Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot comprehend the connection.
In 1968, not content with reading about the war in Viet Nam, or seeing dreadful television images and reports, Fred Marchant enlisted in the armed services. As he put it, “I gave myself an artistic exemption.” Two years later he became one of the first United States Marine officers to receive an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector. He now teaches at Suffolk University, and directs its Poetry Center. He has taught with Maxine Hong Kingston and other literary peace activists, and (no surprise) has some of the strongest work in Poets Against the (Iraq) War. He is the author of three previous volumes of poetry.
The Looking House, his newest from Graywolf Press, is filled with sure-footed lyric muscularity and details that sound as pitch-perfect as they feel. In “Conscientious Objector,” the cadence is just right, with a natural dignity and pace.
you will stand in a line before a corporal’s desk. You will tell them
for the last time that yes you are certain
and no you will not do this anymore. The floorboards will groan,
but they will not be grieving.
Go ahead, take what you are given this day, fold it into a creased half,
and put that paper in your wallet.
Knock on the doorframe and step out. Your feet as they hit the gravel
will make it chatter.
It can take years to write well about important events and experiences, and behind many poems of this quality one can envision piles of shredded paper or my bulging folder labeled “Good Ideas/Bad Poems That Might Get Better.”
Marchant brings to mind a realistic painter who implies something larger and just as important beyond the frame. “In Pinckney Street,” he begins with the title itself. Though the poem is set in Boston, Pinckney is the name of an old Southern slave-owning family, and the surface of the piece is such an appealing description of springtime pleasure that even the always-risky mention of Hopkins takes the reader to a welcome place where the everyday becomes exalted:
for three weeks each year
and beginning tomorrow
this will be the most
beautiful place in the city–
our respite in the brick-faced buildings
blushing in sunlight,
in star magnolias swelling
about to burst into bright badges,
medallions of tangible life and light
the shook “foil” Hopkins wrote about–
the minutes we have of grandeur, hope gratitude.
This excerpt illuminates moments that rescue us when we face the specifics of sorrow or the sometimes exhausting effects of winter in a city north of the Mason-Dixon line. A place like Pinckney Street can be an urban lagniappe–that lilting Creole word for extra little treat–as is this poem, surrounded by more somber material.
“A Diagnosis of Ibis” is emotionally a long distance from that star magnolia, and raises the bar for anyone wishing to make art of human aging and deterioration :
At this pond nothing gathers anymore–
neither nesting eagle nor the newt in mottle.
It is more, and worse than that.What was wondrous inside has all but fled.
Her mind, her precise, beautiful mind–
drained to a stubble of tree, moss, mud.Here’s a white feather of what used to be here–
the strands–long, delicate axons,
tissue of nerve, tissue of flesh and light.
Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot comprehend the connection. He does not seem afraid of how frequently he relies on “beautiful,” “tissue,” “here.” They are such commonplace words but when put to use as he does, each sings each time with individual clarity.
As someone who has read too many tedious “my- loved- one- is -fading-and I- want -you- to- share- my- sadness” poems, I have large measures of relief when pieces like “A Diagnosis of Ibis” and “Balpeen Hammer” come along. In the latter, the approaching death of Marchant senior is grappled with using a typical “guy tool” in the form of a hammer. Again, Marchant makes well-tuned musc with the sound of his carefully selected specifics. At his father’s bedside he recalls that:
There was no claw at the back,
But round steel for peeng,
the shaping and smoothing of metal.That’s how I wanted his minutes
to pass, no thrash or heave,
just a steady tapping away until done.
The news, and personal responses to it, are the stuff of poetry if one goes beyond venting to create an object of enduring moral and literary value. “The Salt Stronger,” again takes an ordinary, if deeply versatile word, and gives it more than two pages to riff with brilliant devastation on war and speech, from the perspective of a citizen in a delicatessen. He sees legislators through a window and knows they will vote for war as the cuffs of their suit-pants are soiled with street salt distributed to melt snow. He is writing to a friend in Baghdad, a friend who has questioned the good of poetry. And the ever-alert observer cannot stop himself from comparing what is outside the window to calves tongue in the meat case inside:
I think that if my tongue alone could talk
it would swear
in any court that poetry
tastes like the iodine in blood,
or the copper in spit, and makes a salt stronger than tears.
This ranks with the best of Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov, and I say this as somone allergic to hyperbole and disgusted by inflated, fatuous blurbs. It is time to put Fred Marchant on the short list for highest honors. He is hugely necessary as a poet and as a citizen.
A POST SCRIPT
1) Not long after I put the finishing touches on this review, The New York Times science section printed a story about some Iraq combat veterans who have offered their brains to research after they die. These soldiers have suffered head traumas that do not show up on MRIs and CAT scans, but affect speech and memory. In other words, resources that could be spent getting closer to cures for fatal illnesses and genetic disorders, will be redirected toward healing wounds that should never have been inflicted.
2) The same day the science story appeared, The Times also ran a long review of a biography of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Author Bradley Graham says that at first Rumsfeld planned not to cooperate unless the subject of Iraq was off-limits. Graham also says Rumsfeld “has acknowledged no major missteps or shown any remorse on the subject to date.”
