Guest post by poet Richard Nester

www.ashleynorwoodcooper.com

Open House

Thanks to everybody who turned out for yesterday's jolly open house / open studio / book signing, a joint event thrown by me and painter AshleyNorwood Cooper. Take a look at her paintings!

* * *

Guest at The Palace at 2:00 a.m.

And here's a post from poet Richard Nester. Richard has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has published poetry in many journals, including Ploughshares, Callaloo, and Seneca Review. His first collection of poetry is Buffalo Laughter. You can find a post about the book here. Richard Nester is married to poet Robbi Nester; they have one son.

Fun in the Confessional

Kelsay Books, 2014

Confessionalism was all the rage when I started writing poetry in high school. Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath had made Time magazine. As a teenager with angst to burn, how could I not be hooked? Add history and the brew became even more potent. The Russians, Akhmatova and Mandelstam especially, lived dangerously and turned their private lives into vital political critiques. One of the first books of poetry that I purchased was Voznesensky’s Anti-worlds and the list of his translators provoked even more discoveries—Kunitz and Snodgrass. 

As a southerner, history was at my fingertips (literally if you consider the local library’s stock of Civil War lit). Faulkner said that every southern boy lives Pickett’s Charge over and over, and he wasn’t far wrong. There’s nothing like losing to get under one’s skin, an itch that can jump regional boundaries. After all, the Boston Red Sox were far more interesting before they won three of five World Series.

In fact, confessionalism had been around before M.L.Rosenthal coined the term and wrote that Lowell had gone “beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment.” Poets had been relying on home-grown experiences, tearing into their lives and reconstituting the pieces on the

Richard Nester

printed page, for a long time. It is hard to imagine poetry more intimate than Emily Dickinson’s eyeball-to-eyeball addresses or Hopkin’s “terrible sonnets.” But there is a difference between their work and the confessionalism that Lowell created, a certain “slant”ness that keeps the reader on the other side like the glass and telephones separating inmates and visitors in prison dramas. Yeats too is a precursor as he walks “among schoolchildren” or prays beside his daughter’s crib. However, Lowell takes him to task for a calculation that he thinks verges on dishonesty as no one walks and prays “for exactly one hour.” Yeats had yet to commit himself to what Lowell called “the real skinny,” the raw truth in his view.

One problem with confessionalism in the raw is that hanging one’s dirty laundry—if I may seriously mix a metaphor—can lead to hurt feelings. Lowell got into some major personal dust-ups in which he had to invoke the supreme authority of art to save his skin. It’s not an alibi that persuades everyone, ask Elizabeth Bishop, in that it merely attempts to erase the distinction between poetry and gossip. Lowell’s poem “Dolphin” is a gloss on the emotional armor it takes to be an out-and-out confessionalist (or is it out-and-outing?)

Dolphin

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,

forgetful as Racine, the man of craft,

drawn through his maze of iron composition

by the incomparable wandering voice of Phedre.

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangman’s knot of sinking lines,

the glassy bowing and scraping of my will . . .

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself—

to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,

an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Is that an allusion to Yeats “walked and prayed” I hear in Lowell’s “sat and listened”?

I felt a certain Lowellian spirit hovering over me recently as I moved toward completion of a poem that both named a name and arose as a meditation on an academic moment.

Facing Facts

My son’s Soc. text is full of strange fish,

commonplaces no less exotic for being familiar.

Take the principle of least interest. 

Now there’s a gloomy little butterfly of truth,

the plot of Alfie or Maugham’s Of Human Bondage,

alive on every teenage date I ever had. It says 

the less you love the more you run the show.

I read the postulate aloud and right away

my son said “Emily”—ouch. 

Who of us would want to live that way, 

but we do. Houdini stepping into the straitjacket

and staying there.

Richard Nester

Well, I’m not recommending my poem for inclusion in the next Norton Anthology, but perhaps you can see the similarities between its situation and Lowell’s “Dolphin.” It describes what I take to be a serious human problem, and I thought about posting it on my Facebook page. However, there’s my son and his former girlfriend to consider. I could, of course, invent a name besides “Emily,” but there’s a perfection to that name that my poor invention cannot surpass. In any case, the poem won’t appear anywhere until I’ve asked my son about it. Though I don’t plan on giving him artistic control.

Contact with younger poets has given me new perspectives on confessionalism. Denise Weuve at a “spoken word” reading said that her second book was less “confessional” than her first, a movement that had been predicted by a mentor as something that would occur naturally as she got early adolescent issues off her chest. This perspective is common, but I think demeans confessionalism as a strategy for making poetry. Confessionalism is more durable and more broadly useful than that and also less psychoanalytic.

Other perspectives have given me more fertile understandings. During a sojourn at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, I came to know a poet who washes dishes at their skid row kitchen, Arnal Kennedy. Arnal writes poems about religious faith that have the same fire one finds in Hopkins, but he covers other subjects as well from street encounters, to battlefield memoirs, to love affairs. Astonished by the range of experience in his book You Woke Me in the Dark, I asked him “how many lifetimes” he had had. His reply was that he found first person to be the most compelling point of view and used it even when the experience wasn’t his own or had been fictionalized. I suddenly felt very naïve, a victim of Lowell’s “real skinny” dictum. “Real” might just as well mean “compellingly told.” So I now have another tool in my confessional toolkit as well as another dodge. Oh, that’s not about you, I just made it up. Or put another way, perhaps the confessional version of Yeats’ golden bird from “Sailing to Byzantium” is not keeping “a drowsy emperor awake” so much as preventing a bored priest from nodding off. Why couldn’t I have discovered lying sooner?

Richard Nester on "Buffalo Laughter"

Cover art by Lavina Blossom
Hemet, California: Kelsay Books, 2014

Buffalo Laughter

Every year the buffalo get
together like a bunch of old actors.
There are only enough of them
left to make a movie.
The head buffalo plans something,
but the old times and the new times
are one time now, and it never quite happens.
There's a buffet--grass mostly and some water.
For a couple of hours the buffalo laughter
is plentiful, stampeding around the room
and then settling like snow.
It isn't as sad as you might think.
Later, there's a bill for the busted chairs.

Richard Nester's collection of poems, Buffalo Laughter (Kelsay Books, 2014), will soon be featured at Lady Word of Mouth. In the meantime, here are some ruminations about the title from Richard, with a splash of advice to young poets.

As far as my collection goes, why the title? Several years ago I came across a kind of workshop precept advanced by Allen Ginsberg that one should never pair an adjective with a noun that embodies a quality already present in the noun. It so happens that Robert Bly violates the precept in a poem I am fond of reciting (partly because it’s short) when he says about striving

           How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
           Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
           The white flake of snow
           That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

Isn’t snow by its nature white? Perhaps not any more. In any case, I enjoy both Bly’s violation of the precept and the precept itself because Ginsberg’s advice provides a spur to creativity of the sort particular to poetry, and is likely to give birth to my favorite trope—the oxymoron. There don’t seem to be all that many oxymorons in English poetry (assuming the Norton Anthology provides us with a representative sample) prior to Robert Herrick, but following his announcement that a “wild civility” is to be preferred in art as well as female fashion, the oxymorons start to bloom like wild flowers.

So all I was originally trying to do with “buffalo laughter” was to please myself by making an oxymoron. I had been watching a television documentary the night before that described the state of the American continent before the arrival of Europeans. Of course, buffalo were plentiful then. However, the show made the somewhat ironic point that this plentitude wasn’t really a “natural” condition, but was rather the result of a complex symbiosis existing between the plains Indians and buffalo wherein Native Americans by engaging in slash and burn agriculture had created more space for buffalo to prosper. So even in those relatively pristine days, ecologically speaking, humankind was still impacting its environment in unpredictable ways.

In reviewing the poem following its appearance in Floyd County Moonshine—a very good magazine currently being published in the small town I grew up in—the local newspaper in its review of that issue described it as “whimsical.” Okay, but I had ambitions for it beyond mere whimsy. I considered it as embedding a kind of ecological comment in its structure. As the poem anthropomorphizes the buffalo, it simultaneously “bisonizes” humanity. The buffalo may well be laughing sardonically when the “bill” for the chairs “busted” by humanity comes due. Nevertheless, it’s still not as “sad as you might think.” After all, the universe will hardly be stopping to weep when the bill is at last presented.

Was I thinking about all this when I wrote the poem. Yes, absolutely. And also, just as absolutely—no! If I may pause to offer some advice to beginning poets, just give yourself a chance, by whatever means necessary, to get lucky, and give yourself the maximum opportunity to learn those means by reading and reading and reading. I can’t tell you exactly what those means are because some of them may not have been invented yet. After all, who told Dickinson that it might be a good idea to use dashes as a primary means of punctuation, and what’s to keep your adoption of the same style from being mere affectation. Nothing. Poetry makes no promises.

How the collection came to be called “Buffalo Laughter” is just that the title poem didn’t seem to fit with most of the other poems precisely because it was so “whimsical.” But I loved it, and so I created a rationale for its inclusion by calling the whole volume that and by positioning it close to other “nature” poems, like “Dune Grass,” whose anthropomorphizing is less obvious. Perhaps, between the two of them, one gets another resonance, which is that the subject of the book as a whole is about humanity’s place in the scheme of things that we create in the stories that we tell about ourselves—all kinds of stories, even Bible stories, which were among the first stories that I heard in my life. Way before Doctor Seuss or the Illiad, which by the way is alluded to in the poem “Between You and Me.”