sentence or three, and not necessitate the several books of poetry and prose that she had neatly stacked on the desk in front of her, their pages marked with colored Post-it notes.
No, the crucial thing was that I couldnât say âit,â because when named directly, abstractly, âitâ vanishes. The subjective world canât be rendered in a summation: âI nearly lost my life but now I am better,â Alex Lemon might say, but so what? That statement might move us in conversation, but on the page itâs empty. It is the made machinery of style that manages to replicate how it feels to be alive, and thatâs why we
require it. âI stared into my eyelidsâ / Bustling magic,â Lemon writes instead, âthe black / Of my hands. Oh, how darkness / Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs / & the choke of the sea.â That is direct, in its way, but itâs also thoroughly couched in style, a mode of speaking.
âThis is how it must be to make a language,â Sandra McPherson writes in âSuspension: Junior Wells on a Small Stage in a Converted Barn,â a beautiful poem occasioned by listening to the blues musician Junior Wells. She should know. Like Wells, she makes her signature sound out of the found and the improvised, cobbling together variation and synthesis, working out an idiom that will stand in for the texture of subjectivity, a model of the perceiving and speaking self. Like the blues, the making of a poetic style is a triumph over speechlessness, a refiguring of the dynamics of power, a songâhowever flinty and peculiarâwhere none had seemed possible.
Style, unlike the defenseless body it is meant to clothe and to present, has a sort of permanence. John Berrymanâs poems, for instance, which must be one of the ingredients of Lemonâs own wrought aesthetic, feel imbued with a sense of personality, the particular quirks of wit and bitterness. The regret and longing that fuel them are just as palpable now as they were the day the poems were written. Selfhood vanishes; style persists. As Berryman did, Lemon likes heated verbs, diction shifts (âthrummedâ and âpissedâ), tonal variations, a quick joke, outbursts of lyricism; he likes a poem to speed down the page. His artfully deployed stanzaic forms orchestrate our movement through his poems, arranging silences into patterns, making a music for ear and eye. He weaves a quick-shifting
fabric of figurative speech that seems to keep the poem fluid, unstable. Alex Lemon makes something larger than any narration of personal experience: a container for struggle, love, and delightâeven, for the wounded and dumb body (âanonymous as graffitiâ), an undeceived, adult form of hope.
Â
â Mark Doty
Trembling
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
âNietzsche
Â
Â
Â
Hello friend, beautiful face
in car fire. I, the flesh wish,
am sickly wrapped in light.
Â
I promise to wink the voyeur,
spike the drinks to a fine glow
& swallow. What happened
to your arms? Raw concrete,
Â
bad paint? Uncapped, the bottle
canât be broken. Voice, be amazing
circling the river bottom.
Â
Remember fingers rattling locks,
fingers jump-starting the zipper
spine. Filleted boy. Anesthesia
is the bottle rocket. The belly.
Â
Did you hear the rain last night,
thunder? Tomorrow, I will be
afraid. I might never wake up.
1
MRI
An old man is playing fiddle in my head.
At least thatâs what the doctor says,
pointing, as he holds my MRI to the light.
Â
He must be eating the same hot dogs
my nephew microwaves. My nephew sees
Bob the Builder everywhereâsmiling
Â
in sauerkraut, sawing in the drifting sky.
Afternoons he names me Bob, knocks
my knee with a plastic hammer. Iâm half-
Â
naked, shivery with chicken skin,
napkin-gowned. But I donât laugh
because I think the veined cobweb
Â
looks like Abe Lincolnâs profile
No, the crucial thing was that I couldnât say âit,â because when named directly, abstractly, âitâ vanishes. The subjective world canât be rendered in a summation: âI nearly lost my life but now I am better,â Alex Lemon might say, but so what? That statement might move us in conversation, but on the page itâs empty. It is the made machinery of style that manages to replicate how it feels to be alive, and thatâs why we
require it. âI stared into my eyelidsâ / Bustling magic,â Lemon writes instead, âthe black / Of my hands. Oh, how darkness / Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs / & the choke of the sea.â That is direct, in its way, but itâs also thoroughly couched in style, a mode of speaking.
âThis is how it must be to make a language,â Sandra McPherson writes in âSuspension: Junior Wells on a Small Stage in a Converted Barn,â a beautiful poem occasioned by listening to the blues musician Junior Wells. She should know. Like Wells, she makes her signature sound out of the found and the improvised, cobbling together variation and synthesis, working out an idiom that will stand in for the texture of subjectivity, a model of the perceiving and speaking self. Like the blues, the making of a poetic style is a triumph over speechlessness, a refiguring of the dynamics of power, a songâhowever flinty and peculiarâwhere none had seemed possible.
Style, unlike the defenseless body it is meant to clothe and to present, has a sort of permanence. John Berrymanâs poems, for instance, which must be one of the ingredients of Lemonâs own wrought aesthetic, feel imbued with a sense of personality, the particular quirks of wit and bitterness. The regret and longing that fuel them are just as palpable now as they were the day the poems were written. Selfhood vanishes; style persists. As Berryman did, Lemon likes heated verbs, diction shifts (âthrummedâ and âpissedâ), tonal variations, a quick joke, outbursts of lyricism; he likes a poem to speed down the page. His artfully deployed stanzaic forms orchestrate our movement through his poems, arranging silences into patterns, making a music for ear and eye. He weaves a quick-shifting
fabric of figurative speech that seems to keep the poem fluid, unstable. Alex Lemon makes something larger than any narration of personal experience: a container for struggle, love, and delightâeven, for the wounded and dumb body (âanonymous as graffitiâ), an undeceived, adult form of hope.
Â
â Mark Doty
Trembling
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
âNietzsche
Â
Â
Â
Hello friend, beautiful face
in car fire. I, the flesh wish,
am sickly wrapped in light.
Â
I promise to wink the voyeur,
spike the drinks to a fine glow
& swallow. What happened
to your arms? Raw concrete,
Â
bad paint? Uncapped, the bottle
canât be broken. Voice, be amazing
circling the river bottom.
Â
Remember fingers rattling locks,
fingers jump-starting the zipper
spine. Filleted boy. Anesthesia
is the bottle rocket. The belly.
Â
Did you hear the rain last night,
thunder? Tomorrow, I will be
afraid. I might never wake up.
1
MRI
An old man is playing fiddle in my head.
At least thatâs what the doctor says,
pointing, as he holds my MRI to the light.
Â
He must be eating the same hot dogs
my nephew microwaves. My nephew sees
Bob the Builder everywhereâsmiling
Â
in sauerkraut, sawing in the drifting sky.
Afternoons he names me Bob, knocks
my knee with a plastic hammer. Iâm half-
Â
naked, shivery with chicken skin,
napkin-gowned. But I donât laugh
because I think the veined cobweb
Â
looks like Abe Lincolnâs profile
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