions of Labour” is a radical poem, an an apt pendant to the street-shout of vexation over things-as-they-are that is Pope Francis’s first encyclical.
The photograph is of an anti-austerity rally held in London last weekend.
Christian Wiman: Courting the Silence
“Mysticism as an astringent … writing in the dark … silence that is charged instead of afflicted …”
That’s from a particularly attentive audience member’s notes on the conversation with Christian Wiman the other night in Riggs Library. The winter storm in New England nearly kept Christian from getting from New Haven to Washington, and a deep cough kept him from getting comfortable beforehand – but once on stage, reading poems and speaking of poetry, he was mesmerizing.
In his account of things, the struggle to maintain a credible language of belief is not a cultural problem but an existential one, born of the writer’s determination to make an authentic statement while also maintaining an “apophatic” suspicion of all statements about the divine as less than adequate. As if to prove the point paradoxically, he explained that the extraordinary success of My Bright Abyss – David Brooks’ praise of it the other week led a whole printing to sell out overnight – has in his case upped the usual challenge of finding the inner silence where poetry is made.
Christian recalled an amazing account of the parable of the mustard seed by Tomas Halik, the Czech priest and philosopher who helped dedicate Václav Havel’s Place at Georgetown a year or so ago. And after ninety minutes, as if all he’d read and said hadn’t been enough, he took my prompt – Jesuit Heritage Week at the university – and recited, from memory and with a convincing north country burr, Hopkins’ “When kingfishers catch fire …”
And then over dinner unpacked the implications of his call for a “poetics of belief” with a dozen faculty members and other guests.
Christian
was the first poet to take part in the Faith & Culture series.
Here’s hoping Les Murray – with a new book imminent – is the next.
Charles Wright: Angel of Happy Meeting
Charles Wright will be the next Poet Laureate of the United States. Truly, is there anybody better? No – though some equals among his peers come to mind.
His body of work takes in Dante, the Civil War, Eastern philosophy, manhood, poetry and poets, and the superaliveness of a certain American mind in the second half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first.
And Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Worker, in a poem that as far as I can tell was called forth by The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
Here is a passage from the book which describes Flannery O'Connor in the early summer of 1964 – more or less fifty years ago:
“Prayers requested,” she informed Sally Fitzgerald. “I am sick of being sick.” She wrote letters to Grace Bug, Marybat, Raycheek, and Raybat— to Maryat Lee— and signed them Mrs. Turpin, Tarbug, and Tarbutter. In a letter to Elizabeth Hester she remarked, “There’s a right interesting review of Richard Hughes ’ Fox in the Attic by Walker Percy in the summer 64 Sewanee.” She spoke fondly of Hopkins’s poem “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
To Janet McKane, who was also sick, she sent the Prayer to St. Raphael, which the Catholic Worker people had sent her on a postcard in 1953. She had said it daily for some years:
O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us: Raphael, angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for … . Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the province of joy, all ignorant of the concerns of our country. Remember the weak, you who are strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright with the resplendent glory of God.
Here is the poem “Flannery’s Angel,” from Charlie’s 2010 book Sestets:
Flannery’s Angel
Lead us to those we are waiting for,
Those who are waiting for us.
May your wings protect us,
may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy.
Remember us who are weak.
You who are strong in your country which lies beyond the thunder,
Raphael, angel of happy meeting,
resplendent, hawk of the light.
That is what poets do. We’re lucky that he’ll be doing it for the next couple of years at the Library of Congress in Washington.
It’s Not About Community — It’s About Narrative
It’s a slow news day when the story of a poetry collective that disbanded seventeen years ago makes the front page of the Times.
That: or else the zeitgeist moves in increments of a quarter century or so. If (as Pound notoriously put it) poetry is news that stays news, literary history is news that takes the passage of time to seem like news, and the quarter-century mark is roughly where the news cycle begins.
So the Times piece on the Dark Room Collective looks back from the promontories of two Pulitzers in poetry (Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith), a poet laureateship (Trethewey) and a sheaf of big prize nominations (for Kevin Young, Major Jackson and others) to see how its members executed a
“shift out of the ‘I’m a black man in America and it’s hard’ mode” into “the idea of ‘you are who you are, so that’s always going to be part of the poem.’”
So Junot Diaz, introducing a new anthology, looks back past his Pulitzer and his MacArthur genius grant not just to excoriate the passive racism of Cornell’s MFA program when he was there but to register “an abiding sense of loss":
Lost time, lost opportunities, lost people. When I think on it now what’s most clear to me is how easily ours could have been a dope workshop. What might have been if we’d had one sympathetic faculty in our fiction program. If we Calibans hadn’t all retreated into our separate bolt holes. If we’d actually been there for each other.
So a 2013 valedictory piece about Cambridge literary mavens Bill and Beverly Corbett (which turned up as I tried to figure out whether Jhumpa Lahiri has ever been reviewed by James Wood) celebrated the suppers with writers held at their table in the late Eighties, so that the poet August Kleinzahler could wistfully recall:
It’s in the upstairs living room of 9 Columbus Square that I remember Bill and Beverly most vividly, with the dogs and The New York Times draped over them. . . . I shall miss walking up those stairs more than I can begin to say.
The conventional wisdom is that emerging writers need community; that out of the community – with its mix of support and criticism, of common purpose and idle sociability – the work emerges; and that the perennial vexation with MFA programs has to do with the way they take the emerging writer’s yearning for literary community and put a pedagogy and a degree and a price tag on it, promising an experience they cannot deliver.
But it seems to me that emerging writers, more than they yearn for community, yearn for a narrative in which they understand themselves to be taking part. A literary movement like the Dark Room Collective sought to shape its own narrative going forward, rather than in retrospect; and the prizes and profiles suggest that it worked. In this way poetry becomes news and stays news. Fortunately, it’s not the only way.