Anthologies do
not just happen. They are – they have – intention. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, so significant
for many of my generation, had the twin purposes of confronting the kind of
contemporary poetry taught in universities after World War Two and of
introducing a range of largely unknown work. In Britain
each volume of the Oxford
series had tried to represent a period, itself in part an arbitrary concept.
The best Oxford Books are
chronologically fuzzy at the edges. Where they have been replaced by New Oxford volumes ideological shifts can be clearly seen as the new editors tried to
represent voices hitherto unheard among the more traditionally canonical work.
As anthologists, Pound and Zukofsky trawled the
poetry they knew for usable examples, their purposes at once didactic and
exemplary for poets of younger generations. Padgett and Shapiro’s An Anthology of New York Poets collected
poets not only of a place but loosely but recognisably of a “school.” By
contrast the recent two-volume The New
York Poets, published in Britain by Carcanet, has
an historical purpose, even if as in the Oxford selections, the poems insist on
breaking out of chronology and asserting that poetry is “news that stays news.”
I hope I may be
forgiven this brief excursus as I review Long
Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets (OSUP, 2006). The editor, David Biespiel, has brought together work by some eighty-nine
poets, most of whom are now living and working in Alaska, British Columbia,
Idaho, western Montana, Oregon and Washington. There is, he says, “no such
thing as regional poetry” (Long Journey,
p.xv). The poet who stays, the poet who leaves, the
poet who arrives, each is capable of attention and work both local and global.
“The province of the poem is the world,” William Carlos Williams once wrote. In
Pound’s Pisan Cantos we find: “What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.” Biespel’s
anthology seems to operate by these principles as well as in his determination
to show what is being written in the greater Northwest now. Biespel
calls the book “an early 21st century snapshot of how various and
engaging this region’s poetry is” (p. xix). This is an image of instantaneity,
of a frozen moment as near as possible to now. In this moment poets of several
generations and various techniques and interests are working simultaneously in
many places. The anthology is arranged alphabetically by poets’ names. Biespiel thus avoids any linear narrative of time or place
and democratically juxtaposes the work of the regionally known, the nationally
known and the internationally known with that of newer or perhaps lesser known
poets. The use of the alphabet also draws our attention to writing itself.
These arbitrary juxtapositions can also be very interesting in formal terms, as
for example when we find Ingrid Wendt’s “Mukilteo Ferry” (p. 284) followed by
John Witte’s “Y”. Wendt’s poem is a single, beautifully controlled sentence
whose grammatical resolution models the resolution of tension and anxiety in
the modern world through water and the stars. The poem attends with exactitude
to language; its commentary on the word “upon,” for example:
without
warning, the cloak of a great
calm descends
upon me, like
the very word
“upon” – the
way
it slows the
sentence down –
a measured
word, hinged –the way
fish, in their
inscrutable
expressions,
hang
immobile…
The emotionally
and intellectually inscrutable “upon” becomes lexical, a cloak of calm, as the
fish in the simile usher in the solace of the water. The poem’s rhythms, the
hard stress on “relentless” in lines one and two compared with, say, line
twenty: “and I enter again into the beneficence”, model the shifts of feeling
which the poem presents. Grammar, rhythm and choice of words combine in the
quiet exorcism of modern stress for the reader as well as for the poet. Witte’s
poem is not and has not a conventional sentence and uses the resources of
typographical spacing to achieve precise timing:
This night and no other
this cold this memory this darkness beyond
the station these stars…
This deictic
approach places the reader on a railway platform as a woman and child wait, the
child forming a “y” with his mother as he arches his back. The central image is
thus written on the night, the page, in a poem where “these words/and none
other” point to precise observation of “this train arriving” in a perpetual present. “Y” is
a synecdoche for the mother and child waiting and for the whole poem.
In such a large
collection, held together with intentional lightness by time and space, there
are sudden surprises of wit. In Michele Glazer’s “Historic House, Astoria,” we find “It
wasn’t my old life I wanted but the one that had eluded me” (p.71). This wry
meditation on heritage, “the invention of nostalgia” (line 1) with its too
meticulous assembling of authentic artefacts, “until the house is more as we
imagine than how it was” (line 15), speaks strongly to a British reader, but it
also raises very important questions about the search for historical
authenticity in the American West.
In “Public Poem
in the First Person,” Linda McCarriston writes:
Myself, the
poet, is musing
on the
spiritual. Not religion, opium
of the people, spirituality
opium of the elite…(p.166)
Dealing with the
tensions of the spiritual, the individual state of mind and the challenges of
poetry to the poet, this poem plays seriously but
lightly with the confessional. It is at once literary, with references to
Lowell, Sexton and Plath, and deeply felt. Distanced
from a narrative “I” by “Myself, the poet,” a third–person construction, the
reader enjoys the witty cultural diagnosis of “opium of the elite” before experiencing the poet’s standing outside
Poetry’s “edifice,” unsure whether it’s a “cathedral or prison”(line 12) or
indeed the chamber of a dying mother. The last line’s “Shall
I come in?” leaves us in a doubt both wide and deep.
By wit I of
course do not mean humour. Consider “After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes”
by Madeline DeFrees (p.50). First, the courage in
choosing one’s title from one of America’s
greatest poets, then in amending it in the light of experience with a
beautiful western image:
It wasn’t formal exactly. More like a
hummingbird
in the midst
of a crow convention…
The bird imagery
is sustained as the speaker “Day after wrenching/day contemplate(s) death”
(lines 21-22). She tells us:
I could drown. But I have work to do,
must join the hummingbird to go the distance…
. . . .
. . . .
…Like
the hummer,
I …/
…hope to take my leave mining
the deepest
cup in the floral kingdom: red
throat of the
trumpet creeper (lines 27-28 and 32-35).
The poem is at
once western and universal, its imagery asserting that human pain and death are
part of the dance, the flight of nature. It is also a homage
to Dickinson,
in whose work wild creatures are so often markers of human feeling and
experience.
In “Song of the
Saxifrage to the Rock” (p.178), Don McKay places human experience and history
in the perspective of geological time:
Who is so
heavy with the past as you,
Monsieur Basalt? Not the planet’s
most muscular
depressive,
not the twentieth century (lines1-3).
But as the saxifrage,
the rock-splitter, insinuates itself into the company of the rock, the “slow
one” (line 9), it speaks of the basalt’s eventual change. The poem with its
fourteen lines, its occasional iambics and absence of rhymes, both is and is
not a sonnet. Like the saxifrage, acting as the rock’s “fool” (line 10) in
telling him an inconvenient truth and incidentally undermining the staple
Biblical image of the rock as eternal, the poem itself models dissolution and
metamorphosis.
Other poets in
the anthology attend to language and form with more obvious insistence. In “Anagrammer” (p. 212), Peter Pereira works anagrams in a
playful but deeply serious fashion.
If you believe in the magic of
language (he begins),
then Elvis really Lives
and Princess
Diana foretold I end as car spin.
If you believe the letters themselves
contain a
power within them,
then you
understand
what makes outside tedious,
how desperation becomes a rope ends it.
“The circular
logic that allows senator to become treason,/and treason to become atoners” (lines 9-10) eventually leads the reader to learn that “listen is the same as silent,/and not one letter separates stained from sainted” (lines19-20). Of course, as the poem’s opening words
indicate, one does not have to believe in the magic of words at all and can
remain outside the poem’s rules. This leaves the reader in an ambiguous
relation to the poem’s metamorphic power and perhaps to poetry in general. This
kind of wordplay might seem addictive but limited, yet in Pereira’s hands anagram seems to extend the
possibilities of poetry in amusing but by no means trivial ways. In his “The
Devil’s Dictionary of Medical Terms” (p. 213), sombre truths underlie the fun,
for example, “Dermatitis: Am dirtiest” (line 9), or “Diabetes Mellitus: diet
abuses met ill” (line 10). A profounder use of alphabetic resources, rooted in
Hebrew abecedarian numerological and acrostic tradition informs Emily Warn’s “Kuf: Mnemonic” (pp.282-283). Here questions strange
and important are juxtaposed:
1.
(alef) Which word struck the first number out of the
formless void?
And
3. (gimel) How do you count from zero to one?
4. (dalet) Is there an instant between life and death?
These questions
and others (un)like them – “How do coyotes, hunters
and angels mark their principalities?” (line 29), or
“Does God lead or follow or reconnoiter?” (line 41 which, coming at the “kuf”
of the title, must be as centrally important as it is puzzling), are also
interspersed with odd, biblical-sounding statements such as, “See, I have set before
you this day ticks and honey” (line 38). This is followed by “Whoever writes
down the Torah burns it.” Yet significantly the poem’s last word is “written”
(line 44) and the whole is a play between the written and the unwritable, the perhaps known and the unknowable, “Who is
your dove, your perfect one?” (line 37) and “Who taught language to be sanctuary?” (line 34). Apparently rooted in medieval Judaism, Warn’s poetry grows in the New World where coyotes and
hunters roam and in where her other poem anthologized here, “Appalachian Midrash” (pages279-281), “…the river Dipper” bobs “seventy
times,” the mystical number of Divine perfection and in the New Testament the
number of divine-human forgiveness. Both poems seem in part a kind of American
rabbinical teasing where somehow the injunction to choose honey rather than
ticks, (“Appalachian Midrash, line 44) is profoundly
important and serious.
Here one is
tempted to carry out some arbitrary juxtapositions of one’s own, read across
the anthology and cite Arlitia Jones’s “A Winter
Fairytale” (pp. 132-133), for an antidote to the mystical and the mythic and to
“poetic” imagery. Jones tells us:
The moon is just
the moon and
not a white doe
standing
still in a forest of stars
and that is
simply a dog
barking off
in the night
and not the
ancient wolf
baying,
crouched, waiting to leap
and pull the
moon down (lines1-8)
“Poets, quit
thumbing your book of myths,” Jones orders (line 29). The poets (somehow,
despite the “we” of line 14 one suspects that they are mostly male like “The
man who owns” the dog and “did not feed him today” (lines 18 and 19)) are
instead to write the words of an exhausted woman shopkeeper to her husband,
instructing him to shoot the dog which has disturbed her sleep. Perhaps he will
shoot a good number of fairy tales at the same time, but the poem cites the
fairy or mythic tropes in the process of rejecting them. Jones’s sardonic humour cuts more ways than
one.
The anthology
contains lyric meditations on death – “ …life at any point exceeds/ the price”
(Tess Gallagher, p.63), narratives which contain
atrocity but so much more (Patrick Lane, “The War,” pp.149-154), satire (Tod Marshall, “Describe Book Blurbs to Nationalism,”
p.163), prose poems (Patricia Goedicke, pp.75 and
76), poems in which I at least hear a
measured, just anger (Candice Favilla, pp. 55-58;
Lawson Fusao Inada, pp. 118-121), and an elegy by
Sharon Thesen for Diana, Princess of Wales which is at
once a homage to Frank O’Hara and a discussion of differences between Canadian
and American culture (“The Day Lady Di Died,”p.266).
The random plot of the alphabet offers the reader the possibility of many rich
cross-readings and comparisons, exciting discoveries and very easy access to
known favourites. One can also read the anthology straight through, gaining as
one does so a sense of variety, energy, technique, thought and deep involvement
in language. These are surely values which constitute a poetic culture. I would
not wish a single omission from the book since in whole and part it has brought
me so much new knowledge. I have one or two regrets; I should have liked more
by Primus St. John. A poet who tells us: “Sometimes, I don’t understand/Beauty at
all” (p. 253) and turns the rhetoric of a poem and a whole generational story
on a single line, “And now your grandfather” (p. 252), has command of a
self-effacing technique which would be better represented by a larger sample.
But this might be said of others; I have some knowledge of St. John’s work already. I also wonder
whether Robin Blaser, Gary Snyder and Elizabeth Woody
were refuseniks or were not asked. Long Journey is a large, generous book,
a “defining moment in the history of the art” of poetry, as its editor hopes.
It does reveal what many poets “living in this region are
working on right now” (p. xix) and it is difficult to imagine a snapshot into
which more effort, time and scholarship could have gone. The poems Biespel has chosen are not local or regional. Western
horses crossing western rivers can be “Poseidon’s”; what matters to these poets
is “…vowels in a poem/…consonants, cadence, and stress/….a route to the noumenon” (P.K.Page, p.198), and
a sense of working where they are.