Arthur Sze’s Compass Rose

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I have fallen into a pattern of getting my poetry book read in the evening, and posting as late as 10 or 11:00. It doesn’t make for a scintillating blogpost.

I have not, however, fallen into any sort of pattern with my apprehension and appeciation of the poems themselves. Every book offers surprises and delights. Every book has taught me something about my own poetry. I tend to tell stories in my poems, I like to tell stories, and just when I’m sure that this book is too different from what I do, from what I can understand or use, I find my mind expanding to include it — even to feeling the resonances with my own work.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in this last week of National Poetry Month, I’m beginning to drag my feet a bit. But the poems renew me.

So far as narrative versus that other element I keep butting up against this month — of not merely lyric but expressionistic poems — Arthur Sze has one foot in each camp. Stories do unfold here, and characters are clearly introduced. At the same time, images leap out and seize me by the imagination, and don’t let go.

After a New Moon 

Each evening you gaze in the southwest sky
as a crescent extends in argentine light.
When the moon was new, your mind was
desireless, but now both wax to the world.
While your neighbor’s field is cleared,
your corner plot is strewn with dessicated
sunflower stalks. You scrutinize the bare
apricot limbs that have never set fruit,
the wisteria that has never blossomed,
and wince, hearing how, at New Year’s,
teens bashed in a door and clubbed strangers.
Near a pond, someone kicks a dog out
of a pickup. Each second, a river edged
with ice shifts course. Last summer’s
exposed tractor tire is nearly buried
under silt. An owl lifts from a poplar,
while the moon, no, the human mind
moves from brightest bright to darkest dark.

–Arthur Sze, Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling

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Although I sometimes felt baffled by Lo Kwa Mei-en’s poetry in this book, I always felt dazzled by it. I am noticing a trend this month, one that first became clear to me when I was reading Alice Fulton‘s Barely Composed, and was heightened by following closely with Terrance Hayes. The poetry that is a bit…beyond…me is the poetry that is making me re-examine my own work, inspiring me to try (if not to leave narrative’s camp altogether) something new.

Yearling is published by Alice James Books, a press I have long admired. It begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson, “This world is not Conclusion. / A Species stands beyond–” and juxtaposes bright facets of images with sounds that chime and jangle together to make music. “Bulbs of velvet gold wink in the insect // night like meteors sailing…” (“Man O’War”). That I had to reread and ponder and reread (again) — as I have with other poets playing so with language and lyric — was not the poet’s fault, but mine. They make me want to rise to them.

Here is just one poem for you to sample. I may have fallen down the rabbit hole in reading this entire collection of poems in one day, but — oh! — what a trip.

The Body as an Empty Cup

They bring things to you in smaller glasses
when they are stronger. Rogue hazelnut

ale, well-diluted soap, blush wine: these are not
stronger things so should come in buckets. Yes,

I see what you see — girl all appetite
riddled with holes. No, my throat has not drunk

down a barrel of Dawn. The West Coast sky
says I should’ve expected that from you.

So it comes down to forecasts and delays.
We used to sit, stare, and wait for what

was promised. When buckets of weaker
copies came instead, I recited cardamom, 

whiskey, blow beneath my breath. If I ever
come back to you, it will be in thimbles.

Lo Kwa Mei-en, Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015)

The way the first line informs the last, gives you a clue to this poem’s interior. I had a sense that once I’d hit on its kernel of meaning, it came unlocked, one of those little puzzle boxes with a secret drawer. Do I fully understand it? I’m not sure. But I can see its strength.

Cat Kigerl’s At the Town Cafe

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Having just spent four hours at Urgent Care with my daughter (whose sore knee checked out just fine, after all), and having read my book for today, how much work is it to type up a short poem and add a few links to a blogpost?

My main question with each of the books I have read this month has been, “What can I learn from this poet?” Some have been a stretch (all the more reason to take them on), while others, even while they affirm my own tendency toward place and narrative, show me something new about the line.

Cat Kigerl’s At the Town Cafe is published by Goldfish Press — which is publishing my forthcoming book — and for that reason alone I thought it was worthwhile to spend some time with her poems. Although she hails from northern California, and I have not met her, I knew her name from August postcards.

Kigerl’s first book of poems, Stirring Up the Water, won the Native Writers Circle of the America’s First Book Award. I’m finding a theme in that — and  I took note that one of her poems (“Upon a Farewell”), includes an epigraph from Sam Hamill: “Basho didn’t know a thing about water / until he heard that frog.” Throughout the book, Kigerl shows a willingness to dwell on the particular that reflects the whole.  Her final poem, the title poem, is long (6 sections; 4 pages), but unveils facet after facet (and cat after cat) visible from the town cafe. But here, a short poem, nicely capturing her own Basho-esque vision:

In the Teak-Tinted Light 

What is it about the constancy
of passing days, of each morning’s arrival
with its cloudy skies
its non-promise about tomorrow
in the teak-tinted light?

There is a tranquility
of the tree-shrouded shore
old fancies swaying in an imagined wind
the fluty chorus of morning birds
announcing a hidden sun
edging into the passing moments.

Cat Kigerl, At the Town Cafe (Goldfish Press, 2016)

Thomas Lux’s To the Left of Time

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I never had the privilege to meet Thomas Lux (1946-2017), but I seem to know an inordinate number of my contemporaries who have. So when I came across this book, To the Left of Time, I scooped it. He writes, among many other topics, about working on a farm as a child, and I have a feeling that I will very soon be writing a hay loft poem of my own. (See his poem, “Haystack of Needles.”) Here is another that made me want to pick up my notebook and start scribbling:

Ode to the Joyful Ones

         Shield your joyful ones.
–from an Anglican prayer

That they walk, even stumble, among us is reason
to praise them, or protect them — even the sound
of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,
is music. Because they bring laughter’s
brief amnesia. Because they stand,
talking, taking pleasure in others,
with their hands on the shoulders of strangers
and the shoulders of each other.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.
Because if they have two pork chops
they will serve you the better one.
Because they will give you the crutch off their backs.
Because when there are two of them together
their shining fills the room.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.

Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time (Mariner Books, 2016)