Instead, let’s drop in on The Bounty, the first collection Walcott published after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. This book came out in 1997, and though its first (title) poem picks up the terza rima as if from the spot where Walcott dropped it at the end of Omeros, the rest of the book is made up of poems whose rhymes often resolve into quatrains. Like much of Walcott’s work, The Bounty is preoccupied with questions of travel and return. The title poem links the poet’s home island and his mother as two lost homes, and the book includes a section entitled “Homecoming,” but many of the poems are about the poet’s exilic wandering in Europe. Though Walcott would go on writing for twenty years after the publication of this book, there is, nevertheless, a sense of lateness in the poems, a felt shift into a phase of his work that feels somehow “post.”

Much of what I like best in this volume can be found in the one-page lyric (many of the poems are multi-part, multi-page affairs) titled for its first line: “I cannot remember the name of that seacoast city.” That sense of lateness is definitely present in the poem, but what I find remarkable about it is Walcott’s quietly confident relationship with the resources of his medium. That authoritative hand is interestingly at odds with the diffidence of the poem’s opening:

I cannot remember the name of that seacoast city,

but it trembled with summer crowds, flags, and the fair

with the terraces full and very French, determinedly witty,

as perhaps all Europe sat out in the open air

that was speckled and sun-stroked like Monet that summer

with its grey wide beach, ah yes! it is near Dinard,

a town with hyphens, I believe in Normandy

or Brittany, and the tide went far out and the barred

sand was immense. I was inhabiting a postcard.

The speaker might not have the name of the town in mind, but look how clearly he remembers the place itself. The details of crowds and flags, full terraces, and sun are first stated and then refracted through the familiarity of an artist’s representation, and we can see the mind’s movement as the place assembles itself in memory and then finds itself here or there on the map. A similar balance between the desultory and the determined is to be found in the end rhymes. Walcott starts off with a perfectly cross-rhymed quatrain, “city” and “witty,” “fair” and “air” all chiming confidence and closure, but then the scheme gets less certain, the partial rhymes of “summer” and “Normandy” breaking the pattern before it is reasserted by the perfection of “Dinard,” “barred,” and “postcard.” I’ll come back to end-rhyme in a minute, but first notice some of the other subtle play with sound in this passage. Walcott weaves echoes down the lefthand margin, with “trembled” picking up both vowels and consonants from “remember,” “terraces” continuing, the “r” of all of them emphasized in “perhaps all Europe,” and the “e” recurring in “speckled.” Notice, too, the little opportunities for misreading or play with multiplicity of meaning: “speckled and sun-stroked like Monet that summer” could, in isolation, refer to the painter struggling in the heat as he worked en plein air, and that possibility shimmers even as we read the reference to the painter’s capturing of light in brushstrokes and the speckling of it gleaming on surfaces. Or “I believe in Normandy.” Well, of course you do!

The poem is not a sonnet, but it is in a quietly combative relationship with the form. It breaks into four parts, three longer sections (9 lines, 6 lines, 4 lines) and a concluding couplet of sorts, riffing on the Shakespearean sonnet’s three quatrains and a couplet structure. The first section, quoted above, sets the scene and the problem: I can’t remember the name, however much else I recall about the place, being in which was like being in a postcard. The postcard pivots into the second section’s meditation not on place or memory but on representation: “I did a good watercolour.” We find something of a turn after this second section, the retrospective stance of the first two sections replaced by an emphatic return to the present: “Now.” The present is characterized by death and loss, and the third section recapitulates the first and second in its imagery, “the seaside city of graves” and “the only art left” picking up on the opening “seacoast city” and the second section’s watercolor. We are in Shakespearean sonnet territory, then, not only in the poem’s argumentative structure but also in its thematic burden, the relationship between art as a stay against mutability and the inevitability of time, change, and, ultimately, death.

The second section is worth hovering over for a minute, as it shifts from memory to representation and takes up the traditional question of whether and to what extent artistic preservation pauses time. As I mentioned, Walcott marks the shift first with a reference to representation at the end of the first section: “I was inhabiting a postcard.” Our ways of seeing are conditioned by what we have seen, and experience is in some way never primary because it is interpreted through familiar and conventional scenes. Beach town = postcard view of beach town. From there, Walcott pivots to the act rather than the mere fact of representation: “I did a good watercolour.” Then things get interesting. The painting is “dated,” but it still holds time’s passage in a strange suspension. Though “time races across its surface,” because the marking of time is captured in paint, “nothing changes / in motion.” The acts of rendering the scene in paint, the “stroke” and “tint” that bring the painting into being, “have eluded time.” In another, perhaps the most important, of those moments in which multiple possible meanings inhere, Walcott concludes the section: “Still, it estranges.” The adverb is doing a lot of work here. “Still,” meaning “yet,” the painting estranges the scene, the experience of time. And “Still,” in the sense of unmoving, in its stasis the painting achieves this estranging effect. And we’re left with multiple possibilities for just what it is that is estranged here: the scene, movement and time, us. Frozen in this way, the beach scene is renewed by being made strange. Confronting it, we are renewed in the contemplation of the renewed scene, made strange in and for and to ourselves as functions of time’s passage.

I said I’d come back to end-rhyme, and here we are. The poem opens with a cross-rhymed quatrain, and the last four lines before the sort-of couplet constitute another nicely cross-rhymed quatrain: “massacre” and “acre,” intertwined with “grass” and “grace.” (Am I alone in hearing a faint Whitman echo in that latter pair?) Walcott uses cross rhymes to stitch the separate syntactic sections of the poem together, too. “Watercolour,” in the first line of the second section, picks up the heretofore unrhymed “summer” from the first section; “grace” and “grass” are riffed on in the couplet’s “lies” and “was.” One end word in the poem, though, is never rhymed on. Though “dated” shares its vowel with “changes” and “estranges,” and it shares its terminal consonant with “barred” and “postcard,” it rhymes with no other end word in the poem. It’s also the end word in the very middle line of the poem: line 11 of 21. Ten lines before, ten after, with “dated” marking the point in between. This little flaw or snag in the poem’s sonic texture names the poem’s fundamental problem: “dated,” we are located in time, both held in it as the poem and painting work to hold it back, and moved with it, as the poem and painting fail to stop it. It is this condition that leaves us, when the scythe swings and our losses mount up, with “the preparation of grace” as “the only art,” so that we can, with the poet, accept an epitaph that names the place as “good to die in.”

I hope I’ve shown something of the brilliance of this poem. But here’s what I really find astonishing about it. Walcott is known for some major works, major whether in their ambition and audacity (Omeros, but also Another Life and Tiepolo’s Hound) or in their shorter, sharper capacity to shock (“A Far Cry from Africa,” “The Sea is History,” “The Schooner Flight,” “The Arkansas Testament”). This is a one-page, 21-line, untitled lyric tucked in after the title poem of his something-like-fifteenth collection, itself easy to overlook in the wake of Omeros. I don’t want to suggest that it’s a throwaway or anything, but it’s just a poem among a lot of poems, both in The Bounty and in Walcott’s overall oeuvre (say that three times fast). And yet, and yet: the painstaking care of its patterning, its sequence of sections, its grappling with deep questions at the heart of the English lyric tradition, its internal self-reference. And the lightness and confidence of its touch as it undertakes all that it undertakes. I keep coming back to this poem not only because I think it’s really great but also because it’s so understated and half-hidden.

We often measure poets by their big successes, by the singular and memorable standout achievements. But maybe a poet’s greatness can also be suggested by their performance on the smaller, secondary, stage, by the quality of the run-of-the-mill rather than the extraordinary. I think this Walcott poem exemplifies that alternative measuring stick.

Maybe, like me, you need a break from wondering where John Roberts stores his Klan regalia now that there’s no need to hide it (not that he ever hid it all that well; I’m pretty sure the neatly folded hood peeked out during his confirmation perjury, and you can see a trace of white robe just below the hem of his tasteful black robe in every picture of the so-called supreme court taken since his so-called elevation to it). I mean, does he send it to the dry cleaner now so it’s ready to wear to rallies this summer as the electorate is Jim-Crowed into eternal right-wing congressional majorities? Does his have special chevrons on the sleeve like the ornaments his predecessor stitched onto his cheap justice gown?

We’ll probably find out soon enough. In the meantime, let’s talk about poetry. Or, really, let’s talk about how we talk about poetry.

Not least because I’ve been rereading a lot of Derek Walcott for an academic project I’m working on, and now I’m thinking about how we respond to the deaths of poets whose work has mattered to us, I’ve been thinking about a response I got when I posted on a social media platform that I am no longer on (fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg) a note about the poet upon his death in 2017. To my lament, a poet acquaintance replied that she wasn’t too worked up about Walcott’s passing because Roy Fisher, who had also recently died, was more her thing. I didn’t really get this. I love Roy Fisher’s work too. Was it the case that we could only mourn one among a pair of poets whose poetry was deeply dissimilar? Did one set of aesthetic preferences cancel another out? Couldn’t someone who admired Fisher also admire Walcott?

I will acknowledge that I might have overread a quick reply to a social media post. It may be that this poet just didn’t like Walcott, and that her dislike of his work wasn’t directly related to her liking of Fisher’s. (It may also be that her verbal shrug at Walcott’s death had to do with things other than Walcott’s poetry. There was quite a bit of this during the last years of the poet’s life, and I remember a handful of conversations in which friends disavowed him over some really deplorable behavior.)

But remembering that exchange has gotten me thinking about another. Long ago, the National Poetry Foundation (now the Center for Poetry and Poetics) hosted conferences at the University of Maine, where the Foundation/Center is located. These were usually organized around decades: the poetry of the 1950s, the poetry of the 1960s, etc. Faculty and grad students from all over the country came to Orono for a week during the summer to give papers, hear plenaries, and engage in conversation about modern, modernist, and postmodernist poetry. And look, with all due respect, there was fuck-all else to do. The campus is not in the center of Orono, and the center of Orono itself is no bustling metropolis. But this was part of the greatness of those conferences. Stuck on campus, staying in the dorms, eating together in the cafeteria, we had a great time. Remind me sometime and I’ll tell you about dancing with Marjorie Perloff (and others) while someone was playing “Brown-Eyed Girl” on the dorm piano and a couple dozen scholars of modernist poetry were singing along.

At one such conference, one of the plenary speakers was the author of a study of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. I wish I could remember more about his talk, but what has stayed with me was a question during the discussion that followed it. A younger scholar, a recent Ph.D., asked, with a tensely shaking voice that suggested strong feeling, a question that sounded, in my on-the-spot translation, something like “Can you really be into George Oppen if you’re into Bishop? Don’t our aesthetic commitments mean anything? For the love of God, man, is nothing worth fighting for anymore? Have you at long last left no sense of decency sir?” And, sitting a couple of rows further back in the auditorium, I thought: Holy shit, I’m doing it wrong. I love both Bishop and Oppen. Hell, I love both Louise Glück and Susan Howe. I love both Rita Dove and Lorenzo Thomas, W.S. Merwin and Michael Palmer. Have I at long last left no sense of decency?

This crisis wasn’t a crisis for long. As my buddy, Jim Smethurst, said over beers later that evening, it’s good to have a capacious palate. I like this IPA, for instance, but it doesn’t mean I don’t also like a well-made stout or porter, and hell, even a mass-produced lager hits the spot after you’ve mowed the lawn on a hot afternoon. Or, in the wine-tasting diction with which I introduced this newsletter some time ago: a love for the big velvety cabs of Sonoma does not preclude a taste for the austere minerality of a Provencal rosé, or even, for that matter, the barnyard funk of certain Georgian orange wines.

But I think there’s more to this than mere catholicity of taste. For years now I’ve been turning over in my head something that Philip Terry wrote in a great London Review of Books piece on Seamus Heaney, that Heaney was “an instinctive Oulipian, or, as Oulipo would put it, an ‘anticipatory plagiarist.’” You don’t usually think of the scrupulously crafted poems of Heaney in terms of the constraint-generated hands-off machinery of Oulipo, but the juxtaposition gets at something essential in poetry that works: the essential and constitutive strangeness of the poetic.

I’m not sure that limit cases have much value, but ever since I read that Terry piece (in 2021) I’ve had this thought: what can two poets without much at all in common have in common? And because at that time I was reading both Heaney and J.H. Prynne, I started thinking about, well, Heaney and J.H. Prynne. For example: what if you set Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” alongside the 16-line poems that make up Prynne’s 1997 For the Monogram? These projects derive from opposed poetics. They differ not only in sound but also in foundational assumptions. It is, at some level, impossible to read them in the same way. But hold that thought.

Now comes the news that Prynne has died, and over the weekend since I started this post I’ve been thinking less about Prynne and Heaney and more about Prynne. I may return to Glanmore vs. Monogram sometime, but for now, instead, by way of eulogy, a paragraph or two about Prynne.

This poet’s work is notoriously difficult. Even describing the difficulty is a task that tortures the syntax and diction of some who have tried it. E.g. “If Prynne’s earlier poetry connoted the real by emphasizing the processes of meaning rather that meaning itself—a technique traditional to the moderns—his later work has proved more radical in method. Now the forms of language are experienced as participating in the forms or underlying orders of the real itself, a participation understood as a coinherence of inner and outer effected by syntactic reversals, such as chiasmus, correlated with verbal play.” Or “The poem confronts “it,” that which is “less” than the “yes and no” of the dialectic of presence and absence of ontology. The poem can extend “it” only the flatness of a demotic denial. Nonetheless, the very contrast of idioms in the language splits the poem away from the conclusion it seeks to effect: “stuff it.” The subject receives from what is other even the message he emits.” By the way, I don’t mean torture of syntax and diction in a pejorative sense; the stuff is hard.

But hard can be rewarding. I have to admit that it took a handful of tries, and also some helpful critical discussions, before I found ways into Prynne’s work. Nigel Alderman, with whom I co-wrote a book, and Dan Blanton, with whom Nigel co-edited a book, both helped me to get a grasp on “Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self” (in the influential 1968 volume, Kitchen Poems), which also exploded my comfortable reliance on the system vs. lifeworld dichotomy through which I had been thinking about the value of lyric practice. Sigh.

But my Prynne of choice is The Oval Window (1983), whose second poem or section includes a phrase that later repeats and that seems to name its agenda: “panic / through the medium itself.” This poem or sequence (it’s rarely clear to me exactly how to name or understand the relationships among parts or of parts to whole in some of these works) deploys the discourses of databases and markets to come sideways at the discourse of the aesthetic. Images or references to “cut,” “frame,” burning, and screens abound, establishing threads or strings that run through the whole. The title’s image of a window, which is also legible in terms of cut and frame and screen, but which brings with it distinctive semantic associations, foregrounds perspective, the situation from and through which perception happens. Our vision, and all that limits, distorts, and otherwise compromises it, refracts here through the management of data, of inputs. Here and there, allusion opens onto vistas that are at once textually specific (Richard III, All’s Well That Ends Well, Wordsworth, Confucius, “Palace Style” Chinese poetry) and metonymic figures for whole fields.

A few pages into The Oval Window, we find a passage that captures better than any description I might try the relationship Prynne posits and explores between representation and reality, a commentary at the same time and therefore, on poetry itself and on its inextricability from the discourses and disasters of capital. I wouldn’t dare to suggest an ars poetica for this recondite poet whose long career is rich and varied in its poetic means and ends, but it’s the passage where I experienced a sort of “a-ha!” and that has been something of my Prynne touchstone ever since:

A view is a window

on the real data, not a separate copy

of that data, or a lower surplus in oil

and erratic items such as precious stones,

aircraft and the corpses of men, tigers

fish and pythons, “all in a confused tangle.”

Changes to the real data

are visible through the view; and operations

against the view are converted, through

a kind of unofficial window on Treasury policy,

into operations on the real data.

To this world given over, now safely,

work makes free logic joined to the afterlife.

With the opening of this post in mind, if you can read those last two lines without a vicious chill shivering up and down your spine, I think you might not be viewing through the right window.

Phillips’s 2022 Then the War and Selected Poems gathers work he published over the twenty years that followed Quiver of Arrows, his first selected volume, which included work published through 2006. The book opens with a substantial slim volume’s worth of new poems under the title, Then the War, followed by selections from the half a dozen books Phillips published after 2007. Then the War is punctuated, about a third of the way in, by a sequence of short poetic essays, “Among the Trees.” This is where we’ll start, out in the woods, a little lost, perhaps, and looking for a path.

“Among the Trees” opens in a decidedly unregretful tone: “What happened back there, among the trees, is only as untenable as you allow yourself or just decide to believe it is. It happened, and now it’s over.” Subsequent essays, most a single paragraph, some quite short, suggest the kinds of things that happen among the trees. In an anecdote from his childhood, a time when he climbed a fig tree in his underwear rather than coming in when called by his parents as evening fell, Phillips gestures toward the history of lynching, evoking an especially violent connection between Black men and trees. Elsewhere, he expresses his love for trees and forests, his sense of the woods as a refuge from unfriendly communities and as a protected, and protective, space of eros: “It makes sense that woods and forests have long been a queer space. Queer, not just in the sense of strangeness or alienation – going back to my relationship to the woods in high school – but in terms of sexuality, the woods as a space to hunt for sex.” This insight seems to inform “All the Love You’ve Got,” from Star Map with Action Figures (the most recent of the selected poems in this book). In that poem, a king leaves his tent and wanders along a river:

Beside the river,

two men are fucking. Young men. Almost too young

to even know about fucking, thinks the king, who can’t

help noticing how the men bring a somehow grace

to the business between them – a grace that some might

confuse with love.

Through the king’s disillusioned witnessing, Phillips disentangles things often entangled: mercy, grace, fucking, love. What do any of these have to do with the others? Which is not (yet) to say anything about regret, though a stance begins to form in this nascent static.

In one of the most substantial of these lyric essays, Phillips quotes himself at length:

Theres’ a forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow.

Regrets find no shelter there.

. . .

There’s no reason to stay there,

nothing worth going to see,

but if you want to you can pass through the forest

in the better part of a long day.

Who would want to, though?

These lines, too, appear in Star Map with Action Figures, in the poem, “Soundtrack for a Frame of Winter,” and that poem’s concluding lines also resonate with this dismissive attitude toward regret. The speaker notes a “makeshift grave” in the center of the forest, one overgrown not only with the expected “weeds, moss, the usual,” but also with

defeat, desire, the usual.

Wingless ambition, frangible hope, misunderstanding, i.e. mistake,

another form of weakness, i.e. the usual.

In the essay, Phillips uses the passage from “Soundtrack for a Frame of Winter” to illustrate changes over the course of his career. He contrasts its content, sentences, and style with a passage from an earlier poem (also focused on a forest), concluding that “I’m not the man I was.”

If, like me, you’re an annual reader or watcher of one or another version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, you’ll recognize that sentence from Scrooge near the end, after the visitation of spirits, when he has been brought to repent his life of selfishness and greed. For Scrooge, for Dickens, “I’m not the man I was” is an expression of regret, a rejection of that earlier man, almost a wish never to have been him. For Phillips, though, it is a mere acknowledgment of change, no more value-laden than the distinction that precedes it: “Catalpa trees aren’t hawthorns.”

To find or offer no shelter for regret can sound like a casual dismissal of damage or harm, but I don’t think that’s what Phillips is up to in his later poems. His more relaxed and continuous sentences in these poems suggest that the opposite of regret might instead be release and acceptance. Many of my favorite poems in Phillips’s more recent volumes acknowledge change of various kinds: aging, diminishment, error, sometimes; sometimes, damage. “Steeple,” from Reconnaissance (2015), is exemplary. The poem opens with a shrug that it’s hard for me to imagine in a Phillips poem twenty years earlier (like those I wrote about a few posts ago): “Maybe love really does mean the submission of power -- / I don’t know.” It goes on to mention “all the ways we do harm / or refrain from it, when nothing says we have to.” There’s a phrase to linger over. On the one hand, there is nothing (no thing – no low or rule or requirement) that says we have either to do harm or refrain from it. On the other hand, “nothing” as something, “the nothing that is,” as Stevens has it, the absence whose presence is so often palpable (and maybe so much more often palpable as we get older), compels us to do harm or refrain from it. Either way, we’re often caught up in the likelihood of harm. Even when unintended, it might be a consequence of mistake, especially, perhaps, the kind of mistake we make when we’re “as naked as naked gets,” when our faith in each other is “as mistaken as mistaken gets.” But the speaker loves “the mistake of it.” Erroneous and liable to harm, this might be us in our most fundamental state. A lot of earlier Phillips poems suggest—in their gestures toward or recollections of or figures that recall rough sex—that this is so. Those poems’ formal torsions and distortions were ways of registering the roughness, the breaking that might result from it, in their very verbal texture. Now, in the somewhat more straightforward (less broken-up) manner of his later style, Phillips seems to look back on this history and find in it not the bitterness of regret but something like the title image’s combination of elevation and diminution: “higher – soon desire will resemble that smaller thing, / late affection, then the memory of it; and then nothing at all.” (Do you, too, hear a little echo of Dickinson there? “Like freezing persons recollect the snow”?) Or I think of “Capella,” from the same volume, which registers absence (“I miss the sea. // I miss the storms”) and error, but finds a kind of pleasure, or at least pleasurable possibility in this bruised fruit: “The windfalls of my mistakes sweetly rot beneath me.”

Trained as a classicist, Phillips is familiar with Aristophanes’ encomium to love in Plato’s Symposium. You probably are, too, even if you don’t know it; this is the story about how we were all once spherical and eight-limbed creatures before we were split and left always in search of the missing half that could complete us. Martha Nussbaum has a nice reading of this speech, concluding that through it, Plato is emphasizing the ridiculousness of our desire-ridden existence. The mechanics are bizarre, Aristophanes’ story shows us, and it would be hilarious, this way we’re all running around trying to stick parts of ourselves into holes in each other, if it weren’t also awful. Phillips doesn’t find it awful in these poems – the king sees those two young men fucking as instantiating a kind of grace – but he gets that it might be a little comical.

You will have noticed, Gentle Reader, that I have, here and there, suggested a perhaps implicit analogy (sometimes even, maybe, a homology) between the relaxation of Phillips’s forms in these later poems and the relaxation of his speakers’ attitudes. We feel, in the move from c. 2010 to c. 2020, a shift from poise to equipoise. I’ll end with a passage from Then the War that beautifully captures this relaxation that is at once formal, rhetorical, and ethical, saying only that Phillips, whose earlier poems were important for me in part because they understood some oft-misunderstood aspects of certain modes of desire, here becomes important for me all over again as he understands aspects of certain modes of unregretful reflection on lost loves:

The truth is, there aren’t that

many people I can say I have loved,

not in any way that matters

or stands memorable, really, and

of those few I’m not so certain

I’d bring any of them back. At

best, they wouldn’t find me

anything close to who I was

when I loved them, which is to say

I’d disappoint them all over again,

just differently, so there’d at

least be that.

The Black sonneteer would love to say his tradition began with Hughes or God forbid Hayden, but actually it began at the intersection of Renaissance artifice and enforced deportation, of enjambment and enslavement, the fashioning of constraints both martial and musical, violent and visionary, stern and stanzaic. The Black sonneteer frets not in the form’s narrow room, seeing its demands to repeat—sounds, words, phrases, sometimes the refrain that kicks the turn at the ninth line and raises it to fourteen identical instances of figurative transformation: “We sliced the watermelon into smiles.” Or to seventy identically entitled American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.

Nobody would reduce the rich and varied career of Terrance Hayes to the phrase “Black sonneteer,” but that is one role that Hayes has played since the publication of his Whiting Award-winning first book, Muscular Music. Over the last twenty years and more, he has published six poetry collections, including Hip Logic, which was a National Poetry Series selection, Wind in a Box, which was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 2006, Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award, and How To Be Drawn, which won the NAACP Image Award for Poetry in 2016. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, the amazing book that came out in 2018, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and just about every other prize a poetry volume can win. Since that book, Hayes has published two more collections as well as a book of criticism. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Hayes was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2014.

Okay, I can list the prizes and honors and that’s great, but it doesn’t give a sense either of why Hayes is so powerful a poet on the intricacies and injuries of race in America or of how he is such a pleasure to read. Here, I’m going to try just to suggest these two intertwined elements of Hayes’s poetry, mostly in the book that keeps me coming back year after year.

A favorite poem of mine since I first came across it when Hip Logic was published is “Touch.” “We made our own laws,” that poem begins, capturing both the order and the outsider nature of touch football. “By moonlight / we chased each other / around the big field / beneath branches sagging / as if their leaves were full of blood.” The poem narrates the violence of this play, the way it is, at some level, a brawl, but also the way the playfulness of the brawl within the lines of a field is misread (willfully misread) by the police who are poised to see only the violence and not the playfulness, to tackle in a category error the players as if they are, because they are, always and already in the cops’ eyes, criminals. “It’s true,” Hayes writes, “we could have been mistaken / For animals in the dark, / But of all our possible crimes, // Blackness was the first.”

I’d never have thought of touch football (even as someone who has been a dedicated player for decades) as a figure for poetry, but in it we can see the definition of poetry Hayes offers in “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “an arrangement of derangements.” There are rules that enable performance, constraints that provoke brilliant invention and improvisation, and within the space of this rule-bound play there are opportunities to take on the violence that lurks just beyond the sideline. There are the ways the human can don other identities and play them out, and there are the vulnerabilities of misidentification that this disguising can elicit. On the field of the poem’s page, Hayes takes up with rigor and energy everything from the rules of the game to the policing of the boundaries. His intellect is unfailingly critical, and in his testing of the value of his predecessors’ work he is as probing and questioning of Robert Hayden (“Is this why / you were quiet when other poets sang / of the black man’s beauty?”) as he is of Wallace Stevens (“This is a song for my foe, / the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron / of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness / blue as a body made of snow”). And in the breathtaking and brilliant and bruising American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Hayes wields the traditions of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence against everything in American history and culture that has been trying to kill him.

In the longer essay I hope to write on that book, I’d want to spend pages discussing the ways he plays variations on the themes of race and violence in these poems, the ways he turns the conventions of the sonnet against the form to perform what Houston Baker describes as the essence of African American literary production, the “deformation of mastery.” For now, I’ll stick with just a couple of examples. When you read this sequence straight through, which you should, you’ll notice the recurrence throughout it of “money.” Sometimes the word is spelled lowercase, and the significance that comes to the surface has to do with exchange value and commodity logic and wealth (or its absence, or its unequal distribution, or the racialized impediments to its accumulation). And sometimes the word is capitalized, bringing to the fore its significance as the name of a town in Mississippi, the location of an infamous atrocity, the murder of Emmett Till, a metonym for the acts of assassination America routinely and insistently perpetrates on its Black citizens. This repetition of reference, incrementally accruing new meanings in new contexts, a thread rising to visibility, disappearing momentarily, and rising again to change our sense of what surrounds it, is at once part of what Hayes inherits from the sonnet sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, and part of the machinery with which he sets out to lock his American assassin “in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” By the way, you hear echoes of Wordsworth and Donne in that little line and a half, and Hayes adds to this allusive wit the wordplay a few lines later of “I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow / You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night / In the shadows of the gym.”

These poems, with their blood and breaking, their sleeper holds and caution tape and bombs and bodies, can be hard to read, or they would be but for the last note I’ll strike here, which is the note of hope and joy that also sounds and resounds throughout this book. I hasten to say that the hope and joy do not reside in the poems’ images or narratives or themes. But poems, those arrangements of derangement, are not only matters of sense. They are made up, too, of sound. They are songs, and in the music of what happens in them, as in the long tradition of the blues, or before them the sorrow songs DuBois describes, or before those the deeply pained singing Douglass condemns white folks for misunderstanding, misery and despair, anger and anguish, are transformed. Hayes is a consummate musician in these poems, as he has been throughout his career. Even as he forces our attention on “Florida, Ferguson, Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, wherever the names alive are / Like the names in graves,” even as he castigates a culture that pays Black poets to name Emmett Till, he gives us “The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk / Stumps us. The lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder. / The umpteenth horny, honky stump speech pumps / A funky rumble over air.” Taking Harryette Mullen’s virtuosity to Michael Harper’s death-watching scrutiny, Terrance Hayes liberates in and through and from these American sonnets. This vital virtuosity has made the book one of those to which I return every year. If you haven’t read it in a while, maybe it’s time.

and for a second

Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed –

Gold as on a coin or walking

Somehow from the sun towards them

One showing the eggs unbroken.

Gentle reader, I am blinking back tears now.

Are those tears simply lingering response to the awfulness of 25 years ago, residual salt water wrung by remembering how those early fall days felt? Or are they because the country of which I am a citizen has once again, as it has under every Republican administration of the last fifty years, embarked on yet another unnecessary, unprovoked, and indefensible war of choice?

Let me be clear: I have nothing good to say about the government of Iran. Indeed, my loathing of theocratic totalitarianism is part of what fills me with fear and dread at the state of my own country and its current trajectory. But that government posed no threat to the U.S. or its allies and had not provoked this attack, and now the bodies, including bodies of children bombed in their school, are piling up and once again (again and again and again), I confront the grisly evidence of my tax dollars at work.

Now, I think, rather than in the wake of September 11, 2001, is when we might turn to Auden with some justification. After all, his poem responded not to a terrorist attack but, instead, to a fascist state’s attack on another country in contravention of international law and agreements. Whatever one thinks of the 1930s, it would be hard to find a more “low, dishonest decade” than the one that began with an escalator ride campaign-kickoff for the 2016 election. The famed upholstery aficionado who currently occupies the vice presidency of this formerly democratic republic sent the clearest signal imaginable in the 2024 VP debate when one of his first moves was to remind the moderator that the rules said he would not be fact-checked. “I am a liar,” he all but said. “And I am going to tell you lies.”

The last year has forced us all to reckon with the Thucydides that Auden paraphrases “About Democracy, / And what dictators do, / The elderly rubbish they talk.” Every American has had to put down toothbrush or razor as “Out of the mirror they stare, / Imperialism’s face / And the international wrong.” We have heard nothing but the “windiest militant trash” and the “lie of Authority” from the criminals in office and, my friends, we are increasingly “Defenseless under the night.”

Auden famously disavowed this poem. He judged its most famous line (“We must love one another or die”) both morally suspect and simply wrong: we all die, no matter whether we love one another or not. But he gives himself too little credit for the final stanza’s fine balance, achieved with precise diction and careful syntax. “Our world in stupor lies” nicely invests the defenseless world with its own duplicity, and the points of light to which he points are, he insists, “Ironic.” Even the closing lines’ prayer – “May I . . . show an affirming flame” – is cast as the message exchanged by “the Just,” that capital “J” doing a lot of work. Like Yeats at the end of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” Auden here balances all, brings all to mind, “Eros and dust,” “Negation and despair,” affirmation and irony. Should we recognize that we and those we deem our enemies are made of the same elements? Of course. Will it make a damned bit of difference? If this kakistocracy allows free and fair elections come November (don’t bet on it), then I guess that’s up to us.

So: Emily Wilson, about whose work I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, published a new book last fall and I like it and I think maybe you might like it too. Here goes.

Burnt Mountain is published by the University of Iowa Press, in the Kuhl House Poets series. That series includes two of Wilson’s earlier books, as well as Transaction Histories, by Donna Stonecipher, another poet whose work I like and about whom I have written here.

All of this to say that I admire the work this series and press do (I’m a fan of a handful of other poets in the series, too).

The poems in this volume bring all the strengths of Wilson’s earlier work, poetry that seems to me at once in the stream that flows from William Carlos Williams and in the deep flow of a phenomenological philosopher. She is a clear-eyed observer of the natural world who is at the same time keenly attuned to the interaction of perception on the perceived and clued in to the ways the means of representation are necessarily also means of interpretation. By the way, when I mention Williams here, I have in mind the poems from Spring and All (1923), poems like “By the road to the contagious hospital” or “To have done nothing.” When I mention phenomenologists, I’m thinking more Maurice Merleau-Ponty than Martin Heidegger (partly because I’m not gonna cite a Nazi while jackbooted right-wing thugs are occupying an American city, terrorizing and killing my fellow Americans, a term I use regardless of citizenship). An exemplary poem that also seems to me to be something of an ars poetica is “Attention.” Here it is:

a small thing produced

red blips at the tops

of its stalks standing

where a forest mulched

the butte of a stripped

stump –

flaring beaded palest

green dotted curled and

cracked along the studs

the silver’s rotting

tinted turkey-tails off

the bark if you paid

The nouns here tend toward the general: “thing,” “stalks,” “stump,” etc. To begin a poem with “a small thing” is to begin with a brave sense of imprecision (though it behooves us to keep in mind the etymological roots of “thing” in gatherings for speech on topics of fundamental importance to a community). But the poem’s verbs and adjectives (some of which are forms derived from verbs) at once sharpen the perception and subtly call attention to the warp of the lens through which we are invited to perceive. Check out the fourth stanza: six modifiers and the conjunction’s promise of yet another. We see not so much the stump named in the prior stanza (and linked to these modifiers by that stanza’s concluding em-dash) as details of its visible surface, the lichen or other growth that colonize and texture that surface. Within the sequence, we find modification of modification, but notice how the color, a detail the mind can grasp and see, is Janus-faced, “palest green” telling us either about the “beaded” it follows or the “dotted curled” that follows it. The object perceived is broken down to a set of qualities that refer to each other internally, but the system isn’t closed. Quietly figurative language opens opportunities for us to see in terms of the familiar: “the butte of a stripped / stump,” for example, offers the distinctive shape of a known geological formation as a means of apprehending the stark verticality and rectilinearity of the stump. And strange syntax involves us logically as well as perceptually as we work to connect the title to the “thing,” finding a resolution (of sorts) in the concluding conditional. That is to say: a small thing provides a richness of perceptible detail and estranging strangeness if we attend to it. Which is to imply: walk by without paying attention, and you miss this, a stump that is a butte, densely textured and compellingly hued, shedding treasure. So much depends.

Over the course of the book, Wilson brings this way of seeing (and saying) to bear on a variety of natural phenomena: a forest, rain, a boulder, a river in summer, poplars, the titular burnt mountain. Sometimes the focus is not object but action: “Yard Work,” “Going Up.” Throughout, Wilson’s poems are characterized by a couple of key features. Crucially, for all of the ways they invite us to see, their attention to the linguistic medium of perception and representation ensures that before we see a thing we see the words, whose relationships—to the perceived and to each other—are troubled by line breaks and caesurae. If that sounds like a negative, it’s not. A big part of the point of these poems is that, to echo Wallace Stevens’s “The Plan Sense of Things,” the means of attention have themselves to be attended to. Wilson sometimes achieves this effect by complicating syntax, as in these lines from “Yard Work”:

Riddled brown the birches

Gullying through the somewhat seen

Root up the raspberries, axe the ashes

Overly complicate slashing down-yard

A comma might clarify whether the first phrase modifies the next, so that birches are the subject of the sentence, the agents of the gullying, axing, and complicating, but that clarity is not what the lines aim at. We have to stop to think precisely about these relationships and their production of significance. We need to wonder whether some unnamed thing has riddled the birches, whether that same agent is responsible for the gullying, etc. But sometimes, Wilson attends to attention in more syntactically straightforward but verbally striking ways, as in these later lines from the same poem:

A bridal clematis rigors up alders

Haws, hollies, colonizers

Daisy and hay-scented fern, crimp-clover

Parasol-tops, goldenrods, moneywort, succory

The interest here arises not from difficulty in ascribing agency (it’s clear that the clematis is responsible), but, instead, from compelling diction, whether the verbalization of the noun “rigor” or the assonance of “Haws, hollies, colonizers” or “Daisy and hay-scented,” or the emphatic consonance of the repeated “r” throughout (rigors, alders, colonizers, fern, crimp-clover, moneywort, succory). Sure, we can see something growing like a weed and wreaking havoc, but we also see (and hear) how we’re seeing (and hearing) this organic amok-running. Get to the end of that stanza, then pause for a second and wonder: Why “bridal”?

The other notable feature I want to hover over is Wilson’s brilliance with line breaks, which she often uses to suspend the reader with one potential sense of a sentence only to revise or reverse that sense in subsequent lines. This is beautifully done in “Let Beauty Be,” whose title also functions as a first line. On its own, the phrase states an imperative; joined with what follows, the copula links to a compelling (re)definition, asking us to understand beauty as “painstakingly / across fallen rocks / wound aground on / the vigilant rocks.” The second meaning generated by this predicate is antithetical to the one on which the title on its own allowed us momentarily to land. But wait! There’s more! Set the title aside, as if it’s just a title, then read the opening lines like this:

painstakingly

across fallen rocks

wound aground on

the vigilant rocks

tenebrous outcrops

opening or clamped

rooty or bruised

the “gum periwinkle cucumber dulse”

One could read here a long setup that lands on the species finally named in quotation marks, as if an implied colon after “bruised” brought us to what it is that is draped and wound, that may be open or may be closed, may be root-like or may show signs of wear. I think there are right answers, but where we land is less important than that we are required to do the work of reckoning, scoping the strip before we let the wheels down.

One word you might have noticed does not frequently occur in these poems is the first-person singular pronoun. It’s not entirely absent from the book: an I “had to sense” aspects of the terrain in “Heath Obscure,” another has to “go out there to see” in “The Pink,” one even “must not like” a “rugged rose” in “Ragged Robin.” But they’re rare, and when they do appear, they set the scene and then recede. These poems’ speakers don’t get in the way. They don’t narrate their responses to what’s seen. Instead, the distinctiveness of the vision is audible in the distinctiveness of the voice. The idiosyncratic impressions of an individual consciousness are there in diction, imagery, and rhythm rather than in the explicit naming of them (“I thought,” “I felt,” “It was then that I remembered”). I love that about these poems.

I’m hesitant to play the game of precursors and predecessors. They’re not necessary, for Wilson’s work stands on its own and more. But, maybe because I’m getting ready to teach them again, Wilson’ s poems in Burnt Mountain seem related in at least attenuated ways to the poems in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All. I mean this as high praise indeed; some of those poems are bangers, and a couple are on heavy rotation in my head (and not only because, in the midst of a deep-freeze New England winter I am anxiously awaiting those first missable signs that enter the new world naked). In its painstaking charting of routes across rocks and up mountainsides, in its careful and precise evocation of the sights and sounds of hiked-through woods, and in its sheer pleasure in the resources of language as these interact with the perceived world, Emily Wilson’s poetry takes its own advice. Let beauty be.

I first started really thinking about the pernicious effects of technological promises to reduce friction, to smooth the way whether the way was buying shit or navigating unfamiliar places, about ten years ago. I was in London for research (on small poetry magazines, in the impressive collection of University College, London, an absolute treat), traveling and rooming with a friend who spent his days seeing sights while I was hunkered down in a little top-floor room of the Senate House Library with copies of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, and we realized that we had very different ways of wayfinding. Not only different ways, but also different attitudes towards those ways. (Speaking of ways and wayfinding: trust me, this is going to get to poetry, just by an indirect route. I am all about the indirect route.)

My buddy (let’s call him “Fred,” mostly because that’s his name) had a smartphone and knew how to get an international sim card for it, which already put him way ahead of me in tech terms because I was then still (happily) rocking a flip phone. And Fred was into using the aforementioned NASA-computer-in-his-pocket as an aid to navigating London. I was not. This was partly because I already knew London quite well. I’ve been a bunch of times, and I’ve learned my way around the areas of the city that I spend time in (mostly the areas around libraries where I’ve done research, but those areas also include a lot of other great places). From the very first time I went, in 1990—when the food was still mostly brown, my hanky sometimes black when I blew my nose, and my pocket very empty after I was mugged outside Victoria Station—I have found my way around the city the old-fashioned way. Which is to say: by getting lost. Knowing where I was and where I wanted to get to, I would consult paper maps (usually at least two, one focused on the surface streets, the other on the Tube). I might also consult a paper bus timetable or two, or I might check the timetable posted at a bus stop. I’d often write some things down on yet another piece of paper: Tube lines, bus numbers, times, turns at intersections. Then I’d set off and either get where I was going without incident or, sometimes, miss a stop or a turn, misjudge a distance, and get otherwise turned around, a little confused, or, once in a while, profoundly fucking lost.

And it was great. I logged some unnecessary miles on sore feet sometimes, but I learned a lot about the city, how it was laid out and layered, how one place connected to another by a variety of possible routes, and I internalized that knowledge. I’m not claiming I could be a London taxi driver, but if you dropped me in Shepherds Bush, I could get to Liverpool Street Station or Elephant and Castle pretty efficiently. Plus, and this is the best thing, I might know a cool pub or a great kebab shop or a tiny anarchist used-book store tucked away on some side street along the way because I’d stumbled on it by being on that side street by mistake on some previous journey.

So when we left our hotel late on a Saturday morning to head for Brentford for a soccer match (the Bees were then a lower-division team with affordable tickets and a pub at each corner around their stadium—we were so in), and Fred whipped out his phone, I resisted. I’d read the map. We could get a bus just a block from our hotel, change at Hammersmith, and step off a bus right by one of the four pubs (we planned to hit them all, two before and two after the match). There was one tricky bit, where we had to watch out for a dog-leg turn, but other than that . . . . But, Fred said, we could just tell the phone to tell us where to go and it would. We’d get to Brentford with minimal difficulty. Which is to say with minimal thought or necessary knowledge. Which is to say, without friction.

Fred won. The phone led us seamlessly. It even found a route that let us stay on one bus, no change, and got us within a block of a different pub by the stadium. Sigh. Fine. And I remember nothing of the route, not even how many stops we passed or which one we alighted at, because I didn’t have to count the stops or look for the stop. Because there was no friction.

There are all kinds of other activities that have become smoother, faster, easier with the help of specific technologies. I frighten my students sometimes with stories of how we used to have to go to the library and look up citations in big bound volumes of the MLA Index and then go find the articles in big bound volumes of journals, and then sit there and read the articles while taking notes in spiral notebooks or, maybe, if we had some dimes, photocopy the pages on one of the cranky library copiers and take them back to our dorm room to read and mark up with leaky yellow highlighters. The bad old days. But some of those searches led me to things I didn’t know to look for, including poets whose work I decided to check out and in whom I developed interests and on whom I eventually published. So there.

I hear the diction of friction and smoothness sometimes in discussions of poetry (here we are! and boy, I wasn’t kidding about indirect routes). When we’re discussing The Waste Land or Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” in class, my students wonder aloud why, if the meaning we just provisionally arrived at through some focused work on figurative language and allusion is right, the poet couldn’t just come out and say it. Why put us through all of that focused work on figurative language and allusion?! It’s so . . . inefficient. In published conversations among critics, the arguments might be dressed up like 19^th-century gentlemen, with, at this end of the table, Wordsworth advocating the speech of common people and, at the other, Blake throwing out apparently inscrutable proverbs of Hell. Fans of the plainspoken dismiss challenging poets as obscure or dismissably experimental (“Oh her? But she’s a language poet!”), though the best “straightforward” poems are not at all straightforward, loading their rifts with ore that simply seems easier to process, taking their wayward ways in syntax that resolves into grammatical sentences.

I have more than once referred in this humble newsletter to the great Russian Formalist, Viktor Schklovsky, and the idea of defamiliarization in literary language, and that is one convenient way to account for the waywardness and indirection of the poems I like best. But another way to think about this aspect of poetry is as a kind of grit in the otherwise smoothly running systems of commerce and consumption to which our lifeworlds are increasingly reduced. The good poem stops you so that you have to think. Where am I? What is the next turn? How many stops before I change? What have I learned by seeing what I have seen? Especially when the turn I took might have been a wrong one, one that I had to turn back from, work my way back through, try again.

One way I’ve been thinking about poetic language lately is as a forceful rebuke to crypto-felon and all-around jerk-ass Sam Bankman-Fried, whose crack about seeing a novel as a waste of time because it could have been a tweet plumbed new depths of dumbfuckery (Oh, how I hope someone is force-reading him Victorian multi-plot triple-deckers while he does his time in the pokey. Oh, how I wish he were stuck reading Dickens aloud to a mean man deep in the jungle a la the end of A Handful of Dust).

The part that can be reduced to a tweet is not the point. The work of getting there is the point, asshole.

But another, better, way I’ve been thinking about it over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been rereading a lot of Carl Phillips is captured in a few lines in a not immediately paraphrasaeble poem, “Deepest, Where the Water Looks More Green”:

What if difficulty turns out to have

all along been the point, and worth everything,

all the hurt it required of us?

Exactly.

I read with dismay Clay Shirky’s op-ed in the Sunday New York Times today, a piece about how students use so-called AI (neither artificial nor intelligent, but whatever) to smooth the awkward interpersonal interactions through which (through the awkwardness, the difficulty, the pain of which) we grow, learning better to be with each other in all of our awkwardness and difficulty. Do I think poetry is the solution, that reading poems is going to make young people better at social engagement? Hell no. But in the nothing that poetry makes happen, I do think there are opportunities for working grit around our innards (intellectual, affective) until we find we’re cradling a pearl.

“Stagger” appears in The Tether, which was published in 2001 and won the Kingsley Tuft Award. It’s a poem that shows some of the difficulties of writing about Phillips because it is hard to excerpt. The poem comprises three sentences, the first a long half-simile (vehicle but no explicit tenor) broken over 23 lines, the other two questions whose relationship to that opening sentence is left to the reader to determine. At the heart of the long sentence is a bruise, described and figured under the opening declaration of its absence. “As when the flesh is shown / to be remarkable / most, for once, because // markless,” the poem opens, but then goes quickly on to show the no-longer-visible bruise as a bell or a tipped wine-glass or spilled wine itself or a lake. We are, Phillips implicitly reminds us here, made, or at least known, by what marks us, or at least by the marks left on us. What, then do we make of, how can we read, the page of the skin when the bruise has “lifted,” when it resembles “clear / tundra neither foot nor // wing finds”? (By the way, both “foot” and “wing” here subtly direct us to poetry, so the skin we’re trying to read might itself figure the page we’re trying to read, and this is one of the things I love about Phillips.) When there was a bruise, some meaning could be made of it: a blow or accident—a “blunder,” as the poem has it—leaves its mark, spilling, like wine, some blood beneath the skin, spreading, lake-like, to organize the flesh around it in a legible geography. In the absence of this sign or trace, we are left to question, and left, in the questions, to the impressions of senses other than sight. Here are the two questions that conclude the poem:

When did the yard get

this swollen –

mint, apples,

like proof of all that

anyway went

on, in our distraction?

When did the room

itself start

stirring with – distant, but

decidedly – the scent of

pines wintering, further

still, a not-very-far

sea –

Bereft of the bruise, we have the haptic sense of swollenness, a lingering “proof” that at least lets us know that something happened during “our distraction.” We have the olfactory evidence of evergreens and ocean (their proximity here seeming to echo H.D.’s brilliant “Oread” – “Whirl up, sea -- / whirl your pointed pines”) to locate us when that lake viewed from a height has dried and faded to invisibility. The poem’s hinge is that “distraction,” the characteristic feature of whatever time has passed during which the mint and apples have swollen, the room become redolent of evergreens and sea. Things happen when we are not noticing, whether changes of atmosphere or fading of the evidence of accident or violence.

What is going on here? What is this poem about? Better to ask what it enacts or engages. Time and its passing. Changes that happen when we’re not noticing. During that long first sentence, with its syntactic suspensions and swerves, with its proliferation of self-canceling similes, with the way its line-breaks and caesuras open up spaces at once audible and visible, Phillips invites us to see what is no longer there. The two questions then confront us with what is in an interrogative form that simultaneously invites us to recall what we have somehow missed. All of this happens under a title that suggests the unsteady walking of someone under the influence, perhaps, or, perhaps stunned after what the poem calls “blunder,” the unforeseen that re-confronts us with the world as it is. The poem is unsteady on its feet (there they are again), stuttering and start-stopping (or stop-starting) its way down the page as if it, too, has drunk a little too much of that wine, or has been struck a blundering blow. The net effect is the paradigmatic defamiliarization of literary language, not, this time, making the Schklovskyan stone stony but, instead, making the lover’s unmarked skin, well, skinny.

This set of intertwining interests – the body figured in language, the body wounded by the world, the body beheld in moments of desire or crisis, the body of the poem inferring all of these in its staggering – is characteristic of Phillips’s work over the course of his career. As with any interesting poet, these preoccupations take forms that look quite different volume by volume. They vary, for example, by their expansion and complication, by the way certain aspects of the public and historical irrupt into or are more explicitly taken account of in poems still largely concerned with intimacy (I think of the title poem of Phillips’s Pulitzer-winning selected volume, Then the War: “Then the war. / Then the field, and the mounted police / parading their proud-looking horses across it. // Then the next morning’s fog, the groundsmen barely visible / inside it, shadow-like, shade-like, grooming the field back to immaculateness”). But they also, crucially, vary in their handling of language, of syntax and the sentence-line relationship. As that quotation suggests, the fragmented and self-interrupting sentences of the early books relax into a more continuous unfolding, a somewhat more orthodox patterning of subject and predicate and modifying phrases. The poems also, sometimes, become a little more open about the dialogues they establish with other poems, and it’s this feature that I want to conclude on. For now.

One of my favorite of Carl Phillips’s poems is, probably not coincidentally, reminiscent of one of my favorite Robert Duncan poems. (Gentle reader, is this invocation of Duncan simply a way for me to extend the temporal span I long-ago suggested I would stick to in these brief appreciations, a way to go back beyond the benighted nineties? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But also . . . .) “There’s a meadow I can’t stop going back to,” begins “Falling” (in Riding Westward [2006], whose title suggests yet another allusive engagement, but I don’t want to make this point overdone. Ahem). I cannot not hear an echo of Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” (1960). Here are the opening sentences of each poem:

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall (Duncan).

There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any

more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove – isn’t

that what it was once? A lot of resonance, trees asway

with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns

the grasses also traced, more subtly, below (Phillips).

Let me just acknowledge here, briefly, that what follows is gestural. Had we but world enough and time, this comparison could be developed in detail, and, hell, maybe I’ll write something sometime that undertakes that development. But for now, let’s just play with it a bit. For each poet, the space evoked is a space held in the mind, constituted by form and pattern, and so a figure for the space of the page or poem itself. For each, it is also a space of something like refuge and a space characterized by ritual, by play, by memory. Maybe (more suggestively for Phillips than for Duncan, by eros, too.) But it is also a space the habitation of which enables, somehow, an engagement with, as the last phrase of Duncan’s poem puts it, “what is.” For Duncan, the rejuvenating resource is dream, the magic that arises in and from the dance of the individual and collective unconsciousnesses. For Phillips, it is the “wrecked birds” appositively associated with “stunned psalms,” versions of Keats’s “viewless wings of Poesy,” which provoke the poet with the spreading, at once indifferent and interrogative, of their “gray wings.” That is to say, it is something like the lyric tradition itself, so often figured in birds of one feather or another, often wrecked but also always arising again, even if only to descend “downward to darkness on extended wings.” A little skeptical, sympathetic as I am, of Duncan’s magic (or “magick,” as he spelled it), I am often moved and emotionally persuaded by Phillips’s reckoning with the resources of lyric to craft moments of, to quote “Falling” again, “occasional tenderness.” His is a meadow to which I am glad often to be permitted to return.

I’ve been putting this off because I’m shopping around a longer essay on her work, but there’s plenty to say about Stonecipher and I’m pretty sure I can show a bit of what I like about her poems here without encroaching on the piece I’m trying publish. Like some other poets I’ll be getting around to (I’m looking at you, Carl Phillips), Stonecipher is someone I’ve written about before. Like the other poets I’ve written about so far in this blog and plan to write about in later posts, she’s someone to whose work I often return. I’ve read and reread all of her books, less often the first two (The Reservoir [2002] and Souvenir de Constantinople [2007]), though both have interesting moments. I think Transaction Histories (2018) might be her best collection (and not just because I’m quoted on the back cover), though a lot of critics seem to like her most recent book, The Ruins of Nostalgia (2023) better. That one was chosen by NPR for its “Books We Love”/ best books feature in 2023 (though I remember that Transaction Histories showed up on the New York Times list of ten best poetry books in 2018, so maybe they’re even). The neighborhood of Stonecipher’s work that I most frequently frequent, though, is her 2015 book, Model City.

A lede I have so far managed to bury is that Stonecipher works almost exclusively (especially after her first book) in the prose poem (or, as she seems to prefer, the poem in prose), a form that such august authority as T.S. Eliot famously tells us does not exist. This formal continuity across her career is complicated by the variation that she effects in the prose poem volume by volume, sequence by sequence. Contra Eliot, the prose poem exists in the productive tension between the imperatives of prose and the often-contradictory requirements of the lyric. One way that Stonecipher varies the prose poem is to tinker with that tension or balance. In the “Inlay” prose poems of The Cosmopolitan, for example, she allows the numbered paragraphs within a given poem to incline toward the suggestion of narrative, usually several intertwined narrative strands, but meets the lyric’s expectation of troping and juxtaposition by dropping into the midst of those paragraphs a quotation from the work of another writer. In “Inlay (Franz Kafka),” an unnamed “she” (Stonecipher seems to share my allergy to the first-person singular pronoun in poems) wonders whether “when one speaks a foreign language, one becomes, briefly, an exemplar of that foreign tongue.” The next numbered section begins, “The silent majority stared hard at the vocal minority.” Between these, the unnumbered quotation from Kafka reads: “’What you say sounds reasonable enough,’ said the man, ‘but I refuse to be bribed. I am here to whip people and whip people I shall.’” So, these threads of story unwind, but they are interestingly snagged by the pinned-on quotation. She strikes the balance differently in The Ruins of Nostalgia, bringing verbal and aural repetition to bear on the poems’ essayistic structures to bend the prose toward the poetic. “The Ruins of Nostalgia 6,” for example, repeats (almost obsessively) the word “disoriented” (it begins with the sentence, “She drove downtown and got disoriented”) and the images of forests and towers (and these in combination, such as “forest of towering new towers”), and she plays with the effects of sound repetition in such phrases as “blue bascule bridge” or “neighboring neighborhood” or “muse upon the mutability of moving water” or “permanent picture of the picturesque.” Stonecipher also riffs metonymically, the forest broken down into such representative constituents or adjacencies as “poplars” and “wooden,” building a set of continuities across the surface of this poem about the discontinuity of one’s experience of a city that is constantly being rebuilt. At moments, she pushes language to enact the disorientation the poem thematizes by effecting within it transformations that mimic the urban transformation she describes. Nouns (tower, bridge) shift to their adjectival form (towering, bridging); “picture” serves as both and then also contributes to “picturesque,” while the usual nominal “wrecking ball” appears only as a verb (“wrecking-balled”). Thanks to these practices typically understood as “lyrical” or “poetic,” words change like landscapes, cityscapes, and attitudes toward land, cities, and views of them, and a paragraph of prose that might otherwise read as an essay on urban transformation and its disorienting effects becomes the richer, more evocative, more lyrically enacted experience of disorientation in the meditation on urban transformation.

One of the key means by which Stonecipher tinkers with the constitutive tensions of the prose poem is the imposition of constraints. By this I don’t mean the topical or thematic focus that can unify all kinds of collections. Instead, I mean the formally generative rules that Stonecipher invents and imposes on herself, whether the incorporation of those quotations in The Cosmopolitan or the mid-sentence caesura that she likens to the semi-intentional flaw known as abrash in “Persian Carpets.” In Model City, the constraint is especially explicit and insistent. The book as a whole is framed by a question: “What was it like?” Every sentence in the 72 prose poems that follow answers this question. Each of the poems comprises four sections, separated by white space and asterisks, with each section consisting of a single sentence. Each of those sentences, returning to the framing question, begins with the phrase “It was like.” As Kelvin Corcoran writes in his blurb, the book “answers its own inaugural question . . . in 288 different ways.” A consequence of this particular constraint is that the simile, a trope strongly identified with poetry, governs the prose paragraphs to provide this volume’s balance. Another is that the gaps between perception and representation are also foregrounded. There is all the difference in the world, that is, between “What is it?” and a bunch of answers that begin “It was” and “What was it like?” and a bunch of answers that begin “It was like.”

With its focus on the city and our representations and idealizations of the city, Model City applies the Kantian recognition that we never get hold of the Ding an sich to the streets and public spaces constructed by, through, and for corporate capital, beautifully (if sometimes vertiginously) estranging us from the selves that move through and are constructed in, through, and by the experience of those spaces. Check out the first poem in the sequence:

It was like slowly becoming aware one winter that there are new buildings going up all over your city, and then realizing that every single one of them is a hotel.

*

It was like thinking about all those empty rooms at night, all those empty rooms being built to hold an absence, as you lie in your bed at night, unable to sleep.

*

It was like the feeling of falling through the ‘o’ in ‘hotel’ as you almost fall asleep in your own bed, the bed that you own, caught at the last minute by ownership, the ownership of your wide-awake self.

*

It was like giving in to your ownership of yourself and going to the window, looking out at all the softly illuminated versions of the word ‘hotel’ announcing their shifting absences all over the city.

Notice how Stonecipher begins with presence (new building) but then finds in that presence an insistent absence (the empty rooms of hotels). The presence of absence provokes a threat to the self, almost lost in a fall into emptiness. Possession enables self-possession, but that ownership is then characterized in terms of submission. Presence and absence, possession and dispossession rise to visibility as salient oppositions, though even as they do so the opposition is complicated by the poem’s diction. The poles of the opposition are collapsed into each other when the “o” in the word “hotel” becomes a visible hole through which the speaker imagines falling, becoming a key figure for absence and emptiness (a fairly familiar effect), but at the same time it is aurally related to the “o” sound in the sentences repeated “own” and “ownership,” words related to possession. There are 71 more poems like this, taking us through neighborhoods in Berlin, through model cities built and only imagined, through the Alhambra and images of the Alhambra, alone and in the company of lovers, none of whom seems to stick around for long. It is a tour as tour-de-force of both the late capitalist city and the work of Donna Stonecipher. Totally worth the trip.

Let’s start by making our way up “Monadnock.” Mount Monadnock, in southern New Hampshire, has gotten poetic treatment before. Readers might be most familiar with the title poem of Galway Kinnell’s 1964 book, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock. This “Monadnock” could hardly be more different from that one. For Kinnell, the mountain is an occasion for self-consideration. The poem begins “I can support it no longer,” and barely notes an aspect of the mountain itself before slipping back to the speaker’s narrating consciousness. Any flowers seen fade before the memory of flowers “that cannot be touched.” Even the speaker’s sweat as he climbs takes him from moment on the mountain as he thinks he is at the sea and then remembers “[o]ne summer off Cap Ferrat.” In contrast, Wilson never refers to herself in her poem (which appears in Micrographia). Check out these opening two sentences:

Sometimes the whole thing stands

still, residual

ribbed as the stratum is

of the branchwork.

You are given the gruff versus

the seams and you must drop back

to recapture its stranded

cloudcap.

Notice how we are carefully and precisely positioned to see the mountain, and how our attention is drawn not to the speaker but to what (and how) we should see. Wilson deploys language to capture a moment, this moment, rather than to read through this moment to some other. She chooses words to enable us to notice not her but what she notices, which is not to say that she’s not in there in the distinctiveness of her diction. “You are given the gruff” is peculiar, catching, one of those little snags in the fabric that gives it a texture all its own. And as much as the poem is about seeing and the seen, Wilson’s diction subtly plays with sound to enrich the sensory experience:

It seems to be listing,

burled in the surface.

The purple adheres to the back

pivots, shunts over

the scotched hump.

We think often of the obvious sorts of sonic repetition – end-rhyme or alliteration, for example – but Keats, in a letter, describes the importance of the river of sound that runs down the middle of the poem. Wilson channels just such rivers. Notice here how the horizontal (intralinear) repetition of sound in “burled” and “surface” become vertical in the next line’s “purple,” whose consonants are then picked up in “pivots,” or how the “ur” slides into the short “u” of “shunts,” which closes the passage with that emphatic “hump,” or how sibilance meanders shimmeringly throughout. All of this works to ground us in the perceived phenomenon of looking at the mountain from a distance, but I don’t want to suggest that Wilson does not draw lessons from the sight. “So,” she goes on to conclude, “the eye has no end / going on outside its compulsion.” In what might work as a paraphrase of Emerson in “The Poet,” she finds in the mountain a “rudiment-hoard,” a treasured collection of fundamentals that is also, in a secondary definition, a gathering of embryonic possibility.

I’m realizing that I might have given you a misleading example. As the book’s title suggests, the poems of Micrographia enact the scrupulously analytical vision that Robert Hooke modeled in his book of the same name (1665). While “Monadnock” views the mountain from a distance, many of the poems in Wilson’s book follow Hooke in looking at things up close, so closely that you can see how they are made of other things. In The Great Medieval Yellows, Wilson brings the same kind of attention not only to the objects of sight but also to the media through which we recall those objects in art. “Siphonophore” is typical with its combination of precise description (“The chance tentacular array”) and figuration (“sort of a rote / openwork, blue-penciled / puce, urn / from the side”), though the poem also stands out for the way its sinuous single sentence mimics the complexity of its titular organism. Looked at closely enough, this creature, which seems so carefully designed, ultimately strains “the illusion of ‘rightness’ of ‘oneness.’” Wilson’s super-close examinations and her rendering of these in super-attentive and reflexive language alerts us to an unexpected intersection, the familiar country roads of Frost meeting the wobbly referentiality of Rae Armantrout. Check this out, the last few lines of “Siphonophore”:

the stringent

element conceivably

rending, remembering

what you wanted it

to feel like

just look at you

button yourself back

the membranes held

down, in the dark

variorum.

That third line – “rending, remembering” – might be an ars poetica. It might be a definition of poetry. It might be Frost-meets-Armantrout (or vice versa). This is a crossroads that I’d like to hang out at more often.

Finally, one last thing I admire about Emily Wilson’s poetic oeuvre is its size. Many poets, including some whose work I like, publish a lot, with books coming out every couple of years. Wilson’s are far less frequent, and they’re short. Her publishing career reminds me of poets like Elizabeth Bishop or Philip Larkin, poets who limited themselves to a small number of near-perfect volumes, carefully keeping only those poems which, after careful revision, really merited curation. In saying this, I don’t want to be mistaken as implying that I don’t want more Emily Wilson poems. I do. But I know that when they finally show up in book form, distilled and perfected and arranged with care, they will be worth the wait.

But wait!

Breaking news (for me, at least). There IS more. Editing this post, I discovered that her new book, Burnt Mountain, came out this fall from University of Iowa Press. So: early Christmas present to myself, I just ordered a copy and might have a bit more to say about this fine poet early in the new year. But why should I be the only one to enjoy such a gift. Go get your copy!

Like many American readers, I first came across Alice Oswald when Memorial, her 2011 distillation of the Iliad, was published. That spectacular book does away with 7/8 of the poem, reducing it to elegiac passages recounting the deaths of warriors juxtaposed with extended similes whose imagery is drawn from the natural world. It is bold and brave, and the best rejoinder I have ever read to Simone Weil’s famous and persuasive reading of the Iliad as a “poem of force.” Oswald demonstrates instead that, for all of the loss of life Homer recounts, the ancient epic is also a poem of abundance. Or, better, the loss of life is not opposed to but is merely part of the abundance:

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves

The wind blows their ghosts to the ground

And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods

Thousands of names thousands of leaves

When you remember them remember this

Dead bodies are their lineage

Which matter no more than the leaves

Part of the brilliance of what Oswald does with this simile arises from the way she positions it to follow the long elegy for the Trojan hero, Hector, who “died like everyone else.” But more of it is due to Oswald’s “irreverent” translation of the simile itself. Aiming, as she puts it, “for translucence rather than translation,” here she deploys repetition—of words, of sounds—to enact the abundance the passage describes. Showing up four times in the first four lines, “leaves” (or its singular form) pile up. Each instance also offers a slightly different significance for the word; this is especially effective when “leaf” takes the place of the expected “life” that spring “breathes . . . into the woods,” but it also importantly draws out the resonance of “leaves” and pages in the way “leaves” appear in modifying “history” and matching up with “names.” The “l” of “leaves” gives them a ghostly presence even in lines where they do not appear (“lineage”). Recalling the name after name after name of dead warriors in the preceding pages (leaves), the (fallen) leaves here offer a fundamental measure of value. Both bodies and leaves are innumerable, and neither metonymy for nature is more important than the other. This vision is austerely ecological, displacing the human from its typical centrality. What matters is abundance, even when it is abundance of absence. Oswald’s language at once names and performs this plenitude.

But I said I wasn’t going to focus on a single book or poem in this post, so I want to turn to the Oswald books that I read after Memorial, though some of them came out before it. Memorial aside, I’d be tempted to say that what flows most powerfully and audibly through Oswald’s work is water. It rises like a tide in her first book, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Wall (1996), especially in that volume’s several poems titled “Sea Sonnet.” Here’s my favorite of those:

The sea is made of ponds—a cairn of rain.

It has an island flirting up and down

like a blue hat. A boat goes in between.

Is made of rills and springs—each waternode

a tiny subjectivity, the tide

coordinates their ends, the sea is made.

The sea crosses the sea, the sea has hooves;

the powers of rivers and the weir’s curves

are moving in the wind-bent acts of waves.

And then the softer waters of the wells

and soakaways—hypostases of holes,

which swallow up and sink for seven miles;

and then the boat arriving on the island

and nothing but the sea-like sea beyond.

Seven “sea”s in fourteen lines, though not evenly distributed; one line alone holds three of them. But the seas are inextricable from the other “waternodes” named in the poem, each animated by its own “subjectivity.” Water. Water everywhere. It is so omnipresent that it can only be figured in terms of itself, a truth the rhyme scheme subtly underscores as each stanza offers a single sound for its end words. The inescapable sea is not only seen but also heard.

Listening out for the “tiny subjectivity” of waterways brought Oswald to our senses in Dart (2002), a book that audaciously links the voices of various speakers in and on and near the titular river to produce a “sound-map,” a “songline from the source to the sea.” A walker, a tourist hotel chambermaid, a naturalist, an eel watcher, a tin extractor, a wool mill operator, a sewage treatment plant worker all make unsurprising appearances (or whatever the aural analogue of appearances is; a writer as brave with neologism as Oswald might say “ahearances”), but Oswald also channels the voices of dead tinners and a drowned canoeist and even the river itself as it seduces the canoeist:

come falleth in my push-you where it hurts

and let me rough you under, be a laugh

and breathe me please in whole inhale

come warmeth, I can outcanoevre you

into the smallest small where it moils up

and masses under the sloosh gates, put your head,

it looks a good one, full of kiss

and known to those you love, come roll it on my stones,

come tongue-in-skull, come drinketh, come sleepeth

As this passage makes clear, the “songline” Oswald traces is not only liquid but it’s also linguistic. Like fast currents tumbling over water slowed by stones, Oswald’s English eddies on its way from archaic to contemporary, little irruptions like “outcanoevre” and “sloosh gate,” little solecisms like “rough you under” and “full of kiss” function like rocks, diverting and distorting the syntactic and semantic streams.

Dart deserves a whole post of its own (hell, each of Oswald’s books does), but remember, I’m trying something different here, so we beat on, boats carried by currents, borne on ceaselessly through this poet’s career, docking all too briefly next at A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009), where Oswald again does the estuary in different voices. This volume is constructed more dramatically that Dart, though Oswald is at pains to tell readers that it “is not a play.” Rather than a source-to-sea map, Oswald offers a series of scenes in which the moon’s phases set the stage for such speakers as a birdwatcher, a vicar, a fisherman, along with the two key sleepwalkers: the moon and the poet (who appears as the “dream secretary”). Like the “Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moonlight in a Net” in Oswald’s first book, the poems in Sleepwalk aim to capture the moon, and like the poems in that book but also in Dart, they often do so by warping language so that its weft snags the attention: “almost frost but softer almost ash but wholer,” where that last neologism embeds an absence. Having announced up front what the book is not, Oswald goes on to use negating prefixes as a medium with which to fix evanescent reflections: the moon bears an “unsolid unstillness” in “this beautiful / Uncountry of an estuary.”

And on again to Falling Awake (2016), whose centerpiece is a breathtaking real-time account of the dawn in the voice of Tithonus, a reminder that mythology is never far away in many of Oswald’s poems, that it is a readily available mesh that sifts and separates our experience of phenomena. In this book, the role of water in the mythic history of poetry appears as the severed head of Orpheus floats down river: “my voice being water / which holds me together and also carries me away / until the facts forget themselves gradually like a contrail.” The standout water poem here for me, though, is “A Drink from Cranmere Pool,” which could almost serve as an ars poetica for this aquatic poet:

I followed the advice of water

knelt and put my mouth

to a socket in the grass

as if an outlet of my own

unveiled stoneliness

and sleepless flight

“Unveiled stoneliness.” The Shklovsky readers among you will remember that Russian Formalist’s claim that what poetic language does is “make the stone stony.” Flowing through their watery courses, puddling in their waternodes, sucked straight from the source and lit on alterating (not a typo) current, Oswald’s poems unveil (reveal) the essential stoniness of stone by estranging the rock we step on or step over and coining its loneliness.

Finally, for now, Oswald’s 2019 volume, Nobody, rides a wave back to the Homeric territory of Memorial. Now, rather than the Iliad it is the Odyssey that the poem plays on, through, and around. The volume explores what Oswald calls the “murkiness” between Odysseus’s ten-year wandering and the plight of a poet tasked by Agamemnon with spying on Clytemnestra but marooned by Aegisthus on a stony island. The poem finds its way to a number of mythological figures. In a section on Procne and Philomela, Oswald returns to the extended simile of Memorial: “As when the moon shines through tent walls . . . / so those two sisters . . . fly / into the blue of amnesia.” She engages the trope of the underworld descent inaugurated in Book XI of the Odyssey, she drops in on Philoctetes on his island, but what flows throughout is “the sea / still with its back to me / in its flesh of a thousand faces all facing away.” To the voices rising from the river of Ocean, to the voices of all the waters, here as elsewhere, Oswald bids us: “listen.”

I mentioned in my first essay on Burnside that he arrived pretty much fully formed with his first book, The Hoop (1988), which won a Scottish Arts Council award. Burnside had the kind of donnée, the burden of experience to transform under aesthetic pressure, that made for compelling poems but that no one would envy as an early life. As his memoir, A Lie about My Father (2006), makes dramatically clear, Burnside’s family life and childhood were shadowed by an alcoholic and abusive father as well as poverty and the oppressive panopticon of small-town Scottish life. He grew up in a Catholic family amid the largely Presbyterian communities in and around Fife and carried both the uncomfortable weight that all of those brought up in the church bear and also the sense of minority. Burnside was also always aware of a brother who died before he really had a life, a ghostly presence that he felt with a painful blend of guilt, sorrow, and something like relief. He endured his own experiences of addiction and mental illness (the blurriness of those boundaries between the patients and the community in “The Asylum Dance” was a familiar phenomenon for him). All of this informs his poems, many of which are explicit attempts to work on, work through, and work his way out of these thematic preoccupations.

That makes Burnside sound like a lot of poets, but what I want to get at here is how Burnside does not sound like a lot of poets. Ruin, Blossom illustrates this as well as any of his books. The volume is prefaced by an epigraph that is echoed in the title, a quotation from Schiller given in the original German: neues Leben blüht aus den Ruinen (“new life blossoms from the ruins”). It is divided into three titled parts: “Apostasy,” “Asylum,” and “Blossom”). The acknowledgments inform readers that the first of these sections originally appeared as a pamphlet published by the Dare-Gale Press in 2022. This section, comprising 15 poems, will be my Exhibit A today. As its title promises, the sequence is about faith and its absence, God and their absence, absence and the lingering presences of ritual and the accoutrements of worship. Almost every poem notes or names something (or someone) that is not there: “No angel at the gate. / No guiding star”; “Convinced of nothing, / least of all the saints”; “nothing came to pass”; “we wait, in vain”; “Another skin has come / to nothing”; “heaven was void / and the angels were always too bright / to be observed”; “nothing to reveal.” All that is not there might be summed up in these lines from “Sweet Jam and Spikenard”:

That Covenant

is lost, Gethsemane

gone down to dust

and buried in the stone,

and nothing in this house

that I can use.

But these acknowledgments of the imperceptible tend to enable, or at least to accompany, moments of precise description of what is: birds, plants, sights and scents often offered in a diction whose formality and unfamiliarity imbue them with the numinous. What is there at midnight Mass (and in “Midnight Mass”)? The cold as “a rumour on the skin / of some old // fiefdom,” “the scent // of spruce and tallow, menthol, L’air du temps,” and the recipient of the speaker’s last prayer: “a plaster // Virgin, paintwork / flaking on an upraised // finger, seams / of gypsum // in the creases / of her veil.” It is as if our reckoning with, our seeing through the lens of, what Wallace Stevens taught us to recognize as both “nothing that is not there” and “the nothing that is” brings into sharper focus the something that we can fully recognize only once the illusions have been given up: “the blue // of daybreak, first sun, / magpies in the snow.”

Let me try to get at the distinctiveness of Burnside in another way. I used to think, and often say, that what I really dislike in a lot of recent poetry is the first-person singular pronoun. Why, I’d ask when exasperated by the intrusion of the “I” into the eye, can’t this poet just give us the vision and keep the commentary to themselves? There is a whole other essay to be written on the various manifestations of the “I” in lyric poetry, the gradations of fictiveness, the difference between the simple reporting first person and the one that reports on its reporting in a way that readers of my generation recognize (not positively) as the Wonder Years voiceover, and there is yet another essay about how, somehow, even that egregious ploy can work in the right hands (think of Louis MacNeice’s “Snow” – “I peel and portion a tangerine and spit the pips and feel the drunkenness of things being various”). All in time, Gentle Reader. For now, though, I want to think through the way Burnside’s “I” functions in these poems (and in his work more generally). For one thing, it is used sparingly and discriminately. In some of these poems (“Nativity,” “Auto-da-fé”), it does not appear at all. In others, Burnside invokes it only to efface it. This is especially powerful in a series of moments in the middle of the sequence; “The Heresy of the Free Spirit” casts it in the subjunctive (“had I been born with nothing to repent”), “Concerning Guile” suggests that the self’s skin “be flayed,” and the flaying image in the next poem’s figuring of the “I” as a “skinned child. In “Ash Wednesday,” the “I” only appears so that its disappearance can be dramatized, the mind “a flashlight ghosting walls,” the body “cleansed and whittled.” Everywhere, Burnside strikes a balance in which the observed details of the seen world far outweigh the light presence of the speaker’s self. Importantly, that speaker’s self is present as memory rather than commentator: “I played,” “I kept faith,” “I have been // indelicate.” It’s all too easy to imagine (because one sees it done so often) how these poems could be marred by a different kind of presence of the “I”: “It was as we walked home after Mass that I realized . . .” or “I see how the streets are paved with blossom and regret that we mistake so readily for home . . .”. Ugh. All of which is to say that one signal strength of Burnside is that he knows how to stay out of his own way. Rather than a self-appointed (or self-congratulatory) keen observer and interpreter, the “I” that appears in these poems is just another bit of data from the perceived world. And Burnside makes his most effective use of the pronoun when he withholds it, springing it only at the moment when it’s both necessary and compelling. In “A Footnote to Colossians,” for example, though the poem begins with the first-person plural (“Let us remember / the stillborn” – an instance, by the way, of Burnside’s invocation of the dead brother), the singular is reserved for the end:

like phantoms,

or that

boy I sometimes saw

in polaroids,

the one they said

was me.

By the end of his life, Burnside had published over a dozen volumes of poetry as well as novels, story collections, and memoirs. A final collection appeared shortly after his death. This abundance poses a challenge. How do you address it in the self-imposed fairly short length of an entry in this series? The short answer there is that you don’t, and I will say right now that there will be at least a couple of Burnside essays here. In which case, the question becomes: where do you begin? At the beginning, with his first collection (The Hoop, 1988)? It’s tempting; having come to poetry publishing later than many poets, Burnside arrived more fully formed than most, and both his persistent preoccupations and formal facility are on display in the book. Or at the end, with that final, posthumously published, book? You know what? I’m not ready for that one yet. Maybe in the next essay, or the one after that. Instead of either end of his career, then, I’ll start around the middle (well, early-middle). And if you haven’t yet read Burnside (oh, how I envy you this discovery), I’ll recommend that you start there, too. Specifically, with his 2000 collection, The Asylum Dance, and even more specifically with that book’s title poem.

The Asylum Dance is dedicated to Burnside’s fellow Scottish poet, Robin Robertson (you can expect a Robertson post in this space sometime). One of the things I find so impressive about Burnside is the way he is at once very much a Scottish poet and a cosmopolitan poet, interested and engaged with the literary and cultural in a variety of settings, moments, and languages. This book is punctuated with long poems focused on different kinds of spaces: “Ports,” “Settlements,” “Fields,” and “Roads.” Like most of Burnside’s poems, the book thus has a lightly offered, loosely built structure, one easy to miss amid what can seem casual considerations, one whose mild constraints afford subtle tension and release. “The Asylum Dance” appears in the “Settlements” part of the book, and I can’t quite get to it without a slight detour through “Settlements” itself because some late lines in that poem seem as good a guide as any to how Burnside’s work works:

it’s bright as the notion of home:

not something held

or given

but the painful gravity

that comes of being settled on the earth

redeemable inventive inexact

and capable of holding what we love

in common

Home not as space but as notion, an imperial affliction sent us not of the air but of the earth, whose gravity, while painful, is enabling, is an embrace. Embracing the ephemeral, the speaker of “The Asylum Dance” recalls the annual dance held at the local mental institution, an event that brought together the patients and the citizens of the community. The dance, he reflects, was “a ritual / of touch and distance, webs of courtesy / and guesswork.” Burnside establishes an opposition between the patients (insubstantial, “subtle as ghosts”) and the community members (“too solid, perhaps, too easy with ourselves”). The repeated word, “shade,” at once suggests the asylum as underworld and its inmates as the souls of the dead.

The value of an opposition in a poem is the way it is resolved or, as in the case of this poem, dissolved. At the heart of this poem, both the opposition and the “we” that is the speaker’s community are subtly, brilliantly, undone:

We loved them for the way they witnessed us,

standing in twos and threes in the waning light,

made other by the rhythm of the dance,

the pull of a larger world, and that taste on the air

of birch-woods and streams: that knowledge of ourselves

as bodies, clothed in brightness, moving apart

and coming together, cooling

slowly, as the lawns and rose-beds cooled,

heat seeping out from the skin and bleeding away,

the goldenrod turning to smoke

at the fence line.

Notice the first phrase’s re-establishment of the us/them, and then the difficulty you have mapping details onto either side of that slash. The movements of the dance – apart, together – are the movements of the bodies but also, perhaps, the movements of attributes to and from bodies. All of this takes place at a liminal moment, dusk replacing day and distinctions disappearing in the “waning light,” and in the evening the heat leaves bodies as if they are corpses, something like spirit rising from them like the sublimation of goldenrod to smoke at the purported boundary.

I mentioned Burnside’s deployment of loose-limbed structure, whether of the book or of a poem. In this poem, it inheres in references to time. “At one time,” the poem begins, “I looked forward to the dance.” That specific generality is sharpened in the next sentence: “At noon I would go upstairs / to wash and change.” This trip to the asylum was a regular occurrence, “something we did, every year.” It is itself temporally subdivided: “All afternoon we picnicked on the lawn,” the dancing beginning only “as daylight turned to dusk.” This architecture of time enacts the “ritual” character Burnside ascribes to the dance. The essence of ritual is the way any individual iteration is also and at the same time the always: do this in remembrance. Burnside’s ritual framing zeroes us in from the repeated and insistently plural – us, them – to the unique and inescapably singular: “and once, / a love affair, of sorts: an awkward boy / finding a girl, and leading her, mock-unwilling / into the lighted circle of the dance.” In the movements of this dance, here, now, (there, then), the speaker himself experiences the fragility of what appears to divide him (sane outsider) from her (patient). The very ground on which they dance becomes “thin as paper.”

The speaker is altered by this one experience. Having loved (sort of) and lost (the nurses turn him away when he returns to try to visit the young woman), he understands himself as the insubstantial one. While her body is present in his mind (“I dream her skin”), his body seems to disappear as he returns annually as an adult to the dance. His contributions are less substantial as he now brings store-bought pickles and “cling-wrapped bread” instead of the cherries or plums, the homemade cupcakes and lemonade, the “mousse and vol-au-vents.” He, too, is something like a shade now, standing alone, aside from the action, seeing “it all from somewhere far above.” Just as paper, perhaps the page on which he writes, figures the thinness of the floorboards during his youthful brief encounter, photographs now figure the whole scene, including the one who sees it: “it makes me think of pictures I have seen of dancers.” We conclude on apparitions, or, better, what “might be apparitions,” the auxiliary verb rendering them even more insubstantial, with “watchers,” too, reduced to “suggestion.” In the space of a photograph, or of a poem, of this poem, the boundaries fade and the opposition’s poles collapse into each other. We are they, and they are we, “all one flesh, in a single dream,” the nouns here enacting the synthesis prefigured in the speaker’s dreaming of the woman’s skin. Nobody here but us ghosts.

I offer this poem as a starting point with Burnside because it shows much of what I admire in his work. There are the subtle structuring features I have mentioned – the opposition and resolution, the time-stamping and shifting. There is the wealth of sensory detail that makes the scene one that we can easily imagine, and there is the deft deployment of that detail to adumbrate the effects of structure. Here, as often, Burnside burrows into remembered individual experience, but he (characteristically) invests that experience with much more generally applicable implication. The poem is not about Burnside’s attendance at asylum dances. Instead, it uses those remembered, or invented, or inventively remembered moments to explore and suggest something about how we understand ourselves through our ways of relating to others, how those ways of relating are artificial, how our very states of matter change in the media of memory and representation.

I register the deaths of poets the way much of the culture registers those of pop stars. I mean, I am affected by those, too, but when I saw the news of Burnside’s death, I lost my breath for a minute. It wasn’t just that he was too young (only 69). His poems have meant so much to me that I was a little shattered to know that this voice had been stilled, that there would be (almost) no new Burnside poems still to read. When I was picking up a copy of a volume that I didn’t yet own on a recent trip to a favorite London bookshop, the young man who rang up my purchase looked at the book and exclaimed, “Ah, Burnside. I love Burnside.” We commiserated as I paid, and I felt a little better that at least two of us in the poetry nook just feet from the Tottenham Court Road had experienced a moment of contact in the spirit of Burnside. All one flesh in a single dream.

I was reminded of this book when I mentioned in the introduction to this newsletter that the poems of William Bronk had helped me through the first pandemic winter. The book that helped me heal during the first pandemic summer was Karen Solie’s The Caiplie Caves (2019). I will almost certainly write more about Solie’s work, most of which predates this volume, so let’s just be clear from the start that chronology is not something that we’ll worry about. I had read some of that other work before 2020 and I had liked a lot of what I’d read, but that’s all for another essay/post/letter.

Part of what made reading The Caiplie Caves so powerful that summer was the way its organizing conceit resonated with the situation in which I read it. The titular site is on the east coast of Scotland, near the village of Kilrenny. It is associated with Ethernan (who gives the village and its church his name), a Christian hermit of the seventh century who is said to have lived in the caves, enduring damp and cold, living on bread and water but otherwise, as Solie writes in her introduction, offering a “poverty of supernatural accomplishments.” The volume’s poems explore both the caves and their environs in the present and the imagined life of Ethernan, linking them in part through the concept of “white martyrdom.” As opposed to red martyrdom (“violent death resulting from religious persecution”) and the blue or green martyrdom of “self-denial and labour,” white martyrdom comprises ascetic withdrawal from the world. The contemporary speaker of some of the book’s poems is engaging in a withdrawal of sorts, its challenges and value amplified by its echoes of Ethernan’s sojourn in and around the caves (which other poems narrate and interpret). You can see how this might have felt apt to someone isolated in a small house in a coastal village after having been isolated in a larger house in a college town. At any rate, I certainly felt the aptness.

I felt, too, the power of attention carefully performed and limned. Whether ventriloquizing Ethernan or in propria persona, Solie is a crafter of lines whose sinuous music complements and complicates their sense. In “Crail Autumn,” Solie writes of a sojourn in “a stone village on a stone coast,” of solitude that “felt necessary, / though hardly a necessity, and so settled / the soot of the subjective over / everything.” Linger over those lines for a minute and notice their music, the assonance of “felt” and the repeated “necessary” continued through “subjective” and “everything,” the insistently sibilant alliteration throughout. Under this light linguistic pressure, the shore breaks “like the day, into simple shapes, / which are the most difficult / to explain.” The book shifts back and forth from poems set in the present, as the poet/speaker moves around and hunkers down near the caves, and a series of right-justified poems in the voice of the eremitic mystic. Ethernan’s sections focus on the challenges and rewards of privation. Here’s Ethernan meditating on “authentic sacrifice”:

I offer cold, the season working as it should

loneliness, love working as it should

pain, the body working as it should

and failure

And here, as the May Island haar (the fog typical of this coast) rests on his brow:

visual losses propagate in supersaturated air

what I can’t see, I can’t see myself in

I don’t mind it

some losses bring peace

But counterpointing the mystic’s askesis (giving things up) is the poet’s attention, which at once notices and generates sensory abundance. Solie augments that abundance with a richer array of aural effects. Watch and listen to sense dance with sound at and over the precipices of perfectly wrought line breaks in this amazing (in the literal, etymological, sense deriving from “maze”) sentence:

The scenery interprets us

and we are also the hyper-vigilant scenery

sanguine in our right to own the frontiers

in our photographs, drop

some payload, linger at neighbours’ windows

with trauma sensors all lit up,

to rat each other out

with the assistance of an airborne scrap

of the 21^st-century unconscious

beside which the old machines of delivery appear

inefficient, comical, overlarge, like a Quaalude,

quaint as any former bond between

the watcher and the watched.

The contemporary speaker, with druggy similes and contemporary references (to cars and mines, space heaters and appliances, Silk Cuts and sleeping bags) is also armed with a wide range of allusions, many of which weave a loose seine or skein in which other ascetics and white martyrs are caught up. Her struggles with damp and loneliness connect to those of Ethernan partly through common habitation of this site, whose histories natural and otherwise inform a number of poems, and also through contemporary mystics whether in Scotland or Slab City, California. The collection’s broad temporal and spatial sweeps sweep into the same pile the Desert Fathers and the Big Book of Bill W., but always with an eye on what is seen when the objects of attention are somehow limited or circumscribed, on what we get by giving up.

In dividing this volume’s poems between the Ethernan ones and those voiced by a contemporary speaker, I have not done justice to the variety Solie achieves within each of these poles. While there is an overarching consistency to the mystic’s voice, Solie speaks the new in different voices, from arch ironizing of advertising discourse to the Latin nomenclature of the natural scientist. The book includes a handful of songs (titled “Song”), and an unannounced sonnet of sorts (“A Lesson”), impressive for the way it stretches that form’s conventions while maintaining a tenuous connection to its strictures. And, finally, among my favorites here is a subtle version or revision of the bog-standard analogical landscape poem (the “speaker goes for a walk” poem) that’s reminiscent of Frost’s “The Wood-Pile.” In “A Miscalculation,” the speaker ends up out after dark, not as one acquainted with the night but as one who didn’t mean to be there when the light failed. She follows a beacon, “a lamp post / at what I assumed was the golf course,” but this turns out to be “a misinterpretation pursued because now / / it is your life.” In the loss of the way and of the sense of proportion consequent on this “misinterpretation,” she has a realization as profound and un-reassuring as Frost’s “slow smokeless burning of decay”:

my body, not as old as when visible

became, not one with mind, but indistinguishable –

consciousness feeling with the blunt toe of its book

as its footprints fill with groundwater.

Perhaps one of Solie’s own titles captures this richness better than I have so far done, and so I’ll give her the last word: “To the Extent a Tradition Can Be Said to Be Developed; It Is More Accurate to Say It Can Be Clothed in Different Forms.”

But . . . poetry! I love the stuff. You might love it, too, but that’s not necessary. I have made a career of offering ways into poetry for people who don’t like it, or who suspect they don’t like it, or who are sure, on the basis of prior classroom experience, that they don’t like it, or who have never read enough of it to have determined whether they like it. The heart of that activity is simply sharing. Here is something that I think has value, and here is why I think it’s valuable. What do you think? Does anything in here resonate with your values? Or, better: here is something in which I take pleasure and here’s how I think it produces that pleasure. Do you find anything about it pleasurable?

I sometimes use the analogy of wine tasting (indeed, I toyed with calling this humble newsletter “Tasting Notes”). It can be useful to be told a few things about the grape, the terroir, the winemaker, the vintage. Having some words for what we’re going to taste, some articulated anticipation, can help us to find those notes, and to explain our own sense of what we’re tasting. I taste a lot of wine, but that’s not immediately relevant for now. I also read a lot of poetry, and what I hope to do in this space periodically, even something like regularly, is offer to whoever wants to read them, some essays in appreciation, some notes on what draws me (often over and over again) to these particular makers, these specific grapes and vintages.

The written conversation about poetry takes a few standard forms. There are reviews of new books, of course, though these are infrequent in the large-circulation outlets of the major media. There are scholarly books and essays that read the poetry through interpretive frameworks in order to make broad arguments about the poetry and/as the culture it interacts with. Both of these have value and I’ve written in both veins, but neither is what I want to do here (though if there is new book I like a lot and want to share, I’ll feel free to share my thoughts on it, and if there is an academic argument that I’m struck by, I might offer a note about it, too). Between these poles are the various interviews and overviews, the introductions and conclusions, that range from, say, the Paris Review’s “Art of Poetry” installments to the “On Poet X” articles that sometimes appear in the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books. The latter are often written by poets who are also critics and are often great articles. I have learned a lot from Maureen McLane, Michael Hofmann, Ange Mlinko, and others in those venues. While I am not a poet, those essays are close to what I’d like to do here, though where they have to cover a whole career in 2000 words, I might stretch things out and spend that long on each of several volumes in addressing the work of someone I really like.

Expect, then, essays in appreciation. Every couple of weeks, I’ll post here a couple thousand words about a poet and their work. I’m mostly interested in sharing thoughts about poets and poems of, say, the last thirty years. That’s not a randomly chosen period. I think it’s a pretty good span that can credibly be called “contemporary.” It also maps closely onto my own professorial career (I started as an assistant professor in 1995), so roughly the period of my life when I’ve paid the most sustained and rigorous attention to what’s going on in poetry currently being published. And it also stretches back to what I am retrospectively finding to be an interesting moment, my shorthand for which is “back when we thought that what Dana Gioia thought about poetry was important.” If anything connects the various poets whose work I keep returning to, the ones I want to write about here, it might be that they found and modeled and thereby offered ways out of debates about poetry in the 1990s that were . . . unproductive. I might come back and say more about that moment and those debates. Or not. (Alas, my chosen time span doesn’t quite stretch far enough to reach William Bronk, but that might not prevent me from an essay, one of these days, on how the work of that fine poet helped me to get through the first winter of Covid.)

A few things not to expect:

Deeply researched and theorized scholarship. That’s my day job, and I’m mostly doing that on things other than recent poetry these days. Here, I just want to share.

My own poems. When you teach and write about poetry, people often ask if you write poems. I usually lie and say that I don’t. But I will admit to you, Gentle Reader, that in fact I do write poems. Many of them. I think of my poem-writing practice like I think of my yoga practice (yep, I have one of those, too): it’s important for me that I do it, but for the love of God nobody needs to see me do it. (That said, I have been known to put a few together in a self-produced chapbook [sometimes you really do wish someone had seen that headstand], and if you’re interested just let me know and I can hook you up.)

Negative reviews. I think it’s probably the case that most of what gets published or produced in any art form in a given moment is not much good, so, of course, there is a lot of new and recent poetry that I don’t like. You won’t read about it here. I’m much more interested in reading, thinking about, and talking/writing about what I enjoy. (I have to confess that this has not always been the case. I have changed. I like to think of this as growth. Who knows?)

Comprehensive coverage. I mean, who can do that?

If this sounds like something you want to check out, please subscribe. It costs nothing and never will cost anything. And if you know anyone who might be interested, I hope you’ll let them know these essays will be here.

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