by David Lehman
Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), the most recent of his nine books of poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has also received a Whiting Writers’ Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill Foundations, an award from the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of five volumes of nonfiction prose, the most recent of which, Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007), won the Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award from the American Library Association. After ten years of teaching at the University of Houston, he joined the faculty at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He has taught in writing programs around the country, including the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New York University, Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton. He is working on two new books, Deep Lane, a collection of poems, and a book-length prose meditation on Walt Whitman, desire, and the ecstatic, What Is the Grass? He lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island.
INTRODUCTION
by Mark Doty
There was in that same monastery a brother, on whom the gift of writing verses was bestowed by heaven. That sentence, originally in Latin, is from the Venerable Bede, who in 680 composed a history of the English people. It’s the subtitle of chapter XXIV, in which Bede tells the story of Caedmon: an origin myth for the art of poetry, and a fable about the nature of inspiration that remains resonant despite the passage of over thirteen hundred years.
Caedmon lived most of his life—Bede tells us he was advanced in years when we enter his story—with no skill in the art of composing verse. When a harp was passed at a party, and each guest expected to contribute a poem or a song, Caedmon would slip out of the room to avoid the humiliation of having no poem to offer his fellows. One evening he’d done just that, and gone out to the stable where he cared for the animals. He lay down to rest, and something marvelous occurred in his dream. “A person appeared to him in his sleep,” Bede writes, “and saluting him by his name, said ‘Caedmon, sing some song to me.’ He answered, ‘I cannot sing; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment, and retired to this place because I could not sing.’ The other who talked to him replied, ‘However, you shall sing.’ ‘What shall I sing?’ rejoined he. ‘Sing the beginning of created beings,’ said the other.”
My guess is that most poets will recognize something of themselves in Caedmon’s story. He’s an inarticulate man who can’t find the right words in the company of his fellows, yet when he’s alone—in the company of beasts, which perhaps is where he feels he belongs—something provokes him, someone appears in the dark and says “sing some song to me,” or, as Susan Mitchell translates the phrase in a strange and remarkable poem called “Rapture,” “Sing me something.”
Sing me something is as good a description as I know of what the world or the dark or the visiting spirit seems to say to the poet, as if we were presented with an imperative, a request, a desire coming from somewhere. Our work is to speak back, but to whom, or to what?
Caedmon’s interlocutor has usually been understood as an angel, and that’s the tradition Denise Levertov honors in this beautiful poem from 1987.
CAEDMON
All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.
Levertov’s language intensifies in heat as Caedmon’s vision kindles: first it’s the earthly fire of “the motes / of gold moving / from shadow to shadow” with its calm, almost bovine chain of o’s. Then comes the conflagration: “a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying.” That phrase is dense and satisfying in the mouth, the f’s and t’s rubbing against one another, the subtle echo of “torches” and “feathers,” the double fl’s of “flame” and “upflying.” Bede himself doesn’t say that divine fire touches Caedmon’s lips or scorches his tongue, or imply the passive nature of “pulled my voice,” as if poetry is something that is done to us; that’s Levertov’s vision, and a compelling one. Bede just says, “. . . he presently began to sing verses to the praise of God . . .” and allows what happened between the beautiful command and Bede’s response to remain mysterious.
And Bede doesn’t actually say that the one who appears to Caedmon is an angel. He refers to the apparition as “quiddam”—Latin for “someone.” Someone says, sing me something. Someone, something—the statement couldn’t be much more open ended.
To what extent do we understand the process that calls a poem into being? Someone or something comes to us in the dark—literally, or in the darkness of not-knowing—and says “Sing me something.” It’s the uncovering of what is to be sung, and how, which are not two separate things but an intertwining spiral, like a DNA molecule, that gives the process its tension, frustration, and, at least sometimes, elation.
The someone who speaks may be a vessel of divine fire, as Levertov says, or we might understand him as a shadow self, that side of us which is by nature in darkness, like a side of the moon, and walks a few steps ahead of us into what we don’t know yet.
Or we might construe him as the embodied form of absence, a sense of lack within: something incomplete requires our attention.
Perhaps the interlocutory angel is an incarnation of the desire for order, the pressing need to locate and define pattern in the chaos of experience.
Or perhaps he or she is a form of the desire to praise. When faced with something beautiful, Emerson says of poets, they “are not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms.”
A little while later in Bede’s text, he provides at least a metaphoric understanding of what the poet does with the mysterious prompting, wherever it comes from. The monks tell Caedmon the sacred stories, reciting to him tales from Scripture, and the poet works: “by listening to them and then memorizing it and ruminating over it, like some clean animal chewing the cud, he turned it into the most melodious verse.”
Clean animal is delightful. Levertov’s Caedmon wanted to dwell
. . . with the warm beasts,
dumb among the body sounds
of the simple ones.
In the barn, he’s lulled by their “deep untroubled sighs.” Poetry may be the highest use of language, speech with all its multiple powers engaged, but paradoxically it seems to like animal company, the proximity of the purely, wordlessly physical. Perhaps that’s another source of the summons: where there are no words, poetry springs into being.
Caedmon dwells among the animals, and presumably he’s with them every day, but still it’s necessary to sing about them; knowledge must be sung into place, a form of praise and of cartography. A map may show us what we already know, and point us tow
ard what we don’t, or reveal the character of what has been obscured by familiarity. To “sing of created beings” is a discipline of attention.
One could also read the silence of animals (not literally, of course, since they make all kinds of noises, but their wordlessness) as a figure for the resistance of all experience to language. Animals are themselves, but they also stand for a realm or register of being that breathes just beneath the surface of the everyday, which is monitored, shaped, and mapped by words; apart from them or beneath them is the creaturely life of the body, the momentous physical life that we are, and are surrounded by every second. I can’t think about this without calling to mind George Eliot’s remarkable, entirely disruptive aside in Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Poetry is an attempt to move closer to the other side of silence.
I’ve been talking about the originating impulse of poetry as if it were all interior, a spark arising within obscure regions of the self. But one thing that makes the story of Caedmon satisfyingly complicated is the second instruction the apparition gives to the dreamer. “Sing the beginning of created beings.”
And thus complexity and chaos enter into the lyric, since the song that attends to “created beings” can never be pure praise, not if it has allegiance to the real; that requires also lamentation, and outrage, and probably irony as well. Auden addressed the tension between the lyric and the world with characteristic eloquence. He wrote that a “poem should be a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering. . . .” But Auden knows all too well that a poem cannot rest there. “At the same time we want a poem to be true . . . and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly.”
The inner spur, the breath of “inspiration,” sometimes is the apprehension of just those things Auden characterizes as the characteristics of truth; that which causes pain may well be the spur which leads the poet to begin. The inner voice and the social world are in endless dialogue; like form and content, it can—and should—be difficult to tease the two apart.
So far you’d have no reason to think this essay an introduction to an anthology. This is a deliberate choice. The twenty-four distinguished poets who’ve edited one of these collections before have done a bang-up job of introducing them, and there’s little for me to add that’s specific to the project itself.
But a few things must be said.
First, the seventy-five poems I’ve placed before you here are the ones that engaged me most during a year of reading a great many poems. “Best” is problematic, if unavoidable; poetry is not an Olympic competition in which there are a few coveted places at the top. Differences in the range of modes, the means of speaking, are fundamentally of value, and a wide and various field of activity is much to be preferred over a pyramidal scheme in which only a few examples can shine at the pinnacle. And even if I believed in such a thing, how would I know? The clouded vision of the present will shift, in time, whether toward clarity or toward some other kind of cloudedness. History will, inevitably, make choices among the poems of our moment, and history will revise those choices in time, if indeed there’s anyone around to read or construct canons in a few hundred years. Meanwhile, I’m happy that a range of voices is included here, as well as poems that appeared in trade magazines and in online-only journals, publications with legions of readers or a handful. Hooray for that. And the poets here are well known indeed or just setting out, or somewhere in between; they have umpteen books or no book at all.
Second, I should acknowledge the obvious, that I read (and read and read) through the filters of my own taste, which a project like this inevitably foregrounds. Anthology-making is, at least on one level, a form of self-portraiture. This book might well be called Seventy-Five Poems Mark Likes, but who’d buy that? And “likes” is too slight—believes in? Wishes to keep, to dwell within? It’s plain that I favor a certain disciplined richness of language, a considered relation between restraint and gorgeousness. And I’m drawn to poems that push against the boundaries of what is accepted as real, reaching into the life of the spirit, past the boundaries of the known and acknowledged toward what’s harder to name. I’ll side with Whitman, as Robert Hass does in his poem “Consciousness”:
. . . not interested, he said, in
the people who need to say that we all die and life is a suck
and a sell and two plus two is four and nothing left over.
Let the poem’s allegiance be to what’s hardest to name.
Third, I want to publicly take off my hat to David Lehman, who has energetically and efficiently (now I know just how efficiently) guided the series he initiated through twenty-five years of publication. A quarter century of editorship and advocacy represents serious literary heroism, a profound commitment to the art—and David has been remarkably catholic in his practices, choosing a range of guest editors, pointing them quietly toward his own favorites but also getting out of his guests’ way while managing to gently shepherd us along when we linger by the side of the path. This collection represents a labor of love for me (I read more literary magazines more systematically than I ever have before, enjoying the feeling of pouring myself into what flooded my mailbox) and a huge amount of work for David, his publisher, and their supporting staff. To sustain this all this time, without showing any signs of fatigue or flagging interest—well, it’s an extraordinary contribution to the art, and to our understanding of what American poetry is at this moment.
We could also say that phantom who appears to the poet, summoning words, is some premonition or anticipation of the reader—who turns to poetry in order to find some music that echoes what we can’t say, to read the inscription of our common lot, to be challenged and engaged, to be less alone, to be startled awake.
All right, I hope you’ll say, opening this book, sing me something.
(A note of gratitude to Alex Duym, for material concerning Caedmon and his context. And to Alexander Hadel, for practically everything else.)
SHERMAN ALEXIE
Terminal Nostalgia
The music of my youth was much better
Than the music of yours. So was the weather.
Before Columbus came, eagle feathers
Detached themselves for us. So did the weather.
During war, the country fought together
Against all evil. So did the weather.
The cattle were happy to be leather
And made shoes that fit. So did the weather.
Before Columbus came, eagle feathers
Were larger than eagles. So was the weather.
Every ball game was a double-header.
Mickey Mantle was sober. So was the weather.
Before Adam and Eve, an Irish Setter
Played fetch with God. So did the weather.
Before Columbus came, eagle feathers
Married Indians. So did the weather.
Indians were neither loaners nor debtors.
Salmon was our money. So was the weather.
Back then, people wrote gorgeous letters
And read more poetry. So did the weather.
On all issues, there was only one dissenter,
But we loved him, too. So did the weather.
Before Columbus came, eagle feathers
Gave birth to eagles. So did the weather.
We all apprenticed to wise old mentors
And meditated for days. So did the weather.
We were guitar-players and inventors
Of minor chords and antibiotics. So was the weather.
Every person lived near the city center
And had the same income. So did the weather.
Before Columb
us, eagle feathers
Lived in the moment. So did the weather.
from Green Mountains Review
KAREN LEONA ANDERSON
Receipt: Midway Entertainment Presents
Two kinds of fair: carnie and perambulator
of the local: shiny peppers on paper plates
and buttercream silk goats: Lizabet & Hope
among the floral displays gone south:
please enter again, this was very strong,
next year. A staged race of pigs in felt coats:
picked out in red, green, blue around a track,
shivering a ring of fat kids used to this
easy choice: commercial, delicious
fries or the sad white bread of the VFW barbeque.
Right among the sloe-eyed dirty cow hose-down,
a tired show horse to pet. Sort of oversold
at the 5 buck K9 demonstration; 4H got a thousand
for a rough old hog in red second-place satin.