I highly recommend Tony Hoagland’s new book Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty .

At the Galleria

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,
there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVs;

one of them singing news about a far-off war,
one comparing the breast size of an actress

from Hollywood to the breast size
of an actress from Bollywood.

And here is my niece Lucinda,
who is nine and a daughter of Texas,

who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde
and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.

Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,
swinging a credit card like a scythe

through the meadows of golden merchandise.
Today is the day she stops looking at faces,

and starts assessing the price of purses;
So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty

and raised and wrung out again and again.
And let us watch.

As the gods in olden stories
turned mortals into laurel trees and crows
to teach them some kind of lesson,

so we were turned into Americans
to learn something about loneliness.

Comment?

In the fall of 2000 I had the honor of sitting in “the circle” of Jim Hall’s Autobiography class at UK. For those who never shared this honor, it’s difficult to express the affect Jim had on his students. To say that he changed our lives is too easy. To say that his wisdom, advice, and nurturing forced us to change our own lives hits closer to the mark, but still doesn’t get it right.

Inside Jim’s classroom was a safety zone, filled with laughter, candor, tears, admiration, and sometimes heated emotions. He refused to teach in the sterile classroom of the Whitehall Building. Instead, he pulled a few strings and had our class moved to the homey and comfortable Gaines Center. Jim knew that writing, as it should be taught, had nothing to do with chalkboards, desks, or projection screens.

Jim’s classroom was a creative space where any emotion, fear, fantasy, or desire could be expressed without judgment or incrimination. The only catch was that our writing, and our responses, had to be honest.

Jim made us better writers by demanding this honesty, freeing us from the burdens of academic pretension and self-censoring. To be part of Jim Hall’s class you had to “show up” every week, and “showing up” meant far more than just warming a seat. I lived for Jim Hall’s class that fall, and I recognized, even then, that what I was coming to know through my work with Jim was special. What happened behind those closed doors in the Gaines Center remains one of the most formative experiences of my life.

We began that semester as a handful of awkward, shy, and (in my case) insecure students. We ended the semester as a strong, confident collective.

The lasting lesson I will take from Jim Hall is that to be a good writer you must first be a descent human being. He taught that being a writer requires constant attention to your own life, a willingness to engage the fleeting and unknowable, and the humble acceptance that one lifetime will not be enough to get it all right. Being a writer means you have to try anyway.

It’s difficult, now, to imagine the Bluegrass without Jim Hall in it. His commitment to the state, to local bookstores and writer’s groups, to everything that is strong and wise and worldly about Kentucky, and, most importantly, his commitment to the young writers he encountered along his way will be truly missed. If those in Frankfort had any sense the courthouse flags would have sailed at half-mast on the day Jim Hall died, for he was one of the Bluegrass’ finest and we’re all a bit better for having known him

Comment?

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2008

For those who would ask “does poetry still matter? I have but one answer, Failure by Philip Schultz.

The announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prize shocked many in the poetry world. First, it was announced that not one but two poets would be awarded the prize (Schultz and Robert Hass)—a first in the Prize’s long history. Second, Failure is only Schultz’s third book of poems and his career has been a rather obscure one.

Failure is a profoundly human book. Graceful, delicate, angry, and beautiful, it is the type of read that we do not encounter often enough.

The poems in this book are divided into two sections, the first 50 pages consist of roughly single-page poems that chronicle the idea of failure. Schultz starts with his own life, the failures of his eagerly entrepreneurial father, Schultz’s own years of mental illness and drift, and even the failings of the larger culture (though always fed through the personal lens).

The next fifty pages consist of one long poem called The Wondering Wingless, an opus to dogs. Many of those who are critical of this book site the indulgence of this poem. This is a worthy criticism, but The Wondering Wingless points to a connection that levies the first 50 pages of the book, a connection that transcends failure and excuses the indulgence of the work. If the human condition is tempered by disappointment and failure, then dogs are the antithesis of the human condition. As Schultz says “The thing about dogs/ is the don’t believe/ they’re geniuses (especially / the ones who are). They/ don’t withhold judgment,/ cultivate opinions,/ mobilize their defects,/ become paralyzed/ with nostalgia/ or disappear/ inside their delirium.”

My own conflict with writing about this book is that it is not a book I wish to review. The weight of reading this volume has hit me rather personally, and so I wish to keep much of that experience to myself. I will say, in leu of a more insightful analysis of this book’s merits, that it is rare for me to have such a response to a book of poems. In truth, it has only happened a few times in my life. This is how I know that Schultz, though he may write lovingly about failure, is certainly not one.

* * *

Husband
by Philip Schultz
from Failure

What could be more picturesque
than us eating lobster on the water,
the sun vanishing over the horizon,
willing, once again, to allow us almost
any satisfaction. William James said
marriage was overlooking, overlooking,
yes, but also overlapping: opinions,
histories, the truth of someone not you
sitting across the table seeing the you
you can’t bear to, the face behind
the long fable in the mirror. Freud said
we’re cured when we see ourselves
the way a stranger does in moments.
Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided
with trying to be a little less or more,
escaping who I was a moment ago?
Here, now, us, sipping wine in this
candlelit pause, in the charm of the ever
casting sky, every gesture familiar,
painfully endearing, the I of me, the she
of her, the us we only know, alone together
all these years. Call it what you like,
happiness or failure, the discreet curl
of her bottom lip, the hesitant green
of her eyes, still lovely with surprise.

Comment?

by Philip Schultz
from Failure

What could be more picturesque
than us eating lobster on the water,
the sun vanishing over the horizon,
willing, once again, to allow us almost
any satisfaction. William James said
marriage was overlooking, overlooking,
yes, but also overlapping: opinions,
histories, the truth of someone not you
sitting across the table seeing the you
you can’t bear to, the face behind
the long fable in the mirror. Freud said
we’re cured when we see ourselves
the way a stranger does in moments.
Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided
with trying to be a little less or more,
escaping who I was a moment ago?
Here, now, us, sipping wine in this
candlelit pause, in the charm of the ever
casting sky, every gesture familiar,
painfully endearing, the I of me, the she
of her, the us we only know, alone together
all these years. Call it what you like,
happiness or failure, the discreet curl
of her bottom lip, the hesitant green
of her eyes, still lovely with surprise.

Comment?

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1998

Charles Wright has the uncanny ability among poets to construct poems that both contain the world and recreate the world in the confines of the poem. Each of his pieces are a mixture of personal narrative, literary and art theory, philosophical ruminations, and mythology. In his books, the narrative gains complexity like a snowball rolling down a hill, and over the course of his book “Black Zodiac” this world becomes more intricate and confounding.

Wright is an example of how a poet can be learned without condescending, how a poet can be cerebral without dividing himself from the world.

Wright’s ability to circumscribe a world within a single poem also works against this volume. By the end of the collection, the reader knows that there is a mythology which holds the book together (signaled by repeating metaphors and memes) but the density of the text renders that bonding mythology elusive. This is not a book whose meaning is revealed on a first or second read, and while that isn’t necessarily a bad thing it is an immediate difficulty with the book.

Black Zodiac is an interesting and captivating read, but most of its meaning is still hidden to me. So, I will say that I enjoyed it even if I don’t yet fully understand what it all means.

Comment?

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2007

Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a profound book of poems. In under 50 pages Trethewey develops a complex narrative world whose connecting core is the South.

The book is divided into three “parts”—a device in poetry manuscripts that I find tedious because there’s often no way to discern between the parts. In Trethewey’s work, though, each part presents a significant narrative break and it is only in holding the three parts together that the heft of the work begins to form.

The first part of the book tells us part of the story of Trethewey’s childhood—a young mother and father separating, the mother’s untimely death, the daughter’s subsequent exile from her home and from the south. Trethewey captures, in her rich, direct verse, a longing many of us once-southerner’s feel—a profound disconnection from the place we are most intimately drawn to.

The second part of the books is a tonal and thematic shift, focusing this time on the Native Guard —an all black sector of the Louisiana Militia who fought for the confederacy during the Civil War. Threthewey treats these characters—who until now have been mere footnotes in history—with understated respect. This portion of the book is as riveting as it is perplexing.

It’s in the third part of the book that Tretheway brings the whole narrative together. She achieved a narrative “twist” seldom encountered in books of poems.

The end result is a stunning collection of finely crafted poems and a story that will linger long after the book is closed. This collection establishes Tretheway as a young star of American letters and I greatly anticipate her future works.

* * *

Theories of Time and Space
by Natasha Trethewey
from Native Guard

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion — dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
rigging of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp — buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry — tome of memory,
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph — who you were —
will be waiting when you return.

Comment?

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1999

A wise teacher once said “if a poem doesn’t work sometimes it’s just not meant for you. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good poem.”

This advice keeps coming back to me as I read the work of Mark Strand. The highest honors available to a poet have been bestowed upon Strand: he has won a MacArthur Fellowship, held tenured positions at Columbia and the University of Chicago, and his 1999 book Blizzard of One won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Still, reading Strand is like hearing a joke without a punch line. The language is regal, the imagery sometimes captivating, but the universality of the poem—the ability of the poet to reflect upon the outer world by traveling inward—never quite connects with me.

Blizzard of One is the third Strand book that I’ve read and I did enjoy it more than the previous two. Still, I found myself too often reaching the end of a gorgeous poem only to realize that I had immediately forgotten it. I retained little from this collection, save for a few gems that stand out from the rest. Whether this is due to focus on an inner world that I, as a reader, just can’t relate to or if it’s just an omission by the poet I am not sure.

At it’s best Blizzard of One has moments of distilled beauty. Many of the poems reflect on life and aging, always with an emphasis on the present moment. These are poems of a man in his graying years, contemplating life and the eternal while reflecting backwards on fragments of the life he has lived.

More often than not, though, I never fully enter these poems. Though I can respect their eloquence and formal beauty (there are many formal poems in this collection, including a sestina and a villanelle), the reason most of the poems were written is never clear to me. Perhaps there are better criteria for judging poems, but if I cannot surmise the why behind a poem’s existence then I can’t seem to care much about it. And in the end, that is how Blizzard of One leaves me—feeling eh.

* * *
Old Man Leaves Party
by Mark Strand
from A Blizzard of One

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?

Comment?

“In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

Comment?

This weekend I had the good fortunate to encounter Without a collection of poems by former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall .

Donald Hall and fellow poet Jane Kenyon married in 1972, and Without chronicles the last year of Kenyon’s life, who died of leukemia in 1995, and Hall’s first year living with her absence.

The book is a rarity among contemporary poetry collections. Though the subject matter is death, mortality, and mourning, Hall avoids the easy trappings of self-aggrandizement that would plague a lesser poet.

The book is a simple, eloquent chronicle of love and death. I chosen the poem below for its understatement and for the simple celebration of a writer’s life that the couple shared.

– - –

The next morning,
they worked choosing among her poems
for Otherwise, picked
hymns for her funeral, and supplied each
other words as they wrote
and revised her obituary. The day after,
with more work to do
on her book, he saw how weak she felt,
and said maybe not now; maybe
later. Jane shook her head: “Now,” she said.
“We have to finish it now.”
Later, as she slid exhausted into sleep,
she said, “Wasn’t that fun?
To work together? Wasn’t that fun?”

Comment?

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Comment?