Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

From Dilthey’s dream: What man is, only history tells. In vain others put the past behind them in order to begin life anew. They cannot shake off the gods of the past because they become haunting ghosts.

To write a body of poetry out of the secular new world in the late 20th and early 21st century may require a certain blindness to paradox: we could follow a fossilized European modernism as if it were an unfinished project; we could build upon the foundations of national literatures at a moment when nationalism could not be more discredited; we could direct our resources of attention to new technologies that are perhaps the greatest threat to song and meditation since the invention of war itself.

The jeremiad, hard to shake.

A poem ‘contains’ history not as an incidental ornament, but as a sail contains the wind.

In the new world we are inarticulate; we mispronounce; we bear archaisms into the future on a peculiar and comic schedule; we are famous for our empty silences; we must make our own ink and paper. Always later, we remain belabored.

The poets before us are sparse in number and shallow in time; they began with landscapes and built small churches of varied denominations.

Two poets I know well, one American and one Australian, have been writing through these new world conditions of center and periphery for some time, and with a serious intent that is evident in the fact that neither considers his or her work to be finished.

‘I felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable phantoms’, writes Susan Howe at the start of her most recent book, Souls of the Labadie Tract. Yet this work speaks first of all, not as a work of reception alone, but as a made thing. It frames exact formal symmetries grown asymmetrical in time: two parts, two halves, as the sides of an open book become truly visible only in sequence. A book is a volume; it has an interior, as a person does, and can be illuminated, as a person can be.

You you loose ramshackle
extract poem do hold ashes
as history qua history half.

If a poem is an urn, it holds within it the evidence of burning.

Each half of Howe’s "Souls" opens with a passage called Errand, raising the question of how two identically named parts can be two.

Meanwhile, an errand is in motion, incomplete, something to set out to do, like the tasks set forward in fairy tales. Going on two errands at once insures parallel lines will never meet; but if one errand follows another, delayed, those who journey might cross paths by chance in the forest.

Each of Howe’s ‘Errand’s opens in turn onto two parts.

The first ‘Errand’ is a page describing the habit of Jonathan Edwards of pinning scraps of paper, whereon he had scribbled down his thoughts, to his clothing as a kind of memory system. It opens to a ‘Personal Narrative’ and ‘Souls of the Labadie Tract.’ This personal narrative is an external history, already published, and so a duplicate, taken from an earlier book of Howe’s called "Singularities". It describes the poet’s discovery of vocation when she gained entry to Yale’s Sterling Library and found in George Shelden’s "A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts" the quixotic story of the Rev. Hope Atherton, chaplain to the English soldiers fighting native tribes at the 1676 Battle of the Falls on the Connecticut River. Separated from his fellows, witness to atrocities by both sides, Atherton wandered lost, famished, and exhausted before following the river home. In Atherton’s testimony, Howe founds her own practice, ‘words on paper with soil sticking to their roots’. The natives extinct, the Reverend descending into Shelden’s ink and paper.

Yet ‘Personal Narrative’ is as well Jonathan Edwards’ title for the account of revelation he wrote at the request of his son-in-law Aaron Burr, father of the future Vice-President and duelist. Howe’s narrative is the singular account, modeled on two prior books, that results in plural singularities.

What does it mean for a poet to repeat herself, and hence make herself into an object of history, particularly under the highly reified rubric of ‘the personal’, as a duplicate and multiple singularity? In Howe’s practice, the self is a place to which one returns to self-examine; ‘a vale of soul-making’, never-ending.

Oh—we are past saving
Aren’t odd books full of us
What do you wake us for

‘Souls of the Labadie Tract’ is spoken by this ‘we’, a series of someones, intensely voiced and lyrical, who, having traveled a great distance to be near, seem to be whispering—they are, after all, quietists; we must wait for them patiently. Each individual lyric is 5, 6, 7 or 8 lines long, centered on the page. If you pick up the book and let the pages flash in sequence, you can watch a little film of symmetry countered by asymmetry, telescoping toward closure, and lit from within. From the start, and to the end, this section of the book is too intense to be contained and radiates to become the name of the whole.

Samuel Danforth’s election sermon of 1670 is the soil on the root of Edwards’ and Atherton’s ‘errand[s] into the wilderness’. In turn, the soil on the root of the election sermon is Matthew 11, where Jesus asks of John the Baptist, ‘What went ye out into the wilderness to see?’

The Labadists, too, were wanderers. Jean de Labadie, a Jesuit, became a Calvinist at Montauban in 1650; traveling to Orange, then to Geneva, he was known as ‘the second Calvin’. Then he and his disciples moved to French-speaking Holland, then to Amsterdam, then to Germany, and then to Denmark. After de Labadie’s death, his followers returned to Holland. Some branched off to establish a colony, ‘La Providence’, in Surinam. The great entomologist, draughtswoman and print-maker, Maria Sybilla Merian, who had once been a member of the group in Friesland, visited the remaining colonists there, at the same time gathering specimens and making drawings for her "Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium". Another branch of Labadists established a colony at ‘Bohemia Manor’ in Cecil County Maryland—the ‘Labadie Tract’ of Howe’s title. A recent map shows the survival of a tree called the ‘Labadie Poplar’ at the site. Poplar/peuplier. Someone there was an ancestor, a leaf on the family tree, of Wallace Stevens.

In a lyric like this one,

Green cloud conceals green
Valley nothing but green
Continually moving then
Silk moth fly mulberry tree
Come and come rapture

the principle of generation is the sounds of g’s and c’s and e’s and o’s, and the shapes of the letters themselves. Howe stitches a metaphoric thread from Jonathan Edwards’ ‘The silkworm is a remarkeable type of Christ’ to the silkworm studies of Maria Sybilla Merian to Wallace Stevens’ aphorism, ‘the poet makes silk dresses out of worms’. To bring the consonants here into clusters (Cloud conceals continually come/Silk fly mul/ valley berry/thing then/ green green green tree – ture) is to evoke Stevens’ metamorphoses of reading sounds in time, his ‘distant diapason delight’. Howe’s great chain of being is thereby on a continuous silk thread with Stevens’ ‘A B C of being’.

The sequence of Howe’s ‘Souls’ branches into other authors as well, both antecedent and following, hence root and stem. Just as Merian showed in her drawings and plates each phase of the insect’s life and the cycle of the plant forms upon which it depended, so does Howe layer texts and images forwards and backwards in time, showing them in causal or simply adjacent relationships.

The Labadists’ bookshelves, as Howe imagines them: Stoic writings on ataraxia; tracts on predestination; Alciat’s sixteenth-century "Liber Emblemata"; Thomas Campion’s "Somerset Masque" (1615), celebrating the marriage of Robert Carr, the new Earl of Somerset, and Lady Frances Howard; the "Christographia" of Edward Taylor (the Puritan minister who had emigrated to the Massachusetts frontier with his library after refusing to take the oath required by the 1662 Act of Uniformity and, well into the 18th century, practised a form of seventeenth-century devotional verse that had long disappeared in England); and Henry Carey’s 1734 satire, Chrononhotonthologos, wherein a queen and king await an invasion of antipodeans who have their heads in their mid-sections and walk on their hands. The king, whose name indicates his blustering false authority, dies of the consequences of denigrating a dish of pork.

Campion’s masque may seem an anomalous source text, but it becomes deeply bound in Howe’s sequence to the figure of John the Baptist. Campion presents four quartets of figures who, like the Baptist in his animal skins, wear ‘skin coates’, or tight leather jerkins. Included are error, rumor, curiosity and credulity; the eastern, western, southerne, and northern winds; the four elements, including ‘Earth, in a skin coate of grasse greene, a mantle painted full of trees, plants and flowers, and on his head an oke growing’, which Howe cites directly; and the ‘foure parts of the earth in a confused measure’— Europe, Africa, Asia, and then America ‘in a skin coate of the colour of the juyce of Mulberries, on her head large round brims of many coloured feathers, and in the midst of it a small Crowne’. This masque celebrates a wedding bizarrely made possible by the poisoning of Thomas Overbury, who had objected to the Howard family’s nefarious plans to gain power by the union. Campion, though he was later cleared of knowing complicity, himself transported the bribe that allowed the murder to happen. As Howe’s allusion, the masque raises the shadow of the violence to nature upon which all social arrangements are founded, including the utopian communities of the Americas.

The second ‘Errand’ is a passage leading directly to Wallace Stevens—his home in Hartford, Connecticut, which, although it is a private house closed to the public, Howe was able to visit in 2005. She creates a symmetrical relation between Stevens’ practice of writing his poems on scraps of paper and Edwards’ system of memory tags. Implicitly, Howe refers to the practice of composition by notation and collage that runs from Emily Dickinson to herself—Howe’s antipodean fragments, shifts of font, and frequent use of transparencies. This poetics is in the line of American salvage crafts as much as it continues the practices of modernist fragmentation. Perhaps such craftsmanship is a regional talent for these makers inside, or adjacent to, ‘Connect-i-cut’.

As the allusions to Campion and Carey indicate, tragedy is close to nonsense, the absurd to the profound. Howe is always drawn to coincidence, even in tiny details like the link between the regicide of "Chrononhotonthologos" and Stevens’ comment about the colonial-era Indian interpreter and diplomat Conrad Weiser, ‘When he speaks of pork he spells it borck’.

In and at the Stevens house, 118 Westerly Terrace, Howe is haunted as well by Henry James’s ghost story ‘The Jolly Corner,’ which provides her section epigraph: ‘His alter ego walked’. James’s protagonist, after an entire adult life spent in Europe, suffers from a too-vivid sense of how his fate might have been different had he never left America. The alter ego whom he encounters in his empty family house—that man who never traveled to Europe—is indeed like Stevens, the most ‘European’ of American modernists though he never stepped on European soil.

In this lyric series the voice is an ‘I’ speaking to a ‘you’; it could be any I to any ghostly you. Houses differentiate inside and outside, give shelter to what otherwise would be dispersed by wind and weather. Howe alludes quietly to terror and towers, but there are terror and towers in James as well. Meanwhile, she also brings forward Stevens’ fine-tuned habits of listening to those exterior sounds made interior: the scrawny cry at dawn, a cat crunching lightly through the snow beyond his night window. She writes,

I heard myself as if you
Had heard me utopically
Before reflection I heard
You outside only inside
Sometimes only a word
So in a particular world
As in the spiritual world

In an earlier lyric from ‘Souls of the Labadie Tract’: ‘Web rosette and winged effigy/…can assume cut from the hard/dark slate of Pin Hill Quarry/ Now turn to the other side just/ here in the other angle yes yes/ we’ve been dying to show you’ we find an allusion to the plates of Merian, engraved into copper or worked as counter-proofs at the reverse angle or her embroidered images, with their ‘other side[s]’. But within its compressed lines, the lyric’s image metamorphizes into a New England gravestone, specifically one of those made from slates from the Pin Hill Quarry in the town of Harvard, Worcester County, Massachusetts—slates used as writing tablets by the living, subject to erasure, and as tombstones by the dead, subject to permanent inscription.

Howe’s poetry, perhaps as a result of her early training as a visual artist, seems most often built from such cut and joined material scraps and remnants. The last section of "Souls" is dedicated to shifting views of an actual fragment of the wedding dress of Edwards’ wife, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, that Howe encountered in the Yale Library—an encounter many years after the Atherton revelation described at the start of the book. The type in this section of "Souls" appears to be smeared, scattered, torn. This does not strike the reader, who must keep turning the book in order to make out what is there, so much as a technical trick with the fonts and lines as a new development with the space of the page—as if the white had become animated by some holy spirit, blowing or shifting or otherwise moving as a cloth is blown about on a line by the wind.

The words of "Souls", meanwhile, like minerals and roots, are mined from the earth, honed, and polished. Yet all this materialism in the end is established in order to disembody it—the ghostly is indeed bodiless. Howe’s myriad voices take precedence over her few images and those images that appear are, in the Puritan mode, emblems. Her iconoclastic project is saturated in reverence for the logos, suspended in space, as the contemplated word.

Howe’s relation to history is genealogical and documentary; at the center of her art is a concern with access to the archive and the democratization of knowledge. Even so, underlying all is a tragic view of life; the ordinary proper name is lost in time; the poet/scholar ekes out his or her traces in the margins, haunted by the sins of the fathers—not the least of which was the violence committed by acts of founding. ‘Indians at Stockbridge’ is a small line on the left side of the page parallel to lines about the establishment of the most venerable of American academies. A dream of religious freedom somehow turned into violence; later, a dream of Enlightenment somehow turned into an anti-intellectual and misogynistic climate.

‘I have already shown that space is God’ is the last intelligible line in Howe’s book; it is a quote from Jonathan Edwards’s early writings on idealism, where he states his belief that everything is part of the mind of God, including space. In Howe’s continuing obsession with the park carved out of the wilderness, a set of sequential spaces, the placing of each lyric, creates a model of humane order. In the end, her Arcady survives in the book’s bounded promise of shelter.

* * *

If the serious pun of tract, a parcel of land, and tract, a bound doctrine, is the basis for Howe’s "Souls", so does the infinitely-rich semantic density of a finite patch of earth serve as the foundation for John Kinsella’s "The Divine Comedy, Journeys in a Regional Geography". This five and a half acre tract of the wheatbelt of Western Australia can be found at the base of the mountain called Walwalinj from time immemorial by the native people, the Nyungar, and Mount Bakewell from 1830 forward after its ‘discovery’ by the British Ensign Robert Dale. The parcel of land includes two connected houses: Kinsella’s mother lives in one and he and his partner, Tracy, and their children, the school-aged Katherine and toddler, Timothy, live in the other.

Like Howe, Kinsella roots his work in a prior text, yet in his case it is the "Commedia" that serves as ‘title’ to his making and his view is not retrospective or memorializing so much as a method of orientation. ‘For me, the world is a purgatory, with hell close at hand, and we can only hope to move constantly toward the light’, he writes at the start of his work. Beginning in Purgatory, then entering Paradise, and, finally, Hell, Kinsella neither follows nor inverts Dante’s path—instead he starts where he is, imagines a happier ending, and puts forward, in concluding, an admonitory vision of what will happen if human beings don’t wake up to the consequences of their destructive impulses. Kinsella’s geography is a moral treatise, and, like Howe, he is an Arcadian. Yet his aim goes beyond reform to transformation. Dante’s line in Canto XVIII of the "Purgatorio": ‘che studio di ben far grazia rinverda’ (where the good is pursued, grace is renewed by green), though uncited, seems to haunt Kinsella’s vision of an enlightened human habitation of the living world.

Dante’s hope, and path of instruction, lies of course in the Christian after-life. Kinsella’s hope, if it does not reside in the possibility of the perfectibility of man on earth, attaches itself to the possibility of learning from one’s mistakes—and learning from them in time. To this end, his brilliant reordering of the "Commedia" surveys a regional "Purgatorio" where institutions, and those in charge of them who promote nuclear proliferation, pesticides, and a range of injustices, are put to judgment. His "Paradiso" begins in the same Australian tract, yet reaches beyond to global sites and all the way to the constellations, exploring the ties of family and community that sustain his life and work. In his concluding "Inferno", he enters into the habits of mind and emotion that keep the good invisible—an invisibility caused by either glare or fog. Throughout, Kinsella carefully draws ties between the three parts of his work so that the wheatlands, the city of Perth, the mountain, and the stars are all drawn under one another’s influence.

This adaptation is in the end far more true to Dante’s poem than would be any direct allegiance to its structure. The poet’s Beatrice is Tracy—who has none of the stern ‘admiral’-like qualities of her medieval ancestor. Instead, true to her name, she finds her vocation as a translator and poet, steady presence even in withdrawal, patiently working through textual knots or wordlessly protecting the little family via her knowledge of plants and animals. As Dante himself shows sympathy and susceptibility to contagion—displaying anger, fainting at Francesca’s narratives of lust, turning factional when he meets Farinata, and drawn toward jumping into the midst of the Florentine sodomites— so does Kinsella show his own suspicions, failings, and appetites.

Dante seems to risk madness when he rails against Pisa and Genoa, wishing those cities would be drowned. Kinsella, in turn, is often battling so many demons that each successive canto seems a triumph over its circumstances. There is no heresy in Kinsella’s "Divine Comedy", but there is plenty of hypocrisy, greed, racism, homophobia, and sinning against Nature’s integrity. Yet, just as Virgil tells Dante that ‘love is the seed in you of every virtue/and of all acts deserving punishment’, Kinsella reminds us that all sins are failures of love—either the greed of wanting too much or the cold calculations of indifference.

In Dante’s attachment to Virgil and Statius and survey of his poetic rivals, particular claims are made for the poet’s vision. Kinsella sets before us the ordinary world illuminated with ordinary insights that nevertheless are often breathtaking. Here is his account of the destruction wrought on trees by ‘Idaho burl importers’.

Saw a burl if you have the gall,
Or to get there quick—burl along
Like vernacular apparatchiks,

As Dante’s birds form shapes and letters, so do Kinsella’s birds and S- and J-shaped trees form a vernacular field of recognitions. His Paolo and Francesca are a ‘swirl of lovers punished for their low incomes’—an ex-con and his girlfriend taking a ride on a touristy small-gauge railroad. The horrific image of the body of Bertran de Born carrying its own severed head as a lantern is yoked here both to the head of the murdered Aboriginal warrior, Yagan, displayed as a trophy in Britain by the explorer Dale, and the ‘Mister Potato Head’ toy that preoccupies young Tim. The ‘pouches’ of Dante’s Hell are carried over into a ‘Canto of a Pouch for the Violent Against Animals’, where a professional hunter leads some tourists to kill a female kangaroo for sport, throwing the live joey in her pouch out into the brush to die. Kinsella recounts seeing another pouched ghost: the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial species extinct on the Australian mainland. There is a drug-dealer named Malebranche, and Kinsella’s great great grandfather, an Irish immigrant on the ship Esmerelda, is linked at once to Cacciaguida and to the sailing Jason, whose ship Neptune sees from the bottom of the ocean, looking up in astonishment.

This moment of startling inversion, where, at the heights of Heaven, Dante imagines the deepest depths of the sea, is only one of many dramatic perspective shifts in the "Commedia". It echoes back to Dante’s vision of the ‘little threshing floor’ of Earth that he views from Gemini. In his ‘Canto of the Small Threshing Floors’, Kinsella watches with comparable vertigo a team of mice ‘working the same husks over’. And he uses the metaphor of a moebius strip to explore precariously the antipodean world of the Southern hemisphere, its Southern Cross, and the other side of the nearby mountain.

Where Howe draws on those historical documents produced in situ and reanimates the landscape with its own lost voices, Kinsella, by taking up a work of exile, is concerned with global issues of displacement. He calls his work a ‘distraction’ on Dante’s work, thereby emphasizing the discontinuity of the relation. His first and continuing allusion to displacement is in his acknowledgment that his family’s homestead was made possible only by means of the displacement of the Nyungar people. Kinsella’s family story recounts the path of settlers fleeing starvation in mid-19th century Ireland who benefit, as did the New England settlers who are Howe’s subjects, from the violent expurgation of a native people--in the Australian case, those aboriginal nomads who represent the longest continual culture on earth, with a tradition of narrative visual art at least 43,000 years old.

Kinsella reminds us thereby that Dante’s ‘Purgatory’, too was in the Southern hemisphere—directly below Jerusalem in the Northern. The content of this ‘regional geography’ is truly antipodean, however, for in Dante the Southern hemisphere is the sphere of water and the Northern the sphere of earth. Kinsella’s world is an inland place of podzolic, resistant, soil—for much of the year so hot, so saturated with color, that he eventually makes it the ground of his Inferno. Building Jerusalem in Australia’s forbidding terrain was the work, at the start, of those who suffered forced exile, and Kinsella remarks of his 408 page work of triplets organized into cantos that in his own garden at the foot of a mountain ‘each day, small distances are achieved and punishments accepted. Sometimes they are rebelled against, but the process of attainment, of rectification for sins done, begins again’. The book is full of torments, from stinging plants that attack the soles of the feet like caltrops to lurking vipers to the poet’s recurring bouts of agoraphobia. At one point, a hard set of seasons building in a garden comes to a scorching halt.

Kinsella himself has been struck twice by lightning and the memory of that, and the miracle of his survival, like the miracle of Dante’s survival of his visits to those places where the living have no passport, gives his voice an almost otherworldly authority. At times Kinsella seems to have learned so much from Dante that he is writing outside of time entirely. For despite the elaborate allegorical apparatus of the medieval poem, Dante pays remarkable attention to the particulars of perception: his account of the dusk moment when ‘the fly gives way to the mosquito’, of a ‘foetus like a sea sponge’, or of the orchestrated motion of sheep find their equivalents in passages where Kinsella similarly is wide-awake to the world. While a ringing telephone goes unanswered in a room, Kinsella attends to a goanna,

I don’t know where
This casts me. I count five
Seconds per breath, per
Swelling and contraction of its belly:
Like watching a fat pulse
In a human neck,
But slowed right down.
Goanna body
Occupying all space.

From the start, the new world demanded the Adamic task of naming and the witness’s task of describing. To name implies staying around for a while; to describe, a viewpoint made intelligible, by means of patience, to others elsewhere. In this "Divine Comedy", the poet/narrator is the one who names things: ‘namings are my thing,/ especially in territory through which I have been/ coming and going over a lifetime’. Five generations into the Australian settlement, naming is not a matter of invention, but of passing on the names to the future. In his ‘Canto of Naming (28)’ from his "Purgatorio", an incantation,

Mungart jam tree acacia wattle
Mungart acacia jam tree wattle
Mungart wattle jam tree acacia

develops into a comparison between the Latin name and the name given by his toddler son, who notices the plant’s shape and function: ‘he calls the Acacia cuminata—subgenus Phyllodineae, section Juliflorae—the Seed Pod Tree.’

* * *

If you send a poet into the wilderness, does she or he come back a prophet?

Literature’s illusion of beginning life anew, of rinverda, may be the fact of beginning life anew. The gods of the past have receded; to be a ghost is to desire to reenter the human world; once Pan was god, but now we are visited everywhere by unfamiliar spirits of anthropomorphism.

We are from new countries, and our myths come from books. Readers of the history that chooses us, we write the history we choose.