June, 2024

June, and even here in Florida, with the great exceptions of long-haulers and those whose friends and loved ones did not survive it, the pandemic has receded so appreciably I imagine many of us now barely give it a thought, Oh, perhaps when we encounter here or there some bit of its detritus – a discarded mask or crumpled plasticine flask of hand sanitizer, faded footprints at the bank teller’s counter like those of some infinitely patient ghost. But how much longer will these remain, to tap us on the shoulder?

Anyway, such were my thoughts this morning, when walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood I noted in the space of three miles another, or rather a series of such artifacts: half a dozen Little Free Libraries.

And so, with nothing better to do, I found myself pausing at each one, fascinated first by the careful whimsy of their design (a robot, a microwave oven, a Hobbit hut, half a grandfather clock); then even more so by their eclectic offerings. Here was Kon-Tiki, The Cat in the Hat, DOS for Dummies; there, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and The Story of Civilization, v 4 Ceasar and Christ. All Boys Aren’t Blue beside In Cold Blood; A Wrinkle in Time settled dolmen-like over a much-underlined Trainspotting (!), and a seemingly untouched Lincoln in the Bardo (!!).  But, alas, very little poetry. Some Dickenson, The 100 Best Poems of All Time. Until, as I was nearly turning homeward, in the miniature facsimile of the house behind it, gold! Poetic gold, at least, in the form of Wislawa Szymborska’s 2001 stunning, Miracle Fair, from which I extract the title poem below, one of her best, I think.

Miracle Fair
Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.
An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.
One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.
Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.
An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.
First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.
Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.
A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.
A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.
A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.
A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.
An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

~ by Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

All right, then. Let’s turn now to Brian Culhane’s thoughts on Michael Waters’ remarkable poem, “The Inarticulate”.

Sometimes, love is found in unlikely places, a theme less observed in life than on the big screen. Take “The Shop Around the Corner,” Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic comedy, in which feuding employees in a gift shop (improbably in Budapest, which oddly enough looks very much like what it is, a Hollywood set), fall in love after discovering that each is the other’s secret pen pal. It’s a tale as silly and delightful as dramatic irony often is in this genre. In fact, we expect histrionic reversals, wild coincidences, and sentimental rapprochements to conclude happily, usually with (finally!) an embrace. There’s a sweetness to such concoctions, an innocence, as when Henry Fonda’s hair is mussed in his stateroom (which oddly enough looks just like a Hollywood set, too) by the seductive Barbara Stanwyck in the 1941 classic, “The Lady Eve.” Of course, the genre continues up to today, and while the sets have gained many degrees of verisimilitude, the plots have not, even as overt sexuality and a fair amount of crudity have taken over the stateroom. The genre predisposes audiences to expect and enjoy the familiar.

That’s why a poem like “The Inarticulate,” by the contemporary poet Michael Waters, is the kind of rare love poem that dispenses with that genre’s usual machinery and offers readers a genuine surprise. Here’s his poem:

Touching your face, I am like a boy
who bags groceries, mindless on a Saturday,
jumbling cans of wax beans and condensed milk

among frozen meats, the ribboned beef
and chops like maps of continental drift,
extremes of weather and hemisphere,

egg carton perched like a Napoleonic hat,
till he touches something awakened by water,
a soothing skin, eggplant or melon or cool snow pea,

and he pauses, turning it in his hand,
this announcement of color, purple or green,
the raucous rills of the aisles overflowing,

and by now the shopper is staring
when the check-out lady turns and says
“Jimmy, is anything the matter?”

Touching your face, I am like that boy
brought back to his body, steeped
in the moment, fulfilled but unable to speak.

With that last stanza, the poet has transmuted a wholly banal setting and an uninteresting trio of characters, turning gratingly unpoetic language into something quite beautiful.

Let’s see how he gets there, beginning with those startling first two lines: “Touching your face, I am like a boy /who bags groceries, mindless on a Saturday. . . .” What?? And indeed, the poem proceeds to move even farther from the expected, chiefly by way of its diction and imagery. I’m reminded of something I believe Robert Lowell once said about how anything can be put in a poem, as long as it’s in the right place, a premise Waters tests with a can of waxed beans, an egg carton, and a check-out line. Certainly, much of this poem’s charm lies in its veiled intent (as we eventually discover, the initial comparison, the poem’s impetus, is returned to only in its last lines). But Waters moves us along toward that end by way of ordinary, quite unpoetic foodstuffs and increasingly odd imagery.

So, we follow along as, one by one, the bag is filled, each item touched by the bagger as it’s raised and packed. We can easily enough envision the contents (beans, condensed milk, eggs) fitting into a shopping bag—common enough—but how do such fit into the genre of love poetry? The better question, I think, is to ask how the poem turns what’s quotidian into something altogether unexpected, a genuinely romantic poem.

The items that go into the shopping bag are in the familiar form of a list, yet as the list goes on, the description of the items changes, making us observe them from unusual perspectives, beginning with the pattern on the frozen meats likened to “maps of continental drift, / extremes of weather and hemisphere.” Now, I for one have never once glanced at the ribboned pattern embedded in frozen meat, but I could visualize such and, yes, could even see how the poet thought they looked like maps. Next, we come to the comically precise “egg carton perched like a Napoleonic hat,” an image that’s hard to dislodge, after which the poem subtly shifts gears: “till he touches something awakened by water,/ a soothing skin”—and we, following the bagger, have come into the realm of sensuous, physical beauty, of “eggplant or melon or cool snow pea”

and he pauses, turning it in his hand,
this announcement of color, purple or green,
the raucous rills of the aisles overflowing . . . .

How did he (and we) get here? Certainly, “awakened by water” brilliantly describes not only a plant’s physical response (roots’ thirst being quenched, a return to lushness), but it’s also descriptive of the boy’s own awakening from the mindlessness demanded of his menial task. Much, too, depends on that unobtrusive adverb “till” for providing the hinge—a volta— from realism to something else. The bagger suddenly pauses as the plants’ color and skin turn his mind to their source in water and, further, to “the raucous rills of the aisles overflowing.” The poem has now taken us far beyond the commonplace and into the sphere of imagination. No doubt, the bagger couldn’t himself have come up with “raucous rills,” especially as a rill is an archaic noun for a rivulet, extending back to Milton’s use of the word in “Lycidas” (“Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills.”) No, the poet has slyly obtruded here, and he’s not done doing so, either. Like a good director, he brings in the scene’s two other cast members, shopper and check-out lady, who get to have their cameos and, as well, become stand-ins for the reader, who may also wonder what’s come over the boy: “Jimmy, is anything the matter?”

His answer is an answer of sorts—he says nothing—and we leave all three behind in the poet’s graceful, understated return to the realm of a traditional love lyric. It’s only now that we grasp the way the movement of the poem’s action, the changes of register in its diction and the evolution of its imagery have conspired to bring us to this point:

Touching your face, I am like that boy
brought back to his body, steeped
in the moment, fulfilled but unable to speak.

“Steeped in the moment,” aside from being subtly aligned to the plants’ relation to water, is as good a definition as any of a successful love poem, one whose emotion is inexpressible outside the magic circle of the poem. We also understand that the poem’s title, far from denigrating the bagger as “the inarticulate,” instead suggests the boy’s kinship with the poem’s speaker who, in touching a beloved face, shares both his inability to speak and a like fulfillment. In this way, if love may strike us dumb, our very inarticulateness can be, as it is here, a sign of deep feeling, one commensurate, to borrow a phrase from Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, with the capacity for wonder.

Michael Waters has written many poetry collections over the years, and I can highly recommend seeking them out. I’m currently reading his Caw (BOA Editions) published in 2020.

A splendid, spirited exegesis, per usual, Mr. Culhane of this, yes, wondrous, love poem – thank you.

Now, what else?

I am pleased to announce that Richard Hoffman’s poem ”This Close”, from the December 2023 issue of Plume, has been selected for a Pushcart Prize.

Also – this just in and  a pleasure to pass along the good news: Mihaela Moscaliuc, Plume’s Translations Editor, has also  received a Pushcart Prize.

And to complete the trifecta, hearty congratulations to Plume Associate Editor Amanda Newell, whose fantastic new book, POSTMORTEM SAY, is out now from Červená Barva Press.

Penultimately, from the Department of It Bears Repeating: As you may have noted, Plume’s Spring Reading Period has just concluded – an..,estimable number of submissions in two weeks. Our staff will be busy weighing and re-weighing each I assure you before we make our final selections, so it might take a while for us to get back to you. Please be patient. And know, too, that we are grateful – more than we can say — for the work you send us.

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

Carrie Etter                    Grief’s Alphabet
Amanda Newell             Post-Mortem Say
David Kirby                    The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983–2023
James Longenbach       Seafarer: New Poems with Earthling and Forever
Robert Pinsky                Proverbs of Limbo: Poems
Donald Revell                Canandaigua

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

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume