riding backwards to see what you missed
by Douglas
Messerli
Clarence
Major From Now On: New and Selected
Poems, 1970-2015 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2015)
In his
introduction to Clarence Major’s new poetry collection From Now On, Yusef Komunyakaa hints, even if he does not directly
state, that there is a kind of natural quietude about Major’s work: “His work
achieves a middle register—not high or low—the same way some of our great jazz
stylists search for the grace note, always dependable but edgy and
democratic….” Elsewhere he describes Major’s work as being a poetry that
“embodies echoes—language as feeling,” presumably in opposition to the language
itself of the poem. And there is a certain truth to Komunyakaa’s
characterization of the poet’s art. Violence is depicted somewhat quietly:
There was no warning.
Rising from his rest
the dog bit the man’s
leg,
did it quietly,
then returned to his
spot
on the front lawn to
rest.
(“East Lansing, Michigan”)
Even war is
described as a matter-of-fact, silent affair:
A coast of embedded
spring.
Today, in what is left
of a barn, John tied a prisoner to a rack,
lay the woman on a
stock of hay, went out
pulled the boat back
into the water.
(“Today’s War”)
In poem after poem, it appears, Major’s
characters—and his is a poetry of numerous beings—grow quiet, the visual
suddenly overwhelming their spoken words. Since Major is also a substantial
painter, perhaps this should not surprise us:
No sound, the whole
thing.
Unknown folk.
People waving from a
hillside
of rippling grass
to people below
in an ongoing meadow.
(“Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving”)
And even
when not all is quiet, there is a sense of sleepiness, of peace, even emptiness
in so many of Major’s poems, as figures sit in an empty room late at night, or
bask on a sunny deck with coffee cup in hand, taking in the scenery (as in
“Bernardston,” “Bricks and Sleep”). “September Mendocino” begins:
What do you hear up
here?
Same Shasta air, same
Nevada air,
same Sierra Nevada air,
same rainsong air
that lured Walt Whitman
when he heard it.
Perhaps one senses quietude in the poet’s
work because, as Komunyakaa observes, Major employs seemingly everyday language
along with his ability to make “profundity seem accidental.” And so the poetry
seems intent on the seduction of the reader as it “whispers to us.”
Yet we also discover, more often, that the
quietness, the narrative whisper that appears to take us into a homey kitchen
for “ham and potatoes, pears and garlic and onions / in a cooking pot” is
simply a ruse, a kind a game Major is playing with the reader before he
suddenly pulls him through the trap door of reality; the next lines of that
poem, “Waiting for the Storm,” say it all:
…… My wife leaning against the sideboard
eating a piece of
chocolate. Pretending to be calm.
I’m pretending too.
In fact, Major is anything but quiet if
you listen carefully enough. His narratives are nearly always “false,” in the
sense that David Antin’s “talks” are not really everyday casual conversations.
What at first appears to be a postcard-perfect landscape nearly always shifts,
pivots, and drops the reader quickly into a metaphysical hole where language
gets reconstructed and demands a new understanding. His “Holiday at the Beach”
might almost serve as a primer for Major’s methods:
What could go wrong?
This is a place of moral certitude.
A pelican on a post.
Gulls circling and searching the bay
In the distance,
drifting sailboats. Children flying kites
all day across a perky
sky.
…………………………………………………………
…………..........The mime
hasn’t moved for two hours
People sipping beer at
the beach bar. Listening to the radio band.
Squinting at the lone
swimmer far out in the ocean
doing backstrokes. He is
moving so far out that even if he turns back
he might not make it. A
dressed-up couple appear
on the boardwalk,
apparently from afar.
They seem to be waiting
for a formal introduction.
Yet, way, way out, in
the misty and majestic distance,
beyond the lone swimmer,
the ocean is turning black and blacker
against a blue-blue strip of sky. Sound of water like
an earthquake.
If we sense
danger from the very first words of the poem, Major immediately calms us with a
series of peaceful assertions, images of people “in green and pink swimsuits /
on yellow sand.”
Butterflies
and children are part of the landscape. Yet distance, we perceive in hindsight,
is a dangerous concept even in the third line. The use of the word “perky” to
describe the sky hints that something is amiss; “still” or “serene” would have
been the more standard adjectives.
By the time we move to the seemingly dead
“mime” we are already entering hazardous territory, a world of inebriated
drinkers. The “squinting” at the lone swimmer takes us again into that
formidable distance, a place “too far” to turn back. And moving into that world
“from afar” is the “dressed-up couple,” strangers inexplicably afraid of
entering the scene. By the time the poem thunders, from a “majestic distance,”
into its catastrophic grand storm or possibly even a tsunami, it is too late to
escape. The narrative has been swallowed up by the thunderous language of the
poem itself, and the reader with it.
Using these tactics, particularly in the
poems from 2000 forward, Major takes the reader from a known place, from the
falsity we describe as everyday reality, into a landscape where meaning and our
sense of certitude are shaken. The quiet clatters into a clamour.
Fortunately, the author does not always
pull out the rug so boisterously; more often, Major’s work is constructed on
the ground of gentle self-parody and irony. Most of “Wild Music,” for example,
is an almost comic sendup of all the nursery rhymes, fables, and children’s
games that are, as he puts it, “animal centric.” The narrator of this poem will
have nothing to do with “blackbirds baked in a pie,” cows jumping the moon, or
riding a “cockhorse” to Banbury Cross.
But the separation he feels from the animal world soon shifts into a
separation within the animal world as
he becomes aware of the difference in the sexes and the issue of sex itself. “I
knew a girl who was a cricket,” he begins, describing the convincing sound she
made in imitation of one. After a humorous aside about all the animals—in the
form of microbes—that live in our bodies, the narrator quips “That spoils all
the fun of being home alone” before he returns to not being home or alone,
joined by the grown-up girl who might now be interested in subject the love:
Seriously, the girl grew
up! I grew up! Love became the thing.
Virginia Woolf knew how
women love.
Her words had a certain
ring. Her timing was never late.
…….
Could it be that all my
life I’ve ignored the endless possibilities
of the wild kingdom and its
music?
My first girlfriend in high
school said
music was with her wherever
she went.
Not because of the bells on
her shoes.
Music throbbed just under
the surface of her skin.
My word to her was I like
music—let me in.
A Spanish proverb says men
are fire, women are firewood!
The bell had rung just as
my tongue sought her tongue.
Instead, a serpent came out
of her mouth.
The poem
suddenly swallows its own tale. His beloved music (not so very different,
perhaps, from the music of nursery rhymes) becomes an ouroboros that presages
his temptation and fall from grace, while reiterating the poet’s previous
mention of the “avalanche” of impressions that Virginia Woolf described as
erupting from the minds of women. More humorously—but not so very differently
from the poem “Holiday on the Beach”—the orderly and predictable suddenly ring
out with new potentialities of chaos.
It is as if, in Major’s poems, the reader
is being taught to think differently, as in “The Sometime Difficulty with
Teaching.” Here the poet as teacher attempts to help his eager young students
perceive something outside of their disdain for routine. In the process, Major
does not so much privilege routine over variety; rather, he considers (through
a kind of desideratum) those things we associate with each of those concepts.
In the poem, the word “variety” becomes associated with youth, possibility, joy
and pleasure, as well as chaos and danger. Routine is perceived, by the
students at least, as related to age, boredom, dullness, and unbearable
pattern, but teacher the proffers another possibility:
……………..They say,
Without variety life is dull.
But, I say, you can
have variety within patterns.
The opposite of
routine is chaos.
They say, Then give me
chaos!
At six in the evening,
from my kitchen window, I see a blackbird.
He comes and lands on
the same limb of the same tree in the yard.
He sits there for
about an hour.
He looks south for a
while.
He turns and looks
north for a while.
There’s variety in his
pattern.
He never does the same
thing exactly the same way twice,
yet he is keeping a
pattern.
The class says, Birds
are not people.
Yet a few
lines later, the teacher is described by “Ron,” presumably a colleague, as a
kind of odd-bird: “You have unusual ideas; / that’s why you’ve never had a best
seller.” By the logic of the poem one can only ask is the teacher, in having
such unusual ideas, a figure of pattern or variety? Now the meaning of those
very words shift; language itself changes meaning. By poem’s end, it appears,
the teacher has learned a lesson from the very process of teaching, from
exploring words by laying them out to consider their possible meanings.
That concept, indeed, seems to be central
to much of Major’s poetry, and works against all the seemingly homey narrative
strategies with which he often begins. His “own language,” in short wins out
over “our language” or a presumed notion of language. As he notes in the poem
“In My Own Language”:
I move things around
to make rock and tree,
water and land,
connect
in their own
language, but
only as I learn to
speak it.
Finally, in works such as the long
narrative, but nonetheless quite disjunctive, poem Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the
Century—a book I have chosen not to discuss at length, since I first
published it on my Sun & Moon Press—Major takes whole other languages, such
as Zuni and Navajo, to tell the tale of a woman’s attempt to escape
traditional, patriarchal values
In the end, it is clear, Major is no
modern-day Robert Frost, whispering homey wisdoms across a stone wall, but a
highly-skilled experimentalist who reveals the dangers of the pretenses of
poets like Frost, whose language gets caught up in nets of their own making
Los Angeles, May 28, 2015
Reprinted
from Hyperallegic Weekend (July 5,
2015).
