Tell It Slant

Janlori Goldman, Bread from a Stranger's Oven

Each year, White Pine Press (hereafter WPP) sponsors a contest, selecting the best book of poetry from what I imagine must be hundreds of worthy submissions.  Don't be fooled by the fact that the mainstream book chat people don't write about poetry--there's oceans of wonderful poems being written these days.

This year's winner of the WPP Poetry prize was Janlori Graham's first book, Bread from a Stranger's Oven, a volume whose remarkably intelligent and heartfelt poems have been following me around all week. My general habit on workdays is to brew coffee and read the front page of the Times--one has to be half-asleep nowadays to digest what comes our way above the fold--and then, just as the sun rises above the mountains, I read a few poems to cheer me up. Wednesday was a particularly bad day, but Ms. Goldman made my day with this poem:

Yom Kippur

Today everything hurts, and I'm as close to god as I'll ever come
or want to be. I try to forgive myself, fist knocking at my chest,

a door that forgot how to open. The prayer book's spine
against my palms, I sing loudly to drown out the dandruff

flaked on the suit in the next row, sing as if I believe,
as if the fervor had not been rocked out of my by the cantor

whose polioed leg rubbed into me as we sang together in front
of the high holiday congregation, as if I were still his student

and he could still grip my waist--always his smell of yellow breath
and wear. That was when the old men said girls can never be

rabbis, girls can't stand before the torah. And now in the synagogue,
familiar as the couch leg that catches my pinky toe when I walk past it,

I think of the woman asleep in the window well, blonde wisping
out of a hoodie, sneakers on the sidewalk like slippers by a bed.

No, I'm not hungry, she said. I come to this sanctuary from that chill,
wonder if this is the night I'll open the door. If this is the night.


Many of Goldman's poems feature a detached observer whose recollection of a deceptively simple event reveals the ways in which meaning ripples out from past to present--to put it more simply--we see more as we move away from the present than we see within the moment. Or, as I've been feeling lately, there's a joke at the heart of life that I'm just too dense to decipher.

Mother, So Happy

Drunk. She walks into the Atlantic
             swims into that angle
                             where wave hits sky.

We three wait on the sand
             like eggs cupped in a carton
                          nestled and separate.

Long strokes into swells
         the ocean gulps her
                    as she shrinks to mist.

Head and arms in lunar beams
             even her teeth lit
                         by a mix of moon and sea.

Disappears as drowned
              only to surface in triumph
                           coming up for air.

Full of luck.

***

["like eggs cupped in a carton"--the verb makes this line memorable; also "that angle," not "the angle;" "even her teeth lit," the doubled voiceless alveolar plosive sealing the deal; and the coda--"Full of...luck!"]

***

Every day we listen to more lies--particularly from those who are supposed to serve us, from those we are enjoined to trust--from our bosses and coworkers--and at a certain point we cannot help but distrust not only those who tell the lies, but also language itself, as if all words were lies, as if the presumed connection between language and truth has ceased to exist. Words now bully and distort--a four-star general appears publicly to fabricate a story that (at once!) is presumed true because when lies are told with enough conviction, who cares if they are lies?

Post-truth: the idea gives me the creeps, but titillates many. Why? Well, we in the West have been fabricating the unassailable Self for three centuries; the only aspect of divinity we've failed to put on so far, the final piece of prosthesis, is the Logos, creating Our Own World from words.

It's odd that Aristotle, the first literary critic, followed the lead of Plato in accusing poets of lying, thinking, perhaps, that only what could be broken into tautology could be true.  If words are obliged to mirror the world and nothing more, then we have to presume a single way of seeing, a single world open to us all.  I don't doubt that there was once such a place, such clarity--we find this mirrored world across literature from Dante and Chaucer, through Cao Xueqin and Wu Cheng'en (for example)--and even if this concocted place were magical, it was clear that magic and truth could coexist.

I've been rereading Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, and in his brilliant survey of Western literature it strikes me yet again that it was Shakespeare who invented irony, that vertiginous sliding of language toward uncertainty. But irony carries with it a form of truth, one that winks at us, as if to say: Careful, there's more here than meets the eye! Auerbach doesn't quite say so, but after Prince Hal the West began to look askance at the presumed reality of things. Which is a far cry from behaving as if there were no truth: to acknowledge complexity is a form of modesty, not duplicity. It's the meretriciously inclined who have abandoned truth, not out of conviction, but self-interest and ignorance.

Anyway, I'm thankful for the consolation of poems. Here, at least, from Tu Fu to the late Maxim Kumin, the point of the exercise is truth-telling, the central article of faith is the urgency of communicating something fundamental to human life.  Goldman belongs to this tradition.


Winter Solstice

Bring me the old season
             that winter familiar

a slow sheathing of moon in shadow
            as if sky were a gill
                          through which all things

flow in and filter out--
             bring me a home with no right angles
                          a space of curling in

not too bright or sharp
          and bring me the time before that
                       with the garden dark with broken down

coffee grounds and rows of flowing mustard greens
           the smell of ripped roots fresh
                        from the pull

and then before that--
            to my round house a friend will come
                            or maybe the friend's mother

I'll say, Stay for dinner
            she'll say, Let me sew that button.

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all. 

George Ovitt (11/19/2017)