Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1

Description

Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1 is a collection of scholarly essays and recent reviews of the best of contemporary poetry. The book reviews and essays include:

• "Musings: History, Memory, Myth (On Gregory Djanikian, Eavan Boland, Charles Wright, and Henri Cole)" by Jay Rogoff


• "About Terrance Hayes: A Profile" by Robert N. Casper


• "Frank Bidart's 'Inauguration Day'" by Steven Gould Axelrod


• "To a Green Thought: Garth Greenwell on Poetry: Varieties of Wildness: on Stephanie Pippin, Greg Wrenn, and Natalie Diaz" by Garth Greenwell


• "Repetition as Voyage and Transfiguration: On Recent Work by Ben Lerner, Kristy Bowen, and Elizabeth J. Colen" by Kristina Marie Darling.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Modern
• Literature
• Contemporary history
• Modern history
• Poetry
• Poem
• Stanza
• Contemporary
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Verse

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438182056
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1
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Contents Chapters Musings: History, Memory, Myth (Review of Poems by Gregory Djanikian, Eavan Boland, Charles Wright, and Henri Cole) About Terrance Hayes: A Profile by Robert N. Casper Frank Bidart s "Inauguration Day" To a Green Thought—Garth Greenwell on Poetry: Varieties of Wildness: On Stephanie Pippin, Greg Wrenn, and Natalie Diaz Repetition as Voyage and Transfiguration: On Recent Work by Ben Lerner, Kristy Bowen, and Elizabeth J. Colen Support Materials Acknowledgments
Chapters
Musings: History, Memory, Myth (Review of Poems by Gregory Djanikian, Eavan Boland, Charles Wright, and Henri Cole)
2008
Poetry, according to Susanne Langer, operates on us in the mode of memory. It produces the illusion that the imaginary external or internal events created by its language, as well as the implied world in which those events take place, become part of our own imagined experience. The psychological anguish of an Emily Dickinson poem, or the sexual ecstasy or religious terror of a John Donne lyric, or the inexhaustible interest in daily things in works of William Carlos Williams or A. R. Ammons adds to our imaginative memory, not because we have performed these actions and undergone these feelings, but because we have had our sympathetic understanding of individual and collective human history enlarged by our vicarious encounter with these poems' events, and by our consequent responses to them. In this way poetry gains us entry into virtual reality.
In her new book, Domestic Violence , Eavan Boland gives these operations of imaginative memory mythic underpinnings. Her poem "To Memory" reminds us that, as mother of the nine muses, Mnemosyne gave birth to poetry in all its genres, as well as the other arts and sciences, all of them dependent on memory while simultaneously expanding it: "you are after all/not simply the goddess of memory, you have/nine daughters yourself and can understand." The new books by Boland and three other poets under consideration here explore ways of enlarging the virtual memory poetry creates. She and Gregory Djanikian investigate the interactions between historical and personal memory, using the tragic pasts of the Irish and the Armenians to meditate on conundrums of self and identity. Boland's lines to Mnemosyne also suggest how memory can metamorphose into myth, a transformation practiced by both Charles Wright and Henri Cole, who attempt to craft out of personal memory a poetry that can confront and accommodate mortality.
*  *  *
Gregory Djanikian constructs his fine new book, So I Will Till the Ground , as a miniature Commedia . It begins with the hell of the 1915 Armenian genocide, including descriptions of tortures and executions that would make even Dante blanch, continues with the hopeful purgatory of learning how to function as an Armenian living first in Alexandria and then in America, and ends with the heavenly discoveries of the wealth of Armenian culture and tradition that has survived to help sustain the speaker and his family.
Djanikian begins with "The Aestheticians of Genocide," a poem that bitterly addresses the problem of witness—how to make human art out of memory when the remembered events shock us with a new understanding of our capacity for cruelty: It's a problem of inflection really, how we have to speak about it with some sense of distance as though from a far hill or a room with no windows. ………………………… For instance, if we were to say they brought the men to the square and bound them to the posts and one by one gouged out their eyes , how many of us would turn away in disgust, witnesses only to our own revulsion?
The speaker's cavalier attitude—the smarmy "really" the sly enjambment that briefly suggests he intends to argue such horrors make "some sense"—knocks against the examples of the allegedly inadvisable, indecorously brutal descriptions that pervade the poem. Yet while the speaker oxymoronically both describes and evades the horror, his diction has internalized it—the "room with no windows," evoking a torture cell or deportation boxcar, or later, the ghastly image of a "blade/seesawing" through a victim's wrist. The question of "how we have to speak about it" arises casually for the aesthetician in this poem, but far more urgently for the poet, because regardless of "how," Djanikian does believe "we have to speak about it."
The results prove ambiguous, however. Callous as it might seem, the challenge really is an aesthetic one, and Djanikian has to make aesthetic decisions—like every poet who has ever wished to present tragic events to evoke fear and pity rather than disgust. Given this nearly impossible task, no wonder his speakers sometimes wax overly sentimental ("children as spry as lambs/before the slaughter," from "Geography Lesson"), or indignantly pedantic ("how many more children bayoneted,/men carved up on the butcher's block,/how many women raped and left for the others," from "The Armenian Question, 1915"), or self-righteously sardonic ("Would you let it happen then,/…/Would you say let us extinguish/and let us do it slowly," from "Covenant").
The wonder of these poems is how often they avoid these pitfalls and take us to the brink of terror. In "The Soldiers," for example, a family discovers its father murdered and mutilated, so that his daughters, finding him like that, faceless, barely himself, were almost unable to weep or anoint with oil or to say this is ours until they had turned him over, put him face down, the blood draining into the dirt.…
The description's brutality succeeds because the larger emotional context of the daughters' awful find widens our horror into pity. Djanikian also can effectively set tragic events ironically within his poems' formal beauty, as in "Children's Lullaby": One eye open when you're sleeping, the night has many arms that touch you. One eye open when you're waking, sometimes day itself can snatch you. ………………………… And when your father falls behind, don't cry, there's always someone else. And when your mother falls behind, don't cry, and then, there's no one else.
With "How My Grandfather Escaped," Djanikian's tale modulates from tragedy into myth, the narrative details less sharp and violent, more vague, lyrical, and playful, as his forebear journeyed by foot to Aleppo or Izmir, to Constantinople where he took a ship, or he swam the Bosporus, made a boat out of reeds, made wings out of feathers and wax he got out, he got out.
Personal memory begins to blend with history to create a new tonality, the comedy of ethnic solidarity and survival: "Everyone was Armenian/and had an aunt named Lola/and an uncle with a gold tooth" ("When I Was Very Young"). But in "Suez War," echoes persist of the genocide and its vanished millions when this new war disrupts the Armenian community in Alexandria and the young speaker experiences his first intimations of mortality: the sound of guns in the distance thundered in my blood as my mother held me tight as if I could disappear like water through the fingers or the flimsiest cloth, or like a hand in the night slipping away from another hand.
His Americanization unfolds in a series of poems that sometimes proceed in a headlong rush, at the speed of American speech and popular culture. In the best of these, "My Name Brings Me to a Notion of Splendor," the speaker suffers because of his Armenian tongue-twister name, until it provides an unexpected passport to a new identity as an American suitor and storyteller, as well as a lovely creation myth of Djanikian the poet: I heard Louisa Richards suddenly call out DeeJay to me from her porch in a way that stopped me in my tracks because nothing had ever sounded so good and nothing came easier than to walk up the stairs and sit down by her and begin telling her who I was.
The book's final section traces the adult speaker's continued integration of his American self, his ethnic roots, and his people's historical tragedy. The effects range from the comic mangling of idioms in "Immigrant Picnic" ("'He's on a ball,' my mother says./'That's roll !' I say, throwing up my hands") to the mournful connections between the Armenian language and memories of the genocide, from animated recipes for lahmajoun (an Armenian lamb pastry) to "the constraints/of history around my heart" that make shopping for a Turkish rug a nerve-wracking ordeal.
The title poem, though a bit too self-consciously incantatory, ends the book with the speaker digging a homely vegetable garden to carry on the family legacy of Armenian cuisine and ethnic endurance. The earth, which houses so many dead, now entices him to "mulch the seedling tomato/that was my grandfather's preference" and "shepherd the turnips for my great aunt/who loved their soundness/…/that out of these many wounds/there might come flower and fruit/to carry forth, to replenish." This little vegetable patch turned paradise garden satisfyingly completes the skillful trajectory of Djanikian's book.
Unlike the Armenian genocide, the Irish troubles have so filled our headlines and our literary memories that Eavan Boland needs merely to hint at them throughout most of Domestic Violence : Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the suburbs. How young we were, how ignorant, how ready to think the only history was our own. ………………………… In that season suddenly our island Broke out its old sores for all to see. We saw them too.… ……………