Mary Mackey concludes in
Creativity: Where Poems Begin that, simply, “creativity is a gift. You
can’t board it like a bus,” she says, “[expecting] it to take you wherever you
want to go.” So what is creativity? It’s ephemeral, phantom-like, ungraspable,
and indescribable by its very nature, because it comes from a place where words
have no dominion.” Does this say something about poetry’s magic? Its wordless
eloquence?
Nabokov’s Speak, Memory can be of help in
appreciating how her reflective memoir might lead to self-realization. “[T]he
supreme achievement of memory [Nabokov writes] is the masterly use it makes of
innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering
tonalities of the past” (131). There’s a music in Mackey’s prose, which nearly,
on its own, carries the book to completion—a process not unlike how creativity,
as a force in our lives, does somehow lift up the facts of a past retrieved from
the realm of poetry. Mackey gathers what she can. Her reach is enormous.
Her gift of recall confirms her notion that there was something first inborn
in Mackey: namely, the realization that art’s vibrancy comes from its refusal to
honor the right and wrong of a pedestrian world. “My memories go back a long
way,” begins her first chapter, “too long to be true, people tell me. And yet
they are there, stored in a wordless space in my mind, because they came before
words […].”
Translation Zone (2023) by Brian Cochran:
Translation Zone recalls, for me, Augustine’s mystical notion of
creation, in the Confessions. Echoing Apocalypse 6:14, Augustine sees
the eternal as a furled scroll, whereas the created world, he says, is “spread
out like a canopy of skins” beneath it, on which “the primal dictation of
creation is dispensed as a written text, as Scripture” (Confessions,
ed. and tr. Pine-Coffin).
Cochran’s conceits are marvelous. Their rigor,
in his collection, comes out of reverence for manifest experience whose gorgeous
symmetry is irresistible. In this sense, the source of his enchantment is an
endless beauty wherein metaphor per se originates.
The poetic
forms his book gathers are determined by a confidence in poetry as never erring.
Or, at least, this is how Cochran’s poems seem. John Yau, Marsh Hawk Press's
2024 contest judge, obviously admires Cochran’s phenomenology, especially
relishing in his poems their “precise clusters through which meaning
peeks”—they’re “allegories [slipping] out of that category as soon as we try to
fix them there.”
As Cochran explains, “the poem [. . .] is a kind of
transitional space”; hence “words” are “gates that open onto the chasm into
which all languages fall.” These “gates” involve “a border, a translation zone,
a threshold.” The magnificence of the created world, as well as of poetry,
depends upon the poem that spirals in on itself, in a peculiar moebius strip.
The divine becomes mortal, just as the poet sees and records the
inspired poem. Cochran is our witness to events. And yet, he tells us, he’s
“almost afraid to watch.” His poems aspire to maintaining their end of the
balance with the world. “When I write the poem,” he says, “I realize it’s my
lack of one.”
The Flaws in the Story by Liane Strauss
(2023)
Liane Strauss won the Marsh Hawk Press Prize with this book. Her
long-lined excursus go on and on in wonderfully kooky, twisted apothegms, which
breathe new life into both tautology and truism. Her jaunty, garrulous wit
fashions shaggy-dog tales I wish never to end. Some of them don’t. “As scenes
accrue” (Mary Jo Bang has commented), “individual points in time become an inner
life made visible, a brilliant enactment of a mind talking back to the world.”
Beware: A remembrance’s innocent tone might quickly turn serious and
disturbing. “One Small Sleep Past” is a poem about dancing, growing up, and the
reach of a dream (in which “balancing” gets juxtaposed with “Balanchine”):
Balanchine was Balanchine, she was saying, as I wound the double
helix round and round my small ankles, spinning and spinning until I
was the last one standing still, and the world, at last, both under
and around me, the only one doing the spinning for all of us. It had
been so long since I had given the benefit of the doubt to
doubt .]
The rich textures of Strauss's voiced perspectives are over the
top but of course she knows that perfectly well. Once we readers get wise to her
excesses, we can sit back calmly to enjoy the ride we now realize we’re on.
Craft: A Memoir (2024)
by Tony Trigilio:
A pleasure in reading Marsh Hawk Press’s Chapter One
collection—these are short books of autobiography, telling the story of becoming
a poet—has to do with how each author in this series responds variously to its
basic premise of autobiography as how-to manual. In praising Tony Trigilio’s
Craft: A Memoir, Denise Duhamel considers how the book “chronicles his own
projects—from pop culture to history” while giving readers “a behind-the-desk
view” of his practice. The book is equally practical and visionary, Whitmanesque
not in style but that it’s unswervingly democratic.
The range of
approaches already apparent in the published Chapter One books, thus far, is
also manifest in short “Chapter One”-like memoirs to be found on the Marsh Hawk
website. All of these share a commitment to relevance with respect to the
aspiring young writer. Craft: A Memoir is perfectly pitched in its author’s
dependable voice. We learn of Trigilio’s heritage and how it has informed his
work as a poet and professor—two vocations entwined. His life began as the child
of Italian immigrants; Trigilio resides in old and new worlds, which are
amenable to documentary.
Meditation lies at the heart of his Buddhist
way of life, the source of his intellectual, writerly success. In Craft: A
Memoir his own story and advice are of equal value to the aspiring poet.
Each is rooted in his philosophy of “[p]oetic language,” which, he explains, “is
the only kind of discourse that helps me untangle what is strange, weird, and
sublime in my everyday lived experience.” What, then, is “poetic” language?
“Poetry forces me to pay attention, [to] listen to what the unknown world is
telling me,” he says. His book, meant to be practical, is gently reflective. His
life—from within a maelstrom of languages—has made his poetry, “first and
foremost […] a personal thing, an art form that documents […] emotions as they
collide with the outside world.”
Green Leaves, Unseeing
(2024) by Susan Terris:
Now late in life, Terris has neither inclination
nor time for illusion. She provides emotional ballast in the plumbing of memory,
her retrospect. The book’s title poem—“Green Leaves, Seeing”—finds its occasion
in a passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: “All tremors shake me,
and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green
leaves, unseeing.” Terris flips Woolf around, furnishing this rejoinder:
[. . . .] Don’t look back Satch said / And since my Brooklyn
guy has left me I’m seeking new spaces / Wilderness maybe but
shall avoid all apples and watch for the snake / Is he lost or
is it me / So action / Look past all green leaves / Breathe in
the lives or the fortunes of others / Carpe diem
While
her interior monologues may be diaristic—her inner-outer thoughts,
personal-impersonal reflections—they’re filled with “small things.”
Jane
Hirschfield calls Terris “a poet of tensile, particular language and fearless
investigation.” My one-word description of her would be elegance. I admire
Terris’ wonderful economy (to which “tensile” refers) in Green Leaves,
Unseeing. Its working principle evokes for me lines from Robert Creeley’s
poem, “To WCW”: “There, you say, and / there, and and / becomes / just so.”
She recalls dining with a man, “years ago,” in “How It Feels When I Am Here
and He Is Not”; he has taken her “to the Grolier // to see its miniature books.”
They sip their rosé wine; he talks of the “crazed world.” “[W]e love // small
things,” he goes on. “They offer us the illusion of control.”
When
Terris observes what’s around her in the moment, in moments past, which I might
describe as her poetics of small things, she allows herself a life within
retrospect. She can be quite light on her feet, as in these lines from “I Live
in the Layers”: “You yes are a husband not mine // You’re layered with Ps & Qs /
As a pianist parent procrastinator // Or as quick quixotic / Enough yet never
quite.” (I love that “never quite.”)
“Being third wife to you old man /
Will not suit me,” she tells a man who “Stalk[s] through [her] nightmares.”
Beware! “My djinns will torture you / My teeth may injure your manhood.” Her
sober clarities come through terse thoughts as well as the spaces between them
on the page. Terris no longer has the time to be anything but piercing, direct,
in dispensing with social niceties.
