From Rhymed Lines to Mongrel Tongues: Now Online!

Not long ago the latest issue of the Hudson Review hit the streets, with a little survey of new poetry I wrote inside.  It's called "From Rhymed Lines to Mongrel Tongues," and takes a look at new books by X.J. Kennedy, Charles Simic, and Julian Talamantez Brolaski, along with very strong debut volumes by Alan Felstenthal and Airea D. Matthews.  Now, thanks to the good people at Ugly Duckling Presse, you can read it online here!

From Rhymed Lines to Mongrel Tongues: X.J. Kennedy, Charles Simic, Alan Felsenthal, Airea D. Matthews, & Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Rejoice! The new Hudson Review has dropped with a satisfying clunk into the mailboxes of subscribers and onto the magazine racks of the more self-respecting sort of bookstores! As always, there are many fine things—including, this time out, Mark Jarman on postmodern poetry, A.E. Stallings on the literature of the sea, and much else.  I've contributed a "poetry chronicle" feature, a round-up of recent books I've found impressive in various ways.  It's called "From Rhymed Lines to Mongrel Tongues" and covers a range from formalism through Surrealism to deeply experimental works. The poets are X.J. Kennedy, Charles Simic, Alan Felsenthal, Airea D. Matthews, & Julian Talamantez Brolaski.  Here's a small taste from what I have to say about each...

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X.J. Kennedy isn’t just a poet—he’s a poet emeritus, or so claimed R.S. Gwynn, holding a laurel wreath aloft over Kennedy’s head at the 2017 West Chester Poetry conference. With dozens of poetry collections, textbooks, edited works and volumes of light and children’s verse behind him, Kennedy has certainly earned the title—and nowhere does he seem more emeritus than in the poems of That Swing.  Here, in Kennedy’s signature combination of storytelling, formal nimbleness, and comic moments mixed with reverie and melancholy, we find the poet assessing the past and looking out on a future beyond his own lifetime...

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Unlike X.J. Kennedy, whose That Swing peers into the dark with uncharacteristic frequency, Charles Simic is the kind of poet who has long since set up housekeeping in the dark existential abyss.  His latest collection, Scribbled in the Dark, contains poems in his established idiom: short, eerie pieces rich with image and stingy with discursive explanation—poems in which the world appears uncanny and, for the most part, vaguely menacing.  The images are typical of Simic: injured flies, threadbare gypsies, bare light bulbs hanging over rooms equally bare, an actor “unable to recall his lines/At the end of some tragic farce.”

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One could be forgiven for thinking that some of the poems in Alan Felsenthal’s confident debut collection, Lowly, belong in a book like Scribbled in the Dark.  Were one to meet Felsenthal’s “El Dorado” running wild in the deserts of Arabia, one might instantly scream out “Simic!”:

A firefly committed to the orphanage

the night I graduated

and prayed for the petite kindness

unknown to an aiming hand

inside a shoe.

The imagery, the tone, the darkly comic sense of a violent world devoid of divine justice: it all seems to come out of the Simic playbook. But this sort of poetry doesn’t represent the heart of Felsenthal’s book, which is in essence an extended rumination, over many poems, on the theme of connecting with one’s ancestors through rituals connected with death and remembrance...

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If Felsenthal fears distraction and forgetting, Airea D. Matthews fears self-deception—or so we can gather from her debut collection, the Yale Younger Poets Prize-winning Simulacra. The book—a contender for strongest debut collection of the year—is formally audacious. Matthews packs it with lyric poetry, prose poems, and closet drama, as well as epistolary poems and their contemporary analog, poems composed of fictitious text messages. The poems of Simulacra treat the theme of addiction—not from the addict’s point of view, but from the point of view of the addict’s family. The poems are particularly powerful in revealing a well-meaning family’s complicity. They cast light on the willingness of families to enable destructive behavior and, especially, the urge to cover up violence and disorder, to put up a false front so as to convince the world, and themselves, that everything is somehow okay when it most decidedly is not.

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Julian Talamantez Brolaski is, I say with some confidence, the only half-Native American, trans-male, country music singing student of Renaissance poetry writing today; and Of Mongrelitude, his third collection, is as idiosyncratic as his background might suggest.  It is a stylistically bold book, with debts to popular culture, Native American mythology, and the classics of English literature, as well as to the experimental tradition in American poetry. Like Brolaski’s previous collection, Advice for Lovers, it is also an emotionally engaging book, provided one is willing to dial into the formally challenging frequency in which it broadcasts.

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I do hope you get a chance to pick up an issue and read the whole chronicle... or better yet, get your hands on the books themselves—they number among the best of the season.

Charles Simic’s Stones: Three Speculations

I remember lying in a ditch and staring at some pebbles while German bombers were flying over our heads. That was long ago. I don’t remember the face of my mother nor the faces of the people who were there with us, but I still see those perfectly ordinary pebbles.  

“It is not ‘how’ things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” says Wittgenstein. I felt precisely that. Time had stopped. I was watching myself watching the pebbles and trembling with fear. Then time moved on and the experience was over.

Not long ago I was working on a review of some books by Charles Simic when there was a knock at the door. It was a colleague of mine, a biologist, asking if I wanted to hit the bike trails. I did, but I also wanted to show him the passage above, from one of Charles Simic’s essays in The Life of Images, his selected prose. “Why,” I asked, “do you suppose Simic remembered those pebbles?” 

There were so many other things that one thinks might have taken precedence in his mind on that horrible day in Belgrade at the end of the Second World War, when as a child Simic had feared for his life.  I told my colleague the theory I’d been mulling over, and with his help—and his expertise—developed two more.

The Uncanniness of Stones 

Decades ago, James Atlas classed Simic among the "stones and bones" poets, whose imagery seemed inevitably to involve one or another, and Simic's fascination with stones has not abated since: earlier this year, I stood outside a small museum on the Upper West Side, talking to a poet I admire, a poet committed to eloquence in expression and the beauties of traditional forms of rhetoric. Simic's name came up, and the poet told me he always pictured Simic holding a stethoscope up to a chunk of rock, listening for some deep message, for a cryptic Truth. "It's a stone, Charlie! Give it up!" he said miming an action that looked something like grabbing a poet by the shoulders and shaking some sense into him.

Simic has long been aware of how his fascination with stones is seen in some quarters, and even responded to Atlas, saying:

...people have written genuinely about stones and are interested in a stone as the utmost kind of presence. A stone is the uttermost limit; there’s nothing beyond stone. It’s an object of incredible interest and variety. I like stones. I love stones. Stone is so alien to us, distant from us, that any attempt to speak across that distance is interesting... 

Simic's sense of stones as being in our world but alien to it seemed important to me as a way into the passage about the pebbles and the bombers, and was the basis of my first theory of their memorability.

As he lay in the ditch, the young Simic was struck not by the bombers or by the people around him, but by the stones. But weren't they the least relevant of details in the scene? Well, maybe that was precisely their fascination: there they were, palpable, immediate, but also strange—because they were both within but also somehow outside the human context of war. They were part of the scene of fear and carnage, but fear and carnage meant nothing to them. And no outcome of the scene, or of the war, would make a difference to them: they would endure in any dystopian, utopian, apocalyptic or muddled outcome. They were there at hand, the most ordinary of things, but they were also absolutely divorced from human experience, and from the context of war, which was the only context that could matter to Simic at that moment. They were familiar, these stones, even mundane—but at the same time deeply alien.

This simultaneity of the familiar and the strange is, of course, the very definition of the uncanny—that most fascinating and disconcerting category of aesthetics. Certain creepy dolls are uncanny, like us but unlike us; the experience of déjà vu is uncanny, and Simic's pebbles were uncanny, too: hence the way they lodged more firmly in his memory that any other, more clearly relevant, detail.

The Neurobiology of Frightened Rats

My colleague listened to my thoughts about the uncanny patiently—he always takes an interest in humanistic ideas—but I could tell he was not entirely convinced.  I asked what he thought, and he told me he imagined it may have more to do with the neurobiology of memory.  We're still in the early stages of understanding these things, but experiments have indicated that fear has an important effect on memory formation, and Simic's experience seemed consistent with some findings in recent experiments.  The one my colleague recounted in some detail had to do with how rats remember maze navigation routes.  The general idea is: frightened rats seem to have much better spatial memory than rats do under normal conditions, and better visio-spatial perceptions.  Apparently under conditions of great stress, the brain processes visual and spatial information differently than it does under ordinary circumstances, probably for reasons readily enough explained by the invocation of Darwin: it is a positive survival trait to be able to remember how one found one's way to safety under extremely frightening circumstances.

This certainly correlates with my own experience, and that of others, during extreme situations: I remember quite clearly the moment after a suddenly opened car door collided with my bicycle and sent me flying through the air.  When my helmet hit the pavement, it seemed to drag along the surface for a long time, and I remember thinking "why can't I pull my head up? I've got to pull my head up!" Of course there was no chance to pull my head up: the moment of impact was barely a second, but my brain, through some complex form of chemistry, was processing the experience differently than it would otherwise.  Time seemed stretched out, and sensations that would have seemed instantaneous under ordinary experience came to me in great detail.  Simic's brain, in that ditch in the war, would have been working quite differently than it normally would have.

But why the pebbles?  Here my colleague invoked the thinking of C.D. Broad, the man Aldous Huxley famously quoted in The Doors of Perception.  Broad, a Cambridge-based philosopher of mind, had said:

...the function of the brain and the nervous system and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive.... The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

In extreme circumstances, said my colleague, the mind doesn't know what is likely to be useful, and ceases to filter for probable relevance—hence the better visio-spatial perceptions and memories of frightened rats; hence the strange experience of time and space I had during my cycling accident; hence the openness of Simic's mind to levels of detail, and to things in a scene not deemed relevant under ordinary circumstances.  Hence, too, Simic's sense of time having stopped, and the searing of those stones into his memory.  Of course he would be haunted by them, and wonder what they meant—of course they would become uncanny.  And a sense of the uncanniness of those pebbles would form the habitual patterns of his imagination, populating his poems with eerie, uncanny stones.

The Faces of the Dead

But one detail still remained unexplained: why would Simic not remember the faces of his mother and the other people in the ditch with them?  It seems one wouldn't forget the expression on one's mother's face at a time like that, especially if you were, as Simic was, a child.  One possible answer as to why Simic wouldn't remember comes from a small verbal tic in another of his essays, written two years after the essay about the bombing, and dealing with the end of the war:

It was the day after the liberation of Belgrade.  I was up in the fairgrounds by St. Mark's church with a few older boys, more or less snooping around.  Then, all of a sudden, we saw them!  Two German soldiers, obviously dead, stretched out on the ground.  We drew closer to take a better look.  They had no weapons.  Their boots were gone, but there was a helmet, which had fallen off to the side.  I don't remember what the others did, but I went for the helmet.  I tiptoed so as not to wake the dead men.  I also kept my eyes averted.  I never saw their faces, even if sometimes I think I did. Everything else about that moment is still intensely clear to me.

Everything remembered with intensity: this is consistent with the way memories are often formed under conditions of fear.  But the faces are somehow not remembered.  Or are they?  "I never saw their faces, even if sometimes I think I did," he writes.  Why would he think he did? Why would everything else have been seen, but not the faces? One answer, which can only be speculative, is that he did see the faces of the dead men, and that the memory tries to come back, to swim to the surface of the conscious mind—but that Simic will not, or cannot, admit such a traumatic sight into his known world.  He needs to admit something else, something less horrible, in place of those images, remembers the rest of the scene with great clarity instead.  Everything brightens, to help dim the unacceptable image, which refuses, entirely, to go away.

We might apply a similar speculation to the scene in the ditch: the unremembered faces must have been seen, and the sight of one's own mother in terror would be too much for a child—such a sight reveals the ultimate powerlessness of one's protector, the ultimate exposure of us to deadly forces beyond our control.  It's not a sight to remember: and one must put something else in its place, something less threatening, something that connects us, somehow, to a world beyond the context of the war.  And then there are the pebbles, waiting, there, in but also outside the war.  They fill the space otherwise inhabited by trauma.  And they'll fill that space in Simic's poetry until the day he dies.

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The review I was working on when my friend came to the door will cover Simic's The Life of Images:Selected Prose and his collection of poems The Lunatic.  It will appear in Boston Review later this year.

After Miłosz: Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski Talk Poetry in Chicago

So two American poets laureate, a Polish poet, and a Harvard professor walk into an emergency room. It sounds like the set-up for some kind of literary joke, but in actuality it was how things began last weekend when Philip Levine, Charles Simic, and Adam Zagajewski sat down for a discussion moderated by Steve Burt downstairs at Chicago's Chopin Theater (for reasons I never discovered, the downstairs part of the Chopin is called "The Emergency Room," and looks the part: painted bright white with teal accents, it features a harshly-lit stage with a gurney in the background). I wanted to make some joke about the gurney and the advanced age of the laureates, but would have had to tear Chicu Reddy, who was seated next to me, away from his discussion with Oren Izenberg and others from the University of Chicago English department, so I let it pass.


The gathering was part of a two-day event called "After Miłosz," one of about 200 celebrations of the Miłosz centenary worldwide—Adam Zagajewski mentioned that this was the tenth such event at which he had spoken this year. There were three parts to the evening's events: readings of Miłosz's works by the participants, an open discussion among the panelists, and then a brief period in which Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski reading from their own works. Here's what I took note of in my battered Moleskine (direct quotes are approximate, from memory and quickly-taken notes—I regret any inaccuracies).


The Priest and the Jester


Philip Levine began by speaking of Miłosz as a great lyric poet of landscapes, and of water, reading poems that demonstrated this. Charles Simic then read Miłosz's poem "Encounter":


We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.


And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.


That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.


O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.


One of the great achievements of Miłosz, said Simic, was to make us more conscious of the world around us, this being "the essence of the lyric poem," which comes to us trying to be disinterested, hoping (perhaps impossibly) to gaze at the world as it really is, making us see it again as if for the first time. This was not the Miłosz of The Captive Mind, the anti-communist writer welcomed by Americans during the Cold War. This was Miłosz as a someone both simpler and more profound than the writer of ideological works.


Adam Zagajewski's recollections of how he first came to Miłosz soon complicated the emerging picture of the Miłosz the lyricist. Zagajewski read the first stanza of "Throughout Our Land," which he'd had been very hard to find when he was a student in Poland. He'd had to lie to a Dean about being a graduate student writing a thesis on Miłosz to be admitted to a special reading room where he was allowed to see the poem: whatever the lyrical qualities of the poems may have been, they didn't prevent the Polish authorities from seeing them as potentially ideological, and they were kept out of general circulation.


Despite the allure inherent in all things forbidden, Zagajewski confessed to not having much liked Miłosz, at least initially. "There was an essay by Leszek Kolakowski, quite famous in Poland," said Zagajewski, "called 'The Priest and the Jester.'" In this essay, he went on to say, Kolakowski distinguishes between two different types of writer: the priest, who is a guardian of tradition and absolutes, and the jester, who doubts all things. "It was then not popular to be a priest in Poland," said Zagajewski. "We liked Zbigniew Herbert, who was a jester. I wanted to be a jester. Wisława Szymborska was a jester. To us, Miłosz seemed like a priest. But we were wrong." Instead of a priest, Miłosz was a poet in which the priest and the jester wrestled. There was a constant dialogue, sometimes a war, between the two, and this made for a rich and complex body of work. It also made Miłosz a more difficult poet to love than most others. “We love a poet for his voice,” said Zagajewski, “but Miłosz had two voices, always.” After a brief scuffle among the poets on stage about whether Miłosz had two voices, or one voice with different modes, or simply offered different points of view, things settled down. The room, I thought, had taken Zagajewski’s point.


Truth, Beauty, and Exile


After the initial readings, Steve Burt led a wide-ranging conversation, which kept circling back to the question of the poet as craftsman (Levine’s statement that “craft may not be enough, but it’s presumptuous to say that it’s somehow secondary” drew a great deal of applause). At one point Burt began to reframe the question by saying “there’s a difference between being a bricklayer, which is an applied art, and being an arranger of Japanese cherry blossoms…” but before he could finish, someone (I think it was Simic) was quoting Miłosz’s poem “What Once Was Great”:


What once was great, now appeared small.
Kingdoms were fading like snow-covered bronze.


What once could smite, now smites no more.
Celestial earths roll on and shine.


Streched on the grass by the bank of a river,
As long, long ago, I launch my boats of bark.


I’m not sure where Simic was going to go with this, because Zagajewski jumped in, sparks flying in his mind between “What Once Was Great” and the image of the Japanese cherry blossoms. “Once Miłosz chose exile,” said Zagajewski, “he became a Japanese poet, an arranger of cherry blossoms, because exile was so different from the environment in which he read his poems in Poland under the Nazis, and then under Stalin.” There was an underground poetry scene even under Hitler, he explained, and people gathered, at some risk, in private apartments to hear Miłosz read. His poems spoke to their condition as occupied and oppressed people, offering a truth not available in public places. “His poems helped people to live under Stalinism,” said Zagajewski, “they needed and adored him, and he liked it, because, like all poets, he was a little vain.” When he read in Poland there was an echo, a resonance of the poem with the needs of the broad public. “But in exile, that echo went away. Now in exile there was silence, and he became increasingly a self-deprecating craftsman.” Where he had written poems devoted to speaking truths that people needed to hear (“What Once Was Great” to be a poem in this mode), he became more a poet of beauty and spiritual yearning (I take “Encounter” to be closer to this sort of thing).


I see what Zagajewski means.  It’s common for people in oppressive situations to turn to poetry as a source for the articulation of values and needs that go unarticulated elsewhere. And in most contemporary Western societies, much of poetry’s marginality relative to other modes of expression has to do with our good fortune in having a great deal of freedom to express our views and needs through other means. A recent article in the satirical newspaper The Onion made some comic mileage out of the notion that Americans were turning to the works of one of the panel’s participants, Philip Levine, to see them through our current economic crisis: there was no similar opportunity for humor when Miłosz read in occupied Poland. And if Americans truly hungered for poetry en masse, would a reading in which a current laureate, a former laureate, and one of Europe’s most prominent poets, draw a crowd of about 75, the number present in the Chopin theater? 


American History, American Landscapes


Toward the end of the evening’s events, readings and discussions flowed into one another more-or-less seamlessly, and the readings of works by Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski turned into something of a discussion of the role of history and landscape for American poets. “History,” Levine remarked, “should only be read in a funeral home, next to a coffin, preferably the poet’s own,” since the nature of the material is so very often dire. But still, one ought not to write without a sense of history, he maintained. “I was just talking to Robert Hass and Jane Hirschfield, and they told me American poets have no sense of history. Well: Simic was born in Belgrade, my parents fled from Europe: we know history.” As, of course, did Miłosz—how could it be otherwise for him, the Polish twentieth century being what it was?


Talk then ranged to the topic of landscape, particularly the Californian landscapes of Miłosz’s poetry. “You can love California landscapes, and be ecstatic in them” said Simic, “but I’ve lived in New Hampshire for decades, which is more of a Robert Frost country—dark, cold, suspicious, miserable: of course Miłosz hated Robert Frost.” Levine chimed in to say that he, too, had become a Californian poet, but his California was the inland valley, not a wild landscape, nor even an agricultural landscape. “It’s an agribusiness landscape, in which whole classes of people are sub-people, and the few have got everything sewn up so tight they’ll never share.” In this, it reminded him of the Detroit of his youth, he said. “But don’t get me wrong—I loved Detroit. I’d probably still love it… if it were still there.”


As the things wound down, I noticed they’d run longer than I expected, and I was unable to stick around and see if I could drag Steve Burt or any of the poets a few blocks uptown to the tiny upstairs room at Myopic Books, where Larry Sawyer was hosting readings by Ann Shaw and Roger Reeves. I’m sure those reading went well, though: if there’s one thing the current American poetry scene makes clear, it’s that you don’t need huge crowds to have an excellent event.