American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  yourself, and borrow charge. What part of us

  you are yet, and what through him and his would I,

  if I were you, retrieve in the purview—or whom,

  if you want someone with a look, sending looks,

  someone underway and expressing it, someone

  drawing from ceremony sensation, separating her own

  from others’—gets lost in happening. This is their scene.

  Situation’s giving onto someone.

  Put out some hedge and overhear.

  The foreground and the horizon are idea’s.

  Consider the milieu durance.

  Way out there now.

  “The History of Ideas, 1973–2012: Education”

  Education

  What Heidi’s grandfather learned from the eagle he taught himself

  Aggregate is a pavement rough on the feet. We spread it around

  the allotment gardens, where monuments are most prone.

  At level grade, we introduce the churn, a procedural masonry

  flocked with beak and shell and pattern after, a deuteronomy

  all over the ground, much like that the maestri spotted

  on the monticule and derived, halfway down again,

  of starshower.

  Trueness to type is the objective in aggregate,

  and chalking it up, roughly, the signature business

  of our internal audit, summarized over the translator before

  the hearings of grievance. In truth the gardeners

  are lucky to have us, and if their gratitude is tactical

  it is no less affecting to have pressed into our aprons

  the gentians indigenous to First Elevation.

  A blossom sometimes, in their parlance, volunteers

  out of season, and it is not without precedent we

  element the youth we find one morning at the pour

  and pattern after. It seems an act of love paradoxically,

  the expulsion they call going to seed—his kiss curl twisted

  up and out in a manner we now recognize as preparatory,

  fontwater wet. While we work his boredom brings to him

  one of our handtrucks and a duet all day to choreograph,

  rock-tip-twisting into dervish a leverage of himself until

  the beck he was assigned to search our faces for

  escapes him and we break silence. He yanks his balance,

  wheels out, skids again. When we escort the probate

  to the audition granted him and his hum among us

  in the melody of the closing prayer the novitiates lead

  after grievances is resonant in our walk back, we notice

  like nuns the march of our feet in its beat and stagger,

  whereupon in testiness we huff and ditch the stiffened

  batch, then mellow. We clap out dust from the proving trays.

  Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity

  “The History of Ideas, 1973–2012: Ut Pictura Poesis”

  Ut Pictura Poesis

  As with a colonnade, repetition not only moves through space itself but, for the viewer, exists in time

  The Fortinbras in one is the avenger we follow

  in another. Foliage, way out a while back, and wet

  still, low boughs. His horse noses through, eyes the size

  of plums, and so soon. How was that supposed to sound,

  overheard, until overcome? like a poem in which ambush

  I crouch, if rooting around for wide new leaves it is I, or fern

  the forest floor in patchy opportunity.

         The fern

  in each new iteration reads the scheme, and like lace

  paper pulled, overland portage fits to screen, offering hitherto

  itineraries artless except for the way the mind swaps roundabout

  for reconnaissant. And reverts. He wears his toque feather

  above the opposite ear! we swore in the gay bar

  on the gameboard of his likeness, running up

  the score on whomever had been high. First sign

  we saw, at the image ridge. Or at least it used to be a gay bar.

  Where eventually we would decide to merge forward-dawning

  with mission creep to condition horizon, which we lost

  in a portmanteau, anachronism still

  scales this map with vetch at the edges, in an arch,

  which gives the open glade an aspect of stage

  so that, and so on, the vixen might trot to her moonlit mark

  mouthing the tar compound of recent kill, or

  an advance man unpack his bag. This is who

  we intercept, that’s the play. We wait for the sun to rezone.

  With the rise of the web, poetry has met its photography

  Eclogue in Line to View The Clock by Christian Marclay

  Okay, but now imagine someone,

  one of fifty, say, in the queue, fiftieth first

  and advancing little, somewhere within

  the seventy-two-hour window of efficacy

  for post-exposure prophylaxis, and, later,

  in the screening room watching The Clock

  with the few dozen others in rows behind and ahead

  who had waited too. He knows he has to

  but he hasn’t yet. We pick it up there.

  It is two thousand eleven a few more days.

  The movie tells what time it is.

  In poetry too we all face forward.

  Open House

  We came in here to pretend. Or, rather, they suffer a run on

  faith who predicate their commission on windfall,

  and that’s us. We saw an opening in situ.

  The realtor was already inside the document we opened

  and encouraged us to roam the levels, helping us to

  imagine a family outgrew the rooms. Motivated,

  she allowed. On spring days, a wind picking up, homosexuality

  blows right into the sale of synthesis, and impresses, as if

  we could explain. She entrusted herself exclusively

  to the parlor floor, so we could call out, wherever we were

  in the square footage, our running queries, like a family,

  meanwhile prowling, meanwhile fitting our practices to

  the built-ins—concrete slabs and formatting palettes at the wall

  and window—meeting eyes in the walk-in until the term radiant

  heating could flare, following by texture and temperature instinct

  dimly understood, onto the balcony and into on-demand

  water control panels, a room of them. To return respectively

  where Wanda waited for candor going forward. We are two men

  who can agree in murmurs there is no purchase

  any more in Hart Crane, but we’d keep a room for him

  called Eileen Myles. What is it about the pretense we belong here

  that requires an agent? Or, is that the trouble, Wanda? To whom

  to speak at the bank and about what not yet are we

  prepared to say. We blew in notional. Somewhere in here

  I once wrote some poems Eileen liked that Nijinsky could send

  to his remote beloved and they demanded Diaghilev,

  his signatory, the management, misunderstand the love

  on tour at hotel intervals, the suite if not the marquee ever

  in his name, remember, an imprimatur that effaces. One man,

  another, and an other. Stamps his foot. Rigid valences

  over the bayview, remember, in the same print as the drapes:

  I drew them, then took that down and put it in

  storage. Here, against the reclaimed material the builders

  appropriated, and other disenfranchised phrases, it makes

  a statement. Wanda, we weren’t faking exactly. Is it better to say

  the cyclone fencing traffics in the paper t
rash the wind

  found overnight or to have the wrappers spirited up against it?

  We were merely on a walk we had predicated on commotion,

  copyists no less than Bouvard and Pecuchet, no less prudential,

  who needed only first to agree to fail in turn at every venture

  except lifelong life together. In the follow-up,

  I’ll need to admit my credit is better off undisturbed.

  Apologist, archivist, agent, eminence, front, Wanda

  there’s no room to call you muse. In the variorum, I had

  this idea, upstairs and to the left. After dinner you’re welcome

  to stay for coffee. Not far from here, strewn broadly,

  we found a board game, and the penalty cards were prettiest.

  What we do is turn them, escalating the damage

  a player’d encounter, as a poem builds, or a bid, until his turns

  are mortal, a chill Belle Islander, the thinkable tertium quid.

  To reside, to inhabit, to dwell: did you know they’re all cognate

  with staying? Wanda, together we have six thousand dollars.

  Which, if it blew away, you might call some six thousand dollars.

  Listen, pianissimo, the love of things irreconcilable.

  That’s not us, not any more. But, we keep a room for it.

  Edge of Water, Moiese, Montana

  Just this dry mix

  of whitening pink and mauve and blue bean

  powdered over cache, which becomes beneath

  the least lick of the Jocko River

  market radish red and cobalt, and some stand

  half in bath—

  To outlast alone the doubt one is alone, or

  acclimate to a decency, differ in temperature

  from the big and little stones in the scree decreasingly,

  and search for a place to build a spine.

  The phrase for it, catch myself, is fugitive

  even. About Moiese the dry first fact

  of a scarab, a white one specked in the chalk rock

  whose antennae, nearly fabric, are data-fond

  and then the woozy look again downriver

  an hour on: moose maybe, opposite

  and large enough, a legend at the water table

  filling the green shade brown. Too, about

  Moiese, to spot her, or anything, is a decision.

  Put that third. Make a rule. Edges of water

  are promise places. Lie back bare and

  there is a cable pulling your next thought

  to the sun. Rake your face cheek to jaw

  with broken mica, and the moth traffic

  triples at your back. Is that a fact?

  POETICS STATEMENT

  From “On Abstraction, Permitting Shame,

  Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source”

  Reprinted from Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat Books 2016)

  The “materiality of language” is a term one hears in the company of poets, and has meant little to me; hearing it, it’s hard for me to imagine anything other than the rounded humps of m’s and n’s or the rivers of text down a page. It makes more sense to me when I consider Dickinson in particular. When in Emily Dickinson “Detour” is stood as a noun, or “Release” or “Pause,” it seems reinvented, or so refilled with potential it spills much of its more common definition. It is as though she has sited a place where value has gathered, where value gravitates. There’s a radiant energy at the word. I do have the sense of the word stirring awake and participating in the formulations of reason and subtle sorcery she is articulating. The circuitry is charged. “My father—that Pause of Space,” she writes in a letter, after Edward Dickinson’s death. A coin is set spinning there. A talent.

  As a reader, and even as a teacher, I lived long with Laura Riding and Dickinsonian metaphysics, before finally learning—or admitting—something of their unnerving power, which has supported my own real, steadily building conviction that there are spirits, numina, in language. That, specifically, a substantive where it consolidates a kind or a quality under a name, a noun, is drawing on, or raising something like a god. A god being that spirit which obtains in a certain situation or petition, which is dormant or dispersed before being called and brought into operations. Is a god substantially different from its summons?

  On a plinth in the desert courtyard within the cathedral complex at the 350-year-old Mission of San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson yesterday there was a loose, laminated prayer card to Saint Anthony. The long day’s sun was softening a small splotch of candle wax that had fixed to it. Part of the prayer reads, “I implore you to obtain for me.” Anthony is the patron saint of lost things, just as Michael, I think, is the patron saint of suffering, and Thomas the saint of doubt or conversion; and saints are not gods, but like ancient Greek deities they are propitiated or invoked or consulted when their respective purviews and specialties are pertinent to the believer. Love and Sleep and Valor and Dolor and Wisdom were gods for early Greeks, not yet intrinsic to what we now call the self; they were sought and summoned to apply to a human circumstance, to oversee it. “Obtain for me” seems not only wonderfully humble as a request, but also similar to the content of a polytheist or pagan prayer. It is also the writer’s wish when selecting a word, when letting a line or sentence take hold and establish and act in relation with what else precedes or comes.

  When named, the entity—Bone or Habit or Election or Treasure—enters into council with the other capitalized imports in a Dickinson poem; each presiding over its invested constituency, together they situate the axes of the poem. The poem is reread, and relationships across syntax develop and conspire with the syntax, or query it. Emily Dickinson did not capitalize every noun—maybe about half of them; the selectivity and idiosyncrasy of her method is a living moment of the philology she studied. In Dickinson there is a revival, a late uptick heartbeat, an atavism: even among American writers, who were generations late in adopting the protocol in English to capitalize only proper names, Dickinson held to an old fashion, and made it hers. Never was a writer a custodian of language more than she. Capitalizing all substantives, however common, was, for a time (in Samuel Richardson’s correspondence, say, circa 1700) a standard practice, and before then I think concepts and nouns of significance were capitalized as an author saw fit, when he or she felt they were entitled to superordination, and in register it wasn’t substantially different from personifying concepts. When positioned as antecedents they might be referred to as she or he. These are the ghosts in custody still. If you ask me, a paganism lived through the monotheist lexicons of Medieval and Renaissance literature, lived through Neoclassical and then Romantic moods, when lowercase prudence became customary. For a measure: the 1850 version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude has far fewer named nouns than the 1805 version. Little s shepherd. Little c conscience. Big n Nature. Value added.

  Siting the place where value gathers. Calling what’s there by the name of what obtains there. (Calling to mind, calling by its name, calling into being what’s there by the name of what obtains there.) How do gods form? Is illocality their address from the start? Here is a speculation, a scenario: Perhaps there is the bend of a river, bright under the sun, where waters accelerate, and the fishing is good there, or life itself feels quickened at the spot. At night it is frequented by moose in estrus. A special place. Generations understand the luck of the site, the propitious fizz above the rocks, and the moss it makes on the banks there, and over time it is a place one visits to ask for a turn in fortune. Something like “fortune” or “flux” or “tingle” becomes its handle. An abstract. By its handle it can be drawn, like any word, anywhere; the visit can be virtual. The word is drawn thereby into prayers, poems, into speech. Eventually, far from knowledge of the bend of river, one comes to host the visit of the word when it obtains. Something of the moose and fizz is preserved in it, belonged to it.

  It may be belonging to is the raison d’être o
f these numina. As in the Mission, which has a designated alcove before which to behold each saint’s beneficent downward gaze or ecstatic upward one, there are offices for Paternality and Subsequence in Laura Riding’s long poem “Memories of Mortalities.” She names the fixed values in the math she makes of her childhood, sickness, and schooling, across the poem’s three parts. Laura is drawn last into the play, through the “slow grammaring of self,” to exist among the familiars and genii. They pool and consolidate and adhere to their physical hosts. My experience bears this out, and I am no visionary. Back from the Mission, I believe I can tour my house as if carrying an instrument, a theometer, say. I feel charges sitting here.

  When I lean back in my chair I can just see the corner of a white cardboard photo mailer envelope under my desk. A foot locker of teaching materials rests against one of the back legs of the desk. Beside the other, in the corner of the room, this envelope. It fell back between the desk and the wall down to the floor about ten months ago. I sweep around it when I sweep. Inside there is a photograph, of my ex-boyfriend as a child. I believe it is a photo of him in costume, in bright tights, dancing and acting on stage in Fort Worth, no older than ten. I won’t look at it again. In it he is hopeful and springy and eager to please, worthy of pleasure, and also surrounded somehow by sadness or hurt. Soon after my partner John and I moved to Tucson I found it; it dropped from a book—The Sighted Singer, by Allen Grossman. I was relieved, as it had been a point of contention in the months after we broke up four years ago; he said it sickened him to know that I still had this last of the childhood photos he had given me, and angered him that I had misplaced it—as though my disinterest in sharing our whole lives had won out in this material way. I bought the envelope right away and intended to mail it to him, knowing that was just, deliberating about what note if any to include. Under the desk delay and regret and irreconcilability have gathered, and even after I mail the envelope and clean up, there they will obtain for me. Please, irreconcilability, accept my surrender. Be germane, that’s all, amen. I believe, all the way to his Silver Lake mailbox, in your charge.

  IN THE DARK WITH BRIAN BLANCHFIELD

  Chris Nealon