EthicalDative

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

Christian J. Collier publishes three poems in Poetry, September 2024: “God,” “Case Study” and “The Compline.” Spoken cleanly, rhythmically, hotly, they orbit around experience gleaned from the crucible of propagating life.

Formal religion can be heavy on bone and light on meat. Collier’s poems flesh out the argument with God that makes faith flicker for me as a kind of alive thing in others. The poems emit sparks of light from the human clash with a theology swaddled in hoary patristics, with the unendurable meant to be endured. Paradox’s alter ego is the Great Indefinite, the Hidden-yet-Revealed eidolon which demands abject submission on top of dogged adoration. It has to be unreal and otherworldly to cohere, if at all, in the human psyche.

I’ll write only of Collier’s “God.” It starts here:

I used to think
there was only one of You
before the miscarriage.
Now I am not so sure.
Maybe there are a number of Gods to wade through
before falling at the feet of the last true one:

In an indented block, the poem cycles through a divine catwalk of temporizing avatars attached to primitivistic epithets and reductive seductions:

the jade God we pray to
who does not come or answer
& and the plum one who appears to offer salvation;
the opal God who offers a limited extent of His kingdom
and the olive one who only offers condolences;
let us not forget the violet God that is bad with man
because He is deeply holy.

The poem alights on the ostensibly desirable God: “We all seek the one of manna though, don’t we?” Three stanzas evoke with ambiguous edginess the God “holding all we hunger for / like butterscotch in His palms.” The speaker, traversing inky moments of mundane days and nights, dreams “with eyes open of goading Him into halting my child’s rest, / guiding his or her tiny light close to the brushfire / flickering in my breath.”

Goading Him! The verb is explosive. Indefinite binary “his or her”; light that’s “tiny”; anomalous “halting” of a child’s “rest”; these are stinging formulations. The rest in question is death. An unrealized life form is being sucked back into the impossibly capacious bosom whence it came, or whatever. Where are “mercy” and “justice” in this sorry transaction? The poem voices a despairing piety that seethes to rescue an imperiously snatched entity from “that God.” Here’s the ending:

That God? That great and swollen orange storm?
That’s the God haunting me. The God who keeps His distance.
The God whose star-draped hands I envy.
They come at day’s end
to tuck my baby, my ember, into its infinite, feathered bed.

“My ember” calls back piercingly to the “brushfire flickering in my breath.” I’m rarely reached as acutely as this by poetry in which faith and grief tangle with such expressive fury.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved