The Language of Forgetting - Lynne Knight (Sixteen Rivers Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Language of Forgetting.  Lynne Knight.  Sixteen Rivers Press.  San Francisco, California.  2018.

The Language of Forgetting is the second book by Lynne Knight that Today's book of poetry has had the pleasure of introducing to our loyal readers.  Back in January of 2017 today's book of poetry wrote about Knight's The Persistence of Longing (Terrapin Books, 2016).  You can read about that here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-persistence-of-longing-lynne-knight.html 

In The Language of Forgetting Lynne Knight gives us four distinct groupings of her poems.  In the first of these the trauma and tedium of an alcoholic father, bellicose with grand dreams but never able to manage the climb out of the bottle, haunts Knight's childhood.  In another section of poems Knight bares witness, watches slowly while her mother loses her mind.  Knight wrestles with the relationship she has with her mother, the relationships she has with her sister, with the past and so on.

Closing out this ferocious gathering of formidable poems, in the fourth part of The Language of Feeling, Lynne Knight trods happier geography, losing herself in the canvases and intrigues of great painters, great paintings, and an almost pastoral beauty.

My Father's House

I was one of the black-hearted ones, my father said,

a Protestant whom they would try to proselytize,

thumping his dictionary like the Bible it was

to him, warning me not to be seduced by the robes

and glories, the incense and beautiful words.

But the gold and smoke, the brocade the murmurs

as penitents knocked at their hearts to open

the door to mercy, forgiveness—who could resist

such pageantry? The chapel walls were painted mauve,

and during Lent, with all the saints and the Virgin

draped in purple cloth, it seemed some elaborate

fashion show was about to begin. Heretical

to think, my father said. No doubt the nuns saw

my dereliction [more thumping] and were contriving

immediate conversion. I was not to let my guard down.

But God was my guard, and the hosts of angels

ready to descend and save my wayward soul,

I would think on my way to school, bantering

like a normal girl on the five-mile bus ride,

but all the while thinking this might be the day

the chapel wall opened and Christ stepped through

in a blaze of light to save me, and everybody

would see, and fame would come, and the dirt

floor under the sofa where I sat while my father

explained the world would vanish into carpet

walls, heat: the finished house of my father.

But my father's house was all words. Make a bed

of words to lie down in. Make a floor of words

to stand on. Make a faith of words that nothing

would betray—not his drunken promises,

not his blueprints untouched under ash and dust.

Make a hope of words, the start of forgiving.

💫💫💫

Knight knows how to pull the line tight, wring out the water.  Her memory may be eidetic.  Each and every detail dovetailed and polished until the truth gleams.  The reader is quenched and then curious again as The Language of Forgetting reveals that it is all about memory.

Every word.

What a Shame

As my mother lost more of her mind, shame

stood at the door like a beggar or prince:

she couldn't distinguish. She knew only Hide.

So she hid, turning her face into a mask,

shoved her hearing aid into a sock shoved

far back in a drawer, burying her leg brace

under fallen skirts in her overcrowded closet.

Those thieves, she said from behind the mask

while I searched for the hearing aid, brace.

Then disdain fled with the crows she'd seen

on the counter when she went to make her lunch.

You don't make your own lunch, I would say. You go

to the dining room. She sat: scared rabbit mask, now.

Don't let it hurt me! her shallow breath pleaded,

though she made no sound approaching words.

I pretend none of this was happening to her.

To me. Then one day I came to visit and opened

the door to the stink of shit. In the night

she'd had an attack of diarrhea but couldn't find

the bathroom. She'd run everywhere, hunting.

It's all right, I said after cleaning the mess,

bathing her. It's all right. I was tying her

shoes, kneeling before her. She leaned close.

In the two or three seconds she was herself again,

she whispered, Liar. So I saw what I owed her.

Shame, whether beggar or prince, had no claim

to her door. What was happening to her could be

happening to anyone. And was. And is.

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry would like to take this opportunity to thank Nick Hesslier and Tina St. John for hosting a reading for me and Deanne Young in their home last weekend.  Their home in Vanier lends itself so comfortably to both the reader and the audience.  Reading to a crowd in a private home lends a different sort of intimacy to both the poem and the audience.  The very warm response Deanna and I received was enough to restore ones faith in the power of poetry.  Nick and Tina made us and everyone else feel at home and I can't thank them enough.

One more sidebar.  Today's book of poetry (me, Michael Dennis), just finished a project many years in the making.  Today's book of poetry joined forces with the most excellent Stuart Ross and after several meetings over several years we finally finished our manuscript 70 Kippers.  We took turns writing the lines and the result is dangerous whimsy.   Any publisher interested in seeing the manuscript can contact either Stuart Ross of Michael Dennis through this blog.

Back to Ms. Knight.  Today's book of poetry is happy to have an encore performance by Lynne Knight.  She has heart, her poems are clean and ring true.  That combination is always going to produce fine poems.  The poems in both of Knight's books that Today's book of poetry has read are instantly engaging, inviting even.  Knight doesn't speak down to the reader, but looks the reader right in the eye.

After Seeing Wolf Kahn's

"Sundrenched Barn IV"

Just to say the words, sundrenched barn,

makes me long for those summers when

all we did was be young, untroubled

by identity, the body just the body

the way the barn was just the barn,

forbidden because it might combust

those hot July days when we climbed in

anyway through the small back window

to leap and leap into the choking hay.

But I don't want to reproduce my story.

It's anybody's barn. It's almost on fire,

the sun's so bright, like the body

walking a country road, the orchard

sweet with fruit, the barn rising suddenly

on the horizon, a second sun, and night

nowhere to be seen—the whole idea

of dark so beautifully, hotly impossible.

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry is looking for some new staff and are open to suggestions.  All we do all day is lounge around and read poetry, argue about poetry, read some more.

Lynne Knight is getting to be a known name around these parts and for all the right reasons.  The Language of Forgetting will taunt, tickle and torment.  Perfect.

Lynne Knight

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lynne Knight’s previous collections are Dissolving Borders (Quarterly Review of Literature), The Book of Common Betrayals (Bear Star Press), and Night in the Shape of a Mirror (David Robert Books) and The Persistence of Longing (Terrapin Press, 2016), plus three award-winning chapbooks. Her cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects (Small Poetry Press), has been translated into French by Nicole Courtet. Knight’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, and her awards include a Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an NEA grant.

BLURBS

Lynne Knight’s mindful, lyrical book reads like a heart-and-soul video, Season One. Her poetry thrills and intrigues, warns and shares, always in language that catches.

     —Al Young

The Language of Forgetting is inspired by a fascination with the accumulated secrets lying under the many stories of a lived life. This is thriving, memorable poetry. 

     —Forrest Hamer

Poetry at the Albany Library - Lynne Knight - April 11, 2017

Video: AlbanyKALB

sixteenrivers.org 

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

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New York, 1960 - Barry Gifford (Curbside Splendor)

Today's book of poetry:
New York, 1960.  Barry Gifford.  Curbside Splendor.  Chicago, Illinois.  2016.

All the big themes are in here.  Death and dying, romantic love and loss, Barry Gifford is all over them.  New York, 1960 is part memory exercise and part dream catalogue.

Mexico, Argentina, Rome, San Diego and so on, they are all in New York, 1960, so is Sumatra along with her tigers and orangutans.  Barry Gifford's New York is an all encompassing grand tour of a place and time that can only exist in poetry world.

The Unconquered Flame

Both the actress Hedy Lamarr

and the writer Clarice Lispector

outstanding beauties in their youth,

believed, as Lispector wrote,

"it was ugly to go out when one

was no longer young."

Still only in their forties

they hid themselves away, wishing

to be remembered as they had been.

My mother, also a great beauty

into middle age, felt differently.

She was relieved, she said, to not

have to bear the burden of being

looked at. "I was frightened

by the thought of others wanting

to possess and destroy me."

Nevertheless, she never stopped

asking those closest to her

how she looked.

                               One night,

in the Bar Chicote in Madrid,

in the company of a famous

film director and an actress

considered by many to be among

the most beautiful women

in the world, I was admiring

a photograph on a wall

of Ava Gardner at her loveliest

drinking in Chicote

with Ernest Hemingway

when the actress asked me who

I thought was more beautiful,

she or Ava Gardner.

"What an impossible question!"

said the director. "Don't answer,"

he instructed. "If you choose Ava,

this one will hate you, and if you

choose her, she'll know you're lying."

I looked at the actress.

"Please lie," she said.

...

In a brief final section of New York, 1960 titled "The Lost Graveyard Poems" Gifford visits the final resting places of Apollinaire, Proust, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire and Ezra Pound.  Although these are cemetery odes they read less eulogic and more like a fancy tip of the hat.  Gifford, like the rest of us, writes about his heroes to bring them closer.

Gifford has the sophisticated demeanour of one who has seen it all.  New York, 1960 reads smart and crisp even when Gifford is playing the agent provocateur.

In his poem "Dinner Conversation" for example, he riffs between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore as though they were in New York right now, talking about current events.  Gifford is persistent and persuasive and funny as hell.

Dinner Conversation

Albert Einstein, the Swiss physicist,
and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet,
met at a banquet in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1931.
"Tell me, Tagore," said Einstein,
"did you get hurt much in the crash?"
"I was lucky, Albert, I got out in '28. And you?"
Einstein shook his shaggy head, grinned
like a tiger, and said, "My wife keeps the cash.
She doesn't trust the market or banks, either.
Our savings are in a suitcase in a hotel vault."
"But you're Swiss. I'd have thought you'd keep
your dough in a bank over there."
"They charge too much," said Einstein. "The hotel
fee is peanuts, and this way I can get my hands
on the case in a hurry."
"What are the odds the economy recovers this year?"
"That won't happen until the next war, Rabi."
"So what do you advise?"
Einstein patted the poet on his right knee
and said, "Tagore, get a suitcase."

...

Gifford is no easy read, he wants you to know all about Agamemnon and Achilles too, it would help if Sonny Stitt and Jackie McLean came easily to your tongue and you better be comfortable with Eric Dolphy.

Today's book of poetry has been to a few rodeos and knows most of this cast but some of my younger office staff spent the morning looking up names. We played a few Dolphy songs during our morning read.  I'm certain Eric Dolphy now has several new fans and so does Barry Gifford.

The Definition of Noir

My cousin Chris blew his brains out
sitting on the sidewalk in front of
a Jack-in-the-Box in Phoenix, Arizona.
I don't like the desert, never have.
Chris ended up in Arizona because he
had no place else to go and my sister lives there.
When we were boys he and I played together
but after he was thirteen and I was nine
we didn't see each other again for six years.
His parents divorced and Chris lived
with his mother. My uncle -- my mother's brother --
remarried and moved to Florida, so Chris
didn't see his father, either, during that time.
Chris and I kept in touch over the years
but never really lived in the same place.
He blew every opportunity he had, got in trouble --
had trouble -- sometimes, became an alcoholic
and a pothead, went to military school, the army,
then got a college degree in history, after which
he drove a taxi, worked construction, taught
in a reformatory school, dealt drugs, tended bar
and shot and killed a couple of guys who
double-crossed him. He was good looking, smart,
wrote a novel that got published, married and
divorced the same girl twice, then married
another girl and divorced her because she was lazy,
he said. Toward the end Chris lost it, mailed
racist and anti-semitic screeds to friends
and relatives, saw himself as a victim with
a capital V, blamed his failed existence
on everyone other than himself. The morning
he reported for induction into the army,
I drove him to the train station. Before he
got out of the car, Chris gave me three hundred
dollars in cash, told me it was his life's savings
and that I should spend it however I wanted to.
This was during the Vietnam War and he didn't know
if he'd get back home alive. You're all I've got,
cousin, he said to me, you're the only one who cares
if I live or die. This was certainly not true
but I think he meant it. I was sixteen.
As Marlene Dietrich, playing Tanya, the gypsy madam
in Touch of Evil, said about Hank Quinlan, the bad cop
played by Orson Welles, after he was dead,
What is there to say about such a person?

...

Barry Gifford's New York, 1960 is a cocktail party you want to be at.  Great conversation, the ghosts of literary giants along with a myriad cultural cornerstones in a city that never sleeps.  Gifford writes to his daughter, his granddaughter, to Pound and to Wilde, and then to the rest of us.  These poems have the near urgent smell of necessity to them.

Gifford is an excellent host, he'll get you that martini while character sketching the room then he'll whisper something delightful in your ear.

Barry Gifford

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barry Gifford is the author of more than 40 books, which have been published in twenty-eight languages. His work has been awarded by PEN, the NEA, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts and more.

BLURBS

"It's like this: It's late at night, or very early in the morning, and you're walking down an empty street, and everything is utterly still and silent; and then you pass by an apartment building and someone on the third floor has a window open, and you hear some music playing, very softly. The music bounces off the walls of the buildings and you can make out the tune, pure and intimate and playing just for you. And that's what you get with Barry Gifford's poetry. It's direct, tender, wry, and heartbreaking."
     — Rob Christopher, Chicagoist

"Like Minerva Jones, the village poet in Edgar Lee Masters’ 1916 Spoon River Anthology, all-around writer Barry Gifford croons out these poem-prose reflections in a well-distilled voice that booms and whispers with life. Consider the beauty of aging women, including his own dying mother or the Andy Warhol film-cult star Ultra Violet. Consider loss and loss and Greenwich Village, ancient China’s poet Li Po, fellow Chicagoan Nelson Algren (whose Walk on the Wild Side precedes Lou Reed’s), baseball, the making of a proper dry martini, Beat-flowered Zen, screenwriting as key to worldwide travel. Consider romance, the constant demand and craziness of love, children, grandchildren, the social over-wash of adoption, the glory of creative life lived out. Picture a table fragrant with food and drink. Across from you, some character straight out of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, sits telling you stories. At comfortable, even-pitched Frank Sinatra level, he leans in to speak or chant of Sumatra’s tigers and orangutans, sighing, uttering: “Here in San Francisco techies jaywalk / talking on cellphones / women windowshop on Hayes Street / sipping gigantic takeout lattes / drivers weave through traffic / while texting / homeless people sleep on sidewalks” – and you get it. What connects New York, 1960 to post-War 1916 USA and Barry Gifford’s 21st century is the measure of his lyric, narrative breath.
     — Al Young, California's former poet laureate

“Barry Gifford’s pure lyrical self shines in these poems.”
     — Andrei Codrescu

curbsidesplendor.com

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.