Search Results for: james tate

April 23, 2015

“The Reality Auction” by James Davis MayPosted by

James Davis May

THE REALITY AUCTION

from a typo on a sign in Warne, North Carolina

It was a dour crowd that gathered at the auction house
beside the Community Center,
elderly, for the most part; the auctioneer, meanwhile,
sounded more like a Latin teacher
rehearsing declensions than a derby announcer
as he invited bidding on the first item,
Sparrow Consciousness, which drew only two offers,
though its description promised keen appreciation
for both the lexicon of gravel and the flavor
of windfall seeds on cold February mornings.

A couple—she wore flowers in her hair,
and a threadbare sundress; he, a greasy ponytail,
jeans, and a stain-spackled t-shirt—bid aggressively
on the blue pills of Altered States and went unchallenged.
The afternoon went on. Objective Reality
went for its asking price, not a penny more.
And when it came time to bid on the Ideal,
a burly man hauled in a miniature oak cask,
the contents of which, the auctioneer said,
should be self-evident, so it remained sealed.

The oldest couple there opened the bidding,
remembering their trip to San Francisco in 1948,
the loaf of sourdough they ate one night instead of dinner
(they could afford the travel but not their meals,
so they ate the bread slowly, tearing off pieces
which they fed to each other, leaning on the bakery’s wall
before returning to their motel and making love
as cold air scudded in from the bay and surrounded their bed).
They were outbid, though, by a farmer’s widow,
and she, in turn, was overcome by a mustachioed man

in a brown suit who appeared to have won
when the auctioneer, his voice excited by then
but quickening to a stop, opened a manila envelope
and, frowning, announced that the minimum bid
had not been reached, that they had to keep going
or the cask would be returned to the warehouse.
By then, everyone’s budget was stretched.
Their sole option was to pool their funds
and share the prize. Fist-thick rolls of twenties,
checks, and jewelry all filled the hat they passed.

When the price was reached and the barrel tapped,
they each tasted their thimble-sized share
of the sunset-red liquor, which was unlike anything
anyone had ever had and thus hard to remember
even seconds after—so they all stayed circling the empty cask,
sniffing their empty glasses, trying to describe what they knew
but couldn’t name. A few said it tasted bright, citrusy;
others thought bitter and ashy. “Brisk,” one said.
“Well worth it,” another added, and the rest stood there
in that sort of silence that sounds like agreement.

—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

James Davis May: “Warne, North Carolina, where I saw the sign mentioned in the epigraph for the poem, is about six miles from Young Harris, Georgia, where my wife, daughter, and I moved last year. Though we’re happy in Young Harris now, our move was a difficult one, as all moves are, and I remember questioning a lot of things, including, as the poem suggests, the nature of reality.” (web)

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May 25, 2013

CHARMS AGAINST LIGHTNING by James ArthurPosted by

Review by Lynn LevinCharms Against Lightning by James Arthur

CHARMS AGAINST LIGHTNING
by James Arthur

A Lannan Literary Selection
Copper Canyon Press
P. O. Box 271
Port Townsend, WA 98368
ISBN 13: 978-1-55659-387-1
2012, 80 pp., $16.00
www.coppercanyonpress.org

I first discovered the poetry of James Arthur in January of 2013 when I attended a poetry reading he gave in Philadelphia. He had recently published Charms Against Lightning, his numinous debut collection of poems. The reading was no ordinary event. Arthur had memorized all of his poems and delivered them flawlessly in his gentle voice.  In between his own poems, he also recited from memory several poems by other poets, including Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Such generosity at a reading—Arthur’s sharing of others’ poems in his own allotment of podium time—speaks of his modest approach to his own ego.  In fact, the thing I love most about Arthur’s work is the way his ego performs a series of subtle vanishing acts in the poems.

Take, for example, Arthur’s fanciful and mysterious poem “Ghost Life,” in which the speaker personifies his shadow:

… My shadow feels my company,
my stepping as he steps, feels,
although he knows it can’t be true, that the fall
and all its wreckage were invented
just for him.

As the poem proceeds and the speaker ambles along with his companionable nobody, the shadow is further reduced to something “thinner than a flame.”  I detect a faint air of joy and relief in this lessness, this side-stepping of the self. The speaker is glad not to stand on the pedestal of importance. Contrast this with the unnamed famous artist in “The Death of a Painter.” Here is a lyric about a man so consumed by his art and status that “he hardly saw his children,/ by habit was self-absorbed.” The great man is so apart from the humble claims of family that when he dies the woman mourning him must weep “from another room.”

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, James Arthur grew up in Toronto, Canada. A 2012 – 2013 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, Arthur’s many other honors include a Stegner Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and the Discovery/The Nation Prize. The poems in this collection have appeared in an equally impressive list of publications including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and many others. Yet with all this acclaim, Arthur states he doesn’t think of his poems as having any effect. “They are like pebbles thrown in the ocean,” he says.

James Arthur is a poet who speaks in mists of images that perfume and disturb the mind. He writes of moments caught and released, that leave one in a beautiful fog. Here are the first lines from one of my favorite poems in the collection, “In Praise of the Indeterminate”:

It has no form, and out-Houdinis Houdini
by dissolving from shape to shape, struggling
to escape itself, remaining the same thing,
like a video feed of the almost-random variations
in the similarity of the sea.

Arthur is in awe of the transient, the unstable, the airy. In concert with this, his rhythms also float. Ever aware of the fragility of life and, beyond that, the instability and changeability of the whole universe, Arthur writes poems that gather and dissipate. In some ways, they call to mind the poems of W. S. Merwin.

This is not to say that Arthur’s poems are without violence. Pain and menace pierce certain poems, in particular the title poem “Charms Against Lightning,” in which the poet calls on some kind of safeguard “Against lupus and lawsuits, lying stranded between nations,/ against secrets and frostbite, the burring of trains/ that never arrive.” Even in invoking the safeguards, the “talismans,” there is the knowledge that the talismans themselves are under threat. Still, the griefs in these poems do not grandstand, largely because the speaker minimizes the self.

Arthur includes several love poems in the collection. In “Summer Song,” the speaker meditates on various scenes of insecurity and threat, but even the threatening scenes ride in on dazzling metaphors—paratroopers sail by like “clothespins/ pinning up the sky.” In the same poem, the vastness of the universe and its galaxies inspire the speaker to tell his beloved, “I marry you in the morning/ and I marry you each day.”  What matters is the lovers’ attachment in the face of the losses and hollow spaces of the world. And, still, there is the erasing self, the gentle melancholy. This love poem concludes, “I feel a tall wind rising up to take/ and bear me far away.”

James Arthur is poet of big gifts delivered lightly. I keep going back to the poems because they offer a sort of ease amid their subtle disturbances. And as for his observation about his poems’ being pebbles thrown in the ocean, I can only say that I hope he keeps throwing the pebbles.

__________

Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection is Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky Press, 2013).

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December 28, 2012

“The Resurrection of Form in Poetry” by David JamesPosted by

David James

THE RESURRECTION OF FORM IN POETRY

For 30 years, I’ve been a free verse writer. I was free to use any words in any pattern, flaunting the page without a thought of rhyme scheme, unhindered by syllable counting. Formal poetry was defined as that work from the past, by the Romantics, by Shakespeare and Chaucer, by poets before the printing press. Of course, I dabbled with forms here and there, merely as exercises, writing a ghazal, sestina, villanelle, sonnet, pantoum. I wrote in these forms so when some wag confronted me with one of them, I could say, “Oh, sure, I’ve written that.”

As I get older, however, I am being drawn to form and meter. And as I write more rhyming verse, using enjambment and mosaic rhyme patterns to mute the obviousness of sound, I have come to the conclusion that we have fallen down on the job. Contemporary poets have done little, if anything, to further the innovative use of end rhyme in literature.

Looking at the major forms of rhyming poetry, it’s obvious that no new forms have surfaced in over a century. The ghazal, a Persian form with couplets, is over 1000 years old. One of the most complex French forms, the sestina, originated in the 12th century with Arnaut Daniel. The Italian sonnet’s origin, a precursor to the English sonnet, dates back to the mid-1200’s, popularized by Petrarch (1304-1374). The French villanelle, our song-like refrain form, was standardized by the late 1500’s by Jean Passerat. The haiku first appeared in the 16th century. The most recent form, the pantoum, a Malaysian invention also containing repeating lines, became popular in Europe in the 1800’s. In the last 150 years, several generations of poets have turned their backs to formal verse, at least with regard to inventing innovative new forms for others to emulate.

As a lifelong free verse writer, I am intrigued when I venture into rhyming poetry. First, writing formal poetry alters my perceptions of the world. The rhymes, line requirements, and syllable restrictions change what I write and how I write in surprising ways. The restrictions send me into uncharted imaginative waters. My poems approach the material from a different vantage point, and I consistently end up saying what I never would have said if I was writing in free verse. The novelty and imaginative gyrations are both worth the attempts. The late great Richard Hugo voiced his appreciation for formal verse, particularly in overcoming writer’s block: “When you concentrate on the ‘rules of the game’ being played on the page, the real problem, blockage of the imagination, often goes away simply by virtue of being ignored. That’s why I write more formal poems when I go dry.”

Secondly, I have this longing to create my own forms, forms that thrive in today’s language and sensibilities. Personally, I find the age-old forms too restrictive and constraining. The sonnet and villanelle, though honorable, seem outdated for the world of the internet and global warming. Our challenge is to imagine the forms that speak to today’s culture and modern times.

So this is the gauntlet thrown down at the feet of poets: to create the contemporary forms of rhyming poetry that will outlive them. What forms will young poets be cutting their teeth on 150 years from now? What are the new types of formal poems for the 21st century? What legacy of form will this generation leave to the future, if any?

To get the movement started, I’ll provide two new examples of 21st century formal poetry. My goal is to invent forms that 1) have a certain flexibility, 2) do not emphasize the rhyming pattern, and 3) play off the strengths of free verse. The first is called a Karousel. It is a twenty line poem, four stanzas of five lines each. The rhyme pattern is the following: abcda  ecdbe  fdbcf  gbcdg. The three inner lines (bcd) rotate in each stanza until they circle back to their original bcd form from stanza one. Though each stanza is enclosed in a rhyme, there are no metrical restrictions.

AS TIME GOES ON

As each year came and went,
the man noticed the tree
outside, the one in back,
how its bark shed
like fur, how it bent

and swayed in time to the wind.
He remembered how his dog tracked
in his last dirt before being found dead.
The man buried him, like the others, religiously.
With each year, something pinned

itself to the inside of his heart,
which he imagined was not red
anymore, but bruised and mildly
dry, an item to be stacked
on a shelf or a cart.

The years began to rain down,
one suddenly became three.
The man looked up into the black
sky. And then a strange thought in his head
fell, like the whole world, into the swollen ground.

My second example is called the Weave. It is less restrictive than a Karousel and can be written in two line stanzas, five line stanzas, or no separate stanzas at all. Its rhyme scheme follows this pattern: abcad  befbg  ehiej (and so on). The first and fourth lines rhyme, and the second line rhyme from the first stanza becomes the rhyme for the first and fourth lines in the following stanza. So, the second line from stanza one weaves into stanza two; the second line from stanza two weaves into stanza three. The following poem is an example of this form.

MILLIONS OF MINUTES

I’m drowning
in a pool of my own making
like a minnow at the bottom of the ocean.
It’s too dark to see. There’s a pounding
between my ears, peeling the flesh

off my brain, breaking
each good thought
into dust that dissolves in water.
Much of what we do could be called faking
it, going through the motions

so we won’t get caught.
But we learn too late, this one life,
these millions of minutes
can’t be bought
or sold, only used or wasted.

Whether or not these forms last or evolve is not important. Only time and fate will determine that. They are, however, forms that I have used and reused to make dozens of poems, new forms that have allowed me to see the world in a different light.

Even though rhyming poetry has fallen out of favor and practice with contemporary poets, that does not mean formal poetry must die a slow death.  It is our right, perhaps our duty, to resurrect rhyme and meter and transform its use to capture the day.  With a little imagination and attention, a new formal poetry can speak out in this terrible world.

—from Rattle e.4

__________

David James teaches for Oakland Community College. His most recent book is Trembling in Someone’s Palm from March Street Press.  His other books include, A Heart Out of This World, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and three chapbooks, Do Not Give Dogs What Is Holy, I Dance Back, and I Will Peel This Mask Off. His one-act plays have been produced off-off-Broadway, as well as in Massachusetts and Michigan.

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May 15, 2011

THE ARAKAKI PERMUTATIONS by James MaughnPosted by

Review by James BentonThe Arakaki Permutations by James Maughn

THE ARAKAKI PERMUTATIONS
by James Maughn

Black Radish Books
ISBN-13 978-0982573167
2011, 120 pp., $15.00
www.blackradishbooks.org

Drawing from his training in the martial arts, and building on his earlier work, Kata, Maughn creates poems simultaneously energetic and spare in a challenging, extended exploration of, in his words, “the connections and intersections between [his] practice of traditional Karate and [his] practice of poetry.” The project sounds simple enough: take a highly structured Karate form, then write from, or into, or against, this form, not to talk about it, but to participate in its controlling energy. Maughn organizes his collection into five sets of permutations, each representing a different kata, or form. Each section begins with a selection from his first book, each line of which then serves as a title or tone center for a new poem.

The resulting poetry demonstrates through its extreme compression of diction the economy of motion and conservation of energy so highly valued in the martial arts. In addition, the poetry is correspondingly enigmatic, exotic, and, some might say, opaque. At first I found this to be an obstacle to understanding the book, but after staying with the poems for a time, the nuances of what turned out to be a kind of nonce grammar began to emerge. Take for example the following:

VIII.               (sentence)

         passed

time’s
served
condemned
to
                       be
  commended

                       no
                     last
                 meal

The first thing one notices about this poem is its extreme lineation. Each line a single word, most a single syllable. The compression of the lines mimics the compression of the syntax with its lack of punctuation to guide the reader along familiar paths. In this poem, Maughn uses, among other devices, homonyms (passed = past) to interact in two ways with the word “time” to give us both the passage of time and the loss of opportunity. When combined with the title, “(sentence),” which also works in more than one way, he evokes a prison term. Immediately, our suspicion is confirmed and heightened by the word “condemned,” but instead of the hopelessness of condemnation and the lost opportunities of irrecoverable time, the poem turns on a sonic dime toward commendation, while the idea of “no last meal” implies hope and continuation. Far from acting as a mere intellectual exercise in wordplay, this poem produced a genuine and surprising melancholy once I felt I had apprehended it.

Without recognizable grammatical clues, the meaning of these compact poems comes from other sources, other indicators. Ron Siliman has suggested a socio-economic rationale to argue for creating sentences whose organizing structures lay outside the schoolbook rules of the dominant culture, but which possess internal consistency to guide the reader to their meaning. Maughn takes this idea to heart. In order to express what he sees as ultimately inexpressible, he abandons the ordinary terms of expression, replacing subject/verb/object constructions with connotation, secondary definitions, subtle puns, sight rhymes and other devices. The more I lived within the tight universe of this poem, the more sense it made, and the more different senses it made, and this, it turns out, is the method of the book as a whole.

Most of the poems in this collection are of this slender-spill-of-smoke variety, their hyper-truncated lines taking Robert Creeley’s aesthetic to its ultimate limit. Later permutations, however, become more expansive, showing both that Maughn is not afraid of longer lines, and that his choices are far from arbitrary.

Sometimes the connections between a poem and its title resist easy interpretation. This too reflects Maughn’s deeply realized experience of the spirit of his martial art. It is combat, after all, at least a restrained, controlled form of it that he tries to capture. But sometimes, with combat in mind, his connotative use of words coalesces quickly into layered performances, best seen through a kind of peripheral view, gazing past the need for syntactical correctness and into the middle distance where one may take in the whole poem at once. This poem, from the “arakaki no jo permutations,” is a good example

VI.     (intent      rivet gatling)

cover fire ground-
                                                   works for a stable
uncover staked
                                                   to –tenable earth
leave posts where
                                                   you drive them in
man your outcrop
                                                   it’s showing get a
grip or switch-hit
                                                   Armageddon-style

Here, the appearance of words like ground, stable, earth, and outcrop, combine to form the impression of territory, fixture of place, immovability, while gatling, cover fire, hit, and Armageddon, combine to disrupt the stability of the others. Notice, though, that these opposing terms intermingle in, among, and between the line segments, suggesting an inseparability of the forces of stability and chaos. By denying us a linear, English-grammar-based semantic statement, Maughn likewise disrupts our readerly expectations and forces us deep into the chaotic moment of the poem. We have not a narrative about combat, but language at war with itself.

I often wonder how we came to the idea that difficulty and value in poetry are inversely proportional, for surely difficult poetry enjoys a far smaller audience than it deserves. These are not easy poems; they require some solitude, some time, and some egoless attention to mine their true worth. This is not a collection you will read in a single sitting, and you should not expect to hear any of them recited on NPR. You should, however, expect to be well rewarded for the effort it takes to enter the core of this book.

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January 29, 2010

“The Famous Outlaw” by David JamesPosted by

David James

THE FAMOUS OUTLAW

            He rides into town on a retarded horse, falling off five times before reaching the saloon. His horse has a tendency to trip over its own hooves, like steps or bowling balls. The cowboy wears a helmet to safeguard against personal head injuries.
            Unknowingly, he ties himself to the hitching post while the horse wanders down main street, looking for a barber shop.
            Within ten minutes, the outlaw realizes what he did and quickly associates this as being the reason for his failure to enter the saloon. He unties the rope and barges in. “Give me dirty milk in a clean glass,” he says to the bartender so everyone hears.
            As evidence of his brilliant courage, he carries his left nipple and mustache in a leather pouch, both shot off during bank robberies. Later, as you know, he made thousands of dollars selling the banks to riverfront store owners in Mississippi.
            His mother and father never met in person, although we do have an extensive series of letters from their correspondences, each containing diagrams of tattoos and question marks. Nothing is known for sure about his childhood. The rumors now circulating state he used to be a choir boy at the age of two.
            He finishes his drink and walks out without paying. The street is empty except for some children who are watching his horse kick in the side of the General Store. He gives them each a bullet and rides off into the sunset. The children stand close to the buildings, waving goodbye. The outlaw turns to wave when his horse trips, throwing him head over heels. The dust slowly evaporates and he is still lying on the ground.
            The children keep waving. They can tell he’s famous.

—from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

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January 26, 2009

“Wheat State Salvation” by Paul DickeyPosted by

Paul Dickey

WHEAT STATE SALVATION

And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou,
bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said,
Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship,
he walked on the water, to go to Jesus.
—Matthew 14:28, 29 (King James Version)

In vacant lots in Kansas, we walk on
wheat-colored weeds, not water;
taste dust kicked up from shoes; cough up
            a child’s guilt that stuck in the throat

like popcorn husks. Dad preached: To the world,
we are just an old movie to go see every time
it comes to town, but under our canvas tonight,
            the Lord is present. Mosquitoes preyed.

Flies buzzed, circled overhead on bare light bulbs,
settled on the light, old ladies with flowered,
hand fans. The tribulations of Job, not
            ecstasies of apostles, inflated our faith.

Dad and Mom worked the aisles, talked
to brothers and sisters from churches
across the state. I did not dare miss one word
            of grown-up talk of how much I’d grown.

Uncle Fred’s headlights surrounded the tent,
shining the spotlight. There is room at the cross.
The Holy Ghost is moving. I pledged fifty cents
            a month—half a week’s allowance—

for the work of God. Teenage cousins dedicated
their lives to Christ. Going home, I’d fall asleep
memorizing scriptures, with a vision for sinners
            being forgiven, hearing my words.

Dad’s church now is all weeds, thirty years of dust.
Tonight in a lot across town where last week
cousins sold firecrackers, folks still come
            to the altar—just as I am.

I hear a voice that sounds so like my own,
it must be Someone Else. It calls me out,
this time to be the cripple and throw away
            the crutches on which I learned to walk.

—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008

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May 8, 2023

“Burger King” by Bill GarveyPosted by

Bill Garvey

BURGER KING

The first man in line can’t find his money. 
He slaps at the pockets of his jeans and his jacket. 
 
He looks behind and beside himself, then directly at me 
As if I could solve his dilemma, or that I picked his pocket. 
 
I shrug as the aroma of grease sneaks into my olfactory. 
The girl in the ketchup-colored vest and bonnet 
 
Has been waiting rather patiently. 
Finally, he finds it, pulls a bill from his wallet, 
 
Shakes his head, hands her the twenty, 
And we all move a notch on this sprocket.
 

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

__________

Bill Garvey: “James Tate’s book, Absences, influenced me to write poetry more than any other thing I can remember. It was 1972. I was 17. He was no less a rock star to me than Mick Jagger. Thirty-five years later, I confronted Tate at an event in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the urging of my wife. He sat on stage before his reading. As I approached, he grimaced. I regretted my decision, but it was too late. Sheepishly, I made my request to interview him for a paper. His wife, Dara Wier, sensing his reluctance, said, ‘What have you got to lose?’ I gave Tate my phone number. I’ll never hear from him, I thought, leaving the stage. Less than a week later the phone rang at our home. My daughter answered. I had blocked out the event in Brattleboro until she said, ‘Dad, it’s for you. Some guy named James Tate.’”

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