Fernando Pessoa, early 20th-century Portuguese poet, is famous for the creation of his three literary personas, or heteronyms. Pessoa wrote under these heteronyms to not only distance the act of writing poetry, but as a tool of identity and perception; that poetry, as is any art form, creates another self divisible by its creator, and when it is observed by the reader it is given life through the perceiver. For we, when we read something, cement its existence. The biggest mystery in this relationship of perception is the emotion it conjures in us; what is this bridge across valleys? It is unnamable, slippery; it lays, a tantalizing rock, at the bottom of a stream. Yet we continue to grapple with this ambiguity through art, through poetry. This Poetry Month, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite poetry books to celebrate the sculptures behind the form.
Louise Glück – The First Four Books of Poems (1995)
Out of these pages moan a desperate wind. The sound of time escaping us, the whistle of a train we didn’t board heading off across a grey plain. Glück, an American poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature just three years before her late death, uses the regularity of domestic landscapes to portray grief; the entities of loss that float around the spaces we habit. Her poems slip aside the veil of reality to reveal the dark theater of our ghosts and how they operate, lingering amongst us in their knowing. The first poem of her book, The House on Marshland (1975) is titled “All Hollows” and is a perfect testament to her prowess, “Even now this landscape is assembling./ The hills darken. The oxen/ sleep in their blue yoke,/ the fields having been/ picked clean, the sheaves/ bound evenly and piled at the roadside/ among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: // This is the barrenness/ of harvest or pestilence./ And the wife leaning out the window/ with her hand extended, as in payment,/ and the seeds/ distinct, gold, calling/ Come here/ Come here, little one // And the soul creeps out of the tree.”
John Ashbery – Can You Hear, Bird? (1995)
Okay okay okay, I picked this one up at The Book Barn in Connecticut, and if you’ve ever been you know that place is both a heaven and a hell for book people. You have to go in with a grand plan, or else you’re absolutely screwed. This time I went right to the poetry section, and picked up Ashbery’s 17th book from the shelf (which I later found was a signed copy). There aren’t many words to express Ashbery’s poetry except that it is unfathomable genius; his work is ethereal and bizarre, yet grounded in his narration. When one reads Ashbery it is almost like they are following a character around an eternal playground. There is joke in his verse, each poem a sardonic microcosm of the absurdity that congeals existence. The poems in Can You Hear, Bird? are alphabetized A through Y, with titles such as “Dangerous Moonlight”, “Do Husbands Matter?” ,“Many Are Dissatisfied”,and “Yes, Dr. Grenzmer. How May I Be of Assistance to You? What! You Say the Patient Has Escaped?” It’s impossible, or just dissatisfying, to read poetry without Ashbery. Or as a line from the last title poem mentioned, “such is my story/ but I’m glad to be having this chance to tell it to you/ even though we are in a silent movie and can speak only words/ painted with milk. Yet someone comes to care about them: // There is always someone to care, somewhere”.
Anne Sexton – The Book of Folly (1972)
It’s hard to talk poetry without Anne Sexton’s name coming up. She is arguably one of the most famous poets of the 20th century, and is categorized in stature alongside contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. I picked up The Book of Folly for the name of the author alone, not quite sure what I was embarking on. After reading the first few poems, I realized the magnitude of what I had in my hands was unshakable. Sexton writes in this book from politics and childhood – the cruelness of our bodies and our desires, a burrowing presence in a world that does not want us but is forced upon us anyway. I love this stanza from her poem, “Anna Who Was Mad”, “Give me a report on the condition of my soul./ Give me a complete statement of my actions./ Hand me a jack-in-the-pulpit and let me listen in./ Put me in the stirrups and bring a tour group through./ Number my sins on the grocery list and let me buy.” In the second part of the book, titled “Three Stories” Sexton writes amazing, strange prose pieces like “Dancing the Jig,” and “The Letting Down of The Hair” that confront ideas of domesticity, sexuality, and public perception in a way that will ultimately ruin you through their sorrow; these futile endings and beginnings. Yet, such is Sexton.
Harryette Mullen – Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002)
Cozied among the stacks of a small, used bookstore in the cellar of an NYC library was where I found Mullen’s work, Sleeping with the Dictionary, as though it was living up to its namesake. Crouched in the corner, I read the first line of the first poem “All She Wrote”, “Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read/ your letter” and found myself a day later on the train back to RI, completely immersed in the technical play of Mullen’s language. Mullen traces gender, race, and politics through the discourse of a poet’s writing companions, Roget’s Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. Using these tools, Mullen writes poems to confront and re-frame the relationship between African American and English language. She writes in her poem “Present Tense”, “Now that my ears are connected to a random answer machine,/ the wrong brain keeps talking through my hat. Now that I’ve/ been licked all over by the English tongue, my common law/ spout is suing for divorce… I can forgive/ everything and forget nothing… Now as the reel unravels, our story/ unwinds with the curious dynamic of an action flick without a/ white protagonist.” Mullen’s poems are smooth stones that sit in the mouth, and with each turn of the tongue a new world is revealed.
Frank O’Hara – Meditations in an Emergency (1957)
I remember reading O’Hara’s poem, Meditations in an Emergency, and becoming obsessed with finding his book. When I was gifted Meditations in an Emergency, I devoured it. O’Hara (leader of the “New York School” of poets, which Ashbery was a part of) writes poems of intellectual stature and emotion that desire to be read before a purple skyline. They are beatific, enormous; his poems are paintings that grant the reader supreme access into an abstract world of twisted irony. O’Hara writes in “For Grace, After a Party,” “You do not always know what I am feeling./ Last night in the warm spring air while I was/ blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t/ interest // me, it was my love for you that set me // afire, and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of/ strangers my most tender feelings // writhe and/ bear the fruit of screaming.” •
