The Rumpus.net » Camille Dungy

Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Camille T. Dungy — Wed, 15 May 2013 07:01:51 +0000

The week I received my copy of Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River was the week I learned one of the most important people in my life had died. He died twelve hours before I was scheduled to fly to his bedside, and I mourned not only his death, but the lost opportunity to tell him, one more time, how much I loved him. This was a season of loss for me, the man I lost before I could say goodbye being only one of many people I cannot talk to anymore. This was, in at least three major instances, a season of loss for poetry. Poets gone before their time, or in their time but too soon for the rest of us. These losses, like all losses, were made all the more difficult to bear because they could not be averted nor can they be undone. In the middle of this season of anguish, I turned to the pile of books by my desk. I was looking for solace and distraction, thinking I’d find some comfort in the busy work of reading, but not believing I’d be lucky enough to find grace. But grace is what I found in River Inside the River. Grace in abundance.

I entered the book from its first pages, drawn in and distracted from my own private pain by Orr’s play of language down the page. Orr’s short lines run up against his long sentences. The brief poems are only momentary intervals within their long sequences. He has something both simple and complex to say. I think I think something about what I am to think, and then Orr asks me to think again. I think I think something about what I am to feel, and then Orr asks me to think again.

Love overwhelms us.

Or death takes

One more
Of those.
We cherish most.

Where else?

Where else can we go? (68)

Immediately I copied these lines out of the book and passed them along. For these lines, alone, I could have chosen River Inside the River to discuss in this month’s club. But this book shows us that nothing, no matter how singular or solitary, really stands alone, and so it is not just for these lines that I selected this book.

I often say that reading poetry, and writing it, means taking part in a long conversation, one that has been going on around us all along. We can jump in with our own way of seeing things, sharing in the dialogue for awhile. Then we, and so much of what we love, will be gone. River Inside the River reminds us these things are true, both the long running conversation and the brevity of our time in its midst. This book acknowledges the frailty and continuity of mortals and their words.

Starting with Adam and Eve and their simultaneously immediate and eternal loss, Orr pulls at the root of all heart ache. “To Speak,” “To See, “To Write,” “To Name”: These are the titles of the first five poems in the book, taking us to the base representation of the verbs, before the complications of tense and time and case. Soon enough, though, in the book’s sixth poem, when the worm fails to appear for the grand naming ceremony in Eden, “a dark shroud” (17) is stitched through the cycle, and even this careful design begins to be corrupted. How quickly Orr brings us to the point. “The book said: everything perishes,” he writes in a later poem. “The Book said: that’s why we sing” (89).

In the collection’s three sequences, “Eden and After,” “The City of Poetry,” and “River Inside the River,” Orr balances the need to say things newly against the impossibility of saying anything new. He gives beauty reign equal to anguish. In the middle of “The City of Poetry,” just after he he asks where else we can go, in the face of love and loss, besides the city of poetry, Orr writes, “If you’re halfway honest, I’m sure/They’ll tell you this city, like the human heart,/ Contains it all–spun sugar and gossamer,/But also deepest grief and even horror” (69). The book deals with loss, yes. The book confronts Orr’s own difficult history, and also our nation’s, and also the world’s. But the book also talks about love and hope, the spaces we’ve created, through imagination and determination, where we can rest and love and grow to be ourselves. The book talks about the “Mother’s House” and how that is just another name for the transformative power of verse.

Despite or maybe because of the length of each cycle, the individual poems in this collection are spare, often as short as eight or twelve lines. Most made up of three or four beats, and some as little as one. Why go on and on?

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures. (124)

We all know what happened in Eden and afterward, so why go on? We all know that people we love will die, that love can corrupt us, that humans are hard on each other time and time again. Why go on? Why rehash, at length the old familiar song? Except that we need, sometimes, often perhaps, to know we are part of something larger than ourselves alone. Except that the writing brings us to something new. The words can “reveal the rose/That the rose obscures.” At times in this collection we run across familiar forms (Oh look, a villanelle!) and names as familiar as Shakespeare, Sappho, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda, and we see them as we always saw them, but yet we see them new. Those poets, like so many people, are lost to us. Those old forms are past their prime, and even the new forms are made up of nothing that’s new. I could be devastated by all of this so easily, but I am not. I turned to this book because I wanted the busy work of reading poetry, the distraction of working through words, but Orr reminds us that poetry is alchemy. In the process of reading about grief and beauty and people and forms I knew, Orr introduced something that made everything altogether new.

“I’m an old man/ Made young again/ By the poems I love,” writes Orr as he closes “The City of Poetry.” I could go on and on quoting lines and stanzas from this collection, evidence to support my admiration for this book which is, in turn, evidence to support the need for poetry. I could go on and on quoting moments when Orr has reminded me, newly, what it is I always knew. I could go on and on, talking you through this book, but I won’t. You’ll need to take this journey on your own.

Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Camille T. Dungy — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:00:36 +0000

Rumpus Poetry Book Club Board Member Camille Dungy discusses why she chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for January’s Rumpus Poetry Book Club.

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To introduce her author note, Camille Guthrie quotes Louise Bourgeois, the artist at the center of her book. “You can stand anything,” says Bourgeois, “if you write it down. My complaint about language is that it is perfect, indispensable, but not enough. It doesn’t say everything.” Indeed, language does not, cannot, say everything. Too often in ekphrastic and biographically-based poetry, the poet tries to say everything, to tell us all there is to tell about an artist’s life and work. Rather than standing as independent works of art, such poems come to resemble the dullest of obituaries. They might contain elaborate descriptions of a thing, but the descriptions are not the least bit vivid. Too often, these dense poems end up not giving me “enough.” I have no such complaint about Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois.

One of the things I admire most about Articulated Lair is that Guthrie does not require her poems to tell us all there is to know about Bourgeois or her oeuvre. She does not ask language to say everything. In fact, Guthrie seems to revel in gaps and silences, the nuances occasioned by what cannot or will not be directly articulated. Guthrie creates poetry within these gaps. She builds her poems around them. She emboldens my ear as it “imagines/ the tenor of the unsaid” (Cell IV), and she guides me as I begin to perceive Bourgeois in a new light.

These poems are not traps, but safe spaces with doors inside them. Just the way Bourgeois liked her lairs. Their very construction reveals what we need to know. Guthrie’s poems are simultaneously airy (due in part to the relatively short lines and the abundance of white space) and steely (due to the multi-dimensional heft of the words Guthrie employs). The opening lines of the poem Fillette begin thus: “Reality I want/ not rigid like a grid/ and not limp, but / accurate as the entrails of a rabbit/ mischievous as a monkey coat.” In Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois, Guthrie has created a new reality which manages to express both Bourgeois’ vision and her own. As Thomas Sayers Ellis says in the jacket copy, “Articulated Lair is wiser and wider than a retrospective.” These poems have more legs than one of Bourgeois’ spiders and, too, they are a marvel to behold.

Why I Chose Cleopatra Mathis’s “Book of Dog” for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Camille T. Dungy — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 23:00:21 +0000

I don’t really even care for dogs, but reading Book of Dog I care, very deeply, for three dogs and a pack of coyotes. I care about a spider and a day old mouse. I care about an over-wintering beetle, a drowning chipmunk and a dissolving marriage. I care about an old heron and the trials of this heroine’s life. I care because Cleopatra Mathis makes me care. She writes with such deft control and concentrated urgency that I cannot help but care about the world she renders.

Through Book of Dog, I see the world as Mathis sees it, and I smell it and feel it, too. This book makes me feel. It makes me hurt. And, in a crucial completion of a job well done, Book of Dog helps me understand the sources of these feelings. In her refined and direct poems, Mathis describes several forms of grief (grief due to the dissolution of a relationship, grief due to dislocation, grief due to the death of someone much loved). She is never wordy. Instead, her poems allow the world to speak for itself and, in that way, we learn everything we need to know. Baroque and potentially sentimental meditations are “replaced by the plain language of the dogs,/ who in a few syllables have everything to say” (“Answer”). There is solace in this path to understanding, a different kind of peace.

When asked what the poet’s job is in the world, I have said poets are the articulators of empathy. The poet understands another’s feelings. The poet clarifies her own feelings as she relates them to the world. This is not easy work. There is a divide between the self and the other that must be addressed with care. In her poems, Mathis bridges that distance in the same way a spider’s web might bridge a divide with “the few crossed lines/ threaded by the sun, lit so lightly/ as if to be ignored” (“Holding On”). This is a difficult task, the spinning and revealing of webs, but Mathis makes it seem effortless. Not because her poems are not carefully crafted, but because they are so carefully crafted as to appear natural. Through her direct and simple language, Mathis masters one of the most difficult challenges of empathy. She enters other bodies without appropriating their individual spirit. No one being’s importance is shoved aside in favor of another’s. The dog’s ambitions are articulated simultaneously with the human speaker’s. I understand both, believe both, and care about neither more than the other.

I am enthralled with the delicate way Mathis handles the world in these poems. I can see how deeply she cares for it. As you read Book of Dog, you will too.

Why I Chose Linda Hogan’s Indios for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Camille T. Dungy — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:21 +0000

Rumpus Poetry Book Club Board Member Camille Dungy on why she chose Linda Hogan’s Indios as March’s selection.

Sometimes a book teaches me more than I knew I needed to know. Linda Hogan’s Indios is such a book. The horror here is greater than I would have ever imagined, but Hogan has written this long poem with such compassion and grace that I could not help but read on and on. And as I read, I learned an ancient story. Though the old tale had been warped and changed and watered down, Hogan’s Indios reclaimed and renewed it, reinforcing a true history and giving me new language to describe an old grief.

In Indios, without dulling any edges or softening the impact, Linda Hogan re- presents the awful beauty of the Medea story. She reframes its lessons, returning to an original story and thus redefining what it is we know. In the Author’s Preface, Hogan reveals the source of the story she conveys in her long poem:

“When I researched the story I found that her children–
not the ones of the later rendering of the Greek tragedy-
-had been stoned by those who feared a mixed-blood
child would come to power in their land. But the story of
that time was changed for the sake of politics so that in
the Greek tragedy Medea, the queen was recorded as the
one who killed her children.” (XV)

Hogan reframes the Medea narrative, using as her source the unpolished horror that originally seeded the myth. In doing so, she releases the original hero from a prison of neglect.

When I have loved the Medea story it is because of the way it reveals the depths to which we might sink in order to reap revenge, and the heartache that might come of such anger. No one was clean in the tale, and no one got out unscathed. Medea was the opposite of the Disney narratives that were vying to be the dominate narratives of my youth. Medea, with its horror and its unbridled hatred, felt much more real to me. But Hogan’s retelling reconfigures the focus of the story in a way that makes it even more relevant than it had been before. I see the story now as much more than a love triangle gone wrong. Hogan’s version is so much richer in depth and even more revealing about the horrors we visit on each other because of lust for power, mistrust of difference, indifference to the needs of those who don’t resemble us in custom or appearance.

Indios recasts the conventional Medea story through the voice of an indigenous woman who suffers the loss of home and family and trees and love as a result of merciless colonizing forces. Hogan’s Indios is the original woman, beautiful and powerful and vilified and castigated. Before we were invited into the prison from which she narrates, she had lost control over even her story. But she has not lost her memory, she has not lost her mind, and she has not lost her ability to speak. This poem, “A performance” as it is called on the title page, is the record of that speech.

The language in this book is crisp as an apple and sharp as a scythe. It is also very sad, and very lonesome. With her spare diction and direct statements, Hogan helps us hear her hero’s every gasp and groan.This is not a book of acquiescent resignation, nor is it a book about turning away. There is, in fact, a refusal to turn away, an acknowledgment that the story has been ignored for too long. “In here the women cry at night,” Indios says about her prison.

“They talk in their sleep
The forgotten ones
Falling as if there is no bottom to their fall.
In our stories, the world grew from songs and love.
Now I wake to find tears falling from my eyes.
How I want to go to the high place in the mountains
Or to the water that is in my blood.
I want to go to the beautiful world
Where we loved even the spiders.

Hogan weaves the very flora and fauna of a remembered world into every page of this poem, creating a song that is too beautiful to ignore and too heartbreaking to forget. Listening to this “performance” I understand newly and more completely what it means to love and lose. I understand America and history and hope. I understand horror, and I understand grief.

When Ezra Pound said, “Make it new,” I’m pretty sure this book wasn’t what he had in mind. But this isn’t about Pound. This isn’t even really about anything new. This is about an old old story, an old old truth. This is about the story before the story we all know. The story beyond the story we all know. The story beneath the story we all know. I chose Indios for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club because in this book Linda Hogan has found a new way to tell me something I already and always knew.

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Why I Chose Things Come On

Camille T. Dungy — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:00:22 +0000

Rumpus Poetry Club Board Member Camille Dungy on why she chose Joseph Harrington’s Things Come On as the March selection of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club.

Devastation. Conflation. Preoccupation. Disintegration. Joseph Harrington’s Things Come On (Wesleyan UP) is a book about loss; it’s also a book about what lingers. Coupling details of the Senate’s Watergate hearings with his own mother’s battle against cancer, Harrington’s “amneoir” crosses lines between public history and private confession, memory and the dismantling of memories.

The book is presented in two sections: Investigation and Resignation. The “terrible rage” triggered by a mother’s cancer and a President’s malignant behavior, preoccupy the poet and conflate:

Brutal irony triggers a terrible rage. Nixon for us had always been the cancer, the cancerer. In America, some one must be to blame. Someone must die, not always the same one. How create a poem or polity where the physical is not a trope?

Nixon betrayed a nation’s expectations. In the same year, a mother, dying, betrayed her son’s. Harrington, in turn, betrays expectations of what poetry can and should be, crafting a mash up of lyric lines, excised letters, Senate hearing transcriptions, conversational speech, chilling photographs, medical records, and personal observations. As the Senate did for the Watergate Hearing, Harrington seeks explanations, substantiation, evidence, but it’s as if, in the end, the best way to cope with loss is to reconstitute all boundaries.

Things Come On is, among other things, a book about coping. Harrington writes, “In order to advance, you begin the next list:” and then he begins the next list. Among other things, Things Come On is a book of lists. Lists of memories. Lists of forgotten moments. Lists that include the mother’s shoe size, slip size, girdle size, gown. Explanations for why he remembers so many of the details of the Watergate hearings. Lists of reasons a woman may or may not break down in the face of unassailable loss. Lists of exercises to help address the pain (which pain? whose pain?) Lists that indicate ways and means of hurting. “The Desperate Making of Lists.”

These lists are one of the book’s organizing principles. He calls this “an amneoir,” a combined system of a memoir and amnesia. I’m as interested in what he remembers as what he forgets. I’m as interested in why he remembers as why he forgets. Things Come On grapples with how to write about personal loss in a time of more global devastation. It asks, conversely, how to write about global devastation in the face of personal loss. How can a person continue if his/her preoccupations are of little to no interest to anyone else? “A majority of viewers responded by saying they were ‘tired of Watergate.’ We kept watching as though we couldn’t help it.” One of the many sets of criterion for how we choose books for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club is that a given selection can sustain online discussions for a month without our members growing “tired.” Things Come On ought to fit this bill.

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National Poetry Month: Day 16. “The Blue” by Camille Dungy

Rumpus Original Poems — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:00:05 +0000

The Blue

One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything
they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless
ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected
by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs,
gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat
along this coastal stretch endangered, everything,
everyone, everywhere in it in danger as well—
but now they’re logging the one stilling hawk
Smith sights, the conspiring grasses’ shh shhhh ssh,
the coreopsis Mattoni’s boot barely spares,
and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith
ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders
if he plans to swim again. Just like that
the spell breaks. It’s years later, Mattoni lecturing
on his struggling butterfly. How fragile.

If his daughter spooled out the fabric
she’s chosen for her wedding gown,
raw taffeta, burled, a bright-hued tan,
perhaps Mattoni would remember
how those dunes looked from a distance,
the fabric, balanced between her arms,
making valleys in the valley, the fan
above her mimicking the breeze.
He and his friend loved everything
softly undulating under the coyest wind,
and the rough truth as they walked
through the land’s scratch and scrabble
and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni
and his friend, walking along Dolan’s Creek,
in that part of California they hated
to share. The ocean a mile or so off
anything but passive so that even there,
in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack
and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze,
basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying
to identify the scent, tearing leaves
of manzanita, yelling, “This is it. Here! This is it!”
his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen
the source of his pleasure, alive.

In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it,
the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been,
how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend
alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school
early that year, his summer finished too soon—
then all of them together in the sneaker wave,
and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking
blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living,
the frail and flighty beast too beautiful
to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked
without his friend, he remembered too.
He called the butterfly Smith’s Blue.

–Camille Dungy

Camille T. Dungy is author of Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She is editor of the poetry anthologies Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and coeditor of the From the Fishouse anthology. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears

Brian Spears — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:06:15 +0000

Hi everyone. I sort of took today off along with everyone else here at The Rumpus, but there was a lot of good stuff in the po-world this week and I wanted to pass it along.

For starters, Memorious launched their blog today, and their first official post is “what books we’re looking forward to in 2010,” which is a wonderful change from all the retrospective lists that pop up this time of year. Forward looking–I like that.

Speaking of forward looking, Identity Theory wonders about the purpose of literary journals in the internet era, especially those who are usign the web in a merely perfunctory way.

The Poetry Foundation is doing a retrospective of sorts, though it’s more about how poetry has changed over the last ten years. I personally found the responses by Annie Finch, Rigoberto Gonzáles and Camille Dungy to be the most on point and interesting, but they’re all worth reading.

Finally, this week’s Twitter follow recommendation. Two of the biggest daily poetry websites out there are Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, but I tend to only remember to look at the former on a regular basis. Why? Because Poetry Daily has a Twitter feed, and they update regularly, without being obnoxious about it. What do you say, Verse Daily? Will you get on the Twitter Train? (If they already are, someone send me a link, because I’d love to follow them.)

Brian Spears

The Rumpus.net » Camille Dungy

Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

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Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

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Why I Chose Cleopatra Mathis’s “Book of Dog” for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

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Why I Chose Linda Hogan’s Indios for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

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Why I Chose Things Come On

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National Poetry Month: Day 16. “The Blue” by Camille Dungy

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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears

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