December, 2024

December, and first, allow me to thank you, Readers, for the many messages of support and concern re: hurricanes Helene and Milton – and for your patience as we delayed our fall reading period until this month.  I should say, too, that we have been fortunate on both accounts: a wild night or two, but little real damage in our part of the city, though I cannot say the same for so many of our neighbors here in Saint Petersburg and up into the Carolinas; and the extra month seems to have swelled our Submittable account! Which is, of course, wonderful, yet, please, be patient – we read carefully, always.

Still…as I say, wild nights – hours that, later, brought to mind Seamus Heaney’s famous hurricane-adjacent poem, from Death of a Naturalist:

Storm on the Island
We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
This wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what i mean — leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
But there are no trees, no natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs,
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo,
We are bombarded by the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

All right — enough.

Allow me, first, to turn to Marilyn Johnson’s wonderful take on…well, see below —

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

That’s how I opened “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” while reading to mostly empty classrooms at weekend forensics and debate tournaments. I’d give voice to that weary, mesmerizing journey through certain half-deserted streets, hoping that a few judges and fellow high-school contestants would follow. Where were we going? Some cultural venue where extravagant observations and passionate emotions were channeled and judged. My challenge was to keep a straight face in a line like, Do I dare to eat a peach? It’s ridiculous; that phrase eat a peach is far better as the name of the great Allman Brothers album. I had to work even harder for my voice not to tighten at the sublime lines that followed, I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.// I do not think that they will sing to me. That still devastates me. The poem took me the allotted ten minutes to read. At its conclusion, I nodded with dignity and took a seat while the judges scribbled out notes. They’d rank us at the conclusion of each round; later we’d get to read their comments.
My Prufrock was a writer and lecturer scratching out a living. He was paying the price of leading a literary life. In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo. I can almost hear him growling, Keep his name out of your mouth! Prufrock is sexist—I both saw and refused to see that the audience he disdained, those pretenders, were female. As a feminist, I was otherwise diving into the wreck or preparing to eat men like air, but I enjoyed speaking as a man. I owned those lines about my bald spot. Prufrock was disappointed, misunderstood, a fool for his art. So was I. That poem, in all its pathos and beauty, still sounds gorgeous to me.
I liked it that Eliot was from St. Louis, where I was born. I was living then in Kansas City, Missouri, so I performed in both Missouri and Kansas. I couldn’t speak Italian, so I skipped the lines from Dante’s Inferno and—where was my coach?!—was not penalized for this unforgiveable sin. In Missouri, where speech, drama, and English teachers ranked the participants, I won trophies and praise. In Kansas, where volunteers, mainly parents, were the judges, I won nothing and was ranked at the bottom. Their comments were along the lines of, No, that is not it. That is not it at all.

Splendid, no?

And now, let’s turn to Brian Culhane’s thoughts on, well…

Finding Affinities 

Like many of you, I spent some time on Thanksgiving thinking of things and people I am especially thankful for (in a more ironic mood, rounding up the usual suspects). Friday, the day after, I stood in front of my bookcases looking at the names of poets jammed together in too little space. I took down a few volumes I haven’t read in years, looking for a poem or two to share here on the theme of gratitude. I found myself thinking of how grateful I am for that communion between poet and reader, journeyers together in a peculiar kind of companionship. I have long appreciated Elliott Weinberger idea, found in his introduction to Marie Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, that “A poem is a place where affinities happen. Poetry is a way of thinking through affinities.” Yet what might such  affinities be?

Standing there, drinking my morning coffee, I thought first that Weinberger meant a poem’s metaphoric language. Metaphors offer ways of seeing likenesses—affinities—in things not quite dissimilar. Take the old woman, in Frost’s “The Witch of Coös,” who slaps the hand of a walking skeleton and watches its bones “Still going every which way in the joints, though,/So that it looked like lightning or a scribble. . . .” The “like” moves us magically from the literal (if implausible) bones shaking, to the surprising affinity that such shaking has with two things that couldn’t be more dissimilar, yet which share a zigzagging action, one splendidly in the sky, the other absent-mindedly on a scrap of paper. Frost’s poem, any poem, of course is more than the sum of its metaphors. Nevertheless, Weinberger’s sense of a poem as a place “where affinities happen” rings true. Reading over the authors’ names on my shelves, I thought about how so much of a poet’s work is given over to the discovery of affinities, unlikely likenesses.

Where else do affinities happen in a poem? Clearly, in the actual act of reading. How a reader responds to a poem has to do with the other meaning of affinity: a liking for or a closeness to something or someone, an idea found in the word’s Latin root, affinitas, meaning a bond, especially one of marriage. (When Shakespeare, in sonnet 116, wrote of “the marriage of true minds,” he was thinking of this sense of affinity, one surpassing mere liking or closeness.) Reading a poet for the first time opens the possibility of hearing, on the page, a particular voice we may find ourselves being drawn toward. Naturally, one’s affinities change over time, and I now find myself turning to Larkin’s reserve and understatement, just as, when young, I thrilled to Dylan Thomas’s gorgeous hyperbole. (The flip side of this, poets evolving and jettisoning earlier styles, is a topic for another day.)

Here’s A.E. Stallings’s “Explaining an Affinity for Bats,” a poem that splendidly illuminates these linked meanings of affinity:

That they are only glimpsed in silhouette,
And seem something else at first—a swallow—
And move like new tunes, difficult to follow,
Staggering towards an obstacle they yet
Avoid in a last-minute pirouette,
Somehow telling solid things from hollow,
Sounding out how high a space, or shallow,
Revising into deepening violet.

That they sing—not the way the songbird sings
(Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—
But travel by a sort of song that rings
True not in utterance, but harkenings,
Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

The movement of the verse mimetically, magically, conjures the “difficult to follow” flight of the bats. So, “Staggering towards an obstacle they yet/Avoid in a last-minute pirouette,” jars our sense, the enjambed yet a hiccup in the syntax, which wants to spill over without pause to the next line. Notice how the interweaving rhymes and half-rhymes (e.g., swallow, follow, hollow, shallow) sonically enact the bat’s “sort of song,” while its “harkenings” subtly remind us of its use of echolocation in the dark.

To return to the promise of the poem’s title, we grasp why this poet has an affinity for bats precisely because Stallings has created a place where affinities happen and where I find myself, on this day after Thanksgiving, giving thanks for such a poem, leaning into it, feeling a deep affinity for the poet’s winged words—itself a metaphor that a classicist like Alicia Stallings would trace back to the beginnings of the oral poetic tradition. As Casey Dué notes in her 2018 book on Homeric epic: “An image in a Bronze Age fresco from Pylos suggests that as early as Mycenaean times, poetry in performance was conceived of as being in flight.”

Luckily, readers can hear Stallings perform this very poem in her TED talk, “The Courage of Poetry,” found at https://www.everseradio.com/the-courage-of-poetry-alicia-stallings-ted-talk/

*****

“A place where affinities happen” – one of the lovelier (and truest) definitions of poetry we have, I think. Thank you, Brian.

Finally, as usual, some recent/present/forthcoming titles from Plume contributors:

Najwan Darwish (trans Kareem
James Abu-Zeid )                        No One Will Know You Tomorrow:
                                                       Selected Poems 2014 – 2024

Vinod Kumar Shukla                  TREASURER OF PIGGY BANKS

Charles Bernstein                        The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies
And Paul Auster

Kwame Dawes                             KUMI: New-Generation African Poets:
A Chapbook Box Set and Chris Abani
Alicia Ostriker                             The Holy & Broken Bliss
Ashley Mabbitt                            A Self, a Frame, a Look in Through

That’s it for now, I think – and an early Happy Xmas: may your holidays be all you wish them to be. As always – I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless

Editor, Plume