BEAST OF TWO HUNGERS

Henri Cole's latest collection, Blackbird and Wolf, has won him the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a purse of $25,000, from the Academy of American Poets. 

I re-read the book last night instead of going to the bar. Imagine, in my black-hooved boots and dark jeans, touching the silver knuckle of my belt-buckle, having showered and slicked my hair, cologne on my bare neck, unshaven, satyr-rough, the spill of my hairy chest just before throwing on a shirt, and there it glanced at me from the table, there it appeared in the suddenly opened book:

Dead Wren

When I open your little gothic wings

on my whitewashed chest of drawers,

I almost fear you, as if today were my funeral.

Moment by moment, enzymes digest

your life into a kind of coffin liqueur.

Two flies, like coroners, investigate your feathers.

My clock is your obelisk, though only this morning

you lunged into my room, extravagant as Nero,

then, not seeing yourself in the sunlit glass,

struck it. Night--what beams does it clear away?

The rain falls. The sky is pained. All that breathes suffers.

Yet the waters of affliction are purifying.

The wounded soldier heals. There is new wine and oil.

Here, take my handkerchief as your hearse.

. . . . . 

You can't get much better than that for a poem at midnight, especially when you're dressed for the promise of sex, like you're getting ready for new love or your funeral.. . 

. . . . .

I was thinking the title to this collection is why I stole it. I was thinking the first time I read it, I wasn't impressed as I was with his pulitzer nominated Middle Earth. It seemed to me the title felt more focused than the collection itself. But re-reading it last night, perhaps I'm changing my mind. 

The title isn't a reference to any phrase or poem in the book. It therefore seems to speak to some idea of the collection itself. But as you begin to read, you're not really sure what this book's purpose is--don't books have these? Don't we expect a book to deliver us? Why else give it a title and not just: Poems. 

The first poems seem to be autobiographical. Indeed, the title to the first section is "Birthday" and the poems themselves relay moments of reflection close to the speaker's animal birth and mother, and then his father, poems that relay moments from childhood or reflections of it: 

To Sleep

Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand

that stroked my brow, "Come along, child;

stretch out your feet under the blanket.

Darkness will give you back, unremembering.

Do not be afraid." So I put down my book

and pushed like a finger through sheer silk,

the autobiographical part of me, the am,

snatched up to a different place, where I was

no longer my body but something more--

the compulsive, disorderly parts of me

in a state of equalization, everything sliding off:

war, love, suicide, poverty--as the rebellious,

mortal, I, I, I lay, like a beetle irrigating a rose,

my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.

. . . . .

I re-read this poem here, because I think it's secretly touching the title on the knee. Because it follows the speaker into some part of self that is not what he is, into the realm of sleep, that here in these lines is warm and corporal. Animal. A realm of instinct and not yet dream. Not yet narrative. No longer body, but being, blood in shade.

Blackbird and Wolf, two animals symbolic of two realms, wind and earth. Two predatory figures reflected in the water of the author's vision. As if the author were rapt in a caught wonderment between them, a beast between two reflected worlds. 

I think part of this book's project--and I think to speak of a book's project is to speak about something found, and not necessarily intended, by the author--is a contemplation of human instinct in relation to human spirit, soul. In the poem "Ambulance", for example, Cole writes, "I felt like the personification of an abstraction". Many of the poems work as meditations that return us to an animalism that is as spiritual as it is un-thinking. Take these few lines from a poem in the third and final section of the book, "Dune" (as if this, finally, is a human realm, a place in flux, between earth, sky, and sea): "Eating the Peach"

Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer.

Time and darkness mean nothing to me, 

moving forward and back with my white enameled teeth

 . . . . . . . . . . 

Eating the peach, I feel the long

wandering, my human hand--once fin and paw--

reaching through and across the allegory of Eden

. . . . .

I don't generally like the word "soul", because it is an assumption I find self-indulgent, like using the word "God". I want to know what these words mean, because I think they do mean something that I can feel and relate to, but their religious connotations are too large, and churches have already destroyed any version of them we can believe in. But in Cole's work these assumptions don't work in any didactic sensibility. His poems work backward, in an almost Whitmanesque, even gnostic, manner, as he contemplates cosmos by considering vulgarities of the flesh. But instead moving in a Calvinistic approach, one that finds the body disgusting first and then the "soul" a thing that can redeem or save humanity from itself, these poems discover transcendent aspirations by stripping us down to the animal. They wonder that we are creatures first, with hungers, but with an ability for metaphor. Cole wonders that a Human animal can be this strange and hybrid. 

In the middle section of the book, "Gravity and Center", aptly titled, as if the forces of nature affect both animal and spiritual hungers, comes the poem that best speaks to the question of the collection's title, and therefore the book's purpose:

American Kestrel

I see you sitting erect on my fire escape,

plucking at your dinner of flayed mouse,

like the red strings of a harp, choking a bit

on the venous blue flesh and hemorrhaging tail.

With your perfect black-and-white thief's mask,

you look like a stuffed bird in a glass case,

somewhere between the animal and human life.

The love word is far away. Can you see me?

I am a man. No one has what I have:

my long clean hands, my bored lips. This is my home:

Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,

as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things, 

trying to create something neither confessional 

nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

. . . . .

So I've stayed up late, but stayed in, to read alone these modern sonnets. Half-dressed as I am, and ready with my own hungers. In this poem the murderous hunger of the bird is answered by the dog's contemplative, but instinctual, fear. And the human? A figure caught between confession and abstraction, "somewhere between the animal and human life". Nature and godhood, whatever that might be, loveless and literal, but drenched with selfhood, the cold, far indifference of a newly breaking but ancient moonlight. 

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can.

. . . . . .

I GO TO PRISON

. . . . .

Friends and Strangers, I'm between poetry manuscripts, in a kind of purgatory of middleness, and part of the silence (while I revise and play my own secretery, mailing out like a mad filing intern) is that I'm rapt and studious--though it feels more like despair--over the manner of poems I truly feel compelled by. I'm in a kind of desperation for the poems of necessity, by which I mean, of course, those poems my heart desires most. I'm reading feverishly few books, over and over, trying to summon a voice from them that is my own. Some authenticity from between the black hammers.

It's all a great mess in my notebooks right now. And then there is the cloud of great worry, the anxiety, the fear. And the intense envy, which is also a gear. In the end, as always, the language fails, and what I have are these long mornings where I blur and try my best to work and come into focus. Then a long walk on the beaches in the afternoon with my cutiepie, my puppy. The most resonant part of my day: the lightning silent on the fronds, the wind rifling the brokenness of the horizon's blue mane, the wind come down off the black mountain to the north to scour the gold dunes. A brightness underscored by some lengthening transparent shade. It's a useless life, and I pace in it. The stars fall down on my head.

. . . . .

I notice in my last post that I use the words "narrative" and "confessional" synonymously. Probably because I'm trying to find my own lyric place between them. A poem with a lyric "I" born by music, helped along by the trappings of both narrative and confessionalism. What exactly is a confessional poem? I am speaking of contemporary poets whose poems are so often spoken by an "I" that seems authentically the poet. The poetry of our journals is filled with self-referential moments, perceptions, incidents, and minutiae from the poet-speaker's own life. To some extant, we're all writing some version of a confessional poem.

Stern says of his AMERICAN SONNETS that they are "memory-ridden," and I think this is true of his latest book, EVERYTHING IS BURNING, a collection of mostly shorter poems written, he's said in a recent interview, in short bursts:

CIGARS

The same cracked hoarse nasal sexy laugh--
I almost lifted my face out of the newspaper
to remind her of the drowned bee and the shaky
pedestrian bridge, I almost told her her
favorite passage of Mahler, we were that close
going up and down the ladders and interchanging
souls with each other, we were that overlapping,
appearing and disappearing, that prayerful,
lighting each other's cigars inside the room of laurel-green
horse laughter.


The "I" here is confessional and not-confessional: sure, this is Stern himself and yet he's not really confessing any incident, there's no secrecy afforded us, no internal monologue that completes a perception of the world. But having written this, it strikes me that this is exactly what this poem does. We're driven by a consciousness in fragmented reflection. Voice is tantamount to the achievement of the poem. As is playfulness with the language, and a remarkable love of experience. But does this make his poem confessional?

The poem is also not-narrative and narrative at the same time: Stern tells the story of this memory, but also refrains from burdening the reader with superficial direction. We don't know who they are, or where, or why they're there, or what happens to them. Stern offers us the details of sensual incident without boring us with the monotony of the story itself. The encounter, the bliss of it was all. We get the good parts! and the poem retains all the mystery of something partially remembered and that emotional resonance that makes it valuable.

One of my favorite poems in the book is a short one that first appeared in The New Yorker entitled "Sylvia." It's written to his little sister who died when they were children, but I like to think of Sylvia Plath:

SYLVIA

Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion
and all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.

. . . . .

A review by Olivia Cronk in the January 2007 issue of Bookslut of Frederick Seidel's new book OOGA BOOGA remarked that "because Seidel spends such time with these bits of the everyday, it becomes noticeable that his existence is textured with a creepy decadence." Seidel, like the best Dr. Seuss book, is violent both in his language and in his imagery. His daily moments, those he might be "confessing", are tempered by metric extravagance and confessional insight. At times his book reads like a psychological profile, as he provokes with sexual violence and bare political heat. As in Stern's poetry, voice is a driving force in Seidel's work. And still, I hesitate to call his work "confessional," even when it is, it isn't:


WHITE BUTTERFLIES

1.
Clematis paniculata sweetens one side of Howard Street.
White butterflies in pairs flutter over the white flowers.
In white kimonos, giggling and whispering,
The butterflies titter and flutter their silk fans,
End-of-summer cabbage butterflies, in white pairs.
Sweet autumn clematis feeds these delicate souls perfume.
I remember how we met, how shyly.

2.
Four months of drought on the East End ends.
Ten thousand windshield wipers wiping the tears away.
The back roads are black.
The ocean runs around barking under the delicious rain, so happy.
Traditional household cleaners polish the Imperial palace floors
Of heaven spotless. THUNDER. Cleanliness and order
Bring universal freshness and good sense to the Empire. LIGHTNING.

3.
I have never had a serious thought in my life on Gibson Lane.
A man turning into cremains is standing on the beach.
I used to walk my dog along the beach.
This afternoon I had to put him down.
Jimmy my boy, my sweetyboy, my Jimmy.
It is night, and outside the house, at eleven o'clock,
The lawn sprinklers come on in the rain.



Even though a poem as beautiful as this confesses, the focus of it seems to be in praise of existence. Of a time of year, a season of being and losing and the adoration of the time. The poem itself isn't concerned with making any confessional statement. Seidel is in his life, but the poem doesn't examine this life as much as it revels in it. It admires the narrative details of Seidel's experience and transforms them into a spiritual dialogue of sorts between the man and the world. It makes a kind of memory as much as it documents a difficult and layered relationship with his experience of the world in time. Still, there is a restraint that hides the details we expect of a confession. Rather, these sections work as psychological profiles of the same man at different moments of attention. They serve as the documentary of his remembering, that moment un-occluded by langauge. Yes, for me this poem works like an independent short film. I see the man touching the flowers and having a wash of emotion, but there is no cut to another time, no explanation. This time, of meeting the flowers, of being between thunder and lightning, of remembering his dog, is the point, and all of these points are Seidel.

I think I'm wrestling here with what I think confessional poetry really is. Robert Lowell in the study of his family, Anne Sexton in her religious and sexual addresses, Lucille Clifton, Dorianne Laux. . . I look to these writers whose work mostly seems to be confessional in that they admit the details of personal being, and their poems seem to examine issues of personal identity: issues of faith, gender, race, politics, philosophy, etc . . . many of their poems are explorations of a personal wonder, anchored in daily experience.

This doesn't sound so different than what happens in Seidel's poem. For me the biggest difference is a kind of dramatic staging of the voice in his work. Perhaps this is only a stylistic remark on my part. In fact, his first book was controversial precisely for how exactly confessional it was, naming real persons. In this poem, clarity results in a psychologically apparent movement in which each section is deflected by the next. So a psycho-lovely poem, and, I suppose, a confessional poem--but with the air of something different. . ..

. . . . .

Perhaps where I feel clearest about what a confessional poem might be is when reading Henri Cole's newest book BLACKBIRD AND WOLF where I'm struck by a very centered and intimate Self who speaks to his own life. It seems apparent that the poems are autobiographical, and that here is the poet in his own life trying to put things down as simply as possible--"simple" is the demanding task that makes Cole's poems so rewarding. When he speaks I feel as if I must crouch down to listen, to eavesdrop on someone else's prayer, and this, for me, has an aura of sacrilege that makes his poetry that much more insistent. When I read them I feel as if something necessary is happening and my attention is required to fulfill it. I am needed by these poems. They demand me. Yet when I read these poems, I am also accutely aware that I am unnecessary. They exist in themselves completely. Cole is a consciousness considering objects and events in his life, weighing them forthright. It is a pleasure to be able to witness this kind of working understanding:

POPPIES

Waking from comalike sleep, I saw the poppies,

with their limp necks and unregimented beauty.

Pause, I thought, to say something true: It was night,

I wanted to kiss your lips, which remained supple,

but all the water in them had been replaced,

with embalming compound. So I was angry.

I loved the poppies, with their wide-open faces,

how they carried themselves, beckoning to me

instead of pushing away. The way in and the way out

are the same, essentially: emotions disrupting thought,

proximity to God, the pain of separation.

I loved the poppies, with their effortless existence,

like grief and fate, but tempered and formalized.

Your hair was black and curly; I combed it.





If we map the movement of the poem, perhaps we see why Cole's work feels so intimate: "I saw the poppies . . . I thought, to say something true . . . .I wanted to kiss your lips . . . I was angry . . . I loved . . . Your hair was black and curly; I combed it." He's confessing an emotional response to the world as well as trying to remark upon it. He risks a self-indulgence that other poems must combat with stylistic overture. I'm being unfair, since every poet must invent their own way to say, to move. But it does strike me that Cole's poem invents a voice that is stunning for its emotional vulnerability.

What's interesting about narrative is that by the end of the sonnet, it's transformed into contemplation. Again, much of the particulars are fragmented as they bolster the bareness of Cole's voice. Nothing happens in the poem but the poem. We're not told about an afternoon when at the wake the speaker tries to kiss his lover's dead lips and instead finds a correlative in the poppies. Still, the story is hidden here in the speaker's confession, though it turns at the end when he considers what existence might be: "The way in and the way out / are the same essentially: emotions disrupting thought, / proximity to God, the pain of separation." Cole's is a contemplative lyric that he finds by writing about his own life experience.

. . . . .

What good is all this diffcult attempt at naming, defining, categorizing? Is it fair to think of a poet as "Confessional" or "Narrative" or "Lyric"? Isn't every poem bound to itself, to how it might achieve its own poemness? Still, I think it says something about my work if I can say what kind of poem I think I'm writing. Whatever the poem does, if I think of myself as a Lyric poet, or a Narrative poet--these admissions are really evidence of an aspiration. Because even if it's still an abstraction, there is a "kind" of poem I'm envisioning for myself, for my own. . .

Friends and Strangers, I'm not sure. But I am caught in wonder at these poets, who seem to move through their poems with a striking lyricism that reaches me. I'm interested in how they carve out a poem from both confessional and narrative stands.

Are these my new models? Perhaps they are the poles between which I will attract my own version. I am triangulating the stars that fall down on me. I love them. I am against them. I steal them. I curse them. I hide them, mutilate and kiss them.

My heroes, my haunts, my lovely hells.

. . . . .

PURE DAYLIGHT IS THE STONE

Except that Cavafy is always discussing sex,

only he never seems to be in the clutches, as I pointed out in my last entry, like Rigoberto Gonzalez, who's absolutely gripping, clawing, entering, being undone by, torqued, worn, re-bodied and re-boundaried by violent desires--where sex is his religion, the death of self and the resurrection. The body too is exchanged in this transformation of person, except in Cavafy there's no psycho-porn, there's only the momentary reminiscence of lips and face and hair.

It's this distance that demands oblique, antique phrases like "erotic pleasure" to Gonzalez' frank, "finger, foot, cock," that I'm referring to when I call Cavafy a Gay Republican. Tonight I'm haunted by the feeling that I was brazen and wrong, that I've hurt my feelings for Cavafy--

that I've wounded a secret love. Though I'm right to say he's a demon with a blue eye.

. . . . .

"Picture Of a 23 Year-Old Painted By His Friend Of the Same Age, An Amateur"

He finished the picture yesterday noon.
Now he looks at it detail by detail. He's painted him
wearing an unbuttoned gray jacket,
no vest, tieless, with a rose-colored
shirt, open, allowing a glimpse
of his beautiful chest and neck.
The right side of his forehead is almost covered
by his hair, his lovely hair
(done in the style he's recently adopted).
He's managed to capture perfectly the sensual note
he wanted when he did the eyes,
when he did the lips. . .
That mouth of his, those lips
so ready to satisfy a special kind of erotic pleasure.

. . . . .

Friends and Strangers, Gonzalez' achievement is that he risks the psychotherapeutic "I" to descend into sexuality, when most contemporary poets use it to romanticize a family drama (still clouded, unknowing Lowell-ists) or to document the daily mundane (as if pure journalism could serve us as poetry), poorly idolizing W.C. Williams. Sex is horror. The challenge for Gonzalez, Sexton, and anyone else who attempts sex as subject (say Bidart, or more recently Siken) is that to avoid being funny or caricaturist, the poem must be more than provocative. Its nature is to shock us. Poets of sexual descent, especially those of us affected by post-modernist sensibilities, have to worry whether this shock will be discredited as pornographic or simply poorly executed. This is not a concern for Cavafy, whose distance from sex itself is as great as the distance between the stone and the light, the living and the remembered.

. . . . .

How do we achieve, on the other hand, something contemplative, quiet, unless we write like Cavafy, apart, at a distance. Is it possible to disrobe in a poem? I mean to actually fuck in a poem? Can poetry succeed in the middle of a sexual display, can poetry really achieve its own Dyonisian impulse and not result in sounding disturbing?


Cavafy is forever considering loss, and not really sex. He's a sensualist, and in the end sensualism is always adorned by a death. His young dead lover is ever stoned by the light of his memory.

For me Henri Cole is more like Cavafy than Gonzalez. His approach is distanced by omniscience, the recounting of a memory. It's so internalized, quiet--and, like Cavafy, this is a mark of its beauty. But it's so much an inward movement that we end up in the air. It's as if he's reading an obituary. It's as if the experience belongs to any of us, and especially to someone else.


"Blur 2"


The strong sad ritual between us could not be broken:

the empathetic greeting; the apologies

and reproaches; the narrow bed of his flesh;

the fear of being shown whole in the mirror

of another's fragmentation; the climbing on;

the unambiguous freedom born of submission;

the head, like a rock, hefted on and off moist earth;

the rough language; the impermeable core

of one's being made permeable; the black hair

and shining eyes; and afterward, the marrowy

emissions, the gasping made liquid; the torso

like pale clay or a plank, being dropped;

the small confessional remarks that inscribe

the sole; the indolence; the being alone.


The power of a poem like this is that in the end we're greedy eavesdroppers--because this is someone else's life, we're reading his journal, he's talking to himself, offering his fallen confession, but we're listening too, secretly, and it sounds like our own experience in the embrace of a shadow: "the impermeable core / of one's being made permeable". Cole succeeds in a compelling exhibitionism without an ounce of vulgarity. I mean, "marrowy / emissions, the gasping made liquid"? You couldn't get any more exact and simultaneously non-descript.

. . . . .

The need for an illicit poetry that addresses taboo sensuality is not new, but it belongs to those tragic personages who risk their lives and public reputations to make of themselves an offering. Think de Sade or Georges Bataille. Think Verlaine and his disastrous affair with Rimbaud. Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Collette (god the French!), Anaiis Nin, Sexton, Kathy Acker. . . To write explicity about sex means you have to offend, challenge, face the admonition of the religious fear-mongers. And yet,

I started writing this to address Cavafy, to apologize for calling him a Gay Republican. Was that unfair? It was to reference his honesty about sexual identity masked with the daylight frankness with which he absolutely avoids sexuality altogether. Of course, this is blameless. Sexuality wasn't his subject at all--it was longing, and how the body torments us because it sails.

I started writing this to address and to define the boundary of erotic poetics, and whether a style of confessional honesty can offer us beautiful poems, or merely disturbing ones. Is the horror of sexual encounter, the terror of losing self, body, boundary, identity, all to the administering of physical pain--the bite, the lash, the orgasm--a realm where poetry can love? We are writing somewhere between the erotic and the sexually vulgar. We are balancing death with love. Love sends us a message:--from the distant light of his eyes to the hot presence of this blood--Naughty is the new Nice.

. . . . .

I don't know whether there is a poetry that couples the vulgar and the romantic, one that balances memory with the intensity of the sexual act itself. If this kind of poem exists, is it a descendant of something cultured or something brutal? Cavafy or Lorca? Straightforward Imagery or Symbolic Metaphor? Nature or Nurture?

I'm thinking now of Carl Phillips, whose work at first, because of the pressure of its syntax, feels related to Cavafy in terms of its portrayal of men in relationships, its reference to classical texts and figures and history, and the clarity of its imagery. (Though, for me, his resemblance to Donne--in terms of the metaphysical intensity of his work--is even more striking). But reading any of his books, you realize he's fearlessly grazing on the vulgar. But like Lorca, he gives it to us like a burning romantic. Even though he's over us, our whole obsession with romantics, with desire. Still, he's faced with the reality of it. How dow we write about something so boring? When every other heart has a love song to cry over? So he's an intellectual, and he's filthy rich, and he's bored with the help--but he's in love, and god it's gross to have to write about it, but oh. His syntax is trying to mezmerize us, hypnotize us. He really has to work hard to cast a spell. Its the beauty of philosophy, that has something sure to say, crossed with the irony of one who's self conscious of his own reflection in the water. He yawns and rolls his eyes and waves down to himself, Cold Narcissus. Well, what's one more poem to you, Friend and Stranger?

(And then the breeze comes through like a secret violence--that like Bishop happens syntactically:

"I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident"

and the whisper of it's enough to reduce us to the lost petals of his looks. . .

. . . . .

"Quarter-View, From Nauset"


Love, etc. Have been remembering
the part in Sophocles
where a god advises the two heroes

they should be as
twin lions, feeding--how
even the flesh of late

slaughter does not
distract them from keeping
each over the other

a guarding eye.
What part of this is love, and
what survival

is never said,
though the difference it makes is
at least that between a lily and, say,

a shield. I think of you
often, especially here,
at the edge of the world or a

part of it, anyway,
by which I mean of course
more, you will have guessed, than

the coast, just now, I
stand on. Against it,
the water dashes with

the violence of two men who,
having stripped it, now take for their
own the body of

a third man on the bad
sofa of an even worse
motel room in what eventually

is movie--one
we've seen . . . The way
what looks like rape

might not be. You'd like
the light here. At
times, a color you'd call anything but blue.