We were sitting in an unfamiliar building on campus, my student Natalie and I, talking about the poet we were reading for that week, Craig Arnold. We were reading back and forth to each other from his book Made Flesh, when the girl sitting adjacent to us put down her work, turned to us and asked, with wide open eyes, what it was we were reading to each other. Her voice had that quality of a tightness unwinding as we smiled and chatted with her about the work.
The way that girl put down her homework to listen reminded me of my own coming to Arnold’s work: with a sense of profound revelation, a feeling of astonishment at coming across something more piercingly beautiful than could have been anticipated. A feeling like being grabbed by the shoulders and shaken hard.
Arnold’s Made Flesh is a book of poems about people and relationships but is as much about the empathetic seer that is Arnold himself. Even when writing about strangers on the train there is a some deep level of a human familiarity.
The reader becomes implicated in many of the poems written in the second person. We very suddenly are thrust into circumstances that are likely dissimilar to our own – but we are forced to step into that position, just as Arnold does with all the characters in this book.
YOU are Hades
brooding over your lightless kingdom
with a cigarette between your lips like a little fuse
with a stone bowl the color of a bruise
behind your eyes it fills faster than you can empty
You want someone to come and help you spill it
[…] You never dreamed she would take the arm you offered
spilling a whole field of flowers out of her lap
We are implicated in these poems in a similar way the world implicates us – implores us to see and feel more than what is socially acceptable. To feel for a stranger on the train, a lover who it seems cannot free herself from her seemingly abusive lover. Appearances do reveal truths in these poems; sometimes things are as they seem. Of watching strangers on a train, Arnold creates a sense of almost awkward intimacy in this watching, noticing, allowing to ourselves to be pierced by noticing:
Across from you
a man yokes one arm
around the neck of the woman he clearly
wants the world to know he’s married to
She sits tightly tries to hide
her hesitation at his touch
Her head hangs as if her makeup weighs too much
a loose lock of her hair keeps
wandering over her eyes but she won’t fix it
setting your teeth each time she flicks it
absent-mindedly aside
The way they sit there it destroys your heart
And these poems do destroy your heart. They argue for noticing, for living with feeling inside the populated world. They argue for bearing witness to the smallest details that can hold so much weight. Arnold continues later in the same poem:
You press the prickle of your skin against
the air in affection raw peeled
You are a field unfenced
over which are conducted by the breeze
the smell of the rain-pattered pavement
slips of whisper wirebrushed on the cymbal of your ear
The bodies of other people near
you feel without hostility without resistance
all equally likely with their own
plans and appointments stops not to miss
To say this book is about relationships is to also say it is about the often incalculable distances between people, most often lovers, that can take on nearly mythic proportions. Arnold says in one poem “the heart loves the sound of its own breaking/ It circles itself in a knot of ice and glass and steel.” And it is not just the heart that is in love with that sound, but the poet and, of course, the reader.
You talk and talk your voices always
patient and pleasant but every word
glitters a long flake of glass
a knife to sacrifice each other’s heart
[…] The pavement scintillates with ants
carrying crumbs of dirt and your eyes
are fat with not weeping milkweed
makes froth of the grass and you are firm
taking a kind of comfort from not yielding
This “flake of glass” Arnold mentions is emblematic of the menace we find just beneath the surface of these poems. He tempers his execution of the emotionally weighted image with more “telling” moments where we see directly the thing itself. We see Arnold’s characters as without walls even when a character such as his Persephone “talks a wall around her, twists the string/ tighter around the teabag in her spoon.” The more these characters try to hide, the more is revealed.
Reading this book leaves the reader feeling like “a field unfenced,” vulnerable and perceptive to the nuances of feeling that pervade every moment of life. Arnold brings us into his world of emotional knowledge, which in turn inspires us to try and see the people around us with empathetic eyes, to allow ourselves to feel even when social boundaries dictate otherwise.
Arnold also brings us into his own world from time to time, implicating himself in this grand scheme of loving in quiet, revealing moments such as these:
For your sake I loved summer
wearing whatever always sweaty
but not caring I think we shared
a longing for kindness and cold water
green water rayed by sunlight
water that lets the body rest
from holding itself up
Who knows if the I in these poems are in fact Arnold himself. I want to believe they are. I want to believe that the person who wrote all those poems about “other people” really had been writing about himself and is now coming clean. I am not sure why that is my impulse. Maybe because I want to find my own way into a person who is no longer physically accessible to the living world. I want to believe even though he is not here, he is not silent, having come to reveal himself so generously in this I.
I knew
I didn’t share and didn’t want to share
with anyone but you
your sunlit demons
your cigarettes and fire escapes
your petals and grenades your laugh
like the chime of wind in icicles
the chuckle of fire in ecstasy
of its own burning
and at my fingertips
were ten digits you had asked me
never to dial again
This book is about the endless longings that make up the lives of those who live passionately. It left me longing for the person, the poet himself. But I never had a chance to know Craig Arnold. Two years ago (April 27th) he went missing and was later presumed to have suffered a fatal fall while hiking on a volcanic Japanese island. His body was never recovered.
While in Japan on a U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist’s Exchange Fellowship, Craig was working on a series of lyric essays about volcanoes, a project he began when he was living with his partner, the poet Rebecca Lindenberg, in Rome in 2006, when Craig was on the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Before arriving in Japan, he wrote about volcanoes in Italy, Greece, Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia (where he had a Fulbright) and elsewhere. Though the book of lyric essays, according to Lindenberg, tentatively titled “An Exchange for Fire”, is far from complete, there is enough to consider publishing, likely through Copper Canyon with help from writer and friend Francine Prose.
As for his poetry, Craig was working on a collection tentatively titled “Peaceable Kingdom” inspired by D.H. Lawrence’s “Birds, Beasts and Flowers”. Some of those poems can be found in Poetry and Paris Review among other places. Though Lindenberg and Craig’s family are all eager to make Craig’s work available, the unpublished works are tied up in probate, which according to Lindenberg is “a very, very, very long (and sort of ongoing) story about how hard it is to get an official declaration of death for a person who disappears without a trace in a foreign country. Until there is official legal declaration (as opposed to ‘presumption’) of death, nothing much can be done with Craig’s unpublished writings of any kind.” So it may be a few more months before these pieces can come to light, but it looks like there is hope, in the sense that the work does in fact exist and there are people trying to release it into the world.
“I really believe,” Lindenberg told me, that when people see these poems they “will see what the first two books have already shown – that Craig was a poet of enormous range, tremendous ambition, genuine hunger, and unparalleled talent. He never did the same thing twice, but everything he did, he did better than anybody else.”
My hope is that though Craig is gone, he continues to be read with love, that the readers of this work believe what they are reading. My hope is that the disbelieving, cynical, sarcastic person in all of us can put aside our reservations about trust and art and embrace the values of this very real, earnest, empathetic work.
And when we lie
together and I feel your bones
blaze and the rose of your face unfolds
and the incandescence of your skin
crackles like the paper at the tip
of a drawn-on cigarette
Craig Arnold’s poetry is an antidote to a world that discourages intense feeling, an argument for seeing the world with empathetic eyes. We should be “without hostility without resistance” to not only the creative work we observe, but the people around us. Poems like these must be read in earnest, with a belief that beauty and pain can (or must) reside, like us, inside one another.
