Superheroes

In anticipation celebration of The Avengers (whoohoo! I hope, anyway), let’s look briefly at A. Van Jordan’s collection Quantum Lyrics, which puts comic book superheroes and heroes of physics together, among other topics, in quite nice poems. (I’m not at all scientifically inclined, as I’ve mentioned before, but I do like the general ideas of physics, the ideas I can almost understand for a moment at a time, anyway, and what’s not to be intrigued by about superheroes?)

Albert Einstein’s personal life, his wives and his civil rights involvement, gets a lot of attention in the collection as well. Sample poem titles: “The Flash Reverses Time,” “The Green Lantern Unlocks the Secrets of Black Body Theory,” “Marian Anderson,” “The Atom and Hawkman Discuss Metaphysics,” “Sculpting the Head of Miles Davis.”

The Einstein poems use a lot of filmic conventions, “FADE IN” and “CUT TO:” and “INSERT SHOT” and so forth, that section adding up to a sort of documentary film made out of poems. In the prose poem “Einstein Defining Special Relativity,” the scientist’s notebook

Larry Levis

I discovered Larry Levis only a few months ago. (I feel the same way about that as I did about seeing Spinal Tap for the first time only last year. How could I have been missing out for so long!)

Larry Levis, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at age 49, wrote six books of poetry, including one published posthumously. His early work is lovely but his later work is what I’ve been obsessively re-reading. The poems’ sprawl, or maybe sweep is a better word —  it is never scattered or unfocused. The tone/voice. The sensibility.

And then of course, there are the great images, for instance “he hears the geese racket above him / As if a stick were held flat against / A slat fence by a child running past a house for sale” and “Heaven was neither the light nor was it the air, & if it took a physical form / It was splintered lumber no one could build anything with.”

Robert Mezey called Levis’ poetry “the nourishing shock of fresh ideas that rise from the work of the true poet.”

April Comes Like an Idiot

It’s April. Fields of flowers, tons of rain, loss and renewal, and poetry.

I love Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Spring,” not just for its oh-so-quotable (and I often do) “April / comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers,” but for what precedes it — “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” I love how angsty and dark it is, teenagery — even as it describes spring beauty (“The smell of the earth is good” and “the redness / of little leaves opening stickily”)  there are maggots eating brains, and not just underground either. It’s a delicious mix of darknesses. She doesn’t deny beauty, it just isn’t enough.

For April rain we turn to Langston Hughes’ “April Rain Song.” Not a complicated poem in thought, but it has a wonderful rhythm.

A consequence of rain is of course mud, and mud makes the world mudlicious,

Basketball

Since it is that time of year…

Skipping over Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, merely because I haven’t read (or seen) it, William Matthews, who I’ve mentioned before, jumps to mind with regards to March Madness. In addition to jazz and family, basketball is a frequent preoccupation of his poems. Matthews talks about practice (“Foul Shots: A Clinic“) with an eye towards the metaphysical, about attending a game (“Cheap Seats, The Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959“) with an eye towards adolescents’ reality, and about players’ physicality (“In Memory of the Utah Stars“), from both a fan and former player’s point of view.

In “Sandlot Basketball” that former-player aspect is the focus. Amidst a memory of youth comes age’s regret, “Dribbling in the dust, coughing like a dying boat, each knee the color of a boiling lobster, I hate my decadent grace. Body, come back; all is forgiven.” Basketball and youth, being so related and so short a period of time, perhaps explains the frequent poems which are looking back on basketball from old(er) age, with tinges of regret, as in John Updike’s “Ex-Basketball Player”  and B.H. Fairchild’s “Old Men Playing Basketball” with their “heavy bodies” and those bodies’ “broken language,” and their hands “fine and nervous on the lug wrench.”

Yusef Komunyakaa’s basketball poem Slam, Dunk & Hook, has these high-energy, beautiful descriptions of athleticism, youth in their prime,

March

March in Portland means weather of every kind (hail, sun, snow, rain, freezing, 60°) in a single day on most days. The weather in March poems ranges too. In Lizette Woodworth Reese’s Mid-March “It is too early for white boughs, too late / For snows” and “The days go out with shouting.”  Swinburne‘s March is a ”master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite,” but William Matthew’s March is hot, with thick air — “Nothing can ease the March heat / nor make it stay.”

In Elizabeth Spires’ “Ocean City: Early March” the month is moody and gray with storm. Dickinson, however, invites March in,

Oh March, Come right upstairs with me -
I have so much to tell -

I got your letter, and the Birds -
The Maples never knew that you were coming -
I declare – how Red their Faces grew -

But I think my favorite

Personality

I suppose it’s common to think of novels and movies as having all the fun character-wise, but poets get in on that action too. Three personality-rich poems come immediately to mind: the speaker in Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” John, the friend who speaks frequently in David Lee‘s poems, and Henry in John Berryman‘s Dream Songs.

I can’t think of a person I’ve met who knows “I Know a Man” who doesn’t like it. There’s a ton of energy there, due in part to the jerky and interruptive line breaks (which, honestly, I hate as a rule, but they completely work in this instance) and just enough characterization to make the speaker feel fully realized. (Fully-fleshed in a 12-line poem). He calls his friend by the wrong name, he is philosophical, his solution to that darkness is to buy a “goddamn big car,” and he’s apparently a terrible driver. You feel like you’re right there with these guys, sitting in the backseat, if not on a great road trip (a’la Tom Waits’ “Medley: Jack & Neal / California, Here I Come“) then at least across town. And his companion, who gets just a sentence, his individualization is all in that first word — “drive.” Not, “hey” or “yo” or “watch it” or “whoa,” but “drive.” As in, shut up and. As in, resigned to this sort of thing.

Mark Doty

Mark Doty is frequently lauded as one of the best American poets writing today, and I certainly concur. His manner of looking at the world is that of regard, an intellectual gaze that insists on detail and beauty, and taking the time to examine. He’s prolific, with about seven is it? eight? volumes of poetry, not including his award-winning New and Selected (which is a great place to start). And three books of memoir (centering around the death of his partner from AIDS, growing up gay, and dogs and loss, respectively). And a meditation about art history. And a little poetics book too (one of Graywolf Press’s lovely “Art Of” series). And an occasional blog.

When Doty annoys, which can happen every once in a while, it’s because of an overdosing of description, a too-mannered-ness. “Dammit, too much elegance!” one perhaps wants to yell on occasion. Or maybe, sometimes, “Cut to the chase!” But mostly he’s wonderful.

My Alexandria was my introduction to Doty (his third, I think, collection, published in 1993). The first poem in it has been one of my favorites since I read it (freshman or sophomore year of college), “Demolition,” which watches a building being taken down by a backhoe, its shy metal scoop, “a Japanese monster tilling its yellow head / and considering what to topple next.” That poem has one of my favorite poet-profound lines, “We love disasters that have nothing to do / with us.”

Two novels

I recently finished two classics, and damn were they worth the designation, both of them — The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1932 Pulitzer Prize) and All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947 Pulitzer Prize). They’d been sitting on my shelf for years, finally got around to them (the list is so very, very long, and then there are all the movies too…!)

The Good Earth follows the life of an ordinary Chinese man, Wang-Lung, from the day of his wedding to the day of his death, during a time of world war, revolution, and great upheaval that touches him directly barely at all. It’s the land that changes him, and then, human foibles that undo him. The sentences are very simple, and roll along quite easily. A simply-told, profound story.

Before a handful of days had passed it seemed to Wang Lung that he had never been away from his land, as indeed, in his heart he never had. With three pieces of the gold he bought good seed from the south, full grains of wheat and of rice and of corn, and for very recklessness of riches he bought seeds the like of which he had never planted before, celery and lotus for his pond and great red radishes that are stewed with pork for a feast dish and small red fragrant beans.

The book jacket on my copy says this book is of interest for anyone who wants to know about Chinese culture, but I say

February

February. In Portland we’re having fantastic 50′ weather and warm rain, but I always think of February as snowy, and so it is most often in February poems. One of my favorite February poems is Norman Dubie‘s “February: The Boy Breughel.”

It starts out with this beautiful metaphor,

The birches stand in their beggar’s row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,

“Clear sleeves of bone”! Then it moves to a further beggar image, “These icy trees / Are hanging by their thumbs” which is, well, terrible.

Titles

I re-read Charles Wright‘s  Appalachia this morning (and Black Zodiac (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998), both excellent) and was struck by — in addition of course to just how good he is, and how the feel of his long lines (in his later books anyway) differs from so many other poets I like, and how deep and meditative the poems feel  — just how fantastic the titles in Appalachia are.

Titles, as a point of craft, can be quite difficult. And a great title does not a great poem make, just as a pedestrian title does not a bad poem make, of course. Mark Doty, Elizabeth Bishop, and Cornelius Eady are wonderful poets, but they won’t be on my favorite titles list, nor many others; they have good titles, that set up and affect the rest of the lines (“Poem” is actually a perfectly fine way to go) but that are unremarkable out of context. Dickinson didn’t title any of hers. But, a great title can be an awfully fun way to start things.