Wuthering

Here's what you do. Hold on to this link for Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" (the whole dang thing is on the Poetry Foundation site--good work Poetry Foundation site!). Wait until a few hours before Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights opens in your town. Read the poem then go see the film.

Both address the textures that make Emily Bronte's novel linger on the WTT brain much longer than others from the period. They're punishing, inescapable dreams of thwarted love and bitter chill. With disconcerting pileups of hanged puppies (it's one thing to read that puppies are hanged on the page but even a coldhearted cinephile might get a little squirmy watching it onscreen). 

On the whole, however, humans prove less violent than nature. Carson writes "spring opens like a blade" and Arnold's nature is daggers of wind, cutting through any shelter. Even the mud of the moors seems to breathe, sucking down and threatening to swallow young Heathcliff (Solomon Glave, a boy essentially without language) and Catherine (a spot-on Shannon Beer).

Arnold snaps a tremendous cut from luggage being dropped off a wagon to a coffin thunking in the ground. The funeral features some of the only sunlight seen in the picture and when I reread "The Glass Essay" it resonated with the description "wooden sky carved with knives of light."

The director works in a square frame with enough rack-focused blurring that she could be using Instagram functions to dictate the look of the film. She's probably not though. It's probably more her representation of the enclosed wooziness of the Earnshaw house, groaning like a ship at sea.  And she doesn't eschew with her now trademark slow motion shots. Heathcliff trails Catherine, petting her horse, her curled behind like gorse.

Youth ends and Heathcliff (now a somewhat less affecting James Howson) comes back home. The results are as disastrous as we might expect if Mia had returned to Mardyke Estates in Fish Tank. Heathcliff moves from the "bluish dusk like a sea slid back" to Thrushcross Grange, dappled in pink and white light. He ignores Catherine's husband (whatever his name is--it's especially irrelevant in this adaptation) and returns to crushing on Catherine (now a significantly less affecting Kaya Scodelario).

Heathcliff waits for her to reappear in the unfamiliar shadows of bird cage and crystal. Arnold inserts enough flashbacks that we know his position is hopeless, that the girl with whom he wrestled in the mud is not walking through those ornate doors.

I saw the film a month ago at SFIFF and I've grown more convinced that this story is the worst kind of horror. Heathcliff comes in to Wuthering Heights for the light and the fire and the humanity and is worse for it. Better to have been merely stripped to his bones in the cold. As he sees it, life is bitter but bitterer without Catherine. So he waits out his prison sentence of grey mornings and still the hope that a pair of lapwings will rise over the moor.

What Poem Was that Anyway?

 
I've read Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station and there's something I have to get off my chest before I can begin discussing the work itself. In an era where gorgeous books open my wallet all over town, it's unconscionable that Coffee House continues to put out such a relentless parade of ugliness. The most offensive part is that the books look cheap, like galleys. They need to put on an extra turtleneck for those chilly Minnesota winters and sort this shit out.

Moving right along...Lerner's book is one more brick in the likable, 3.5 star wall of contemporary American fiction that is recommended to the WTT. Perhaps that's not enough of a compliment. While slight in areas like love or the American expat experience, the novel is quite wonderful when addressing language acquisition.

Early in the book I nodded along to several bits that elegantly described the disconnect between knowledge of words and fluency. Like me, I sensed that our protagonist Adam was excellent in Spanish class without having any idea of how to absorb the language aurally:

She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn't tell; I heard the names of streets and months; a list of things I thought were books or songs, hard times or hard weather, epoch, uncle, change, an analogy involving summer, something about buying and/or crashing a red car. I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.

That's a great passage, exactly the understanding I could get from a Madrileño speaking to me at the conclusion of my minor in Spanish. Or the effect I get sometimes drifting off to sleep while watching a subtitled French film.

I made it through the novel thinking the title referred to a completely different poem than it actually does. As any poetry MFA worth his salt could tell you, "Leaving the Atocha Station" is the blab of arctic honey in John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oath. If, hypothetically, one were a blogger looking for something intelligent to say about the poem and turned to the internet for help, he'd only find people using terms like "Pollock," and "obscure," and summarizing the poem thusly: "it just is." It just is the frustration of what Lyn Hejinian would say is my rage to know. I would venture that Lerner selected for his title a poem that matches his narrator's deliberately obscure verse, another writer who wished to push his readers further from narrative. Also a rather large plot detail in Leaving the Atocha Station occurs at Atocha Station.

The poem actually on my mind while reading the novel is from Houseboat Days (really the only Ashbery book I consider mine ("The Other Tradition," is the first Ashbery poem I can remember reading (that "Emblazoned" is now a word I can only associate with t-shirts))). I'll have you know that in my misremembering I at least got the train part of the station correct. "Melodic Trains" begins with a girl's toy wristwatch, its painted hands, presumably, right twice a day. Observing the anxiousness of his fellow travelers our speaker says wisely: "any stop before the final one creates / Clouds of anxiety, of sad, regretful impatience." Here I am now, waiting in a terrible hurry for trains almost every day, sometimes coming back to the lines: "there is so little / Panic and disorder in the world, and so much unhappiness."  

A Review in Verse for Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog's Love Letters (in 3D)

There is not art tonight

But that of memory.

Yet how much room for painting there is

In the tight passages of Chauvet cave.

There is even room enough

For the drawings of my forefather's forefathers,

32,000 years ago,

That have been locked so long

In a slide-sealed limestone cliff

That are etch-edged and fresh,

And liable to shock as Pollock.

Over the great carpet of calcite crystal

Steps of cave man and cave bear.

It is all lit by invisible red flames.

It trembles as rhino limbs rushing through time.

And I ask myself:

“Are your eyes strong enough to bear

these species that are but echoes:

Is this camera strong enough

To carry a wild horse back to its source

And back to us again

Belted over with stars?”

Yet I would lead my grandson by the hand

Through millennia we'll never understand;

And so I stumble. And the crystals drip into stalactites

With such a silence of forgotten dreams.

*

(All apologies to Hart Crane, both for this poem and for the existence of James Franco.)

Throw the Dice

Mostly I read things because smart people compel me. My happy visit with Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband comes from a post by Katherine Hill.

But, in a larger sense, I like to think I also read things because they reconcile irreconcilable parts of my life. This morning The Beauty of the Husband has also done that.

I still find Carson's Autobiography of Red more affecting overall than TBOTH (perhaps it's worth noting that, biographically speaking, I'm more familiar with mythic unrequited redness than the truthful complications of marriage) but, thanks to a recent viewing of Bright Star, I had better occasion to gasp at this Keats-centric book.

The reminder of why I read poetry came in the book's 22nd tango, "Homo Ludens." Carson's plainspoken thunderbolt:

If a husband throws the dice of his beauty one last time, who is to blame?

For years I've tried to wrap my head around seemingly illogical romantic leaps made by family, friends, exes, etc. and I've never known how to put it until reading that line. They're throwing the dice of their beauty and, finally seeing that, I can draw a fresh breath. I've always enjoyed watching craps anyway.

(Next week I hope WTT will return to the cinema. But, after all, May is National Poetry Month, right?)

Out Stealing Clouds

I steal all my best ideas from Katherine Hill. Not only am I taking her idea of posting about neato word clouds, I'm also going to use Ernest Hemingway as my first example:

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Turns out just right, no?

I am furthermore going to borrow Katherine's idea and add a word cloud of my own writing because it's amusing. This is from my grad school submission which was, for reasons known to my 22 year old self, a crown of sonnets.

Field Poem

An added benefit to this one was my theatrical gasp of horror as I reread the poem (you'll note the preponderance of "like" and "thought," always the hallmarks of good writing). Now, thanks to the word cloud version, I can view Field and Trace as pleasantly colored abstractions and pretend the actual poem doesn't exist.

2046 as Christmas

My Christmases sound like Mark Kozelek's "Have You Forgotten," Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown and Nat King Cole where holiday cheer is washed with a certain aching nostalgia.

These Christmases look like Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, a film featuring a recurrence of December 24ths I've watched more or less every winter since it came out in 2004. I saw it first almost by myself at Landmark La Jolla, slicing Haribo gold-bears bilaterally with my incisors and looking contentedly at the reds and greens onscreen. It was a less a sequel than a coda to In the Mood for Love and I always prefer codas, a fluidity of time instead of a march, circles instead of lines.

Intervening years have, of course, changed me and now, watching Tony Leung's dapper newspaperman Chow Mo-wan, I'm gutted (I notice I've even started wearing sweatervests like he does). It's not just the suspicion that romance might be dead in our culture. It's that even in the best, most symphonic partnership the question "Why can't it be like it was before?" is always coming. That's what Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi, astonishing every time) asks Chow-san again and again until he has to turn away. He walks around with his hurt smile every day with the same question in mind, not that it helps, as "before" is quite a different place for him.

I like to identify with Chow, his omnipresent memories of Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung in ITMFL, Gong Li in 2046, that one) and the power of atmospheric noodle stalls in the rain.  Then I look down the way to Fremont where some fluorescently minded person has installed the exact opposite.

The movie also proves writing itself is like the train to 2046, the paradoxical future location where everything is as perfect as it was in the remembered past. The hours spin away as you move closer and closer to an ideal past tense reflection where nothing ever changes. A past perfection that must be there, even if no one has ever taken the train back.

This Christmas I decided that, if I had a moment with Chow, I would read to him Liam Rector's "Song Years" and it would go like this.

Song Years

For years I lived in a kind
Of wistful song world where
One foot was always out

The door, almost like a sailor
Ready, anxious even, to decamp
Once more for the sea,

And always the American highway
And its great story calling, built by
The American restless and all

Its subsequent moving. Loosely
Around the seasons I moved
Looking for what I thought of

As a natural life, and looked back
At anyone who stayed put as if
They had given up,

Given up something
That should never be
Given up,

Ever.
No sooner
Would I get some place

Than I'd begin
To check train schedules
And other venues of departure.

I hated the notion
Of insurance and never
Had any. I gave

Myself no place to fall.
I thought of all this as keeping
Myself clean, keeping

Myself honest. It really
Wasn't a variant
Of the old high school

Locker-room chant of find 'em,
Feel 'em, fuck 'em,
And forget 'em, I told myself,

But sometimes,
Especially when I was packing,
It surely felt that way.

I was always leaving one
For the next one. I wished them
Well and remained friends

With most of them. I hoped
A right one one would come along
For them, and they would be

More ready for their lasting lover
Given the lessons, good and bad,
We'd taught each other.

Fall would come
And I'd head north
For apple-picking, winter

Would find me holed up
In Vermont for a moment,
Working on some chilly construction,

And spring was always
A sure-fired scamper south.
Summer mostly meant

Going out west for, I suppose, hope.
Change is slow and hope is violent.
I wanted the speed and handling

Of a good sports car; I wanted
Things not as they should be
But things as they are.

Most songs are sad and most people
Do not want to live in song world,
Except when some loved one leaves

Or maybe over a drink, alone, at home,
Or perhaps in a car, ever more alone.
Someone is always falling or being thrown.

Most songs say
But one thing:
"My heart aches,"

And if you doubt this
Listen to the songs.
And tonight

Let us all together send out
Our love to the songwriters
For moving us.

I moved this way
Until the cruelty of it
Overwhelmed me.

*

Merry Christmas Chow-san. Tell Wong Kar-Wai I need you in just one more film. Maybe set in spring?

In the Morning

The other morning (of the poem!) I went back into my FSG-on-the-cheap copy of James Schuyler’s Collected Poems. It's not nearly as attractive as this cover:


Three years ago I got the book and read Freely Espousing to little effect. But a Weird Deer told me to read “The Morning of the Poem” some morning and I, a fan of lounging in bed, decided to try Schuyler again. You can tell that Collected Poems is a New York School book because it features an ugly watercolor portrait of a New York School writer on the cover. This one is James Schuyler, reading, quite possibly on a morning!

I like that the poem starts off with Schuyler questioning the date (“July 8 or July 9, surely the eighth, certainly / 1976 that I know”). I like this because it presents a nice uncertainty to matters immediately but also because it helps characterize a poem pulls backward and forward across many mornings. Between descriptions of the morning out the window and various beverages consumed indoors, Schuyler has flashbacks like this one: “Green eyes in the / Medicine-chest mirror. You said, ‘I’m sorry: / everything just got too / Fucked up. Thank you for the book.’ That’s / what I get. Was it worth it? / On the whole, I think it was.”

These lines really speak to the tone throughout the poem: clear-eyed humorous and a gently wistful. The man’s eyes in the mirror seem to me incredibly bright as he gives the brush off any writer would fear, a variation on “goodbye but thanks for the good reading material.” Schuyler is never overwrought though—he decides the relationship was worthwhile on the whole.


Though it is a fifty-page piece, “The Morning of the Poem” feels like a simple, pleasant exercise. I think of it as a poet deciding to capture each thought, story and image that floats through one’s brain on a (particularly lucid) morning. This way we get descriptions of winter (“the kids are gloved and / Bundled up and it’s snowball-fighting time”) as well as descriptions of the July day that’s actually unfolding outside (“violet laced with orange and / White fritters: kimono colors”). It’s satisfying, the My Life-style fullness to the whole enterprise. And near the end, as Schuyler discusses Fairfield Porter painting on an island, there is some confusion over whether a rowboat or a canoe bobs in water of that landscape. The poet admits, parenthetically, “I can’t remember everything.” But still, a whole hell of a lot.

this is not
your poem, your poem I may
Never write, too much, though it is there and
needs only to be written down
And one day will and if it isn’t it doesn’t matter

Light Boundaries

Introducing I Have Designed This For You by James Meetze

My title for this review is trying to be clever because it refers to both a great poem in James Meetze’s new book I Have Designed This For You and the ease with which his poems travel between media. The first thing I did when I got the book is read the opening (and most comprehensible) line of Eileen Myles’ blurb, which praises Meetze for his “drawings/poems.” It is Eileen Myles, so I just take that coupling as truth—but I’d like to add another slash with “sculptures” after it.

Designed is not an illustrated pop-up book so words must be doing the work. However, the following segment from the poem “A Hidden Beach” does fold out for the reader: “I am building a bridge of paper cranes.” The words infer an origami multiplication outside the range of the page. Still, Meetze is more directly sculptural in the lines, “I am a risk, proof / a hope that one day we can build / our citizenship by building structures” from “A Model Citizen.” The poet here is risky in that he requires the participation of his fellow citizens, just as sculpture’s three-dimensionality demands that the viewer walk 360˚ for full appreciation. The model citizen of the title is not merely the cliché of respectability—it is the offer to participate in the construction of something upright.

I also have on good authority from a Buddhist poet that James is the reincarnation of Hart Crane so look at this from Allen Tate’s introduction to White Buildings: “The poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious. It is the only poetry I’m acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand manner. It is American poetry.” That’s a fantastic way to begin. I lack Tate’s boldness so I’ll start with something safer: James Meetze is a tall poet. I know this from walking with him through sculptures in the Pacific Northwest and you will be able to tell for yourself from the skinny image on the back of Designed.

Meetze is I think less likely to fling himself over the railing a steamship in a drunken bisexual despair than Crane—the nautical submersion is more likely to occur in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park in the five iterations of hull-like Core-Ten steel that comprise Richard Serra’s Wake. The poems Meetze writes throw light like Serra’s sculpture throws heat, the way you can warm your hands on his burnt orange steel after the sun has gone down (in “The Light of the Boundary” it is “where pink and blue meet” or where, in “An Edge to the World” “the world at bay, allowing a little dusk”). This subtle lushness proves Meetze to be a more restrained reincarnation of Crane, whose well-known “Repose of Rivers” features sulphur-dreaming mammoth turtles rippled asunder by “sun-silt” while the wind is “flaking sapphire.”

Both Crane’s and Meetze’s verse projections follow an internal logic, however, whether metaphorical or synaesthetic. Returning to “A Model Citizen”—the narrator begins his address “I see you in red,” and mentions several lines later “I thought of my favorite blue.” Hence his conclusion—arrived at irrevocably by the color wheel—“I thought of purple. / You are sitting in it.” The poem leads us through an unfamiliar narrative but we are not lost. Color similarly guides us in Crane’s beguiling “Voyages” lines, “As bells off San Salvador / Salute the crocus lustres of the stars, / In these poinsettia meadows of her tides.” Here a violet is mixed in the meeting of red phytoplankton and blue ocean but the overall palette mirrors Meetze’s.

Moving his coloration back to a sculptural space, Meetze mimics the blue and white graffiti present in various stages of fade on Wake with the words “I draw them on my arms Europa, / my arms with U2 bombers and pin-ups and an anchor” from the poem “Curator Passavant.” In this functioning synthesis of Meetze’s work as drawing/poetry/sculpture, the poetry exists in the refracted light between the graffiti and steel. It is delicate as the paper sculpture that textures the cover of Designed.

On then to the brilliant “Light of the Boundary,” “where the answers are, or could be.” This poem is a series of “Todays,” ways to write one line daily to capture a moving life. We see a bluebirdhouse one day, wild mustard another and heart valves from a pig farm still a different day. Then the words that I take as greatness: “Today a poem on the fairway in the form of a divot.” In the act of writing that line I see Meetze swinging a golf club, the poem just one discrete satisfying lump in the expanse of mowed short green (the rest of poetry all around). The unmentioned but necessary golf ball climbs its trajectory in the reader’s mind. And we need not replace the divot—we sit with it in the fairway and watch the light shine around it. The scene is perfected in the poem’s closing line: “The light of the boundary is spring-green-and-pink light, I see it in the people and in the natural world.”

I once made a poem designed to be cut apart and hung in pieces from a mobile. Wind and dust made this a still jellyfish less phosphorescent than a real natural thing like James’ work—I don’t know which way it will move. Consider the switchbacks in just one line, “Believe in life perhaps and not dying for no good reason because a young boy, and because her eyes still haunting even if they see different sunsets, because poetry.”
Because poetry I had notebook in hand on the not quite azure steeps below the sculpture park. I thought of the light on the sea and saw the surprise of “because poetry” as a match to the single reversed S cut like a rudder amidst the other gravel-locked ships in Serra’s Wake. Let’s take in one last view of the water from “To See the Sea”:

A frigate sails alone so that it may bisect the waves, and it is
my ship my morning sails rising into possibility of knowing
one thing in lieu of a collective unconscious.

A final news item from a reading at Village Books in Bellingham, WA: Meetze is buoyant and scary standing at the podium saying that he doesn’t like these “old” poems and is making for new ones—the fresh verse breaking down oceans from his imposing black portfolio. You should hear him speak of bikini bottoms—that certain glee in the glinting sea sand. Yes now I will say it: the poetry of James Meetze is ambitious.