Marina Tsvetaeva is known for having divided poets between two types, “poets with history and poets without history.” Like most categorical pronouncements by poets about poets, her essay of that title creates the chimerical foundation on which to validate her own inclinations. “Poets with history are, above all, poets of a theme,” she wrote. “Rarely are they pure lyricists … [they are] poets of will.” They cultivate their projects, they indicate (they would dictate) how life ought to be lived. “All poets can be divided into poets with development and poets without development,” she insisted. “The first could be depicted graphically as an arrow shot into infinity; the second – as a circle.” Poets with history discover themselves in the world; poets without history discover the world in themselves, and their “pure lyric poetry has no project … Pure lyricism is the sheer condition of going through something … a condition of infinite poverty.”
But some poets are compelled to work in the turbulent middle space where history and psyche query and glare at each other. Volleys of certainties and contradictions create a third thing: a familiar world cohering and affirmed by way of the form and sound of the poem. This brings me to Previously Owned, Nathan McClain’s second poetry collection. The severities he names or alludes to are made approachable, visible, audible through his pensive, companionable tone – without minimizing the endurance of those severities. As I proceed through Previously Owned, I feel that sway or pivot between the clench of history and the freedom of speculation, the suggestion of values and the worry over their potency.
Midlife Aubade
There’s a certain comfort
in knowing a bridge has stood
almost forever. There
long before the dawn’s first
foghorn blast — like one beast
lowing to another —
and before each ship I could describe now
with painstaking precision
that will glide slowly
underneath. Steel. Suspension wire.
Something in my life
should compare to these … Once
there was a bridge whose name
I never learned, under which
a small stream shimmered
the way a pond sometimes shimmers
for a moment, when a child flips a coin into it.
Tiny fish swam there. But the water
was like smoke. I thought,
nothing should have to live like this.
For all its simplicity, this poem resists summation. Its final, recalled observation turns me back to the first line, the “certain comfort” I had been sure this poem was probing. “Something in my life / should compare to these …” – bridge, blast, boats, yes, all of them, as fixed and firm as steel. But perhaps in childhood, something more primordial was encountered – a steely memory, not quite in opposition to the great bridge of comfort, but rippling with apprehension, flipped into the poem with the modesty of a penny. The poem’s title announces the personal life, but the poem, through its very recollections, uncovers something missing or perplexing in that life.
Two phrases come to mind when I consider McClain’s work. In Zbigniew Herbert’s work, William Meredith discovered what he called “the demanding reticence of poetry.” Reticence isn’t shyness or reluctance. For the accomplished poet, reticence is a willingness to wait, to prefer the scent of a truth over its poundage. Reticence, then, is a gesture of generosity towards the reader, who is given something to think about rather than to march behind. For McClain, reticence in a poem like “What You Call It” is picturing himself on the way to the market and peering at a peach tree, “peach-like” fruit pending there – “Ripe, / one might say, which, true, / is more precise – precision // a thing of value. Not that / fruit cares what you call it.” Anything that one might pass on the street may be “an object that has gone / unwatched for too long, susceptible // to trespass, which happens / first in the mind …” Deftly, he then leaps to “Knowledge …
which a poet once called ‘historical,’ too
a trespassing of sorts, the proof of which
perhaps best shown in how one
might punish a slave who had been
taught to read the word beauty or toil
or rest, secretly, and by firelight.
There are things nearly impossible
to forget, having so trespassed,
having badly needed to see up closed
this tree fixed in place, its fruit
dangling – there
within reach, though not
the same as being offered.
The poem concludes with the figure of the speaker reconsidering the peach and its possible ripeness. The history and longevity of racism become accessible by way of exquisite correspondences here. It is not that McClain’s reticence has softened the topic for consumption like a ripe peach; on the contrary, he leaves us hanging there as if we are peaches as well. Even the book’s title conjoins two references, one historical, one mundane.
The second phrase that comes to mind about this body of work is something attributed to the neoclassical French painter Ingres: “With talent, you do what you like. With genius, you do what you can.” This is related, for me, to Tsvetaeva’s notion of lyricism as “a condition of infinite poverty.” In “What You Call It,” McClain may sound out his historical chops, but ultimately he leads us to the density of experience – not by raising the pitch of the poem’s sound or with can’t-miss polemical imagery, but through a respect for what his temperament and limitations allow him to do. Naturally, he will test those limits. The poems confront some harsh truths about our world, but the guiding impulse is one of self-inquiry.
The book’s second section, based on experiences as a juror, includes 13 pieces titled “They said I was an alternate.” But the sequence isn’t a lineated op-ed about the criminal justice system. Rather, being an alternate suggests an opportunity to speculate and observe. One poem titled “The sentence” conflates the textual unit and a jury’s verdict, wordplay as a life awaits judgment. There’s much self-awareness in this gesture. Other parts of the sequence look directly at the court’s procedures:
They said I was an alternate
and brought me to the other room
with the other alternates
where we couldn’t hear
what might have been whispered
about evidence
or guilt by the others,
though I did
press my ear to the quiet
wall as if listening
for the tumblers of a bank vault
There are question marks throughout Previously Owned, several at the very end of poems. Near the conclusion of the collection, there is “Against Melancholy,” and like everything else here, this poem presents the language of a man thinking – while his rhythms and line-breaks are those of a man feeling and wondering. In this poem, first there is the man alone in his room listening to Beethoven and its “feeling / of triumph”; then there is spirited noise from a party next door; and finally, there is fascination about joy itself:
it’s a child’s
red bouncing ball
that somehow gets asway
from you, and you
have to chase it
into a busy intersection,
and everyone’s
laying on their horns,
all that air
vibrating and swollen,
your chest swollen, too
and maybe chasing it
could get you killed
or crippled at best
but what feels better
than that moment,
when you catch it,
when it’s yours?
For me, much of Previously Owned is enacted in a busy intersection, and McClain has caught me while I’m stuck in medias res, honking fecklessly. His manner has both calmed me down yet has made me alert, and has alerted me. What means more than that moment when I catch a glimpse of what is actually there, what has actually occurred? I proceed through the sudden openings of his poems, watching out for a childlike life.
[Published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2022, 112 pages, $17.95 paperback]
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Marina Tsvetaeva’s final destination was Yelabuga, located about 300 miles east of Moscow on the Kama River. She committed suicide by hanging in her house on August 31, 1941. When Viktoria Schweitzer, a Tsvetaeva biographer, visited the town in 1966, she met people with still-fresh memories of the poet. Tsvetaeva was one of about 1,000 evacuees from the west. They recalled a woman who “was very depressed. Just smoked in silence … She left the house frequently looking for work, or for someone to buy what little was left of her silver cutlery.” A woman named Anastasia Ivanova, who lived in the same house, said “She couldn’t do anything … If I heated the water for her she’d wash her hair. If she asked me to mop up for her I would.” Yet despite her listless despair, Tsvetaeva was trying, and had tried for many years, to keep going. In 1910, she had emerged as a poet phenom at the age of 18 with the publication of her first collection, Evening Album, and continued to publish poetry and plays through the early years of the Revolution. But in 1922, Tsvetaeva left Russia for Berlin, beginning a roving exodus that would end in Yelabuga. When Anastasia discovered her body, she noticed that Tsvetaeva was wearing an apron.
In Marina Tsvetaeva, the novelist and poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata conjures the psyche of Tsvetaeva in prose that is not so much lyrical as incisive and intimate. She addresses Tsvetaeva throughout as “you.” She doesn’t analyze, but may ask a question. She depicts and withholds judgment — but she doesn’t scant Tsvetaeva’s churlishness and demanding nature (“Your demonic egotism”). Repetition, the cycle of ecstatic expression blunted by anxiety and desperation, comprises Khoury-Ghata’s challenge: how to express the obsessions and stubborn habits while accruing the illusion of a whole person perceived.
The narrative begins at the final hour and winds its way back to her early adulthood, meeting and marrying Sergei Efron, raising her children — a family chronicle that existed separately from her exalted relationships, mainly epistolary, with Mandelstam, Pasternak, Rilke and many others. Khoury-Ghata inserts passages from letters and poems. She imagines the various spare rooms in which Tsvetaeva lived — seven moves in 17 years. The past is a swirl of encounters, tragedies, arrivals and departures — and within that swirl, the inception of poems. The story is told through the abjection of the last days — when the weight of all that had occurred, the imprisonment of her husband and daughter, the poverty, the collapse of the life she had enjoyed before the Revolution — crushed her. In a letter Tsvetaeva writes, “And here I am in the great silence that I never break, wounded to death … Without ever having understood anything … not how or why”:
You throw yourself headlong onto people, drown them under the waves of your feelings, demand that they listen. They must share your unhappiness, accept your justifications. Declare you innocent.
The death of little Irina whom you could have saved if you had taken her out of the orphanage at the same time as Alya, that death hidden for years rises up in your consciousness ever since the birth of Mur. You
Your talk about it for the first time with Sergei although you forbade him from doing so in order not to open what you called your wound.
In 2020, Seagull Books published Soutine’s Last Journey by the German writer Ralph Dutli. Like Khoury-Ghata’s Tsvetaeva, Dutli’s narrative begins with the final hours of the dying artist, following a desperate ride back to Nazi-occupied Paris. Here, too, is an attempt to capture the elements of Soutine’s psyche and attitudes toward his art. Knowing only a little about Soutine before reading this book, I finished it with an excited sense that I had seen something vital about Soutine’s spirit, depicted through both his delirious memories and the narrator’s rendition of parts of his life. But I knew quite bit about Tsvetaeva before starting Khoury-Ghata’s portrait. Initially, I did wonder about how a reader of Marina Tsvetaeva, not knowing much about her, will fare with all of the references to the Russian and European figures mentioned within. But any reservations were dispelled. If you admire the force of Tsvetaeva’s work and the determination of her artistic impulse, you will be struck by the accumulating force of Khoury-Ghata’s vision of her essential qualities. If Tsvetaeva is a new figure to you, this narrative will offer an unblinking but compassionate portrait, a fitting companion to your volume of Tsvetaeva’s poems.
[Published by Seagull Books on December 20, 2022, 140 pages, $$21.00 hardcover]