May 19, 2013

Dear Friend,

I’m sitting in the garden of an old house here in Noting Hill, reading an anthology of young British poets called Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK. It’s amazing how similar and how different the poetry of the United States and The UK really are seeing how the basic tool being used is absolutely the same! Rhyme and meter are still alive and well on this island but so is the prose poem and a kind of free verse that seems both free and sometimes shy about its own possibilities. Some exciting work in this selection is being done by poets such as Marcus Slease, Amy De’Ath, Ahren Warner, Rachael Allen, Emily Critchley, and someone named Jonty Tiplady.  There’s a range of energy here and it expresses, perhaps, a moment where young British poets are beginning to look away from their Iambic parents and toward something wilder inside themselves… or perhaps I’m being West-Coast-Centric and only want them to be wild. Either way it seems like an exciting time here and perhaps also a time where well-defined groups that identify as Marxist poets or Avant-Garde poets or just plain old poets begin moving out of their safe-houses and into the streets to party together, to spill into one another, and create a poetry community that is loose and vibrant. Any poet or reader of poetry in The States who wishes to know what’s going on over here should pick up this anthology.

I read here in London the other night and got the chance to meet some of these poets and hear them read. I wish you were with me, all of you, and that we could begin to build a bridge over the Atlantic and be in touch with these poets in a new way.

Instead of thinking of Shakespeare we might think of this:

“Now I’m real nakedness some kind of hay bale girl a goofball/ actress jumping rivers in the Comic Adventure of Boots” – Amy De’Ath

“I liked to read/ on you all my false news it went across your head like The/ Financial District and how you glowed with it” – Rachael Allen

“Matisse, radiance of crepe, cancer smarting like a bitch”  — Ahren Warner

Believe me,

Matthew

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

As I sit here at my desk in Northwest Portland, in a lime-green apartment full of skylights, sandwiched between Tin House Magazine and Tin House Books, reading the dynamic and very brave poems my grad students at Portland State are writing—I find myself thinking, in the most basic terms, about what it means to be instructed by a poem. What are we talking about when we say we turn to poems for instruction?

Richard Hugo is the presiding poet-spirit in the M.F.A. program where I usually teach, The University of Montana.  From my (weirdly sunny) perch here in Oregon, casting a long glance back at my home state, I want to consider one of Hugo’s most-celebrated most-anthologized poems, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” from his 1973 volume The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, in the hope of finding some provisional answers.

The poem opens with “You might come here Sunday on a whim.” (you can read the entire poem at the end of this post) The “you” in that first line seems to be a visitor, not unlike the poet himself, who, in his essay “The Triggering Town,” recommends to fellow poets that it might help “to use scenes (towns perhaps) that seem to vivify themselves as you remember them but in which you have no real emotional investment other than the one that grows out of the strange way the town appeals to you, the way it haunts you later when you should be thinking about paying your light bill.”

So you (the visitor, the poet, the speaker, the reader) come here some Sunday to take a look around, and although you’re not from Philipsburg, the town still makes some claim on you.  “Say your life broke down” is the first indication that what follows is a vision; you have to go there in your imagination and walk the streets, and try out—or try on—a life.  Whatever whim brought you here, there’s nothing remotely whimsical about the town, with its numbing failures, its streets “laid out by the insane” Philipsburg is in the last stages of collapse, constituted almost entirely of dilapidated, gutted structures, and eerily emptied of people.  A few isolate souls remain:  the jail’s single prisoner, a couple of local drivers (maybe driving in circles around the block, pathetically gunning their engines), the old man who was twenty when the jail was built, and a waitress.  There are mostly men, because the “best liked girls…leave each year for Butte.”

Life flows out of Philipsburg; the hotels were closed because people stopped coming; even the single prisoner doesn’t know why he’s “in,” why he’s been held back—and yet you’ve come here looking for something. Where is everyone? The poem tells us that the only surviving institutions are churches and bars, and yet we find out later that nobody’s in the churches:  the church bell rings and no one comes. In a sense, the town’s buildings are just as alive—just as dead—as the citizens themselves: the jail turned 70 this year. Evidence of the late stages of decay is everywhere. The huge mill is in ruin but “won’t finally fall down,” the economy is in shambles, and what’s left beyond these few persisting husks of life are the most impoverished human emotions:  rage, hatred, failure, defeat, scorn, and further beneath these—fueling these, perhaps most primal—boredom.

These are the degrees of gray, the filth itself, imaginatively entered and described, and they hold out the central challenge of the poem, which is not so far from what American citizens and readers and poets are facing today. What, beyond rage and boredom, is left of us?

Philipsburg’s past is nothing but a souvenir, and there seems to be some suggestion in the poem that, however specific and vivid, memories themselves won’t sustain you.  That one last good kiss, that one last good year (the 1907 boom), those eight once-productive silver mines (“going” in a way that the town’s current citizens can’t seem to), the very springs beneath the dance floor—each memory is “resolved” into a single, sweeping, generalizing, impersonal final gaze, figured here as a field of “panoramic green” that surrounds the town and is literally being eaten away by cattle. Boredom or memory: both do away with the vital, burning particulars, and Hugo hints that our eyes themselves are compromised, “two dead kilns” like two dead eye-sockets looming over the town, trying to grasp at something that once fed them. “Isn’t this your life—that ancient kiss / still burning out your eyes?” These are extinguishing fires—the fires that, like the forces of anonymity, wipe you out, slowly eating away at your spirit until you succumb.

This whole town, your whole life, announces nothing but its defeat, and the church bell announces its defeat, and all the empty houses ring with defeat.  And no one is responding to the call:  no one comes. This is a crisis of human response, and it is also the province of poetry. As Hugo understood, poems are at their most essential responses, genuine responses to a call that comes from outside the self—from the broken, spite-driven world. And so this speaker pushes on, hoping for some kind of instruction, some sense of purpose. What will suffice?  Are magnesium and scorn “sufficient” to support a town, a life? What can support your life, any life, given that the world will not offer you certain things—the “towering blondes, good jazz and booze,”—given that your desires will not be met?

And then a response arrives.  It is the first real action or undertaking on the part of the speaker in the poem: “Say no to yourself.”  It echoes the original “Say your life broke down,” and seems to mean, in this deepened context:  say no to your life breaking down; no, this isn’t enough; no to some part of your spirit that just wants to be extinguished. And the whole poem starts to pivot around that no.

Say no to yourself.  The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse.  Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

The old man, with whom the speaker appears engaged in conversation, is still able to laugh although his lips are collapsing around his mouth (The rhyme between “still laughs” and “collapse” suggests that this laughter is hardly carefree. And the description of the old man’s puckered mouth seems to be a kind of cruel parody of the “ancient kiss” that reminded the speaker of a time when he felt alive.). We don’t know, then, if an actual conversation is taking place, or if this old man is simply laughing and the speaker is imagining the old man’s thoughts. On the weird border between an actual and an imagined exchange, the moment is especially charged because the landscape of the poem thus far has been intensely desolate and solitary. This is the last remaining shape of human contact, even if it only takes place in the speaker’s head.  And out of this exchange comes what is to my mind the most crucial line in the poem, in all its visceral immediacy: You tell him no. This phrase is of a different order than “Isn’t this your life”—where the speaker is articulating something he already feels to be true—and it goes beyond “Say no to yourself,” where the refusal is somehow more general and more exclusively directed at the contents and choices of the speaker’s own life. Here, the speaker is simply—and extravagantly—refusing a stranger’s death, or more specifically, refusing the man’s resignation in the face of death. (“Someday soon, / he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.  You tell him no.”)

One of the things that makes this gesture so striking is that it’s undertaken on behalf of another:  it’s not the speaker’s life in question, but it might as well be his.  And the speaker’s refusal is striking because it’s outrageous:  nobody can say no to death, and certainly someone like this old man, about whom we know nothing beyond his apparent physical decay, is perfectly correct in maintaining that at some point, perhaps soon, he’ll go to sleep and not wake up. What we seem to be witnessing, then, is the sudden assertion, on the part of the speaker, of some buried or latent force of will—a will made manifest at the point of greatest urgency and threat of vanishing. I refuse your death; I insist against all plausibility, against everything I know to be true about the world, that you not succumb. And with this gesture Hugo puts his voice into a stream of beautiful, agonizing speech, a whole company and history of voices—the voices of poets who rage against death and against the habits, conventions, and dull, languishing routines of the self that threaten to make us die every day.

With “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” as in so many of his poems, Hugo offers us a city-map straight into, through, and—in a very fleeting, tenuous way—out of despair.  Some bedrock defiance of death is in you; you have a stake in life, this man’s and your own. “The car that brought you here still runs.”  There is money to buy lunch with; you can still eat.  Someone’s bringing you food:  there is company, you’re being served. And, as if to accentuate these reminders of worth, the very materials of the world seem to be making themselves present.  Although mined from elsewhere and so not supporting Philipsburg, the money is silver (gray, but lit—gray, but still burning), and like the silver of the change itself, the waitress’ red hair is “lit,” casting a red-gold, almost hallowed light against the wall.  There’s a flicker of the erotic among these newly luminous surfaces (Hugo pairs “silver” with “slender”), and we feel how hard-fought are the color and the light against that thick, lingering backdrop of obsessive grays.  Something at once small and tangible and ethereal and shimmering has appeared:  the light from the waitress’ red hair seems to spread to the wall itself, as if the confines of that space were, however quietly, expanded and transformed.  And all the eroded surfaces in the poem—from the meaningless grid of streets to the outward collapse of machines and concrete and persons—seem to momentarily give way to this singular illumination that is no reminder of a past life, but altogether of the present; that is not made of abstract, future desires, like the town of “towering blondes,” but of a glow that seems to emanate from this one woman, right now, in this last space on earth. However temporary it might be, it’s here, and it’s real. The poem never suggests that it will last: but that it happened. For a moment, the world was lit from within.

The poem follows an arc from the “last-one” sense of things in the first two stanzas (that last one kiss, the last one prisoner, the only restaurant) to the “no one” of stanza three, to the “no” of stanza four, and comes to rest on the apparently casual “no matter” of the final phrase. No matter wretchedness and degradation, no matter rage and hopelessness and constant, corrosive defeat:  some piece of life, some premonition of our worth, survives. “Call it,” writes Hugo in his essay “In Defense of Creative Writing Classes,”

the obsessive and irresistible love of being alive, if you can stand the rhetoric.  It is born of the certainty we will disappear fast enough…No matter how justified our despair, we still live in a world where circumstances that make death preferable to life are limited by our revulsion.  When moments that support our awareness of ourselves and each other, fond or sad,…insist, some of us would not deny them any more than we would deny our lives.

Joanna Klink is the author of three books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, and Raptus. She teaches poetry at The University of Montana and is currently the Tin House Writer-in-Residence at PSU.

hhhhh

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

by Richard Hugo

jjjjjj

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down.  The last good kiss

you had was years ago.  You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

hhhh

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year.  The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage.  Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

jjjj

Isn’t this your life?  That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement:  ring and no one comes?

Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium

and scorn sufficient to support a town,

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

jjjjj

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.

The car that brought you here still runs.

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it’s mined, is silver

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of four books of poetry, including Portuguese (Tin House Book/Octopus), O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011), The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean, 2011), and The Alps (Flim Forum, 2008)—among other solo and collaborative works in print, on cassette, online and on vinyl. He is currently co-editing, with poet Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of writings by Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books, forthcoming). He was born in California, and has lived most recently in Maine, Taiwan, and Arizona. He maintains some part of himself at vispoetica.tumblr.com.

Brandon will be reading this evening in Boston as part of the Tin House/Octopus AWP Party.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of four books of poetry, including Portuguese (Tin House Book/Octopus), O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011), The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean, 2011), and The Alps (Flim Forum, 2008)—among other solo and collaborative works in print, on cassette, online and on vinyl. He is currently co-editing, with poet Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of writings by Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books, forthcoming). He was born in California, and has lived most recently in Maine, Taiwan, and Arizona. He maintains some part of himself at vispoetica.tumblr.com.

Brandon will be reading at the Tin House/Octopus AWP Party.

While we ponder the meaning of another year lost  work feverishly over the holiday break to bring you more exciting blog diversions, we hope you’ll take a moment to revisit some of our favorite essays that appeared on The Open Bar in 2012.

Jack Gilbert remembered.

An interview with Ben Fama.

Alien Poems.

Cate Marvin’s wives.

Poetic drama.

Track K. Smith asks you a question.

An Adrienne Rich memory.

Nick Flynn’s pheromones.

Oregon Poets.

A Jane Austin Board Game.

Filled with lines that demand to be re-read and images that linger, the poem, which now reads prophetic and familiar, was an immediate favorite for many of us on staff. We hope you’ll fall for it too.

ON THE INEPTITUDE OF CERTAIN HURRICANES
By Cate Marvin

As the leering boss poised by a photocopier
might prevent a secretary from completing
a simple task, she will approach the machine,
dread-filled, ocean’s stomach of inevitability—
for certainly he will lean to her shell-small

ear (pinched with a plain pearl) to impart
his jism, words jetting deep up from within
his throat: the grocery stores are ransacked.
Generators battled for. Gallons of water lugged
beneath arms to car trunks. As if we might die.

Only past midnight rain begins its sluicing
through tree branches, lashes streets’ tarry
lengths, runnels its hasty murks down drains.
Wait for it to hit. One waits, does not sleep.
As if it’s better to be struck while conscious.

Which brings us to the question of why it is
only tonight that we stay awake, lie in wait
for its punch. Brings us to the question of how
is it that we, as a highly developed species, are
even capable of sleep, since strikes lie always

in wait, even when hurricane is not a season,
this weather that cannot but be our own, is all
that of which we are ourselves capable. Stand
in cashier lines and your jawline dies to break
at the impact of an anonymous fist. Because you

talk too much. Because of your lips. Have you
not been told, in no uncertain terms, you’ll die
before your time, by an individual who in no
uncertain terms wants you to die? So lie dead
to this wind, unnoose yourself from weather,

because oblivion becomes us. Waking, I clear
glasses from tables, empty ashtrays, go out for
a drive. See whole red clouds of tree heads sunk
onto sidewalks, sirens stream scarlet embers
along the surfaces of knee-deep puddles. Every

single block’s been hit, minus mine. Minus me,
I can’t complain. Minus me means a vacation from
me. Yet, will my lovers be concerned by my absence?
This problem is quickly solved since I have none.
Go ahead, yank my insides out. Name your pleasure.

Cate Marvin’s second book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, appeared in 2007. The poems in this issue are from her third book, a work in progress that is forthcoming from Norton. A Whiting Writers’ Award recipient, Marvin is an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and cofounder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

V

By Matthew Dickman

888
The skinny girl walking arm-in-arm
with her little sister
is wearing a shirt that says
T A L K  N E R D Y  T O  M E
and I want to.
I want to put my bag of groceries down
beside the fire hydrant
and whisper something in her ear
about long division.
I want to stand behind her and run
a single finger down her spine
while she tells me about all her correlatives.
Maybe she’ll moan a little
when I tell her that x equals negative-b
plus or minus the square root
of b-squared minus four (a)(c) all over
2A. I have my hopes.
I could show her my comic books
and PlayStation. We could pull out
my old D&D cards
and sit in the basement with a candle lit.
I know enough about Dr.Who
and the Starfleet Enterprise
to get her shirt off, to unbutton her jeans.
We could work out string theory
all over her bedroom.
We could bend space together.
But maybe that’s not what she’s asking.
The world’s been talking dirty
ever since she’s had the ears to listen.
It’s been talking sleazy to all of us
and there’s nothing about the hydrogen bomb
that makes me want to wear a cock ring
or do it in the kitchen while a pot of water boils.
Maybe, with her shoulders slouched
the way they are and her long hair
covering so much of her face,
she’s asking, simply, to be considered
something more than a wild night, a tight
curl of pubic hair, the pink,
complicated structures of nipples.
Maybe she wants to be measured beyond
the teaspoon shadow of the anus
and the sweet mollusk of the tongue,
beyond the equation of limbs and seen
as a complete absolute.
And maybe this is not a giant leap
into the science of compassion, but it’s something.
So when I pass her
I do exactly what she has asked of me,
I raise my right hand and make a V
the way Vulcans do when they wish someone well,
hoping she gets what she wants, even
if it has to be in a galaxy far away.

Matthew Dickman is the author of two chapbooks, Amigos and Something about a Black Scarf, and two full-length poetry collections. His first book, All-American Poem, was winner of the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, published by American Poetry Review and distributed by Copper Canyon Press. His second full collection of poetry, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, was published by Norton in 2012.

This week we delve into the vault to bring you a poem from Cat Richardson, a new voice when she appeared in Hope/Dread, #41. Check out this doubled sided issue where Lorrie Moore, one of our nation’s most astute and sliest writers, talks to Tin House senior editor Michelle Wildgen about the subversive uses of humor and wordplay, Ander Monson and Nick Cave wallow in the fictional depths of despair and depravity, and Matthea Harvey and Deborah Landau plumb the poetic dark heart.
*
*
Half is Just Enough to Make Sure You Will Eat Another Someday
by Cat Richardson

Enough of this, this mania, and the fear that your body will turn against you.
Keep waking up in the empty morning and its thin light,
and everything will be the same for the rest of us.
This should calm you: that nobody can see the blood that’s been rolling
through you, shouting that here there is damage, that here
rest is impossible, that your hand can hold only so many
pebbles from the bottom of the stream before they plink back
to the water and the sand. Maybe with a sneeze you could start over—
you are impossible like that—and we could share our time carefully,
chase these things away, the pigeons that stared slyly at our sandwiches.
This time is an orange that will not be eaten by either of us alone.
If I gave you the whole thing, you would tire of the
twinge after the seventh segment.

………………………………There are things I cannot say even to myself:
that some smiles make me curl into myself like a dead snake. My skin
has become porous and this two-way seeping has given me a new color.
Watching the days crank lazily makes me crazy. The smile, the lurch backwards.
Feeling memory bundle around me like a blanket making each step slower. Kneeling
in front of things and wondering why they feel like old friends.

Cat Richardson is a freelance reviewer and first-rate whistler who lives in Hoboken, NJ.

Whether it is Bolivian Edmundo Paz-Soldan writing from the point of view of a young Kansas woman exhuming graves in Srebenica or Romanian Dumitru Tsepeneag bending time and form in his romantic Robbe-Grillet-inspired fable, the writers in our International issue pushed the stylistic and emotional envelope. It’s an issue that stands up to the test of time, as does Vera Pavlova’s contribution to it.

One Touch in Seven Octaves

by Vera Pavlova
Translated by Steven Seymour

1.

A light touch with a slant
like a first-grader’s handwriting, with a tilt:
you brush away a hair from my cheek
with a motion vaguely tender, stretching
my face slightly upward and to the left,
turning me into a doe-eyed geisha.
With a slant, yet in a straight line:
the shortest and the quickest path.

2.

The trick is in the suffixes, diminutive and endearing:
to diminish first, then to caress,
and by caressing to reduce to naught,
and then to search in panic, where can you be?
Have I dropped you into the gap
between the body and the soul?
And all the while you are right here,
in my arms. So heavy, so enormous!

3.

First, cursory caresses, on the surface,
light, a kind of coloratura: crumbs of
pizzicato in spots which seemingly require
a brusque, tempestuous treatment,
then with a bow across the secret strings,
the ones that were not touched at the beginning,
then across the non-existent strings or, more exactly,
the ones we have never suspected of existing.

4.

Are my palms rubbing your shoulders,
or are your smooth shoulders rubbing my palms,
making them drier, sharper, more perfect?
The more repetitive a caress, the more healing it is.
Water slowly grinds stone; caresses
make the body light, chiseled, compact,
the way it wants to be,
the way it once had been.

5.

Who plays blindman’s-buff with those aged twenty,
hide-and-seek with those aged thirty?
Love does. Ah, the silky pelts,
the simple rules, the witless stakes!
Is it easy at thirty-five to say goodbye to love?
It is, not for the reasons of great shame involved,
but because there is no spot more tender, rosier,
more concealed than a scar.

6.

Within a hand’s reach from the foreskin
is fleshlessness, dense, resonant, boundless.
Touching, because of its nature, takes part
in the mystery of disembodiment.
I am rid of the body, but the shiver stays,
and so do the pain, the joy.
The shiver, the pain, the joy have no fear
that the skin might never reappear.

7.

How tender the sensation of ants racing,
how many shivers in a slow progression!
Some take no less than a full five minutes
to get from one vertebra to the next.
For years a gentle hand has been the trainer
coaxing them to run from one tiny hair
to the next, until the finishing line,
until it is madness, until . . . Hey,
are you sleeping?

From issue 36, Oliver De La Paz’s wonderful explanation as to why the letter has yet to arrive.

Excuse Poem

I was planning on writing you but

the hawthorns were like blown fuses.

The energy in the room was a bad kite

and the clock around my neck chimed

as I fingered the Kmart blouses.

Clothespins held me as a call

from a conch shell holds a ship.

I was a madman, dressed to go out,

but the houseplants were on fire.

The salmon were lustrous like diamonds

in the gutter and I had to cradle each one.

I was drunk on crème de menthe

and roomfuls of my furniture shadowed

my every move. Oh sad evening,

the meatpacking trucks were at my door!

The books were slapping like cowboys

in their leather chaps! I was hot

as six reading lamps. I was sad and dirty

like my big-haired rock loves. Breath,

oh breath, I was kept alive like a queen

on horseback. I was floured

and I was finched. I was zephyred, alas,

blown back to Hellenic ruin.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry. Names Above Houses , Furious Lullaby , and Requiem for the Orchard, winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada. He teaches at Western Washington University.