Dip Me in Honey and Bury Me Someplace Nice
1 year ago
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Lesley Yalen on Natalie Lyalin's "All Night Vigil"
How many things can one person look out for, lament, honor, and ward off, and how often?
All the time. All at once.
It is hard work, exhausting, to be awake through the night, devoting oneself to everything. But it must be done, (reading “All Night Vigil,” a chant of some length at the center of Natalie Lyalin’s new book of poems, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat).
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “vigil” comes from the Anglo-French and the Old French and before that from the Latin, vigilia, meaning watch, watchfulness, wakefulness. The modern definitions of the word also describe Lyalin’s poem just fine:
“an occasion of devotional watching”
“prayers said or sung at a nocturnal service, spec. for the dead”
“a wake. obs.”
“a watch kept during the natural time for sleep”
An occasion, a vigil is not something for all the time, nor can one usually keep many vigils at once. Even the monks in their cloisters cannot maintain continuously over time and across experience a heightened state of awareness and devotion.
Lyalin’s poem is sad and anxious and magnanimous and beautiful because: there are just so many vigils:
“All night vigil for not returning / to that continent. All night vigil for / a church that turned into a gymnasium, / complete with swimming pool. / I keep an all night vigil for the Kunstkammer, / which keeps an all night vigil / for the deformed skeletons it houses, / and I keep an all night vigil for them too.”
There is a great beautiful anxious sense of responsibility in this poem, like saying Hail Marys, lighting a yahrzeit candle, like obsessively checking that the coffee pot is unplugged,
“Another vigil for my drunken neighbor, / as she hollered government conspiracy… All night vigil for Mrs. Emily Bossin / and spelling tests, green sweaters and parts / of New Jersey, Boston, and Atlanta.”
as vigils must be kept for everything helpless and helpful one can remember.
The poem acknowledges the impossibility of the job, but insists that one must try,
“I ask forgiveness for not keeping an all night vigil / when the bombs keep a greenish vigil of their own”
try to be the sentry who doesn’t nod off.
Listen to the bells, the first notes of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, from 1915: http://www.patriciagray.net/Musichtmls/vespers/1Come.mp3
All the time. All at once.
It is hard work, exhausting, to be awake through the night, devoting oneself to everything. But it must be done, (reading “All Night Vigil,” a chant of some length at the center of Natalie Lyalin’s new book of poems, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat).
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “vigil” comes from the Anglo-French and the Old French and before that from the Latin, vigilia, meaning watch, watchfulness, wakefulness. The modern definitions of the word also describe Lyalin’s poem just fine:
“an occasion of devotional watching”
“prayers said or sung at a nocturnal service, spec. for the dead”
“a wake. obs.”
“a watch kept during the natural time for sleep”
An occasion, a vigil is not something for all the time, nor can one usually keep many vigils at once. Even the monks in their cloisters cannot maintain continuously over time and across experience a heightened state of awareness and devotion.
Lyalin’s poem is sad and anxious and magnanimous and beautiful because: there are just so many vigils:
“All night vigil for not returning / to that continent. All night vigil for / a church that turned into a gymnasium, / complete with swimming pool. / I keep an all night vigil for the Kunstkammer, / which keeps an all night vigil / for the deformed skeletons it houses, / and I keep an all night vigil for them too.”
There is a great beautiful anxious sense of responsibility in this poem, like saying Hail Marys, lighting a yahrzeit candle, like obsessively checking that the coffee pot is unplugged,
“Another vigil for my drunken neighbor, / as she hollered government conspiracy… All night vigil for Mrs. Emily Bossin / and spelling tests, green sweaters and parts / of New Jersey, Boston, and Atlanta.”
as vigils must be kept for everything helpless and helpful one can remember.
The poem acknowledges the impossibility of the job, but insists that one must try,
“I ask forgiveness for not keeping an all night vigil / when the bombs keep a greenish vigil of their own”
try to be the sentry who doesn’t nod off.
Listen to the bells, the first notes of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, from 1915: http://www.patriciagray.net/Musichtmls/vespers/1Come.mp3
Thursday, October 8, 2009
"The Faculties of Yes": On the Poems of Lewis Freedman, by Jessica Fjeld
Lewis Freedman’s poems are necessary toys, jungle gyms of the mind, small machines all the parts of which are words. They are jointed objects, which ask their readers to animate them. They are recombinant, a resistance to ordinary, linear thought.
They do the work that poems have to do, and they do it admirably well. As creatures of language, we are creatures of habit. Poems, good poems, place themselves in the ruts of the roads we travel and overturn the horse-carts of our minds. Until we come across a poem, we go about making grocery lists and talking to bus drivers and reading the news. What we don’t know, what we can’t name, where we haven’t been—the uncertainty raises our hackles. Few among us approach it with grace.
And that’s where Lewis Freedman comes in. When confronting the undefined, grace, kind and patient and brilliant, is his specialty. His poems are a challenge, yes. They are documentation of a brain on the move, working fast through open fields of sense, self, intellectual history. But Lewis’s poems do what they do so gently, with such tenderness and faith in language. They encourage—even quietly require—active reading, a three-dimensional movement of the reader’s mind, made in tandem with the poet. Other people’s poems maybe take you on a trip through some caves in a miniature train. Those poems move as much as a train can, squeaking around the corners, all hitched up on itself. When you’re in the care of Lewis’s poems, there’s no seat to sit in. You are on your own reconnaissance. Lewis writes about “the faculties of yes”: you possess them. You have a chance to recover that absorption in play that you had as a child. You can stake your claim on a new homestead of language. You can take these poems apart and find your every impulse validated. You can put yourself back together in a new way.
Hearing Lewis Freedman read is a treat: congratulations, you.
They do the work that poems have to do, and they do it admirably well. As creatures of language, we are creatures of habit. Poems, good poems, place themselves in the ruts of the roads we travel and overturn the horse-carts of our minds. Until we come across a poem, we go about making grocery lists and talking to bus drivers and reading the news. What we don’t know, what we can’t name, where we haven’t been—the uncertainty raises our hackles. Few among us approach it with grace.
And that’s where Lewis Freedman comes in. When confronting the undefined, grace, kind and patient and brilliant, is his specialty. His poems are a challenge, yes. They are documentation of a brain on the move, working fast through open fields of sense, self, intellectual history. But Lewis’s poems do what they do so gently, with such tenderness and faith in language. They encourage—even quietly require—active reading, a three-dimensional movement of the reader’s mind, made in tandem with the poet. Other people’s poems maybe take you on a trip through some caves in a miniature train. Those poems move as much as a train can, squeaking around the corners, all hitched up on itself. When you’re in the care of Lewis’s poems, there’s no seat to sit in. You are on your own reconnaissance. Lewis writes about “the faculties of yes”: you possess them. You have a chance to recover that absorption in play that you had as a child. You can stake your claim on a new homestead of language. You can take these poems apart and find your every impulse validated. You can put yourself back together in a new way.
Hearing Lewis Freedman read is a treat: congratulations, you.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
On Natalie Lyalin's Poems (by Seth Landman)
Herman Melville, taking a break from finishing Moby Dick, wrote the following in a letter to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Significantly, Melville then goes on to note:
In Natalie Lyalin’s poems, anxieties are explored and, because of that, truths are uncovered. This is no light matter; not enough of us go as far. It takes courage to get down to – as Melville put it in that same letter – “the inmost leaf of the bulb,” to admit that we are subject to the whims of the world going on around us, that the all feeling works both ways. In Lyalin’s poems, experiments go all the way towards results which in the final analysis are achingly gorgeous, inconclusive, incendiary; the poems insist on more poems; there is more to say about the family, the friends, what life is like when you are brave enough to be someone who notices, who stops to take stock.
In desperate times, these poems are provocations to take an uncertain step, to open a scary door. In her poem, “Vision,” Lyalin writes, “The world was not yet discovered.” Then the world does things like travel and wait. When a poem happens, something is revealed, but I don’t know if I can discover something that I can’t tie down. Lyalin makes poems that posit a new frontier, where the world continues being discovered in time machines you conjure, words that don’t exist yet, and language that has just been delivered, right when you arrive.
In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,--good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!”
Significantly, Melville then goes on to note:
This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
In Natalie Lyalin’s poems, anxieties are explored and, because of that, truths are uncovered. This is no light matter; not enough of us go as far. It takes courage to get down to – as Melville put it in that same letter – “the inmost leaf of the bulb,” to admit that we are subject to the whims of the world going on around us, that the all feeling works both ways. In Lyalin’s poems, experiments go all the way towards results which in the final analysis are achingly gorgeous, inconclusive, incendiary; the poems insist on more poems; there is more to say about the family, the friends, what life is like when you are brave enough to be someone who notices, who stops to take stock.
In desperate times, these poems are provocations to take an uncertain step, to open a scary door. In her poem, “Vision,” Lyalin writes, “The world was not yet discovered.” Then the world does things like travel and wait. When a poem happens, something is revealed, but I don’t know if I can discover something that I can’t tie down. Lyalin makes poems that posit a new frontier, where the world continues being discovered in time machines you conjure, words that don’t exist yet, and language that has just been delivered, right when you arrive.
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