April, 2024

April, and for a moment, allow me to escort you into the world of Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), which I recently stumbled across in my online wanderings and from which this month’s cover art is drawn. In Prinzhorn’s work, we find not only the initial cataloging if not the first stirrings of Art Brut but, as well, what came to be called more familiarly “Outsider Art”. (Also, alas, anticipating the National Socialists’ dismissal of the style as “degenerate” (Entartete), with its inevitable consequences.) In the text-preface by Sam Dolbear, he, Dolbear, notes

The book caused ripples when it was published, not just in medicine but in the art world too. It reflected a breakdown of high culture’s claim to “civilization”, exposing the misery and turmoil at the heart of modern life. Against the grain, the book granted voice to the previously marginalized: those incarcerated, those deemed insane, those suffering under poverty, those untrained, those in the wrong type of institution.

An analysis for which the term “prescient” might have been coined, no? One need only add to those “against the grain” any number of currently dispossessed ethnicities, genders, geographies.

Much work to do, yes, much work…

OK.

Onward, then, to Brian Culhane’s salutation to the great Jean Valentine and her “enthralling…perplexing” poem, “April”. (You can find an interview with the poet  here, by Nancy Mitchell in Plume # 61, by the way).

It’s spring, finally, and I’m prepared to be dazzled by the Pacific Northwest’s burgeoning beauty, should the sun stay out long enough, that is. I’ve been doing a spring cleaning, going through bookshelves and culling the volumes I bought on a whim and didn’t much care for but kept anyway (sometimes for years), rearranging bookcases, dusting off, tidying, often absorbed by an author I’d not reread in ages, my self-imposed task forgotten. In this way, I found myself gripping a slim volume by Jean Valentine (1934-2020), which led me to look on-line for more of her work and there discovered “April,” first published in the January 1968 edition of Poetry, but whose title is apt enough for this season:

April
by Jean Valentine

Suppose we are standing together a minute
on the wire floor of a gasenwagon:
suppose we are in the dark.

It’s warm and dry.
We have food.
We aren’t hiding waiting.
We have grown up white in America: mostly
we’re sitting in our light rooms.

Come over, bring things: bring
milk, peanut butter,
your pills, your woolens, crayons.

Nuns pray.
Snow. It’s dark.
Pray for our friends who died
last year and the year
before and will die this year.

Let’s speak,
as the bees do.

I imagine that I am not alone in being enthralled and, simultaneously, perplexed by that bareness of diction; those weird dislocating jumps in location; the soft—almost hushed (though, at the same time, authoritative) tone of the speaking voice; the identity of those being addressed (the explicit “we” and the implied “you”), who are  seemingly known to the author but, for readers, anonymous; and, especially, the coming-out-of-nowhere (yet strangely fitting) last two lines.

The poem begins with a hypothetical situation or a thought experiment: suppose the poem’s speaker and an unidentified “we” (perhaps the reader) are standing in one of the gas wagons both the Nazis and the Soviets used as small-scale, mobile killing sites (the Russian for the German gasenwagen is instructive: dushegubka, literally “soul-killer”). This is a shocking way to begin a poem, especially when the speaker’s voice seems so matter-of-fact. She might as well be saying, Suppose we were on a beach in Hawaii. . . . But no, we’re in a dark van. How, a reader might ask, did “we” get there, standing on the wire floor, presumably about to be liquidated by piped in carbon monoxide? Of course this very question, far more grievously asked, must have occurred to those who’d found themselves in such a dire, non-hypothetical situation.

We’re joltingly moved far from such brutal acts of genocide, when the next stanza begins with a homey “It’s warm and dry”; we’re now in contemporary America where, if fortunate enough to have grown up white, “We aren’t in hiding.” Let’s not forget that, with its barely concealed scorn, this poem was published in 1968, the year MLK was assassinated because he’d courageously not gone into hiding. What, then, starts as a juxtaposition between the scene of the first and that of the second stanza, ends with our realization of dramatic parallels. Black citizens may not be facing genocide, but they are being brutally attacked. Metaphorically, white Americans and Aryan Germans can be seen as “sitting in light rooms,” while “undesirables” must ominously wait in the dark.

The third stanza begins with a casual invitation (“Come over, bring things. . . .”), and in so doing extends the prior image of a warm and dry sanctuary, one with food (here, milk and peanut butter). The unnamed guest being invited should also bring over “your pills, your woolens, crayons,” which by synecdoche stand for safety, warmth and children’s play. I think we are to see this scene as a continuation of what it means to sit in a light room.

But once again, in the next stanza, the tables are turned:

Nuns pray.
Snow. It’s dark.
Pray for our friends who died
last year and the year
before and will die this year.

Here, in a scene that’s powerfully summoned with just the barest generic description (snow, darkness), prayer is needed, for here too is death, which if it doesn’t come for us this year or the next, nevertheless comes for our friends. I am not sure how to read that first line: it’s either a statement of fact (the nuns pray) or a softly voiced imperative, asking (pleading?) for the solace of prayer.

These various scenes: have they happened? will they happen? There’s a dreamlike quality to our progression through them, as if we were stepping into conjured spots of time. But there’s no dreaminess in the voice that ushers us along; rather, there’s a serene alertness, clear-eyed, understated, which moves from the wire floor of a gasenwagon to the bucolic image of bees, of all things. We can see the poem’s leaps, even try to explain them, but the verse resists explication even as it seems to invite such in the freeze-frame of illuminating images. I’m thinking especially of the poem’s ending, which jars with a sudden, gnomic rightness: “Let’s speak,/As the bees do.”

The speech of bees is their dance language, a language of movements, whereby a scout bee can swiftly and accurately communicate to the hive’s foragers the precise distance and relative position of a food source. The reader is left to ponder how we may speak like the bees. Perhaps, the poem implies, we should strive to be as subtle, wordless, and beautiful, drawn to the nourishment that saves and which lies just out of sight. Although Jean Valentine often writes of darkness and strife, joy and hope can lie within the narrow margins of her poems—or just beyond them.

The scientist who first deciphered the bees’ language, Karl von Frisch, was accused by Nazis for pursuing “Jewish science,” an irony that would not have escaped this poet’s notice. For when I first met Jean at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where we were both fellows, she was immersed in the study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great anti-Nazi theologian and martyr. I hope some of that study resulted in new poems, because just a few years later, Jean would die in New York, one of the country’s most lauded poets, though one few outside the hermetic poetry world would have recognized. Fortunately, Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine is coming out this month from Alice James Books, giving her a kind of second life, appropriate for the spring.

I’ll end with another of her mystical, haunting, oneiric poems:

The River at Wolf

Coming east we left the animals
pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake
their hair and skin and feathers
their eyes in the dark: red and green.
Your finger drawing my mouth.
Blessed are they who remember
that what they now have they once longed for.
A day a year ago last summer
God filled me with himself, like gold, inside,
deeper inside than marrow.
This close to God this close to you:
walking into the river at Wolf with
the animals. The snake’s
green skin, lit from inside. Our second life.

What else?

A note, should you recall—and how could you not? —the “We Are the World” video, now – yikes! — nearing its 40^th anniversary. And so I direct your attention to the recently released documentary on the evening-length single session, The Greatest Night in Pop, in which Plume’s great benefactor from the Shifting Foundation, poet, journalist, producer, and all-around Zelig-like polymath David Breskin makes several appearances. He was one of only two journalists allowed in, as he knew (and had interviewed several at length for Rolling Stone) many of the performers—and notably can be seen at film’s end chauffeuring an exhausted Quincy Jones homeward. Definitely worth a look. Toutes nos félicitations, David!

Also, Congratulations to Pushcart Prize Nominees from Plume:

Molly Peacock “The Next World is One of Ideas” PLUME # 147 November 2023

Rachel Hadas  “Same Screen” PLUME # 147  November 2023

Stephen Ackerman  “While Another Dove Nude in to the Breakers”  PLUME # 136 February 2023

Jeffrey Harrison  “Opossum”  PLUME # 146  October 2023

Finally, our habitual nod to a few of our contributors who have books recently published, soon-to-be, or fresh acceptances.

Susan Rich                  Blue Atlas
Jim Daniels                 Comment Card
Miguel Avero.              AGUAS/WATERS
(tr Jona Colon)
Victoria Chang            With My Back to the World
Arthur Sze                   The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry
Philip Metres               Fugitive/Refuge

That’s it for now – be well — as always, I hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume