EthicalDative

There must be a type of experience that isn’t uncommon among folk, yet is felt individually as epochal and singular. I classify it as contemplation of a certain prospect from a particular height in circumstances which combine to induce a geyser-burst of sheer animal spirits. A spasm of serene thrill, as it were, in which life and hope and possibility appear all rolled up in one and shimmering in the reachable distance. My moment happened at night on a modest hilltop in the vicinity of Villefranche-sur-Saône with lights winking in the shadowy expanses way off yonder. Breezes, stars, romantic partner, bit of wine, and blood thundering in its arteries. In my telling it sounds like a hackneyed cinematic trope, but Kwame Dawes made my French hilltop moment come surging back, mixed with sweet, stupid tears, in the finale of his poem “Walk ‘Bout.”*

It’s pertinent to mention the Bob Marley line with which Dawes prefaces the poem: Bless my eyes this morning.

Kingston is the poem’s place, haunted by ghosts loitering in the pens… a village of gutters and middens…, where a wheezing boy roams and knocks about, his shoes / worn down by the deformity of an old ankle wound. A turning point for the boy is the sound of reggae, psalming its apocalypse across this city. Until then, he says, I had no language for the holiness / of this Kingston.

That language is supplied by the griot (“It sipple out there”) and the roots man (“It slide out there”) calling me up / to the hills, and me walking, child astray, up Jack’s Hill, aimlessly moving toward a certain absence… from where I see / the city laid out before me, contained by sea and mountain…

Piecemeal summary is inadequate to how the poem masses itself toward its culmination in a kind of terrified joy. Its own “distilled language” is indispensable:

… far enough to become art, glorious enough to calm
my terror of predators and temptations, from there,
a city requires psalms, songs, and the distilled language.
I can’t say I knew this then, not in such clear holy
prophecy, but the impregnation of need did happen,
the disquiet of the anticipation of an unseen forming, a kind
of lamentation long before the amassed dead drew
closer to my door. Bless my eyes, oh God, bless my eyes.

The hook, for me, is the elusive specificity, the dark clarity, that starts with the child aimlessly moving toward a certain absence, and rolls forward in prepositional phrases: … but the impregnation of need did happen, / the disquiet of the anticipation of an unseen forming…

I was a mid-twenties child on my French hilltop. Kwame Dawes connects me with a complex hippity-hop. The gap between “a certain absence” and “an unseen forming” — stunning multivalent formulations — is where youth ends and whatever follows it starts.

*Published in the June 2024 issue of Poetry (not yet available on the Poetry Foundation website at this writing.)

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

Frank Stella has died. He’s the one who said, “What you see is what you see,” with reference to painting (his painting, at least), a slogan someone described as “pithy and enduring.” I liked it so much I had it printed on a tee-shirt several years ago. Then wore that shirt.

I’ve adapted Stella’s slogan, with added emphasis, to reading poetry, because I have a bias, which is this: Publishing has consequences. I should have a say commensurate with the writer’s as to what a poem “means.” It falls to me, a humble (?) reader, to sense its burden and weigh its import. My job is to summon attentiveness, the poem’s to deserve it. What I make of the poem needn’t be, nor even can be, what Helen Vendler or Yvor Winters made, or would make, of it.

This cocky stance gravitates against a nagging unease that a poem will hover beyond my grasp, that I will fail to apprehend the message or signal encoded in it. Here’s a thought: The poem’s words and their layout on the page are its signal. The poem’s message becomes what I take from it and keep for a length of time. If it leaves no mark, verse stayed on the page, poetry didn’t happen.

My attitude makes nothing happen critically, but it keeps me chugging through shed-loads of verse with a mulish resolve verging on enjoyment.

(c)2024 JMN — EthicaDative. All rights reserved

The most terrifying exercise I know is to calculate how many seconds I can expect to live. I refuse. Never send to know for whom the clock ticks. It ticks for thee (not me). I heard my dad in his sixties tell a buddy, “I don’t plan to die.” He was sipping and smoking and enjoying himself. He had another couple of decades left in him at the time. It was a good plan.

Time, time, time… You can’t live with it and can’t live without it. Can’t pump more of it or drill for new reserves. Just runs out when it’s good and ready, and you’re done. Let it count down on its own clock, not on mine.

Blame these straggly thoughts on Trey Moody. In “Against Distance” (Poetry, May 2024) he writes a single sentence that goes for fourteen lines of a seventeen-line poem. The sentence starts here…

I don’t know who needs to hear this
other than me, but the moon will never leave
you,…

and ends here:

… so when you try counting your remaining
moments with the moon, the moon
that will never, ever leave you, give up.

It’s a transparent, readable sentence, too, not Proustian or Jamesian — you know what I mean. Then Moody does a deft turn in the last three lines: Writes three sentences in quick succession, and one of them is a zinger. By that I mean it has the aphoristic sheen of a nugget so quotable it cries out for citation even out of context. I don’t take the bait. Here in toto are the last three lines of the poem with the embedded zinger:

Even the moon inches a little more distant
every year. I’ve heard grief is only love
with nowhere to go. But then you look up.

It may not be the “best” poem of the lot — who am I to distinguish good from bad? — but the moment of my reading it, usually morningtide, and the fact of it saying a particular something in a given way conspire not to “trigger” in me — that word is grubby now — but to wring from me a flicker of joy. You take it where you find it.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved