If, as Seamus Heaney believed, one chief function of poetry is to write place into existence, another of its engines is the impulse to conjure an extant, if fickle and ephemeral, self — a cosmos or construct, depending on your point of view, of gender, demographics, sexuality, environment, and the exigencies, abilities, and of the desires of one’s conscience, one’s body, one’s identity.
Beautiful, daring new books by Jake Skeets and Matthew Zapruder, take up, in striking ways, the question Gregory Orr poses in his poem “Who’d Want to Be a Man?,” published in his 1995 collection City of Salt, long before toxic masculinity became a buzz phrase:
Who’d Want to Be a Man?
With his heart
a black sack
in which a small
animal’s trapped.
With his grief
like a knot
tied at birth,
balled up and hard.
With his rage
that smashes the ten
thousand things
without blinking.
With his mind
like a tree on a cliff —
its roots, fists
clutching stone.
With his longing
that’s a dry well
and where is the rain?
The question for Skeets and Zapruder is not so much who would want to be a man, or whether or not “traditional” notions of masculinity are toxic, binary, or otherwise, but rather how does one be or become a person who is also a man — a lover, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, a husband, a survivor, a father, a son, a citizen, a human — in a world that can obstruct or confuse that becoming.
Skeets, in his inaugural National Poetry Series-winning collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, ranges the fields, train tracks, backseats, coal yards, and watering holes of liminal border towns attuned to the particular roil of the Native American boys and young men who wander in and through them. He attends with exquisite, lyric eroticism to the ways in which their world is shaped by landscape, violence, danger, prejudice, intoxication, Diné language and culture, sexual tension, and the hauntings of a host of familial and tribal ghosts. Soma, word, and world turn into one another everywhere (“I open the word and crawl inside its spine, barbed wire, turbine / with dark belly, coil hierarchy. // What word, you ask. Your body a cloud flattened in my hand” from “Love Poem”).
Father’s Day, Zapruder’s fifth poetry collection, moves with audacity and vulnerability into the territory of “fatherhood” — across familial generations but also in terms of nationhood, especially in the shameocracy of our current purgatorial Trumpian slough of despond, during which time — Zapruder tells us in a prose Afterword to the book — most of the poems in this collection were written. With characteristic wry humor and forthrightness (“is there anyone worse / than Roseanne Barr?” he asks in one poem), Zapruder makes brave forays into his own complex experiences and emotions as the father of an autistic son while at the same time confronting the vexed promises, inheritances, and failures of America’s Founding Fathers and its citizenry.
*
It was 106 degrees in August 1985 when I moved with my husband to an un-air conditioned rental house in Denton, Texas, so that he could enter a graduate jazz program at the University of North Texas. We’d arrived from the east coast (except for a trip to St. Louis to see my youngest sister graduate, I’d not ventured west of the Mississippi in all of my then 29 years). One of our first outings was to view Richard Avedon’s show In the American West that had opened that fall at the (air-conditioned) Amon Carter Museum in nearby Fort Worth. I found the exhibit stunning, disturbing, haunting. It unnerved me that Avedon —himself an Easterner on unfamiliar turf, and best known for his fashion and celebrity photographs — would choose to photograph, over a period of several summers — a wild mix of wanderers, snake handlers, drifters, policemen, carnies, workers of all kinds — all in front of a large backdrop of white paper that removed any context and intensely highlighted the bodies and faces of his subjects. How weirdly lyric, I remember jotting in my notebook, this attempt to remove the kind of “story” that landscape or other surroundings might provide his subjects. Against their seamless, blank backdrops, each person portrayed evinced a terrible isolation.
In the 30-plus years since I saw that show, certain images from it — faces, mostly — have stayed with me, in the way that some of Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, and Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs have become part of my psychic landscape. A month ago, when an advance review copy of Jake Skeets’s book slipped into my hands from an envelope sent by Milkweed Editions, I found staring back at me, on the book’s cover, one of the very particular images I’ve carried with me from the Avedon exhibit and the catalogue that accompanied it: a portrait of a man/boy, a Native American, his brownness implied and intensified in the black-and-white photo by the white drop-cloth, his shell buttons and fingernails luminous, fists clenched. This was a person, I wrote at the time in my notebook, both indelible and disappearing.
As I would very soon learn, this person (“Benson James, Drifter, Route 66, Gallup, New Mexico, 06/30/79,” a subject murdered, I would also discover, with a year) was in fact Jake Skeets’s uncle, the photograph taken before Skeets was born. It strikes me that Skeets’s book is in many ways a writing into and around the space that Avedon’s photographic praxis for that project obliterated — acknowledging the isolation, yes, but also conjuring the tribal, familial, and geographical forces that shaped Benson, that shape any person in liminal or marginalized circumstances. (Skeets has written and spoken about his experiences with this photograph in many places, including here (https://milkweed.org/blog/drifting-a-cover-image-story) and here
https://lithub.com/on-the-famous-photograph-of-my-late-uncle-that-inspired-a-collection/ ).
Skeets’s book is full of fields, not the least of which is the page itself:
dogs
maul
remains
like white
space
does
(“In the Fields”)
Skeets not so much populates each page with words but rather calls forth or invokes out of the field of each page what might not otherwise be seen or noticed: two boys exploring each other’s bodies under a blanket of stars, overgrown train tracks, “a tractor tire backing over a man’s skull,” broken bottles, and a galaxy of flora and fauna — owl pellets, corn beetles, bottle caps, lupine, beardtongue, pigweed, Mormon tea crowns, sego lily, burnt matches, coal slurry, blue flax, buffalo blur. Boys and young men — drifters, drunks, lovers — are the denizens of these fields, and in their violence and in their erotic desires they are inseparable from the landscape and the words that in part create that landscape (and vice versa), as in this last section of “Tácheeh” (Diné for a ritual ceremonial sweat lodge) :
fingers lupine
beardtongue
bee plant to harrow grasses
pronghorn in wild rose
truck radio more sego lily
and pigweed spewing
from open mouth
boys watch ricegrass shimmer in smoke
fires everywhere round them
arms stretch in sap and bark
hair now meadow
limbs tangle into snakeweed
burning burning burning burning
they know becoming a man
means knowing how to become charcoal
staccato of ash
holding a match to their skin
trying not to light themselves on fire
The incendiary ritual here depicted holds the float of communal, cultural, as well as sexual initiation. The boys are the field, the field the boys. It is a hallmark of all of Skeets’s poems, in fact, that the risks, terrors, and beauty of the land, of sexuality, of criminality, of language itself are inextricable, inseparable. A poem for a cousin, “My Brother,” again shows this rich panoply of pantheistic forces by which manhood, personhood, can be shaped or shut down:
You kissed a man the way I do
but with a handgun. You called it; I’m the fag
we were afraid to know, the one we’d throw rocks at, huff at like horses.
I learned to touch a man by touching myself. I learned to be a man by loving one.
Prison is not the chicken wire we’d get tangled in. Remember our bloodied
knees and bloody palms from mangled handlebars, beer bottles,
and cactus spines? Remember the horned toad
we didn’t mean to kill?
Our silence — thick as the dusk kicked up by our skinny legs. You are still
that silence. Still that boy holding a deflated body
with your dawning hands.
In yet another poem, “Naked,” Skeets writes, “the closest men become [to being naked] is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.” And it is perhaps this wish to be naked, transparent, known, shown, revealed as true that is the simmering, about-to-blow combustion engine of these poems of becoming. Joining the most powerful male poets of Eros of our moment — Carl Phillips, Cyrus Cassells, Forrest Gander, Michael McGriff, Brian Teare — Skeets brings his considerable gifts not only to the particular terrible beauty of his native Navaho turf, but to a world in which we must all “unlearn how to hold a fist.”
*
If the “field” is the presiding formal trope in Skeets’s book, a meta-awareness of “the poem” itself suffuses Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day. Of the book’s 52 poems, nearly half contain in their titles the word “poem” or “poetry” (usually as “poem for,” as in “Poem for Doom” or “Poem for Coleridge”) or “song” (“Another Song,” “A Love Song,” for example). This forthright confrontation of the mode, process, possibilities, and limitations of his chosen form of communication is typical of Zapruder, whose book Why Poetry? is a testament to this writer’s faith in the privilege, limitations, and responsibilities of the poem, especially in troubled and troubling times.
Parenthood has its superstitions, its “offspring-protective” rituals and behaviors. In many cultures, for instance, parents ward off the evil eye by circling their babies with salt or spitting on them if they’re complimented for their beauty. In other places, babies are dropped from rooftops into waiting blankets or squeezed until they cry to inspire strength and courage. For Zapruder, the poem itself becomes a talismanic site for expressing his personal and political worry, ire, guilt, love, and conscience, all italicized by his being a father, and in particular the father of an autistic son. In their odal appeals — to abstractions like doom, vow, and harm, or to particular poets (among them Tomaž Šalamun, James Tate, and Paul Éluard) — the poems often serve as totemic “anthems” from a father concerned about his son (and other people’s children) born into difficult times and under straining circumstances. The poems either confront bad “fathers” [Paul Ryan, Justice Kennedy (“pious blowhard / from the dark collective grief / of half of us”), Donald Trump] or evoke those in whose poetic vision he can believe, his poetry “fathers” (“we were each born / the shadow of reality upon us // so be not easily angry,” for example, from “Poem for Merwin”).
In “December,” a poem that narrates a family’s participation in a peaceful protest in the wake of Trump’s election.
. . . I lifted my son
so he could see
what people
look like
when they hear
the song Imagine
. . .
everyone understands
in a different
contradictory way
the so far purely
abstract
catastrophe
so many millions
of choices
brought us,
not too far
from the water
I sat on the couch
below the sound
of blades
drinking amber
numbing fluids
my thoughts
chopping the air
feeling not
what is the word
to be father
equipped . . .
“My Life” recounts the birth of the narrator’s son, its joy, its complexities:
sorrow months
then slow realizing
playground dread,
the year
of diagnosis when
our life kept
being a place
for worsening fears
in enviable comfort
to occur as we
graciously received
the humiliation
of being the ones
gratefully not to be,
those many hours
in the bedroom screaming
then lurching out
for exhausted walks,
trying with no
success to protect
us from everything
anyone could say . . .
This poem and the others in Father’s Day provide a way for Zapruder’s father-speaker to “equip” himself. Later in “My Life,” the speaker writes of his son’s great pleasure in song, itself a redemptive gift:
now we’re moving
fortunate ones
from our beloved house
to another hill
near a school
where his mind
happily alive
in music can grow,
can I say he is
my painful joy,
he thinks in rhyme,
the truest friend
to no one yet
he is my
favorite word
remembrancer . . .
Zapruder is ever mindful that even despair is a privilege, and his poems offer a bellwether clarion call to the advantaged to be mindful of the plight of others. In the title poem, “Father’s Day.” he writes,
we don’t deserve
a little brunch
followed by
a sleepy blow job
we all know
merely to survive
this totally
survivable life
is not enough
what good will it do
we must not think
this is some dream
the children sleeping
alone in some
detention center
don’t need
our brilliant sincerity
it’s not enough
to give some money
make some calls
they are not ours
but they are
we are the first
new fathers
ours failed
where we cannot
stop waiting
there are no others
In their unique ways, these two poets — Skeets in his intense, compressed, and oblivion-haunted somascapes and Zapruder in enjambed, expansive, and seemingly tangential jeremiads and love songs — offer insightful delvings into the manifold lives of boys and men. Both books acknowledge, as Zapruder puts it in “Tunnel Park,” the final poem in Father’s Day, that “everyone knows / worse times // are coming / who isn’t afraid / only the dead,” yet each believes in the redemptive forces of language, of love made through language, as cliché as that may sound. Zapruder is ruthless in his willingness to face down hard wrongs (in addition to politicians, colleagues at a staff meeting, he even takes on the iconic Walt Whitman for his racist views), but his “Poem for Vows” is one of the most honest and beautiful epithalamiums I’ve ever read. And Skeets’s incantatory “In the Fields” is a calling back into the fold of the present all who have been turned by its injustices and bigotry to ash:
We are all beautiful at least once.
Mud water puddles along enamel.
Eyeteeth blossom into osprey. Our bones
dampen like snowmelt under squirrel grass.
We could be boys together finally
as milk etch, tumbleweed, and sticker bush.
We can be beautiful again beneath
the sumac, yarrow, and bitter water.
[Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers, published by Milkweed Editions on September 10, 2019, 96 pages, $16.00 paperback. Father’s Day, published by Copper Canyon Press on September 3, 2019, 96 pages, $17.00 paperback]