In a recent interview, Harriet Levin explained herself, “My poetry is hard to describe because it varies from book to book. I wrote my first book after grad school (University of Iowa Writers Workshop) so I guess I was responding to what I learned there and trying to subvert that in some way.” Her first book, The Christmas Show, was selected by Eavan Boland for a 1996 Barnard New Women Poet’s Prize and was a winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and a Grolier Prize; it was a Philadelphia Inquirer Notable Book. “My second book,” (A 2009 National Poetry Series finalist), “was written also as subversion, largely as a response to a reviewer of my first book, who said I should stop looking out through the ‘lens of rape.’” That criticism can’t be leveled at her new collection, whose perspectives are varied but unified by intense focus, much like the eyes of bees. Hive is a word that recurs, and the nervous energy of the poems gives the reader a non-alcoholic buzz.

Levin’s introductory selection of a quotation from Isaac Newton’s Principia directs a reader’s point of view: “in philosophical disquisitions, we ought to abstract from our senses, and consider things themselves, distinct from what are only sensible measures of them. For it may be that there is no body really at rest, to which the places and motions of others may be referred.” But I found among the poems in Girl In Cap and Gown the greatest charm in many invitations to reflect in tranquility, the title poem a case in point. Along with its persona of a young woman who resembles a murdered co-ed, you lose and regain yourself again.

I gasp…
What happens is
they put me in her place
at the bottom of a deep ravine.
I close my eyes. I hold my breath,
the possibility becoming next.
And then it stops,
and I come back.

The 38 poems are organized in three sections titled Girl in Cap and Gown, A Lens, and Survey of Debris. My favorite in the second grouping invokes Beowulf’s welcome by Hrothgar, its title Hine halig God/For ar-stafum us onsende, (Beowulf, ll. 382-383). This translates, “Blessed God out of his mercy this man hath sent,” and arises organically out of the poem in which the father’s love for this fragile boy mirrors Beowulf’s heroic/tragic narrative.

Alone with the boy
in the cabin all winter,
the wood creaking
and the fire crackling,
reading him to sleep
from the text
that as he worked on the translation,
clawing open steel-edged consonants
to slip in vowels,
words that grackle in Anglo-Saxon,
thud to the ground,
now hold the hush
of this father’s love for this fragile boy.
…He kissed the back
of the boy’s neck
before getting up
to throw another log on the fire,
smoothly rolling it
into the flames,
resisting the temptation
to let the fire die out
for the boy’s peace of mind.
…He pictures the boy
shaking snow from his hair
as if sensing death,
he did not want it
to touch him…

The ambiguity/double entendre of those masculine pronouns causes a full stop, the last lines inviting the experience of tranquil reflection. The evocation of the ancient poem and the use of turgid Anglo-Saxon diction achieve a temporal dimension for a reader’s inner eye which I enjoyed again in the crescendo-like poem “Vestigial” from the third section.

She slips on snow packed steps
rushing for the subway.
She zooms through tunnels,
goes through a dark time
emerges, then goes through it again,
creeping along, heavy enough to muffle thought,
the bitterness of clove,
the pungency of cardamom
and the coarseness of coriander,
traveling away from the dark soul
of the pot, cast iron with baked on drippings
of garlic cloves…

“In A Jam,” also from the last section, includes another show-stopping double entendre (so much depends upon a so):

The river is a miracle of attentiveness,
eyes and blood, wandering
through a passage so labyrinthine
grief is released,
unlike the place we inhabit
which stands so certain
with a door to lock
and a key to fit inside it.

And “Key,” at the end of Survey of Debris, turns out to be an imagist expression that feels as sprung and affirmative as the Gerard Manley Hopkins Birder that closely precedes it.

Through canopies of whirling woods,
whippoorwills, woodpeckers, warblers,
finches, cardinals, swallows stippled
at dusk, delight, stir,
rouse and rescue him in such
abundance, he will not fall.

Arm’s yield, body’s fit.
Let guilt not create
the opening.

Forced to turn. Stopped short.
Clasped in one hand.
Vines cut down to reveal
the dappled on.
I am waiting.
Sitting on rattan
among the scented,
focused on emptiness,
a single notch, a slit,
grooved, declivitous,
sliding into an intensity
that is neither unrepeated or
undiminished.

That Key sent me back inside the Chauvet cave all the way to Coleridge’s Xanadu, paved by Harriet Levin’s double negative affirmation of repeated, undiminished orgasmic pleasure in what remains & renews. From now on, we can also read the pronoun:

For s/he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

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• The Dead Man’s Back Arches
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• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

On the 1st anniversary of 9-11, I was driving to my allergist’s office in Garden City on Long Island, NY, which takes you along an avenue of car dealerships. One of them was flying the biggest American flag I’d ever seen, like the size of a football field. It registered on the corner of my (unconscious) eye, but when the message was interpreted by my brain, its giant sound, snapping in the wind on that yet again perfect September day, steered me to the curb, sobbing. So when I was looking for my way into Fred Moramarco’s new retrospective collection, The City of Eden, I avoided two poems in its middle, “Irreconcilable Differences” and “Messages From the Sky: September 11, 2001,” which turn out to be two of the best in the book. Both are formatted to look like the Towers, that indelible II icon.

They appear in one of the collection’s 8 sections, titled “Love and Other Dark Matters” which attracted me because it hinted at an awareness of current physics, but there is only one poem included that refers to “Dark Matter” which begins with a quotation from The New Yorker: “A number of physicists today are convinced that most of the universe is made of unknown matter…They call this alien stuff the Dark Matter.” I think of dark matter & energy as evidence that we are the aliens in this Universe, but Moramarco uses the science metaphor to describe an infestation of ants in his house one

sunny summer San Diego morning…
I get the broom and Black Flag ant spray
I keep stored for occasions of this sort
and hiroshima them into oblivion,
first sweeping with the broom then blasting
with the bug spray until not a trace of this
dark matter can be seen moving like animated dots

The previous section, “Takes and Retakes”, brings together poems about poets like Sylvia Plath, Cesare Pavese, Wallace Stevens, Franz Wright (“At 15 Mr. Wright wrote his first poem and sent it to his father. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he wrote back. ‘You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.’, Yeats, and John Donne. These vary in density and tone. The Yeats-inspired “The Dark Leopards of the Moon” is great to wrestle with, and the next page’s “Conversation with John Donne” is a subtly rhymed hoot:

“So what’s been happening?” he said
sounding awfully Southern Californian for the Dean of St. Paul’s.
I wasn’t sure if he was in his ‘Holy Sonnets’ mood
or in his ‘Jack the Rake’ phase, so I hesitated
before answering, but then told the truth.
“I’ve been falling in love…
What can I tell you,’” I said, “we’ve gotten so close,
we’re like an e-mail and its reply…
Such is she to me, who must
like my other self, click on her mouse
to send our words full circle, a pulse just
sent in an instant from her place to my house.”
“Nice conceit,” he said. “I get the sexual reference,
to ‘her mouse’, and how ‘must’ and ‘just’
evoke ‘lust’, but what the hell is email?”

The City of Eden has its own Facebook page and as of early August, eleven laudatory reviews at Amazon. This admirable marketing energy echoes in Moramarco’s poems. As a “Door to Door Poetry Salesman,” he begins by quoting the actor Charles Grodin, “Maybe the only way harder than show business to make a living is selling poetry door to door…” and continues, rhyming,

Early start today. Would like to make a sale
in the morning, then kick back for the day…
It’s not a day for Petrarch or Dante,
though on Thursday I might up the ante…
I just want a poem that feels honest and true;
that tells about me as it tells about you…
I’ll knock now and see if anyone’s at home.

The City of Eden that opens :“’You mean Garden, don’t you?’/No, city, though there are apple trees there,/ and snakes, lots of them…” closes with some poems that don’t convey the range of his section of Shakespearian sonnet knock-offs (“Takes on Shakes”) or the flash fiction-poetry of “Five One Line Poems with Titles”:

What a Cigar Means
You need company
What Tomorrow Will Be Like
Yesterday. Today. Maybe Today is enough.
What Tomorrow Will Be Like – 2
Today
Did Richard Nixon Swim?
I am not a fish.
The Brooklyn Bridge
used to be a wonder.

But in the collection’s last section, “The Two Thousandsies” (dedicated to Rachel Maddow), his “Garden of Eden” reminds us this Professor Emeritus poet has managed to sustain over decades a vision of the profane as sacred, which alone is worth the price of admission and transforms his “Cunt Variations” from curse into choir. “The Messages from the Sky” of 9-11 that he repeated are the ones he sends his fortunate readers:

… To mothers and
wives, to husbands and friends, to
fathers and lovers, to brothers and
sisters, to aunts and uncles, to the inert
tapes of answering machines: Love
from the Towers, love from the planes,
from the towers and the planes:
“What thou lov’st well remains
the rest is dross. What thou lov’st
well shall not be reft from thee.”

Amen.

Related Posts:

• Girl In Cap and Gown by Harriet Levin
• The Dead Man’s Back Arches
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• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

So who would you carve into the Mount Rushmore of American poets? Dickinson & Whitman …and then? “To become the face of a mountain – you’d think he’d want it.” (67) In a 2002 interview, Bell explained himself and his Dead Man poems, now arriving in the latest collection titled Vertigo :

Seiferle: If the Dead Man had a literary family tree, from whom would he be descended?

Bell: Whitman, of course, is Granddad. A reviewer called The Book of the Dead Man “The Undersong of Myself.” Whitman is Granddad, William Carlos Williams is his more or less respectable son, and Allen Ginsberg is his rebellious grandson…On a more inclusive family tree, the names would be those of photographers, potters, philosophers, sergeants…—you know, the people who taught me the world. For the Dead Man is very much of this world.

Alphabetically arranged, as if in a primer, the poems move from The Dead Man in The Alleys to the Zine. The (Living) Dead Man poems prompted a critic to say “Bell has redefined poetry as it is being practiced today,” but beyond his teaching/influencing poets including Tess Gallagher, Michael Burkard, Marilyn Chin, Rita Dove, Norman Dubie, Albert Goldbarth, Robert Grenier, Joy Harjo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Mark Jarman, Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, David St. John, and James Tate – that’s a questionable blurb.

That Bell is a helluva guy and impressive poet, though, is without question. So if you’re not cognoscenti and pick up this paperback with the aptly chosen Space Age Mandala #2 (1977, Morris Graves) on the cover, be ready for a “rampant” reading experience. Rampant is a recurring word in Bell’s work; if you can superimpose whatever images that word evokes (ram, panting/running/heraldic/iconoclasm) on retrospective (reflections in tranquility/daffodils), you begin to get the rhythm of his juxtaposing, paradox-prodding mind. The older you are, the more accessible Bell’s Living Dead Man is. If you’re old enough, his observations about the past half + century are as eloquent/elegiac/defiant as the thinning skin on the back of your still grasping hands. If you’ve walked around in your life feeling like a ghost on the sidelines but are still very much a fan of the next play, Bell’s VERTIGO describes a familiar dizziness. As in The Arch, Bell spans the past and the present with a real vista on the future:

In the curvature of space…
The dead man’s back arches…
it is all a line over the
horizon…a tilted
parallelogram leaning on a wormhole..
It is what he passed through and under.

The collection works as poetic biography and Whitmanesque dialogue, and this approach and its repetitions become irresistibly hypnotic. “The dead man’s lingo will get in your head.” Even if you’re decades away from 70-something, after awhile you can see from his expansive perspective that the way to feel alive is to imagine yourself neither etherized on a table nor really dead, but as Dos Passos’s Camera Eye consciousness of Time, like in a movie when the camera pulls ’way back up and out so you see the whole landscape and how horizon is an illusion when the universe is background. In Big Eyes, “Like a camera, he squints to lengthen the depth of his field and bring the future into focus.” In Boomerang, the poet predicts that “Any words he utters now are souvenirs of the future.” In Collaboration, he yawps:

His is the ultimate collaboration…
He is a proponent of the big shebang theory.
The dead man is the past, present and future, an amalgamate of
atoms and strings and who-knows-what of bespectacled
theorists.
Meanwhile, he wiggles among the squiggles, he mops up the
washes, he rolls on the scrolls, he whirls within the whorls,
he goofs in the gyres, yes he laughs and laughs, and yes he
squirms among the worms.

And you gotta love him.

There are angry poems about politics/politicians — “a time of bush-league government” — and professorial ones about aesthetics — Matthew Arnold, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Henry James, William James, Gurdjieff, James Joyce, and Galileo all cameo in Conversations. But most and best, Bell’s poems are about:

what was beyond words that made him speak to you this way.
Take a line from it when anxious, for it will compose you.
You may remember it, you may memorize it, you may take it to
heart, it will endure in the interstices of time.
For here the excerpt is a whole, and the whole is an excerpt – it
is so.

There are lines so quotable, you can imagine them carved in stone:

from “His Hats” – “To the surrealist inside him, the moon is a mothball in a closet of fedoras.”

from “Olde Ode” – “So long as there can be a few last drops, the dregs, the bottom of the barrel, a sip, a taste, a bite, a sniff of the apple, for that long can time-to-come retain its welcome.”

from “The Metronome” – “He is a kind of Klein bottle, a sort of human Mobius strip…He saw early that space eats time, and he moved to the periphery. The dead man is a fringe element.”

from “Nothing” – “Give him that, that he crystallized a plan, that he made from smoke something to him real as quartz, ivory, or the hoof of a gelding.”

from “The Pause” – The way forward was too loud, too fraught, it was a rebuke to the applications of beauty…The dead man is leaving it to you, what are you going to do?”

from “The Red Wheelbarrow” – “The dead man can hold in mind a red wheelbarrow and a blue guitar at the same time…Stevens was music, Williams was dance, the wheelbarrow was red…So much depended on the poem having no title.”

from “Scars” – “Oh, the dead man’s scars are like bandages.”

from the poem Bell chose as the book’s title, “Vertigo” – “Time to unmask the clock face…he found he could not go back…and knew falling…he looked to the constellations and grew woozy…His happiness has been a whirl, it continues, it is dizzying.”

“Zine” ends the collection — “nor all our piety nor wit can cancel the binary yes and no of the method. The dead man is the essence of on and off, of now and later, of forever and not at all. The dead man, at the end, turns a page.”

Zeitgeist is inescapable, so here’s an observation about Vertigo, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and what-I-was-also-just-rereading: John Vernon’s 1992 novel Peter Doyle (which includes an imagined letter exchange between Whitman & Dickinson and a relic hunt for Napoleon’s penis). A journey ostensibly into the past is a stepping back that creates perspective on the present, and by a triptych-like expansion, can give us what glimpse is possible into the future. Contrast that hopeful movement by facing two mirrors/facing yourself in a mirror: there, the elongated hallway appears of claustrophobic, repetitive, diminishing reflection of so much modern poetry/art. Marvin and Woody were boys in the early war years when John V. was born; these three see the e pluribus unum of spacetime with keen humor, Beauty, and now, a welcome rebirth of wonder. No stone faces here.

Related Posts:

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• You Mean Garden, Don’t You?
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Inside the event horizon of astronomy’s black hole, time and space change places, and that’s how I like to read books, backwards. It’s a good way to approach Tess Gallagher’s new retrospective collection Midnight Lantern New and Selected Poems because the most recent poems are at the end under the title Signature. Also included in the collection in chronological order are poems from Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, Willingly, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge, Portable Kisses, My Black Horse, and Dear Ghosts. The Signature poem in the last section with its name is a useful first-last step:

The father and children walking where
they would always walk in the mind
of the father’s remembering, more perfect now
than life could make it, illuminated by loss,
yet more gift than loss.

You can find in these few lines Gallagher’s poetic DNA: family, mind, memory, and paradox-juggling optimism. As a whole, Midnight Lantern provides enough light to see more than just the outlines of a portrait of the poet aged 33 to 68. Neither Sappho nor Frost are mentioned, but both feel present in the collection’s surrounding darkness. Sappho is one of the first memoirists (with Augustine) of individuality, and a woman. Frost has hope: “Take nature altogether since time began, /…And it must be a little more in favor of man.” Their dramas are personal rather than public, lyric rather than epic, neither urban nor ironic.

Her poetry also provides relief from academic culture wars. She echoes John Gardner’s emphases on clarity and morality. In her 1987 Amplitude we read “If Poetry Were Not a Morality,” which Gallagher introduces with a quotation from Jean Cocteau: “It is likely I would not have dedicated myself to poetry in this world which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not a morality.” Then she begins:

I’m the kind of woman who
when she hears Bobby McFerrin sing without words
for the first time on the car radio has to
pull over and park with the motor
running…

Continuing her self portrait, Gallagher depicts her Cherokee grandmother whose grandfather

had to be
one of those chiefs who could never
get enough horses. Who if he had two hundred
wanted a hundred more and a hundred more
after that.

This marvel concludes with a manifesto consistently exemplified in her poems:

I have to go through the world
like an overwrought
magnet, like the greedy braille of so many
about-to-be-lost memories.
… there being no answer except
not to be dead to each other…
…And even some of our soon-to-be deadness
catches up to us
as joy, as more horses than we need.

Comparing 1987’s Amplitude selected poems with those from 2006’s Dear Ghosts, the older poet speaks of herself not as a “kind of woman” but as

…the schoolgirl at the back of the class
who can’t help raising her hand toward the ceiling
even when she can’t answer
the question, lifting herself
by desire alone.

In this poem, “You Are Like That” and section, Gallagher speaks to her dead. She selects “My Unopened Life” to begin, questioning assumptions: “Why/only darkness?” answering:

So are we each lit briefly by engulfments
…yielding to sudden corridors
of light-into-light, never asking: ‘why
tell me why
all this light?’

The 2006 Dear Ghosts section includes more powerful poems conflating a haircut prior to chemo with “The Women of Auschwitz,” the poet’s “time in Cairo,” “one blue-violet night in Hawaii during/ the Vietnam War,” a surprising slap to “America 2001-2009” in the short lyric “Weather Report” which invokes a Romania “under Ceausescu” and how a poet “would codify opposition.” “What The New Day Is For” is a glorious requiem asking to be put to music:

The new day has been given
so whatever befell us yesterday
can be withstood, not as it was,
but as if we had perished
into it…
As the carriage horse…
…memory awaits the new day,
wants to be stroked…
…we have more mercy
…than the world has.
And we know this. For such knowing
makes spirits of us, sends the new day…

Did Gallagher obey the instructions she’d given herself back in 1976, in the title poem from “Instructions to the Double”?

a caress or a promise. Go
to the temple of the poets
… the one on fire
with so much it wants
to be done with. Say all the last words
and the first…:
If anyone from the country club
asks you to write poems, say
your name is Lizzie Borden.

Well, a lot happened since the memory of her young mind in “Breasts” when “The day came/ this world got its hold on me –” and her brothers could hold her down by a cotton shirt. By 1992’s Moon Crossing Bridge, mourning began: her husband, famed short story writer Raymond Carver, died at 50 in 1988. In her end Notes, Gallagher explains the title poem of that section,

‘Moon Crossing Bridge’ is a translation from the Chinese characters for the Togetsu Bridge, which spans the river Oi near Kyoto…known for the many important literary works that celebrate its beauty…As I walked across the Togetsu Bridge in late November 1990 with two Japanese friends, it occurred to me that I had literally just walked across the title of my book. The name of the bridge is said to be an allusion to the moon crossing the night sky.

Praise comes easily for this recognized poet. But she called for “all the last words,” and my son-in-law is related to Lizzie Borden. How will Tess Gallagher’s voice sound after Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Singularity when humans look like Model-T primates? It grieves me that the bridge she invokes isn’t one between C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Perspective and introspection are plentiful in this fine retrospective collection, but Gallagher doesn’t fully see now. She speculates profoundly and eloquently, metaphysically — never astro/quantum physically, as if from any century — but our own. Consider the essay “Modern Poetry, Modern Science” which cites Miroslav Holub as the only “world-class laboratory scientist…also a world-class poet.” A classy poet like Gallagher could be inspired to learn that the human eye has the same protein – cryptochrome — that lets migrating birds know how to fly South every winter. We carry a sort of internal compass that can help us see in the dark. In the glare of a century of life/global-altering knowledge, Midnight Lantern is more a lantern at noon. This is both its luster…and lack.

Related Posts:

• Girl In Cap and Gown by Harriet Levin
• You Mean Garden, Don’t You?
• The Dead Man’s Back Arches
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover