Mary Biddinger: PRAIRIE FEVER

In recent weeks I’ve found myself reading a number of new poetry books that also are the authors’ first volumes. I have previously mentioned elsewhere that I enjoy encountering these initial offerings, especially by younger poets perhaps still in the exciting process of discovering their voice or more mature individuals whose premiere collections of poetry still display a fresh voice with novel observations on life, love, loss, landscape, lyricism, or any of the other more common topics treated in their works.

As much as one hopes a first book of poetry will present an opening glimpse into the author’s personal perspective and a signature style, a reader also may expect the collection to provide hints at links to past literary figures so that there appears to be a continuation of the poetic tradition. Even the most well known examples of notable or inventive verse—whether Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, Eliot, Lowell, Ginsberg, Ashbery, or Graham, among many others—exhibit easily apparent bits of predecessors’ influence within their works.

Indeed, one welcomes surprising poetry that repeatedly gives the impression of an original free-floating imagination on display, even though the poet (along with most readers) knows his or her pieces will necessarily be tethered to history and specimens written by those literary icons from earlier eras. Such was the case for me when reading the poems in Prairie Fever, Mary Biddinger’s debut volume from Steel Toe Books. As I moved through the collection, I admired Biddinger’s ability to continually cause a sense of uneasiness even in those pieces where upon first impression the poems’ settings or personae seem rather ordinary.

Images of the Midwest (specific locations in Ohio and Michigan are mentioned in the poems), with descriptive passages mostly heightened by innovative similes or metaphors, fill many of the pieces in Prairie Fever. And with her vivid imagery, Biddinger’s compact poems sometimes evoke recollections of James Wright’s poetry for me, despite differences in the two poets’ stylistic mannerisms. In fact, my initial impulse upon examining Biddinger’s work was to recall sitting at my first poetry reading as an undergraduate in an introduction to creative writing course. My classmates and I had been assigned to attend a presentation by James Wright, someone about whom I knew almost nothing at the time, but for whose poetry I soon fostered a fondness.

James Wright’s lyrically descriptive language frequently focused upon Ohio, particularly the factory town of Martin’s Ferry, the place of his childhood. Although Wright often exhibited an innate ability to render natural images in an expressive fashion, his Midwest poems habitually carried an added level of intensity or suspense, perhaps even supplying indications of a darker tone pointing toward more ominous conditions somewhere beneath the region’s usually quiet and tranquil surface. As Laurence Lieberman once wrote of Wright in his book of essays on contemporary poetry, Beyond the Muse of Memory, the poet composed “lines that, despite their pared-down, wiry tautness, are stained with the irremovable residue of lived terrors as surely as particles of soil cling to tree roots.”

Like Wright, Mary Biddinger writes poetry that explores and exploits local Midwest imagery in a way that regularly alludes to a darker and more mysterious, sometimes almost magical, human existence underneath stereotypically modest scenery. In the first lines of “The Flyers,” a typical piece in Biddinger’s collection, readers see the poet’s skill at turning a routine sight into a vividly imaginative image, usually through original simile or metaphor: “The blue lights of an Ohio airfield / are the hundred eyes of a peacock / tail.” Later in the same poem Biddinger describes “houses the size of my kitchen, white, // leaning as if people lined the walls, / fell backwards until the eaves listed.” Even “a tow truck shudders / into late shift. Its carnival tail lights / are cherries pickled in gin and salt.” The poem closes on a startlingly subtle but effective note as a Cessna crosses the sky, “loops above // mildewed steeples and the backside / of parables, to the crow holes, gnats, / slow drip of a hose left in knots.”

Periodically in Biddinger’s poetry the narrator resembles a Midwestern female version of Bruce Springsteen, whose songs often pertain to a “darkness on the edge of town.” (Appropriately, the first lines of the book’s opening poem, “Salsa at the Belair Lounge,” refer to another singer, Roy Orbison, whose mellow yet unnerving voice could be heard with lyrics concerning individuals or situations one might find similar to those within Prairie Fever.) In fact, one of the most interesting pieces, “The Edge of Town,” perfectly exemplifies the emotional edginess felt when reading a number of the works in this collection, where speakers and personae seem caught in moments bordering between innocence and experience, love and lust, security and danger, or “the lost and the waiting” (“The Old Neighborhood”).

“The Edge of Town” chronicles actions of teenage girls seeking adventure somewhere just outside the social control of their town. The girls walk railroad tracks along the river where freight trains “carried the men south, stalled / at intersections for hours while / the girls smoked Parliaments / under a cloak of citronella.” Some of the girls express themselves rather innocently in graffiti: “tag the rail cars // in spray paint: foxy or wash me / or hearts and daggers.”

However, an incident shatters their remaining innocence when they come upon the bodies of three men drifting in the river: “A grackle // landed on one man’s naked / stomach, began preening. Trout / churned in the shallows as he / pinwheeled through the cattails // like a windmill with white eyes.” As horrifying as the experience may be, more shocking are the reactions of the girls, who simply “used branches to push / him until the river took over.” Finally, though, the speaker confides the image persists, as she has been haunted by that figure ever since, imagining she sees him everywhere she travels: “I saw him for years after that day: / behind the wheel of an ice truck, // in a conductor’s hat and coveralls. / Lurking in the stalls of the farmer’s / market, iridescent behind corn silk.”

Occasionally, the younger females depicted in Biddinger’s poetry appear to be like the goldfish circling inside plastic bags in the final lines of “Show Pony.” The girls, caught in the isolation and apparent safety of their small-town lives, longingly look out at a perplexing world just beyond the city’s limits. Sometimes a poem’s narrator seems so desperate for change that she is willing to accept any new identity for escape. “Anklebone” begins: “Some towns have the story / of a man gone mad. / Our town had the dead girl. / How I wanted to be her.” This disconcerting poem concludes with one of Biddinger’s characteristically unsettling images in language that almost echoes those disturbing lines in “The Edge of Town”: “I learned to be her / the day I floated downstream / on my back. The river / filled my mouth and ears / and I drifted out of town.”

Because of Biddinger’s gift for scripting poems with a sequence of authentic yet evocative scenes, where her poetry mimics the visual narratives of movies, she is most successful, as in the outstanding “Housewarming,” when the speaker relates a detailed and dramatic series of actions: “you wake in a truck driver’s / house downriver, next to his son. / An all-night poker game outside / the room. First glass you lift / is tapwater, whiskey, fingernail // slivers of ice left from the night / before. Mascara smudged / from eye to hand, cocktail dress / hiked, stockings missing. Slink / to the toilet, a blanket drawn / over your shoulders . . ..”

The book’s cover carries a pleasant yet chilling photograph of railroad tracks discontinued and disappearing in a rural landscape, the end of the line marked by the circle of a red reflector, almost as if it were a stop sign. On the picture’s side, intersecting lines of a utility pole rise above a mound to stab the air and fade into the horizon’s glare like a cross over a newly dug grave, while here and there in the foreground some scattered wildflowers struggle to survive. Green grass and full trees, along with an absence of humans at this edge of town, preserve a placid atmosphere that still continues to contribute to the nearly palpable sense of foreboding accompanying many of the scenes the poems’ personae also will explore.

When I was an undergraduate, Robert Bly once advised me that Harmonium by Wallace Stevens represented the rare first book worth emulating. Although first books of poetry commonly contain a number of questionable entries, perhaps early poems with less developed language or other patchy pieces chosen to complete the collection before ripening had been accomplished, Prairie Fever continually demonstrates a comprehension of craft and a self-confidence through its more mature and satisfying voice.

Nonetheless, in a couple of poems the private connections or personal allusions may seem too elusive, even cryptic, for some readers to follow fully and appreciate completely. Also, the shorter line lengths and sentences, as well as a few sentence fragments—even though normally effective in this collection, like puzzle pieces or separate brush strokes and dabs of dye accumulated to totally paint the poems’ pictures—at times play against the flow of the whole work, creating an unneeded hesitation or stagger in the rhythm. On the other hand, the pair of prose poems in this collection appears admirably experimental, but both lack some of the tension, suspense, and energy Biddinger’s poetry so often excels at generating.

Notwithstanding these perhaps minor quibbles, I find Prairie Fever an intriguing initial collection of poems containing innovative and sometimes twisted images of Midwest living filled with implications of danger for their personae, as well as insinuations of a darker spirit hidden within the seemingly serene facades of their settings. Mary Biddinger’s poetry sometimes reveals characters emerging from a somewhat insular lifestyle to be confronted by incidents that cause anxiety and discomfit—in some cases like the best suspense stories—as much for readers as for the poems’ personae. Like curious chapters in a mystery novel or episodes in a serial drama, Biddinger’s poems often effectively transfer their uncertainty and apprehensiveness to readers in a thrilling manner that presents unexpected pleasures in page after page, poem after poem.

Biddinger, Mary. Prairie Fever. Steel Toe Books, 2007.

Charles Wright: "Nostalgia"

The Poem of the Week is Charles Wright’s “Nostalgia,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue (Volume II, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This poem later was included in Wright’s collection, A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

Charles Wright is the author of 18 books of poetry. He received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995 for Chickamauga, and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for Black Zodiac. His translations of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm and Other Poems (1978) won the PEN Translation Prize. He also has authored two books of commentary on poetry, Halflife (1988) and Quarter Notes (1995).

Earlier this month Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Charles Wright’s book-length poem, Littlefoot, and he received the international award of Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. Wright is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he is the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia. An extended essay on Charles Wright’s work appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and a review of Scar Tissue (2006) is included in “One Poet’s Notes” (3/2/07).

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

The Departure of PARNASSUS

When the first issue (Fall/Winter 1972) of Parnassus: Poetry in Review was published, I was an undergraduate just deciding to switch my major from chemistry to English so that I could begin to gain a background of knowledge that would help me develop as a reader of poetry and as a writer. At that time I already found myself disheartened by much of what I encountered that passed for academic commentary on contemporary poetry. To my thinking, so much of the theoretical criticism seemed lifeless and disengaged, and very little of it offered observations from a poet’s point of view, the way essays by T.S. Eliot or Randall Jarrell had done.

On the other hand, book reviews of poetry in magazines or newspapers, when they appeared and even extended more than a paragraph in length, frequently seemed to lack substance or treated poetry mostly in a superficial manner. For many magazines, including a number of literary journals, reviews of new poetry books appeared at most to be an afterthought—something brief and tucked into the last few pages of an issue. Newspapers usually included reviews of poetry only if the author already had achieved a measure of fame for winning major literary awards or a celebrity had authored the collection.

Fortunately, the timing of my apprenticeship as a poet and critic coincided with the appearance of the aptly titled Parnassus, published and edited by Herbert Leibowitz. The first issue contained commentary and criticism by an array of interesting voices (among them: Helen Vendler on Frank O’Hara; Michael Wood on Borges, Neruda, and Vallejo; Donald Sutherland on Valery and St. John Perse; John Koethe on Ashbery), and like many poets or other readers of poetry, I found myself anticipating each subsequent release of this unique journal, even when at times its publication schedule seemed a bit irregular.

Indeed, over the years Parnassus has amply demonstrated that thoughtful and comprehensive critical essays on poetry can be serious, yet can occur in an enjoyably readable fashion, perhaps appealing to a little wider audience than academic analysis penned in a dry and difficult idiom might reach. The journal practically provided an ongoing conversation about contemporary poetry. Today, more than three decades since its initial issue, readers and writers of poetry owe a great debt to Leibowitz for the standards he set as an editor and for the encouragement his publication subtly supplied those who desired to write different types of critical commentary on poetry.

Therefore, I find myself saddened by news included within the latest issue (July/August 2007) of Poets & Writers Magazine regarding the closing of Parnassus as an ongoing journal, with its final issue due in September. As Leibowitz explains his decision to end the publication of Parnassus: “Funding has become an insuperable obstacle. I love editing, but the good fairies did not give me any entrepreneurial gifts at birth.”

Characteristically, the journal’s last volume will be substantial and singular, a six-hundred page special issue focusing on international poetry, a subject about which Leibowitz has insisted it is important for American poets to become better read. “With globalization, American poets are much more aware, or should be, of an inventive Iraqi, a French or Senegalese poet, or a bard in Ecuador,” he suggests in the Poets & Writers interview with him. Indeed, one of the considerable contributions Parnassus has made during its tenure has been an emphasis on diversity of voices and styles of writing. As Leibowitz reports: “When I first started Parnassus thirty years ago, there were not many books of poems by women or minorities published. All of this changed for the good.”

Much has been made in recent weeks and months, and rightfully so, about the danger to social understanding by downsizing or eventual elimination of book reviews in some major newspapers. However, the issue hasn’t troubled me quite as much since book reviews in the major newspapers often focus on mass-market releases about current fads in popular culture or biographies of entertainment personalities, and usually even more substantive commentary on serious fiction or the rare review of a poetry volume still seems weak and insufficient. I’m honestly not sure how much will be lost, especially with the blossoming of critical writings on a variety of writers’ blogs, or extended essays becoming more commonplace and available extensively in Internet publications.

Likewise, one could credibly claim the gap created by the absence of Parnassus is already beginning to be filled in a number of personal blogs, such as Reginald Shepherd’s blog, or online publications, like the Contemporary Poetry Review, just to mention a couple among many that come to mind. Nevertheless, the loss of Parnassus is regrettable, and I believe it represents a significant transition, one that presents a challenging opportunity and an increased sense of obligation for web writers composing criticism or commentary about contemporary poetry.

For now, I commend Herbert Lebowitz on his many years of service to the poetry community, and I recommend that readers visit the Parnassus web page for full information about its upcoming issue on international poetry—which the site describes as containing a symposium on translation and numerous essays on international writers, as well as new poems by emerging poets from Brazil, China, Croatia, Cuba, The Czech Republic, Ireland, Israel, Poland, Russia, plus monologues by women poet-playwrights from Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Also, while there, I suggest browsing the journal’s archives for past issues, some of which may yet be available.

Philip White: THE CLEARING

Philip White’s collection of poems, The Clearing, could be regarded as a book of mourning and grieving containing works in which the poet mourns the deaths of his parents and grieves over the loss of his wife, whose death in her mid-thirties seems to be a central circumstance initiating many of the most emotional moments. This volume, winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Award presented by Texas Tech University Press, displays a dedication to those three individuals now missing, and missed by the poet, whose series of pieces might be seen almost as an elegiac sequence, especially if readers remember that an elegy frequently reveals and informs as much about the speaker as it does about the subject under discussion.

White nearly acknowledges such an effect in “The Roads,” a poem spoken about his father: “What I remember / is a photograph of his I found once, / a curving lane, arching yellow trees, / a house. I wanted to have seen that.” The speaker tries to recreate the scene in this old photograph using his father’s Leica; however, although the natural landscape remains much the same, the son cannot capture the imagery in the same way: “None of it came through. / My pictures seemed cramped, blurred, closed-in. / Not like his.” In this manner, White displays limitations in his own view and emphasizes the importance of individuality or personality, particularly in perspective and imagination. Still, though the father’s vision may not be the son’s, and though the roads appear physically the same, each individual travels his own road in life. Whereas the father’s images were captured by his camera eye, readers realize the speaker’s images exist in his exquisite and descriptive poetic language.

The issues of individual vision and personal perspective appear again in “At Dead Horse Point,” where the speaker remembers: “I came here as a child once, played / while my parents gazed. What they saw / I can’t say.” The poet mourns for his parents, and he mentions how his emotions may have been shaped somewhat by this loss; “in time their deaths, / grief on grief, were mine.” White continues to consider the impact of others’ deaths on the lives of the living left behind, and he wonders about the influence of the past on the present, as he calculates the cost of enduring loss: “I’ve lived / to see my past before me and ask / if the eye is ground dull or ground clean / that it can lean like this into vacancy, / gorging on laceration and light.”

Questions White poses earlier in “Cricket,” a prefatory poem to the collection, apply to many of the book’s poems: “Whose life is this? / And was it the dead who left it, or we?” When a person experiences loss of loved ones, that individual absorbs them in his or her memories. However, the poet also suggests the loss of someone close sometimes forces more independence and introspection, perhaps with the hope for each of us that we may be led to a better understanding of ourselves and our relations to the world we find around us, even if that self-knowledge or personal vision comes accompanied by great pain.

In the book’s title poem, “The Clearing,” White writes: “You, whose word then made me see, have vanished. / So long your absence has inhabited me / I hardly know where my own death begins. / And the green blazing in your eye that day? / A blank night builds in me now. It will have / the tree, its power to stand, to ramify.” Obviously, a “clearing” could refer to an open space among trees, perhaps emphasizing absence and irreparable damage, as in clear-cutting of natural habitats. However, sometimes clearing of land proves necessary for future cultivation, for further growth.

Also, a more abstract reading of the title might additionally refer to a clearing of the mind, to one’s seeing without old obstacles, and the clarifying needed in order to approach a respite, some relief from so much grieving. When one engages in the act of clearing, occasionally such an action precedes moving forward unhindered by past difficulties. One might even think of being in the clear, away from a threatening situation, or envision a sprinter clearing a hurdle to travel forward. Intentional or not, the various examples of ambiguous interpretations and the multiple connotations available to readers contribute to this title’s effectiveness in the poem that carries it and throughout the entire volume.

Deep within The Clearing, readers come across lines that might strike one as thematic for the whole of the collection: “Truth is the first casualty / of survival” (“Magnolia”). Of course, the statement takes its shape from an old saying about war, and the preceding lines of the poem indicate White’s equating the process of grieving with the conditions caused by combat, perhaps a bit of battle fatigue: “Even mind-changing sorrow dribbles away, / gets misplaced, shouldered out by some new thing / clamoring into presence. We grow used / to it, this being at war, meaning we get / neglectful.” When separated, a central line in this cluster seems to speak more forcefully as the breaks compel readers to bridge sentences so one comes away with an additional observation that could be written in isolation and suggest a meaning indicating the living become old and worn: “Clamoring into presence, we grow used.”

The most emotional section—the third of five parts—occurs in the center of this collection, and appropriately offers the central situation for investigation and introspection, one in which White relates the death of his wife. In the section’s moving initial piece, “East Lawn,” the speaker describes revisiting his wife’s grave: “I stood alone / where I had stood in the fall, months earlier, / with the families and children, flowers in hand / over the open grave.” He then recalls his reaction when flowers had been tossed down, followed by shoveled dirt, “smothering their flaming colors / like a cloudbank slowly blotting out stars.” The persona confides, “as the earth fell, my heart finally failed,” and readers are aware of the emotional death he experiences, as he will need to begin “to struggle into this life again.”

Later in this section, White opens the poem “They Rise” with a statement that seems to point toward the despair felt during bereavement: “All things die . . . all things but grief.” However, by the end of the section the speaker comments upon a man observing an archetypical image of mourning, a crow’s soaring movements in winged flight: “He feels it / in his arms, the strain, the oaring stride, / his chest a prow dividing the warm / morning air” (“Crow”). The warmth and the early time of day appear to evoke a bit of emotional recovery and introspection that initiates a growing sense of independence. Indeed, the poem closes with the man’s realization: “he understands. Nothing is given. / The man also must choose how to turn / his head, what to look at, where to land.”

The Clearing contains numerous references to time, usually indirectly through mentions of months or seasons, but often using the word “time” itself, as in “Family Prayer”: “We know more of damage now / and evil: lives shredded by time.” Readers perceive “time” as a culprit, eventually collecting all mortals. However, in “A Muffled Sound,” near the end of the central section, the speaker admits time allows opportunity for understanding lessons: “I learned, in time I learned. But for what? / I’m only half here.” Nevertheless, numbed by the absence of another, the speaker still feels half of himself is missing, the half that had belonged to the loved one and the half that holds emotions.

The collection fittingly closes with “Six O’Clock Flight to the Interment,” a compelling poem written around the event of another death: “I’m going to see my second mother lowered / in the ground, beside her daughter, my late wife.” In the poem’s first lines the speaker confides continuing discomfort: “Sometimes it seems that everything’s dislodged, / slipping, and all we really know is pain.” However, the passing of time seems to ease the speaker’s suffering somewhat. The poem records reflections upon the process of grieving. Arriving, the persona remarks: “I feel both freed and lost.” He explains how his feelings have been modified: “my pain was lost and what remained / was a mere place, the fields I walked in day / by day.”

The speaker confesses: “It’s ugly feeling nothing, but worse / to be unaware of it, or to call it moving on / or working through or healing.” Again in this final poem the poet references “time”: “Pain may be true, but in time the mind numbs / and wanders, and the dead don’t come.” In fact, the poem discloses a revelation when the speaker admits: “After all there’s room for joy here, too.” However, how does one reconcile continuing in life and feeling any joy when one has endured such losses? How does one characterize the lives of those who mattered so much and who helped form the person he or she has become? “Weren’t they themselves sometimes, / maybe from the start, a world for us, a field, / and so the dead are like a struck stage, a slate / wiped clean, a cloud moraine above or below / or within which everything takes place / and we will never find ourselves again?” We will no longer be the persons we once were when fulfilled by those now absent. Consequently, we must decide to start over.

Repeatedly in this volume Philip White speaks of grieving and offers images of bereavement, yet this collection of poems admirably maintains its balance and avoids falling into sentimentality or any excessive self-indulgence. The poems are persuasively personal, yet they never uncomfortably trespass upon the private. Instead, The Clearing chronicles the honest emotional responses experienced in traumatic circumstances.

Although the poems often explore depths of sadness and loss one might encounter during mourning, the book’s movement mirrors other emotional stages one enters as time shifts. Importantly, despite the focus on death and the absence left for the living to fill, as well as a sudden numbing of emotions when one has lost so much, The Clearing seems to encourage in all an appreciation for life and love, even if we necessarily become vulnerable once more. Thus, we must trust again and overcome our fear of loss: “news we don’t turn on or off, / that seeks us out, that interrupts the lunch. / An officer stands coughing at the door, / our name in hand” (“Loving Again”). As the poet advises with his earned wisdom in this poem: “What we learned once we’ll have to learn again. / Who could live as if every good-bye were the last?”

White, Philip. The Clearing. Texas Tech University Press, 2007.

Kimberly Blaeser: "Apprenticed to Justice"

The Poem of the Week is Kimberly Blaeser’s “Apprenticed to Justice,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This poem also is the title work of her new book of poetry, Apprenticed to Justice (Salt Publishing, 2007).

Kimberly Blaeser is the author of two previous books of poetry, Absentee Indians and Other Poems (Michigan State University Press, 2002) and Trailing You (Greenfield Review Press, 1994), winner of the First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, as well as a critical study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). She also edited Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose (Loonfeather Press, 1999).

Blaeser’s poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the Enemy's Language (W.W. Norton), Sister Visions (Minnesota Historical Society Press), The Colour of Resistance: A Contemporary Collection by Aboriginal Women (Sister Vision Press), Native American Songs and Poems (Dover Books), and Unsettling America: An Anthology of Multicultural Poetry (Penguin). She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections.

Theodore Roethke: "My Papa's Waltz"

Each year as my students and I discuss twentieth-century poetry, I always can count upon Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” to inspire some of the most interesting and conflicting opinions. Amazingly, examination of this fairly brief and seemingly accessible work usually initiates an elaborate and occasionally emotional conversation that moves beyond the poem’s clever use of rhythm and clear sense of sound into the direction of animated debate about the possible presence of messages covering child abuse and alcoholism.

Rather than reading the poetry as an elegiac tribute by a son to his father, perhaps a belated statement of love by the speaker, many in my classes want to condemn the father for his behavior, especially for the pain they perceive him inflicting upon the young boy in the poem. A few also accuse the mother in the work of acting almost as an accomplice because she witnesses the roughhousing without interfering to stop her husband’s clumsy carousing.

When pressed for evidence of the violence they claim Roethke presents, particular phrases or images are noted. The students begin by citing the opening two lines, which certainly establish drunkenness. In addition, they declare the poem suggests physical injuries to the small boy, whose ear is scraped by his father’s buckle and who feels his father “beat” him. The mother obviously appears upset, the students claim, and they wonder if the father’s battered knuckle resulted from a barroom brawl. Finally, they conclude the first stanza’s allusion to death opens the poem for darker, if not more ominous, interpretation.

When consulting with colleagues at my university and elsewhere, I find this response to be a somewhat common reaction among growing numbers of students as well as some scholars. Indeed, in the last couple of decades, as society’s awareness and alarm over child abuse have increased, and concern over all forms of substance abuse has become more prominent, one can understand why a legion of readers might highlight these issues in their analysis of “My Papa’s Waltz.”

Nevertheless, I find myself repeatedly rising to the defense of the parents in the poem, not so much for their specific actions or inactions, but because I believe we also need to read the piece within the context of its time frame. In the era this poem was authored, the late-1940s, readers would not have shared the same sensibilities about these issues that contemporary readers exhibit. Certainly, the definition of child abuse would not have been as broad as that expressed by my students, and a man returning home with whiskey on his breath after a day of work would not immediately raise great concern since it would not have been very unusual.

If we switch to a different time frame and another frame of mind for the persona in the piece based upon the poet’s autobiography, we would retreat even further a few decades to early in the twentieth century. Roethke was born in 1908 and could not have been very old when the actions might have occurred since the boy’s height only extends to his father’s waist, and that may be with him standing on his father’s shoe tops. Also, we know the father’s work in a greenhouse would have explained the battered knuckle and the caked dirt on his hands.

Therefore, in the current interpretation of this poem by some readers, we see a contrast between contemporary readers’ objections, responding within their own perceptions of proper parenting, and the author’s apparent intention at honoring a more pleasant memory of an enjoyable incident with his father, even if it “was not easy.” After all, the poet refers to his father as “papa,” connoting greater affection. Additionally, the word choice of “romp” reflects a more playful tone. The two dance a carefree version of the upbeat waltz. Indeed, the poet’s use of “beat” pertains to the father keeping the musical beat for their movements, and it possibly foreshadows the poet’s own eventual understanding of rhythm as evidenced in the poem itself, which mostly uses an iambic trimeter line to echo the musical beat in a waltz composition and maybe imitate the swaying of waltzing dancers.

When we remember Theodore Roethke’s father died when the poet was only fourteen, and that loss appeared to impact much of Roethke’s later life as well as his writing, the mention of death seems even more elegiac. In fact, when we find similar lines in the first and last stanzas (“I hung on like death” and “still clinging to your shirt”), we may believe the father’s death is foreshadowed and that the son is unwilling to let the father go despite possible pain, even decades later when Roethke writes the poem.

In any case, one could contend the competing readings of this poem allow for a richer and more rewarding experiencing of Roethke’s lyrical recollection, and the conflicting conclusions help all conjure a more haunting image. As someone who appreciates ambiguity in all forms of art, whether in a Roethke poem or the finale of The Sopranos, I suggest “My Papa’s Waltz” for this Father’s Day weekend, and I recommend an additional delight by listening to Theodore Roethke’s reading of the poem.

MY PAPA’S WALTZ

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Jonathan Holden: "Knowing"

The Poem of the Week is Jonathan Holden’s “Knowing,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jonathan Holden is University Distinguished Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Kansas State University. He is the author of seventeen books, including poetry, criticism, a memoir, and a novel. Holden has won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, the Juniper Prize, the AWP Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and several other awards and prizes.

Holden’s poems published in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review were included in his collection, Knowing: New and Selected Poems (University of Arkansas Press). That issue of VPR also includes an interview with Jonathan Holden by Chris Ellis and a personal essay by Holden, “William Stafford: Genius in Camouflage.”

Jonathan Holden’s two-year term as Kansas’s first Poet Laureate concludes at the end of this month. In honor of Holden’s tenure as state laureate, New Letters has posted an audio in which the poet answers questions and reads his work. This audio will be available until June 27, 2007.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections.

Larry Levis: Passion Matters

This last week as stories on the front pages of newspapers reflected the controversial and competing philosophies on reforms in immigration legislation, I coincidentally found myself returning to read the prose and poetry of Larry Levis. My initial focus concerned his writings reminiscing about those younger years when he worked in the fields of his family’s California farm on the East Side of the San Joaquin Valley, picking fruit in the lines of vineyards and rows of orchards alongside the migrant workers he came to know and admire.

In an autobiographical essay—included in The Gazer Within, a posthumous selection of Larry Levis’s prose—about his experiences during those days, Levis reports: “That land! It was a kind of paradise preserved, held intact, by the toxic perfume of malathion and sulphur, insecticide sprays, fertilizers, and by the people who worked on it, who were Mexican if they were older, Chicano if younger, who spoke Spanish mostly, and who were underpaid. Many of them lived in poverty and the intermittent misery of unemployment . . .. ‘They’ were not a ‘they’ to me. They were men I worked with in orchards and vineyards.”

Levis insisted in both his prose memoirs and his elegiac poetry that he had a need—indeed, an obligation—to offer “their names, which deserve to be mentioned and won’t be unless I do it.” For Levis, elegies were matters of passion. By writing the names of the workers, this poet who excelled at elegy felt he was assuring these people that meant so much to him would not be forgotten. In his essay, he speaks of “John Dominguez, Tea, Ignacio Calderon, Ediesto and Jaime Huerta, Coronado, Fermin,” and others. In the poems, Levis also identifies the workers as sympathetic characters, about whom he cared and who cared for him, rather than as simply symbolic figures. For example, he begins “Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967”: “I’m going to put Johnny Dominguez right here / In front of you on this page so that / You won’t mistake him for something else, / An idea, for example, of how oppressed / He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless / Grapes from a row of vines.”

Although he was aware that his memories of these workers tended toward nostalgia and a romanticizing of the figures, Levis tried to offer honest and more realistic views in his poetry, perhaps as Johnny Dominguez might want to be portrayed: “The band / On his white straw hat darkened by sweat, is, / He would remind you, just a hatband.” In the essay, Levis acknowledges: “I’m sure I idealize them. But oblivion has no right to claim them without my respect, without their names written down, here and elsewhere.”

In fact, in another prose piece Levis lists a few workers he knew: “If your name was Ramon or Coronado or Xavier, or if they simply called you Dead Rat (pronounced Debtrat, y rapido) and if you had just stepped onto the high rung of a ladder to pick early Santa Rosa plums . . ..” Near the end of the prose, Levis informs readers: “although the altering of facts and the justification of any fabrication because it is an ‘art’ is permitted everywhere now, it is not permitted on the East Side of the San Joaquin Valley, not without the restoration of fact.”

In his poems, as graceful as they may seem, Levis usually guarded against sentimental portraits, preferring to present more honest appraisals of the individuals. Within “Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard” the poet recalls Tea: “An alcoholic giant whom the women loved— / One chilled morning, they found him dead outside / The Rose Café.” Levis also remembers: “Angel Dominguez, / Who came to work for my grandfather in 1910, / And who saved for years to buy / Twenty acres of rotting, Thompson Seedless vines.” Later in life, picking grapes alone under an autumn sun, the poet states: “Today, in honor of them, / I press my thumb against the flat part of this blade, / And steady a bunch of red, Malaga grapes / With one hand, / The way they showed me, and cut— / And close my eyes to hear them laugh . . ..”

By remembering these influential characters from his past and depicting them for readers, Levis keeps them alive and identifiable as distinct individuals, a perception that easily can get lost among current cultural or political discussions of immigrant groups and legislative initiatives governing millions of workers. Also, with the typically conversational tone in his poems, readers might hear the relaxed and credible voice Levis so often displayed on the page and in his readings. In “Winter Stars,” the title poem of his 1985 collection, Levis narrates a tense moment when his father intervened and perhaps risked his own life to save another: “My father once broke a man’s hand / Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man, / Rubén Vásquez , wanted to kill his own father / With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held / The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first / Two fingers, so it could slash / Horizontally, & with surprising grace, / Across a throat.”

As I have written elsewhere, Winter Stars stands as one of the best collections of poetry produced by his generation. The poems in that book represented a turning point for Levis, a shift toward more relaxed and more persuasive poetry. Levis even started to place ampersands within his lines where he had previously written the word “and.” Although minor and idiosyncratic, this small gesture signals a less formal approach to his poetry. As a matter of fact, this nearly casual conversational level of language, yet containing clarity and deceptively complex content, characterizes most of Larry Levis’s best poetry. Indeed, those of us who knew Larry or even were fortunate enough to attend a personal appearance by the poet will recall his casual, confident, and occasionally comical performances.

When I returned to reading his work this week, I found it difficult to believe Larry has been gone more than a decade now, dying suddenly in May of 1996, and I realized many current readers may not even have been fully introduced to his poetry yet. Therefore, I recommend three posthumous books to begin discovery of Levis’s writings: two collections of poetry (The Selected Levis and Elegy, both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press), and a gathering of his prose pieces (The Gazer Within, published by the University of Michigan Press).

In the Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue (Volume III, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review I included an extended essay about Levis’s career. A slightly revised version appeared subsequently in a voluminous anthology of articles, A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington University Press, 2004), edited by Christopher Buckley and Alexander Long. That version of my essay is also available online at Blackbird, which maintains a marvelous ongoing tribute to Larry in its continuing “Levis Remembered” series, including a number of audio and video presentations by Levis. For instance, at one page readers can find an audio and video of Levis presenting “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” which includes an additional section not part of the published version, and the same page contains text for “The Space,” one of Levis’s unpublished poems.

Replying to a question during an interview when Levis was asked by David Wojahn about what he would like to achieve, Larry responded in a self-effacing manner: “I don’t know. I can’t really say. I would like to write my poems and leave it at that.” However, elsewhere Levis wrote that in a dream he once had been offered advice by William Butler Yeats: “Passion is the only thing that matters in poetry. As a matter of fact, it is the only thing that matters in life.” As I note near the end of my extended essay: “Larry Levis presents in his poetry not only the passion that matters in poetry and life, but a poetry that reveals a life of passion that matters to all who will read his works.” I invite those not familiar with Levis’s poetry to use these words as an introduction to his best work, those matters of passion, and I encourage readers already aware of his work to view these words as an excuse to revisit Larry’s poetry, where passion matters.

Ellen Bryant Voigt: MESSENGER: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1976-2006

In his recent collection of essays on history and the arts, Cultural Amnesia, Clive James includes a profile of Italian literary scholar Gianfranco Contini. James concentrates on Contini’s lament that “the custom of learning by heart has disappeared in the schools, and as a consequence the very use of memory has gone with it. Nobody knows how to read verse. My best students, notably gifted philologists, can’t recognize by ear whether a line is hendecasyllabic or not: they have to count on their fingers.”

During his consideration of Contini, James also discusses the rhyme and rhythm of traditional and formal verse in contrast with the free verse style of most modern or contemporary poetry. James cites Robert Frost’s famous aphorism declaring that writing without rhyme or a metrical pattern is like playing tennis without a net. Despite my great admiration for Frost’s poetry and most of his commentary on the poetic art, I’m often reminded of my own experiences as a boy growing up in New York City, where the park tennis courts often lacked nets, stolen or broken by local vandals, and I recall the increased difficulty as players were forced to test their sense of perception and exercise more careful judgment with every shot taken as they delicately discerned whether a ball was deemed good each time it passed to the opponent’s side of the court.

Similarly, James states: “The most difficult way to rhyme is not to rhyme at all, and yet maintain coherence. The hard part of doing that is to square unrelenting vigilance with the free play of the mind that will let a new idea break through to the surface.” Though expressing a preference for formal poetry and a fondness for memorization of rhyming lines in metered verse, James argues some free verse poets, “without rhyming at all, achieve an alert tension in every line and an unfailing sense of coherence in the strophe.” As an example, James praises Philip Larkin, who “could have written verse forever without rhyming even once. It is very interesting that he usually chose otherwise, and rhymed solidly . . ..”

The stylistic dexterity and poetic expertise Clive James detects in Philip Larkin’s poetry can be found as well in the works by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Whether writing in free verse, blank verse, or a more formal sonnet sequence, Voigt almost always displays an ability to create great lyrical lines that communicate clearly to convey through images their important emotional content. Throughout her more than thirty years of publishing, including seven collections of poetry, Voigt has demonstrated her talent as a writer who combines lyrical craftsmanship with compelling content. Indeed, in Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, evidence exists, through an accumulation of esteemed poems, of Voigt’s immense and continually increasing talent.

As early as the initial lines in this collection’s opening poem, “The Hen,” which first appeared in Claiming Kin (1976), Voigt presents a powerfully gripping description that alerts readers about the intense and vivid language they may expect from her other poems as well: “The neck lodged under a stick, / the stick under her foot, / she held the full white breast / with both hands, yanked up and out, / and the head was delivered of the body.” She is a poet from a rural background in Chatham, Virginia, who moved to Vermont in 1969, and she frequently depicts harsh images concerning human interactions with nature or sharp observations of natural elements in one’s environment.

Voigt begins “Snakeskin” with a vivid and lyrical stanza: “Down on the porch, the blacksnake / sits like a thick fist. / His back is flexed and slick. / The wedge of his forehead turns / to the sun. He does not remember / the skin shucked in the attic, / the high branches of our family tree.” However, she allows the scenes depicted to suggest interpretations or inventive associations, as when she comments on other ways transitions and transformations occur in nature: “The moth will not recall the flannel / cocoon. The snail empties the endless / convolutions of its shell. Think / of the husk of the locust, / sewn like an ear to the elm. / How easily they leave old lives, / as an eager lover steps from the skirts / at her ankles.”

The poet always appears aware of passages of time in nature and the subsequent progressions in life, and she consistently creates memorable similes or metaphors, often containing ominous connotations that foreshadow endings and emphasize mortality: “we turn toward each other / in the ripe air of summer, / before the change of weather, // before the heavy drop / of the apples” (“Tropics”). In a poignant poem, “Year’s End,” taken from The Forces of Plenty, Voigt’s second collection, the poet describes a harrowing moment: “a child was dead / and his mother so wrung by grief / she stared and stared / at the moon on its black stalk, / the road glistening like wire.”

In “The Last Class” drawn from The Lotus Eaters, her 1987 volume, Voigt again speaks of grief: “I tried to recall how it felt / to live without grief.” She also seems to indicate one of her main reasons for writing poetry: “I wanted to salvage / something from my life, to fix / some truth beyond all change.” The speaker examining an old picture of her mother notices “her hair / is a spill of ink below the white beret, / a swell of dark water” (“The Photograph”). By the close of this poem, the poet confides further her intentions of confronting mortality by connecting differing ages or eras through the use of her poetry, in this case joining generations together, from her mother to her daughter, with a recurring image: “Sometimes I hear the past / hum in my ear, its cruel perfected music, / as I turn from the stove / or stop to braid my daughter’s thick black hair.”

Voigt sometimes makes a case for accepting mortality and valuing the temporal world in which we live, though filled with imperfections and disappointments. “Two Trees,” the title poem from a 1992 collection, begins with a depiction of Eden: “At first, for the man and the woman, / everything was beautiful. / Which is to say there was no beauty, / since there was not its opposite, its absence.” Cleverly, the poet proposes perfection as a possible enemy of beauty because one cannot appreciate such splendor or elegance without the presence of flaws, faults, and fallibilities with which to draw contrast. Consequently, into the garden “God put two trees, different from the others.” With contrast temptation exists, a desire to have what is different. Therefore, nature becomes the alluring source of grandeur and the cause of the human fall from grace, a constant and occasionally uncomfortable reminder of our frailties, of human nature: “So God kept them from the second fruit, / and sent them into thistles and violent weather, / wearing the skins of lesser beasts— / let them garden dust and stony ground.”

Indeed, Voigt’s views of nature are often realistic rather than idealistic, and she is a poet whose romanticism remains tempered by thoughts on the difficulties of life that occasionally suggest such temporal hardships actually prepare and strengthen one in the long run. In “The Farmer” she depicts a man overcome by bees from the hives he keeps: “Suddenly, like flame, they were swarming over him. / He rolled in the dirt, manure and stiff hoof-prints, / started back up the path, rolled in the fresh hay— / refused to run, which would have pumped / the venom through him faster.” Arriving home in his kitchen, “he tore off his clothes / crushed bees dropped from him like scabs.” Later, readers understand: “What saved him / were the years of smaller doses— / like minor disappointments, / instructive poison, something he could use.”

A number of poems in this book refer to the poet’s personal background as a pianist, and her musical experiences seem to lend lyricism to the poetry she offers readers. For example, the opening stanza of “Largesse,” the first poem from Shadow of Heaven (2002), displays smoothly written imagery: “By noon, the usual unstinting sun / but also wind, the olive trees gone silver, / inside out, and the slender cypresses, / like women in fringed shawls, hugging themselves, / and over the rosemary hedge the pocked fig / giving its purple scrota to the ground.” Among the new poems in the Messenger section, Voigt’s musical influence continues (“ragtime, American stride left hand / a steady measurement, the free right hand // a stitch ahead of the beat, then a stitch behind, / the stammered math of feeling . . . ,” and her lyricism lingers in natural descriptions like that in “Harvesting the Cows” (“Stringy, skittery, thistle-blurred, rib-etched, / they’re like a pack of wolves lacking a sheep / but also lacking the speed, the teeth, the wits . . .”).

“The Art of Distance,” an extended poem from Shadow of Heaven and one of Voigt’s best works, is presented in sections and it seems to emphasize connections between the speaker’s memories of her father and the natural scenes she sees around her. Again encountering a snake, this time one damaged by her dog, the poet begins: “Wrinkle coming toward me in the grass—no, / fatter than that, rickrack, or the scallops a ruffle makes, / down to about the fourteenth vertebra. The rest of it: rod / instead of a coil.” After a number of lines with wonderfully descriptive language, the speaker reveals “the damaged part, / two fingers thick, was torqued / pale belly up, sunstruck.” The speaker’s reaction to this vision of “what seemed / a peeled stick” becomes one of conscious inaction, as she watches the snake drag its marred body through the long grass. Nevertheless, such nonintervention also represents an act of defiance, liberation, and independence when the speaker reveals: “My strict father / would have been appalled: not to dispatch / a uselessly suffering thing.”

In this decision, the poet creates a greater distance between herself and her father, a powerful and influential figure already distanced by time and death. Remembering him, a man whose identity she repeatedly links with nature in her pieces, the poet recalls a significant and surprising moment of revelation about her father: “What didn’t fit / was seeing him cry. He’d stand alone in the field / like a rogue pine that had escaped the scythe, / as he would stand beside the family graves, / a short important distance from the car / where we were hushed until the white flag / had been unpocketed, and he jangled his keys / and got back in, not ever looking at us.” In another section of the poem, Voigt relates advice she’s heard: “Detachment is my friend’s / discovery, what he commends / against despair. // And though my father claimed / I never listen, of course I do.” At the close of this section, Voigt concludes: “to see a thing // one has to push it away.”

Ellen Bryant Voigt devotes one of the collection’s sections to her book-length sequence of sonnets, Kyrie (1995), spoken in the voices of personae and offering ample evidence of her ability to succeed in a more formal style of writing. The sequence treats historic events, World War I and the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic, in strong carefully chosen language and striking imagery, as when the schoolteacher speaks: “All day, one room: me, and the cherubim / with their wet kisses. Without quarantines, / who knew what was happening at home— / was someone put to bed, had someone died?” The young speaker’s concerns narrow to specific acts, such as when “they sneezed and spit on books we passed around / and on the boots I tied, retied, barely / out of school myself.” In the final lines of the sonnet, the speaker confides her conscious decision to separate herself physically and acknowledges the difficulty of distancing herself emotionally: “when the youngest / started to cry, flushed and scared, / I just couldn’t touch her, I let her cry. / Their teacher, and I let them cry.”

Like the teacher speaking in that sonnet, Ellen Bryant Voigt frequently seems conflicted, appears to be a woman who knows the realities of human existence and nature’s complexities sometimes require a practical approach to life that does not permit merely idealistic visions or strictly romantic writing, and who is aware that along the way those realities or complexities may cause consternation or emotional turmoil. Indeed, a poet raised in the farmland with this kind of thinking, one who proposes “the past is not a scar but a wound: / I’ve seen it breaking open” (“Rubato”), certainly knows the importance at times of simple survival.

Despite its often-vivid imagery and lyrical stanzas that “achieve an alert tension in every line,” as Clive James might claim, Voigt’s poetry does not just present delicate language. She offers incisive insights honed with a razor edge. Whether employing the formal pattern of sonnets to portray personae enduring the dark events of war and disease or exploring the difficulties of personal relationships and one’s own mortality in free verse, Voigt recognizes each day may bring a struggle of some sort, but she seems to believe every endeavor to continue forward and enjoy life or eventually appreciate the enrichment nature contributes is well worth the effort. So, too, is the reading of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s fine work worth the effort to discover her development as a poet and her notable accomplishment over the past three decades.

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006. W.W. Norton, 2007.

Frannie Lindsay: "Talking to My Father About God"

The Poem of the Week is Frannie Lindsay’s “Talking to My Father About God,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Frannie Lindsay’s second volume of poetry, Lamb, was selected Perugia Press’s 2006 Intro Award winner and was the runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her first volume, Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004), was selected by J.D. McClatchy as the winner of the May Swenson Award.

Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Tampa Review, and Yale Review. They have also been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and her work has been read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio’s Writer’s Almanac. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony. More information about Frannie Lindsay can be found at her web page.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections.