Monthly Archives: January 2013
Jim Nabors, AKA Gomer Pyle
My body is your compass
At the Gym
At the Gym
Mark Doty
This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,
and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they’ve chosen
this time: more reps,
more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we’ve been:
shroud-stain, negative
flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,
gaining some power
at least over flesh,
which goads with desire,
and terrifies with frailty.
Who could say who’s
added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here where
we make ourselves:
something difficult
lifted, pressed or curled,
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there’s something more
tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.
Here is some halo
the living made together.
From Source by Mark Doty, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2002 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
About Mark Doty:
Mark Doty was born in 1953. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award; School of the Arts (2005); Source (2002); and Sweet Machine (1998).
Other collections include Atlantis (1995), which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award; My Alexandria (1993), chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, and was also a National Book Award finalist; Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991); and Turtle, Swan (1987).
In 2010, Graywolf Books published a collection of essays on poetry titled The Art of Description: World into Word, in which Doty asserts that “poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself.”
He has also published Heaven’s Coast (1996), which received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Other memoirs by Doty includes Firebird (1999), Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (2000), and Dog Years(HarperCollins, 2007).
Doty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2011. He has taught at the University of Houston and is currently serving as a Distinguished Writer at Rutgers University. He currently lives in New York City.
Spartacus
Someone thinks you’re sinning. Now it’s your move.
1 Corinthians 10:23-11:1“Everything is permissible” – but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible” – but not everything is constructive. Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, for, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”If some unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience. But if anyone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, both for the sake of the man who told you and for conscience’ sake – the other man’s conscience, I mean, not yours. For why should my freedom be judged by another’s conscience? If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for?So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God – even as I try to please everybody in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.
One Today: Reprise
Blanco—who, according to his Web site, has a “poetry dance—a little Michael Jackson-inspired shtick I do around the house in my pajamas when I am high from a good-poem day”—was a great choice for the inaugural honor. But “One Today,” in my opinion, falls flat. It reads like an early draft of what could be a good poem. I’m trying to restrain automatic prejudice against quickly made-to-order poetry, but I find the effort slapdash, and simply not very coherent.It’s full of clichés: the din of honking cabs and buses, a songbird on a clothesline, the sun rising over the Rockies. Emotional clichés too: the father who, early in the poem, worked hard so that the son could have books and shoes, but still, later in the poem, couldn’t give his child what he wanted; the mother who rang up groceries so that the poet could write this poem. (Poets should be very wary of writing poems about writing poems.)The title itself is awkward, elusive. Today we are one? There is only one today? Every day is today? I’m not sure.Blanco’s imagery doesn’t resonate as clever or creative—which is, of course, the burden of poetry: pencil-yellow school buses, squeaky playground swings, the plum blush of dusk, the moon like a silent drum tapping on the rooftops. The word “howdy” should probably never appear in a poem, and certainly not sandwiched among a polyglot smorgasbord of howdies: shalom, buon giorno, namaste, buenos dias. “Crescendoing” is another word that feels out of place.Blanco strains to bring in the 9/11 attacks, juxtaposing the handiwork of a person making the first brush stroke of a painting with that of someone completing “the last floor on the Freedom Tower / jutting into a sky that yields to our resistance.” I find this dubious, gratuitous.Even more unexpectedly, Blanco works in a reference to the Newtown killings, in a passage that’s especially difficult to follow. A stanza that begins with images of learning and imagination takes a forced detour to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and ends oddly—it’s not clear how we got here—with churches, museums, and parks. Amid all this, in a jolting scene that strikes me as impious and insufficiently thought out, Blanco meanders into “the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain / the empty desks of twenty children marked absent / today, and forever.”It’s not that poetry can’t or shouldn’t invoke last month’s massacre—but the decision to broach this tremendously raw tragedy should be accompanied by a sensitive, courageous, meaningful treatment that does justice to the pain as it is recalled in the poem. There’s a heavy responsibility in writing about this. I don’t know exactly what is the right way to remember those poor children, but “marked absent / today, and forever” is not it. This misstep is a symptom of what’s too undigested, too unsettled, about “One Today” as a whole.I think Blanco’s intent—a sensible one for the occasion—was to create a vast, varied portrait of our country. It’s the kind of task that Alexander achieved more subtly and comfortably in her poem four years ago, a smooth confluence of cultural and historical images which contrasted quotidian American life and the monumentally historic importance of Obama’s first inauguration day. Alexander’s poem has many thematic similarities with Blanco’s (children and parents, the hard work of living each day, the awe of a unifying moment in America), but she succeeds, where Blanco fails, at handling the task eloquently. I guess she works well under deadlines.“One Today” is a frenetic mishmash. No poetry dances here, I’m afraid.
The simple poem effectively wrapped around the otherwise “frenetic mishmash” that we as Americans are and that the Inauguration Day festivities likewise were.Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the homespun images of diversity seemed both democratic and moving–hopeful, really, as I think the poet intended and entirely appropriate for the occasion. The image of the one moon “tapping on every rooftop and every window” is one that lingers.
Reliquaries and Research
If you are not familiar with relics and reliquaries, here is a brief description. Christian belief in the power of relics, the physical remains of a holy site or holy person, or objects with which they had contact, is as old as the faith itself and developed alongside it. Relics were more than mementos. The New Testament refers to the healing power of objects that were touched by Christ or his apostles. The body of the saint provided a spiritual link between life and death, between man and God: “Because of the grace remaining in the martyr, they were an inestimable treasure for the holy congregation of the faithful.” Fueled by the Christian belief in the afterlife and resurrection, in the power of the soul, and in the role of saints as advocates for humankind in heaven, the veneration of relics in the Middle Ages came to rival the sacraments in the daily life of the medieval church. Indeed, from the time of Charlemagne, it was obligatory that every altar contain a relic.
But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.
One Today
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
to teach geometry, or ring up groceries as my mother did