Brendan Galvin: "A Neolithic Meditation"

The Poem of the Week is Brendan Galvin’s “A Neolithic Meditation,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Brendan Galvin is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), which was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. Galvin’s new book of poetry, Ocean Effects, is forthcoming this fall from LSU Press. In addition, his poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry. Brendan Galvin’s work also has earned various honors for him, including the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation, the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. 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.

John Ashbery: "My Philosophy of Life"

Tomorrow, July 28, marks John Ashbery’s 80th birthday. As most readers of poetry know, John Ashbery is the author of about two-dozen collections of poetry, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. His most recent book of poetry, A Worldly Country, was published in February by Ecco Press. In addition, Ashbery has been an art critic and executive editor for Art News, and he served as the art critic for New York magazine. He has won almost every award possible for an American poet, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He also has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. For further information, I recommend a more lengthy and informative biography of Ashbery compiled by the Poetry Foundation.

This seems a perfect occasion for revisiting Ashbery’s “My Philosophy of Life,” a poem that begins with the following stanzas:

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—
call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,
would be affected, or more precisely, inflected
by my new attitude. I wouldn't be preachy,
or worry about children and old people, except
in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.
Instead I'd sort of let things be what they are
while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate
I thought I'd stumbled into, as a stranger
accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,
revealing a winding staircase with greenish light
somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside
and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.
At once a fragrance overwhelms him—not saffron, not lavender,
but something in between. He thinks of cushions, like the one
his uncle's Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him
quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush
is on. Not a single idea emerges from it. It's enough
to disgust you with thought. But then you remember something William James
wrote in some book of his you never read—it was fine, it had the fineness,
the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet still looking
for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it
even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and his alone.

The entire text of the poem and an audio of John Ashbery reading “My Philosophy of Life” can be found at an Academy of American Poets web page. John Ashbery was a chancellor in the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999.

The audio of an interview with John Ashbery—broadcast on May 17, 2007, by KCRW— is available online. Also, readers are invited to examine a recent commentary (July 19, 2007) in “One Poet’s Notes” concerning John Ashbery and his most celebrated poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

The image of John Ashbery accompanying today’s post comes from a Jane Freilicher portrait composed about 1950. Unfortunately, the painting has since been lost.

Poetry's Odd Couple

In a recent post on “One Poet’s Notes” (“The Departure of Parnassus,” June 23, 2007) I commented about the end of a thirty-five year run for Parnassus: Poetry in Review, the longtime literary magazine devoted primarily to poetry criticism. Throughout the past few decades, Parnassus maintained a well-deserved reputation for thoughtful and thought-provoking articles on modern or contemporary poetry. Editor Herbert Leibowitz has published Parnassus basically as a labor of love, and he plans on closing production of the journal this fall with a final six-hundred-page special issue. In Leibowitz’s words: “Funding has become an insuperable obstacle. I love editing, but the good fairies did not give me any entrepreneurial gifts at birth.”

In that previous piece, I suggested readers and writers of poetry owe Leibowitz an enormous debt for his endeavors over the years, especially for the way he maintained substantial quality with superb standards for comprehensive critical commentary that informed and analyzed, but kept a very high level of readability rather than allowing the reviews to slip into cryptic theoretical treatises or arduous academic jargon. For his extended service to literary criticism, Leibowitz now has been selected to receive the initial Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism presented by the Poetry Foundation. The award carries with it a $10,000 prize, which perhaps would partially represent an official validation of Leibowitz’s tremendous efforts in the field.

Apparently, the prize money for this new award offered by the Poetry Foundation stands as another benefit made possible by the estimated $100-200 million endowment recently donated by Ruth Lilly. Reportedly, Poetry also will soon be housed at new multi-million-dollar offices in a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot building under construction in Chicago for the Poetry Foundation. In contrast, as Willard Spiegelman notes in his article, “Fortune as Fate: The Story of Two Poetry Magazines,” appearing in the July 25 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Parnassus always has had to scramble for cramped spaces, and at one time even published out of the bedroom for Leibowitz’s infant son.

Poetry magazine enjoys a current yearly budget of about $1.4 million, and a continuation of the journal’s regular release of issues appears assured as it approaches its 100th anniversary in 2012. Meanwhile, Parnassus has published on a somewhat irregular schedule during its history, currently existing within a budget of well less than ten percent of the amount afforded Poetry. Certainly, when taking into account the two journals’ relative economic status, one might easily regard this pair of publications as poetry’s odd couple among literary magazines. Indeed, there appears to be an element of irony in a situation where the publisher of literature’s richest poetry journal rewards the editor of another poetry review with a monetary prize just as he announces the review’s discontinuation due to a lack of funds.

As most readers of poetry know, Christian Wiman, Poetry’s new editor, has used a portion of the funds from the Lilly gift recently to refashion the journal just a bit as he also places a personal signature on the content with his poetic taste. During the last year I have heard various assessments, both positive and negative, by readers of the magazine’s new editorial directions. In many cases the evaluations merely mirror the readers’ own particular taste in poetry. However, one legitimate criticism leveled against a few issues of the journal concerns the larger number of pages devoted to prose rather than poetry.

In an ideal world I’d like to witness one member of the odd couple welcoming the other under its roof, the way Oscar welcomed Felix, and to see some of the Lilly money committed to sustain publication of Parnassus: Poetry in Review as a companion periodical to Poetry. Such an arrangement would provide a continuing location for poetry commentary, reviews, and analytical essays in Parnassus, perhaps while also allowing more of an opportunity for Poetry to be solely a source of fine poems in its pages.

Nevertheless, I commend the Poetry Foundation for acknowledging the decades of work by Herbert Leibowitz and by bestowing upon him the Randall Jarrell Award. The Poetry Foundation describes this prize as one that “recognizes and rewards poetry criticism that is intelligent and learned, as well as lively and enjoyable to read. The prize is intended for criticism aimed at a large general readership rather than an audience of specialists.” I can’t think of anybody more worthy of this recognition than Herbert Leibowitz.

Kim Bridgford: "Remembrance"

The Poem of the Week is Kim Bridgford’s “Remembrance,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Kim Bridgford is the author of three collections of poetry: Undone (2003) and Instead of Maps (2005), both published by David Robert Books, and In the Extreme: Sonnets About World Records (2007), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Award from the West Chester University Poetry Center. Her work also has appeared in various literary journals, including Christian Science Monitor, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, and North American Review. Kim Bridgford directs the writing program at Fairfield University, where she is a professor of English and editor of Dogwood.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. 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.

John Ashbery: "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

Recently, while writing about ekphrastic poetry in a few reviews, I was reminded of my fondness for John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” perhaps the best known contemporary poem inspired by a painting. First published in the August 1974 issue of Poetry, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” later served as the title poem for Ashbery’s celebrated 1975 collection that won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Currently, in honor of Ashbery’s 80th birthday this month (July 28), Poetry features the original pages of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” at its online archives site.

Coincidentally, at the time of its publication I was a first-year graduate student in Ashbery’s poetry writing class at Brooklyn College. The graduate program in creative writing had just begun, and this was his first teaching position after nearly a decade (1955-1965) of writing art criticism in Paris for the Herald Tribune, then working until 1972 as an executive editor at Art News in New York. Indeed, the 1974 contributor’s note in Poetry accompanying “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” announced to everyone that John had joined the faculty at Brooklyn College.

I remember well the excitement surrounding the volume’s release as my classmates and I attended the publication party. The date written by John beneath his inscription in my copy of the book indicates Monday, May 12, as the evening of the reception. I also recall other celebrations, at Ashbery’s Chelsea apartment and elsewhere, as the book became famous for its unusual feat, in a single year receiving each of the three major book awards for poetry, what we jokingly labeled as winning the “Triple Crown,” a term I’ve seen repeated a number of times in print over the decades. A few years later I was thrilled and honored when John wrote a prefatory note for my first book of poems, choosing to borrow a couple of lines from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to describe unexpected perceptions and contemplations he found in my work.

Although at the time everyone knew he’d achieved something extraordinary, even today I’m amazed by the great amount of attention this lone book of poetry and that particular title poem have garnered. I’m not aware of any poem from the last forty years that has had as much critical commentary written about it. Indeed, one might have to look back to Ginsberg’s “Howl” to find a recent poem with a greater history of commentary. Over the more than three decades that have passed, I’ve noted the ongoing resonance and persistent guidance “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” yet demonstrates for many readers and writers of poetry.

This week as I returned to read Ashbery’s poem once more, I again quickly realized how significant this work has become, both as a touchstone for late-twentieth-century poetry and as an influence for many contemporary poets continuing into the twenty-first century, though not all necessarily initiating precisely his particular style of writing. Most who have followed in Ashbery’s footsteps have written with a greatly liberated sense of connection between observation and speculation, producing meditative poems containing playful and intellectual self-reflection often presented with language or imagery that surprises, at times maybe even befuddles some in its audience. Certainly, such a way of relating one’s perceptions to readers was not new; however, Ashbery’s speaker in this poem seemed almost to reinvigorate interest in poetry where “words are only speculation / (From the Latin speculum, mirror),” as the poet proposes.

“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” begins as an examination of the sixteenth-century Parmigianino painting of the same title. In fact, the speaker’s opening lines sound similar to some of the descriptive and engaging language one might find in Ashbery’s numerous reviews or essays on artworks and artists: “As Parmigianino did it, the right hand / Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away, as though to protect / What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams, / Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together / In a movement supporting the face, which swims / Toward and away like the hand / Except that it is in repose.”

Not surprisingly, Ashbery once acknowledged in an interview with David Lehman: “That was the first time I ever took a painting as the subject for a poem. And I did it only after I left Art News and supposed that I wouldn’t be involved with writing about art anymore. It was as though I had been consciously avoiding this particular input while I was in the business of being an art editor, as though I shouldn’t be writing what is so close to my daily business.” Indeed, Ashbery had first seen the original painting in Vienna fifteen years before he rediscovered it in a collection of reproductions bought while browsing at a small bookstore and decided to focus upon it for his new poem.

However, as many reviewers and literary critics have noted throughout the years since its publication, much of the poem’s strength lies in its revelations about Ashbery’s perceptions, his self-portrait as a poet who nevertheless knows words, like the brush strokes in a painting, may not always be fully sufficient in rendering experience. One may view art as a fictitious substitute, though a valuable representation, for actual experience. Even “the portrait / Is the reflection once removed,” placed at a distance, as well as reversed and distorted by the physical shape of an object: “The surface / Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases / Significantly.” Similarly, Ashbery suggests the words in poems sometimes prove inadequate: “They seek and cannot find the meaning in music, / We see only postures of the dream.”

Throughout the poem readers witness a blending of personae, particularly the way pronouns shift and at times mix the painter with the poet. Although Ashbery appears to be addressing Parmigianino in the poem, the voice of the speaker also seems self-reflexive sometimes, so much so that a certain amount of confusion contributes to an already ample supply of attractive or amusing ambiguity filled with allusive remarks: “you could be fooled for a moment / Before you realize the reflection / Isn’t yours. You feel then like one of those / Hoffmann characters who have been deprived / Of a reflection, except that the whole of me / Is seen to be supplanted by the strict / Otherness of the painter in his / Other room. We have surprised him / At work, but no, he has surprised us / As he works.”

Later in the poem, Ashbery speaks of confusion with the way time is perceived and portrayed, perhaps even delayed or stayed, by forms of art: “I used to think they were all alike, / That the present always looked the same to everybody / But this confusion drains away as one / Is always cresting into one’s present. / Yet the ‘poetic,’ straw-colored space / Of the long corridor that leads back to painting, / Its darkening opposite—is this / Some figment of ‘art,’ not to be imagined / As real, let alone special?” The speaker even cleverly relates how the original artwork endures, but is often distanced from viewers, and routinely all that remains are poor surrogates: “the public / Is pushing through the museum now so as to / Be out by closing time. You can’t live there. / The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how: / Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime / To learn and are reduced to the status of / Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates / Are rare.”

John Ashbery has always been unpredictable and has experimented with different manners of narrative (or lack of narrative) within his poems, often incorporating seemingly arbitrary or stray elements and apparently disjointed phrases into his work. As he stated in his interview with Lehman: “Art with any serious aspirations toward realism still has to take into account the fact that reality escapes laws of perspective and logic, and does not naturally take the form of a sonnet or a sonata.”

In his poetry-writing classes, Ashbery always emphasized this attitude. Frequently, he assigned exercises that would free students from conscious construction of a poem and urge them to write pieces arising from the subconscious. I remember times he asked my classmates and me to borrow lines randomly from one another to start a poem or recommended we write an imaginary translation of a poem from another language that we don’t understand. Indeed, I once jokingly chose John’s own poem, “Glazunoviana,” as the text to translate, and I wrote my own poem ignoring meaning in the original; instead, I solely used the lyrical sounds of the lines in his work for inspiration.

John later introduced me to the music of Glazunov, as well as other classical composers, when a core group of four members from class gathered at his apartment for an informal seminar. In turn, Ashbery always expressed curiosity about elements of pop culture. In fact, I recall a time when we were driving from Brooklyn to John’s Manhattan apartment, and all the while the four of us were being quizzed by our curious teacher about rock music and other aspects of current culture. He especially seemed to want to know about the rise of those rock or folk singers and recent other American trends whose beginnings he may have missed during his years in Europe. Clearly, Ashbery’s interest in bringing folklore or popular culture—even movie stars, song lyrics, or cartoon characters—into his writing can be seen in many of his poems over the years.

On one occasion, during another small gathering of members from our class at Ashbery’s apartment, some of us played a form of the “exquisite corpse” game in which we alternated placing lines of poetry on a page in John’s typewriter. (In fact, when he took his turn and sat to type his lines, Ashbery’s posture appeared nearly identical to that represented in the well-known portrait of him by Larry Rivers. Even now, each time I see the image of John hunched over his typewriter, I’m brought back to that evening.) When we completed the poem and read it aloud, we immediately realized how someone else’s contribution might have unexpectedly altered our own perspectives, forcing each of us to draw more on our imaginations and maybe reach further into the subconscious, perhaps not all that different from the manner Parmigianino’s painting stirred Ashbery’s imaginative reactions.

Consequently, I’m not surprised by a passage in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” about playing such games as ways for seeking inspiration. This portion has become one of my favorite sections, a part of the poem that suggests distraction from intent and distortion of form can help create interesting art: “This always / Happens, as in the game where / A whispered phrase passed around the room / Ends up as something completely different. / It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike / What the artist intended. Often he finds / He has omitted the thing he started out to say.” As a result, the poet or painter may “create something new.” Significantly, readers will note that the final phrase of the poem will again mention “whispers.”

As the poem comes closer to its end, the speaker addresses two crucial concepts captured during the contemplation of Parmigianino’s painting: otherness and time. Of course, the painter’s reflection in the mirror, as well as its depiction in the portrait, represents a sense of otherness. But so too does the artwork derived from the mind of the poet, whose eventual creation comes as a pleasant revelation, something one could not consciously cause, but one invents when allowing thought association and wordplay during the composition process. Perhaps for the poet, the persona developed in the writing of a poem and revealed through its speaker stands as the equivalent of the artist’s mirror reflection, closely resembling the author, yet in places distorted or even reversed.

However, art also exists as a tool that holds its subject in place, preserving a moment in time, so that the past is always evident in the present. As Ashbery’s speaker observes: “This past / Is now here: the painter’s / Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving / Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned / Frequency.” Just as artists of the past influence the present, so too do future viewers cooperate in shaping reaction to it. Indeed, in many ways an artwork becomes dependent upon its spectators for fabrication of new or evolving perspectives and further appreciation.

If the artist can only supply a surface image, as Parmigianino does (“everything is surface. The surface is what’s there . . ..”), then it is up to the spectators to provide depth. In his work—just as the personae of the painter and the poet sometimes seem to blend—Ashbery also merges the two functions when he acts both as spectator and artist, and with this disclosure, Ashbery indirectly appears to invite his readers to do likewise, to speculate (remembering the word’s root means “mirror”), engaging in self-reflection as part of their response to the poem he’s written. Perhaps he includes his readers when he prefers the plural pronoun near the poem’s end: “We have seen the city: it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect.”

Knowing one of the poet’s prime instruments is his use of memory, a tool that filters elements of reality and supplies readers with revealing misremembered details or important assorted distortions, perhaps parallel to the misshapen and wrongly proportioned items in Parmigianino’s portrait, Ashbery may be additionally recognizing his own frailty as an artist—the inherent inadequacy of any artist—and speaking of his shared ruminations in the last lines of the poem, where he refers to the “cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time.” In any case, those whispers he offers in this poem about an artist of another time also continue to be heard by today’s readers, more than thirty years later, and surely will be perceived as significant by inquisitive readers with novel perceptions long into the future.

Walt McDonald: "Leaving the Scene"

The Poem of the Week is Walt McDonald’s “Leaving the Scene,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999-2000 issue (Volume I, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Walt McDonald has published twenty-two collections of poems and a book of fiction, including Faith Is a Radical Master (Abilene Christian University Press, 2005), Climbing the Divide (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), All Occasions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), Blessings the Body Gave (Ohio State University Press, 1998), Counting Survivors (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989). His poetry also has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, First Things, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review.

McDonald was an Air Force pilot, taught at the Air Force Academy, and served as Texas Poet Laureate in 2001. In May 2002, he retired from Texas Tech University as Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English and Poet in Residence. Walt McDonald appeared as the featured poet in Valparaiso Poetry Review’s debut issue, in which he also contributed an essay of practical advice to beginning poets, “Advice I Wish I’d Been Told.”

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. 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.

Steve Gehrke: MICHELANGELO'S SEIZURE

Over the years I have repeatedly expressed my interest in ekphrastic poetry. I have assigned ekphrastic exercises for my poetry writing students, have written a number of poems inspired by artworks, have edited an anthology of poems responding to the paintings of Charles Burchfield, and have regularly arranged readings of ekphrastic poetry in the appropriate atmosphere of my university’s art museum.

Literary history has long chronicled the connections between poetry and painting, as well as the close relationships poets and painters have often enjoyed. In a recent post to “One Poet’s Notes,” “The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank Dudley” (April 29, 2007), I spoke of similarities I’ve perceived between particular verbal and visual forms of expression, most notably between lyric poetry and landscape or portrait painting.

Ekphrastic poetry usually presents verbal descriptions and interpretations of visual arts. The poem’s images and observations represent the poet’s personal responses to paintings, photography, or works of sculpture, sometimes informed by scenes or events in the artist’s biography. However, the most interesting examples of ekphrastic poetry often move beyond the strict confines of the original artwork’s physical description to more speculative, meditative, and imaginative impressions that extend into innovative offerings only initiated with the piece under study by the poet. In this manner, the poem sometimes becomes stronger by obtaining a certain sense of independence from the source that has inspired its composition.

Whether Keats or Stevens, Shelley or Ashbery, Williams or Walcott, the poet hopes to open the artwork examined for further consideration, engendering internal investigation of one’s emotions. The poem acts almost as a lyrical homage to the original artist though, out of necessity, frequently freely leaving behind the painting’s primary focus or even the artist’s original intent, translating the visual depiction into vivid language and transferring a graphic illustration onto the page in lyrical lines and stanzas. At the same time, the poet knows his or her verbal excursion could constitute an intrusion upon the actual artwork, perhaps even an act of trespassing that might influence others’ experiences when encountering the source, which was created by an artist with his or her own motives or perceptions and obviously without any intention of issuing inspiration for someone’s poem years, decades, or centuries later.

Indeed, the reader must recognize the differences of knowledge and understanding, the evolution of social standards or moral expectations, that helped shape the poet’s consciousness, particularly if hundreds of years have intervened between compositions of the painting and the poem. A reader also needs to acknowledge the many ways in which contemporary viewers’ perceptions of any artwork consequently may be altered by a poet’s cleverly inventive or extremely fanciful rendition.

One commonly encounters a sample or two of ekphrastic poetry in contemporary collections; however, except in anthologies with examples by multiple authors, rarely does one come across an entire volume devoted to the genre by an individual poet. In fact, the construction of a collection of ekphrastic poems could be considered something suspect or a series of artificial exercises, and certainly such a book would serve to test any reader’s trust in the poet, mostly because of the liberties usually undertaken in dealing with the history of an already well-known artwork or famous artist’s life. At the same time, the poet may feel restrained in his or her imaginative explorations, limited by the constraint of remaining faithful to the original art that inspired the poem.

With this in mind, I opened the pages of Michelangelo’s Seizure, Steve Gehrke’s third book of poetry. The volume contains only ekphrastic poems dealing with renowned works or biographical incidents in the lives of some prominent figures from the great art of Western civilization. Many readers will easily recognize the sources for Gehrke’s poems—something which may aid in visualizing the images described, but also a situation of familiarity that makes the task so much more difficult for Gehrke, whose precise words and imaginative variations will be held up, almost as if in competition, against the mental picture envisioned in the reader’s memory.

Nevertheless, upon completing my reading of Michelangelo’s Seizure I concluded Gehrke has produced a sensational album of passionate poems filled with vivid and evocative imagery, every one leaving an original and lasting imprint that should linger in the mind of each reader. The muscular, lush, and lyrical language in this collection exhibits energy and an elegance befitting its subject matter. The lines in these poems are rich with texture and layered like brush strokes of finely applied paint arranged on a large canvas for greatest effect. The substantial and supple style of the writing in the twenty-one poems, packed into this 62-page book, demonstrates ways a poet’s graceful choice of words so successfully try to depict images that they may at times nearly rival those devised by the trained eye of a painter.

The poet impressively opens his collection with a prefatory poem, “Self-Portrait as the Head of Goliath,” a piece immediately challenged by readers’ awareness of Caravaggio’s powerful and haunting David with the Head of Goliath, in which the painter placed an image of his own face on the severed head of Goliath: “he stared / into the spotlight of his face, his head swinging / in David’s hand, like a lantern, / as if it might guide them, fearless, / through the valley of their myth.” To this visage Gehrke contrasts “David’s face, made tender / by the slaying, resurrection light / all along his skin, so that he / could ask with humility, / and for more than himself: of sins, are all our paintings made?” In this fashion, Gehrke raises an intriguing question to be considered throughout the rest of the volume.

At the beginning of the second in the book’s three main sections, Gehrke again returns to Caravaggio and his dominant themes of death and religion with “Death of the Virgin,” and unites the intensity of an incident in the artist’s biography with the scene on the canvas. Alluding to the historical incident of Caravaggio’s stabbing Ranuccio Tomassoni to death, Gehrke writes: “the artist / pinning a corsage of blood onto his chest, / Ranuccio falling, stung, reaching dumbly / for his breast, like the gesture Caravaggio / will give the Virgin’s hand.”

Even if one may be unfamiliar with the original artwork from which an individual poem’s inspiration arises, such understanding is usually unnecessary since the paintings often seem to serve more as starting points from which Gehrke’s imagination moves forward in one unexpected manner after another, frequently speculating on the artists’ mindset or motives, and even once or twice suggesting personal associations with the poet’s own biography. As suggested earlier, such a sense of independence, relying so heavily on a speaker’s voice, only enhances the poetry’s strength.

In “At the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp” Gehrke supplies distinct details mirroring the image in the famous painting by Rembrandt, but suggests an inner influence on the artist derived from a difficult past: “the cadaver’s skin turning slowly into the frozen, // winter-light of memory, the plagued and anemic / village of his childhood, all ice-floe and broken / arteries, a mud-horse breaking an ankle in the slush, // reared back, the death-cart toppled in its wake, / the dull-eyed, naked bodies spilling through the artist’s / mind, the death-flies, the stench.” Before the end of the poem, however, the speaker appears to peer into his own memory and voice a more confidential attitude toward the picture: “like the one scene / I can’t quite imagine from my life, corpse-like beneath / the surgery lights, the doctors masked, slowly breaking // into me, like outlaws gathered around a safe, the tissue / spreaders, the clamps, the dead man’s kidney coiled / atop the surgeon’s hand.” The poet later affirms the power of art to illuminate: “I can’t see any of it / until I see it in Rembrandt’s scene.”

Gehrke presents a similar situation in “Self-Portrait with Doctor,” apparently inspired by Goya’s Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta, where the poet once more speculates on the thought process of the painter, as “Goya glimpses / his own face, / a watery self-portrait / that wrinkles through his mind.” But later in the poem the words return to the speaker’s memory of a particular experience with a doctor: “I saw him that morning, / more than a dozen years ago, strung between / my draining tubes as the machine churned / the blood out of me.”

One of Gehrke’s greatest strengths lies in the use of numerous innovative and connotative metaphors or similes throughout the volume, as in the following few examples: “the bones of his wrists like chalice / stems” (“Self-Portrait with Doctor”); “he holds / the brush, not like a baton / to the music of the shore, / not like a scalpel or a key, / not the way a mother holds / a spoon to the child’s mouth, / but almost, yes, like an arrow / he’s withdrawing, with experience / and love, from the chest / of a dying man, so as to let the wound / bleed out” (“Monet Going Blind”); “the moon winding its turban / across the waves, as his father leans down / to check the wrist for life, his mother’s arm turned / over in his hand, like a water-snake twisting / its belly towards the light” (“Magritte in New York”).

With such chains of connections in poems linking one image to the next, Gehrke moves smoothly through details of meditation and memory, almost resembling the odd way he implies an artist’s ingenuity flows forward: “Is this how inspiration works, / he thinks, one image corrupted by the next?” (“Magritte in New York”). During the course of the twenty-one poems in this collection, like a wise and insightful docent, Gehrke guides his visiting readers through a gallery of art and introduces them to an array of great artists: Caravaggio, Goya, Monet, Renoir, Rembrandt, Magritte, Turner, Seurat, Pollock, and Mapplethorpe, among others.

And, of course, Gehrke portrays Michelangelo with the title poem. In “Michelangelo’s Seizure” the poet describes what tremendous physical and emotional effort the artist must have exerted to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as the straining painter on the scaffold (“clouds / of plaster in his beard”) required the assistance of a boy, who “huffed up / the footbridge to wedge / the handle of a wooden brush / between the mouse-trap of the teeth, / to keep the master from biting off / his tongue.” All the while he painted, “Michelangelo could still hear / the tortured voices on the ceiling / calling out for completion.” Eventually, the pressure becomes so stressful that readers finally witness how “he lifted his fingers to his lips, / to the wasp’s nest of his mouth, / and withdrew, with the ease of spitting / out an apple stem, a tiny splinter / of wood that had sunk into his tongue.”

In commentary explaining his selection of Michelangelo’s Seizure as a publication in The National Poetry Series, T.R. Hummer begins: “Steve Gehrke has delivered up a masterpiece of masterpieces, a book made up entirely of ekphrastic poems which is altogether unsettling, unfamiliar, uncanny, powerful.” These ekphrastic poems do display a stunning poetic perceptiveness. Though often written in elaborately long and expressive sentences, perhaps almost as “operatic” and “bold” as the sultan’s robes in “The Death of Sardanapalus,” their narratives are compact and compelling. Some—such as “Gassed,” the final poem of the volume, written in response to John Singer Sargent’s magnificent World War I painting of the same title—are among the strongest poems of their kind I’ve read in recent books.

The actual Sargent canvas rises seven feet and stretches twenty feet long, and it shows a line of soldiers blinded by mustard gas as they are helped back from the front, led through numerous fellow combatants lying at their feet, some no doubt mortally wounded men, yet awaiting treatment. I became familiar with this artwork decades ago after my grandfather gave me his Purple Heart adorned with its additional oak leaf cluster, signifying the two separate occasions he was wounded in France, once with a bullet through his leg and the other from painful symptoms incurred during an attack of mustard gas.

Gehrke’s descriptive lines evoke the images of Sargent’s painting, but also of the original war scene: “The dying grasp at their pant-legs / as they pass, as they wobble along the duckboards just above / the mud gasping at their feet, the steaming trash heaps / of the dead, the battlefield sloppy as a butcher’s floor, all blood // and aftermath, the dusk-glint of God turning to put his knives away.” However, Gehrke smartly acknowledges the great separation sometimes seen between a work of art and the grave experience it attempts to replicate: “he edits the horror out, no vomit, no severed limbs, / the faces a touch too bright, each man with his hand / on the shoulder of the one in front of him.”

By the close of the poem, Gehrke again makes an apt connection, not only between the artist and his subject matter, but also between the art and the poet writing about it: “he sutures the men back together / with a pencil tip, as he feels them moving through his thoughts / like a line of text, written nearly a century later by a man // with a book of paintings open on his desk, who sits and watches / the rain fall into the empty flowerpots outside his window, / which he can’t help seeing as the upturned helmets of the dead.” With this imagery Steve Gehrke ends his wonderful collection of ekphrastic poetry; however, like the indelible and inspiring images in the many paintings cited by Gehrke, these memorable and poignant poems should also linger somewhat longer—after the poet turns away from his book of paintings and after each reader shuts this volume’s covers—carried forward by everyone who encounters them.

Gehrke, Steve. Michelangelo’s Seizure. University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Rick Mulkey: "Connecting the Dots"

The Poem of the Week is Rick Mulkey’s “Connecting the Dots,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Word Press has just published Rick Mulkey’s second book of poetry, Toward Any Darkness. Pecan Grove Press released his previous full-length collection, Before the Age of Reason, in 1998. He also has authored two chapbooks—Bluefield Breakdown (Finishing Line Press, 2005) and Greatest Hits: 1994-2003 (Pudding House Press, 2004). In addition, Mulkey’s work has appeared in various literary journals, such as Connecticut Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poetry East, and Shenandoah, as well as several anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Poems and Sources. He directs the creative writing program at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. 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 Gateway of the Database

Last week while browsing through the many feeds from blogs on my Google Reader, I came across a curious couple of contradicting entries offering apparently opposing perceptions on an issue that could soon confront readers and writers in literary journals, and ought to be a source of ongoing conversations. The pair of posts seemed to need each other for complete appreciation. Indeed, the two posts—“The Graveyard of the Database” by Kevin Prufer at Critical Mass and “Library Hack: lit mags, free” by Emily Lloyd at Poesy Galore—drew me into an unintended discussion with one another.

I was interested in Prufer’s remarks, especially since I admire his poetry and the publication he edits, Pleiades. I also found Lloyd’s comments constructive, particularly because I once worked as an editor at a print journal, and I have long wondered about how the best literary magazines could become more available to wider audiences. I recommend both posts.

In his statement, Prufer laments the drift of literary journal issues at libraries from paper copies to their presence on a database. He notes how his own university has canceled individual subscriptions to various journals—including Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review—in favor of making those publications available in a database. Prufer objects to this trend and questions the consequences such a shift may create. His conclusion: “beyond my own admittedly sentimental attachment to the printed page, there are a number of reasons why this is a bad thing.” Although I share with Prufer the sentimental attachment to paper volumes of magazines and prefer turning pages of a print journal, I cannot go so far as to share Prufer’s determination that this trend is necessarily “a bad thing.”

The rationale offered for Prufer’s evaluation begins with his opinion that literary journals differ from scientific journals or other publications found in databases because “magazines like The Kenyon Review” appeal “to a general audience.” Prufer doesn’t define what he means by “general audience”; however, since he contrasts the readership of literary journals with the “limited audience of scholars and scientists” he sees reading other publications present in a database, I can only ascertain Prufer imagines anyone who might like a good story, a quality poem, or even some critical commentary on contemporary literature would be among that general audience.

But doesn’t the expansion of availability made possible by the universal reach of databases enlarge the potential readership for literary journals? How many members of the reading public, who could be counted among the wider audience previously defined, have until now practically lacked access to most literary journals, whose limited distribution (except for the rare few one might find at a nearby Barnes & Noble store) leads to their being stocked only in university libraries or various specialized bookstores usually located in large cities or university towns?

As Emily Lloyd indicates, through the use of a database at one’s local library branch, all readers among the “no-longer-have-access-to-academic-libraries crowd” now can find the full texts of many literary journals that otherwise would be beyond a general audience’s grasp, including “American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, etc.” Lloyd humorously points out: “Yes—you can be mildly disgusted by the current issue of Poetry for free without having to skim it surreptitiously at Barnes & Noble.”

But what of other concerns raised by Prufer? Through a comment contributed by Kevin Morrissey, the managing editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, Prufer suggests print editions of journals could become marginalized by the widespread access in databases. However, later in the blog post Prufer also cites Meg Galipault, the managing editor at Kenyon Review, as observing thus far no measurable impact on magazine sales due to the journal’s presence in a database.

Galipault does speculate: “I suspect, though, that eventually libraries will do away with periodicals completely and only offer access through the online services they subscribe to.” However, her comments cannot be seen as any indication the review’s overall readership will decline. On the contrary, the audience could grow as it becomes accessible to many more potential readers. Such a possible growth in exposure of literary journals to a greater contemporary audience also seems to argue against another of Kevin Prufer’s worries voiced when he wonders: “To offer these only on databases may be wonderful for researchers fifty years from now, but probably at the expense of the contemporary readership for whom they are intended.”

Also, when he quotes Ted Genoways, editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, as to the fact that some elite authors’ works (the examples delivered are a nonfiction piece by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a fiction piece by Isabel Allende, both represented by the same agent) may not be available because their agent won’t allow “electronic rights,” that seems to me more a problem necessitating further negotiations with the agent, who should be willing to adapt with the technological transition much the way musicians have done. The fact that I can access online the latest releases by most musicians, including videos of them performing their songs, only increases attention in a new and larger audience, and brings greater interest in their other works.

On the other hand, Prufer provides an excellent point that characteristics associated with some special issues of literary journals could not be accurately reproduced in a database. He quotes Genoways: “comics by Art Spiegelman don’t translate well—and certainly the inserts and fold-outs we’ve run can’t really be digitized at all.”

I will acknowledge my own regular reliance on databases for much of my reading of recent journals. Just as I am now pleased to be able to read nearly any newspaper from all geographical regions (something impossible in the past), I also am delighted that I have access from my laptop at home to so many journals, more than my library could ever afford in individual subscriptions. I also will confess that due to my repeated requests the last twenty years or so, the university library still continues a fair share of subscriptions to literary journals I had recommended; however, ironically, now when I try to view these reviews from afar on my computer, I’m sometimes frustrated by the message that a particular journal is not available in the database because my university’s library still stocks it in the stacks of the periodicals room.

Another irony presents itself in the two posts by Kevin Prufer and Emily Lloyd. Prufer, editor of Pleiades, laments the transition of some of his other favorite literary journals to database, whereas Lloyd closes her comments by lamenting that not all literary journals are yet available on database: “if only it had the full text of Pleiades . . ..” Additionally, there appears to be a bit of irony in the way I arrived at Kevin Prufer’s thoughtful commentary, remarks I found only because they were posted on a blog and were among those stored among the numerous feeds to which I subscribe.

I do not believe the literary magazine will disappear as a result of technological evolution, though a few changes may occur. Almost all print literary journals have a presence on the web, and many permit access to their publications in electronic format as well. In some cases, full texts and archives are accessible, and occasionally additional elements allowed by the format, such as audio and video or simple linking to other texts, actually enhance the journal’s presentation. Admittedly, my students probably are more comfortable reading electronic media than I am, and future generations of readers might find no difference between the electronic text or the printed page.

Nevertheless, like Prufer, I enjoy reading the printed page; therefore, I continue my subscriptions to some journals I could read online. But I cannot afford to subscribe to all the journals I’d like to read, and neither can my university library. In the opening of his message, Prufer reveals he only visited the periodicals floor of his university’s library to look at the journals because “it had started to rain and I was on campus anyway.” In fact, at this time of year, as during other vacation periods, nearly all students and faculty in the university community are traveling elsewhere and unable to visit the library’s periodicals room; therefore, the library’s database provides a continuous presence for online reading anywhere at anytime of the year. Even during the academic year, I frequently find myself after hours or on holidays taking advantage of the convenience of reading the journals in the online database available from my library.

Hardcover books did not disappear with the introduction of cheaper and more convenient paperbacks, and home theaters have not wiped out presentations of films on the silver screen. In fact, the television networks are now making some of their shows available online, and I no longer have to worry about forgetting to record Kiefer Sutherland’s attempts to save the world when I am not home, perhaps away at a poetry reading, because I can catch them on my laptop the next day. In the spirit of this week’s previous posts concerning the Fourth of July, Walt Whitman, and democracy, I’d like to think free universal access of literary journals to readers provided by database inclusion at all libraries may eventually lead to a more democratic distribution of literature.

Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I hope the future will supply a situation that satisfies the desire for more availability of journals online free for everyone as requested by Emily Lloyd, yet allays those legitimate concerns correctly raised by Kevin Prufer. Moreover, I would like to see an environment in which Prufer would no longer consider his reviews published by magazines universally available for reading online as “destined immediately for the graveyard of the database.” Instead, I’d prefer to view a future in which all literary journals, including Prufer’s fine Pleiades, are democratically available for Emily and me, and all others. I’d like to discover that writers, editors, and readers then will perceive not “the graveyard of the database,” but the gateway of the database.

Walt Whitman and American Independence

Each year around the Fourth of July, I find myself returning to the writings of Walt Whitman, his poetry and his prose, hoping to rediscover the excitement and energy I had experienced reading his work when I first encountered Whitman as a student. I am never disappointed.

Having grown up in Brooklyn, where Whitman labored for a while in the newspaper industry (one of my uncles worked at the original Brooklyn Eagle, the paper for which Whitman once served as editor for two years), and later lived near Whitman’s Long Island home, I felt an early personal identification with the great poet.

However, along with so many others, I also quickly recognized Whitman’s importance as the Father of American Poetry, the nation’s poet, or as Harold Bloom has characterized him, “the center of the American canon.” Whitman established an American voice and allowed this country’s authors an opportunity to fulfill the wish for literary independence mentioned in Emerson’s 1837 “American Scholar” address: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?”

Therefore, this holiday week wrapped around Wednesday’s Independence Day, I recommend revisiting Whitman’s poetry in Leaves of Grass, but also those two wonderful prose pieces: the “Preface” to Leaves of Grass, an original case for distinctively American poetry, and “Democratic Vistas,” an interesting and invigorating essay investigating philosophical perspectives on political and literary democracy.

“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

“America prepares with composure and goodwill for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite … they are not unappreciated … they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No disguise can pass on it … no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only towards as good as itself and toward the like of itself will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is true the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

[Excerpts from the “Preface” to Leaves of Grass, 1855]

“Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatures, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life . . ..”

“At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway'd the most, and whence it sways others, is its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy.”

“. . . there could hardly happen anything that would more serve the States, with all their variety of origins, their diverse climes, cities, standards, &c., than possessing an aggregate of heroes, characters, exploits, sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to all, typical of all -- no less, but even greater would it be to possess the aggregation of a cluster of mighty poets, artists, teachers, fit for us, national expressers, comprehending and effusing for the men and women of the States, what is universal, native, common to all, inland and seaboard, northern and southern.”

“. . . a new Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy . . ..”

[Excerpts from “Democratic Vistas,” 1871]

ONE SONG, AMERICA, BEFORE I GO

One song, America, before I go,
I’d sing, o’er all the rest, with trumpet sound,
For thee—the Future.

I’d sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality;
I’d fashion thy Ensemble, including Body and Soul;
I’d show, away ahead, thy real Union, and how it may be accomplish’d.

(The paths to the House I seek to make,
But leave to those to come, the House itself.)

Belief I sing—and Preparation;
As Life and Nature are not great with reference to the Present only,
But greater still from what is yet to come,
Out of that formula for Thee I sing.

—Walt Whitman

John Ruff: "'JULY, 1935-1943' (from a painting by Charles Burchfield)"

The Poem of the Week is John Ruff’s “‘July, 1935-1943’ (from a painting by Charles Burchfield),” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999-2000 issue (Volume I, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

John Ruff is the poetry editor of The Cresset journal. His work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including Poetry Northwest, River City, Seattle Review, Seneca Review, and Xavier Review. “‘July, 1935-1943’ (From a Painting by Charles Burchfield)” was also published in an anthology of poems and paintings, titled A Poetic Vision: Poets’ Responses to the Artwork of Charles Burchfield, released by the Brauer Museum of Art in association with its exhibition of Burchfield’s lifetime of works. John Ruff teaches in the English department at Valparaiso University, and he serves as director of the university general education CORE program.

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.

David Baker: "Patriotics"

Today, as we begin July and peer forward into the week at Wednesday’s Independence Day celebrations, I strongly recommend to readers David Baker’s “Patriotics,” a powerful poem concerning the Fourth of July festivities at which citizens participate in every county across the country. Baker’s poem is drawn from his 1991 collection, Sweet Home, Saturday Night (University of Arkansas Press), and was later reprinted in an anthology, Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa Press, 2002), edited by Virgil Suarez and Ryan Van Cleave. Please visit the Academy of American Poets web page to read the text and listen to Baker’s performance of the poem at the AWP conference in Atlanta this past March.

“Patriotics” veers from the expected in its opening lines, as it shakes readers awake: “Yesterday a little girl got slapped to death by her daddy, / out of work, alcoholic, and estranged two towns down river.” Indeed, the author knows what he is doing with this beginning, and he acknowledges its impact in the following line: “America, it’s hard to get your attention politely.”

The address to “America”—along with the poem’s visual appearance of long lines and sentences—suggests an influence by Walt Whitman, and one wonders whether Baker’s poem provides a contemporary parallel to the old bard’s many poetic epistles to his fellow countrymen. Indeed, we see some of Whitman’s other tactics employed in these stanzas as well, such as his tendency toward delivering lists of items that signify a situation or scene. In the fourth stanza the poet scans those he notices around him at the county’s staging of a fireworks spectacle—“the acned faces of neglect, / the halter-tops and ties, the bellies, badges, beehives, / jacked-up cowboy boots, yes, the back-up singers of democracy.”

As has been chronicled elsewhere, David Baker often exhibits his fondness for Whitman and periodically reveals his reliance upon the Father of American Poetry for influence in his poetry. However, here readers recognize a subtle attempt by the poet to tie together the times of Whitman and America’s past, including the earlier history of America’s origins, with the nation now on display around him. Baker even resurrects “the soul of Thomas Paine” in one reference. In fact, the poem transitions from a father who beats his daughter to death in the first lines to a remark pertaining to previous generations of fathers, including the Founding Fathers, near the close of the poem: “Our fathers’ dreams come true as nightmare.”

“Patriotics” apparently challenges the unique nature of a fireworks blowout as the central activity for celebration: “our country’s perfect holiday, so direct a metaphor for war / we shoot off bombs, launch rockets from Drano cans, / spray the streets and neighbors’ yards with the machine-gun crack / of fireworks, with rebel yells and beer.” Moreover, the poem seems to seek connections between this holiday environment, full of explosions that simulate scenes of warfare, and the personal domestic violence detailed in the poem’s opening or the nation’s domestic violence alluded to in other spots throughout the poem.

Despite its long free-verse lines, this poem’s language remains rich with rhythm and sings with lyrical elements, especially the numerous examples of alliteration, assonance, and consonance within the lines. However, the word selection throughout this poem often jars readers from the lull of lilting language. Vocabulary choices that frequently contain harsh or unpleasant connotations continue from the first line to the last: “slapped,” “death,” “alcoholic,” “estranged,” “blow up,” “shot to the chops,” “dribbling chaw,” “sweaty,” “war,” “shoot off bombs,” “launch rockets,” “machine-gun crack,” “rebel yells,” “neglect,” “attack,” “pointless,” “terrifying,” “arsenal,” “moved to tears,” “convicting,” “poor child,” “welfare plot,” “wilting prayers,” “nightmare,” “bomb blasts,” “plague,” and “agape.” Clearly, “Patriotics” is not a typical poem about how glorious the Fourth of July festivities appear. Indeed, the poem’s underlining thread threatens to call into question the meaning of the term in its own title.

As with Whitman, who witnessed great anguish and the wide-spread violence visited upon one another by his nation’s citizens in the Civil War, Baker observes the presence of strife in today’s nation beyond this special day of observance and throughout the entire year: “We’ll clean up fast, drive home slow, and tomorrow / get back to work, those of us with jobs, convicting the others / in the back rooms of our courts and malls.” Nevertheless, like Whitman, Baker appears to maintain a measured presence—though perhaps he does not quite share Whitman’s almost undying supply of optimism—and a resolve as he looks toward the future, again addressing his country at the end of the poem: “America, I’d swear I don’t believe in you, but here I am, / and here you are, and here we stand again, agape.”

What a surprising final word to find for this poem, and what a correct ending! “Agape”: an adjective that registers astonishment and wonder—though published in 1991, one might even suggest “shock and awe”—at the pyrotechnics performance before the speaker, as well as in regard to the position in which he believes his nation now stands. However, marvelously enough, “agape,” as a noun derived from the Greek for “selfless love,” also denotes deep emotional affection, and as a theological term, it alludes to a religious sense of community associated with the communal meal held to express Christian fellowship, a rite once undertaken to commemorate the Last Supper. Thus, the poet elevates the ritual gathering of citizens to celebrate their nation’s independence on the Fourth of July as members of a local community to a sacred level, a spiritual upper echelon at which more positive accomplishments might be expected and, significantly, perhaps where one could hold out hope for the future.

David Baker is Professor of English and holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Midwest Eclogue (Norton, 2005), as well as two critical books, Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement. Earlier this year, Graywolf Press published Radiant Lyre: On Lyric Poetry, which he co-edited with Ann Townsend. Baker's works have appeared in numerous journals, including Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and Yale Review.

Baker was the featured poet in the Spring/Summer 2002 (Volume III, Number 2) issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, where readers also will find an essay on poetry by him. Additionally, an extended review of David Baker’s poetry appears in the same issue of VPR.