September , 2024

September, and to make way for a bit of long-delayed home renovation (before it falls down around our ears), I found myself moving books from one room to another, stashing them neatly under a table, laying them in stacks of five or six under a bed, piling them up in tidy corners, one might say, like ziggurats. Was it this activity that called to mind the poem I offer below? Perhaps. Or something about the style (laconic, almost affectless) of the poem itself, so different from the one (surreal-ish/absurd-ish ) so often encountered in prose poems? Both, no doubt. In any case, it’s a work that thrilled and unsettled me when I first encountered it, and has stayed with me for almost fifty years now, as I see from the inside cover of the book in which it appears: The Prose Poem An International Anthology, Edited and With an Introduction by Michael Benedikt. (A masterpiece, yes, and one, I should say, whose spine even now announces if somewhat mutedly its provenance — PN, 6101, B46. But from which library was it purloined or innocently never returned? Lost to memory.)

All to say, such are my thoughts on PACKING HERRING by Helga Novak, translated Ann Marie Celona.

PACKING HERRING

The herring is beheaded and boned. he filets are as big as a face, though folded up. I bend them over, press them down, pack them in. The silver-blue backs belong underneath. The light brown meat faces up.
I pack the herring in cartons. – two yards long. One yard wide. I weigh it.
Two kilos make one package.
Fish oil, the color of antique gold, collects on the table. Yellow flecks on the on the herring’s back, they dazzle. They sting your eyes.
Time doesn’t pass.
Outside there’s a storm.
Fold up the herring, press them flat, pack them in, weigh them out. My lower arms are studded with glittering scales. They stick like Saran Wrap and leave little circles behind. If you don’t think about the clock, the time goes by.
The storm screams, wails, whistles. I t tears off the window bars and rips the building open. The wall of rock opposite the creek is shrouded. I’d like to be outside.

Note: Although the anthology is out of print, you can find Selected Poetry and Prose of Helga Novak – albeit at a hefty $51.40 — here.

Oh — also, regarding last month’s newsletter’s subject, the Chilean Poet Nicanor Parra, about which a number of you have written me to express your admiration for this too-often overlooked master: I want to point you to an essay on the relationship of Thomas Merton and Parra, called The Poetry of the Sneeze. I think it would be worth your while.

But enough of that. Let’s turn now to Joseph Campana’s essay on Jack Spicer’s interrogations – dreams and permutations – of summer and poetry, or the poetry of summer.
Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
Sometimes I wonder about my inclination to begin so many of these columns with statements about the weather. Is this some social frustration–the desire for more of those often pleasingly shallow conversations about what’s raining down from the heavens or bubbling up from the earth as temperatures reach 100 (and exceed it with the heat index) in Houston? I’m in central New York where it may hit a low of 48 in a few days: coolness not to be seen in Texas until perhaps January. Summer means different things. And so I find myself turning (as I am often inclined to do) to Jack Spicer, to his lush and searching “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.”
And suddenly my own self-analysis on the subject of weather seems insufficient. I love the idea that weather or a season might as much as anything else be the subject of a “psychoanalysis” whatever one takes that to be. Here the analytic technique of repeated, delving questions aims not at inner weather but at states of summer. We may start with what the lyric speaker is “thinking about” but it is the specificity of the landscape–”wet hills in the rain”– that captivates, as do the “oak and manzanita” and the “old green brush tangled in the sun” and the hills driven crazy by wind and the peach trees near the city.
But lush landscape gives way quickly to something more like a state of mind. Asked, again, “what are you thinking?” the speaker insists “I think I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer.” Time, inevitable if also relative, writes its devastating cursive in brief, gorgeous strokes that the mind can’t help but take in. And suddenly the speaker wants the doctor to understand the slowness of summer but also a “poem as long as California.” A psychoanalysis of California? Why not? It is a land that is lush and hot and somehow also, in the next section, reminds the speaker of a woman whose body is like California in the kind of intimate detail one might expect from a certain version of psychoanalytic dream analysis with its furtive or sometimes quite direct intimations of sexuality.
Each time the question is asked, the speaker modulates and intensifies. But even as it is the doctor’s query that gets repeated, the poet, not surprisingly, keeps taking the subject of the repetition to be the poem:
I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.
Maybe every poet is a mad cartographer whose maps burn up in the sun. And yet he is also someone who believes, in the final statement of what he is thinking, “I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.” Sigmund Freud suggested, in an essay called “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” that, in fact, analysis was interminable. One can keep delving and associating and asking, over and over, what one is thinking to allow language to pull the shadows of the mind into sharper contour. Is that why this poem is, in its subtitle, “an elegy”? What is the sadness of the poem that never ends, even though summer always does?
Click for a biography of Jack Spicer at the Poetry Foundation.
Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
What are you thinking about?
I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.
What are you thinking?
I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.
What are you thinking now?
I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.
What are you thinking?
I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.
What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Marvelous, yes? Thank you, Joe – and Jack.

Anything else?

I think not.

Except, of course, our habitual nod to a few of our contributors who have books recently published, soon-to-be, or fresh acceptances.
Kwame Dawes Sturge Town: Poems
Linda Pastan Almost an Elegy: New and Later Selected Poems
Arthur Sze The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems
James Longenbach Seafarer
Yusef Komunyakaa I Said That Love Heals From Inside: Love Poems of Yusef Komunyakaa
That’s it for now – be well -- as always, I hope you enjoy the issue!
Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume