Light Up

In a moment everything was lit up
Illuminated by fire as
Smoke cleared to left and right
And the hardwood burned
Through the night men
Looked on and did nothing
For what they had seen
They neither loved nor hated
But hated to speak loved
To sit on their hands
And the hardwood turned
To ash driving forth roaches
Both low and high


----In the style of W.S. Merwin------

Poems Referenced

I Had Been a Polar Explorer

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

Error

We drifted downstream under a scattering of stars
and slept until the sun rose. When we got to the capital,
which lay in ruins, we built a large fire out of what chairs
and tables we could find. The heat was so fierce that birds
overhead caught fire and fell flaming to earth.
These we ate, then continued on foot into regions
where the sea is frozen and the ground is strewn
with moonlike boulders. If only we had stopped,
turned, and gone back to the garden we started from,
with its broken urn, its pile of rotting leaves, and sat
gazing up at the house and seen only the passing
of sunlight over its windows, that would have been
enough, even if the wind cried and clouds scudded seaward
like the pages of a book on which nothing was written

  

Fire

Sometimes there would be a fire and I would into it

and come out unharmed and continue on my way, 

and for me it was just another thing to have done.

As for putting out the fire, I left that to others

who would rush into the billowing smoke with brooms

and blankets to smother the flames. When they were through

they would huddle together to talk of what they had seen--

how lucky they were to have witnessed the lusters of heat,

the hushing effect oashes, but even more to have known the fragrance

of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.

Man and Camel

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."

Mother and Son

The son enters the mother's room
and stands by the bed where the mother lies.
The son believes that she wants to tell him
what he longs to hear—that he is her boy,
always her boy. The son leans down to kiss
the mother's lips, but her lips are cold.
The burial of feelings has begun. The son
touches the mother's hands one last time,
then turns and sees the moon's full face.
An ashen light falls across the floor.
If the moon could speak, what would it say?
If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.

Imperfection

Mark Strand’s Man and Camel speaks to the difficulty of transforming experience and self into poetry. Strand documents with his poetry both his experiences, his struggles to make record of them through poetry, and the failures and successes of the poems to complete the task. Lacking a narrative arc, Strand relies on the concurrent theme to tie his poems together through the three sections of his work. The first two sections consist of Strand’s short poetry and showcase his quiet conversational voice, precise language and landscapes of surrealism.  The third consists entirely of a longer poem, “Poem After the Last Seven Words” specially commissioned for performance in conjunction with Haydn’s quartet, “Opus 51”. The first section is easily the tightest, most adhering to the theme, while the second deviates somewhat, and the last poem moves in and out of theme at will. Though also pocked with ideas of death, filial love, and nothingness, the book nonetheless vibrates with discussion of expression and its difficulties, perhaps the truest subject of any poem.

            In only the second poem Strand seems to address the difficulty of poetic expression. In “I Had Been a Polar Explorer”, after describing his trials as a traveler, the speaker recounts, “I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed.” With the excitement of the experience itself fading, the speaker finds his only recourse is to write about those experiences. Abruptly he finds, “with nothing more to say, I stopped/ and turned my sights on what was near.” It is the suddenness of the poem, the turn does not even merit its own line, that lends power to the notion. Strand seems to be saying that it is only once we write about what we have seen outside, far away, that we can write what about what is close to us. Indeed the speaker notices something new, a man, “Almost at once.”  The speaker is then unable to contact the figure he thought he recognized, who vanishes. Perhaps Strand is capturing the frustration at an inability to truly understand oneself, the barely recognized man being Strand, as compared to our ability to see and record the larger world around us.

            A pair of poems on opposite pages, “Error” and “Fire”, further examines the power of language. “Error” tells of a group who endures extreme conditions and ruin on their travels. The speaker bemoans the decision to keep going, eschewing “the garden where we started from.” He claims that the mundane but pleasurable sunlight of the house “would have been/enough, even if the…the clouds scudded seaward/ like the pages of a book on which nothing is written.” The speaker wishes to have stayed in, to stayed home and ignored the experiences that turned out to be mostly painful. He believes that the simplicity would have satisfied him, even if it meant he would not be able to write anything, to fill any pages of a book. His travel has been an error. “Fire” seems to pick up where “Error” left off. The speaker notes that they would encounter a fire and he would walk through it unharmed, “and for [him] it was just another thing to have done,” it was just another experience. But for his companions it has a much more profound effect. They are struck by the fire, and think themselves lucky to “have known the fragrance/ of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.” His companions have come to understand that words are not eminently powerful; they have limits and are vulnerable to erasure. Where, in “Fire,” the rest wished to go on and experience life that they might write on the pages of their books, the speaker did not and now the others understand his point of view.

            The title poem, too, provides a significant glimpse of the book’s theme. The speaker in “Man and Camel” sits on his porch, on his fortieth birthday, when a man and camel come down the street, singing. He is ensorcelled by the song, but suddenly the pair come running back and accuse him of “ruin[ing] it.” It is a very challenging poem, without many clues for the seeker of meaning. However, there lies power in one sentence. This one sentence, “The wonder of their singing/…seemed an ideal image for all uncommon couples,” alone in the poem speaks of something greater the concrete happenings of the man and the camel. We are left to wonder what uncommon coupling can be on the speakers mind? Read as the pivotal poem of the entire book, perhaps the couple is the irreconcilable themes of “Error” and “Fire”. Perhaps the uncommon couple is experience and expression. The speaker, “wanted to believe,” that the man and the camel had somehow found a way to sing a song, to tell a tale, that so accurately matched the reality of the moment that it was possible for him to do so as well. But as he thinks this to himself, “the man/ and camel ceased to sing.” By assigning too much power to song and the singers, the speaker has “ruined it,” the song its expression, “forever.”

            In the second section of the book, the poems tend to focus slightly more on experience and perhaps a longing for capable expression. Take, for instance, “Mother and Son.” In this poem, a son visits his dying mother. He “believes that she wants to tell him/what he longs to hear,” but she can say nothing. She has died before she could say what the boy needed to hear. She has been silenced. The poem ends with an emphatic pronouncement:

            “If the moon could speak, what would it say?

            If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.”

The poem seeks to illuminate the difficulty of words to express feelings. When the boy sees his mother is dead it states, “The burial of feelings has begun.” We do not always have words for how we feel, or words to make things better. That is the problem of the moon. It cannot speak, but even if it could, in all its ageless wisdom, it would have nothing to say for the death of a mother who could not say she loved her son. Sometimes, this poem seems to say, there simply are no words.

            To be sure, this collection’s themes are fairly eclectic and not merely limited to that which this essay discusses. The themes of experience and expression, however, prevail through much of the work and seem most natural for Strand. Though it is undoubtedly a subject matter ripe for examination, it seems an unnatural one for a United States Poet Laureate. Why, we must ask, does Strand feel he cannot capture life with words? Of course it is an enormous task, but is there no irony in writing a book of poetry about one’s inability to effectively use language? There is no easy answer, but perhaps Strand finds that, like Churchill and democracy, poetry is the worst form of expression except for all the others. Perhaps Strand finds it necessary, after so many years of poetry, to admit he, one of America’s foremost poets, does not have all the answers, does not have a bottomless ability to craft verse to fit the world around him and within him. It can hardly devalue the way we read his work, but rather make it realer to us. For anyone who has put pen to paper has discovered that words are not perfect, words do not follow your orders like soldiers in the field. Strand means to reach out to us, to the poet in each of us, and remind us that poetry is imperfect.

          

                   Strand, Mark. Man and Camel. New York: Knopf, 2006

           

Truth in Numbers

            James Doyle’s “Civil War Photograph” is beautiful in its simplicity. At its base it consists of a single metaphor, indicated in its first line: “Flesh and blood turn mathematic.” The poem seeks to equate the death and destruction that is the aftermath of a battle with mathematical equations and geometry. The poem continues, “The limbs illustrate opaque angles/ The sky rotates three hundred sixty/ degrees.” The images that make up the photograph are turned into rational, logical ideas. Then the poem, on the premise of describing those images that prove the idea of “interlocking masses”, details the death on the battlefield. It speaks of hands still clinging to muskets, uniforms hung upon limbs, bodies fallen into the foliage. It is in these middle four stanzas that the true tension of the poem is revealed to us. The poem purports to make rational and understandable a battle of the Civil War, one of the bloodiest altercations in the history of mankind. As we read the descriptions of the dead we know intrinsically that such violence cannot be made sense of. In the last stanzas, the poem seems to acknowledge this untenable relationship. It refers to the lens as a “blackboard solving equations/ each one for its elusive X.” Doyle sees the photograph as a form of art, just like poetry, trying to make sense of the world around us. The photograph, too, is trying to figure out what X equals, what all this death and destruction means. The poem ends in a series of “maybe[s]”. The variable is unknown; neither the poem nor the photograph has peeled back the veil for us. Again, the beauty of the poem is its simplicity. Without frills and conceits to obscure the simple truth and untruth of the words, we are able to hear exactly what Doyle has to say.  

Found Poem

Voices on Retirement

Mustain said: "I don't know if there's
a worse feeling.
You have to learn to
Move on."
Ellison said: "A lot of it is very
Challenging. My career
Ended."
We played for each other.
You remember, when you look back on your
Career
The games, those great rivalry
Games.
An American experience very few get to
Enjoy.


*from The New York Times' Karen Crouse

Mystery and Warmth

 On Eamon Grennan’s “Visitation” accessible at http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14949

            Firstly, I loved this poem’s simple elegance. It begins simply to state events, without much music or contrivances. But our first simile, the geese “like mystery/I thought”, is a powerful one, and reverberates throughout the poem. The poem continues simply, with a few more similes and a bit more music, but never tangling itself up with conceit upon conceit. A careful reading will reveal the careful use of alliteration, “but we know no more the meaning”, and upon the geese’ departure anaphora, “they’re gone, gone dark, gone on”, which I took to mimic the stammering confusion of the ignorant, the mystified.

This poem is so interesting because it allows us to look directly through the speaker’s eyes, and only through that very narrow lens. We, with the speaker, are looking only up at the geese flying overhead. We do not get to turn our heads down, or to the side. There are questions begged, but left all but unanswered. Who are we? Is it a point of controversy, contention, or a regular occurrence that we “share” the birds? Then of course there are the actual questions of the piece. Why do the birds look so different at night? How are the birds lit the way they are?

            These questions, indeed, are the crux of the poem. For it is truly a poem about mystery. The poet does not expect, nor give, complete answers. The geese are above “us”, and us; they are in some ways intangible, unknowable. Indeed there seems to be something magical to the event. “We” were there only by chance. “We”, and we, know we cannot begin to understand or explain the phenomenon. We can only ask questions, scratch our heads as the birds fly on by.

            The poem defines mystery as:

“a lit thing bearing nothing but the self
we see and savor but know no more the meaning of
than I know what in the cave of its fixed gaze
our cat is thinking”

This idea of mystery is without a doubt the central idea of the poem. By this definition the geese are certainly a mystery. They are lit from below and we cannot begin to imagine what they mean. But towards the end of the poem, I think the poet wants to emphasize a different word in his definition: “savor”. The poet describes the atmosphere after the geese had gone as “for a little while neither cold/ nor dark”. Witnessing the mysterious has warmed “us” up, has allowed “us”, and us, to savor the moment. He calls it “a place of visitation”, and as this is the title it has added weight. The place of visitation is the site of the mystery, the site of something special. However, it almost goes without saying, that a visitation is something fleeting, something temporary and surely so is the feeling to be savored.

Favorite Poems

Of course, this list is fluid and anything but final. It is much to hard to ever be satisfied 

with a list of merely ten poems, for how many poems must you leave out?

1.    "O Captain my Captain", Walt Whitman

2.     "Dulce et Decorum est", Wilfred Owens

3.     "Lucinda Matlock" (from Spoon River Anthology), Edgar Lee Masters

4.     The Aenied, Virgil

5.     "Harlem", Langston Hughes

6.     "The Raven", Edgar Allan Poe

7.     The lyrics of “Something”, George Harrison

8.     "The Tyger", William Blake

9.     "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", W.B. Yeats

10. "The Wasteland", T.S. Eliot

 Excerpt from "O Captain! My Captain!"

My Captain does not answer me, his lips are pale and still;

My father does not feel my arm, he has not pulse nor will;

The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object one;

   Exult! O shores, and ring, O! bells

      But I with mournful tread,

         Walk the deck my Captain lies

             Fallen cold and dead.