What Sparks Poetry

Books We’ve Loved

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.

In Books We’ve Loved, we’ve asked our editorial board members and select guest editors to reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year, with the intention of creating a list of book recommendations for our valued readers.

Henri Cole on James Longenbach’s “In the Village”

The title of this quietly majestic six-part poem brings to mind Elizabeth Bishop’s haunting story “In the Village” about a little girl living with her grandparents, two aunts, and grieving mother who has a breakdown and is sent away to a sanitarium, so it is a title I associate with a small place (Great Village, Nova Scotia is, in fact, a very small place) and with trauma. Jim’s title also brings to mind Anthony’s Bailey’s classic work about the Stonington borough, the small, intimate coastal Connecticut town where Jim and his wife, the excellent novelist Joanna Scott, bought a home a few years after Jim’s cancer diagnosis. In an email to me, Jim wrote that after a residency at the James Merrill House, he and Joanna adored Stonington, “loved the people, the place, and bought a little house on School Street, near the lighthouse. This was just before the pandemic—probably the only smart thing we ever did . . .”

So “In the Village” is a lyric sequence that finds its origin in life. With Jim’s cleverly posthumous narration, the poem begins, “Shortly before I died,/ Or possibly after,/ I moved to a small village by the sea.” Then the scene—on a “rocky sliver of land”—is conjured with its little houses once owned by fisherman. I believe Jim’s short lines and stanzas give us speech made for the reader to utter aloud, so we find ourselves, with only a little disequilibrium, inside Jim’s voice. And inside his rooms overlooking the harbor, where there are books like those “In our youth,/ We called literature.” Though Jim’s death arrived before the poem begins, this is preeminently a poem about life, with books, and trees, and walking, and ghosts from the past. How brave and poignant of Jim to make himself a ghost from the past as he was fighting cancer.

Soon we are in the eleven-line section 2, where Jim’s ghost tells us about poem-making and the ardor of writing: “Those sentences I’ve just written/ Took it out of me.” Jim is not really nostalgic for his past life but in love with beginnings, “A wish// A wish not to be removed/ From time/ But always to be immersed in it.” Yes, to be immersed in time again, like the boats that come in and out of the harbor, and to feel again the progress of the sun and the splash of green waves, to begin anew, to not be removed, and to listen to the secret vibrations of the world.

Then, with section 3, the poem dramatically resets, and Jim gives us sober medical facts in prose: “After a routine ultrasound revealed a fifteen-centimeter mass, my left kidney was removed robotically on February 12. Fifteen months later, nodules were discovered in my lungs and peritoneum. Two subsequent rounds of therapy failed to impede their growth, so I enrolled in a trial, a treatment not yet FDA approved.” Jim, who is the tragic hero of his own poem, must face the reality of a terrible prognosis, and though he imagines himself walking down High Street to the harbor with its prosperous scallop fleet, he hasn’t actually arrived in the village yet, so when he says that he walks, he is dreaming again of a new beginning.

In section 4, the poem starts up anew and speaks of ghosts: “Everywhere I go/ The trees are full of them,” Jim tells us, and from these venerable trees come books that beckon us forward and connect us to others. Next is section 5 where Jim ingeniously presents a list of ten poetry book titles (from a shelf in the James Merrill House—where perhaps this poem was written). The books are by James Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Randall Jarrell, W. S. Merwin, Michael Harper, John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Richard Howard, and James Merrill, poets whose poems shaped a generation’s sensibility, including Jim’s. To them, I would add Louise Glück, whose vatic voice I hear throughout Jim’s work.

Finally, in section 6, we see the young lovers meeting (might they be Jim and Joanna?): “Their heads are close/ Enough to be touching.” Then Jim’s poem suddenly resolves itself with a sky full of stars and the sun climbing every morning over Watch Hill, Rhode Island and vanishing behind the harbor at dusk. We are back in the village, where “Water Street runs past/ Church and Wall/ Harmony and School,/ Until it crosses Omega, by the sea.” The speaker observes the village, taking one last look, before we return to the ordinary sense of things. As in all memorable poems, something true in the world has been revealed to us. Feelings of loss and the bleakness of dying have been replaced by marital love, trees, books, boats and the intimacy of village life.

On October 13, at the celebration of Jim’s life and work, at the Stonington Free Library, Joanna Scott told the packed reading room that shortly after Jim started treatment for cancer he wrote to her that he hated the idea of bucket lists but he nevertheless had some everyday things he wanted to do: “Eat a little flat pizza. Get in the car. Take a shower without worrying. Enjoy the water … Have one martini … Feel on the other side of treatment. Read a book. Discover something in someone’s sentences that I haven’t before. Think out loud about what it is that I so love about sentences, about syntax, the simple beauty of grammar … Have dinner at the little bistro in Soho, just you and me …” I enthusiastically recommend James Longenbach’s posthumous book, Seafarer (published recently by W. W. Norton). In our precarious world, it is full of astonishing poems. I trust a few will last forever.

Writing Prompt

In Memoriam

With great respect and affection, Poetry Daily remembers the life and work of James Longenbach (1959-2022).We celebrate and recall Jim and hope our readers will enjoy revisiting the work he allowed to appear on these pages:

Essays:
James Longenbach on Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me”
James Longenbach on William Butler Yeats’ “The Tower”

Poems:
Barcarolle
Now and Then
School Street
In the Village

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Henri Cole

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan to a French mother and an American father. He has published eleven collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published “Orphic Paris,” a memoir. A new collection, “The Other Love,” is forthcoming in July. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.