Kevin Young: Dear Darkness

I’m reading it for PFFA’s NaPoReMo II.

I will not be writing much about it on this blog.

If you want to know what I think about it, go here:

http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?t=66786

But if you want to know what it’s like, go buy it.

NaPoReMo – June 15

June 15 – Heaven

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We’re back in the land that we started in, the pastoral/gardener’s land, a land I feel more comfortable in, don’t know why. This poem, “Heaven”, plays off the various ideas of paradise/Eden, off gardens and serpents.

The setting is simple. N. has been clearing the land beyond his own to make some more room for vegetables. In the process, he’s attacked by a snake, a copperhead:

Before me,
……………….coiled in weeds,
…………………………………………….a copperhead
jabbed at
……………my boots, but I could barely feel it.

And then he creates the juxtaposition that’s at the heart of the poem:

the copperhead’s paradise,
……………………………………….which I had cleared,
hoed into furrows, planted.

Gardening, says the poet, is opposed to wilderness. Gardening is extra (outside of) heaven. Or, more specifically, outside of, inimical to, Eden.

But this is an Eden with a serpent in it. And the serpent proves devastatingly simple to get rid of:

and with the hoe, I hooked
……………………………………..the angry snake
and flicked it,
…………………..writhing, across the ditch
into my neighbor’s untouched bramble

And that place is a place of refuge for all the wildlife, all the creatures who “had also fled” from N.’s “advancing paradise”.

We’re left with a very ambiguous account of “Paradise”/heaven, to say the least.

NaNoReMo – June 11-14

June 11 – Wind

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Falling behind, largely because of work.Beginning the catch-up.

Poems I didn’t read this week:

Wind

Oh yes, this is one of the better ones. Maybe it’s the echoes of Eliot that I hear in its lines, like here:

Wind shook the dead but not-yet-fallen leaves.
Wind tugged and plucked and rattled the dead leaves,
the wind entreating come and the oak leaves,
already dead, saying no to death, no,
for that was what the wind through brown leaves was — death –
and I was afraid

and here:

………………………………………I longed
to be the wind, which is the deep, untroubled
inhaling or exhaling of our god.
But I was not the wind, or the leaves wholly,
riding without knowing what it was,
the in-breath or out-breath of the Lord.

or maybe it’s the take on this ordinary thing, that wind is death, that wind is blowing all humans to death, and life is leaves clinging desperately and doomedly to the bough.

This is the Hudgins I hold my breath for.

A little taste to close:

I loved the hard wind, loved it, loved the huge
steps I strode when the wind’s muscular hand
clamped upon my back, and thrust me before it

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June 12 – Supper

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We’re back to the ocean-of-meaning-in-a-drop sort of poetry, and this one, dealing with human relationships, predictably, doesn’t excite me at first glance.But rather than get caught up in the content, let me take a look at the craft for a moment, see whether I can be fairer to Hudgins, give this a less partial review.

The speaker writes of a candlelit supper. There are two candles (it’s not specified, but by implication there are two flames as there are two diners). There are also two shadows. The shadow and the flame (and, presumably, the speaker and the partner) are twinned, mirror-like. The twinning of the flames appears to pair the light and dark sides of the speaker and the partner too, which works pretty well.

A description of the flames, which works for me:

They bowed their heads, then snapped upright –
a ripple in the gases’ fluted yellow silk,
blue silk, transparent silk.

and of the shadows, which works even better, IMO:

But the dark flames reached out, licked the meat,
licked the plate, the fork and the knife edge.
They licked our faces and our lips — a dry unfelt tongue,
the shadow of the flame consuming nothing

and the ending, which, in this case, I think works as the blurb claims Hudgins’ endings do:

……………………………………….How ardently it hungers
because it cannot have us.
How chaste the bright flame, because it can.

Conclusion: having engaged with the craft, I’ve changed my mind. From not being excited, I now like this poem.

Who knew?

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June 13 – The Daffodils Erupt in Clumps

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Another daffodil poem. I am going to have to apply myself to craft, etc, to get past my irritation.

Trying.

The poem is another paean to the flowers, and, predictably, it’s about the flowers, and about life and death. It’s written in the broken-line form that Hudgins has been employing with some frequency in this book. At some points it recalls Eliot and his Waste Land approach to spring, most notably the way present participles at the ends of lines balance adjectives on the verge of action, hanging them on the end of the line, opening up possibilities but not closing them.

But I’m not convinced by it. Daffodil poems have to work hard to make me pay attention, and the last one worked much better — the daffodil armies was arresting and has stuck with me. Here, though, the focus is more predictable:

The daffodils erupt in clumps
so think they
…………………………lift a block of dirt
above their heads, raising
…………………………………dark soil
in exultation, offering
wet earth
…………….to wet March air.

As usual, the poem’s about life and death, and death in life, death at the very moment of most life, and the cycle of that life; Hudgins spends several lines talking about the daffodils’ work as they supply bees and moths with nectar.

The ending becomes a little more intriguing. The N. cuts daffodils for the table, and then writes:

I’ll study them as Nero studied
the corpse of Agrippina,
…………………………………..handling
the suddenly compliant limbs,
admiring
……………….one arm, faulting
……………………………………………one.
“I hadn’t known,” he said,
……………………………………“I hadn’t known
my mother was so beautiful.”

By linking the daffodils not only to death, but to murder and madness and power-hunger and mother-images (but what a mother! what a son!) he lifts the usual image of daffodils-spring-regeneration-life/new life to a different level altogether, one that links life with, well, madness and murder and a perversion of the aesthetic of beauty.

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June 14 – We Were Simply Talking

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This one straddles, I think, line between the conversational meaninglessness that I don’t like and something more significant, and I’m thinking it’s working. It’s about a moment when, while talking, the narrator loses control of the car he’s driving, and he and his wife spin out of control and face a similarly out-of-control tractor. In the moment the narrator prepares for certain death, he’s overcome with love. And then it’s all over; they slide into a ditch, and they are still alive. The poem balances speech and silence, love and estrangement, life and death, and seems, in my mind, to work. The language is very prosaic, which is one strike against it in my books (but not necessarily in anyone else’s), but there are some bits of it that appeal to me for one reason or another. For instance, there’s this:

I saw my wife and was overjoyed that I had married her,
though our marriage was already falling apart

and this:

………………………………………………….I loved
every molecule of breath I wasn’t taking

And then there’s the ending:

Fine. We were fine. But what was “fine,” I wondered,
and why do we always, always have to speak?

The jury’s still out, but I’m not inclined to hate this one. Not at all.

NaPoReMo – June 10

June 10 – Signs of a Change in Weather

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OK, a little more to like in this one, though I don’t think it’s in “Dirt Clod”’s league.

The “change” Hudgins is addressing is, presumably, applicable to more than weather. He mixes the national/global/potentially cataclysmic with the mundane and the familiar:

The jackdaw chatters late, the chaffinch pipes at dawn,
and in a week the market sets record highs
and record lows.

and as the poem move on the ordinary becomes extraordinary, until it inches towards apocalypse:

Visions grow more frequent among believers,
and bees swirl near the hive, guarding their stores
against an unseen foe, while vodka prices
inch downward and the cost of razor wire skyrockets.

But the ending, strangely, loses force for me (despite the book’s backblurb, which says that “Andrew Hudgins concludes his poems better than just about anyone else writing today”) :

…the president preempts Saturday programming
and tells bored children his recurring dream,
bored because they too have dreamed repeatedly
of the steep roof, the book with unturnable pages.

The last line (which I have not reproduced) redeems him (and the reviewer) a little, but I could’ve done without the president and the children, to be frank. It’s telly, and it doesn’t move me. I don’t know what they’re doing (they remind me of the divine drunk) and it irritates me.

NaPoReMo – June 9

This one, unlike the previous ones, stopped me cold.

I’m not going to say what it’s about. It’s better if you read the poem, the whole thing, from start to finish, to get the full impact.

Here are the bits that got me. The whole thing is in the same mould, and the power of the poem keeps building and building as the poem goes on:

One threw a dirt clod and it ran, and when it paused,
another threw a rock and it trotted out of range,
so they pursued it, lobbing rocks and sticks,
just to see it gallop, which was beautiful,

Go read it for yourself. Go buy the book, for only for this one poem.

It stopped me cold, I tell you. Cold.

NaPoReMo – June 8

June 8th (read and thought about on the date, but not written up till today) is one of those that don’t move me really. I’m finding that the conversational ones, the ones that deal with ordinary occasions with other people, don’t speak to me. Maybe it’s a matter of taste — I’m not often overly moved by conversational poetry (“Island Girl” not withstanding). Or maybe it’s the lack of dramatic monologue that I find unsatisfying. Or maybe it’s that Hudgins attempts to Find the Big Moment in the Ordinary, and tries too hard, or maybe it’s that he ends up telling instead of showing. Anyway, despite the subject matter of this one, which should excite me, because it’s about death (always worth a second look) I’m left cold again.

It’s about a teacher in a night class who pulls aside a student after class and asks him not to tell the other students about how he killed his father. This is the best bit, to my mind:

…………………………………………..“I didn’t shoot him.”
“You didn’t?”
……………………….. ”No sir, I hit him with a bat.
See, he was whipping on my mom again
and whipping on me too and then one day 
I just got tired of being whipped on
and I hit him with my uncle’s metal bat
and just kept hitting till he didn’t move.

It ends with the narrator’s angst:

………………………………………I waited
until I heard the outside door clank shut
before I followed. I wanted to be the one
whose leaving let the hall fall into silence –
silence which I have, from talking, learned to love.
But what, when no one loved me, have I done
but talk, talk, talk until I’ve said, like Peter,
the thing I shouldn’t say, or, like tonight,
until I’ve said exactly what I had to say.

which does nothing, really, for me but irritate me, I’m afraid.

NaPoReMo – June 7

Dragonfly

I’ve been contemplating my dislike of “In the Red Seats” — which I am convinced has to do with the application of modifiers — and wondering whether I’m not being more judgemental, more rigid, than I need to be, whether I’m not applying workshop platitudes in a place where they do not belong.

I’m not sure about that. The adjectives added little to that poem. Here, though Hudgins’ adjectives work.

Perhaps it’s because they have a purpose, a context, which lets them work.

Consider:

Book says “most predacious.” Book
says “fastest
…………………..flying insect,” says
it eats its body weight in half an hour.
Mother called it
……………………..the devil’s
darning needle. Book
…………………………….adds “darner”
and “devil’s arrow.” Mother said
it stitches shut the eyes,
……………………………..ears, lips
of sleeping children …

and

…………………………..damselfly
that strafes the pond clabber, soars,
swoops,
……………hovers, sideslips, loops
…………………………………………….and twists,
sunlight revealing a new glint
of iridiscent
…………………….shimmer — purple, red,
green, turquoise, gold, gunmetal blue –
with every pass.

Every one of the adjectives has a purpose. This is what I’m looking for from Hudgins and his poems. This one I like.

NaPoReMo – June 6

Edge

Is it a question of Hudgins’ craft, or of my taste, that I like this poem better than the one before?

“Edge” is about the polishing of steel — a knife, a cutlass, an axe? — until it is a thing of beauty, a deadly thing of beauty.

This excites me far more than the tale of drunks and red seats.

Perhaps it’s the detail of the beginning, a detail that shows process, places me in the poem.

Or perhaps it’s the return to nature at the end. The return to nature is complicated. The edge the narrator’s put on his tool slips all too easily, to “gouge tiger maple, miscut cherry,” so that

…..soon exotic scrap rises
……………………………………………waist high
beside the cast-iron stove, while I stand scraping
…………………………………………………………………………..bright
unblemished steel against the waterstone,
warmed by the fire of my
………………………………………expensive failures.

NaPoReMo – June 5

In the Red Seats

I have to say this one lost me. It didn’t move me at all; I found it flat, too conversational, insignificant. Not that conversational is necessarily bad; but I wasn’t convinced by the epiphany-in-the-ordinary that Hudgins clearly intended.

It’s a simple piece, easy to get, about the narrator’s experience with a drunk while sitting high in the red seats at a ballgame. The “drunk” and his friends edge by the narrator and the “drunk” overbalances and is in danger of falling, when N. catches him. The drunk is profoundly grateful. This is the result:

from an adoring, pink,
intoxicated face,
love shimmered, love radiated
like equatorial sunshine,
the way a lover’s face
illuminates the lover,
the loved, and the dark world
in one strange, lucent moment:
satisfied and thrilled, intense
and effortless — as God
regards us every moment

I’m not convinced by it. I think it’s forced. I don’t buy the link between the drunk, the lover, and God, I’m afraid. 

See, for me there’s a difference between the damn daffodils (which I object to on principle, because I’m expected to know what daffodils are and understand why poets write about them, while when I write about what is familiar to me I have people respond by saying “I don’t know what this is”, and why the hell should I care? Wordsworth and Hudgins don’t care that I don’t recognize daffodils, do they?) and this. In “Poem”, the link between the daffodils and war is arresting, and it resonates with me. That poem is growing on me and may work its way into my consciousness. This one? Not a chance.

Maybe it’s all the adjectives.

NaPoReMo – June 4

Ashes

This one’s the one about the narrator spilling a woman’s ashes.

This, I think is my favourite part:

……………………………………………Who wants
to track a woman’s ashes on the floor
of a rented hall, then get home
………………………………………………slightly drunk,
pull off his dress shoes and find a residue
of the dust
…………………….trapped in the polished leather creases,
especially if it’s dust
………………………………you know by name
and flirted with

I find a lot of the rest a little rambling. It’s a striking moment to write a poem about, but I’m not as taken by the whole as I expected I would be. Hudgins appears to lose that first electric shock and the hum doesn’t follow through all the way to the end of the wire. In my opinion, anyway.

Here’s the ending, see if you agree. The narrator helped clean up the spill with a damp paper towel which he took home and kept on his dresser for eight months before throwing it away.

the magic
………………….leached away, the awe
………………………………………………………….withdrew,
and I disposed of it, her dust, as we do
almost all
…………………the dead — even those
…………………………………………………….we loved,
loved utterly –
……………………….because they are sheer dust
and should be honored as the dust they are.

On second thought, maybe the poem’s a tour de force — the magic has leached away even from the poem itself, and the moment’s electric charge is lost. I’m not at all convinced about this, but it’s just possible that the poem fades to a close the same way the narrator’s grief fades away in the end.

Nah.

Go read the poem for yourselves, see what you think.

NaPoReMo June 3

Poem

What is about daffodils that makes poets addicted to them? (I ask this, of course, because we do not have them here).

This is a poem about daffodils. Fuck.

That said, it’s a different approach to daffodils from the ones the Romantics used when they made me wish for matches so I could burn the poems to ash. For Hudgins, daffodils are warriors — their shoots are “spikes” and “blades”, they “bayonet” the earth, they’re “murderous”, undying, “back-from-death”.

Consider these lines:

……………………….They’re yellow,
the coarse dead yellow
they died back to
last summer, leaf tips
returning as pale flames:
unburied candelabra, a dead
queen rising from below,
led by a cold torch.

Well, fine. Not romantic, then. But still about daffodils.

NaPoReMo – June 2

After Muscling Through Sharp Greenery

The second poem’s about vegetation again. Hudgins appears to be sending his messages through the symbolism of specific plants — the “greenery” of the title is the greenery of the yew, a tree rich in meaning and history. Yews are sacred, associated with regeneration (they’re evergreen), associated with death (they’re poisonous, they’re planted in graveyards), associated with immortality (they’re long-lived and hard to kill), associated with Christ (their berries are red like blood), associated with pre-Christian beliefs (they’re sacred to the druids) … I could go on, but won’t.

It takes him a while to tell us the “sharp greenery” is the branches of the yew. It takes him a while to tell us that he’s destroying the indestructible, cutting it down. Instead of telling us what tree he’s killing, he tells us how he does it: cutting the branches as close to the trunk as possible, lopping the top of the tree, sawing what remained of the branches to the stump, mulching the branches, and then working to dig the stump out of the ground — then and only then does he mention the yew.

“I traced the yew roots deep,” he writes.

I tore and teased them from the greasy clay,
tugged and pulled and chopped
…………………………………………….until the stump
sagged in the ground, unfixed. And now I own
what I desire:
………………….a hole

It’s tempting to claim he’s making a statement about faith and unbelief, about the loss of faith, the digging out of the sacred. I want to go off and look up the meanings of the plants he lists when he contemplates filling the hole, and I will; but for now I don’t have to, I know that they’re “paper-thin”, white, and fragile.

NaPoReMo – June 1

Otherwise known as National Poetry Reading Month, the brainchild of Rob Mackenzie.

Over at PFFA we have a mantra we like to toss at beginning poets. (We have lots of mantras, and we love tossing them.) It’s this:

Read more poetry.

By that we normally mean read more contemporary poetry.

But how much do we follow our own advice ourselves?

Well, let me speak for myself. I have been particularly bad in this regard. I used to read a whole lot of poetry, but I have not been good at keeping up with contemporary writers. There are numerous reasons for this, not least of which is that I live in The Bahamas where books are selectively imported. We are not exactly on the highway of the poetry publication! So I’ve been relying on Amazon and on other people to suggest books to me. And I’ve bought them, some of them — and (to be honest) have been underwhelmed.

So I thought I’d take Rob up on the challenge.

My chosen poet is Andrew Hudgins, someone to whom I was referred while workshopping a poem. I bought his book a couple of years ago but never read it. I’d dipped into it and wasn’t turned off, but never finished the book.

So.

My book is Babylon in a Jar by Hudgins, and I started reading it today.

Here’s my response to the first poem (lifted wholesale from PFFA):

The Chinaberry

In the first poem there’s a tree, there’s some birds, there’s a shadow, and somehow it all adds up to a comment on life and afterlife and mortality. I approached it cautiously, as the poet approached the birds, and the shape of the poem rose up and hung in the air for a moment before scattering and becoming itself, and I was left to ponder.

Much like Hudgins.

The tree’s a chinaberry, which is beautiful and poisonous. The birds are grackles, a kind of jackdaw (shiny black bird), also beautiful, but presumably ominous, and certainly so in a clump. And then there’s the narrator, who can’t stop himself from approaching the sight, even though he knows he’ll destroy the sight as he moves.

This is what sticks, afterwards:

and for a moment in midair they held
the tree’s shape

…………………………the black tree
…………………………………………………peeling from the green

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Edited to get the bloody name right …

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