EthicalDative

…
The dead wake for nothing.
Or wake & nothing
is still there.

The wide meadow. Deep grass.
Distant ships.
The far fires

Only glimpsed
from a distance.
Nothing looks back,

blinks twice.
…
(Kevin Young, from “Usher”)

That “blinks twice” produced a red-letter reading moment for me, a laugh of surprised delight and recognition. Recognition of what? I ask myself. I suppose it’s recognition of a conceit, an old word, I think, in the poetry vineyard. It turns on the term “nothing,” a workaday word if ever there was one, repeated 3 times in an increasingly interesting way. When it’s still there, fair enough; when it looks back, wait a minute! When it blinks twice, the full punch is delivered.

Spooky and delicious. Rather than a container of absence, “nothing” is turned into a presence, perhaps even ominous and aggressive. I think of the Canadian forest fires “blinking” at us. The mega-nothing which they imply encroaches.

The entire poem, with others of Kevin Young’s, is published in Poetry, July/August 2023.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

… And yet
the escapement enforces its circle
of unbreakable numbers…

Sakia Hamilton’s verse “From ‘All Souls’” in Poetry, July/August 2023 refers to a pocket watch in a cupboard.

Dancing with a technical term in a poem is a wily achievement. Words like “escapement” have a life of their own even when you don’t know exactly what they mean. Lookup is a chance to phrase a complex definition in one’s own words — an act of assimilation. Here goes: An escapement is a contrivance that triggers a periodic, measured shift of position in one mass relative to another. Using those words gives me a sense of owning the term, and a greater appreciation of how it enforces its circle / of unbreakable numbers in the poem.

Hamilton throws a curve ball in what follows, which is also the conclusion of her poem:

… Someone
has let it run down. Don’t turn back,
it’s the wrong way, is the relation of
chronology to history at all valuable here.

At first blush I want to see a question in the last sentence, yet the structure makes it impossible. What I perceive instead is a flex of syntax permitted by English in which a subordinating conjunction and copula are elided before an adjectival clause modifying “relation.” The words “that is” are to be understood before “at all valuable here.”

Perhaps I should have said that the poem has remarked prior to this on the fragility of the wound-down clock’s hands: They would snap off with pressure / from the smallest finger. Turning them back is the wrong way to rewind the clock. The numbers, on the other hand, are unbreakable, and the escapement enforces an inexorable forward motion around them. History likewise flows in only one direction, and that’s the relation to clock time that has value.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

Who is this Phillips person? — I wondered after reading aloud what had looked like a forbiddingly long poem in Poetry, July/August 2023. (The biographical note tells me what I dread knowing: He’s a distinguished professor of English!)

The poem, “Child of Nature,” has knocked me silly and induced a state of maudlin rapture. (Everything I jot down here I’ll surely regret as hasty over-sharing, leaving a good poem hard done by with my petty tribute. That’s my disclaimer.)

Only a dozen lines or so into “Child of Nature” did I detect blank verse — so unforced, transparent, vernacular, yet so true to measure throughout. The writer weaves internal rhyme and flashes of sonic dazzle, light-touch literary and of-the-moment cultural reference, ironic self awareness, and language-conscious wit with an extended meditation on what “nature” is and how it’s intuited by one whose roots are urban.

Starting with the line No one is ever alone with their thoughts, I had to stop reading for a moment. You know that constriction in the throat and onset of congestive nasality that signals getting all swimmy-eyed, when your next words will surely be croaky or sound like a wheeze, so you fall silent to regroup? That’s what happened before I steadied voice and followed the poem to its serene consummation:

Alone on a cliff or here beside me,
We are crowded by presence and perchance
Where listening to stream and street we hear
The other, even as one of them gleams
And the other gleams we can’t forget
One or the other; ethereal stream
And electric street are parts of the same long
Link in the same human chain. I came
To this poem, the long one, with a lot to say.
I’d sung my art before this with real zeal,
Chanting through three moods so as not to forget:
The ground, then heaven, then the weapon. Years
Passed. And now from my high window, the cliffs
And canyons of these avenues call me
Back to sing through fire for their sweet sake.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved