EthicalDative

Economy and directness are said to be paramount traits of poetry. “Directness” does heavy lifting in that statement. The poem by Alafia Nicole Sessions titled “Immature Animals” (Poetry, October 2024) stumps, like something glimpsed that you can’t identify, but so interesting you stare after it hoping it’ll reappear, or slow down, or become recognizable. Consider these phrases vivisected from the poem:

… should’ve set my quiver for meat,…
… spare my palms for prayer, from reaching…
… their hard parts barely bridled…
… cleaning my teeth with their bones…
… make sounds that seem like want with your trachea…

How can you not dig into language so deucedly vigorous and convincingly irrational? It creates intellectual friction on top of fascination. The poem reads like a riddle, cleanly indited down to the very punctuation level, save for this run-on sentence: I sniffed all manner of immature // animals, most, with their hard parts barely bridled, / met my eye, were willing to spill themselves. Does “poetic license” make my avowedly fastidious longing for a semicolon after “animals” irrelevant? Of course. I would say the poem articulates with striking indirection the experience of transitioning from a state of muddle — the natural condition of callow youth — to a state of clarity in matters of physical love. It’s only a hunch.

This commentary runs to excessive length, worth my time to write, possibly not yours to read. I want to see in “Immature Animals” an erotic journey told… how? Parabolically? But have I fallen into the trap of dithering over what a poem “really means”? Isn’t that called exegesis or something? Books say poetry doesn’t traffic in “narrative,” or doesn’t have to. Images (configured by words tethered to significances) are poetry’s building blocks, they say. If you attend not to the words’ denotation, but rather to their connotation — the associations they trigger — your message center will be set alight with receptivity and feeling, they say. Hmm. That has brought haiku to mind. If a haiku is its own thing, a syllabic crystal beaming its little signal, “Immature Animals” is a walled garden wafting lush sounds and aromas over ten feet of masonry. Those waftings tease and arouse the construing faculty. You want to find an entryway and get to the sensory source. Or compare it to a drawing of pure lines doing what lines do, going somewhere under their own unapparent steam, changing direction at the unspoken behest of an unapparent hand, resolutely evading conventional figuration. 

Every three-line stanza bleeds enjambedly into the next. This armors the poem against piecemeal citation. You go whole hog (like below), or not at all. Also, you quote phrases with elision of line breaks, like this: I never thought I’d be the hunter. That’s what the “I” of the poem reproaches themself for not knowing at its beginning  — the fact that they are the hunter, not the hunted. The poem makes you the hunter by reading tactically. You’re looking for clues. Blood running pink can be a sign of undercooked meat. A “meat” setting on the thing that holds arrows (a quiver) was called for, says “I.” An arrow meant for killing is tipped differently than one tipped for butts. “I” also regrets not having devoured the dandelion greens, a healthful salad. So what? Here, the first domino of a sequence stood on edge sets off the train of toppling “nonsense.” Instead of the quiver-setting and dandelion-eating that should’ve occurred, pronominal “I” climbed into / a pot, added salt, became a handful / of small bells. We’re definitely not in Kansas, never were.

Let’s work through it. “I” cooks themself up into something different, a self-transformation involving bells, and undulation like waves of the sea, where sirens whose telltale gaze (violet eyes) betrays them on land can cry safely under water. It’s a state of affairs that’s unsatisfactory to “I.” They wanted their thoughts to be drowned; to pray, not reach, with their hands. They’ve had varieties of interaction with partners (?) who were tempestuous (hard parts barely bridled), who held up to reasonable scrutiny character-wise (met my eye), and who had animal momentum (were willing to spill themselves). Following a climax (after the branch snapped), however, “I” holds their breath! Why? Let down by what was “sniffed”? “I” expresses wonderment at former guises and modulations (the crown I knit from bluebells, soft waves I cultivated in the pool of my throat) now discarded. Also maybe, wonderment at the advent of sexual maturity: Was the bush of my belly just a dream? 

The answer is “No.” The poem turns to what feels like affirmation. A second person pronoun, a “you,” materializes. In three days “you” will return with your bluebeard and your new scent. (“I” counts the days.) If the allusion is to Bluebeard the serial wife murderer, its import eludes me. But what seems more pertinent is that new scent attaching to “you.” The sounds coming from “you”’s trachea have “I”’s attention. I confess that for a while I kept reading the next phrase as “Obedient to the bassline,” a musical reference. The poem’s actual word, baseline, means a benchmark for comparison purposes. Maybe it’s a new standard brought to the table by the bearer of the new scent, which leads to the quivering ankle bells.

Immature Animals
When the blood turned pink I should’ve known,
should’ve set my quiver for meat, downed
the dandelion greens. Instead I climbed into

a pot, added salt, became a handful
of small bells. Undulated to recall myself
as sea. Underwater the siren’s cry is safe —

on land, my violet eyes undeniable. I wanted the alarm
to drown my thoughts, to spare my palms for prayer,
from reaching. I sniffed all manner of immature

animals, most, with their hard parts barely bridled,
met my eye, were willing to spill themselves.
Holding my breath after the branch snapped,

cleaning my teeth with their bones, I never thought
I’d be the hunter. What happened to the crown
I knit from bluebells, the soft waves I cultivated

in the pool of my throat. Was the bush of my belly
just a dream? In three days you’ll return with your
bluebeard and your new scent, make sounds

that seem like want with your trachea. Obedient
to the baseline, I’ll string a thin strand of brass bells
around my ankle, watch them quiver.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

In a single poem Gwendolyn Brooks wraps up in a big bow the harrowing, goofy joy, the confused exultation salted with brow-knitting angst, that enters into raising yourself with children. “Life for my child is simple, and is good” is the title line of a Brooks poem published in Poetry, September 2024.

Life for my child is simple, and is good.
He knows his wish. Yes, but that is not all.
Because I know mine too.
And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things, […]

What comes next flouts expectation. Brooks has prepared us for something with her curious adjectives “undeep” and “unabiding.” What are those un-usual things she shares a wish for with her child?

Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window
Or tipping over an ice box pan
Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet
Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.

There it is — the flash of mischievous toleration residing in Brooks’s persona. She enlarges on it with that rhythmic forward gear of hers:

No. There is more to it than that.
It is that he has never been afraid.
Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a beautiful crash,
And the blocks fall, down on the people’s heads,
And the water comes slooshing sloppily out across the kitchen floor.
And so forth.

And lo the chair falls. The mock epic tone supports the whimsy. The falling of the blocks is artfully comma-paused, heightening a child’s delight in their downward trajectory to the people’s heads. An apt coinage — “slooshing” — augments the sloppiness of an emergent escapade. And so forth — the dry summation clinches the riff’s gentle irony with a note of resignation coupled with acknowledgement of the blithe ways in which tykes slither through and slam into their world.

A hallmark of well-oiled English is contraction in many contexts, formal and informal: “that’s” (“that is”), “he’s” (“he has”), etc. Brooks’s avoidance of such forms in this poem conveys weight to what poses as casual speech. It’s a subtle elevator of tone.

The poem ends with a swoop into profundity that I stretch for a word to describe. What I come up with is diamantine.

Not that success, for him, is sure, infallible.
But never has he been afraid to reach.
His lesions are legion.
But reaching is his rule.

I’ve quoted the entire poem! I’ll have to live with the shame of unraveling it when it says all it needs to without me. Every poem of Gwendolyn Brooks’s in the September magazine — there are several — has me in thrall. That issue is archival now — the October one has since arrived. But a good poem is what Ezra Pound said it is: news that keeps on being news.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

Adjacency can have a downside when it sparks comparison. “Praise Song for Annie Allen” by Angela Jackson is published alongside Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Memorial to Ed Bland” in Poetry, September 2024. The juxtaposition drives home for me how brightly Brooks shines as a writer.

Jackson’s “Praise Song” pays respect to Brooks’s second volume of poetry titled Annie Allen. The tribute has movement familiarly endearing like that, say, of a butterfly.

Before you
There was none so high
Minded,
So elegantly eloquent.
You were high standing
Fruit.
[…]

“Elegantly eloquent” is adverb heavy, but the text stays airborne. Showy enjambments with “minded” and “fruit” are their own reward. The tribute has a deft enough ring to it; it just happens to sit opposite a text that beats wing like a windhover. 

Brooks eulogizes a fellow Chicago poet named Ed Bland killed in WWII. Her poem leads with italicized fact, as from a clipped obit: … killed in Germany March 20, 1945; / volunteered for special dangerous mission / … wanted to see action…

Her entry point has outrageous daring:

He grew up being curious
And thinking things are various.
Nothing was merely deleterious
Or spurious.
[…]

It takes brass to elicit buy-in on the deadpan rhyming of a litany of Latinate words which conjointly nail a vast dimension of her subject’s character. The youth she knew was perceptive and connective and intuitive; he had an expansive, reflecting mind. All of that gets established in four lines memorably and with impudence. The spunky emphasis conveyed by the clipped, two-word finale of the stanza previews the knack for straight-ahead rhythm and phrasing that juices the poem’s unsentimental tenderness.

I feel I’ve already said too much. The practice of commenting on poetry is heartbreaking, and notoriously spurious; heartbreaking because you have to leave out most of what you want to say — you can’t quote the whole damn poem waxing rhapsodic at every turn; spurious because commentary devours readerly bandwidth which in all likelihood is better invested in the poem itself. 

I’ll quote only the second stanza, then, and try to conclude quickly.

Or good.
HIs mother could
Not keep him from a popping-eyed surprise
At things. He would
Be digging everywhere until things gave.
Or did not give. Among his dusty ruins,
Suddenly there’d be his face to see,
And its queer, wonderful expression, salted
With this cool, twirling awe.
[…]

What resonates for me is the the early blush of a raging curiosity, a young sojourner’s unselfconscious demonstrativeness over the gains and setbacks of discovery. The language is eventful, unpredictable; it crackles and throws sparks. I have to exclaim how Brooks’s use of the verb “give” in this passage is straight from the beating heart of American vernacular, or at least from the dialect that raised me. When something “gives,” it cedes to probing, shows itself truly, reveals a bit of essence. A conundrum, in giving, yields ground to a curious young man’s unyielding gaze. Sometimes.

Death is a topic on which people are willing to let poetry have a say — mostly they’re too busy for it. What Auden wrote on the occasion of Yeats’s death is gold standard in the genre. Gwendolyn Brooks’s elegy is from the same vein.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved