In Praise of Defeat - Abdellatif Laâbi (Archipelago Books)

Today's book of poetry:
In Praise of Defeat.  Abellatif Laâbi.  Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith.  Archipelago Books.  Brooklyn, New York.  2016.

There are many joys associated with doing Today's book of poetry but there is also a little pain, we are constantly rediscovering and confirming our vast ignorance.  Until Abdellatif Laâbi's In Praise of Defeat landed on our desk we had never heard of the major francophone voice of Moroccan poetry.

In Praise of Defeat brings together work from fifteen or more of Abdellatif Laâbi's books of poetry. Was it T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound who wrote about "perfecting the language of the tribe?"  I think it was Pound.  Well he wasn't alone.  Moroccan exile Laâbi has perfected a certain sort of precision in bringing us from his childhood in Fez to his forced exile in modern Paris.

Talisman's Eye

everything dies

patched-up brain down in crypts

                                                        dies

         logos of cities

                                                        dies

reason dies

                       crushed by wrinkles

with no help from hands

brain with its gray cells

                                         dies

night approaches with so much telling

                                                          of rosaries

for the break of a new day

as the sphinxes say

                                when none is possible

they themselves having grown old

wearing of their alliance

                                        with the wind

now

I seek a language

                                  for my tribe

that is not a hybrid

let cyclones of argan trees

                                      come join my fingers

collar of wasps

                             around my throat of clay

my awful lucidity

like a mirror

                              rusty with memories

that are the butt of History

now I know what power inhabits me

peoples run through my language

while flaming night

                                  constructs silence

with hammer blows

                                 I compose lullabies

my awful lucidity

that ruffles my voice

                                 to the caravans' cadence

my awful lucidity

that carves me out an ear

                                    as wide as the desert

now

                    I need to vomit up

                                                       layers of narcotics

and steaming manure

                                      words of reason pale as herb tea

and throw away books that taught me pride

here I am

                        present

night-hairy

                       bristling with wasps

with that perfume of the muscles

that camel's boniness

ready to bound down the road

                                             yelping

look and see if my breasts

                                            are not bursting with maledictions

but leave me a few blood vessels

just a few nerves

                              nothing but a finger

and I shall outline on my parchment

a new cosmogony

                               its elements in perfect harmony

hear the clash of languages

                                               in my mouth

the thirst for new births

hear the swish of sweat

                                         at my underarms

the ripple of my biceps

driven by my inner fauna

                                             springing from caves

pen bloodied

                           my head against every wall

my breath at the gallop

spewing planets

                                in its eruptions

here I am

                 torrential in full flood

working my crannies

craters overlooked in my incandescence

I Atlas

              striped by the sun

                                            of diurnal tribes

gathering up in my descents and ravines

the impatient foam of a future

ask the vultures what my venom tastes like

ruggedness of my grip

                                       iron grid of my maledictions

accuser I am

                            building a kingdom

                                                             of insubordination

do not seek me in your archives

fearful of my censure

                                       writing is not in my nature

look for me rather in your innards

when a host of worms

                                          distorts your gut

look for me in the urine of fever

in the malaria of the backstreets

and there

               in the mud of cataracts

erase my forbidden names

                                           stamp out the spells that I cast

but at my call

break jars of honey

slit the throats of black bulls at mosque doors

feed beggars by the thousands

then I shall come

                              to spit in your mouth

destroy your tumors

                                rid you of your ancient ills

I still prefer you

                                in the straightness of your plowshares

my brothers with your rough hands

my brothers who sleep like roots

come

               tossed down

                                      overboard

stranger to the course of planets

between sky and void

sprung forth

                         in the blink of an eye

                                                           at the birth of speech

I know nothing of weightiness

                                                   or the mathematics of revolutions

Arab

        Berber

                  above all human

but with this indestructible voice

                                                      this mark

come from your tomorrows

                                              gravediggers of ruins

not to take upon myself

                                               the errors of the night

but unrestrainedly

                               to hammer with doorknockers

until every doorway

                                   offers up its logarithms

yes

      I slumber

in mountain salt mines

an ear hearkening to the wheel of time

I let new arms grow

                                  to enhance an awakening

I laugh yes I laugh in my dream

look at my eyelids

seeded by caravaneers

and my terrifying eye

                                   accurate

                                                   as a sandglass

...

In Praise of Defeat includes poems that encompass the period from 1965 right up to 2014 and it is an enormous tome coming in at over 800 pages plus.  Laâbi gives us his mandate coming right out of the gate in his long poem "Chronicle of the Citadel of Exile" where he tells us to "Write, write, never stop."  "Chronicle of the Citadel of Exile" is a true monster list poem and you all know how much we love those here, but at a whopping thirteen pages we just couldn't reproduce it.

Most contemporary poets have never had to face the challenges like those that have faced Abdellatif Laâbi.  None of my contemporaries have ever gone to prison for the political action of being a poet. Although a few of them have been behind bars.  Laâbi spent several years in prison and then was exiled.  Through it his poetry has remained distinctly humane, reachable, direct and impassioned. Somehow Laâbi has been able to find light in a world determined to regale the force of darkness.

To My Son Yacine

My darling son

I have received your letter

You already talk to me like a grown-up

you say how hard you try at school

and I feel your passion to understand

to chase away the shadows, the ugliness

to pierce the secrets of the great book of life

You are sure of yourself

And though not deliberately

you list your riches for me

you reassure me on your strengths

as if you were saying "don't worry about me

see me walk

see where my steps lead

the horizon, the vast horizon over there

has no secrets for me"

And I picture you

your fine brow

so high and straight

I picture your great pride

My darling son

I have received your letter

You say

"I think of you

and I give my life to you?"

without an inkling

of what you do to me in saying that

my crazy heart

my eyes on the stars

and through this word from you

it is no longer hard for me to believe

that the great Feast will come

when children like you

now men

will walk with giant steps

far from the poverty of the shantytowns

far from hunger, ignorance and sadness

My darling son

I have received your letter

You wrote the address yourself

wrote it with confidence

you thought to yourself, if I put this

Papa will get my letter

and perhaps I'll have a reply

and you started to imagine the prison

a big house where people are locked up

how many and why?

but they they can't see the sea

the forest

they can't work

to get their children enough to eat

You imagine something mean

something ugly

something that makes no sense

and makes you feel sad

or very angry

You think too

that those who made prisons

are certainly mad

and so very many other things

Yes my darling son

that is how one begins to think

to understand humans

to love life

to detest tyrants

and that is how

I love you

how I love to think of you

from the depths of my prison

...

Today's book of poetry is thrilled to share another Archipelago Books treasure, this Brooklyn publisher consistently pumps out classics from around the world of poetry and exposes them to North American readers.  In Praise of Defeat was translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith and the translation is seamless, invisible mending so to speak.  Laâbi's poems read and sound like they were written in English, all these uncompromising and tender love letters to his readers sound as natural as daybreak.

Sensation

The moment they open

the eyes

create light

So many eyes

so much light

The moment it blooms

consciousness

creates the world

then the universe

So much consciousness

so many worlds

then so many universes

If the eyes close

if consciousness is extinguished

the Whole disappears

This

is just a sensation

Nothing that deserves

to be graven in stone

or "written in a book"

But it is my sensation

I am here

eyes half-open

clinging to the thread

that sews day to night

the veils within

to those without

and swaddling clothes to shrouds

I am no longer here

The cavalcade of words

paws the ground

fails to get moving

between fingers and page

Welcome

dear

so dear stranger!

...

Abdellatif Laâbi's long poems are giant quilts of both comfort and instruction, bitter blankets of bitter defeats and regret.  Laâbi is a narrative monster and we were happy to hang on for the ride.

Today's book of poetry might have mentioned this before, perhaps not, but many years ago I had the honour of meeting George Faludy and hearing him read.  Well I haven't met Abdellatif Laâbi but I get the same gracious, intelligent and humble vibe from In Praise of Defeat as I did all those years ago sitting at Faludy's feet.  Prince's of peace, gentle scribes, fierce poets.

In Praise of Defeat is going to improve every poetry collection it joins.

Abdellatif Laâbi

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and political activist, Abdellatif Laâbi was born in Fez, Morocco in 1942. He was also the founder of Souffles, an important literary review that was banned in Morocco in 1972. Laâbi received the Prix Robert Ganzo de Poésie in 2008, the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie for his Oeuvres complètes in 2009, and the Académie Française's Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011. Also available in English are his debut collection of poetry The Rule of Barbarism, the memoir Rue de Retour, and The World's Embrace: Selected Poems.

BLURBS

Keeping pace with the long poems that are Abdellatif Laâbi's distinctive achievement – the poems of torture and imprisonment in Morocco, or 'People of Madrid, Pardon' written in response to the train bombings of 2004 – an English-speaking reader like me inevitably keeps waiting for the public voice, the high style of anger and compassion, to falter or overreach. But Laâbi's voice does neither. Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations hold fast to this poetry's unnerving eloquence and simplicity, and its hell-for-leather speed.
     — T.J. Clark

As the new collection In Praise of Defeat, deftly translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, shows, Laâbi’s early poems are poems of protest and of incarceration. They powerfully evoke the need for poetry to bear witness...In Praise of Defeat presents a poet-activist who was born in the direst possible circumstances, survived them, and has continued on a trajectory of art and activism. He shows any poet how the artistic space created by “poet, activist, former prisoner, exile” is the space where the most crucial acts of art happen.
     — Emily Wolahan, The Quarterly Conversation

archipelagobooks.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.

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.

The Earth Gods Are Coming - Gabe Foreman (Baseline Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Earth Gods Are Coming.  Gabe Foreman.  Baseline Press.  London, Ontario.  2016.

"Grace is electricity, science has found,

it is not like electricity, it is electricity...."

                                                                                - Donald Barthelme, 

                                                                                  "At the End of the Mechanical Age"

Today's book of poetry was terribly fond of Gabe Foreman's A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House Press, 2011), so when we saw The Earth Gods Are Coming come through our poetry door we knew what we were getting into.  

Foreman continues to write with one foot firmly planted on terra firma and the other in a variety of parallel and non-parallel worlds.  The Earth Gods Are Coming has an entirely disproportionate serving of intelligent whimsy.  Gabe Foreman is all about the "what if" universe.

The poems in this volume don't have titles.

~~~

You called music

the nicotine-patch

of the masses.

Some songs were in the key of Lord Byron.

As though we found an orange on the floor

and held it to our faces.

Poke rivals with those keen little stars.

Now kick that charging security guard

in half, with your naked foot.

A cough, spread-eagling through the cove at low tide.

Charlotte, various breeds of unicorn prance in predawn meadows,

preying on incantations of your face expelled by the tiny lungs of songbirds.

You were not real.

At least not mentally real.

You were a gymnast, and I,

a musician hired by NASA

to sing about the moon.

"The moon beams are rafters branching over," etc.

"The moon's iambic diameter is at its maximum

when you come over," etc.

A ghost tugs a panel of ocean fear

across a dumpster's busted radio.

It pelts your grubby backpack with caddis flies,

and pelts as well the faded jackets

of the men who stoop after cigarettes

while another Saturday fills with cars

who crash into motels already on fire.

...

According to Foreman we might find some light in the Dead Sea scrolls, Ninja campers and corn-dogs.  Talking oxen will relax our minds and ancient Mayans await pilgrims arriving in taxi cabs.

His random and encyclopedic flashes of brain lightning all point in the same direction, to grace, to electricity.

~~~

At the lamp store shopping for a lamp,

do you have any lamps

that don't work?

I need to replace a light which never worked

that I smashed when I was dying.

I have but one lamp

that doesn't work

but it comes with a curse.

Are you willing to purchase it

before I ramble on about the curse,

a hex both banal and morose?

Of course.

I paid an exorbitant price

for when I took my new lamp home

and set it in the old light's nook,

before I stooped to plug it in,

it worked.

...

Our morning read was big fun.  Even though no one has seen the sun for a couple of days there is an unmistakable optimism that only arrives with the smell of spring.

Hard to know for sure if Gabe Foreman is an optimist but when my staff had finished reading The Earth Gods Are Coming aloud to each other they were all smiling.

~~~

What thoughts I have of you tonight, transformers, as the power fails in

a swelter, and the subway falters between stations. The charm of the

failing transformers is that they deliver peace to neighbourhoods that

might deserve a meal by candlelight.  I remember a week of statewide

black out. This was years ago, decades past, in a similar heat wave. On

the second night, my wife (1) and I invited an old timer we spotted on the

street for supper. I placed a candle on the table.  The man was bearded,

sweaty and grubby.  Over cold soup and raspberry wine, he spoke of

desperate nautical voyages he had experienced, of near starvation at sea,

often in superb detail.  I felt his story contained alien circuitry, but my

wife absorbed the hardship of the man's cannibalistic past and wept

openly.  We never told him, but she and I had dabbled at people-eating

in college.  In those days, our dorm had been a slow-cooker of untenable

grief.  Those who grabbed hold of the burning filament and climbed

inside our fading bulb had made no promises, just as we had made no

plans.  We had been different people.  Over barbequed steak, our guest

half-forgot a joke whose punch-line was: you are what you eat.  My wife

laughed.  we were like one person then, the flickering meat, the dark

hallway behind where my wife was sitting, and the parts of the joke that

the old man had forgotten.  When respectable Americans bid goodnight

to old timers, they seldom make chivalrous vows in Latin, or promise

never to forget, but my wife and I did both, first over fortified sherry

and blueberry pie, and a second time, on the porch, before the old man

finally staggered off into the darkness and was consumed.  Before he had

left, our guest asked if he could borrow a flashlight.  He asked again, as if

we had not heard his words.  When he was finally gone, my wife and I

knew that we had done the right thing.  We sat on the porch swing, and 

counted all the flashlights in the house.  There were six.  One for each of

the babies that we had planned to have once the power came back on.

Look, a shooting star, I said.  Amanda turned to me then, smiled, and

became an older man for the rest of her life.

(1) My wife's unusual superpower was that she would spontaneously change age

and sex, on average every few months or so.  These transformations occurred

randomly, and were beyond her control.  They presented a terrific challenge to our

marriage.  More a curse than a gift really.

...

Gabe Foreman's considerable charms are almost too grand for a chapbook but Saint Karen of Schindler seems to be able to carry any weight with her marvelous Baseline Press.  Schindler continues to produce chapbooks of subtle and exacting beauty and fills them with poetry worthy of the splendor.

Today's book of poetry is a sucker for certain things and the Japanese Uzumaki tissue used to make the flyleaves for The Earth Gods Are Coming is beautiful enough to make you cry.

Gabe Foreman's The Earth Gods Are Coming reads like a much larger book, good poems do that.

Gabe Foreman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gabe Foreman's first collection, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House, 2011), was awarded the A.M. Klein Prize for poetry and was shortlisted for the Concordia First Book Prize. Gabe lives in Montreal where he works at a soup kitchen.

TPV Spring 2012: Gabe Foreman "Should I listen to this ox?"

Video:TorontoPoetryVendors

baselinepress.ca 

566

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.

Star Journal - Selected Poems - Christopher Buckley (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Star Journal - Selected Poems.  Christopher Buckley.  Pitt Poetry Series.  University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2016.

Star Journal - Selected Poems  by Christopher Buckley is as straightforward as a yardstick, measuring by star-light, the weight of a butterfly heart.  In fact Star Journal is a book of poet magic, a proverbial pot of gold.  Today's book of poetry defies you to open any page of this book and not be entertained and enlightened.

I don't hear 'em but I certainly feel the ghosts of Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers in the elusive space in the English language where intellect and emotion get to tango it out in an invisible swirl of yin and yang.  Here is a poet with a giant poet clock time machine, metronomes of logic, tiny unseen hammers of reason, all of ticking away in balance inside the Buckley noggin'.

Today's book of poetry couldn't help but think cinematic when reading these expansive certainties. There were moments of complete satisfaction, just like watching a Francis Ford Coppola movie where all the details are exact, all the details make it true.  Buckley does the same thing, makes sure you are hearing the right sound, fills the mirror in the corner with the proper reflection, colours in the edges of the image until you are there breathing it in.

Why I'm in Favor of a Nuclear Freeze

Because we were 18 and still wonderful in our bodies,

because Harry's father owned a ranch and we had

nothing better to do one Saturday, we went hunting

doves among the high oaks and almost wholly quiet air....

Traipsing the hills and deer paths for an hour,

we were ready when the first ones swooped

and we took them down in smoke much like the planes

in the war films of our regimented youth.

                                                                  Some were dead

and some knocked cold, and because he knew how

and I just couldn't, Harry went to each of them and,

with thumb and forefinger, almost tenderly, squeezed

the last air out of their slight necks.

                                                         Our jackets grew

heavy with birds and for a while we sat in the shade

thinking we were someone, talking a bit of girls--

who would "go," who wouldn't, how love would probably

always be beyond our reach...We even talked of the nuns

who terrified us with God and damnation. We both recalled

that first prize in art, the one pinned to the cork board

in front of class, was a sweet blond girl's drawing

of the fires and coals, the tortured souls of Purgatory.

Harry said he feared eternity until he was 17, and,

if he ever had kids, the last place they would go would be a

parochial school.

                            On our way to the car, having forgotten

which way the safety was off or on, I accidentally discharged

my borrowed 12 gauge, twice actually -- one would have been Harry's

head if he were behind me, the other my foot, inches to the right.

We were almost back when something moved in the raw, dry grass,

and without thinking, and on the first twitch of two tall ears,

we together blew the ever-loving-Jesus out of a jack rabbit

until we couldn't tell fur from dust from blood....

                                                                               Harry has

a family, two children as lovely as any will ever be--

he hasn't hunted in years... and that once was enough for me.

Anymore, a good day offers a moment's praise for the lizards

daring the road I run along, or it offers a dusk in which

yellow meadowlarks scrounge fields in the grey autumn light.

Harry and I are friends now almost 30 years, and the last time

we had dinner, I thought about that rabbit, not the doves

which we swore we would cook and eat, but that rabbit--

why the hell had we killed it so cold-heartedly? And I saw

that it was simply because we had the guns, because we could.

...

Christopher Buckley's poems are small stories that spin out so large you can't help but get caught up in the vortex, they becomes proclamations without ever proselytizing.  We can almost believe that Christopher Buckley has our planet sussed out, or at least our meagre scrabbling over its surface.

But in truth Buckley is asking as many questions as your average skeptic.

Range.  Good poets have range and Buckley covers it.  We are subject to musings on Mao Tse-Tung, a beautiful blue evening in Santorini, Bertrand Russell's musings on astronomy, reading/not reading Einstein, dancing "the Stroll," and so on.  These poems swell with the lovely interconnectivity of a man full of ideas, Buckley encompasses a big universe and he does it in big, big poems of staggering beauty and subtle intellect.  When you're reading these poems you are taking in a lot of new information but it is coming through the Buckley filter.

Watchful--Es Castell, Menorca

     But the truth is what we are always

      watchful, lying in wait for ourselves.

                                                 

                                            -Neruda

I remember the idiot in the town square

of Es Castell, trying each day to entice

the resident pigeons to eat the orange peels

he threw blissfully, and with hope,

on to the grass and walks.

                                                         But, after so much time,
they were on to him, and the worthless peels,
and waddled away in a mumbling cloud
of feathers....And each day he'd finally tire
of their truculence and unzip the jacket
of his purple warm-up suit, spread it wide
as a red kite's wings, and run
into their grey midst, scattering them
a few feet beyond the fountains, but never out
above the sky-colored water,
or into the water-colored sky....

Like the old men already sitting there
in the wet shadows on the benches,
we soon tolerated him--like the pigeons
who came back in a minute or two
and who seemed to forget,
as he did, such purposeless and 
momentary confrontations--days
like lost clouds.
                          I soon realized
that I was blessed simply
to walk out each morning
around the square and hear
the clock tower above the post office
strike the hour two times,
a few minutes apart, and not care
which could be correct; blessed
to sit next to the public phones,
which occasionally rang for no one,
and watch the bees dissolve into the sun,
knowing someone else had done the math of light--
the stars never showing any sign
of distress.
                  Yet, if there is some truth
about us, it's not in the stars,
or in the cluster of orange peels
almost as brilliant on the mid-morning walk--
but perhaps in the fact that we can tolerate
one among us to whom they are of equal
consequence.
                      I no longer need to look
to stars, the poorly punctuated dark,
for no matter what I tap out on the Olivetti,
the earth still looks inescapable from here.
But if some innocence remains,
a little of it might be here
on this small island
deserted in winter by tourists,
foreign commerce, and even the attention
of the more fashionable birds.
The green finch and the swifts are
content and have their say.
The boats are in each afternoon,
gulls climbing the air after them,
praising the fruits of the sea.

And if now we are not sure
what is of value--looking out
at the fig trees thin as refugees
along the cliff--we at least understand
what is worthless before our eyes
morning after morning, as the steam
and fog of industry lift off
beyond the port and to the west
without us.
                   I sit above the harbor,
happily on the benches provided
by the ayuntamiento for just this purpose,
beneath the orderly palms,
freighters and cruise ships slipping
in and out, going somewhere...
and make do with the intuition of wind,
the pines with their impromptu rhythms,
my hands and feet free
to defeat the intricate purposes of air,
to do nothing more than claim
the prosperity of light.
                                    Late afternoon,
I like the white tables fronting
the bars in the square, relaxing
with a small Estrella--a beer
named for a star--knowing that,
soon enough, around the corner,
I'll be on my way back
from the market and bakery
with a heart as full as the summer
5:00 sun, with a yellow grocery bag
in each hand as I ascend the steps
to our flat over the cove, where
I'll look out, and see in the reflection
of the glass doors, a happy man
arranging oranges in a bowl.

...

Buckley's Star Journal made for a great morning read in the office today.  His poems read like tidy little novels so the reader has time to sink their teeth in.

Christopher Buckley keeps a narrative line strong enough to climb up the side of a mountain with, or pull shipwrecked survivors from the sea.  He keeps it taut.  Buckley's narrative line is strong enough to be a lifeline, you could hang your hat on it.

Poverty

           for Phil

    la colera de pobre
     tiene dos rios contra muchos mares.

                                          --Cesar Vallejo

Vallejo wrote that with God we are all orphans.
I send $22 a month to a kid in Ecuador
so starvation keeps moving on its bony burro
past his door--no cars, computers,
basketball shoes--not a bottle cap
of hope for the life ahead...just enough
to keep hunger shuffling by in a low cloud
of flies. It's the least I can do,
and so I do it.
                      I have followed the dry length
of Mission Creek to the sea and forgotten to pray
for the creosote, the blue saliva, let alone
for pork bellies, soy bean futures.
                                                      Listen.
There are 900 thousand Avon Ladies in Brazil.
Billions are spent each year on beauty products
world-wide--28 billion on hair care, 14 on skin
conditioners, despite children digging on the dumps,
selling their kidneys, anything that is briefly theirs.
9 billion a month for war in Iraq, a chicken bone
for foreign aid.
                        I am the prince of small potatoes,
I deny them nothing who come to me beseeching
the crusts I have to give. I have no ground for complaint,
though deep down, where it's anyone's guess,
I covet everything that goes along with the illustrious--
creased pants as I stroll down the glittering boulevard,
a little aperitif beneath Italian pines. But who cares
what I wear, or drink? The rain? No, the rain is something
we share--it devours the beginning and the end.

The old stars tumble out of their bleak rooms like dice--
Box Cars, Snake Eyes, And-The-Horse-You-Rode-In-On...
not one metaphorical bread crumb in tow.
Not a single Saludo! from the patronizers
of the working class--Pharaoh Oil, Congress,
or The Commissioner of Baseball--all who will eventually
take the same trolley car to hell, or a slag heap
on the outskirts of Cleveland.
                                                I have an ATM card,
AAA Plus card. I can get cash from machines, be towed
20 miles to a service station. Where do I get off penciling in
disillusionment? My bones are as worthless as the next guy's
against the stars, against the time it takes light to expend
its currency across the cosmic vault. I have what everyone has--
the over-drawn statement of the air, my blood newly rich
with oxygen before the inescapable proscenium of the dark,
my breath going out equally with any atom of weariness
or joy, each one of which is closer to God than I.

...

Star Journal - Selected Poems is a big book full of big ideas and Today's book of poetry loved it.  The personal and political merge as Buckley storms over the horizon.  Today's book of poetry will be down for anything Christopher Buckley wants to cook from now till the end.  Buckley burns with the best.

Christopher Buckley

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Buckley has published twenty books of poetry, several chapbooks and limited editions, and three memoirs. He is the editor of six poetry anthologies as well as critical books on the poets Philip Levine, Larry Levis, and Luis Omar Salinas. Buckley is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Fulbright Award, four Pushcart prizes, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America, among other awards. Buckley has taught writing and creative writing at several universities, and is emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

BLURBS

“The poems are modest, straight forward, intensely lyrical and totally accessible. . . . This is a humble poetry of great truths and profound emotions that never overstates its concerns for the events both in and above the world. It rewards countless readings and never betrays itself.”   —Philip Levine on Sky in Ploughshares “Time and the shifts of time are the burden: not simply time as recollection or loss, but also and everywhere the persistent loneliness of star time, mastodon time, so that finally these are poems in which reflection takes on uncommon amplitude and presence. And all this would be nothing, of course, without the language, which is the glory of these poems.”      —Peter Everwine on Dark Matter “Christopher Buckley’s gift for wide-ranging thinking meshes so gracefully with lovingly tender details, he feels like a companion voice for all time—a Hikmet, a Neruda, yes.”       —Naomi Shihab Nye on Back Room at the Philosopher’s Club “There is a deep nostalgia here, but also wisdom and common sense, and beautiful writing. I welcome him at his maturist, poet of stardust.”     —Gerald Stern on And the Sea “The poems are verbally so rich, generous, out-loud (I can't not intone the rhetorical flourishes), inclusive, wry. I like especially the orientation to the large-picture physics/cosmology at the same time that (Buckley) relates his own past. . . . I like the tone—how else to address one's mortality & mixed luck except with irony & affection stirred with gratitude?”      —Dennis Schmitz “Some poets like only celestial music, other the grit of the streets, but Buckley engages winningly with both.”       —David Kirby in San Francisco Chronicle “Prize-winning poet Buckley has a unique poetic voice, a sort of breathless, long-sentenced style that is gripping and captivating . . . . These are poems of immortality and extinction that can still make you smile. He has an exquisite ear for language and a gutsy way of blending bravado with humility.”      —Judy Clarence in Library Journal "There is a quietness to these poems and breakouts of lyrical intensity that define Buckley as a master of the art."      —North of Oxford upress.pitt.edu 565 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.

The Art of the Lathe - B.H. Fairchild (Alice James Books)

Today's book of poetry:
The Art of the Lathe.  B.H. Fairchild.  Alice James Books.  University of Maine at Farmington.  Farmington, Maine.  1998.

1999 Pen Center USA West Poetry Award
1999 William Carlos Williams Award
1999 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
1998 National Book Award Finalist
1997 Beatrice Hawley Award

For many knowledgeable poetry fans it will be old news that B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe is a contemporary classic.  Today's book of poetry got Fairchild's gem in the mail yesterday and as a result we are sailing slightly off course today.

With our vast resources Today's book of poetry has started to gather foreign correspondents.  We currently have Otis wandering through the poetry cellars of Sicily searching for treasure, he will be returning soon.  Our latest addition to the staff is a trumpet playing be-bop artist from St. Louis, Mark Twang.

Mark grew up in reasonably normal environs but somewhere early on someone dropped a Pork Pie hat on his noggin' and he hasn't been quite right since.  Twang has been raiding his own vast library to send pieces of gold north.  Twang sent David Lee to our door and you will be hearing much more about Mr. Lee in the near future because he is a monster.  We had a thing, instantly, for David Lee. So we put him in the system.

The system wouldn't wait for B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe.  Today's book of poetry apologizes for not having read it before but you simply can't read everything, or find it.  Twang had sent us individual poems by B.H. Fairchild in his letters, along with quotes from Sonny Rollins and a couple of Crying Charlies.  Today's book of poetry was instantly convinced by those poems.  When The Art of the Lathe arrived we knew no one would object if Fairchild skipped his place in line.

The Art of the Lathe is an eye-opening deal breaker of extraordinary beauty.  Fairchild uses some deep sonar of the human spirit to get inside of the reader and then sets off bombs of reason.  The Art of the Lathe is the real deal.  When Twang sent it to us he included a note where he suggested that The Art of the Lathe may be the best, pound for pound, book of poetry he has ever read.  I happen to know for a fact that Mark Twang has read, and understood, more poetry than I have so I take his opinion to heart. That and he's been right about everything else he has told us.

So when The Art of the Lathe arrived I dug in.

Dear reader please believe me when I tell you that Mark Twang was right as rain.  The Art of the Lathe may be the finest book of poetry I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Body and Soul

Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,

our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling

the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend's father begins

to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story

about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.

These were men's teams, grown men, some in their thirties

and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,

sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music

whanging in their ear, little white rent houses to return to

where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores

and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul

in the bathtub stroking their husband's wrist tattoo and smoking

Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.

Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,

another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

They say, we're one man short, but can we use this boy,

he's only fifteen years old, and at least he'll make a game.

They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing

the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,

the thick neck, but then with that boy's face under

a clump of angelic blonde hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,

let's play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,

joking about the fat catcher's sex life, it's so bad

last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,

pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into

throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging

into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,

and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air,

talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little

angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter

and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead

and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs

right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two

but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure

that they pause a moment before turning around to watch

the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond

the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.

They're pretty quiet watching him round the bases,

but then, what the hell, the kids knows how to hit a ball,

so what, let's play some goddamned baseball here.

And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look

at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one

is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chambers,

high and big and sweet. The left fielder just stands there, frozen.

As if this isn't enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.

They can't believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced

man from Okarche who just doesn't give a shit anyway

because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with

three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,

leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch

who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something

out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something

that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards

the kid's elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed,

and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field

where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt

dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.

But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,

the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher

is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours

into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised

Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,

Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets

and they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them

though it should to you when they are told the boy's name is

Mickey Mantle. And that's the story, and those are the facts.

But the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan

the faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,

I think I know what the truth of this story is, and I imagine

it lying there in the weeds behind that Allis Chalmers

just waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh

why in hell didn't they just throw around the kid, walk him,

after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,

especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks

and diminishing expectations for who winning at anything

meant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,

who had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer

who without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could

  go home

with their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house

singing If You've Got the Money, Honey, I've Got the Time

with a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab

Dixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum

as if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not.

And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.

And they did not because sometimes after making love,

after smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and

listening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,

so distant, they glanced over at their wives and noticed the lines

growing heavier around the eyes and the mouth, felt what their wives

felt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing

  couples

and in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness

were as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon

ballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there

in the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary

that said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves

looped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not

because they had gone through a depression and a war that

  had left

them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers

and everyone else had cost them just too goddamned much to lay it

at the feet of a fifteen year-old boy. And so they did not walk him,

and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves

to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not

a fact. When I see my friend's father staring hard into the

  bottomless

well of home plate as Mantle's fifth homer heads towards Arkansas,

I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and

worthless Dodge has also encountered for his first and possibly

only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen

as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde

and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgiven.

...

Today's book of poetry isn't much of a baseball fan and suspect that many of you aren't big ball fans either but we do know how difficult it is to dream the real thoughts of men and women and make them more than real on the page.  When Fairchild gets through with you it is almost possible to believe that the stories in his poems are your own experience.

As a recent convert to the House of Fairchild I have assigned Milo, our head tech, the task of filling all the missing Fairchild spaces on our racks.  He was able to find a copy of Fairchild's Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (W.W. Norton Books, 2003) on the shelves but that won't ever be enough.

Keats

I knew him. He ran the lathe next to mine.

Perfectionist, a madman, even on overtime

Saturday night. Hum of the crowd floating

from the ball park, shouts, slamming doors

from the bar down the street, he would lean

into the lathe and make a little song

with the honing cloth, rubbing the edges,

smiling like a man asleep, dreaming.

A short guy, but fearless. At Margie's

he would take no lip, put the mechanic big

as a Buick through a stack of crates out back

and walked away with a broken thumb

but never said a word. Marge was a loud

dirty girl with booze breath and bad manners.

He loved her. One night late I saw them in

the kitchen dancing something like a rhumba

to the radio, dishtowels wrapped around

their heads like swamis. Their laughter chimed

rich as brass rivets rolling down a tin roof.

But it was the work that kept him out of fights,

and I remember the red hair flaming

beneath the lamp, calipers measuring out

the last cut, his hands flicking iron burrs

like shooting stars through the shadows.

It was the iron, cut to a perfect fit, smooth

as bone chine and gleaming under lamplight

that made him stand back, take out a smoke,

and sing. It was the dust that got him, his lungs

collapsed from breathing in a life of work.

Lying there, his hands are what I can't forget.

...

B.H. Fairchild had some very rapt ears on his work this morning.  It is bitterly cold here in Ottawa today but our reading helped to heat up the office.  Milo, our head tech, was very dignified, Kathleen, our Jr. Editor, gushed.  Max, our Sr. Editor, harrumphed as he marched out into the cold but he was smiling when he marched back in.  Max gave us a world-class reading of "Body and Soul", Odin grinned from the corner.

Our foreign correspondent Otis is still in Sicily checking out wine cellars but he's scheduled to return later this week.   Otis also sent a note making sure I included him when the staff here at Today's book of poetry welcomed our newest member, Mark Twang.

After reading B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe I am now considering making all of our future staff take an oath of office by swearing on Fairchild.

The Art of the Lathe

Leonardo imagined the first one.

The next was a pole lathe with a drive cord,

illustrated in Plumier's L'art de tourner en perfection.

Then Ramsden, Vauconson, the great Maudslay,

his students Roberts, Fox, Clement, Whitworth.

The long line of machinists to my left

lean into their work, ungloved hands adjusting the calipers,

tapping the big lightly with their fingertips.

Each man withdraws into his house of work:

the rough cut, shearing of iron by tempered steel,

blue-black threads lifting like locks of hair,

then breaking over bevel and ridge.

Oil and water splash over the whitening bit, hissing.

The lathe on night-shift, moonlight silvering the bed-ways.

The old man I apprenticed with, Roy Garcia,

in silk shirt, khakis, and Florsheims. Cautious,

almost delicate explanations and slow,

shapely hand movements. Craft by repetition.

Haig and Haig behind the tool chest.

In Diderot's Encyclopaedia, an engraving

of a small machine shop: forge and bellows in back,

in the foreground a mandrel lathe turned by a boy.

It is late afternoon, and the copper light leaking in

from the street side of the shop just catches

his elbow, calf, shoe. Taverns begin to crowd

with workmen curling over their tankards,

still hearing in the rattle of carriages over cobblestone

the steady tap of the treadle,

the gasp and heave of the bellows.

The boy leaves the shop, cringing into the light,

and digs the grime from his fingernails, blue

from bruises. Walking home, he hears a clavier--

Couperin, maybe, a Bach toccata--from a window overhead.

Music, he thinks, the beautiful.

Tavern doors open. Voices. Grab and hustle of the street.

Cart wheels. The small room of his life. The darkening sky.

I listen to the clunk-and-slide of the milling machine,

Maudsley's art of clarity and precision: sculpture of poppet,

saddle, jack screw, pawl, cone-pulley,

the fit and mesh of gears, tooth in groove like interlaced fingers.

I think of Mozart folding and unfolding his napkin

as the notes sound in his head. The new machinist sings

  Patsy Cline,

I Fall To Pieces. Sparrows bicker overhead.

Screed of the grinder, the bandsaw's groan and wail.

In his boredom the boy in Diderot

studies again through the shop's open door

the buttresses of Suger's cathedral

and imagines the young Leonardo in his apprenticeship

staring through the window at Brunelleschi's dome,

solid yet miraculous, a resurrected body, floating above the city.

Outside, a cowbird cries, flapping up from the pipe rack,

the ruffling of wings like a quilt flung over a bed.

Snow settles on the tops of cans, black rings in a white field.

The stock, cut clean, gleams under lamplight.

After work, I wade back through the silence of the shop:

the lathes shut down, inert, like enormous animals in hibernation,

red oil rags lying limp on the shoulders

of machines, dust motes still climbing shafts

of dawn light, hook and hoist chains lying desultory

as an old drunk collapsed outside a bar,

barn swallows pecking on the shores of oil puddles--

emptiness, wholeness; a cave, a cathedral.

As morning light washes the walls of Florence,

the boy Leonardo mixes paints in Verrocchio's shop

and watches the new apprentice muddle

the simple task of the Madonna's shawl.

Leonardo whistles a canzone and imagines

a lathe: the spindle, bit, and treadle, the gleam of brass.

...

Today's book of poetry is thrilled to travel back to 1998 to bring you this masterwork.  Make no mistake, B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe is as good as it gets.

B.H. Fairchild

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B. H. Fairchild, the author of several acclaimed poetry collections and a recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, has been a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize. He teaches in the creative writing PhD program at the University of North Texas.

BLURBS

“The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched. . . . Workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music. . .”
     — Los Angeles Times

“With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work. . . . Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration.”
     — Anthony Hecht

B. H. Fairchild 

at VCP Poetry Series

video: Wayne Linberg

alicejamesbooks.org

564

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.