Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

Jillian Weise on Catullus 37

Posted on December 4, 2012

37 trans. C. H. Sisson Less pub than brothel, and you, the regulars The ninth pillar from Castor and Pollux Do you think you are the only ones equipped with a penis, That you are the only ones licensed for fucking And that the rest who do it are merely goats? Do you think, as you sit waiting in rows A hundred or two hundred together, that I shall not dare To do the whole lot of you, two hundred together? Think again: I will draw scorpions All over the walls of the place. For my girl, who has escaped from my arms, Who was loved as much, and more than any is loved, From whom I have expended all my forces, She…

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Baron Wormser on Joe Bolton’s “Childhood”

Posted on December 3, 2012

Though the most well-known turn in poetry is probably the turn between the octave and sestet in a sonnet where the argument meets some counter-argument that often hinges on a rhetorical word such as “but,” most poems manifest some sort of turn where the poet challenges what has been thus far presented or discovers a complication or surprise or simply pushes an image or metaphor or detail further and thus changes the course of the poem. In some ways the turn is similar to the issue of conflict in a story. If there isn’t some occurrence that wrinkles the events then of what interest is the story? We go to literature for that unpredictable element that is at once understandable and mysterious. Untoward things…

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Tagged: Baron Wormser, creative writing, Joe Bolton, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, volta

Andrew Feld’s “False Turns in Alan Dugan’s ‘Last Statement for a Last Oracle'”

Posted on November 29, 2012

Last Statement for a Last Oracle After this oracle there will be no more oracles. The precinct is hereby desanctified. You wanted it, you have it. From now on everything I say will be a lie said for cash. Now, for the last time, here’s the truth: You have won with your horse power and numbers from the north. You will go on winning forever—this is your damnation— until your conquests and the insides of your heads are alike, and you and I know what it’s like in there, so if some dirty beast remembers, on some future dirty night, what it was like once to have been a human being and pleasing to me in a fair exchange of pure sacrifice for…

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Tagged: Alan Dugan, Andrew Feld, creative writing, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, Lord Byron, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, volta

Catie Rosemurgy on Sherman Alexie’s “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel”

Posted on November 27, 2012

How to Write the Great American Indian Novel All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food. The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory. If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender and in love with a white man. But if she loves an Indian man then he must be a half-breed, preferably from a horse culture. If the Indian woman loves a white man, then he has to be so white that we can see the blue veins running through his skin…

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Tagged: Catie Rosemurgy, creative writing, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, Sherman Alexie, volta

Kimberly Johnson’s “The Crèche and the Brothel: The Poetic Turn in Crashaw’s Infamous Epigram”

Posted on November 26, 2012

Richard Crashaw, from the 1646 edition of Steps to the Temple.

This brief epigram, by seventeenth-century English poet Richard Crashaw, has exercised readers for nearly four centuries now. It arises from a biblical story, related in the Gospel of Luke, in which a woman shouts from a crowd of people as Jesus is walking past with the most extraordinary compliment: “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked,” she says in the language of Crashaw’s contemporary King James translation. The woman’s general sense is easy enough to discern: she voices her respect for the mother that reared and nurtured this good man out of childhood. But the profound and insurmountable corporeality of the compliment offers an opportunity for this poem to focus on devotion as a bodily phenomenon. As Crashaw riffs on the implications of divine embodiment in these four lines, the audacity of the conceit that he develops is met and amplified by the structure of this short poem. The turn that accompanies the change in rhyme at the poem’s midpoint signals disjunction between the recognition of the corporeal valences of spirituality and the discomfort that inevitably attends any effort to define divinity within the parameters of human understanding.

The proposition set up in the first two lines invites the poem’s reader to meditate on the incarnational mystery at the heart of the Christian mythos: that Jesus had a body, and consequently had bodily needs like hunger. If Jesus nursed from you, so the set-up goes, you would not be the weaker for having nursed him. You would not be diminished by the sharing of your substance with that dependent body. That first rhyme keeps our attention squarely on the natural bodily process of lactation, and secures the connection of eating for nourishment and the physical structures that make maternal nourishment possible—the imagined “Teat” is not invoked scandalously or scurrilously but rather for the way it allows one to “eat.” The first couplet of the poem, with its focus on mother and child, offers us a kind of mealtime crèche, a Madonna col Bambino as sweet and charitable as any altarpiece painting.

And then we pivot into line three.

The last two lines of this poem pile transgression upon transgression, each new shock a product of the uneasy proximity between a spiritual principle and its literalization. From a theological perspective, these lines don’t argue anything that would raise any eyebrows: the notion that Jesus should grow a “Teat” and take on the role of nurturer is built into conventional formulations of the Eucharist, that central sacrament of Christian worship in which the worshipper partakes of bread and wine and through that partaking engages in some way (what way, exactly, varies from creed to creed) with the body and blood of Christ. It is a commonplace that Christ is a nourishing mother figure, dispensing spiritual nutriment to all who partake of his body sacramentally, never diminished for having nourished those he feeds.¹ But as these lines render that theological principle, the body, whose incarnational valences were so important in establishing the notion of nourishment in the first two lines, begins to intrude disorientingly into the metaphor for universal nourishment. “Hee’l have his Teat” emphasizes the dissonance between that principle of nourishment and the decidedly male body of Jesus, which doesn’t allow for easy associations with lactation. The parenthetical gesture toward naturalizing Jesus’s “Teat” by arguing that it’s not the kind of teat whose mammary function finds no structural cognate in the male body actually just makes things worse: it’s a different kind of teat, “a bloody one”—a phrase that follows hard on the heels of the word “long.” The accumulating associations become disorienting at best, and rebarbative at worst; William Empson can be forgiven for writing of these lines, most of a century ago, that “a wide variety of sexual perversions can be included in the notion of sucking a long bloody teat which is also a deep wound.”² In other words, despite our understanding that this couplet describes a conventional spiritual principle, the body just keeps getting in the way. The sense of indelicacy produced by this overlap of erotic and sacramental, bodily and spiritual, is compounded, in the typography of the poem’s contemporary publication. In its original printed form, the elongated initial “s” transforms “suck” into a verb whose raw physicality occludes any possibility of reading this act as any kind of disembodied, spiritualized mingling with Christ.

At issue here is the fraught relationship between the spiritual and the physical. And it is entirely appropriate that Crashaw’s poem should register this tension, for the ritual at the heart of his epigram serves precisely to modulate between these two states of affairs. That is, the Eucharist is ultimately about repeating the mystery of the Incarnation by locating an apprehensible figure for a perceptually absent divinity here in the material world: incarnated divinity isn’t available to our senses, as the tradition holds it was in the body of Jesus, but the substitutional elements of bread and wine are, and we can touch them and taste them and incorporate them into our bodies and feel a kind of nourishment that signifies nourishment of a different kind, a soul kind. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper argues that the immaterial sphere needs the stuff of the world so that we can comprehend it: the spirit needs the body. The danger, of course, is that the body will intrude itself so strenuously that the spiritual gets blocked entirely.

Crashaw’s short poem dramatizes this tension both in content and in form. The discrete rhymes cordon off the bodily transgressivities of the final couplet from the more innocuous incarnationalism of the first couplet. The turn at the poem’s midpoint demarcates the boundary between acceptability and excess, between a functional symbiosis of body and spirit and the rapacity of the body unsublimated, the crèche and the brothel.

¹ See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

²Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947) 221.

Kimberly Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Leviathan with a Hook, A Metaphorical God, and the forthcoming Uncommon Prayer, and of a translation of Virgil’s Georgics: A Poem of the Land. Her scholarly monograph exploring the way that Reformation theology provokes poetic developments in the seventeenth century will be released next year. With her husband, the poet Jay Hopler, she has edited an anthology for Yale University Press that surveys the long tradition of devotional poetry, also to be published next year. Recipient of grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Utah Arts Council, Johnson has recent work in The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, and other journals.

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Tagged: creative writing, epigram, Kimberly Johnson, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, Richard Crashaw, volta

Derick Burleson on Louise Mathias’s “Prone, November”

Posted on November 21, 2012

Prone, November Just your slow, pink movements near the doorway. If there were fields, they’d long ago rolled back in agate bliss. Until you were indelible, a dahlia. Bale of hay, almost made for a woman bent over. Her pale sweet hedging (which, in certain landscapes, is an early form of love.) I want you slow: birds hover near my waist. Not sleep in the distance but the mimeograph of sleep. Above all else, the trembling resembles a forest. Some of my favorite turns in contemporary American poetry are of the astounding hairpin sort, a mountain road, night, your headlights try to gleam through the rain but instead reflect off it, freezing or nearly so, no guard rails and just a couple…

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Tagged: creative writing, Derick Burleson, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, Louise Mathias, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, volta

John Poch on Laura Kasischke’s “Fatima”

Posted on November 20, 2012

Fatima God exists. Instead we are a group of teenage girls, drunk at one of those awful carnivals in a field, out between the airport and the mall. It’s raining, and this has become a festival of mud, which is just fine with us. A man with hundreds of tattoos has taken a fancy to Heidi and is slipping her extra darts to lob at the balloons. There are sirens every time she misses, and she wins nothing. Why is there straw in the mud, why is it plastered now to the wet sleeves of our leather jackets? Something cruises into the air with its light bulbs zapping and when we turn around, the man has disappeared with Heidi. Am I wrong or…

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Tagged: creative writing, John Poch, Laura Kasischke, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, volta

Arielle Greenberg on Shane McCrae’s “[We married in a taxi]”

Posted on November 19, 2012

[We married in a taxi] We married in a taxi in Chica- go mid- November in the long wind blowing Our son has autism married in the back Seat of a taxi slipping in the wind We’ll never have you said another child On Michigan and on our left the lake The long white shadow of the lake in the blowing Wind and what happens you asked when we die Who will take care of him the taxi slip- ping in the wind and on our right the Mir- acle and on our right the Miracle Mile ending on our right no miracles Cheaper hotels but he…

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Tagged: Arielle Greenberg, creative writing, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, Shane McCrae, volta

Courtney Queeney’s “Frank O’Hara’s Hilarious Despair: An Appreciation”

Posted on November 15, 2012

Poem [“The eager note on my door said, ‘Call me’,”] by Frank O’Hara As an under-read undergrad, I inhaled Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency for a seminar, and have been smitten with his work since. I met him exactly when I needed to be shaken up. In high school—like so many other girls from dysfunctional families—I overdosed on Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, who spoke to me from the Slough of Despond and (largely) formed my preliminary ideas of What Poetry Is.¹ Finding Frank O’Hara was like wandering into a sun-dizzy room crammed with monkeys and Russian cigarettes after being locked in a dim garret for years, squinting to make out print. I threw away every poem I wrote save one² from…

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Tagged: Anne Sexton, Courtney Queeney, creative writing, Frank O'Hara, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, Sylvia Plath, volta

Anna Leahy’s “Turn, Preempted: Claudia Emerson’s ‘Migraine: Aura and Aftermath'”

Posted on November 13, 2012

Migraine: Aura and Aftermath First, part of the world disappears. Something is missing from everything: the cat’s eye, ear, the left side of its face; two fingers from my right hand; the words from the end of a sentence. The absence is at first more absolute than whatever darkness I imagine the blind perceive. Perfect, without color or motion, nothing replaces what is gone. The senses do not contradict. My arm goes numb, my leg. Though I have felt the cold air of this disappearance before, each time the aura deceives me to believe reality itself has failed. I fear this more than what it warns because I cannot remember I will survive it. The other half of me will shine all night, defined…

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Tagged: Anna Leahy, Claudia Emerson, creative writing, Gail Mazur, Joan Didion, literary analysis, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetic turn, poetry, poetry analysis, poets, volta