Li-Young Lee on July 17, 2012

The next poet to be discussed by the Book Club for Poets will be Li-Young Lee. The discussion will take place 7–9 p.m. on Tuesday, July 17, in the Sayce Lounge, 4th floor, Simon Center at New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire. If you have favorite Li-Young Lee poems you’d like to discuss, let me know!

The Craft of Elizabeth Bishop

I have to admit to feeling some anxiety about preparing a Book Club for Poets discussion of the work of Elizabeth Bishop. In the past, I’ve taught hour-long classes on just one poem by Bishop. How could I talk in a meaningful way about “her work” in just two hours?

Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is writing that not only bears but actually benefits from repeated close readings, our appreciation of her craft deepening each time, especially for her masterpieces, like “The Moose.” I decided that one way to prepare our discussion would be to point out the kinds of things that Bishop can teach us about working both on the small scale of line and stanza and on the large scale of patterns across an entire poem. Can we set this as a challenge for ourselves as writers—can we produce poems that are artistically satisfying, compelling, on both the small and the large scale?

In preparing for this discussion, I was struck especially by the many uses Bishop makes of repetition in her poetry. Repetition can be used to emphasize rhythm and create pattern across stanzas, as in the opening stanzas of “The Moose”:

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in
the bay not at home;

The repetition of bay in the last two lines of the second stanza are not merely repetition, in the pejorative way we use that term when, say, grading compositions. Instead, the repetition creates music, both with identical rhyme in those lines (which also rhymes with day and bay in the first stanza) and with a particular rhythm: “the bay coming in / the bay not at home.” In addition, the third stanza also begins with another dependent clause starting with where, continuing the syntactical pattern set by the first two stanzas. Another way that the third stanza repeats the work of the second is through a similar use of comparison: Stanza two compares how the river moves at rising tide and at ebbing tide. Stanza three describes how the sun looks at high tide and then at low tide: the sun “sometimes . . . sets / facing a red sea” and other times “veins . . . / rich mud in burning rivulets.” The overall effect is very balanced and calm—an almost storybook opening, which will give way to swift movement and “interruptions” and epiphanies later in the poem.

Smaller-scale repetition like this can be used also to intensify imagery, as in “At the Fishhouses.” Look at the references to color and translucence in these lines:

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster poets, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks
is of an apparent translucence . . .

A bit later, Bishop describes other surfaces that shine in a pale, translucent way—the “layers of beautiful herring scales” that line the fish tubs and wheelbarrows, scales that look like “iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies crawling on them.” Not only does all this silver and iridescence reveal what is beautiful, even dreamlike, in an unlikely location—“down by one of the fishhouses”—but these images also intensify, by contrast, a  discordant image that soon follows: “an ancient wooden capstan” with “some melancholy stains, like dried  blood.” On the larger scale, echoes of the earlier shine and silveriness recur in the fish-scale “sequins” on the “vest” and “thumb” of the old man and, even later, on the “thin silver / tree trunks” making up the ramp that leads into the ocean, as well as “the gray stones” beneath the surface of the water. This is an important ramp: it marks the moment the poem shifts into the narrator’s meditation on the significance of the ocean and, eventually, of knowledge and time.

In a poem like “In the Waiting Room,” repetition serves another function: to evoke the perspective of a child. Note how often a form of the verb wait (which I’ve formatted in boldface) appears in the opening lines:

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs . . .

This repetition works to reinforce other elements of the language that suggest a child’s voice: the short sentences of “It was winter. It got dark / early” and the parenthetic and, strictly speaking, redundant statement about a childhood milestone: “(I could read).”

The repetition of key words and images is presented quite differently later in the poem. For instance, the syntax gets more complex when the narrator contemplates what it means to be human, and we start to feel the narrator’s adult voice assert itself. Instead of following the primary pattern of the opening lines quoted above—mostly clauses beginning with subject and verb, followed by modifiers—the sentence that explores the significance of the child’s epiphany delays the appearance of the main verb, forcing the reader to complete the entire sentence to understand the full meaning of the main clause. So even though this passage echoes images that appear earlier in the poem—boots, hands, voice, National Geographic, breasts—the poem feels as though it’s doing something very different than the opening lines did:

What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?

Similarly, the final stanza repeats many details already mentioned in the poem: the city and state, the season, and the date. But now, after the child has realized that she is “an Elizabeth,” a human being among many others, the repeated details take on a charged sense of significance. How strange that the world should still be as it was:

The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

The steady, primarily iambic three-beat pattern is very strong here, and the long vowel sounds—outside, night, cold, 1918—add to the music of the lines. This is clearly not the repetition of a child’s voice but a rhetorical frame that echoes the opening of the poem while amping up the music.

Other poems in Bishop’s work repeat key phrases in this heightened way. Look again at “At the Fishhouses.” After the narrator describes the ramp leading down into the water, she calls the sea “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal.” Several lines later—after a funny narrative passage about a seal listening to hymns—she says, “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / the clear gray icy water . . .” This repetition, with some variation, introduces the most meditative section of the poem, which describes the sea as “icily free above the stones.” In this section the narrator again repeats the phrase, with variation: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.” With each repetition, each echo, the narrator moves further away from the narrative moment and deeper into her final metaphor, in which “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.”

In the Book Club discussion, we also talked at length about the different modes Bishop uses, and these modes also form large-scale patterns in her work. In “The Moose,” the narrative of the movement through the Nova Scotia landscape is suspended by a lyric moment describing the fog, which allows the narrator an imagined intimacy with “white hens’ feathers,” “gray glazed cabbages,” and the flowers of the garden. This kinship with nature is echoed in a later moment of intimacy with nature, this time on a larger scale: the moose herself, “high as a church, / homely as a house,” brings all the passengers on the bus together in their response: “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?”

There is so much more to say about Bishop’s work. One participant e-mailed me later, saying that if I ever taught a course on Bishop to let him know. I’d welcome that opportunity, and if it comes along, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

 

All poems are quoted from  Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983).

Bishop Poems to Discuss on April 11

It’s been hard to narrow down the list of Elizabeth Bishop poems that the Book Club for Poets will discuss on April 11, 2012, but here are poems I hope to cover during out time together:

“Sestina”
“In the Waiting Room”
“The Armadillo”
“Crusoe in England”
“The Moose”
“Poem”
“One Art”

As time permits, we may discuss additional poems suggested by Book Club participants, including these:

“The Fish”
“At the Fishhouses”
“Questions of Travel”
“The End of March”
“Five Flights Up”
“Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”
“Song for the Rainy Season”

We’ll meet from 7 to 9 p.m. on April 11, 2012, in the New England Room of the Danforth Library, New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire. Poets who want to discuss the craft of Bishop are welcome to attend, free of charge.

From the Poetry Foundation website:

“During her lifetime, poet Elizabeth Bishop was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, her reputation has grown to the point that many critics, like Larry Rohter in the New York Times, have referred to her as ‘one of the most important American poets’ of the twentieth century.”

The Art of the Chapbook

I’ll be leading a class, The Art of the Chapbook, at the Writers’ Day conference on March 31, 2012. To learn more, visit http://www.writersday.org. I’d love to see any of our Book Club for Poets participants — or anyone who’s considering attending our discussions.

Elizabeth Bishop

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

—from “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop

On April 11, 2012, the Book Club for Poets will discuss the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. For more details, visit the Book Club for Poets page on Facebook (you don’t have to have a Facebook account to view the page). I welcome suggestions for poems that you’d particularly like to discuss. Book Club for Poets discussions are free and open to the public, especially to practicing writers who want to learn more about craft from reading the works of master poets.

The Craft of Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin’s poetry, on the surface traditional and apparently overt, is filled with tensions and contrasts: The poet both rejects the possibility of eternal life offered by Christianity and evokes our longing for that kind of certainty. His narrators are often detached, ironic observers of other people, yet Larkin’s poems focus on the common experiences of humanity. Larkin wrote most often, and masterfully, with the old tools of rhyme and meter—but his poems concentrate on contemporary experience and use conversational, natural diction spiked with more lyric phrasing. Some poems use swearwords, but his language is alliterative, assonant, and rhythmic. His poems are rooted in place and description yet often leap into metaphors that transcend the just here, the just now. His poems are frequently very funny, often deeply cynical, and always extremely intelligent. On a personal note, I’m very drawn to Larkin’s handling of time: how he evokes scenes in his contemporary world but also captures how time seems to slow, or leap forward, or circle back.

As we noticed in our Book Club for Poets discussion of some of Larkin’s shorter lyrics, it would be a mistake to confuse this poet’s clarity for simplicity. “The Trees” starts out by apparently striking the familiar chord of spring as a metaphor for rebirth: “The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said.” But by the fourth line of that first quatrain, this isn’t a statement of simple, optimistic renewal: “Their greenness is a kind of grief.” It’s the exploration of the source of that grief that drives the rest of the poem.

As Ellen Bryant Voigt has noted in The Art of Syntax, while the first stanza is extremely regular in its iambic pattern, the second breaks the pattern:

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.

(Voigt hears “No, they die too” as four stressed beats in a row. It’s certainly possible to read the line that way, though I think perhaps “die” is not stressed. Larkin doesn’t seem to stress it in a Poetry Archive recording.) Voigt notes that even though the rest of the poem reasserts the regular iambic pattern, “an unease has entered the poem at its center” (69). When Larkin returns to the image of the trees in “fullgrown” leaf, they only “seem” to be saying “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” The final word of the poem—“afresh”—is actually the source of our grief. The rebirth of the trees is an illusion—but even that illusion is beyond our human abilities. That sensation of renewal is powerful, however, and cheerfully asserted: grief and hope expressed to us simultaneously.

Part of our enjoyment in reading this poem comes from its music—its rhythms and sound echoes. Within that music, Larkin is capable of both colloquial speech and more traditionally lyric statement:

Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

It’s the contrast of that casual “yearly trick,” I think, that makes the music of the next line and its metaphor deeply satisfying, with its repetition of r sounds and very regular iambic meter. At the same time, “yearly trick” balances out, grounds, the poetic impulse to compare the growth rings of trees to something “written.” In the wrong hands such a metaphor might seem like a clumsy, or precious, personification.

Voigt notes that in “Cut Grass,” another short lyric, it’s easy to misread the poem as making a distinction between the “Long, long” death of the mown grass and the survival of a series of fruitful summer images—chestnut flowers, hedges snowlike strewn, Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, a high-builded cloud. But the prepositional phrases of the second sentences in the poem actually suggest that all the flowers and images of summer are not just living “in” June but actually dying “with” the grass:

Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
with chestnut flowers …

The trochees in this list of summer images—young leafed, lost lanes, high-builded—echo the opening double trochees of the very first line: Cut grass | lies frail. (See Voigt’s full discussion of the poem in The Art of Syntax, 73–77.) It’s the poem’s capacity to have two simultaneous meanings—one of them considerably darker than the other—that creates a sense of surprise in our reading of the poem, and it’s that surprise that makes the poem memorable.

Since our Book Club discussion of “The Whitsun Weddings”—a long, complex poem—I’ve had the chance to more fully explore the stanza structure of the poem. Joshua Weiner notes, “Larkin manages the easy naturalness of his voice so flawlessly that one hardly notices the poem’s rhyming stanza structure (ABABCDECDE), a kind of shortened sonnet (the quatrain is Shakespearean, the sestet Petrarchan).” Weiner points out that “Keats invented this stanza for his summer odes,” so Larkin both “evokes the summer season, its redolent promise and pastoral sweetness” and balances this sweetness with “grittier” images of “industrial froth” and “the stale smell of the cloth seats inside the train carriage.”

James Fenton also discusses this stanza form, including the effect of the shortened third line of each stanza of “The Whitsun Weddings” He compares Larkin’s formal pattern to that of Keats in Ode to a Nightingale:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness —
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Here the short line (“In some melodious plot”) doesn’t appear until line 8 and creates what Fenton calls “an interesting variation.” Because that short line appears well into the established pattern of the poem, it strikes me as evoking the opposite of “delayed gratification”: an early, easy fulfillment of the rhyme pattern—an ease appropriate to the “happy lot” of the bird.

Fenton notes that “Larkin imitates [Keats’s] design in The Whitsun Weddings, but he puts his signature on the form by varying the placing of the short line.” The resulting effect, Fenton says, is “a carefully prepared but relaxed, prosy effect: the urban details, lovingly marshalled, prepare us for the beauty of the rural evocation of the last two lines [of the first stanza].” I think the first short line, which comes so early in the poem, certainly seems more like an abrupt statement—with that proselike quality Fenton talks about—than an “interesting variation.” That is, there hasn’t been enough pattern established yet in the first stanza for that third line to seem like variation. Fenton observes that the short line in Larkin’s poem may have appeared early in the stanza by “chance.” “But,” he continues, “once it has happened in that way, in a regular stanzaic poem, the pattern must be repeated, but repeated in a way that is not repetitive. If you look at the short lines in The Whitsun Weddings from a technical point of view, you will find that each is handled in a slightly different way: enjambed with line before or after it, made to stand alone, broken with a comma, and so forth. Each variation seems utterly natural, but each has been prepared for.”

What I love in this poem is the way it shifts, subtly, inexorably, in place and time and attitude. The oddly quantitative opening—“Not till about / One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday / Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out”—will give way to descriptions of the landscape; then depictions, perhaps condescending, of working-class wedding parties; then multiple points of view, as the narrator imagines how the different people at the weddings—children, fathers, mothers, young women—feel about the ceremony that’s just taken place; to descriptions of the increasingly urban landscape; to the narrator’s recognition of at least the potential of marriage, in the phrase “all the power / That being changed can give”; and finally to that closing metaphor of “an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” Time presses only onward, as the image of the “short-shadowed cattle” early in the trip is replaced by “Long shadows over major roads” later in the afternoon. At the same time, the pastoral and urban change in proportion to one another but always overlap in the landscape, as the pollution tainting the countryside in “Canals with floatings of industrial froth” makes way for a vision of  London as a kind of cultivated farmland: “I thought of London spread out in the sun, / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.”

In the penultimate stanza, the narrator has a vision that the married couples themselves do not: the past, present, future are brought together in a very moving, even tender way: “and none / Thought of the others they would never meet / Or how their live would all contain this hour.” In the future, the individual couples won’t recognize this shared journey as part of their past, which is now the present moment of the poem. Only the narrator sees past, future, present coalesce like this. His recognition of this moment—this journey of “some fifty minutes”—is underscored by his awareness that the moment is on the brink of passing, with the train’s arrival in London: “walls of blackened moss / Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail  / Travelling coincidence.” In an interview in the Paris Review, Larkin spoke about his desire as a poet to capture experience: “You’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. The duty is to the original experience.” His narrator in “The Whitsun Weddings” seems to feel the same urgency to recognize, and so capture, the fleeting moment.

Running through all of this movement is the music of Larkin’s poetry. Note the alliteration and assonance of these line:

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose …

In addition to the end rhymes, these lines contain the internal rhymes All/tall in the first two lines; the long o echoes of slow, shadowed, floatings, rose; the long i sounds of miles and wide, and the short i’s of inland, industrial, dipped. There’s also the alliteration of slow, stopping, southwards; short-shadowed; floatings, froth; hothouse, hedges. The rhythm includes variations of iambic pentameter, with five beats in nearly every line. There is an example of poetic inversion of the syntax—“A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept”—but the language of the description is so clear and the phrasing of the first stanza was so matter-of-fact that this inversion doesn’t strike the ear, it seems to me, as “too poetic.”

Another poem that we discussed in detail was “The Explosion.” This poem isn’t rhymed, but it follows a metrical pattern, trochaic tetrameter, the same meter as Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Stephen Dobyns notes, in Best Words, Best Order, that this use of meter expresses a difference in class in British poetry, iambic pentameter being representative of elevated, upper-class language, and trochaic patterns of lower, “uneducated” classes (117).  The poem is also a wonderful example of how narrative and lyric writing can be combined in the same poem—and how Larkin creates a sense of surprise in his poetry. As the Book Club discussed, the explosion itself is not a surprise: the title of the poem sets us up to expect it. What is surprising, as Dobyns notes, is that “Larkin greatly diminishes the actual explosion” (47):

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The explosion is experienced for readers as it would have been for people at the surface, not down in the mine with the workers. As I noted in our Book Club discussion, the telegraphic phrasing and pauses of this stanza echo the description of the probably young miner earlier in the poem:

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

After the explosion, the poem suddenly shifts into the language of the church, quoted in italics: The dead go on before us. The opening of the next stanza, “Plain as the lettering in the chapels / It was said,” is intriguing. What is “plain as the lettering in the chapels”? And when does it become plain? Has the poem actually jumped to the event of the men’s funeral service? Or is the mind anticipating the funeral, the language of the church being imagined at the very moment of the explosion—that kind of tremor being subtly but unmistakably, to a miner’s wife, a fatal sign? That is, do the women’s thoughts jump from the first evidence of an explosion immediately to the immortality of the soul?

With the stanza that begins The dead go on before us, the poem doesn’t follow a strictly narrative approach. In lyric fashion, it jumps by association from the memorial service to the imaginations of the surviving widows—who envision how their husbands seem in death “Larger than in life they managed— / Gold as on a coin, or walking / Somehow from the sun towards them.”

As Dobyns says, “The shifts in time, language, and levels of reality all create surprises, that is, they are unexpected. … These surprises leave us uncertain as to what lies ahead and set us up for the main surprise, which is the reappearance of the eggs” (49). That final image of “the eggs unbroken” has been interpreted by critics as an allusion to the immortality of the soul, and eggs in Christianity certainly are associated with resurrection. But I think they also allude to the fragility of life, how easily lives can be broken—and to the irony that the natural workings of the world continue as they always have, despite the death of any individual human, no matter how beloved.

More than one of my teachers noted over the years that some writers are known for innovation, like Joyce and Eliot—while others are known for taking traditional forms and  fulfilling their potential in a masterful way. John Milton falls into this camp, as does Robert Frost and, I think, Elizabeth Bishop. And certainly Philip Larkin does. Even for those of us who may not choose to write in metrical forms, Larkin has a lot to teach us about pattern and variation, layers of possible meaning—even paradoxical meanings—tension, texture, music, movement.

When we turn to the poetry of Bishop for the April 11, 2012, meeting of the Book Club for Poets, it will be interesting to compare her work to Larkin’s. We’ll see in a poem like “The Moose,” for example, a complex journey similar to that of “The Whitsun Weddings” as well a combination of lyric and narrative approaches similar to that of “The Explosion.”

Works Cited

Dobyns, Stephen. Best Words, Best Order (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996; paperback 1997).

Fenton, James. “Writing to a Tall Order: James Fenton Looks at the Most Complicated Forms of Rhyme.” Guardian, September 20, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview24. (This article is an “edited extract” from Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry, the first American edition of which was published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2002.)

Phillips, Robert. “Philip Larkin: The Art of Poetry No. 30” (interview). Paris Review 84 (summer 1982), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin. (Larkin rarely gave interviews.)

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. “On the Grid.” In The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (Graywolf, 2009), 65–77.

Weiner, Joshua. “Philip Larkin: ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: Philip Larkin Swings” [in “Poem Guide” section]. The Poetry Foundation, 2011, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poem/178047.

© 2012 Martha Carlson-Bradley

Philip Larkin Tonight!

Tonight the Book Club for Poets will discuss the poetry of Philip Larkin, 7 p.m. at the New England Room of the Danforth Library, New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire. The discussion is free and open to writers who wish to learn more about their craft by discussing the techniques of master poets. See the previous post for recommended poems.

I’m especially fascinated with Larkin’s handling of time in his poems—and his ability to write beautifully crafted metrical poems while retaining such conversational, contemporary diction.

Hope to see you there!

For more information, visit the Book Club for Poets page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Book-Club-for-Poets/209231575760071. (You don’t have to have your own Facebook page to view the information.)

© 2012 Martha Carlson-Bradley

Recommended Philip Larkin Poems

The January 11, 2012, discussion of the Book Club for Poets will focus on the craft of Philip Larkin. You’re welcome to use either the Collected Poems edited by Anthony Thwaite or Poems edited by Martin Amis — but I’m using the 2003 edition of the Thwaite collection, which I like because it prints the poems in the order that Larkin preferred. (The Thwaite edition was originally published in 1988, in a slightly different arrangement.) We won’t, of course, have time to discuss all of Larkin’s poems, so here’s an initial list to get us started:

“The Explosion,” 154
“Cut Grass,” 153
“This Be The Verse,” 142
“Dublinesque,” 140
“High Windows,” 129
“The Trees,” 124
“The Whitsun Weddings,” 92
“Home is so sad,” 88
“Deceptions,” 67

If you have other Larkin poems you’d really like to discuss, please just let me know. I’ll suggest others as the time for the discussion gets closer. You can also check out the Facebook page for the Book Club for Poets: http://on.fb.me/bc4poets.

© 2011 Martha Carlson-Bradley

Book for our winter discussion . . .

For our winter meeting, we’ll be discussing the poetry of Philip Larkin. More details to come …

The Craft of John Murillo

I had the pleasure of meeting John Murillo at the Frost Place two summers ago — and of hearing him read his poems and give a class on duende. So, in preparing my notes for our Book Club for Poets discussion of his Up Jump the Boogie, I was happy to find some of his comments on duende, in a review of John Crowe Ransom that Murillo wrote for the National Book Foundation in March 2011. Murillo, who finds duende in Ransom’s work, discusses a common misconception:

I can hear the criticism already: Duende is not a matter of craft, but quite the opposite. It’s that bright black heat boiling up from the ground, through the gut, and out the mouth or hands or whatever the artist is using to fashion his art. But I’d argue that this is an incomplete view, that Lorca himself was a craftsman of the highest order. (He once wrote — tired, I believe, of critics treating him as if his work were all viscera and no brain — that if he is a poet by virtue of the duende, he is also a poet by virtue of knowing exactly what a poem is and how it works.) Although he argued for art that started from and ended in soulcry, he also knew that the means of achieving this — the wrestling with the duende that he spoke of — is by way of craft. (Consider Valery’s proposition that the poet’s duty is not to experience what he called the “poetic state,” but to evoke that state in others by using whatever technique he has at his disposal.) Duende, then, is both source of inspiration as well as a quality of art.

A bit later in the same review, Murillo also notes, “Lorca tells us that in Spanish and Mexican culture — where he considers duende most apparent — one of the defining qualities of duende is the way in which it engages death, embracing it as a necessary condition of this world.”

Murillo himself, in his own remarkable first collection of poems, exhibits both soulcry and craft, often “embracing death . . . as a necessary condition of this world.” Those who were murdered or died are remembered; and violence, with its potential for death, is explored in these poems.

The craft is evident in the music and rhythms of his language and in the many poetic forms he uses and makes his own in the book. In section V of “Renegades of Funk,” the narrator says about himself and his friends at age twelve: “few / There were among us couldn’t ride a beat / In strict tetrameter.” And there are indeed poems based on rap rhythms — as well as poems influenced by the repetition and variation of blues song, and sonnets and sestinas and poems written in couplets and other stanzas and in free verse. Listen to the music of the opening poem, “Ode to the Crossfader”:

Got this mixboard itch

this bassline lifted

from my father’s dusty

wax   Forty crates stacked

in the back of the attic

This static in the head —

phones   Hum in the blood.

One of my favorite poems in the book is “Renegades of Funk,” a sonnet sequence. Murillo plays with the form from sonnet to sonnet, though all end in a rhyming couplet, sometimes with a slant rhyme, sometimes with exact. The sixth sonnet, which traces African American song back to the time of slavery, is built not of quatrains or the octave-sestet pattern of traditional sonnets but of four rhyming tercets before a concluding couplet. The sequence as a whole marries passion and craft, including also flashes of humor often found in Murillo’s work, humor than can rapidly shift into more serious emotions. At the opening of “Renegades of Funk,” the narrator describes his twelve-year-old battle against oppression:

. . . So when Miss Jefferson —

Her eyebrows shaved then painted black, the spot

Of lipstick on her one good tooth — would praise

the genius Newton, I knew then to keep

Her close, to trust her like a chicken hawk

At Colonel Sanders’. I refute your laws,

Oppressor! I’m the truth you cannot stop!

 Notice the rhythms of the language, and the echoes of sound: spot, hawk, laws, stop. It’s funny to think of even trying to defy gravity, but of course break-dancers do attempt just that: “we taught ourselves to fly, / To tuck the sky beneath our feet, to spin / The world on fingertips.” Oppression quickly becomes more grim as the poems go on, as in the second sonnet:

. . . Ghosts come late

To find the crossroads cluttered, strip malls now

Where haints once hung. The young, it seems, forget

The drum and how it bled, the dream and how

It fed the mothers on the auction block.

This passage is rich in internal rhymes and echoes, like the short u sound of cluttered, hung, young and the short e sounds of forget, bled, fed — and the repeating consonants in crossroads/cluttered, haints/hung, drum/dream. The sequence as a whole celebrates the singers — of blues, of spirituals, of rap. The final poem in the sequence, I think, is especially moving, as it celebrates that impulse to sing as a way to renegade, whether or not the individual singers are remembered:

The walls are sprayed in gospel: This is for

The ones who never made the magazines.

Between breakbeats and bad breaks, broken homes

And flat broke, caught but never crushed. The stars

We knew we were, who recognized the shine

Despite the shade. We  renegade in rhyme,

In dance, on trains and walls. We renegade

In lecture halls, the yes, yes y’all’s in suits,

Construction boots and aprons.

We see consonance, assonance, and wordplay mastered here: “Between breakbeats and bad breaks, broken homes / And flat broke.” This sonnet as a whole is a song of praise, and I don’t want to spoil its impact for readers by quoting too much of it, piecemeal, here. It’s best read in its entirety, especially as part of the whole sequence.

The craft of Up Jump the Boogie is fueled, lit, by a need to connect to community — to the father and literary fathers of the narrator, to the Mexican side of his family, to poets and singers of many stripes. Read “Flowers for Etheridge,” which — in a passage I especially admire — imagines the narrator’s father, a Vietnam vet, talking with Etheridge Knight. Read “How to Split a Cold One,” in which the narrator faces questions of identity and how we express that identity: “Words / Like Corona and Cultura / Simmering in closed mouths.” Read “Sherman Ave. Love Song” for a remarkable, extended image of a shadow encapsulating first a specific narrative, then a whole history. Read “Variation on a Theme by Eazy Z” to explore how the narrator felt about participating in violence; then read the following poem, “November 26, 1980,” to see him witness the consequences of violence for the victim. Read the whole book.

John Murillo is clearly a poet committed to duende. He knows that “song” is a matter of balancing when to control the language and when to ride its sounds and rhythms, to let it sing.

© 2011 Martha Carlson-Bradley