CHARMS AGAINST LIGHTNING
by James Arthur

A Lannan Literary Selection
Copper Canyon Press
P. O. Box 271
Port Townsend, WA 98368
ISBN 13: 978-1-55659-387-1
2012, 80 pp., $16.00
www.coppercanyonpress.org

I first discovered the poetry of James Arthur in January of 2013 when I attended a poetry reading he gave in Philadelphia. He had recently published Charms Against Lightning, his numinous debut collection of poems. The reading was no ordinary event. Arthur had memorized all of his poems and delivered them flawlessly in his gentle voice.  In between his own poems, he also recited from memory several poems by other poets, including Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Such generosity at a reading—Arthur’s sharing of others’ poems in his own allotment of podium time—speaks of his modest approach to his own ego.  In fact, the thing I love most about Arthur’s work is the way his ego performs a series of subtle vanishing acts in the poems.

Take, for example, Arthur’s fanciful and mysterious poem “Ghost Life,” in which the speaker personifies his shadow:

… My shadow feels my company,
my stepping as he steps, feels,
although he knows it can’t be true, that the fall
and all its wreckage were invented
just for him.

As the poem proceeds and the speaker ambles along with his companionable nobody, the shadow is further reduced to something “thinner than a flame.”  I detect a faint air of joy and relief in this lessness, this side-stepping of the self. The speaker is glad not to stand on the pedestal of importance. Contrast this with the unnamed famous artist in “The Death of a Painter.” Here is a lyric about a man so consumed by his art and status that “he hardly saw his children,/ by habit was self-absorbed.” The great man is so apart from the humble claims of family that when he dies the woman mourning him must weep “from another room.”

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, James Arthur grew up in Toronto, Canada. A 2012 – 2013 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, Arthur’s many other honors include a Stegner Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and the Discovery/The Nation Prize. The poems in this collection have appeared in an equally impressive list of publications including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and many others. Yet with all this acclaim, Arthur states he doesn’t think of his poems as having any effect. “They are like pebbles thrown in the ocean,” he says.

James Arthur is a poet who speaks in mists of images that perfume and disturb the mind. He writes of moments caught and released, that leave one in a beautiful fog. Here are the first lines from one of my favorite poems in the collection, “In Praise of the Indeterminate”:

It has no form, and out-Houdinis Houdini
by dissolving from shape to shape, struggling
to escape itself, remaining the same thing,
like a video feed of the almost-random variations
in the similarity of the sea.

Arthur is in awe of the transient, the unstable, the airy. In concert with this, his rhythms also float. Ever aware of the fragility of life and, beyond that, the instability and changeability of the whole universe, Arthur writes poems that gather and dissipate. In some ways, they call to mind the poems of W. S. Merwin.

This is not to say that Arthur’s poems are without violence. Pain and menace pierce certain poems, in particular the title poem “Charms Against Lightning,” in which the poet calls on some kind of safeguard “Against lupus and lawsuits, lying stranded between nations,/ against secrets and frostbite, the burring of trains/ that never arrive.” Even in invoking the safeguards, the “talismans,” there is the knowledge that the talismans themselves are under threat. Still, the griefs in these poems do not grandstand, largely because the speaker minimizes the self.

Arthur includes several love poems in the collection. In “Summer Song,” the speaker meditates on various scenes of insecurity and threat, but even the threatening scenes ride in on dazzling metaphors—paratroopers sail by like “clothespins/ pinning up the sky.” In the same poem, the vastness of the universe and its galaxies inspire the speaker to tell his beloved, “I marry you in the morning/ and I marry you each day.”  What matters is the lovers’ attachment in the face of the losses and hollow spaces of the world. And, still, there is the erasing self, the gentle melancholy. This love poem concludes, “I feel a tall wind rising up to take/ and bear me far away.”

James Arthur is poet of big gifts delivered lightly. I keep going back to the poems because they offer a sort of ease amid their subtle disturbances. And as for his observation about his poems’ being pebbles thrown in the ocean, I can only say that I hope he keeps throwing the pebbles.

__________

Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection is Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky Press, 2013).

OLIVE OIL

The toast would taste better with egg, but there aren’t any,
so I pour a thimble-sized serving of olive oil on, to make it more

flavorful. I like the taste of olive oil. It reminds me of the time
when I was eighteen and jumped clear over the hood of my car

because I could. To be more specific, olive oil is the part where
I leave the ground and I’m in the air, halfway across. Right then,

before landing on the other side. That’s the taste of olive oil.
It also tastes the way Madagascar sounds when you say it

backwards. If there were olive oil cologne, I would wear it and if
there were olive oil goldfish, I would have two in a bowl on the

table. For some reason, it is also a man swallowing lighter
fluid because the pain in his belly is bigger than the Kalahari

Desert. But maybe that’s only when you drink it straight; and
sometimes it tastes like Brigitte Bardot. To be more specific,

in the scene where she is sunning naked in Capri, an impossibly
blue ocean wrestling with the sky in the distance.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

FOUND BEHIND THE BOX FACTORY

for Deanna Siefert, abducted and murdered in
Warren, Michigan 1982-1992

This is not about heaven,
it is about me, in a city
for automobiles. Two letters away
from dead, behind a shop.

Here is my failure:

I am not dead
I am not heaven
I am not Nine Mile Road
I am not Deanna

I am two letters away, an ‘e’, and an ‘a’,
the middle a missing girl. The beginning
of a song without end. Deanna, two vowels,
two streets away, two hands, an open box
behind a shop. Right by my house, my street,
she was ten, count them—ten fingers, toes, same
numbers as mine. Two hands hold
a rock, hold her scream, hold heaven. The middle,
a missing girl. The ‘e’ ends
us. In the back of a shop, open
to sky in a box.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

CARRYING TWO PACKS

She appeared on the platform of the Seventh Street Subway
a large pack on her back and another hung in front,
a young woman carrying two hiking packs looking for a northbound train.
And I remember a love of many years ago when a young woman
told me that we would never meet again, so I had taken to a high trail
hiking, clawing, pulling, dragging my way above timber line
seeking the widest vision that I could contain to fill this emptiness,
up, up, ever higher toward the uttermost peak, to the summit until a
darkening blue black sky revealed a breathtaking view of another world
promontories, rocks, deep ravines, gashed open slides, stretching forever
among an oncoming night.
My hollowness filled with the greatness of it all until satisfied
I stampeded down the mountain into darkening forest shadows
like a wild animal only to grasp that I had left my pack far above.
Whether to make perilous return or walk on and in that frozen moment
another person appeared on the high trail,
a young woman carrying two packs, one on her back and one slung before
and though I could not see her face I knew it was the one who had said,
“We shall never meet again” and this dream has spoken for our love,
repeating, returning, rerunning again and again until now I understand
what she has done for me.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

Something about men and boats:
the hopeful way they nod
to each other, even
before the wind kicks up
and grants permission.

The honest way men clamber
over gunwales, hauling bum knees,
muscles stiff from wading
through cold waves
with traps and oars in hand,
out of breath and out of shape
yet willing to lend tired arms to pain.

They know the rules of daily limits
and closed waters, the art of knots
and bait buckets packed
with expectations.
But joy is something else,
something more than reading tides
and steering clear of shoals;
it’s more about—somehow—
getting one damn thing just right.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

PLAYING BACH IN THE D.C. METRO
by David Lee Garrison

Browser Books Publishing
2195 Fillmore St.
San Francisco , CA 94115
ISBN: 9780982850169
2012, 63 pp., $16.00
www.browserpublishingsf.com

“Having an instrument does not make a panhandler a busker. The simple difference is being able to play competently”
—Oregon Vagabond Motivator News, the street newspaper of Eugene, OR, February 2013, p. 2

What if busking on the streets included poets! They would join jugglers, actors, acrobats, and a whole variety of musicians in that age-old line of work. Perhaps if they wiggled suggestively and jumped around while they called out their words—as they do in poetry slams—and if their articulation, cadence and dramatic pauses were smoothly executed, they might be able to hold down regular performing spots around the cities of the world, to ply their art.

This collection—whose title poem is about a famous violinist briefly agreeing to do a stint as a street musician—might be regarded as a set of potential busking poems: they are brisk, fluid, and conversational. They are full of vivid sensual images and short dramatic incidents of the kind that might stop a commuter as she emerges from the top of the escalator stairs in, say, the Bethesda, Maryland Metro Station, where the low-ceilinged, semi-outdoor parking lot is a mass of concrete that turns even the brightest day into a kind of grayish purgatory.

Here, in the Fall of 2002, I stopped to listen to three teenage violinists quite competently play a Bach double violin concerto, their battered cases open in front of them. So glorious and penetrating was this music that we could all hear it very faintly from the bottom of what seemed to me at the time to be one of the steepest and longest stairways into any underground train system in the world. The music drew us up like gold from hell, numbed and bound as we all were by the deep poison of the city’s endless machine voice. And there, as our heads slowly appeared above the horizon, were the performers contorting on the pavement, and as David Lee Garrison says in his title poem, the music …

sang to the commuters in the station
why we must live.

From this opening salvo Garrison’s poems move deftly through all the senses, including humor. We are offered bits of fruit to lick and crunch as we are treated to a dialogue between God and Dog, in which Dog asks for a companion:

So God made Man

with hardly any sense
of smell and just two legs.

And God said to Dog.
“He has only a few words

like ‘come’ and ‘fetch,’
and he knows little of the earth

and its redolence, but let him
totter along behind you and learn.

After this he (Garrison, not God) offers us two quick and delicate sketches of birds among tree branches, suffused like Japanese paintings, with hints of season. Here is “November”:

Like black notes
on gray staves

of oak and ash,
grackles gather.

Measure by measure,
they lade the branches,

then swirl away
in speckled clouds.

It’s churlish, of course, to hold an author too closely to any theme that might be implied by the title of his book. And yet, although a kind of transition from sense perception and image, into incident and personal anecdote takes place long about the middle of this book, I feel the collection remains quite  true—even down to the food fight on page 43 – to the title’s metaphorical strength. Bach, after all, is a force not to be trifled with, and truthfully, every single piece he ever wrote had a poem in its heart and a story misting out from that poem. If, like the photo on the cover, the heart of this collection remains touched by a violin, it’s most definitely one with gut strings.

____________

Anita Sullivan is an essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

RENTING TOM MIX’S HOUSE ON CATALINA

The technicolor organ roars “Avalon”
and shakes the movie planetarium,
stars blink inside the dome, the travelogue
lights up the panoramic screen—
a sea nymph, with her breast strokes,
parts the portieres of floating kelp,
then dives, flutter-kicking
to a sandy bottom decorated
with the spills of island pottery—
urns, teapots, flagons—as bright as neon
in pacific waters more transparent
than the polished windows of boutiques.
Where cinematic cowboys and comedians,
in white flannels and sailing caps,
chase their second wives and mistresses
around the staterooms of their rented yachts,
the young college women of California
paddle by athletically in their canoes,
Olympic medals, won in swimming pools,
tucked modestly between their breasts;
at the beaches, where the folding chairs
are done in canvas awning stripes,
starlets in bathing caps, treading water,
picnic from floating table tops
set up with brut champagne in flutes,
and wave coquettishly at any seaplane landing;
at harbor side, parrots fix their eyes
upon the marlins in the fountains’ tiles,
tuna leap in trophies, palm trees
flaunt their barren minarets
above the flowers of Grand Canary,
and the little shelving tile-town oasis,
with art deco touches in its shops,
and Tuscan architecture in its houses,
squeezes up the canyon to the mausoleum
of the God of spearmint gum.
From the town, a climbing spiral
of roadside eucalyptus wanders,
like pilgrims with umbrellas,
into the mists or empty blue of desert sky;
on the rugged B-western slopes
where fennel and tossed geraniums
grow wild, a long-haired boy and girl
helloing, and with arms thrown wide,
run naked through the buffalo,
trailing the vines that broke
like victory tapes, against their strides.
O topsy-turvy world—the mountains
lift their shades upon the sun,
the silhouettes of lovers, spinning
from the ballroom, embrace on balconies
that sail above the moonlit boats
like gondolas beneath balloons;
in rippling bars and measures,
the light bulbs of the big band’s notes
waft far from the Casino, and explode
like bombshells over Hollywood.
In the wild interior, deer, in miniature,
leap about the steep ravines;
in far blue coves, pirate ships lie anchored,
swashbucklers topside in their hammocks,
the whole scene waiting to be filmed.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

TIP FOGARTY (1963)

“For graduation I gave her a black terrycloth
bathrobe, only such garment in Milford, Utah.
My dad, hunched shoulders from window repair,
electrical contracting, and sneaking off
to Nevada to guzzle whiskey off big titties,
says, ‘Every man knows what he needs to hack free of,’
which codes out to, ‘Don’t marry Angela May.’
But I love how she poses in the midnight center
of her daddy’s pasture, robe untied, quarter smile,
smackin’ hot in the thick white headlight beams
of my Dodge pick-up, like a special picnic treat,
not one flaw from God, no silly teasing,
like I’m some Swedish film director
at the high noon of his heart’s requirements.”

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

ART FESTIVAL

A woman stands on the crescent of the moon.
She has no face.
Her hair runs down her breasts,
the dark blue night spreads behind her.
Not about to move, she is peaceful
standing with outstretched arms,
a purple cloth around her waist.

I barely speak
to the artist. I carry the painting home
and when I get
to my house it is quiet.
No one sees me walk up to
my door, open it and
close it quietly. I hang the painting
on the wall.

I never feel
the way others expect
me to feel. No one knows
how much I love her. No one
knows that I love her face
blank like that—
and how she stands so peacefully
on the crescent of the moon.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

BELOVED FAMILIAR

When the infected wound has healed,
And final angers all seeped out like blood,

What refills the space that’s held the flood
Of tears? For over twenty years, a shield

Grew like a scab across my heart, concealed
Blue bruises born when memories thud

Against the brain. It’s tough to judge
Wellness, when grief’s old adaptations are repealed.

Funny, how in the moment pain abates,
Its gaping absence cuts as deep as any slice?

Or deeper. While weariness concentrates
On the exorbitant, usurious price

Of fortitude, freedom decapitates
Joy, snaps its neck in apprehension’s vice.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004