text:
For our latest feature, we've asked 50 poets to weigh in (briefly) on the long poems that interest them. To avoid spending too much time on the usual suspects, we suggested that most of our contributors focus on poems from the last 70 years.
This is the fourth of six installments. (You can see the others here, here, here, here and here.) Scroll down or click on the links to read:
–Reginald Gibbons on Thomas McGrath
–Darcie Dennigan on Brigit Pegeen Kelly
–Carl Phillips on Jean Garrigue
–Jane Hirshfield on Gilgamesh
–Garrett Hongo on Charles Wright
–Daisy Fried on Don Paterson
–Debra Allbery on Larry Levis
–Solmaz Sharif on June Jordan
–Devin Johnston on Christopher Logue
–Patrick Rosal on Thomas Lux
–Karla Kelsey on Barbara Guest
–Sebastian Agudelo on Derek Mahon
–David Yezzi on Anthony Hecht
–Peter Cooley on Louise Gl├╝ck
Gladly Again: on Thomas McGrath (1916-1990)
What McGrath did in his handling of his mediumÔÇölanguage and poetic craftÔÇöwas to achieve a change in consciousness.┬á He gives the reader a different stance toward language, poetry itself, history, and the social imagination by creating an exhilarating variety in his way of organizing and articulating the materials of his poems.┬á To register this change one simply has to read a lot of the pages of both Letter to an Imaginary Friend and his short poems.┬á My own first encounter with his work, years ago, was in the single-volume Swallow Press edition of Parts 1 and 2 of Letter (1970ÔÇöMichael Anania was then the tremendously acute poetry editor of that valiant little press) and then, a little later, the short poems that McGrath collected in Movie at the End of the World (also SwallowÔÇöÔÇť[1973, c. 1972]ÔÇŁ the Library of Congress says).
I met Tom McGrath at a poetry reading in Chicago around 1981 in a little gallery, a little cultural efflorescence, that soon afterward went out of business.┬á A poet friend (whose own work was completely different from McGrath's) had given me copy of that two-part Letter to an Imaginary Friend.┬á The lines and language had exhilarated me; the materialsÔÇöMcGrath's autobiographical ÔÇťrepresentative momentsÔÇŁÔÇöof the poem had fascinated me; the way McGrath put the two together moved me; and off I went to the reading, where a small crowd listened to the somewhat gravelly McGrathian voicing.┬á He was living in Minneapolis, and several years later, after I had been in touch with him repeatedly and felt we were at least long-distance friends, I asked him if he would agree to be interviewed at length by me and by Terrence Des Pres, whom I had recently met, in the midst of his work on what would become his book Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the Twentieth Century.┬á (Des Pres was thinking about how some poetry can, without sacrificing the deftness of a great poetic craft, sweep in a whole culture in its praise or dispraise; the other subjects of that book are W. B. Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Breyten Breytenbach, and Adrienne Rich).┬á On the telephone, McGrath laughed and expressed wariness about my proposition, but he agreed to it.
Terrence and I met in Minneapolis, checked ourselves into a drab downtown hotel, and on three afternoons in a row we walked to Tom's apartment, sat down with him, and turned on a tape recorder for two hours.┬á It was one of the best conversations I ever had with anyone.┬á At one end of the old couch on which McGrath sat for much of the day was a dictionary that had been used hard.┬á A few years earlier, McGrath had had shoulder surgery at a Veteran's Administration hospital; the surgery had been very badly done and for the rest of his life he remained in persistent pain, and also wore a black winter glove on one perpetually cold hand.┬á "I hate paper!," he said, laughing, as he shuffled through some manuscript sheets and got a paper cut in the tired, papery skin of a finger.┬á Tom laughed a lot, in fact–at himself, often, with a kind of good-natured rue at his present physical weakness or when remembering something from the past, how this or that person or conflict or projectÔÇöpoetical, political, or personalÔÇöhad turned out.
"Martin!" Tom called out suddenly to his younger brother, who had let himself into the apartment to join us for a few moments.┬á Martin was younger than Tom, hale and cheerful.┬á "Martin should have been the poet!┬á He's got the great memory and the words for it!" Tom said.┬á A while before, another North Dakotan poet, Roland Flint, a great admirer of McGrath, had described to me what was called, out on the North Dakota farms, "the great strength": the man who had lifted a big tractor off his son caught under it after it had flipped while he was working; the man who, standing in a trench at the corner of a barn, where he and two others were repairing the sill, suddenly had to stand and put his hands under the corner and hold up the barn itself when the sill work began collapsing and the other two frantically pitched and jammed stones under the corner for a few infinitely long instants till the man of great strength could let go and they could simply go back to work.┬á What Tom McGrath had was a great strength of poetic mind.┬á And Martin McGrath had the great memory and the great gift for making a story out of nearly anything that happenedÔÇöas soon as he came in he began somehow to make hilarious his telling of how he had been working that morning at dredging for the first time in many years around the end of a little dock at his home on a Minnesota lake.┬á "Mud?"┬á I asked.┬á The dullest and most obvious possible question I could have asked.┬á "It's six feet deep in loon-shit!" he laughed.┬á Both brothers had an ear that had learned when they were children to listen to others who said aloud stories, tales, poems, curses, prayers, jokes, seductions, the pleas and dreams of farm owners and farm workers, and every other kind of sheer verbal performance (when the only electronic sound in the world was the family radio).
Each idea led sideways to another, and at some point Tom asked Martin to sing some verses of an old campfire or far-field lunch-break song to amuse Terrence and me with the vernacular wit of the lines.┬á Martin sang about a dozen, amazingly, and stopped.┬á ÔÇťBut he knows all 27 verses!ÔÇŁ Tom said.┬á ÔÇťAnd I don't!ÔÇŁ he added.┬á He knew, though, how to bring together in Letter and in the full variety of his short poems the rustic and urban strengths of infinitely capacious American English.┬á The sheer size of McGrath's vocabulary in his poems is remarkable, and the words come from everywhere.┬á In the capacious unruly Letter, especially, whether the passage is comic or sorrowful, McGrath built a brilliantly ramshackle structure for his episodes, reflections, linguistic games, and richly allusive texture.
In the North Dakota crop-fields and barns, at a remote Alaskan military post during World War II, in England and Greece, in California and Minnesota, McGrath lived a very long-view experience of men and women at work, in winter and summer talk, at worship of one failing god or another, and trying not to be at the mercy of their political, military and religious leaders. His poems, with their wry or lolloping or even grave exhilaration of language, with their dignity of regard for the human body and human labor, and with their fierce love and anger (poetry's two great sources, Tom said), will persist, I do hope.┬á Even in our age of instantaneity, of RAM-replaced memory, of the meaningless free association, of the randomness of web searches, of electronic distractedness, ÔÇťtextsÔÇŁ rather than ÔÇťtexts,ÔÇŁ computer-screen ÔÇťfriendship,ÔÇŁ and the relentlessly ÔÇťpostmodernÔÇŁ performance of the ironies of brand-name allusion,┬á McGrath's poems must persist, and we must persist in reading them, if we're to hang on to the long view of what it is to be human.
6 June 2012
I Want to Know IÔÇÖm Alive:┬áon Brigit Pegeen KellyÔÇÖs ÔÇťThree Cows and the MoonÔÇŁ
There is a stick in this poem. It was, at one time, a branch on a poplar tree.
The poplar tree was felled by a hurricane some yearsÔÇömaybe threeÔÇöbefore the poem takes place. But even after the tree is flat on the ground, its branches continue to bloom. The tree doesnÔÇÖt know it is dead.
By the end of this poem, I am not sure whether or not I know I am dead.  I am not sure that my life is not a dream, and that the infrequent glimpses of what is not physically there are not what is real.
On the night that ÔÇťThree Cows and the MoonÔÇŁ takes place, a mother, son and daughter are using the poplar branch as a bat in their baseball game. It is March. They are in a field at dusk. The son swings the branch in three ways: like a bat, like a sword, and like a scythe. That there are three humans and, later, three cows, and that the woman in the poem knows that the night will bring a full moon because this is her third night watching the sky, and even that this poem is written in tercetsÔÇöall of these threes feel inevitable.┬á Something about the number three, its unevenness, the way it pushes you to straddle the line between one thing and another, or else to unify all three things within your sight, is important to the way this poem works.
The poem is made up of sticks, manure, blood, hair, dogs, flowers, zippers, septic tanksÔÇöits thinginess pastes the mind to its pages.┬á But the poem is also of another realm. The bullÔÇÖs face is human. Reality bleeds into dreams, which then prophesize future realities. The three cows, noses touching, form a wheel and turn and turn in the field and the spirit, the poem says, is in the wheels.┬á So the poem is really in a third place, in the in-between.
Several times a year, for eight years now, I have read ÔÇťThree Cows and the Moon,ÔÇŁ and IÔÇÖm always surprised at how frightening it is.
In between readings, what I remember is the joyful baseball game. I remember how the color yellow seems to act like an exclamation point in so many of the lines: the moon is eventually yellow, the baseball is yellow, and so is the sonÔÇÖs spring jacket. Yellow also is the daughterÔÇÖs hair, the description of which gives way to such grave and lovely joy: ÔÇťThe color/ Also of my daughterÔÇÖs hair, which was uncombed. / Uncombed or not, she is always beautiful. / ItÔÇÖs the funny laugh and those long legs.ÔÇŁ
They throw the ball late into the evening: ÔÇťOur skin was alive/And we were getting hot while the sky got colderÔÇŽ.ÔÇŁ The joy is in their vigor–and the joy is right out there in the open.┬á The fear is the thinking and observing and feeling. As they play, the darkness rises ÔÇťlike flood water gradually filling / the basement of a house.ÔÇŁ┬á The darkness is ÔÇťsoft as the current of fear that almost always runs through me.ÔÇŁ The moon when it first comes up is the color of a body pulled from icy water. The childrenÔÇÖs skin smells of bleeding.
What do simultaneous joy and fear equal? Maybe a tilted field, like the field in this poem where the cows spin. Maybe some kind of opening.┬á The poem, in a strange italicized line, says, ÔÇťSometimes our hearts are stone, sometimes not.ÔÇŁ
When I read this poem and especially when IÔÇÖve misremembered it, I think my heart must be of stone.┬á I am not, as Rimbaud says poets must, ÔÇťexamining the invisible and hearing the unheard of.ÔÇŁ I think I must be asleep, or worse.
I have the kind of headache of spirit that Unamuno calls the God ache.┬á I believe we all may die utterly, or maybe worseÔÇö weÔÇÖre all dead and donÔÇÖt know itÔÇöbut when I read this poem, there are flashes of somethingÔÇöof a larger way of seeingÔÇöof not immortality exactly, but of there being more in and under and behind the mortal world than I can seeÔÇöif I donÔÇÖt look directly at it.
On the night of the baseball game in the poem, the mother, son and daughter are chasing their cocker spaniel, who keeps stealing the ball. They have to tackle him, and they are getting dirt and grass on their faces. The poem doesnÔÇÖt explicitly say this, but they are probably laughing.ÔÇŽ And so they donÔÇÖt notice the moment the moon first comes up, nor the moment the cows first touch their noses together and form a wheel and begin to move in circles.
I think they donÔÇÖt notice these moments because they are moments of magic. And if you look straight at the magic in this poem it might, like many mysterious and therefore beautiful things, disintegrate.┬á You have to look everywhere but at the poemÔÇÖs centerÔÇöthe spirit in the wheelÔÇö in order to lure the poem, like a shy rabbit out of its hole. There is herein, as the poem itself says in its last line, ÔÇťSomething / Completely understood. But unspeakable.ÔÇŁ
You might look at Yeats. The phrase in the poem ÔÇťspirit in the wheelÔÇŁ reminds me of his Great Wheel.┬á ÔÇťThree Cows and the MoonÔÇŁ is a vision, and the wheels of joy and fear that turn in it might be born out of YeatÔÇÖs wheel of discord and concord. In fact, from his long series ÔÇťSupernatural Songs,ÔÇŁ from his book Full Moon in March, there are these lines, which remind me of the testament quality of the Kelly poem:
ÔÇťÔÇŽ That light Lies in a circle on the grass; therein
I turn the pages of my holy book.ÔÇŁ
You might look at geometry. There are everywhere in the poem triangles, squares, and circles. In 1632, in the Opere Il Saggiatore, Gallileo writes that ÔÇťthe universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.ÔÇŁ Galileo uses geometry to look out, Brigit Pegeen Kelly to look in.
Or you might look at Sylvia PlathÔÇÖs poem ÔÇťThe Moon and the Yew Tree,ÔÇŁ which begins, ÔÇťThis is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.ÔÇŁ It begins where ÔÇťThree Cows and the MoonÔÇŁ ends, with the moon high up and small and the night all staked out, and the eyes blind but the mind illumined, like light flooding a room.
I want to see the universe in all its darkness, as this poem does. I do!  And I want also to be alive and play and have joy.
If I cannot have these things, this world of ÔÇťThree Cows and the Moon,ÔÇŁ then I want at least to be like the poplar tree and not know I am dead.
Four sentences: one a single line long, the second coming in at nine, third at half a line, and the fourth at 108 (and a half, technically) lines.┬á In that fourth, sprawling sentence, Garrigue manages not only to describe the Grand Canyon in terms of its geologic origins, but to begin thinking of these formations figuratively: now they resemble the elements of human civilization (ÔÇťrostrums, pulpits and lecternsÔÇŁ), now things that in turn remind us of various lost civilizations (ÔÇťthe mad Tiberius arches,ÔÇŁ ÔÇťAztec pyramidal temples,ÔÇŁ ÔÇťobelisksÔÇŽ from the sands of EgyptÔÇŁ). Without announcing itself, the result is a moving and as-if-stumbled-upon meditation on the relative insignificance of human achievement and history beside the much more immeasurable history of the earth itself–of the Grand Canyon specifically.┬áAlso, something to do with our human impulse to see the timeless in terms of whatÔÇÖs transient–is it impulse, though, or does the fact of our own transience prevent us from seeing the world without that particular lens?
By the time Garrigue begins, at line 90, to list and describe the various layers of the Grand Canyon (Bright Angel shale, Shinumo Quartzite, Hakatai shale, Coconino sandstone, Kaibab limestone), each layer containing fossils of a world come and gone, the names for each layer as yet another instance of the human dilemma, our instinct to name a thing and thereby possess it, when our transience means nothing, ultimately, can be possessed–by the time Garrigue has said as much, we realize that the poem itself has been an accretion of layers, layers of thought and image, a kind of monument made of language. Which is to say, thereÔÇÖs a defiance and/or courage to the poem: its having been made is the evidence of a gesture against mortality, on the part of its maker.┬á Even as Garrigue reminds us that language, like civilization, is transient, lasting only as long as there are people who know the language, she insists on–or cannot help–fashioning from what is transient something that, if only for now, will say this much: she lived, she saw this, she was here.
The gesture seems all the more hard won when we see how the poem started. ÔÇťWhere is the restaurant cat?ÔÇŁ the poem begins, and the speaker announces her loneliness, as if the cat would have been remedy, more effective company than the people mentioned in the second sentence (a cook, a waitress, cowboys, and other ÔÇťintimates, I would guess, of the CanyonÔÇŁ).┬á Something happens, though, in the shift from ÔÇťWhere is the restaurant cat?ÔÇŁ to the variation of that question soon after: ÔÇťWhere is my cat?ÔÇŁ┬á The cat that belonged more generally to the restaurant is now attached to the speaker alone.┬á Or that is how the speaker has come to think of the cat, which suggests something of her desperation, of how alone she feels–even surrounded by other people, but especially when faced with the Grand Canyon, which she goes on to detail until poemÔÇÖs end. The smallness of self, compared to the vastness of history. The interior life that each of us lives, that can never be entirely known by others, no matter how many people weÔÇÖre surrounded by, or how close we get to them. The way in which, as Howard Moss puts it in ÔÇťRules of Sleep,ÔÇŁ a decidedly shorter poem, ÔÇťeven intimacy is only another form of separation.ÔÇŁ┬á I may be lonely, I may seem invisible–and eventually will be, Garrigue suggests.┬á But I was here.┬á ÔÇťThe Grand CanyonÔÇŁ is the glittering proof.
GilgameshÔÇöÔÇťHe who saw the deep.ÔÇŁ We know┬á it as the world's earliest epic, and we weep with its eponymous hero-king when his companion Enkidu dies. In this scene, death becomes for the first time conscious, recorded. That is the part I remembered most strongly, from having read the poem young. Reading it some good part of a lifetime later, the scene still unfastens innocence, rends love. But the epic reread raised also a different grief.
Let us consider this ur-tale, not for its poetry, but for its account of our human relationship to the other-than-human, within and outside the skin's borders. At the start, Gilgamesh, King and oppressor of his city's people, asserts his first night privilege over every marriage. The half-wild Enkidu–created by the gods to distract a hero whose power and lust have run amok–is lured into the realm of the human by a temple prostitute's opened legs┬á When he and Gilgamesh meet, they battle, then become friends, and the distraction succeeds. Gilgamesh decides that the one test worthy of┬á their bond and their strength is to go into the primeval forest and slay its guardian, then cut down the sacred, tallest cedar. Thus begins a long and heedless destruction–of the wild, plant and creature equally, and of the sacred. But the ecos has its protective deity, whose curse strikes Enkidu dead.
Wild with grief and horror–it is a maggot's emergence from a nostril that proves to Gilgamesh that his friend is not only motionless but emptied of selfÔÇöGilgamesh then sets off to find the secret knowledge that will undo all he's seen, and make him immortal. Along the way, asking directions, he meets a barmaid. She counsels┬á him to accept death, return home, love his wife, raise his children, enjoy food and the warmth of sun and coolness of rain. Gilgamesh ignores her, finds and then loses the herb of immortality to a snake while he sleeps, as all humans must, and goes home to continue building an immense wall around his city.
The final image, to me, is no symbol of civilization's beginning, nor even of a necessary individuation. This wall encircles the ur-choice toward ego-pride, separation, death-acceptance's failure, life-acceptance's failure. The wall  holds the self-protection that accompanies heroic distinction; its stones predict war, the natural's wanton exploitation, and their own destruction. We call Gilgamesh the first epic. But how can  we know in what spirit its even-then ancient stories were carved into clay? To me, Gilgamesh seems the first taste of the tragic: a story of irremediable losses, born of hubris, pity, and terror, that enlarges our comprehension of the human.
When I have to talk about Charles WrightÔÇÖs poems, what I feel first is reticence, as so much of what he does arises out of a kind of reticenceÔÇöa decorum of avoidance, a forestalling of most interpretive certainties.┬á His writing is fuguelike, variations on a theme he barely introduces, yet works at throughout, quietly, with great attention, with an imagination expansive as any poet writing today.┬á He is our Beethoven, in a way, taking a theme from Haydn and re-working it through divagation after divagation, pirouettes and fantasias piling up into rondos and boure├ęs.
His poem ÔÇťThe Southern CrossÔÇŁ is perhaps the first in which he consciously worked this approach over an extended theme, and it happened while I was his student in the MFA Program at UC Irvine, where he taught for fourteen years.┬á It wasnÔÇÖt easy to get him to show us students what he was working on, but, after pestering him, I somehow got a copy and it took my breath away.
Before I talk about it, though, I want to introduce a few interpretive themes of my own.┬á For Wright never writes ÔÇťoccasionallyÔÇŁ–his work derives from a project, lifelong, from a kind of skeptical metaphysics, from a carefully kept storehouse of literary references, and from autobiographical investigations consciously framed within these verbal and half-theological scaffolds.┬á He adopts the Medieval verticality of Ezra PoundÔÇÖs imagination, seeing intense personal perceptions of scene as gateways to repeated mediations on the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of the afterlife, and deploying iconographies derived from the literature of the past (particularly Dante Alighieri) alongside fragmented chronicles that are details of his own temporal journey.┬á With this tradition of the vertical drama of the soulÔÇÖs progress through incarnation, the sufferings of earthly hell and purgatory, and ascension to the angelic orders, Wright also embraces the Chinese poetic tradition of the TÔÇÖang Dynasty in which poets like Tu Fu and TÔÇÖao ChÔÇÖien assert that the transcendental is within the earthly specificities of life, that the divine is within the details, that there is no verticality, but instead a simultaneity of spiritual and earthly being.┬á Seemingly contradictory, WrightÔÇÖs consciousness nonetheless holds both spiritual traditions in his own brand of the Taoistic ÔÇťall-in-one.ÔÇŁ
ÔÇťThe Southern CrossÔÇŁ is written like an unfolding scroll painting, a version of ÔÇťMountains and Rivers Without End,ÔÇŁ that legendary landscape from the Chinese tradition that depicts a world rising in sublime mountain scenes, crashing in cataracts, opening to fertile river valleys, then ascending again towards a blank heaven.┬á His sections, his verse paragraphs, are like panels in this way, each taking up a different scene, working variations on his theme that ÔÇťThings that divine us we never touchÔÇŽ.ÔÇŁ┬á┬á Yet no one section resolves the issue completely, but connects up with the next, with memories and scenes and provisional solecisms that spume like standing waves in a river rushing over its boulders.
In different scenes, the poem traverses over WrightÔÇÖs childhood in Tennessee, ÔÇťin a brown suit,ÔÇŁ over Lake Garda and oblique references to a personal epiphany re-enacting moments in an early poem by Ezra Pound, occupying the same scenes as Dante and Can Grande, as Catullus before them.┬á Wright describes the garden around his old home in Laguna Beach, the Pacific Ocean below shuffling its deck of cards, the sugar chest in his living room haunted by the imagined ghosts of his parents.┬á He remembers his days in Venice, specific caf├ęs and old friends, sighting Ezra Pound ÔÇťat passeggiata, ÔÇŽhis eyes on the long ago.ÔÇŁ┬á And he pursues memories of scattered pieces of his life, complaining he cannot remember, and yet he does, with brilliantly rendered images phrased in a sweet and golden style reminiscent of la dolce stil novo from Cavalcanti and Dante himself.
But like all of his work, ÔÇťThe Southern CrossÔÇŁ is framed by the moral imperative behind so much of American poetryÔÇöthe need to read the manifold world as a metaphysical message, to interpret from its phenomena a piece of moral wisdom.┬á He cannot refuse this impulse, inherited from the Puritans, from Bryant and Emerson, from Whitman and Stevens, from Pound himself in the Pisan Cantos. ÔÇťThere is an otherness inside us/we never touch/no matter how far down our hands reach,ÔÇŁ he writes about midway into the poem, and he claims it is the past and our efforts to connect with it through the kind of effortful remembrance of his crepuscular and spiritual imagination.
Finally, itÔÇÖs important to appreciate WrightÔÇÖs fabulous handling of the English language–how he extends a phrase through meanderings and zigzags of imagistic description, how he builds an extended metaphor and then gently mocks it, how he moves from personal remembrance to invocations of the spiritual tradition of Italian painting or to The Book of Common Prayer. As he has claimed himself, his line has the extension and integrity of WhitmanÔÇÖs long line and the tight, spiritual images of DickinsonÔÇÖs short ones.┬á He describes the Smokies in Tennessee and his folks asleep in one of its valleys in lines that, at one moment, can seem vaguely reminiscent of EliotÔÇÖs in the Four Quartets and yet, in another, ruefully echo Bob DylanÔÇÖs in ÔÇťDesolation Row.ÔÇŁ
But itÔÇÖs only the beginning of his great literary frescoesÔÇöthere is yet ÔÇťThe Other Side of the River,ÔÇŁ Zone Journals, Appalachia, and A Short History of the Shadow.┬á There are so many poems of his to talk about, to wander in, to loll with, sucking on a straw stuck into a gin-soaked watermelonÔÇŽ.
–Garrett Hongo, Greve-in-Chianti–
Don PatersonÔÇÖs poem ÔÇťPhantom,ÔÇŁ from Rain (2009), is full of dark holes, black suns, pages of black slipped between pages of white, the ÔÇťtiny batwingÔÇŁ of a painted saintÔÇÖs open mouth, dark folds in white linen, white skulls, white mugs for drinking the waters of the Lethe. ItÔÇÖs an elegy for PatersonÔÇÖs friend, the American poet Michael Donaghy, who lived in London and died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2004, at the age of 50. ItÔÇÖs not a very long long poem: seven blank verse sections range in length from 13 to 55 lines. ItÔÇÖs also an ekphrastic poem in the best sense, using works of visual art not to display the poetÔÇÖs sensibility, but as compositional, emotional and philosophical devices for organizing, balancing and overbalancing the poem.
The paintings in ÔÇťPhantomÔÇŁ are Francisco Zurbar├ín 17th Century St Francis in Meditation and contemporary painter Alison WattÔÇÖs ÔÇťBreath.ÔÇŁ The latter was part of Phantom, WattÔÇÖs 2008 exhibition of monumental paintings of fabric at LondonÔÇÖs National Gallery–which she hung near Zurbar├ínÔÇÖs St. Francis. Paterson, it would seem, borrowed this┬á association for his elegy–an act which in itself interests me. (An earlier version of the poem, which I havenÔÇÖt seen, appears in WattÔÇÖs exhibition catalogue). I often wonder with poems–especially long, lyric ones that rely on the yoking of disparates rather than narrative chronology–how they came about. Was Paterson writing about Donaghy, and also writing about Zurbar├ín and Watt, and discovered that put together they made a vigorous–really, an astonishing–poem? Was there a plan for this from the beginning? I donÔÇÖt know. But the best elegies often have a strong preoccupation with something other than the deceased and other than personal loss–a way of submerging and subverting too much feeling, an avoidance of mawkishness, a way to look at how life goes on. And of course, many elegies are ultimately poetsÔÇÖ confrontations with their own deaths and with the universal fact of death. A certain coldness, a certain playfulness, comes in handy–and often, as in ÔÇťPhantom,ÔÇŁ has the effect of making greater, not less, feeling.
ÔÇťPhantomÔÇŁ is a complicated many-layered poem in its interactions of narrative and lyric, abstraction and representation, connections and loose ends. ItÔÇÖs also always clear in its particulars. Part of what makes it go–and makes it continue over nine pages–is its shifts, not so much of tone and diction–though that too–but of focus.
Part I: Paterson addresses Donaghy as ÔÇťyouÔÇŁ and writes, stagily, affectingly, his death, with night reaching
ÔÇŽinto the roomswitching off the mirrors in their frames
and undeveloping your photographs;
it gently drew a knife across the threads
that tied your keepsakes to the things they kept;
it slipped into a thousand murmuring books
and laid a black leaf next to every whiteÔÇŽ.
One white cup is left illuminated, and Donaghy, Paterson implies, will use it to drink from the river Lethe. Parts of ÔÇťPhantomÔÇŁ seem arranged like cinematic stills, or 17th century devotional paintings. In Part II, Paterson describes the Zurbar├ín, in which Saint Frances holds a skull and looks heavenward. Remember that white cup? Paterson, a master of the distribution of associated but not overdetermined imagery, suggests and rejects a series of like-but-not-like images:
ÔÇŽI would say the fetish-point, the punctum,
is not the skull, the white cup of his hands
or the frayed hole in the elbow of his robe,
but the tiny batwing of his open mouth
and its vowel, the ah of revelation, grief
or agonyÔÇŽ.
The concept of a pictureÔÇÖs ÔÇťstudiumÔÇŁ and ÔÇťpunctumÔÇŁ comes from Roland BarthesÔÇÖ Camera Lucida, a short book about photographyÔÇöand about the death of Barthes' mother. The ÔÇťstudiumÔÇŁ is the obvious symbolic content of the picture, while the punctumÔÇöthe fetish-pointÔÇöis the part that gets you in the gut. That batwing mouth in the Zurbar├ín gets a parallel in Part 3, in PatersonÔÇÖs description of WattÔÇÖs painting, a ÔÇťpinwheel of white linen, at its heart/ a hollow, in the hollow a small hole.ÔÇŁ Part 3 is something of a reverse punctum: the part of the poem that does not get you in the gut but that, in its coolness, allows the rest of the poem get you in the gut.
Part IV, a sonnet, returns to Zurbar├ín. Reversing the traditional order of octet and sestet, the first six lines describe how Zurbar├ín would, for the unveiling of a painting, arrange the light in the room for maximum impactÔÇöÔÇťat least one fainting fit.ÔÇŁ In the octet which follows, Paterson instructs the reader under what conditions of light and loneliness–ÔÇťon a black moon, in a forest after midnight,/a thousand miles from anywhere your plea/ for hearth or water might be understoodÔÇŁ–to read his poem for proper impact. Part V is a mystical/metaphysical set-piece made out of more dark and light and nothingness.
We come from nothing and return to it.
It lends us out to time, and when we lie
in silent contemplation of the void
they say we feel it contemplating us.
This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.
This is vatic, not quite satirically so, but not perfectly seriously either. PatersonÔÇÖs tonal delicacy allow ideas, though important, to become somewhat less important here than mood. Part VI is spiritual and atheistic; part of something larger and transcendent, but not quite faithful:
One night when I was lying in meditation
the I-Am-That-I-Am-Not spoke to me
in silence from its black and ashless blaze
in the voice of Michael Donaghy the poet.
It had lost his lightness and his gentleness
and took on that plain cadence he would use
when he read out from the Iliad and the Táin.
What follows is 30-plus italicized lines of God/not-God/Donaghy intoning with self-serious grace, and lots of wounds and eyes and lower-case god and death and doom. But Part VII begins:
The voice paused; and when it resumed
it had softened, and I heard the smile in it.
Donno, I canÔÇÖt keep this bullshit up.
Voice-of-Donaghy becomes more natural and guy-ish, talking about memories, regret, disgustÔÇödisgust, especially, with the work of poetry. Says Voice-of-Donaghy:
I knew the game was up for me the day
I stood before my fatherÔÇÖs corpse and thought
If I canÔÇÖt get a poem out of thisÔÇŽ
Did you think any differently with mine?
ÔÇťPhantomÔÇŁ canÔÇÖt go on much longer after that rebuke from Paterson-as-Donaghy to Paterson-as-Poet-Speaker, about the strange relationship of artists to suffering (itÔÇÖs a poetÔÇÖs job to make art of suffering, but itÔÇÖs a sick sort of job). The poem lasts but five more lines. Voice-of-Donaghy extinguishes itself, and Paterson extinguishes the ÔÇťdark lightÔÇŁ of his own mouth, becoming, in his own poem, a St. Francis:┬á ÔÇťI put down MichaelÔÇÖs skull and held my own.ÔÇŁ
ThatÔÇÖs brutal, wrenching, self-mocking. And I think ultimately it asks us what we are going to do with the elaborate skull of the poem ÔÇťPhantom.ÔÇŁ Me, IÔÇÖll reread and reread it.
Memory is the Confederate of the Eye
In 1981, in my second year as an MFA student, I took a class with Larry Levis called ÔÇťMemory and Imagination.ÔÇŁ┬á My notebook from that class seems more his now than mine, a document of his reading and thoughts as he wrote the poems which would become Winter Stars. Quotes from Nietszche and Flaubert, Auden and Eliot and Stevens, Keats: ÔÇťThe Imagination may be compared to AdamÔÇÖs dreamÔÇöhe awoke and found it truth.ÔÇŁ┬á And his own observations and asides:┬á The shape of the understanding is the form of the poem. Poetry depends on the way we can include things that are not poetry.┬á Memory is the confederate of the eye.┬á An arrow flying in both directionsÔÇöhe must have drawn it on the chalkboardÔÇöwith Memory (Lowell tucked beneath it) at one end and Imagination (Ashbery inserted here) at the other.┬á Larry Levis, in art as in life, bringing those two points full circle. Not so much a distinction between the two, my notes say, but the method in which they are used.
ÔÇťSensationalism,ÔÇŁ the poem which concludes Winter Stars, has been a classroom for me for decades nowÔÇönot just as a brilliant example of ekphrasis or as a masterful braid of the political and personal; not only in the digressive and casually inclusive progression which ultimately, inexorably, reveals itself as purposeful in every detailÔÇöbut in the serious questions it raises about the effort to render ÔÇťinto paperÔÇŁ a human life, whether our own or anotherÔÇÖs.┬á What is ÔÇśtrueÔÇÖ or ÔÇśa lieÔÇÖ in what we createÔÇöhow do we speak for another, and do justice to without presuming or imposing upon that lifeÔÇödefined (and limited) as our understanding is by our own experience?┬á How are we, to borrow LowellÔÇÖs lines from ÔÇťEpilogue,ÔÇŁ to ÔÇťgive each figure in the photograph his living nameÔÇŁ?
A photograph sets this poem in motion, Josef KoudelkaÔÇÖsÔÇťRomania, 1968,ÔÇŁ which Levis frees from context in the first line as untitled & with no date / Given to help us with history. He lingers in his slow circumference of description:┬á a man talking to a horse, in front of a wallÔÇö which, like most walls, has/ No ideas, and nothing to make us feel comfortableÔÇŽ– barrier and entryway, blank page.┬á The various narratives he imagines are set thirty years earlier, as if this is a photo from KoudelkaÔÇÖs early memory, not one he could have taken.┬á Of course, I have to admit I have made all of this up, & that / it could be wrong to make up anything.┬á Imagination yields to a meditation on artifice ÔÇôperhaps this, or that, is the story, perhaps Koudelka arranged it, perhaps none of this is true.┬á (ÔÇťIÔÇÖm very interested in self-interrogation in the midst of oneÔÇÖs own poem,ÔÇŁ Levis said in a 1983 interview, ÔÇťbecause I feel such absolute ambivalence about things.ÔÇŁ)
Though thereÔÇÖs no reference to it, the image itself calls forth ChekhovÔÇÖs story, ÔÇťMiseryÔÇŁ:┬á Iona Potapov, talking to his white horse because his son has died and no one else will listenÔÇöand surely Levis, and perhaps Koudelka, count on us to sense that palimpsest.┬á The storyÔÇÖs epigraph courses beneath the poem, charges it, whether we recognize it or not:┬á To whom shall I tell my grief?
And yet: I do not wish to interfere, Reader, with your solitudeÔÇö/ So different from my own.┬á That hinge comes at the poemÔÇÖs exact midpoint.┬á ItÔÇÖs quietly galvanizing, the sleight of hand of this direct address, which looks out and inward both, assessing the readerÔÇÖs assessment, inviting doubt, freighting the silence.┬á The passage becomes a hall of mirrors compounding, illustrating, the illusion.┬á I would take back everything ÔÇŽ
Unless even that retraction would amount to a milder way
Of interfering, & a way by which you might suspect me
Of some subtlety. Or mistake me for someone else, someone
Not disinterested enough in what you might think
Of this.  Of the photograph.  Of me.
That rallentando takes us to the place weÔÇÖve been headed toward all alongÔÇöthe memory which is the confederate of this poemÔÇÖs eye.┬á Once, he begins (that offhand adverb his signatureÔÇöor then, finally, laterÔÇöthose small, relative time-markers each a photograph of him, now, for meÔÇöa note that conjures the whole chord):
Once, I was in love with a woman, & when I looked at her
My face altered & took on the shape of her face,
Made thin by alcohol, sorrowing, brave.  And though
There was a kind of pain in her face, I felt no pain
When this happened to mine, when the bones
Of my own face seemed to change.  But even this
Did not do us any good …
Disinterestedness, that notion he touched upon so lightly a few lines back, returns to us here, in its reach and its limits.┬á (I think of KeatsÔÇÖs chameleon poet, with his ability to hold ÔÇťuncertainties, Mysteries, doubtsÔÇŽÔÇŁ┬á As Keats wrote Richard Woodhouse in 1818, ÔÇťWhen I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon meÔÇŽ.ÔÇŁ)┬á Loss, the time-altered perception of and resignation to that loss, lead to lines that in their repetition deny their avowal:
And so began my long convalescence, and simple adulthood.
I never felt that way again, when I looked at anyone else,
I never felt my face change into any other face.
It is a difficult thing to do, & so maybe
It is just as well.
ÔÇťSensationalism,ÔÇŁ in its empathy and honesty, in its demurrals and amplifications, its guilt and doubt, gives each figure his or her living names; they emerge through the slow circling of its subject, through the concurrences and convergences of thought which a long poem allows.┬á ÔÇťCircling back on [themselves] in a larger musical pattern,ÔÇŁ as he described in a 1989 interview about the long poems in The Widening Spell of the LeavesÔÇöbut that structural blueprint is present here.
To whom can I tell my grief? The gesture of KoudelkaÔÇÖs photograph is the gesture of the poet to the page, to the reader.┬á The poem, at its close, returns to the man in the photograph, whose story the poet no longer treats as conjecture:
If he went mad beside that wall, I think his last question
Was whether they shot his wife & children before they threw them
Into the ditch, or after.  For some reason, it mattered once,
If only to him.  And before he turned into paper.
It has the ÔÇťeffect of a double imagination, an echo,ÔÇŁ Levis said of this poem in 1983. ÔÇťI talk about something real that happened to me, and then suddenly, with some kind of odd magic, the man IÔÇÖm talking about seems to have had the life that I gave him at the very end of the poem.ÔÇŁ
In a reading he gave late in his life, Robert Lowell introduced his poem ÔÇťEpilogue,ÔÇŁ by talking about a disparaging comment heÔÇÖd overheard about Randall Jarrell–that JarrellÔÇÖs poems (IÔÇÖm working here from memory, as my cassette has long since vanished) ÔÇťwere just things he remembered, not things he had invented.ÔÇŁ┬á ÔÇťIÔÇÖm not sure of that distinction,ÔÇŁ Lowell continues. ÔÇťBut Memory, weÔÇÖre told, is the mother of the muses; memory is genius, really. But you have to do something with it.ÔÇŁ
Not so much a distinction, but the method in which they are used.┬á ÔÇťMemory distorts. Madness is forgetting. Experience is changed in the recording,ÔÇŁ IÔÇÖve written and underscored in my notebook, from the first day of class. ÔÇťTo deny oblivion is to write a poem in which you do remember.ÔÇŁ
ÔÇťOn a New YearÔÇÖs EveÔÇŁ is the closest thing I have to a letter from June Jordan. In late September of 2001, I saw June for the first time. She was delivering a speech on the steps of Sproul Plaza on UC BerkeleyÔÇÖs campus. She was demanding a halt to the impending US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but I had some place to be. I would catch her later because the rallyÔÇöwell, the rally did not seem particularly historic. LetÔÇÖs call this her first lesson.
Given how fit and spry she looked on Sproul, and knowing nothing about her health, I was surprised to find Jordan on medical leave in following the Spring and her Poetry for the People course taught, instead, by her former student, the indefatigable Junichi Semitsu. Each week, it felt, she was slated to come in for a guest lecture. Each week, she couldnÔÇÖt. At the very close of her studentsÔÇÖ final reading, she asked Semitsu to read ÔÇťOn a New YearÔÇÖs EveÔÇŁ as her address to us. She died a few weeks later. And it turns out that this poem, like her first lesson to me, is an argument against postponement, against anything less than a meticulous minute-to-minute participation in the history we continuously make. ÔÇťOn a New YearÔÇÖs EveÔÇŁ is, for me, her final lesson to us on poetics and politics.
But what are these poetics and politics about really? She opens with: ÔÇťInfinity doesnÔÇÖt interest me.ÔÇŁ And then we find her:
I crawl and kneel and grub about
I beg and listen for
what can go away
(as easily as love)
Who wants that haughty ÔÇťinterest,ÔÇŁ musically and intellectually required by a remote ÔÇťinfinityÔÇŁ? Who wants such a verb when superseded by the music of a woman wanting viscerally, a woman kneeling, for example, for what will vanish? This is a poem of lust and desireÔÇöa poem that obliterates the canonical requirements of beauty. The poem snorts at the ÔÇťsupposedly beautifulÔÇŁÔÇöthe ÔÇťcanyons,ÔÇŁ the ÔÇťevergreens,ÔÇŁ the ÔÇťdiamond minesÔÇŁ and ÔÇťwhoring ore.ÔÇŁ The poem rejects a profundity, a ÔÇťwealthÔÇŁ where those that write the diamonds beautiful are those that reinforce the diamond mines and the violence those mines necessitate.
Instead, Jordan holds tender the ÔÇťbrown arm before it / movesÔÇŁ and then ÔÇťbrown arm / just / before it moves.ÔÇŁ And it is the repeated admiration of that singular loverÔÇÖs arm that brings profundity. And then this you slides into a we,
it is this time
that matters
it is this history
I care about
the one we make together
No he! No she! A you. Then this we. A we beginning from a beloved and shifting into all of us who are up for the risk, rises again and again in her work. Take, for example, a line of JordanÔÇÖs that Obama used on his 2008 campaign trail (did he ever cite her?): ÔÇťwe are the ones we have been waiting for.ÔÇŁ This line is taken from ÔÇťPoem for South African Women,ÔÇŁ a poem that refers to ÔÇťthe 40,000 women and children who, in August 9, 1956, presented themselves in bodily protest against the ÔÇśdompassÔÇÖ in the capital of apartheid.ÔÇŁ Beloved. There, Jordan begins with that singular resistance and leads to a call for all of us:┬á ÔÇťwho will join this standing upÔÇŁ. And what begins here in ÔÇťOn a New YearÔÇÖs EveÔÇŁ as two lovers laughing becomes a we that makes history. Two lovers laughing or sleeping becomes a we that, again, we better join. Just an inquiry into the smallest words, you and we and they, can shake our poetics and our nation to its core.
I imagine she knew this poem would be the last time she would address her students in a classroom. I imagine she wanted to give us a farewell to carry. Today, I think of her as she picked something from relatively early in her career, as if to say that her later works, too, are a refiguring, a reinvestigation into this very poem. And that she found herself greeting the last lines she wrote years earlier with a (what?) familiar or changed or pained or tender or laughing understandingÔÇöÔÇťall things are dear / that disappear // all things are dear / that disappear.ÔÇŁ June, for me, for us, so very dear.
Like Ezra PoundÔÇÖs Cantos, Christopher LogueÔÇÖs ÔÇťaccountÔÇŁ of the Iliad is an imagist epic. It is surely less various and original than its modernist precursors, but it canÔÇÖt be matched for sheer pleasure. With plot and character given, Logue attends to local intensities and rhythmic development, offering us animated sequences of unfolding action. Moreover, he understands the mechanism of the simile as well as any other modern poet: the electric jolt of defamiliarization, followed, in a flicker, by our recognition of accuracy. Take AchillesÔÇÖ description of Agamemnon as ÔÇťSlow as an arrow fired feathers first / To puff anotherÔÇÖs worth, / But watchful as a cockroach of his own.ÔÇŁ Take the leap (in Kings) from the competing voices of the Trojan council to modern Skopje, shortly before the disastrous earthquake of 1963:
As once, as tourists, my friends and I
Smoked as we watched
The people of the town of Skopje
Stroll back and forth across their fountained square,
Safe in their murmur on our balcony,
One dusk, not long before an earthquake tipped
Themselves and their society aside.
Later, the councilÔÇÖs tumult becomes ÔÇťthe cross talk of their dark, that grew / Slowly and slowly less, until / All were a quiet as children drawing.ÔÇŁ
In particular, Logue makes sublime jump cuts between the world of humans and that of gods: ÔÇťPatroclusÔÇöhis face kept down. // Firelight against a painted box. // 10,000 miles away / A giant child rests her chin on the horizon / And blows a city down.ÔÇŁ Always, the earnest dignity of human prayerÔÇöantiphonal passages of elaborate sacrificeÔÇöcontrasts with the childish brutality of the deities. As Hera says, ÔÇťI want Troy dead. / Its swimming pools and cellars filled with limbs, / Its race, rotten beneath the rubble, oozing pus, / Even at noon the Dardanelles lit up, / All that is left a bloodstain by the sea.ÔÇŁ In such lines, Logue manages to be both gauche and exhilarating (here, itÔÇÖs worth remembering that he collaborated with the filmmaker Ken Russell).
But in the long run, the poem proves less remarkable for its flash than for its sinuous movement. In LogueÔÇÖs Paris Review interview, he comments, ÔÇťNone of my contemporaries seem to be interested in the things that interest me, such as fast, clear, several-stranded narrative, action, character, violence.ÔÇŁ For evidence, consider the following passage from ÔÇťGBHÔÇŁ:
Not your day, king Merionez, not your day.
Dust in the air? or smoke? a shout–
Source out of sight, but near, but out of sight
Behind the crest, trough, crest, trough, crest,
Now soon, now soon to see
–Put down that armour, isolated lord–
Hector with Gray, Chylabborak, Anaxapart,
Outdistancing the wind that comes from Greece
–ÔÇťIf I leave you , Patroclus, whatÔÇŁ–
And HectorÔÇÖs blood-cry, HectorÔÇÖs plume
–ÔÇťIf I do not, what will become of me?ÔÇŁ–
Among the other, nodding plumes;
And all their banners rising one by one
–ÔÇťPrince HectorÔÇÖs one of themÔÇŁ–
Come between LetoÔÇÖs Chair, the corniced horn,
Fast as a horned viper over tile,
Into the yellow bay.
Here we find the vivid perceptual unfolding for which Logue is justly famous. But we also find his varied, extended syntax, with a sort of bravura that can collect voices as it goes. And as in the loveliest passages of his poetry, the blank verse occasionally drops into tetrameter or trimeter, supple in its variations and patterned repetitions. These lines resonate with irregular rhymes and near rhymes, the rhyme of day and bay setting the passage off as a unit of thought (a technique that Logue makes use of with some frequency).
LogueÔÇÖs Iliad is full of atmospherics, dust and cloud, specific qualities of sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight, and bronze reflections thereof. But even more, itÔÇÖs full of sounds. When the Greeks draw their swords, ÔÇťthis dis-scabbarding was heard in Troy / Much like a shire-sized dust-sheet torn in half.ÔÇŁ The Greeks move as silently as if on wool. And the Trojans ÔÇťshout, shout, shout, smashed shouted shoutÔÇŁ like autumn skeins of geese honking in their flight. One thinks of PoundÔÇÖs ÔÇťpoor old Homer blind, blind as a bat, / Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old menÔÇÖs voices.ÔÇŁ As Logue explains to The Paris Review, ÔÇťHomer is full of noises. So, although I know it sounds a bit daft, I collect noises, the sound of steel keys hitting concrete perhaps, or a letter dropping into a half-filled post box.ÔÇŁ
Logue means ÔÇťcollectÔÇŁ literally: he kept file folders of clipping for ÔÇťlighting effectsÔÇŁ and ÔÇťsound effects,ÔÇŁ bits waiting to work their way into the epic. ┬áFor filmy light, he takes from the opening to Tom WolfeÔÇÖs Bonfire of the Vanities. For HaephestusÔÇÖ crippling plummet, he borrows from MiltonÔÇÖs description of SatanÔÇÖs fall. ItÔÇÖs difficult to say how much of LogueÔÇÖs Iliad is collage. The term ÔÇťpasticheÔÇŁ could be applied everywhere, yet it hardly applies, with its implication of hodgepodge. In an interview with The Observer, Logue is cheeky (he often could be) about his method: ÔÇťAlmost everything I do is based on other texts anyway. Without plagiarism, there would be no literature. I'm a rewrite man, a complete rewrite man, like our Willy Shakespeare.ÔÇŁ
Linear B, the Bronze Age Aegean script, was finally deciphered in the early 1950s, giving us the administrative workings of the Homeric age: flocks tended, crops harvested, goods manufactured, and so forth. Tablet after tablet of authentic stuff, in a rendering dry as dust. Meanwhile, Logue was embarking on his epic, at an impossibly slow pace, with no knowledge of Ancient Greek, distant from the Greek text and its context, distant from what we usually think of as actual experience. As Logue reminds us in his Paris Review interview, ÔÇťThese things occur in a nonexistent world, set in the middle of a nonexistent event: a ten-year war fought over a woman.ÔÇŁ None of it should work, as poetry. But should has no bearing, happily, on this fiercely exuberant, vivid poetry.
He wants to own nothing
but his heartbone banging, born of anything.
ÔÇö ÔÇťTriptych: Middle Panel Burning,ÔÇŁ Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux usually writes portable poemsÔÇöno more than a page long, a page and a half on occasion. ÔÇťTriptych: Middle Panel BurningÔÇŁ is a whopping ten pages, an epic if you compare it to the rest of his work. The poem (in scale/form/substance) depicts the better part of our cruelties for what they areÔÇöpetty. At the same time, it chastises the powerful for their much nastier wrongs. Of the triptych: one panel is a look-you-in-the-eye, front-porch narrative: a puckish uncle zapping a kid with the charge from an electric fence, ÔÇťa little rural humor.ÔÇŁ The second panel detonates into oracular rage ┬á(the middle panel burning), into a rhetoric not of CEOs or politicians, but a farmerÔÇÖs kid, fed upÔÇödrawing on all affections, abundant and simple. The last panel, in third-person leaping narrative, reveals how one young American survived his own personal brand of stupidity (as well as a much more perverse and pervasive national ignorance).
LuxÔÇÖs triptych draws on sacred tradition to honor the vulgarity and directness of American speech–its simplicity and fury. Yes, this is a narrative/rant/meditation on the arrogance of the 50s and the decadeÔÇÖs insistence on the uselessness of the imagination, but is also, among other things, a love poem for the way us Americans talk and gripe and sing. And reading it not just in oneÔÇÖs head but in the air (fully inhabited), one feels the language grow and recede in oneÔÇÖs very blood, muscle and bone.
I should say, if the poem is a celebration of an American voice, then it must be read in oneÔÇöthat is, aloud, in all its registersÔÇöthe one I might use at the bodega, the one I curse with when IÔÇÖm losing at eight-ball (often), the one I call to my niece withÔÇŽ or the one I shout at cathedrals with. As a poet, I want to acknowledge and affirm a living, human voice. LuxÔÇÖs poem allows me, as a reader, to collaborate on his ode to the profane. As an oral document, it calls, as most good poems do, upon the very real tendons of the body, the very pleasures and variety of human speech put into the air. When itÔÇÖs going good, language changes the body as the body, simultaneously, invents the poem. It becomes another poem then. And then I, for a time, become something else too.
In a 1995 interview for his radio show LINEbreak, Charles Bernstein asks Barbara Guest, given that she had just defined herself as an imagist, what imagism means. Guest replies: ÔÇťIt used to mean using an image to replace an idea. I think now I would like a few ideas to enter in also ÔÇö sideways, next to the imagination.ÔÇŁ A long poem in four movements, GuestÔÇÖs Rocks on a Platter, published in 1999, launches from this desire. Part I of the work commences with a question of idea and image, ÔÇťIdeas. As they find themselves. In trees?,ÔÇŁ and proceeds to imagine an intellectual-physical landscape where this confluence flourishes.
At one and the same time a long poem and a collection of fragmented notes on literature, Rocks on a Platter, considered to be one of GuestÔÇÖs more difficult works, constitutes a poetics of vertical and horizontal intercepts. A text with immaculate structure, the book begins with a quotation from the great German poet-thinker H├Âlderlin, (ÔÇťTo live is to defend a formÔÇŽÔÇŁ) and ends with a quotation from H├Âlderlin (ÔÇťIn ancient times Heavenly Beings made sense of themselves and how they have made off with the strength of the Gods.ÔÇŁ). These quotations, and the act of quotationÔÇöalong with its attendant gesture, allusionÔÇöanchor the intellectual landscape of the book. For physical anchor, Rocks on a Platter begins in water (ÔÇťShip shoal rocksÔÇŁ) and ends in water (ÔÇťThe Dolphin GodÔÇödoes he swim on the page?ÔÇŁ).
The experience of Rocks on a Platter draws on letterforms and whitespace: ÔÇťdreams set by typographyÔÇŁ crossed with sound and multivalence:
Tantamount to theory
of tender truckland
near Trebizond.
A TREMENDOUS TUNE-UP.       ORTHODOXY.tremendous    tune-up
tra- la-la.
As such, the physicality of GuestÔÇÖs mental and typographic imagery constitutes a horizontal plane that intercepts idea and musicality, always intangible, but here made manifest in the poemÔÇÖs verticality. And it is at these intercepts, these nodes, that imagination flourishes in several of its many forms: as question (ÔÇťIs this what they mean by transfuse?/ the hum pouring into another,ÔÇŁ); as pronoun and character (ÔÇťHe has written out a plan and glued it to the text. He told me// he is a king himself entering life on a whimÔÇŁ); as image and music (ÔÇťÔÇśtrailing skirtÔÇÖ blossom/ in mimetic hairÔÇŁ).
Experience unfolds as affordance, asking us to question what it is that can be made available when lingering within a specific site. If at the shore then sand and tide and wind and horizon and moon (if night) and sun (if day and if the sky is clear). If in a Barbara Guest poem, glimpses of fair realism, the mind showing up for the world, receiving, and giving back.
Derek MahonÔÇÖs two epistolary sequences from the 90ÔÇÖs, "The Hudson Letter" and "The Yellow Notebook," read now, trimmed and renamed in the his New Collected, like a unified two-part Odyssey of sorts. "The Hudson Letter," renamed "New York Time," begins with the poet, displaced, in-transit, missing ÔÇťthe half-tones weÔÇÖre accustomed toÔÇŁ while stranded in the ÔÇťautistic slammer,ÔÇŁ the ÔÇťcarnivalesqueÔÇŁ ÔÇťvirtual realitiesÔÇŁ of an Ogygia for which Manhattan steads. ÔÇťThe Yellow Notebook," renamed "Decadence," enacts a homecoming, not unlike OdysseusÔÇÖ, to a homeland beleaguered by suitors, whoÔÇÖve turned the island into ÔÇťthe ersatz, the pop, the phoney.ÔÇŁ It resolves as the poet finds an alternative to this ÔÇťpastiche paradise of the post-modernÔÇŁ in Kinsale, where ÔÇťThe harsh will diesÔÇŽ among snails and peonies,/its grave an iridescence in the sea breeze,/a bucket of water where the rainbow ends.ÔÇŁ MahonÔÇÖs homecoming foreshadows his late style, the sort of discursive, secular, eco-devotional of his last three books. Separately, the two sequences explore somewhat different emotional registers. The first one is a series of rueful homages to people and poets. ÔÇťLondon TimeÔÇŁ includes a prayer for his daughter:
Today, across 3,000 miles of water
and five time zones, my own prayer for my daughter
would be, not innocence and ceremony
exactly, but a more complicated grace,
the sort of thing you play when you are alone,
Katie, something slow and meditative,
some rich myth of reconciliation
as if a statue moved and began to live–
for I like to think all this is a winterÔÇÖs tale.
St. MarkÔÇÖs recalls AudenÔÇÖs New York surroundings just to bring his shadow for advice:
what would you make now of the cosmic pax
Americana, our world of internet and fax,
an even more complicated military-industrial complex,
situational ethics, exonerative 12-step programs,
health fascism, critical theory and ÔÇśsmartÔÇÖ bombs?
As tutelary presences, neither Yeats nor Auden come as a surprise. The latter is a forerunner of the programme for the sequences. His and MacNeiceÔÇÖs work are obvious models. WhatÔÇÖs surprising about "The Hudson Letter" is how many unexpected guests make it implicitly or explicitly. There is Stevens in Key West:
…till mauve and rose,flecked with pistachio cloud, a new kind of day arose
and I saw why once to these shores came other cold
solitaries down from the north in search for love and poetry
to sing the crashing, galaxy-lit sea porches.
There are travesties of the confessional. LowellÔÇÖs ÔÇťOnly teaching on Tuesday, bookworming/ in pajamas fresh from the washer each morningÔÇŁ surfaces as:
Here I was, sitting quietly on my studio
and grading papers with the radio low.
Frank OÔÇÖHaraÔÇÖs short-hand notation is here also:
I go night-shopping like Frank OÔÇÖHara I go bopping
up Bleeker for Juice, croissants, Perrier, ice-cream
and Gitane filter, pick up the laundryÔÇŽ.
and so is Crane–ÔÇťfoghorn echoes in deserted sheds/ known to Hart CraneÔÇŁ–and other echoes as well: Whitman and Ginsberg. "New York Time" is more than just a sampling of contemporary poetic modes, though the sampling is of essence. It marks a departure from the compression, obliqueness, and encoding of MahonÔÇÖs earlier work, and it signals the poetÔÇÖs new concerns. Sometimes it reads as the mimetic gone berserk: ÔÇťRX GOTHAM DRUG GAY CRUISES SONY LIQUORS MARLBORO.ÔÇŁ More often, the pop-culture and the city intrude in more unsettling ways:
glued to a rerun of The Exterminator
on a portable TV in a corner of Battery Park
(some have park views, others sleep in the park)
and think how sensible the alternative polity
beneath the ostensible, pharaonic city
glimpsed through rain and dust from the expressway–
Largely introspective, personal, about family and friends, "New York Time" is a meditation on different kinds of homelessness, willed or fated, and dwells primarily on the possibility of reconciliation. Nonetheless, those disruptions from the city point to injustices that only "Decadence" seems to tackle directly. "New York Time" needed its sequel, not merely to have the wandering and return of the Odyssey, but to test contemporary poetic practices and their claim as critical stances toward the socio-political, cultural and economic realities of a deregulated, saturated, globalized world.
More than its predecessor, the sequence is a direct confrontation of ÔÇťour post-modern world economyÔÇŁ and it is voracious in its absorption of it:
the body art, snuff sculptures, trash aesthetics,the video nasties and shock computer graphics;
Now closing time and the usual commotion,
crowds and cars as if to a revolution
geared up by Klein, Nike, Banana Republic, Gap
our climate now that of the world at large
in the post-Cold War, global-warming age
of corporate rule, McPeace and Mickey Mao.
If "New York Time" was, in part, about fatherÔÇÖs reckoning with his offspring, "Decadence" inverts the dynamics and confronts a younger generation and the world they made:
Those were the days before tourism and economic growth,
before deconstruction and the death of the author
when pubs had as yet no pictures of Yeats and Joyce
since people could still recall their faces, their voices;
MahonÔÇÖs is not simply nostalgic. His is not an idealized past. The living presences of Yeats and Joyce also entail the living presences of
crozier-wielding Bishops, vigilant censors,pre-conciliar Latin,  smoke pouring from swung censers;
of sexual guilt, before French letter and Dutch cap,
fear muttered in the dark of dormitory and side chapel.
"The Yellow Notebook" returns again and again to the dissolution of social, political, familial bonds, which was so much the history of the 20th century. That had been LarkinÔÇÖs territory. However, if ÔÇťHigh WindowsÔÇŁ is the compressed exploration of a world where ÔÇťbonds and gesturesÔÇŁ have been ÔÇťpushed to the sideÔÇŁ and LarkinÔÇÖs conclusion leaves us unanchored, dizzy with ÔÇťnothing,ÔÇŁ ÔÇťnowhere,ÔÇŁ and ÔÇťendlessness,ÔÇŁ "The Yellow Notebook" takes the reader to a different sort of abysmal.
Nothing to lose but our chains, our chains gone
that bound with form the psycho-sexual turbulence,
together with those black hats and proper pubs
at home now with the ersatz, the pop, the phoney,
The ÔÇťblack hats and proper pubsÔÇŁ seem Larkinesque enough, the homecoming to ÔÇťthe ersatz, the pop, the phoneyÔÇŁ do not.┬á Instead of LarkinÔÇÖs existential vacuums, Mahon explores the way in which ÔÇťour chains goneÔÇŁ has meant enthrallment to a free market, where ÔÇťeverything aspires to the condition of pop music,/the white noise of late-century consumerismÔÇö/even WhistlerÔÇÖs Thames,ÔÇŁ and the muse is literally and figuratively in chains,
tough IÔÇÖm in two minds about Tank Girl over there,
the muse in chains, a screw bolt in one ear,
the knickers worn over biking gearÔÇŽ
As it responds to a commoditized culture that co-opts, absorbs, appropriates and cheapens anything and everything, "Decadence" tests what has become too common a modality in the contemporary poem, namely, the omnium gatherum of cultural referents from all registers, the bricolage, the hodge-podge. However, MahonÔÇÖs perspective, as an ÔÇťoutcast from the continuum,ÔÇŁ now seems, in hindsight, to question many of the assumptions behind the practice. ┬áFor if many a hyperactive poem explains its hops from Dickies to Dickinson as a short-circuiting of sorts, as a form of culture-jamming, a derivate of┬á d├ętournenment, sees the practice as politicized or radical, Mahon makes clear that mash-up, cut-up and remix are tributary of the very culture they mean to challenge. Loyal to its Odyssean lineaments, MahonÔÇÖs second sequence is more derive than d├ętournenment, a way to gauge the effects of what Debord called ÔÇťvarious ambiences.ÔÇŁ Of course, IÔÇÖm using Situationist mumbo-jumbo to contextualize the sequence. MahonÔÇÖs lineage goes farther back. The hero that wanders his Ithaca is Baudelerian via Symonds and Yeats and Wilde, a flaneur who at each stop in the sequence maintains a distance, tests and embraces or rejects. In a society where the new chain is choice, the poetÔÇÖs prerogative is rejection. At the Chelsea Arts Club, from the now where the Thames' ÔÇťembankments gleam with exhausted chrome,ÔÇŁ he opts for WhistlerÔÇÖs ÔÇťsymphonies in white,/those nocturnes consecrating wharf and bridge.ÔÇŁ He keeps ÔÇť[a]loof from the disco ships and buzzing bikesÔÇŁ to ÔÇťflirtÔÇŁ with ÔÇťinsects dithering on the rim.ÔÇŁ The sequence ultimately seems to reintroduce the idea of sensibility as a way to anchor a critique of the culture. And if critical practices have dismissed and debased taste and sensibility as compromised or culturally bound, there is an uncanny way the poem gets the upper hand, at least for anyone who has followed the headlines in the last four years:
Not long from barbarism to decadence, not far
from liberal republic to defoliant empire
and thence to entropy, not long before
the great money scam begins its long decline
to pot-holed roads and unfinished construction sites.
Anthony HechtÔÇÖs haunting long poem ÔÇťThe Venetian VespersÔÇŁ is dedicated to his longtime editor Harry Ford and FordÔÇÖs wife, Kathleen*. The first of two epigraphs is from Othello, where Iago says:
…whereÔÇÖs that palace whereinto foul things
Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and lawdays, and in session sit
With meditations lawful?
ÔÇťThe Ventian VespersÔÇŁ is a dramatic monologue in six sections, and it portrays a soul bedeviled by uncleanly apprehensions. ÔÇťApprehensionsÔÇŁ is the title of an earlier Hecht poem (from Millions of Strange Shadows, 1977), set during the poetÔÇÖs childhood. The ÔÇťapprehensionsÔÇŁ experienced by the speaker of ÔÇťVespersÔÇŁ (critics typically refer to him simply as ÔÇťXÔÇŁ), likewise attach themselves to childhood memories. Hecht has said that X is, in part, based on his younger brother, Roger, who was sickly as a child and required treatments such as these described in the poem:
…the glass jar, like a wet cell battery,
Full of electric coils and boiling resins,
ItÔÇÖs tin Pinocchio nose with one small nostril,
And both of us under a tent of towels
Like child conspirators, the tin nose breathing
Health at me steadily, like an insufflation from God?
Hecht likens the jasper slabs of light that fall around the legs of chairs at evening to ÔÇťA tide of sadness, a failing, a dying fall,ÔÇŁ and we think of OrsinoÔÇÖs request at the opening of Twelfth Night for one particular strain be played again for its exquisite melancholy.
The poemÔÇÖs second epigraph is from RuskinÔÇÖs The Stones of Venice : ÔÇťWe cannot all have our gardens now, nor our pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide.ÔÇŁ Ruskin, Venice, and the visual arts were all touchstones for Hecht. In an interview with Bruce Cole, from Humanities, Hecht speaks approvingly of RuskinÔÇÖs claim that ÔÇťthe task of seeing and seeing accurately is almost the most important act that a human being can perform in life.ÔÇŁ ÔÇťThis,ÔÇŁ Hecht continues, ÔÇťis a task certainly, for good poets as well as for painters: to see with precision, with accuracy, without lying, without exaggeration. This is a very difficult task.ÔÇŁ
ÔÇťThe Venetian VespersÔÇŁ is a tapestry composed of many threads: personal history, world history, the history of art and architecture, the plays of Shakespeare, and the pressures of conscience and even of consciousness. One of the most striking aspects of the poem throughout is its visual acuity, every mysterious, megapixel image capturing a shaded emotion.
…the sight, on a gray morning,
Beneath the crossbar of an iron railing
Painted a glossy black, of six waterdrops
Slung in suspension, sucking into themselves,
As if it were some morbid nourishment,
The sagging blackness of the rail itself,
But edged with brilliant fingernails of chrome
In which the world was wonderfully disfigured
Like faces seen in spoons, like mirrorings
In the fine spawn, the roe of air bubbles,
That tiny silver wampum along the stems,
Yellowed and magnified, of aging flowers
Caught in the lens of stale water and glass
In the upstairs room when somebody has died.
That somebody, it turns out, was XÔÇÖs mother, and there is a fair amount of backstory worked out in the poem. The poemÔÇÖs glue, however, its guiding structural principle and emotional center, may be best found in the myriad details, so carefully and almost uncannily observed. The form of the poem, in other words is the quality of its seeing.
*I am reading the poem in a copy owned by Hecht, a third printing of the paperback edition of Collected Earlier Poems, which contains a note on Knopf stationary from Ford to Hecht heralding the appearance of the edition. Ford mentions that the new printing would be available in time for the announcement of HechtÔÇÖs receipt of the Tanning Prize in 1997. Ford, who began his career in publishing as a designerÔÇöand who later edited Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, W. S. Merwin, James Merrill, Mark Strand, and, more recently, Mary Kinzie, George Bradley, Jill Bialosky, and Edgar Bowers–also designed the book.
PETER COOLEY ON LOUISE GL├ťCK
I Stood Apart: Lyric Temporality in Gl├╝ckÔÇÖs ÔÇťDedication to HungerÔÇŁ
For a lyric poet, ÔÇťthe long poemÔÇŁ may be as abbreviated as the five-part drama enacted in this lyric suite, each of whose separate poems was published as an autotelic work of art.
The burden of the lyric is the voicing of one characterÔÇÖs emotion. This accounts for its privileged intensity and authority: we are willing to accept an instant of emotion as unverified truth. While in earlier times the voice might have been seen as ancestral or tribal, it is too often interpreted nowadays as the direct personal feeling of the poet himself or herself, an affirmation of some personal experience in the authorÔÇÖs life. Such interpretation confirms our mania for those ÔÇťtrue livesÔÇŁ we witness on the talk shows of afternoon TV.
Gl├╝ckÔÇÖs poems counter this paradigm. Her uniqueness is nowhere more apparent than in a poem where the speaker is both at one with and detached from subject matter; in addition, assuming multiple points of view, the speaker is further and further detached from ÔÇťpersonalÔÇŁ involvement as each event, each frozen moment, is held up for inspection.
In ÔÇť1. From the Suburbs,ÔÇŁ the I-speaker assumes the motherÔÇÖs point of view, then that of the ÔÇťlittle girl purposefully/swinging her armsÔÇŁ and, finally, the view of the mature poet pronouncing upon the father, ÔÇťShe is a child; he could touch her/if he wanted to.ÔÇŁ The sentences modulate between past and present tenses.
In ÔÇť 2. Grandmother,ÔÇŁ the title character is quoted directly, then commented upon by the speaker who sees male sexuality silencing the female. In ÔÇť 3. ÔÇťEros,ÔÇŁ a maxim on male genital sexuality, ÔÇťTo be male, always/to go to women/and be taken back/into the pierced flesh,ÔÇŁ opens the poem, only to shift to the speakerÔÇÖs pronouncement on the father-daughter relationship: ÔÇťBecause the bond cannot be proven.ÔÇŁ
What we are encountering is a double or triple viewpoint in each brief section and, in these first three, a consideration of both male and female perspectives. Sections 4 and 5 proceed somewhat differently.
ÔÇť4. The DeviationÔÇŁ starts once more with generalization: ÔÇťIt begins quietly/in certain female childrenÔÇŁ and then modulates into the ÔÇťconfessionalÔÇŁ aspect of the poem as the speaker reveals her own anorexia, the need to control her body, relating it to poem-making, the immediacy of the ÔÇťnowÔÇŁ moment and the need to perfect.
ÔÇť5. ÔÇťSacred ObjectsÔÇŁ contains the speaker reflecting on that moment of lyric immediacy ÔÇťtoday.ÔÇŁ She is the mature artist, wishing to capture the buds of the dogwood and ÔÇťto make them eternalÔÇŁ yet with her recognized ÔÇťpremise of renunciation.ÔÇŁ
At last, the necessarily tragic underpinning of the poetic enterprise in the entire suite is exposed: the speaker stands apart but only ÔÇťlike a godÔÇŁ since humans can never achieve ÔÇťthe deed [for which] there is no parallel in the natural world.ÔÇŁ The poet necessarily suffers removal through her achievement, that detachment both process and product of the creative act. And art, in that suffering enacted in this poem itself, is based primarily on a continuous recognition of the distance between human beings, and human beings and the natural world, even as humans constantly attempt the impossible, to close those distances.
ÔÇťDedication to HungerÔÇŁ foregrounds Gl├╝ckÔÇÖs ability to flex the temporality of lyric event: in her hands it is initiatory, interactive, conclusive, emblematic, iconic and heuristic. That range and depth of emotion one might identify with extended works of fiction or tragic drama is encapsulated here in this beautifully wrought poem from Descending Figure.


text:
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subset: commoncrawl


text: SELECTED FACTS ABOUT CONNECTICUT Name of State Connecticut Official Designation: "The Constitution State" was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1959. Indian Name (Beside the Long Tidal River) Quinnehtukqut State Motto: Qui Transtulit Sustinet--He Who Transplanted Still Sustains.The emblems of the State are as follows: The State Seal was provided for in the Constitution, 1818.The State Flag was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1897.The State Flower, the Mountain Laurel, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1907.The State Bird, the Robin, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1943.The State Tree, the White Oak, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1947.The State Animal, the Sperm Whale, Physeter Catodon, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1975.The State Insect, the Praying Mantis, Mantis Religiosa, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1977.The State Mineral, the Garnet, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1977.The State Song, "Yankee Doodle," was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 197.The State Ship, USS Nautilus, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1983.The State Hero, Nathan Hale, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1985.The State Shellfish, the Eastern Oyster, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1989.The State Composer, Charles Edward Ives, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1991.The State Fossil, Eubrontes Giganteus, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1991.The State Heroine, Prudence Crandall, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1995.The State Tartan (see C.G.S., Sec. 3-110j for a description), was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1995.The State Folk Dance, Square Dance, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 1995.The State Flagship and Tall Ship Ambassador, the Freedom Schooner Amistad, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 2003.The State Cantata, "The Nutmeg" by Stanley L. Ralph, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 2003.The State Fish, American Shad, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 2003.The State Aircraft, F4U Corsair, was adopted by Act of the Legislature, 2005. Hartford has been the sole Capital City since 1875 Population, 2012, estimated 3,590,347 Cities with largest population (2012, est.): 1. Bridgeport, 146,425 2. New Haven, 130,741 3. Stamford, 125,109 4. Hartford, 124,893 5. Waterbury, 109,915 Counties .......8 Towns .......169 Cities .......21 Boroughs .........9 Net Grand List of Taxable Property (2012) est. $372,238,738,421 Average rate of taxation (2012) est. 26.91 mills Birth Rate (2012-per 1,000 pop.) 10.2 Death Rate (2012-per 1,000 pop.) 8.1 Area of State approx. 5,565 square miles; 3,561,886 acres Land Area of State approx. 5,565 square miles; 3,561,886 acres Length of Boundary approx. 330 miles (including boundary with New York and Rhode Island in Long Island Sound and Fishers Island Sound) Length of Shoreline approx. 332 miles (including bays and coves) Highest Altitude approx. 2,380 ft. above sea level (slope of Mt. Frissell in Salisbury) Mileage of Rivers and Streams approx. 9,700 Number of Lakes and Ponds approx. 3,900 State Parks 107 State Forests 32 National Historic Landmarks 60 Miles on State Highway System 4,155.73 State Maintained Access Roads and Ramps 424.82 State Maintained Routes 3,730.91 Miles of Divided Lane Highways in System 729.41 Receipts of State Government for the fiscal year July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013 $33,449,598,944 Disbursements of State Government for the fiscal year July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013 $35,280,319,735 GOVERNMENT STATISTICS Elective State Officers Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of the State, Treasurer, Comptroller, Attorney General 6 United States Senators from Connecticut 2 United States Representatives 5 State Senators in the General Assembly 36 Representatives in the General Assembly 151 STATE EMPLOYEES IN EXECUTIVE BRANCH Number of full-time state positions 31,340 JUDICIAL STATISTICS (2014) Justices of Supreme Court 8 Judges of Appellate Court 9 Judges of Superior Court 175 Senior Judges 19 Probate Courts 54 Regional Children's Probate Courts 6 LAW ENFORCEMENT Dept. of Emergency Services & Public Protection 1 State Police Troops 11 Correctional Centers 4 Number of Inmates, March 31, 2014 4,416 Correctional Institutions 10 Number of Inmates, March 31, 2014 11,589 Youth Institution 1 Number of Inmates, March 31, 2014 546 HOSPITALS AND INSTITUTIONS University of Connecticut's John N. Dempsey Hospital (State, General) 1 Number of in-patient beds - Licensed General Hospital Beds 224 Bassinets (well born) 10 State Inpatient Facilities for Mental Health and Addiction Services 3 Number of patients on books, Jan. 1, 2014 649 State Training School for persons with intellectual disability 1 Regions 3 Number of clients in residential settings and with DDS funded residential supports*, December 31, 2013 7,892 *Residential settings include: Southbury Training School, DDS Regional Centers, Community Living Arrangements (CLAs), Continuous Residential Supports (CRS), and Community Companion Homes (CCHs). DDS funded residential supports includes those that are provided to people living in their own or family home. EDUCATIONAL STATISTICS (2013) Number Full-Time Employees* Students University of Connecticut (Including the UConn Health Center) 1 8,391 30,474 CSCU - Connecticut State University 4 3,093 34,062 CSCU - Community Colleges 12 2,200 56,977 CSCU - Charter Oak State College 1 64 1,581 Independent Colleges and Universities 25 21,875 78,099 U.S. Coast Guard Academy 1 542 902 *Totals as of 2013. Excludes colleges that do not participate in federal financial aid programs. (2013-2014) Number Full-Time Equivalent Professional Staff Students Local Public Schools 1,040 47,830.8 510,221 Charter Schools 18 670.7 7,096 Academies 3 339.5 3,895 State Technical High Schools 16 1,258.7 10,669 State or State-Aided Schools 20 317.4 739 Regional Educational Service Centers, Schools, and Programs 52 1,644.6 12,666 Nonpublic Schools 352 7,626 62,098 AGRICULTURAL STATISTICS (2013) Number of Farms 4,900 Agricultural Land Resources (acres) Farmland 400,000 Commercially viable forest land 1,689,000 Shellfish grounds 70,000 Total Agricultural Acreage 2,159,000 Total Agricultural Employment 20,000 Value of Agricultural Products produced: $652,627,000 Greenhouse/Nursery* $273,840,000 Eggs $60,116,000 Dairy $72,720,000 Poultry $5,447,000 Livestock $8,473,000 Aquaculture ## $27,600,000 All Other Livestock** $13,497,000 Tobacco (Broadleaf) $20,026,000 Fruits and Vegetables $63,449,000 Field Crops (Hay & Silage) $39,012,000 Forestry $22,600,000 Maple Syrup $1,170,000 Other Crops*** $44,677,000 Numbers of Farmers Markets 125 Total Number of WIC and Senior Farmers' Market Participants 83,388 *Includes Christmas trees.**Includes sheep and lambs.***Includes shade tobacco. ##Includes data as 2010. MISCELLANEOUS STATISTICS Connecticut Businesses (as of May 5, 2014) approx. 365,633 Foreign Businesses (as of May 5, 2014) approx. 58,935 Corporation Taxes, including Corporation Business Tax, Business Entity Tax, and Unrelated Business Income Tax, July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013 $743,792,034.23 Personal Income Tax, July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013 $8,720,684,753.13 Sales and Use Tax, July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013 $3,960,012,891.81 Fees received by Office of Secretary of the State from July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013 $30,571,827.54 Notaries Public approx. 54,387 Water Companies - Investor owned 15 Water Companies - Municipal 46 Gas Companies - Investor owned 3 Gas Companies - Municipal 1 Water and Sewer Investor Companies 1 Sewer Companies 0 Electric Companies - Investor 2 Electric Companies - Municipal 6 Number of Railroads 12 Route miles of active trackage 629 Track miles of active trackage (includes multi-track commuter mainline and Amtrak lines; excludes yard tracks) 843 Domestic Telephone Companies providing service in Connecticut 2 Number of Access Lines 1,169,934 Community Antenna Television 25 Number of Bus Companies, 9 Intrastate, 6 Interstate, 8 urban, 4 Rural Transit Districts operating own systems and 1 operating both urban and rural, plus 8 divisions of Conn. Transit - 3 operated by HNS Management and 5 state-owned privately operated. Number of Taxi Companies 111 Banks and Thrifts 75 National Banks 19 State Banks and Trust Companies 8 State Savings Banks 22 Federal Savings Banks 13 State Savings and Loan Associations 0 Federal Savings and Loan Associations 1 Out of State Banks (operating branches in CT) 7 Foreign Banks (operating branches in CT) 5 State Credit Unions 29 Federal Credit Unions 89 Out of State Credit Unions (operating branches in CT) 11 Check Cashers 131 Debt Adjusters 56 Money Transmitters and Issuers of Money Orders and Travelers' Checks 78 Small Loan Licensees 4 Sales Finance Licensees 152 Consumer Collection Agencies 1,040 Mortgage Lenders 250 Mortgage Brokers 207 Mortgage Originators 6,059 Mortgage Correspondent Lenders 118 Securities Broker-Dealers Registered 2,799 Securities Broker-Dealer Agents Registered 154,725 Securities Broker-Dealer Branch Offices Registered 2,262 Agents of Issuer Registered 22 SEC Registered Advisors Filing Notice 2,006 Investment Advisers Registered 535 Investment Adviser Agents Registered 11,765 Insurance Companies with Home Office Headquarters in Connecticut, June 30, 2013 98 All Active Motor Vehicle Registrations as of January 2014 3,017,325 Total Number of Valid Driver's Licenses as of January 2014 2,542,879 Newspapers published in State (daily, Sunday, weekly and monthly) approx. 118 Broadcasting Stations (AM) approx. 34 Broadcasting Stations (FM) approx. 40 Television Stations in State approx. 11 OCCUPATIONAL STATISTICS (2013) Acupuncturists 361 Advanced Practice Registered Nurses 4,069 Athletic Trainers 640 Audiologists 271 Barbers 1,693 Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselors 267 Chiropractors 988 Dental Anesthesia/Conscious Sedation Permittees 135 Dental Conscious Sedation Permittees 20 Dental Hygienists 3,700 Dentists 3,463 Dieticians/Nutritionists 846 Electrologists 156 Embalmers 822 Funeral Directors 51 Hairdressers/Cosmeticians 24,428 Hearing Instrument Specialists 120 Homeopathic Physicians 9 Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselors 800 Licensed Clinical Social Workers 5,999 Licensed Nurse Midwives 216 Licensed Practical Nurses 13,838 Marital and Family Therapists 1,183 Massage Therapists 5,037 Naturopathic Physicians 288 Nursing Home Administrators 753 Occupational Therapists 2,150 Occupational Therapist Assistants 749 Optical Selling Permit 239 Opticians 694 Optician Apprentices 283 Optometrists 659 Perfusionists 73 Physical Therapists 4,756 Physical Therapist Assistants 754 Physicians Assistants 1,988 Physicians/Surgeons 17,294 Podiatrists 302 Professional Counselors 2,067 Psychologists 3,867 Radiographers 4,187 Registered Nurses 61,454 Respiratory Care Practitioners 1,767 Speech and Language Pathologists 1,558 Standard Ankle Surgery Permittees 12 Veterinarians 1,385 AVIATION & PORTS (2013) State-owned Airports: Bradley International Airport, Windsor Locks; Groton-New London Airport, Groton; Hartford-Brainard Airport, Hartford; Danielson Airport, Killingly; Waterbury-Oxford Airport, Oxford; Windham Airport, Windham. Commercial Airports 22* Commercial Heliports 8 Private Heliports 53** Private Seaplane Bases 7 Commercial Seaplane Bases 0 Private Airports 29*** * Includes state-owned and municipally owned. **Includes state heliport. ***Includes 2 restricted military airports. DEEP-DRAFT PORTS Port of New London: Chief Exec. Officer, Mayor Daryl J. Fanizio; Chm., Jesse Marshall; The Admiral, Harold E. Shear. State Pier is located at the Port of New London. Port of Bridgeport: Acting Exec. Dir., Andrew Nunn; Chm., Denis J. O'Malley. Port of New Haven: Exec Dir., Judith Sheiffele; Chm., Katharine Goodbody. CONNECTICUT INDIANS Number of Indian Reservations in Connecticut 6 Number of residents Golden Hill Paugussett Reservation, Trumbull (1/4 acre) 6 Golden Hill Paugussett Reservation, Colchester (106 acres) 3 Paucatuck Eastern Pequot Reservation, North Stonington (225 acres) 25 Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, Ledyard (1,500 acres federal trust land) 388 Mohegan Reservation, Uncasville (240 acres)(409 acres federal trust land) 123 Schaghticoke Reservation, Kent (400 acres) 4 LEGAL HOLIDAYS IN THE STATE January 1 New Year's Day First Monday on or after January 15 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day February 12 Lincoln Day Third Monday in February Washington's Birthday Last Monday in May Memorial Day July 4 Independence Day First Monday in September Labor Day Second Monday in October Columbus Day November 11 Veterans' Day December 25 Christmas Whenever any of such days occurs upon a Sunday, the Monday next following such day shall be a legal holiday and whenever any of such days occurs upon a Saturday, the Friday immediately preceding such day shall be a legal holiday. (Sec. 1-4 CT. Gen. Stat.) *The Friday before Easter Sunday Good Friday *The Fourth Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day*These days are designated by the Governor.


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Julie and Julia
In Maleficent, Angelina Jolie recreates her iconic curse with such perfect charisma that it's a big letdown when she changes tune about 2.5 seconds later as Disney strives to make her relatable. Our beloved villainess became the reactionary scorned woman, and all of that potential for more evil cackles flies... -
This year has been a strange one for acting performances. In a big way, the only category to fully reflect the new diversity that the Academy seems to be going for is the Best Actress category in which we see a Southern mom, a famous author's wife, a young girl... -
The 67th Annual Golden Globes Winners: Avatar Takes Best Picture
- By Neil Miller
- @rejects
- January 17, 2010
The 67th Annual Golden Globe Awards are upon us. And while they are on live on ABC as of 8/7c, you may not be watching them. That's okay, as I will updating our list with the winners as they are announced.... -
2010 Writers Guild Awards Nominees Skew Populist, As Well
- By Neil Miller
- @rejects
- January 11, 2010
Put simply, it's going to be a populist kind of year. Once again, the likes of Avatar and Star Trek, along with The Hangover, are hanging around during awards season.... -
Friends, lovers, countrymen... lend me your wallets. (Or something like that). It is time once again for This Week in Blu-ray, our look at what is hip and happenin' in the world of those weird, formerly expensive high def.... -
If you are going to the movies this weekend, there will be less lineups to navigate and more of a chance you'll get a good seat, far away from other noisy and annoying theater patrons. And maybe you'll be able to watch Gamer, All About Steve and Extract in relative... -
This week on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we uncover long-lost FSR editor Brian Gibson, who brings us tales from down under -- updating us randomly on the future works of Eric Bana. Other things happen, too.... -
I always find it odd when people whine and complain and bash a movie before it appears for months on end, and then suddenly everyone has a big change of heart at the last minute and sees it. Such is G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra. ... -
Kevin Carr breaks down the week's releases, looking at G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Julie & Julia, and A Perfect Getaway.... -
Kevin throws some hatred Neil's way for being one of the few critics in the country to be allowed to see G.I. Joe: The Rise of COBRA. They put their differences aside for a brief moment to discuss the alien holocaust movie known as Julie & Julia.... -
It's almost the weekend! Wanna get laid? Want your girlfriend/wife/lifemate/roommate you hook up with occasionally after karaoke night to cook delicious crap you can't pronounce for like, a month? Take her to see this movie. And know a little backstory.... -
Julie & Julia has been cooking up some serious drama in the foodie world. One part movie based on a blog, two parts snark, and the zest of good ol' fashioned dissin'. 500 degrees for 18-22 minutes. Recipe for disaster? You tell us.... -
I have this to say to all you people out there who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and claimed you loved the action and effects. All I have to say to you is simply this: see you all at G.I. Joe: The Rise... -
The summer's almost over, and so far it's been an incredibly mixed bag movie-wise....


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Topic closed. 69 replies. Last post 2 years ago by KeltonSureWins.
Indiana..99 or 66
999(669)* 992* 995*
Thank you jonnybgood07 for IND, val8
LET's get paid$$$$ money roll
370* 570(270)* 170*
Thank you JonnyBgood07... like 570 and 170...do you think we still might get those pr.22?
Clover$Bay ATM ... Open 24/7
Tks johnny
"I am a mere student wanting to be taught"
Anything for VA, Johnny?
Thank you in advance!
"See, feel, believe and be thankful for the ideal result."
Richard Levy - New Thoughts Guru
it's the last night for it to materialize' if' it works.
You could get inventive and use the flip(55) or 52 as a substitute if you like those better.
"No matter how bad things may get, I'd like to thank my middle finger
for always sticking up for me.."
Thanks JonnyBgood07..257 and 253 two numbers on my weekly list...
Anything for CT?
you're kidding right?? lol
ALWAYS CT!! right?!! too funny!!
IN LOVING MEMORY OF SPOOKYSOOZY AUGUST 17, 1949- APRIL 28, 2011 R.I.P. Dear Friend
Jersey...05 or 50 in the front this week
501* 508* 505(050)*
Michigan 02 or 20 in the back.
120* 420 * 020* 920*
Thanks Jonny, I really like the 420.
There's only one
Quote: Originally posted by JonnyBgood07 on February 11, 2013
Thanks gary!...I would still hold that pair I sent you though.Alot of times these hits get delayed.
Virginia....47 pair probable this week.Yellow would be a repeat if it happens
417* 474/447* 479(476)*
47 Pair Still hitting in VA - Midday 2/19/13
714 Boxed! You call it, Johnny! Any update for VA. Thank you for all you do!
Florida..73 as a front pair or split.
731* 732* 733* 734*
374 showed up today.....WTG....
Thanks FLAT+
It's probably closed but keep 732/723 near if you lack for plays the rest of the week
yeah that's last weeks.Congrats if you hung on.
I hadn't found anything new earlier in the week for Virginia...but now see possible82 x or flip to 85 pair til this sunday.One of these 3 sets possible
826/856* 829/859 823/853**


text:
The hard hitting Hi-Shok® bullet is designed to reliably expand to create larger wound cavities and create an effective energy transfer. This cartridge is perfect for home defense.
This is top of the line, American-made defense ammo made by ATK (same company that makes Speer Lawman, CCI, Blazer Brass, etc)
- it doesn't get any better.
Additional Information
Manufacturer | Federal |
Condition | New |
Bullet Weight | 125 Grain |
Bullet Type | Jacketed Hollow-Point (JHP) |
Use Type | Self Defense |
Ammo Casing | Nickel-Plated Brass |
Quantity | 50 |
Ammo Caliber | .38 Special |
Pressure | +P |
Manufacturer SKU | 38E |
Primer Type | Boxer |
Muzzle Velocity (fps) | 950 |
Muzzle Energy (ft lbs) | 250 |
Product Question and Answer
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Customer Reviews
- Excellent Ammo Review by WFD711
Performance Value Quality - Sweet Deal for Sweet Ammo Review by ChrisB
Performance Value Quality
This is dynamite ammo for my S&W 638 for defensive carry. Price was good enough to get several extra boxes for the range. I bought 6 boxes but I wish that I had bought many more once I got them. (Posted on 11/28/12) - Just right for the size of revolver I have. Review by Ger
Performance Value Quality - Federal 38+P JHP Review by D.
Performance Value Quality
I really like the fast shipping as long as the product is is stock, and LG tells you up front if it is in stock..
D. (Posted on 8/16/12) - FEDERAL 38+P JHP Review by Oldsquid
Performance Value Quality