Author: admin

2
We lived in many houses and left remnants of memory
in every one of them: a newspaper, a book face-down, a crumpled map
of some faraway land, a forgotten toothbrush standing sentinel in a cup –
that too is a memorial candle, an eternal light.

Notes on the Poem
This snippet comes from Yehuda Amichai's poem "Houses (Plural); Love (Singular)", translated by Chana Kronfeld and the late Chana Bloch, from the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Open Closed Open. Brief and plainly stated, how does it manage to be so moving?

The excerpt establishes intimacy immediately, with the words

"left remnants of memory
in every one of them"

conveying a rueful, confessional and wistful tone that you would only share with those with whom you are close.

Swiftly, the poem excerpt moves from intangible "remnants of memory" to objects that are poignant concrete examples of remembered feelings. The "book face-down" suggests interruption or distraction. The adjective "crumpled" could mean frustration or despair, and coupled with "map of some faraway land" could connote longing. What do those objects say to you?

Then there is the humble toothbrush, at first described as possibly unimportant because it is "forgotten", but then transformed into something vigilant ("standing sentinel"), then steadfast ("a memorial candle"), then everlasting ("an eternal light"). Whether you interpret that last metaphor as expressly religious or more generally symbolic, it is breathtaking how beautifully and succinctly Amichai as translated by Kronfeld and Bloch sweeps out from the personal to the universal.

…
My mother’s every exhale is
somewhere between a rasp
and a scream now.

Hospice says they’ll bring
phenobarbital in the morning.

Between us we have
–new bottle of morphine
–the dog’s phenobarbital
–three syringes of Parry’s insulin
–methadone, Haldol, etc.

Parry and I discuss combinations.
We want the best for our mother.

We do not want
to fuck this
one up.

   — October 22, +/- 2 a.m.

                              ,,,
                              On the phone, my brother Whit
                              says Don’t Google it.

Notes on the Poem
Jane Mead's moving World of Made and Unmade, shortlisted for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize, is a book-length poem reflecting on how family members cope with the final days of their matriarch. Many selections, once plucked out for concentrated consideration, stand on their own with singular, glowing intensity. This is one of them, subtle elements of which make it unforgettable.

Even as Jane and her siblings grapple with the heart- and gut-wrenching mechanics of a life central to theirs needing to end, interjected snippets of the seemingly quotidian (as we've observed before) leaven the stress, grief and horror.

But what appears at cursory first glance to be a mundane shopping list - laid out complete with point-form dashes and suggesting yet another goofy intrusion from the dog - is actually a lethal recipe. The lines

"We do not want
to fuck this
one up"

could be a casually profane comment about not messing up some other kind of recipe, but the tight, terse turns of lines in this short phrase convey anxiety.

What to make of the date and time stamp ... is it from a text, an email message, a journal entry, call display? What is it recording, accounting for, signifying? Whatever it is, its placement on the page stamps the rest of the contents of the page with even more urgency.

What punctuates the end of the page gives the entire sequence yet more tension, even as that ominous punchline draws the three siblings together. While part of a longer work, how this section is assembled creates a gripping, poignant story unto itself.

                                            Were we twins earlier
we might have saved the other from learning to speak,

to speak dead, to speak dead romance, to speak dead romance
languages. Utter embouchure. The aftertaste of hurt knots the tongue,

an unripe persimmon. An echo tumbles from the mountain range
of a French horn, hunt long finished, rabbits interrupted

by bullets. Then skinned. Then opened wide. There is no translation
for rescue save breath. How we speak to and only to each other.

By the routine of lung. After years of half-formed, airtight Hebrew
the lonely heart’s grammar relaxes, allows one vowel. U.

Notes on the Poem
In the poem "Idioglossia" from his 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Personals, Ian Williams nimbly circles then zeroes in with devastating precision on a type of language about which most of us might not know, or might be pointedly prevented from knowing. That mysterious language is both alluring and dangerous.

Dictionary definitions of the term idioglossia cover everything from the charming "a private form of speech invented by one child or by children who are in close contact, as twins" to the alarming "a pathological condition characterized by speech so distorted as to be unintelligible." Williams' poem ranges from the whimsy of 

"to speak dead, to speak dead romance, to speak dead romance
languages"

to abrupt and violent imagery.

This parenting article about idioglossia strikes notes of concerns about letting twins linger too long in the tantalizing realm of their own private discourse, to the detriment of their development and socialization. So, when Williams opens his consideration of idioglossia (also known by the more treacherous-sounding "cryptophasia", with which we're grateful Williams did not choose to title the poem) with:

"Were we twins earlier
we might have saved the other from learning to speak"

he's posing some notions that demand pondering. "Were we twins earlier" indicates that the duo understood in this poem didn't start out as twins ... so how did they become twins or twinned beings? Further, "we might have saved" suggests, contrary to that parenting article, that developing speech or the ability to communicate outside this very small circle isn't necessarily desirable.

Ian Williams captures intriguingly the compelling but potentially perilous intimacy of a private language or code shared with only one other.

are without exception irresponsible. Which
sounds alarming and is, admittedly, an aberration
(perhaps not funny) of a more valid, thinkable notion,
that dolphins, wolves, chimps, etc., flip a switch

in us, casting klieg light on the frightening solitude
engendered by the very Fifties idea — I know —
that we alone are responsible for our own
consciousness. A friend, who’d taken work as tutor

to a high-school student, leaned over the back wall
of a booth in a pub and told me: of all the thumbnail
sketches he’d done for her, from Plato to Pascal
and beyond, this Sartrean concept of taking ownership over all

that you know, feel, and do, had proved the most opaque,
the singularly most inconceivable stupidity
ever designed to befall a girl, driving her to kick some shitty
desk chair in frustrated disbelief. Now, Reader, make

a face that’s meant to express some woeful sense
of pity and surprise, while feeling a cold sickness underneath.
That was my face. I was mumbling things so far from the truth
of what I felt, I could have been a clergy entering the manse,

touching tops of heads, asking how days went, seeking food,
while wishing one or the other end of this circus dead.
The sight of a pint glass didn’t cause me to vomit. I didn’t
reel, sweating and murderous, out into the street; but my mood

stiffened, grew intractable, opaque; I felt blue flashes inside
that were flares of all the moments I’d sought causality,
a why for each failing of character, somewhere outside
of myself, amounting to a web of reflexive sophistry

that reached back into the years of my life like illness
discovered late, or how rot sets into wood compromising
the strength of a structure by softening its centre. Rising
from my seat, I went and faced a woman whose caress

had eased my passage through some months I couldn’t pass
through on my own, she’d been more than kind, I’d
found I couldn’t love her at the time, and fled.
So I faced her, and apologized as best I could, given the mass

of people in the pub. ‘This is a poem,’ she said, ‘and that’s not
good enough. Around here, we don’t let art, no matter
how acutely felt, stand in for what’s necessary, true, and right.
Next time you face me, maybe leave you here. End quote.’

Notes on the Poem
By the end of Ken Babstock's poem "The Minds of the Higher Animals", do you feel like you've indeed been invited into the mind of a higher animal ... or repelled, pushed away or possibly hoodwinked? Perhaps you're even left wondering what a higher mind is exactly. In fact, we're still wondering this since we first looked at this poem, so we've decided to visit it again.

How the title of the poem segues so smoothly into the poem's first thought draws you (directly addressed as "Reader" as the monologue continues) right in to the narrator's ruminations. Even the abrupt and somewhat unexpected conclusion of that first remark is not without its charms. Will we be dealing here with someone who is disarmingly rueful, self deprecating but not afraid to offer definite opinions?

Features and patterns of speech - particularly parenthetical interjections (ha ha) and even a dash of profanity - make the poem seem more direct and intimate. While a little long-winded, this narrator seems to be dealing honestly with the Reader. But then again, when you're direct to

"make

a face that’s meant to express some woeful sense
of pity and surprise, while feeling a cold sickness underneath.
That was my face."

Is the narrator coaching the Reader to understand how his duplicitous behaviour feels? Does that make the narrator honestly dishonest? Is he being candid when he admits that

"all the moments I’d sought causality,
a why for each failing of character, somewhere outside
of myself"

only to realize that "a web of reflexive sophistry" had him denying that the "rot" originated from within?

Do we cut the narrator some slack then? Or have we been subject to the manipulations of a truly higher, but not necessarily kinder, mind? Maybe the spurned lover has the best response: "This is a poem ... and that's not good enough."

4

What a witches’ sabbath of wings
– Robinson Jeffers

Little bird, little bird, LET ME OUT. Not-a-chance Not-a-chance Forget-get-get-get-it …

Damn this cracked crow! Damn this wicked net! A snare of ritual and vexation: Icterinæ Tyranny. Grackle Sacrament. Sins of the Feather. Banging your head till you’re blackbird and blue.

All the time in Hell on your hands and an eternity of bird devotions on an endless string of millet … Ave Aviary, Ave Oriole, Hail bob-bob-bob Bobolink …

—

Dead of night and captive to an unremitting chorus of blackbirds: Rusty Falsetto (creaking demons and doors and coming unhinged!), Nasal-Toned Tricolour (triple-glazed windows, blue in the face), Quiscalus mexicanus … Arriba! Arriba! Arriba!

Grisly dreams. A palpitating litany of shadowy birds: Quiscalus quiscula (Commonest Common Grackle), Euphagus cyanocephalus (Brewer’s Blackbird, volcanic stomach), Euphagus … esophagus (a nagging bird in the throat and your hands

won’t stop trembling).

Notes on the Poem
How does 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize winner Sylvia Legris manage to pack so much into her poems? Even when the word count is comparatively modest, poems such as this section of "Strange Birds; Twitching Birds" feel dense with meaning and intense with feeling.

Perhaps Legris achieves that effect through, among other things, getting many words to serve double and triple duty. One such method of getting that extra mileage out of a word is punning, or creating partial puns. A pun is defined as "a play on words in which a humorous effect is produced by using a word that suggests two or more meanings or by exploiting similar sounding words having different meanings." We've touched on this device in another Poem of the Week, "Artless" by Brenda Shaughnessy.

In Legris' poem

"Sins of the Feather"

echoes "sins of the father", a biblical phrase that suggests that the sins of one generation pass on to following generations.

"Banging your head till you're blackbird and blue"

maintains the avian theme of the poem, while connoting and denoting something much more furious. A tone of frustration builds to references such as

"Rusty Falsetto (creaking demons and doors and coming unhinged!)"

When "Euphagus", the taxonomic genus that includes grackles and blackbirds, morphs into "esophagus", Legris brings this segment of "Strange Birds; Twitching Birds" to a conclusion that looks and sounds like the narrator is choking ... clutching her throat, in effect. Has the supposedly humorous punning and wordplay taking a troubling turn?