Like many others enduring this distended moment of political and cultural turmoil, I have wondered and worried about its psychic effects, its wear and tear on our personal and social consciousness. I feel the impulse to delete my social media accounts, or even more desperately, to abscond myself to the forests and mountains and wait it out. I’ve also been peering at how this constant tension is shaping or contorting our poets and poetry. Political engagement is one thing — our protest poems, or poems of witness, or poems asserting a historically repressed voice. But beyond (or in addition to) these expressions is a certain disposition, a weariness or wariness, which I’m keen to understand.
As this era grinds on, the interconnected anxieties over politics, terrorism, institutional violence, race, the environment, the economy, and so on — essentially the amorphous blob of the contemporary in all its self-contained turbulence — increasingly presents a test of our resilience. And it’s the rise of resilience — of bearing, almost bodily, all this uncertainty — that I see in much poetry, as evidenced and exemplified in two recent collections, Richard Greenfield’s Subterranean and Jericho Brown’s The Tradition.
These are quite different books, but both inspire me with their steadfastness. Each seems to emerge out of the very middle of a life, from a vantage that sees death and catastrophe all around, is touched, knocked down, by trauma, yet persists, not in despondency or even anger but through a hardened resolve. Here below is a brief section from the title poem of Subterranean:
Animals in emaciated limbs anonymously look outward from
the nether mouthing their fading needs to each other because
they have no discrete walls against which to reverberate their
private atrocities
Placeless grief revs in the queasy-sweet flowers in the obscuring
canopy a net to catch the weightless junk falling from above
night fully named the huge tangled patriarchy of branches
the stars tingling irretrievable
Placeless grief revving, private atrocities set loose in the boundaryless landscape — we encounter a charged description of system collapse. Subterranean, with its obsession for entering viscerally into impoverished landscapes, envisions environmental doom. Greenfield is a notable writer of deserts, and so drought, violent geology (one central force of the “subterranean” in this book is the volcanic), and the hard struggle for life pervades with a brutally matter-of-fact, nearly philosophical indifference: “October kills the agaves. // Desiccated ragweed, / boxed into a vacant lot, veers in the wind. / No symbolic value.” I’d hazard that Greenfield takes a certain pleasure with this steely writing, but I also see in it great care, an attendance to his subject, trying to write himself to its attainment — from “Sun Ray”:
Protean clouds pump out of a coal-burning power plant
smokestack, vaguely extending a gray umbra over the playa and
into the alluvial foothills.
When are you?
Lips shedding off
the plain teetering
the axis stopping —
mute birds at last coolly chirruped, for the first time, for the last
time.
Here we encounter the pumping rhythm of description, the driven stressed syllables forcefully enjambed and irregularly interrupted by breath, an enacted gasping that also foreshadows the birds that chirrup “for the first time, for the last time.” The speaker’s voice is a transcription of the landscape itself. Like the most ambitious environmental writers, Greenfield attempts a full immersion into the scene, and we sense that the method is one of infinite, unflinching observation, second by second. For as energetic as this writing is, it is also extremely patient; for as musical as the prosody is, the speaker himself feels remote and mute, focused on his commitment to getting the landscape right. This is what I mean by resilience — an unwavering attendance to a suffering world.
Greenfield carries this disposition beyond landscape. Living in the southwest, he writes about the border (the opening poem is titled as such: “Dear bright / ingot / every child-crosser / tastes it / on barrens / ceremoniously swabs / the body / with rags / filled with river”) and surveillance. But he also folds in self-reflective territories, the literal and figurative impoverishments that beset his daily life and, especially, the loss of his father. Throughout the collection, Greenfield notes the figure of the “deadfather” (“—found the deadfather’s poem – the / left-to-me – flecked with black spots … his / voice percusses with mine – in spite of my / defiance – that busted hicking rhyme”), but in an early poem, “Effluvium,” he directly addresses the loss with staggeringly frank narrative treatment. Here is the poem in full:
My brother and I poured him from a red sharps container into the
short noisy river and the bonebits blinked in the current
The sunlight
illuminated the bottom with the pumice
He went
to the ocean
of the ocean
We waded through stranded brackish water as the tide went out
From the mouth of a cave I watched my brother watch his wife
and their son and daughter close to the waves
The little tide
eased into the estuary
Greenfield creates a subtle but strong tension between ceremony and non-ceremony. This is his father’s burial, but there are hardly any emotional or aesthetic signals of the meaningfulness of the event. The opening clause simply starts and then goes, a plainspoken narrative of the labor, as though they were pouring concrete into a posthole, the sharps container a practical and profane vessel. Then by habit, Greenfield returns to the landscape, the illuminated bottom of the short noisy river. The extreme emotional temperance of the poem is all the more remarkable given that Greenfield is describing an almost literal unification of a person with landscape, something that the poems themselves are trying to achieve — and yet there isn’t even a whiff of a suggestion that the poet wants to exploit this significance. This is a speaker who absorbs, rather than responds to or makes use of, trauma and significance, and while many might make a therapeutic argument for more vulnerability and emotional analysis, such absorptive resilience is — especially as these poems show me — a very real and important carriage now.
* * * * *
In contrast to the remote attendant-speaker of Greenfield’s poems, the presence in Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is much more conversational, socially embedded, and his politics are far more overt. In his poems, we are not given the full array of a litter-ornamented playa but the cultural and political ligatures (informed by nationwide discourses) that stitch themselves through the homes and neighborhoods of day-to-day life. Here, too, we have a title poem, quoted below in full:
The Tradition
Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat, in elements classical
Philosophers said could change us. Stargazer.
Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath.
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.
Delivered through traditional poetics (neat iambs, unchallenging cadence, natural line breaks), this poem has a deceptively simple premise: to contrast the expression of life via the care of this flower garden with the abhorrent violence of institutional racism, which is conjured in the last line through the uttering of these victims’ names (as so many flowers plucked from the earth). At first glance, the poem relies on an inadequately swift juxtaposition of these elements, insisting on, rather than necessarily inspiring, outrage. But in the effort to get to this speech act, Brown must move, with some labor, through other large issues that contextualize the given political object. As in Greenfield’s poems, climate change (“the will / of the sun”) is an omnipresent force establishing an atmospheric threat. The “fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt” no doubt resonates with the long history of black agricultural labor and property rights, including but not limited to slavery. The “dead fathers” (Greenfield check again) is a quick notion heavy with fraught themes around masculinity, heritage, and childhood trauma. There are even nods to education (“learning names in heat”) and surveillance/evidence (“filmed what we planted”).
In “The Tradition” we can hear a poet attempting to make a pointed political statement that successfully navigates a larger chaos of interrelated anxieties. It is a stalwart act, and as I begin to reckon with those anxieties surrounding the foundational impulse of the poem, I start to read the last line differently, not as a hastily attached political signal but as a truer determination that these names will be named, despite of or through a wider confusion, as an act of political will. In an unexpected way, the conservative poetics help to enable this, giving the right dramatic/steadying pause before that last line, and perhaps, in a more theoretical way, reclaiming this traditional poetic meter with a necessary confrontation, a meaningful disobedience.
Elsewhere, Brown expresses a similar resolve. “Bullet Points” begins: “I will not shoot myself / In the head, and I will not shoot myself / In the back, and I will not hang myself / With a trashbag, and if I do, / I promise you, I will not do it / In a police car while handcuffed.” The poem “The Long Way” begins: “Your grandfather was a murderer. / I’m glad he’s dead” and continues “I imagine the wealth he left / When you turn red. I imagine you as a baby / Bouncing on a rapist’s knee.” These are combative lines, but Brown’s more argumentative moments are yet still in control — he isn’t afraid to say what might need saying, but neither does he luxuriate in his anger, nor employ the poems as vehicles of catharsis. He is not so much defending or attacking any political or social positions but establishing his own survival strategy via a moral clarity that he wields almost tool-like, navigating what he can and cannot accept. It is a tool forged by his own resilience, by the violence and uncertainty that he has already absorbed.
His determination extends even to his own body and the stark reality of his survival with HIV. Mortality in these poems is a matter-of-fact horizon felt so assumed that it isn’t even an emotional destination but a springboard toward some other issue. In the recurring formal poems, all titled “Duplex,” Brown offers some of his most sophisticated emotional expression. One begins:
I begin with love, hoping to end there.
I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.
I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.
Full of medicines that turn in the sun.
Some of my medicines turn in the sun.
Some of us don’t need hell to be good.
Brown deploys the word “corpse” in a willful embrace of the abject. He doesn’t avoid thinking of himself as merely a body, as something so rotten that even the very medicines meant to maintain his life are themselves rotting. But here, too, we see Brown employing very compact references to larger emotional issues, specifically love and his religious/moral upbringing. The play of “beginning” and “ending,” and the notion of measuring the meaning of one’s life by love rather than judgment (as in, going either to heaven or hell) is so soundly delivered in this repetitive line-making that it successfully conditions, makes absorbable, the very real reality of death (“corpse”); and it does it very quickly, with durable construction. This is precisely the kind of thing poetry can do best.
It is poem-making itself that most powerfully unites these two poets in these two collections — not any specific thing they say but how they put themselves to the task. The forms of resilience I’m trying to point out are certainly various, and the poems themselves are strikingly different. But they share a prosody and a frankness, either descriptive or conversational, embodied in the syntactical craft of the poems. In Greenfield’s poems, I see it in the engine-like production of his images, what feels like a machine sucking in the landscape and rendering out the poems. In Brown’s, it’s the play of syntax and line and the angular resolution of his statements which enact his moral resolution. Both represent the output of poets standing upright in a late history, in full determination. The poems offer a window onto a personal political experience everyone can recognize. For all the Twitter outbursts and protest marches that typify an instant response to turmoil and uncertainty, there are countless moments where any one of us may be looking out across a lot or listening to the news or planting flowers where we are simply taking it in and conditioning ourselves toward what we should do and who we should be. It’s that more considered experience that these poems capture, and why these poems are needed.
Subterranean by Richard Greenfield, published April 1, 2019 by Omnidawn Publishing, 96 pp, $17.95 paperback.
The Tradition by Jericho Brown, published April 1, 2019 by Copper Canyon Press, 110 pp, $17.00 paperback.