{"id":130716,"date":"2018-11-08T11:00:46","date_gmt":"2018-11-08T16:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130716"},"modified":"2018-11-08T15:20:14","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T20:20:14","slug":"poetry-is-a-volley-between-the-living-and-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/08\/poetry-is-a-volley-between-the-living-and-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Is a Volley between the Living and the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Francine j. harris.<\/p><\/div>\n

The influence of one poet upon another is neither simple nor singular, but a matrix of experiences, of other poetry absorbed, adapted, smeared, blended, and spat out. I\u2019m going to take a close look at the work of one extraordinary new poet, francine j. harris, whose highly original poems demonstrate a wide range of influences absorbed and put to new uses, or to old uses in new contexts. Harris is a black woman whose upbringing and adult residence in the city of Detroit are major subjects for her poetry. So are the subtle and overt manifestations of racism, especially against black people, in America. She\u2019s also a formal and verbal innovator, bringing together elements of the experimental and modernist traditions in American poetry with aspects of performance poetry and the confessional lyric. From all of these strains, it\u2019s easy to draw lines back to harris\u2019s forerunners, but it\u2019s also startling to see how, by combining them, she\u2019s created powerful new poetry for our time.<\/p>\n

In many ways, harris is an exemplary contemporary poet. If contemporary poetry has a hallmark, it is variety: the best poets of this period are neither experimental nor traditional, neither formal nor free, neither political nor aesthete. A formalist, a confessional poet, a protest poet, a love poet, and more, harris is a skeptic about the possibilities of language to effect change and create bridges between individuals. Her best poems demonstrate the breadth of what a contemporary poem can be, making her an ideal case study in how the work of older poets, and contemporaries, is exerting influence on new poetry.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s only in the work of a newer poet that we can identify the achievements of the older ones. The marks of a wide array of poets, from e.\u2009e. cummings to Robert Hayden to Lucille Clifton to D.\u2009A. Powell, appear in harris\u2019s work. And there are plenty of others in the mix as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lucille Clifton.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I can\u2019t imagine harris hasn\u2019t read Lucille Clifton deeply. By the time harris must have been starting her serious poetic pursuits in the nineties, Clifton was one of America\u2019s most acclaimed poets. The two poets share elements of a literary mission: to fashion a highly personal and individual voice that can nonetheless engage the larger black community. And they both write out of urban landscapes, transposing the pastoral mode to the city. Both of them seem to subscribe deeply to the school of poetic thought that stresses the inseparability of the personal and the political. Clifton would have been a necessary and liberating model, a jumping-off point for harris.<\/p>\n

The first poem in 1969\u2019s good times<\/em>, Clifton\u2019s first published collection, is called \u201cin the inner city.\u201d It\u2019s the kind of ars poetica that signals a new poet\u2019s new voice. Here it is in its entirety:<\/p>\n

in the inner city
\nor
\nlike we call it
\nhome
\nwe think a lot about uptown
\nand the silent nights
\nand the houses straight as
\ndead men
\nand the pastel lights
\nand we hang on to our no place
\nhappy to be alive
\nand in the inner city
\nor
\nlike we call it
\nhome<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a seemingly simple poem with deep undertones. Clifton is a poet of icons, broad strokes that are meant to indicate a vast swath of specifics. In the poem\u2019s first phrase, Clifton makes a number of claims. The first line signals the pastoral, the communing with one\u2019s environment. To outsiders\u2014white readers, perhaps, uptown\u2014\u201cinner city\u201d indicates a kind of forbidden zone, a frightening place where they won\u2019t be welcome. But right away, Clifton makes it clear that this poem is not spoken by an outsider\u2014it is uttered on behalf of a collective, a \u201cwe\u201d for whom the \u201cinner city\u201d is<\/em>\u00a0home. When Clifton repeats that phrase at the poem\u2019s conclusion, after shading in the aspects of this \u201cno place\u201d that frighten even the insiders\u2014\u201cthe houses straight as \/ dead men\u201d\u2014as well as its beauty, such as the \u201cpastel lights,\u201d the repetition indicates resignation as well as celebration. This is Clifton wringing deep meaning out of a seemingly simple poem, as if to indicate the unjust circumstances black people are forced to live with, as well as their capacity to fashion a \u201chome\u201d despite those circumstances. So \u201cin the inner city\u201d is a protest poem as much as a pastoral, railing subtly against subjugation and imprisonment in the city, but also claiming the deep and personal dignity that makes this community \u201chappy to be alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris\u2019s take on this theme, called \u201ci live in detroit,\u201d which appears early in her first book, is far longer and more specific but uses many of the same techniques. It\u2019s a ghazal, a classical form with roots in Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani music but which was popularized among modern American poets by Agha Shahid Ali, the revered Kashmiri American poet who lived and published in the United States from the seventies until his death in 2001. The ghazal is a series of somewhat independent couplets that share a typically melancholy theme and use a repeated word or phrase at the end of the last line of each couplet. For harris, that phrase is in detroit<\/em>, and the poem serves as a sad ode to her hometown, illuminating its beauty and its darkness in much the same way Clifton\u2019s poem does for her archetypal \u201cinner city.\u201d Here\u2019s a part of it:<\/p>\n

she said i live in detroit. and there are no flowers in detroit.
\nso why would anyone in detroit write about flowers in detroit.<\/p>\n

i don\u2019t tell her we live under the trees. root up curbs and dam fire hydrants
\nto water black pansies licked to the sides of popped black balloons in detroit.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

there are plenty of violets in flophouses. pistils broken open
\non forty-ounce mouth lids making honeybees bastards in detroit.<\/p>\n

i don\u2019t tell her look around you. i don\u2019t point out the bottoms of coffee cups
\nwhere the city spits iris and scratches the back of your throat in detroit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Clifton, harris is a poet of icons and subtle undercurrents, but she\u2019s also a poet of the Internet age, so she has a lot more language to compete and contend with. Clifton, writing at the end of the sixties\u2014a time of protests and accessible, loud slogans, the energy of which she tried to incorporate into her poems\u2014could get what she wanted out of broad strokes. One feels that harris, spurred by endless, anxious social-media feeds, wants to get everything into her lines. Hence her poems are often overwhelmed and overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Flowers are harris\u2019s version of Clifton\u2019s \u201cpastel lights.\u201d \u201cThere are no flowers in detroit. \/ so why would anyone in detroit write about flowers in detroit,\u201d the poem\u2019s interlocutor asks. In responding, harris also claims a collective community\u2014\u201cwe live under the trees\u201d\u2014and the poem works, with subtle anger and celebration, to show the outsider why \u201cwe are happy to be alive\u201d \u201cin detroit\u201d and to offer the insider a sense of familiarity and kinship.<\/p>\n

This poet, too, has her \u201cinner city\u201d to explain. There are flowers in Detroit, harris asserts, both the plants and the people who have grown strong in spite of dark circumstances. The power of plants to split pavement\u2014like William Carlos Williams\u2019s \u201cflower that splits\u00a0\/ the rocks\u201d\u2014is the poem\u2019s central metaphor. Despite the lack of lush greenery, the people of inner-city Detroit \u201croot up curbs and dam fire hydrants \/ to water black pansies,\u201d a figure for black children playing in the spray of opened hydrants.<\/p>\n

Where Clifton could make do with the iconic \u201cpastel lights,\u201d harris chooses to specify, taking us through a cascade of layered metaphors, flowers that are people blooming despite adversity. And all her images are double-edged, simultaneously grim and hopeful, protesting and celebrating at once. \u201cThere are plenty of violets in flophouses,\u201d she writes, and \u201csome of our mothers rescued begonias with cheap plastic planters,\u201d showing these city dwellers importing natural beauty into their environment, adopting a kind of actual pastoral.<\/p>\n

Of course harris is angry: life for inner-city black people hasn\u2019t improved much, and \u201clike a lot of flowers,\u201d they are at the mercy of larger forces: \u201ci have split my stem. cleaved into root balls. stuck to sweaty \/ bus windows. like so much dandelion, i get rinsed down shelter shower drains in detroit.\u201d The poet exhibits a split self, both a victim of centuries of unforgivable treatment that have led to poverty and few opportunities, and also, like Clifton, a celebrant of her community\u2019s endurance and strength, claiming her \u201chome.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the poem, harris finds herself wishing for access to nature and beauty the city simply can\u2019t\u2014won\u2019t\u2014afford. Her ending\u2014\u201cif I can\u2019t leave. is that enough flower grounded in detroit\u201d\u2014renders her flower metaphor highly ironic: these flowers are both \u201cgrounded,\u201d as in rooted, at home, and ground down, minimized, subjugated. The outsider who at the poem\u2019s beginning says \u201cthere are no flowers in detroit\u201d is schooled by the poem. The poem is meant to warn this person of how much she misunderstands: there are flowers, but not the kind she assumes. To say there are none dismisses Detroit\u2019s survival and empowerment; it\u2019s an insult. And reading backward from harris to Clifton adds a shade of irony to Clifton\u2019s ending, too, lending the word home<\/em>\u00a0another layer, forcing outsiders to confront the difference between what they and the inner-city citizens call theirs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

D.\u2009A. Powell. Photo: Trane DeVore.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Perhaps more influential on harris\u2019s poems is D.\u2009A. Powell. Like harris\u2019s, Powell\u2019s poems stand at the convergence of many streams. Powell may be, for instance, the only poet to show how the Bible and eighties club music are of equal value to poetry. Powell is an imperative poetic chronicler of HIV and AIDS<\/small>; his language is equally rooted in the time it describes and timeless. Put simply, Powell\u2019s work combines both important subject matter and major formal innovation. Many poets do one or the other, but few do both so seamlessly, with such deep roots in the history of language itself.<\/p>\n

Powell\u2019s most obvious innovation is his long, expansive line. A line is a poem\u2019s basic unit, meant to symbolize or visualize a unit of thought, a packet of language that belongs together, according to poet and poem. It\u2019s a verbal scene, a view from the poem\u2019s window. This notion\u2014one packet to one line\u2014worked for much of the history of poetry, when it was more natural to imagine and musically score thoughts occurring one at a time (though of course they never did). But what\u2019s the appropriate line for a time of many thoughts at once, for layers of associations, for vision saturated with media, for an era when the mind is battered with information from all directions? Powell developed and honed his own version of a single line that could accommodate multiple lines in one, many packets.<\/p>\n

The gaps in the poems\u2019 long lines function a little like semicolons in sentences: the separated phrases are, or could be, lines of their own, but they have too much to do with each other to be separated. They are parts of a single thought, spilling into each other backward and forward across the line. In this way, Powell gets more than one line onto a line, asserting something about how we make associations now. Powell began writing before the Internet was omnipresent; he wrote out of what might be called the first era of media saturation since maybe the fifties and out of a camp sensibility, with pop music, film, TV, literature, and product placement all blurring together. Powell\u2019s is a poetry of reminders. Songs recall experiences recall places recall times recall people recall songs, and so on.<\/p>\n

A quick glance makes Powell\u2019s influence on harris obvious\u2014even from a distance, the poems look similar. Let\u2019s take two poems with related themes, the first a possible model for the second. Here is all of Powell\u2019s short \u201c[nicholas the ridiculous: you will always be 27 and impossible. no more expectations]\u201d:<\/p>\n

nicholas the ridiculous: you will always be 27 and impossible.\u2003no more expectations
\nyou didn\u2019t carry those who went in long cars after you.\u2003stacking lie upon lie as with children
\nswearing \u201cno\u201d to pain and \u201cyes\u201d to eternity.\u2003you would have been a bastard: told the truth<\/p>\n

afternoons I knelt beside your hiding place\u2003this is the part where you speak to me from beyond]
\nand he walks with me and he talks with me.\u2003he tells me that I am his own.<\/em>\u2003dammit
\nnothing.\u2003oh sure once in a while a dream.\u2003a half-instant.\u2003but you are no angel you are<\/p>\n

repeating the same episodes: nick at night.\u2003tricky nick.\u2003nicholas at halloween a giant tampon
\ndon\u2019t make me mature by myself: redundancy of losing common ground.\u2003for once be serious<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here is part of harris\u2019s longish poem \u201ckatherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet\u201d:<\/p>\n

this morning, i heard you were found in your mcdonald\u2019s uniform.<\/p>\n

i heard it while i was visiting a lake town, where empty
\nwoodsy highways turn into waterside drives.<\/p>\n

i\u2019d forgotten my toothbrush and was brushing my teeth with one finger.
\na friend who didn\u2019t know you said he\u2019d heard it like this: you know katherine. short.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

with a lazy eye. poet. not a very good one. yeah, well she died<\/em>. the blue on that lake
\nisn\u2019t so frank. it fogs off into the horizon like styrofoam. the<\/p>\n

picnic tables full of white people. i ask them where the coffee is. they say at meijer.<\/p>\n

i wonder if you thought about getting out of detroit. when you read at the open mic
\nyou\u2019d point across the street at mcdonald\u2019s and tell us to come see you.<\/p>\n

katherine with the lazy eye. short and not a good poet, i guess i almost cried.
\ni don\u2019t know why, because i didn\u2019t like you. this is the first i remembered your name.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both poems are elegies for lost community members\u2014nicholas a friend and fellow clubgoer who died of AIDS<\/small>, katherine a fellow poet. Nicholas was beloved, katherine disliked. Both leave the poems\u2019 speakers feeling guilty, longing for a chance to speak again. Both poems deal with a kind of ambivalent love and a complicated, abstract, distant form of loss.<\/p>\n

The poems\u2019 similarities don\u2019t stop with the line. Powell\u2019s nicholas \u201cwill always be 27 and impossible,\u201d a young man frozen in time, his youthful mischief and stubbornness preserved by death. Similarly, katherine will always be the young woman \u201cwith the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet,\u201d an unfulfilled artist for all eternity. Both of these character descriptions are also fears the poems\u2019 speakers harbor about themselves, cautionary tales, roads thankfully not taken. Perhaps Powell survived because of his changeability; he was, perhaps, not \u201cimpossible.\u201d Harris became a good poet and so was able to transcend her circumstances. And of course both went on to become chroniclers of those who, unlike themselves, couldn\u2019t survive AIDS<\/small> and the damnations of Detroit, so that both of these poems enact a kind of survivor\u2019s guilt.<\/p>\n

The failings of nicholas and katherine are enumerated in both poems. In life and then in death, nicholas fails as a lover: he \u201ctells me that I am his own<\/em>.\u2003dammit \/ nothing.\u2003oh sure once in a while a dream\u201d; in a later part of her poem, harris describes how katherine let \u201csome homeless dude \/ flirt with you.\u201d Both, through a kind of irresponsibility or desperation, succumb to their environments\u2019 hazards, AIDS<\/small> for nicholas, violence \u201cin an abandoned building\u201d for katherine. Neither could adapt and protect themselves. But in the poems, each is a projection of the speaker\u2019s fear. For Powell, nicholas is a cautionary tale about the dangers of promiscuous sex in an age of disease; \u201cfor once be serious\u201d he entreats this man who is \u201cno angel,\u201d doomed to \u201crepeating the same episodes\u201d in Powell\u2019s memory, offering no new wisdom or advice. For harris, katherine, who foolishly lived \u201clike nothing\u2019s gonna get you,\u201d can\u2019t show the way, in this elegy, \u201cto leave detroit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Poetry is a reader\u2019s art: poets make new poems in response to the ones they\u2019ve read, using a special way of communicating, through symbols and gestures, insinuations, fakes and feints. Robert Frost said it \u201cprovides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.\u201d Poetry requires like-minded conversation partners, other poets and poems communicating in this way.\u00a0 Poetic influence occurs as an aspect of this kind of conversation, a volleying between poets living and dead, as the ongoing conversations among harris, Clifton, and Powell make plain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books of poetry, most recently <\/em>The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions), which won the 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His collection of essays, <\/em>We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress (Graywolf), was just published this week. He edited <\/em>Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions). He also teaches at NYU and the New School and is the director of special editorial projects for Publishers Weekly.<\/em><\/p>\n

This essay is an adapted excerpt from\u00a0<\/em>We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress<\/a>, by Craig Morgan Teicher, published by Graywolf Press this week.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In francine j. harris\u2019s verse, Craig Morgan Teicher senses the inner-city pastorals of Lucille Clifton and the burning elegies of D. A. 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