Carter Revard’s ‘A Song That We Still Sing’ is ‘a demonstration of ease, of extended family connections, a memorial, and a horrifying history lesson, especially for listeners who do not know Cheyenne, Ponca, Osage, or Omaha culture. It’s a ghost story, a revenge tale, a way to think about oral tradition and lore alongside the written record.
‘The Sand Creek Massacre is a centre of history, what Tony Horwitz calls ‘the My Lai of its day. It fuelled decades of war on the Great Plains. And yet, over time, the massacre receded from white memory, to the point where even locals were unaware of what had happened in their own backyard.’
He writes against toxic stereotyping where ‘death gives fictional Indians their power. And Indians in fiction function as knowing ghosts whose presence alone speaks back in time to the crimes committed against them’ says David Treuer. They are beautiful, strange and walked the earth a long time ago is the ‘baleful clich é’.
Revard’s poem relies on complicated indentation. Revard’s a medievalist. He’s carrying forward cultures that are still singing. Allan Peterson’s ‘Epigraph’ collects complicated facts and tropes in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘surrealism of everyday life. Zach Pickard says of Bishop ‘… artistic discovery came from patient readiness (which she associated with Charles Darwin) “to observe the conscious world.” Ditto Revard. But he’s more tacky and opportunistic.
Rae Armantrout’s ‘Our Nature’ starts as a cryptic rebuke but it continues, leaving self-containment and pronounlessness behind. She now talks about her gang and how gangs grow apart. A language poet on the west Coast, she asks ‘I do wonder how much we, ‘language poets’, identify with and/or objectify one another.’ Dan Chiasson says she ‘… takes the basic premises of Language writing somewhere they were never intended to go: towards… a single individual’s… uniquely broken heart.’ She warns against the clich é of being true to yourself.
Elizabeth Alexander’s ‘Race’ works with a familiar coded story from W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ records to Henry Louis Gate. Alexander refrains from the rhetoric of black nationalism, treason or loyalty, stays calm with out going cold and leaves us with unanswered questions, ‘a gentle caution about what we assume when we read poems.’ Liz Waldner’s ‘A/ppeal A/pple A/dam A/dream’ is sexy, whose ‘concrete nouns make more sense… if we take them on a detour through up-to-date (or at least through vintage 1980’s) theories about sex, gender, and the unconscious.’ It’s about Adam and Eve in Genesis 2,3 and 4 and ‘Paradise Lost’. ‘Waldner joins Blake, Pullman, and C.D. Wright in rewriting the story of Eden to favour sexual pleasure and human solidarity, deemphasizing authority and sin’ in a ‘gender-fluid way.’ It’s a ‘set of echoes, almost like a child’s nonsense speech, repeating monosyllables, seeking rhymes, playing on the simplest of words…’
Kari Edwards’s ‘>>>>>>>>Please Forward & >>>’ articulates a transgender, dyslexic experimentation. Like Kathy Acker Edwards attacked identity and categories, semantics, consecutive, logical sense etc. It’s an aggressive experiment in visual text something essential for the survival of our unstable, incomprehensible selves. The poet is here ‘a survivor from the shipwreck of convention, a stiltwalker, an Ishmael, someone who will no longer make the “big mistake” of following a conventional order, whether in religion or in typography.’ Edwards says: ‘ Poetry and, as far as I am concerned, writing in general needs to cut the linear language in half, create a new syntax.’ So she cuts pronouns, typography, semantics, goes over the edge of comprehension. It looks a lot like nonsense but Burnt finds also exhilaration and roughness.
Agha Shahid Ali’s ‘Tonight’ comes in four versions between 1996 and 2003 and is about love, loneliness, Islamic and Western religious inheritances. It’s a ghazal, an Arabic form of lyric from medieval Iran , a form that ‘… encompassed secular, erotic longing and (as in the work of the poet Rumi) mysticism, in which the beloved is God.’ So it links Ali with Mirza Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz and contemporary Urdu singers of classic ghazals like Begum Akhtar. ‘Tonight’ is an ars poetica of the ghazal. Throughout, Ali is tricky, allusive, an exile, blasphemous and travelling like Ishmael in ‘Moby Dick’.
D.A. Powell’s [when he comes he is neither sun nor shade: a china doll] belongs to the tradition of fulfilled visions with supernatural visitors bringing verbal power, comedy, sex, terror and inconvenience. This is the fag end of the 1990’s. ‘A Christ who sang like France Joli would sing alto or high tenor – he would be sexy, but also sexually ambiguous: he might be a disco queen…’ says Powell. Gay sex here is ‘a little dingy’, a ‘little sour.’ Angie Estes’s ‘Sans Serif’ is a manifesto in defence of a Baroque of excess plus brevity and dessert. Oppose ornament and you will oppose life itself, she implies, because poem-work is play, ‘extravagant and whimsical’, ‘more than just colour and opulence and .. decoration…’ And play is hard work. It is the sweet at the end of a meal. ‘A gorgeous dessert also has something of a virtuoso musical performance, perfectly crafted but also impermanent and fleeting… confectionary was as much a branch of the decorative arts as it was of cuisine…’ writes food historian Michael Krondl. This poem advovates the baroque and the Rococo against the straight-laced sans serif.
W.S. Merwin’s ‘To The Wires Overhead’ laments the damage humans have wreaked on non-human life. Jonathan Culler thinks the lyric addresses those beings who cannot answer. But ‘The wires trouble Merrill not because they won’t respond but because they are present, and swallows are not.’ ‘Absent birds and silent seasons mark a wrongheaded civilisation’ in the tradition of Longfelow’s ‘The Birds of Kilingworth.’ He knows that where things are absent their darkness remains.
New York’s Bernadette Mayer’s ‘On Sleep’ is still working its ass off to change the language and not get famous. She attempts to bring sleep to poetry as a radical democratic. Catullus gave her a model for literary scandal that broke off from the society we have . ‘I am not scared’ she writes. Donald Revell’s ‘Moab’ comes from Utah but closes on Arches National Park with Christian faith striving with animated, animating nature like Henry David Thoreau and Gerald Manley Hopkins canceling time, doubt and death. It’s an epiphanic lyric that ‘doubles as a father’s prayer.’ Terrance Hayes’s ‘The Blue Terrance’ is story and song, a singular heartbreak and then everyone’s. African American strands of musical culture are all in the mix. The lonely black boy ‘digs himself deeper into a dirter hole like a grave, and Hayes gets to do Big Mama Thornton and terza rima as in Dante and rhymes vowels but not always consonants to show a persistent sorrow, loneliness, dejection and sexual frustration. He likes bringing all styles together and has a serious music intent.
Jorie Graham’s ‘Futures’ comes after we ‘used to think that shape , a finished thing, was a corpse/that would sprout from the ground, Easter in every heart… what do we think now?’ she asks. But even if she’d want to, she cannot stop interpreting. Graham feels guilt about Western civilization. To her this is a guilty burning world. Laura Kasischke’s ‘Miss Weariness’ looks back to the genre allegory. She draws a ‘clever and terrifying portrait, built up out of common American material – a folding chair, a country fair – portrays (without offering resolution) the particular problems of girls and women in a society that feminism has not yet transformed, along with the enduring problem, of any gender, of finding purpose in this world.’
Frank Bidart’s ‘Song of the Mortar and Pestle’ looks like a masochistic thing: ‘The masochist’s wish to experience his authentic, inner reality in the company of another parallels the sadist’s wish to get outside the self.’ It’s about self revelation and surviving. It can’t be done alone. But there’s no ‘you’ in the poem. It’s an imagination responding to destructive sexual extremes. He takes the flesh as far as it can go. Desire is a grinding, making the self live.
Robyn Schiff’s ‘Lustron: The House America Has Been Waiting For’ uses the actual slogan from adverts for the prefab housing introduced in 1947. The Lustron company failed for reasons, one was federal loan fraud. ‘Seldom has there occurred a like mixture of idealism, greed, efficiency, stupidity, potential social good, and political evil.’ Schiff updates Dante’s canzone, where each stanza reuses the same end words. It’s a poem about form, about what they let us do, what they ask. Written during the second Iraq War, wih George W Bush the Commander In Chief, she knows like Elizabeth Bishop that we could avoid all the troubles in the world if everyone just sat alone in separate rooms. With technology and advancements, the future grows claws. You cannot trade death away forever, ‘not even with the finest gun’ comments Burnt.
Mary Jo Bang’s ‘Q Is for the Quick’ begins with the shortest Standard English sentence containing all 26 letters. That and the alphabet represents Lacan’s and Kristeva’s symbolic order and discipline and she writes against all of it. But its bitter and strange: she chafes against ‘white-shoe adults’ but also the rules of creative writing too. She rejects what anyone says about what we can grow up to be. ‘What causes a dog?’ Whatever you say, Bangs isn’t buying it, says Burnt, ‘… to see ‘Q is for Quick’ as a poem about poetry, about the tradition of poetry, is to ignore its sullen, peculiar, perhaps heartbreaking charge: it is a poem about children without adults, and about adults who can’t reach children.’ It spins from Kristeva’s: ‘From a linguistic point of view depression is characterized by a disavowal of the symbolic.’
Lucia Perillo’s ‘Viagra’ gives you uplift, ‘light stabs at popular culture and its unrealistic worship of fertile youth to serious speculation about the meaning of orgasm and the denial of death.’ Desire suggests surrender, so it’s like Bidart earlier. Her essay ‘Sick Fuck’ goes: ‘I think hope shackled me to my body as it dropped like a dead weight to the floor of the sea. And surrendering hope has left me feeling unburdened, lighter, strangely giddy as I float’ and there’s
‘… an erotic component to this surrender – it comes from the self relinquishing control, throwing itself away. Then the body is offered to whatever seizes possession of it – whether the seizer be a disease or time or a human lover.’
And what Burt sees is that she redirects the power of sexual symbols towards hungry women. ‘She also relocates sexuality, at the very end, flirtatiously, provocatively, at high volume, away from the anal (“back pockets”, “buttocks”) to the oral, ‘the silver teeth and tongue’, the ‘open throat.’
Melissa Range’s ‘The Workhorse’ inherits versions of rhyme and meter to describe a horse. She’s a Christian and works in the territory of the older Richard Wilbur. It’s a protest poem, all southern, antiwar and Christian in that the horse is a type of Christ ‘giving up its body over and over for unworthy human beings like you and me.’ It’s Nietzsche’s horse in the Tarr film. Joseph Massey’s ‘Prescription’ is short and implies the sky’s weight. It’s about how we think about what we see, how we work out where we stand. Burt suggests we read it as a photograph, or a series, or mediations on what photographs can do. And what they can’t. ‘His poetics of intensely revised and carefully arranged perceptions may take us out of ourselves, allow us to bear an otherwise intolerable weight, and calm us down.’
D.G. Nanouk Okpik’s ‘Date: Post Glacial’ looks to the post glacial, an ideal to which we might return. Okpik is Inuit, Inupiat, raised by an Irish and a German in Anchorage, writing about a period coming on that may be ‘beyond the scope of human experience.’ Rosa Alcala’s ‘Class’ raises Virgil’s and Milton’s questions about whether poetry is ‘work’. She brings a blue collar perspective as well as Chican@, Latin@ and Puerto Rican to reading Milton and knows the best union lines aren’t the best poetry. There’s frustration here with poetry and labour activism both. How many of us teachers have wondered what the hell it means to say what the objective of the lesson is when we teach a book we love. There’s a gap between the measurements of bureaucracy and unmeasured poetry. Burt ends with this:
‘ Its sarcastic epigrams (what “is not work”, and who says?) let us inhabit her persistent sense, somewhere between an educator’s beleaguardness and an activist’s outrage, that the US class system, the US academic system, and the US labour market, must not continue as they are.’
Gabby Bess’s ‘Oversized T-Shirts’ links with Alt-lit and Beats, confessional poets, bloggers and fanzines. Bess presents her sadness as a case study. It’s a sadness and feeling of being a weak link, embarrassing, because so personal and like in Matthew Arnold’s, ‘Yes! In the sea of life enisled we mortal millions live alone.’ The more isolated, the more expression is craved, like falling in love with a couple. Her generation is the generation of tweets, facebook, social media of various kinds where content is persistent, audiences invisible and contexts ever collapsing. Interactions are fleeting, but become closer to art, persisting through time and requiring we make sense of them in divergent ways. Bess’s poem plays with these features, her raw style ‘stays with us, and with Bess still, even as she hovers above her former self, a creature from the future, in midair.’ ‘Know that if you are a woman, your body is intimately linked to your work. Resent this,’ she says. Network writing seems to be with words that do what they desire.
Brenda Shaughnessy’s ‘Hide and Seek With God’ is close to the size and shape of a sonnet, sestet and octave reversed, blank, in the not-yet-born child genre of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Child’ and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘To An Invisible Being Expected Soon To Become Visible’. It’s about a born child with serious disabilities of communication and motion in a distraught voice: ‘ If an emotion eludes me, a dream, a yearning for my child’s good health, certainty, adventure, and all the possibilities – I write about those things precisely because I cannot have them.’ She says. Burt comments: ‘ her intense frightening poem of maternal love and cosmic resentment is also a memorable arrangement of language, a poem as well made, as perfect for its situation, as any we have.’
Claudia Rankine’s ‘You and your friend go to see the film’ comes from her ‘Citizen: An American Lyric’ of 2014 which has prose as well as poetry, essays on racial stereotyping in sport, deadly racial injustice eg Trayvon Martin, Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six etc. Plus visuals – graphic work by Glenn Ligon whose text repeats Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘I FEEL MOST COLOURED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND.’ It ends with a print of Turner’s ‘The Slave Ship.’ Is it poetry? It is outraged by the killings of black citizens. ‘The perception that race is not an active part of existence allows people to make the mistakes that they make against each other. From that which is systematic we detach ourselves. But some of us have drowned and coughed ourselves up.’ She says. And she knows that poetry doesn’t always get what it wants, and doesn’t always work as the poet intends.
Brandon Sol’s ‘Oulipo’ comes from a Chinese American frustration, fascination, and sophistication with immigration and language, is a pseudo-song emulating sounds of the Tang dynasty poet Li Po as recited in “northern Chinese, Peking dialect” aka Beijing Mandarin by Lo Kung-yuan on a Smithsonian Folkways LP released 1963. Li Po’s original presents exile, nostalgia and Oulipo does too. A homophonic in the line of Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s Catullus of 1969 where ‘Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all/whom but me, none see say Jupiter if she petted’ is the original latin ‘ Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle/quam mihi , non si se luppiter ipse petar.’ It rethinks the ‘I’ and asks: who is this? You, me, the poet, a particular group? How much has poetry changed since Li Po, since Wordsworth and Coleridge? Marjorie Perloff says of Oulipo that its ‘ constraint… that forces the poet to give up an illusory artistic freedom…has as its corollary the elimination of the ego.’ Sol writes American as if Chinese, like Milton writing English as if Latin.
Ross Gay’s ‘Weeping’ lines up all the way back to the Gilgamesh’s lament for Enkidu where the recondite and the demotic mix, where Ross sounds loose and informal, is mock learned, domestic, with an eye on why poetry and what is being shared with poetry of the recent and distant past. The child is caught in the irretrievable sentimental language of Gay’s lyric poetry. Poet Kyla Marshell asked Gay what it meant for him to have written ‘ … a book about flowers by a black man… even though you do talk about race, I wonder if perhaps you were resisting all the things you could talk about.’ Gay when talking of his teacher at Sarah Lawrence Gerald Stern says; ‘ His heart’s really out there. And that’s something you don’t really learn how to do, necessarily, if you’re a man, or brought up in sort of a male way, or even if you’re an American.’ Passion, compassion and aesthetic success are fused in Gay where his poetry book is not ‘… a book against anything; it’s a book imagining, or advocating, for something… I want to express a sort of wild love.’
I’d say Dylan’s very much at home with this company. My point’s a simple one. There’s nothing in the language used here to describe the achievements of 60 of the best American poets around since 1980, language pivoting off the wonderfully expansive and critically nuanced book by Christopher Burt, that couldn’t be used to appreciate Dylan’s work. And that’s the only point I’m making: his achievement can be measured in exactly the same terms of these others and so yes, he really really is a poet. If you read Chronicles you can see that he writes about himself in much the same way too. He’s our ‘Shakespeare in the alley, with his pointed shoes and bells…’, a song and dance man with one hell of a twist. I’m raising my glass to both him and all who sail with affection alongside, remembering those postcards of the hanging that always remind us of what’s really happening …
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Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
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