Poets Die

Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies Association

Death comes. Always. Everyone knows this. Poets tend to dwell on it. For Diane di Prima, it came, one might say, naturally, in the eighty-eighth year of a daring, dynamic, and celebrated life. For Vittoria Repetto, it came in obscurity, in the form of a virus that found humanity through a Chinese market not so different from the ones where she bought supplies to practice herbal healing. For Bob Viscusi, it came in waves of disease, which struck him near the end of an epic voyage to comprehend the oceans that have borne us here. As I sit thinking about them, I am weeks away from heart surgery, feeling close to my own death, and feeling also that at least I understand the parameters of life, especially the writer's life, better for having known and read the work of these three extraordinary poets.

Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2018

This essay represents the Closing Remarks for the Opening Session of the 2017 National Communication Association annual convention. It attempts to make usable the profound thoughts and rhetoric experienced in a session of performative pleasure and protest.

2012

This anniversary of John Donne’s death (31 March), approaching at a time occupied by occupations of one public space after another in the name of (almost) everybody, marks an appropriate moment for reflection on fear and religion by way of poetry. Donne’s career, before and after his ordination, is a life in poetry poised between love and death – or, more properly, in love, in medias res, eye to eye with death in the arc (as Doris Humphrey suggested) between dying and dying. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx characterized religion as “the general theory of this world,” inverted, as he understood it, because the state in which we live is upside down. A general theory of a world is a product of that world, but it is also a vision of the whole of that world articulated by one acting in it as a theorist, inside standing as though out. In a time and place marked by pervasive feelings of impending danger identified with death and politics, Donne embraced poetry as a sacramental act affirming the real presence of love. At a time when those feelings are familiar, that is where I propose to begin – not with a paper on Donne but, taking Donne as an exemplar, with a brief essay in what can be done in poetry in medias res to nurture a res publica that is not twisted by fear toward violence.

It is possible the origins of religious ways of thinking are to be found in the effortsd of humankind to avoid, or at least to cope with, death. This essay simply aligns a few major poems of the English literary tradition according to their attitude toward death.

Journal of the Association For the Study of Australian Literature, 2009

In much of Francis Webb's poetry 'the tale brings death' ('A Drum for Ben Boyd', CB 47), but death largely remains off-stage. The poetry seeks to dramatise the arduous journey towards death rather than the moment of death itself. In 'A Death at Winson Green' (1953-54) 1 the repetitive drum of 'dead' closes every stanza and insistently drives the poem towards the moment of death. But the poem refuses to name that moment. It eschews the space of death and remains focused on the gaping bed: Time crouches, watching, near his face of snows. He is all life, thrown on the gaping bed, Blind, silent, in a trance, and shortly, dead. (CB 160) There is a significant shift, however, in Webb's last poems in which death is more deeply explored and, in 'Sturt and the Vultures' (1970), boldly named. A clear example of this development can be seen if one compares the stanza endings of two structurally similar poems: 'A Death at Winson Green' and 'Incident ' (1970). Both poems record the goings on in a hospital ward at a time when the speaker contemplates the death of an inpatient. In the later poem the patient is dead; his name is McMurtrie. The 'lie as still as the dead', 'feast-day long since dead', 'almost dead', 'almost dead' and 'shortly, dead', which close the stanzas of the earlier poem give way to five insistent 'McMurtrie's dead' (CB 235). The tentative approach to death of the earlier poem is replaced with an almost brutal confrontation of the event. It is important to note, however, that in both poems the dying and the dead man are transfigured in and through their suffering. Elsewhere I have discussed how death and the void are explored in Webb's final poem 'Lament for St Maria Goretti' (1973). 2 I want, here, to trace how death and the space it occupies begin to be more fully confronted in the poetry, and then offer a reading of the relationship between poetry and death in 'Sturt and the Vultures'.

The Yale Review, 2014

TEXT

the screeching of anarchic cats, a child crying, a voice from somewhere could be of pleasure or anguish. At dawn, exhausted fences lean inwards, over palings where fruit-tree branches hang, dry thickskinned lemons, sun-hardened, bird-picked. Wind gusts drift papers and grit into corners. On a back step, a pot of scarlet bougainvillea-the pavement gives way to soft purple flowers of clover their intimacy of a naked inner wrist exposed by a dressing-gown sleeve pushed back from wet soapsuds in a sink: back in alleys there's a thrumming, like heartbeatsit thuds and blossoms and roars.

2013

This thesis is composed of two parts: Hoard, a collection of poems, and Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry, an inquiry into the metaphor of darkness in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry. Hoard includes four series of poems-'Red Boat', 'Hoxne', 'Quatrefoils' and 'White Swan'-which use the Hoxne hoard as a metaphor for lost love. The second series is titled 'Foundlings', and is based on archival tokens from children who were abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the mid-eighteenth century. The third series includes 'Elegy' and 'Decorations', and uses descriptions of the Staffordshire hoard along with eyewitness accounts of global conflict in the late-twentieth century to the present day. Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry examines the theme of loss presented in the poems Hoard, progressing from orphans to silenced women to bereavement to war to ecological disaster. The book is a series of mediations of a central topic and includes close readings that show how an individual contemporary writer uses the topic within his or her work. Meditation One posits that forms of loss appear in poetry as metaphors of darkness, and proceeds historically through the work of Dante, Shakespeare and Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Wright; the chapter ends with a close reading of John Burnside's prose poem 'Annunciations' (Common Knowledge). Meditation Two looks at the mythological uses of the concept of darkness, especially as it represents ego loss, and discusses Joan Retallack's 'Afterrimages'; the chapter closes with a discussion of Rusty Morrison's Whethering and when the true keeps calm biding its story. Meditation Three looks at the emotions of lost love, both familial and romantic, and includes a discussion of Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions and ethics. The chapter includes close readings of Elizabeth Robinson's The orphan and its relations and Susan Howe's That This. Meditation Four discusses the pain caused by war and the form of my long poem 'Decorations'; it includes an examination of Seamus Heaney's North. The chapter concludes with an essay on Maxine Chernoff's book Without. Meditation Five discusses objects and how they become a part of the body and therefore become a potential locus for both pain and loss; the chapter closes with a close reading of Brenda Coultas' The Handmade Museum. The themes and ideas are reiterated in the Conclusion.

Poetry of Chaos and Death Every attitude has its poetry, and a small, neat nation may, in one age, present a singularly unified attitude and its poetry to the world, as did England in the last sixteenth century. But such a tidy clarity is impossible for India. No country in the world offer greater extremes or variety in the total experiences which shape poets. Every social ordering from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, may be found; every major religion and most of the minor ones are practiced: the world views and value structures of India are nearly endless and expressed in 723 languages. The only area in the world that offers even remotely an equivalent complexity and confusion is the whole of Africa. Two things give the country what unity it has: the first is false generalization-that there is an Indian temperament, discernable both in the North and the South, composed of egoism, agility of mind, quickness to violence, a penchant for vaporous theories and an honest material avarice; the second is a terrible truth-that nowhere else is there such an omnipresent doom, of the implacable approach of absolute disaster and collapse. India produces many kinds of poetry; I am familiar only with that in English, and it falls roughly into three categories. The first is simply bad: the sentimental outpourings of the young or heartsick; formal and bombastic occasional verse; a gauche and florid romanticism: grotesque prayers and pious exhortations, and such like, all of which suffer from banality, false emotion, and technical incompetence. The second is compromised and serious, often well-written poems which sometimes move me but most often seem too dependent on the poetic traditions of England a generation or more ago, and the bland and inoffensive taste of the upper middle class. These works exist in the limbo of the lukewarm, and represent a timid art that dares neither to hate nor love too much. Like our own academic verse, these poems reflect calm intelligence, tamed passion and the polite despairs of gentlemen born into a world they never made. The poems are cultured, introspective, sensitive, and are most true to the plight of the Indian estranged from his own culture by his mastery of English, but whose situation is tolerable, and who would not admit that poetry is a criminal occupation. These are sincere and harmless poems, and aside from a little local colour, could have been written in Leeds or Philadelphia. The denatured cosmopolitanism that infects the poetry of the West prevails in India as well, and few of the poems carry any sense of place, or the sound of a man speaking, or the rasping smell of cow-dung fires. The academic poets of India have yet to grasp the vernacular and all that implies. The poetic vision of the Hungry Generation erupted in Bengal five years ago, and has rapidly spread to such cities like New Delhi, Bombay and Allahabad. This kind of poetry is dangerous and revolutionary, cleanses by violence and destruction, unsettles and confounds the reader. This is the poetry of the disaffected, the alienated, the outraged, the dying. It is a poetry which alarms and disgusts the bourgeois, for it describes their own sickened state more clearly than they wish to hear, and exposes the hypocrisy of their decency. One reaction of good citizens has been to accuse the poets of hysteria

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives