The Hide-and-Seek Muse Read online

  While many of us choose as a New Year commences to take stock, to make an accounting of the past twelve months, to draw up pro and con lists or to make pledges of resolution regarding behaviors, rehabilitations, and goals for the 365 days to come, one senses that every day is new year’s day for this poet. Any experience is plunderable for what it might reveal about how to live one’s life, what questions to ask, what is worthy of letting go, of keeping, of noticing and remembering and of using as a catalyst for new understanding or change. There’s nothing self-righteous about this undertaking, however. Cushman is a poet eager to understand, but he doesn’t use his curiosity and intelligence against himself or his reader. He’s got some ideas about what’s going down, but never presumes to intuit all the answers, to give the game away, or, worse, hoard illumination, to keep it hidden and arcane. This is a poet who believes that his reader is at least as sharp as he, and so the revelations of his poems always finally belong as much to the reader as to the poet—there is that kind of generosity about them.

  In “List List,” a meta poem if there ever was one, the word “list” appears 20 times in ten lines (including the title, where it appears, obviously, twice). Compelled to consider what constitutes a “list,” the reader is reminded that, in addition to the obvious cataloging, the simple mnemonic or descriptive series the word most familiarly denotes, “list” can also be an intransitive verb meaning to wish or choose, deriving from the Old English lystan, lust—to desire, to lust. List can also connote a remnant, a selvage, as in the Old High German lista, edge; similarly, with the same etymology, it can be a verb meaning to deviate from the vertical, to tilt.

  Bearing these meanings in mind, the reader moves through the list that is the poem. The title alerts us to a complexity of meanings, but the poem opens fairly straightforwardly, with a catalog of seasonal, celebratory lists: wine, wish, to do, top ten, grocery, Christmas, price, packing, bestseller, mailing. Subtly, swiftly, however, the poem deepens into the darker side of consumerism and accrual, so that by line six the speaker reminds us that at the very same time something is back-listed, put out of circulation, made unavailable (perhaps because of unpopularity, but also perhaps because of failure or mishandling) other things are being “short-listed”—both in the sense of their being culled and promoted as finalists for special recognition or award, but also in terms of having one’s list cut short, for whatever reason—death, shortfalls, scarcity.

  Similarly, a “passenger list” for a trip might well become a “casualty list” (and again, the context here is cultural as well as personal—while some travel for pleasure, others are dying in wars). As the poem culminates, it makes clear that implicit in any “guest list” are the uninvited, the cursed, the black-balled, the marked. By the poem’s conclusion, we are no longer in the cheery world of wine and wishes, but we have not negated these desires, either; in this brief, incrementally repetitions, and rhythmic poem, all meanings of “list” remain with us acoustically, metonymically, figuratively; joys are brought into the realm of the bereft, the done for. “List List,” we see, is a tautology, an ars poetica. One reads the last line, “black list, hit list,” with the sense that any desideratum that does not include this kind of range is not fully human, or fully realized.

  “Time Management,” two sentences organized by colons and semi-colons and trellised over 26 lines (same number as the letters of the English alphabet: coincidence?), is also a list. The poem begins with various tasks to which one must attend, followed by a sense of how often these duties should be performed:

  Oil change: every three thousand;

  Tire rotation: every five thousand;

  Dental check-up: every six months;

  Annual physical: figure it out ….

  In the fifth line, Cushman shifts into a nominal imperative (“paint the house: one side a summer; / service the furnace: every October; / mow the grass: once a fortnight, / except in drought, if one’s informal”), and as his list of tasks and the timetable/calendar/justification of responsibility for each proceeds, the reasons for accomplishing the deeds become increasingly conditional. In line ten, he brings his first sentence to a light close with a play on the world “leave”: “rake the leaves: easier to mow them; / turn over new leaf: every January.” At this point, we realize that the expectations set up by the opening lines have already been tested and transformed. We’re not on shore anymore, with our “build Rome in a day” “to-do” list affixed to the refrigerator. We are in a new zone, where the stakes are more consequential.

  The next sentence of the poem begins in lower case, and conditions intensify, with the tasks and reasons for them breaking more and more often out of the “equations” of “task colon reason semi-colon line break” that began the poem. We do things not only by rote, the poet suggests, but also when things “[get] caught” and “in phases of crisis.” All the elements of Cushman’s calendrical poetics are here—numbers, months, seasons, days, nights—but we come to see that time is “managed” as much in terms of our inner weather (crisis, Eros, theory, practice) as it is in terms of the dictates of automobile maintenance manuals, the medical establishment, and the natural world. By the time the speaker admonishes “pray without ceasing: / figure it out,” the repeated phrase “figure it out” calls us to see, if we have not already, the figurative in all of this numerical and time-haunted figuring.

  Yet lest we think that “emotional health,” an honoring of Eros, getting enough hugs, and reading and rereading important texts, for example, is all that is at stake, the speaker concludes with, again, lines that move the poem into yet a more consequential place: “pump out the septic: / three to five years, easy to remember / with elections for president.” Here the quotidian, household purging of the septic tank is compared to the ritual by which, in a nation, presidents are elected every four years, intimating that we negotiate the time we are given by a complex of psycho-historical, personal, and natural imperatives, and that the upshot of enacting these rituals reaches both deeply into and far beyond ourselves.

  Both of Cushman’s poems recall us to our own human propensity to make lists, to catalog, to record. But each suggests that it is not enough to merely list, to enumerate, and then relax because it’s January 2nd and Miller Time. The quality and thoughtfulness of our lists, and our attention and devotion to them over time and in the context of our culture and our responsibilities, is a measure of who we are and what we might, or must, become.

  MARY SZYBIST

  Happy Ideas

  I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.

  Duchamp

  I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air

  and watch them pop.

  I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening.

  I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.

  Then to call it natural.

  Then to call it supernatural.

  I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.

  I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.

  I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would know them and feel them,

  and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.

  I had the happy idea to string blue lights from a tree and watch them glow.

  I had the happy idea to call myself happy.

  I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in mold-life.

  I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do

  and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes.

  I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say

  hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.

  It was my happiest idea.
r />   Mary Szybist’s anaphoric litany, “Happy Ideas,” resounds with a note of whimsy and the kind of resolution one entertains at the start of a new year or at the end of an old one, that liminal spell of days between the winter holidays and the Janus-blade of the new year. For some of us, this spate of out-of-time hours, often disordered by changes in routine, can be a welcome reprieve from quotidian demands, providing more than usual time for reflection, taking stock, and anticipation of a fresh start. For others, the week can be a toilet flush, a slough of despond, a time of unmet expectations, of feeling out of synchronicity with the celebratory acoustics of the season.

  Szybist’s playful catalogue—threaded through with tempered accruals and incremental repetitions of the word “blue” that intensify the emotional stakes of the poem as it proceeds—takes its title from and opens through the lens of an epigraph from the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp: “I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.” About his sculpture Bicycle Wheel (1913) Duchamp said in an interview, “The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn’t called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment where you live …. To set the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day.”

  Szybist appropriates Duchamp’s notion of “Readymades” (objects manufactured for another use—snow shovels, urinals—and presented as works of art) to her own poetic purposes. Note how her understanding of what can constitute a found object becomes more and more metaphysical as the she makes her list:

  I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air

  and watch them pop.

  I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening.

  I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.

  Then to call it natural.

  Then to call it supernatural.

  I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.

  With each spin, with each line’s revolution, Szybist creates for herself some of the comfort of which Duchamp speaks in his interview, the repeated motions of turning the wheel allowing the artist both to transcend and accept the mire of the everyday. Eschewing sentimentality and quick fixes, Szybist takes (and offers) as much pleasure in broaching existential, wide-reaching historical ideas (“I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything”) as she does in conveying notions decidedly domestic and intimate (“I had the happy idea to string blue lights from a tree and watch them glow. / I had the happy idea to call myself happy”). Both the philosophical and the grounded give pleasure, as these rhymed lines that come near the poem’s conclusion demonstrate: “I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do / and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes.”

  In his gorgeous, irreverent On Being Blue, a book-length philosophical essay on blueness in all its resonances and contexts, William Gass writes, “Being without Being is blue.” As “Happy Ideas” concludes, Szybist’s speaker embraces her blue soles, the intrinsic blueness, the full menu range of her emotional being: “I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say / hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello. / It was my happiest idea.” Szybist’s poem is a call to accept if not celebrate the full menu of our “being”—blue-shod and dancing.

  SPRING & ALL:

  POETRY & THE SEASONS

  SPRING & ALL: POETRY & THE SEASONS

  The Roman calendar marked the new year, and spring, as commencing at the start of March. In early spring on the central East coast, as gritty snow piles at the local shopping center shrink and snowdrops and crocuses tremble at the foot of tree trunks, it isn’t premature at least to begin to turn one’s thoughts, if not to love, then to shedding heavy coats and ordering rose canes for the garden and anticipating mornings unshackled by the scraping of ice off the windshield for the privilege of driving in to work.

  In its broadest usage, a “season” can be any period of time characterized by a particular activity, phenomenon, or circumstance—hunting season, for instance, or football season, trout season, flu season, theater season, tick season, conference season, mating season. The word “season” comes from the Latin sation -, satio, from serere, to sow. Perhaps most commonly, then, season refers to a specific division of the earthly year, determined by changes in weather and the tilt of the planet’s axis in relation to its revolution around the sun. And although meteorological and astronomical seasons are reckoned in a myriad of ways in different parts of the globe, ever since the Societas Meteorologica Palatina defined the seasons in 1780 as groupings of three months, the northern hemisphere has marked four of them—spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

  Poets and poetry have ever been attuned to the seasons, to the stirrings they engender, the possibilities they present or refute. In his journal, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Each season …. gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other …. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel.”

  Emily Dickinson uses the word some 20 times in her verses, and she seemed to be especially fond of spring, calling it “the Period / Express from God.” And who does not know the poetry of the King James translation of Ecclesiastes 3:1: “To every [thing there is] a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” or Shakespeare’s plays and poems, which are full of songs and references to these turnings of the year:

  The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

  Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

  And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

  An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

  Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,

  The childing autumn, angry winter, change

  Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

  By their increase, now knows not which is which.

  (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.112-119)

  Chinese poetry has always been especially beholden to the seasons, as in this poem by Su Ting (670 – 727):

  The year is ended, and it only adds to my age

  Spring has come, but I must take leave of my home.

  Alas, that the trees in this eastern garden,

  Without me, will still bear flowers.

  Across cultures and time, then, poetries connect with and at times depend upon the transformations signaled by seasonal changes to articulate all sorts of emotional and psychological conditions. The phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard called the seasons “the fundamental mark of memories,” going on to assign them “soul values.” In a poem called “The Human Seasons,” John Keats writes, “Four seasons fill the measure of the year; / There are four seasons in the mind of man.” After extolling the beauties of spring, summer, and autumn, Keats concludes: “He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, / Or else he would forego his mortal nature.” Wallace Stevens presses this point in “The Snow Man.” “One must have a mind of winter,” he claims, in order to behold the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

  Yet anyone remembering even a few of this past decade’s dramatic seasonal weather events knows that the seasons as we know or understand them are changing. Wikipedia reports that “ecologists are increasingly using a six-season model for temperate climate regions that includes pre-spring (prevernal) and late summer (seritonal) as distinct seasons along with the traditional four.” And although we know that changes always are occurring, that change is the norm, and that most
“climate forcings,” as the experts call them, happen at a glacial pace, over millennia, each generation must feel itself, at some point, to be the one poised to witness first-hand, in real time, these inevitable eonic disruptions, a conspiracy—ecological, climatological, environmental, political, human—that certainly must eventually alter everything about the earth as we know it.

  And so it’s hard for a certain kind of naïve mind at a restless, awakening time of year not to wonder, for example, what a seasonless world might mean for poets, for poems. Shall I compare thee to a weirdly hot, dry purgatorial spell of days broken by torrential spates of relentless rain whose climactic aberrations may be caused by ozone depletion? Or to the aftermath of Cyclone Yasi wreaking havoc in Western Australia? To devastating eruptions of the earth in New Zealand? Well, maybe yes. Because poetry is about nothing if it’s not about transformation. Never mind that the kind of apocalyptic changes that could occur may make the writing of poems moot. That the seasons have confirmed and perhaps even created human understanding of life’s mutability for poets is undeniable. Here are the last lines from the end of Stanley Kunitz’s beautiful poem “The Layers”:

  Though I lack the art

  to decipher it,

  no doubt the next chapter

  in my book of transformations

  is already written.

  I am not done with my changes.

  Clearly we have our interior weathers, our human seasons, too.

  CAROL MUSKE-DUKES

  To a Soldier

  Imagine it: a world away, Autumn.

  Leaves scattering but not in fiery

  Effusion, like the red/gold sentinels

  Of the Smokies or north of Boston.

  A world away: not enough Fall to

  Make a cliché, the one we love about

  The season’s redemptive powers, its

  Dazzling imitation of death, the gold & blood—