#david wojahn

[poem-today]

A poem by David Wojahn

Necromancy: The Last Days of Brian Jones, 1968

Hair fanning out, he'll float upside down, Like the end, and beginning, of Sunset Boulevard. Kicked out of the band, he's come home To his manor in St. John's Wood—acid,

Hard drugs, delivered by minions to poolside, Where for months on the nod he strums his National Steel, Sprawled on a Day-Glo deck chair, lavender strobes Festooning the water. He'll drown on his last meal,

Then fall to the chlorined deep end. But today he's dressed As a wizard, star-checked robe and pointed cap, Cover props from His Satanic Majesty's Request. A syringe and phone are on his lap

But who does the necromancer call? Dial tone. Hair fanning out, he'll float upside down.

David Wojahn

[beguines]

David Wojahn, The Falling Hour

[priorybear]

But it is neither in the book's more ambitious efforts like "The Clay Dancer," nor in character studies like "Oshi" that White displays his most powerful writing. The last poems in the volume, written shortly before the poet's death, may be White's finest achievements. Their language is deceptively simple, employing a quirky diction that without warning shifts from plainness to embellishment. In contrast to "The Clay Dancer," these poems appear to have come to terms with mortality. The knowledge of approaching death gives the speaker an almost paradoxical belief in self-renewal. Characteristically, it is a renewal born not of Rilkean mysticism, but of lucidity and attention to immediate experience. "Dying Out" begins, I love the cambric night snowing down First Avenue and the heaven of being near things I know, my apartment, the old rugs and chair, the moons of my nails above which I write. And the snow in distant woods where animals give silently all and everything into dying - their fossils in spring, the jonquil and pure bone. In the poem's conclusion, White again returns to the sculptural metaphors of "An Ordinary Composure": I've left so many this year who've felt too comfortable with my old design. Because I want another life rinsed new in middle age, the way a hard sickness changes a person. The way snow changes the billboards by my drugstore to read VANQUISH PAIN and RELIEF FROM THE ORDINARY. I don't want forgiveness from people, only to be seen from another way, like the back of a sculpture, perhaps the nape of a neck or an open helpless palm, some familiar form viewed from another direction. The stance here is one named in the book's penultimate effort, a sequence called "Poems of Submission." And the reader finishes the book believing that White has not triumphed over the forces he has battled, but he has submitted to them and in doing so has found a kind of liberation that is partial, but nonetheless convincing. In "Poems of Submission" and in "Naming," the book's final poem, the issues of memory, mortality, and sexuality that have propelled the collection are finally brought to closure. "Naming" is a moving tribute to the poet's mother. Here is its final stanza: Old woman, my mother, so full of sickness it becomes acquaintance, don't die. The world is nearly empty for me. Take me to your river of first words again. "Look son, this is stone. Here is flower. Here between my legs you entered the world. Call it 'door.' Look son, another flower called going away, and this is called too soon." Perhaps a significant achievement in poetry cannot rest on a single collection, but there are moments of grandeur in The Salt Ecstacies, and they equal the best efforts of almost any of the poets in White's generation. Whether this means that the book will be widely read or not remains to be seen, but The Salt Ecstacies is a superb collection, and it deserves to be recognized as such.

David Wojahn, 'Review of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White' in The Iowa Review.

[priorybear]

David Wojahn, 'Review of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White' in The Iowa Review.

[priorybear]

David Wojahn, 'Review of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White' in The Iowa Review.

[priorybear]

The central tension in the volume, the dilemma around which White creates his personal myth, is between the immediacy of approaching death and the poet's desperate need to abandon nostalgia while still making sense of his past. Like Cavafy and James Wright, the poets he seems to have been most influenced by, White views recollection as an ambivalent process, both comforting and frightening. For White, viewing the past nostalgically is not a way of recapturing our earlier lives, but of diffusing them, and he wants nothing of this. Instead, he seeks to remember precisely, no matter how discouraging the result of this process may be. These ideas are best conveyed in "The Ordinary Composure," the prose poem which opens the volume and which serves as the book's ars poetica. I quote the poem in full:

I question what poetry will tremble the wall into hearing or tilt the stone angel's slight wings at words of the past like a memory caught in elms. We see nothing ahead. My people and I lean against great medical buildings with news of our predicted death, and give up mostly between one and three in the morning, never finding space large enough for a true departure, so our eyes gaze earthward, wanting to say some thing simple as the meal's too small: I want more. Then we empty from a room on Intensive Care into the sea, releasing our being into the slap of waves.

Poems break down here at the thought of arms never cou pling into full moons by holding those we love again, and so we resort to the romantic: a white horse set quivering like a slab of marble into dancing flesh. Why remember being around a picnic table over at Brookside Park? My mother wore her sweater even in the summer because of the diabetes. Night blackened the lake like a caught breath. We packed things up. I think I was going to school that fall or a job somewhere. Michael 'd go to Korea. Before we left I hit the torn softball into the lake and Michael said, "You can't do that for shit James Lee."

Going back I realized the picnic was for us. It started to rain in a totally different way, knowing we'd grow right on up into wars and trains and deaths and loving people and leaving them and being left and being alone.

That's the way of my life, the ordinary composure of loving, loneliness and death, and too these prayers at the waves, the white horse shimmering, bringing it toward us out of coldest marble.

The poem's principle impulse is mnemonic, moving from its reliance on statement in the two opening paragraphs to the childhood memory in paragraphs three and four. The usefulness of art and poetry is doubted in the poem's opening sentences ("I question what poetry will tremble the wall into hearing. . . "), just as the usefulness of nostalgia is questioned as the poem continues ("Why remember being around a picnic table over at Brookside Park?"). But finally, as the poem concludes, the impulses of both art and memory have somehow fused, not into a new synthesis that clarifies these issues for the poet, but simply as a way of explaining their obsessive power over him. The ending of the poem, while not transcendent, is at the very least courageous, and informs us of White's resolve to come to terms with both memory and loss during the course of the volume. The book's other major concerns - the poet's need to confront his own mortality, and his struggle to exist in our society as a homosexual - are filtered through White's desire to comprehend his own past, and therefore to understand the nature of time.

David Wojahn, 'Review of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White' in The Iowa Review.

[erisolympia]

Echinacea, bee balm, aster. Trumpet vine I watch your mother bend to prune, water

sluicing silver from the hose—

                                           another morning you will never see. Summer solstice: dragonflies flare

the unpetaled rose. 6 a.m.                                       & already she's breaking down, hose flung to the sidewalk

where it snakes & pulses in a steady keening glitter, both hands to her face. That much

I can give you of these hours.                                               That much only. Fist & blossom forged by salt, trellising

your wounded helixes against our days, tell us how to live                          for we are shades, facing

caged the chastening sun. Our eyes are scorched & lidless. We cannot bear your light.

— THE ART OF LOSING (edited by Kevin Young); Written on the Due Date of a Son Never Born, David Wojahn

[fairerhousethanprose]

Ghost Supper BY DAVID WOJAHN after Pavese Under the trellised arbor, and our supper’s over in the memory I’ve found myself inside. L not speaking, and beside us the river sliding softly by. Now the light will fade to moonlit water. And in memory I work to make this lingering accurate and sweet. White ouzo and her hand that lifts the grapes, first to her lips, then to mine. I may as well speak to moonlight as to her. And the walls of Bruges light up again, a costume jewelry pearl string. Her profile and her shawl hugged tight against the breeze in memory’s flammable celluloid—flaring and gone, replaced by bread and grapes, a checkered tablecloth. The two chairs stare each other down, empty now, upon which moonlight flickered all night. The bread and grapes drip mist as dawn carves the morning with a chilly wind, slicing away both moon and fog. Now someone without a name appears—first the fevered hands, Dustdevil quick, that grope for the food in vain. Then the pale light shows the open mouth and rippling throat, white face on black water, sparrow-flock fast, its spiraling path. But the bread and grapes stay where they were, their smell tormenting that famished ghost, helpless to even lick away the dew that gathers on the grapes, blue fluted sides of the wineglasses. Dawnlight, everything dripping wet, and the chairs stare at each other, alone. Sometimes on the riverbank you can sense an odor—of grapes, or sex, or memory. It swirls through the moonlit grass. And now wakes someone always mute, someone without a body weaving also through the half-lit grass. The hoarse wail of someone who cannot speak, who reaches out but cannot touch the grass, and only the nostrils flare. Now the dawn will break, late autumn cold. To crave so endlessly the warmth— the blood-pulsing fingertip, the body to embrace, the pungent smells commingling. To rise like breath and slither through the trees and tangle every branch in this unappeasable longing, this endless lust for touch and smell which afflicts the dead. The souls in the trees face the gathering light. Other times, in the ground, the rain torments them.