What Sparks Poetry

I have long favored the idea that poetry is a kind of sheet music the composer creates for somebody else to perform across time and space, rather than a mode of self-expression.

What will fascinate me most is the way the poem’s ending gestures toward my own potential complicity, which seems a much more nuanced and realistic engagement of power as a subject. In the end, the poem’s language and form are vehicles used in an attempt to absorb my own terror and the reader’s terror—though the story of the poem and the story of the country—is far from complete.

I usually only email poems to people so soon after writing them when it feels like I didn’t write them at all but copied them down from wherever they already existed, taking them down from the air.

The bowl she fills in the wake of his failure is an artifact fused with hurt and irony. The rose petals—perennial symbols of love and romance—obscure a collection of dead pollinators: no honey is about to be made by this meeting of flower and bee, at this hive of an art colony. As with most arresting images, the arrival of the bowl re-angles how I consider parts of the poem already read: in this case, setting, which is now made ironic: art colonies intend cross-pollination, fertilization, and bloom, not sting and death. The bowl of rose-covered dead bees is a clear, precise expression of rebuke delivered straight to the composer’s front door: intimate and elegant, a painter’s speech-without-saying.

Every public persona implies a negotiation between the facts of biography and the imperatives of form.

I had been ready to give up on the whole enterprise as well, I told her—for an alarmingly long time, nothing I picked up seemed able to penetrate or point the way, a demoralizing experience indeed for someone who’s always balanced a great deal of himself on an abiding faith in literature. But then I happened to revisit Philip Levine’s What Work Is.

The “I” slyly travails through historical significance and triviality until the tribulations of fear, faith, and ferocity surface in a dizzying dream state, hauling history into the prophetic present, where associative meanings are distilled into a crude and cruel illumination. “In the confluence of hand, head, eye, and brow,” the metamorphosing “I” remains intactly resolute in its unsatiable quest for the hidden truth.

The word “overland” connotes an arduous journey, a direct engagement with the environment and the vicissitude of nature. Broken into its constituent parts, “over land,” the term is also the root of global disputes, why nations go to war. “Over” can mean about, but also done, finis, kaput. But this is more a book of journey through life than despair at it.

But what keeps me reading and rereading this collection, aside from the precise, often stomach-churning imagery—the dead goats and halved snakes, maggots heaving, “the stink / generating its own heat”—and formal command of line and sound and shape, are the characters who populate this landscape. The men, the men. Bambrick pays them the close attention that reads, even when the prevailing emotion evoked is fear, like a radical act of love—the speaker is always implicated in the little intimacies and violences and betrayals and forgivenesses they unleash on each other.

The World Doesn’t End is, in essence, a storybook—one full of old gods, new gods, beautiful misfortunes, and terrifying miracles.

Maybe what Nature and Art have in common is their amenability to being read—the fact that both can be the object of lectio divina, the contemplation of the “living word.” In April the gods have left us, but Nature, like poetry, is being written, and can be read. The world is a poem, or a painting, and a poem, in turn, is the world, or at least a world (an “imaginary garden[] with real toads in [it],” if you will). In that sense, April seems to argue, to count stresses is to “tally stars,” to “tell the story / End-stopped by snow”; it is a way of arranging the “Leaves drying on the blacktop / Loosely iambic, wet with ash.” In a poem it is always April, month of rebirth. And in the infinite April of the present tense, Nature is Art, Art Nature. The living word is the living world.

The oracular “Sentry of the Speechless” appears in Returning Upland, the second half of this collection, in which the poems are longer and less aphoristic than in The Brittle Age, but equally elemental, equally blinding in their lucidity. What ignominy looks like a glass of water? Who are these beings sustained on moss? How have I come to such segmented depths? The sentry guards this place still. I can’t resolve its mysteries. That’s why I keep returning there.

[E]mbedded in Choi’s deep inquiry is beauty, the beauty of language transcending our expectations of what can be said and felt within its confines.

The genius for a simple clarity is what makes all of Ferry’s Horace and Virgil so commendable, and his verse is proof as well that “simple clarity” is not “economy,” nor less and stranger language. That he adds a word or removes a god is hardly worth attacking when the former makes for grace and the latter is a name we neither cared about nor said correctly. Instead, like the King James translators, he understands that another language is another material, and one cannot build a wooden house from marble. The attempt will last forever.

After the bath was over, I kept thinking of an image from her poem, “What This Elegy Wants,” when the speaker wants her father “in the soil/of my heart.” LeBlanc’s poetry has that element I’m always searching for, a reminder, not so much about the beauty of this world but its ongoingness, and the fierceness with which we temporarily cling.