“Elegy, Sing to Break the Bones / Cycle. Cycle: Sing to Break. Break to Sing.”
-Philip B. Williams’ raise every voice
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This month, we look at poets collaborating on a page and interacting beyond words, from Victoria Chang’s hand-stitched historical photographs to Brenda Shaughnessy’s robot libretto, joining the great ranks of poet-librettists that include contemporary poets Douglas Kearney, Janine Joseph, Avery R. Young and Robert Pinsky, owner of the 2011 Robot Opera. Death in the powers, A group of robots is centered. The line between poetry and song remains porous; The journey of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was set to song by his brother, later coined the “Black National Anthem” and then personally turned into poetry in the form of Philip B. Williams’s Golden Shovel, reminds us of the endurance of a poem, as do Franz Wright’s final words, captured in the poems of his last collection: “Let it be alone, / The light alone / of home is mine / The wandering is over.”
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Jose Felipe Alvargue, En el Norte/Soy del Sur(Omnidon Publishing)
“I’ve been receiving signals all my life. Bits of radio bouncing around.” Álvaregué crafts those signs, those fragments of her family history of migration from El Salvador – “historical pain, like lightly pressed stone steps” and “the spectacle of unmoving bodies” – in fourteen-line lines that do not need to align with borders. Alvargue’s sonnet-essays, as he calls them, wandering, turning the page, free of line, sometimes fit around the color photographs that anchor this collection, heightening the sense of change in an echo of inter-generational trauma. Even photographs can be turned upside down: “A family of turns / Becomes the form. The work is embodied that / Captures the future, but does not concern the future. / The turning rejects the used value.” In a compressed pair, the left half of the sonnet speaks over a photograph – “My mother, recently orphaned, came new” – while in a thin column of space the sonnet depicts a man in a Costco shouting: “She landed believing / She would be American only to find herself / A colored woman in America.” In these poems the turn is also to dance, a form of survival, celebration, endurance: “We came dancing,” “We danced in defense,” “The dance is repairing/in motion. Salvadoreño parents snap their fingers at their children and you better move on.”
Victoria Chang, tree of wisdom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Victoria Chang’s latest collection centers around a tree felled by a chainsaw: “It was swinging / like a woman was hanged.” One line later, the speaker continues, “I wondered what it felt like to just swing/ecstasy in death at last.” These elaborate poems draw on artists ranging from Picasso to contemporary artist-writers like Renée Gladman and Ai Wei Wei, and Chang creates the material for this engagement by taking historical photographs into her own hands, sewing them together with red thread, and combining them with “little personality poems” printed in red. Because at the center of this collection is the expansive, breathlessly long poem “Eureka,” which reflects not only Eureka’s story of the expulsion of her Chinese citizens, but also menopause and sadness, ambition, loss, and ultimately expectations, as the speaker laments “But I only want to write about the trees / About the dead Chinese people near the trees / About my dead family near the trees.” And in “Motherhood”: “When I can’t find the words to describe it, / The neighborhood kid tries to speak, the trees drop their stars.”
Anna Yatra, Wolf’s Cut: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press)
If you come to Anna Jurney’s new book for a poem about Larry Lewis’s stored shoes, you’ll stay for the stories, about a speaker at a concert who “got so messed up by mixing his drugs that I accidentally / stole a baby,” and who recalls “the chaos / symbol I painted in blood on my bedroom door.” During the bakery’s dozen of new poems that shuttle between California and the South, the spirit of the father, now gone, emerges: “When I, at fifteen, refused to hand over the carton of Newports / hid it behind a row of calf-high boots in my closet, / slammed and locked my door, my father tore the whole / damn thing off the brass hinges. Gave, injured his shoulder.” He appears to be trying to prevent the speaker’s self-harm, revealed to the reader by cigarette burns on his forearms. We also see him dying, and in his youth in Mississippi, copying Greek from a bathroom stall, after which he “brought his transcription to the Episcopal priest / who taught Greek and Latin at Millsaps. The priest / laughed while translating –It says, “My shit doesn’t stink.” in both image and music – came out with more concise features than their first four collections, Journeys new and selected is both revealing and full of life.
Brenda Shaughnessy, Sensorium X: An Opera in Verse (knopf)
Shaughnessy’s Robot Opera, written in collaboration with composer Paola Prestini, captures the complexity of the intersection between corporate control of technology and its possibilities, focusing not only on inclusive disabled casting, but also on the use of AI to “assemble the recorded voices of non-verbal human actors into their characters’ lines,” “AI that gives you your own data back, to use as your own voice.” For, for their own purposes.” The cast includes a robot named Sophia, who is “our new human that you are expected to perfect!”; a scientific single mother, Dr. Mame, and her nonverbal child, Kitsune; A group of spirits; and The Corp, the human embodiment of a large corporate entity that has “billionaire tech-owning omnipotence” and is “sometimes chased across the stage by a trumpet.” (And is definitely a baritone.) Mycelia, who is “partly tree and partly human”, explains that she is “versed in aspen, birch, / and cypress” and “I sing what I remember. / That’s how I got my information.” This tale of mother and son provides an impressive contribution to human-centered literature about robots, AI, and disability, marked by Shaughnessy’s sure hand as librettist as much as a poet. (And if, like me, reading this makes you want to experience opera beyond the page, check it out Trailer.)
Philip B Williams, raise every voice (penguin)
“Sing to break. Break to sing.” From this evocative evocation in the introductory poem, “Ad-Memoir,” Williams’ third collection turns to poems that grapple with the poet’s active mind and the acute sensibilities of vantage and context, voiced: “A close friend told me my mother told her my father / committed suicide. That’s not how overdoses work, love.” In a series of “While Reading” poems, Williams enters into the narratives and symbols of others, at once transforming and borrowing, whether evoking the stag of Brigitte Pegeen Kelly, or in “While Reading Sula”, identifying with Nell: “Why should I burn / While a man is murmuring / jesus christ– Scared – of me?” His grand gesture is a finale, “‘Till Earth and Heaven Ring” that moves as epic and lyrical in its retelling as a golden shovel, using James Weldon Johnson’s “‘Till Earth and Heaven Ring” to “make the wind around it ready to sing/About my father’s mother/Till/I get it right.” . ..” Overall, Williams makes the idea sing.
Christian woman, that dance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Christian Wyman’s latest collection comes with “Bad Literary Gathering”, which features “a kind of naked darkness in which everybody sees / everybody’s dead: a mortality colony.” Highlights include more earthy lyrics: “Holding an Earthworm at Fifty-Eight” features childhood memories of insects with “Oily, eily / Under it all, / The viscid seeth” and “Reading Steinbeck”, which begins in media res: “-And sorrows hardened, / And clear at first light, became pliable.” Wyman’s formal focus turns to lines like “When sleep was sleep and morning was supposed to come” and, in “There May Come a Cuckoo”, which contemplates being “in the middle of your life’s journey”, the speaker quips, “You don’t even believe in breakfast, much less a sweet breakfast, / But here you are, slathering nostalgia on waffles.” Faith and formality persist, and Wyman brings a beautiful touch to pandemonium in “The Word”: “Consider the shiver that runs through still waters like a sound. / Who must we become to hear it?”
Franz Wright, Ax in Blossom: Final Poems and Fragments (knopf)
“It won’t be much longer, Ghost Planet.” So Wright addresses us saying goodbye in this posthumous collection, whether in this prose address, “Age in Sepia Visions,” or in “Someone Else Will Change,” a love poem – his notes remind us that these poems are for his wife and take shape with her, but we feel part of this “I” and this “you” – “Everything on earth will change when I die. / No one but you.” Won’t even notice. / No one will suffer except you.” These are “Last Poems and Fragments”, not a distilled collection like the first, yet there is something unbearably beautiful and harmonious in them Ax in flower. We are in the presence of a most incomparable poet whose future poems we will never be able to keep track of. “Theology” opens, “There must be someone else / Who wakes up troubled, alone; / Too bad we can’t talk on our little phones.” These poems are the little phone that connects us to Wright and his poems remind us that we can endure.
