Glassworks

Why this perpetual desire to be seeing into?
That a poem should be translucent
as the soul, the experience of experience,
written, perhaps, at a train station,
seated by a wide bay of windows—
while the baker and the lemon merchant talk below
(the poem should smell of bread and lemons).
Ultimately, we want windows, not words,
Or perhaps we want to be the poet,
not the reader of poems,
gazing again out of the window.

But for all this talk of windows, souls,
walls deserve their due: without them,
no privacy for the afternoon lovers,
draped in each other like wild silks;
no way to shut in the stove’s thick, shadowy light
and shut out the world’s bitter, toothy wild.
And for the poet, it is not
airiness and sweep and light,
but the earthen room, the wooden chair,
and the pen, cradled and spun like
the glassmith’s pipe.

Le Taxi

We spoke French in the cab
I do not know why
We were very drunk
The driver was excited
With the foreigners—
These strange unknown
fools and their compassion.

A Statement of Purpose

I have received some positive feedback from my “Bog and Tower” paper so I wanted to provide a little more background on how and why I went to Ireland.  Here is my James W. Meyer Grant Application.  I have achieved some of these goals, many are still unfinished, ground left unearthed:

In 2005, I walked into a bookstore and selected a book of poems.  Strangely, it was Jay Parini’s quotation on the back cover that grabbed my attention. On the back of Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground, Jay’s endorsement read: “The poems stay in the mind, which is the one essential feature of major poetry.” The poems have stayed in my hands and my mind ever since. I have carried the book to four continents. Yet despite reading and rereading Heaney’s poems and essays, I feel excluded from something in his poetry—a sense of place, the experience of Ireland, is vividly tied into his work, and I have never stepped foot on Irish soil.

I continued writing at Andover, under the aegis of an in the flesh Irish poet, Ted Deppe. There I discovered Yeats, Paul Muldoon, and spent a semester reading Joyce’s Ulysses. I fell in love with Irish poetry and prose. There was something in the diction, the sense of experimentation rooted in a formalist tradition, the mix of the political and the poetic, and there is the land itself inspiring poetry as it reflects back the work of past poets. I hope to better understand Irish poetry by exploring Ireland for the month of January with the aid of a Grant W. Meyer Fund grant.

What do I intend to research and report on while in Ireland? I have a sense that Irish poetry is uniquely tied to the country. It is no mistake that Paul Muldoon’s first publication was entitled Knowing My Place, for it is the knowledge of place that gives rise to such rich meaning in Irish poetry. Heaney speaks of his County Derry home as an omphalos, the navel, the stone marking the world’s center, and the sound of the communal water pump of his childhood. His poetry is deeply centered in the reality of Northern Ireland: the landscape, the people, and the history. Muldoon, Yeats, and Joyce are equally tied to Ireland, despite the fact that they all left the country for significant periods of time. Place in Irish poetry combines the music of the name, the physical fact of the land and in its history, and the ideal or abstract version of the place created by the poem. Heaney’s “Sweeney in Flight” creates a sense of Ireland by tying these three elements together: “I prefer the re- / echoing belling of a stag / among the peaks / to that arrogant horn // … // the stag of high Slieve Felim, / the stag of the steep Fews, / the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery, / the fierce stag of Killarney. // The stag of Islandmagee, Larne’s stag, / that stag of Moylinny, / the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill, / the stag of the two-peaked Burren.” Surrounding the deep tremolo of “stag”, there is a music of place. I fear that, given my ignorance of Ireland, entire cadenzas and hemiolas have passed inaudibly before my ears.

For my project, I would travel all across Ireland to cities and sites made famous by Irish poems and poets. To better understand Yeats, I would visit Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee, and Drumcliff Churchyard where “Ben Bulben sets the scene”. Travelling to Thoor Ballylee, I could witness for myself the source of “The Winding Stair” and “The Tower Poems.” I could attempt to decipher whether the poems bear the marks of their surrounding or if, as Heaney suggests, the poems create “a country of the mind” separate from the physical place overlaid onto the surroundings. Is it the place that gives rise to the abstractions in Yeast’s poems (as in the turning staircase of the Tower and the “widening gyre” of “The Second Coming”)? Or does Yeats’s poetry create the Tower as I would see it?
To better understand Heaney’s work, I would travel to Northern Ireland, to the country of his birth, County Derry. I would trace my way through the bucolic Ireland he has immortalized visiting Anhorish, Brough, Toome, and Moyola. I would also spend time at the Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry at Heaney’s alma mater Queens University in Belfast, where I would delight in meeting the current director.

While in Belfast I would also visit the Ulster Museum, where I could find paintings like Sir John Lavery’s “Daylight Raid from My Studio Window” that have inspired the ekphrastic poetry of Derek Mahon. I also want to plumb how the changing face of Northern Ireland alters the meaning of recent Irish poetry. What does it mean to read Mahon’s “Everything Is Going to Be All Right,” in a peaceful Belfast? Is the poem reconciled with a peaceful world or does it depend in some way upon “the Troubles”? What does it mean to read the lines, “There will be dying, there will be dying, / but there is no need to go into that” today and how would Irish citizens react to the poem today?

In the pursuit of so many prominent Irish writers, I would travel to Dublin. To research Joyce, I would visit the Joyce Museum in Martello Tower and look down at the “snotgreen sea,” before poking my way over to the James Joyce Centre. Of course Dublin has also hosted Yeats, Shaw, Kavanagh, and Heaney. I could sit beside Kavanagh’s statue along the Grand Canal and contemplate “Canal Bank Walk,” and look for that bird “gathering materials for the nest for the Word / Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.”

I would also seek out the Irish landscape. Poets like Mahon and Heaney are quick to conjure up meadows of herbs and beauty that ripen our appreciation of nature. I want to see what all of the fuss is about. Is it an accessible beauty? Is it created within the poetry for effect or does it stand alone? Perhaps January is not the most picturesque of months but any place holds a winter beauty.

Another goal of mine would be to meet and interview current Irish poets. I would like to hear how they conceive of the Irish poetic tradition, how important is it to be in Ireland when writing of Ireland, and how they believe the Irish country has shaped their own writing.

Beyond this, I wish to surrender myself to Ireland for a month, to discover new poets, poems, and places. In addition to writing my essay on relationship between Irish poets and the sense of place, I also hope to write my own poems, to expand my “word-horde.” I would greatly appreciate this opportunity to go and grow abroad. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Jack B. Yeats Poetry Sequence

Written in the National Gallery of Ireland, January 2009

The following is an ekphrastic poem, meaning it is description of a work of another work of art. Unfortunately, the National Gallery of Ireland does not offer digital reproductions of the following three pieces, but I hope the poems stand by themselves.

“The Cavalier’s Farewell to his Steed” (1949)

His face a storm of light, a lightning-crackle
Of brain-movement, forward facing, directional brilliance,
While his legs full of midnight gore, gloop and buckle—
How like ourselves, our ideas and molasses movement.
Wait, hold a second, there to the left:
Is that blue murk and dabble his face?
The blue shadow, an eyeless gaze
Cast at the steed, nostalgia stumped—
Oh the lollipop-movement of a two-faced man.

There are more questions:
There, on the thick ribcage of the horse,
Is that saddle and swelling regalia, velvet fashion,
Or killing crimson, yellow pus past the flesh gates, blood forked?
The boy’s steed bears it’s desertion and load regally,
Head swan-high. “We always knew
It would have to end,” it seems to say.

And what, finally, are we to make of these borders—
Frames within frames. As if the artist were cutting out
A pain-memory, and caging it there: “No take-backs.”
The steed, facing a sloppy, navy-night.
The top, a ceiling, a thick black bar—
Nor horizon or hallelujah here for the having.
The ground, yes, we can recognize
The muddy squabble of earth and grass.
But what, what is this brimstone crying blood?
This smear of judgment in the Cavalier’s path?

Can he break the molten with his head of light?
Or is his mindflare not enough,
Prejudged, already damned upon his feet, walking
Into the abyss?

“The Liffey Swim” (1923)

First of all, I love the squareness and focus
Of the man’s grey bowler cap,
And the single lock of blond hair tumbling
Free from the woman’s scone-brown bun.
It is almost enough to distract us—
If only the lock weren’t notched like an arrow
To the one crowd-face staring our way, eyeing us:
A sad olive shawl, bags under the charcoal eyes,
The pink smudge of a frown.
No doubt she has lost a child, young,
And she is watching the powerful bodies,
Sluicing the waves, for a hint of him,
Or inspecting us, patient these 80 years.

Then the deep-suffering gasp of the swimmer
His mouth an unquenchable O
A lung-pit infinite in its appetite
Swallowing our air.
He is laboring upstream, arms
Blurred into a shepherd’s crook.
I imagine him dodging the unseen I know now:
The murky trash, the many bicycles
With their sharp, silent spokes.

“Four Scenes in Search of Characters: Beginning with Naples, Scene I-IV” (1942)

Don’t worry Jack; I’ll cast your characters yet.
This one you’ll like: a man in Amazonian blue and scalded orange,
A smooth indecipherable face and a startling jacket:
He is you Jack, born into your own swirling world.

He, well, you stand staring out the window
Commenting on the floody beauty of that yellow wave.
You say it looks like God
Washed together water and light on a lark
And then, bored again, dumped the sun-beamy wash into the sea.

Of course, all this is spoken to a lover, sitting on the corner bed.
You have absconded, leaving the loose weave of family.
All this is very common, but here Jack, you are in for a surprise.
She is not wild brush stroke and creamy, floating flash,
She is not one of your indefinite, golden-butter, so-modern figures.

Her name is Amelia
And her skin is the crisp rosy-white of the peach
Cradled in her left hand.

Jack, surely you remember it was she
Who threw open those shutters
Letting in that magic, tea-scented, tan air.

Amelia casts a gaze, but she is not interested in the wave
Of water and liquid light. She is looking at you, Jack.
You know she is out of her place, carried from our world
Of sharp edges and over-exact electrons.

When she dances, the inhabitants here
Wonder how her arms leave no ribbon-trail,
No melting brush of color. They wonder
How she is always exactly where she is.
You love this about her, Jack, love
Watching the pure line of her fingernails
Bite into the spongy blob of the peach
Bleeding snow-white, indefinite juice.
You whimper, full now of the wide, salmon-pink
Brush strokes of desire.

When you make love, you drape her in your colors,
Trailing a half-globe of lyrical reds and pleasure yellows—
Love in rainbows, she calls it.
Hours later, you lay in the dark
Watching the echoes of your body, Jack,
The arch of your wild back,
The bow of your bowler,
Still falling to the floor.

Grounded

Dugout, pithouse, cavehouse, burdei, yaodong –
each a calling back to the world
of whirled earth, of square and honest plantings,
each born of dirtscrape, turfscrap, cow dung.

Whole towns dig down to the roots of things:
Mangup-Kale, the Goth’s submerged city;
The Barrio of Guadix: where old maestros
di pico still tunnel today, lost in their earthing;

And Cappadocia, home of rock-cut temples,
their daredevil majesty stamped on stone. Inside:
a dim, cool, sacred space, underhanging on arches,
columns, frescoes. I have stood there, simple

in my joy, an Antaeüs, clay king,
cheeks dimpling at the dusty thought
that spiritual strength arises
from the earthen fact of things.