THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES
The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the
publication of five collections of poetry annually through five
participating publishers. Publication is funded annually by the Lannan
Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, Barnes & Noble, the Poetry
Foundation, the PG Family Foundation and the Betsy Community Fund,
Joan Bingham, Mariana Cook, Stephen Graham, Juliet Lea Hillman
Simonds, William Kistler, Jeffrey Ravetch, Laura Baudo Sillerman, and
Margaret Thornton. For a complete listing of generous contributors to
the National Poetry Series, please visit www.nationalpoetryseries.org.
2015 COMPETITION WINNERS
Scriptorium
By Melissa Range of Appleton, Wisconsin.
Chosen by Tracy K. Smith. Publisher: Beacon Press.
Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last
By Justin Boening of Iowa City, Iowa.
Chosen by Wayne Miller. Publisher: Milkweed Editions.
The Wug Test
By Jennifer Kronovet of New York, New York.
Chosen by Eliza Griswold. Publisher: Ecco.
Trébuchet
By Danniel Schoonebeek of Brooklyn, New York.
Chosen by Kevin Prufer. Publisher: University of Georgia Press.
The Sobbing School
By Joshua Bennett of Yonkers, New York.
Chosen by Eugene Gloria. Publisher: Penguin.
for my grandmothers
Edith Mae Davis Range
(1907–1995)
Ena Gay Ritchie Pierce
(1921–2007)
CONTENTS
Foreword, Tracy K. Smith
Verdigris
Labyrinth, Chartres
Ashburnham
A Skiff of Snow
Orpiment
Negative Theology
Kermes Red
Flat as a Flitter
Navajo Code Talkers, WWII
Tyrian Purple
Pigs (see Swine)
Ofermod
Lampblack
Fortunes of Men
Nicodemus Makes an Analysis
Biblia Pauperum
Minium
Anagram: See a Gray Pine
Solidus of the Empress Irene, AD 797–802
Incarnational Theology
Woad
Hit
Vernacular Theology: Mechthild of Magdeburg
To Swan
Ultramarine
Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg
All Creation Wept
The Giants’ Sword Melts
Gold Leaf
Cento: Natural Theology
Regionalism
Scriptorium
Shell White
Notes
Acknowledgments
Credits
FOREWORD
Each of the poems in Scriptorium is a marvel. What may likely strike you on the first read is Range’s remarkable facility with form. She moves nimbly, naturally, with comfort and acrobatic delight through the rigors of sonnets, villanelles, anagrams, cento, and the like. She submits joyfully to the whims of rhyme, allowing music to exert its will upon her train of mind, and she does so with such virtuosic ease that you may not even detect it on a first read. But what you will feel more than any of this, I am certain, is an urgent usefulness. These are poems for which form is not an end in itself.
All the many formal commands to which Range’s poems gladly bend are in service of something urgent, something having to do with a view of language as a means of survival. In this sense, Range’s work reminds me of the phrase “the Living Word,” the very thing that ignited the piety of medieval monks; only here it is made up of words that fit in the mouths of “drunkards, / bruisers, goaders, soldiers, / braggers” and their kind. What we say and how we say it, Range urges her readers to see and claim, tells us who we are and who we’ve been. Our voices mark our time, but they also guard a place for us in time, which is to say, they keep us alive.
Among the things this particular voice seems entrusted with keeping alive is the voice of Appalachia, what the poet claims as her “hillbilly” legacy. Not academically or anthropologically, but as a kind of earnest commemoration, a claiming of kin. And that’s not all. Range reanimates Old English, which she assures us “has a word for our kind / of people.” And she initiates us into the language of the brightly colored illuminations once meant to serve as vehicles for Christian belief. She casts her eye and ear in every direction, asking, “Must one sing of this?” And answering, “One must.”
Traditionally, a scriptorium was a room where monks sat copying manuscripts. The word calls to the sense of what is precious, what must be made and remade, what one could give one’s entire life to preserving. How elegant a corollary for the work of the poet, and of this poet in particular, whose most sacred text—the one inspiring the most rapt devotion—is the very vernacular we live, love, grieve, fumble, and forgive in.
Tracy K. Smith
VERDIGRIS
Not green as new weeds or crushed juniper,
but a toxic and unearthly green, meet
for inking angel-wings, made from copper sheets
treated with vapors of wine or vinegar,
left to oxidize for the calligrapher.
When it’s done, he’ll cover calf-skin with a fleet
of knotted beasts in caustic green that eats
the page and grieves the paleographer.
There’s copper in my brain, my heart of hearts;
in my blood, an essential mineral.
Too much is poison. Too much air imparts
sickness to the script—once begun, eternal,
its words forever grass in drought. Nor departs
my grief, green and corrosive as a gospel.
LABYRINTH, CHARTRES
Most days the labyrinth’s covered
up with folding chairs, but Fridays
it’s open even to unbelievers.
Our docent says the labyrinth is not a maze,
that the pilgrim cannot lose her way
coiling toward the center rose.
My pastor friend and I are chaperones,
here to help field-tripping kids
weave the ancient circuit that the masons
made without diversions or dead ends. “One pathway
in, the same path flowering out,”
the docent says, “so that you cannot stray.”
My friend instructs our group: “Release,
receive, return.” Kids wind along the stone
with palms upturned, seeking the peace
they’ve been told radiates from the roundels,
the buttresses, the crypts, the statues
of virgins, saints, apostles.
Above us, glaring from the western wall,
Christ the Judge rides on a cloud
of glass, grabbing sinners for his hell,
the righteous for his heaven,
part of the gospel that the craftsmen
fractured into windowpanes.
Shining through the quatrefoil, the wounds
the glaziers cut and set
into Christ’s feet and hands,
sun pools blue and scarlet
on the floor, dappling the medallion
where, the legend goes, penitents
and priests walked on their knees.
Now anyone can walk here,
including the faithless, whom God always sees.
The kids circle the path, they pray
as if prayer was a right and not a grace,
they turn upon the way (my friend will say)
of the blest, those who can trust in Chri
st’s name.
He’ll remind us, “We’re pilgrims, not tourists,”
though the admission is the same.
ASHBURNHAM
With a name like that,
the librarian shouldn’t have been surprised
when late night hearth-sparks
kindled mantel-tree and wainscot,
turned the hallways to tinder,
cindered the vellum
already almost too fragile to touch—
an antiquarian’s collection
amassed when the monasteries
were dissolved, when books
were flung from scriptoria, torn
parchment used for bootblacks’ rags.
A gospel, an epic, a charter aflame,
the only copies thrown from a window
when the librarian could no longer wait
for the bucket brigade;
the next morning, schoolboys
pocketed the black and buckled scraps.
The poem about the seafaring hero,
bound into a larger volume
of monster-tales and marvels,
smoked as if from dragon-fire,
parts of the tale already worm-eaten,
and though the restorationists
cleaned and pinned the leaves—
fire-brittle, water-warped—
to a line to dry, the story kept
disintegrating, its margins
crumbling further at each touch,
leaving scholars less to copy
of what was already less a copy
than a shadow—the original
unpreserved, irretrievable
the instant the pen quenched
the harp: a smoldering
smothered, a ruin of the tongue.
A SKIFF OF SNOW
Not a boatload but a sift that barely sticks—
the flour sloughed from a rolling pin,
flakes scarce as skiffs in a landlocked state.
In the ballads brought over
with the Scots, women pine for word
of a lover or a son put out to sea,
a skiff of song scabbing the ground
beneath the willow when they’re buried,
beneath the ocean when they’re not.
My father on a ladder doesn’t sing;
he cusses, banging boards
onto the wind-scrapped barn,
roof half off, wood give out, sky
spitting snow, salvaging
his daddy’s daddy’s daddy’s work—
and before him, even, a man
who didn’t row, he walked here
(when this was barely Tennessee)
from New Jersey, and before that,
his father drifted in from Holland,
England, Germany, or France
(the family trees disagree
about which accent
got mangled into mine).
When I left my mountain home to hitch
to cities, I became a hick,
my skiff of twang scuffing the air,
breaking on scoffers’ ears like ships
busting on rocks. My granddaddy,
on a job in Cincinnati, drinking up
his paycheck, heard “You must be one of them
hillbillies” soon as he opened his mouth
to ask the baseball score;
he replied, “They is two kinds of people
in this world, hillbillies and sons
of bitches—so what does that make you?”
Then he slugged the feller one,
or got slugged, depending
on who’s telling it.
“It’s a-skiffin’,” we say,
to mean there’s not much,
there won’t be much, and it’ll be gone
in two shakes. It’s untelling
where it goes. It’s untelling
who’ll tell it once it’s gone.
ORPIMENT
King’s yellow for the King’s hair and halo,
mixed if the monastery can’t afford
the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord,
to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro,
in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow
a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard
not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word
curves in compass circles, and again I follow,
tracing on yellowing vellum my dread
of this intolerant composition,
this gold that cannot coexist with lead,
this God who prefers extermination—
of false prophets, golden calves, and other gods
before him—to the wideness of devotion.
NEGATIVE THEOLOGY
I get the call about my grandmother. Maybe it is nothing.
A dark spot on a screen: someone says, “Pray that it is nothing.”
On the surgeon’s gurney, swaddled in blue—
she’s lost how much blood? Like you, she weighs nothing.
Pseudo-Denys says to cast off all images, all qualities of you.
So the sculptor chips marble away into nothing.
The preacher speaks over my grandmother,
half her colon gone, where? He lays hands on nothing.
Unlight, Undark, Unfather, Unson,
Unholy of Unholies—all your names stray into nothing.
In the ICU, she vomits everything but the ice.
Unknowing I know her, a body on its way to nothing.
The star points on the monitor collapse to a line,
Ray of Divine Darkness, ray searing all light to nothing.
Cast off all images, even those that seem flesh, seem true.
“Jesus paid it all,” says the preacher. Did he pay it for nothing?
Unmother, Unlover, Undoer, Undone—
like you, she won’t have a name. Two can play at nothing.
My mother calls my name, asks me to pray.
When you’ve got nothing to say, better to say nothing.
KERMES RED
Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm”
in both the Persian and the Latin, red
eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood
crushed stillborn from her dried body, a-swarm
in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form
the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s Blood—
the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,
whose blood became the germ of a crimson storm.
Christ of the pierced thorax and worm-red cloak,
I read your death was once for all, but it’s not true:
your kings and bishops command a book,
a beheading, blood for blood, the perfect hue;
thus I, the worm, the Baptist, and the scarlet oak
see all things on God’s earth must die for you.
FLAT AS A FLITTER
The way you can crush a bug
or stomp drained cans of Schlitz out on the porch,
the bread when it won’t rise,
the cake when it falls after the oven-door slams—
the old people had their way
to describe such things. “But what’s a flitter?”
I always asked my granny. And she could never say.
“It’s just a flitter. Well, it might be a fritter.”
“Then why not say ‘fritter’?”
“Shit, Melissa. Because the old people said ‘flitter.’”
And she smacked the fried pie into the skillet,
and banged the skillet on the stove,
and shook and turned the pie
till it was on its way to burnt.
Flatter than a flitter, a mountain
when its top’s blown off:
dynamited, shaved to the seam,
the spoil pushed into hollers, into streams,
the arsenic slurry caged behind a dam,
teetering above an elementary schoo
l.
The old people said “flitter.” They didn’t live to see
God’s own mountain turned
hazard-orange mid-air pond,
a haze of waste whose brightness rivals heaven.
When that I was a little bitty baby,
my daddy drove up into Virginia
to fix strip-mining equipment, everything
to him an innocent machine in need.
On God’s own mountain,
poor people drink bad water, and the heart
of the Lord is a seam of coal gouged out
to fuel the light in other places.
The old people didn’t live
to give a name to this
kingdom of gravel and blast.
Lay me a hunk of coal
on my flittered tongue
to mark the mountains’ graves,
to mark my father’s tools
quarrying bread for my baby plate,
to mark my granny slapping dough
as if with God’s own flat hand.
NAVAJO CODE TALKERS, WWII
When “turtle” is a tank, a bomber
“chickenhawk,” when a Marine’s
a kid who’s got a mouth on him
his country never cared to learn,
a war can be won. Not
eighty years after the Long Walk
tried to crush it to a stutter
it was pronounced a gift
to the military, this language
they tried to scrub out with lye
or beat out with belts
at Indian boarding schools,
its tones rising and falling
to switch the meaning,
too liquid and difficult
to be broken. When America’s
“our mother” and death’s
spelled “deer, eye, axe,
tooth, horse” (the cryptograms
never written, always spoken);
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