Dead Wren by Henri Cole

When I open your little gothic wings
on my whitewashed chest of drawers
I almost fear you, as if today were my funeral.
Moment by moment, enzymes digest
your life into a kind of coffin liqueur.
Two flies, like coroners, investigate your feathers.
My clock is your obelisk, though only this morning
you lunged into my room, extravagant as Nero,
then, not seeing yourself in the sunlit glass,
struck it. Night – what beams does it clear away?
The rain falls. The sky is pained. All that breathes suffers.
Yet the waters of affliction are purifying.
The wounded soldier heals. There is new wine and oil.
Here, take my handkerchief as your hearse.

Mimosa Sensitiva by Henri Cole

Polishing your eyeglasses, I try them on
and watch the nurses hoist you—blind, giggling,
muttering nonsense French. For a moment, like a spider,
you dangle at the edge of the present,
pondering who I am: "Ma, I'm Henri.
You made me." Then my eyes flee the here-and-now.
You're pulling yourself out of the deep end,
your skin like the seamless emulsion on a strip of film.
Sensuality is confirming beauty. I'm eleven again.
Then the banal shatters everything.
In a tangled nightgown, your skin marsupial,
you're pawing through leaf mulch for pain medicine
you can't function without. The thrash of your hands
smolders like wet black ash.
In Chinese, the basic phonetic value of horse, ma,
turns up in the word for mother.
"Horse-mother, look!" I cry. Soldier-ants
are suckling on the big pink heads of your peonies.
Horse-mother flickers like a candle in the dark.
Horse-mother, why does your mouth have a grim set?
I know that all beneath the sky decays.
I know that you once cradled me in sleep,
your belly empty as a purse. "Horse-mother, look!"
I repeat. The mimosa tree is going to sleep,
its tiny pinnate leaves closing and drooping,
like you, sensitive to light and touch,
mimicking death when I push a needle into you
and bright beads run out, as from a draining bird

Gravity and Center by Henri Cole

I’m sorry I cannot say I love you when you say
you love me. The words, like moist fingers,
appear before me full of promise but then run away
to a narrow black room that is always dark,
where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,
devouring the thing I feel. I want the force
of attraction to crush the force of repulsion
and my inner and outer worlds to pierce
one another, like a horse whipped by a man.
I don’t want words to sever me from reality.
I don’t want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured into a bowl.

Self-portrait of a Poet: A Commentary on Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf

           Blackbird and Wolf is a wonderful handful of simple-titled poems, all strung together by the common Henriesque soul-searching and self-reflection.  The whole volume gives off a gentle rawness. There are some sensitive subjects addressed very sensitively. Fortunately, Cole’s biography doesn’t impose on the poetry, rather it seeps into what he writes. So, it didn’t hurt to find out that his childhood had been rough, at a tempestuous home with abusive, drunken parents who didn’t provide much support for his search for his identity. [1] He was also raised to be Roman Catholic, turning to prayer and God through such difficult times. Both autobiographical characteristics appear in several of his poems, as he openly reveals the cold relationships between him and his parents and often exclaims to God or refers to a biblical story.

            The book is divided into three parts: Birthday, Gravity and Center, and Dune. All of which were named by a central poem within that section. Though, there is some overlap in the overarching themes and motifs between the parts, most generally, there are distinct trends among the parts. The first part, Birthday, is made up of the more autobiographical pieces that reflect on his past and childhood. The second part covers a lot about his love story and a certain “you” of romantic proportions. The last part contains much darker images with melancholy undertones that can easily project onto us readers.

             Two representative poems of the first part are “Mimosa Sensitiva” and “Birthday.” In “Mimosa Sensitiva,” Cole describes a scene when he is much younger at eleven years old in a hospital waiting on his mom. The moment must have been a very vivid memory for him, for he writes details of trying on the glasses of his mother who is left “blind, giggling,/ muttering nonsense French.” The scene seems very precious, the way his mom is almost childish, perhaps forgetful of who the boy at her bed is. Even though the giggling moment is very innocent, at the same time it feels somber how it is set in a hospital and how his mother doesn’t quite remember him. Then, immediately within a line, the whole mood changes and his mother is now “in a tangled nightgown…pawing through leaf mulch for pain medicine/ [she] can’t function without.” The poem becomes painful, as we not only witness this private breakdown, but we also see the little boy watching his mother flail in an animal-like manner, thus establishing the unstable reltionship between him and her. However, in the same first part of the book, the poem, “Birthday” has a much more optimistic tone. Perhaps because “Mimosa Sensitiva” is one of the first poems in the section and “Birthday” is one of the last, there may be a sort of upward progression of attitude or growth within the first section. In the poem, Cole recalls being locked in, not as a punishment, but as a sort of freedom. Less harshly as in “Mimosa Sensitiva,” Cole alludes to his rough childhood with the lines, “I remember my father’s angry voice/ mixed with anxiety and love. As always/ the possibility of home—at best an ideal—/ remains illusory.“ We again see the push-pull relationship between Henri Cole and his parents, but this time with his father whose anger has an odd mixture of anxiety and love. Then, we sorrowfully see that a home for him has become somewhat of an ideal because of his own ruined household. Then, Cole is able to turn the mood around and keep that ideal home in a Platonic fashion, imagining on his room floor. The last line of this poem, “Like an outdated map my borders are changing,” ties up this newly gained maturity over the course of Part I: Birthday. He takes all that’s been thrown at him from the past and shifts his borders a bit, takes down some walls and expands his comfort zone.

            From Part II, the poems, “Gravity and Center” and “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” show that more mature and romantic mood, characteristic of Part II: Gravity and Center. In “Gravity and Center,” Henri Cole uses the words, “I love you” as a metaphor for all words and how he does not want to let them get in the way of expressing himself. It’s such a great, clean parallel that directly connects to his poetry. “I don’t want words to sever me from reality./ I don’t want to need them” he writes, just as he uses words to describe his feeling in this whole volume. It’s an interesting paradox that is also parallel to that push-pull, love-hate for his parents. Though without metaphor, “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” still is able to elaborate on the relationship between the poet and the “you” lover. For instance he writes, “I cared nothing about/ life outside the walls of our bedroom.” This line puts out a really intimate setting for the whole poem and also reminds us of the “Birthday” poem, in which he didn’t care much for life outside his locked door. He, perhaps so in love, is able to see beauty in something not conventionally beautiful as seen in the line, “Even the white spit on your sharp teeth/ was the foam of love, saying to me: It is not true,/ after all, that you were never loved.”

            The poems “Eating the Peach” and “Dead Wren” set the tone of the third part.  In “Eating the Peach,” Henri Cole describes eating a fleshy peach like eating a small animal whose skull would was the pit of the peach. With the first line, Cole sets a darker tone than in previous poems, saying, “Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer.” He then goes on to describe sating his hunger on the flesh of the peach in almost savage language. To continue, he describes a backwards evolution. We humans were rooted from a whole of line of ancestors including those with paws and fins. He almost reduces humans, us, to the savage, animal-like days. The other poem “Dead Wren,” does not have a critique on humanity, but it still carries the eerie vibe of death and darkness of Part III. In this poem, Cole recalls a death near him, in fact, a death at his window. All of a sudden “today” becomes a funeral, Cole’s clock becomes an obelisk and his handkerchief becomes the hearse on which he will carry the corpse of the dead bird. The poem feels so haunting how it was so ritual to carry out a funeral, immediately making everyday objects turn into symbols of death.

            Along the parts, one can see a large-scale change; they seem to be chronological, not quite in a progression, simply aging. The parts are almost chapters of Henri Cole’s life, each in which he has a struggle that he faces. When younger, in his memories of the first part, his poems are most occupied with his unstable household, while when a little older his concerns are with love and the “you” or possibly more than one “you”s, and when much older, more experienced and wizened, he sees more broadly the chaos of the world and closely philosophizes in a pessimistic manner.

Some overarching themes or prominent motifs of the entire book include the personification of animals or the animalizing of humans with images such as bears, bees, loons, gulls, wrens, sharks and of course the blackbird and the wolf. Perhaps it is Cole’s own interest in nature to use animals as common images in his work, for he also uses trees in his work. Sometimes the trees are the main subjects, the sycamore, the mimosa, the apple tree or the persimmon tree, and other times they make prominent images in the poems, as the tree which bears the wet apples and the tree in which the bear hides. However, there is always a certain wisdom going about each experience of a poem. Henri Cole writes somewhat like a philosopher: very introspective, self-reflective and complex, flowing but sometimes jumping thoughts, but all in very profound language. Because of such complex thought, Cole often writes abstractions or oxymorons, leaving readers pondering his very well thought out words. For example, in “To Sleep” one line reads, “Darkness will give you back unremembering” or in “Ambulance,” where Cole writes, “I felt like the personification of an abstraction,/ like mercy.”

The structure of Henri Cole’s poems are quite uniform; they don’t have any strict line structure or end rhymes to line up. Line breaks simply happen when they need to be, at quite natural pauses. There aren’t interruptions where the lines end in prepositions or articles. But, stanzas are rare; only a few of his longer poems break into stanzas sometimes to introduce a new thought or idea, but at other times the sentence continues across the space to the next stanza. Most of the time, jumped thoughts or ideas simply continue on the next line in the same stanza or in the same line. Though there may be jumps in his train of thought, there’s still a sense of fluidity, of constant pondering and almost like a well-organized stream of consciousness. Also, Henri Cole’s poems are for the most part free verse; there is the occasional internal rhyme such as “pity the poor and avert war” from “To the Forty-third President.” But those rhymes seem to have effortlessly come about while writing. Along with the natural line breaks, Cole’s poems have ordinary punctuation with periods at the ends of sentences and several commas throughout. Because the punctuation is really standard, something we’re used to seeing when reading, it does not distract from the meaning and organization of the poem.  

The poems, though at first read seem like a motley of Cole’s words, weave themselves into each other. Between the poems, they all reference each other. One poem will just say one word, that was so prominent and important in another poem that we resurface it from our memory. For example in “Bowl of Lilacs,” Henri Cole says, “the act of looking and perceiving/ was no longer something understood/ from the exterior. It was pure being.” Then a few poems down in “My Weed,” there is a line that reads, “I circled around it and looked a lot,/ which is to say, I was just being,” somewhat of a repetition of the former line. Another example is in “Mirror,” where an image of a silvery body like an ember alludes to the poem “Embers.”

There are many of those lines or words that one can immediately link back to another poem in the collection, but there is one poem that seems to be dedicated to that task. The last poem in the book, “Dune,” stands out in length, content and voice compared to the rest of the poems. It is as if the form of this last poem was to use the vocabulary already written. I see the word “treetops” and instantly think up the wind raking the treetops in “Self-portrait with Hornets.” Then, I spot the word campfire and I remember the simile of the moon sprinkling light like the campfire in “Embers.” It acts somewhat like a conclusion, stringing everything from the top to the bottom together. Also, perhaps because the poem is longer, Cole is able to go into more elaborate descriptions. In his other poems he sometimes uses very concrete similes before leading into some unfathomable abstraction. However, in “Dune,” there is one moment, where, for a whole stanza, he provides us vivid concrete images to draw out in detail and digest. “Dune” is also the only poem where he acknowledges his presence as writer instead of persona. The whole book is a self-portrait of Henri Cole, even when he writes all about the special “you” some aspect of his character is revealed in the poems. In “Dune,” he deliberately opens the curtains and doesn’t just show us the normal “I,” but we get the unmasked, blunt self. He writes “I think I’m at the lowest level of actual control…I want to write something highly controlled,” taking himself out of the picture, showing him not as a character in his poems, but as the writer himself. Even in the line, “While I am writing this, the cat scratches herself/ and rubs her belly against my knees, purring,” Henri Cole almost addresses his readers personally, describing his literal actions, unlike the normal soul-searching sort of actions in the rest of the collection.

            Though Cole intended to not be trapped or limited by his words, he ends his book claiming “poetry, which is stronger/ than I am, makes me do what it wants.” So, in a way poetry forced him to create this very honest volume, this very raw self-expression, a self-portrait that made him confront himself and then let us in on this very personal piece of art.

Cole, Henri. Blackbird and Wolf. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007.

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[1] Borzoi Reader Authors, Henri Cole, “How I Grew,” http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/cole/poetsonpoetry.html accessed 22 January 2011.

My Map of "Farsickness" by Megan Harlan

            Right away the title grabbed me. "Farsickness." Not your average homesickness or the all-too-familiar love sickness, but longing to flee, to go far away from here. There are  total of nine couplet including the rough German translation. I feel as though, after reading each couplet, we readers take two steps away from “home.” However each two steps seem to get bigger than the previous two steps.

At the beginning, we start with the line, “the opposite of homesickness.” We begin this escape of a poem, somewhat at home, wherever home seems to be for each reader. For instance, my actual home is in Hawaii, but when reading this poem, Lawrenceville assumed the role of “home” because it is where I am now, and in a way we are sort of trapped inside these gated walls. I realized in the fall, when I took the Russian literature course, Lawrenceville was quite similar to how those Russian work camps ran. It was a scary thought, but of course some punishment like detention is not nearly as bad as the punishment of those prison camps. We don’t starve on small rations of bread like they did, but we have days, where there is nothing to eat at Irwin. Anyway, this association established the “home” in the poem as Lawrenceville for me. Then as the poem reads on, we “imagine a love turned out” or took a couple of baby steps away from home through the escape of imagination. Next, we step bigger with strides as big as walking on only the white strips of paint at a crosswalk. The steps become bigger because we start to pick up the pace and head “to the rivers,” somewhere further from home, in the nooks and crannies of the world.  Then, we take “fire-flights,” which relative the previous two steps, is as if we jump over a branch in the pathway. As a side note, this couplet reminded me of Elizabeth Bishop’s The Armadillo. With the line, “forms alighting, then airborne,” I imagined the fire balloons in The Armadillo, which would be lit, then fly up taking “fire-flights.” However, the only difference is that in this poem, we readers become those fire balloons and in Farsickness, we don’t come crashing down to ruin everything below. In fact, after taking two leaps, we catch the wind, “until the breeze begins / to feel like hunger.” The way that line breaks, sort of takes a sharp turn. With the first line, it seems as though the wind is beginning to blow, but by the second line of this couplet, the wind is actually beginning  “to feel like hunger.” Perhaps this taste of wind, the extra umph that makes us float a little longer, makes us hungry for more distance. Then, by the next stanza, we become this “holy wheel,” which I imagine as quite large, therefore covering a lot of distance away from with each revolution, each step of the foot or when each spoke touches the ground. Then, farther and farther we travel, around the sun, like the pilgrim’s chaff. Finally, we reach the horizon. Perhaps in the imagination where the world is flat, that would be the farthest we could get.

I’m not quite interpreting what is going on in the poem, because it is unclear to me what it means “to both call and receive” in the context of farsickness. This is more of the imagery that popped up in my head as I read, as I strung together the words, home, imagine, rivers, airborne, breeze, etc. Though I took these key words out of their lines, their meaning still provides that longing to escape, travel and explore. 

My First Villanelle

Here's my first villanelle and the first poem I've written in a really long time. So, it's a little rough around the edges. (be nice!) It's a rough draft, that I'll probably spend more time on cleaning it up:

Stop Me Please

My head hung low so that no one could see
I squeezed through those grooving on the dance floor,
While hoping someone will notice me leave.

In a room full of people, I felt so lonely.
So, I fled the party and left through the door
With my head hung low; no one could see.

Yet I began to walk away slowly
Maybe then someone will stop me for,
I was hoping someone had noticed me leave.

I left to be alone and solitary
‘Til I couldn’t hear music anymore.
My head hangs low, but maybe someone will see.

Who will follow after I flee?
Someone to ask what’s wrong or
Someone, anyone, that noticed me leave?

Somebody stop me please
Am I really that easy to ignore?
I hung my head real low; now no one can see
But still, I wished someone had noticed me leave.

combing through "Visitation" by Eamon Grennan

      Even when I went back in time into the archives on Poetry Daily to search for a poem that I liked, this recent poem by Eamon Grennan struck me the most. It was easy for me to draw the scene and the imagery in my head, as well as assume the mind state of the author. I don’t mean to say that Eamon Grennan is feminine, but when I first read the poem, I imagined a female describing the scene and asking the questions. I wonder if this is because I can imagine myself being in this exact same situation observing something unusual but beautiful and questioning why or how, or why not all the time. (I had a similar experience when I stepped out of my house and the sun was low, but shining really bright and all the light simply seeped out from between tree branches and everything was in this tint of honey. It’s hard to describe and I’ve never seen the sunlight like that before. It was an escaping moment, of which I have taken a mental picture) I was really able to jump into the poem because of Eamon’s descriptive very real wording. No words are there for fanciness or style. It seems to just come out of him, raw but real, and that is why I, a reader, am able to assume the position of “I” or perhaps the reader becomes the “you” that joins him as “we.”
     It’s funny how geese flying in the air can have more even and symmetrical formations than a dance team with spike tape on the floor. This is an evident observation of the author’s as he describes the flock “bent into a flexed bow” and “moving as one.” However with no need for excess description, because generally, we’ve all seen flocks migrate south (either in life or on some media) and can conjure up the image without fault. It’s the phenomenon of the lit up geese that the author spends the most time describing, because it’s something he wants to share with us and draw out since we do not have this moment in our mental film and cannot conjure up such imagery. In fact he spends most of the poem contemplating how the bellies of the geese were lit with warm tones, though it was a winter night and the sky was probably black without moonlight.
     Grennan’s descriptions were reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop’s characteristic ability to see the beautiful in the normally-not-so-beautiful. They’re not the same, I was only reminded; but in fact, they may be very different. At first read, I felt as though the descriptions of the color were beautiful, warm and of a sunny, wheat-colored shade. But after closer read, the shade of lighting is actually quite darker, colder. It’s not golden, but “of tarnished gold,” worn and aged. Then, the color of “dead oak leaves hanging still in sunshine,” or tall reads shone with light in the winter alludes to the winter “December dark” we are currently in. The oak leaf is dead and hanging as if holding on, while others have fallen off due to the changing season, and the tall reeds though splashed with lights are enduring winter, frail, maybe wilted. They’re all beautiful, almost quaint, images; they just have hints of melancholy in them.
      Throughout the poem I feel a common theme of fickleness or unknown. Cycles are always fickle, always changing from fall to winter to spring to summer. So, present in the poem are the changing seasons, the months, the time of day, and with all those cycles come and go the migrating geese who are “winging it,” perhaps improvising? And if not improvising then flying which is also change in altitude, speed, direction, and whether or not one is flying. Only for a minute or two do we get to see the geese before they fly out of our sight, “gone dark, gone on.” We also see the tarnishing gold, which cannot remain in a state of pure gold, but changes over time. Then of course we see there is no moonshine. As we are told by Juliet, the moon is fickle, one night there, full and bright, then another night gone. Even the title of the poem, “visitation” is a temporary stay, a fickle moment.
     Overall, I liked this poem, because it brought me somewhere, on a little journey and then to someplace different than I was before reading the poem. The author didn’t just take me and describe the scene and then leave me there. He took me, pointed at the sky, took me inside to show me his cat, then outside to look up then down on earth, then up to no moonlight, then swept across the sky to find no longer geese but darkness and finally paused to look back at the minute or two. We were just a miniscule passing, a place of visitation to the geese, whereas the geese to us were this image and phenomenon that had indeed passed us but would forever reverberate as a unique memory.