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Djelloul Marbrook sounds like no one else. If I had to compare him to someone, I would say Emily Dickinson, oddly—because no one sounds like Dickinson, either. But that stubborn originality; the short, gnomic utterances that turn idiomatic speech in odd ways to illuminate unusual places; the elusive grace—these reveal Marbrook’s lifelong reading of Dickinson. Other lifelong influences are Rimbaud and Arab culture; the fact that his obsessions are international sets him apart from many contemporary American poets. Then there is the fact that Marbrook is himself like no one else; as Dickinson put it, “There is always this to be grateful for—that one is oneself, and no one else.”

Far From Algiers considers the unusual situation of Marbrook’s birth, and his consequent feelings of otherness, which becomes one of the book’s main themes: seeing through the notion of belonging to any group as the basis for exclusion and violence; as he writes in “The Price of Admission,” “Give me members, I’ll give you war.” In astonishingly unsentimental terms, Marbrook’s poems narrate his conception, “a spurt in thoughtless dark,” (from the poem “Djelloul”): his father was a Bedouin, an Ouled Nail from Bou Saada in M’Sila Wilaya (Province), his mother a Bohemian painter of German ancestry from New York City. Spurned, Marbrook’s mother returned to the US, where the infant was shockingly neglected (because he was both illegitimate and of mixed race, a “person of color,” as we now say, at a time when neither was acceptable), shipped off to an English private school, where he was molested. He employs psychological splitting that leads to surrealism in some of the poems, such as “Autobiography,” in which he, too, rejects his young self:

I left the little bastard and never looked back.
What became of him had nothing to do with me
nor with anyone else involved in the project.

He views himself from the outside, as an other (Je est un autre, in Rimbaud’s famous formulation). Like Berryman’s alter ego Henry, it is hard to see how he (Djelloul) survived.

William Matthews said that in every real poem, someone’s heart is breaking. Some of the most heartbreaking poems in this volume have to do with his rejection by his own mother, as in the poem “Under the Grates,” in which he keeps faith with “the desolate . . . in subway cars,” counting among those who disliked him “lovers and my mother./ I think of them with a sob and permanent dismay.” Other heartbreakers, such as “What Good Did My Own Good Do Me,” deal with the subject of molestation, although more obliquely, ending, “I knew I had a fatal crack/ I squirmed away from touch.” The poem “The Angel Departs” opens:

Now every creak and whimper of light
molests me in an ancient bed

I read this metaphorically, until I listened to the excellent CD of Marbrook reading the volume: Here Marbrook provides explanatory headnotes, as at a reading, that clarify some of the more difficult poems, such as this one. He also writes (and, again, speaks utterly unabashedly) about nervous breakdown, which is not unusual among survivors of abuse and neglect, in poems such as “The Men’s Room.” But he also seems to have come to terms completely with all the difficulties of his youth; at the terrifically moving end of “Autobiography,” he admits that he put himself “in harm’s way” as “the safest place” for an unwanted child, in a magical bid for rescue:

There my father, coming to his senses, could come to find me.
He never did, but late in life I found his child
cowering in a corner and picked him up and calmed him.

He seems to have healed himself so profoundly that he becomes able to write about his mother, Juanita Guccione, with love and respect, in poems such as “Exile” and “A Sixty-Bag Departure”; one of her paintings provides the book’s cover art, and Marbrook continues to strive to find her work the audience it deserves.

Marbrook looks at the U.S., specifically post 9/11 (when he began writing poetry again after a hiatus of many decades), with its xenophobia enflamed, and, indeed, looks at all of Western culture, from his unique position, his “advanced degree in bastardy,” as he calls it in “Sinistral.” In this lovely poem he states:

I am to the left of belonging,
forlorn, bereft and looking in.
Some are conceived under stars,
I was conceived under stairs.

And also, “There is only my djinni to lead me/ through the loud exhibitionism of the world.” He has spent much of his lifetime researching Arab history, and critiques our hegemonic view that writes out Arab influence, such as the zero, born out of India by Arabs, in Marbrook’s view, as a necessary corrective to the Greeks’ fixation on form, as he writes in “Profanity.” Some of the most beautiful poems spring from this deeply imagined sense of his fatherland; in “Escape Route,” for example, he imagines, to save his sanity, “a Moorish garden in al-Andalus/ where an old man is watching/ aspens write on walls.”

But the poems are neither strictly political nor confessional; all of this personal and historic background gives the poems weight and gravitas, but it is not exactly what they are “about.” What makes these poems so marvelous is their light touch, their frequent “escape into the beautiful,” an elusive quality that makes you feel, just when you think you understand a poem, such as “The Memory of Sand,” that it is about something else entirely. Again like Dickinson’s, these short poems can be read over and over, making you feel on the verge of an understanding that finally eludes you. It is hard to analyze this magic, how Marbrook does exactly what he does. It is the sleight-of-hand of a seasoned magus. Although Far From Algiers won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, which is for a first book, Marbrook is now 75, a retired newspaperman, who has clearly been thinking and writing hard throughout his long lifetime, to have acquired the wisdom to remind himself, as he does at the end of “The Flutes of the Djinn,” another favorite poem:

Make this gnosis your heart:
Everything is a facet of the same jewel.

You will want to read this book over and over again, and, you may also want, as I did, to listen to the accompanying CD over and over, marveling each time at new facets of the jewel revealed as you turn the poems this way and that. Marbrook has written many other volumes of both poetry and prose over the past decade, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Hear me read and talk about poetry

Far From Algiers music

WAMC, Albany, interview

I heard my stepfather talk about trench warfare as a marksman for the 69th Regiment in World War I. Voices such as his are now silenced, except in the poems of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.

Tony Barnstone’s prize-winning epic Tongue of War reminds us of this as he brings to life the voices of the Pacific war in poetry. And now the 10-part HBO series The Pacific is recreating some of those voices.

But we can turn to an eyewitness poet for an account of that war, one in danger of being overlooked. In many ways Paul Elisha’s Swash parallels Barnstone’s work. Where Barnstone gives voice to the many, Elisha tells us how he experienced the enormity of the same period.

Elisha saw what the men in The Pacific see. Elisha, a decorated combat veteran, landed in the first wave of eight amphibious invasions with a special forces communications unit. His is a voice that should be remembered.

He is now a well known and much revered commentator on WAMC Northeast Public Radio in Albany, New York. He is the originator and host of Bard’s Eye View, part of the station’s daily Roundtable, and he has interviewed many fellow poets, myself included.

Elisha’s characteristic language is like his radio presence, deferential, courtly at times. His poetics is demotic, subdued, reminiscent at times of C.P. Cavafy—the prosodic demeanor of a scholarly gentleman. He is not interested in pyrotechnics. He is not interested in showing you what he knows about poetry but rather what he knows about life.

Nor is he interested in trading on his warrior credentials, as he might have been tempted to do to call attention to Swash. He has not lived a long, honorable life and seen horrific things to indulge such a cheap end. He approaches the war as the boy he was, then as the man that perforce he became, and finally as the ruminant that a long life and poetic disposition makes him.

Swash has a quiet integrity that in a more contemplative world would have prompted media attention alongside Barnstone’s more ambitious work, not merely because Elisha fought in the war but because it shaped his sensibility as a poet and lover of poetry. This is why, I am sure, such eminent poets as Peg Boyers, Robert Pinsky and William Jay Smith have praised Swash. I had Swash at hand when I wrote about Tongue of War in this space, and I regret that I did not undertake the much larger task of speaking of the two works in the same breath. I was carried away by the grandeur of Barnstone’s vision, by the immensity of the task he had set for himself, and although I knew that I already admired Swash and intended to reread it, I was at first deceived by its palpable humility. I was distracted from its ultimate achievement by its own quietude. That is often the case with the finest poetry; it is easily overlooked in comparison with more dramatic work.

Toward the end of Swash a significant pun occurs in the title “In Quest” because the poem is in fact an inquest. I don’t know if it will have the same effect on others that it has on me, but the minute I read the first stanza a great Homeric sea swell lifted me up and bore me into the poem:

What were they after, prows pressing
past where myopic pontiffs
decreed they dare not venture?

There are the authorized versions of war, the accounts of the victors, the consensus of historians, and then there are the real stories. We know damned well that neither Helen’s beauty nor the lust felt by Paris caused the Trojan War. We know equally well that the Crusaders didn’t do all that slaughtering and sacking for a splinter of wood or a cup. What we don’t know as well—not yet, because the historic sea spray has hardly settled—is that Imperial Japan had more reasons to go to war than the bloody-mindedness of its leaders. We had been crowding Japan, and Japan needed oil.

A poem can go a long way on the heat of the moment. That this is true accounts for the sting and thrust of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry. That Owen, Brooke and Sassoon died young inclines our ear towards them. That Randall Jarrell was still young when he wrote the five-line “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” chills us to this day. But there is much to be said for the poem written in a more meditative state. The Iliad and The Odyssey, which may have accumulated over time, are imbued with the grandeur of historicity and reflection. We can think about why Poseidon hounded Odysseus instead of being tossed this way and that by the hounding. And herein is one of the virtues of Swash: the poems are finely distilled. They have worked their way through an alchemical laboratory in Elisha’s mind, and he has taken time to discover which elixirs best activate the poems’ crucial elements.

“Where War Is Waged,” a poem that appears on page 49, this aspect of Elisha’s work here emerges as sharply as the crack of a rifle:

In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,”
Hemingway wrote of a dead expatriate’s
legacy to his nephew: Legend embedded
in a note about a leopard
found by climbers, its body
perfectly preserved in ice,
far above Mount Kibo’s tree-line.
No one could divine a reason
or account for what, in any
season might entice it there,
where a leopard shouldn’t have been.

In the whatnot of my own lifetime
I discovered the answer
on a Micronesian dot when,
sprawled at the water’s edge, a pledge
to retake this bloody place or die
defied certain logic arrayed against us.

Here is Elisha’s dominant metric line, enjambment, refined speech and the attitude towards life, all defining his poetry. He is willing to say how it was to be there on one of those hellish, rat-infested islands, but he is more interested in knowing how it relates to everything else he has experienced, in this case Hemingway’s famous story,a story whose metaphysical subtleties I have found to my dismay often elude readers. Much of Elisha’s work, not merely in this exquisite poem, is about being that leopard. Not just climbing up there past the tree-line, but dying there, and lying there for others to find and ponder.

There is notable musicianship in Elisha’s poetry, not surprising in light of his work as a composer and host of classical music programs. This is poetry acutely aware of the relationship of poetry to music and mathematics. With Richard Albagli he composed Drums and Echoes for spoken chorus and percussion, a 1999 work dedicated to the war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

There are a number of coincidences between the ongoing television series The Pacific and Swash. Both works address another, almost forgotten America, a time when racism was officially sanctioned, and not just against African-Americans. Indeed one of the more unsettling aspects of watching the First Marine Division in the series is its lily-white complexion. Both works speak to the ruthlessness of war not just at the front but to our interiority as individuals and cultures. War is not only authorized genocide, it is also authorized mass rape of the pysche, if not the body. No one is ever the same. There is in a real sense no home to which to return, because the home one took to war has been destroyed. The poems again and again convey this sense of dislocation and grief.

A swash, the poet tell us in a footnote to his first poem, is a narrow body of water lying within a sand bank or between a sand bank and the shore. Perhaps this is all we can hope a poem will be. Or a book. But there are worlds within a swash, as there are in a crack in a wall. In his title sonnet Elisha reveals to us that the sea is his matrix and also alpha and omega. This lovely sonnet ends with a line that will echo throughout the book:

Awash, just out of reach, the prize we seek.

Like a soldier killed on a Pacific beach or the elderly reckoning what they sought and what they found. Poems, one way or another, are always about a prize just out of reach. Whether they fall short of the poet’s expectations or exceed them, the prize is always just beyond our fingertips, glistening in the wet sand.

Unlike Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, or Tongue of War, Elisha’s war comes upon him slowly in the midst of his youthful contemplations of his uncle’s wife, the place of a Jew in a determinedly WASPish culture—witness the Gentiles Only sign in his poem Last Resort— a New Deal parade, Philco “cathedral” radios, family ghosts. The boy is growing up as the war crowds in on him.

Elisha is a formalist of a notably unobtrusive kind, a kind of neoclassicist as opposed to a modernist. Sometimes language is the story. Sometimes a poem’s architecture is what it has to say. But Elisha is a contemplative, relying on certain formal conventions to impart what he has learned.

He does not want to tell us about or imply his own heroism. He simply wants to say, This is what I was thinking and feeling when the world blew up in our faces, and I went to war hoping that what I had felt and thought would not be wasted on a distant shore. It wasn’t. We have this profoundly moving and elegant verse memoir as testament. —Djelloul Marbrook

Hear me read and talk about poetry

Anyone who knows anything about the history of Arabic, anyone who has savored the elegance and balletic athleticism of its script, is both reassured and exhilarated by the first poem of this daring book: reassured because the speaker is in awe of his subject, exhilarated because the poet is a soldier-contemplative, not a saga-teller.

The demeanor of the work is neither heroic nor antiheroic, which is fitting because true heroism speaks for itself; everything else is adjectival. There is no enemy here, only combatants, even children. The true enemy is elsewhere, as is always the case with war. What is remarkable about Here, Bullet, even more remarkable after five years, is that it remains a far more enlightening testament to the Iraq war than news reports. That is because poetry and art are news, and what we call news is commercially censored simulation.

It is a shame that our taste-making apparatus conveys an impression that once a book has been reviewed it has been dealt with. We don’t deal with books. We don’t get past them. Good books live on, they operate in the world, they change our consciousness. Here, Bullet is more significant now

Brian Turner

than when it was published because war is never past, it is never history. Not Troy, not Carthage, not World Wars I and II, not Korea nor Vietnam. We do not understand Achilles and the Greeks or Hector and the Trojans the way the Renaissance did or the way the Victorians did. The great literature we have read becomes part of our DNA. Politicians and bankers may choose to ignore it, but we merely write their venality into the human code. Authorized versions never retain their authority. If we believe Helen launched a thousand ships it is because we choose to entertain ourselves. No one who has read Carl Jung or Bruno Bettelheim reads The Iliad the way it was read in the West when it reemerged in the 15th Century after a long stint in obscurity.

Our throwaway, hyper-commercialized culture misleads us. We think we know things we don’t know. We think we have experienced things we have only brushed up against. We think received ideas are our own. But there is that soldier standing on the cover of Here, Bullet, defying the bullet not only of immediacy but of time and our perception—defying the news reports, the thousands of pundits and their conclusions, the speeches and lies. We don’t know if that soldier is Brian Turner, infantryman or Everyman or both. It doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter if it is Brad Pitt playing Achilles. The poetry, like Homer’s, will outlive the hype.

The word for love, habib, is written from right
to left, starting where we would end it
and ending where we might begin….

This is how Here, Bullet begins, in the poem called “A Soldier’s Arabic.” The poem consists of four tercets. The third reveals how the poet has considers the nature of Arabic:

Speak the word for death, maut,
and you will hear the cursive of the wind
driven into the veil of the unknown.

Like T. E. Lawrence before him, like some of the Crusader poets, Turner grasps the alchemy of a Bedouin society—sand, time, waves, stars. He understands, and says so from the start, the irrelevance of politics, even of history. It means something to him what Arabic script looks like, even if it meant nothing to the people who sent our soldiers there. That is why that terribly vulnerable soldier on the cover is our hope; he represents what is good in ourselves.

“A Soldier’s Arabic” sends you back to this cover— that lone soldier stands in a brown waste, his weapon down, his stance that of a dancer at rest. There are no heroics, no opera. no posture. Each stone is as important as the soldier. The photograph is as remarkably reverential as that first poem.

Next comes a Sura from The Qu’ran:

Who brings forth the living from the dead,
and the dead from the living?

The Qu’ran, of course, has some of the world’s most soaring poetry, and no headline that has ever emerged from Iraq or Afghanistan is as significant as the news that a single American soldier, considering that life has brought him under arms to Iraq, should ponder it. Nothing is as reassuring to common humanity than that. I have no doubt that there are Iraqis who have read Here, Bullet with the same sense that it is somehow hopeful, that war is not always made by brutes, by politicians and profiteers. Sometimes it is made, however reluctantly, by poets and scholars.

The news media are unsuited to report wars, the scholars too remote. Artists, poets and musicians should tell us about war when it is still hot and loud and bright. They will tell us the truth. They serve the numinous, not Mammon. That is the nature of Here, Bullet’s urgency. It is a reliable, terrible witness to a war that has been covered under the rubrics of a 19th Century journalistic paradigm.

In the 21st Century, especially in a terrorist era entrenched in the public consciousness by Germany’s violent Bader-Meinhof gang from 1968 to 1977, the objective standards that governed coverage of World War II are no longer as useful as they once were. War is not merely a factual complex; it has a psychic and spiritual dimension, and journalistic norms must be revisited to encompass that. Dispatches from the field, the tradition begun with the Crimean War, no longer cut it. War does not take place overseas, it takes place everywhere. We can’t wage it without waging it here. Enemy strongholds are not bombed in isolation: the psyches of the bombers are bombed. It is the 19th Century journalism we practice that makes Holocaust denial an issue. Much more to the point are the thinkers and poets who wondered how art could be created in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They understood the nature of horror; the current state of journalism merely acknowledges it as stagecraft.

There have always been aspects of war that the press has chosen to ignore or downplay, such as the way banks profit from interest on war debt. Recently it was left to the film, The International, to bring this squalid concept home to the public. That is why what Brian Turner has to say about Iraq and Tony Barnstone about the Pacific War in Tongue of War broadens and deepens our contemplation of war in a way the present state of journalism cannot and will not do.

Turner’s poetics offer much to admire, not least the poet’s fierce respect for his own material. He never imposes a convenient meter or form on a vision or idea. One senses an intense communion between the poet and his witness, so that the poetics that emerge are so appropriate that one hardly considers them at all:

This time it’s beautiful.
He’s in the kelp beds somewhere
off the California coast, floating
where green leaves touch the sun,
as if he’s disentangled
from thought itself, as if the mind
has come this far, up from the depths
to release him to crests and shallows
drifting wave by wave back to shore….

That is the opening stanza of “Dreams From The Malaria Pills” (Turner), Forward Operating Base Eagle, Iraq.

Respect is a crucial aspect of this work, respect for Turner’s experiences, his comrades, the enemy, and the innocents. The idea of enmity almost disappears in Here, Bullet, giving way to the much larger tragedy of men and women pitted against each other for reasons they do not always understand. Here, Bullet is not so much about war as it is about the inability of humanity to grasp its enormity. And this sensibility is reflected in the book’s design, which is subtle.

Turner told The New York Times that “the day of the first moonwalk, my father’s college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.’ ” Turner himself has fulfilled that prediction. Poets understand how stereotype demeans the human experience; they understand its evil. When they tell us what a war is like we can believe it. They are not foreign correspondents—a term that tells us much that is wrong with the world—they swallow the war and die from it, and in dying they open our eyes.

No two accounts of a thing are ever identical. Ask the police about this. Eyewitness doesn’t necessarily mean consensus. But usually the differences in accounts derive from the degree to which witnesses consent to see what they see—or the degree to which witness is uncensored by prejudice. If Turner has prejudices they are against whatever he hasn’t seen with his own eyes, and what he has seen seems hair-raisingly unfiltered.

Here, Bullet is informed by Turner’s recognition that rarely is anything like anything else, not really. Unlike journalists the poet is not concerned with consequences because they are already so horrifically evident. No conclusions need to be drawn; everything he sees is its own conclusion. How absurd, in this context, all the fact-finding junkets. How absurd the political reference to “facts on the ground”—where else would they be?

Take, for example, the poem “The Al Harishma Weapons Market” with its deadly line: An American death puts food on the table. Journalists can’t stop politicians’ mouths because they thrive on the output, but poets can, and this line is one of the world’s great show-stoppers.

Then there is the poem “The Hurt Locker,” which concludes:

…Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls.

The poem has been speaking of the enemy. A 12-year-old rolls a grenade into a room, and the poem ends on a note of universality, suggesting that in a sense we’re all the enemy, because if we’re not, then nothing really makes sense.

I thought for a long time before trying to write about this book that I would have nothing to say unless I understood why the poet chose to make the title poem the ninth poem, not the first. The poem defies the bullet with the poet’s intention to speak. Wasn’t this as natural a first poem as Homer beginning The Odyssey by saying, Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles? I’m abashed that it took me so long to see the poet thought it intolerable for Here, Bullet to be about him. He is simply a poet-witness, and what befalls his comrades, the 12-year-old boy, the insurgent snipers, the blast victims—what befalls us all—is more important than what befalls him.

Here, too, he differs markedly from journalists, because inevitably they are about hyping the significance of what they report, and that demeans it. War is reported as a show, a game, and that is a tragedy for us all. The poet himself hints at this when he quotes an old Iraqi proverb late in the book in the poem “Caravan”: No matter the barking of the dogs, the caravan marches on.

A sequence of prose poems called Medevac occurring towards the end of the book deserves special mention. It reminds me of Arthur Rimbaud’s breathtaking prose poems because Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell conveys a sense of nothing like it having gone before, and so does “Medevac”: The sheriff of Baghdad needs to know—A smoke signal? An orange panel? How best do you mark a place of loss and pain?

We need to know, all of us. It’s the war’s epitaph, isn’t it? All wars.

I think I knew instinctively when I read about Here, Bullet—it has received much popular attention—that I wasn’t up to it and wouldn’t be for some time. I had been rereading The Iliad and The Odyssey for perhaps the fourth or fifth time, and, as usual, I was dismayed by all I had missed and misunderstood. I suppose in a sense we are, none of us, ever up to the deeds and misdeeds of our race. I felt ashamed that I didn’t want to see the soldier’s witness, bear an iota of his pain. What kind of American, what kind of human being did that make me? But over time I came to realize that we’re never up to such things. Ask the detectives whose teen-age suspects seem incapable of grasping that they have killed a fellow human being, killed him dead so that he will never be among us again.

How could I have preferred news report—words piled on words, interspersed with advertisements—to this tragic testament, this lyric benchmark of human sensibility? Simply, I suppose, because the news reports cheapen events, trivializing them and making it all seem like a video game. I think this suggests the fate of Here, Bullet on our library shelves. It is always going to daunt us, just the way Homer does, and every time we return to it we are going to see what was there all the while for us to see if we’d had the heart for it. —Djelloul Marbrook

• Hear me read
• Far From Algiers music

The reason vampires are always in vogue is because we encounter them. All of us have left the company of certain people feeling we have just donated a bit too much blood in an uncertain cause. And we have all entertained that sense of the world being not quite what it insists it is.

Poets affirm this sense of otherness, this presence of otherlings among us, this multidimensionality that our antennae restlessly pick up. Theirs is always the alternate view, the other way, the road we dared not take, the love we dared not pursue, the decision we never made.

Poets are our shamans, but they are also eternal children, ourselves having grown up the way we might have grown up had we not been so “interfered with,” as the British used to say of certain unfortunate children. Poets are our more innocent selves, and yet also the more knowing selves which we deigned not to be so as to make ourselves more convenient to our parents and others.

From the title of his book to its very last poem, Stuart Bartow imbues us with the presence of this might-have-been child, this lost child, this otherling. This is the strength and persistence of his poetry, that it so faithfully eschews the received idea, the convenient interpretation, the predictable muse. In a time when the very best publishers of poetry often opt for the predictable and reassuring, if not the outright sentimental, Bartow’s work insists again and again that things are not what they seem but rather as they often seem to children, madmen and eternal strangers.

This is not to say his work is the sort of outré work that clamors for attention. Bartow simply sees the ordinary things we all see as if he had woken up that particular morning, the morning he wrote that particular poem, and found himself a bit out of his head, not himself, so to speak. And this person who is not himself writes a poem that describes his condition, and the poem begins to make so much sense that nobody ever cares again just who the poet was the day before.

The first poem, “Deneb,” speaks of dusty legions of moths banished by the first frost. This is insight more significant than the latest mindless bombing in Iraq, and anyone who has brushed with mysticism knows that a poet is a foreign correspondent from unimaginably more important capitals than Baghdad. Poetry’s ability to report back from realms far more distant and yet more relevant than those in the headlines makes poetry so resilient and such a powerful presence in our everyday lives, whether it is the poetry of the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Vedas, rap, rock, rai or country.

Bartow’s second poem, “Reasons to Hate Birds,” is wry and heartbreaking. Robins make the poet homesick when he’s home. The poem recalls Eliot’s April is the cruelest month. The birds become a symbol of all that is witless and therefore menacing. One thinks also of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. But the hater is also a lover, for the poem ends with him grieving for the fallen companion of a female cardinal, an apparition,/a blood stain/in the snowy branches.

A contrarian impulse like Bartow’s could be an irritant, but not in the employ of an elven artist intent on suggesting that the dimension in which we live is in fact interwoven with other dimensions whose inhabitants are as familiar with their world as we are with ours, perhaps more so. More tellingly, they may be more familiar with our world than we are. But there is a larger point in this contrarianism: poets are uninterested in the authorized, conventional view of anything. In that. they transcend fact, and it goes without saying that they are not as beholden to vested interests as most correspondents.

In the ordinary world when a doorknob comes off in your hand one morning it may bode ill for the day, but in the poet’s world the knob is supposed to come off and nothing is supposed to happen according to dogma. Even when we are shocked by this element in poetry, as we were when Arthur Rimbaud spoke to us, we nonetheless depend on it to save us from a world that would otherwise kill us with its prescriptions. The prescriptive world is the enemy of poetry.

In the next poem, “Hummingbirds,” he calls them gravity’s gypsies. It is this sense of having long considered matters before speaking of them that makes Bartow’s poems reliable and rewarding. He seems less inspired to say something and more inclined to allow observations to grow up in him until they have nowhere to go except the page before him, giving the reader assurance of being in hands that do not seek to handle us.

I think Stuart Bartow must have considered Gerard Manley Hopkins well. Some of his lyrics, as in the poem “Short-Eared Owls,” are haunted by Hopkins’ syncopations, but they have blessedly foregone the dicey virtuosity of the master. A little of Hopkins goes a long way, and it’s easier to go the distance with Bartow.

“Ethyl’s Crow,” which follows “Short-Eared Owls,” begins:

The crow she healed
returned daily
through the open window
and paced the sill
like a bantam Hamlet
complaining
between the summer’s curtains.

It would be difficult to say anything more perfectly. The poem is not only a story but a comment on Hamlet himself, on all Hamlets finding their sills, their curtains and their audiences. The crow pilfers Ethyl’s home creating an alchemy/of crow logic. As Hamlet pilfers our empathy and patience.

“To Ghost a Human Shape” is subtitled “To the sparrows who live in Home Depot and Lowe’s.” There is nothing we might carry out of those places more valuable than the insight of the poem’s opening stanza:

As though the sky were made by a mind to keep space out,
look up and there will be a superstructure of x’s,
an expanse of skeletons, trees abstracted, boughs
arranged in order to make these flying gypsies believe

Believe what? There is a suspense until the next stanza begins: in mathematical deities. My guess is that this also expresses a suspense in the poet’s thinking. And this is the aspect of Bartow’s poetry I most admire, this ability to take the reader on a short stroll through ordinary places as if the two of us, poet and listener, were silently chatting, reading each other’s minds.

Bartow refuses to hint that he knows more than he is saying. He takes his reader right to the end of his vision, to its outer pale. Beyond that, reader and poet are both on their own. I remember this quality in C.P. Cavafy, who published his own poems and simply shared them with friends and others whom he thought might enjoy them, without thought to their destiny as literature. Cavafy might have known he would be famous, but he was determined not to let the issue distract him from his vision. I feel this virtue in Stuart Bartow’s work. If you write for someone you need to impress you diminish your work.

For all his often conversational humor and rue, there is also a formal eeriness, a hauntedness in some of these poems. In “Phantom Laboratory” on page 42 the poet speaks of a mill behind the town—it’s not beyond the town, but behind it—which, although no one is in it, we might not be able to dream if it should cease its work, becoming nothing/but machines of light. In other words, we don’t know the purpose of things as well as we think we know them. We don’t know anything as well as we think we do.

I can’t be sure, but I suspect that this eerie quality in Bartow’s work may derive from his contemplations of upstate New York’s many ruined places, curtains still blowing in abandoned windows, slumping buildings, hog-backed roofs, rotting doorways, a pervasive sense of abandonment and coming to ruin. The state has been through many economic and cultural cycles, and there are few towns or cities that do not convey a sense of foreclosure and the disappointments and sorrows of the long dead. Even where there are no buildings, one often senses the lives of the native inhabitants.

Bartow teaches at Adirondack Community College. His other books are Whelk and the chapbooks White Ravens, The Perseids, The Stars Belong to No One, Sleeping Through Seasons and As Armless Messengers Wake.

Reasons to Hate The Sky is divided into two parts, “Reasons to Hate Birds” and “Celestial Mechanics.” Anyone who has lived in the Adirondacks or Catskills would have reason to consider the heavens, the meteor showers, the crackling electricity of the stars on cold, clear nights. His intimacy with galaxies informs Bartow’s work. Several times while reading and rereading this book I found myself thinking of the star beasts of Giordano Bruno, that famous heretic whom we now celebrate for his prescience. Bartow’s “Phantom Laboratory” may well be operating at the behest of star beasts.

And, in a sense, I came finally to regard the book itself as a phantom laboratory responding to distant impulses, impulses Bartow picks up, adapts for our minds and ears, and transmits to us as a benign alien visitor might, musing as he does his work, inviting us to share and savor this or that, amiably making space for us as we walk the same path for a moment or two. —DM

When I was fourteen I started writing quatrains in the style of Edward Fitzgerald famously misrepresenting Omar Khayyam. Then I wrote couplets in the manner of Alexander Pope. It was Pope who introduced me to Homer. Later, feeling my oats, I emulated Gerard de Nerval, scaring myself half to death in the process.

As time went on I became more respectful. By the time I’d finished a stint in the Navy and gone to work as a reporter I had become so respectful of Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and quite a few others, that finishing a poem seemed as remote a goal as sainthood. My respect had turned to fear.

I regarded each word with the apprehension of an apprentice diamond cutter. The danger of cracking it the wrong way obsessed me. Working after fourteen-hour days as a reporter—I always regarded poetry as my real work—I saw that this apprehension was casting a pall over my work as a reporter.

A reporter has to resourcefully gather facts, wheedle information from the unwilling and reticent, and then martial the facts or seeming facts and comments quickly and appealingly into stories. Some reporters are better at getting the facts than reporting them. Those who are better at the big picture than waking crooked governors up at 3 a.m. usually end up writing books. I was good at delving into seemingly innocuous files.

The poet’s quest for the perfect word is incompatible with the reporter’s need to compromise his desire for excellence and meet deadlines. Reporters can’t afford to be known as thumb-suckers. I was pretty good at meeting deadlines. My metabolism is slow, so hits of adrenaline were welcome. Deadlines always looked to me like another bullet dodged.

But my secret life as a would-be poet had stalled. I would fall in love with my researches, whether for the subject of the poem or for a decision as to how the poem should be written. I’d remember something Andrew Marvell had written, and then spend months studying Marvell. I’d find myself imitating Rimbaud and spend months dissecting his poems. I’d write a few lines about Omani pearl divers and wind up months later in the Mughal court in Delhi—in my head.

In short, things were not going well for me as a poet. I liked writing poems too much. I hated to finish them. I never thought they were finished. I liked burying them with elaborate rituals. Viking funerals were common. And the whole idea of getting them published felt like a death march. Besides, I was getting published every day, and it was easy. All I had to do was work hard for peanuts and harangue myself about the public’s right to know.

I think all this had something to do with my becoming an editor. I didn’t much like the desk work involved in editing, but I liked working with typographers, compositors and darkroom people. I liked seeing words in type. They had edge and shine and shadow. They had precise weight, heft, and a visual logic. They fit into “turtles” and were wheeled around groaning composing-room floors. The tails of commas could be cut off to improvise periods. Sentences could be excised and dumped in a kill box. Words could be picked up with your fingers—if you belonged to the right union. And finally, at the end of the cycle, everything was put to bed. There was a daily sense of having passed through fire.

Poems were different. They were forbidden passions, mistresses, vices, illegitimate children, offshore bank accounts, arms caches, crimes against the ordinary, anarchic protest, sabotage, treason.

My life of crime was not going well. By my mid-thirties I had become as respectful and wary of each word as I might have been of a Mafia don. I knew how easy it was to cross a poem, to betray it to the authorities, to testify against it and end up in witness protection in a town where books are as suspect as newcomers. I knew how easy it would be to rat out a poem, cop a plea, bury the body. I knew I didn’t have the heart to finish a poem, to make words say what I wanted them to say rather than what they wanted to say. I wasn’t up to being as subversive as poetry required.

I always thought as a reporter and newspaper editor that I was bullying words for a greater good. I felt I was doing my bit to uphold the republic, and if words had to pay the price, well, it was worth the price. But my role as bully poet ill fit me. I liked for words to run around like beads of mercury. I liked to admire them the way I admire fireflies. I don’t tell fireflies where to light, and I didn’t want to push words around and make them serve meanings which in any case I felt unqualified to entertain.

Perhaps if I’d finished college instead of dropping out—crashing is more like it—in my third year, I would have felt more confident about saying what I meant and meaning what I said. But it took many years to recognize that I had suffered a breakdown in college, and it took me quite a few years after that to feel I had anything to say. In some ways I loved poetry too much to write it. Trying to write seemed like intruding where I wasn’t wanted or needed, a kind of vandalism.

Poetry was like the girl who was too beautiful to approach. If I had married her, if she had been willing to have me, I would have been too much in awe of her to be a husband. I would have treated her like the holy of holies, the inner sanctum which might be willing to tolerate me once a year, if I incanted the right things and wore the right robes and tied a golden cord around my waist so that I might find my way back to my state of paralytic awe.

This girl was for someone taller and more handsome than me, someone better born, richer, smarter, friendlier. If she smiled at me I looked over my shoulder to see who she was smiling at. If she addressed me I stuttered. And if she persisted in the folly of liking me I assumed it was my bounden duty to go to some remote place and get myself killed so that she wouldn’t have to face the consequences of her misjudgment. I was altogether too honorable in her presence.

I’ve always had a hunch that writing involves a certain amount of disrespect for the sanctity of the words. Journalism is a kind of language fast food, and it enjoys a long history of rationalization in its behalf. But poetry, to me at least, is a kind of sacrilege, requiring the constant forgiveness of the gods. —DM

Michael Roy Meyerhofer

If you were trying to game the market for poetry in our time, trying to second-guess editors and judges, you wouldn’t write the kind of poetry Meyerhofer writes. It isn’t voguish, it isn’t safe, it isn’t reassuring, and it doesn’t readily promise to conform to what at times seems like a canon of comfortably competent but markedly unchallengng poetry.

There is often something of Arthur Rimbaud’s stick-it-in-your-eye deviltry in Meyerhofer’s work. But he is wiser and sadder than Rimbaud. And more observant:

All women
who have passed
an angry nine
pound blossom
through what
is more or less just
a very tender
three inch grate
have endured
something worse
than veterans
of any combat…

This is a third of a poem called In Praise of Mothers in Leaving Iowa, his 2007 Briery Creek Press book of poems and his first full-length book.

Meyerhofer celebrates the heroism of women and little girls. Perhaps one of the attributes that draws me to his work is its foreshadowing of androgyny, a world in which our silly adversarial view of the sexes will have passed into dust.

Meyerhofer doesn’t wrestle poems into being, and so his work doesn’t seem to steam, as many poets’ work does, with the effort. He collaborates with the spirit of his recognitions, making each vessel with the patience and skill of a glass blower. The interesting thing about glass blowers is that for all their savvy they must seize the moment, for the hot glass will not forgive them.

I think of Roman and Arab glass when I consider his poems, not Greek vases with their obviousness and historic purposefulness, but the translucence and yearning inherent in Roman and Arab glass, that sense of heat having only recently cooled.

Leaving Iowa is restless, often savage and bitter. If it recalls Rimbaud, it also recalls Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but it has none of Howl’s pretension and grandiose pronunciamento. Rather it has the gaze of an unrelenting hawk. Meyerhofer is the one person in the room you are sure is going to say the one thing you can’t bear to hear, and you are going to have to do something about him, to him, because of course it’s the one thing you ought to hear. If he’s sitting, you may have to say it’s your chair he’s sitting in. If he’s standing you may have to claim that one square foot. Each of his poems is that one square foot. This is the uncomfortable position of the finest poets. They make heroes of the few editors who publish them, but they piss off a lot of people, people who wouldn’t be caught dead copping to how uncomfortable the poems make them.

That said, Meyerhofer has been finding his hero-editors, and I can hardly think of anything more encouraging to other poets who may share his penchant for making readers wince. His chapbook, Real Courage, won the Jeanne Duval Editions/Terminus Magazine Chapbook Prize the same year Leaving Iowa won the Liam Rector First Book Award from Briery. Two years earlier, his chapbook, Cardboard Urn, won the Copperdome Press Annual Chapbook Award from Southeast Missouri State University. And this year Steel Toe Books in Bowling Green, Kentucky, brought out his superb Blue Collar Eulogies. He has won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Annie Finch Prize and the Laureate Prize. He teaches at Ball State University in Indiana.

I wonder what phobia made God
so surly in that ancient world…

he writes in Diagnosing God, one of the Blue Collar poems, addressing the quarrel many thoughtful souls have with the Old Testament God. He’s a testy, sometimes nasty piece of work. He needs his Spartacuses, He deserves them. Still, this is a far cry from remembering grandpa’s spectacles, which might describe all too many contemporary poems. Another of his far cries is his poem in the same book about a used condom. Here is another itch in our private parts. We have all passed them by, wondering about their circumstances, but few of us would be caught dead writing an Ode to a Trojan: I still wonder sometimes / what couple left their used condom / in the playground woodchips / of Sacred Heart Catholic School—

It is exactly what many of us wonder about. But there are other things I admire about this poem, not least being that it is “their” condom, not the man’s or boy’s, not something he is using on the girl but rather with her. This is the poet’s supposition; we have no way of knowing how the couple felt about the condom, but we certainly know the poet believes their tryst to have been a mutual adventure, and therefore it has dignity.

And that brings me to perhaps what I admire most of all about Meyerhofer’s poems. He is never swiping, as some poets do, a recognition from something or someone observed. He is always celebrating the dignity of something, even when it is the loss of a horse’s ass (literally) in a Clydesdale’s unhappy encounter with a blonde in a Porsche, as in the poem Elegy for a Horse’s Ass, which precedes, not accidentally, Ode to a Trojan. Rimbaud would have liked these poems. They are not naughty, but they are bawdy, and yet they observe the gravity of our lives in the most topsy-turvy and even comical situations.

Many a poem, particularly in our times, cops a feel from life but returns little to it. I sometimes think of these as pickpocket poems, and I am guilty of them myself. If I were in a darker mood I might say they are piratical poems that in the guise of charm and endearment relieve us of our possessions, much as Wall Street has done. But Meyerhofer is rather like a miniaturist who breaks into a house, apprehends its genius, enjoys a few bonbons, takes a warm bath, but leaves a series of miniatures that will immensely enhance the lives of the inhabitants when they return, realizing they have been invaded only because someone has enriched them.

In some ways I think the title poem of Real Courage suggests the position Meyerhofer has chosen to occupy as a poet. He has wondered a great deal about the nature of courage, finding it in women and children and sometimes even men, and never where we think it is, never where we look: But in the real world, vampires only attack / while you’re sitting on the toilet / or trying on your mother’s high heels; / muggers only leap from the rosebushes / when you’re ducking out of a cheap motel / or leaving Family Video with armloads / of porn…

Yes, you can write with the swordheft of Yates, as Meyerhofer often does, but the demons you encounter must be your own, not borrowed from more perfect settings, otherwise your engagement with them will ring hollow. And Meyerhofer is always the poet who sees what we don’t want to see precisely when we least want to see it. If there is a thing to be said that decorum would rather skirt, he is going to say it, and yet, curiously, he is not a poet you have to be up to. He comes upon you like weather.

In the poem Real Courage I noted with a sense of fondness that the poet refrains from telling us whether it is a girl or boy who is trying on the mother’s high heels. His poems are full of such playfulness—and respect for the reader’s own impulse to join in the making of the poem. This is a rare quality, because so many poems, in their quest for a finishing veneer, foreclose on the reader’s eagerness to say something, to respond, to add to the poet’s recognition.

Much is made in criticism of the writer’s voice, but when you come right down to it you are not quite certain of just whose voice you are listening to in many contemporary poems. You know it is unusual, perhaps even unique, but is it the voice of the poet or an amalgam of voices the poet has admired? Can you really let this poet into your adytum or is he merely an entertainer you encounter and then go home? In other words, would you buy a used car from this poet? In Meyerhofer’s case you know who this guy is. This is not Richard Burton telling you how somebody ought to sound. This is Michael Meyerhofer telling you how things look and sound to him, and you can rely on this voice not to try to impress or beguile you. Let me put it another way. You know how some poets at a reading get into that whiny, singsong mode that makes us instinctively guard against them because we feel they are using the authorized technique to get over on us? Well, you can forget about that concern with Meyerhofer. He is letting you overhear his mind, the ongoing dialogue in his head. And you don’t have that concern that it has been gift-wrapped. You are overhearing a poet think.

I often think of something the English poet Jim Burns wrote to me not long ago when I reread Meyerhofer’s poems. Burns, a Beat Period scholar, recalled how Maxwell Bodenheim, the Greenwich Village bohemian poet who got himself murdered, had tried and failed to persuade the prevailing literary poohbahs to publish Hart Crane. Crane made them uncomfortable. He did not fit any of the notions and trends of his time, although today we read his The Bridge and can’t imagine it failing to impress the tastemakers of his time. The more I think of Burns’s recollection, the more I rejoice that Meyerhofer finds his editors, and they are to be celebrated just as we must celebrate him. —DM

Charles Baudelaire

Our oompah ideas about heroism are often public and triumphalist. Private heroisms—perhaps the way we confront ordinary dying or prolonged adversity—go unnoticed. So, the writer Brian McDonald’s essay in Friday’s New York Times, Under the Literary Influence, isn’t likely to inspire a parade.

But McDonald’s tale of weaning himself off our famous literary drunks—Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote and only God knows how many others—is in our self-congratulatory alcoholic society a singular act of courage because it’s unlikely to be welcomed by any number of poohbahs.

I share Mr. McDonald’s struggle to break an addiction to the romanticization of booze, just as I struggled with booze itself. It’s a taboo subject and one approaches it advisedly. Those of us who use this over-the-counter drug are usually medicating something, most often depression. We usually become addicted in our adolescence and we remain adolescent even when we stop boozing unless we engage in some sort of sustained and painful introspection. There is no easy run around this.

But an addictive person gets hooked on more than alcohol. For me, drink and Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire’s mind-altering poems, proved the deadliest of cocktails. I encountered Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud in high school, and I did not have the intellectual resources to to put into perspective their idea of unmediated knowledge, knowledge outside of science.

The idea of finding truth in disorganization of the senses and decadence was all too heady. I didn’t progress from Baudelaire to the astonishing interiority of Marcel Proust. I hadn’t yet encountered the medieval Arab idea that there is no irreconcilable conflict between science, mathematics and the direct apprehension of knowledge.

And so, zoned out on The Flowers of Evil and Mr. McDonald’s boozers, I boarded Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat and merrily circled my personal drain until in my thirties I was at death’s door, being told by a kindly surgeon that he didn’t wish to see me in the morgue where I could no longer chat with him about poetry.

I didn’t understand, nor is any young person likely to, that the best of ideas taken with alcohol may lead to brain damage. Alcohol perverts the route taken by a fine idea. It gives bad ideas bravado and flushes perspective down the drain. Of the many things that may be taken for depression, alcohol is the least suitable. Our so-called war on drugs will remain an exercise in hypocrisy as along as we refuse to face up to alcohol’s devastation not only on us personally but on our health care costs and our culture in general.

Do I renounce any of forenamed authors? Of course not. But I attest that drink is not an essential writing tool. And I further attest that ignorance is a poor companion to enthusiasm. If I had bothered to travel back in French time to Gerard de Nerval and from Nerval back to the poets of Provence and from Provence across the Pyrenees into Arab Spain, I would have savored that I had grasped only a crumb of what Baudelaire had meant.

I would have seen that the idea of unmediated apprehension need not stand in stark conflict with Newton or any of the scientists and mathematicians. I would have seen, had I considered the history of mathematics, that the Arabs, without whom we could not have gone into space, drew no distinction between chemistry and alchemy, mathematics and religion.

Having seen that, I would have been somewhat more prepared for Baudelaire’s seductive ideas. But I was an addict, and so I seized on what was at hand.

I know from firsthand experience that the renunciation of alcohol and a jaundiced look at the booze gods of literature is a costly exercise, because many of the powers that be are still chasing the daughters of the vine and don’t particularly like being reminded that great writing doesn’t depend on the hair of the dog. —DM

For this reason I don’t attend as many poetry readings as a poet needing to attract readers should. I’m acutely aware of how much bad writing and thinking can be disguised by performance. I often won oratorical contests by sounding good while knowing my materials were second-rate, and I won many a debate on the strength of personal appeal.

When I do attend readings and slams, as some people call them, my fingers itch to get hold of the material. I understand perfectly well the poet is not pitching himself but simply doing his best by his poem, but I don’t trust the idea. I want to see the material. I like it much better when one poet reads another’s work, because it brings something hidden to the fore. On the other hand, a contemplative reading of a poem by its author can impart an invaluable sense of how the poem was written. Some readers, as opposed to performers, can even invite listeners to take part in the writing of the poem, but this requires extraordinary humility and respect for the listener.

My experience in college and the Navy convinced me that some people get where they want to go by merely looking and acting as if they had arrived. This so offends my sense of symmetry that I vainly insist writing should live or die on its merits, not the personality of the writer or his charm.

Whole societies—Germans listening to What’s-His-Name, Arabs listening to that murderous old mountain goat, Americans listening to Bushwa—have swallowed lies and half truths and washed them down with self-righteousness. What if they had merely read all that drivel? Just asking. I don’t know the answer. Probably wouldn’t have made a difference. I read Gabriele d’Annunzio’s fascist manifesto when I was young and was enthralled; now I’m merely appalled.

I know I’m hopelessly naive, but I enjoy it. Perversely. For this reason, when I read in public I tend to dial myself down, to eschew taking advantage of a poem’s dramatic possibilities on the grounds that I might cheapen it, turning it into soap opera. This does me no good at all in terms of self-promotion, but every once in a while I see someone in the audience who appreciates the restraint.

I like understatement. That’s an understatement. I adore it. But understatement doesn’t like to be adored. Too melodramatic. It simply wants to be appreciated. I’ve been known to walk out of restaurants if there are exhibitionists holding forth—the kind who trumpet their self-importance into their cellphones.

I’ve heard poets give tripe the Richard Burton treatment, and I wanted to wring their necks. That might be all right for Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but it would be sacrilege for Gerard Manley Hopkins or W.S. Merwin. You give a poem its own inherent treatment; you shouldn’t lay an overtone on it. Some poems aren’t made for declamation. I know my own aren’t. They’re like certain people, quiet. Certain poems do more listening than talking.

I like reading poetry aloud, my own or the work of others, simply because I like studying the faces of the listeners. But I no more like trying to impress them than I like trying to get my work published. There is something about it, to me at least, that soils the soul. We either get a poem (or each other) or we don’t, and the rest is snake oil.

That said, there are many poets and poems I didn’t get when younger and now savor. But my most constant demeanor towards poetry has always been a preference for reticence and quietude, and so I worship Emily Dickinson. I can’t imagine her at a slam. But I have heard a few people read her work aloud and I have been amazed at the subtleties that surface. For example, how do you deliver a Dickinson dash? There are many ways, but I think none of them should be a loaded shotgun.

There are many other characteristics, besides reticence, I find admirable. Perversity, for example. So I enjoy Arthur Rimbaud. Plain speech that suggests overhearing someone’s mind, and so I read C.P. Cavafy again and again.

I would have liked to hear Dickinson in her parlor. Given her reclusiveness, no one did hear her at a reading. I would have liked to hear the sound of Rimbaud’s voice, but I’m not especially bereft for not having heard Charles Baudelaire or Gerard de Nerval, whom I also admire.

I did hear Allen Ginsburg read Howl, and I thought it was over the top and glitzy. But I was young and drunk, and over time I have come to admire this crucial poem. I can’t remember if I thought the poem over the top or his delivery, but it was one of several occasions that prejudiced me against performance poetry. About the same time I heard Frank O’Hara and came away regarding him as a friend, although I never spoke with him.

Another facet of performance poetry that I dislike is its disrespect for the discernment of listeners. It’s often rather like politicians bottling bilge water as Chateauneuf du Pape. They want the poem to enter the listener’s mind in a certain way, but poems want to enter our minds on their own terms. It seems to me the least a performing poet can do is set aside his strategy in favor of the ambiance and mood of the particular place. If this doesn’t happen, everyone is disoriented because we all seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My caveat to the foregoing bilge water is that if the poet is reading his poem as it sounded when it traveled from his head to his hand, I would have no quarrel, because a listener, after all, might reasonably be grateful to know how a poem initially sounded to its creator. But if he is juicing it to sell himself and his work I’m inclined to think it a disservice. Insight is one thing, hucksterism another.

Besides, we live in a commercial society. We are consumeristas; at least that is the role to which our leaders have consigned us. So it’s small wonder that readings should come across as commercial occasions. And it’s even smaller wonder that they should strike us as horse races in which someone wins and others lose. This win-lose aspect of our lives is poisonous. I remember winning a Hearst oratorical competition with a three-minute spiel about Alexander Hamilton. It didn’t do well by our first treasury secretary, but it sure did well by me. I wowed the audience with intensity, cadence, caesura, body language, etc. But the performance concealed third-rate thinking. I had simply read a Hamilton biography, but I hadn’t done much thinking about the man. He deserved much better than to have my disrepect for him rewarded.

Poems have to do without their poets for a very long time. The sooner they get used to it the better.—DM