Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling

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Although I sometimes felt baffled by Lo Kwa Mei-en’s poetry in this book, I always felt dazzled by it. I am noticing a trend this month, one that first became clear to me when I was reading Alice Fulton‘s Barely Composed, and was heightened by following closely with Terrance Hayes. The poetry that is a bit…beyond…me is the poetry that is making me re-examine my own work, inspiring me to try (if not to leave narrative’s camp altogether) something new.

Yearling is published by Alice James Books, a press I have long admired. It begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson, “This world is not Conclusion. / A Species stands beyond–” and juxtaposes bright facets of images with sounds that chime and jangle together to make music. “Bulbs of velvet gold wink in the insect // night like meteors sailing…” (“Man O’War”). That I had to reread and ponder and reread (again) — as I have with other poets playing so with language and lyric — was not the poet’s fault, but mine. They make me want to rise to them.

Here is just one poem for you to sample. I may have fallen down the rabbit hole in reading this entire collection of poems in one day, but — oh! — what a trip.

The Body as an Empty Cup

They bring things to you in smaller glasses
when they are stronger. Rogue hazelnut

ale, well-diluted soap, blush wine: these are not
stronger things so should come in buckets. Yes,

I see what you see — girl all appetite
riddled with holes. No, my throat has not drunk

down a barrel of Dawn. The West Coast sky
says I should’ve expected that from you.

So it comes down to forecasts and delays.
We used to sit, stare, and wait for what

was promised. When buckets of weaker
copies came instead, I recited cardamom, 

whiskey, blow beneath my breath. If I ever
come back to you, it will be in thimbles.

Lo Kwa Mei-en, Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015)

The way the first line informs the last, gives you a clue to this poem’s interior. I had a sense that once I’d hit on its kernel of meaning, it came unlocked, one of those little puzzle boxes with a secret drawer. Do I fully understand it? I’m not sure. But I can see its strength.

Cat Kigerl’s At the Town Cafe

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Having just spent four hours at Urgent Care with my daughter (whose sore knee checked out just fine, after all), and having read my book for today, how much work is it to type up a short poem and add a few links to a blogpost?

My main question with each of the books I have read this month has been, “What can I learn from this poet?” Some have been a stretch (all the more reason to take them on), while others, even while they affirm my own tendency toward place and narrative, show me something new about the line.

Cat Kigerl’s At the Town Cafe is published by Goldfish Press — which is publishing my forthcoming book — and for that reason alone I thought it was worthwhile to spend some time with her poems. Although she hails from northern California, and I have not met her, I knew her name from August postcards.

Kigerl’s first book of poems, Stirring Up the Water, won the Native Writers Circle of the America’s First Book Award. I’m finding a theme in that — and  I took note that one of her poems (“Upon a Farewell”), includes an epigraph from Sam Hamill: “Basho didn’t know a thing about water / until he heard that frog.” Throughout the book, Kigerl shows a willingness to dwell on the particular that reflects the whole.  Her final poem, the title poem, is long (6 sections; 4 pages), but unveils facet after facet (and cat after cat) visible from the town cafe. But here, a short poem, nicely capturing her own Basho-esque vision:

In the Teak-Tinted Light 

What is it about the constancy
of passing days, of each morning’s arrival
with its cloudy skies
its non-promise about tomorrow
in the teak-tinted light?

There is a tranquility
of the tree-shrouded shore
old fancies swaying in an imagined wind
the fluty chorus of morning birds
announcing a hidden sun
edging into the passing moments.

Cat Kigerl, At the Town Cafe (Goldfish Press, 2016)

Thomas Lux’s To the Left of Time

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I never had the privilege to meet Thomas Lux (1946-2017), but I seem to know an inordinate number of my contemporaries who have. So when I came across this book, To the Left of Time, I scooped it. He writes, among many other topics, about working on a farm as a child, and I have a feeling that I will very soon be writing a hay loft poem of my own. (See his poem, “Haystack of Needles.”) Here is another that made me want to pick up my notebook and start scribbling:

Ode to the Joyful Ones

         Shield your joyful ones.
–from an Anglican prayer

That they walk, even stumble, among us is reason
to praise them, or protect them — even the sound
of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,
is music. Because they bring laughter’s
brief amnesia. Because they stand,
talking, taking pleasure in others,
with their hands on the shoulders of strangers
and the shoulders of each other.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.
Because if they have two pork chops
they will serve you the better one.
Because they will give you the crutch off their backs.
Because when there are two of them together
their shining fills the room.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.

Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time (Mariner Books, 2016)

Cortney Davis’s Details of Flesh

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Cortney Davis‘s Details of Flesh has been on my shelf since it was first published by Calyx Books in 1997. A couple of times I’ve come close to giving it away, but on each occasion I thought twice. A nurse practitioner, Davis writes about issues that matter to me. Shouldn’t I reread her poems before letting them go?

Short answer, yes. As I read, I thought of the nurse’s aides who care for my mother, of the RN’s who change her catheter twice a month, of the nurses in hospitals who cared for my father after his open-heart surgery, and, ten years later, after his stroke, during his final week in the ICU. Davis often writes of children and young women, but the indignities of the flesh, the beauty of the flesh — these are omnipresent throughout the book. It takes a calling to do such work. Reading about it gives me heart for my own work.

The Nurse’s Task

When I pluck the suture
or pack the ulcer with gauze,
it becomes my task
to introduce rage to this body

that calls me nurse, nurse,
as if my hands were gold.
I cradle the body
like a mother rocks.

I lean close
and let it memorize my face.
Then, I begin.
First, something subtle.

A hasty scrape.
An accidental pinch
as if I might thrust needle
down to bone. The body

raises its hands in disbelief!
This is nothing. I thread veins
with catheters of fire,
I change morphine to milk.

When the body asks why?
I am silent. When the body
whines, I act bored
and turn away. If sleep comes

I sneak in and shake the body
until, angry and squinty-eyed,
it rises on its elbow
and stares at me, at last understanding

that the flesh is everything.
This is the body I love–the one
that laughs down death’s trumpet.
The one that escapes.

Cortney Davis, Details of Flesh (Calyx Books, 1997)