EthicalDative

The Poets

There he sat among them
(his old friends) a walking ash
that knows how to smile.
And he still dreamed of a style
so clear it could wash a face
or make a dry mouth sing.
But they laughed, having found
themselves more astonishing.

They would drive their minds
prismatic, strange, each wrapped
in his own ecstatic wires,
over a cliff for language,
while he remained to raise
a few birds from a blank page.

Poem by Bert Meyers in Poetry, January 2023.

Bert Meyers is singled out for celebration in this issue of the magazine. The poem appears, ironically, in a journal that seems to be dominated by writers wrapped in their own ecstatic wires, to borrow Meyers’s phrase. As poems go, there’s relatively little to translate. “A walking ash”? The essay about him mentions that Meyers was a heavy smoker — indeed the habit is implicated in his relatively early death. “Drive their minds over a cliff for language” is so apt it explains itself — the perfect metaphor! — portraying a mode of recondite, self-referential versifying that the speaker dismisses in favor of unassuming eloquence. With its unemphatic rhyming and lucid phrasing the poem is graspable, coherent and concise, all of which makes it linger in the mind, and even on the tongue. I hear a flutter of wings!

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

A turn of phrase can unsettle when the poet goads words beyond their commonly agreed boundaries. When the impertinence works, the reader experiences a shocked flash of assent. Ah yes! I see why you write that she “whirls” her hoe. The poet has created a context which can make the act of whirling be right for a hoe. Perhaps it connotes a manic wielding of the tool whose blur is shared with whirling. Perhaps the context is that of a person in possible breakdown who flails irrationally at grievous loss.

When it doesn’t work, the reader fails to assent. He’s stuck haggling with “whirl,” unable to divorce the word’s weight in his mind from a sense of twirling something in a circle, unable to match the association with any conceivable handling of a hoe.

There’s no “right” response. The writer’s design is to stir the reader with words. The verse is the fact; the writer’s work is done. With the making of it his limits have been tested, his choices made. The rest belongs to the reader. When the reader is stirred, it’s poetry.

Off Interstate 20 / she whirls her hoe / the acreage now / a bedroom wall / a six foot / stand of weeds… / the house lost to / a lightening fire in / ‘68 and she / whirls her hoe / It lifts and / disappears / lifts / disappears / in the sun / in the moon / The relatives pass / at 70 yelling / GIVE IT UP BEATRICE / The weeds keep working / at that one / charred wall… [My bolding.]
(Charles Behlen, “Widow Zebach,” Dreaming at the Wheel, Corona Publishing Co., 1988, p. 31)

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved