Publisher’s Note
Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.
Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. It’s a little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.
There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.
We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.
This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.
—Dan Halpern, Publisher
Dedication
To Daniel Halpern
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Publisher’s Note
Dedication
Preface
1. New Poems
Saying No
Pentatina for Five Vowels
A Greeting on the Trail
My Music
Birds and Trees
Four Love Poems
Andromeda
My Sadness
Patrimony
Reading Emily Dickinson at Jiffy Lube
Saying Goodbye to Paul Walker
Cryptozoology
Another Night at Lester’s
Sleepwork
The Red Dragonfly: After Shiki
Four Elegies
My Moods
Tools
Words
Two Nocturnes
My Estate
Releasing the Sherpas
2. Poems
The Human Heart
The Golden Angel Pancake House
The Orange
Sugar or Blood
Capitalist Poem #5
Sunrise and Moonfall, Rosarito Beach
Night Travelers
Sleep
Where the Water Runs Down
Books
Late Spring
Spicer
Invitations
Emily and Walt
Florida
California Love Song
Angels and the Bars of Manhattan
Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer
Poetry and the World
Girl with Blue Plastic Radio
Wheel of Fire, the Mojave
Consciousness
Smokestacks, Chicago
The Burning Ship
The Future
The Zebra Longwing
Nights on Planet Earth
3. Prose Poems
Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas
Plums
Rifle, Colorado
West Virginia
Langdon, North Dakota
Delphos, Ohio
A Dove
The Leatherback
Squid
Praia dos Orixás
Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys
Philadelphia
Tabernacle, New Jersey
Memphis
North Carolina
Manitoba
Rice & Beans
American Noise
Capitalist Poem #25
Krome Avenue (January 17)
The Prose Poem
Dahlias
The Custodian
The Gulf
The Wreck
Silt, Colorado
Dawn
4. An Odyssey of Appetite
The Genius of Industry
Almond Blossoms, Rock and Roll, the Past Seen as Burning Fields
Commodity Fetishism in the White City
Benediction for the Savior of Orlando
Nagasaki, Uncle Walt, the Eschatology of America’s Century
Guns N’ Roses
September 11
Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-Mart on New Year’s Day
5. Poems
Woe
The Key Lime
Vice President of Pants
Wild Thing
Poem That Needs No Introduction
Poetry and Fiction
Hemingway Dines on Boiled Shrimp and Beer
Maizel at Shorty’s in Kendall
What They Ate
Capitalist Poem #36
Ode to Bureaucrats
Because This Is Florida
Villanelle
James Wright, Richard Hugo, the Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest
Allen Ginsberg
Pax Atomica Triptych
Capitalist Poem #57
The Manatee
Storm Valediction
Rock Falls, Illinois
The Fly
Zeugma
Egyptology
The Toad
Shrimp Boats, Biloxi
Then
Luxury
Campbell McGrath
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Campbell McGrath
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
Poets may inhabit a realm of words, but they remain closet numerologists. Perhaps it’s a vestigial memory of counting syllables in all those lines of iambic pentameter, but ten seems like a significant number, and so ten books feels like a milepost worth pausing beside, a place to assess, examine, parse, and reassemble. Thus this book, which surveys thirty-five years of writing (the most recent poems were written in 2016, the oldest in 1981), though only eight of my ten previous collections are actually represented here. Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is a book-length poem that feels complete unto itself, while XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century is too recently published to need revisiting. Longer poems are simply harder to accommodate, and so “The Bob Hope Poem” is represented by only a single section, while works such as “The Florida Poem” and “Dawn Notebook” are absent altogether.
The mandate of such a collection, as I see it, is to offer a hint of where you are going while charting the territory already e
xplored. Accordingly, the first of this book’s five sections is composed of new poems, written over the past six or seven years, in a variety of shapes and sizes. In the hopes of creating a book that harmonizes with, but does not echo, the originals, I have organized older poems by form rather than chronology: there are two sections of lyric poems, a lengthy set of prose poems, and a sequence of longer poems reconstituted as an episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” which explores America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers. If anything has obsessed my creative impulse to date, surely it is this. There is also a scattering of uncollected poems, happy to have found a home at last. Nouns & Verbs is just that, I hope—not a greatest-hits collection but a new house sheltering some familiar residents, a book that stands on its own solid foundation, unbothered by a few termites in its beams or a little rain seeping in around the windows.
Part One
New Poems
Saying No
No sir, absolutely not, sorry, but no.
Not sorry, actually—just no.
Keep it simple, plain vanilla: nope.
Not happening. Big en, big oh.
No way, no how.
Negative, nuh-uh, ixnay, nyet.
No no, no no.
No-no-no-no-no-no-no.
Not likely, not likely. Maybe,
but I doubt it.
Possibly, conceivably, in theory.
Un-huh, mm-hmm. . . .
Well yeah, sure, okay, why not,
oh definitely, yes,
wow, I mean anything,
anything at all, when can we begin?
Pentatina for Five Vowels
Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying.
Nothing unspoken goes without saying.
Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing.
The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying.
The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing.
Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing.
Love is a marriage of feeling and being.
The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing.
Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.
Nothing gets cloven except by dividing.
The future is chosen by atoms colliding.
The past’s an elision forever eliding.
Today is a fog bank in which I am hiding.
Love is a burn forever debriding.
Love’s an ascent forever plateauing.
Nothing is granted except by bestowing.
Today is an anthem the cuckoos are crowing.
The future’s a convolute river onflowing.
The past is a lawn the neighbor is mowing.
The past is an answer not worth pursuing.
Love is only won by wooing.
The future’s a climax forever ensuing.
Nothing gets done except by the doing.
Today is a truce between reaping and ruing.
A Greeting on the Trail
Turning fifty, at last I come to understand,
belatedly, unexpectedly, and quite suddenly,
that poetry is not going to save anybody’s life,
least of all my own. Nonetheless I choose to believe
the journey is not a descent but a climb,
as when, in a forest of golden-green morning sunlight,
one sees another hiker on the trail, who calls out,
Where are you bound, friend, to the valley or the mountaintop?
Many things—seaweed, pollen, attention—drift.
News of the universe’s origin infiltrates atom by atom
the oxygenated envelope of the atmosphere.
My sense of purpose vectors away on rash currents
like the buoys I find tossed on the beach after a storm,
cork bobbers torn from old crab traps.
And what befalls the woebegotten crabs,
caged and forgotten at the bottom of the sea?
Are the labors to which we are summoned by dreams
so different from the tasks to which sunlight
enslaves us? One tires of niceties. We sleep now
surrounded by books, books piled in heaps
by the bedside, stacked along the walls of the room.
Let dust accrue on their spines and colophons.
Let their ragged towers rise and wobble.
Of course the Chinese poets were familiar with all this,
T’ao Ch’ien, Hsieh Ling-yün, Po Chü-i,
masterful sophisticates adopting common accents
for their nostalgic drinking songs, their laments
to age and temple ruins and imperial avarice,
autumn leaves caught in a tumbling stream.
As the river flows at the urging of gravity, as a flower
blooms after April rain, we are implements
of the unseen, always working for someone else.
The boss is a tall woman in a sky-blue shirt
or a man with one thumb lost to a crosscut saw
or science or art or the Emperor, what matter?
We scrabble within the skin of time
like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor,
Jonah within Leviathan, pacing the keel, rib to rib,
surrounded by the pulse of that enormous, compassionate heart.
Later we dance in orchards of guava and lychee nuts
to the shifting registers of distant music,
a clattering of plates as great fish are lifted from the grill,
seared black with bitter orange and lemongrass.
Orchid trees bloom here, Tulip trees and Flame trees,
but no Idea trees, no trees of Mercy,
for these are human capacities, human occasions.
Because it has about it something of the old village magic,
the crop made to rise by seed of words,
by spell or incantation—
because it frightens and humbles us to recall
our submission to such protocols—
for this do we fear poetry, for the unresolved darkness
of the past. Where are you bound, friend,
on this bright and fruitful morning—to the valley
or the mountaintop? To the mountaintop.
My Music
My music belongs to me and it is awesome.
My music is way better than your music,
your music is trash, garbage stench
of a hot summer night behind the dumpsters at Taco Bell,
rancid, but I’m there, too, drinking beers
in the parking lot with the windows down
and the radio tuned to a baseball game
we are following as casually
as the stars’ erratic flight plan—that music
is my music, all of it, ball game, laughter of friends
and the crack of frosty six-packs,
asphalt returning the day’s heat to the sky.
My music is so much better than your music
I pity you—almost I would pity you
if I were not disgusted by your chump-change music.
My music will beat your music to a pulp.
My music will turn your music into a car wash
run by infants—their tiny hands
can’t even hold the sponges!
They will never, ever degrease those tire rims!
Get out of my business with that nightmare
you call music, with your tears
and pleading, the whining of excuses—oh, sorry,
that is your music,
that crybaby boohoo-ery,
that blurt, that diminuendo, that waaah,
that large-ass mess,
that chicken potpie all pocked with freezer burn,
that coyote hung from a fence post as a trophy and a caution.
My music cannot be muted or dimmed,
it cannot be labeled, disciplined, contained
by
manicured hedges, my music
is the untamed wilderness of the soul,
the rebar that holds up the skyscrapers of your city is my music,
watch out, your city will crumble to rubble without it,
but don’t worry, it wasn’t much to begin with,
that place you called home
with its measling river, its rusty bridges,
there’s a carnival in the meadow of the old floodplain,
cotton candy and whirligig lights and the racket
rising up from the carousel
is my music,
old guys fishing along the breakwater,
coffee can half-full of fat, wriggling night crawlers—
that worm-thrum,
that earth-mouth-echo is my music.
The trinket in the bottom of the Cracker Jack box is mine,
the Employee of the Month parking space is mine,
I am the little golden man on your bowling trophy,
I am the nickels collected in your old pickle jars,
I am the U-Haul pulling out of the driveway, leaving
your town forever—goodbye, Loserville,
hello, New Hampshire, Alabama, Montana, Texas,
I am all those places, everywhere
you ever dreamed of going
I have been there and pissed on the phone poles already,
I am the names of all fifty states on your tongue,
their Olde English nostalgia and Amerindian prolixity
and majuscule Latinate transliterations rolled together,
I own the alphabet and the stars in the sky,
I own the pigeons sleeping beneath the overpasses
and the shadows of pine trees
and the corn husks in a paper bag on the porch
and the ants on the bottle of barbecue sauce,
ants all over the cupcakes and watermelon wedges,
huge black carpenter ants and raspberry crazy ants
and the almost invisible warp-speed ants
like cartoon swashbucklers of the microsphere,
the footfall of the ants is my music, oh yes,
cacophonous, euphonious, that tumult, that mad march,
louder than circus elephants
and softer than flowers opening, gentler
than apple blossoms descending into creek water,
petals falling—one,
two,
three, four.
Birds and Trees
I’m tired of not being a great blue whale.
I’m sick of frills and gossamer ostinatos.