You had been gone a few days.
The place went looking for you,
unaware you were returning.
I remained lonely in the evening
when the moon broadcasted
silence through the dust.
My love was once
a faint blue tear
of thin glass glowing
in my chest.
Now my love is you.
It must be three in the afternoon
and I am trying to sleep
on your side of the bed.
THE CONSECRATION OF AN APRICOT
It has become what was irrepressible
in its nature. It is the color of fire
suspended in a passion of green.
It is ordained the egg of the sun
and when the hull of the moon
rides through a whisper of stars
it is a fever, desirable for its sweet
ache on the tongue. It is the swell
and flesh of a flower, the lost
antecedent of an almond-stone
heart. One after another after another
fills its office and falls into death’s
inception, where it is observed
on the slope of a knoll, lucid,
laid open, and rotting in utter beauty.
“Home” first appeared in The Oregonian. “The Consecration of an Apricot” first appeared in the Mid-American Review. These poems are published here today with permission from the poet.
Carl Adamshick won the 2010 Walt Whitman Award. His book Curses and Wishes is to be published in March of 2011.
Editor’s Note: I came across Carl Adamshick’s work in the recent issue of Narrative Magazine and I just about died and went to poetry heaven. Letter, which appears in that issue, is a must-read for any lover of that genre of poetry that intersects with the sexual and the heart, of which I most definitely am one. With the help of Lezlie Mayers, editor of the Friday Poetry Series here on As It Ought To Be, I was able to track down this poet-on-the-forefront and obtain his permission to print the two poems featured today.
According to the poet Dorianne Laux, Adamshick “has not joined the ranks of the M.F.A./Ph.D.’s and has never attended a writer’s conference or residency.” His work speaks for itself, I believe, in showing where nature outshines nurture, and how one can maintain genius simplicity in poetry by remaining outside of the world of literary higher ed. With moments like “It is the swell and flesh of a flower, “My love was once a faint blue tear of thin glass glowing in my chest. Now my love is you,” and “desirable for its sweet ache on the tongue,” Adamshick’s choice of language is a delight to the senses and the heart, a combination that is pure delight to those who love great poetry.
This is the second of three posts in tribute to my father, Myron “Mickey” Unger, who would have turned 85 in August. Last month, I posted a reaction to an old baby picture of me in a stroller, laughing, with my parents on either side. The piece ended with the rhetorical question, “What could possibly go wrong?”
This month, I continue that story with an essay on life and parenthood by Mickey himself. Mickey studied writing and psychology in college, hoping to pursue one or even both. But when he returned from naval service in the Pacific, he was eager to marry my mother and start a family. He entered his father’s business instead.
Still, he continued to write when he could, and penned this essay sometime in the ’50s. I find it beautifully crafted, unbearably wise, and eminently worth sharing. Next month, I’ll post a reflection on a father’s legacy.
Again, I want to acknowledge and express appreciation to my mother, Lois Zussman, and my adoptive father, Milton Zussman, who remain active in my life today. I am blessed with a heritage from three parents, not just two.
◊
Upon Reaching the Age of Three
By Myron Unger
Upon reaching the age of three, what does a little boy expect from his dad?
Probably very little of what you want to give him.
For what do you tell a little guy that you can barely catch up with as he dashes from room to room helping Mommy fix the party.
You might put your hands around his little waist and lift him high over your head and laugh while he squirms and giggles, but what do you tell him?
Or you might sweep him up in your arms, swing him unto your lap, punch him in his tummy and run your hand through his tangled hair as he struggles to get away, but what do you tell him?
Or you might accept his invitation to play marbles on the floor with me, Daddy …… and he sticks his chubby, dirty hand into his pocket and brings out ten shining, colored symbols of his boyhood and says I’ll loan you one if you give it back to me, Daddy … and when he jauntily sits down on his knees waiting for you to take firsties, you wonder what to tell him.
And then it comes to you that it still isn’t your turn.
Not while God and his mother make his body erect and his mind alert.
And you think that his is really a simple love which comes through in his quick hugs and his warm smiles and his rollicking Hi, Dad when you come through the door. And so he asks little but the confirmation of your love and there remains little you can tell him about this.
And this is probably right.
For what can you tell him that he would understand?
Can you tell him about the dreams you’ve had for him long before he came into your life?
Can you tell him how you remember being a boy?
Can you tell him about your father, your marbles, your birthday cakes?
And then it comes to you that even if he could understand, you couldn’t tell him, because you don’t understand.
And you wonder about this because you wonder what you’ve been doing while he’s been growing up. What have you learned? If this was the right time, what could you teach him?
What happened to all those firm convictions you had when you left college? Were you right about life, about love, about God?
Once in your life you were confused and you asked questions and you got answers and now you’re asking the same questions and you’re not sure you remember the answers. And you begin to think what do I tell myself, the father of the boy who has reached the age of three?
Full cycle ……
Yes, and awareness that the stuff of life is a thin fabric and you can catch it only in seldom moments of quietness …. and the rest of the time, you work on impressions and fleeting recollections of knowledge.
Once, when you first held a girl you loved in your arms and smelled the sweet fragrance of her hair and felt the smooth flow of her body and knew she felt you, you held the fabric.
And once, when you stretched hard and flat on the fantail hearing the spray gently splash across the deck and watching the sun slowly kiss the flowing horizon and then fall softly into the rolling, moving sea and you saw the other ships slipping silently through the dusk and you thought how these ships and these men and this ocean and this sunset belonged together and you were part of it and you belonged too, you held the fabric.
And there was another time, much later, when you stopped your car in the middle of traffic and picked up the dog and carried it to the sobbing girl waiting on the street corner and you gave it to her and she stood on her tiptoes and kissed your cheek and then ran away in childish embarrassment scolding the dog, her tears turned to mock anger. And when you got back into your car and waved to the honking, scowling street, you felt sheepish but warm. And you thought how long it had been since you last held the fabric.
And you think if this is the true matter of life, what is all the other? And you think why can’t you be wise and aware each moment of each hour? And you think why must age bring the callowness of repetition?
Now you remember the pledge of your youth and a bewildering enigma startles you. For when you were young and intense you wished for maturity so that you would understand and mellow. And now that you were older and mature by men’s standards, you have lost the spark and thrill of youth and must go out to search for the feeling.
Is this what God meant?
Or is this what man has done to man in the guise of becoming civilized?
Here are the questions then that you must answer before you tell him anything because maybe it’s not too late for you.
Three years is a wonderful age, you reflect; full of magic and warmth and treats and laughter and toys and bulging pockets and runny noses and red cheeks and wet shoes and band-aids and stuffed animals and playing old, and the wonderment of the whole, huge, whirling world which to a small boy means fun.
Thirty years is a wistful age, full of old dreams and new doubts and old ambitions and new fears, and maybe a good place to stop for a moment to total up the ledger and see where you stand and perhaps revise and rededicate.
And this is about as far as you can go.
Now,
For you have come full cycle and you know again that your life doesn’t have the meaning you looked for, not yet, And you know that somehow, you’re falling short of the mark; that the blend of youth and age is still brewing and hasn’t yet mellowed. The vote is still out and you wished there was a place you could go to get it counted.
Is yours a futile search? Perhaps.
Yet, perhaps to search makes life richer even if you never find the answers. Perhaps life isn’t easy because it is rich.
And so it comes to you that it will be up to no man to answer your questions. That you must search and find yourself.
You’re suddenly very glad your three year old doesn’t question your smile. You’re glad he’s young enough not to doubt you.
When you shove him under the covers and turn out the light and kiss him goodnight, you pray that God and his mother keep doing their work while you look for the fabric.
◊
Myron Unger died of cancer fifty years ago next week, on October 11, 1960. He was 35.
After the long cold foggy summer in San Francisco we decided to chance a weekend camping trip to Tomales. The Marin coast is often just as gray and cold as the city in fog season but being out on the bay sitting round a campfire with friends is more fun than sitting at home alone with the heater on.
We take our holidays with a group of friends and most years in June we haul up to a spot on the Eel River, an hour from the nearest town and set up our tribal headquarters. At the end of the summer we regroup out on Tomales Bay and do our hippy hangout thing again before the winter sets in.
This wouldn’t be a lot of folks idea of a relaxing break, whether we go to the river or the bay there is considerable hard work involved, carrying in the off-grid supplies, washing dishes without soap, traipsing to the homemade outhouse & dealing with the mosquitoes there….
We are the last contingent to arrive at Marshall boatyard, dusk is falling fast but Jim is hanging on waiting for us, his little boat bobbing on the white caps just beyond the jetty. We clamber on board and head for the far shore, the wind low and persistent and the boat, heavier now with us and our stuff on board, slams magnificently into the waves. The boys scream with terror and delight as we are instantly drenched.
On the Bay our kids spend their time searching for arrowheads and dentillium beads; a sprawling midden at the far end of the beach is falling into the water, disgorging many broken oyster shells and precious bits and pieces which the Indians left behind.
These sheltered coves on Tomales Bay were where the native Miwok spent their summers not so very long ago, fishing, swimming, eating and probably sweat lodging too.
In our hippy way we try to emulate them, revitalizing ourselves from the rigors of our twenty-first century lives with a little time in nature. I always feel a streak of sadness as we sit here on their shore looking over the bay at these same carefully preserved rolling hills.
That night as we sat around the fire the moon disappeared into a fat black cloud, it was dark and Adela talked about their dog that had passed that week. That cloud seemed like a prompt to her and we all mourned Kemmet while the sky was black.
Chantal and I slept down by the shore, its an extraordinary feeling looking up to the stars and space, laying right on the crust of the planet: small yet connected. My dream before waking was of reaching for a pair of baby moccasins slung high up on a pole.
When the weather is good we swim in the bay, the kids wakeboard or just tootle around learning how to drive the boat. Grown-ups generally hang out by the fire smoking, talking, drinking coffee, making meals and endless snacks. We’ve had up to thirty people camping out on this particular beach, looking like a wild hippy tribe, kayakers wave to us and beach further down.
We fall under the spell of the elements; the movement of the trees at the shoreline, the shift of the tides, the time frame of our normal lives fades away into irrelevance.
On this trip the resident night heron squawked her discordant friendly squawk and the local seals popped their heads out of the water to check us out. Our conversation ran like a wildly successful discussion group; we don’t get to hang like this much and we talk a lot about what we are reading and what we think of it all. Lessings’ The Cleft and David Grey’s new gender expose, Venus on Fire, Mars on Ice got a good work-out but we end up with our favorite, Lucy Thompson’s only book: To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman
Lucy Thompson, was born into an influential family of Yurok shamen whose ancestral lands are on the Klamath River. She was born in 1853 and named Che-na-wah Weitch-ah-wah, but became Mrs. Lucy Thompson when she married Milton Thompson and assimilated with the European incursionists. To the American Indian was published in 1916, the first book by a native woman and Lucy certainly mastered the nuance of turn-of-the-century literature, but her story was not popular: she disses her fellow Indians for abandoning their traditional life so quickly and pours scorn on the Europeans for their voracious appetite for territory and their greedy over-fishing practices.
The reason Lucy wrote at all was to try and preserve her tribe’s cultural history, the book details the Yurok way of life, their myths and religious beliefs. Lucy’s mother was on another tip with this process: Lucy tells us that her aged mom would walk some good miles back to their old village and spend the day smashing up ceremonial bowls and artifacts, what she couldn’t smash she buried, she didn’t want their holy items handled by unbelievers and set in glass cases for white people to gawp at.
Like most native tribes, Yurok religious customs were tethered to the natural world but part of their belief system centered on a very ancient myth: Lucy tells us that when the Yurok arrived on the Klamath there were already people living there, they were white people, with light eyes. They were called the Wagas and they were very kind to the Yurok, teaching them everything they knew about animal husbandry and farming and sharing the land with them. The Wagas and the Yurok, never fought, they intermarried sometimes and shared the land for thousands of years. In the end the Wagas left, they traveled north and then ‘up to heaven’, they built stone lines and obelisks on high and exposed ground before they left and the Yurok maintained these sites in the hope that one day the Wagas would return. Needless to say that when the European hunters and trappers arrived it did not take the Yurok long to realize that these smelly folk were not their beloved Wagas.
I believe that there is a tribal trend in contemporary holidaying: people to want to be with like-minded souls not stuck with random others on a package holiday.It’s the allure of that mythic time that draws us in; like the partnership societies of the Neolithic, a true tribal life where humans have not yet imagined themselves outside of nature.While it is easy to dismiss these yearnings for tribal life as sentimental and unrealistic its easy to see why we romanticize.
Ever since the great coming-together of Woodstock, the camp-out festival has become a way to spend time with other people and engage on a different social platform.When I was a teenager living in the West Country I went to Stonehenge at the summer Solstice and marveled at the wild anarchist party aesthetic, it was mind-blowing to a provincial hipster like me. The rarified atmosphere of the counterculture at events like this enticed the masses and spurred the growth of camp-out parties like Glastonbury, which in turn grew huge and more mainstream. The English mega-fests, Glastonbury, Reading and Knebworth eventually spawned, as a reaction, what is known as the ‘boutique festival’ scene. The Big Chill, originally a Sunday afternoon ambient club in North London started putting on a campout festival in the 90s and quickly became well-loved by grown-up ravers who liked their music leftfield and the flavor high-brow alternative; Spiralling popularity turns festivals into immense temporary cities and for some participants the conditions are intolerable, the tents too close to rowdy neighbors and uncomfortably proximate to the portable toilets. Other parties, recognizing this, impose a limit on numbers, choosing smaller venues, annual events like Free Rotation in Wales and the Sunset Camp-out in California are communal experiences for the lucky few hundred they accommodate.
Burning Man is the ultimate expression of our contemporary tribal desire – Larry Harvey, spokesman and founding father, does not consider Burning Man to be a festival rather a re-invention of a public world. Harvey, a baby- boomer, believes that the rabid growth of consumerism in the last fifty years has commodified life and destroyed the meaning of community, our materialistic value system has led to moral coarsening and social cynicism. Black Rock City, the temporary municipality which has emerged on the desert playa for the last twenty years is the greatest expression of our desire to come together in re-imagined community. The premise of Burning Man is that each participant creates their vision and shares it in the public environment, ergo, many amazing art installations and fellows either painted day-glo, jiggling naked or dressed like chorus girls. Money is banned in BRC and only gift-giving is allowed, this Harvey hopes creates a moral bond instead of the cold abstract commodity exchange of buying and selling. The exponential growth and popularity of Burning Man clearly illustrates that there is a global community dedicated to both surviving the harsh desert conditions and reveling in the true nature of community.
Harvey himself may or may not concede an element of tribalism at Burning Man, I haven’t found anything on the record to say either way but for me the Burners are a tribe: the best bad-ass art tribe ever and while I’ve never participated, I’m enthusiastic about their scene. My understanding of a contemporary tribe is one of alignment: a way that people create identity and a social reality which isn’t defined by the standards of the larger society. We are simply reaching out for each other in the artificial world we find ourselves in.
As religion lost its iron grip on Western society communal urges filtered into other formats: in Britain the formation of Butlins, the first holiday camp initiative in the 1930s brought many families together to vacation in a entertainment–laden environment. The emphasis was on talent shows and bingo as well as crafts and sporting pursuits, and the initiative was wildly popular. These were people who as late as the 1950s and 60s went to the pub for a sing-song around the piano as much as for a pint. With the acceleration of technology the fabric of community life in the West has been rapidly worn down by the desires of a secular materialistic culture: through the twentieth century people accrued more and more sophisticated stuff: cars, televisions, telephones, all of which are widely acknowledged as advances in the quality of life. Perhaps we didn’t look too closely at what we lost as we accrued our luxuries.
We didn’t realize that living in community meant so much to us, although the phenomena of long-running soap operas should have given us a clue: we don’t know who lives next door to us but we know all about the fictional neighbors on tv.
I’m not sure that seeking a communal holiday experience is exclusively a sign of our times but like so many forms of contemporary cultural expression there is a sense of déjà vu, and perhaps this is a good sign, a harbinger of the Archaic Revival.
When I woke on our second and last morning on the bay I thought I could hear women singing together, I sat up and looked over to where our four camping girls were still sleeping by the firepit, but it was not their sweet voices I had heard.Before we leave Adela and I swim naked in the cold still bay. Kate has made more coffee and ululating modestly shows us the tiny dentillium bead she has found.
“You know,” she says, “Maybe we are the Wagas, we just don’t know it.”
Piloting the retired and restored New York City fireboat JOHN J. HARVEY back to its berth, at first Bob brings it in at a right angle to the dock, then signals the engine room to slow it down. He brings the stern over to starboard, angling in gently. Coming up close to the fenders on the dock, he gives us time to secure the bowline to a cleat on the dock. That line will work as a pivot point, allowing him to slowly turn the boat and bring the stern around so it can be secured as well.
The “us” is Karl, the bo’sun; John, the assistant engineer – who doubles as a deckhand – and myself, newest of the volunteers to sign up to crew on the boat. Built in 1931, the JOHN J. HARVEY was rescued in the 1990’s, when a group of investors who love boats was organized to save her from the scrapyard. She was pressed back into service briefly on 9/11, helping to pump water out of the Hudson River for the firemen battling the Twin Towers fires when the water mains were out of service for several days. (The boat’s story is well and completely told in Jessica Dulong’s MY RIVER CHRONICLES.)
This is my first time crewing on the boat and, as Karl told me, it’s mostly my job to watch. Which I’m glad to do. I’m comfortable enough with applied mechanics to understand using the cleat/bowline combo as a pivot, but theory and application aren’t always the same. What the theory doesn’t account for is the fact that another crewman – the assistant engineer become deckhand – has to work his way along the guardrail that rims the dock (along with being the fireboat’s berth the dock is also home to a popular waterfront restaurant, hence the guardrail) and I have to pass the heavy hawser to him,making sure that I feed him enough slack so he isn’t pulled backwards as he works his way along the narrow edge between the guardrail and the dock’s lip. Nor does the theory account for the fact that the hawser, once secured, will stretch and complain loudly as it is tensed by the docking maneuver. Karl advises me to stand away from the hawser once it’s secured to the clear and Bob brings the stern around: if it breaks it will shoot straight back. If that happens and I’m standing there, I will be severely injured if I’m not killed outright.
I move.
Today, theory and application coincide. Though it complains mightily, the bowline does not break; the stern is brought around and secured. There is a little more jiggling back and forth as the lines are adjusted. A few minutes later the engine room goes quiet. The boat sits quietly at its berth.
Thinking later about this simple maneuver, I think about the chain of trust that linked us. Bob, the pilot, trusted Karl to understand his signals, both yelled and conveyed by hand from the wheelhouse. As well Bob trusted the engineer Jessica to respond to the signals he sends down to the engine room from the wheelhouse.Karl has enough confidence in me to let me help with the tying up, albeit under his watchful and alert eye. John trusts me to feed him the line he needs to fasten the bowline to the cleat on the dock without pulling him backwards. And Bob trusts all of us not to screw up.
Think about it. Trust is an essential lubricant in every part of our lives. A soldier says of a fellow platoon member, “he’s got my six.” (With the soldier at the center of the clock, facing forward is 12 o’clock; directly behind him it’s six o’clock.) You’re not going to let someone have your six if you don’t trust them. Less dramatically, I trust a friend to meet me at a place and time we agreed upon a week before. We trust the butcher not to put his thumb on the scale when he weighs our order. We trust the dairy coop not to water down the milk. (In one of his journal entries Thoreau says – I paraphrase – that you know your milk’s been watered when a trout comes out of the bucket.)
I’m not the kind of thinker who can start with an abstraction. It takes something concrete like bringing the boat in and tying it up to set me to thinking about trust: in our personal lives, our social lives and in our political lives. Trust and mistrust fill the political air these days. Republicans do not trust Democrats; Democrats don’t trust Republicans; the Tea Party doesn’t trust anyone (a bad sign as it may soon stop trusting itself and consume its own children); it’s Right versus Left; Rich versus Poor; the West versus Islam. And if you don’t have a dog in one of those fights, just go online. You’ll soon enough find someone or something to distrust.
In his slender book TRUST: SELF-INTEREST AND THE COMMON GOOD, Marek Kohn reminds us that distrust of politicians, their motives and their actions, is built into the structure of government. Hence the various national and local schemes for separation of powers, sunshine laws and term limits. Unfortunately, the kind of distrust afforded politicians these days goes far beyond institutionalized distrust; it is all-encompassing and it is corrosive. It extends beyond the politicians themselves and calls into question the very structure and practice of politics itself. Anger cuts all across the political spectrum, though in this season it seems to be most powerful on the right. (In its intensity and its totality it reminds me of the American left’s all-consuming anger about Vietnam in the latter part of the 1960’s.) Nowhere are there clear signs of the kind of chain of trust that allowed us to safely dock the boat that day.
When your trust is violated, you feel betrayed. You may not be justified in feeling that way. Your initial trust may have been clearly misplaced, or you may have invested too much trust in the relationship. But if you trusted and if you no longer trust, then you will feel betrayed. And if enough people feel betrayed; if the anger grows; if a movement grows out of the anger and demagogues waiting in the wings see their opportunity, then you are in real danger.
Because, if you know your history, you will know that in 1918, in defeated Germany, there began to grow the great legend of betrayal, the “stab in the back.” German soldiers who had fought in the Great War; patriotic German civilians who had given so much for the war effort (including their children); Germans loyal to the Kaiser: many wondered why, at the end of the day, Germany had been forced to surrender, to suffer a humiliating defeat and even more humiliating armistice and peace conference. They wondered and they turned their attention to those who they thought were to blame, most notably the Jews and the “socialists”. Eventually they turned their fury on both groups, exorcising the ghosts of “betrayal”, avenging the “stab in the back.”
Am I comparing America in 2010 to inter-war Germany? If, by comparison, you mean “the same”, then no, I’m not. Historical situations are never the same, especially when they are separated by an ocean and 90 years. But I am saying that history teaches us, that if we do not look at ourselves and our actions in the light of history, we run the risk of committing the same mistakes that others have committed before us.If we allow ourselves to lose all trust in those who govern us and in the institutions we have built up since the American Revolution – and that seems the goal of many – then we are danger of crashing the boat into the dock, injuring or perhaps killing ourselves and many others in the process.
“Suddenly, lately, very lately, I realized that I love yellow”.
Omar Khadr, a 19-year-old Egyptian photographer, writer, law student at Alexandria University and a jazz enthusiast.
Editor’s Note: It seemed to me (going through his facebook albums) that he’s obsessed with yellow. When I asked him, he said: “it’s a bit confusing. Yellow is associated with depression and sickness, but it could also be vulgar should you, for example, paint your wall yellow. I find it very expressive of any state. Most of the photos I use yellow filters on have different subject matters; I see yellow in everything: in the face of a laughing little girl or a bustling cityscape. Some find this annoying, while others see it as an Omar Khadr trademark. But in recent photos I’ve distanced myself a little from yellow to avoid being limited by a certain approach and vision that will eventually grow tedious to people.”
Evidently, Omar has no respect for “normal”. None of his photographs pretend to depict “real” colors of “real” life in Alexandria or Cairo. Long time, in a yellow history (1st photo) and old yellow sculpture (10th) have the same subject of Orientalist paintings and photographs; yet, while Orientalist art claims to recreate an exotic reality in paintings and photographs, Omar just puts them through a yellow filter that strips them of every “realistic” quality. There’s nothing fascinating or exotic about an alley in Cairo, it’s as vulgar as any other alley on any given day.
Some photographs were shot in Alexandria, others in Cairo.
I protect my heart when I perform, but the night is another thing.
It does not appear to care much, and I am weak.
Nightmare: my father is a bride. I lift the veil over his eager face.
His wife’s eyes are very dark suckling holes.
I fasten some pearls around his neck and send him off.
Grow well, little dad! Send me a postcard when you wake up.
I will have you over for a nice lunch.
We will make a toast with your new champagne glasses!
They will sizzle and froth over with our aggressive clinks.
SMALL AND PRIVATE TRAGEDIES
The cow was cold and yet I milked it. Under a dirty blanket
I found something warm, so I held it tightly. It was my own
hand, don’t worry. Under a slanted sky I cursed the cold and
kept on going. My mountain is called grief I say, and when
feeling toothed, that is, when teeth come into a conversation
I miss mine. I also miss my father and mother being married,
because that was when we did all this terrible work together.
Now this frost reflects my wounded mouth to me and in
the shower, under very hot water, I cackle at the thought of
things passed. I make a bird call and confuse the others. I set
the clocks back. My insanity is precious. It is a gem I smuggled
out and now it shines like a moon over this fortress.
These poems first appeared in The Offending Adam and are reprinted here with permission of the poet.
Natalie Lyalin is the author of Pink and Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books 2009) and Try A Little Time Travel (Ugly Duckling Presse 2010). She is an editor for GlitterPony Magazine and Agnes Fox Press. She lives in Philadelphia.
Editor’s Note: I have to thank our Editor and Webmaster Okla Elliot for pushing us to seek out lesser-known poets and turn to poetry journals to find new pieces for As It Ought To Be. That gentle pushing led me to today’s discovery, a “a gem I smuggled
out and now it shines like a moon over this fortress.”
Natalie Lyalin’s work is a disturbing breath of fresh air. Haunted with images and notions of family struggle and allusion to the darkness that lies just beneath the surface, the poet paints a picture in shades of gray as if sketched from the crumbling chalk of human suffering. All in all it is a severe understatement to say that Ms. Lyalin is the architect of well-crafted poems.
Recently, poet Jeff Laughlin sent me a copy of his first collection, Drinking with British Architects. This is a chapbook of less than 50 pages that went through a press run of 100 copies and is now sold out. I would guess that of those 100 copies, 90 of them went to friends or people at the small reading held for its release. To put that in perspective, more people will probably read this blog post than Laughlin’s collection.
And yet it is good. A full disclosure forces me to admit that Laughlin is a friend of mine, and that he offered to send me the book, free of charge, over drinks. So perhaps I wanted to like it; and yet I think, objectively speaking, that it is livelier than most poetry I read in major journals and that the fact that it was released so modestly is a testament to how hard it is to make it in this business, how much toil and sheer luck it takes, and how the cream doesn’t always rise to the top. This is especially true for first collections. Resumes are, of course, a self-powered engine: the more impressive your resume looks, the more likely a journal or small press is to seriously consider your work. Many of these presses are struggling to stay afloat and they probably shouldn’t be faulted for preferring an author with a track record. It does seem a little small-minded when you consider the miniscule difference in sales we are talking about here – does one previous publication in the Black Warrior Review bring with it a rabid cult following? – and yet when you are treading water, you will cling to even the smallest piece of driftwood. As someone who has seen the editorial side of this business, I understand and sympathize with this even while it saddens me.
But let’s look at the collection. The title sounds like a Decemberists song, and indeed, much of the work seems influenced by the new literary side of indie rock. Colin Meloy, singer of the Decemberists, is a graduate of the MFA program at The University of Montana; conversely, Jeff Laughlin was (until his move back to North Carolina from New York) the singer of an acoustic, ballad-based group known as Beards. Many of his poems have a sung quality, aware of their rhythm and canny in their use of repetition, and the overall attitude is one of romantic, drunken Tom Waitsism. This is particularly evident in the “women” poems, which apparently were supposed to be part of their own chapbook, but which the publisher insisted Laughlin include – rightly, I might add. The first is called “The Women I Know” and every stanza begins with that phrase. It is a critique of the pursuit of an empty, surface-type of pleasure at the expense of a deeper happiness:
The women I know crack their
clavicles if only to stick out their
chests.
This perfectly conveys the desperate need these women have to be thought of as sexual beings. Another line struck me as entirely accurate to a recent experience I had had with a young woman whose chief aim seemed to be worshipped by every man around her. That he had outed my interior life so accurately bespeaks the quality of the work.
The women I know go about their
pleasure the same way: without
love and continuously.
As you can see here, Laughlin privileges the strong opening word rather than the clever line break. Nouns like “clavicles” and “chest” get initial weight, not the last word. Lines don’t end so much as flow into each other. And here at least, he privileges abstraction over the concrete image – a preference that, as much as the extravagantly sentimental attitude, lends to the quality I’ve already identified as coming from the indie rock lyrical tradition.
But Laughlin is too skilled in other ways to be dismissed as a rock musician turned poet. The collection is united by several systems of images and titles that give it a formal quality its free verse lacks. There is an obsession with body parts – particularly the poet’s own broken and damaged parts. This is from “The Critic’s Worry,” one of a series.
There were grease marks along my arms—
Their length took me off guard.
I scrubbed until capillaries broke,
But my blood was not as thick as the car’s.
This stanza shows that Laughlin has the ability to paint a specific scene using concrete images. It also shows that he is not insensitive to the charms of formalism. Not only does he end every line on a strong monosyllable, but there is a definite respect for rhyme hinted at it in “arms”/”guard”/”cars.” Here are more broken body parts in the sister poem, “A Soldier’s Worry.”
We march through split heels,
chafed shouldertops, sprained ankles, compressed
knees, and, invariably, arthritic knuckles.
I particularly like that word “invariably.” Later more body part imagery, albeit now wed to some nice description of the physical world:
The most amazing things actually do affect us,
ever so slightly: groves of oranges, broken branches,
houses foraged with rotten wood, rain, broken vessels
on elderly hands or voices floating through light brush.
Here “affect us” is echoed by “vessels,” and “groves” by “broken.” Similarly, the repetition of “broken” unites “branches” and “vessels” – the world of nature thus equated with the human body. As the soldiers walk, they are beaten down by the physical world until they become it. Even the voices only come at them “through light brush” –a nice, simple image which also manages to convey painting, and thus art in the abstract.
[Note: these are my interpretations and are in no way intended to suggest authorial intent; this is just a survey of the many association these poems, like all good poetry, inspired in me.]
As I’ve already hinted, it is in repetition where Laughlin really excels. “Lists” finds the poet guessing at the contents of a list left behind by his roommate. Each verse is structured with the casualness of a prose poem and is yet another guess at the list’s contents.
No. You are a list of morose sights—deceased grandparents, bloodied fists, crooked-billed birds with feathers still falling from once-clean windows, dead dogs on the sides of dirt roads. You are the wrong vision at the right time.
Or:
No. You are a list of pragmatic decisions—split-ups before things got too serious, pets put to sleep, gifts exchanged on Christmas Eve, shirts in donations boxes despite still being in fashion. You are a remembrance of things still around but unwound from the mind.
There is further subtler repetition here in the mention of another dead pet, this one purposefully and pragmatically “put to sleep.” Similarly, the last lines echo each other.
Another repetition poem, appropriately titled “Simultaneous Reactions,” verges on the annoying but somehow transcends that by sheer brave bombardment. It begins: “Appetites are growing, finger-skin is getting more coarse, strength is waning.” (Another reference to body parts, specifically hands, which are mentioned over and over.) The use of the gerund here makes reading it a bit of a slog, but the joy is in seeing the different uses and combinations Laughlin comes up with. “Parachutes aren’t opening, cause is no longer affecting, science is calculating.” Here “calculating” can be a verb or adjective. Another example of the same: “Waitresses are finishing doubles, carrots are digesting, work is boring.” Not carrots are “being digested,” but are doing the “digesting” (though obviously they are also being digested). Similarly one imagines work “boring” into the speaker’s skull, like a drill. Many other lines have similar effect, making us question our preconceptions of the meaning of words. The sum total of all this repetition is to soak the reader in the variety of world. The poem ends, “I am brimming with capability, I am leaning side-angled into nothing, I am proselytizing.” Not only does this nicely bring the lens back around to the observer, it also hints at the meaning of all these “Simultaneous Reactions.” The poet is “brimming” with the possibilities of the world, but at the same time he is sunk in the infinite “nothing” of its excess, his only recourse “proselytizing” (really just another word for making poetry).
I wish I could sink my teeth more thoroughly into the meat of this collection. I’d like to talk about the series of “Autobiography” poems, the other “women” poems (especially “The Women I Don’t Know,” which flirts with and redetermines “The Women I Know”), or the absurdist “Not Titled,” a prose poem about, yes, a biblical rain of tacos. I hold a soft spot for the poem “Pregnant Crooked Horse,” having unwittingly inspired the title (long story), if not the subject matter, and so I feel like I have slighted it. I’d also like to discuss whether or not it was wise to have ended the collection on the title story, a strong poem which turns out to be deliciously less surreal than its name suggests, or whether it would have been better to end with another “Autobiography” poem, thus giving the collection a cleaner symmetry.
But I fear taxing the reader’s patience on a book he may never read. The good news is that the author is working on a new collection, one that he claims will be even darker and more alcohol-drenched. Until then I’ll leave you with my favorite poem in the collection, which sums up the entire history of literary friendships (the existence of which are, in fact, at least partially responsible for the writing of this review). Hopefully it will be enough to convince you that the underground of American poetry is alive and well – in fact, often more fully alive than the more heralded surface.
Upon Hearing Liakos Read From Another City While We Were Both Drunk
If you don’t keep that one
I will throw something at you.
It will be heavy,
and possibly wet.
It will be, most definitely,
something close and large.
It will be an object symbolizing
my obstructive frustration.
It will pass by your head,
grazing your cheek-skin.
It will remember you to
the sharks of your past.
It will recall the conquerable
people that made both of us.
It will punish you to leave a
contrail or convex or context.
I do not know much else about it
except that it will smash on the floor.
It will leave a mark on the ground
where I didn’t want it to.
I didn’t want it, I never ever did,
and it will crash, waking roommates.
You will look and we will laugh
but you gotta keep that one.
You’ve got to, got to—because
there is only one envelope left.
It will shatter next to the only envelope
left in the entire universe forever.
[Note: if you are interested in receiving a free electronic copy of this collection, email Jeff Laughlin at repetitionisfailure@gmail.com. I will post details about his follow-up collection as they become available.]
As It Ought To Be 