By Abriana
Jetté
Staten Island,
NY, USA
The Fall
semester often takes me by surprise. Certainly, that semester did. After a
summer of solely focusing on my craft of poetry, I had to come to terms with
dividing my time between grading, lesson planning, and meetings with students.
This division is often one-sided. My creative work falls short. With 130
college-level students, I
considered myself lucky to read a poem once a week
that wasn’t on the syllabus. Writing seemed out of the question. But there is
always the joy of this column coming at the semester’s end, and the thrill of
pairing poets whose oppositions deliver clarity, whose differences remind me of
why I write. In today’s divisive political climate, I find it comforting to
turn to these poets who, at first, seem to have little in common, just to
discover their undeniable connections.
When I write this column, sometimes my
observations fall into criticisms. Sometimes I simply observe. Regardless, it
is through this act of reading poems by poets whom I admire that I come to
recognize what I want to capture within my own work, what rhythms I’d like to
listen to, borrow, what phrases I wish I could claim as my own. Writing this
column is often the catalyst for the surge in my own creative work. I hope it
instills something similar within you, too.
This winter, I want you to find
yourself a warm blanket and a comfortable chair and curl up to the work of
Jeremy Michael Clark, Mat Wenzel, and Tiana Clark. These three poets hail from
different backgrounds, and their writing invests itself in various themes, from
abandonment to identity to acceptance, yet, regardless of their differences in
form, content, and voice, their work teaches us over and over we write to make
things right.
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To put to words
our emotions is a difficult task. This difficulty is a lesson I repeat over and
over again to my poetry students. Readers don’t want to just be told an idea,
they want to feel it. They want to see it. Breathe it. Smell it. Be able to
feel as if they’ve held it in the palms of their hands and held it. I’m a
believer that if one has never experienced a particular emotion, it is very
difficult to find the words to describe it. Some psychologists and doctors use
the term “Alexithymia” to describe those who suffer from an inability to
describe or identify particular emotions occurring in the self. The poet Jeremy
Michael Clark does not suffer from this disorder. In fact, Clark’s words are
often so acute that even if we have never stood in front of a home that once
belonged to our father, we begin to empathize with what that experience might
be like.
And what it
seems like is a painful experience. At least that’s how it’s described by the
speaker of Clark’s poem “Those that Flew.” The scene, the catalyst for the
poem. It begins:
“I stand before the house I
believe
is [my] fathers…”
As the
speaker stands in front of the house (not home), he recognizes a “rust-flecked
fence & the answer, a latch” that he can’t lift. Clark’s work often takes
up the subject
of the home as an extension of the body, a symbol of loss,
abandonment, structural inefficiencies, of memories remembered and unwanted. Here,
it’s as if the home is the answer. Even more, it’s as if the speaker knows the
question to ask. “Those That Flew” is composed of nine couplets, eighteen lines
that stray across stanzas as the speaker strays from his past, from his future,
from them all.
 |
| Jeremy Michael Clark |
In “Those That Flew”, amongst many other poems, Clark’s tone
is starkly to the point, a strong rhetorical tactic when considering the
fleeting ephemera described: moving, leaving, always the distaste of reality.
His wryly observational voice is persistent and hypnotic. Parataxis embodies
much of his poetry, short sentences broken exquisitely to drag the reader’s eye
and steady the momentum of each piece.
Like the idea of home, the nature of
birds, Clark’s speaker encounters a constant deliberating over where he
belongs. “Why I Keep Writing About Birds” confronts the speaker’s obsession in
the form of a litany. The repetition of “because” at the start of consecutive
sentences beckons to the speaker’s need to find a reason as to why he keeps
writing about winged-things. A seventeen line poem with no stanza breaks, the
reasons intensify with more philosophical and mythical intensity as the poem
reaches its conclusion. The speaker says: “Because to stay / still requires so
much motion.” For Clark’s speaker, the idea of living is exhausting. There is a
deliberate effort needed just to be.
“Those That Flew” contemplates the
process of leaving, the idea of abandonment. At the poems’ close, the speaker
confides to readers that
“From my mother
I learned my name. I don’t
know
What to call those birds that
flew
but I’ve heard their song. Is
that enough?”
The speaker gives us, always, just enough to keep us wanting
more. “Now You See It” charms in its title – such ambiguity, such flexibility:
The familiar phrases of a magician, the calling upon others to finally
understand, the insistence that in just a moment it will be gone again.
The
content of Clark’s trajectory spans from confronting the challenges surround
the existence of black men to examining relationships between fathers, sons,
and mothers, and developing a fondness for the land. Except the fields of
Clark’s south evoke images of distorted familial pastorals in desperate need of
care.
Jeremy Michael Clark is from Louisville, Kentucky. Currently an M.F.A. candidate at Rutgers University-Newark, his work has appeared or is forthcoming
in Callaloo, Horsethief, Vinyl, The Rumpus, Nashville Review, Scalawag, and
elsewhere.
_____________________________
A house in
Jeremy Michael Clark’s poems can stand in for the body.
In a Mat Wenzel poem,
the body is the body, and the body, with its quirks and weaknesses and desires,
well, the body is enough. It is the earth, the enemy, and the guide – the
sacred is never too far away.
 |
| Mat Wenzel |
Wenzel’s recent work includes a turn towards
the abecedarian; a form whose lines are arranged alphabetically, 26 lines, A
through Z, and poems that aesthetically resemble perfect squares. As playful as
these structures may seem, the speaker need not be taken lightly. In fact,
Wenzel’s playfulness, like his use of internal rhyme, offers a linguistic protest
against the standard. This resistance (to the earth, to the enemy, to the
guide) wholly embodies Wenzel’s work. Consider “Sticks”, which begins:
“I forgot until this morning
that I once lived in a tree-
tall valley by a lake, forgot
the mist from my shared
chalet…”
Wenzel’s intriguing
use of enjambment here carries readers forward within the memory. His unique sense
of word-play enters readers into a mystic world, one no longer part of reality
– instead of a tall-tree valley, it’s tree-tall, a simple yet imperative
semantic switch, distorting our expectations, taking us for a spin. Such
inventiveness channels itself through the rest of “Sticks”, and through much of
Wenzel’s poetry.
“Sticks” is
divided into 8 stanzas with 9 lines in each stanza, and gathers, like one might
sticks in the wood for the fire, the speaker’s thoughts on the control, or lack
thereof, of the self. The first stanza ends on the image of a “rock body”…
“stronger / material than we human / animals are made of.” According to this
speaker, we are not just human beings; we are animals; there is no thing in our
control, no thing to be, there is no being, no being but instinct. Later on in
the poem, when the speaker meditates on the animal community, he writes:
“I’m sure birds sang; though
they’d be east-side birds
where I lived. And at least
one banged his beak
against a tree over and over…”
In
“Sticks”, readers realize, not even animals have control over their bodies.
Like the birds, we are all just creatures of the earth, banging our beaks
without knowing the reason. The speaker continues reveling in reverie, fixating
on one that occurs in “his village” where the morning is “penetrated by the
deep / blue-violet voices of men” singing. Their song is a prayer, a formal
gesture for a mostly free-verse poem. Prayers are often questions without
answers. The prayer interjecting the memory in “Sticks” is lyrical, and comes
close to defining the grace of the physical world; the “billows / roll,
fastened to the rock…/…grounded firm and deep”: in short, beautiful language.
But the prayer “burned” the speaker’s ears. This religious-oriented village in
which the speaker lives with his brothers forces him to come to terms with his
own sexuality. Like prayer, denial is a powerful movement; it is consciousness
turning its back on reality, the human beings ability to say “no.”
But what
it seems the speaker of “Sticks” says is nothing, as he overhears “Christian
soldiers / joke / It’s time to throw / another fag on the fire.”
Mat Wenzel
is a poet in the English Ph.D. program at Florida State University. His poetry
explores the space and conflict created between his faith and sexual identity.
He is a Lambda Literary Fellow (2015) and earned his M.Ed. at Lesley University
and his MFA in Creative Writing at Ashland University. His work can be found
in Glitterwolf Magazine, Guide to Kulchur Creative Journal, Off
the Rocks Anthology, Penumbra, and Puerto del Sol,
among others. His most recent publication can be found online as part of a
special feature issue of Glass: A Journal of Poetry of LGBTQ
poets responding to the massacre at Orlando.
_____________________________
In many ways
the poet is addicted to the other. The other word, the other detail, the other
side of the story. The speaker of Tiana Clark’s poetry often addresses her own
obsession with loving the other, whether it is the other self, the other
option, all of the other, whatever other it may be.
In “Waking in
the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital”, the speaker describes herself having a
“pinot-bright DNA”, and being “so black she was blue.” The poem begins
with the
speaker watching her “students come and go”….as the “bright indigo of daylight”
sluices “through / dark boundaries on” her “skin’s hue.” The scene is obsidian.
The speaker comes off as aware, not critiquing the gaze, but participating in
it. But in a few stanzas, there will be “creamy pills, pills three times a
day.” Addition brings the other.
 |
| Tiana Clark |
The poem begins and ends with couplets, but
between them, tercets composed of internal rhymes and rhymes that reach across
stanzas explore the history of the speaker’s life in the absence of the father.
The three lines symbolize the instability of memory, and the tart taste of
accepting reality. At one point, before calling upon Langston Hughes, she
implores:
Drink me, eat me,
Wash me clinical and white.
Seduction
and sadness. “Bessie, Billy, and Simone.” In the poem, the speaker writes
I want to write a happy world,
but every line jazzes elegy.
And
while this sentiment seems perfectly natural for the speaker of “Waking in the
Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital”, the idea also speaks for most of Clark’s
work, which often infuses elements of polyrhythms: jazz and the blues. Music,
for Clark’s speaker, is akin to nature, and nature is akin to history. All of
the rhythms are connected. It all matters.
“A Blue Note for Father’s Day”, a
poem written in hypnotic couplets that weave in and out from the margin’s
start, describes a speaker aware that she won’t do it, but still dreams about
speaking with her father. In the poem, sends him “John Coltrane”, claims that
“We destroy ourselves for splendor-- / emerging form the buried deep / like
cicada song to mate”, and says she will send him the sound of “wet piano keys.”
She wishes for her father to know that she’s “done good with” her life, and
that she knows “how to kneel before imperfect men.” For the speaker, making
good demands sacrificing the self.
During a turn in which the poem’s content
directly addresses the father, Clark writes:
“Dear father, I hope you know
that I can love
the absences of a thing even more than
the thing itself.”
Abandonment
is either acceptance or denial of the other. Sometimes, it can be both without
us realizing it. The speaker of Clark’s poetry wrestles with sexuality and loss
and with the idea that the pleasure and love are not mutual exclusive.
Tiana Clark is
the author of the poetry chapbook Equilibrium, selected by Afaa
Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull
City Press. She is the winner of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and
2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Tiana is currently an M.F.A. candidate and
teaching assistant at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Poetry Editor
for Nashville Review. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming
from Sewanee Review, Rattle, Best New Poets 2015, Crab
Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine,
Thrush Poetry Journal, The Offing, Grist Journal, and
elsewhere.
Tiana grew up
in Nashville and southern California. She is a graduate of Tennessee State
University where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Tiana has received
scholarships to The Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Frost Place Poetry
Seminar, and The New Harmony Writers Workshop. She has been awarded funding
from the Nashville Metropolitan Arts Commission for her community
project, Writing as Resistance, which provides creative writing
workshops for trans youth. Additionally, Tiana has taught various creative writing
workshops for the Porch Writer’s Collective including SLANT (Student Literary
Artists of Nashville, Tennessee—a creative writing program for teens).
Abriana Jetté
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| Abriana Jetté |
Abriana Jetté is an internationally published poet, essayist, and educator from Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals, including the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, The Iron Horse Literary Review, The American Literary Review, and 491 Magazine. She teaches at St. Johns's University and the City University of New York, writes a regular column for Stay Thirsty Magazine that focuses on emerging poets and she is the editor of The Best Emerging Poets of 2013 that debuted on Amazon as the #3 Best Seller in Poetry Anthologies and the author of 50 WHISPERS that debuted on Amazon as the #1 Best Seller in Women's Poetry.