Malachi Black – Storm Toward Morning

Copper Canyon 2014

Page Length: 75

Retail: $15

 

Like the greatest formal poets, Malachi Black writes in shapes. Received forms sculpt the shape of a poem by the measure of their recursiveness: the manner in which the poem moves forward and back simultaneously. In a traditional sonnet, for example, as the speaker develops an idea, a scene, or a narrative (an argument), she also, at the end of each line, creates sonic consonance with that which precedes and/or follows. The result is the sensation of forward movement through recurring patterns and the modulation of poetic effects (in this example the effect in question is end-rhyme, though the same argument can be made for poetic features like anaphora, syntactic parallelism, and other features that can echo through a poem). This recursiveness of the sonnet is heightened and dramatized when the poem looks back on itself in its volta: the previous content is artfully repeated and thereby modified, and the result is something like epiphany. The extent to which a poem establishes and then resists its form can be understood as its poetic “shape.”

 

Malachi Black’s poetic shapes are both elegantly discursive and dizzyingly circular: spiritual yearning in swirling eddies of sonic clusters. Storm Toward Morning, Black’s first full-length collection, relies heavily on received forms (most notably the sonnet) to present an aesthetic argument that is equal parts familiar and strange, and the result is palpably beautiful tension: between the traditional and contemporary; between first-book energy and technical virtuosity; and, most importantly, between faith and doubt: a spiritual disquiet masterfully imbued into content and form.

 

Black possesses an astounding command of prosody, and like a world-class athlete, he moves through his lines without wasted motion.

 

“Rocking in my midnight robe, I am

alive and in an eye again beside

 

my kind insomniac, my phantom

glass, companion and my only bride:

 

this little window giving little shine

to something. What I see I keep

 

alive. I name the species, I define

the lurch and glimmer, sweep and pry

 

of eyes against the faint-reflecting glass

by what they can and what I can’t

 

quite grasp…” (Against the Glass)

 

While this sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, Black opens with a procession of trochees that accentuates the quietly desperate state of the speaker. Notably, the opening line ends with a kind of existential release: “I am,” which both posits a stability of self and shifts the poem into its natural meter, which wraps itself around the line in a series of enjambments that create a cascade effect as we progress down the page: “I am / alive”; “my phantom / glass”; “What I see I keep // alive.” But as we course through the couplets, we are returned to previously introduced sounds. At times this consonance is semantically pleasing: “I am / alive;” “my only bride;” “I keep / alive.” However, at other times the effect is something more unnerved: a kind of haunting: “phantom” and “companion;” “faint” and “can’t.”

 

Black’s formal recursiveness is a microcosm of his poems’ engagement with poetic tradition: there is something undeniably traditional in Black’s prosody, yet that quality is cantilevered by Black’s associative ingenuity and contemporary diction, concerns, and general aesthetic orientation. In this regard, there are echoes of James Merrill, Robert Pinsky, Frederick Seidel, Thom Gunn, and the very best of Philip Larkin. And yet: the heart of Black’s formalism, which is, in the end, utterly Psalmic, seems to be in the spirit of the Metaphysical poets of the 17^th century: John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Andrew Marvell, to name a few. These poets sought in their verse an ascent into the mysteries of the divine—mysteries rarely resolved but left open like metaphysical wounds that are simultaneously fatal and freeing. It was this quality, their articulation of spiritual brokenness in formal precision, that T.S. Eliot found utterly compelling, which led him to not only champion these once-derided poets into their still-standing critical favor, but eventually state that devotional poetry is actually poetry in its highest form.

 

Black’s poems are devotional in this regard: rather than proclaim “truths” about the divine, they are poems written toward the possibility of God. This postmodern faith is most prominently displayed in the second section of Storm Toward Morning, a crown of sonnets that testifies to both the undeniable reality of the sacred and its impossible position within the profanity of human living.

 

“There is no end: what has come will come again

will come again: and then distend: and then

and then: and then again: there is no end

 

to origin and and: there is again

and born again: there is the forming and:

the midnight curling into morning and

 

the glory and again: there is no end:” (Vigils)

 

Rarely are form and content so seamlessly transposed: as in Heaven so on Earth; so too in the poem. “There is no end” is both a joyful declaration and an ominous lament: to be “born again” in poetic rapture is to see the infinitude of experience within the finite moment. Or, as Blake famously wrote: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” And yet: to be born is to be subjected to death. Incessant birth yields incessant death, and this fact yields profound ambivalence in Black’s poetry, which hiccups its rebirths and stutters its praise. In this, we are reminded inseparability of beauty and death, a tension that cannot (and must not) be resolved.

 

This resistance to resolution is Black’s most unique aesthetic move. While it has become a hallmark of postmodern poetics to parade this resistance, Black’s angle is fresh because of the shape of his formalism. Received forms convey implicit order: they are teleologically determined from the outset. Black’s sonnets are both elegant and desperate—their formal ruptures proceed out of existential doubt.

 

“Once more the bright blade of a morning breeze

glides almost too easily through me,

 

and from the scuffle I’ve been sutured to

some flap of me is freed: I am severed

 

like a simile: an honest tenor

trembling toward the vehicle I mean

 

to be: a blackbird licking half-notes

from the muscled, sap-damp branches

 

of the sugar maple tree… though I am still

a part of any part of every particle

 

of me, though I’ll be softly reconstructed

by the white gloves of metonymy,

 

I grieve: there is no feeling in a cut

that doesn’t heal a bit too much.” (This Gentle Surgery)

 

Black oscillates between formal precision and something like an artful wobble: by embracing imperfection in the presence of technical virtuosity, he dramatizes spiritual poverty and celebrates the fallibility that constitutes the essential distinction between the human and the divine.

 

 

 

Every few weeks she met Saint Jim in the park.
She just wanted to get on Saint Jim’s bed and float

away; the bed which happened to be on the same
street as her beloved Mark. But, Saint Jim was

difficult and recalcitrant as is often the
case with saints. So, for now she had to be

happy with their short walks and discussions
of New York, October light, tiny animals, and politics.

Saint Jim told her don’t you dare put me in a poem
as he tried to feed a squirrel an acorn.

If I cut my body in half, vertically,
words would come pouring out.

If I cut my body in half, I would
have to cut vertically, I would need

really big scissors to do this
and fish would pour out.

She imagined him telling the next one

about her as he had told her about

 

the previous one. She imagined him

kissing her as he had kissed the previous

 

one. She imagined him holding hands

with the future one as he had held hands

 

with her. She imagined him putting

his hand up the skirt of the future

 

one near the river as he had put

his hand up her skirt near the river

 

and up the skirt of the previous one.

She imagined him not telling the future

 

one nor the past one that he loved them

just as he had not told her he loved her

 

not in their bar, nor the house, nor by the river.

She imagined him putting his fingers

 

inside of the others: the future, past and present

as he had put his fingers inside of her.

 

She imagined him lying to the previous

ones, the future ones, and the current ones.

 

But some of the facts were also true.

 

Jennifer Bartlett is the author of three books of poetry and co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She is currently writing a biography on Larry Eigner.

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s first poet is Jennifer Bartlett.

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Jennifer Bartlett: I have always been attracted to words and reading. I love visual art too, but using words and connecting with the world through language feels natural. In terms of “why poetry” I believe it’s random. I know people who are musicians and visual artists and each kind of art, including nonfiction and fiction, has its own language.

I don’t know to what extent I’m really involved in po-biz. I am in the sense that I’ve gotten in quite a few fights for my radical views on disability. I tend to insert myself in places that I probably should not. I believe that ableism (the prejudice against disabled people) should be spoken about and fought with the same rigor as the other isms. I have gotten into “battles” because sometimes my methods aren’t always the best. I sometimes insert disability into discussions about gender or race, and this makes people feel put out. But, there is also the fact that people don’t want to discuss disability at all. Ever. Poets pick and choose what they want to fight or speak about and, disability as a metaphor or inaccessible spaces just doesn’t interest them.

I do not have a university job in creative writing. I currently teach English Comp and this is what I prefer. I also don’t make much money. I make some but not enough to live on. I wonder if this takes me out of the ‘competition’ to a certain degree because there is no prize for me. I do it because it’s fun and it connects me to people. But my livelihood isn’t really connected to whether I publish.

 

FFF: What are your influences – creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

JB: I want to answer this in form of lists [more or less]:

Poets: The Language Poets, The Black Mountain Poets, mostly Charles Olson. I love the idea of duration. Lisa Jarnot, Lisa Robertson, Fanny Howe, Kathi Wolfe, and Andrea Baker. Earlier than that, two big influences were Muriel Rukeyser and Allen Ginsberg.

Visual Artists: Woody Allen, Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Bill Viola, and Mark Rothko.

Music: Miles Davis, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Fiona Apple.

Personally: My husband and son.

Nature: specifically Oregon. Motherhood. New York City.

Politically: Ableism and the way that people approach people with disabilities. I want to break down all the barriers and perception of disability, specifically in terms of education, accessibility, and sexuality.

 

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems – as author and as reader?

JB: I read this term in an old copy of Acts of verse called Analytical Lyricism. That seems as good a term as anything. In poetry, I am most interested in beauty. For me, that is the number one quality that makes a piece of art worth engaging. It can also show great ugliness and still be beautiful. I also like simplicity and understatement. Meditative.

 

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

JB: Not to be too egotistic, but I really think Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability is the book that “everyone should read.” I think this because it is so crucial for people to learn about disability and how people with disabilities actually live rather than perception. The essay that comes to mind is Laura Hershey’s “Getting Comfortable.” This is part of the book that people who are not poets have told me they connect with the most. I assigned it to my students this semester and they loved it. Hershey’s writing is direct and honest. She has a gift for evoking empathy. Unfortunately, Hershey passed away before Beauty was published. I wish she had lived to see what a great effect her writing had on people.

The other thing about Beauty is that it was put together by three different editors with different experiences and tastes. So, the book comes at poetry from many different angles. It includes poets who derive from the New York School and Black Mountain as well as narrative works that come from the crip poetics side of things. The essays also open it up to non-poets. Do I sound like an ad?

 

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

JB: I don’t want to sound like Denise Levertov, but I really would be a better writer if I didn’t have a cell phone and owned a working dryer and a good vacuum cleaner.

 

Jennifer Bartlett is the author of three books of poetry and co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She is currently writing a biography on Larry Eigner.

Beauty Broken and Decamped

The women in Ivy Alvarez’s chapbook Hollywood Starlet (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) have all lost something. Whether it’s their minds, a man, anonymity, peace, or a sense of self or place, it’s not coming back. We feel for their losses, but like any disaster hungry mob, we cannot look away. All of the titles have a name of a “starlet” followed by a word depicting an action of loss. Here are some of the titles: “What Vivien Leigh Dropped,”  “What Greta Garbo Offered,” “What Betty Grable Gave.” These women are missing pieces; like the artist Lana del Rey, they embody that idea of “beautiful sadness.” Alvarez captures this theme to a tee in this collection.

In “What Katherine Hepburn Lost,” we are transported into her inner conscious. Alvarez writes:

“Yorkshire. Why’d he bring me here?”

“…How long since I’ve had dirt under my nails?

This pantsuit’s stained with chlorophyll.

Maybe I’ll change. He can’t marry me. I have my role to play—

good time girl and quick repartee doth not fine marriage material make…”

Alvarez’s last lines carry a plea: “Oh Spencer, It’s me Kathy.”

The poem goes from recognizing Hepburn as the quick witted “girl Friday,” the friend, not the lover, and ends in heartbreak; we feel her plain yearning at the end. Alvarez brings out the “Kathy” (vs Katherine)  in us, in the wanting what we never seem to get, even though we already seemingly have it all.

Even the elegant and pristine Olivia de Havilland pines silently. She says, “Errol –

please call me Livvie once more.”

In “What Olivia de Havilland Wished For,” the last couplet is:

“I wish for something more than a celluloid kiss,

the mirage of eternity between our lips.”

Alvarez captures the persona of these famous heroines in a few lines of poetry. Olivia de Havilland was classy and perfect, never mussed up. What did this cost her? Alvarez offers us a personality for us to recognize and touch. It doesn’t matter if it’s fiction. The poems are emotional truth.

We never know where Alvarez is going to direct us next. These short celebrity poem portrayals are surreal and bizarre. There is a welcome grittiness to some of the poems.

In “What Clara Bow Stole,” we are introduced to an obvious director’s statement when he says “Don’t speak…look pretty.” And Clara is a trouble maker, full of vim and vigor.

“…When I stole

my mother’s coat, after she held that butcher’s

knife to my throat, it scratched like that…

One more bite. Just like her, I’m committed

to my paper bag, my asylum of sweetness.”

This was one of my favorite poems. With Clara Bow, Alvarez draws attention to the fact that these women were forced to fit in a certain mold/persona.  The movie production companies controlled them and used them to make a profit.  These women fit into boxes of “best friend,” “siren” “ingénue,” “tomboy,” etc. Once the die was cast, no one could escape. These poems offer an escape. Alvarez offers an insight to a different reality for these women. They can escape, leave the set, love someone they are not supposed to. And they do it with tenacity.

In “What Ingrid Bergman Wanted,” we are made privy to Bergman’s thoughts. The actress was always so cool and collected in her films, but Alvarez throws in some grit and immediacy:

In Bergman’s thoughts:

“I spot a chapel in the shade

covered in lichen’s dull brocade.

No-one’s looking at me, kid.

Take a flake of rock, scratch the word

Ingrid into bark, letter by letter.

By the force of my hand.

I might earn permanency.

Let that plane leave without me.”

Alvarez gives Bergman a voice. She isn’t “made” to get on a plane by Humphrey Bogart, the symbol of a masculinity and control. Bergman stays because she wants to stay and maybe she lives in the woods, carves her names into the pines. Other starlets are given a voice as well: Frances Farmer chooses to swallow a chicken fetus whole while living in a foreign country. Rita Hayworth is nostalgic for her childhood, dancing with her father.

The closing poems are a direct line from A to B in terms of “innocent girl” transformed into Hollywood icon. They are “What Marilyn Monroe Ran From,” and “What Norma Jean Became.”

With Norma Jean, Alvarez pointedly describes an insecure girl, seeking validation:

“I’ve trimmed my flesh for muscle…

…becoming more anonymous with every step.”

With Marilyn, she is pursued by a swarm, “a halo of flies.”

“Jackrabbits, ears pricked,

follow me with their eyes.”

Like Ophelia wandering in madness, who takes center stage handing out herbs and flowers in one of her final scenes, she enraptures the audience for a time, steals their hearts.

But then we hear of her death offstage. Only her essence lives on, floats through our memories until the next breath of fresh air, the next live performance.

 

 

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. She is the author of two full length poetry collections (forthcoming.) Her chapbook “Clown Machine” is forthcoming from Grey Book Press this summer. Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming at Jet Fuel Review, Freezeray, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Inter/rupture, Poor Claudia, and decomP. Visit: .

All publishing poets know what chapbooks are. So, I’m not going to provide a history of the chapbook. The internet is full of good essays documenting that history. In fact, one brief essay can be found here on Poetry Blog by Sam Riedel. Here’s another link to one by the British historian, .  What I want to draw attention to is the importance of the poetry chapbook and the folly of considering it as less significant than a full-length collection.

A chapbook, which is basically any book with a page count under 48, will not be considered for any major prize. No matter how good, it cannot win a Pulitzer or National Book Award or National Book Critics Circle Award. In fact, there is, to my knowledge, only one national prize in the country dedicated to already published poetry chapbooks: The Jean Pedrick Award, sponsored by the New England Poetry Club. I emphasize “already published,” because there are plenty of prizes for chapbooks in which the prize is publication. But the incredible failure to acknowledge the significance of chapbooks after publication mirrors the failure throughout the poetry world to respect chapbooks as artistic achievements in their own right, the failure to judge them solely on their quality. Of course, there are devotees of the chapbook, but there are devotees and collectors of everything from backscratchers and umbrella covers to sugar packets. The error for poetry chapbooks is in the disregard for them, not only by the general reading public who may not even know of their existence, but by poets themselves, especially those aspiring to carve out a place in the literary world. The feeling is that if you want to be taken seriously as a poet you have to publish more than a chapbook, you must publish a full-length collection. Even those who value them value them only as “calling cards” or stepping stones toward publishing larger works. This is clearly an error if one reflects briefly on the history of great poetry.

Philip Larkin published five collections of poetry in his lifetime. Of those five only one of them would be a full-length collection by today’s standards and that one, his first one, The North Ship, only just makes it, coming in at 48 pages. The four that followed—XX Poems, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows—would all be considered chapbooks by today’s definition. XX Poems was privately printed and so it’s difficult to find information about its page count. However, given that Larkin generally wrote short poems and even if each poem in this collection took up 2 pages, which is highly unlikely, it would be 40 pages of poetry, and thus, still a chapbook. The page count for each of the following four books respectively goes: 45, 46, and 42. So, only The North Ship qualifies as a full-length collection. Imagine the loss to the world of poetry if such chapbooks had been ignored as insignificant merely because of their length? Or consider the ridiculousness of relegating them to being mere stepping stones to his Collected Poems, published after his death.  These short collections contain some of the most startling and beautiful poetry written in the last century.

William Blake’s famous collections: The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience were both chapbooks. The first book comprised only 19 poems published in 1790. Four years later he published The Songs of Experience, which was only 26 poems. And to be clear, none of these poems were long. Most were a page or less. Even though these chapbooks were very small, not only in page number but in actual size, they were works of art unlike anything anyone else had produced, created using Blake’s own method of printing from copper plates etched by acids.

More recently, the poet Tomas Transtromer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize, demonstrated the power of an oeuvre that accumulates in small increments, growing slowly like a glacier over years. Each individual addition to his total output never amounts to what is defined as a full-length collection. Only by combining old material with new material does he make more than a chapbook. His first book, 17 Poems, was, of course, 17 poems and they weren’t long enough to cover 48 pages. Not even close. The next set of new poems, Secrets on the Way, added fourteen more poems to his work. The collection after that, The Half-Finished Heaven, added twenty-one more poems. In this way, he kept adding to his oeuvre. But any given addition never would have broken that 48-page barrier.

Many other poets have published works that are chapbooks. The original publications of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, and Ginsberg’s Howl were both chapbooks. Of Louise Bogan’s four major collections, two of them—The Body of This Death, and The Sleeping Fury, were chapbooks. Edgar Bowers’ second collection, To the Astronomers, was 36 pages. And the following collection Living Together, although 84 pages, was a new & selected and therefore, full of material from his first two collections. I’m fortunate to own a copy of this book and can tell you that the new poems in the collection only compose a total of 10 more pages. This could also be pointed out of many other poets. So what is our obsession with making collections long when so many important poets published short works of great significance? Why consider these mere works on the way to—not more important work, but just larger collections of work?

I’m not an expert. But my guess is it’s market driven. Somewhere along the line, it is all ultimately determined by graphs of market value and profit margins for the larger houses that publish poetry. Unfortunately, we poets have largely bought into this mentality. Our entire culture believes, as if it were divine writ, that bigger-is-better, that perpetual growth defines success. But it is error in many ways and folly for poets to follow along with this thinking. A poet should write and construct the best book they can, and if that collection is under 48 pages, then that is how long it’s supposed to be. To ignore a collection because it’s only 20 or 30 pages long rather than 60 or 80 pages is simply the error of a mind that thinks bigger is better. Or it at least is not questioning that implicit assumption. I wager that most poets don’t think of themselves as adhering to this mentality and yet, here we are, all racing toward that 48-page mark as though it were what defines a collection of poetry. Certainly nothing in poetry itself determines that. It is an ulterior motive shaping the collection to reach that mark. Consciously or unconsciously it is not a poetic motive directing the poet’s choices here and it’s time to put that to an end.

We should encourage what bookstores remain in the world to display chapbooks as clearly as others.  We should encourage institutions to establish prizes that recognize the best chapbook published in the previous year, prizes that are honored and respected as equally as any other prize for full-length collections.  Chapbooks should be reviewed as regularly as other collections and in both large and small journals.  They should be reviewed with the same attention as other collections.  I would be willing to wager a large sum that if these things were done, we would begin to recognize a large number of very accomplished poets who haven’t had a full-length collection published but are just as deserving of recognition as any who have.