The mark of an exceptional poet is one who can give form and voice to the amorphous and inarticulate. Beyond that - and this is subjective - if that poet also achieves mystery and if he can startle - not confuse - with words and images, I'll return again and again to the poems.
Such a poet is in our midst. Bill Van Every grew up in Charlotte and lives and writes in Valle Crucis. Prize-winning New York poet Thomas Lux ("The Drowned River," "The Street of Clocks" ) selected his manuscript from 900 entries and named Van Every this year's Tupelo Press Judge's Prize Winner. The poems in "Devoted Creatures" (Tupelo Press, $14.95 soft cover) investigate the nature of the missing and disconnected, the found and held, and, finally, that anxious and tenuous state of being merged.
A poem dealing with all three conditions is "Look At Me When I'm Talking to You." A woman "shaped like sunrise" asks the narrator what he will do when she is gone. He holds her face in his hands, peers into her eyes and tells her to look at him when he's talking to her.
It's a lazy connection, and he senses she'll leave. After all, the "sky is an accident, / a cracked pane of blue mistake / sneering over the house"
She pulls her dress over her head, and he falls down "in the crowd / formed by the sound / of our faces running together / like a string of wishes."
The condition of "missing," Van Every tells us, does not have to be a final act. Merger is still possible after the other is gone.
In "Ceremony of Motion," a woman "in a white dress," and the narrator "out of reach for anything," will always be merged because this very night tonight she "can eat dinner in a dress / that marries you to the thought / of me standing in this spot forever."
Disconnection not only happens between people. Van Every knows it also happens inside people.
In "Meditation While Looking for Big Sky, Montana, on the Map," the narrator says he gives in "to an emptiness / that brushes up against solid things." Just as, "Alone is beautiful / if you eat it out of the palm / of someone's hand."
In an afterword, Van Every notes that he wrote most of these poems "in fits" while living in Tucson, Ariz., where he was "in love with a woman and her two cats."
"As for craft or style," he says, "the music I learned by reading guys like (Theodore) Roethke. The voice I tried to steal directly from poets like James Tate, though hopefully it is not too painfully obvious."
What's honest is the bare emotion expressed in these poems, and what's painful - and also beautiful - is how Van Every takes the hard facts of life ("that loss can grind the bones and stain the dark") and shapes them with an extraordinary grace.
Falling
I am a bird,
now I am the space
a bird might fit.
Perched on a branch,
I am its wings beating
in that moment before flight,
the one that lasts a lifetime.
Now I am the last thing
a bird would ever think of.
Van Every
Charlotte Observer, The (NC)
2004-02-01
Section: ARTS
Edition: ONE-THREE
Page: 7H
Column: DANNYE ROMINE POWELL - POETRY
2004-02-01
Section: ARTS
Edition: ONE-THREE
Page: 7H
Column: DANNYE ROMINE POWELL - POETRY
A POET IN OUR MIDST BRINGS GRACE, HONESTY TO THE HARD FACTS OF LIFE
Mark 16:17-18: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover”
them that come was mostly early as it said on the sign outside the block building and then someone had managed a cross up above the double entrance doors, they come early for seats, not so much to sit up front, i think, but more to get a seat close to the end of a pew, or even towards the back in some instances. anyways, old pickups and beat down station wagons started showing aroung 11. folks, mostly men, as the women stayed out of site, and was busy bringing food into the church s well, mostly men, lingered and mingled amongst the vehicles, wearing what they had on from friday or saturday's work, mostly, some in coats and ties,mostly not though.
around 12, everyone moved towards the old block building, one corner of which was falling off the foundation, a large crack ran up the entire side of the building, hit the joist set, and then ran a bit down the top of the building. it could fall pretty easy if the creek come out of the banks one more time this spring
everyone gathered in the building and sat. up front was a drum kit and an old peavey amp, as well, some folks with instruments and a woman with hair all knotted up on top of her hair. everyone set and eventually a tall skinny man entered from a side door, in his right hand was what looked to be an old cat carrier or some kind of other box for to put an animal. he placed it up front, in front of the congregation, forgot about it as quick as he let it down. this man then went up to a makeshift pulpit, really just an old lecturn, and reached down on the floor into another box and pulled out an old bible, looked to be a king james, he opened it to the page he sought and began to read a little, slow and uneducated, really by memory, but the book held the power, and i reckon he wanted those in front of him to see the book as he red the words from one of the gospels.
the band began to play some scratchy electric music, haunt music is what we called it when it come drifting out of the old building and slowly filled up the parking lot of the drive through across the way. and we knew when the haunt music started, things were to follow
The fellow up front at the pulpit, his voice began to rise into a falsetto and gain in volume. he began to shake a bit and his hands got up over his head as the message arrived:
‘we should pray that god destroy all sinners’ is what come first, then her went on a tyrade enough to make the holy ghost drop his head in wonderment.By this time he was howling it out animal like. I Pray god to destroy the sinner, which is all of you which is wicked and full of evil. god hates sin, the man come again, but it is wrong to think he loves the sinner, the Bible tells this to me, I got the proof here in my hands.Proverbs tells me god hates lots of things: proud looks,the shedding of innocent blood,a wicked heart full of dirt and filth and a false witness! god hates these things! there’s more too, I’m tellin you folks so as to help you let god save you from yourselves. Don’t be a lukewarm Christian, he loves the born again only, are you truly born again? I’m tellin you the doctrine of this here book in my hand, it’s the true message, the way god taught it, the way jesus done. take a look at where God put hate on Esau, but loved his brother Jacob – come a stirring and nervous amens from the twenty or so folks up front.You go and find it, you read it! the man was now full blown hysterical.
now us across the street is sitting at them round cement tables in front of the dairy quean and fixing our plans for the day which is to head up to rock bottom and hike a bit to the ridge, maybe look for sign, as the first season of deer is comin in soon enough. we take turns off the jar and decide we might leave frank if he don’t get his ass here soon enough. most of us, at one time or another, have been to the church across the street, either with a family member or for a funeral, or some even as members of the congregation. some of us has been right there and seen it, and some has done it as well. Jed takes a fair swallow off the jar and mentions “that preacher is gonna burst a vein if he don’t slow up’. we just laugh soft, not to disrespect, but just to laugh. come again from across the street, the preacher is now on fire, the ladies, by now, are having fits in the lord and many shake their long hair down, some reaching to the floor; a sign of devotion or good spiritual health I reckon.
“god only loves those who fulfill the law of this here book!’ anyone who thinks not is our enemy, and shall be destroyed by the hand of god. if you love an enemy of god, God will take it out on you too, he knows wickedness and will find it out!’You can read it, David asks in psalms more times than there is fingers on my hand for god to destroy the wicked. Now brothers and sisters, let me say to you god does his destroying out of grace, grace for the pure of heart and the born again, so as those that are need not carry the burden of those that are not. god kills them that are against him, and there is more ways to be against god than there is cherries in a cherry tree. That is why God kills the sinner along with the sin, take an abortioner or a drug dealer, when god kills them, he is saving all of us the burden, he might be saving someone you know who ain’t come to him just yet, or someone who loves a person.
About this time, Frank shows up, slips the door open hops down and wanders over. frank says without shame, godam, he won’t shut up this moring now will he? frank’s wife and two kids are sitting in the front row, frank is one of the ones I was to say had been a member but then removed himself because of a sudden realization he refers to as seeing a thing for what it is and not what it claims to be. everyone laughs, but some a touch nervous like, and we pass the jar.
The preacher carries on – “if you have evil in you, you won’t learn God’s lessons!’ God puts his judgement on earthly things harsh!” look here at this book in my hands, it holds the word of god which is the only truth there is. you know what else god does, I’ll bet you a dollar you are wonderin’ about now, god don’t save no one out of love, people get saved to escape his mighty hand, fear of being destroyed is how god shows us the way.’look at the evil around you, think of those who have come down hard under god’s law. everyday you can count it out like a roll call. this here is god’s grace, he will spare you his wrath and protect you from evil by killin off the evil doer’
all along the band has been playing electric style music in the back of the room. the preacher looks over to them and gives a nod, and the volume comes up and the tempo comes up and some dark ecstacy begins to roll through the sound of the music. the preacher turns to face the folks again.
‘If you truly believe, you must believe everything the bible says, you can’t pick and chose which it is you like and which it is you don’t like about god’s law. no man is capable of such rubbish. firstly you must know and always remember god does not separate sin from the sinner. god hates both equally. them soft Christians will say to you something different and they will carry on about god’s love and charity. but they will not be here in the final hour, they will be on fire like the rest of them that practice ungodly things. God is angry everyday because of such wickedness!’
The preacher steps forward to the box he come in with, and raises it up. ‘if you have been saved from god’s mighty hand and believe in all his law, you can stand in the light and feel the spirit come into you. but god won’t take a simple word or prayer, god is angry at the soft Christian and the onbeliever, these are the final days, all mighty god wants to see us all practice acts of faith, true faith, not easy, comfort in god is for the wicked, we should serve and make ourselves known to god out of the fear his law confirms is unfailing and just’ the preacher opens the spring door on the box and dumps out a good ten or twelve snakes onto the floor out in front of the pulpit. the band has gone to a frenzied pace, women and men all the way to the back of the building are in full custody of the power, they wail and scream and cry, and then some of the men begin to jump and lurch about, out of their own control – people begin to move towards the fron of the church, some with eyes closed, some eyes open; hands up over head, and all and every sound imaginable coming from their lips. circles of women begin to gather around one another and the language of god commences and the practice of knowing and saying what the language of god is meaning commences, and the little church glows hot.
the fire started an old shaft on the side of whitfield's property, some kids must have been messing about with kerosine rags and trying to get far down through the boarded up entrance and on down into the main shaft, wanting to drop down to the number three shaft that ran all the way over into the next county and came out near the steel rail bridge. and them kids probably dropped a rag or two on down to see what they could and some of that anthracite lit on and well fire can get in an old seem and run along and deep into it. there's town up north still on fire from down in the belly or so it said in a newspaper article once got passed around the mercantile. So this shaft boiled up and started spewing the blackness of smoke out into the hollar and it was like the devil himself had come up to take a look around. whitfield weren't one too happy about it and especially when the ground out in his front yard got so hot you couldn't hardly walk on it. and then he come up wondering if his entire homestead was gonna burn and he knew he had done things in his paadt that might call for such bad luck, and he could understand how a person might imagine this old mine shaft belching smoke and running fire under half the town could be misconstrued as a reckoning and he began to fear what it was that was inside the earth and how it might be an actual thing out of his hands come to take care of what it was that was inside of him......
three old women are sitting at a picnic table sheeling half runners and pulling husk and silk off silver queen. the clouds are moving around in the sky the way sand does in one of the toys which is two pieces of glass pressed together with sand between them, and every few minutes, you flip the two pieces of glass over and the sand runs down between different holes and spaces formed by tiny slats of plastic. the clouds have that in them this morning, and the world seems to be turning them this way and that just by moving on it's own toylike axis, which is to say, it is the kind of morning a child would want if he saw it in a store window and could a hold of his mother's skirt and tug on it hard enough to stop her from talking long enough to her friends who are all intenet on everything but what might be in a store front window thata little boy would have an interest in.
The women have been meeting at this table for near on twenty years every saturday and every sunday during the growing seasons, spring isearly vegetables and summer is another thing and in the late summer comes all the goodness, and with it, conversations a milliion miles long and a thousand years old as thet sit and get everything ready for the farmers market in town where everyone is buyging local and going and green and the three women think that is pretty funny; having a youngster and his wife and two kids packing off local food in their hybrid, trying to start up discusions with the vendors about how wendell berry changed their lives and really made them realize what it was in they were missing.
it's like taking an egg out from under a fat hen, says one woman, not say it mean,ut with a wink in her eye. people say my grandmother grew up on a farm, or, when we were kids, my daddy had a farm down in south carolina where he raised white face or angus - hell, he had to pay a city lawer to get him out from under that just as soon as he lost interest in them cows and the bills came in, but these women don't live on farms, they live on their families land where things have been growing one way or another for four and five generations. they sometimes keep a cow or four, and always have chickens, nobody makes a living ona farm anymore, and butter and egg money is butter and eggs from the yard, so these gatherings is more about speaking to the times when the mountains weren't so crowded and the men went off the mountain to earn cash money. things have changed so much, all they got left is to sell a few vegetables to a lot of city folks, and to speak to the rythm of everything come before this day which was good and unfetterred by change and development and an economy that never paid them no mind until it broke down the mines or stopped the construction jobs. they know poor is something rich folks talk about, and they don't eckon they have ever been rich, and they know for sure they been without, but it wasn't poor, it was making do and working a little longer and a little harder at something to come along that could bring a meal or a trade or maybe cash money to the table. three women sitting at a table, their voices warming in the morning air, nothing ever got done around here without god's hand in it somehow says one over with the silver queen...........
ththee old man set there whittlin' on a piece a balsa and spitting out into the wash gutter of the street. The clouds were so big in the big blue sky they were to give me headaches and siezures. them's days you just have to pick yourself up by your shoestrings and dust yourself off moving on, the old man sat and them clouds got bigger, none with rain, some like chikcens others like dogs, and they moved along over the precence of a sedentary man and myself who ws listening. he said, the old man said, after about a few minutes of this and that, he said, some things is like a quick spring, them early springs that burble up on the first good warm rain in may; and other things is like a tombstone, not to move, just to sit and wait on it's folks to come and trim it up or cut the grass around it's base. most everything is like the corpse inside - but them quick springs, they is life giving, they's what can do all honors to a miserable time or a tired thing, the drink from a quick spring, kneeling down among the bloodroot and moss, the wet coming in through the knees of your pants and the palms of your hands getting hurt cold by the natural good cold of the water, which had been sleeping in the belly of the earth until enough new water come along to get her going, the drink from a cick spring can make a person kindly appreciate all what's good and easy to forget a harm or an anger. it's like drinking from the hads of god, travelling water is what i calls it, cause it gets your soul to moving about and m
Love Song
In this dirty little town
we don’t breath the air,
we breath “whose fucking who ”
we breath “look whose fucking me”
we breath the word fuck
right in like a sweet perfume
and exhale out “look whose fucking you.”
We breath from the space
where the breathing left,
the monoxide belch
of the affixed and permanent notsmile,
coupled with the keep your distance hug,
where the eyes don't meet the eyes
and lips don’t meet the cheek.
We breath the lowest common denominator,
which is we, together in this stolid
and sinking truth it is agreed
this town could drown if dirt
weren’t what it loved to breath.
And in and of itself, we love
its worthless emptiness –
the murmering acceptance of
this is where we are, and this
is what we have,
and this is who we were
when we did and did not
do to one another, things,
back when pretending to pretend made
happy glad, fulfilled but mistaken
for inspite of all our fucking this
and fucking that
our breathing was mistaken -
Today, we may not seem as sad
when at the bottom of the pile,
or when at the top or in the middle,
because we take from one another
what it is we thought was freely given,
After all, we’ve kicked each other
when were up, we’ve kicked
each other when we're down.
we’ve used look whose fucking who
as our every excuse
to fill a book of lies.
This town is the soft parade,
and would just as soon hold your hand
as punch you right between the eyes.
| |||
Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year's horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.
In this one and vicious literary life, the one it takes i suppose - I have been made aware over and over and over again of the fact that James Wright modelled this famous post modern lyric poem after Rilke's more prosaic and formal lyric poem. Not being the one so good at critical thinking, I have made only a few connections between the two, the opening and the ending - which is free candy as far as intellectualism goes. brain fart rubbing itself like yellow smoke upon the windowpane of my carelesness. I have always taken great pleasure, however, in knowing for a fact my winkie is bigger than the one in the photograph included above which often acompanies Rilke's poem on the internet, and in some books of poetry and criticism. I never met james Wright when he was alive, and if I had, would probably not have had the opportunity to compare winkies. But Seeing as so much of modern poetry is masked in intellect, I have developed a theory all modern poetry does is give the male poetic voice a chance to talk about its winkie in esoteric ways. Both these poems address the value of conciousness, the knowing of oneself, and one's winkie, I imagine. Is Rilke saying to the reader, you must change your life because your winkie is smaller than the archaic winkie found in the bust of appallo, or is he reflecting more on the metaphysical undoing of self knowledge? Is wright admitting his life has been nothing more than obsessing about his winkie, or is there something more in divulging to the reader a feeling of having wasted one's life. Both poems juxstapose the sedentary - ie, a statue, fixed, and a man, fixed - both to the earth, while in one the poet speaks of the ethereal, and in the other, a man watches a hawk soar, perhaps looking down upon the field for a mouse, or more likely, trying to gauge the size of wright's winkie, though i am pretty sure the author is fully clothed while lying in the hammock, otherwise, the poem would be entitled, Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota while a hawk stares at my winkie. In any event, it has come down to this, has it really come dow to nothing greater than this, that we can pull from stone, profound shape and form, only to have it laid upon the wing's of a sentient rapture which is then led through time, eventually to soar in an ever widening gyre above a man who, among many things, understood the nature of profundity, life/death, and perhaps most of all, winkies. |
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
clarity, precision, discovery. this poem is to poetry, what quantum physics is to an elephant.....well, an elephant who understands quantum physics.
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.clarity, precision, discovery. this poem is to poetry, what quantum physics is to an elephant.....well, an elephant who understands quantum physics.
