Night Angler

Alongside these books for the Sealey Challenge, I had been reading The Writer's Library, and in the last interview in that, Russell Banks says that "books open the door to a larger world. I don't read to escape. I read to enter. To go somewhere, which is different. A very different motivation, I think." I agree, a different motivation, and, while I did some escape reading during the pandemic's lockdown period, mostly I read to enter other worlds. Reading poetry gives me an intense, intimate, profound look at other lives through various doorways.

Reading Night Angler, by Geffrey Davis, I enter the life of a tender father, devoted to his family, who is also ambivalent toward his own father. (Violence, addiction, desertion.) There are several poems called "The Night Angler," meaning fishing but also navigating the darkness. In one, addressed to his son, there's this aching iteration:

     Dear Boy: In the beginning
     father was a fear I wanted

     to call love.

That gets to the heart of everything, I think! Water, rivers, fishing weave throughout this book, and love, and so does the song, "You Are My Sunshine," which my mother sang to me. In "Pleasures of Place," I also encounter  the familiar--places members of my family have settled in the past or present, Pennsylvania and Oregon, but not Arkansas, where the poet speaks from now, but here's the month of August, with his Dear Boy spinning in it, and into my world:

                              As if on cue, you come
     bombing out the backdoor, two flashlights in hand, and run
     deep into the August dark, where you invent a dazzling
     dance that frames your body in this turning I can't describe.

I am grateful and glad to witness this joy, and sad to enter the reality and woe of "Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy," an elegy for more than one Black man. But how else can I learn?

Sweet Two-fer

John Sweet sweetly sent me a stack of his books when I featured him at Escape Into Life. I hoped then to read some of them this month for the Sealey Challenge, and it's happening! The beautifully designed chapbook famine (Leaf Press (2004), editor Ursula Vaira) has a gorgeous cover image, "New Shadows," via Artemy Levedev. It opens with a missing child, postered to the telephone poles of a small town and "the fact that love cannot / exist without fear." So it's a sad, dark book, reminding us

     how easy it was to destroy
     everything we had

     how much it felt
     like breathing

But if things are ugly here

     and not even dirty white light
     spilling from magritte's sky
     can make this great art

still, I can't look away. This reminds me of what Wren Hanks was doing in Lily-Livered and what my husband does as a painter: show us the darkness, trouble, pain so intensely that we don't look away, can't look away, and then, facing it, we might do something. And also what the poet Bruce Weigl said in his  poem, "The Impossible": "Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what."

I'm reading famine on Friday afternoon and in "the sky enormous over the human cathedral" it's "friday afternoon in / the house of empty truths." A little later, "a random progression" answers my hope that something will be done with "the knowledge that / nothing will be done." Nothing will be done about war, famine, rape, murder, the abuse of children in these dark Sweet poems. But the poems are so tender in the midst of despair, since "poetry is a useless weapon." Still, I feel the presence of hope, as in "the weight of the known world":

     and what i have
     in this world are the
     people i love and the ways
     that i make them angry

     the ways that
     we fail each other

     such simple acts of faith

Ah, so, of course, the second chapbook I've picked from the stack is bastard faith (scarspublications, 2017), and it's dark, too, maybe moreso. But it has this beautiful title in it: "one of us, speaking without bitterness to the other." I was thinking of that, walking home from a public hearing yesterday evening, how I'd like to speak quietly, without bitterness, with some of those who testified, to see, though we might disagree, where we do agree.

Today, I had a conversation with someone I do agree with (that we should all get vaccinated, if we can, and wear masks) about how shocking it is that decent people who love their kids don't care about other people. But here in "one for the drowning man" is a couplet of dark truth: "no one here is ever truly sorry / for anyone else's pain."

Oh, and what a surprise to find this couplet/question!:

     your job is to map the
     city of masks, but where to begin?

I'd say that makes this a Random Coinciday in the blog. Yes, bastard faith is a dark book that ends

     why do you keep
     begging for the truth if it's
     never what you want to hear?

after delivering lots of hard truths. But also this golden nugget of hope: "not every noble idea / has to be a lie." Feast or famine, how Sweet it is.

In the months of my son's recovery

Today's book opens with Kate Daniels's wonderful song of herself, "Her Barbaric Yawp," referencing Walt Whitman's song of himself via epigraph: "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." It's celebration and lament, praise for the aging woman who misses her juice. Great, bold fun, terrific honesty. The honesty continues in the addict's story within In the Months of My Son's Recovery (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), though I should mention her disclaimer via A Note to Readers: "These poems are narrated by a character similar, but not identical, to myself, and represent other characters and situations that may be archetypal, emanating from many aspects of and perspectives on the current opioid epidemic." In the center of the poem titled "In the Midst of the Heroin Epidemic" is the crux of it all:

                                                           Addicts destroy
     themselves--that's just where we start. And why
     they might have wanted to, or if it was an accident
     is beside the point... The aftermath is what's at stake.

A partial narrative is told just in titles: "Detox," "Getting Clean," "Relapse," "Recovery." Poems about meetings, support groups. While it is "her" story, and his, her son's, uniquely their own, it is also like every other story of addiction I've ever heard. We know what happens. If only we could stop it! We can; we can't. From "The Brothers," this:

     Addiction is a family disease. It infects
     each member and distorts their stories. It lives
     to breech the boundaries of given texts,
     and to change old narratives and destroy
     plots you thought were set in stone.

This is a heartbreaking and heartbreakingly familiar story--the addict who steals from his own family to support his habit. The endless worry and stress. And then such a stunning tribute to "The Daughter-in-Law," who climbs through a window to get this man to rehab.

And there's more woe--breast cancer, divorce. What amazing strength and resilience, patience and liberation. To get to "Detachment." To get to "Yes."

Postcolonial Love Poem

I haven't seen much of the Olympics, but I did watch some exciting basketball. And there's exciting basketball in Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020), by Natalie Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In "Run'n'Gun," she writes that she "learned to play ball on the rez, on outdoor courts where the sky was our ceiling. Only a tribal kid's shot has an arc made of sky." 

It's a prose poem in sections; here's one:

"We played bigger and bigger until we began winning. And we won by doing what all Indians before us had done against their bigger, whiter opponents--we became coyotes and rivers, and we ran faster than their fancy kicks could, up and down the court, game after game. We became the weather--we blew by them, we rained buckets, we lit up the gym with our moves."

The river runs through this book. "The First Water is the Body" begins, "The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States--also, it is a part of my body." Later, the "I" becomes a "we." "We carry the river, its body of water, in our body." In the poem called "exhibits from The American Water Museum," water is like language: "I am fluent in water. Water is fluent in my body-- / it spoke my body into existence."

Love poems wind in and out. Animals. Snake, wolf, crane, coyote, bull, tiger, horse, yellow jacket, all the animals on the ark. More basketball. In "The Mustangs," her brother is a high school basketball star; the team is beloved by the whole community. "We ran up and down the length of our lives, all of us, lit by the lights of the gym, toward freedom--we Mustangs. On those nights, we were forgiven for all we would ever do wrong."

It was a beautiful day to read this book outside. I love August, its pure summer feel, its poignant, back-to-school-soon, summer's-almost-over-feel---but it isn't! Summer goes on and on, long past school. And now August is the Sealey Challenge for me, a poetry book a day, a lushness of reading in the green afternoon, the coneflowers blooming, phlox, round two of golden lilies, the oregano flower-headed and leaning out into the lawn. I love how I can read these poems to learn, to experience beauty and desire in someone else's language, culture, voice. I'm reading for joy!--though, yes, I encounter grief--and for knowledge. I learn that "Manhattan is a Lenape Word." I learn the "Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball."

And what a thrill to find Kearney, Nebraska in a poem, a town I lived in as a child, and the sandhill cranes. In a heartbreaking brother poem with a dismantled Polaroid camera. What a book! And what is a sky hook? Ah, now I know!

Finna

FINNA, by Nate Marshall (One World, 2020), begins with a "landless acknowledgment" containing this line: "we lost the land we were custodians over before i was a twinkle in the eye of a twinkle in the eye of a twinkle in the eye." I love how I get lost in that. I wanted Finna the first time I saw its title, its cover, and I'm so glad to be reading it now for the Sealey Challenge, Day 3. My son wrote "finna" on the window of his car. I wanted to learn from these poems what "finna" means. Thank you, Nate Marshall! The poem "FINNA," an on-beyond-definition poem, teaches me

     finna comes from the southern phrase fixing to
     like i come from my southern grandmothers & finna
     is this word that reminds me about everything next.
     even when i've been a broken boy i know i'm fixiing to
     get fixed.

I'm learning lots more, too. For instance, that there are lots of Nate Marshalls out there--one a white supremacist--and several poems about these namesakes. In one, these heartbreaking stanzas:

     1 time a dude i knew hit me up relieved & shaken
     when his timeline told him Nate Marshall had been murdered
     but it was a different me somewhere on the North Side.

     definitely peace to that Nate Marshall
     & to his people who would have been relieved
     had i been the news article instead of their sweet, beautiful boy.

I love the poem "step." It begins:

     learn this or get out my house
     is how mama started my dance lesson
     when i was a boy.

And it has this stanza of possible other names:

in Chicago we call it steppin'

but perhaps every Black

neighborhood has some version

they call swing or bop or hand dance or hustle.

The book is full of Chicago, where I used to live, where I visited this weekend and played volleyball on the beach with old friends, family, and new friends, who fed me, fed all of us, like family. This couplet resonates for me now: "but fam, understand, if you treat the fam / like strangers, then you a stranger, fam." I am shy, but no longer a stranger.

I love how some of the poems in FINNA are sideways; some of the stanzas are upside-down. Another definition poem begins

     scruples

                      is the word i tell anyone who asks

     for my favorite. what sounded

     to me like a doctor's instrument was just a

     name for the hesitation respectability births.

And the poem "slave grammar" defies definition:

                                           whole time

     i'm writing this down its obsoleting

     itself. whole time we talking we ain't got

     no dictionary we guessing the spelling

     we deciphering the phrases through

     our slurs we slurring like we ain't sure until

     we murmur a sure vow.

This book has great titles. One example: "welcome to how the hell i talk." Today I went with my mom to a neuropsychology appointment. Today I read the poem "what can be said" in FINNA, that ends:

     once Alzheimer's does what it do
     you never really have conversations

     it's more a man becomes a poem

     a lot of repetition & love with something

     indecipherable in between.

I think today is/was Tuesday, but "wednesday feels like a funeral" is the poem that says

     what i know 

     of hate

     i learned early

     & then every

     day after that.

I might have a favorite poem in this book. It tells a story and explains the world to me; it's called "let me put it to you like this fam." It gives me a new golden rule: "who you believe in is a matter / of who you mattered to." And it's referenced in the title poem, too, a poem of praise and hope

     & it's finna

     take on this wide world

     with a whole slang for possibility.