“Maggot and Tare: From Elegy to Self-Elegy”

Maggot and Tare: From Elegy to Self-Elegy

“Nothing but Clay is Enkidu”: The Origins of Elegy

The moment when something like elegy begins in written poetry, the very exact moment perhaps, occurs in that formative work, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, first set down sometime during the third millennium BC onto cuneiform tablets, those sunbaked rectangles festooned with chicken scratches — they’re almost exactly the size of an iPhone — and deriving from a still older oral tradition. If you’ve read some translations of the poem, you know that Gilgamesh is a tough customer, the petulant and vainglorious archetype for all the flawed tragic heroes of literary epics which follow. Two-thirds god, one-third mortal human, and something like 75 feet tall, he lords over the city of Uruk with an arbitrariness and bluster that make Donald Trump seem almost civil. Like Trump, he’s a sexual predator: among other things, he insists on sleeping with all the city’s brides on the night prior to their weddings. Early in the poem, the people of Uruk have had their fill of Gilgamesh’s wrongdoings, but they have no means to vote him out of office; instead, they implore the gods for a savior, a hero who will challenge and subdue their bonkers king. The gods offer what at first seems an odd choice for this role: Enkidu, who is a giant as well, and who, like Gilgamesh, is supremely strong. But he is also a grown-up feral child, a wild man covered with body hair, who knows nothing of the ways of other humans. He crawls about on all fours; he slurps up pond water like a cow or dog. When Gilgamesh hears of Enkidu’s existence, he seeks to placate, civilize, and do what so many dictators do with their most threatening rivals; he means to make Enkidu his minion, beginning the process by sending Shamhat, a temple prostitute, to seduce Enkidu. This she accomplishes with enormous success; she and Enkidu copulate for seven days straight, and by the time she is able to bring Enkidu to the gates of Uruk, he’s been cleaned-up nicely; he’s been to a barber; he no longer walks on all fours. In fact, he seems to intuitively possess the “moral compass” Gilgamesh so sorely lacks.

While Gilgamesh is enroute to another one of his forced liaisons with a bride, Enkidu blocks his way. They wrestle with one another, so violently that Uruk gets trashed in the manner of New York City in the first Avengers movie. Gilgamesh wins the match, but seeks neither to kill nor punish Enkidu. In fact, the two opponents suddenly become best buddies. Enkidu praises Gilgamesh as — in the words of David Ferry’s masterly version of the poem — “the strongest of all, the perfect, the terror” (1). They kiss, they hold hands, and henceforth the two are inseparable. And together they’re a formidable team; Enkidu may be a wild man, but in some ways he is the Superego to Gilgmesh’s Id. This is no mere bromance; it’s all sacerdotal ardor, a marriage of two hearts beating as one–but some hubris is involved as well. As with so many other epic heroes, from Odysseus to Tarzan to Harry Potter and John Snow, there are quests to be undertaken. These adventures occupy several of the existing cuneiform tablets/chapters of the epic, and would provide an opportunity for some great FX in a Gilgamesh film adaptation, but they make for rather boring reading. They journey to the cedar forests of Lebanon to chop down a nifty city gate for Uruk, dispatching the monster Humbaba in the process. Later, they slay the sacred Bull of Heaven, which is the last straw for the gods — Gilgamesh and Enkidu have grown too uppity, and the gods punish the pair by inflicting a long and agonizing demise upon Enkidu. His deathbed speeches are heartwrenching. Here, once again, is Ferry’s translation:

On the twelfth day he raised up in his bed

and spoke these words to Gilgamesh and said:

“Gilgamesh, who encouraged me in the battle,

saying, ‘Two people, two companions, they can prevail,

Gilgamesh is afraid and cannot help me!’

After that Gilgamesh heard the death rattle. [2]

Enkidu’s death happens almost exactly in the middle of the epic, and the quest that Gilgamesh undertakes in its second part is radically different from the buddy movie adventures of the earlier sections of the poem. Gilgamesh’s grief for Enkidu has made him introspective and cautious. If Enkidu can die, so can Gilgamesh himself. Gilgamesh’s bewilderment–and especially his struggles with denial — gives him a psychological complexity that transforms him from a 75-foot giant to a kind of modern anti-hero along the lines of the narrator of Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Malte, the prototypical sensitive starving-artist-wandering-the-streets-of-Paris, spends a good portion of the book brooding over mortality. In one quite startling use of metaphor, Malte asserts that we all carry a sort of intuitive knowledge of the moment of death inside us, like a snapshot in our wallets or purses. More startling still, Malte suggests that this snapshot of death is likely to be that of someone else’s demise and not one’s own. “Besides,” Malte writes, “I now know quite well how someone could carry, all those years, deep inside his wallet, the description of a death hour. It wouldn’t even have to be a specially selected one: they all have something unusual about them” [3]. Rilke was an ardent admirer of Gilgamesh, noting in one of his letters that the poem is “the epic of the fear of death that arose in primordial times among people for whom for the first time the separation of death and life had become definitive and fateful” [4].

Allow me to describe the moment in the epic that best evokes this “definitive and fateful” understanding. After Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh embarks on a meandering journey to the netherworld, where he seeks to find the secret of life and death from Utnapishtim, the survivor of the Great Flood, the prototype for the Biblical Noah, and the only human to have been granted immortality by the gods. The reckoning, however, comes not during Gilgamesh’s encounter with Utnapishtim, but during an earlier passage, a seemingly innocuous layover on the hero’s journey. He stops at a tavern, a nondescript watering hole, notable only for the fact that it happens to be located at the very end of the world. Siduri, the bartender, is at first reluctant to serve Gilgamesh, who looks too wild and distraught to be allowed inside the door. But once he’s convinced her that he is indeed the heroic King of Uruk and slayer of Humbaba, he begins to pour out his soul to her in one of those moments of barstool anagnorisis that’s more reminiscent of a scene in a Mad Men episode than it is of ancient Mesopotamia. Although Gilgamesh has buried Enkidu with great pomp and ceremony, he still cannot accept “the companion’s” death. Now comes the detail I’ve been promising. After relating Enkidu’s death agonies, Gilgamesh describes to Siduri the vigil he kept over the body. Perhaps it’s better to say that Gilgamesh relives the vigil. Here’s Ferry’s description of the scene:

Seven days and nights I sat beside the body,

weeping for Enkidu beside the body

and then I saw a worm fall out of his nose.

Must I die too? Must Gilgamesh be like that?

It was then I felt the fear of it in my belly.

I roam the wilderness because of the fear.

Enkidu, the companion, whom I loved,

is dirt, nothing but clay is Enkidu [5]

Is there any better example of what T.S. Eliot calls the objective correlative than the appearance of that worm? For me, it is the most astonishing scene in the entire epic; thanks to the worm, Gilgamesh comes to the definitive and fateful understanding of mortality that Rilke tells us is the overarching theme of the poem. Some translators of the epic, most notably Yusef Komunyakaa in his verse play adaptation, move the description of the worm dropping from Enkidu’s nose from the scene in the tavern to the earlier scene where Gilgamesh prepares Enkidu’s body for burial. This makes a certain dramatic sense, but not a psychological one. Gilgamesh has for a long while been haunted and obsessed by his glimpse of the worm (some translators prefer to call it a “maggot”), but only now, after many travails, is he at last able to speak of it. No matter the translation, the scene takes your breath away: Here’s Benjamin Foster’s rendering.

Six days and seven nights I wept for him

Until a worm fell out of his nose.

I was frightened […]

I have grown afraid of death so I roam the steppe,

My friend’s case weights heavy upon me.

A distant road I roam over the steppe.

My friend Enkidu’s case weighs heavy upon me!

A distant road I roam over the steppe.

How can I be silent? How can I hold my peace?

My friend whom I loved is turned to clay,

Enkidu, my friend whom I loved, is turned to clay! [6]

Even in the consummately strange version of the epic by Belfast poet Philip Terry — which renders the poem into Globish, a radically simplified version of English, limited to a fifteen-hundred word vocabulary and designed as an international business language, as a kind of Esperanto for oligarchs — the scene has a decidedly visceral power [7]. Terry finds some hugely inventive ways to address the formal constraints of writing in Globish. For example, Enkidu goes by the moniker of “WILDMAN,” while Gilgamesh becomes “DICTATOR”:

until | a snake | fall out | he nose

Then I | frighten

heart + + +

I tra | vel a | long path | through the | valley

The friend | I love | he turn | to dust

WILDMAN | the friend | I love | + + + + + + | + + + dust [8]

Choosing to have a snake emerge from Enkidu’s nose is a bit problematic, but this we can attribute to the highly specialized lexicon of Globish: it has no word for “worm” or “maggot.” “Snake,” however, made the Globish final cut, presumably because, as the international black market traffic in exotic pets attests, snakes can be commodified in ways that maggots cannot.

So there you have it, reader: as Gilgamesh bares his soul to Siduri, and as she pours the hero another Sumerian equivalent of an IPA, the author of Gilgamesh invents the genre we have come to know as elegy, and it’s especially worth noting that, as in so many subsequent elegies, Gilgamesh’s speech to Siduri serves a dual purpose—to mourn the loss of Enkidu and to confront Gilgamesh’s own mortality. Far be it from me to offer a strict definition of “elegy,” for the term has become infinitely more fluid in its meaning over the centuries. Classical Greek literature defines it purely in metrical terms, and some dictionary definitions still give the word a secondary meaning that exclusively emphasizes the elegy’s form rather than its content — “a poem written in elegiac couplets,” says one definition in the online Merriam-Webster [9]. Peter Sacks, in his highly regarded Neo-Freudian study of the English Elegy, finds a useful, catch-all for the term, calling it “a poem of mortal loss and consolation” [10]. John B. Vickery, in his The Modern Elegiac Temper, finds contemporary modes of elegy so various and diversified that he labels our era the time of “the elegiac matrix” [11]. Furthermore, Jahan Ramazani, in his excellent Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, identifies various subgenres of the word, most notably the “anti-elegy,” and the “self-elegy” [12]. These terms are especially useful to him in a chapter on Sylvia Plath, with “Daddy” being the quintessence of the anti-elegy, and those terrifying efforts predictive of Plath’s suicide—think of “Axes,” and especially of “Edge”—epitomizing the self-elegy. These two terms are so exactly right that they almost don’t need further definition, even when they overlap, as when Gilgamesh describes for Siduri that maggot squirming from Enkidu’s nose. Gilgamesh’s earlier funeral oration for Enkidu, recorded in Tablet VIII of the poem, is all about “mortal loss and consolation.” “May the holy Euphrates weep for you,” says Gilgamesh, who then implores a host of other people, animals, and personified natural objects to join in the weeping, ranging from highlands, lowlands and mountains to the harlot who “massaged Enkidu with sweet-smelling oil” and the nurse who “treated his rashes with butter.” [13]. The funeral oration is a grand public gesture, and grandly rhetorical, partly Marc Antony declaiming over Caesar’s body, partly “Where Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d.” Gilgamesh’s description of the maggot has none of that grandeur — in that respect, it’s anti-elegy. But it’s also self-elegy, isn’t it? In Ferry’s translation, Gilgamesh querulously asks this of Siduri–twice within the space of eight lines: “Must I die too? Must Gilgamesh be like that?” [14].

What interests me about the self-elegy is how the genre so militantly — and helplessly — reckons with its speaker’s own sense of their coming demise. More general intimations of the brevity of our lives and the nature of mortality are for the most part only incidentally present: the emphasis is on the pathos of immediacy, and not on generalization. Consider the most storied self-elegy in the language, Chidiock Tichborne’s “Elegy.” An ardent Catholic, Tichborne was one of the leaders of the Babington Plot, a conspiracy to bring down the Protestant Elizabeth I and replace her with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. When the plot was discovered, Tichborne and his cohorts were imprisoned in the Tower of London, and executed in a manner grisly even in an era where beheadings and hangings were routine — they were first eviscerated, then hanged, and finally drawn and quartered. Tichborne enclosed the poem — one of only three that have been attributed to him — in a letter to his wife, written on the eve of his death:

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of paine,
My Crop of corne is but a field of tares,
And al my good is but vaine hope of gaine.
The day is past, and yet I saw no sunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard, and yet it was not told,
My fruite is falne, & yet my leaves are greene:
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seene.
My thred is cut, and yet it is not spunne,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my wombe,
I lookt for life, and saw it was a shade:
I trod the earth, and knew it was my Tombe,
And now I die, and now I was but made.
My glasse is full, and now my glasse is runne,
And now I live, and now my life is done. [15]

The backstory of the poem surely helps to explain its continued existence in the canon. Never mind that a good many scholars believe Tichborne was simply writing out someone else’s poem from memory: Sir Walter Raleigh is the prime suspect for authorship here, although this has never been proven. But whether this is Tichborne or Raleigh or some other lace-collared courtier, the poem is an astonishing example of the Elizabethans’ skill with metaphor and paradox. The metaphors are homely, but they certainly do the job — “My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,” “I looked for life but found it was a shade.” What is to my mind the most remarkable of the poem’s lines needs a bit of explanation: “My Crop of corne is but a field of tares.” For the Elizabethans, all domestic crops were referred to as “corn.” But in this case we know the crop in question is wheat, for “tare” is a species of weed that closely resembles a wheat stalk [16]. If Tichborne is indeed the author of the poem — and let’s assume for the sake of argument that he is — then the line epitomizes better than any other the poem’s strategy, which is above all to ruefully elegize oneself, much as Gilgamesh does when he describes Enkidu’s maggot. My accomplishments? All vanity and delusion: “my threade is cut and yet it is not spun.” And my golden, abundant harvest? Just weeds, a vast prospect of weeds.

The fraught spirit of Tichborne’s self-elegy is especially persistent in contemporary poetry. Mind you, contemporary poetry has been awash with elegies of every sort; our cultural and historical moment has made them inevitable. The AIDs pandemic in the 1980s and ‘90s saw some harrowing elegies for dead loved ones and friends, by poets as different from one another as Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Tory Dent, and Marie Howe. Many poems of elegiac spirit were written in response to the two Gulf Wars (not to mention the conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, and Afghanistan). In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, elegies for young black male victims of police shootings have appeared with sorrowful frequency. Many of them — I think of Kyle Dargan’s Trayvon Martin elegy, “Failed Sonnet After the Verdict,” and Ross Gay’s lament for Eric Garner, “A Small Needful Fact” — are quite powerful testaments. But self-elegies have a significant place in the literary landscape as well. There’s a sadly obvious reason for this. As Ramazani reminds us, ours is “a time when an aging population must face death in increasing numbers.” And many of us who are critically ill now have the means, unlike Tichborne, to postpone our death dates, be it through heart valve replacements, chemotherapy, radiation, or organ transplants. Sometimes that postponement can go on for years. The poet L.E. Sissman began his meteoric literary career as a result a diagnosis of incurable Hodgkin’s disease in 1965: thanks to chemo, Sissman lived for eleven more years and published three collections of verse, the first being the cheekily titled Dying: An Introduction. In the paragraphs that follow, I want to discuss books — all of them posthumously published — by three poets who were, like Sissman, given death date postponements. Unlike Sissman, however, their prognoses were more dire. All three — Ciaran Carson, Stanley Plumly, and Claudia Emerson — wrote their collections after diagnoses of incurable cancer, and their books display, among other things, three highly different approaches to self-elegy. And all three were poets whose work has inspired, influenced, and sustained my own writing. I knew Claudia well, Plumly somewhat, and Carson not at all. But in each case, I’d eagerly await the publication of their various books — and the occasions when I’d open one of their new collections were always events for me. And none of them ever wrote a bad or mediocre book. And I have no hesitation in saying, though to do so aggrieves me, that their last books are their best.

“The Whole Brilliant Apparatus Evaporates”: Ciaran Carson’s Still Life

I can think of almost no contemporary poet, on either side of the Atlantic, who was as inventive, as protean, or as humane as Belfast’s Ciaran Carson. Although he is less known in the US than his one-time teacher at Queen’s College, Seamus Heaney, or his classmate there, Paul Muldoon, his work surely holds its own with theirs. And Carson was nothing if not prolific. His debut collection, The New Estate, published in 1976, puts him squarely in Heaney territory — they are graceful formalist poems, attentive to their music and imbued with a deeply custodial sense of Irish culture. Carson departed from that mode completely in his groundbreaking second and third volumes, 1987’s The Irish For No, and 1989’s Belfast Confetti. Through Muldoon, he’d discovered the propulsive, long-lined meditations and narratives of America’s C.K. Williams, and Carson’s use of Williams’ form was strangely compatible with his edgy reports from Belfast at the height of The Troubles. The poems are a bracing but more often a deeply unsettling admixture of war correspondence, urban pastorals, pub talk, the blithe linguistic nihilism of Wittgenstein, and cartography. In the closing of the poem “Belfast Confetti,” the speaker’s familiar streets — named to commemorate British battles and generals — turn labyrinthine; and, as he’s interrogated by British soldiers, language devolves into blunt force, and to a perversely Homeric catalogue of weaponry:

I know this labyrinth so well — Balaklava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street —

Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again.

A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie talkies. What is

my name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks. [17]

Carson would be a poet of significance even if his career had ended with Belfast Confetti. But over the next decades he kept expanding his range, and kept reinventing himself: there are more long-lined poems that resemble those of Williams, but many of them are in rhyming couplets; there are sonnets; there’s a book-length sequence of mainly found poems taken from the work of William Howard Russell, a war correspondent who documented the Crimean and Franco-Prussian Wars. And there are translations aplenty, many of them brilliantly quirky. His versions of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, perhaps the most famous prose poems of all, are largely rendered in rhyming hexameter couplets. His translation of Dante’s Inferno employs a much stricter terza rima than Robert Pinsky’s widely praised version; and its imagery and vocabulary would not be out of place alongside the urban nightmares of Belfast Confetti. Take, for example, this tercet from Canto XIV. Dante’s following Virgil to the Seventh Circle, which punishes those violent towards God: “Then onwards to the outskirts of the block,/ where lies the border of the second precinct, / and the third, whose penal code is bleak” [18].

A passage such as this suggests the ferocity that has always haunted Carson’s work, even beneath a seemingly placid surface. His final poems are no exception, although Still Life is ostensibly the poet’s most quiet and contemplative collection. All seventeen of its poems are ekphrastic, each a scrupulous but never merely static description of a painting; the choices favor what used to be called work by “old masters” — Monet, Canaletto, Constable, Cezanne, and especially Poussin. Not surprisingly, there’s also a fairly large representation of works by modern Irish and English painters, among them Jeffrey Morgan (known for his striking portraits of Irish poets, Carson among them); Gerard Dillon, and William Nicholson (who, sadly, is probably best known as Winston Churchill’s art instructor — imagine trying to teach Churchill anything). Carson focuses largely on landscapes and, not surprisingly, still lifes.

Over the course of the past century, poems about paintings and other artworks have become as ubiquitous as YouTube videos of pets doing cutesy stuff, or posthumously issued recordings by Jimi Hendrix and Prince. The trouble, though, is that most of these poems are considerably less interesting than Rover playing a tympani or bottom-of-the-barrel performances issuing from Paisley Park. Carson’s painting poems, however, are very much the exception to that rule. Many of my generational peers and students are drawn to ekphrastic writing simply to fulfill a need for self-forgetfulness. When you’re tired of endlessly talking about yourself, it can be refreshing to just crank out description. But such description can easily become soulless, even when the artwork it reckons with astonishes us. In fact, it often seems that the more astonishing the work that is being written about is, the greater the risk that the writing will be inert. The truly great ekphrastic poems are not only efforts of vivid description, but also expressions of pathos and idiosyncratic moral instruction. Rilke’s “Torso of An Archaic Apollo” slowly but inexorably comes to admonish the reader: the fragmented Apollo receives our gaze and immediately looks back at us, indicting us for our paucity of imagination, a failure that extends to our perception of the world at large. Elizabeth Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” instructs us “to look and look our infant sight away,” reminding us that to see something truly requires us to overcome our preconceptions, our biases, and the uber-romantic notion that intimacy with another allows for shared perception.

Carson’s ekphrastic writing is of another order entirely: there’s nothing static or lapidary about the poems, nor is there the sternness of Rilke and Bishop. Instead, Still Life is a series of last looks, written over a mere six months, and as a consequence of the poet’s diagnosis of incurable lung cancer. The poems hew mainly to description and analysis of the paintings he references, written in Carson’s capacious long line, but eschewing the pyrotechnics — the spondees, the jarring syntax — that Carson previously relied on when he’d let his lines stretch out. Yet Carson punctuates his scrupulous valedictory gazing with forays into memory, weather reports as spring transforms to high summer, the course of his chemo treatments, and accounts of domestic life, most importantly of his daily walks about Belfast with his wife Deirdre. Paradoxically, the poems achieve their tension and equipoise by steadfastly resisting urgency. Whether he is contemplating a Velazquez painting or describing how “some vandal uplifted the terra cotta pot/of daffodils/ in our little front garden,” Carson seeks to savor each moment, memory, or description which he sets down — although “savor” is surely an inadequate word. Better to say that Carson seeks to transform each of his actions — whether he is looking or doing — into what Czeslaw Milosz called a recognition of “the eternal moment,” or what Wordsworth in The Prelude labeled “spots of time,” events of “distinct pre-eminence.” The opening passage of the book’s first poem, “Claude Monet: Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil, 1880,” acts as a kind of credo:

Today I thought I’d just take a lie-down, and drift. So here I am

Listening to the tick of my mechanical aortic valve — overhearing, rather, the way

It flits in and out of consciousness. It’s a wonder what goes on below the threshold. [19]

These lines encapsulate almost everything that makes Still Life such a singular accomplishment: consider the matter-of-factness of the speaker wanting to “take a lie-down, and drift.” He’s drifting to that state of “mindfulness” that present popular culture tells us is so restorative, and at the same time offering an evocation of mortality that has nearly the same degree of resonance as the worm that inches from Enkidu’s nose. Focus on your breathing; go to your Happy Place. Yet to do so also reminds Carson’s speaker that a mechanical device, high-tech but also jerry-rigged in the way that such devices invariably must be, is keeping him alive. It’s a scene of both detached contemplation and a singular dread. “It’s a wonder what goes on below the threshold”: however offhanded this observation may sound, its effect is quietly devastating. Kevin Young, who published this poem in The New Yorker, does an eloquent job of articulating the overarching design of Still Life: the book is comprised of “poems reconsidering art and life, determined but not deterministic, not falsely hopeful but fully in the moment. Their long lines suggest full breath and heartbeat, finding and filling in as much to say as is necessary or possible, getting it all in before the end of the line, emerging less tragic than triumphant” [20]. In the case of “Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil…,” Carson’s “reconsideration” eventually finds its way to Monet’s painting, but the path is loping and circuitous. Carson must first contemplate spring flowers — daffodils and pansies; then the eccentric work habits of Poussin “bringing back bits of wood, stone, / Moss, lumps of earth from his rambles by the Tiber”; then the gentrification of his block in the years since The Troubles; then a catalogue of various shades of yellow oil paint that seems inserted mainly because the names are such gloriously percussive trochees (“Gorse. / Lemon. Mustard. Saffron. Ochre.”); then What Painting Is, a book by the magisterial art critic James Elkins (who writes with something like Carson’s associative swagger); and then — Carson can’t seem to let this go — that pesky vandal who upended the speaker’s pot of daffs. Monet’s Garden, and Elkin’s appraisal of it, finally make their way into the poem, but only to be superseded by a shift back to Poussin, specifically a painting titled Landscape with a Man Washing His Feet by a Fountain. These associative turnings never seem abrupt or arbitrary. The movement is calm and steady. And the ending of the poem — which is serene but heartbreaking — could not do a better job of confirming Young’s claim that Carson’s intent is to be “not falsely hopeful but fully in the moment”:

It’s beautiful weather, the 30th of March, and tomorrow the clocks go forward.

How strange to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.

The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left.

And the pencil I am writing with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end.

Again and again in the collection, Carson insists that to be fully in the moment is to be unflinchingly aware of our transience. As Freud argued in his famous essay on transience, to recognize the beauty and singularity of a moment is to at the same time begin to mourn its passing. Yet Freud also insists that to mourn can have a mysteriously salutary effect: it can serve to intensify our amazement at the world’s sublimity: “mourning,” he writes, “is the great riddle” [21]. The tradition of still life painting has always exploited this conundrum. A classic Dutch still life, Simon Schama insists, is about “life and death, animation and mobility, the illusion of vitality and the reality of inertia; all these polarities [seem] deliberately made to rebound off one another” [22]. Carson brilliantly exploits these notions in a lyric devoted to contemporary Irish painter Angela Hackett’s Lemons on a Moorish Plate, 2013 [23]. It’s another loose baggy monster of a poem, beginning with a catalogue of his wife’s childhood memories of Christmas before focusing on Hackett’s canvas, a gift from Carson to his wife — “apropos…. / because when looking at things we often drift into a memory of something else.” This is followed by a bravura description of the painting worthy of Elizabeth Bishop, and then by an offhanded but stunning meditation on “life and death, animation and mobility”:

You know how lemons, if left too long in the bowl, one or two from time

To time will show a blush of green, a dimple or a bruise of bluish green

That overnight becomes a whitish bloom? So we think Angela Hackett’s lemons

Might be on the turn. Though it’s possible the green tinge might be an echo

Of the two limes I haven’t mentioned until now … [24]

But this isn’t all. Here’s the closing of the poem, perhaps the most remarkable passage in the entire volume:

It gave us pause for a thought. How long does it take, we wondered, for a lemon

To completely rot? We imagined a time-lapse film, weeks compressed into

Seconds, the lemon changing hue, developing that powdery bloom, then suddenly

Collapsing into itself to leave a shrunken, pea-sized, desiccated husk — the flesh

Evaporated, breathed into the atmosphere as it transpires. And that is why,

On the 26^th of March 2019, we set up the lemon experiment. On the avocado and aubergine-colored

Moroccan saucer we bought in Paris we set a fresh lemon and a banana whose peel,

We are led to believe, releases ethylene gas and thus ripens any other fruit

With which it comes into contact. We wanted to see with our own eyes

The end of the life cycle of the lemon. I write this on the 6^th of April. The banana has gone

Black except at the tips. The lemon looks fresh as ever. We’ve just been for our daily walk

Around the waterworks. Ducks are kicking up a racket. A bluebird sings.

From a blackthorn bush. And as we enter into Glandore from the Antrim Road

How clean and fresh and green are the newly sprung leaves of the chestnut tree!

What better exemplifies self-elegy than Carson’s “lemon experiment,” and its foreshadowing of the writer’s own demise? Yet the whole passage is strangely ebullient, thanks in no small measure to its gloriously witty gesture of what could be called reverse mimesis, of turning Hackett’s art into life — or, more precisely, literal still life. Then there’s the speaker’s surprise that the experiment does not unfold as it was expected to — the lemons seem disinclined to rot, and thus seem to be identified with the catalogue of spring flora and fauna described during the couple’s walk. This conflation of putrefaction and rebirth may draw some inspiration from Elkins’s What Painting Is: Elkins goes to some length to liken the practice of contemporary visual artists to that of medieval alchemists, observing that both groups seek knowledge and transcendence through a sanctification of things such as feces, urine, mold and rot. (Think of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.) Carson’s decomposing bananas and lemons can be seen as, in Elkins’s words, “a metaphor for the desperate impoverishment and loneliness of the first moments before creation” [25]. The final line of the poem, however, traffics in less highfalutin notions, and it ends the poem on a quietly triumphant grace note. The statement reads like a haiku by Basho or Issa, both of whom Carson has translated. And aren’t the great haiku of these Japanese masters all pungent celebrations of our transience? Lest you think this connection is not on Carson’s mind, try turning the line into a 5/7/5 syllabic tercet — the classic configuration of English-language haiku:

How clean and fresh and

green are the newly sprung leaves

of the chestnut tree!

In a poem that comes later in the collection, “Gustave Caillebotte: Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877,” the speaker wakes on a rainy morning to contemplate Caillebotte’s monumental canvas of bustled and top-hatted gentry, scurrying down a Paris street beneath their umbrellas. But the poem shuttles relentlessly between descriptions of the painting and descriptions of the rainscape beyond the speaker’s window. These shifts occur so dizzyingly that we often don’t know whether Carson is describing the painting or the scene outside his study (“Constantly condensing vapor. The tinkling of vertical strings as they strike the ground; gutters/ Going glug-glug; dings, dongs, and tiny gongs; all resound and multiply in simultaneous concert, / By no means monotonous, and not without a certain delicacy” [26]. The synesthetic imagery, the onomatopoeia, and the relentless pacing all combine into a moment a visionary intensity. Then the sun comes out, the speaker wakes from his trance, and “the whole brilliant apparatus evaporates.” Carson has again moved, as he so often does in the collection, from a moment of ecstatic timelessness to a querulous recognition of transience—our own in general, and Carson’s own in particular.

“You Could Fall Asleep and Not Know Where You Were”: Stanley Plumly’s Middle Distance

Isaiah Berlin’s quip that the fox knows many things but the hedgehog one big thing has endured to become something of a cliché. But if Carson was a consummate fox poet, then Stanley Plumly was very much a hedgehog poet; over and over he wrote from the same formal template, the same essential palette; over and over he returned to the same subjects and sources of inspiration. To make this observation is another way of saying that Plumly wrote from his obsessions–and of course few of us have more than a handful of those. Writing well from obsession is no mean feat: obsessions are inert; they change little, even after years of psychotherapy. They are fundamentally undramatic; when your subjects stubbornly continue to be torpid and bewildering, it’s hard to project a narrative arc or to wrench from them some moment of epiphanic reckoning. Same hammer, same nail: always the same dull thud. But eclecticism can be overrated. Some of the most essential figures of the past half century have been hedgehog poets. Consider Philip Levine, Charles Wright, Louise Gluck, W.S. Graham, and the list goes on. Plumly belongs in that formidable company, as Middle Distance so abundantly attests.

Born in 1939, Plumly arrived at his mature voice early, with his third collection, Out-of-the-Body Travel, issued in 1976. Early on he learned, mainly from Robert Lowell, that memories of growing up in a dysfunctional family can, if rendered with the proper focus, make for haunting subject matter. Unlike Lowell, however, Plumly was born in Southern Ohio, and was by no means a child of privilege. His father owned a lumberyard and was a drunk; his mother silently suffered her unhappy marriage. In none of Plumly’s collections does his parents’ marital turmoil go unmentioned. From one of his other masters, Wordsworth, Plumly learned to explore childhood memory through its most granular specifics. It’s a strange confluence of influences: the confessional turbulence of Lowell and his peers on the one hand, and Wordsworth’s apotheosizing of childhood experience on the other. Plumly’s recollections of domestic violence and infidelity are always rendered with an exactitude that values lyric precision over mere disclosure. Plumy seeks not to relive these scenes as much as to imbue them with a goldening bucolic luster or an elegant chiaroscuro, as if to say here, I have fashioned from this wretched event a thing of astonishment. (In an interview I conducted with him a good many years ago, he stated that he wrote these poems in order “to forgive” his family: the tone of that observation seemed to arise from ruefulness rather than from petulance or anger.) Furthermore, Plumly’s project of reclaiming and reframing memory was rarely a solipsistic one, for the poet is always careful to remind us that his childhood travails are set during a century of strife and cataclysm: the end of the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the polio epidemic — the era when existential dread found its way to placid Midwestern Main Streets. Thus, one poem fondly recalls the young Plumly seeing Harry Truman give a whistle-stop speech; in another, its speaker awakens in an iron lung.

Plumly often juxtaposed these personal poems with nature lyrics — he knew his birds and he knew his trees. I find these poems to be much less singular than the autobiographical poems, but they are sharply observant, and often serve to underscore the other poems’ elegiac intentions: “Humility Elm,” a mesmerizing sestina which alludes to the Dutch elm disease that wiped out the most common large tree species of the poet’s childhood Midwest, is as signature a Plumly poem as any of his troubled recollections of his upbringing.

In respect to his technique, Plumly was a formalist in the best sense of the term. He was not a metrical strict constructionist, but his free verse rarely strays too far from a loose pentameter line, and even his prose poems are attentive to cadence in ways you don’t find in most examples of the form. But it is in the sonnet and the sonnet sequence that Plumly’s prosodic chops are most abundantly on display, and in each of his books, there are impressive examples of his use of the form. You can sense the presence of Lowell here once again: the sonnets tend to be unrhymed in the mode of the older writer’s Notebook poems; yet they are much more scrupulously hewn than the hit-or-miss efforts of Lowell’s fanatical sonnet-writing period. They nod to Wordsworth and Keats as well, favoring a rather high level of diction — but one that can suddenly shift to the demotic. There’s no better example of Plumly’s skill at this mode than an effort from Middle Distance that is simply entitled “Sonnet.” It begins with a passage that suggests a Keatsian sublimity, but it soon — with the appearance of the father — turns stark and brooding:

Like a light coastal rain, with its sadness,

the windshield spotted with it, wiped away.

the wipers like a metronome, an hour maybe,

my sister and I waiting in the truck, the motor

running to keep us company, and the night coming

on at any minute … He’d say he’d be a minute,

and knowing was enough, the streetlight already

bright among the black slick coiling of the air

and the counting of headlights passing through

the cab and the wet singing of the tires against

the wetter pavement and — what else? — people

on the street, sometimes looking in or looking

straight ahead, red neon signing on, signing off,

the great evening all around us, darker, tighter. [27]

The visual and kinetic acuity of the scene is quietly breathtaking. Most notable is way the poem alternates between stasis — the two children immobile in the parked car — and kinesis, the windshield wipers, “the wet singing of the tires,” the bar sign’s neon flickering on and off. The scene makes you think of Hopper. But Constable and Turner, with their mania for rendering delicate atmospheric effects, also seem to be on Plumly’s mind. Plumly wrote a study of the two Romantic painters, and his comments on Constable’s working methods are especially pertinent here:

“You have to go down into yourself but you cannot do it alone, you need tools, a paintbrush and a canvas or a stick of charcoal, or a pencil, chalk, and watercolors. You need the thing to look at that will pull whatever it is out of you, but you will not see it if it is not what you needed and wanted, if it is not already in one shape or form inside you and so much like what you are looking at, as if it had been imprinted — somehow, somewhere in the past — as a dream asking to be made real in the dream of art” [28].

This description says less about Constable than it does about Plumly: his emphasis on the grunt work of craft on the one hand, and his hypnagogic desire for regression on the other, that maddening need to bring forth deep memory, recollection so “imprinted” within you that it suddenly becomes alive in the present. Alive and thus fit to be “made real in the dream of art.”

The qualities I’ve listed have been Plumly’s modus operandi since at least the middle 1970s. They remain intact in Middle Distance, but in this final collection the stakes are invariably higher. If Carson’s Still Life is about last looks, then Plumly’s book may be said to be about last memories, a final set of reckonings with the past, final efforts at reconciliation and forgiveness. Set against Plumly’s descriptions of hospitalizations, chemo treatments, and the peculiarly restless forms of insomnia that tend to accompany old age, Plumly returns to what Wordsworth calls the “sad perplexity” of the past with an even more strident urgency — and the past is no less sad than before, and surely no less perplexing.

This greater urgency also requires the poet to work with a far wider range of forms than he has attempted before. The chiseled short lyrics and sonnets are still featured in Middle Distance, but so are the lengthy prose poems Plumly began to favor in his recent collections; in the new book, these pieces stretch out enough so that they more rightly should be called lyric essays; one of them, “Germans,” is a tautly rendered childhood recollection of a group of German POWs who have been sent to work for the poet’s father, who runs a logging camp. It’s a masterly account of a child’s introduction to the concept of otherness, and a strangely gripping description of how trees were cut down, using perilous old-fashioned methods, seventy-odd years ago. Throughout the piece, Plumly finds himself asking why this particular set of memories is so important to now set down. He never offers an answer, although we can infer that the significance of the events described in “Germans” is meant to be self-evident; the memories must be excavated, for soon it will no longer be possible to unearth them. Like Carson’s last poems, the majesty of Middle Distance ultimately arises from a stance that is partly obstinate and partly prayerful: allow me to finish the work; allow me, Goddamnit. “Night Pastorals,” one of the book’s lyric essays, is also comprised largely of childhood memories, but its opening section takes place during a hospital stay. “Multiple myeloma was attacking my kidneys…,” Plumy writes, “Then came pneumonia” [29]. The doctors advise Plumly’s wife to prepare for the worse. The account of her response is worth quoting in full: “She said no. If anything, she said, no. I would die in my bed. And I would be given the chance to finish a last book, regardless of the odds. It’s as if she waved her hand, since the next morning I rose again with enough life to go on.”

Far be it from me to guess at which of the book’s poems were written after Plumly “rose again,” but a fair share of the collection’s efforts were surely composed in those crepuscular days after Plumly’s reprieve, and they are self-elegies of the very first order, fitting codas to an especially noteworthy career. Perhaps one such poem is “Deathbed,” which begins abstractly, asserting that we are apt to die, “almost the same / way we were born, brought into the world with lights/too bright for the sun burning holes in the air…” The final two stanzas grow more personal, and their tone is one of muted acceptance:

At eighty I’ve discovered the royal chair, the kind

you sit in to read with wine and hear yourself travel

at the soft end of the day, though right now I’m thinking

end-of-days, the way we fall asleep in the dim afternoon,

without knowing it, in a sort of asleep-at-the-wheel,

and wake up in a rush, as if we’ve missed something …

Those hours, for instance, that my father took away

or that I gave him back because I loved him.

I think I’ll die in a chair. In the ward there’d be those

so wrapped up and infused you’d think they’d already

passed into some place in between, and perhaps,

for the moment, they had — they’d come back smiling,

the slow degrees of pain nearly gone from their faces.

I was lucky, I was only alive, I was just starting on the journey.

The ward chairs, with windows, were like lounge chairs.

You could fall asleep and not know where you were. [30]

“And Your Sorrow is Ecstatic: Claudia Emerson’s Impossible Bottle

“In essence, the poet has one theme: his [sic] live body,” wrote George Seferis [31]. It’s hard to argue with this claim; it captures the essence of the lyric poem. The boasts of Walt Whitman notwithstanding, the lyric poem is generally not a celebration of the body as much as it is a proclamation — William Matthews likened it to a bird call: the lyric says, in endlessly various ways, Here I am. The self-elegy commences when that call begins to fade, and we turn inward, becoming hyper-aware of the body’s frailties, its limitations, its rebellions against the health we had previously taken for granted. We find ourselves within the body in frighteningly novel ways. The last books of Carson and Plumly do not much care to reckon with this condition: even as he walks his beloved Belfast streets, Carson has already bidden the body farewell, as has Plumly as he reads and sips wine from his “royal chair.” This stance might be called post-corporeal. Still Life and Middle Distance issue from what Keats, dying in Rome, famously termed his “posthumous life”: the pathos of the books is all about leave-taking. The purpose of Claudia Emerson’s Impossible Bottle is to relentlessly continue to proclaim “the live body,” to interrogate its final, inscrutable metamorphoses. The poet’s stance is altogether more fierce than that of Carson and Plumly, although she shares many of their elements of style. Like them, she felt at home in both received forms and in free verse — Late Wife, the collection which earned her the Pulitzer Prize, is centered around a stunning sonnet sequence. Also like them, she moved easily between narrative and lyric poems.

The living body: it’s worth remembering that much of English poetry is built upon a marvelously compact yet supple metaphor for the body: the iamb. Prosodists love to remind us that the sturdy da-Dum of the iamb replicates the human heartbeat. There are problems aplenty with this comparison — among other things, the heart does not speak exclusively in English — yet this trope is too resonant and enduring to entirely dismiss. Claudia certainly didn’t. A few months before her death, during the last meal we shared, she showed off her new tattoo to our restaurant table of friends: an iamb, placed on her right hand between the thumb and the index finger — it was small, about the size of the twelve-point Times New Roman that I’m typing this with. She’d recently decided to donate her body to the Virginia Commonwealth University Hospital, where for the last few years she’d been operated on, operated on again, where she’d been chemo-ed and radiated. Who knows what the tattoo would mean to the medical students gathered around the dissecting table? But that memory of her hand, outstretched! Outstretched and thrust to the center of a very different table, with its checkered tablecloth, its dishes and wineglasses. And there’s another memory that also astonishes: it happened a few months after Claudia’s death, in my graduate poetry workshop, the one that Claudia would have been teaching had she lived, comprised of students who had come to adore her. Why hadn’t I seen it before? They were passing out worksheets for the next week’s discussion, and on five of their hands I could see an iamb tattoo. I remember that count — a perfect pentameter line.

In the years that followed her first and subsequent cancer diagnoses, Claudia wrote three books of poems, working on them more or less simultaneously. Each of them was distinctly different from the others, and each of them was issued posthumously. In her earlier years, Claudia tended to be a slow and deliberate writer. But something about her repeated reckonings with mortality sped up her writing process, and offered her the bittersweet gift of a new abandon. Of the three final collections, Impossible Bottle most evidences this quality.

This new abandon results in no small measure from Claudia’s sly conflation of metaphor and form, from her desire to find new descriptives for an illness whose prevailing metaphors are so shopworn as to debase imaginative–and therapeutic–possibility. Impossible Bottle seeks, I think, to fulfill the hope which Susan Sontag sought at the conclusion of her fabled essay, Illness as Metaphor. We need, she said, a language “in which cancer will be partially de-mythicized; and it may then be possible to compare something to cancer without implying either a fatal diagnosis or a rousing call to fight by any means whatever a lethal, insidious enemy. Then perhaps it will be morally permissible, as it is not now, to use cancer as a metaphor” [32]. The desire to “demythicize” her condition was perhaps Claudia’s foremost goal in Impossible Bottle. This she accomplished by self-consciously jettisoning the old tropes for the experience of cancer: she doggedly hunts for new metaphors for her condition, and in doing so also offers radical reinterpretations of the received poetic forms she so cherished. This process commences in the book’s opening poem, “Metastasis: Intercession”:

too late here perhaps for some

intercession the physician

speaks to his screen instead to the all

of you it has

become his words not imagined

now but real and

your sorrow is ecstatic something

you do not feel

you hear your own voice at a distance

in the abelia bush

outside at home a voiceless God

flames there late bees

a burn slow miraculous such green there

there you are [33]

There’s a fairly large subgenre of illness poems in which a protagonist receives The Diagnosis: I think of Raymond Carver’s “What the Doctor Said,” and Lucia Perillo’s “The Body Mutinies,” both of them poems of melancholy brilliance, both of them hushed recognitions of fate. Compared to these poems, “Metastasis: Intercession” seems less about the cruelty of fate than it is about a kind of initiation. Dread is gone, as is the hope of that liturgically charged word “intercession.” From here on “sorrow is ecstatic,” a condition the poem’s “you” seems tasked with rather than fated to endure: the allusion to Moses’s burning bush is risky but symbolically fitting. I’m also reminded of the task that Rilke — and Claudia knew Rilke like the back of her iamb-inked hand — ascribed to Orpheus: to build “a lament heaven.”

“Metastasis”: no term in the dizzyingly large glossary of cancer-related words — the National Cancer Institute website lists 8,643 of them — seems as frightful to us. And it is all but impossible to use the word without also employing those hackneyed battlefield metaphors that Sontag saw as so simplistic and distorting, as so demeaning of the cancer patient’s actual experience. But how can you not describe as an “invasion” the process of lung cancer cells reproducing in the liver, or the spine, or the brain? Yet the poems of Impossible Bottle set out to resist this martial impulse; they seek to at least get the metaphors right, to wrest from the process of wayward cells, madly replicating within one’s body, some new understanding of the body and the self. This understanding is by no means consoling. And in her search for new and more exact metaphors to describe her illness, Claudia also recognizes that these creations will be untamable. Insight is apt to come in flashes, in fragments, or via erasures. In the volume’s second poem, the speaker undergoes an MRI. The poem begins sardonically, with a description of her technician yammering on about “Dixie Donuts — and so / overweight I cannot / imagine she could fit herself into the tube / where she will send me” [34].

But the poem soon shifts into a more troubled meditation on the MRI device itself:

The metaphor for it metastasizes, too;

I am in the belly

of the beast, the belly of a whale, of some sterile

wilderness, desert

island, sand-blind: I am a thread in the deep

eye of a needle; in some

percussive otherworld that rises up

every time I exhale

and hold still my empty lungs …

This is a moment of astonishing tension. Consider the implications: I am a poet; I order the world around language; as such, I understand that words are apt to fail me. But must they also be so bewilderingly beyond my control? The problem is not the failure of language to express the author’s intentions; it is instead the superabundance of language, its metastasis. You set out to find le mot juste–but instead you are given all twenty volumes of the OED.

“Intercession” and “MRI” form the structural and thematic template for Impossible Bottle. The book’s opening section alternates the “Metastasis” series with longer lyrics — all of the latter written in fluid couplets, mostly written in free verse, but sometimes framed in a loose pentameter. When I first read the collection, I was a good many pages into it before I realized the Metastasis poems were a kind of defaced sonnet crown. They are all about brokenness and fragmentation, and amount to a kind of ode to a relentless process of cellular duplication, one that alternately amazes and horrifies. The couplet poems are haunted by death, but approach the topic slantwise: one is a study of a “Mortuary Makeup Artist”; another recalls a lesson in bird taxidermy offered by neighbor, who keeps his study skins “all in a freezer / in the lab, bagged in plastic,//a random, patient flock” [35].

Claudia’s desire to intersperse introspective lyrics with the narratives and character studies of the couplet poems culminates in the collection’s second section, “Infusion Suite.” Here too she offers up iconoclastic sonnets, ones less jagged and telegraphic than those of the Metastasis series, but once again the poet both pays homage to the form and assails it: each of the poems in the sequence is thirteen lines long, and all of them are set in a clinic where she and others are receiving chemo. Unlike the Metastasis poems, the Infusion sonnets are all narrated in the first person. The jump-cuts between character studies and poems of self-reckoning are even more jarring — but also, somehow, seamless. Here’s a typical pairing:

Leonard, he shrugs the name patch on his shirt;

his cancer back after a good year and a half;

it’s worse this time; then tells me just as much

a matter of fact he is a mechanic

at the collision place, his specialty the under

-carriage of a car after a wreck,

realignment, the stuff nobody ever sees

and will never notice unless — no, until —

it gets out of whack; he’s lucky, though,

his brother’s bone marrow a match, the one

he had not spoken to in thirty years;

he will go into work tomorrow, has to, that new guy —

he shrugs again — some brand new kind of stupid.

I am not this, not here, this time. I am

what I mistook for a shadow

in our walled garden, gathered beneath the concrete

bench, concrete also the sky,

like the cold, sorrowful bottom of something; it is

a collared shadow, though — a stray cat

I see us feeding in the afternoon. And I

will watch it eat from a dish

on the back stoop, then bathe in the open doorway

of the garage, in that narrow shaft

of afternoon light, where I will be also,

and also behind it, where I am

the body of light that swings from the rafters. [36]

The sketch of Leonard begins with caustic brio, but soon the speaker’s stance gives way to empathy; the closing of section 4 of the poem is of course a punch line, but the joke’s not made at Leonard’s expense. Then comes the tonal swerve toward another of those Hopkinsian inscapes where sorrow is ecstatic. Yet the closing of the section is anything but ecstatic—its fusion or the visionary and the violent — the speaker as a “body of light that swings from the rafters” — recalls Paul Celan, or perhaps the later Plath. How does a writer travel so far — tonally, emotionally, and prosodically — in a mere 26 lines, all the while maintaining such precise formal control?

I must ask that question over and over again when I read Impossible Bottle. We of course know where the journey ends, know that the writer’s urge to celebrate the moments when sorrow is ecstatic will be replaced by mere sorrow, and by pain. It is a fool’s errand to believe that we can make from our transience something indelible, but we go on that errand every time we begin to write a poem. Sometimes, by a process just short of miraculous, our poems will outlive us, or be miraculously rediscovered — never wholly, always in part — on objects such as sunbaked clay tablets written in a language unspoken for four-hundred centuries. And those poems and lines in poems which outlive us are as likely as not to be the products of our woundedness, our embitterment, our scars. The maggot emerges from Enkidu’s nose, and Gilgamesh is forever changed; Tichborne’s banquet is a dish of pain. Carson’s lowly pencil stub will outlast his nearly outnumbered days. The child Plumly and his sister will await their inebriated father, inside an antique Chevy or Ford, await and await him, as the windshield wipers beat their plaintive tattoo. “The Scar,” the poem which closes Impossible Bottle, is the story of a wound, a wound that becomes a legacy, a family legend, and, finally, a means of alchemical transformation:

The fainting she cannot recall — or the strike

of her face against

the table’s edge — only the waking, the blood

in her eye from the brow-

bone, her mother’s face so close to hers

she could not see her.

The remedy: to fill the gash with soot

from the stove — a quick

staunching, the firebox still hot with live coals.

The bleeding would stop.

and the wound heal over to this — palest

blue, reminiscent

of an eyelash tattooed, prettied as though meant.

something she might have

chosen for herself. She does not have to

tell it for me to see

a morning’s shimmering heat, the rooms of that child’s

house — her mother seeing her

the way she sees me through this indelible

sill of ash —

and behind it the fire that had given the stove-eye

its brightest-ever aura. [43]

The poet and essayist Mary Ruefle defines poetry as “dead people talking about being alive.” But “The Scar,” like all essential poems, refuses to differentiate between the living and the dead: the dead have instead become their stories — and their stories’ recovery across a triad of generations. This transformation, Emerson insists, allows the dead to be resurrected, if only for an instant, glimpsed though the occlusion of an “indelible sill of ash.” The separation between the dead and the living becomes, if only fleetingly, no longer “definitive and fateful.” It is instead a frail telepathy, a murmured voice at a séance, a portal between life and afterlife, like those wondrously crafted “spirit cabinets” before which the Shakers would stand vigil — awaiting to hear the voices of their departed beloveds. A place where the dead bestow upon us The Gift of Tongues, “a firebox still hot with live coals.”

/ / / / /

NOTES

David Ferry, Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992), p. 15.
Ferry, Gilgamesh, 43.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 166.
Quoted in Theodore Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 32.
Ferry, Gilgamesh, 56.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, and ed. Benjamin A. Foster (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 74.
The complete Globish vocabulary can be accessed at https://www.globish.com/gng/GNGPromo/SidebarPromo/1500GlobishWords.htm (June 2, 2020).
Philip Terry, Dictator: A New Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018), p. 119.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elegy (June 3, 2020).
Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre From Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 2.
John B. Vickery, The Modern Elegiac Temper (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), p. 1.
Jahan, Ramazani, The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 30, 283-92.
Foster, The Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 61.
Ferry, Gilgamesh, p. 60.
Cidiock Tichborne, “My Prime of Youth is But a Frost of Cares,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47443/my-prime-of-youth-is-but-a-frost-of-cares (June 3, 2020).
For a useful glossary of the poem’s Elizabethanisms, see https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/english/schools/poetry-bank/tichborne (June 3,2020).
Ciaran Carson, Collected Poems (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2009), p. 125.
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Ciaran Carson (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 92.
Ciaran Carson Still Life (Loughcrew, Oldcastle, IRL: The Gallery Press, 2019), p. 13.
Kevin Young, “Ciaran Carson’s Urgent, Hopeful, Final Lines,” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/ciaran-carsons-urgent-hopeful-final-lines (June 3, 2020).
Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/freud_transience.pdf(June 3, 2020).
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 10.
For an image of the painting, see https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GCEB_enUS865US865&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=angela+hackett+lemons+on+a+moorish+plate&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiby8Dd-ubpAhXMg3IEHTpWCTYQsAR6BAgKEAE&biw=1172&bih=443#imgrc=bc3xvljjOPj9aM (June 3, 2020).
Carson, Still Life, 18.
James Elkins, What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting Using the Language of Alchemy (New York: Routledge, 2000), p.74.
Carson, Still Life, 50.
Stanley Plumly, Middle Distance (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020), p. 41.
Stanley Plumly, Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), p. 220.
Plumly Middle Distance, p.72.
Plumly Middle Distance, p.63.
George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951, trans. Athan Anagnostopoulos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 62.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), pp. 86-87.
Claudia Emerson, Impossible Bottle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), p. 3.
Emerson, Impossible Bottle, 4.
Emerson, Impossible Bottle, p. 19.
Emerson, Impossible Bottle, pp. 32-33.
Emerson, Impossible Bottle, p. 65.

On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Essay |June 14, 2022

“Maggot and Tare: From Elegy to Self-Elegy”

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