For Poetry Friday, I offer up this lovely poem by the talented young poet (and my friend, I'm happy to say - we went through the MFA program together at the Univ. of Washington) James Arthur. He read Tuesday night from his new book,
Charms Against Lightning, just out from Copper Canyon Press, as part of the Castalia Reading Series at
Hugo House in Seattle.
On Day and Night
And as the neighbors' guests retire, coaxing their cars
into the snow (we're gazing through the curtain
into winter's pale hub), two girls gaze up. They're all
going home, like wheels correcting
into steering hands, or drawn breath returning to the air,
but you can't come back to anywhere—there's no perfect here
and there, or now and then—but here we are,
again. A silverfish crosses the windowpane. We peer
into the street, and up at the stranded moon. White wheel,
black field. Black winter, white road. White silence,
black wind. White cars, black wires.
Just look at how he controls sound in this poem, obscuring to the
reader's eye the rhymes and near-rhymes while still letting them chime
in the ear. In other words, he allows readers to hear the music of the
poem (air/there/anywhere, air/are, hub/up, then/again,
we're/steering/here/peer, and the bookended rhyme of "retire" in the
first line with "wire" in the last line - like the echo of a bell)
without it becoming sing-song.
And I simply love that ending -
white/black, black/white, white/black, white/black, the slight crossing
of the order of those just once, in the same way black wires seem to cross
at one telephone pole and then uncross at the next as you drive down a
long highway. This is what good poetry does - the words are evocative on
more than one level. They paint the scene (or, in this case, possibly,
photograph the scene in
black and white) but they mimic the visual
pattern found in the scene, as well as the rhythm of the scene - listen
to the heavy syllables of those last sixteen words, like tires
turning over and over as they come down a road - boom, boom, boom, boom. In this way, form
approximates content.
This is
SO much harder to do than it looks -
present rhythm and rhyme to a modern reader who has been trained to
think formal elements are fusty and archaic - and to do it subtly. It's even harder if
you're not just playing a game with the language but you're saying
something meaningful, as James is, something with heart. For me, this poem fulfills
Ezra Pound's mandate that a poem must appeal to sound (melopoeia), sight
(phanopoeia) and mind (logopoeia.)
James Arthur is a poet to watch - just look at the high honors he's already won (taken from his website): "His poems have appeared in
The New Yorker,
The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and
The American
Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry
Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the
Amy Clampitt House, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize...He's currently a
Hodder Fellow at Princeton."
Definitely look for this book - it's filled with poems that - well -I'll just admit it: that I would love to have written.
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You'll find the Poetry Friday round-up this week over at Lura Salas's blog,
Writing the World for Kids. Head over there to see what people are posting. And just in honor of those last lines of James's poem, I'll post this black/white white/black photo of a road in winter:
