“Can this be New Rochelle?” George asked J—. “I lived in a house on the water, near the harbor, in a small village.” J— replied, “What village? What harbor?” —Mary Oppen

This is true: the work before you is still the work ahead of me. It is not George Oppen, but something other than what that figure stands for. It is an alchemy of memory, both actual and “false.” (I say “false” because it is not false—I have felt a stranger breathing down my neck, in a wind, a we, descending, as our gifts remain above us, ungrasped.)

It started simply. I wanted only to use “another’s” words to cull memory—not to express it, but to excavate. It quickly became something else, or many things. Though I tried, I could never control it. Every move I made had multiple repercussions, often damaging, always damaging—it was a Spicerian game of chess, the enemy pieces themselves laughing, threatening to end the game.

It started like this: On the first day of Spring I was sitting haphazardly before Oppen’s “Disasters.” I wrote the line “In the notorious violence of birds” and crossed it out. I then wrote the line “Pieces of the past arising out of the rubble,” and wrote many more lines after it until I lost my breath and my hands (not my own) were shaking. I called it a wolf assay. I called the poem “My Own Private Idaho.”

The next day came, and then the day after, and then a week passed, then a month, and the next Spring became many Springs later. During this period, I continued to revise the poem, taking a line out here, replacing another there, drastically altering a section of stanzas and then rewriting them more or less as they were before, and so on, over and over. I would send out my newest revisions to friends—sometimes several a day—until all of them eventually stopped responding or commenting. I could never get it right—it still isn’t. Here is one of the earliest versions of the opening stanza (I don’t expect you, Oppen, to respond either):

Pieces of the past rising from Joseph.
Junked,
an overturned Weremart cart

—Weremart, spelled as I have remembered it. I had come to associate this place—a supermarket in Caldwell where housewives shop—with wolves, the root of a savage becoming, so present in what lurks behind Idaho: were, Old English for “man,” a cognate of Irish fear (Oppen: wolf walks in my footprints fear fear). But it was not until I started this essay that I realized Weremart was actually, and had always been, spelled Waremart.

Oppen: Remember Yeats chained to a dying animal? … The animal’s bare eyes in the woods—that’s no joke.

The poem continues:

In Idaho wolf hides in mother
and her hair unfolds beneath the metal
of her helmet, and there’s something about

where a past and your pulse separate
into two kinds of machine:
the clunky and the jammed

the ghosts and the guns that don’t work
when they don’t have oil in the barrels
and they don’t have soldiers in the fields.

Apparently I had worried a lot over these stanzas. A few versions later they had been changed to:

in Idaho where there is
something about this separation
of the pulse with a past

as clunky and jammed as
a gun that don’t work
when it don’t have oil in its barrel

or a hunter’s arm to cradle.
Dear killed hunter,
I made you up and

A variability of image: the heavy handed, politicized elements (helmet, oil barrel, soldiers) were just that: images. (Had I lost the finger with which one silently points to a soldier?) Yet in the second version these images’ context was only replaced by another context, one which evokes my father (who had been a soldier in Vietnam, but who I remember as the hunter who shot himself in the cab of his truck many years before I started the poem).

This version continues its address to the hunter:

now I’m asking you a question
noone ever answered for me:
how come pop tastes so good?

In the field behind the school
you were vacated from my body.
In a secret cab of the Chevy.

In a cemetery where
present events defy us
and the past rests its corpses.

In a later version, the poem continues:

Oh floating wolfy,
your teats are metal and when
I was teething my gums

were so dry; now
all our ghosts can’t evoke
an art that doesn’t evoke

suspicion in this farmer’s daughter
fingering the seems of
the future, the crow’s

feet that stretch from the past.

My first gesture was to write toward primitive memory, toward “wolf” and “Idaho,” using—with usura—the Oppen I have inherited in the overpriced editions so widely available. It was to cling our disparate pieces together, to put them into a constellation. Yet the force of the bringing together—my force—was too much, too suffocating. Somehow, despite or because of myself, it has remained insistent, and continues to be—

Oppen: I am sick with a poet’s / vanity legislators // of the unacknowledged.

Yet in retelling the story of the poem’s process, I cannot not be aware of the inadequacy of my very I. This essay has been dismantled, demolished, its shells placed in new orders, yet it is never right—just as the poem was never right—we circle around the constellation of a presence, the broken constellation of a broken presence, but there is no final stroke to close the circle—

Oppen: What I couldn’t write I scratched out.

So I start over. Scratch that.

So he starts over, moving forward. It is Oppen’s poem now:

In an ocean confusing all our ghosts
can’t evoke an art that doesn’t evoke

Suspicion in this, father, fingering the seams
of the future—The crow drags its telephone
lines from the unacknowledged, a world so dreary

to which we descend
who have become strangers in this wind

As the revision continued, does it not seem as if he were trying to revert the language of the poem back to its sources? Compare the lines above to “Disasters:”

of the unacknowledged

world it is dreary
to descend

and be a stranger how
shall we descend

who have become strangers in this wind

Perhaps this is the question: Is there an Idaho to be found below Oppen’s language? He had led myself in equal measures of belief and doubt to find this Idaho, to bring it forth and place it at the side of whatever George Oppens may exist—

But that’s not quite right. Yes, there was faith, there was doubt, but we cannot now place this beside any Oppen or thing. Instead, does it not seem that he was attempting to condense “our” language—already “others’”—to a different state of otherness? Or, in other words, wasn’t he merely trying to rewrite “Disasters” through us, and in the process squeeze us out of the poem—to further other the poem’s already absent author?

Oppen: One sees a man in his place, which excludes us, as travelers through it.

But we cannot let our story end there, in that space of both confirmation and negation. Backtrack a bit, to an earlier version of the poem which continues with an address to “Disasters” itself:

So, Dreary, do we descend
as strangers through this wind

or through the radios in our sitting rooms—
My own room, where I assay, is
we, an ancestral disorder,

the promised gift after all
stories end in good and
impossible dimensions—

Can these “impossible dimensions” be true? Or,

Can this be true: When he started the poem on the first day of Spring, he was living next door to the hotel where the Falstaff scenes in Gus Van Sant’s film were shot—a fact he hadn’t realized at the time. When he first saw My Own Private Idaho it made—against dis-aster: “the breaking apart of constellations”—a deep impression. In the film, Mike Waters, the narcoleptic street hustler played by River Phoenix, searches for his estranged mother in an attempt to recover his past out of the vagaries of memory. His search takes him between Portland, various parts of Idaho, all the way to Italy, and back to the streets of Portland. Throughout the film, as Waters’ narcolepsy overcomes him and he passes out, grainy Super 8 footage of rolling cloudscapes, a decrepit house falling from the sky, demolishing itself through its own weight, and images of a young mother with her infant on the porch of that very house, are spliced into each other as he sleeps. Seen only in narcoleptic fits of dream, after falling with a thud in moments of extreme duress—Oppen in the foxhole, blasted, dreaming of his mother, or the wolf that hides under her helmet—we see Idaho, this ungraspable, private scape, in whose arms we never wake. In this same manner, our search—from line to line, body to body—can never recover that impossible thing: the impossible poem. The last stanza of “My Own Private Idaho,” through all its years it remains unchanged, continues:

To what this is ancestral
is the past surrounding us in Idaho:
a wolf formed from clay
hands stuffing mouths full of fur.

as skylit eyes, you’re peeling open and

I in silence can only point toward
your pointing. Darting away
who will find my arm embedded in the trees

felled to make the bird alight?
Who will find the swift tiger we write
to loose and propel and be

propelled by haunches sprung as wolfen wings?
Who can see the single ashen bird
in the dust of Father’s arms beating

Father, who will fear not your fearful sheen
and peel our fingers from our nails
and nails from our teeth.

                                    — from Metamorphoses, Book 11 (tr. Rolfe Humphries)

Having descended into Hell; having found, led, and lost Eurydice; having re-ascended, mourning his loss; having camped himself on the hill overlooking the Hebrus; having declared he can never love again; having then sung his final, greatest song; having attracted the trees and beasts and stones through that song; having then been overtaken and torn apart by maenads; Orpheus, beheaded, is here stripped to his primary element: the tongue. His spirit stays with this murmuring tongue until grounding at Lesbos, where he parts with the flesh, and again descends to Hell, reuniting with Eurydice.

But here, on the way, we are mourning. Ovid’s word is flebile: “flebile lyra,” “flebile lingua,” “respondet flebile ripae.” Flebilis is defined as “pitiful, pathetic, deplorable; tearful.” But we’ll accept “mourning:” as when a poet is reduced, deplorably, to the bare element necessary for poetry (a tongue, a potential to sound), the “small nouns” that the poet lights through sound (here, the banks) are, appropriately, going to echo the same deplorability.

Certainly, this is a mournful state for the poet, and for the objects that receive the poet’s attention. In this moment, the poet is recast as a homo sacer, Giorgio Agamben’s term for the outsider, literally meaning “taboo man,” a kind of person suicided by society. And when the Bacchic women overtake and destroy Orpheus, are they not treating him as a classic taboo? He is both sacred (in that his song lights, animates), and forbidden (in that he has denied all suitors his love).

Thus, the maenad’s overtaking of Orpheus is a kind of Freudian primal scene: they destroy the taboo in order to achieve the forbidden, but the act of destruction — in which the taboo thing is lost — in turn makes the lost thing sacred, thus also forbidden, and thus still taboo. Even though the maenads were unmoved by Orpheus’s singing as they killed him, their principle motivation for killing him came from the fact that they were originally moved, and, being so moved, made advances to him, but were denied.

We cannot then say that it is the song that kills the singer, a romantic cliché. Instead, what kills is the confusion of the poet’s self with the poet’s flesh. What drove the maenads was the beauty of Orpheus’s song; they knew nothing of Orpheus the man. What powers constitute the poetic self are manifested in the poem; the flesh is the repository of a life.      

These two lines of George Oppen’s, from his final book Primitive, encapsulate, among other things, his poetic stance. Oppen’s objective, from his first to last book, was unwavering: he sought the commonplace, which is, if not altogether lost, always being lost, and always of the past. And the loss is always violent, or at least involves some degree of violence; thus, that the imperative to save is repeated twice in the couplet quoted above is entirely appropriate: it is a stutter in a moment of panic.

In poem after poem, Oppen points to the ways in which the present is determined by the past, by attempting to look at objects, things, with a new clarity, or a clarity that is itself a renewal of sight, and a philosophical reflection of what could be called his materialist poetics. In “Civil war photo,” from his first book, Discrete Series, the cannon “of that day,” (i.e., of the Civil War era) remains “in our parks.” But, I would argue, Oppen does not point to the cannon as a reminder of the past, but as an embodiment of it, a sinew holding the past and present together.    

Yet, a peculiarity of Oppen’s stance here is that to save the commonplace depends on a rarified, one might even say fanciful, thing: Blake’s Tyger, that machine-like beast of such fearful symmetry. And it’s not only the commonplace that must be saved, but also the poet’s self that must be saved from the Tyger, from the fearful symmetry of the mind, of its absolute dominance over thought, and ultimately over the poet. What becomes peculiar then is not the rarified Tyger but the commonplace. It alone is the only thing untouched by the contagion of the Tyger (through its flame).

The commonplace is also the only thing not mentioned twice: me/myself, the Tyger, the burning, and the movement of saving, all occur twice in the short space of two lines. The commonplace, then — even here, where it is only referred to abstractly — becomes odd, strange. Often represented by “small nouns,” as Oppen called them, the commonplace is perhaps the most uncanny thing. Trees, stones, birds, the sea, a house, and so on, all embody powerful mystery.  

Another thing certainly embodied in these two lines is a crisis of consciousness buckling, redoubling, as the poetic mind confronts the imminence of death (Oppen wrote the poems of Primitive in his late 60s, during the onset of the Alzheimer’s that killed him). And perhaps it was this moment of crisis, with its demand for a new logic, that led Oppen to what might be the most peculiar thing about these lines, when read against his poetic nexus: the reference to or appropriation of Blake.

Oppen scholars have often noted how few literary allusions there are in his work. When they are there, they are poignantly there. And, given his predilection toward pointing to the ways the present is determined by the past, we must then extend this train of thought to literary reference. We can trace backward, from this moment of crisis, to Blake’s Tyger as embodiment of the loss of innocence (or as a kind of manifestation of Hell), through Milton, Dante, back to the Orpheus of Metamorphoses. In other words, through the presence of the Tyger, we are linked to a tradition of literary conceptions of Hell, or of the soul’s descent.

In Hell, the poet’s self is burning, and needs to be saved — and to be saved, specifically, by the poet. This sense of self-determination is central to Oppen’s poetic stance, and explicit references to the construction of the self are staunchly peppered throughout his work. Which makes this moment of crisis in “The Poem” all the more remarkable. He has descended, and the poetic self — and therefore the commonplace that can only be saved by the poetic self — is on the verge of smoldering. There is a sense of deep displacement that arises from the presence of these lines in a body of work that is the materialization of a man’s effort to light the world anew, to achieve, as he often put it, clarity.

Yet this would then suggest that Oppen has, by interiorizing the Tyger, quite literally achieved clarity. Billowing out from within, like smoke pouring out of the windows of a house aflame, the burning Tyger within the poetic self is itself the power of clarity.

***

Trees, stones, birds, water: some of the many common things imbued with mystery, or, as Oppen often put it, marvel. As he writes in “Populist,” again from Primitive : “if I stumble on a rock I speak / of rock.” His is a mode of poetic speech entirely Orphic, or, in other words, giving life to the inanimate. Of course, the obvious counter to this would be: What poet is not Orphic? Are we not all descendents of Orpheus?

Perhaps, though, to become truly Orphic would involve a descent into Hell. Certainly for these two lines in “The Poem” we see Oppen descended, writing from within Hell. Perhaps to become truly Orphic also involves a loss, as of Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice, which I think we see in the crisis moment, in that it has arisen from at least a temporary loss of the commonplace and the poet’s self. Just as Ovid’s Orpheus sang his last, most beautiful song after re-ascending from Hell, perhaps the commonplace and the fractured poetic self can only be restored through a final song after they are lost.   

On the subject of Philip Jenks, an email correspondent recently wrote me this: “I sometimes divide the world into people who love Phil’s work & people who don’t,” adding that this division is “a narrow but helpful measure.” Following this measure, I’m going to assume that if you are here, reading this essay, that you, like me, are in the former camp; that you’ve read Jenks’s full-length books, On the Cave You Live In, and My First Painting Will Be “The Accuser,” and maybe even his recent autobiographical e-chap of photography and poetry, How Many of You Are You — and that you love all of them. Yet, even among Jenks’s fans, not many seem to know about his first book-form publication, a chapbook called The Elms Left Elm Street.

Published by Zach Barocas’s defunct Plane Buckt Press in 1994, The Elms Left Elm Street can give much insight into the poetic beginnings of Jenks. When On the Cave You Live In was published in 2002, it seemed to many (including Benjamin Friedlander, who wrote a sympathetic, in depth analysis of the book) that a young poet with an already highly developed, unique poetic had arrived. Yet in Elms we see an even younger Jenks working out the poetic concerns that appear more fully realized in his following books. Which is to say that Elms is a flawed book (how many first books aren’t?), and which is not to say that the poems that make up the book are all bad, or not worthy of attention. Indeed, several of them made their way into Cave with only minor changes in punctuation, including “It Was,” “Shed,” and “Skin.” The latter two of these poems appear in Elms as part of “The Shed Poems,” one of the two longer sequences that make up the bulk of the book, the other of which is “The Fits.” And it is in “The Fits” that readers of Jenks can see him developing some of the major elements that run through much of his work thus far, especially the simultaneous engagement of different modes of perception, as well as a related engagement — the writing of and through the experience of epilepsy.

In Peter O’Leary’s Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness, the following statement is quoted from Jenks, on his understanding of the relationship between his epilepsy and poetic practice: “It is the grounding and source of my relationship with God and everything that this word entails. It is horrible, it is awful in so many ways but tucked into it is also a palpable bliss.” In this we see the familiar conflation of God with the sign, along with the enjoinment of binary states — horror and bliss — which suggests that Jenks’s epilepsy is nothing less than a mystical experience. And this, in turn, makes “The Fits” a fascinating sequence, especially since much of it is made up of astonishingly frank, literal descriptions of the physiological states that occur before, during, or after a seizure. Take for example this passage from “Deja vu:”

Aura precedes the deja vu,
immediate surrounding of blue wax
and a frightening smell,
it will put a jackal on its haunches.
Taste of gun-metal spit on strings.
Words actually sink through skin
and are physically felt running arm to arm.

Or take this passage from “It:”

My eyes were stuffed with memory
as they clipped the motion of
Brennan turning toward the light
in the hall by the door.
Seconds later, my arms looked
funny as the gun-metal taste
was upon me.

Or this passage from “subway fits and kitchens:”

A frightening chain between
blood and electricity is evident
in the emerging squeal
of something being crushed to
death. That is, the impulse
of a neuron is to stifle.
The body believes in merging gas-fields.

These passages, reminiscent of Hannah Weiner’s descriptions of altered perceptual states risen out of extreme physiological conditions in The Fast, ground Jenks’s work, like Weiner’s, in a poetics of variegated perception; we can see here Jenks’s mystical experience of epilepsy as an answer to Weiner’s clairvoyance. And here we can see Jenks directly addressing what constitutes his poetic grounding — epilepsy — before turning his attention more directly to the immanence of the divine (often embodied through a “you” in all of the books that have followed Elms), in what amounts to another area of the mystical. This seems all the more evident given that Jenks’s ubiquitous, nearly trademarked “you” hardly appears at all in Elms; he was, in terms of duration, before “you,” slogging through self-perception in order to get outside to the space of “you,” the mystical path of epilepsy leading outward to the divine — a divine which, further, includes its own absence.

***

Jenks, at my request, leant me his only copy of The Elms Left Elm Street when I was his student at Portland State University in 2004. I remember walking by him as I was leaving his class, while he was talking with another student. He quickly handed me the book and said something about how this book is more formal than his others, before turning around to resume his conversation. Yet there are only two poems in Elms which strictly adhere to traditional forms: “Store,” which dallies in blank verse and which is, in my opinion, dispensable; and “Smokestack,” a sestina, which is also an earlier version of “Passing Notes,” a poem which appears in On the Cave You Live In.

It is interesting to compare “Smokestack” to “Passing Notes.” The first stanza is nearly identical in both poems. The version I give here is from “Smokestack:”

Even further South of here worshippers
attend to their beliefs, plumed in the wilderness
of a blood-letting
carnival of despair and hope.
In Gettysburg, the most intimate sacrifice
is initiated by two sliced hands

There are two changes made to this stanza in “Passing Notes.” The bigger of the two is a revision in the fourth line — its last word, “hope,” is rewritten as “promise.” Right away, we can see Jenks cutting the sestina out of the poem: a casting off of received form which is perhaps analogous to the difference between hope and promise. And this instance of revision could also possibly be the embodiment of poetic maturation: Jenks is shedding a youthful poetic hope for the affirmation of poetic promise, which occurs, in “Passing Notes,” as a rejection of received form. This can be seen much more clearly in a revision that occurs in the second stanza: the line “They lie recumbent in the exhausted fumes of American hope” in “Smokestack,” is changed to “recumbent fumes of American hope” in “Passing Notes.” In the first, we can see a young poet blatantly attempting to capture that elusive Great Line; yet in the second, we see a more subdued, humble poet. It is telling of Jenks that he did not altogether throw out the line — he recognized its essential place within the poem, and simply cut the distracting flash.

The 39 lines of “Smokestack” are reduced to the 19 lines that make up “Passing Notes.” While much is altogether thrown out, a remarkable amount of material is kept, but condensed in the rich, fractured language that is Jenks’s hallmark — the appreciation of which divides the world into fans of Philip Jenks on one side, and on the other the haters, the ignorant, or those whose hands are welded to their ears. But, in all seriousness, what makes comparing “Smokestack” to “Passing Notes” so engaging — or, for that matter, what makes reading The Elms Left Elm Street against Jenks’s still growing body of work so engaging — is to see the youthful, fitful beginning of a poet whose powers, over time, have increased — powers which are still increasing, and which show promise to continue to increase for many years to come.

Joseph Massey’s Property Line (published by Jess Mynes’ Fewer & Further Press) begins & ends in the same paradoxical realization: that the experience of landscape, while so close & near, is only perceivable through the perception of its being perceived. Check part II of the final poem, “Greyhound, North Through Sonoma County:”

Window
night makes

a mirror of —

my face
supplants
the landscape.

This face, superimposed (as if cinematically) onto the landscape outside the bus, a face that looks at itself looking beyond itself, appears much more subtly in the poem that opens the book:

Hill’s red
tethered
edge —

berries
that numbed
your tongue.

Here, it is not only the face that is superimposed over the landscape, but also the window of the final poem: the face, the eyes (os in Latin meaning both face & eye), are here the window through which the interchange of perception takes place. The liminality of perception is inscribed in the “Hill’s red / tethered / edge;” & it is in fact perception — sight — that tethers the hill to the perceiver. In this poem, as in all the poems in Property Line, we are presented with perceptions of what is ordinarily mundane, looked over; yet the manner in which they are presented points to the (often invisible) lines that divide perception & perceiver, owner & thing.

So many of Massey’s poems are situated at that divide, or meeting, between the natural & the human-made, especially where the two become (often literally) entangled:

Spider web
(wind-
ripped)

weighted with
a wet receipt.

A poem such as this presents a single, complex image of a single, complex moment. In the entanglement of two very different objects, which object do we identify ourselves with? I’d argue for the receipt, our invention for record keeping (also common garbage). Yet the web & the receipt are here equated, to be understood on one another’s terms: an abandoned spider web is a kind of receipt (remainder, proof) for a spent activity, that of domain-making; likewise, doesn’t a receipt signify an entanglement within commodity exchange? It is a circular entanglement, or two objects of entanglement having become entangled.

Ron Silliman wrote that Massey is in the business of making “miniatures,” which I don’t disagree with. Though the cutesy connotation that often accompanies that word is stripped away in Massey’s poems; the miniature, when it’s at its best, becomes the terrible, the terrifying, through all of its variegated ramifications. Indeed, its means & capabilities of entanglement (here’s a new spin on Keats: entangling capability) are achieved through dwelling in implication. And the sheer power of the terrifying occurs in Property Line, I think, not so much because of the poems’ contents, their presentations of complex stages of decay & abandonment, but through Massey’s strict attention to prosody. Take again “Spider web:”

Spider web
(wind-
ripped)

weighted with
a wet receipt.

It’s a poem that uses a remarkably small number of sounds. We are swept along in the alliteration, while, due to the carefully placed line breaks, simultaneously forced to go through slowly, pronouncing each syllable — “(wind- / ripped)” — before halting in the final hard t of “receipt:” in this way, the poem performs the wind that rips the web. It is thus curious that the word that contains the most complexities & peculiarities of sound is the first, “spider.” Within the nexus of sounds that makes up the poem, “spider” is then the heaviest word — it throbs in the mouth. Is it, then, the spider’s absence — or maybe our presence — that we feel throbbing?

Now about the book itself. Jess Mynes has done a beautiful job making a book that fits the demands of the work. At first glance, I was alarmed by the red ink used for the text; though while reading through the book, that deep, earthy red seemed more & more appropriate to poems that are themselves so fiercely & humbly concerned with breaking through that mirrored perception of self-in-landscape to a direct perception of the earthen thing — no small task, indeed. Yet the book, its portability (it’s very small, slides easily into the pocket), lends itself to what the work is: a field-guide. In picking up this field-guide, we are being summoned to perceive ourselves within a place, or two places: Massey’s northern California landscapes, as well as the bookscape that constitutes Property Line. In putting down the book, in whatever world we inhabit, we are left with an implicit imperative: perceive what is both outside of ourselves & entangled with ourselves, what we cannot own in perception, if we can.