David Blair on Big Cabin by Ron Padgett
At some point in the first week of my social isolation, as I was rereading and loving Big Cabin again after reading it and loving it through part of the fall, I thought that people are so full of nonsense sometimes, so pompous, self-regarding and expansively wrong about seemingly everything — maybe some guy from high school who always knocked welfare now beefing about how he can’t get unemployment or relief or whatever because he banked too much money in 2018, sure, tap that fat 401-K, the Babbitt, the boob, or maybe reposting haw memes that don’t like Joe Biden or something, on a Jill Stein banana peel — or they are so saddened by the world and loss and so thirsting for play and for a way to love things as they really are but also with the fluidity of imagination, or that they go too far to one extreme, thinking they are they are entirely with people just because they are not alone, and that, well, in any of those cases, what people really need is to read Big Cabin, the new book of poems by Ron Padgett.
Could it have been when Padgett describes how a space heater makes his legs feel? Maybe it was when I came upon the poem “The Triumph of the Beavers,” which celebrates the triumphant weirdness of the real, the baroque quality of being alive:
Is there any evidence
that a surrealist
ever saw a beaver?
I know it’s a trivial question
but I’m wondering.
I imagine the face of a surrealist
and the face of a beaver
as they suddenly see each other.
They turn and run.
That night
the surrealist has horrible nightmares
of the face of the beaver.
The beaver sleeps pretty well.
Or maybe it was when I read the poem “People,” which come to think of it is also the title of the most lachrymose Barbara Streisand song of all time, nothing against Barbara Streisand:
People are so
fucking nutty
it’s amazing
that we get through
the day
without one of them
undoing the parts
of his body
and then putting them
back together
in the wrong places
right in front of us.
That poem has everything, wonder, connection, warmth, irritation, an f-bomb, the only one in the book. Of course, we are all people, o Babs.
The book has two sections of brief, seemingly off-hand and perfectly wrought poems bracketing a moving and philosophical middle section of prose that explores the tensions of Padgett’s poems here, his earliest motivations and sense of himself as an only child, and maybe his whole career and a tradition of American poetry going back to O’Hara and, surprisingly, in a rational, American sort of way, the Gary Snyder of his “Cold Mountain” sequence of implications after Han Shan, and also exploring the selfishness and loss and the decentering sense of comedy involved in any good writing (“I’m still not happy that I was named for the film star who went on to become president”). This prose is only nine pages long but requires a big sentence to unpack some of its wealth. It’s a beautifully structured book, the first section in someway mirroring the developments of the third, like images reflected in the poem’s central image field of a pond.
Padgett gives us sophisticated pleasures that feel basic. I can almost hear Eleanor Shellstrop say, “You’re basic, Ron Padgett.” Of course the ultimate expression of “seeming basic” is in Padgett’s career-long and signature use of sincere but playful comic-book style onomatopoeia and weird sounds, so I feel gratified when a poem on page six, “Chickadee,” ends “Glump glump.” It’s like Jonathan Richards opening a set with “I Was Dancing at the Lesbian Bar.” Thank you, for not making me wait.
But it’s also fun to read his poems in the basic way that we are taught to read by good close readers as undergraduates and experience the pleasure of the loaded, beautifully weighted word or phrase, the implication of the feeling or idea. You can feel in these short poems by Padgett, the lover of French poetry and Apollinaire translator, more obviously in a poem like “Thin,” which turns on our recognizing the unstated but implied image of the thin red margin line on a piece of loose leaf paper for us to recognize how this is a poem about writing and loss, suggestive of the limitation of writing as consolation and the value of writing in the face or mortality:
My skin has grown
thinner, as thin
as the paper
on which I write.
Sometimes
I accidentally cut myself
and don’t even know it:
a thin line of blood is there.
It’s hard to talk to.
A lot of the poems play with cliches, particularly older ones that are not as common now, in way that could have rated a chapter in an old-fashioned sort of book on how poets “purify the language of the tribe.” So we have a kind of funny poem about the phrase “My Eye” and how kids would use that in Oklahoma in the 1950s. But then when Padgett calls a poem about seeing his passing reflection looking old “Sideways Guy,” he is picking up on a note of anguish in the contemporary lingo that we may not have felt.
Padgett’s poetry of implication allows for a lot of good things, laughter that does not make you feel mean or stupid being one of them. Another thing that a poetry of implication can reach is a state of rational mystic bliss, a sense of joy that things as they are can sometimes suffice. Here is “Timex Blur,” a poem with beautifully unprepossessing rhymes that takes the measure of our capacity for pettiness and happily overthrows it:
I was going to complain
about how irritating it is
to have to change one’s clock
twice a year and not
understand why, but sunlight
just came down and hit
the pond and my brain
at the same time.
Another thing that goes with implication is room for other people and other perspectives, a sense of life. We are all getting too straightforward and loud, I think. When I walk around out in virus world, the people on cellphones seem to be talking louder than ever, the joggers panting loudly around corners. What a relief to have this book now. “We use italics / to put electricity into words,” Padgett says in “And Truly.” His cabin is not far away at all. It’s 300 yards from his house, and in that house is a refrigerator with the ingredients for a sandwich in there, and maybe another person, or a few other people, too.
[Published by Coffee House Press on July 2, 2019, 81 pages, $16.95 paperback]
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celeste doaks on Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is a volume that oscillates seamlessly between past and present, the same way rack focusing works in filmmaking. Highlighting one image with razor sharp focus, while allowing the other to appear blurred in the background (and vice versa) is Murillo’s specialty. This cinematic trick allows him to exert complete control over what the audience takes away from his urgent, deftly-crafted poems. He wields that control in Kontemporary as he explores themes such as violence, racial injustice, revenge, and domestic abuse with anger, love, grace, and vulnerability. He also salutes poetic traditions like magical realism and negative capability alongside musical and literary forebears — Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Yusef Komunyakaa and Gil Scott Heron — just to name a few. This is a heavy weight to lift, but Murillo snatches it with ease.
Kontemporary, Murillo’s sophomore volume, examines some of the same haunts as his first volume, Up Jump the Boogie. This impressive debut was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery and the PEN Open Book awards. However, in Kontemporary we find the poet examining a whole life with maturity. The opening poem, entitled “On Confessionalism,” begins the book with a pending violence, while simultaneously referencing a poetic style of writing. It tells the fractured story of a young man who loses a girl, and ends up confronting the plausible cause of this loss with a pistol.
Blacked out
and woke, my hand on a gun, the gun
in a mouth, a man, who was really
a boy, on his knees.
The tragedy of two young black boys engaged here is accentuated by the alliterative music in these lines. In the end, the gun jams and no one gets shot. While the audience is shocked and relieved, the narrator’s view of what has transpired in this scene haunts the whole volume.
Cold enough day to make a young man
weep, afternoon when everything,
or nothing, changed forever.
Readers may wonder, how often does this happen to a young man of color? Although no actual crime is committed, how does this shadow the rest of the man’s life? Will it be “live by the sword, die by the sword”? Perhaps the music referenced in the poem’s background is telling — the “dead rapper nudging” could be Notorious B.I.G. Even more clever is that Murillo gives B.I.G. his very own stellar tribute in the last poem of the book.
In Up Jump, Murillo has a signature mini-epic poem called “Flowers for Etheridge.” It is an ode to the influential Black Arts Movement poet Etheridge Knight. And Kontemporary includes a similar quasi-epic poem entitled “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn.” The epicenter of this gem is the 2014 Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley shooting of two police officers. The officers died, and afterwards, Brinsley killed himself. However, this poem is more than a free verse repeat from Murillo’s first volume; isn is a sophisticated examination of racial in/justice through a crown of sonnets. Going even more meta, Murillo places epigraphs from various African American male poets at the top of each sonnet, sometimes even mimicking the style of the quoted poet quoted. As readers can see, both the content and the form are intense, but purification by fire as a metaphor is crucial.
It’s natural, no, to put your faith in fire?
The way it makes new all it touches. How
a city, let’s say, might become, by way
of time and riot, pure.
Unlike “Flowers for Etheridge” this poem is more than a lament, it’s a meditation, an invitation to think about justice and who gets it — if, when, and how.
Despite these heavy themes of violence and racial injustice, Murillo’s new volume does not drag with heaviness. The love of music, and Murillo’s deceased father, are also themes that unite Kontemporary. Music is embodied both in mentions of famous artists and in Murillo’s lyrics. In Up Jump, music is also a huge character. Musical artists such as Chaka Khan and Marvin Gaye (who gets a special poem entitled after one of his songs — “Trouble Man”) appear. However, in Kontemporary, music reappears but in a much more complex way. For example, take Murillo’s “Upon Reading that Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” Murillo’s opening line “I think of the first two sparrows I met when walking home …” invites readers to listen to birds, too. Later, birds invite the narrator, “They called to me —something between squawk and chirp, something between song and prayer — to do something.” But as readers descend into the poem, the focus blurs the birds’ melodies, and brings the sounds of domestic abuse to the forefront. Just that quickly, Murillo shifts readers from ornithology to anthropology.
Two of my favorite poems are “On Metaphor” and “Poem Ending and Beginning on Lines by Larry Levis.” “On Metaphor” is a small and impactful poem about finding photographs, and a pistol, in the back of the narrator’s father’s closet. The poem ends with
… I think I see my father
Reflected in the steel. Wait, no —
Not my father. It’s me.
This gorgeous line conjures the last line of Komunyakaa’s “Facing It.” Another fave of mine, “Poem Beginning …” is really a meditation on getting older while youngins watch the narrator lifting weights. I’m heartened to see an Afro-Chicano poet engaged in critical self-reflection and rejecting reductive notions of masculinity. Actually, this may be a trend, considering last year’s Scorsese and Tarantino films are arguably doing similar work. This gives me great comfort because grey hairs and crow’s feet have been “women’s worries” for far too long.
Rarely do I find a volume as honest and close to the bone as Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. Murillo can hold both a .45 and a sunflower in the same hand without flinching. And these dichotomies do represent life in its truest form. Kontemporary is a sincere look at a fully-lived life, and all the things in it.
[Published by Four Way Books on March 2, 2020, 104 pages, $16.95 paperback]
* * * * *
Elizabeth Jacobson on The Art Of Voice by Tony Hoagland
In the fall, in Santa Fe, Tony Hoagland taught a free community poetry workshop on Tuesday evenings. Everyone gathered in a room he rented at the Unitarian Universalist church and for two hours Tony would rhapsodize about what he loved so absolutely, American Poetry and the crafting of poems. During one of the last classes he taught, in the midst of treatment for pancreatic cancer, Tony dubbed himself a shaman of the imagination. And this he certainly was as he had an irrefutable genius for conjuring writers to make poems.
Tony, who died in October, 2018 at 64, was a poet and essayist recognized for, among many things, his clear, precise language — the well-defined articulation of his own voice and the voices of his speakers. A master at the idiomatic, his often-conversational style directly engages a reader in both his poetry and in his thorough, eloquent, critical prose. He left us two new books of poems, both published before his death, and two new books of essays, both published posthumously. The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice is organized into twelve engrossing and accessible chapters on craft and ends with a long section of helpful, engaging exercises
Everything about The Art of Voice invigorates me. This is one craft book that can certainly get a willing poet, novice or experienced, making poems. Each chapter looks at voice in a sort of magical way to guide the curious poet and jump start creativity; Tony’s discourse on voice, its many variations, both contemporary and traditional, propose occasion after occasion of possibilities. “In many poems voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, that holds it together and aloft …” If taken as a premise from which the rest of the book unfolds, this quote, from Chapter I, “The Living Speaker,” empowers a student of writing, offering support to be one’s self by giving permission to investigate both concrete and enigmatic aspects of writing.
I am always grateful for Tony’s exceptionally clear and accessible writing which is as communicative as the selection of poems he uses to demonstrate his arguments. His ideas are inventive, opening wide the channels of creative opportunities without straying into abstraction. The complexity of his thought is both academic and intuitive, a sensibility that blends well for a successful craft book. Chapter III, “The Sound of Intimacy,” discusses compression in relation to vernacular speech. “in poetry, often the charm of the voice is more important than economy,” Hoagland suggests. “All day, every day, those “uhs” and “ers” and “likes” pepper and salt our spoken interchanges. These ‘inefficiencies’ of speech serve a purpose in building tone and voice; they ‘warm’ and humanize poetic speech.” As an example, he selected an excerpt from Mark Halliday’s poem, “Population”: “we all have a grocery list on the refrigerator door; / at any given time there are thirty million lists in America / that say bread. / Isn’t it nice / not to be alone in this.” The phrase,“isn’t it nice” and the word “nice” are repeated several times in the poem and may seem extraneous, yet as Tony points out, they are exactly the seasonings that “pull us deeper into the poem.”
A shaman is an escort into altered states of consciousness, maybe not unlike a poet. In reading over the book again, as an experiment, I decided to stop when I was inspired to write. I didn’t get far. On page 11, with the example of Gerald Stern’s poem “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees”: “What I took to be a man in a white beard/turned out to be a woman in a silk babushka / weeping in the front seat of her car; / and what I took to be a seven-branched candelabrum / with the wax dripping over the edges / turned out to be a horse’s skull.” With Stern’s poem, Tony says, “We see an American poetic speaker whose mind is ‘in process.’” I wanted to try what Tony suggested Stern’s poem was doing, “precisely feel the physical rhythm of the speaker’s breath; the poem is breathing … the reader himself feels included in the warm immediacy of the speaker’s life.” I was directly inspired to use Stern’s device of going back to a refrain “what I took to be …” to write my own poem, which is what Tony suggests in the exercise section at the end of the book.
The Art of Voice is with Kay Cosgrove, a former Ph.D. student of Tony’s, who is currently an assistant professor of English at St. Joseph’s University. In her words, she “helped Tony finish the book, which involved discussions of structure, content and examples, as well as editing.” Tony was a generous and kind poet and teacher who wanted anybody with earnest aspirations to write to have the chance to cultivate a voice. Together, Kay and Tony offer encouragement: “The Buddhists have a saying, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,’ but we don’t believe in waiting around for the magic teacher. We believe in the adventure of work, and in diving deep and looking around … Go forth, read widely, work hard, teach yourself. Then teach others.”
(Published by W.W. Norton on March 5, 2019, 163 pages, hardcover, $22.95, $16.95 paperback)