Kevin Miller, Vanish

/2 Comments/in , /by

VANISH, Kevin Miller. Wandering Aengus Press, PO Box 334, Eastsound, WA 98245, 2020, 81 pages, $18 paper, https://wanderingaenguspress.com/index.html.

Kevin Miller’s poems are rooted in the material world, juice glasses, wet laundry, garden hoes, baseballs, beer and Lucky Strikes, but also blossoms, chickadees, rivers. In Vanish, which won the 2019 Wandering Aengus Book Award, that world seems about to blink out. In the title poem, the first in this collection, the word itself seems at risk: “whispers its swish of sound / as a trail of breath follows / an image you hold like the title / of the film you saw two nights / ago, no longer on the tip of anything…”

Paula Meehan describes Vanish as “teem[ing] with ghosts and their reckonings…narrative raised to elegiac heights.” But those heights are shot through with particularity, grounded in things.

Which makes me think of William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things!” And Sylvia Plath: “I love the thinginess of things.” I loved spending the morning in Miller’s world, and with these poems. Here’s one:

It’s Like Weather

Sixty days without rain, the leaves
fall from heat, the colors fail fast
as if too soon the surrender,
loss without regret, you miss rain
like some miss breakfast, or a cigarette,
what it is—day after day sameness
until you want to scream, and you
know no one’s at fault, still fault
settles it, allows blame, and blame
feels good, like a shot of vengeance,
it bruises in ways the fall colors
come alive under the skin, again
a fall, a parting, a loss you forget
with the first storm, when a fire,
tea, and a blanket find you together,
cozy enough for a change, though
too long under a relentless sky
becomes its other side, and you long
for the same sun, forgetting where
fault lay, nevertheless fault sends you
to your corners until first snow
or spring thaw turns you to each other,
and when this happens, you turn
blame to praise, overdue gratitude,
for if you made the dark, you must give
the light, if you kept the rain, you might
have brought the sun, and since no god
sleeps next to you in these beds, you share
the blame. Make praise your daily bread.

—Kevin Miller

“Make praise your daily bread” is such good advice.

I’m trying to find a way to point out that many of these poems are about marriage—both its dailiness, I think—but, more important, the gift of it (and, it seems, several grandchildren). I’m compelled to share one more short poem, in part because a second title beginning “It’s Like” caught my eye, but also because I wish I had written it.

It’s Like Feeding Horses

in a snowstorm, the sky descends
like a veil and conceals pastures an acre
at a time, the order that is fence lines
disappears in the marriage of earth and sky
as the two of you dish the flakes, collars up,
heads down, and what doesn’t vanish
is the idea of the horses and each other
silent within the whistling quiet of storm.
This is work whether you see it or not.

—Kevin Miller

Kevin Miller is a retired teacher—another connection—and lives in Tacoma, Washington. I’ve never met him, but he feels like an old friend.

I first encountered his poetry at Loren Webster’s blog, In a Dark Time, and you can skip over there to see another poem. Find additional poems at Terrain.org.

Elizabeth Austen, The Girl Who Goes Alone

/0 Comments/in /by

THE GIRL WHO GOES ALONE, Elizabeth Austen. Floating Bridge Press, 909 NE 43rd St, #205, Seattle, WA 98105, 2010, 40 pages, $12 paper, www.floatingbridgepress.org.

I was excavating shelves, looking for a more recent Floating Bridge chapbook—which I know I purchased last year—and I turned up this one. Yes, I read it a long time back, with pleasure, but it hasn’t ever made it onto the blog. So, here we are, another book about a poet, walking.

The Girl Who Goes Alone won the Floating Bridge chapbook award and was Elizabeth Austen’s poetry debut. Since 2010 she has gone on to write several books, including the full-length Every Dress a Decision (2011). She served as Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2014-2016. She is an acclaimed teacher and speaker. Her poems capture the “trance-like tidal pull / of sweat and flesh” (“For Lost Sainthood”), while at the same time eluding any grasp. Dave Meckleburg described The Girl Who Goes Alone as “an excellent feminist manifesto,” that “becomes a guidebook through the wilderness of being human that anyone can use.” Exactly.

In the title poem, warnings abound, “girls outside aren’t safe,” “Girls must be chaperoned”:

Tell someone you’re going into the woods alone
and they’ll fill your ears with every story they’ve ever heard
about trailside cougar attacks, cave-dwelling misogynists
lightning strikes, forest fires, flash floods
and psychopaths with a sixth sense of a woman alone in a tent.

But, this girl? She goes everywhere. (You can hear Austen read this poem at her website.)

Consequence

In case the river calls me, I carry
two stones. But this is a lie, Virginia.
I have only enough courage to carry on.
These stones are nothing more
than pocketed threats. I am not
anyone I expected to be.
Give me some message, dreamer
or give me back my sleep. Are we here
by grace? Virginia, you knew
the consequence of silence.
This page is the only prayer I know, the line
I follow into darkness. Is there anything
the body, the breakable body
can say or save?

—Elizabeth Austen

Learn more about Austen’s awesomeness at Pictures of Poets, https://wapoetlaureate.org, or her website. Be sure to check out some of her videos!

Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed

/0 Comments/in /by

URBAN TUMBLEWEED: NOTES FROM A TANKA DIARY, Harryette Mullen. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 2013, 127 pages, $15 paper, www.graywolfpress.org.

In 2020 I mentioned to a friend that I had been writing poems about my daily walks, and she dug around in her bookbag, pulled out Urban Tumbleweed, and gave it to me on the spot. At home, I read a page or two, here and there, and then put it away “for later.” I am really, really glad that I took it down this morning. Although individual tankas can delight—

The determination of a turtle
clambering out of a pond, up the slippery
side of a rock to rest in the sun. (p. 18)

—I discovered further pleasures by reading it all the way through at one go.

At the entrance to the botanical garden,
a sign hung on the gate forewarns: “Slow down.
Watch for turtles on the roads and paths.” (p. 47)

Mullen explains her project in the foreword:

My tanka diary began with a desire to strengthen a sensible habit by linking it to a pleasurable activity. I wanted to incorporate into my life a daily practice of walking and writing poetry. As committed as I am to writing, I needed a break in my routine, so I determined to alter my sedentary, unconsciously cramped posture as a writer habitually working indoors despite living here in “sunny California.” (p. vii)

A professor of creative writing and African American literature at UCLA and the author of seven more conventional poetry books (notably, Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for the National Book Award), Mullen adapts the traditional form of the Japanese verse of thirty-one syllables (originally printed as a single line of text, in English generally broken into five lines of 5-7-5-7-7) to suit herself. Each of her tankas is close to 31 syllables, but rendered in three lines. The main point was to walk, pen and notebook in her pocket, each day writing a single observation:

Another goal was to address the question, “What is natural about being human?” While Mullen’s observations are often about the natural world, they don’t stray far from newspaper stories, bus riders, and trash.

Along the roadside, someone has spilled
pink Styrofoam peanuts. They add color
to the grassy green, but I still prefer flowers. (p. 13)

Ha-ha-haw-haw, the dark bird’s rowdy laughter
as it flew over the heads of earthbound
pedestrians who didn’t get the joke. (p. 115)

In The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice, Tony Hoagland asks a question I’ve been pondering this month:

What do we want from a contemporary poetic voice? One good answer to that question is that we want to feel that we are encountering a speaker “in person,” a speaker who presents a convincingly complex version of the world and of human nature. When we commence reading a poem, we are starting a relationship, and we want that relationship to be with an interesting, resourceful companion. (p. 5)

I find that this is also true with an entire book of poetry. And even when I start out with some reluctance, I find that if I keep going I inevitably begin hearing the poet’s voice, maybe trusting it, definitely glimpsing the world through new eyes. At least, that’s how I felt this morning, reading Harryette Mullen’s 366 tankas. I have a feeling that her journey, in writing the poems, was much the same.

Although I don’t expect that I will soon burst into a book-length experiment with the tanka, I have decided to start carrying a notebook on my walks.

To read more about Harryette Mullen, follow this link.

Lorna Goodison, Turn Thanks

/0 Comments/in /by

TURN THANKS, Lorna Goodison. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1999, 95 pages, $15.95 paper, https://www.press.uillinois.edu.

The first two sections here (of four) are stories set into lines—stories of her family and gratitude, too. You kind of have to enter them with an open mind. And when you do, the wealth of images and playfulness of the language begin to find you.

Several poems celebrate place rather than ancestry. A poem ultimately about Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean begins: “There is a perfume rising off the sea today. / A scent of almond top notes and base notes of ambergris”; and culminates:

I think about Columbus and how he thought at first

these islands would be a source of gold,
of cotton and mastic, aloes, wood, and things invaluable

to him, poor thing. That sweet smell rising off the sea today.
May the perfumed tides wash my people now bright berries.

It’s clear what the better bounty is—a landscape and seascape rich in sights and scents, plenty, for those able to value it.

And then there’s the section, “The Mango of Poetry,” which addresses a number of poets, including Yeats and Akhmatova, and artists, too. Another sort of ancestry. (My attempts to categorize this book keep falling apart.) In the last section, “God a Me,” lyrical poems abound.

The poem I’m sharing is my favorite in the collection, the first in the book, and the first in an unnumbered sequence of three poems for her mother.

After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down

August, her large heart slows down then stops.
Fall now, and trees flame, catch a fire and riot

last leaves in scarlet and gold fever burning.
Remember when you heard Bob Marley hymn

“Redemption Song,” and from his tone and timbre
you sensed him traveling? He had sent the band home

and was just keeping himself company, cooling star,
sad rudeboy fretting on cowboy box guitar

in a studio with stray echo and wailing sound
lost singing scatting through the door of no return.

When the green goes, beloved, the secret is opened.
The breath falls still, the life covenant is broken.

Dress my mother’s cold body in a deep green gown.
Catch a fire and let fall and flame time come

after the green gown of my mother gone down.

—Lorna Goodison

Turn Thanks returns gratitude even for hatred and ill-use. These poems reminded me to be grateful for the wild woman who shows up, uninvited, “disheveled and weeping.” Who knows from where the next line will come?

To read more about Goodison, see my previous post, or go to Poetry Foundation.