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10 Poems

The following is from a project for David Rivard's poetry workshop--to pick 10 favorite poems. These are mine for the moment.

Picking favorites is difficult for me. When I go out to a restaurant I almost always order something new. When I smoked cigarettes, I never “had a brand.” And in my bag at any moment there are at least three or four books I am currently reading. I like variety. I like things when they’re new. And, like many of our generation, I have a sporadic and easily distracted attention span. Still, as much as it goes against these personal tendencies, there is much to be said in defense of favoritism. Our relationship to literature should perhaps never be monogamous, but it is good to settle down for a while and really get to know someone in those deeper levels of affection, trust, and understanding. While they may be thrilling, not everything can, or should be, a one-night-stand. So for me, with so many favorites, I had to narrow my scope in assembling this collection and, in the end, I picked the moment. These are recent favorites, chosen not for nostalgic or developmentally indicative reasons—that would be another group altogether—but for what has been wowing and wooing me in my readings of poetry over the past six or so months. These are poems from the books still stacked and piled on my desk as I write this. While, in the long scope of things, this is perhaps not the best or most telling way to compile my ten favorite poems, it is at least one way of doing it. And I can only hope that you enjoy reading these as much as I do. 

1.

LONG AND SLUGGISH LINES

Wallace Stevens

It makes so little difference, at so much more

Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.

Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow

Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.

The trees have a look as if they bore sad names

And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,

Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side

Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

Or these―escent—issant pre-personae: first fly,

A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,

The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

...Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.

The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal

Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep. 

Now I will begin by contradicting myself. I do have some obsessions in poetry, and one of them is Wallace Stevens. Choosing which poem of his to include in this collection was no easy task. Most of my favorites lay in Stevens’ longer, sprawling poems: “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “Credences of Summer,” “The Rock.” None of these, I felt, would be appropriate for this project. They would dominate, not only in length, but in sheer scope and ambition over the other poems, unless, of course, I began choosing great long poems from each poet, and then...well, you can see how that snowball would start rolling. So, I finally settled on the later poem “Long and Sluggish Lines.” Contrary to how many feel and contrary to what I seek in most other poets, I am drawn toward the last pages of Stevens’ Collected Poems for the restful, arcane, and austere beauty that those poems inhabit. He seems very much, in reaching at the end of his life, to have come home in these poems—to have come home, not only from the tropicali lushness of Harmonium back to the New England grey skies of Hartford, but to have returned from the epistemological voyages of the imagination that mark almost every poem heretofore in his career. While some say it is all old hat for him at this point, that he could write these poems in his sleep, I agree, and that is what I love about them. They are feel effortless and, in being so, resonate as the poems coming from a unique and truly collected “sense of the world,” as Stevens liked to put it. Also, as in this poem, from the precipice of old age they look out on death and see a wonderful infancy, in which “you [are] not born yet…/...in this wakefulness inside a sleep.”  

2.

WET CASEMENTS

John Ashbery

                 When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open                  
                 doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.

                                         Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country

The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected

In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through

Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of

Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your

Ghostly transparent face. You in Falbalas

Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics, 

The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you

Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)

Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,

Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present

Which would have its own opinions on these matters,

Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes

That first mentioned our name at some crowded cocktail

Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)

Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet

For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in

And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can't have it, and this makes me angry.

I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that

Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling

Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at least see my complete face

Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

I shall keep to myself.

I shall not repeat others' comments about me.

John Ashbery is, admittedly, my other obsession. Another difficult choice, I picked “Wet Casements” from his almost mid-career collection Houseboat Days. Following in the shadow of his runaway hit Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, “Wet Casements” addresses the anxieties of public life with both remarkable sensitivity and typical Ashbery evasiveness. Through the complex syntax and roaming meta-discourse of the poem’s bulk, identity is passed around like currency at a cocktail party, eventually to disintegrate in some fourth-party’s wallet. What really makes this poem, however, is the startling, and somewhat childish, assertiveness that Ashbery comes back into the poem with: “I want that information very much today,/ Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.” Following this, we witness the wonderful transformation of this anger into a bridge “on which people may dance for the feeling/ Of dancing on a bridge”—a beautifully constructive use of negative energy, if I may say so. This sudden, yet bizarrely inevitable turn this poem takes is one of the things I love most about Ashbery. His poems, at their best, make you feel like you are lost somehow in the familiar streets of your hometown, seeing things for yet another first time.

3.

 from MAYAKOVSKY

Frank O'Hara

4.

Now I am quietly waiting for 

the catastrophe of my personality 

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

 I am not ashamed to say that I was introduced to this poem by the TV show Mad Men. It is a terrific show. If I remember correctly, it is at the end of the second or third season when the main character reads the last section of Frank O’Hara’s “Mayakovsky” as some montage is summing things up in the background. I felt stupid I had never read this poem before, that I had not read more of O’Hara in general, so immediately after the show was over, I tracked down the poem and it gave me shivers all over again. I include here only the fourth section of the poem partially because this was the section I had had this reaction to and partially because I like the fourth section significantly more than the rest of the poem. Additionally, as the notes to the Collected Poems describes, James Schuyler actually assembled this poem from four loose poems O’Hara had lying around and titled it, upon O’Hara’s insistence that he should name it, “Mayakovsky” because O’Hara had been reading him lately. Interestingly, of the four sections, the first three had been written over the summer, while the last had been written in February. To me, this justifies orphaning this section of the poem from the whole as it seems it was an orphan to begin with. The solemn and stark repetition of phrases make this the most wintry poem I can think of. So delicately, we hear the personality softly crack as when crossing a frozen pond we reach the other bank and hope, “perhaps I am myself again.”

4.

THE GREAT LONELINESS


 Mary Ruefle

By March the hay bales were ripped open

exposed in the fields

like bloated gray mice 

who died in December.

I came upon them at dusk

and their attar lifted my spine 

until I felt like turning over an old leaf.

So I walked on, a walking pitchfork.

From every maple hung a bucket or two

collecting blood to be distributed across America

so people could rise from their breakfast

healthy, hoping to make a go of it again.

Now this is a riddled explanation

but I am a historian of pagan means

and must walk five miles a day

to cover the period I will call

The Great Loneliness

and the name will stick so successfully

that for years afterwards children will complain

at meals and on sunny days and in the autumn and at Easter

that their parents are unnecessarily mute

and their parents will look down harshly

upon the plates and beach towels and leaves and bunnies

and say you don't know what you are talking about

you never lived through The Great Loneliness

and if you had you would never speak.

And the children will turn away

and consider the words, or lack of them,

and how one possible explanation

might be that inside our bodies 

skeletons grow at an increasingly secretive rate,

though they never mention it,

even amongst themselves.

Mary Ruefle’s poems just put me in awe of their human strangeness. They are “strange” in the way Victor Shklovsky uses the word in his language, ostranenie: “as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic,” he writes “and art exists that one may recover the sensation of life...of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” For me, Ruefle’s poem “The Great Loneliness” truly invigorates the complex feeling of cross-generational isolation that exists within families and within societies as a whole. The poem is almost allegorical in this way; I feel a sincere connection to this strange and wonderful little scene. I wonder, in reading her poems, if she likes the films of David Lynch.

5.

FROM AN ISLAND

 James Tate

Fogged in all day, the long, low horns announcing

the passing of another ghostship.

But we see nothing. It's as if a curtain had been dropped.

Go back into yourself, it says. None of this matters

to you anymore. All that drama, color, movement―

you can live without it. It was an illusion,

a tease, a lie. There is nothing out here but smoke

from the rubble that was everything,

everything you wanted, everything you thought

you needed. Ships passing, forget it.

Children bathing, there's no such thing.

Let go, your island is a mote of dust.

But the horns of the ghostship say, remember us,

we remember you.

Because I could not decide between an old Tate or a new Tate poem—the difference, I my mind, is pretty significant—I chose one that seems to fall perfectly in the middle. This short poem “From an Island,” comes from his 1994 collection A Worshipful Company of Fletchers.  If pressed to give two reasons why Tate is one of my favorites, my two reasons would be for Imagination and for Humor. When I stumbled upon Tate (through his more recent work), he gave me exactly what I was seriously lacking in my poetry: a real-life funny bone. I was stunned, am stunned, at how loose and goofy he can be, yet still tether it all to the most existential elements of living in this century. In its quasi-solemnity and forlorn tone, “From an Island” is a somewhat atypical poem for Tate; still, I like it. It reminds me of the nocturne paintings by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, which I similarly love. It takes pleasure in the veiled mystery of things, of the darkness, and its unseen. The sound of the ghostship’s horns seem to transcend the doubt that racks the poem, assuring the reader of not only the imagination’s existence but the existence of hope in a fog-haunted world. 

6.

 from The Dream Songs

John Berryman

1.

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,―a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry's side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don't see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea 

and empty grows every bed. 

Even though it is an obvious and heavily anthologized one, Berryman’s Dream Song #1 continues to blow my socks off every time I reread it. Perhaps what I love most about it is its perfectly wrought syntax. The first time I read it, I remember being completely amazed that a poet could do (had done, like 50 years ago) what Berryman does with a sentence. It was a new way of thinking about language for me, and still it reminds me of the dexterity of poetry. So much has been said about this poem, I don’t feel the need to add anything more. Just feel how pounding and oppressive the inversions of the final two lines are: “Hard on the land wears the strong sea/ and empty grows every bed.” 

7.

AGLOW

  Matthew Zapruder

Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under this sky.

Where were you Tuesday? I was at the El Rancho Motel

in Gallup. Someone in one of the nameless rooms

was dying, slowly the ambulance came, just another step

towards the end. An older couple asked me

to capture them with a camera, gladly I rose and did

and then back to my chair. I thought of Paul Celan,

one of those poets everything happened to

strangely as it happens to everyone. In German

he wrote he rose three pain inches above the floor,

I don't understand but I understand. Did writing

in German make him a little part of whoever

set in motion the chain of people talking who pushed

his parents under the blue grasses of the Ukraine?

No. My name is Ukrainian and Ukrainians killed everyone

but six people with my name. Do you understand

me now? It hurts to be part of the chain and feel rusty

and also a tiny squeak now part of what makes

everything go. People talk a lot, the more they do

the less I remember in one of my rooms someone

is always dying. It doesn't spoil my time is what

spoils my time. No one can know what they've missed,

least of all my father who was building a beautiful boat

from a catalogue and might still be. Sometimes I feel him

pushing a little bit on my lower back with a palm 

made of ghost orchids and literal wind. Today

I'm holding onto holding onto what Neko Case called

that teenage feeling. She means one thing, I mean another,

I mean to say that just like when I was thirteen

it has been a hidden pleasure but mostly an awful pain

talking to you with a voice that pretends to be shy

and actually is, always in search of the question

that might make you ask me one in return. 

In talking about poetry lately, I have found myself referencing the line from Zapruder’s poem in which he says “I don’t understand but I understand.” For me, this explains so much about, and so simply, the position of the reader in the most profound encounters with poetry. To straddle that fence, to hum in the discordance of that realm between knowledge and mystery, control and the uncontrollable, is to feel one of the true wonders of existence: that you are here, you don’t know why, and that’s cool. Stevens wrote constantly about this—the harmony of opposites—most often marking the Imagination and Reality as the two primary poles. While Zapruder gets at this from a much different angle than Stevens, I feel like they’re aiming for the same target, “in search of the question that might make you ask me one in return.” 

8.

WHAT AN UNDERTAKER DOES TO HIS FAMILY AT NIGHT

Heather Christle

What an undertaker does to his family at night

cannot be spoken of in man's paraphasic tongue.

For that we need actual metal. Steel signs

arranged by giants. We expect them any minute.

We can hear them sighing and soiling

themselves behind the great mountain.

Compared to the undertaker they lack a career.

Most of the world gets embroidered in the end.

We know that. It's a fact we carry around

like a small sack of seeds with a hole.

Most of our lives got forgotten. It's an assignment,

a motherhood that can't be avoided. I'm not Catholic.

Episcopalian poets control the future from 1953.

Which is the reason for houses. When I'm born

the whole world's born with me. And time

contained in a button. My first trip to the moon,

then my last. I almost stayed there, but then

I remembered Earth's need for new rocks.

I tugged the string and came sputtering back into air.

I have never attended a baseball game, but I understood

it is the only place on this continent where I could

finally stop lying and sleep. I apologize to everyone.

Darling offspring, terrible in Butte, I don't believe in you.

If you're under a sheet, you're a ghost. If you're under

my feet, you're a plant in a poem by an Episcopalian poet.

During the first wireless era, department stores moved

information from one area to another in canisters

shot through pneumatic tubes. That is how I travel.

There are times I'd like to be perfect, i.e. digital.

Other times my knees and elbows are brass and

Catholic poets from 1910 are polishing me. Years ago

at parties we tried to touch people for as long as we could.

Strangers. Once we stood on their couch to sing

the national anthem. My favorite kind of singing

is choral, but I don't believe in harmony. When we all

sing the same notes, we wake a newborn monster.

In line with what I’ve been saying above, Heather Christle’s poem is quite simply a poem that I love and do not know exactly how or why. Like many of her poems from the collection The Difficult Farm, it’s a poem of leap-frogging non-sequiturs that miraculously holds together. She travels effortlessly from the moon to a baseball game, from a couch at a party to sleeping monsters of songs. It is a real feat how much ground she covers in her poems and the strange worlds she opens while doing so. As crazy as they are, I trust her insights and I just simply love being part of her voyage.

9.

[ETERNITY IS...]

Tomaž Šalamun

Eternity is

cruel and crystal.

It ruins

everything alive.

It replaces people and

loves and does not

open 

the well. With a hand

you dust a glass

you do not 

break it. Let every 

love 

die as

a man does. Death

protects us.

There are so many Tomaz Šalamun poems I would have liked to include here, but this rather short and recent one has really stuck with me much like a pleasant splinter over the past few months. I remember exactly where I was when I first read it and where I read it again. The first time I was on bus coming from New York City to Boston, still in the outer-boroughs stuck in traffic in Queens. I doge-eared the untitled page. The second time was in New Hampshire, at Wagon Hill in Madbury/ Durham looking out on the Pisqataqua Bay on an unseasonable day in October that, by normal standards, was perhaps too cold to be sitting by the water and reading. There, I decided to commit it this one to memory. Arguably, this is one of Šalamun’s more “idea” driven pieces—though, I could be wrong in making this judgement—and, philosophically, this notion of Death as a sheepdog protector against the cruelty of Eternity is greatly comforting to me. As small as it is, it feels like a huge poem to me. The closed door of the well, the disembodied hand dusting a glass and not breaking it, all loom huge between the physical polarities of the poem: eternity and death. And how charged with humanity that image of dusting is! The hand caring for the glass, crystal like eternity, like a fragile pet, as we all do with our secret assumptions of our own immortality. That Salamun is speaking against such hubris, arguing for death as our protector, is what makes this poem so insightful, and one I could read over and over. 

10.

NO ENCORES. NO AUTOGRAPHS.

 John Gallaher

When I was little, and could float,

I made up my mind to touch everything

 on the way. Here I go and

Yes into the red leaves, the winter logic.

Waving seemed so sad

when I was mild, and could hear

the sounds of the house

growing into the hill. The eternal workings

of the going-to-be,

while out to the left

there's a hole in the overcast. A little hole.

It may be growing,

it may be shrinking. Hard to tell.

Either way, it comes back now

without meaning.

It comes back as people I knew once,

fading in and out of buildings and trees

in a north wind,

while, full of spider webs, the porch

glistens in dew and first light.

A foggy translucence covers the world.

You can go out and read the argument

in the grass.

Just take off your shoes.

You can call yourself a pilgrim,

noting the texture of matter.

You can go from here to here.

John Gallaher is perhaps my favorite currently lesser-known poet (or perhaps he is better known than I think he is; in either case, he should be). His poems seem alive to me in the ways Ashbery and Stevens’ seem alive—“poem[s] of the act of the mind”—though without the intellectual clutter. Also, they are very suburban poems and, having grown up in a suburbia myself, this interests me deeply. “No Encores. No Autographs” is taken from his 2007 collection The Little Book of Guesses and, to me, seems like a fitting poem to end with. Having gone “from here to here,” Gallaher’s poem is very much about touching everything and how that everything can exist between that infinitely acute distance of the moment. It is about living in the “Unified Field,” as David Lynch likes to use the term, and there is a truly poetic acceptance of all things—from tract-housing developments to shopping plazas—in Gallaher’s work that is neither pardoning nor ironic. It is about living where we live in the time in which we live and opening our eyes to it; it’s about standing here in wonder.