Field Notes, Week of 04-20-21

I’d like to start off tonight’s notes with a little prayer for two of our local poets who died in the last week: Laura Boss, editor of LIPS, and a mainstay of the Northern NJ poetry scene passed away after a battle with cancer. I knew Laura Boss only slightly, and yet from the few times we met, I came away liking her. Also, sadly, Brooklyn Poets’ reining Yawper of the Year, Robin Romeo, a young man, died; I’m not sure of the cause. After only a year or so at BKP, Robin had become irreplaceable, a poem of the month winner, a solid supporter of other poets’ work. Irreplaceable and now gone. May he rest in peace.

Clearly, if we still had a poem of the week, it would have gone to LanChi Pham for “The length of a line is the length of a human breath, Tom told me.” It’s a daughter’s love poem to her father who loves all poetry but his daughter’s poems particularly. Completely unadorned by fancy poetic language, it shows us the father “Lying in his hospital bed/ With the oxygen tubes/ Running up his nostrils/ And two tanks/ Always next to the nightstand.” And then father and daughter share poetry and conversation, “Until he wheezes,/ And can barely catch his breath anymore./ Then we stop…” A poem of short lines for a father short of breath.  Didn’t Stephen Sondheim write “Send In The Clowns” in short phrases so that Hermoine Gingold, the getting-up-there-non-singing-star of “A Little Night Music” could make a go of it? This poem enacts the very love it speaks of.

Claudia Serea, the master, was back with a garden as god poem called “I’m helping my grandmother pull from the earth potatoes and onions.” The poem proceeds directly from the title to tell us “It’s hard because the earth/ doesn’t relinquish them easily,/ because it never does,/ once it snatches something from us.” Sly work, but the poem doesn’t linger on that easy mortality; instead it enacts a Marx Brothers routine: a tug of war between the speaker the dirt, ending in the triumphant speaker showing off her “trove of potatoes,/ glistening amber piglets,/ and the onions,/ hanging in the air,/ rare golden birds.” Thank you, Claudia.

Yana Kane’s poem, “Filling in the blanks” tracks the speaker’s family’s migration story. From where to where is omitted though ‘from oppression to freedom’ seems like a fair bet. The poem is a verse narrative whose lyricism resides in the clipped, vaguely teletyped sequencing: “Permission granted.// No coming back would be allowed./ Every goodbye is carved in stone.// Three weeks to put our affairs in order.” In the last segment, the migrant family of 3 (two parents and the speaker) sitting three across in the plane “are entering this world/ together,/ as if we were triplets.” 

Ana Doina brought a polished up version of her poem “Bilingualism, a legacy,” which intersperses a lecturer’s spiel about the benefits of bilingualism with language-based memories from the speaker’s past. 

John J Trause brought a concrete poem called “Dementia,” that enacted the descent into dementia by writing the word vertically in a typeface of diminishing density acting as an erasure that mimics the supposed erasure of memory or self or whatever is erased in the course of the disease. Recently in a controversial 40 page poem published in Poetry, called “Scholl’s Ferry Road,” Michael Dickman used an analogous technique, of dedicating more and more of each page to white space reflecting the dementia that overwhelmed the speaker slipping into dementia. 

My poem, “Chains to the Sea” was a sound poem riffing on the famous final line of Dylan Thomas’ famous poem “Fern Hill”: “though I sang in my chains like the sea.”  It was intended as an homage to that triple anapest line of Thomas’, which has astounded me since I first memorized “Fern Hill” with Thomas’ Collected Poems propped open on the steering wheel of my 1973 Monte Carlo while I drove north and west on Route 17 from NYC to Alfred, New York where my then girlfriend was learning to be a potter.  It was a five hour drive, and I had the poem down cold by the time I got there. So this poem is an incantation rolling that phrase around until it seems to make new meaning. 

Raymond Turco brought a poem called “For Those Who Are Wretched” which takes off from the Victor Hugo novel, Les Misérables, suggests that the wretched of the world should “find the Jean Valjean” (a character in the novel) in themselves.

Susanna Lee wrote a comic poem about how hard it is to write a sonnet called “How to Write the Modern Sonnet.” It was super well received, having inside poetry jokes like “Only fourteen or so of the sonnet’s lines need words” and “Sonnets follow a metrical pattern when they feel like it” and other attitudinal humor as in “Shakespearean sonnets are the best, tres cool.” The poem ends with a line of the driest, morbid hilarity a poet can reckon: “Follow all these sonnet tips and you still die.”

Jen Poteet’s poem “Woman and Whippet” sounds like the name of a painting, and here the dog in the painting is the speaker, narrating from inside the frame what the unrecognized viewer of the painting must be thinking the dog is thinking. It’s a clever conceit, which starts off with some rudimentary observations about the sitting, the dog’s relation to his mistress with her “ruffled silk dress, gloves/ and elaborate feathered hat…” and the requisite unfulfilled dog desire to “terrorize mice,” etc. But then, almost exactly 2/3 of the way through (where the turn would be in a sonnet), there’s a ferocious turn.  The dog in the painting who has been enacting the viewer’s thoughts throughout suddenly says: “I don’t know death. I don’t know guilt or pride./  I’m the sort of chap that’s here now…” That is where the poem catches fire, as the energy ping-pongs between dog and painter and poet. Dogs don’t philosophize about a sense of mortality they don’t have, but someone does.  Fascinatingly, after that moment of surfacing passion, the dog goes back to wondering what (spoiler alert: garbage) is for dinner.  Thank you Jennifer Poteet!     

Shane Wagner brought a provocative poem called “Would You Fuck Me?” that jumps directly from the title to a confrontation.  A movie theater manager is propositioning a young usher. Hot as a pistol, the poem proper starts: “He repeated the question several times.” As that first stanza ends, the question repeats: “Would you fuck me?” After that, however the poem cools off considerably.

What Frank Rubino’s poem lacked in a title it more than made up for in poem.  It reads as a grab bag of disparate ideas: a meditation on (or by) one of the speaker’s toes (“I am toes”), an overly long one, a meditation that morphs into a consideration of adhesion or binding, which transmutes into a discussion of the painter Delacroix’s ability to paint water droplets, and then section 1 ends with the memory of a long ago taxi ride to Newark Airport during which the speaker sees the demolished building that once housed his father’s diner on Route 21. In section 2, the poem almost wills itself to fly. The speaker is still his toes, but his toes are in the Southwest on a hiking trail, perhaps a tour of butte country, and here, in this environment the speaker (c’mon, it’s not the toe), engages in a series of reframing observations: looking down he sees “the small figures on the road below” and figures “that was us.” He hears a cute exchange in the men’s room between father and little boy; he tells us the sat thing he saw and the happy thing, which was the same boy “lying limp across his father’s shoulders.” Some of the workshoppers wanted to cut away everything about this poem that didn’t sing with the easy impact of the demolished diner, or cut the poem into sections that could be separate poems. I say if John Donne were in the workshop, we’d be a little more anxious to figure out what he was trying to accomplish and how he went about accomplishing it, and a little less quick to give it a nip and a tuck. My point is that John Donne’s not coming, but Frank is here, so let’s treat him with the same respect we’d show to Donne.

Janet Kolstein’s poem “Miss Pink” was a tongue-in-cheek updated/fractured fairy tale, a sort of version of Little Red Riding Hood, a kind of ballad. It’s strength came from its densely artificial language, such as “The train screeched into the station like a Chinese Dragon,/ and opening all its metal jaws sharply and at once,/ commanded, “Clear the doors and step in.” The poem’s not in the package, but it’s got a lovely ending.

Thanks to everyone who brought poems, and thanks to everyone who assisted in the discussion to help these poems on their way to coherence.

—Arthur Russell