on Tenderness, poems by Derrick Austin
Six years after attending a poetry reading at the Guggenheim Museum, Muriel Rukeyser recalled that the poet, upon reaching the end of one poem, “said, ‘But it is not true’ … a waver went through the audience. No, I cannot say that, I can speak only for myself. I thought, ‘It may very well be true.’ She had cut through the entire nonsense about confessional writing, and returned me to the poem.” The poet was Anne Sexton. Rukeyser was telling us that while we may be inclined to lean on a backstory (a benign temptation), the poetry itself insists on being its own complete, envisioned world. The insistence is the freedom of the poet.
As in Sexton’s work, the presence of the first-person is particularly robust in Derrick Austin’s second collection, Tenderness. And for both poets, the world within the poems often appears as inhospitable – then suddenly dangerous, threatening. For Austin, the toxicity of homophobia and racism always lurks – but he will not expend his breath on an unmissable take-away. He demands something from us other than concurrence or empathy. He wants our involvement in the process of discernment. Through the turbulence, Austin tartly assesses his own disquietude and tendencies. But he does not presume to know too much. In each poem, he sets out to catch a glimpse of what is continuously if fitfully coming into view, including memories distilled to their active ingredients. There are damages to report – but while the scars may be permanent, their significance is far from finalized.
Flies
I waste the morning in bed eating Talenti and chocolate-
covered almonds infused with cannabis.
The only people I’ve talked to in weeks are the father
and son who own the corner store.
The father blocked me on a meat market of an app.
My ego compulsively licks its wounds.
Your type, a friend texts me, is the kind of man
Lee Pace could play in his sleep: cerebral, imperious.
Books cover the other half of my bed.
In the one I’ve nearly finished, a prince becomes a hermit,
his soul growing receptive and active
like a plant consuming green flies.
There is abjection here – and there are poets who would stop at that point. But Austin, adjusting his touch, suddenly pivots in the final two couplets, and without making claims for his recuperative powers, gives us the figure of the prince, “receptive and active.”
In “Son Jarocho,” Austin conjures a scene in which “We were black men in a city / an oasis, where we need not / flinch at another’s approach.” Rukeyser also said of Sexton that her struggles had “made a poet who no longer looks at the audience to see how the confession is going.” I don’t mean to say that Austin is primarily confessing anything – but I do sense that he isn’t primarily seeking validation. We’re the texting friend who registers the imperious gesture and valorizes the cerebral details of what is actual.
While completing my MFA degree work at Stanford back in the 70s, I had a part-time job at the Sears in Oakland. I was working in the sporting goods department when I witnessed two white security guards beating up a black man. Things haven’t changed.
Blue Core
Being chased by a while man
on the second floor of Sears
is my earliest memory of panic.
I was the age a kid could get lost
in a rack of clothes. Kids
got lost all the time in the 90s.
Back then, the neighbor’s son
taught me to sip honeysuckles.
We were inseparable until he moved.
Where my childhood home should be
there’s now a lot, which isn’t notable.
Homes flood. Homes packed
with chemicals leveled into the dirt.
The blizzard of ’97 left a mountain at the park.
We crawled through a hole at its base
and laughed inside the blue core.
Collecting snow, our multicolored sleds
looked like clothes by a ditch.
This poem is spoken as if from within an updated blue core, a safe space with friends – and if the boy yearned for someone among them to be inseparable from him, he also had to imagine that they had disrobed (but what an ingenious way of putting it, via the sleds). “There’s a roof one man’s body makes over another” he writes in the opening poem, “Days of 2014.”
Derrick Austin is a beguiling poet who expresses an affinity with the ancient practices of enchantment and hex. But he also knows that charms and being charming take one only so far, and historically the witches have had to be their own fan club. The poems are commanding through their artful and moving precisions, their unpredictable next steps. Still, when he ends his title poem with hesitations – “That I’m getting this all down wrong. That I’m getting it down at all” – he is voicing not a disclaimer but a preference for the uncertainty that waits and listens for what comes into focus.
[Published by BOA Editions on September 21, 2021, 78 pages, $17.00 paperback]
Muriel Rukeyser’s remarks appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (fall/winter 1973); this review of Sexton’s work is included in Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics, edited by J. D. McClatchy (Indiana University Press, 1978).
/ / / / /
on Within the Sweet Noise of Life, poems by Sandro Penna
Benito Mussolini and his censors didn’t care for the poems of Sandro Penna (1906-1977). As a young queer poet living in Rome in the early 1930’s, Penna initiated correspondence with Umberto Saba (who was managing his bookstore in Trieste), sending his poems under a nom de plume. With Saba’s help, Penna’s first poems were published in journals. The two poets must have recognized in each other certain correspondences in their attitudes and aesthetics. Just as Saba was ill-suited to conform to the prevailing modernisms, Penna felt no impulse to follow Montale in the escape from personality and remained loyal to the first-person. His mode was established: exuberantly erotic, sexually yearning, unabashedly joyful or sweetly melancholic. Some of Penna’s early poems were collected — in expurgated form — in Poesie (1939).
Alexander Booth’s translations of Penna’s work in Within the Sweet Noise of Life include 27 of the early works. The first uncensored edition of Poesie appeared in 1957 with 100 new poems, and an expanded selection was included in Stranezze (Oddities, 1976), awarded the Begutta Prize for Poetry just a week before Penna died.
It was September. The streets
Once more were full of shouts. The sun
Loved wine and the worker. Songs
Burnt late into the night.
But a young boy
Stayed behind, astonished, then bewitched
— in the sultry canopy of an evening –
By the innocent laugh of a friend.
Within the Sweet Noise of Life also offers a broad selection of poems written through 1977. In 1950, Penna published 37 poems in Appunti (Notes), written between 1938-1949. This time the critics were more responsive. Struck by the work, Pier Paolo Pasolini arrived in Rome, contacted Penna, and became a vocal supporter of the poetry. The poems are often described as “epigrammatic” by Penna’s commentators. Many of these very short pieces sketch a location from which a boy or young man emerges to spark the joy and admiration of the watcher.
Furnished room in a vicoletto
Church bell there at the foot of the bed
Is love not a tight knot
Between angst and exultation?
Penna didn’t publish any poetry in the 1960s. In the early 1970’s, a selection of his essays appeared along with enlarged editions of his verse. He worked at various odd jobs, barely scraping together a living. When he died from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1977, a new collection of poems was discovered in his apartment and was published posthumously in 1980 as Confuso Sogno (Confused Dream).
To Eugenio Montale
The frolic towards twilight I go
In the opposite direction of the crowd
Happily and quickly leaving the stadium
I look at no one and look at all
Now and then collect a smile
Rarer still a cheerful hello
And I no longer remember who I am
I’m sorry then to have to die
Dying seems too unfair
Even if I don’t remember who I am
[Published by Seagull Books on March 15, 2021, 120 pages, $19.00 hardcover]
For Ron Slate’s essay on the poetry of Umberto Saba, click here.
For a delightfully informative essay on translating Penna’s work, see John Taylor’s “Sandro Penna’s Secret Poems” in A Little Tour Through European Poetry (Transaction Publishers, 2015).