EVERY SUNDAY MORNING we watch CBS’s Sunday Morning. Well, almost every Sunday morning. With The New York Times waiting, I wait, somewhat impatiently, for the final minute of the show—that minute where Charles Kuralt used to say, “I leave you now near Omaha, on the banks of the Missouri,” and the camera would simply sit there, looking at the long sweep of the river on a clear day in November with the sun lowering itself in the west. Then, a goose or two would come into the range of the lens, followed by more until the screen was filled with geese wheeling and banking, skein upon skein threading themselves through each other, the air filled with yelping as they came in to land. Or else he’d say, “I leave you in the mountains of Vermont,” and the camera would start up close, focused on ice melting, so that a drop would slowly form, take on solidity and weight, tug at its own surface tension, elongate, then drop to the stream below—over and over, the accumulated shedding of winter until, finally, the camera would carefully pull back, and we’d see a rushing stream and then, at last, the mountains in the distance.
Those moments mattered. In a busy world—one in which we do all too little sitting in the middle of the forest, or standing at the edges of rivers—they put us in touch with ourselves. With the self who had once been the child on her stomach in the grass watching the precarious progress of a ladybug, or the adolescent suddenly struck by the ever expanding universe as ranges of hills unfolded before her and the wind made the only sound for miles around, lonesome and austere. You only need to have had one of those moments in your life—one clear, fixed point at which you fit yourself into the larger world—for that final minute of CBS Sunday Morning to matter. It gave you back to yourself, briefly, even as it took you somewhere new.
Things have changed a bit since Charles Osgood took over. For one thing, he comments more, can’t seem to resist using words to tell us that here in the flatlands of Western Washington we are likely to see what the Spokane saw long before the white man, etc. In other words, he directs our thoughts just at the moment when they should be most free to roam. And the camera has changed, too—more radically, and far more destructively. It’s a nervous camera now. Instead of letting things come into the range of its lens, it takes on life as an active verb, flitting from branch to branch, flirting with nature. It pounces on its images—one recent Sunday I counted six different animals in less than a minute—then darts away in search of something more interesting. The eye cannot rest, cannot take in, cannot settle and savor. We are no longer participants, but spectators.
Sometimes an individual poem can act as the fixed lens of a static camera. It can put us back in touch with ourselves by inviting a sustained attention, transforming its subject by the quality of the attention being paid. Once we’ve entered its field of vision, that poem opens to us others by the same writer. A poem we encounter in the initial stages of becoming familiar with a writer’s work can have predictive power; it acts as a genetic marker, a key to open the door. We see more because of that earlier poem; we are attuned to nuance that comes from that earlier poem. We assume a kind of direct lineage, an underlying sensibility that links one with the other.
Reviewers, almost by definition, look at an expanding universe: the world created by the poet as the poems accumulate. When we make a statement about a book, it is necessarily abstracted, defined by what we think the individual poems add up to. So we tend to forget that the way they add up is poem by poem, drop by drop, and that how we read the individual poem is the way we once looked so hard at the ladybug—with intense scrutiny, amazed curiosity, passionate response.
Interestingly, it seems to be possible to agree on the cumulative effect of a poet’s work without agreeing on the particulars. Joseph Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason” (1994) takes a long, hard look at two poems by Robert Frost. Brodsky finds a dark vision in Frost that leads, in the end, to the isolation of the poet as maker: “he stands outside, denied re-entry, perhaps not coveting it at all. . . . And this particular posture, this utter autonomy, strikes me as utterly American.” But on the way to a conclusion with which I concur, Brodsky fails to read the tone of “Come In” to such an extent that he gives the poem a particularly Catholic reading. I would venture to say that “repent” (which Brodsky would substitute for “lament”) was not much in Frost’s vocabulary. Yankee Protestantism would dictate an even darker reading of the poem—one where a recognition of nature’s indifference eclipses any religious yearnings. And when Brodsky reads the “darkened parlor” in “Home Burial” as a metaphor for the grave instead of what it clearly is—a darkened parlor—he also takes himself (as reader) outside the time-frame of the poem. The child’s body is still in the parlor; the husband is outside digging the grave with an abandon that offends the wife; the reader of the poem is expected to understand the simultaneity of the events in order to preclude any tendency to “take sides.” Frost stands with the reader; to make a metaphor would be to violate his impartiality, to force meaning. The greatness of “Home Burial” has always depended on its maker knowing “not to sing.”
Both the mystery and the individuality of reviewing, it seems to me, lie in how the leap is made from the particular to the abstract. For each book, there must be several discrete moments of recognition: moments in which the poem itself acts as objective correlative, as an entry to the way the poet’s world comes to meaning. You look through the viewfinder, adjust the focus, and click: the lens flies open to take in the world of someone else.
This is especially true when you are reading poets with an established body of work, poets whose work you have followed over the years. How easily your voice slides into theirs. Maybe you’ve heard them read in person, made some adjustments in how you hear. Maybe you’ve simply grown used to the cadence, the rhythm of their thoughts. But there was a time when the work was new, when you walked into a strange landscape and didn’t know which way to turn. And what you did was what nearly all readers do: you let one poem speak to you so deeply that it speaks still, and goes on speaking.
“As one who was not predestined, either by nature or by art, to become a prolific poet, I must admit it pleases me that, thanks to longevity, the body of my work is beginning to acquire a bit of heft.” This sentence, from the author’s note to The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, was written almost twenty years ago. Now his longevity is celebrated once again in Passing Through, marking the occasion of Kunitz’s ninetieth birthday. This book collects the poems from three books (including a Selected) written after 1958. It also contains the long major poem “The Wellfleet Whale,” which appeared as a separate chapbook, as well as nine new poems. “Three Floors,” first published in The Testing Tree in 1971, is one of those poems that serves as a lens; it speaks to—and through—the later poems.
Mother was a crack of light
and a gray eye peeping;
I made believe by breathing hard
that I was sleeping.
Sister’s doughboy on last leave
had robbed me of her hand;
downstairs at intervals she played
Warum on the baby grand.
Under the roof a wardrobe trunk
whose lock a boy could pick
contained a red Masonic hat
and a walking stick.
Bolt upright in my bed that night
I saw my father flying;
the wind was walking on my neck,
the windowpanes were crying.
Over the solid warp of the poem—a strict stanzaic and rhythmical structure placed there to support the sweep of memory and imagination—the poem is a sea of shifting images and associations. In sixteen lines, Kunitz has peopled the house with ghosts. The small boy is literally caught in the middle between the past (the loss of his father) and future (his sister’s marriage, his own manhood). The poet re-creates the various claims on his affections as he presents the immediate moment of the poem—the darkness and the visionary sight of his father flying. The reader is drawn into the poem’s emotional complex in such a way that childhood itself, with all its confusions, is awakened in memory.
“Three Floors” is a study in variation. Alternating between four- and three-stress lines (with slight differences in syllabic count), each stanza is at once familiar and surprising. There is a contrast between the strong masculine end rhymes of “hand/grand” and “pick/stick” and the haunting feminine rhymes of “peeping/sleeping” and “flying/crying.” “Whose lock a boy would pick” is iambic trimeter, but the strong beat is muted so that each word must be read in a slower, more measured cadence. The child picks at the metaphorical lock of the family, hoping to discover his own identity.
The final couplet creates a sense of closure by returning to the strict meter of the poem and, at the same time, by moving into the realm of fantasy. In this way, the make-believe sleep of the first stanza is contrasted with, and equated to, the wide-awake vision of the last. The poem thus feels complete in its metrical package even as it opens up a strange emotional world where nothing is quite what it seems. “Three Floors” itself has become a vehicle for the imagination, creating a father for the son. But even as the father apprehended, he seems to be leaving. In a frenzy, the child perceives an elemental loss where the external world reflects his own amorphous grief. And behind loss is a question: Warum—why? The father’s death, the mother’s anger, the child’s internalized conflict—nothing makes sense. Without an answer, the child is fated to ask this question throughout his life. The imaginative act, then, is seen as a way of discovering meaning, of making a divided house, however briefly, whole.
Twenty-five years ago, “Three Floors” harked back to a still earlier poem, “Father and Son” (1944), in which the poet searched for the lost father who had committed suicide before the son’s birth—and found, at the bottom of a pond, “the white ignorant hollows of his face.” But it also pointed to a companion piece in The Testing Tree, “The Portrait,” in which the mother jealously, even angrily, denies the child any access to his dead father. But now, in 1996, “Three Floors” seems to prefigure the new and important final poem of Passing Through:
Touch Me
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
“Touch Me” connects directly to its antecedent, but it is a connection made as much by contrast as by similarity. What makes these two poems coalesce, for me, is sensibility—and the poet’s desire to fix the moment in memory. Once again he is lying in bed, haunted by wind and rain, by the branches thrashing against the windowpanes. And once again he sees through to the heart of things. This time, however, the present is meditative as opposed to visionary. He reactivates the child whose questions haunted the earlier poem by recovering the child who paid attention to the crickets. Both poems contain the large underlying questions of identity, but the later poem poses, first, the simple question of being.
Opening with a reference to a much earlier poem (“As Flowers Are”), “Touch Me” is a bit less formal than “Three Floors”; the structure is more subtle, its music even more varied, and its methods more sure. There are the same intricate rhymes—more a crochet than a weaving—slant rhymes that make a pattern like the fluid course of a soccer ball as the players work it down the field: “rain/flown/ afternoon/down” and later “again/machine/done,” or the initial “air” echoed in “clear/pour/desire, desire, desire” and then, as in a reprise, caught up again in “remember”—the operative word of the poem. But the ending is not elevated as in “Three Floors,” where the poet tries to make language fill the void. In “Touch Me” he falters at the edge of the visionary, falters where the song has “flown,” pulling back from the urge to fabricate in favor of the urge to resuscitate. At the exact moment when the earlier poem would have made the transformative leap, this one settles back. The poet foregoes rhyme and rhythm in favor of statement, a deflated kind of poetry that makes the end both terrible and moving: “Darling, do you remember / the man you married?”
The line break is crucial. Because if she remembers, then he has identity; if she remembers, she connects with the person who was “wild with love”; if she remembers, she is the link between the old man, his younger self, the child, the cricket, the very earth in which he has been gardening all afternoon. She connects him to his life through touch—the very thing that was withheld in “Three Floors.” Even as he interrogates, he answers his own question: “remind,” not “show.”
The act (if it comes) will remind him of what has already been fulfilled. The gesture of poetry is superseded. “Touch Me” is a poem of completion and incompletion: poetry can only do so much, makes the link for the poet but it isn’t sufficient. With great honesty and great vulnerability he admits to a need for another to restore him fully to a sense of himself, but it is a self rooted firmly in the present tense: “who I am.” Such a simple poem (a study in monosyllables almost comparable to Frost’s) for such a complex thought.
Speaking of poetry as a form of blessing, Kunitz tells us (in an introduction to Passing Through, which he calls “Instead of a Foreword”) that “it would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meanings cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.” Time and again, as this volume shows, Kunitz locates himself at that intersection, still asking why and still discovering that, although it has “one season only,” life is worth the living.
Donald Justice’s New and Selected Poems also collects work from a relatively small number of books—six, including a previous Selected. As for Kunitz, book publication has been infrequent and each volume has made an impact. Justice has earned his reputation as a master of the art through careful attention to the craft. Over fifteen years ago, when I first heard his “Absences” (in Departures, 1973), I could not believe that so much could be said—and not said—in only twelve (or thirteen) lines. It seemed to me then, and still seems now, a study in how what is absent from a poem can fill it with its presence.
Absences
It’s snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.
Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .
So much has fallen.
And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers abounding.
The first thing I notice is the plural of the title, the sense that more has been lost than can ever be retrieved through the act of memory—and that memory itself is elegiac. As the snow falls in the present (this sound of falling), the flowers of the past both bloom and wither; the visual image of the snow outside calls up the sight of a dress—the active memory of the poem; the room fills with music held in memory so powerfully that it obscures whatever step the poem has been listening for. The speaker’s own absence meant that he was present in another time, another place. Thus the past is more active than the present. In fact, the absences are so realized that the reader feels as though the speaker is courting loss, counting on loss to fill him. The present tense of the poem—“hear it now”—is caught between the immediate past (the afternoon), the distant past (the piano, the palms, the memory) and the future in which this loss too will bloom with the others, will be relived in the active voice of memory.
So the presences of the poem reside in innuendo, in image and imagination. They are conjured through sound, as though the vowels of the language could refashion the past and make it palpable. The long i of “quiet” intrudes on the musical o’s of the first two lines. It is picked up again in “white” and from then on the two play tag, circling each other, circling the long e of “heap” which contains the potent image of the poem. The middle two lines shorten to pentameter in order to hold their images—white petals, white skirts—in opposition. Then, the e shortens to that of “memory” and “step” and “terrible.” Everything ends in ellipsis. The broken line emphasizes that the “I” also has fallen. Sound, too, seems to fall away, only to be revived in the last line with its opposite—“silent”—and then the echo of o’s again, a reminder of what is present—the snow, the absent flowers abounding.
With so much music, such a poem seems to savor its subject. Loss is a muse. The voice dances around it, making of nothing something so all-encompassing you feel you could turn and touch it.
Sense (or meaning) would send me from this particular poem to “Invitation to a Ghost” in Justice’s New and Selected. Written in memory of Henri Coulette, it begins, “I ask you to come back now as you were in youth.” This poem, of all the new ones, names the active desire to remember, to be alive in a past almost more vivid than the present. But I’m not following sense in Justice: I’m letting sound send me in other directions.
The Artist Orpheus
It was a tropical landscape, much like Florida’s, which he knew.
(Childhood came blazing back at him.) They glided across a black
And apathetic river which reflected nothing back
Except his own face sinking gradually from view
As in a fading photograph.
Not that he meant to stay,
But, yes, he would play something for them, played Ravel;
And sang; and for the first time there were tears in hell.
(Sunset continued. Years passed, or a day.)
And the shades relented finally and seemed sorry.
He might have sworn that he did not look back,
That there was no one following on his track,
Only the thing was that it made a better story
To say that he had heard a sigh perhaps
And once or twice the sound a twig makes when it snaps.
Here is a perfect example of how one poem informs another. By moving the myth into the landscape of his childhood, the speaker of the earlier poem now equates himself with the figure of the artist. The impersonal poem is made personal. And once again the vowels call the tune. The long and short a’s flicker through the lines like darting fish. Taking their cue from the word “landscape,” almost every line contains a combination of long and short sounds, a syncopation of vowels as in “came blazing back” and “fading photograph . . . stay.” Over this pattern of sound, Justice has imposed the structure of a sonnet with its expected rhyme scheme. The rhythm varies, but there are three pentameter lines (two strictly iambic) to suggest a scaffold through which the rhythms wind their skein of sound.
The epigraph for the entire collection refers to the traditional myth of the poet:
Orpheus, nothing to look forward to, looked back.
They say he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
In “The Artist Orpheus,” however, this is subverted. Whereas the traditional story shows the consequences of looking back, here the variations on and repetitions of rhyme (“back” with “black”, “back” with “track”) imply not only the direction of the gaze, but also its circularity. The near rhymes alert the reader to what might have been, but isn’t. “Might,” “perhaps”: the poet poses an alternative myth, one that is more in line with his own sense of loss. With a kind of gentle wit, he suggests Eurydice may never have been following at all. Story is more powerful than the real physical loss that generates it. Version becomes reality: loss, not Eurydice, is the muse. This, it would seem, is the necessary condition of art.
With this in mind, the reader can approach such new poems as “The Miami of Other Days” or “Pantoum of the Great Depression” as further manifestations of absence. And “Sadness,” which begins “Dear ghosts, dear presences . . .” reminds us yet again that the lost world has its own imaginative power, doubled somehow, like lanterns in the river—the shimmering reflection that is the poem—until presence equals absence squared. New and Selected Poems reminds us that Donald Justice is still an important presence in American Poetry.
The title of Gerald Stern’s most recent book, Odd Mercy, is a variation on a theme—or, more accurately, a concept—that has threaded its way through his work ever since “The Dancing” first appeared in The Paradise Poems a dozen years ago. In a long sustained sentence, that poem sweeps from junk shop to holocaust in the space of nineteen lines (and from fart to God in eight). Full of exuberance, the poem virtually rollicks on its way to its surprising ending, its sudden and sobering empathy.
The Dancing
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco
with an automatic eye
nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop—in 1945—
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—
Oh God of mercy, oh wild God.
“The Dancing” unfolds through accumulation, and as in any good junk shop, anything goes. In a freefall down the page, held together through the illusion of the spoken voice, the lines follow a process of association from object (coffee pot) to remembered object (Philco) to music to remembered dance to a conjunction of specific time and place that sends the speaker reeling outward in his imagination. The poem is Jewish to its core—especially in its enigmatic closure, which is worthy of whole pages of the Talmud. Instead of hoarding experience, the poem is expansive. It opens ever outward, moving from the “I” in the junkshop to the shared experience of millions and finally to the unknown (and unknowable) mind of God.
“The Dancing” is more a middle than an early poem; in fact, it occupies the exact center of Stern’s selected volume Leaving Another Kingdom (1990). When I first read it in 1984, it was reminiscent of the wholehearted embrace of experience in “Lucky Life” as well as the self-conscious celebration of “Behaving Like a Jew,” two even earlier poems with which I was deeply familiar. But its ending was new precisely because it was equivocal. What were Stern’s definitions of “mercy,” of “wildness,” and of “God” himself? Until then, God had been as likely to appear in lower case, a “god of rain,” a “god of tears.” Until then, Stern’s Jewishness was a condition—something he shared, celebrated, examined—that linked him with a longer history. Suddenly, in “The Dancing,” he was speaking not about it but through it—speaking out its painful wrestling with the nature of a god who can spare or condemn as part of the same dance. Although I can find no earlier mention of mercy, there’s no question that, from this poem on, the enigmatic concept of mercy has become one of the underlying—and driving—questions behind Stern’s poetry.
To some extent, this query was ever present but muted. The vibrant voice of Bread Without Sugar (1992) seems, in retrospect, to be shouting down some nagging doubts. Now, in Odd Mercy, the question surfaces over and over like a whale rising for air. The opening poem of the collection states that a craving for light is “the first mercy,” raising the issue of what is the second? the third? The title poem quickly follows, taking a sidestep into an oblique angle of vision by looking at the quality of the mercy—its oddness—not at its ranking in some ordination of mercies. The poem is too long (seventy-nine lines) to quote in full, but its opening lines move immediately inside the speaker’s ruminative range.
I kick a piece of leather; except for the claw
it’s mostly sky. Let the silkweed bury it.
and let the silkweed bury the silkweed. There isn’t
a particle of life there, that’s if leather
can have a life. Silkweed sends its seed
to cover the body—there is grease; there are
feathers on the claw. Juice, I think,
juice of the cat, juice of the silkweed. The pods
are empty, there is no cream, only a little
white left over, dry and fluffy. Let the
nail bury the nail, let the helmet
of someone named Knute bury the helmet of someone
named Si or Cyrus. Inside the bliss is gone,
the mind is empty; it has moved from one form
of grasping to another. I lift it up,
it is a kind of football, something between
a dry tongue and a ball. I execute
a perfect dropkick, claw after claw—there still
are dropkicks in Pennsylvania. It could be
the self growing more aloof that gives me the courage,
something I can hide behind.
This is quintessential Stern, raucous and daring. He’s kicking dead cats and singing about it! He’s going into one of his deep underwater dives and who knows where—or when—he’ll come up? He’s playing with Ecclesiastes, playing with nature, playing with death itself. And he knows it. He makes claims for a “self growing more aloof,” but I’d argue that he finds a self growing less and less aloof. As in “The Dancing,” connections are being made; the poem is spiraling inward to where self and history are intimates. “Odd Mercy” also uses Stern’s typical associative method of progression, but by now he so trusts his ability to be far-ranging that what is association for him might be disjunction for anyone else. The poem explores the relationships between self and cat, self and the past, son and father (“he will spend his lifetime / waiting”), moving from literal to figurative with lightning speed: seed of the present, seed of the past, seed of the seed, seed of the self, self suddenly facing the self as it kicks a dead cat like a football . . . no, like a suitcase. In a moment of fusion, the suitcase filled with books and underwear is also packed with the images of the poem and these, in its final lines, open not so much to hindsight as to retrospective insight:
. . . the cat
is in a rage, there is silkweed, it drifts
like insulation over the brushes, it falls
like snow in the farthest pockets, there is toothpaste
and Neutrogena and Solex; there is a clock
I bought in Sienna, it is a German clock
a Peter, with three stars and a kind of forties’
face; it ticks like an ancient bomb, the size
is perfect, the paint is a little chipped, it is
a second heart for the cat and after a day
of odd mercy another one for me.
Memory, and the consolation of memory. Stern has returned to the junkshop of the past only to come face to face again with the inexplicable: he has packed his imaginary suitcase with an object that harks back to the forties—and the clock’s ticking sets in motion an “odd” mercy, as enigmatic as the wild god who conceived it.
The world contains all things: the cat that killed the bird, the boy who waited for his father, the clock that ticks away the time, the lives we lead, the lives we might have lived, the man who waits, now, for answers he knows he will never have. To love that world is to forgive it. And Gerald Stern loves with all the passion of someone who refuses to drown. It’s interesting to note that both this poem and the earlier one culminate in a single defining moment around 1945, one which stops the imagination cold. For Stern, I think, this moment is one he must live—and love—his life against.
The concept of mercy is the linkage between the poems, an idea that plagues rather than consoles the poet. Notice that it’s always qualified (first, odd) as though he has no strict definition; however, it’s a quality that must exist if Stern’s universe, with all its pain and irrationality, is to have room for the joyous, the redemptive. Perhaps the poet dispenses the mercy after all, and that’s what he finds odd about it.
Odd Mercy marks a change in tone. It has all the wit and vitality of Stern’s other work, but it’s a quieter book, more contemplative. And Stern is harder on himself, over and over pointing an honest finger at his own direction, worrying away at the edges of a contemporary culture that lets the dead bury the dead as it turns its back on its homeless, its disadvantaged. “Hot Dog,” the long last poem that takes up half the book, threatens to get out of hand as it flits from point of view to point of view, from Augustine to Whitman, from oppressor to oppressed, with a kind of deflated mania. Near its conclusion, the speaker repeats “Never again” and the reader suspects he’s heading for deeper water. It will be interesting to see where Stern’s voice—which over the years he has come to trust so completely—will lead him next.
Black man:
I’m a black man;
I’m black; I am—
A black man; black—
I’m a black man;
I’m a black man;
I’m a man; black—
I am—
This is the opening stanza of “Brother John,” the first poem in Michael Harper’s first book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, published in 1970. A first poem necessarily informs all others, but Harper has actually used fragments from this poem that act as a refrain in subsequent books. So the poet himself has highlighted this lyric, expecting the reader to know how—and why—it reverberates. Beginning with a blatant statement of condition, the stanza then pulls the statement apart, emphasizing and deemphasizing in turn “black,” “man,” and the combination of the two, ending on an assertion of identity—the affirmative iamb of “I am.” From there, the poem continues to celebrate both jazz and the jazzman in a series of riffs on Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, each time reiterating part of the first stanza as a refrain. Then comes a harmonic progression to Brother John, who is simultaneously universal—“he’s a black man; black”—before the variation on the opening that ends the poem:
I’m a black man; I am;
black; I am: I’m a black
man; I am; I am;
I’m a black man;
I’m a black man;
I am; I’m a black man;
I am:
Each punctuation mark dictates a timed pause, creates a rhythm that approximates jazz, allows Harper to create a syncopation of his own—a celebration of being that includes blackness as part of its meaning. Whereas Stern seems to discover a defining moment, Harper’s, in a way, was from his birth. But as a poet he has undertaken the task of looking beyond—or beneath—historical condition to discover the existential.
From “Brother John” forward, Harper has explored what it is to be black in our society and, in so doing, has opened up to all readers the wealth of black contributions to our history and our art. His work has never flinched as it faces the hard questions of racism and race relations. In a dense, staccato style, Harper has taken another look at American history, collapsing time and condensing fact so that the juxtapositions often startle us. At he same time, he has offered up personal experience in conjunction with national events. In making us more aware of our differences, he has made us more aware of similarity. “Tranetime” is for anyone who can listen and respond.
Honorable Amendments is Harper’s first book in ten years, and its appearance makes us suddenly aware of the too-long absence of this strong, energetic teller of truth. Harper’s style has been one of syntactical compression, of declarative statement, of fact superimposed on fact building layers of ambiguity until they make demands on the reader just at or beyond the breaking point. The effect is discomfiture. We do not know what we need to know to read these poems, and somehow our not knowing is a part of the way they open up the world. First, we are asked to realize how little we know of what has shaped this country; second, we are treated to what we do know from another perspective; third, we are asked—no, required—to alter our own perceptions to encompass those of the poems.
In Honorable Amendments, the range of epigraphs, historical notes, and dedications covers Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison, Eugene McCarthy to Martin Luther King Jr., the dictionary to traditional oral formulations. Harper’s subject matter is eclectic, moving from Grant’s autobiography to Lincoln’s second inaugural address to the poet’s own trip to South Africa to the plight of the Cherokee to the art of Romare Bearden to Langston Hughes’s boyhood to Frederick Douglass to Coleman “Hawk” Hawkins (for whites) and Coleman “Bean” Hawkins (for blacks), and right down to Jackie O—which is to say that the book is about (if books can be said to be about) a refiguration of American history in order to expand, adjust, redress, inspire. Amendment is necessary if we are to understand each other, and this book presents some alternative aesthetics through which we may also make amends.
So how are we to read the provocative ending of the long last poem, “Prologue of an Arkansas Traveler”? After a litany of historical events, the poem concludes:
District of Arkansas
set up as partial payment for Louisiana Purchase; Quapaw Treaty
and ceding of lands between rivers, Arkansas and Red; Cherokee
agree to leave Arkansas; Sam Houston’s revolution plan; Federal troops
burn Napoleon (look that up!); Poll tax; Convict Leasing Law;
Elaine race riot; state-owned bridges made toll free: quilt that!
One believes that Harper has looked it up—has looked up everything—and found it wanting. One also believes that he is offering up his version, his unique slant on American literature. The challenging “quilt that!” takes on more of the tone of the imperative: turn this, too, into art.
The years since 1970 have been stormy, and they’ve seen myriad changes. But “I’m a black man” still haunts me, forces its rhythms on me, its insistence and its assertion, its triumphant otherness. So I turn, now, to “Laureate Notes” from Honorable Amendments to see what, if anything, has changed. Written to the Providence Journal, it raises all the old questions.
Four papers a day, Globe, Times,
Monitor are not enough,
this is a personal editorial,
this is demise. Update your photo
gallery; all the black people do not
appear in the negative, and in broad
daylight, let’s say, on Broad Street,
a rainbow a cliché, but a full range
of coloration.
Which is your slant
on dry and wet news, please, give
us the facts; save the attitudes
for the collection plate,
which in the old days,
was a hammer, a trestle,
and a boy in the dark
unable to make change
because he was folding the news,
in the hot, in the cold.
Your police news lacks how you treat
the rich, how you make fun of
immigrants, who count out their
change in the women’s room,
which is often out of paper:
this is the paper of the numbers,
this is the paper of the rich.
I will not comment on the police:
they are brown, sometimes on horses,
and often patrol: my boy watched you chase
a 15-year-old up Chestnut Street
in a heisted car, and, when he lost
control, watched him beaten into
submission, and because he was upstairs,
and not at ground level,
with a perfect view for justice,
and my answers, which came quickly,
because he stutters, looks Cape Verdean,
has been hassled by men in brown
for their amusement.
I realize these men have their own children;
I realize they are not in love with mine;
when it comes to protection, editors,
one must get one’s blows in early,
If you want to make sense
to a kid about justice,
about the law.
This is one or two incidents,
it must stand for the whole;
it is all he knows about order,
it is all he speaks of the law.
Tomorrow: car theft; tomorrow: trash
collection; tomorrow: judges and juries;
tomorrow, the IRS, BVA, MLA, PAL, CVS, NBC, BRU
tomorrow: happened today.
Possibly the most accessible poem in the collection, “Laureate Notes” could be said to “stand for the whole” as it makes its simple claim on our humanity. The police (their brown uniforms have connotations of fascism) stand for the whole of society. Twenty-five years later, “Laureate Notes” does not end with the strong identity of “I am” but with a series of impersonal acronyms and the scary prediction of what “will be.” Yet here “will be” equals “is”: Harper lets us know that time has run out. “Justice will take us millions of intricate moves,” said William Stafford; in this poem, the perfect angle to view justice is from above—and it’s clear that most of those intricate moves have yet to be taken.
“Laureate Notes” is another assertion of identity: a personal editorial made public, a pronouncement. And it predicts future assertions. Fact: there is more than one “slant.” Fact: the newspaper was built on the backs of the boys in the dark “folding the news, / in the hot, in the cold.” Fact: the police can be seen to use excessive force. Fact: a boy has been hassled. Fact: from now on, it will be difficult to talk to him about justice, about law. Fact: the rhythms make a jazz of the experience, the music of a future that, if we don’t heed its warnings, will spell more misunderstanding. As time present is torn between time past and time future, so the language is torn, charged with pun and double meanings (e.g., newspaper / toilet paper; film negative / negative stereotype), like the double vision of history/today Harper makes us see.
If “Brother John” was celebratory, in some ways “Laureate Notes” is one of Harper’s most pessimistic poems, its ending definitive. The poems of Honorable Amendments are difficult to read—even in “Laureate Notes,” the third stanza fuses pronouns to the point of confusion. The poems can be daunting, at times condensed to inaccessibility, yet the book does not exclude me from its experience. It invites me to learn more, to learn the limits of my knowledge. And this is probably because I sense that Michael Harper stands with Ralph Waldo Ellison in refusing to play what has come to be called the “race card”: “and who knows but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.”
Harper’s voice—honest, penetrating, combative, censorious, exultant—is to be welcomed back. His is a voice of reason, I think, but impassioned reason. The ending of “Late September Refrain,” yet another praise for Coltrane, could almost be called the poet’s self-portrait:
A mouthpiece is different from a reed,
which flanges into the spaces of the mouth
where even spit evaporates to the song.
viaduct, headband of the sun;
it is the fields, and the call of the fields.
It is the shining in your example:
I say your name; John William Coltrane.
I say the refrain: a love supreme!
Michael Harper just might be the mouthpiece through which American history and American literature can find a way to reconciliation.
So an earlier poem may be reflected, enlarged, in a later one; it may, even by contrast, illuminate the shape of a poet’s vision. When we look long enough, the two become reciprocal. Which is the ladybug, which is the universe? We do not always read chronologically. It occurs to me that the reverse could also be true: upon discovering a significant later poem, the reader might, with hindsight, be able to discern its roots.
I pick up a recent issue of The Georgia Review: first, I turn to Fred Chappell’s review (what books did he look at, which did he like?), then the essays, then some of the poems—and I encounter, mid-magazine, a poem by Philip Booth that is so chillingly beautiful I’m suddenly afraid for us all.
Views
Walking, you thumb the remote
to scan news,
watch the weather girl
dance both hands, pivot,
smile, and point to
the other coast.
So what does morning look like?
What does the world.
From this motel:
an anywhere town, across the bay, shining.
Elsewhere mountains.
Miles beyond hills,
the capital cities, their walls behind walls.
Monuments to our lies,
to our self-blinded lives.
Above us now, two fish hawks, cheeping musical shrieks,
the risen sun easing their wingbeats.
daylight’s invisible satellites, shamelessly
bouncing back from space the emptiness we feed them.
It must be Sunday morning, I think, a Sunday in transit, waking in a motel room in a strange town. Time to let the world in—a world available by remote control. The weather girl is speaking about another city, other conditions, and with the sound on mute she becomes a dancer—the most poetic act of the poem. But she’s as impermanent as the weather, a part of the larger system: TV, motel, satellite. If the speaker looks out, he can see what’s across the way. That world—the one he might call the world of reality—is framed by window, framed by unfamiliarity.
The title implies more than one: views within views. The gap between what is on the screen and what is outside the window widens. The poet becomes aware of the fish hawks above him and, above them, “over us all,” the unseen presence of the satellites that bring yet another reality—information about what he cannot see. In a transient world, the capital cities—centers of power that encircle us like an environment—take on permanence. Yet they are walled, inaccessible. We’ve constructed our own vast impersonal lie and now it holds us in its cage.
In the end, “Views” is a poem of limitation. The poet’s act of seeing the grace at hand is not the act of seeing the whole world. The tone of the poem, both ironic and elegiac, is a little sad, a little angry—but not with an anger that could transform anything. Yet “Views” also opens wider and wider vistas with an intimation of the universe. Now that I’ve read this poem (written after the publication of Booth’s eighth book, late in a career that spans over forty years), I’m going back to the early books to look for the ladybug—for the early poems that, through this Sunday morning insight, might now shine with new significance.