Danusha Laméris, Bonfire Opera

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BONFIRE OPERA, Danusha Laméris. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 13250, 2020, 84 pages, $17 paper. https://upittpress.org.

What on earth am I to say about this stunning collection of poems?

Both elegiac (“nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash / dissolves and is taken…”) and a celebration of the body’s pleasures (“To feel the way / it lifts up the octaves of sky”), Bonfire Opera took a fillet knife to my emotions, laying them wide open.

I’m not alone in my assessment of its paradoxes, and its beauty. On the back cover, Colleen J. McElroy describes the book as “a vibrant folk opera….a balance of music and imagery.” Dean Rader writes: “Everything is alive in these poems, even loss. Even death. In these finely crafted lyrics, worms, berries, skin, hawks, dirt, and desire exist and even thrive in a symbiotic relationship…”

Some of the poems are long, and begin the way a conversation or a story might (“It was late afternoon and we were standing / on the deck”; “In those days, there was a woman in our circle…”) But poem after poem stretches itself into a crescendo of sounds and images. In the title poem (the one beginning, “In those days”):

…a voice lifted into the dark, high and clear
as a flock of blackbirds. And everything was very still,
the way the congregation quiets when the priest
prays over the incense, and the smoke wafts
up into the rafters. I wanted to be that free
inside the body, the doors of pleasure
opening, one after the next, an arpeggio
climbing the ladder of sky.

from “Bonfire Opera”

I wish I could read the whole book aloud to you, over a dinner of persimmons and salmon. But for now, just one poem. I chose this, by the way, in part because it hurled me back in time about twenty years, but also because it so well explains why Laméris won the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Prize.

Egg

And here it goes, again, the body
hauling one out of the ovary
like coal from a mine,
lifting it up from the mother lode
by the frayed wires of late progesterone.
I can feel the familiar cramp
of effort it takes to summon
a lone ovum: my forty-odd year friend,
my little homunculus, my dwindling sack
of genetic gold. How many moons
have I carried you deep inside the secret stores?
You came into this world with me,
down the narrow birth canal, buried in the girl
until the first blood. And here we are, still
performing our same old reproductive ritual,
more formality than use. A mock battle
staged by aging warriors, turned allies.
Childless, I’ve called myself—
a son in the grave, and another seedling
gone to ash. But now I see
how far we’ve traveled together,
me and my specks of yolk,
sealed in the same skin,
spores caught in their pinules
beneath the fern’s curled fronds,
barnacles on the back of a whale,
nuggets of ore covered in silt.

–Danusha Laméris

Sometimes, as I read, I think about who I might pass the book along to. But this book is one I’m going to hold onto. Like her first book, The Moons of August, it demands savoring.

You can read more about the poet, and several poems, at her website, and at Poetry Foundation.

It’s National Poetry Month!

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Every April I challenge myself to read one poetry book per day—tackling all those books I’ve impulse-bought or been given by friends over the past year. Last year, I went all-out at the blog (see my post about Kathleen Flenniken for a great example), contacting many of the poets and asking questions about how their books were created. This year, I’m scaling down, but I still want to share with you what I’m reading, and at least a poem and some links for each poet. Rather than a review, you might think of these as “appreciations.”

And before I get started on Gregory Pardlo’s Digest, a couple house-keeping announcements for the poets looking for further NaPoWriMo inspiration:

At the blog POETRYisEVERYTHING, bookstore owner and poet Chris Jarmick is sharing a poetry prompt for every day in April.

At The Poetry Department, Judy I. Kleinberg posts poetry news daily—local, national, or international—and she has a calendar for April events: https://thepoetrydepartment.wordpress.com/2022/03/31/get-out-the-calendar/

 

DIGEST, Gregory Pardlo. Four Way Books, POB 535, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, 2014, 78 pages, www.fourwaybooks.com.

Here’s one you may have heard of, as not only have I blogged about this book before, but Digest was the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. On the back cover, Campbell McGrath beautifully captures some of my own thoughts about this complex and mind-blowing excursion into literature, philosophy, and the extraordinary domestic: “Gregory Pardlo’s engaged, intelligent poetry, with its exuberant range of cultural and historical reference, feel[s] a bit like stumbling out of the desert to encounter the Nile River. Smart and humane, Digest engages in lyricized textual analysis, playful philosophical exegesis, and satirical syllabi building.”

About that last—Pardlo includes a series of syllabi-like prose(ish) poems that delighted me. I thought of my days as an adjunct at the University of Washington, where each quarter we competed to come up with the most stunning (and increasingly obscure) paragraph describing our upcoming courses.

Ghosts in the Machine: Synergy and the Dialogic System

Self-effacing, the number zero stands austere, a window onto Nature’s
abhorrent force, a hyperborean rebuke to the tropic heat of being. We
might say zero is the perfection of affect, round as a pucker it dallies,
dispassionate, for a kiss. In this course, we will observe our stalwart
and lonely hero, zero, and its intercourse with the number one or,
what Nietzsche refers to as “Dionysiac rapture,” the “vision of mystical
Oneness” symbolizing the root assertion of self-surrender: yes. And
we will study how this primordial union begets the mystery of Zeno’s
arrow stitching the sky across a battlefield, or begets the way sweet
nothings from a random-dialing jailhouse phone might morbidly
prick the pulse. we will consider the connotative spark rattling like a
pinball in the void between two bumpers of denotation, overloading
the light bulb above our heads, or worse, animating anxieties strapped
to the gurney within. That one hand clapping, for example. For
example, the call is coming from inside the house.

The book begins with riffs on home and a lens that tilts both toward childhood and parenthood, and (I admit) those poems were my favorites. The publisher, too, highlights this aspect, ending its description with family:

From Epicurus to Sam Cook, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.

—from the publisher

But. It’s saying far too little about Digest to let you think the book smacks of domestic harmony. A long poem with  numbered sections digs deep into philosopher Louis Althusser’s murder of his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, evoking a deeply troubling intimacy. In another poem, “Copenhagen, 1991,” Pardlo writes, “As adversaries we made good / lovers, made heat where there was little / to hold…” I could go on, but instead, in closing, a few lines more from the poet himself:

from Four Improvisations on Ursa Corregidora

…Once upon a time means once and for always
and for wherever you are and now I’m singing blues
in a bar revealing as much skin as you should
be willing to reveal when you pouring your seed
into the electric element. We are given two names:
one to work like witness protection, and one to carry
mechanically to the grave.

Indeed!

For links to videos, interviews, and more, go to https://fourwaybooks.com/site/gregory-pardlo/.

Lorna Goodison (b. 1947)

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Very likely it’s because I have a bad case of “want-to-escape-this-life-itis” (or maybe it’s just this news cycle), but lately, everywhere I look, I see poems about alternate lives.

One that keeps surfacing is a poem from Hold Fast, “Approaching 52,” in which Holly J. Hughes imagines a self realizing “she’ll never be a lion-tamer, tall hat and curling whip,” and it’s “too late for Jacques Cousteau,” or “a wildlife photographer….” Except in dreams — and in the poem.

Along this line of thought, I recently ordered a couple of books by the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, purely based on an On Being broadcast that put me entirely under her spell. Here is a somewhat unassuming poem from her book, Turn Thanks:

Domestic Incense

Just then, in that early afternoon,
I wanted to be that simple woman
who had cooked you Saturday soup

using all golden foods. Bellywoman
pumpkin, yellow yams, sweet potato,
carrots and deep ivory bones of beef.

I would bear it to you in an enamel bowl,
the smell of fragrant thyme and pimento
would waft, domestic incense, as I go.

How the hot Scotch Bonnet pepper
would issue its flavor through
the ripened walls of its own skin

but because like our love its seeds
can scorch, I’d be careful to remove it
before it cooked itself into breaking.

—Lorna Goodison, from Turn Thanks (University of Illinois Press, 1999)

And, really, how lovely in a world of war and contagion, that there is still soup — and poets to recall us, if not to our ideal selves, then somewhere else.

So, if I have an assignment for you this week, it’s just this. Maybe you’re entirely satisfied with your life, but if you — for a few hours — could be someone else (Lion Tamer or Soup Maker), what would that someone be?

Lorna Goodison

The Poem Itself: A Conversation

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It’s been two weeks of dodging my work and trying to walk away from images in the news. But I’m pleased to recommend poet Sharon Bryan’s poetry blog and its new series of conversations, often on the very topics I’d most like to  avoid.

In this week’s post, Sharon writes, “Not surprisingly, the terrible destruction in Ukraine is on my mind right now, a bloody livestream in my head and heart as I go about my safe, ordinary life here – feeding my cats, doing the laundry, shopping for groceries, going for a walk. I was at one extraordinary event, a reading via zoom earlier in the week, with Ukrainian poets and their English translators – and 850 people there to watch and listen.” She adds, a little later in the post, that war touches us all, and: “Those of us who write poems have to find our own vantage points, what only we can say about the unfolding events.”

Sharon also shares three poems by Syrian-American poet Seif-Eldeine. Well worth our attention.

Civilian Life in Wartime