An Inflorescence (A flowering of poetry every Friday - Dan Chiasson - lyrical odes for our day

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

I feel a little unprepared for the inflorescence as this week has been all about my physiology midterm and the GRE I have to take today. Ugh. But I did fall over a fun volume of fairly recent poems by Dan Chiasson called The Afterlife of Objects, so I think I'll give you some of those. He is a New Englander and teaches at Wellsley College. Here's a terrific interview with him from Guernica. He seems at times almost apologetic about writing poetry:

Every poet wants to have that great, transcendent renunciatory power of Whitman, the access to other sites and other persons, that amplitude, that confidence and authority as a voice. Even the most narrowly private or confessional poets want that. 99% of them didn’t get it, and that’s roughly the percentage of poets in any given mode that don’t succeed, so I don’t think confessionalism offers any worse odds than any other mode

In his poem Your Stone the narrator prays to be made inanimate - is that confessional? When asked for what advice he would give a young poet:

Develop an effective camouflage. I think camouflage is important in establishing a talent and a sensibility that will be individual and different from the group. I’ve always avoided the tribal markers of being a poet.

The risk with camouflage is that when you’re not writing, the camouflage becomes the real thing, and then you think I’m just a phony, I’m just this person who gets to be a little sullen at Thanksgiving dinner or opt out of taking my kids to the playground. That’s what being a poet amounts to: being perceived as a poet, when in fact you are just this suburban voluptuary. This mere “guy.”

How to describe these poems... their tone is often dark, haunted, their subject matter is familiar and mundane - a salt dish, an aging relative, a peach tree, the objects in a storage locker - he mixes up-to-the-minute concerns with classical ones. Their rhythms are formal I can really feel them, but the life of the objects or ideas as imagined by Chiasson are freed up in a dream-like fashion - things don't have to behave the way they're supposed to but as I read them, I accept that they are that way.

I really admire Ward, - the feeling of isolation is redolent through the poems lean composition - the way it lies on the page - a narrow column - classical rhythms - in an iron hive/no drop/of water fell/more quietly than I/fell through/the elevator shaft -but the ways the lines are broken make me extra-conscious of them. Like the feeling of being made to listen to my own footsteps as I walk down the corridor of that hospital. The elevator shaft - like having been dropped into another world, Alice down the rabbit hole. And the disgust is palpable - people whose humanity has been replaced by something else. There is so much happening in this poem: utter reality and fantasy, present and past, memory and death and it reaches me with directness and simplicity. Sometimes he references other writers, Self Storage is slyly quoting Emma Lazarus, I think - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." With lady liberty as a widow now. Sometimes he imagines America as the storage bin, sometimes himself. What we inherit, what we keep. Are we richer for keeping these "treasures" or poorer?




Your Stone

Here's your stone he said what for I said for your girl he said
and left me alone in the bedroom strewn with punctured cans.

They bring the fire so close to their face I thought every time
the living room flashed and wild cries climbed to ecstatic silence.

Ecstatic silence: just yesterday alone in my study I heard
the neighbor's child practicing scales on a rented clarinet

just last night when you crying ended and you fell asleep
I prayed to be made inanimate, a hand-me-down mattress.

But tonight the little crystal called forgetfulness, the postures
of delight and appetite, and the beautiful girl said what's your name?



Ward

I came quietly where
my grandmother
was an insect

in an iron hive.
No drop
of water fell

more quietly than I
fell through
the elevator shaft.

Then, on the ward,
I walked along
a hallway of formaldehyde

and glass.
A woman bent
herself in half

to scratch her coal-
black swollen foot.
Christ, one man's

forehead shone
white and dewy, like
a dolphin's belly.

Maiden never was who heard
the cribs fall
silent where he daughters were,

whose husband, frozen
still, berated her
one long year from

a piss-soaked chair.
What is awareness
here, so late, so close to night?




Self-Storage

Bring me your amateurish try
at taxidermy, fleur-de-lys

upholstered chair, flea-bitten oven mitt, replica Mars lander, old suit bad

choice, wrong turn.
Bring me your freak, your odd, your ugly

rug, dull knife, dull life. Threatening noise heard
over and over in your skull, a bell

how many thousand decibels
loud, how much distraction, sadness, everything

is safe with me and out of sight

*

America the widow
sorting through his drawer

of fisted socks. The ice shedding
itself inside the water glass.

The diagnosis. The dozen
childlike men begging for medication.

The monkey screaming behind
iron bars. Tender objects:

the dried corsage. America
a certain model

motorcycle, rare Beatles
butchered baby cover

safe, all safe,
all out of sight.

*

Are you the phone call
or the military

base, North Carolina
or Vermont, the rapist or my
aunt sent

far away for basic training,
senator
or sergeant, mother's tears

or father's stern
embarrassed
order to shut up? The den

or the phone, the voice
or the street noise, or television's

usual banal exuberance? America
they wanted

her to marry him.

*

Of all things seen
beside the highway I

am most like you. The stories
of lunatics and pack rats

storing old newspapers
broken bottles

scribbles animal remains
are true. Also

the corpses. Also
the stolen stereo.

A priest stores
jeweled chalices in me, no questions asked.


*

O pension everyone
agreed upon.

O slave, sieve, place
to put the precious useless things.