High Five: Poetry

(In this issue's High Five, poet Christine Stewart discusses her favorite poets)

My High Five in poetry is a snapshot of what is currently taking my breath away, haunting me, making me envious, making me nervous, thrilled, and challenging the way I think (thought!) poetry should be written. I'm just going to give you a brief 'why' and let you discover these on your own, without telling you what you should be thinking and feeling about them. I want you and the poem to meet on your own terms.

"The Archipelago of Kisses" by Jeffrey McDaniel, from The Splinter Factory

McDaniel, a former student of Thomas Lux (also fantastic), teaches at Sarah Lawrence. When I first read his book I felt all the rules I'd learned over the years, especially in grad school, join hands and jump out the window as I waved cheerfully goodbye. I felt incredibly talentless and boring and safe as a poet. Here is someone whose writing is so raw, who is on such intimate terms with language, without any rules or map, that I had to surrender. If McDaniel had a cult (and he should), I would join in a second. In "The Archipelago of Kisses" he breaks the metaphor rule: don't have too many and what you have better agree and be consistent and not too crazy. He starts off listing types of kisses: "the sympathy kiss," "the I wish you'd quit smoking kiss," "the I accept your apology but you make me really mad kiss," then really takes off:

...As you get older,
     kisses become scarce. You'll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
     with its purple thumb out. Now if you
were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's ruby door
     just to see how it fits....

He builds to an incredible moment of transformation, where he saves his poems from coming off as mere word play or—please no—magical realism, becoming both serious and sincere while staying true to the framework of his own voice and structure, reflecting back all the excruciating joy and pain of being human, especially a human in love:

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection
     of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when
     I'm dead, I'll swim through the earth
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

"Recipe for Resurrection" by Amy Gerstler, from Crown of Weeds

If Jeffrey McDaniel is King of the Poetry Prom in my head, then Amy Gerstler is the Queen. Similarly she pushes language and metaphor, weaving them into a kind of spell. This poem appears in a collection of 41 undivided poems that are dedicated to her brother, who had a brain tumor. This is the first poem in the collection, where a meticulous accumulation of details creates a slightly anxious feeling in the reader, in response to the suppressed hysteria in the voice of the speaker, tempered just enough by the irony and irreverance of humor:

Bathe the body in quinine.
Then let his wrists
be braceleted with the stings
of tiny iridescent insects.
A group of ten restless boys
should encircle the sleeper
whose marrow is to be rekindled....

Rub footsoles with prickly poppy
and buttermilk. Place a live
green treefrog over each nipple
and stroke the frogs tenderly
until they are calm. Cover the empty
genitals with white duck feathers....

The sounds and images offered up are intoxicating in their fantastic dress, but she also delivers a heartfelt nakedness:

Resist the temptation
to fall to your knees
and beg his forgiveness....

Graciously welcome the truant
soul home as you stutter your love—
that thin tuneless exhaust
we exhale every day.

"Cassandra" by Louise Bogan, from The Blue Estuaries

This is how I sometimes feel when I write poetry. Mad (as in madness), tormented, possessed, and yet, despite that possession, not a pure enough channel for what wishes to come through, but instead imposing my own needs and ideas on the words and therefore distorting them so there is no real truth. Poetry is an 'other' form of speech, with a brand of truth not everyone wants, or can, hear, and "Cassandra" has a violence that definitely disturbs one enough not to want to listen.

Bogan (1898-1970) was the poetry critic for The New Yorker for nearly forty years. The Blue Estuaries contains poems from her five volumes of poetry, and a section of uncollected work. Her poems are lyrical and highly formal. Here is the poem in its entirety:

To me, one silly task is like another.
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
This flesh will never give a child its mother,—
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

Cassandra was a sybil, or oracle, who was cursed by Apollo to be disbelieved after she spurned his advances. Note the play on 'bare' (bear) and the repetition of 'again.' The drumbeat of disgust in the last, nearly completely monosyllabic, line.

Bogan's writing process was a painful one, with poems coming rarely as she struggled with two failing marriages and depression. Her poem "The Daemon" depicts her muse as a monster demanding revelations again and again. Despite this struggle, Bogan was honored with almost every major poetry award.

"Meander" by Stanley Plumly, from Old Heart

This is a poem I cut out of The Atlantic Monthly before it appeared in Plumly’s new collection, Old Heart. I studied with Stan at the University of Maryland, for my MFA, and during the winter break of my second year, he had a heart attack and there was some concern that he would delay his return to class, or not return at all. Fortunately, neither happened and I was grateful, not for myself, personally, but that we—the University, poets in general, the world at large—hadn't lost him. There are 'poets' and there are 'Poets' and Stan is of the latter group, though he is too modest to agree. He goes beautifully and quietly about his lyrical business, which is to be one who most call the last of the Romantics, a Keatsian poet who writes with both an elegance and a simplicity, using symbols of spiritual weight, about the natural world, family, and love.

He is a Keats scholar as well, currently writing a book about the poet, and is, in my mind, the best example of Keats' term 'negative capability' there is. Negative capability is "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Bascially, beauty is all you need to know; it is not necessary to drag the intellect into it and try to explain it. Plumly gently draws and weaves the images and ideas as purely as possible and allows their meaning, and juxtaposition to create their own connections and magic for you, even as the poems are suffused with a subtle reverance.

This poem captured my attention because it is the first one I read in which he dealt with the issue of his heart attack. It begins, "Yes, a river is a tree, a tree a river, built by source and branchings..." and slips effortlessly into the simile at the heart (literally) of the poem:

...each divided limb finding
shape
inside the air, like this rain slip-slipping down the window,
capillary, fragmentary,
bled and bleeding out, a kind of river delta, spreading like the
root-like
veining of the heart or ganglia of nerve cells off the spine,
the spine itself a slight meander, rooted to the ground, branch—
ing to a cloud,
my heart, my spine, my cloud, the X-rays coldly spiritual, the
invisible made visible.

I was holding my breath when I first read this poem, reading into it a prognosis for his future and, happily, found hope and realism at once:

That loving shape of the limb on the dying elm, how far from
where it started,
still growing, even now, toward ending, the way a river and its
runoff end.

Plumly, as a mentor and poet, teaches me to 'back off.' That in taking the pressing need of my heart out of a poem and allowing its beauty to emerge on its own (with a careful, respectful nudge of craft)—whether warm or cold, dark or light, direct or indirect—the feeling still comes through and the mystery is preserved. The entire collection is Plumly at his best. It was a National Book Award nominee for 2007.

"14," by Inger Christensen (trans. by Susanna Nied), from alphabet

This book was a gift from a friend who made her own discovery of it and passed it on to me. Christensen is Denmark's most admired poet, and this translation was awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize. The book is based structurally on Fibonacci’s mathematical sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers, so each section reflects that sequence. It is philosophical and metaphysical, but the subject is simply everyday life.

The poems are deeply reflective; most begin with a type of listing of what 'exists' as she is writing. Anything can make it into the list: bombs, air, love, rabbits, ice, skin, birds. The poems are meditations, stream of consciousness; her focus is both zoom and wide-angle. For me, they capture thoughts and feelings I hadn't been able to articulate myself, or known that I needed to articulate. I confess I am still working at understanding this book. Each time I pick it up I discover a new order. Here is the opening of the poem I always return to, the last poem of the book’s last section, section 14:

dreamers go around openly now
with dreams out on their skin
with the lustre of membranes
and entrails spread over
their bodies like old-fashioned
maps; the specific
contours of the moment show
the future’s embryo
as a contagious stand of fossils
and the earth’s surface cracks like
peeling canvas; the stuff
of dreams and everything else a human
being was made of flutters
in the air, a few classic
strips of veil and gauze
around the glassclear thoughts...

I think of her as the Scandinavian Anne Carson. I love Anne Carson, but find Inger Christensen more compelling. Like Plumly, she reminds me to get out of the way, to see the thing itself, not what I want to see or wish to see, of the balance of concrete and abstract, and to allow for the gaps of what I don’t understand and for the silence.