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In Mr Cogito, the post-modern Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) takes on no lesser subjects than identity and aging. We enter the heart of the poem I will discuss with the title of the book, “Mr Cogito”—“Cogito,” from Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”)—and then the full title of this particular poem: “Mr Cogito Studies His Face in the Mirrior.” This poem is a 28-line interrogation of ancestry, in which we travel back in time into the gene pool of Herbert’s Cogito, looking as he gazes at his face in a mirror.

“Mr Cogito Studies His Face in the Mirror” begins:

Who wrote our faces chicken pox for sure
marking its o’s with a calligraphic pen
but who bestowed on me my double chin
what glutton was it when my whole soul
yearned for austerity why are my eyes
set so closely together it was him not me
waiting in the scrub for the Vened invasion

It’s hard to stop here, or pause at all, to excerpt from such a rich meditation. This, like many, but not all, of the poems in this collection, appears without punctuation (as translated by Alissa Valles). Herbert’s Cogito considers the sensory responsibilities of the face—the ears, for example, are “two fleshy seashells/ no doubt left me by an ancestor who strained for an echo / of the thunderous march of mammoths across the steppes”—the lexicon of complexions, and then on to the nose. In lines 16-27, a minor turn occurs, and the speaker also remembers that the finery of civilization—including that which might be bought “in art salons,” including “powders potions masks / the cosmetics of nobility,” and “the musk of old books”—also made him who he is. We ride this epic journey of the flesh, one that spans centuries, as the face is made palpable as “a sack of old meats fermenting.” We taste the “paleolithic hunger and terror” that lifts us to such a pitch it is almost a relief when we reach the quiet, ordinary lines:

an apple falls not far from the tree
the body is locked into the chain of species

Almost a cliché, but for their precise placement, in these two lines Herbert sets us back on the ground in iconic language and imagery commonly heard and used. We are in the world of Isaac Newton, Adam and Eve. These set up the major turn, which is the final line in the poem, that at once cements and opens the poem up, the turn I carry with me, and often quote.  Here is the turn, with the lines that precede it:

the apple falls next to the apple tree
the body linked to the chain of species

    that’s how I lost the tournament with my face

The lack of punctuation is particularly resonant here, leaving the last word, the “face,” open. The surprise, the tension, the turn, in fact, maybe isn’t the entire last line but in the single word “tournament.”  The word yanks us back to the “medieval cravings and sins” we read four lines earlier, a singular yet universal struggle, the lifelong game of it. In choosing “tournament,” we experience the tragedy of losing as sport: noble, time-honored, and bitterly amusing. Herbert’s gestures here, as in other poems, are quietly dramatic armatures or conduits of composition. He uses the turn as an inward/outward boomerang, the simultaneous point in a poem where we know and don’t know a thing.  He pushes us out and tugs us back into the work to reexamine the clues that clicked their way through Cogito’s thinking, then ours, again. He uses the turn to re-engage the reader, doing elegant battle with the eyes, the ears, the nose, offering the “sudden cry” as he falls into “fell into the void only to return in me.”

Herbert’s turns often expose interiority as inevitability. A memorable turn like the  one found at the end of “Mr Cogito Studies His Face in the Mirror” penetrates the surface of the poem the way the hot sun warms the skin on our faces, then sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually reaches down to the bone.  It energizes a poem, deepens it with what is obvious, but not. We get it. We don’t. We feel it. We wonder.

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Elaine Sexton’s latest collection of poems is Causeway (New Issues). Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry, Pleiades, Oprah Magazine and other media online including Poetry Daily, and From the Fishouse. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute.

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There are two remarkable turns in Donald Justice’s Italian sonnet “The Wall.” One could be called rhetorical, that is, built into the Italian sonnet form with its octave-sestet argumentative structure, and one dramatic, provided by the narrative and the way that Justice chooses to tell or dramatize the story. Surely one of the great accomplishments of “The Wall” is that it manages to fit Paradise Lost into 14 lines!

The second turn, or dramatic one, is located in the final line: “As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.” Those wings have been foreshadowed dramatically in line 4, as the wings of the angels which did not instill awe in Adam and Eve as long as they remained “furled.” In the last line, the awe and awfulness of the revelation of the wings dawns on the fallen pair. The line is also ambiguous. Though grammatically “they” in “they advanced” ought to refer to Adam and Eve ,who are the subjects of the entire sestet, “they” may also refer to the wings themselves and by implication the angels, advancing in all their colossal glory. A state of instability makes the entire poem stand on a shifting base, rather like that cake of ice on a hot stove Robert Frost speaks of, in this case riding not only on its own melting, but its own falling.

But the turn that is a stroke of genius is the first line of the sestet, line 9:  “As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.”  All of Book 9 of Paradise Lost is contained in line 9 of “The Wall.”  Granted, the line does not have the impact of Milton’s “Earth felt the wound,” but I’d put it beside “Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat” any day.  With line 14 in Justice’s poem, line 9 brackets the four lines of anaphora that make up lines 10-13:  “They had been warned .   .   .  They had been told  .   .  . They saw it now,” etc.  The two turns together rotate the sestet like a wheel of history, like the fallen world itself, and the entire poem rides right into immortality.

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Mark Jarman’s latest collection of poetry is Bone Fires:  New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 2011).  He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and an Elector for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City.

†The version of the poem to which we have provided a link differs slightly in its punctuation from that of the original poem. For a more accurate version of the poem, we encourage readers to consult the print version, which can be found in Donald Justice’s The Summer Anniversaries, Wesleyan University Press, 1960.

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 As to the poetical Character itself,…it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character….What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet….[H]e has no Identity—he is continually in for[med]—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women….

When I am in a room with People…, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins [so] to press upon me that, I am in very little time annihilated….

- John Keats. Letter to Richard Woodhouse. October 27, 1818

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As young poets meeting for evening workshop in the book-lined Browsing Room, we’d step outside the Hall of Letters during the break to smoke cigarettes under the palms and ask one another curiously—desperately—if in our poem just discussed (some bald lyric of sex or ham-handed surrealism, perhaps) we might have finally found our voice. Because Finding Your Voice was our quest, our syllabus. In those mythopoetics that the workshop creates by its own idioms (like the Puritan economy of a poem that earns its ending or the grace of a final image that creates a fitting surprise), we knew that in finding our voice we would graduate from apprentice to Poet. The achievement of singularity was everything.

These days, I might want to think that such a singular quest is the quaint Romanticism of the young poet. Yet this drive persists—I’ve heard it both coming from fellow poets about their own work and used by fellow poets as instruction to their pupils. Moreover, it raises a question of the persistent reinforcement of this kind of expression, that one-note “poetical Character” Keats would deride as the “egotistical sublime” (Keats 387). Here, unexpectedly, a pop emblem swims into my ken: four high-backed chairs turned away from a singer on stage in a spotlight while Cee Lo, Christina, et al, listen intently for “The Voice.” With singular focus, these experts blindly audition each singer, pressing a buzzer to affirm the one whose distinctive voice fits an empty niche in their stable of singers. The reality of this show may point to the apotheosis of the phenomenon, where the paradigm of singularity is raised to the level of a competition and originality is streamlined by commerce. And yet even if we could strip this narrative of its pursuit of commercial fame, we’d find the rubric of critique of these artists to exist at an intersection of self-actualization (“be who you are”) and refined technique (“use your range”). (Over at “American Idol” this season, Nicki Minaj regularly coaches contestants to work within “your comfort zone,” advice which leads us to the remarkable realization that Minaj has turned radical variety [of musical style, of wig style] into her one voice.)

Of course, poetry is not television (though a few, from O’Hara through some quicksilvered contemporary poets, might ask it to be more like TV). Still, we connoisseurs of poetry hold a similar ability to identify a poet by her voice and a tendency to take that voice as the marker of a career. Of course, there is something identifiable about an individual poet, and it is more than the trick of a party game or the GRE to be able to spotlight “a Bidart poem” or “an Oliver poem” or many others. To say that the work of these poets is one thing—“the extended meditation” or “the nature poem”—blurs their variety and subtlety in order to champion the original space they have created.

Onto this stage Louise Glück enters with the distinction of carrying a different voice in every book. Her public accounts of her process detail how after completing each book she engages in “a conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off” that often occurs at the level of language (“Education of the Poet” 17). So, for instance, after Firstborn she sets herself “the task…to make latinate suspended sentences” (often as one-sentence poems) that will be in contrast to the “little bulletproof poems” of that first book (“Education of the Poet” 17, Poetry in Person 53). Glück ruthlessly re-configures what she determines to be the “habitual devices” of each book (Poetry in Person 53). And since these habits are often the foundations of voice—diction, syntax, their collection in idiom—her work amounts to a re-pitching of voice. This may be where the poet can do what the singer cannot; we borrow the term of voice from the singer’s performative interpretation of song, but, for the singer, voice is more tied to the physical body and less able to undergo the radical transformation possible for the poet, whose variety of song can draw on the near infinite variation of the language to be able to be, as Keats would have it, “continually in[formed]—and filling some other Body” (Keats 387).

In invoking Keats here I’m considering voice as the craft of achieving negative capability, the way the poet creates his chameleon changes on the page. As I’ve suggested, voice is not one craft element; rather, it is a composite, allowing the poet a number of variables with which to orchestrate the complex. Most immediate of the components of voice is diction. Through a chosen vocabulary, the poet sets the sonic and political boundaries of a voice. Does the speaker prefer the sophisticated Franco-precision of “baize” to name the playing field of a billiard game, or does he chose instead the colloquial and pool-hall crack of the Anglo-Saxon “felt”? Next, syntax defines a voice by indicating disposition via the kind of sentences a speaker makes. Does he prefer the no-nonsense of the simple declarative; or does he show the skepticism (or ill confidence) of successive qualifying parentheticals; or is he the withholding sort who builds periodic sentences making us wait many lines for the predicate’s conclusion?

Diction and syntax, taken together, form the complex of idiom, that unique way of meaning-making that defines any speaker like a thumbprint, like a geo-tag marking a specific space, time, and dramatic predicament. Within idiom, the poet further creates voice through choices of pacing. The speaker who prefers multiple latinate adjectives and compound sentences may be exacting but also relaxed—in no hurry to get to the next noun or next period. Moreover, the poet creating voice also has the line. By “turning the line” (as Mary Oliver prefers it to “breaking the line”), the poet can confirm or cut across syntax (or even, thinking of Creeley, across the word) to further modulate the voice (Oliver 35). Consider the headlong rush and desperation of that speaker in Creeley’s “I Know a Man” compared to the grossly emphatic speaker in Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man” poems, who declares peculiar truths at the rate of one end-stopped sentence per line.

By tracking these components, we can locate the “tuning fork” of voice in the poem. Often the tuning fork is a place of resonant idiom where the voice clearly defines itself—and around which the whole of a single poem can align in matched pitch and harmony. In this way, identifying the complex of voice may be most of what we are doing when we say that a poem “teaches us how to read it,” regardless of whether the poem claims the distinctive voice of a defined persona or is instead presenting an equally identifiable speaker (who we may usefully or errantly equate with the poet).

All that I’ve said about voice so far suggests it as primarily a means toward alignment, not a method of the turn. That is, we’re interested in the voice that carries a single poem. Louise Glück’s virtuosity with turns of voice goes further. In even her earliest work, she will finesse turns into distinct voices not just between books or between poems but within a single poem. The result is a remarkably complex music and an intricate play between characters in the dramas and politics of the poems—and an astonishing linguistic play between their idioms. And the poet? She surpasses singular character to achieve Keats’s own byword: annihilation.

Fittingly, Glück announces this virtuosity of voice in the first poem of her first book, “The Chicago Train.”  With an economy that prevails through all of her lyrics, Glück immediately fits us into a tight and charged (if also nuanced and quiet) dramatic space of this poem. She accomplishes this by first announcing the location of the encounter dispassionately in the title. Then, what seems an accommodating adverbial to help further establish scene within the train (“across from me”) also establishes the drama of separation of the speaker and her fellow passengers in this small compartment. Moreover, this first line places all of the initial perception of the poem in relation to the speaker: across from me.

But as quickly the point of view shifts from immediate scene placement to the speaker’s summary perspective of “the whole ride,” and she gives slight suspense to the ride’s outcome by deferring the predicate across the first line break. Upon reaching that predicate, the mild inflection of the adverb, “hardly,” indicates a voice of precision—while also hinting at the dramatic promise that something will yet stir here. These first eight words have defined this speaker’s voice, ringing a tuning fork of balanced syntax and gentle modification (the brief introductory adverbial, the single adjective and single adverb) in a simple sentence. In many ways, there is little of note here in a voice of fairly plain style. Still, a plain style is distinctive—and deceptive if we think it to be inert. Here, plainness also signals cultural privilege, and we’re about to realize how this is the heart of the drama and emotion of this poem.

The first swift and arresting turn of voice comes mid-line after this introduction, the hint of some potential stirring immediately comes to bear with the exception of “just Mister” actually stirring. If the aspect of this adverb, “just,” aims to temper the situation, the impact of its tight fricative combines with a consonance and the intimacy of “Mister” (lifted up to the place of proper noun) to sharply tune a new, “other” voice and present a drama of voices: me and Mister across from one another. What follows is a nearly three-line run of this second voice, though this command of the space of the poem is mitigated by the fact that syntactically it’s still dependent and within the perception of the primary speaker. In addition to “Mister” addressed as someone known, “the kid” is likewise named from within, as an intimate. Even when the possessive of “his mama’s legs” reminds us of the point of view, the choice of “mama” in the kid’s own vernacular keeps us on that side of the train car. Likewise the specificity of “skull” and the nonstandard “got his head” declare a distinct voice unlike but not necessarily at odds with the speaker’s. Still, Glück insists on a sympathetic experience with this other voice, perhaps drawing it out a bit longer so that we’re sure to reside there. Intriguingly, she also builds a poem that initially segregates within tight quarters, as might two groups on an El, with that colon in line two marking the aisle.

Meanwhile, this dialectic of voices complicates. This second voice enters with an abruptness and a hissing aspect (“just Mister”) that becomes a sense of risk when that “barren / Skull” is laid out in the open. Yet that noun, “skull,” firmly inhabits the rougher (and more bodily) second voice, while the adjective, “barren,” seems to return to the register of the first (also echoing an “rr” consonance with the earlier “stirred”). We seem to be, for the moment that these two notes strike through the linebreak at line two, in both voices and both points of view. Is “barren” the speaker’s voice intervening in both diction and judgment? Or in considering that as the explanation, are we mistaking characterization with caricature and the tuning of voice with monotone such that we can’t believe that Mister or mama is capable of naming a bald head as “barren”? I’m reminded of Noam Chomsky reminding us that intelligence surfaces in every realm and in many forms. The fact that Glück places this moment of vocal ambiguity on an enjambment before returning squarely to two lines in her second voice suggests she means to heighten the tension of a speaker who may want to draw clear boundaries while we readers, hearing both as voices other than our own, encounter our assumptions about singularity of voice.

In any case, this hesitation or overlap of voices anticipates another like moment at the end of line four. Given the message of the vulnerability of the body communicated in the bare skull of one man and in a child seeking refuge in the legs of his mother, we’re likely to consider the implied threat of “The poison,” hanging off the end of the fourth line, as a continuation of that risky situation and therefore still within the poem’s second voice. But since neither the specific diction of “poison” nor any sonic echoes distinctly tie it to that voice, we reach the end of this line with some vocal ambivalence. Only when that clause continues (“The poison / That replaced air took over.”) with the kind of summary declaration reminiscent of “the whole ride / hardly stirred,” do we realize the poem has again turned to change back to the first voice, which the next clause (“And they sat”) confirms by underscoring “they” as separate from the speaker.

This short clause is followed with another broad summary—“as though paralysis preceding death / Had nailed them there”—that turns into bi-vocality, the poem using the cleaving of linebreak to at once confirm and lose its stark segregation. That initial summary engages the poem’s speaker in a distant, intellectualized depiction of the poem’s central scene, where “paralysis preceding death” is her best expression of concern. Yet this clinical regard draws our attention to how that same scene, when inflected by the second voice, is more a physical mesh of bodies at once vulnerable and loved. Crossing through the linebreak at line six, it is as if the speaker has herself confronted this disparity, and with her chosen verb, “nailed,” the suggestion of vulnerability (really a pervasive outside threat of violence) returns. As quickly as this note of the second voice interrupts the speaker she recovers, although a neutral clause completes this line (“The track bent south”), both voices quieted while all the bodies sway in one direction.

The last line makes the most unexpected turn of the poem—not neutral, neither aligning with one nor the other of the poem’s two voices. Rather, in drawing on each voice in pirouettes of turns, Glück performs a final annihilation, a move of radical sympathy that diffuses the politics of point of view without naively dismissing the debate these perspectives create. Glück finesses these turns in her verbals and verbs. The final line is the first and only explicit owning of the first person, “I saw her,” and one that at first seems to too neatly segregate subject-I from object-her. Here, too, is the dominant first voice with its diagnostic tendencies identifying the specific ailment of “lice.” But then this voice also moves very close to her fellow travelers, her fellow humans, and becomes more raw. The speaker approaches the mother’s body, seeing specifically, intimately and adopting the rough vernacular of “her pulsing crotch,” which is pulsing both with life and to the speaker’s horror, lice (themselves a threat in their violent “rooting” on the child’s body). But where this child had been off-handedly but endearingly “the kid” within the perspective of the second voice, now, in its culminating intimacy, the poem renames “that baby’s hair,” the distancing demonstrative eroding into softness. With the tour de force of this final line, we understand that finding voice in the poem—and for this poet—is no sole accomplishment but is instead an activity of greater and lesser turning into “every thing and nothing.”

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Works Consulted

American Idol. Fox Broadcasting Company. Season 12, Spring 2013.

Bell, Marvin. Book of the Dead Man. Port Angeles, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1993.

Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 2002.

Creeley, Robert. For Love: Poems 1950-1960. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962.

Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821. Vol. I. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Glück, Louise. “The Chicago Train.” Firstborn. 1968. In The First Four Books of Poems. New York: Ecco Press, 1995. 5.

Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. New York: Ecco Press, 1994.

Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. New York: Mariner Books, 1994.

Neubauer, Alexander, Ed.. Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

The Voice. National Broadcasting Company. Season 3, Fall 2012.

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Gary Hawkins writes poems; writes on Modern and contemporary poetry; and writes and presents on the scholarship of teaching and learning. This work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, born magazine, Emily Dickinson Journal, and Teaching Creative Writing in Higher Education, among other places. He teaches in the undergraduate writing program and serves as associate dean at Warren Wilson College, an innovative liberal arts college with integrated work and service programs, where with students immersed in books and riding on tractors mean workers are everywhere. He lives with his wife, the poet Landon Godfrey, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, one of poetry’s most enviable addresses.

†As we were unable to attain reprint permissions or find a link to an accurate online version of  the poem, we offer a citation in lieu of the poem itself. We encourage interested readers to consult the print version.

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I.

This poem never ceases to find me. But how does it manage—against all difference and distance—to do so?

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II.

The poem begins with the plural assertion of a chorus: we are instructed to hear this as a collective voice, a “being numerous.”

But immediately, at the very colon that commences it, the poem enacts its first turn (or, more aptly, its first tack).¹ Instead of “Find us,” the chorus androgynous intones: “Find me.” Find the foundered, the lone, the shipwrecked and singular “me.”

“We are single,” Oppen writes in his letters, “And face, therefore, shipwreck” (Selected Letters, May 30, 1973).² But how is it that this particular “we” is so sequestered and solitary: isn’t a chorus a form of quorum, accompanying and, by its very nature, accompanied?

To begin to fathom this, we have to look a little further…

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III.

After the first turning, we encounter an SOS of iterated so’s, each of which marks its own decisive shift:

So that I will exist….
So that it will exist….
So that they will exist….

The urgent litany progresses from “I” to “it” to “they,” so that the originating “me”—upon seductive proximity or scientific magnification (an almost autopsy)—multiplies. The singular body is parsed by nearness into near-anonymous nipple, navel, hairs.

The poem (which is itself a distinct part of a larger sequence) insists that we consider how each individual is constituted of numerous and, one might say, numinous parts. To find “me” is necessarily to find “them.” In many ways, the poem’s progression is parallel to the opening of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which proceeds seamlessly from “I” to “you” to an implied “it” (the grass)—accumulating, as it moves, a radical inclusivity. While Whitman’s poem celebrates this, Oppen’s poem cerebrates it: asking if we (the chorus) are composed of many I’s, and each I is constituted of infinitesimal parts, how then can any one (or one-ness) be found?

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IV.

The iterations gradually draw our attention down the body and build an insistent momentum toward the final turn, one of the most memorable and monosyllabic plaints in 20th century American poetry:

“I am good (or I am bad),
Find me.”

Here, in this climactic moment, the “I” asserts itself for the first time as a subject and declares itself to be something singular—I am, it says, either “good” or “bad.”

These adjectives, the only adjectives to appear in the entire poem—with the exception of “androgynous” (which means “common to both men and women”)—are the very fundament of law and civilization. They suggest the entrance of the “I” into a relation with the mores of a culture, like Crusoe being returned to puritanical England, in which “being found” also entails the possibility of being found innocent or guilty, good or bad. Or, perhaps on a less literary level, it is like the process of falling in love: it is often as one becomes cognizant of nearing another (of being known or found-out by him or her) that one begins to question one’s own goodness or the nature of one’s ethics.

But instead of conceding to these biblical tropes, Oppen places the attribution of badness in parenthesis. By isolating the adjective and placing an “or” before it, he suggests that one’s moral qualities are immaterial to the question of whether or not one warrants being found. The forceful jolt of the final “find me” reminds us that we don’t send out a search-party for someone because he/she is good; we send out a search-party because he/she exists.³

I am… Find me.

“We have chosen the meaning of being numerous,” Oppen writes in an earlier section of the sequence. In other words, we have chosen to believe that an individual must be found/saved/discovered by another (or others), must be a part of a collective, a chorus, a creed, a nation, an army, or a love-relationship in order to have meaning, in order to have fully lived. We cannot exist, Oppen writes in his letters, “without the concept of humanity,” without the idea of membership in a larger whole (May 30, 1973).

But can we exist with the fact of humanity itself; can we abide with an actual other?

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V.

To live is a physiological condition; to exist is a philosophical/psychological one. In Oppen’s work, the word “exist” suggests a quality of life—a living among or in resonance with a larger principle or entity. As he writes in his poem, “Monument”: “To exist; to be among things.”

“Find me” is left alone on the final line—as if to say (as Oppen does in his correspondence), “We cannot escape this: that we are single… And yet this, this tragic fact, is the brilliance of one’s life … which discloses all.” The poem never resolves the manifold meanings and implications of being found, leaving open (or perpetually dis-closed) the idea that to be found is to risk losing one’s individual self to the collective and yet to fail to be found is to risk that deep, mortal membership (“I am / of that people the grass / blades touch”).

This, which is neither solitude nor the being found, is the state in which Oppen leaves us. “Find me,” the poem insists, and a great space extends away from it and its shores—

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¹Throughout their married life, Oppen and his wife, Mary, were often to be found sailing: When encountering certain “turns” in his work, one can’t help but think of the shock of the boom passing over the hull as the sail moves, often violently, to the other side of the craft—while the poem itself remains on course.

²In the deep precision which exists in any word-choice of Oppen’s, it  is clear that to “face” shipwreck is to be at once in peril of shipwreck oneself (at risk, therefore, of isolation) and also one who is likely to witness (to face and look helplessly out upon) the shipwreck of others.

³It is also worth noting that the chorus never admits (or suggests) that it is morally “lost,” as in such hymns as “Amazing Grace,” but simply demands to be found.

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Christina Davis is the author of Forth A Raven (2006) and An Ethic (2013). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, jubilat, Pleiades, Paris Review, and other publications. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University, she is the recipient of the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress, selected by U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, and the American Academy in Rome. She currently serves as curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, and lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Rhetorical turns are especially important to Bruce Weigl’s “Song of Napalm,” since it achieves its success by reenacting an authentic process of realization. Not that less dramatic, more meditative poems that share a sequence of thoughtful retrospection don’t employ such strategies—they can and do—but Weigl’s approach demands it and provides a particularly instructive illustration.

The blend of past and present tenses, coupled with stances of both indirect and direct address, create a doubling effect in which the reader can experience Weigl’s speaker as poet, as husband, and as troubled veteran with immediacy and urgency. The poem’s rhetorical movement seeks less to convince the reader or the wife it addresses than to allow us to participate and feel engaged by the speaker’s perceptions and apperception. We are allowed into the mind’s process within a present moment that utilizes memory but does not seek, as a more ruminative poem might, to merely mirror the process of memory.

To appreciate its success, first imagine the poem framed differently. Say a first-person, past tense address, but as a purely internal monologue or an address to some other outside the margins of the page in which the moments of realization and explanation to the wife are recounted. This added layer of distance would force the poem back into thoughtfulness, back into the reconstruction of an event for the reader’s benefit as opposed to the speaker’s, undermining the poem’s drama. As it is written, present tense moments of self consciousness open the process of explanation to reader engagement. “Okay. . . I am trying to say this straight,” the speaker says. And later, “So I can keep on living, / so I can stay here beside you….” The speaker recognizes, even as he’s doing it, the temptation to revise history in order to escape its effects and to protect his wife from the very real presence of those images. But even more important to our experience of the poem–and to its insistence that there is no separation between past and present–the poem’s movement reenacts the speaker’s initial process of realization. Throughout the poem, the speaker vacillates (turns), seeing through alternate lenses of life and death. When he waxes poetic, sanitizing what happened with a romanticism that extends from the poem’s opening, almost idyllic, pastoral scene, he catches himself. So, it is not long before “the lie swings back again” and he sees that he has no choice but to write it as he truly knows it—a past that can never be past, but is indeed always present in its effects on him. At this point, the speaker’s shared imagery turns gruesomely realistic, direct and stark. His diction levels and word choices reflect–as the turning of sentences do–the shift to this next plateau of realization: “And nothing can change that….or deny it.”

Because of its complexity, and the turns that mirror the speaker’s process, we are allowed to experience what Weigl’s speaker has undergone. The poem’s closing lines hold two strong notes next to each other like tuning forks. One, the horrific, naked reality that the girl suffered and that our speaker must bear; the other, an almost transcendent understanding of the necessity of truth–of bearing honorable witness to human brutality and the girl’s tragic fate. It is a cross to bear, the poem says, but it is one that must be and should be borne honestly, not sanitized or romanticized. Most importantly, the structure of this poem, by mirroring as best it can the speaker’s authentic human struggle with knowledge as it unfolds and effects him, allows us as readers to pass through the artificial skin of paper and ink into that struggle, for ourselves.

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Mark Cox’s latest books are Natural Causes and Thirty-seven Years from the Stone, both published in the Pitt Poetry Series. Recently, he edited Jack Myers’ posthumous poetry collection, The Memory of Water (New Issues, 2011). He teaches at UNCW and Vermont College.

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February is crystalline. Inside these days, everything turns ice and shatters. No wonder a sparrow misses his leg, or doesn’t, the poet only imagines. “That sparrow on the trash again,”(emphasis mine) the story goes, welcome old friend, and the watcher from the window again, we also now envision. There is a sight that propels the observer into the observed, and there are moments, reading this poem aloud, where you stumble forward like a small bird landing on one leg or taking off again. No wonder the poet enjambs each line as ragged and precise as Robert Creeley:  a bird who cannot perch calls the sky exhaustion. When we look so intently into the sky, we return to see the sky inside ourselves. In turn:

            . . . feathers
puffed out — swollen thing, ridiculous —
for warmth. All the lives I
might have had: this one,
oh, this one.

Every turn is an act of inward expansion. Especially here, what first seems a simple switch in perspective instead implodes into quasar. So many lives I might also inhabit, the light turned on illuminates. This about-face arrives so suddenly, for a second, the mind asks, who am “I”? Is the turn the perceiver awakening inside the perceived? Or the perceiver awakened by what is perceived? I think the answer is yes, and yes. But notice, the poet doesn’t suggest she revise her life á la Rilke,  or consider anything wasted as James Wright might. The poem simply unfolds in the last three lines, every possible ending blooming from “this one, / oh, this one.” The singular repeated, exalted, a prayer. What’s uncovered, turned over into light.

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Brent Goodman is a poet and writer living in northern Wisconsin. His latest book, Far From Sudden (2012), is now available from Black Lawrence Press. His debut collection, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me (2009), was a finalist for both a Thom Gunn Award and a Lambda Literary Award.  Brent is an assistant editor for the online journal Anti- and an instructor with the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions.

I see two voltas I care about in this poem—both marked by big “but”s. There’s haughty distance in the first section—spatial distance, with the tabs all over the place, and syntactical distance, talking like Yoda with “yr verses I taught.” The only place I see that disdain tearing a little is in the knife turn of repeating “destitute.” BUT then there’s that “but”:

Ah, but that was, as you’d say
“the past”

Here Jonas lets the ex-“destitute” ex speak for a moment, but only to damn himself: what kind of ungrateful a-hole tries to re-cast that obvious rescue, the volta in his life, as nothing but “the past”?

I don’t know. But I bet everybody who read this poem when it came out in 1960 knew who was getting outed with that “doom of Atreus” dig. BUT that’s not the only dig: the next “but,” the second volta I love, comes here:

but the bed you slept in
does not lie vacant
new fauns have come to my crags
to try my tender fern shoots

Look how big I am! You were just a little Eliza Doolittle, and I am a god damned landscape. Crags, fern shoots: I’ve got it all. All the hot fauns are crazy about me. Your loss. Oh, and did you forget that when you hang out with me, you get awesome lines like “to try my tender fern shoots”? Maybe. But now you remember, a-hole.

I lied about there only being two voltas I care about here. The last three lines make a new one, “but”-free.

let there be deep woods between us
and briar thicket impasse
in the beyond.

I can be human and petty; I can dig at your former losses and current ingratitude. But ultimately? I’m so over you. I’m way bigger than you are. And I don’t even want to know you after we’re dead.

Stephen Jonas is dead. Our loss. But this poem is very much alive. Lucky us!

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Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough’s books of poems include Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008), Oh, James! (Seven Kitchens, 2012), and Where You Live (Salt, 2012). The recipient of NEA, Cullman Center, Fine Arts Work Center, Witter Bynner, and Stegner fellowships, her work appears in Slate, The Threepenny Review, Best American Poetry 2011, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at UMass-Boston and directs 24PearlStreet, the online writing program at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Frank Bidart’s poem “For Mary Ann Youngren” begins with twelve lines evoking this woman’s imperious drive to escape from the human world, to repudiate it and become “untouchable” and absolutely free from human connections. The twelve lines would make a powerful poem by themselves – an unforgettable poem, indeed – ending thus:

Dip a finger into the River of Time,—
it comes back
STAINED.

But that is not the end of “For Mary Ann Youngren.” There is a second section, of fourteen lines, beginning with what may be the most blatant, most naked, most urgently corrective turn I’ve ever seen in a good poem. I am not sure what happened in the actual process of Bidart’s composing the poem, but in the drama of the poem on the page, what we are made to feel is the poet’s temptation to settle for a very impressive, austerely authoritative one-directional vision, followed by a painful silence in which he can’t help realizing that he has failed to catch the full truth about his dead friend, followed by an outburst of self-correction in which the poet is willing to sacrifice lyricism (“River of Time”) and risk bald flatness of speech for the sake of a more complicated human truth.

For me, this is one of the poems by Bidart that achieve a sword-sharp effect of having cut through layers of impressions to a stark exposure of fundamentally ambivalent truth – achieving this effect so convincingly that poets who worry about making each line attractively musical or colorful seem trivial by comparison. Yet it would not be right to say simply that this poem turns by substituting prosaic reporting for lyricism; in fact the poem ends with an image, an image I have found unforgettable, the image of a human spirit returning from oblivion to the world and pacing, pacing near a telephone, hoping for renewed contact with other human voices.

The drama of a mind digging toward truth – this is the central drama in Bidart’s best poems. We notice that the second section of “For Mary Ann Youngren” does not erase the first section, even though the first section’s vision is declared to be “not true, wrong –”. The poem does its work not by amalgamating the two perceptions of Mary Ann into one smoothly cohering statement about a two-sided person, but rather by showing the mind of her friend, the poet, moving through the two perceptions, reaching the second perception through the realizing of the incompleteness of the first perception.

In showing this movement so openly, so blatantly, Bidart is finding a form that can represent the drastic ambivalence and scary swerving of one woman’s intensity. At the same time, he is making nakedly visible something that happens more subtly in countless poems: a self-critical turn from one tempting but problematic idea to a deeper or wiser idea. Poems that include such a turn are poems that have not chosen to confine themselves to the deeper or wiser idea; instead, the underlying intuition is that the full experience of the poem’s wanted truth depends on the co-presence of both ideas and the vibrations between them.

Frank Bidart was my great mentor during my formative years as a poet. His sense of a poem as a drama performing itself on the page became crucial in my own thinking and writing. When I try to write a poem, there usually – or always? – comes a moment when what I’m feeling (whether I can become conscious enough of this or not) is some version of “No, that’s not enough, — / not true, wrong –”. In the talky style I often use, there’s a phrase that tries to climb into my poems embarrassingly often; the phrase is “But that’s not my point.”

I’ve had to realize that if I allowed myself to turn with “But that’s not my point” in every poem, the effect would become predictable and formulaic – the opposite of dramatic. I’ve had to seek ways of intelligently avoiding such blatant turns – perhaps by creating an atmosphere or a sense of the speaker’s personality whereby the reader can be trusted to deduce or infer that one idea in the poem is deeper or “farther along” than another. Similarly, a thorough study of Frank Bidart’s poetry would find many moments where a self-critical turn is implicitly present but not explicitly shouted like the turn in “For Mary Ann Youngren”. The drastic stop-the-presses move of “No, that’s not enough” needs to be saved for when its cold (or hot) splash-in-the-face is most appropriate, most in tune with a speaker’s painful or tense ambivalence.

So my point (!) is not that the starkest, most right-in-your-face turns are necessarily the most powerful; but I’ve tried to explain why Bidart’s use of this move in “For Mary Ann Youngren” seems to me so honest and revelatory and has stayed powerful in my memory.

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Mark Halliday teaches in the creative writing program at Ohio University. His sixth book of poems, Keep This Forever, was published by Tupelo Press in 2008.

†As we were unable to attain reprint permissions or find a link to an accurate online version of  the poem, we offer a citation in lieu of the poem itself. We encourage interested readers to consult the print version.

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Living with a poem—in a long-term relationship, I mean, that’s mostly internal and entirely one-sided—is a bit like periodically digging in a familiar spot, each time recovering a trove of shards of one’s own memories.  The poem hasn’t changed, but the reader tracks his or her own progress (or, I suppose, decline) in relation to the act of the mind on the page.  That’s how it has been between me and Denis Johnson’s “The Incognito Lounge,” the title poem of his collection originally published in 1981, reissued in the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series five years ago.  It’s a volume that a lot of writers my age (and a bit younger, and a bit older) can quote piecemeal to one another, sort of the way we play badminton with shibboleths from the Beastie Boys, or Richard Pryor, or Johnson’s other masterpiece, the story collection Jesus’ Son.

A poet friend of mine gave me The Incognito Lounge when I was still in college, and he was freshly out of it.  We were both in a period one might politely now refer to as our checkered pasts.  The details are mostly irrelevant, but they were generally un-picturesque.  That poem seemed like reassurance that someone who understood the world the way we did, who was just as fucked up and just as hard-edged and merciless in writing his own experience, that someone like that could write something both sublimely beautiful and deeply, intimately personal.  I don’t just mean personal for the author; I mean personal for us.  It’s pretty rare that I find someone on the page thinking my thoughts for me, someone whose language’s rhythms become my own.  But when it happened, I knew it, and I sorely needed it.  It was color in the ruin. 

One grows up.  One moves along.  One cleans up one’s act.  Years passed—many of them—between that bleary time and this more lucid, productive, useful, happy one.  I heard there had been a reprint.  I bought a copy, opened it, and realized—having remembered my past affection for the poem, but forgotten its particulars of subject, texture, image, and elasticity—that in the interim, from roughly twenty to roughly forty, I had been trying to write this poem over and over again.  It was as if I were returning to a part of my inner life that others knew about, but I didn’t.  It was uncanny, and exhilarating, and sad.  If I could re-meet the woman who was my lover in those days, and if she were still now the age she was then, I’d expect it to be about the same thing, emotionally.  (I’d advise her to keep her distance—partly for her own good, partly for mine.)

I hadn’t known specifically about volta—the piece of vocabulary, or the concept that underlies it—until I got to know “The Incognito Lounge.”  It was pretty early in my apprenticeship to the vocation, I guess.  But when I think about it now, it seems quite clear to me that it’s the hinge, the leap, the turn, the vault that lets a reader—a reader who loves a text in its details, who opens wholeheartedly to a poem’s inferential logic—gain confidence, through the act of reading, that the idiomatic and associative way she or he receives the world is not as untrustworthy, not as lonesome, and not as banal as she or he might have feared.  

“The Incognito Lounge” is set in an apartment complex and several bars of what I assume is probably Tucson, Arizona—where late one night in 1992, incidentally, I lost my copy of the book, or perhaps had it stolen by friends of the friend who had given it to me originally.  Its speaker, with “my eyes closed and two / eyeballs painted on my face,” is both present and not present, expressing but not perceiving.  The meteor shower he compares figuratively to “these questions of happiness / plaguing the world” is, accurately enough, empirically there, real, and brilliant, but remote, unreachable; like the meteors, the questions appear less violent when one perceives them from such an incomprehensible distance.  The poem’s ambiguities mount as we get comfortable with its setting: the helicopter both asking and telling “whatwhatwhatwhatwhat,” the synaesthetic gesture of the “boiled / coffee that tastes like noise.”

By the time those ambiguities develop into uncertainty about the integrity of the poem’s speaker, though, we’re already in.  His words are “smaller and smaller words,” and he plays “a brisk/ rubber / with cards nobody knows / how many there are of,” as though his dissociative outlook ought to make perfect sense to us.  (Note: if it does, seek help.  These are signs that one’s personality is deteriorating.)  Then, out of the present, a quick memory from the short term (the speaker does not appear to have any long term memory, or perhaps no interest in it): “Last night, some kind / of alarm went off up the street / that nobody responded to.”  We’re used to his prepositions at the ends of sentences, his enjambments that feel like teetering forward on our chair, but we’re unprepared for what comes next: “Small darling, it rang for you.”  This moment—the first of the poem’s several voltas—introduces a darling, a you, who either desperately needs or uniquely can render assistance.  It gives a sense that emotional commitment and attachment underlie each word and action of the poem thus far.  That’s a surprise and a wholesale revision, since it had otherwise communicated itself as apart, isolated, remote, and damaged beyond the ability to desire or express warmth or closeness.  It’s a reassurance.  It’s a revelation.  

After a section break, the poem continues with “[t]he center of the world,” by which Johnson means the local hopeless, black-hole-like bars.  “Only the Incognito Lounge is open,” the bar whose name tells us one cannot be known there, can do whatever one wants without drawing attention or being found out.  The faces of the people within become the faces of televisions, as—and this reference dates me, I realize, to the depths of history before cable—the broadcast day ends, the national anthem plays, and the screens all go deadly blank until the next morning’s resumption of programming.  The section flirts with the prospect of intimacy, discards it, and resolves without closure: “The air is full of megawatts // and the megawatts are full of silence.”  We’re in an atmosphere of energy transfer, but with no way to observe or draw sustenance from it.

This insulation between the real and the speaker’s ability to perceive it—or between his own inner life and the external world from which it feels so distant—animates the poem throughout.  It provides a constant narrative and psychic tension, of which each volta is a partial release.  Each one lets the reader know that we’re reading him right, and that, by extension, we’re reading our own experience right.  Not rationally, since voltas don’t narrate logic, but intuitively, since they allow us to watch someone change the subject by necessity, by instinct.  The last volta in the poem occurs nine lines before its ending, as evening descends over the desert; the speaker returns to direct address, admonishing the reader/darling that s/he will “indefatigably” seek words to describe the feeling of such a moment “over the imitation / and actual wood of successive / tabletops”—presumably, in “saloons”—and that that moment is the same of feeling terror for the certainty of pain someone else will feel, someone who has done nothing to deserve pain.  In short, the voltas make the poem humane.  They prevent it from being altogether about the speaker, or his problems, or those of the reader.  They allow him, in a long series of strike-slip faults, to turn away from the self entirely, to let the internal focus resolve into a focus on one’s feelings for and about other people.

 It was this understanding—that even the most numb, self-destructive, soluble personality could make itself compassionate through the act of poetic engagement—that so energized me as a young poet.  I didn’t particularly want to write about my own life, although I often did.  I wanted to write poems that would take into account that “baby child,” a little person Johnson describes with a redundancy that forces a Blake-like reckoning with innocence.  In retrospect, I wanted, too, to have the permissive and imaginative powers that let Johnson make those precipitous leaps—to trust myself that much.  So in some ways, I still see the poem as a charge, still admire its craft and nerve.  It’s not a poem about survival—none of the good ones are—but it’s not content with defeat, either.  Amen to that.

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John Casteen’s Free Union (2009) and For the Mountain Laurel (2011) are part of the VQR Poetry Series from the University of Georgia Press.  His poems have appeared recently in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and other magazines, and in Best American Poetry and The Rumpus Poetry Anthology.  He lives in Earlysville, Virginia, and teaches poetry at Sweet Briar College.

“Perfect Pitch” is a short poem, only fourteen lines, that is filled with ironic twists and turns:

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Perfect Pitch

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Give me back my voice, the one I hear
in my head, the one that still greets you
on my answering machine: clear, nuanced,
cultivated, as reliable as Monday following Sunday,
able to surge at will from pianissimo to fortissimo,
unique as a signature, recognizable as a face.

It’s the singing I miss most.  Breathing deeply,
emitting melody, I sang on pitch—now,
not even close, my voice a casualty of my disease.
When I try to sing, the cats run from the room.
“I can’t sing!” I tell my husband, my voice
slurring and cracking from the stress.
“Welcome to the club,” he says in his habitual
off-key baritone, then, silently folds me in his arms.

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Imagine losing your mobility, your dexterity, your voice—and never knowing from day to day what little piece of yourself you might lose next.  As Christopher Bakken writes in “The Ironic Structure” in Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, “the ironic structure imitates or enacts a sense of uncertainty about the world.”  Erica Lehrer shows this uncertainty in clear terms.  If you knew nothing about the poet or her disease, you might read the first stanza as if the narrator has a cold or a sudden case of laryngitis, a temporary loss of her “perfect pitch.”  She hears the “clear, nuanced, cultivated” voice only in her head or on her answering machine, longs again to “surge at will from pianissimo to fortissimo” like some operatic diva.

But as she moves into the second stanza, it becomes apparent to the reader that this loss of voice is permanent—“a casualty of my disease”—and getting worse.  Her voice, once “unique as a signature,” mocks her when she hears it on the answering machine; even “the cats run from the room.”  In this way, to quote Christopher Bakken again, “what is first proclaimed is suddenly or systematically undermined by what follows.”  Everything announced in the first stanza turns in the second stanza by the new information: “my disease.”  The voice, once “reliable as Monday following Sunday,” is now “slurring and cracking from the stress” of neurological degeneration.

A lesser poet would end the poem here, wallowing in self-pity and expecting the audience of the poem to feel sorry for her, but Lehrer has one more ironic surprise.  She complains to her husband, “I can’t sing!”  In his “habitual off-key baritone,” her husband replies mischievously, “Welcome to the club.”  Beyond the look at a loving relationship, what becomes obvious is that, before this point, the narrator never realized that her perfect pitch was extraordinary, that her disease has, in some ways, made her one of “the club,” the majority, who have never had and will never have perfect pitch.  In at least one way, ataxia has made her a little more like the rest of us.  The ending is humorous and lovely in its playful wordplay, but it is the ironic structure that makes this poem sing.

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Scott Wiggerman is the author of two books of poetry, Presence and Vegetables and Other Relationships.  Recent poems have appeared in Spillway, Assaracus, Naugatuck River Review, Contemporary Sonnet, and Hobble Creek Review, which nominated “The Egret Sonnet” for a Pushcart.  A frequent workshop instructor, including workshops on poetic structure, he is also an editor for Dos Gatos Press, publisher of the annual Texas Poetry Calendar, now in its fifteenth year, and the recent collection of poetry exercises, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry.  His website is http://swig.tripod.com

Erica Lehrer, “Perfect Pitch,” from Dancing with Ataxia. Copyright © 2011 by Erica Lehrer. Reprinted with permission of the author. unique as a signature, recognizable as a face.-