A Great Poem: Norman Dubie’s “Ibis”

Zach Savich's first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize and received a New American Poet honor from the Poetry Society of America. His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Kenyon Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, and Pleiades. A recipient of a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Savich has lived and taught in Italy, France, New Zealand, and around the US. He currently teaches and studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he helps organize the jubilat/Jones Reading Series.

Zach's piece is the second of ITIWNH's new series of writings called "Expositions," which are, in essence, short essays about "great" contemporary and/or non-canonical poems. The idea behind this series is to allow for critical interaction with either individual poems or small clusters of poems, since such writing is hard to come by in mainstream publications. My guidelines, as such, are both nominal and (therefore) flexible, so authors are free to investigate poems they find fascinating in whatever way they see fit. Even after just two installments of "Expositions," the nature of the project surprises me--and, to a degree, escapes me. Peter Ramos's inaugural essay on Joy Katz's "A Desk." is rigorously focused on exploring the poem at hand; Zach's work, by contrast, tapers toward its observations about Norman Dubie's "Ibis" only after considering some of the constituent elements of poetic "greatness": great lines, great poems, great books. It spirals, beautifully, toward insight. Perhaps Peter's work will establish the precedent for future Expositors; perhaps Zach's will. I don't know. But I do enjoy the fact that I don't know what to expect. It's all so wonderfully out of my hands.

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Is “Meditation at Lagunitas” greater than Robert Hass? Is any Robert Duncan poem greater than his use of “ensouling?” Is his “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” great or does it just have great first and last lines? What about Alice Notley’s “The Prophet”—I’ve often quoted lines from it (“The purpose of awakening is black coffee”; “You are not great you are life”) but have never been moved to memorize or copy-out the whole piece. This is typical of my favorite poems: with effort, you can memorize any poem, but the best lines seem to stick with me whether I want them to or not; I often forgive dull books that have three great lines. And often, I mentally anthologize poets not by poem but by line—Ezra Pound, for example, wrote more beautiful lines than anyone since Chaucer, one might claim in an undergraduate paper, but may have never written a great poem. And then, of course, there are the poets I love who do not write poems but books of poetry, sometimes in contrast not just to the idea of great poems but to the idea of great lines. There are passages by Rosmarie Waldrop that have composed my days (“Much work still to be done. And the smell of ripe peaches. And Long-Jin tea. And lungs full of words. And being an opaque body that intercepts the rays of the sun.”), but I would tell students to read an entire book by her, not any anthology’s selection.

Of course, this may be a problem not only of contemporary poetics—that today’s best poets often work more by sequence and line than by lit mag page units—but of contemporary perspective, as Keats’ contemporaries neglected his odes and Auden’s best early verses (including the hits we all know) first appeared untitled. One day, we will come to see the singular in what now seems continuous, and the major anthologies will no longer get limp after O’Hara. Perhaps, we will come to see that a truly great poem is one that has no great lines—those painted scarecrows—but exists as a unit, each piece equally required. Carl Phillips’ “Custom” is one of my favorite great poems that may have no great lines (except for, perhaps, the displaced augur’s thesis of “I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere / to be found” and the line linking that sensibility to poetic effort, claiming that “art can become, eventually, all we have / of what was true”—but I see these lines as structurally integrated into the poem, necessary machinery, not vivacious fauna flashing in the rough). It is a poem I never tire of reading or sharing with others. Like other poems I have memorized and recited to myself and motley assemblies over the years (Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse,” in particular, comes to mind) it deepens with each saying, like things should in the old idea of greatness. On the same hand: what about a poem like Dean Young’s “Sunflower,” with its “ketchupy light” and “crowness?” Some memorable phrases, riveting turns, general plunging descent and the invention of running by moving your legs very fast—but I remember most the rush and the voice of it, its vibrational contagions infecting my oatmeal when its way of seeing comes to mind, not a particular bon mot that’s reducible from it.

Other concerns: recent poets who do not focus on producing polished poems at all, but on recording their producing of poems, a process set down; or those whose process is not product but project, apart from the projection of greatness; or those who intentionally uglify a poem’s proceedings so its experience is more empirical than transcendentally great, based in a friction that can be created only through the exchange within its particular presentation. (An upcoming smart, sharp, and somewhat sociological review of American Hybrid by Michael Theune and Jay Thompson in Pleiades gets into thoughts about how anthologies variously represent poets, poems, and ideas of poetics.)

And I think of the conventional “beauty is truth” great line ending of a great poem, in which the line is great at all because of the particular path of greatness that has preceded it, long ice luge that makes the cheap vodka worth getting on your tie…And how that gets changed in a book like, e.g., Joshua Harmon’s Scape, where I often feel the BMX boost ramp of Keats’ ending in grounding, voice-rooted phrases that frame and stitch more burbling and diverse lyricism mid-poem…

All that said, this weekend I have been reading Norman Dubie’s The Mercy Seat (Copper Canyon), which compiles poems from 1967 and 2001, most of which appeared in earlier volumes, and such thinky thoughts have been far from my mind: I’ve been thrilling at the poems, jealous of what Dubie can do, pleased that his work exists. I first read his poems in 2002 at the suggestion of my teacher at the University of Washington, Linda Bierds, whose own careful and passionate work shows the influence of Dubie’s historical dramaturgy and personae. At the time, I got that, but missed the strange depths and hard-bright rhetoric that drive the speeches and scenes of Dubie’s poems. His poems may resemble work you, reader of adventurous poetry, distrust—imported scenes and personages; tremors of Zen; naturalistic landscapes depicted as though language can, by naming, portray and give voice—but they are more startling and solid than the often-made, dull performances of those traits. The sense of the actual in them recalls Yeats’ materially constructed images (“a tattered coat upon a stick”); the presentation of consciousness is as expressive as Faulkner’s or shifty-stanced Keats’. The mix of reserve and rollick, characterization and its dissolution, detail and the minds that frame them—

There’s a poem called “Ibis,” first published in 1975, that I particularly recommend. It begins:

There is the long dream in the afternoon

That turns a large, white page

Like, once, the slow movement

Of slaves at daybreak

Through the clouds of a stone laundry.

The blossoms

On a black vegetable and

The olive wood burning in the plate

Are the simple events

That I’ll wake to this evening.

At dark, we’ll walk out along

The shore having finished

Another day of exile in a wet place.

As a boy I burned

Leaves in the many gardens

Of a cemetery in Rome.

I wrote in my diary:

A blue vessel

Is filling out in the rain. All day,

Here, the water falls and is not broken,

But it punishes me like the girls

With their clubs and bowl

Flattening the new maize,

Millet, and the narrow tubers

Of yam

That are white like hill snow.

You do not yet realize that the speaker of poem is Ovid, in exile, attended by a servant he envies, admires, and hates, who, a page and a half later, is told he must “fuel the terra-cotta lamp / And gather the cress and hidden eggs / Of the Ibis” when Ovid is dead, but of course the poem isn’t really about Ovid: it’s about a situation, a dailyness that surpasses the weary dailyness of most dailyness-based poems. Are these lines great? Well, the sense of line is great. The sense of real things somehow more real than the things around me, given with range that is held so it is tight but still vibrating, a heavy kite by which you deduce these must be very heavy winds, and somehow my thin wrists are up to it—it makes my poems feel smaller than they should, as though I do not take on the real good variety of utterance and world. I would like to. To see poem and line, book and poem, intelligence and artfulness as more wildly aligned. As they are in the great poems of Norman Dubie. 
 


More Pepper Than Salt: a response to Joy Katz's "A Desk."

Peter Ramos’ poems appear in Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, The Chattahoochee Review, and Poet Lore. He is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003).

Peter Ramos' essay, as noted in the title, responds to Joy Katz's poem "A Desk." quoted in its entirety below.


A Desk.


Solicitous of its own business. Not chewable, and never mordant.
How to say a desk as I would say a hand? I look out
from the brows: wooden, unaltering.
Perhaps a desk is more important.
Perhaps I cannot have a sentence without a desk,
more pepper than salt, more violà. Perhaps in life
one does not discover a desk enough—its cruelty and trousers—
simple as a line of dancers, full of bone.

Is a desk modestly a field?
No: a turnstile, an airplane wing.

You can count on railroad bridges, on cut celery.
You can count on the flatness of bateau,
on all that is not the flesh, such as a deck of cards.

The boxes fit one inside the next, the cutlery is put away,
sturdy to push on as bike pedals. All this belongs to the desk,
and a berm awash with tide—all things at rest,
not panicked or insane.
As if the heavy telephones were back.

--Joy Katz, from The Garden Room


Peter's essay is the first in a series of "Expositions," in which poets present brief essays on either a single poem or a small group of poems...

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It’s almost not a poem. At least it doesn’t fit the model I usually hold up: most poems begin with a scene that is then destabilized and then, finally, resolved—in some fashion, either by the passage of time or the arrival of some epiphany—as in, say, Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which the sun sets by the poem’s end, and the speaker has gone from addressing the historical moment in which he is situated to confronting those readers of future generations taking in the poem long after the speaker has passed away; or in Dickinson’s “465” (“I Heard a Fly Buzz when I died”), in which the speaker’s death-bed expectations for the coming of Christ—or wisdom or final illumination—are horribly undercut by her/his ultimate and final sensation: the carnal, decadent, insistent, small and defiantly non-transcendental noise of a fly.

Katz’s poem, by contrast, doesn’t really begin in one place and end up somewhere else. Nor does the poem seem to resolve anything like a conflict or tension. In this, and other ways, it resembles Gertrude Stein’s most compelling work (for me, anyway), the shorter prose poems of Tender Buttons. In fact, Katz’s use of the period in the title/phrase makes the allusion seem intentional. And, like Stein, Katz takes up the otherwise drab, commonplace items usually associated with the domestic sphere—food, linen closets, coffee, desks—and transforms them, makes them appear strange, magical, out of context. It’s tempting to read this as a critique of the domestic sphere—of the place socially constructed and designated to accommodate a patriarchy. But that’s too simple a reading. This poem is about establishing a ground, a solid surface on which a self or subject can establish itself as a self, from which that self can then greet and make the world. Yet the poem contains both aspects: a launching pad and flight, the latter inconceivable without the former. But flight can only be imagined or anticipated here—what the “turnstile” or “airplane wing” will precipitate. The ground must be receptive and innocuous—neither imposing nor critical—and also trustworthy—“sturdy” and “full of bone.” That something so simple—a wooden desk—can be so valuable, so essential also reminds us of the times in which we live: where a place for silence and meditation is threatened by the speed and distractions of living in this era—with our apparent dependence on email and cell phones, on various pressing and immediate obligations. The desk is “not panicked or insane./ As if the heavy telephones were back.”

In terms of meter, the poem maintains a wonderful conversational quality that keeps the bouncy anapests and dactyls almost hidden: “MORE PEPPer than SALT...Is a DESK MODestly.” The rhymes, too, move just beneath the surface, internal and aslant, innocuous, insistent, and essential as the desk itself: “solicitous/ business”; “brows/ trousers/dancers”; “flatness/ bateau/ back”; “desk/rest.” It’s as if, somehow, especially in this age of spectral distractions, there is still a need for something simple, solid, and dependable, on which and from which to cast the nets of our imagination.

Expositions

"Expositions" are, in essence, short essays about "great" contemporary and/or non-canonical poems. The idea behind this series is to allow for critical interaction with either individual poems or small clusters of poems, since such writing is hard to come by in mainstream publications. My guidelines, as such, are both nominal and (therefore) flexible, so authors are free to investigate poems they find fascinating in whatever way they see fit.

Zach Savich - A Great Poem: Norman Dubie’s “Ibis”, March 2010

Peter Ramos - More Pepper than Salt: a response to Joy Katz's "A Desk.", February 2010