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The new old motion: contemporary poetry, nostalgia, and the American West

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The new old motion: contemporary poetry, nostalgia, and the American West

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Content The New Old Motion: Contemporary Poetry, Nostalgia, and the American West By Joshua Rivkin ______________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Ful&llment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) August 2016 for my family i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Graduate School at the University of Southern California and the Literature & Creative Writing Program for the generous support of a Provost’s Fellowship, a Middleton Dissertation Fellowship, a Hovel Travel Grant, and a CWPhD Summer Research & Writing Award. I would also like to thank the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center for a fellowship that provided me with the community , space, and time to complete much of the creative project. Thank you to the editors of the journals in which some of the poems &rst appeared. Thank you to my advisors John Carlos Rowe and David St. John for their thoughtful guidance and continual encouragement. I would also like to thank the many other professors who provided essential conversations and direction: Heather James, William Deverell, William Handley , Mark Irwin, and David Truer. A special thanks to Janalynn Bliss for her endless patience and kindness. For their sustaining friendship and generous feedback, I also wish to thank Gerald Maa, Brandon Som, Jessica Piazza, Christopher Santiago, Elizabeth Brad&eld, Lacy Johnson, and Jacob Rivkin. Finally , this work would not have been possible without the love of my family. Thank you to my parents, Harriet Horwitz, Marc Horwitz, Richard Rivkin, and Robin Anderson, my siblings, and, most of all, for their love, encouragement, and affection, Erin Beeghly and Esme Rivkin. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication i Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: Nothing Is Gone: Nostalgia In Randall Jarrell’s “The Lost World” 15 Chapter Two: Pasadena Tracts: Four Good Things And The Drift Of Nostalgia 44 Chapter Three: To Queer The Past In The Present: D.A. Powell's Pastoral Nostalgia 75 Conclusion 103 Bibliography 115 Appendix: Knots 122 iii ABSTRACT Nostalgia has been an essential, if misunderstood, part of the mythos of the American West. In my dissertation, The New Old Motion: Contemporary Poetry, Nostalgia, and the American West, I examine nostalgia’s centrality in the work of three California poets: Randall Jarrell, James McMichael, and D.A. Powell. I argue that these poets challenge the view that nostalgia is simply sentimental longing for the past. Deeply aware of the inherited narratives of the region, each poet uses nostalgia in ways that problematize dominant historical narratives of the American West and engage questions about authenticity , history , and identity. I offer a new framework for considering nostalgia as a poetic practice, a process of critical engagement with political, social, and historical concerns. I do not argue for a single form of productive nostalgia but a diversity of methods and results. What connects each of the cases is that nostalgia, responding to the shocks of modern life, can provide a way for writers and readers to imagine, disrupt, and transform the present and future by critically exploring the past. Poetry , I claim, is unique in that nostalgia can be an affective response—the feeling of loss or melancholy for the past—but also a methodology , a process essential to poetic language, form, and content. Also included in this dissertation is a collection of poems, Knots. The collection explores questions of desire, masculinity , and landscape. Comprised primarily of prose poems, and deeply informed by my study of nostalgia, many of the poems are located in explicitly Western American landscapes. iv INTRODUCTION “Themes recur: nostalgia, for instance, the elegiac tone...,” writes Wallace Stegner in his 1967 essay “History , Myth and the Western Writer,” “... a tone that may seem odd in a new country , and yet it may express something quintessentially American: our sadness at what our civilization does to the natural, free and beautiful, to the nobel, the self-reliant, the brave. Many of the virtues seen as defeated, gone by , no longer honored” (76-7). Stegner offers a common a literary trope of the American West, an edenic place corrupted by human contact and development. The ideal past is recalled in an imperfect present. This is the version of nostalgia that critics often point to when describing how nostalgia can create a seductive, false, ahistorical vision of the past. The conception of the American West suggested by Stegner continues in current writing about the region, part of the ongoing myth that often imagines the West simultaneously as a lost paradise of limitless resources and ideal values and “a promised land, site of innocence, site of redemption, a place where the world or the self can be transformed and perfected” (Comer 56). The frontier is both closed and forever opening. Near the end of his life, Stegner acknowledged the &ction of the nostalgia about the American West: “the West is no more the Eden that I once thought it than the Garden of the World that the boosters and engineers tried to make it...neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope” (Bluebird 99). And yet, nostalgia was and continues to be an essential part of Western narratives: those that describe a lost Eden or new Jerusalem, and all the literary and 1 historical attempts to correct these misconceptions. In reviews and essays on contemporary poetry , nostalgia is invoked, usually negatively , to describe backward looking longing. But sentimental escape is not the sum of nostalgia's means or ends. The nature of nostalgia in poetry , both generally as a process, and more speci&cally when it comes to writing about the American West, has not been well understood. There is no monograph on nostalgia and contemporary poetry. This dissertation is a corrective to that absence. I will suggest through close readings of contemporary California poets, the productive possibilities of nostalgia as a process of discovery. The idea of process is essential to my account. Rather than a passive feeling or refusal of the present, as it is often accused, critical nostalgia can be an activity , one that is deeply connected to both the form and content of a poem. Nostalgia in poetry , speci&cally in response to the circulating myths and narratives of the American West, can be a force of productive engagement with social, political, and economic concerns. 1. Return and Longing The OED de&nition of nostalgia – “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual's own lifetime” – contains the pejorative associations that the word often signals. However, nostalgia at its start was a medical condition, an extreme homesickness afLicting solders, diagnosed in 1678 by Johannes Hofer a Swiss doctor. 1 The cure for the nostalgic was to reLect on images of home, a cure that would, in time, become the disease. The coined word, from Greek roots, nostos (return) and algia (longing), &rst associated with disease and the military , has been demedicalized and demiliteraized, a shorthand for a wishful affect in 1 For a comprehensive historical background on nostalgia, see Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia.” Diogenes 54 (1966): 81 – 103. 2 which those two strands of desire come together. But nostalgia is not simply memory or recollection of the past. I want to suggest three ways to distinguish our contemporary conception of nostalgia from other forms of memory or recollection. First, nostalgia, in its very etymology , is intimately connected to loss. The past – place or time or space – is gone and cannot be recovered in the present. “What are we longing for, in our nostalgia?” asks Lawrence Lerner in his The Uses of Nostalgia, “Is it for a host of lost objects and lost experiences, or for one in particular that underlies them all? Are we longing as representatives of man, for the lost unity of primitive society (as a Marxist critic claims)? Or as individuals, for our own lost childhood?”(61). This is the algia, the longing by which nostalgia orients itself to the irrecoverable nature of time and the desire of an impossible homecoming. One might think of Adorno's claim that, “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” Which is not to say that pain is the only , or even primary , feeling of nostalgia; as one critic writes, “The vexation produced by nostalgia is, in fact, intimately related to its capacity for offering solace and pleasure” (Dames “Nostalgia” 269). Second, the longing that de&nes nostalgia – and separates it from other forms of looking back – is as much for the present and future as the past. In her essay “The Way Things Never Were: Nostalgia's Possibilities and the Unpredictable Past,” Debra Singer writes of how nostalgia can offer, “alternative perspectives through which to understand how we structure lived experience and learn from history.” She continues, “nostalgia is almost never just about hindsight but also foresight, looking back in order to move forward and realize new possibilities” (32). The time of nostalgia is a complicated motion between past, present, and future. Third, in contrast to other forms of memory or recollection, nostalgia can be constitutive 3 part of personal and collective identity. Scholars in both humanities and social sciences have suggested that nostalgia can have an essential role in self-conception and de&nition. 2 Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies in their essay “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History” claim that nostalgia, “gives sensory depth to our awareness of the other places, times and possibilities that are at once integral to who we are and de&nitively alien to us. In that sense, nostalgia always has the potential to function as a kind of critical self-consciousness” (184). Nostalgia need not always function in this way , rather, the experience of nostalgia can be an essential part of self-identity. I offer these de&nitions and distinctions not as an end to the question 'what is nostalgia?' but as a starting point for further investigation within the substantive chapters that follow. While other scholars might de&ne nostalgia in different ways, w hat many would agree on is that nostalgia in its present form is in some sense a byproduct of modernity , though for good or bad, they'd disagree. What makes nostalgia in literature, in particular in poetry , so potent is that it acknowledges the disruptions of modern life and the attempts to cope with these profound, and ongoing shifts. Boym writes in The Future of Nostalgia, “nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires...to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (xiv). It is in this complex relationship to time, what one critic calls “the sheer counterfactuality of nostalgia, its dwelling in the possibility of things not as they are,” that gives nostalgia its power and ubiquity (Goodman “What Nostalgia Knew”). Dwelling in the impossible is the very activity of lyric poetry as it confronts and alters a reader's relationship to time. “Nostalgia stalks modernity as an 2 For example, Clay Routledge, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jacob Juhl & Jamie Arndt, “The power of the past: nostalgia as a meaning-making resource. Memory 20:5 (2012): 452-460; Matthew Baldwin & Mark J. Landau “Exploring Nostalgia's InLuence on Psychological Growth.” Self and Identity 13:2 (2012):162-177;Clay Routledge, Nostalgia as Resource for the Self (New York: Routledge) 2012. 4 unwelcome double,” writes Peter Fritzsche, “a familiar symptom of the unease in the face of political and economic transformation... it takes the measure of the distance people have fallen short in their efforts to make themselves ‘at home in a constantly changing world” (62). Critics, such as Fritzsche, points to how and why nostalgia has problematically infused everything from literature to &lm, lodging itself in the modern consciousness. They emphasize how nostalgia offers a false vision of the past, in particular with regards to public memory and history. Linda Hutcheon in “Irony , Nostalgia, and the Postmodern” makes the claim that,“nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from 'the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal' – in other words, making it so very unlike the present.” In a similar way , Susan Stewart in On Longing asserts that nostalgia constructs a past that, “never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as felt lack” (23). That emphasis on the constructed stability of the past, in particular in regards to history , employed by conservative political agendas, can be the most troubling version of nostalgia: the present is exchanged for a false past, “an association of nostalgia with liberal sentimentality or later fascist celebrations of blood and soil” (Goodman “What Nostalgia Knew”). But, there is an important distinction between the state function of nostalgia and the private literary use, between nostalgic representations that confront the violence of history and the wish to diffuse or evade it. Moreover, as I'll discuss later in the introduction, the narrative shaping (or reshaping) of the past, rather than a means to distance or “sanitize” can in fact complicate, explore, and question that history. Fredric Jameson's accounts of nostalgia remain a forceful critique of nostalgia. Easily co- opted by capitalism, Jameson describes the “insensible colonization of the present by the 5 nostalgia mode” (Postmodernism 20). Jameson, writing about what he calls the nostalgia-&lm, points to nostalgia as “something of a substitute for that older system of historical representation, indeed as a virtual symptom-formation, a formal compensation for the enfeeblement of historicity in our own time” (Signatures, 130). For Jameson there is a fundamental “incompatibility of postmodernist 'nostalgia' art language with genuine historicity” (Postmodernism 9). The antidote to this is history , or so claims Jameson. “ A history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos,” he writes, deeply aware of the medical history of nostalgia (Postmodernism 156). But what would an non-nostalgic reading of history look like? David Lowenthal in The Imagined Past argues that Jameson and others overstate “discontinuities with the past and scants its living persistence” as if there is, by contrast “some non-nostalgic reading of the past that is... 'honest' or authentically 'true'” (30). At the same time, as Hutcheon and others have observed, Jameson himself can often seem nostalgic in his desire for an authentic historicity. Jameson writes in his essay “Walter Benjamin; Or, Nostalgia” about the possibility of nostalgia for “revolutionary stimulus”: But if nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of Benjamin is there to prove it. (Marxism and Form 68) Even the most skeptical critics acknowledge the potential of nostalgia, “conscious of itself,” for a critical awareness and “revolutionary stimulus.” The negative descriptions of nostalgia – counterfeit, ideological, sentimental, ahistorical, simpli&ed – have given way to a more complicated understanding of both nostalgia’s history and 6 its literary possibilities. Part of the critical recovery of nostalgia comes from the scholars who have traced the historical origins of nostalgia, an “excavation” that allows a new perspective on nostalgia as a productive force rather than a pathology” (Lowenthal Foreign Country 272). Nicholas Dames's Amnesiac Selves: Forgetting, Nostalgia, and British Fiction points to how the rise of the Victorian novel enables “the amelioration or cancellation of the past” by making the lived life a “a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed, and &nally moralizable” (10). Other scholars suggest different historical moments where what we think of as nostalgia emerged. Linda Austin’s Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917 offers a reading of a ‘new‘ nostalgia as “cultural aesthetic – a way of producing and consuming the past” (14). Aaron Santesso in A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia, looking at the transformation of nostalgia in eighteenth-century poetry , describes nostalgia as “a kind of trope machine.” In an argument that points to the present rise of nostalgia, he writes, “as a genre such as pastoral – one of the great original factories of tropes – faded, nostalgia took up its role as a genre that was originating new tropes and injecting them into the general literary pool” (187). Most essential for this project is Kevis Goodman's reading of nostalgia as a kind of reading practice by tracking of the progression of nostalgia from disease to literary trope. She writes, “ As medical nostalgia moved outside the purview of scienti&c explanation and beyond the physician's treatment, the history of mobility – and history perceived as motion – came to lodge in the project and practice of poetry itself ” (“Romantic Poetry” 199). To treat homesick patients, doctors prescribed the reLection on images and ideas of home. Now, the very idea of nostalgia is an attachment to those images and ideas of home. Goodman, in thinking about the earliest de&nition of nostalgia, the attachment to a literal place as opposed to the longing for a distant past, argues that in literary nostalgia the mind can be “marooned upon 7 words as things.” These historical recoveries have lead directly and indirectly to the scholars who attempt to redeem nostalgia from its critics. 2. Response and Recovery The recent critical attempts to recover nostalgia form the groundwork for my own investigation. Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, by dividing nostalgia into its etymological parts of return (nostos) and longing (algia), considers what she coins as “restorative” and “reLective” nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia looks toward the past in an attempt to create a coherent narrative while reLective nostalgia engenders a more skeptical and questioning view of the present by questioning narratives of linear time and memory. ReLective nostalgia points towards the future thorough a critical awareness that “delays the homecoming -- wistfully , ironically , desperately” while restorative is “an abdication of personal responsibility , a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure” (xviii). ReLective nostalgia, “ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary ,” allows nostalgics in the “gap between identity and resemblance” to “tell their story.” Longing can lead to transformation, a way to “explore ways of inhabiting many places at once” (50). Other scholars, notably John Su in Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi in Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity, and Jennifer Ladino's Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature, argue too for the critical function of nostalgia. Su's study of the Anglophone novel points to the progression of nostalgia from the modernists who used nostalgia to mediate their relationship with the past to the contemporary writer for whom nostalgia offers an ethical way to confront “loss and displacement” by imagining a more satisfying 8 past (12). Ritivoi's work develops a model of nostalgia that is essential to self-identity. She writes, “Released from the negative connotations, nostalgia can be de&ned as an effort to discover meaning in one’s life, to understand oneself better by making comparisons between the past and the present, and thus integrating experiences into a larger schema of meaning” (29). Her work – like much of the work done on nostalgia in the social sciences – suggests that nostalgia can be a constructive and positive force for understanding both present and past. Social and environmental justice motivate Ladino's work. Ladino's term ‘counter-nostalgia’, argues for nostalgia as the “vehicle by which critique happens.” Rather than a “totalizing narrative that stabilizes the past and the present” the critical of function of nostalgia can “illuminate a traumatic event” (227). A common thread among these scholars, as well as my own work, is the instance on nostalgia as a force for progressive thought, and even action. Indeed, the new thinking on nostalgia is in direct response to the old critiques of nostalgia. The same critiques of nostalgia – the return to an 'imagined' past and its distancing from the present– can also be a source of its potential. Nostalgia, in the continual re-engagement with the past, spatially and temporally , allows one to, “&nd places and moments of resistance to oppression” (Oliver 135-6). The possibility of future change, political or personal, rooted in the ongoing relationship between past and present, depends on imagination and interpretation. “Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future,” claims Boym. (xvi). At the same time, nostalgia is not simply a willful fantasy that owes no claim to authenticity or fact; instead, the very tension between desire for authenticity and the knowledge that our experiences of the world are already mediated is essential to a critical nostalgia. 9 These scholars, Boym, Ritivoi, Su, and Ladino, offer an important and useful critical vocabulary to move beyond a simple description of nostalgia as sentimental longing. But what's missing from these recent investigations and rede&nitions of nostalgia is two-fold. First, these scholars mostly consider prose instead of poetry. Su's book for example is exclusively on novels. There is no monograph (and surprisingly few essays) on nostalgia in contemporary poetry. 3 Second, and more importantly , poetry , I claim, is unique in that nostalgia can be both a transformative affective response and also a methodology , a poetic process essential to form and content. Rather than seeing nostalgia as either “an end reaction to yearning” or “a technique for provoking a secondary reaction,” both important descriptions of nostalgia offered by these scholars, I will suggest that nostalgia can be part of a poem's structure (Scanlon “Introduction” 4). In the chapters that follow, I will point to how contemporary poets employ and complicate nostalgia both in form and content. My project pushes forward on these critical recoveries to consider nostalgia’s relationship to form itself. 3. West of the West The essential questions and themes exposed by nostalgia – loss and home, authenticity and mediation, change and stability – are not limited to the American West. However, they are often heightened and made urgent as the result of a history of contact and transition. “Certainly nostalgia and progress were the twin motifs of the frontier myth,” writes Richard Slotkin in “Nostalgia and Progress: Theodore Roosevelt's Myth of the Frontier,” “in which dreams of a lost Eden alternated with enthusiasm for a “fortunate fall” that allowed us the adventure for what was 3 See Daniel Cross Turner. “Restoration, Metanostalgia, and Critical Memory: Forms of Nostalgia in Contemporary Southern Poetry ,” The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2, (Spring, 2008):182-206; John Gerry . “Robert Hass and the Poetry of Nostalgia,” Threepenny Review. No. 5. (Spring 1981) 6-7. 10 lost” (636). As with Stegner's quote at the start of this introduction, it is possible to both question the veracity of that “lost Eden” and still see how nostalgia, as myth and narrative, is part of the ongoing story of the American West. Popular myths of the West and Western history are not simply relics of a bygone view but have a &rm foothold in the contemporary imagination. Elsewhere, Slotkin writes of the movie “The Untouchables,” where the “elaborate 'restoration' of the historical setting, serves the covert project of evoking nostalgia for the heroic simplicities of the heyday of the Cold War and the New Frontier” (Gun6ghter 641). In contrast to this version of nostalgia – one that evokes Jameson's nostalgia &lm, those 'heroic simplicities' mobilized either implicitly or explicitly in the service of conservative or nationalist projects – are the more complex, self-conscious attempts to deal with these same histories and legacies. The tension between embracing narratives of the past and challenging, disrupting, or revising those narratives is not easily reconciled. Consider Krista Comer's description of nostalgia in Joan Didion's Run River: “Even as Didion memorializes a proud pioneer past and would mobilize landscape discourse to deny civil rights claims upon “authentic” western identity , she also relentlessly exposes the contradictions and romanticizations of that past” (74). Likewise, William Handley’s Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West describes a similar stance in Willa Cather's &ction: “Cather’s nostalgia draws on the desire for western romance yet ironically and self-consciously reveals the nationalist and blinding effects of such nostalgic retrospection” (8). In both accounts, the individual, literary experience of nostalgia is &nally rejected. Nostalgia in these two cases is a limit to understanding place or history. But what happens when a writer embraces nostalgia? I want to push forward the possibility that nostalgia 11 can engage these same concerns and challenges, not through rejection or irony but critical engagement. The decision to focus on three Western poets, speci&cally Californian writers is both practical and theoretical. Beyond simply a way to narrow the scope of the project, nostalgia, as I've suggested, is deeply connected to the conception and history of the West. Each of the poets under discussion live or lived in California and write from a stance of insider knowledge about the place rather than an external viewpoint. Jarrell lived in Los Angeles from age 3-12 and spent several years in Emerald Bay in the 1950s. McMichael grew up in Pasadena, studied in Northern California, and currently teaches at UC Irvine. Powell, who went to high school and college in Yuba and Sonoma Counties, now lives in the Bay Area. These poets, each deeply aware of the inherited narratives of the region, all challenge and complicate these received narratives. Chapter one, “Nothing Is Gone: Nostalgia In Randall Jarrell’s 'The Lost World,'” explores how the poet-critic's long poem “The Lost World,” the title poem of his last book, engages nostalgia as a critical process of discovery. The speaker of the poem recalls and traverses the remembered landscapes of his youth, in particular Los Angeles and Hollywood. The returns and repetitions of the poem, in both narrative and image, make nostalgia an integral part of the poem's form. But Jarrell's nostalgia, beyond the attempt to replay memories of the past, also speaks to a serious tensions for speaker and reader: the desire for authenticity and the fact that world is already mediated. The result, I argue, is that “The Lost World” considers what it means to be a reader and critic, an argument for seeing words not as means but ends in themselves. Chapter two, “Pasadena Tracts: Four Good Things And The Drift Of Nostalgia” considers James McMichael's book length poem set in the early days of development in Pasadena, 12 California. Engaging personal family history as well as the history of the region, the poetic process of nostalgia becomes a means by which the capacious poem drifts across space and time. As with Jarrell, the process of nostalgia is essential to poetic form and content. By enacting the digressive, repeating nature of nostalgia the poem re-inscribes the erasures of history that would otherwise be lost, in particular the environmental and humans costs of urban development. Chapter three, “To Queer The Past In The Present: D.A. Powell's Pastoral Nostalgia” describes how D.A. Powell, in his &ve books of poems, Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic, and Useless Landscape, A Guide for Boys, constructs pastoral spaces that are both queer and nostalgic. The pastoral, as mode and topos, provides a way for Powell to write about the erotic and rural life with a comic, wry , and ironic style. The poet simultaneously engages and challenges tradition. Powell's queer and pastoral nostalgia makes visible the violence of history , the erasures of the past, and the construction of identity. Behind his poetics is a sense of transition, whether economic, social, political or sexual. The nostalgia in Powell's poetics, like the pastoral genre he borrows, negotiates between the boundaries of its &ctions, between the imperfect present and the possible future. The conclusion, which turns to Brenda Hillman and ecopoetics, is a starting attempt to broaden the conversation beyond the three poets in the previous chapters. As I continue to develop future chapters, it will be essential to bring in a more diverse group of poets that represents the ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity of poets at work in the American West. The three chapters of this project offer a series of case studies of how nostalgia can be a productive force in poetry. I do not argue for a single method or uni&ed purpose in how these writers use nostalgia. The absence of a uni&ed aim of nostalgia is itself a methodological argument about 13 the importance of process. Nostalgia can be deployed as a process of discovery or critical engagement in a multitude of ways. In the end, I do not offer an easy rubric for identifying the instances of productive nostalgia. I agree with Ladino's claim that, “there is no formula for exactly how nostalgia becomes progressive— no checklist of six traits like the one [Terry] Gifford generates for his post-pastoral framework...It does not have a constant ideological form, even though it functions with/in other narratives that do” (13). But that &nally , is part of my very argument, one that acknowledges what another critic calls the “creativity” of nostalgia. My aim is to think through a diversity of poetic engagements with nostalgia, and in doing so, expand the conversation about the possibilities of nostalgia as a signi&cant and complex poetic process, beyond these three poets, and indeed beyond the West. 14 CHAPTER ONE Nothing is Gone: Nostalgia in Randall Jarrell’s “The Lost World” In his essay “Poets, Critics, and Readers” Randall Jarrell recalls an interview with a well- known critic who confesses,“I read, but I don’t get any time to read at whim. All the reading I do is in order to write or teach, and I resent it. We have no TV , and I don’t listen to the radio or records, or go to art galleries or the theater. I’m a completely negative personality” (Poetry and the Age 112). Jarrell's response, though long, is worth quoting in its entirety: As I thought of that busy , artless life—no records, no paintings, no plays, no books except those you lecture on or write articles about—I was so depressed that I went back over the interview looking for some bright spot, and I found it, one beautiful sentence: for a moment I had left the gray , dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing “at whim”. The critic said that once a year he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or an article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for 15 their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy , and powerful hours of our lives, but during the contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence: Read at whim! read at whim! (112–113) Jarrell's ideal practice of reading is one in which the text is written and read not for anything that one might “get out of it, but for itself.” The use value of art, and speci&cally literature, is contained in and of itself. The critic who rereads Kim “at whim,” and Jarrell's picking up of the phrase, this one bright, beautiful sentence, explicitly recalls Emerson's “Self-Reliance”: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation” (30). The individual impulse at work in Emerson's whim is the same one that guides Jarrell in those “contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking.” To read at whim is to shun the external world and the tethers of life and obligation in favor of the self's deep inner resources. The insistence on “whim” by both Emerson and Jarrell is one too that asserts the capricious and idiosyncratic nature of reading. It is an argument for seeing the texts of the world as “ends, not means.” Randall Jarrell's long poem “The Lost World” embodies this plea to read the world “at whim.” The speaker, recalling the lost Southern California landscape of his youth, returns to the pleasures of invention and imagination. Jarrell’s nostalgia for these &rst objects of critical play become an argument for seeing the texts of the world as “ends, not means.” Jarrell's nostalgic return to this place and time is more complicated and interesting than it might &rst appear. In the 16 poem's &rst section “ A Street off Sunset,” the speaker, a young boy , refuses to sleep after reading in Amazing Stories of the scientist who wants to destroy the world: “It’s time for you to say good night,” Mama tells me; I go on in breathless joy. “Remember, tomorrow is a school day ,” Mama tells me; I go on in breathless joy. (Poems 290) Twice repeated, the “breathless joy” is the joy of the mind awake to the potential of narratives to challenge the dimensions of the self and the limits of personal experience. The pleasure of reading is enacted not just in the mind but the physical body: “That night as I lie crossways in an armchair/ Reading Amazing Stories (just as, long before, / I’d lie by my rich uncle’s polar bear / On his domed library’s reLecting Loor)” (Poems 289). The “breathless joy” of this experience is the same pleasure offered at the end of the essay “Poets, Critics, and Readers.” Jarrell writes, “Yet the poet could bear to have people cut off from all that, if only they read widely naturally , joyfully in the rest of literature: much of the greatest literature, much of the greatest poetry , even, is in prose. If people read this prose – read even a little of it – generously and imaginatively , and felt it as truth and life, as natural and proper joy , why , that would be enough” (Poetry and the Age 112). As in the poem, the word joy appears twice. Jarrell’s prescription for reading turns on a dynamic and direct engagement with the text, a “natural and proper joy.” I will argue this engagement is made possible in “The Lost World” through nostalgia. The word nostalgia, along with sentimental, appeared in many of the &rst reviews of Randall Jarrell's &nal collection of poems The Lost World. It is a word that continues through recent scholarship of Jarrell’s poetry , often to mark his limits and shortcomings as a poet. 17 Responding to the nostalgia of the book, and its central title poem, Joseph Bennett's review in the New York Time Book Review asserted, “the book is taken up with Jarrell’s familiar, clanging vulgarity , corny cliches, cutenesses, and the intolerable self-indulgences of his tear-jerking, bourgeois sentimentality” (qtd. Letters 509). And yet the nature and signi&cance of Jarrell’s poetic nostalgia and the critical process of nostalgia in poetry more broadly has not been well understood. I agree with William Prichard in his biography of Randall Jarrell who writes, “My own sense is that compared to these contemporaries [Lowell and Berryman], Jarrell worked out a richer vein of nostalgia than either of them possessed” (303). By considering Randall Jarrell's nostalgic vision of California in his &nal collection of poems The Lost World, in particular its central title poem “The Lost World” and its pendant “Thinking of the Lost World”, I argue for a more complex understanding of nostalgia as a process, not simply an affective response. The restless searching of Jarrell’s speaker in “The Lost World” makes nostalgia the subject and method of investigation. The process of nostalgia in Jarrell's long poem, essential in form and content, can be understood within the larger framework of conversations about the productive possibilities of nostalgia. Essential to my own account of nostalgia is Kevis Goodman’s historical rereading of nostalgia as it shifted from a medical discourse to an aesthetic one. Goodman's work radically reconsiders the productive possibilities of nostalgia in literature, namely that nostalgia is more than just the poem’s content. Nostalgia is form. Goodman writes of Wordsworth’s “The Thorn”: “The poet, it seems, wants to make craving nostalgics of us all – that is, to correct our eyes from skimming the 'space upon paper' by catching our minds in the same repetitive motion, to induce or encourage thought’s tendency to return to the same grooves, grooves which the period’s science had rendered quite literally” 18 (“Uncertain Disease” 207). Through repetition the reader’s mind is “marooned upon words as things” (“Romantic Poetry” 207). The form of the poem allows the reader to participate in the process of nostalgia. Goodman continues, “It is a clinging-to that attempts precariously to fend off a profound separation or endless circulation, just as (and at the same time as) words as things are preferred to words valued for their exchangeability -- either as “symbols of the passion” or as spaces on the paper. This is not the distancing of the present associated with sentimental nostalgia” (“Romantic Poetry” 207). That preference for words as things valued in and of themselves strikes a similar chord as Jarrell's insistence on “ends, not means.” A similar argument can be found in Ruth Abbott's “Childhood Wordsworth's Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Nostalgia.” Abbott writes of the return necessitated by the metrical or sonic patterns of a poem, “Our sense of metre, like our sense of ourselves, is thus reliant on a sense of the past” (211). The idea of return is an essential notion and one inherent in the very etymology of nostalgia, the nostos. In Abbot's reading of Wordsworth, the experience of reading becomes one in which nostalgia is essential as we expect, anticipate, and even long for the rhythmic patterns in a poem. The experience, as with the earlier and original medicalized de&nition of nostalgia, is physical. Abbot writes that the Ode, “doesn’t just make us feel the existence of time in our bodies as we read, it also makes us feel the loss of time” (212). To feel this loss of time – our minds and bodies “marooned upon words as things” to return to Goodman's phrase – is to understand nostalgia not simply a passive emotion but a process. Instead of bad memory or false history , nostalgia can be a formal process that enacts the practice of critical reading. 19 In this chapter, I'll begin by describing how Jarrell enacts a series of nostalgic returns where similar images, sounds, memories, narratives are reanimated by repetition and self-citation. Jarrell's poem enacts the motion and process of nostalgia. These returns point to the tension between the desire for authenticity and the ever-present mediated objects of cultural production. The poem calls attention to the materials and methods of creative production in various forms and media, and in each of these, the boy-as-future critic must form heuristics for seeing them as they are. Nostalgia, in its continual circulation and mediation, offers a way to return to a vision of words and texts not as means but ends. At the heart of Jarrell's poetic nostalgia is an attempt to consider what it means to be a writer and reader. 1. Return Nostalgia at its core is about a form of return, the nostros of homecoming. The movement of the speaker through the remembered landscape of the city in “The Lost World” performs the searching quality of nostalgia. The speaker returns temporally to a home that no longer exists in the same form. In her essay “"Bouncy Little Tunes": Nostalgia, Sentimentality , and Narrative in Gravity's Rainbow,” Nadine Attewell suggests: “What one might in fact ask is whether reading itself isn't nostalgic in some fundamental way” (44). Attewell continues: We might de&ne nostalgia, then, as this longing for the certain shapes the past assumes as history , as narrative. The desire for retrospective order, pattern, and closure may receive particular ful&llment in the reading of generic narratives such as the romance novel or the mystery novel, but this doesn't preclude, surely , the possibility of &nding nostalgic 20 ful&llment in less familiar structures, narratives without conventional closure and any recognizable pattern at all. (44) While some of the nostalgic returns in “The Lost World” are narrative, others are the kinds of effects and affects only possible in a poetry. Of Jarrell’s poetics Langdon Hammer writes, “[His] poems tend to accumulate; they can be only be demonstrated in context; and parts of even the best poems may seem wayward, uneven, or banal… Jarrel's poetry questions the normative criteria of power, clarity and unity by which Jarrell himself tended to judge poems” (396). This “accumulation” is evident in the nostalgic repetitions of “The Lost World” – idiosyncratic, subjective, “wayward.” Taken together, the returns within Jarrell's “The Lost World” make nostalgia part of the poem's form and content. The boundaries of between the three sections of “The Lost World” – I. Children’s Arms, II. A Night With Lions, and III. A Street off Sunset – dissolve in the literal and thematic repetitions of the poem. From the kenning “stick-stairs,” which appears in “The Lost World” and “Thinking of the Lost World,” to image of the movie prop sphinx to the phrase “I believe,” the poem returns or repeats within and across its sections. One might move physically beyond these objects or sounds but the mind inevitably circles back, lingers, pauses, and continues. Just as the rhymes of the terza rima continually call back to previous lines, the repeated end words of Jarrell's poem (play , work, belief, habit) create an ongoing refrain. These repetitions hold the promise that even when one moves past a word or scene or sound, it will come back. For “nothing” to be gone is the pivotal wish, and apology , of “The Lost World.” The speaker, passing through “...the blue wonderland /Of Hollywood” who desires to “hold my story tight,” is granted his wish, at least temporarily (292). The result of these returns is to transform the 21 relationship of reader and poem. The reader, like the speaker of the poem, is unable to move past these moments. A reader experiences the nostalgia of the poem in both the content of the material – the longed for moments of the past that the speaker relives – as well as in the very form of the poem. As with other formal structuring devices such as rhyme or meter, these literal and &gurative returns challenge, con&rm, confront, and even frustrate a reader's expectations. Beyond individual words or images (to the stair-sticks and sphinx, one could add the lion, the crystal set, the bow and arrows, and on) Jarrell restages narratives scenes within “The Lost World” and indeed across the book. From the Chopin music heard in both “The Lost World” and “Player Piano,” to the repeated phrase “some Gay Twenties / Nineties” in “The Next Day” and “Thinking of the Lost World,” Jarrell’s self-citation extends past the borders of individual poems. The killing of the chickens by the speaker’s grandmother (Mama) in its multiple iterations offers a representative example of Jarrell’s return in narrative and image. Here is a long excerpt from “The Lost World”: She enters the chicken coop, and the hens shove And the hens Lap and squawk, in fear; the whole Lock whirls Into the farthest corner. She chooses one, Comes out, and wrings its neck. The body hurls Itself out -- lunging, reeling, it begins to run Away from Something, to Ly away from Something In great Lopping circles. Mama stands like a nun In the center of each awful, anguished ring. The thudding and scrambling go on, go on -- then they fade, 22 I open my eyes, its over... Could such a thing Happen to anything? It could to a rabbit, I’m afraid; It could to -- “Mama, you wouldn’t kill Reddy ever, You won’t ever, will you?” The farm woman tries to persuade The little boy , her grandson, that she’d never Kill the boy’s rabbits, never even think of it. He would like to believe her...And whenever I see her, there in the dark in&nite Standing like Judith, with the hen’s head in her hand I explain it away , in vain -- a hypocrite, Like all who love. (Poems 292) Within the scene, the perspective shifts from &rst person to third as “Mama” becomes “the farm woman” and the speaker is now “the little boy , her grandson.” The transition from individuals (“I” and “Mama” and “Reddy”) to archetypes (“farm woman” and “little boy” and “boy’s rabbit”), from the witnessing “I” to the more skeptical third person – “He would like to believe her” – turns the self into subject. The child’s perspective is transformed into a grown-up one. For some critics, in particular Richard Flynn in The Lost World of Childhood, the return to an adult perspective marks a rejection of nostalgia by Jarrell. Flynn asserts, “the usefulness of the child’s perspective for the poet depends on a rejection of such nostalgia, the speaker comes up empty...adult and ghostly child exchange intangibles that exist only in memory but their continued existence there yields a kind of ongoing happiness” (“'Infant Sight'” 15 qtd in Burt 23 218). I want to suggest that Jarrell does not reject the nostalgia of either perspective. Instead, the poet points to how the past and the present are continually exchanged, “Our end copies / Its beginnings” as the speaker suggests at the start of “Thinking” (Poems 336). The killing of the chickens, speci&cally their physical bodies, comes back in “Thinking of the Lost World.” The poet writes, All of them are gone Except for me; and for me nothing is gone -- The chicken’s body is still going round And round in widening circles, a satellite From which, as the sun sets, the scientist bends A look of evil on the unsuspecting earth. (337) The body of the chicken no longer “hurls” itself in “great Lopping circles” but goes “round and round in widening circles, a satellite.” While motion is consistent in both versions, the present tense in “Thinking” turns the decapitated body into a satellite, an object of regular, motion set above the earth. As Ritivoi’s writes of Proust, one of Jarrell’s great models of nostalgia, “the 'presencing' of the past elevates habits or familiar images to the status of mythical representations” (34). This event is rei&ed into myth and, as the speaker desires, “nothing is gone.” Speaker and reader can read and re-read this moment, its meanings endlessly circulating. In “Washing,” a poem between “ A Street off Sunset” and “Thinking of the Lost World” in Jarrell’s ordering of The Lost World, the death of the chicken returns once again: When Mama wrung a chicken’s Neck, the body rushed around 24 And around and around the yard in circles The circles weren’t its own idea But it went on with them as if it would never stop. The expression of its body was intense, Immense As this Help! Help! Help! The reeling washing shrieks to someone, Someone. (Poems 330) Again the bodies of the chickens circle, though now the circles “weren’t its own idea / But it went on with them as if it would never stop.” The language is strikingly similar to “Thinking”: “around and around” instead of “round and round”, for example. The point of the repetition here isn’t so much revision of the narrative details but a kind of inability to let the moment go. “The private life is at once a refuge and a prison” as one critic describes of Jarrell’s poetics (Hammer 404). Jarrell’s repetitions, within the poem and across the book, of word and phrase, scene and narrative, enact for a reader the habitual return of nostalgia. Readers are not a passive participants in the poem but imbricated in the reoccurring patterns of narrative and image and sound. In these returns Jarrell's nostalgia works as a critical engagement between a reader and the form of the poem. The poetic returns of “The Lost World,” reminders of the instability of memory and identity , disrupt ordinary linear time. At the same time, these continual returns order and organize and limit – like the very activity of poem making – the past into a kind of temporary stability. Stephen Burt in Randall Jarrell and His Age claims that the narratives of Jarrell's poems, “constitute equipment that adults savage for continued use only through memory , by establishing 25 that we are the same people who once lived on that island -- just as the woman of “The Player Piano” is the same girl who skinned her knee” (203). Burt's description aligns with Ritivoi’s assertion in Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity that “released from the negative connotations, nostalgia can be de&ned as an effort to discover meaning in one’s life, to understand oneself better by making comparisons between the past and the present, and thus integrating experiences into a larger schema of meaning” (29). For both Burt and Ritivoi, the returns of nostalgia allow an individual to orient themselves in relation to their own personal and cultural history. In the case of Jarrell's poem, nostalgia connects past and present. The boy in “Children’s Arms,” hearing of his grandfather’s childhood, physically relives the past, “I play/ What he plays, hunt what he hunts, remember / what he remembers” (Poems 286). The past returns in the present as the speaker aligns his habits and memory with his grandfather's childhood. The expansive imagination nostalgia makes possible allows the poet to transcends the normal limits of logic and time. The nostalgic returns of “The Lost World” also point to the way in which the past cannot be reconciled with the present. Nowhere is this more clear than in the autobiographical description of the unanswered letters from his grandparents once the poet returned to Tennessee: Because I didn’t write. Because-- of course, I was a child, I missed them so. But justifying Hurts too: if only I could play you one more game, See you all one more time! I think of you dying Forgiving me --- or not, it is all the same 26 To the forgiven... (Poems 291) The opening “Because” of the stanza is repeated twice, a kind of stutter of dif&culty to write it down. The speaker cannot change his boyhood error but he can imagine an alternative version: “I think of you dying forgiving me.” But the suggestion of a different past, a rewriting of family history is undone by the assertion that it is “all the same / To the forgiven.” It is all the same because, as the repetitions illustrate, the memory will continue to return and never be satis&ed or complete. The process of nostalgia at its most complex and dynamic is concerned not with settled moments or time but those aspects of self and past that refuse to be reconciled in the present. “Thinking of the Lost World”, the &nal poem in the book, placed apart from “The Lost World,” like a coda for a piece of music, revises and returns to the images and themes of the earlier poem. As with the returns within the poem and the book as a whole, the effect is to make nostalgia a process essential to the form and content of the poem. The poem’s adult speaker speaks directly back to the childhood self: “I say to my old self: ‘I believe. Help thou / Mine unbelief ” (Poems 337). The speaker of “Thinking,” returns to the materials of the past, the bows and arrows, the lion and the movie sets (“I believe the dinosaur/ Or pterodactyl’s married to the pink sphinx”), as he continues to search for the “calm country”, that “undiscovered country between California and Arizona.” The adult speaker searches for a way back to the past, or at least some image of it: “ A shape in tennis shoes and khaki riding pants / Standing there empty- handed.” “If only I could &nd”, says the speaker several times – “I f only I could &nd a crystal set”; “if I could &nd in some Museum of cars” – with an understanding that those things are accessible only in memory (Poems 337). It is the process of nostalgia, a conditional “if ”, not the 27 arrival or reconciliation of the past in the present, that matters here, a process in which the reader, like the speaker, repeats again and again. 2. Mediation As I've suggested, nostalgia in “The Lost World” and its coda “Thinking of the Lost World” is often enacted through motion: physical motion of the speaker within the landscape of Los Angeles, psychological movements in time, perspectival shifts within the poem itself. Jarrell's poem is not concerned not simply with movement but how that movement is mediated. Distance, between the speaker and the remembered self, and between that remembered self and the physical world, is suggested by the speaker’s passing by the &gurative and literal screens of Hollywood: car windows, fences, cages. Even dreams become a kind of screen that mediate the speaker’s experience of the world. The screens that limit the speaker’s access to the physical and psychological landscapes act too as a form of mediation between poet and reader. As with the returns, I want to argue that nostalgia, in this mediation, is part of the poem's form and content. Jarrell's poetic nostalgia is more complicated than a simple desire to replay or restage the past. To negotiate between the desire for the authentic while recognizing its mediation is the heart of the critical and creative process of nostalgia for Jarrell in “The Lost World.” The texts of the poem – a J.M. Barre play performed by children about reversals of class hierarchies on a desert island, literary epics recreated with “beaver board” shields, popular pulp novels, magazines like Amazing Stories, advertisements on billboards, radio broadcasts of the Four Square Gospel – are already mediated, like the Hollywood &lm sets the speaker witnesses, and yet the speaker still attempts to &nd the authentic, immediate experience. 28 Andreas Huyseen’s essay “Nostalgia for Ruins” offers a useful critical framework to consider the speaker’s journey through the terrains of cultural production – movies, plays, advertisements. Huyseen writes, “The more we learn to understand all images, words, and sounds as always already mediated, the more, it seems, we desire the authentic and the immediate. The mode of that desire is nostalgia” (11-12). Nostalgia reveals the construction and incompleteness of the world’s “images, words and sounds,” while at the same time acknowledging that one continues to desire them. There is an inevitable belatedness that Jarrell's nostalgia captures. Like the female speaker in “Gleaning,” a poem uncollected in Jarrell's lifetime, who remembers driving home from childhood picnics in the canyons and stopping to glean &elds of lima beans, the poet can only pick up the scattered remains. Jarrell’s poem anticipates the postmodern readings of the West offered by critics such as Nathaniel Lewis, Neil Campbell and Krista Comer. 4 In Unsettling the Literary West Lewis writes, “If only because in the West the real was never an Eden or empty wilderness (beyond preservation) and because the real has always seemed so vast and extraordinary (beyond representation), we can identify the production of the real at work from the beginning. Western literature, by this logic, may be understood as a series of simulacra, copies without originals, maps that precede the territory” (15). In a similar way , Campbell in The Rhizomatic West argues “We have seen this dilemma at work in the American West’s attachment to authenticity and the past (myths and all), rooted deep in the landscape itself, and paradoxically the rejection of those mythic imaginings in 4 Though Jarrell is seldom described as a writer of the American West, he was born in California and spent his early years there, including a transformative year (1925-6) in Los Angeles with his grandparents, a year that would serve as the autobiographical touchstone for the “The Lost World” sequence. The poet's relationship to the West goes beyond his boyhood years. Jarrell and his second wife, Mary Von Schrader, a California native, spent summers together in Southern California. His letters of the period offer his fascination, knowledge, and love of the region. Jarrell’s boyhood seesaw between sides of the country , the result of his parents’ fractious marriage, an accident of biography , becomes a conscious choice in his later life. 29 favor of the 'real' and the 'new.' This desire for rootedness in some essential tradition and authentic, communal narrative, such as the frontier or the Wild West, is, after all, so often seemingly at odds with another desire to articulate a “routed” history of contact, cultural collision, and mobility” (46). The movement of the speaker illustrates the nostalgic desire for an authentic exchange with the past and the futility of that search. The physical motion of the speaker across the mediated landscape of the city suggests the tension inherent in nostalgia between the desire for authenticity and the illusive nature of that authenticity. The &rst section of “The Lost World,” “Children’s Arms” begins with the speaker observing on his way home “a cameraman / on a platform on the bumper of a car” (Poems 283). The speaker of the poem and the subject of his observation are both moving and recording the scenes around them. The line continues, tumbling forward in a continuing sense of motion, the end-word rhymes, “cameraman”/ “comedian”; “car / star”, emphasizing the bright, moving, landscape of Hollywood. Here is the entire opening stanza: On my way home I pass a cameraman On a platform on the bumper of a car Inside which, rolling and plunging, a comedian Is working; on one white lot I see a star Stumble to her igloo through the howling gale Of the wind machine. On Melrose a dinosaur And pterodactyl, with their immense pale Paper-mache smiles, look over the fence Of the The Lost World (Poems 283) 30 The speaker is allowed behind the scenes of production for a brief moment. What is witnessed isn't the “blue wonderland” of &lm but fallible human moments – singular, particular, uncontrolled – where the veil of fantasy , of make believe, falls away and the machinery behind the dream factory is revealed. The line break between “star” and “stumble” enacts the initial vision of the fantasy before the line turns, “to stumble,” and the actress is returned to mortal life. In the same way the break between “howling gale” and “Of the wind machine” is suggestive of the tension between what is real and what is constructed. For a split second before the turn, the woman is caught in a real gale, not a manufactured one. Unlike what Jarrell calls the, “predigested sentences which the Reader’s Digest feeds to him as a mother pigeon feeds her squabs,” the moment as seen by Jarrell as a boy holds still the possibility of unmediated, authentic experience (Poetry and the Age 27-8). “Emptiness [is] trans&gured into something palpable and dear,” as one critic writes of Jarrell's narrator at the end of the poem (Longenbach 63). It is only in the looking back, from the adult perspective, that the speaker can &ll in the information the fence has prevented him from knowing. The scene depends on the double time of nostalgia – then/now – in order to fully capture the complexity of the simulacra. The formal elements of the poem recreate the simultaneous and contradictory wish for the unreal to be real, and vice versa. The end of “Children’s Arms,” like the section's opening, records the motion of the speaker and his limited vision: “We press our noses / To the glass and wish: the angel- and devil&sh / Floating by on Vine, on Sunset, shut their eyes / And press their noses to the glass and wish” (Poems 287). The twice repeated refrain at that end the &rst section, the press of the nose to the glass and that “wish,” shifts the perspective from inside “our” to outside “their.” It is a moment reminiscent of the woman in the poem “Next Day”: “my wish / Is womanish: / That 31 the boy putting groceries in my car / See me” (279). It is not just the speaker but all of us who are moving through this landscape, a conLicted wish to be on the other side of the glass and secure in “a womanish and childish / and dogish universe.” (287) The event isn’t appreciated at the moment, only after: “I take for granted / The tiller by which she steers, the yellow roses / In the bud vases, the whole enchanted / Drawing room of our progress” (287). What’s being taken for granted is the details of the scene, the roses in the car’s “bud vase” and the wheel’s metaphoric “tiller.” This observation, another shift in the point of view, allows these particulars to be recalled and recorded even as they are missed. The next section, “ A Night with Lions,” uses the dream-factory of Hollywood &lm to describe another moment where the speaker confronts a vision of the authentic / inauthentic. The section begins with an explicitly past tense memory: “When I was twelve we’d visit my aunt’s friend / Who owned a lion, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/ Lion” (Poems 288). Tawny the lion, star of the &lm Tarzan, offers to the speaker a close-up perspective on the distance between a movie’s images and reality. With echoes of Rilke’s “The Panther” and Jarrell’s own “ A Woman at the Washington Zoo” the speaker observes, “I was the real player / But he’d trot back and forth inside his cage / Till he got bored” (Poems 288). A lion on celluloid is never bored. The animal’s motion continues in the present day dreams of the speaker, “The lion’s steadfast / Roar goes on in the darkness” (Poems 288). First in his cage and then in the speaker’s mind, the then/now structure of the poem suggests how the images of the past continue in the present, a rewriting of how the image of Rilke’s panther, “enters in / rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, / plunges into the heart and is gone” (Rilke 25). Here, the image doesn’t disappear but is instead transformed to include a further, larger awareness of the past. In the “dream-discovery” 32 of the second half of the section, a shift to the present “now”, the speaker understands his sexual awakening, his desire for his “young, tall, brown aunt out there in the past / Or future” (288). Just as boy in “Children’s Arms” witnesses the machinery of the &lm, the adult speaker in “ A Night With Lions” allows the reader to see the machinery of his mind’s unconscious. The third section, “ A Street off Sunset,” opens, again, with motion, though not in the California landscape. Driving by a Vicks factory (the location, though unnamed, is North Carolina) the adult speaker is transported to the eucalyptus tree playhouse of his youth, a scene that is, “witty and parodic of Proust” (Oostdijk 115). The poem alternates between the adult’s perspective and the child’s perspective, though both are rendered in the present tense. From behind windows of moving vehicles, the speaker is engaged with the landscape, absorbing the world into himself, and unable to stop the “stream of my life.” The memory is physically experienced and enacted through movement: “I feel its stair-sticks / Impressed on my palms, my insteps, as I climb / To my treehouse” (Poems 289). The poem shifts from the memory of the treehouse and the “coughing chest” to another moment of automobile transit in Los Angeles: My lifetime Got rid of, I sit in a dark blue sedan Beside my great-grandmother, in Hollywood We pass a windmill, a pink sphinx, an Allbran Billboard; thinking of Salammbô, Robin Hood, The old prospector with his Lapjack in the air. (Poems 289) Flynn in The Lost World of Childhood writes this about this scene: “Hollywood, like the tree house, represents a magical world, an emblem of the lost world of childhood. The child is oblivious to 33 the tawdriness of the Hollywood scenery; he delights in the pink sphinx and the Allbran billboard -- his imagination turns even the crassly commercial trappings into the subjects of make-believe. By getting rid of the lifetime that knows better, the speaker of the poem can redeem even advertisements” (126). But redemption doesn’t seem to be the desire of this nostalgic remembrance. The speaker attempts to orient himself within that landscape, a landscape where things are not what they seem. The detritus of movie making – the pink sphinx – is turned into advertisement, a strangeness once removed, a riddle of belonging that is unanswerable. 5 On one side of the glass are the surreal images, on the other are the narratives of far-off lands and times. But the windmill and sphinx no more belong in this landscape than the imaginative stories of Salammbô and Robin Hood. What belongs here: Is it the “old prospector” of California gold rush narratives repurposed to sell breakfast? Is it the young boy dreaming of imagined golden ages? As Krista Comer writes of the age old narratives of the American West as a “promised land” where the individual or even the society as a whole could be transformed, “ As in days of old, contemporaries too turn to western places for retreat, renewal, solace. As a tourist destination, the West’s commercial viability lies in its knack for transforming the above meanings into negotiable commodities” (56). The speaker is aware of this commodi&cation, and is implicated in all that it represents. The window divides the worlds and brings them together: they both are out of place, they both belong. Beyond the visual, “The Lost World” suggests the mediation that is part of aural perception. For example, Jarrell writes of himself as a boy secretly listening to his crystal set: “the uneasy tissue / Of their far-off star sound, of the blue-violet / Of space, surrounds the sweet 5 Mary Jarrell claimed that the pink sphinx, a memory she and Randall shared of Los Angeles, “starred once in a Pharaoh movie and then wound up as a failed real estate of&ce across from Randall’s school in Hollywood” (Letters 284). 34 voice from the Tabernacle / Of the Four-Square Gospel” (Poems 290). The speaker’s perception is auditory – “star sound”, “sweet voice” – echoed by the repeated ‘s’ sound , a gospel of word, a seduction of both speaker and listener. But this too is only a fraction of the whole. He can’t see the faces behind the works, and the history of the Aimee Semple McPherson isn’t mentioned explicitly though there’s little doubt that what appears as “far-off sound” is human, earthly and fallible. The narrative shifts from one of remembered plenitude, a private experience, to a one that records a moment in Southern California cultural history when a voice of authority is revealed to be not what it seems. This is not the “pattern of idealization that fantasy – a child’s fantasy , grow-up literary and cinematic fantasy – uses to enrich all lives,” as Suzanne Ferguson writes of the poem, but rather a more complex negotiation between the mediated &ction of the “sweet voice” and the awareness, by the poet and reader, of a more troubled reality (230). Here and throughout the poem, Jarrell does not attempt to resolve the gap between the real and the mediated, between the desire for authenticity and its illusion. The idyllic Los Angeles suggested in “The Lost World” is undermined in “Thinking of the Lost World” The barriers to sight – fences, windows, cages – have been replaced in the present by the scrim of pollution: The sunshine of the Land Of Sunshine is a gray mist now, the atmosphere Of some factory planet: when you stand and look You see a block or two, and your eyes water. The orange groves are cut down.... (Poems 336) 35 Moving beyond the images of Hollywood production and ruin, Jarrell considers the Southland more broadly; his capitalization of “Land of Sunshine,” for example, calls to mind the magazine of the same name and the Southern California boosterism of the era. Jarrell’s nostalgia for the lost city , sunshine and orange groves in the above passage, does not privilege the past in favor of the present. What appears to be natural and authentic is not. The cut down orange groves offer a further irony in that they were imposed on the landscape, the product of the capitalist enterprise, the turning of desert into groves by the human manipulation of resources. Jarrell points to the mediated landscape – both physically and psychically – by challenging a popular and prevalent vision of a California Arcadia. The past does not, as Susan Stewart suggests, “take on an authenticity of being, an authenticity which, ironically it can achieve only through narrative” (23). The choice of Jarrell's nostalgia isn’t between a ideal past and a unsatisfactory present – the pejorative conception of nostalgia – but a recognition that those binaries always collapse under careful investigation. In looking at and for the physical and cultural ruins of the California past, Jarrell’s nostalgia acknowledges that the true objects of desire are always mediated and out of reach. The failure to see clearly – and the desire to – marks the end of the poem: I seem to see A shape in tennis shoes and khaki riding pants Standing there empty handed; I reach out to it Empty-handed, my hand comes back empty And yet my emptiness is traded for its emptiness I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found 36 Columns whose gray illegible advertisements My soul has memorized world after world: LOST - NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD I hold in my own hands, happiness, Nothing: the nothing for which there’s no reward. (Poems 338) Between motion and stillness, between passage and arrival, between absorbing the world and being absorbed by the world, the wish at the poem’s end is the paradoxical wish to remain apart and within the world: “my emptiness is traded for its emptiness.” Again the material world of cultural production, in this case the newspaper Lost and Found columns, suggest both the desire and limit of nostalgia. 3. “ A fool’s game”: The Nostalgic Critic The process of nostalgia as suggested in the returns and mediated motion of “The Lost World” offers a version of what it means to be a critic, not just for the speaker or poet but for the reader. Without irony or mockery Jarrell’s nostalgia shows the critic at play , reading the world not with “harsh luminosity” (as Lowell described Jarrell’s prose) but with the nostalgic's desire to return and the critic's desire for authenticity. For Jarrell, the adult critic, the “democrat at heart” as Hannah Arendt claimed, this is perhaps the greatest nostalgia – a vision of a world with critical readers. In “Taste of the Age” Jarrell writes, The greatest American industry—why has no one ever said so?—is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are 37 living in the middle of a dark wood—a bright Technicolored forest—of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn’t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.” (Poetry and the Age 27– 28) Jarrell implicates himself twice: as one of those who is paid to use words and one who is living in the “bright Technicolored forest.” With echoes of nostalgia’s medical history , words are both the poison and the antidote, “a nourishing medicinal compound,” a Derridian pharmakon. One can recognize the constructed, commercial purposes of words, participate in the industry of their making, and still desire their “truth.” It’s an uneasy position for Jarrell, a critic deeply suspect of what he calls the “Medium,” the mass media of advertisements and &lms, television and other forms of entertainment: from his essay “Sad Heart at the Supermarket” to the parodic opening of “Next Day ,” the &rst poem in The Lost World, a woman choosing between detergents “Moving from Cheer to Joy , from Joy to All” (Poems 279). 6 “The Lost World” reveals a more complex relationship than rejection or approval, what Wendy Lesser calls “Jarrell’s divided sensibility... [his] allegiance to the ordinary individual on the one hand and a temptation to mock or deplore mass taste on the other” (Lesser 10). Jarrell critiques the fantasy , the inauthentic, the hollow, the medium saturated world where “newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for understanding real poetry , real art of any kind” (Poetry and the Age 27-8). At the same time, for the young speaker in “The Lost World,” these are mechanisms of pleasure that de&ne and form the 6 See also Diederik Oostdijk’s “Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture” 38 possibilities of creative exploration and production. Nostalgia points to a way to reconcile these competing impulses. Jarrell writes of Frost’s “Directive,” a poem to which “The Lost World” is deeply indebted both in feeling and image, “Here the water of Lethe are the waters of childhood, and in their depths with ambiguous grace, man’s end is joined to his beginning” (Poetry and the Age 53). Much in the same way “The Lost World” joins the poet's earliest critical practice of play with his later work as a poet-critic. “I commence / My real life: my arsenal, my workshop / Opens,” Jarrell writes of his play with the bow and shield fashioned by “sawing” beaver board and goosefeathers (Poems 283). Just as poem's occasional terza rima conjures Dante and Virgil, the literary ghosts of “The Lost World” return in implicit and explicit way. The speaker becomes a little factory of production, constructing and using the weapons of his own drama. And in that pageant of play , Jarrell is literally reenacting the foundational narratives – the Oddessian bow in content, the Dantesque terza rima in form – that underpin his later work as poet and critic. As Burt writes, “The adult world is distinguished from the child’s not by sexuality or disillusion but by its different relation to production and wage labor” (205). I agree with his claim but would argue that the child’s world of play foreshadows the adult’s production of critical readings. “ And what is play / For me, for them is habit,” says the young speaker of “Children’s Arms.” The games of the poem, whether the private reenactments of great epics or the restaging of his grandfather’s childhood adventures, offer an alternative in the present to Jarrell’s “adult” work. Habit, one of the pivotal and repeated words of the poem, is transformed in the present to be more like the play of the child. 39 Play – in multiple forms – is at the center of Jarrell's description of the performance of J.M. Barre's “ Admirable Crichton”, a drama in which castaway islanders assume new class roles, roles undone when they’re rescued: Escape from their Eden to the world: the real one Where servants are servants, masters masters And no one’s magnanimous. The lights go on And we go off, robbed of our fruits, our furs -- The island that the children ran is gone. (Poems 284) In Jarrell's poem, children perform the roles of adults who themselves perform roles on the play’s island. “The island... the children ran” becomes not merely a setting for the play but a way of viewing performance: the “island” of the theater, the refuge of imagination. Like Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, another play of island shipwrecks and role reversals, the play is “not as an escape from “reality ,” but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate” (Frye 184). Jarrell writes, The island sang to me: Believe! Believe! And didn’t I know a lady with a lion? Each evening, as the sun sank, didn’t I grieve To leave my tree house for reality? There was nothing for me to disbelieve (Poems 284-5) Though the temporary dark of the theatrical performance ends, and with it the dream of equality (of control and continuation, too), the performances of the past don’t simply stop when the lights come up. The treehouse, like the island of the stage, is a willful refusal of the “real” 40 world in favor of the pleasure of imagination. It is not so different from the critic reading Kim “at whim. Yet behind the play is the serious business. Unreality – indeed play – holds possibility for the writer and critic; Jarrell writes in his review of Walter de la Mare in “Poetry and the Age, “It is easy to complain that de la Mare writes about unreality; but how can anybody write about unreality? From his children and ghosts one learns little about children and nothing about ghosts, but one learns a great deal of the reality of which his ghosts and children are projections, of the wishes and lacks and love that have produced their ‘unreality’” (139). The “wishes and lacks and love” that make up “The Lost World” are to be found in the speaker's – and reader's – nostalgic escapes into play. The adult in “Thinking” turns to the younger self as a way to recapture the pleasures of imagination: “I say to my old self: “I believe. Help thou / Mine unbelief.” In contrast to the examples of pleasure in the past, the models of creative production in the adult present have been altered or replaced: “the planks of the tree house are all &rewood / Burned long ago; its gray smoke smells of Vicks” (Poems 336). The smell of eucalyptus has been replaced by cough syrup, the tree house has been turned into kindling. Authentic experiences of the past (and nature) can only be suggested by the commercial factory. This dissatisfaction with the present offers an opening to reimagine what's possible. “There is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself,” as Jameson’s writes of Benjamin, “a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other” (Marxism and Form 68). In this case the “revolutionary stimulus” is for critics who follow Jarrell. 41 The poem becomes an ars poetica of the poet-critic, a model of how to read that depends on nostalgia. To offer an alternative model of creative production, the speaker must return to the “lost” objects and people of the past. In “The Lost World,” the decline of the “&rst Rome / Of Childhood” isn’t the loss of childhood naivety or rite of passage into the adult world, but a recognition of complexity concerning how language is used. Language, like the visual world of &lm sets and advertisements, is also already mediated and must be read carefully. Take for example his great-grandmother’s description of the “The War Between the States,” when the speaker recounts the passed down story of the “cheerful troops” who “steal from us / The spoons” and the captain who “stoops / To Dandeen and puts Dandeen on his horse, / She cries...” (Poems 291). The ironic “cheerful” crashes against the theft and abduction as the violence of history intrudes into the protected world. There is a tension between the “cheerful” words and the political and social subtext. In the passage that follows the speaker describes the mother entering the chicken coop to wring its neck. What begins in simplicity gradually accumulates complexity and subtext and allusions as the moment unfolds; Mama, &rst “like a nun” is later “like Judith,” a complex, literary progression, a moment not unlike when the younger Jarrell describes the Papa’s work, like something from Wagner, “a dwarf hammering out a Ring” (Poems 285). The allusions in the poem suggest that behind the speaker’s nostalgia is the foreshadowed awareness that the stories of adults – indeed all narratives – must be read with both pleasure and care. Jarrell's “nostalgia insists on an engagement with texts where pleasure and complexity , authenticity and “unreality ,” are not opposed. James Longenbach ends his chapter on Jarrell in Modern Poetry after Modernism by considering the end of “Thinking of the Lost World”: “Jarrell 42 confronts a vision of himself as a child. He knows that the child has nothing to give him. But as in Steven’s “Snow Man” (and looking back to King Lear), 'nothing' becomes a powerful presence. As Jarrell drives inexorably forward, into the future, nostalgia is revealed as a fool’s game – a game of pretense and disguise that Jarrell plays lovingly , over and over again” (64). The young speaker in “Children’s Arms” claims, “I’ll never forget / What it’s like, when I’ve grown up.” But his insistence on recollection isn’t enough. The “over and over again” of Jarrell’s nostalgia demands return, not simply to a lost place or time but to our own experience of reading the poem. This is where Jarrell’s nostalgia leads us, a “clinging-to that attempts precariously to fend off a profound separation or endless circulation,” as Goodman describes it. Our minds are not simply caught but confronted with a uncomfortable complication. It's to see the mediation at work, and keep going. We return to the word, to the line, to the page. We can’t leave the poem. 43 CHAPTER TWO Pasadena Tracts: Four Good Things and the Drift of Nostalgia One of the central questions of James McMichael's book length poem Four Good Things, and it is a real question, is what is the poem about. Robert Archambeau begins his essay “Caging the Demon: James McMichael and the Poetics of Restraint” by asking that very question, quoting Robert Hass's assessment of the poem, its sprawl of subjects as evidence of this uncertainty , even by those that admire McMichael: “It is a new, remarkable long poem about - of all things - Pasadena,” writes Hass, “it is about worry , death, taxes, planning, probability theory , insomnia, stamp collecting, cancer, domestic architecture, sex manuals, the Industrial Revolution, real estate” (Hass, qtd in Archambeau, 149). For Hass, the thrill of the poem, and the organizing principle at work, “is in watching McMichael take up one unpoetic subject after another and illuminate it by turning it back on the emotions of the child who is watching the city take shape around him.” A similar claim is offered by Archambeau; he describes the poem as a narrative about the “growth of the poet's mind... [that] takes the form of a story about powerful emotions and the strategies of intellectual reserve that the poet develops to contain them” (149). The shifting subjects of Four Good Things, in Archambeau's reading, attempt to contain the poet's fears “of impermanence and of vulnerability.” The poem's surprising turns and subjects – the rise of the industrial age factory , Arkwright's mills, standardization, and production of capitalism, all the plans and solutions to resolve unpredictability and variation – lead McMichael, “back to himself, 44 and toward an understanding of his own means of dealing with uncertainties and vulnerabilities. McMichael turns panic into planning, worry into caution and carefulness” (150). Archambeau's assessment of McMichael turns on &nding a central organizing principle for the self, an argument that misses the importance of McMichael's nostalgia and the larger historical and political stakes in McMichael's poetic digressions. Using James McMichael's Four Good Things, I argue that nostalgia's digressive force creates points of contact between memory and imagination, between personal and public history , between reality and an ideal world. 7 The movement offered by nostalgia in Four Good Things leads to a process of discovery and transformation; McMichael's drift into history through nostalgia becomes a way to avoid seeing the transformations of urban space and technology as inevitable. “It's hard for me to think about the past in a way I can separate from nostalgia, which is something that seems to me to be driven by a will to reverse unhappy consequences,” McMichael said in a 1997 interview (Burton 133). McMichael's de&nition begs the question w hat is the difference between nostalgia and other forms of memory or remembrance? To ask it another way , what makes nostalgia nostalgic? What differentiates nostalgic is two-fold: the fundamental conLict that is part of nostalgia and the relationship between the nostalgic remembrance and the formation of identity. The algia of nostalgia's etymology points to the loss or pain at the core of the experience. Which is not to say that there can't be pleasure as part of this looking back. Dylann Trigg in Memory of Place : A Phenomenology of the Uncanny writes, “What renders nostalgia nostalgic is the peculiar interplay 7 Though McMichael is less well-known poet than his contemporaries, I want to make a claim for the importance of his work among his peers. McMichael's long poem, described by another contemporary (and former classmate at Stanford), Robert Pinsky as “a great poem, a great book, certainly the most neglected book of contemporary poetry in relation to its merit.” For a thoughtful discussion of Four Good Things, in particular its relationship to the suburbs, see Robert von Hallberg's American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. 45 between memory and desire, such that the proximity of the past is never entirely oblivious to the present but at the same time occupies a covert hold through the body” (182). Towards the end of Four Good Things the speaker says, “My longing for it now encloses it in my not / being there to let it get away” (137). The lines are a perfect gloss for the modern condition of nostalgia. The past is “enclosed” in the desire to return, not simply to relive but to “let it get away.” This is nostalgia's paradox and power: the longing to both return to and escape from the past. Beyond the algia, or the “interplay between memory and desire,” is nostalgia's essential role in self-conception. What one longs for isn't a lost or missing object – stolen stamps or a father's maps – but how these things play a role in the “conception of who I am” (Trigg 186). McMichael's description of nostalgia as the “will to reverse unhappy consequences” suggests the active potential of poetic nostalgia to transform the ongoing relationship between past and present. Nostalgia's potential for recapturing time is perpetually in conLict with the limits of memory and the demands of the real. The reversal of time by nostalgic remembrance &guratively rewrites the past, not to alter history , but as a way to better live in the present and future. Four Good Things, in its intersection of a transforming Western American landscape and its investment in nostalgia as a productive force, “brings together a broad range of subject not by juxtaposing striking images, as his contemporaries often do, but with the technique of narrative and expository art” (von Hallberg 243). Borrowing from Srikanth Reddy's critical monograph Changing Subjects, I'd like to use the word drift, to describe how McMichael moves from subject to subject, both in terms of content but also as poetic form. Drift helps suggest that the aim of moving away from the starting point is not merely a strategy to return or repeat motifs, though 46 that certainly occurs. The poetic drift of Four Good Things, what in Whitman is described as “studied indifference” or a poetics “that prioritizes the drift of poetry over its own words might assume” can be seen in McMichael's own progression away from the starting point of nostalgia (Reddy 101). The possibility of drift is two-fold, &rst in terms of content – the digression from one topic to another, not strictly logical nor entirely disjunctive – and second in terms of form – the privileging of digression over the material or information. Engaging nostalgia in form and content, McMichael offers a route to historical thinking otherwise unavailable to either reader or poet. It is in this activity that the poet stakes a potent claim about the nature of place, the limits of progress, and what it means to be citizen. McMichael's nostalgic drift, the shifting subjects of his poem, are indicative of his response to, and critique of, a teleological narrative of progress. As Reddy writes, “In lieu of a cultural poetics of progress, drifting offers a wayward model of the individual's passage towards geographical, social, or theological destination in American transcendentalist writing” (99). In the same interview in which he offered his de&nition of nostalgia, McMichael described the dehumanizing effects of technology: “What scares me if I do no more than watch history pile up is that present culture seems to be treating persons as if they're obsolete” (137). Though he was referring speci&cally to computers and the Internet, this fear of dehumanization – from the early days of industrial factories to the marginalization of people during real estate booms recurs in Four Good Things. McMichael in the interview explicitly borrows language from Walter Benjamin's “On the Concept of History ,” where the wreckage of history piles up at the angel's feet. “The angel would like to stay , awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” writes Benjamin of Klee's Angelus Novus, “But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his 47 wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress” (257-8). The desire to transform in Benjamin's image– to stay , to awaken, to close the wing – is the desire to shift from a passive relationship of history , the piling up, to an active one. Nostalgia in Four Good Things, like the desire of the angel to awaken the dead, turns back to the past with the “will to reverse unhappy consequence.” McMichael offers a way of thinking historically , and a more complex understanding of the tension between the dominant narratives of progress and the lived experience of human lives. 1. PASADENA TRACTS In one of the pivotal episodes in Four Good Things, the speaker and his father, a real estate developer in Pasadena, visit a family whose house is slated for destruction to make room for the expansion of a school. 8 The speaker's nostalgic remembrances drift from unhappy personal memories into a social awareness about the human consequences of urban development. Though the father claims the Damiano family with their nine children would be compensated and he'd help them &nd a new house, the father “understood their / wanting to stay” (85). The adolescent speaker, silently grieving the loss of his mother, wants to wait in the car but is brought 8 Pasadena, the location of McMichael's poem, is in many ways the ideal location to write about the economic and social transformations (and self-created myths) of Southern California writ large. Pasadena, writes one historian, was “a liberal, Protestant upper-middle class daydream” (Starr 31). Karen Voss in “Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment” writes, “Pasadena represents Southern California's most sustained attempt to adorn the Machine with Lowers... from the subdivisions of "open" mission territory to exploiting horticultural opportunity to building fantasy estates to zoning landmark districts...these processes built a city and simultaneously sustained an anti-urban ethos.” But as Michael James argues in The Conspiracy of the Good: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Community in Two American Cities, 1875-2000, the wealth of the city – by 1920 Pasadena was per capita the wealthiest community in the country – hid the “racial and class exclusion.” From the so-called Chinese Riot to the sharp class divisions, James describes that “By World War I, the City on the Hill could very well have shown itself to the outside world as “The White City” as racial practices, religious orthodoxy , class and racial violence, were all cloaked behind a carefully planned gentility that rejected, at least publicly , any suggestion of social discord” (31). 48 inside and “assigned” to the oldest Damiano daughters while his father and Mrs. Damiano discuss business. From grief to displaced desire, he falls in love with the girl; “overmatched and homesick,” the speaker is brought to tears and then silence by the situation. The poem, rather than dwelling in the speaker's personal emotions, drifts to larger social and historical awareness, what the speaker describes as “retribution”: I'd made him leave before he'd settled with them That didn't mean they'd get to stay. I didn't care, or if I did I wanted there to be some retribution. Nothing as clean as the wreckers piling into it with their great ball. I think of this now, and place some children there to watch – not me, who was too old for that, nor any younger Damiano who I hadn't seen. Instead, they'd be from several blocks away and would have passed it in the weeks it sat there waiting. They'd have the simple interest in its vacancy that I have now, but would have wanted to remember how the upper Loor dropped through and slammed and jostled as the sides where hit again until it all came down and the trucks collected it and took it off to burn. (85-6) The scene, as it drifts from the imagined inner thoughts and wants of the observers watching the 49 destruction of the house to the trucks that “collected it and took it off to burn”, moves away from the speaker's own personal experience. The hinge of the passage – “I think of this / now” – turns the scene from past to present, and from memory to imagination. McMichael unable to change history , rewrites the past through poetic imagination. The speaker's assertion that even a casual viewer of demolition, “would have wanted to / remember” becomes a kind of reversal, imaginatively , of the neighborhood's transformation. The school is unnamed here, and the precise one doesn't matter; what does matter is the changing landscape of Pasadena and what is valued. The growth of Pasadena, as later sections of Four Good Things describe, is deeply connected to scienti&c research institutions (Thorp Polytechnic later Cal Tech, JPL), themselves part of the larger narrative of Western expansion. The school, what in theory should be a bene&t to the citizens, is for the Damiano's an undoing and displacement. In tracing the fate of the house, even beyond the limits of his own knowing, McMichael re-inscribes his father's complicity for what happened to the house and the family. As Alastair Bonnett in Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia claims, “within avant-garde praxis, it was at the level of everyday space, especially the changing urban scene, that we &nd nostalgia most forcefully asserted” (31). To “understand / wanting them to stay” isn't, in the end, enough to save the house or prevent its destruction, instead the poet can only offer imagined witnesses (“some children”) and later memories. Displacements, and speci&cally displacement in the name of progress, mark the houses, personal and public, of Four Good Things. Attentive to the physical construction and architectural style, the house as the marker of social and economic transformation offers the poet a way to question the received narratives about progress. The destruction of the house, becomes a primal scene for the speaker's understanding of 50 his father, for his own desire, for his &rst awareness of fairness or justice, and for his awareness of his own responsibility. The speaker, we understand, is like his father, changing the landscape of the neighborhood, remaking the new urban world. The father the developer and the son the writer both attempt to create order from the unordered world. Of his father, the speaker describes a man who had divided up the landscape: “[he] mapped them, called them PASADENA TRACTS and / had them published, found they wouldn't sell” (84). The production of real estate – dividing, ordering, naming, and printing – is not unlike McMichael's own poetic making. In metonymy of father and city that marks the poem's ongoing relationship between the public and the personal, the speaker's father, “would be somewhere within his maps at any time” (84). This slippage of father/city/map – “he was the city” – elided for the young speaker the implications of his father's work: Sales were what I understood. People moved in and out of houses. Who they were, what they cared about or did was less insistent than the fact that they were there at any time for him. (84) This initial perspective, where the people – their lives and desires – were insigni&cant to the speaker, evolves over the course of the poem. The section that describes the stamps begins “What did people do all day? I never asked that, / but I'd go downtown where there were people whom I / didn't have to talk to or to know” (97). On the one hand the speaker claims indifference and exclusion from “the lives that made [the city] clear” and yet the poem's ongoing examination of how the self relates to the world, the obligations and responsibilities of place and community , suggest a deep engagement with these concerns. McMichael makes his father's role in the very 51 transformations of the place central. The destruction of the Damiano's house resonates through the speaker's entire life (and the poem), an awareness about both economic expansion and poetic possibility. In Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel John Yau claims “every conception of place posits an ethics – an idea of how humans might interact with each other and their environment. And the identi&cation with physically remote or imaginary places often implies the desire to rede&ne the ethics associated with the localities and individual inhabitants” (22). The return of the Damianos in the present tense of the poem, &fty lines and many years after the &rst encounter, offers more than just a repetition or return to an earlier scene. McMichael writes, Like her heart now, the river was about itself the way a vacant house can be about the Damianos and go on as I would have it go, not as a prop in an account with general dispositions of the characters -- that they moved here or there within the city , didn’t like the house and moved away again as one by one the children left and had their own lives somewhere else. I'd have it go on as a house and use it as I use a piece of music, investigate it in no deliberate or exacting way with my retreat from people and their stories. (87) The nostalgic remembrance is not a return to an ideal time but a painful past, one of unhappy 52 circumstances that speaker attempts to avoid but can't. McMichael wrestles with the ethics of remembering, the past as example, “prop” or “music,” that might serve the present: “I never asked my father / what became of them. I know the house was razed. / But I have kept going on beyond its / natural and even just conclusion” (88). The boundaries of subjects dissolve – a word McMichael uses to describe his own process – as the poem expands beyond the Damiano house. To go beyond that “natural or even just conclusion” is part of the poem's argument about the nature of drift and the possibilities of nostalgia. The private home, with its infused narratives of individual lives, is both the locus of memory where particular forms of unarticulated grief &nd their correlative and a point of nostalgic departure. In the description of his stepmother Lucile's house, the house where the speaker moved when his father remarried, McMichael goes to great lengths to describe the history of the place, both what's visible and what's absent. She bought the house from a pharmacist with a neck tumor and “until a year or so before he'd sold the house, / there's been an organ with the pipes extending to an upstairs bedroom” (94). This series of details – the pharmacist, the tumor, the organ – at &rst might seem unimportant , but they suggest the digressive process of nostalgia. An awareness of the layers of narrative, in particular people at the margins, offers the poet a route to thinking beyond what he knows or thinks he knows, what the poet later describes as “ordinary hidden business.” “In order to surpass,” Bachelard writes in Poetics of Space, “one must &rst enlarge” (112). The absent organ is recreated in imagination (and words) by the speaker in the space, an incomplete layering of a series of pasts onto each other: “the whole clear shape of it in that one place remains as / closed to me as how it worked.” One narrative displaces another, and yet, like the Damiano's destroyed home, it continues as “a piece 53 of music” that the speaker (and reader) can “investigate..in no / deliberate or exacting way.” The anecdotal moments or asides or digressions that don't seem to arrive anywhere – the long description of maps or the habits of the newly arrived migrants to Southern California, for example – returns us to Reddy's claim that digression, “prioritizes the drift of poetry over its own words might assume.” This drift, which &nds its impetus in nostalgia, points to the larger social changes and transformations the house comes to represent in the poem. The destruction of the Damiano's and Lucile's houses offer speci&c personal examples of the changing landscape of Pasadena. But the singular house and particular individual memory is not the end of nostalgia but a point of departure. McMichael's poetic ambitions extend beyond the individual: “What I was / after wasn't any single house but was instead / the possibility of houses, the abstruse sum of all / possible houses” (101). In Four Good Things the speaker's personal nostalgic connection to houses gives way to a larger awareness of the house as a site of contact with history – local, national, and transnational. For the adult speaker, returned to Pasadena after his father's death and his step-mother Lucile's departure, the individual house becomes the stand- in for this “abstruse sum of all.” Pasadena – indeed Southern California in the early 20 th Century – a site of rapid physical and social transformation, a place where the surge of midwest transplants found, “living here was too much what they'd / thought it'd be,” offers an ideal case study to see how nostalgia “takes the measure of the distance people have fallen short in their efforts to make themselves ‘at home in a constantly changing world’” (Fritzsche 62). The section that follows the speaker's return to the Damiano house, one of the poem's shortest, recalls his mother's sickness and his father's remarrying. The tonally cool description belies the grief and disruption, and confusion as the 54 speaker becomes part of a new family with four step-siblings who “fought only in the / petty ways of adolescence” (89). From personal to impersonal, the poem then turns to the landscape at a macro level, geology and meteorology , before telescoping down to the changes at the street level. Hundreds of years of Pasadena history , human and nonhuman, are condensed and compressed. “The slopes have low rough shrubs, some &rebreaks. / It rains sometimes, and then the soils wash easily / through Rubio and Eaton canyons...” writes McMichael of the Pasadena landscape, the names of the canyons marked by their human names (90). The interplay between natural geological features and meteorological changes drifts to the human interventions onto that same landscape by human settlement. Describing an early colonial settlement, the Indiana colony , the poet describes how &rst they hauled out the “only steady water” from a naturally formed basin before they “cleared / the greasewood from the Lats and planted groves of / orange and peach trees, built their houses in the / California Style with battened redwood boards” (90). The physical transformation of land is the beginning of change, a rapid progression from the carved-up tracts to “citrus fairs” to hotels to a telephone brought in by someone from Los Angeles. The poem, in describing the transformative economic cycles of boom and bust, also captures how they were felt by people in every day life. He writes, The boom came back toward the center and was done. What they were selling was the weather and a place to live, and that was what was left. (91) McMichael, in tracking the desire and limits of these newly arrived migrants – state society 55 picnics, Clifton's lunch trays, studio tours, etc. – recalls John Findlay's observation in Magic Lands, “The effect of this desire to begin again has always been part of the western dream, and in the New West, has found renewed expression with the city 'not as a single place but as a series of environments catering to different needs or tastes'” (269). For the new residents, “what was left,” climate and location, was not enough. The poem, in contrast to a nostalgia that idealizes the past, offers the distance between the ideal and the reality. The physical displacement of these migrants becomes an emotional or spiritual one. Missing from the “sequence of perfect days” are the human connections, the commodity that can't be bought or replicated. The result of these physical and psychological displacements is an attempt by people to &nd stability through nostalgia. An example of this can be seen in the dominant architectural style of the place and period, a borrowed mode of so-called Mission style houses, churches, “&lling stations, movie houses.” McMichael describes the “spanishy / Lat shuttered fronts, wrought-iron bars and spears... ornate / churriguersques...”(117) 9 What looks authentic or natural is part of a pattern, one deeply indebted to the past that was never theirs; “This was their Colonial Revival,” as McMichael writes. One might take this as an example of the form of nostalgia often pointed to by critics, the replication of a past that never was, what Jameson would describe as the “nostalgia mode” that satis&es a craving for history with “the spatial logic of simulacra” (Scanlan 50). However, within the rapidly changing urban landscape, this nostalgia is a visible reminder of the continuing shocks of modern life, an attempt to stabilize the present through images of the past. These frontages might be read as false or ahistorical. Yet within the larger context of the poem McMichael is keenly aware of both the discomfort and the ways in 9 See Carey McWilliams,Southern California An Island on the Land (New York: Peregrine Smith, 1980) and Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja:Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: UC Press, 2008). 56 which people attempt to make themselves at home. In a similar way , the later section that begins with Richard Arkwright and his industrial age mills ends with an image of the “great facades in Portland St.” with their “arched or pedimented windows, glass-roofed wells” that “hid the workers' quarters” (111). These “quarters,” temporary and crowded and subpar, are contrasted with the “great facades.” The word “homes” or “houses” is conspicuously absent. And though the poet does not speci&cally refer back to Lucile's house or to the Damiano's house, the drift that started with the nostalgia for particular personal houses is echoed in the later public ones. The connections between the various parts of the poem may not be immediately clear; “We tell each other things that are only / starting to make sense,” the poet writes at the end of the poem, a gloss on the very activity of his poetic making (138). But to make sense of them, even in limited or incomplete ways, is part of the process for the poet, and for the reader. 2. “WE HOLD A VASTER EMPIRE THAN HAS BEEN” Continually in Four Good Things, what begins in nostalgia drifts towards social and historical narratives. These narratives, even as they seem to digress from the speaker's personal experiences, speak to the larger questions at stake in his own story: how to deal with loss, how to make meaning from disorder, how to live ethically. A particularly useful example is the section that begins with the theft of stamps by the speaker as a boy , stamps we later learn are relics of British Colonialism. A visionary and surprising movement, the digressive stimulus of nostalgia offers a way to think historically. I want to suggest, as Reddy does, that transition or digression “may offer a literary tactic for writers who seek to interrogate and evade the imperium of divisive power” (19). To the possibilities of “interrogate and evade,” I would add 'take responsibility'; 57 nostalgia can make one aware of one's own complicity and obligations in the light of the past. Historical knowledge is not an end in and of itself but part of a process of reckoning with a past that informs, often in troubling ways, narratives and events of the present. The drift from the speaker's theft of stamps to colonialism, like the narrative about the destruction of the Damiano's house, begins with interiority – the physical space of the stamp shop and the young speaker's conLicting emotions. The speaker describes that each week he'd go “to an upstairs shop on Green and steal more / stamps from the show-books while I chose a few to buy” (97). At the counter of the store, the woman would lay out “all the British Colonies in the Americas,” a series of distant images: “Infant Welfare Clinic. Modern Dairying. And Native Straw Work. Water Sports. A Fishing Fleet” (97-8). From the speaker’s own stamp books, his 612 counted stamps, the poem shifts from the individual fetish value of these objects to the spectral history in their very materiality: These islands were anachronistic baggage of slave and sugar trade, geographies of simple dockets, bills of lading, ports, and putting in. The manufacturers had wanted more. They drank to “Markets! Markets!” at their dinners, and for Christmas 1898, Joe Chamberlin had given them a penny postage and a stamp that said, “WE HOLD A VASTER EMPIRE THAN HAS BEEN.” (98) The poet immediately calls into the imperial motto of power and dominion printed on the stamp, “WE HOLD A VASTER EMPIRE THAN HAS BEEN.” In a clear counter to this 58 claim, McMichael writes, “They hadn't learned / that properties and goods were not enough, / that the sum of what they held was still a sum of / limits” (98). Of this passage Jennifer Clarove's dissertation Rhythm and Certainty: The Problem of the American Long Poem argues that, “The stamp itself...by relegating the upper-case claim to its tiny margin, introduces the idea of the canceled value of the British Empire. Great Britain pays the price for de&ning its glory by its holdings, and for wanting to hold the wrong things” (187). McMichael's poem, in its refusal to “hold” or &x the memory of these stamps apart from their larger colonial narratives – “slave and sugar trade” – or the corruptive expansion of capitalism, offers a way to critique the history these stamps represent without repeating the same problem of “hold[ing] the wrong things.” History arrived at by nostalgia offers not an end of knowing but an ongoing process, a refusal of closure. The story of colonialism and pernicious forms of capitalism, the poem suggests, are not relics of a closed-off past. Just as nostalgia makes the past present, the digression into history for McMichael, makes the story of the past one that is ongoing, a suggestion of how, as Jonathan Levin writes, “power is in transition and serves the interests not of any settled condition” (xi). The power of nostalgia, as Dylan Trigg claims, is that it slows but does not seize “time in its tracks” “Nostalgia,” he writes, “resonates with the ambivalence of demonstrating a unity that is ever glanced at only from afar” (186). The result is that the poem, by motivating digression with nostalgia, refuses – or at least keeps at a great distance – the unity that is the very business of empire. The drifting form of the poem rejects coherence and order in favor of boundlessness and disorder, a choice that can be read as a formal critique of power. McMichael suggests his own complicity in the narratives of these stamps and their images, a reminder of the destruction of the Damiano's house. The speaker as a boy calculating 59 their value (“each checked against its/ mint or cancelled value”) and sealing under cellophane the images of those colonial islands – again, like his father, measuring plots for development – participates in the same economic and social structures the poem critiques. The expansion of the British empire offers an echo to the expansion and development of the American West in the interwar period, a development that is recounted again and again in the poem. As Michael James writes in The Conspiracy of the Good, “As alluring as the vision of a western Paradise may have been, pro&t is what drives colonization and it was no different in Southern California” (9). The relationship is not one-to-one. Instead, the drift of nostalgia offers slippages between distant past and more recent past. The historical investigation that began with the stamps is bookended by personal nostalgic recollection. The section ends with a return to the speaker's life, a description of a series of deaths: The son of man I worked for died of a bubble in his blood-stream. As a messenger, one week near Sixth and Main, he'd seen a man on &re and heard a window-washer scream and fall ten stories to the sidewalk. When he went home, his aunt was dead in the bathtub. He made the phone-call, ate some cheese, began to walk around unlike himself and asking quietly “Is everyone all right? Is everyone all right?” (100) The speaker's connection to these incidents is limited – “the son of a man I worked for” – and 60 the knowledge is second hand, or simply imagined as in the man eating cheese, pacing, and talking to himself. To end the section with this anecdote returns us to the human scale: the interior of a house, the consumption of food, the human voice. The answer to that repeated question, “Is everyone all right?”, after this sequence of unfortunate and untimely deaths – the bubble in the blood stream, the man on &re, the falling window-washer, the aunt in the bathtub – seems to be a very clear no. “Everyone” is not all right. The question and its implied answer call back to mind the earlier imperial slogan: “they hadn't learned / that properties and goods were not enough, / that the sum of what they held was still a sum of / limits” (98). The “sum of limits” in this context is the very nature of human morality. It's the same mortality that returns at the beginning of the next section with the speaker's mother: “With my conception, I was virtually / coincident with the cancer in my mother's body” (100). “Coincident” functions here in both senses of the word: accidental and simultaneous. Incidents, the poem suggests, at the scale of nations or neighbors, are coincident. The drift back to the individual, particular, and regional is a reminder that the personal and historical are inextricably connected, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accidents of place and time. 3.The Circuits In an interview with William Veder and Robert von Hallberg in 1975, &ve years before the publication of Four Good Things, McMichael responds to a question about the absence of what von Hallberg calls “system poems” in favor of books by Ammons, Lowell, Rich, Levertov and Creeley that, “claim continuity on the basis of lived time... a more satisfactory organizing principle to poets since the war” (162). McMichael responds: 61 And that method doesn't exclude learning as part of the subject matter. I'm not tempted to write a poem organized by a system, though at the same time I am interested in a lot of different and uncomplimentary disciplines. As yet I'm not sure how to put those disciplines together. I don't want to put them together as easily as Pound puts them together. I hope there's an alternative and it maybe the one you describe – the continuity of time. (162-163) Four Good Things doesn't exclude learning as part of the subject matter (or the form) but makes it a necessity. The nature of digression makes circulation and continuation essential to the process of discovery and understanding. As Clarove argues, in contrast to the “disruptive” Cantos of Pound or Eliot's “The Waste Land,” McMichael's “most important contribution to critical and creative aspirations might be his method of extending poetic argument by dissolving, rather than erecting, oppositions” (194). This “dissolving” makes possible new and surprising connections. The section, as it drifts from stamps to Von Karman's Light simulation tunnel at Cal Tech, can be read as part of the poem's implicit (and sometimes explicit) argument is that the expansion of capital is the continuous story of the West: “Growth was the provision of the time it took to / know that what was planned was right because it / earned more time to plan” (99). In the transition from military production to corporate production, “They kept some military contractors, hired more engineers / who narrowed every unit of their work on TV / kinescopes and circuits” (99). The technology of televisions is fundamentally no different than the 19 th century call for “Markets! Markets!” and the “things that needed places: calicoes, bright shirts, / Stoke potteries and Shef&eld knives” (98). McMichael doesn't assert this explicitly. Instead, the 62 reader draws the implicated connection between these parallel narratives of technology , progress, and change. The transformation of civilian scienti&c projects into the military tools of war is part of a larger narrative in the American West. Four Good Things offers a way to consider how the military industrial complex is interwoven into a suburban narrative of the American West. John Beck in Dirty Wars argues: the open secret of the American West...is that its open landscapes, so often the overdetermined signi&ers of American liberty , screens off its military uses and their environmental and human consequences, supplemented and reinforced by a long- standing discourse of Western “wasteland” that further shields from view the contradictions produced by the inclusion of the excluded. The West is the screen upon which openness is projected and also the veiling screen that preserves secrecy. (21) In one of the poem's longest continuous sections at over 340 lines, McMichael begins by recounting the origin story of Aerojet. At stake in this section are the tensions between technological advancement and its human costs. The section begins with a kind of abstract poetic statement of purpose, the speaker's wishful desire: Suppose we'd want to memorize the present, We'd begin with a scenario and follow it towards ourselves from one point that's both beyond us and contained within our past. (111) What the speaker proposes, for a scenario to be both “beyond us” and “contained within our past,” is the same work of nostalgia: the future and present informed by our past, beyond and 63 contained at once. The poem turns from this vague desire to a speci&c case: “The paradigm was Zwicky's” (112). The “paradigm” here is the building of telescopes. The poem moves from Zwicky to the section's central &gure Von Karman, from the pure science of telescopes at Palomar and Mt. Wilson to the founding of Aerojet and military rocket production. McMichael situates the development of technology within the context of Pasadena landscape and history: His lab off San Pasqual looked residential and benign among the dorms with courtyards, cool arcades, the same pale stucco as the whitewashed or adobe walls of mansions south of California. (113) Coupling “residential and benign” together, the poet calls attention to the fact that it was neither of those two. As Beck writes,“openness has long been deployed as a weapon in the American West... concealing in plain sight the installations and facilities that manufacture, test, store and dispose of American military hardware; barrack military personnel; and provide an economic base for the region” (285). Those facades, “whitewashed or adobe walls of mansions,” in their inauthentic patinas of age and history , are part of that same process of “concealing in plain sight.” The lab as a military and research site is part of a larger story of economic expansion in the West, one that has real human costs. In one passage, describing the founding of Aerojet, the speaker recounts the moving of the company after “two / propellants...blasted through a Cal Tech wall”: He set them up where JPL is now, in the low 64 dry hills behind the Devil's Gate impoundment and the spillway to the channel draining south beyond the Vista del Arroyo where the nurses walked with burned skin-grafted veterans of World War II He'd helped to plan the arsenals of Germany , Japan and China, Russia, the United States. (113) In the shifting scales of the passage, from individuals and regional particulars to macro, nation- states, the poem offers a subtle critique of these technological advancements. The location, in plain sight and hidden, is both part of the natural landscape and separate from it. The detail of the injured veterans being walked by their nurses, an image of war's human cost, creates a sharp contrast to the cool, dispassionate descriptions of the technology itself and Von Karman's work to “plan the arsenals.” The human subject within the storm of history refuses polemic in favor of image. The poem, like the “spillway to the channel,” doesn't sentimentalize or fetishize their injuries, quickly shifting to the arsenals of nation-states. The drift from the lab to the natural features of the landscape to the men to the war makes an implicit argument for seeing these things as part of a continuous (but not uni&ed) story. While nostalgia can provide the impetus for the drift into history , it also can lead the poet back to interior spaces, spaces of imagination that would not otherwise not be available without that initial movement to the past. Nostalgia in McMichael doesn't work in one simple direction but offers a conduit of possibilities, an ongoing circuit between knowing and not-knowing. The section that begins with scienti&c and military culture of Pasadena in the mid 30s – “pure research and technology as complementary twin halves” – ends with the speaker's own mother, 65 still alive (117). It comes as a surprise that the last 50 lines of this section, following a turn back to the developments and transformations of the region, its growth “by &lling in” – Huntington's “day for a dollar” trolleys, Clifton's cafeteria, or the state society picnics of the recent, lonely arrivals – to arrive at an interior space of a house where a woman, at &rst unnamed, is reading. He writes, It &lled one with the ease of trusting that the other person too was in a place. Nor was it lonely here. Her chair. The dressing table. Desk. A blue slip cast ware and a single tile. (118-9) The physical objects of her room are rendered in individual and staccato sentences. The emotional charge of the section comes from the attention to these ordinary objects and the sensory sensations of light and smell and sound. It's a scene too that is beyond the speaker' own personal memory or knowledge. At &rst glance the woman in the room seems to be set apart from the historical and social changes that have dominated the section. One is reminded of the private moments from earlier in the section; how, for example, Von Karman climbed “inside his tunnel./ He'd lie out Lat. He'd feel the way the Low would / touch him” (113). But even within this intimate, personal space, the press of the real intervenes. The point of view of the poem shifts to a close 3 rd person, a dissociation from the constant perspective of the speaker. “I” becomes “Jimmie” and the reader understands the unnamed woman is his mother. She thinks of her husband, the speaker's father, as returns from work: “Jim would be driving home from downtown past / Elysian Park and through the tunnels, past the glazed / deep pocket of the reservoir he might not see” (119). The public landmarks of Los Angeles are invisible and ever 66 present, like those labs set among the whitewashed adobe mansions. The woman in the room is reading “about North Borneo, about a / concentration camp, the Japanese, their curious / honor and the cruelty that came from it” (118). The violence and brutality of WWII, indeed the colonialist legacy of those stamps, North Borneo was a British colony for almost sixty years before its wartime occupation by Japan, returns at the end of the section. The world within (memory , private houses) and the world without (history , public spaces) are in fact closer than they &rst appear.. What began with technology and public history arrives back at the personal, though now, the private sphere and the larger history come together, charged and changed. At the very start of the section, the speaker laid out an oblique claim that within the family tree: “we'd found a branch that was an / axis, a manifold of what we could imagine if we / changed the metaphor and made it deeper” (111). At the end, the metaphor making “axis, a manifold” has been made “deeper” by seeing it as linked – by the act of reading – to history. This ongoing relationship between personal nostalgia and historical narratives suggests that to understand the past we must be able to see both the interior and exterior narratives. Towards the end of the poem, McMichael writes about the limits of a map's bird's eye perspective: “Even at this largest scale, we're shown / nothing in the way of rooms” (129). A poem on the other hand can offer, at once, these “rooms” and the larger scale of maps (and history); McMichael argues for a way of seeing that is not either/or but and/both. 4. “Whose costs were mostly labor” Renato Rosaldo's “Imperialist Nostalgia” raises a serious concern in thinking about Four 67 Good Things and by extension poetic texts that also employ nostalgia as a route to historical thinking. Rosaldo claims, “Nostalgia is a particularly appropriate emotion to invoke in attempting to establish one's innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed” (108). He goes on to assert that one should, “try to eliminate altogether the validity of elegiac postures toward small towns and rural communities” (109). One might accuse McMichael of a posture that elides the true “violence and brutality” of the places and history he writes about. The poem seems to praise, or at least hold up as examples of curiosity and ingenuity , 'great' men and their projects. “How far from the earth itself could we project? And what was light?,” the speaker asks, a question about the limits of human knowledge (117). McMichael, in writing of Zwicky or Von Karman or the Greenes and George Ellery Hale, suggests that disruption and displacement, at least in a macro view, can offer hopeful change. Four Good Things, at times, suggests an, “investment in nostalgia as a moment of displacement and, hence, creativity” (Bonnett 31). Consider the following two passages: The Greenes, like Morris, wanted well-made things for everyone and wanted everyone to make them, if they could. Cal Tech was still Throop Polytechnic. It taught both sexes carpentry and turning, architectural design. (117) [George Ellery Hale] could foresee pure research and technology as complementary twin halves. The region was cut off. It needed 68 fuel and water, power. Geologists and engineers would pay for one another's futures, for the futures too of climatology and astrophysics. (117) The suggestion of equality “for everyone” elides the racial, ethnic, gender, and class discrimination in Pasadena, both at the time of the Greenes' houses and ongoing in the present. Where, one might ask, are the minority communities in the world created by McMichael's poem? 10 Where are the immigrant communities in Pasadena? For while McMichael's poem is clearly concerned with the invisible human collateral of empire, from workers on the economic margins to the causalities of war, there are signi&cant omissions. From the architectural works of the Greene brothers to Richard Arkwright to George Ellery Hale to Fritz Zwicky and Von Karman's work on the technological foundations of the JPL and CalTech, McMichael privileges a particular form of narrative centered on individual vision and accomplishments, the 'great men' of history. Similarly , the solving of the region's problems through science and technology , neglects or at least omits the social and environmental costs of “fuel and water, power.” There are clear limits to McMichael's historiographical imagination. However, his aim is not history but a way of thinking historically. It's an important distinction, though it doesn't change the absence of essential perspectives and narratives. Nostalgia, rather than an elegiac posture for what has been lost or destroyed, offers a means to question what the results have been, both positive and negative. McMichael's poetic task is not to write history or to right the wrongs of the past, instead it is to offer a process to engage these questions. In her introduction to Modernism and Nostalgia, Tammy Clewell suggests 10 See Michael James'sThe Conspiracy of the Good: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Community in Two American Cities, 1875-2000 on the de facto and de jure racial exclusions that were part of Pasadena's history , from its Indiana colony days to the recent past of racial segregation and exclusion. 69 that nostalgia, “may constitute a progressive force by functioning as a bulwark against any unquestioned acceptance of the present social order and by giving rise to new directions for change” (3). This “progressive force” is apparent in McMichael's surprising turn to Richard Arkwright. “Richard Arkwright was a barber,” the section begins, a surprising shift in time and subject after the regional and personal world of Pasadena (103). The poem describes the progression of Arkwright's water-frame mill, a 18 th C. world in transition where “Cotton was it own country... Land could itself be capital” (105). The section on Arkwright, as well as the optimistic stance of the early developers of Pasadena's scienti&c and technology industries, might at &rst be read as a fusing of “nostalgia with anti-progress critiques of history” (Scanlan 46). However, I want to argue that McMichael is ultimately concerned with the human costs of these transformations. This is not a longing for a simpler time or technology nor a lament for change, but a way to refuse a narrative of inevitable progress. The digressive movement of the poem refuses a hierarchical or strictly chronological sequencing. What in retrospect looks ordered or fated is often the product of accidental or arbitrary events. Arkwright's inventions and innovations, as well as the rise of the factory and Industrial Revolution, did and did not lead directly to the present. Displacement, again in the name of progress, is the byproduct of transforming economic forces. Arkwright's personal narrative digresses to the larger changes in property and society , from commons to private land, from farm to factory. The poem, quoting The Earl of Leicester – “'I look around and see no other house than mine / I am like the ogre in the tale, and have eaten up / all my neighbors'” – returns to the house as a marker of social and economic transformation (106). The ironically deployed observation of Andrew Ure that the “nimbleness” of the children 70 at the loom resembles “'lively elves whose work resembled sport'”(108) also splices primary source material into the poem, and like McMichael's own &rst person descriptions of Pasadena's changing landscape, offers subjective historical observations. 11 The practices of child labor and the historical working conditions at these factories are offered without direct, editorial comment: “Mothers were back at work the same day they delivered/ milk dripping from their shirts. Each wet nurse / had a dozen babies. She'd give them Quietness – / a doses of treacle, sugar, and crude opium” (108). The factual, uninLected tone, like the passages of quoted text, suggest the poet's refusal of polemic in favor of suggestive association. Clarvoe asserts that in this section, focused on the Industrial Revolution, the iambic lines, the most regular in the poem, “embody the oppressive, almost inescapable certainties of the workers' lives” (195). Indeed labor and work, and to a lesser degree class, have been central concerns of the long poem, starting in the very &rst lines of the book: From the McMichaels' Florence. She passed the Silvers', the Johnsons'. She was walking to Martello and the bus. She was the woman who took care of me, and she was going shopping. (2) Robert von Hallberg writes of this novel-like opening, “Florence is the housekeeper (almost no 11 While McMichael's poem is not an example of documentary poetics in the model of contemporary writers such as Mark Nowak or Philip Metres, his work anticipates some of their methods and concerns related to capital, workers, and history . Moreover, the documentary &lm is described by McMichael as one of his formal inLuences as described in this interview: James McMichael: Thinking about models, I think one other model for me is the documentary &lm. I hear that in some of the sections. Interviewer: Even the movement from section to section, jump cutting. James McMichael: Dissolving. (Burton,138) 71 one but domestic workers ride the buses of southern California); her role is a confusing mix of economics and intimacies” (239). In response to the rapid building of houses in Pasadena, “ A local factory expanded to keep up with them” (92). McMichael does not explore the lives of these factory workers in the same way that he later does with Arkwright's mills and the early centers of factory production in England, but the long poem offers resonances with the labor needed for the construction of these houses, both the single family dwellings sold by McMichael's father, the “tracts,” and the 'fantasy estates' that would later mark the wealth and class divisions of Pasadena. Of these building enterprises, the speaker notes, their “costs were mostly labor.” The word “costs” can be read as both economic and social, at once quanti&able and concealed. Just as the replaceable women and men and children in Arkwright's factory are part of that “VASTER EMPIRE” printed on the penny postage stamp, so too are the workers constructing the houses of Pasadena. The digressive movement of the Arkwright section again uses the poet's personal narrative to show the already imbricated, and implicated, relationship of individuals to history. McMichael, addressing an unnamed “you,” perhaps a grandfather or great-grandfather, writes, “Your name could mean that you'd / crossed over in a packet-boat from Cork for the / summer harvests...” (106). The surname McMichael isn't explicit but implied. The “you” is part of the same system, the patterns of migration and transformation, that begin with Arkwright's mills, one of the people “living in the seams,” working or living in the city , “as you'd found it, / Jersey street, The Phoenix Works, long rows of looms with / straps from a central shaft, the oil, steam, the / operatives and overlookers, a Lour-and-water / paste between your &ngers as you dressed the warp” (107). The precision and speci&city of McMichael's descriptions, here and elsewhere, 72 as well as the harsh working conditions already noted, allow an entry into the otherwise invisible history of these workers and their lives. The nostalgic move to the speaker's family informs the section's previous description of Arkwright and the subsequent return to the macro scale of history , a narrative of market expansion: “Their way out of the ignorable was to &nd other / places in the empire – St. Lucia, Trinidad, Lahore. / England had outgrown the continent of Europe” (110). The poem, like the very process it describes, makes the workers invisible once again in this return to the larger historical perspective. However, the initial nostalgia for the physical reality of their lives prevents the reader from forgetting them altogether. They instead linger on the margins, a reminder of those often invisible costs. Nostalgia offers the poet and reader a form of thinking and reading akin to what Jameson describes in Marxism and Form (a passage remarked upon for the same purposes by Goodman in her essay on Geoffrey Hartman): an entire complex of thought is hoisted though a kind of inner leverage one Loor higher, in which the mind, in a kind of shifting of gears, now &nds itself willing to take what had been a question for an answer, standing outside its previous exertions in such a way that it reckons itself into the problem. (Marxism and Form 308-9) Poetic nostalgia, as a way of thinking historically , can create context and dialogue between past and present, self and history. To follow nostalgia through (and often beyond) the limited perspectives of the self or experience offers McMichael and his readers a way to see the overlapping and connected narratives of place and time, and more broadly , the social, economic, and political implications of progress and technology on the lives of people. The critiques of empire or capitalism in Four Good Things are not systematic, but that is the very point and genius 73 of the nostalgic drift: the refusal to engage in the same methods of production or logic as what it critiques. The nostalgic drift of Four Good Things refuses cohesive order and the corollary of state power in its response to radically transforming social, economic, and political landscapes. McMichael's poetics depends on the drift of nostalgia, both in subject matter and in the privileging of digression over content. Historical and social narratives that circulate in McMichael's poem are not exceptional but part of deeper patterns of individual and collective transitions: cyclical, repeating, and never far from the personal. 74 CHAPTER THREE To Queer the Past in the Present: D.A. Powell's Pastoral Nostalgia D.A. Powell begins his fourth collection of poems Chronic with an epigraph from Virgil's Eclogue IX: Time robs us of all, even of memory: oft as a boy I recall that with song I would lay the long summer days to rest. Now I have forgotten all my songs. (xi) The lines, an acknowledgement of the poet's debt to pastoral, offer a contradiction: a simultaneous remembering and forgetting; the speaker claims to have lost “all my songs” but not the memory that he did indeed sing. His songs are both absent and present. The past is longed for but irrecoverable: a nostalgia. It is a passage Powell employs for the sexualized language of the translation. The “lay” of the summer day , with the turn at “to” in the translation, creates this playful reading, for it is (or was) not always “rest” that is being “laid.” The poet's very relationship to time, if one reads “lay” as slang, is sexualized. Virgil's lines, as spoken in the poem by Moeris, a shepherd who has just lost his land, offer an apt tonal and thematic starting point for the overlapping concerns of this essay as well: sex and death, memory and loss, nostalgia and its complexities. For its skeptical critics, of which there are many , nostalgia is an uncritical sentimentality , an attachment to a false or distorted past, a “desire for desire” (Stewart 23). The fantasy history , 75 both personal and collective, of nostalgia offers only simple, totalizing, or coherent narratives of the past that “justify the present...and stabilize history” (Ladino 14). Queer theorists are no less prone to see nostalgia as a form of pernicious ideology. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Huley in their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children describe nostalgia as the doppelgänger of utopian fantasy: Nostalgia is the fantasy of a preferred past (past pleasures, past desires for the future). Caught between these two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, the child becomes the bearer of heteronormativity , appearing to render ideology invisible by cloaking it in simple stories, euphemisms, and platitudes. (xiii) Nostalgia, by their account, is complicit in a reductive heteronormativity , one that distorts time and desire. Recent attempts to understand the productive, critical function of nostalgia have attempted to move beyond these critiques. Jennifer Ladino's Reclaiming Nostalgia, to take one example, argues that “Nostalgia performs a valuable critical function when it illuminates a traumatic event... This sort of nostalgia does not simplify or elide history; rather, it reveals a complex past with legacies like poverty , ongoing racism, oppressive working conditions, and the paradoxical mandates of assimilation” (227). Though queer identity is not explicitly part of this list, nostalgia can offer that same revelation of a complex past that informs present understanding and future action. D.A. Powell, author of &ve books of poetry – Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic, and Useless Landscape, Or A Guide for Boys – offers an ideal example to think abut nostalgia as a poetic process, one that attempts to preserve and mark what would otherwise be erased: by disease, by age, by amnesia, by exclusion, and by forgetting. Nostalgia becomes a way to construct pastoral spaces 76 that are decidedly nostalgic and queer. Powell makes visible the erased or censored experiences that are part of rural or exurban spaces of the American West. The pastoral, as lens and topos, offers new ways to think about nostalgia and communal identity. I will argue that nostalgia can speak to the queer experience in a way that “can resist both mainstream imperatives to forget and queer claims that memory can lead only to shame, abjection, and antisocial isolation” (Reed and Castiglia 211). Powell's poems, like the speaker of Virgil's Eclogue IX, embrace continual contradictions of what it means to be a contemporary queer poet: remembering and forgetting, preserving and erasing, connecting and separating. Nostalgia, as a poetic process of constructing and refusing identity , both individual and communal, is essential to Powell's poetics. 1. Pastoral Pastoral, from its start, can be read as nostalgic and queer. “Nostalgia,” Lawrence Lerner writes in The Uses of Nostalgia, is the “basic emotion of the pastoral” (44). He points to the loss of home and property (as in the epigraph) that characterizes the Eclogues of Virgil. Lerner writes, “There is no simple love of home in the Eclogues: it is seen through eyes that have changed, or eyes that are losing it. Country life does not lead directly to country poetry: to express the sweetness of content, you must have stepped out of the world of golden slumbers” (44). The double time of nostalgia, present and past, offers a structure in which the pastoral lyric functions. However, the nostalgia of the pastoral is typically part of the critique and criticism leveled at the pastoral genre: the dressed-up and falsely innocent past. It is important to note that Powell's relationship to the pastoral is poetic. His primary interest is not in the traditional de&nitions of pastoral poetry , but the way in which the tropes and 77 features of the genre can be transformed. What Powell draws on in pastoral is a reLection of the genre's inherit possibilities for adaptation and change, what David Halperin describes as, “the triumph of inner form over outer form in critical de&nitions and the predominance of pastoral as theme over pastoral over convention” (Halperin, 53). Annabel Patterson’s Pastoral and Ideology claims Lexibility for the pastoral, an adaptability that can be either progressive or conservative, political or decorative, depending on its handling. She writes, It is not what pastoral is that should matter to us. On that, agreement is impossible, and its discussions inevitably leads to the narrowing strictures of normative criticism, statements of what constitutes the ‘genuine’ or the ‘true’ to the exclusion of exemplars that the critic regard as ‘perverse.’ What can be described and, at least in terms of coverage, with some neutrality , is what pastoral since Virgil can do and has always done; or rather, to put the agency back where it belongs – how writers, artists, and intellectuals of all persuasions have used pastoral for a range of functions and intentions that the Eclogues &rst articulated. (7) On the one hand I agree with Patterson. The pastoral as used in contemporary poetry depends less on a narrow list of historical requirements of the “genuine or the true” than a &ltering of the past into the present. That said, it is still necessary to point to what Terry Gifford would call the “historical form” of pastoral (as distinguished in his vocabulary from the pastoral as “literature of the countryside” and “pejorative of idealization”) not as a way to de&ne the pastoral but as a way to contextualize later inheritances/adaptations. A recent interview with Powell addresses directly the question of his relationship with the pastoral. “What problems,” asks the interviewer, “does a contemporary poet face in attempting to 78 reengage this old tradition?” Powell responds: “The pastoral is not unique to me, nor even to our time. It’s a mode of engaging the temporal that has fretted the history of poetry. And I think that we return to it largely because of the ephemeral nature of living: 'that time of year thou mayst in me behold.' We see our own deciduous selves mirrored in the landscape” (Brady , “The Rumpus”). For Powell, the temporal – the mortal wants of “our deciduous selves” – is always wrapped up in the pursuit, loss, and remembrances of desire. Powell's interest in the pastoral is connected to his writing about gay male lives and communities. Same-sex desire, particularly between men, has been an essential part of the pastoral, the genre's “participation in &elds of sexual deviation” (Bredbeck 200). From Theocritus's explicit Idylls to homoerotic desire in the pastoral elegy , Arcadia has been, from its start, a space of queer desire. Writing of a more recent queer pastoral text, the short story and later &lm “Brokeback Mountain,” Martin Muhleim claims, “The reason as to why the pastoral has come to constitute a privileged discursive site for male-male affection is that it provides a context where same-sex desire can be expressed harmoniously as part of a 'natural' (as opposed to urban and supposedly corrupt) setting” (215). The reading of the pastoral as a naturalized queer space is one possibility of why it has been, historically , a site of homosocial or homoerotic desire. At the same time, Powell's pastoral poetics are deeply interested in the complex interplay between 'natural' and 'constructed' landscapes. In particular, the literal and &gurative pastoral spaces created in Powell's two most recent collections, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, are marked by human interventions: the crematorium beside the high school, the sewage facility next to the park where men meet for anonymous sex, the spray of pesticides onto the &elds and the workers. The tension in Powell's pastoral nostalgia recalls, in part, Erwin Panofsky's 79 claim in "Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition” that, “In Virgil's ideal Arcady human suffering and superhumanly perfect surroundings create a dissonance” (300). In Powell's work, however, the “human suffering” mirrors the corrupted landscape. For example, Powell's poem “republic,” from Chronic, describes forms of technological 'progress': from the machines that, “back-&lled the marshes / replacing buckbean with dent corn,” to the environmental changes that helped eradicate diseases such as yellow fever and typhoid. The illness of the past are replaced with illness of the present, over 19 maladies from dyspepsia to cancers of the “mouth ovary thyroid colon bileduct lung” (Chronic 46). The poem suggests an ongoing metonymy of illness: corrupted land, sick body. Fundamental cycles of work and morality are unchanged even after, “the rural areas also / vanquished: made monochromatic and mechanized, made suburban” (46). 12 At the same time, the speaker offers a note of longing for what is absent from the language of this differently constructed place, “it meant something—in spite of machinery— / to say the country, to say apple season.” The poem ends with an ambivalence about the nature of these transformations. Powell writes, you want me to tell you the marvels of invention? that we persevere that the time of Lourishing is at hand? I should like to think it meanwhile I put the notebook on which I was scribbling 12 Powell's return to the &elds and towns of his youth recalls John Su's argument about how nostalgia can be a productive force of awareness to progressive social and environmental concerns. Su writes, “The rede&nition of space and place has been motivated largely by the desire to challenge dominant forms of social relations with respect to class, race, and gender” (21). Poems in Lunch – “[baby's on a pallet. in the screenporch you iron / bluing and starching to temporary perfection: fabrication]” or “[the future rose: an a-frame on the cumberland],” for example – deal most directly with labor and gender as they reject an idealized version of rural life. 80 it began like: “the smell of droppings and that narrow country road...” (Chronic 47). The nostalgic impulse at the end of the poem is paradoxically rejected and embraced in that act of “scribbling.” Powell's pastoral spaces are de&ned as much by the poet's language as that transforming “machinery.” Powell's version of pastoral, written and constructed, does not offer a return to the past but a return to the arti&ce of the past . Landscape, like memory is not natural but assembled, continually changing and made visible by a nostalgic relationship to place. As he writes in the poem “Dying in the Development,” Unsurprising what gets blocked out, reapportioned. I say it was a rustic place, but in transition. I say the land was sculpted, but it was simply held back. (Useless 21) Human alternations of the physical landscape – the “held back” nature, the transformation of rural life by technology – like the arti&ce of pastoral and nostalgia are continually shifting and adapting in the present. “With your permission, / I'm going to make a lot of this story up.,” writes Powell in poem “Notes of a Native Son,” “Here is California, region of new mythologies, / the substitute for plot: a history pageant” (Useless 61). The past, arranged, handled, misused, is acknowledged by Powell. The poet's pastoral nostalgia offers, in part, a process of coming to terms with this conLicted, constructed experience. In other poems from Chronic, the constructed, corrupted landscape is put directly into relation with the speaker's sexuality. As he writes in the poem “central valley ,” “here I inhaled 81 &rst plum blossoms and took the yellow jacket stings / saying “sticks, I live in the sticks, don't drive me home I'll sleep instead / on your rug, be your boy , just ask me to spread my legs, I'll spread” (Chronic 7). The offer to “be your boy” follows the inhalation of the plum blossoms and the “yellowjacket stings,” each of which pre&gures the sexual desire. And this is &nally Powell's primary engagement with the pastoral, as a space of queer nostalgia and possibility. One can see this in the &nal two poems in Chronic, Powell's most literal engagement with pastoral. The poems “corydon & alexis” and “corydon & alexis, redux,” respond directly to the pastoral tradition, from the names of the two shepherds from Virgil's Eclogue II to their dialogue. But the poem is not simply an imitation of an older genre. “corydon & alexis” begins: shepherdboy? not the most salient image for contemporary readers nor most available. unless you're thinking BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN a reference already escaping. I did love a montana man, though no good shepherd. (77) The poem acknowledges the Leeting contemporary reference as well as the older poetic tradition. Later in the poem Powell splices direct quotations from Virgil's Eclogues (“and did he have a grove of beech trees?” “and did he go back to his 6elds and caves?” “back up a moment: the forest you mentioned – remember, instead of a grove?”). These questions work as a call and response, not only between poet, self, and reader, but also between the poet and the larger tradition of pastoral itself. “corydon & alexis,” like “republic,” ends with a writerly act, the rendering of a speci&c material world of a California coast through language. He writes, shepherdboy , do you see the wild fennel bulbs I gathered for you olallieberries, new mown grass, the tender fruits of the coastal &g? 82 I put them on paper, too, so fragile. For nothing is ever going to last (78) The act of naming on paper the particulars of the place, “olallieberries” or “wild fennel bulbs,” is as Leeting as the lover/beloved relationship which is as Leeting as mortal life: “nothing is ever going to last.” Not page. Not Lesh. “corydon & alexis” investigates the nature and limits of the pastoral: “we gouged each other's chests instead of wood: pledges that faded / he was not cruel nor I unwitting but what endures beyond any thicket” (77). The question of what “endures beyond any thicket” is considered in the context of the speaker's attempts to record the past, to put a former lover down “on paper.” But the poem is immediately followed by a “redux,” another poem that acts as a continuation and revision – of desire, of nature, of language itself – against this note of loss: what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches yearning for that vernal beau. for don't birds covet the seeds of the honey locust and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet &ligree and slender oats foraged in the meadow kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by the nape (79) Images of attraction in nature that coincide with the speaker's own innate wants become a corrective to the speaker's “silly” idea: “guess I &gured to be done with desire.” We're not done with desire and the “song” doesn't end; the poem concludes by acknowledging this ongoingness: “as if banishing love is a &x. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes.” The two poems, indicative of Powell's pastoral imagination, explore the ongoing relationship between nostalgia and desire. Powell's interest in “replaying the poetry of the past” is at its heart a nostalgia for an impossible object, one that is always out of reach. “Nostalgia,” as Svetlana Boym claims, “tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, 83 materialization of the immaterial” (xvii). Rather than being a source of limit, his nostalgic return to the pastoral mode allows him to consider and dwell and explore the themes and tropes of sex and death, transformation and displacement, identity and desire. 2. Otium / Sex An essential part of Powell's pastoral and nostalgic imagination is the idea of the otium. Otium is a central idea of pastoral leisure and rest in which the shepherds can engage in song and conversation. Thomas Rosenmeyer in The Green Cabinet describes it this way , “Otium is two things; it is the condition under which the herdsmen operate, the social and psychological characteristics of their world; but it is also a function of the ethos of the poem, the idea which the poem is expected to communicate over and beyond the dramatic realities within it” (68). The otium can, at &rst seem like a move away from the demands and obligations of real life. But the theme of otium, Rosenmeyer writes, “has in it less of the Light from reality and more of the joy of living” (69). The otium in Powell's poems, in their playfulness, their attraction to wry humor and campy songs / movies, and their subversiveness, insist on apartness from hetero-normative expectations. The tensions of the otium is created, traditionally , by desire. The love objects of a pastoral poem are longed for but never possessed, at least not sexually. Again Rosenmeyer: On the one hand, all pastoral characters are potential lovers and are quick to refer to their beloveds in a manner indicating that love is a normal part of their lives. On the other hand, sex, in its cruder forms is allowed to color the context marginally without reducing the pastoral bower to the conditions of a stable. The naturalness of love is tempered by its lack of consummation; the herdsman either refuses love, or he loves without success. Only 84 in this way can the poet control passion within the boundaries that it needs to obverse so as not to dispel the mood of noon peace. (85) The complication of this tension is developed by Lerner who posits two versions of Arcadian sex: “freedom from law and freedom from desire (86). The pastoral world, in his reading of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess and A Midsummer Night's Dream, is more complicated: the “ pastoral world clearly contrasted with the everyday...But it is not a world of free love; rather one in which lasciviousness is a crime and the innocent are blest” (Lerner 88). Powell's pastoral topos turns this on its head. I want to suggest that in Powell's &rst book Tea the otium is staged within the queer landscape of tea dances and sex clubs, in the shared social world of music and movies. Take the poem “kenny lost in the mineshaft among silver stalactites. his irises bloom in darkness” in which the notorious sex club is transformed into a mythic underworld. In the poem, Kenny &nds sex and pleasure in this place that, from the outside, seems to be one of pain: “of course nobody loves him. except the few who do” (12). As Stephen Burt notes of Powell's work, “Club nights, backroom sex, church services, even perhaps hospital visits – all become in Tea – as cinemas, bars, supermarkets, and Christian rituals become in Cocktails – communal, ritual experiences where performative language exalts a vulnerable (gay) male body, con&rming rather than countering its erotic charge, and rendering desirable, or honorable, its experience of disgust and pain” (“Here is the Door” 91). What Burt describes as “disgust and pain” is understood in terms of pleasure, desire, and freedom in Powell's poetics. In an interview, Foucault said of S&M practices, the kind that characterized the the mineshaft, “Of course there are roles, but everybody knows very well that those roles can be reversed” (169). The “always Luid” roles within these spaces become like those 85 dressed up shepherds or the lovers in the Arden woods. As with the bower of the pastoral, meeting places for sex or companionship are set in contrast to the outside or 'real' – in this case, straight – world. Powell's poems valorize spaces of life and pleasure that would be otherwise be elided, ignored, or disregarded. “Riverfront Park, Marysville, CA ” describes a meeting spot for anonymous gay sex: Cars circle here at night – They Lash their lights at someone in the outhouse shadow or pass like slinking cats afraid to taste the stranger's milk. It's okay , my dear. Someone cares for you here. Were you dying, here's a &nd place for your mangy head. Hush. Someone's backing in. (45) The place offers a simultaneous erasure of the self – “Would that we could rid ourselves of everything not ours: / reverse the birthing hour, // return the beastings to their teats; jizz to its bushed nub” – and a promise of recognition, “It's okay , my dear / Someone here cares for you” (45). These lines, as well as the opening with the smell of the sewage treatment plant, bring to mind Elizabeth Bishop's “Filling Station” and her repeated line, “Someone here loves us all.” Like the dirty station and its residents Powell makes visible, and asserts the value, of what might otherwise be rejected or not immediately visible. 86 The nostalgia in Powell's work is essential for naming and protecting the enclosures of gay male life. These protected spaces, of leisure and rest, of play and game, offer more than just the naturalizing of same-sex desire, but a protected imaginative space, one that might be described by Jose Esteban Muñoz in terms of their “world-making potentialities” (35). Muñoz's Cruising Utopia points implicitly towards the ambition of queer nostalgia. He writes, “these queer memories of utopia and the longing that structures them, especially as they are embodied in work that I identify as public-sex mimetic cultural production, help us carve out a space for actual, living sexual citizenship” (35). What Muñoz characterizes as utopian, the instance on hope and relationally , can be understood in how Powell's poems refuse narratives of death or illness in favor of joy and pleasure. Powell's explicit sexual content challenges the pastoral tradition his poems engage. As Lerner writes, “There may be a wild wood &lled with satyrs, but they are not the inhabitants of Arcadia. They may threaten it, and even make raids (Arcadia is always frail), but they do not belong in a paradise of chaste love” (85). By contrast, the pastoral topos of Powell is not chaste. The poems depend less on explicit sexual content than innuendo, word play , and odd juxtaposition. In the poem “Having a Rambutan With You,” a take off of Frank O'Hara's famous poem, Powell writes, “Sometimes I tug you, with my happy teeth. // Sometimes I forget to spit out the seeds” (Useless 93). It's a typical of how Powell's double entendres – the seeds of the fruit/ the seeds of semen – reveal that the language of sex is always and already present in our everyday words and speech. Powell's language of sex, the puns and play , works against the melancholy or self-shattering that characterizes some views of queer desire. Instead, his poetics seem closer to the “sex positivity” that Ann Cvetkovich writes of in Archive of Feelings: “What's 87 required is a sex positivity that can embrace negativity , including trauma. Allowing a place for trauma within sexuality is consistent with efforts to keep sexuality queer, to maintain a space for shame and perversion within public discourse rather than purging them of their messiness in order to make them acceptable” (63). Powell's nostalgia does not elide the “messiness” of sex or desire, or its constant presence in language, but makes these elements an essential part of his poetics. I want to suggest too that the otium can be seen not just in content but in the very form of Powell's poetics. The fragmented, staccato lines of Powell's &rst three books are little machines of hurry and delay , continually adding and reversing their moment. David Leavitt's introduction to Repast, the collected reissue of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, describes the other formal devices and techniques that Powell is by now know for: “bracketed, lowercase non-titles, its wide lines occasionally interrupted by graphics, its triple spaces like heavy breathing” (xi). To Leavitt's list of Powell's inventive punctuation, I would add the colon, another mark of punctuation that has the effect of both delaying and continuing, creating the sense that Powell's poems can go anywhere within his expansive lines. In a way , almost any of Powell's poems from Tea, Lunch, or Cocktails can illustrate this distinctive style: nicholas the ridiculous: you will always be 27 and impossible. no more expectations you didn't carry those who went in long cars after you. stacking lie upon lie as with children swearing “no” to pain and “yes to eternity. you would have been a bastard: truth be told (Repast 11) The long broken lines of Powell's early work offer a subversive, formal otium, the idea that 88 “game take[s] precedence over work.” Games – humor, wit, play , puns, neologisms – are created in part through how Powell's long lines use various ways of halting and listing, caesuras created by punctuation, to hold and turn back. Punctuation becomes an important element of Powell's nostalgic imagination: the setting off of experience and suspension of real life (and real grammar). The effect is to see the thinking of the poem performed on the page. As Powell writes in the poem “[between scott's asshole and his mouth I could not say which I preferred: perfect similes]”, “the truth: he was no monument” or “the truth: I have never left him” (27). The nostalgia of these poems, as enacted in the fragmented syntax, reveal a poetic attempt to grasp or understand the past, and the inevitable failure of that knowing. One critic of nostalgia describes the phenomenon this way: “ As the longed for moment becomes lost in time, individuals create a simulation or a copy of the original moment that not only moves them further away from, but also fragments the experience they are trying to recapture” (Day 19). But what she sees as a failure of nostalgia – the fragmented experience – is for Powell a part of his poetic process and a source of possibility. 3. Elegy / Community “To survive is an astonishing gift. The price of that gift is memory ,” writes Powell of his &rst published book of poems, Tea. The book begin with anecdotes and memories of the men who died of AIDS. Mortality , the presence of death in life, Et in Arcadia Ego, is central in Powell's poetics. To think about the question of nostalgia and queerness, in particular for gay male artists at the end of the 20 th Century , is to wrestle the trauma and aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. Alexandra Juhasz asks in her essay “Nostalgia, Technology , and Queer Archive Activism,” “But 89 what, I wonder, of art rooted in nostalgia? To begin, let us imagine nostalgia as a kind of duration trouble in that one de&antly wants something to endure that cannot and has not” (322) 13 To think of nostalgia as a kind of “duration trouble” is to see the paradox of nostalgia: the desire for an impossible past. 14 In the introduction to the &rst printing of Tea, Powell's introduction cautions that “this is not a book about Aids.” He writes of his process, a book of “other loves – friends, lovers, tricks”: I began Tea as the chronicle of a relationship...Because I was unable to contain the &rst lines I wrote I turned my notebook sideways, pushing into what would traditionally be the margins of the page. The lines, with their peculiar leaps and awkward silences became the strangely apt vessel into which I could pour my thoughts. I took fragments and made new statements from them, just as I wished to reshape my life from its incomplete bits. (Tea xiii) The “incomplete bits” as Powell himself notes, are part of his attempt to “reshape” his life, and the lives of those of in the community. The poem “[he must have been a deejay this one. the pulse quickens at another “lost companion” sale],” takes as its occasion a common feature of life during the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, the selling of the things of the “lost companion.” The word aids or AIDS does not appear in this poem, nor in most of Powell's poems, a refusal to make the disease (and its politicalization) more central than the lives recollected in the poems. The items for sale in the poem, vinyl records, become talisman of a larger narrative about loss and memory: 13 Juhasz quali&es this de&nition by pointing to Boym's distinction between communal and personal memory: “Unlike melancholia, which con&nes itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory” (Boym xvi). 14 Ruth Abbot, writing of Wordsworth, notes, “Backward-looking nostalgia for lost times gives birth to forward- looking writing seeking to give shape to time itself ” (209). 90 I &lcher and dilber through crates of vinyl the glowing end of my glee cuffed in reverence lovers carted away in stacks. (Repast 29) In the &rst publishing of Tea, Powell included this note about “&lcher and dilber,” an allusion to “the charwomen in Dickens's A Christmas Carol who steals the deceased Scrooge's meager possession” (Tea 69). The records are markers of absence and presence, the missing companion, the one who survives and the poet who steals from a ghost. Using the vocabulary of records – needle, bpm, etc. – the poet claims the past is “undergoing reconstruction.” the way the past is actively recaptured: not a whiff of poppers and halston z-14 no brief encounter with a surviving negative. just a soundtrack undergoing reconstruction. (Repast 29) The description of the action is present tense and yet the poem has the feel, like many of the poems in Tea, of retrospection; the events and people are caught in a forever present: “you will always be 27.” The poem is &nally one of living and the accompanying sensory and physical sensations, from the smell of the cheap, popular cologne from the 1980s, halston z-14 to the 'poppers' or amyl nitrate an inhalant often used for sex. “It is not our suffering that is compelling,” writes Juhasz, “but our willingness to record it, and in doing so, make it communal and move it into the present” (328). Powell's poem reconstructs the past, not simply for the speaker, but for a larger community. The lovers and tricks from Tea reappear in later collections by Powell, an obsessive return to the past. Scott, the subject of many of the poems of Tea, is named again in Cocktails. In the poem, [chapt. ex ex ex eye vee: in which scott has a birthday], Powell writes, chapt. ex ex ex eye vee: in which scott has a birthday 91 [many happy returns of the day, says piglet] & buys himself a puppy soon the scent of burning leaves is too much. hunting season the crisp Lannel air and hot oatmeal: instead of &shin' (153) The poem, framed as a child's fable with its reference to Winnie the Pooh, evokes a pastoral scene with the hunter and his dog in the snow: “and the whiteness covers them almost completely. almost / far enough away from this moon and those rabbits and the geese” (Repast 63). The man and dog become part of the landscape. Almost. The whiteness of the snow, not unlike the white space of a poem, covers but does not erase. As Powell writes in a poem from Tea, “dead boys make the sweetest lovers. relationships unfold like stroke mags: tales less complex” (Repast 14). The sweetness of these lovers, the poem suggests, is that they are not real, not material. The relationships “unfold” in one static direction. And yet, like those “stroke mags”, these men – “ghost and polaroid” – and the community they were are part of, is revisited, recorded, and recreated. Powell writes, “games evolve into storylines. moments pure and impure / the novel you write ends in many tragedies. from which autobiography scarcely begins” (14). The emphasis at the end of the poem is not on singular but the collective. Though it “scarcely” begins, the autobiographical, the personal narrative of the self, emerges out of the collective one – the novel. What both of these poems share is an understanding of the dynamic between writing and nostalgia – the imagined chapters of the book, the novel of tragedies – that connects individual and collective experience. Gilad Padva's Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture describes what it calls queer nostalgia as a redemption of “mutated narratives.” Nostalgia, according to Padva, can reclaim “what 92 seems lost, underestimated, underrated, and misrepresented” (230). He writes, as a journey to the irrecoverable, the written off, the forbidden and the neglected, queer nostalgia is a creative practice that creates new 6elds, dimensions, and perspectives of the queer experience. Fantasized and fantastic past are signi&cant parts of every community as much as of&cial and alternative historical narratives and imperatives. Subaltern sexual communities can be empowered by a glori&ed past and its mythic playgrounds, role models and halls of fame. (8) Padva's account of queer nostalgia focuses on how nostalgia, “cherishes past experiences, whether these are personal or communal occurrences” (3). Rather than rejecting what critics often see as the problem of nostalgia, sentimentality and illusion, Padva offers an accounting of nostalgia in which these aspects become potent ways of de&ning and creating community. The poem “in the elegant days of downtown: we sunned on the porch” from Cocktails recounts the easy and worry-free days before “nose cancer” and “deep lines in our brow,” a tongue-in-cheek celebration of an alternative community. This is Powell at his most nostalgic, at least in the standard popular de&nition: the looking back to a sort of golden age before AIDS. The house where the unnamed friends live is deeply imperfect, their “gassy dog,” the couch that “smelled where rotten pears had melted in the cushions,” the tricks coming and going. At the same time, the place is idealized, “abundant as grass the graces touched us” (Repast 148). In one of the poem's absurd moments, like a scene from a slapstick sexual comedy , the speaker writes, “perhaps someone's trick liquored up: stinking with navy stories / until we conked him. rolled him down the steps in a drum.” The poem, in an urban setting, does what many of Powell's later poems attempt for a rural scene, to make visible what would be obscured. Powell ends the poem 93 with the retrospective knowing that these days were numbered: “in the wee light: a wilding song unsettled. a bell for the coming mass” (148). The return to the past is not simple or without consequence. The poem after all ends with that “wilding song,” the bells a forewarning for the countless funerals of those who died of complications from AIDS. The aim of Powell's nostalgia can be read, as Padva describes it: “not necessarily a longing for (devastative) home or hometown, but rather, quest to remember and relive a lost time, glamorous time” (75). Though “glamorous” seems the wrong word here, Powell's poem makes a claim for how nostalgia offers a vision of community: collective, alternative, and most essentially , alive. Part of the project of de&ning and making a claim for community is to put the queer one in contrast to the straight one. A suite of three poems towards the end of Tea – “[my sister-in-law never uttered his name. solving the problem of the open &eld: house sprawl],” “[what happened to “signi&cant” out of bed: abolished in the act of standing. like a 'lap'],” and “[who won't praise green. each minute to caress each minute blade of spring. green slice us open]” – reject heteronormative expectations about family and desire. “[what happened...]” describes how the naming of a same-sex partner as “signi&cant” changes once they leave the bed: “abolished in the act of standing. like a 'lap.'” Language, rather than being &xed, changes with the position of the speaker and his lover. The poem, ends with another metaphor of erasure, “scenes from a wedding of two invisible men: roll after roll of over-developed &lm / all the world's mirrors won't have us. at the cinemascopic margins: the eye must seek us” (41). Even if the “world's mirrors” – the images in books or &lm or television, for example – don't show the men, even if they must be found at the “margins,” the poem becomes a call to attention, a command to “seek us.” The &nal poem of the three, what the poet describes as a song of mayLies, ends in praise: 94 “fatherless and childless: not a who will know us. dazzled afternoon won't we widow ourselves away” The absence of procreation in the poem might be read as part of the anti-social turn in queer theory , what Edelman describes in No Future. One scholar describes Edelman's project as, “a relentless form of negativity in place of the forward looking, reproductive and heteronormative project of hope that animates all too many political projects” (Halberstam 141). But to read negativity or limit in Powell's poetics would be a mistake. The lifecycle of the mayLies, though short-lived, is one of repetition and plurality. “Powell is no antihumanist, no eraser of character and social relations,” writes Burt. “Powell's ambition to gather and speak for a broad array of people does not compete with, but reinforces, his boundary breaking, sexualized pairings of the sacred and the profane: he calls his mouth “a tiny neon lounge,” where characters (“like my lovers”) congregate” (Door Marked” 92). These remembered characters – lovers, friends, family – challenge imposed narratives about queer identity. 15 4. Childhood and Identity I want to end with by thinking through the complicated relationship of nostalgia and identity in Powell's poetics, speci&cally as it relates to childhood and adolescence. For some critics, nostalgia offers a way to create a uni&ed narrative of the various stages of one's life. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi in Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity suggests that nostalgia, in its transformation from “fatal disease” to “instance of self-reLection,” can be “a defense mechanism designed to maintain stable identity by providing continuity among various stages in a person’s life” (9). Nostalgia helps create cohesive narratives apart from the disorder and randomness of a 15 Likewise, Jose Esteban Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, “relationality is not pretty , but the option of simply opting out of it, or describing it as something that has never been available to us, is imaginable only if one can frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger social matrix” (94). 95 life lived forward in time. By contrast, several queer critics refuse the stability of origins (and their narratives) in order to reject a common point of origin for queer identity. Elspeth Probyn's “Suspended Beginnings: Of Childhood and Nostalgia” suggests a form of queer nostalgia that, “re-makes childhood into evidence of the absence of any primary ground in queer politics.” By connecting “nostalgia, genealogy , and the writing of memory” she proposes that “we seek to queer the past in the present” (457). Probyn's essay works against the idea of the childhood as “a kind of ground zero for the edi&ce that is adult life and around which narratives of sexuality get organized” (Bruhm and Huley xiii). In their essay “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History” Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies describe what they see as the false dichotomy between continuity and discontinuity when it comes to the relationship between identity and nostalgia: Our identity is not simply a matter of preserving continuously the selfhood embodied in some earliest germ or seed of consciousness. Rather, we are inclined to de&ne who we are by reference to the least determined of our choices, the characteristically individual ways in which we have responded to our circumstances. As subjects of modernity , the continuity of our identity resides precisely in our most personal discontinuities, in the ways we have altered and created ourselves. If ‘nostalgia’ names the particular emotion or way of thinking that arises from a deeply felt encounter between our personal continuities and discontinuities, then nostalgic emotion might be nothing less than the felt awareness of how identity is entangled with difference. (184) Their &nal claim, that nostalgic emotion might in fact be, “the felt awareness of how identity is entangled with difference,” can be seen in Powell's conception of childhood and adolescence in 96 his most recent collection Useless Landscape, A Guide for Boys. Again, sex and queer desire are enacted within a pastoral topos, one that offers the poet a way to think about the essential nature of nostalgia to both understand and destabilize identity. Andre Furlami, writing of Guy Davenport's &ction, claims that the writer's “ bucolics depends on a recognition of its status as fantasy , made conspicuous by a Launted arti&ce. Such arti&ce allows him to explore proscribed areas of childhood sexuality , but also to con&ne it outside the norms such &ction would challenge” (226). Powell's attitude towards sex and nostalgia contrasts Furlami's reading of Davenport. Furlami writes that in the earliest sexual experiences, “[Davenport] imagines instead an arcadian margin where children are granted an autonomy they are schooled to maintain in a spirit of idealism. From his utopian &ctions emerge various versions of pre-adolescent sexuality: as bucolic interval, as the core human experience, as an idyll the adult must endeavor to recover, as a means of interrogating ideologies, as a stage of vitality primitive to the mature conceptualizations of taboos” (227). The queer nostalgia in Powell's poems of an arcadian childhood reject the idea of the “bucolic interval” and the sense that this stage will lead to “the mature conceptualizations of taboos.” The opposite is true in Powell's Useless Landscape, A Guide for Boys. Powell's nostalgia for the past is not about dividing the foolish past from the wise present or the idealized past from the imperfect present. Instead Powell challenge the notion of identity. The poem “Boonies” begins: Where we could be boys together. This region of want: the campestrial Lat. The adolescents roving across the plat. Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither. 97 Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttes that mammilate the valley right were it needs to bust And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me on the inLorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles; upon the grassland's raf&sh plaits. And he could roll me in coyote brush: I who was banished to the barren could come back into his fold, and I would let him lay be down on the cold, cold ground. (Useless 70) The sexual language of landscape becomes in the poem a kind of arti&ce that both names and obscures the desire at work in the poem. The poem ends with the promise of return: This is not a time to think the trumpet vine is sullen. Rather: the trumpet's bell is but a prelude. It says we are all beautiful at least once. And if you'd watch over me, we can be beautiful again. (Useless 71) To read this poem in isolation though would be to suggest a more idealized past where “we can be beautiful again.” However, within the context of the most recent book, nostalgia for a remembered past allows Powell to see the complications as well as the pleasures. The poet's ironic instructional poems in the section “ A Guide for Boys” sexualize the rituals of adolescent life with schoolboy jokes and puns: from the command of “Donkey Basketball Diaries” – “Don't expect to remain impeccable / in this gymnasium” – to the opening 98 instructions of “ A Guide for Boys” – “The &rst knot doesn't count / You're bound to fuck it up” (Useless 68). In the described relationships, master / apprentice, teacher / pupil, coach / student, Powell's poems reject a vision of the child as innocent or a blank sexual state. They reject too the idea that sex is harmful. Instead, sex and desire can be, in the words of Judith Levine, “a vehicle to self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity , adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness” (225). Powell writes in “Funkytown: Forgotten City of the Plains”: “I gave myself to a lot of men. It was okay. I was okay. & them”; “I was a minor then, my record's sealed”; “Oh the many / many balls a man could juggle then” (Useless 59) The scenes Powell returns to in these poems – marching bands (“ A Little Less Kettledrum, Please”) or high school athletics (“Elements of A Cross- Country Runner”) – af&rm the presence of queer desire within the landscape (and the very sexual awareness that is part of adolescence). The poems don't have speci&c ages, nor do they claim to be autobiographical. Instead, they make a counter claim about the instability of identity. In “Tender Mercies,” the second poem of Useless Landscape, Powell writes, I was a maiden in this versicolor plain. I watched it change. Withstood that change, the in&delities of light, the solar interval, the shift of time, the shift from farm to town. I had a man that pressed me down into the soil. I was that man. I was that town. (6) The identity of the “I” both is and isn't D. A.Powell. The same play of gender and autobiography can be seen in earlier Powell poems such as “[my father and me making dresses: 99 together] and [my father and me in hollywood: fading and rising starlets].” Powell's queer nostalgia does not erase identity but turns autobiography Luid. Nostalgia, speci&cally as it relates to queer identity , can be a way of u nsettling time and destabilizing origins. “The past does not lead to the present, &nding its completion in the uni&ed subject,” writes Linda Anderson in her essay , “ Autobiographical Travesties: The Nostalgic Self in Queer Writing” (72). She argues that “replacing historical fact with nostalgic subjective memory...open[s] up a space where the narrative of gender, race and the family can recirculate, can acquire new and different meanings” (79). In the poem “Ode to Joy” Powell describes adolescent rituals the speaker was once part of, and to which he now returns. Writing of the teens, “eating the potato nuggets / of cupidity” in their Friday night rituals, the procession of their cars “the golden eyes of catatonia of the valley ,” Powell doesn't distinguish between straight or queer desire. This is the place of, “all the shots one young man takes, / of hit and run trade / the hidden features / of men with boogie-woogie on their minds... of horrible missteps with fucked up chums” (Useless 99). The cycles of the past and present come together, a blurring of time where the present tense at the start of the poem slips backwards to another era, the one of the speaker's own youth: Push Push in the Bush is the title of a dance hit, but it's just as easily a country song Out there, in the dark, they have found each other like lightning bugs, despite the pesticides and stay. There is a luminance of all things. Of all things, which are of place. 100 The place where they begin. Therefore, belong. (Useless 100) To see the past in the present allows Powell to assert his own belonging in this place. Difference, between styles of music, dissolves, just as the difference between queer and straight desire dissolves. Powell's aim for Useless Landscape, Or A Guide for Boys, to “naturalize a queer life in a rural landscape,” depends on positioning the self within this landscape of stereotypical teenage desire (Conversation with D.A. Powell, May 8, 2015). What “belongs” is not necessarily the ideal– “despite the pesticide”– and yet this place of beginning is a place to which he can return. Powell's nostalgia offers an awareness of “our remembrances and their ritualized tellings” while refusing to idealize it (Munoz 35). Powell writes at the end of the poem “The Opening of the Cosmos,” a sexually charged poem of “the &rst fugitive act of copulation,” one that again frames sex against a pastoral landscape: Go back and try to snag me while I’m yet unspoilt. The morning's saporous dew, the early strut of the cockerel, the &rst fugitive act of copulation, which, because it is a &rst, feels like a last. You picked it all when you picked me out: what satis&ed you, what couldn't love you back. The endless act of revising, and with that revision. (Useless 56) Revising becomes revision, a new way of seeing, a literal re-vision of the past. Nostalgia, Lawed, incomplete, and arti&cial, offers a way to look back at this moment with an awareness that it is not a static memory but part of a Luid, even contradictory process of self-de&nition. On the one 101 hand, Powell in “Bugcatching at Twilight” claims the “past is a kind of future / leaning against the sporty hood.” (Useless 41) The provocative lean on the “sporty hood” turns the past dangerous, sexual, and inevitable. At the same time he describes that this kind of retrospective stance can't capture the full complexity of singular or collective identity or history , and so radically simpli&es it: “Every Western ends this way: Sunset / Chaps.” There are too many formulaic narratives, too many cliches. And yet. As he writes in the poem “courthouse steps,” tread light upon this pedestal. dream instead of a time before your love dis&gured, a time withstanding even crass, wind-beaten time itself (Useless 61) Rather than avoid these tropes and patterns, these already inscribed, already nostalgic stories, Powell sees them as part of the process of engaging the past, a way of “withstanding... time itself.” 102 CONCLUSION “Pretty much every state west of the Rockies has been facing a water shortage of one kind or another in recent years,” begins the 2015 article “California’s Drought Is Part of a Much Bigger Water Crisis. Here’s What You Need to Know” (1). The article describes the ongoing reckoning with the “new normal,” the severe economic, social, and environmental consequences of limited water resources in the American West. “In addition to the economic cost, the drought has subtle and not-so-subtle effects on Lora and fauna throughout the region. This current drought may be contributing to the spread of the West Nile virus, and it's threatening populations of geese, ducks and Joshua trees” (2). This most recent draught, part of a larger pattern of crisis and response, has prompted renewed attempts by government and nonpro&t organizations to change in human behavior – one need only think of the 'fade to gold for the summer' campaign to encourage people to give up the idea of a idyllic patch of green lawn. “That Californians – and the nation, for that matter – have abused the land and waterscapes and failed to develop a coherent water policy hardly seems surprising,” writes Norris Hundley in The Great Thirst, “for a people with centuries-old exploitative tradition and with a (perhaps illogical) desire to accommodate growth with environmental restoration and at least some wilderness preservation” (421). The fraught relationship between natural resources and human activity in the West is often framed in narratives of loss, corruption, and damage. 16 16 For writing on water and the West, see also Worster, Donald, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity , and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Robert Lloyd Kelley , Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy , and the Sacramento Valley , 1850-1986 (Berkeley: U of California, 1989); Marc Reisner,Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York.: Viking, 1986); William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The ConLict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley: U of 103 The longing to reconcile the conLicting desire between protection or preservation on the one hand, and exploitation or use on the other, is a continual theme in literature of and about the West. This struggle, in its complexity and uncertain (or impossible) resolution, can lead to nostalgia for the 'simpler' past. The current California water crisis can present a seductive longing for an earlier time – real or imagined – in which this natural resource was available and there were no costs for development. Hundley's account, for example, offers contrasting descriptions of native peoples (“a desire to live in symbiosis with nature”) and early Spanish and Mexican settlements (“emphasized the preeminence of community rights, the inequity of monopoly , and the need to measure all actions by the extent to which they promoted bien procumunal – the common good”) with the later exploitation of people and resources that, by his account, started during the gold rush. He argues that a shift occurred in the 19 th Century to “a new kind of social imperialist whose goal was to acquire the water of others and grow at their expense, a goal that catapulted California into a modern colossus while also producing monumental conLicts and social costs” (xiv). The view of the past as one of environmental harmony (or at least less harm) in contrast to the more recent history of “monumental conLicts and social costs” might seem naïve or false. This longing for the 'old days' at &rst seems problematic, a view of that past that ignores a long historical legacy of fraught of water rights, violence, and oppression, in particular with regards to indigenous groups and workers. As Linda Hutcheon in her essay “Irony , Nostalgia, and the Postmodern” points out, “But, the nostalgia for an idealized community in the past has been articulated by the ecology movement as often as by fascism, by what Jean Baudrillard calls 'melancholy for societies without power.'” However, the violent and troubled California, 1982). 104 history of imperial conquest isn't erased in his account of water diversion and use by settlers to the region. This return to the past is not, as some critics would suggest, problematic in and of itself. Rather, the longing for an alternative kind of ecological activity or thinking can be a part of a critical and productive process of nostalgia. The questions I want to wrestle with at the end of this dissertation, concerns that emerge from the three previous chapters, consider what nostalgia can offer to a conversation about ecopoetics, and vice versa. 17 How can a nostalgic turning to the past illuminate alternative ecological relationships in both the present and future? These are, of course, very broad questions. My aim here is more suggestive than comprehensive. I'm interested in exploring how the previous chapters on poetry and nostalgia might be framed within a new &eld of inquiry. The tension in eco-critical writing and nostalgia is reLective of the larger conversation about nostalgia and poetics. Nostalgia for a simpler time of harmony with the natural world or consequence-free actions can be an illusory , ahistorical view of the past, what one critic “constant elegy for a lost unalienated state” (Morton 23). Even the very idea of nostalgia can be problematic in its anthropocentric stance. Contrary to that position is an argument that, “nostalgic appeals to what we have lost can be one of the most potent rhetorical tools for green politics” (Davies 265). In his essay “Sustainable Nostalgia,” Jeremy Davies suggests that nostalgia is way of looking towards the future. He writes, “The dream of sustainability...is a nostalgia for the future. Its fundamental desire is precisely that which the nostalgic yearns for: a stable home, 17 The editor of the journal ecopoetics Jonathan Skinner describes ecopoetics this way: “Eco” here signals—no more, no less—the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth. “Poetics” is used as poesis or making, not necessarily to emphasize the critical over the creative act (nor vice versa). Thus: ecopoetics, a house making” (5). His etymological account of ecopoetics suggests its Luidity and broad scope. Essential to almost every account is an insistence that ecopoetics is not simply nature writing. Instead, it explores the complex and dynamic connections between environmental and human activity in which “innovative practices and ecological thinking/being/feeling combine to produce a site of resistance, of politics, of political resistance” (Arigo 1). 105 free from the losses of time. Sustainability de&nes the present time and present way of life as a satisfactory home – satisfactory ethically , emotionally , culturally and politically – by positing it as the place to which the future will always recur” (264). Thorough an awareness to what has been lost by human interventions, nostalgia points to the need for social change. As John Su claims in Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel: “Thus, if nostalgia does not assist directly in imagining a better future, it enables a more precise sense of how previous systems of social relations failed to address genuine human needs” (175). “This is the necessary precondition,” he argues, “for future actions” (175). A similar idea can be found in Kate Soper's “Passing Glories and Romantic Revivals: Avant-garde Nostalgia,” an essay on the ongoing link between Romanticism and what she describes as “avant-garde nostalgia,” an awareness of how reLections of the past in response to the consumerism of the present can “stimulate desire for a future that will be at once less environmentally destructive and more sensually gratifying” (24). For these critics, nostalgia’s engagement with ecological and environmental concerns offers readers an alternative future, or at least another way to imagine one. To see nostalgia and eco-poetics in productive conversation, I'll consider how several poems in Brenda Hillman's sixth collection Cascadia make implicit claims for the possibilities of an ecopoetic nostalgia. “The Shirley Poem” by Brenda Hillman, a long poem that borrows quotations from The Shirley Letters, Being Letters Written in 1851-1852 from the California Mines by “Dame Shirley” (Louise A.K.S. Clappe), braids together the lives of the historical &gure and the &rst-person speaker in the present. The poem, by engaging with history and landscape, gives voice to underrepresented and untold narratives and ecologies of the past. The poem is not an explicitly environmental poem nor does it depend on nostalgia for a personal past. However, as 106 Hillman has said, “One of the things ecopoetics tries to do is recon&gure the poem so as to include some of the endangered thought species” (“Imagining Ecopoetics” 762). Here is Section VII of “The Shirley Poem”: VII. Nobody works a claim alone. In 1851 law arrives; government hasn't yet been invented. Forty feet around a claim. This need to be unique has mostly made us miserable.... In mining operations, dirt is moved constantly by spadesmen through a series of descending troughs and sieves of a three-tiered apparatus only to end in what's called a “riddle.” Hard not to think self-pity is a descent. Usually we hear the dead preform but they have to remain half-here active in dirt's community. A replica of a mining machine 107 has been made into a planter. Brilliant girly Shirley nearly forgotten now – The woman at the campground market knows about Shirley's description of the muletrain coming down the canyon with supplies. The gay ringing of bells reminds her of salty longed-for weddings. I married all the women in books. (42) The poem's nostalgia longs for an alternative construction of history and landscape. The double reading of “claim” in the &rst line, both the claim of the mining plot and the claim of the poet to engage the past, can be read into the &nal lines of the &rst stanza as well: “This need to be unique / has mostly made us miserable.” The poet suggests the necessity of cooperation, a rejection of individuality as a given virtue. The second stanza describes the process of dirt as it is moved to &nd the valuable material hidden below the surface. The process of discovery – a descent to that provocatively named “riddle” – is one that depends on the cooperation of others, those plural “spadesmen” moving the earth “constantly.” In the next stanza, that same emphasis on community becomes explicit in the dead being “active in dirt's community.” This is not a place of solitary pursuits or engagements. The shift to the present and the woman at the “campground market” is in many ways the most typically nostalgic moment in the poem. The 108 letters are evoked and shared in the present: “The gay ringing of bells / reminds her of salty longed-for weddings.” The &nal line – “I married all the women in books” – is another moment that suggests collective understanding. In this case, the speaker “married” not only the life of “brilliant girly Shirley” but other narratives and voices of the past. To push the metaphor of panning, the act of reading or writing, like the “series of descending troughs and sieves,” can be about passing the past through the 'riddle' of the present. Read through the lens of nostalgia, Hillman suggests alternative ways of thinking about the relationship of humans to their environment. In image, diction, and narrative, Hillman rewrites the past in the present from a radical, collective stance. In her essay “On Song, Lyric, and Strings,” Hillman's suggests that in contrast to the “normal world” of “environmental harm...it is the poet's job not to sing normal, comforting ditties. [Poetry's] mind is a counterculture” (“Imagining Ecopoetics” 760-1). This section of the poem, indeed the whole poem, offers an alternative stance towards gender and history , one in which we might “hear” and “half-here” the past. As I've suggested in previous chapters, nostalgia is not an escape from reality but a way to engage it, albeit by indirection. In Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia Alastair Bonnett claims, “We are used to imagining nostalgic longing as akin to reverie, a moment of dropping response. But it also is a moment of creativity , of discord and danger” (10). The circuitous access that nostalgia offers to history , to identity , or to environmental consciousness, is not its limit but the source of its possibility , its “creativity.” The poem in its interrogation of authenticity engages one of the central questions of nostalgia. The nostalgic longing for the past, as I described in depth in the chapter on Jarrell, negotiates between the desire for authenticity and the awareness of the mediation at the heart of 109 that longing. In Hillman's poem the “replica of a mining machine,” an image of the past reconstructed in the present has been repurposed. The machine is a simulacra, an object doubly separated from its original purpose. There is the irony too that the planter is a place where something live might grow, a shift from destruction and excavation of the mining machine, from something inorganic and man-made to something organic and natural. But what might at &rst read as natural, the plant in that planter, is dependent on human activity , yet another moment of the human attempt to control, manage, or limit the natural world. The poem participates in the critical conversations about the nature and scope of Western literature. In their introduction to True West: Authenticity and the American West (2004) William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis write, “The most continuous story of the West, then, is neither the (Old) clash of civilization and savagery nor the (New) legacy of conquest, but competing claims of cultural authenticity , even belonging—in the sense both of an original “at home-ness” and of possession” (2). The complexity of Hillman's image works to challenge assumptions about what is natural, what is authentic, and how commodities might be reimagined. The tension in Hillman's poetics between what belongs and what is erased or lost – “Brilliant girly Shirley nearly forgotten now” – is in many ways the often unresolvable tension at stake in a critical nostalgia. Nostalgia's engagement of poetic form and content, as I've suggested throughout, can be seen too in Hillman's work. In “Hydraulic Mining Survey” from Cascadia the poet describes how 19 th Century mining practices, “drained whole stream beds, washed half mountains to pay for the Civil War.” The poem, half of which is printed sideways across the page, describes the destructive human activity of mining: “Whole cliffsides moved in / salmon paths when they met their sister, poor river. Poor forever having to / act like this. In a hundred / years, people were 110 still using Visa to / pay off MasterCard” (18). Ruinous action and ruinous thinking are not separate, the poem suggests in its juxtaposition of mountaintop mining with cycles of debt. This is a moment that seems to enact how, in Jennifer Ladino's words, “a nostalgic relationship to a particular landscape can propel a character, an author, or a reader into an insightful critique of present-day concerns, such as poor working conditions, racist ideologies, toxic environments, or the downsides of a postnatural consumer culture” (10). The “poor river” and the “poor forever” of these actions are seen from the vantage of a troubled present – a nostalgia for what has been altered by human violence. The typography of “Hydraulic Mining Survey” forces the reader to engage the book as an object, literally turning it on its side to read the middle section which is printed in a smaller font than the rest of the poem. To wrestle with the materiality of the very book – turning, shifting, squinting – is to enact the imposition of human activity on the landscape described in the poem. “Hillman experiments with thinking and writing in alien and inhuman time scales,” writes Laurel Peacock of Hillman's “ecopoetics of affect,” “in order to de-naturalise our relation to the land. Naturalised ideologies involving manifest destiny and the California dream can tend to overlay the landscape of California; “geological syntax” exposes the faults in this kind of thinking” (89). Reader, the form of the poem suggests, you are part of this same continuity of activity , this same violence of human movement; you are not exempt. “Hydraulic Mining Survey” and “The Shirley Poem,” even as they alter a reader's relationship to time – geologic, human – insist on the power of a locally informed imagination. “ Artists say general / Mother of god be speci&c,” the speaker claims at the end of “Patterns of Paint in Certain Small Missions,” one of the 'mission poems' in Cascadia, each of which ends with a speci&c mission, in this case San Rafael Archangel 1817 (61). These poems, historically informed 111 and locally situated, illustrate Hillman's engagement with the overlooked objects and narratives of the past. The poet makes a claim for rethinking the present day human interventions in the landscape of California. The possibilities of Hillman's ecopoetic nostalgia to create environmental awareness and change can be, in part, located in her commitment to a regional landscape and the speci&c issues and history of the place. As Hillman writes in “Hydrology of California: An Ecopoetical Alphabet,” part of her collection Practical Water, “Mulholland / stole her water/ L.A. poets knew it power rhymes w/shower / poor Mojave River & Earth will know the source.” (85). Poetic knowledge can precede and challenge typical power structures and narratives through language, that ability to rhyme “power” with “shower.” Hillman's poetics enact what she describes as the “unresolved conversation between language and nature” (“Interview with Brenda Hillman”). In another interview, asked if one can “have a poetics of place without a &xation on the local?, the poet responded: There are interesting problems attached to a word like “locale”—but the main problem for the planet is not that humans will know their locale too much so much as that they will not know it enough. Most people don't know where their water comes from, or the true cost of their food. Imagination, breadth of vision, and speci&c knowledge of a place are not incompatible—they must go together. (“Imagining Ecopoetics” 764) The necessities of “imagination, breadth of vision, and speci&c knowledge” point to the unique ability of poets to engage environmental and ecological questions. At the end of Stegner's “Myth, History , and the American West,” the essay which started the dissertation, he writes, 112 I share the nostalgia that I have attributed to most writers of the West. I share their frequent distaste for the ugli&ed and over-engineered and small-spirited civilization that threatens to turn us into one gigantic anthill. But I do not think we can forget the one or turn away from the other. In the old days, in blizzardy weather, we used to tie a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make it from shelter to responsibility and back again. With personal, family , and cultural chores to do, I think we had better rig up such a line between past and present. If we do, the term 'western literature' will be enlarged beyond its ordinary limitations, and its accomplishments not so easily overlooked (79). Stegner's image of that rigged line between “past and present,” though powerful, is incomplete when it comes to thinking about the possibilities of nostalgia. That line, from “shelter to responsibility ,” must also be rigged towards the future. Framed within this conversation about ecopoetics and nostalgia, that means considering how a longing for the past can create change and possibility in the present and beyond. It means rethinking the environmental crisis we've created. Though, as Hillmans suggests, perhaps even that idea of “crisis” or “emergency” is inadequate in conversations about ecology and the environment as it evokes the idea of a singular event that might be “&xed”: Surely , we can start with an ecological sensibility that doesn't consider the human as somehow the keeper or steward of something that was given to us, that we have ruined through one patch of bad activity , that we have to manage and &x. It's about noticing our relationships at many levels—the level of economic and linguistic assumptions we create. One job of poetry is to make thinking subtler, more textured, and more nuanced. (“Imagining Ecopoetics” 756) 113 What nostalgia makes possible is that nuanced thinking about our selves and the spaces we inhabit. Hillman's poetics reimagine that rigged line as an ongoing negotiation between the past, present and future, between language and landscape, between imagination and reality , between the world as it is and the world as it might be. 114 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, R. "Nostalgia, Coming Home, and the End of the Poem: On Reading William Wordsworth's Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Memory Studies, 3, 2010: 204-14. Archambeau, Robert. “Caging the Demon: James McMichael and the Poetics of Restraint” Chicago Review, Vol. 51, No. 3, Autumn 2005, pp. 141-154. Arigo, Christopher. “Notes Toward an Ecopoetics: Revising the Postmodern Sublime and Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs” How2 Journal. Vol 3. No 2 (Summer, 2008). 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Here's What You Need to Know.” ProPublica, 25 June 2015. 121 KNOTS 122 TABLE OF CONTENTS ONE A Letter in My Head 126 Boy in the Ocean 127 Lighthouse 128 Rooms Inside Rooms 129 An Open Field 130 Two Girls 131 Fragment, A Body Without 132 Nothing Has A Shadow 133 To see stars in daylight 134 Some Days 135 And thinking pine 136 Sleep of Apples 137 Hunger – was a way 138 TWO Tributaries 142 Flood 143 Property Lines 144 Wonder is a thing to be known... 145 Some Drugs 146 Little Fire 147 House I Keep 148 Neighbor 149 Little Key 150 Knots Tied 151 Western Land 152 The Way A Man 153 Judd’s Boxes 154 Each man, a calling 155 Zoetrope 156 THREE Safe Harbor 161 Catastrophe is only sweet... 162 Everything Has a Shadow 163 Archipelago 164 All Awake 165 Hockney’s Pools 166 The Clouds 167 The Sky Without Mark 168 123 Muybridge’s Clouds 169 Audubon’s Birds 171 A Little Jar 172 Passage 173 124 ONE 125 A L ETTER IN MY HEAD I walk uptown with a letter in my head, past the piers and the languishing seals, the spiral of a spring day: landmark, harbor, inlet and bay, the ocean into more ocean, the gray of a gray sky. Dear God. Dear Absentee Landlord Who Collects the Checks. Dear Barbershop Glass and Barbicide Blue. Dear Recession and War and Empire I’ve Agreed To. Dear Sky , Line, and the Heaven on Earth Building. Dear God. Dear Little City of My Lungs. Dear you; – here is the arrival, that footclip delay to say what’s been there, pressing blue airmail skin: razor, hinge, dust swept into day , its low cloud rising and then gone. I walk. I want. I need. I’m here, walking until the letter is that mysterious bird of thought, yellow canary neither kept nor free, swinging on its perch with the cage door open. Imagined but not written, written but not sent, sent but unarrived, arrived but unopened, opened but unread, read but misunderstood, and then I’m writing another letter and another after that. Dear God, and I go no farther. 126 BOY IN THE OCEAN Almost is the shortest version of this story . That doesn’t say how at that moment, handed over from the lifeguard to my father, I didn’t feel gratitude. Saved from the riptide pulling me toward open water, I knew just shame. I am less than the water, foolish and careless. I am unable to save myself from the tide’s strong motion. Shame too is a gravitational system, a bloodline, a godhead, a grammar, a vowel in the alphabet of my body . I write this moment again and again. The boy in the ocean sees a jelly&sh and follows it as far as his arms will take him, past blue light buoys. The boy learns to swim with the water, and is rescued by himself. He is rescued and runs back into the surf, never afraid again to be carried away by force. The boy returns grateful to be alive. Almost, almost. He shouts to the rocks and they call back. He follows the current below the current. He loves its strength. The boy in the ocean drinks enough saltwater to become a wave. 127 L IGHTHOUSE I love your refusal to talk too long about the hawks kiting above us. We’ve got serious business here. On the foot-worn path green spikes of coastal greenery neither of us can name. We have a vocabulary for so much of the world – headlands, missile battery , decommission, coastline – but we can’t get to the given name of those jagged fronds. Call them hope. Or rage. Call them motherless. Call them loss. We look down the cliff face. Water breaks white over the rocks. You say , some believe that what’s lost to us can be brought back by us, to us, with our remembering. Memory made Lesh. If there is a space within us, I don’t know if I want to seal it. I’ve come to trust this longing, how it hawks – noun and verb, circle and call – from within me. What lighthouse would & ll the saw-tooth space with its illumination? At the trail’s end, families take photos of each other climbing on the old bunkers where soldiers smoked cigarettes and told stories and watched for submarines approaching the city. All gone. The empty silos &ll with rain. Look, the grass is growing inside the fort’s crumbling quarters. Look, the rusting iron doors open to sky . Beer bottles smashed in the corners, walls brightly spray-painted. Says one girl to her father – I hate the graf6ti; yellow namesakes and pink designs cover concrete walls with their curving versions of Me and I and We, insisting on this day – this day , like a ripe apple twisted from its branch, quartered and eaten in the orchard’s shade – this day , and no other. 128 ROOMS INSIDE ROOMS You. The waves belly up to sand. No You. The ducks dive. You. City kids. They kick a star&sh between them. Bravado, wrote a friend, is the work of the gods. We’re &ckle as coastlines. A woman with gray hair and binoculars walks over and picks up the sea star – she knows about these things – her &ngers &t neatly in the space between the animal’s body and arms. She shows them what they couldn’t know by looking at the topside, its curve and spike, defense and shimmer: nothing is alive inside. Y ou can hold it if you want. Hollow as wind off the bay . Empty vessel, empty room. Cavafy: rooms inside rooms, left vacant by bodies and left full by time: three wicker chairs, two yellow vases, the mirrored wardrobe, the lover’s bed, and the afternoon light slipping from wall to wall to wall – all gone, all here. Past the waves, more waves. The woman leaves the kids to argue over their treasure: take it home or leave it. He holds the sea to his ear. An arriving surf, a bird’s wanting call, a world beyond this one. How lush this absence, how full is this room. Cavafy: They must still be around somewhere, these old things. How we try to leave them. How they call us back: You. You. You. 129 AN OPEN FIELD By which she means, I’m the horse. In want of wildness, possibility , permission to run until the body is the body most fully yours. A refrain fuses the day , bone to bone, secret to secret, the poem with horses roaming, coincidence as con&rmation: the privacy of them had a river in it... had a river in it, had a forest, a glade, a blueberry bramble, had a tractor rusting into ground, had a small mountain range of skin, a lake where deer gossip before dawn, two Bays or Paints leaning over a trough, paper whites and dogwood ears skim the meniscus, a fragile surface – meniscus in Greek: crescent of the moon a symbol of coming and going, waiting to be broke open or whole – before drinking glass, before galloping beyond grasslands or meandering in lilac. They come to pines, trees close as lovers. A man’s land split: ending or beginning, halved or doubled. The river in them closes that open &eld, divides them into each other. An act, I hope, of making more with less. 130 TWO GIRLS A hare’s ribcage, a mule deer’s dogleg, the gully of a man’s hipbone: this matter of Lesh, named or undone. One kind of desire praises God. Another kind of desire understands Him. I know little of the body . Little too how to live in gentle ways. I’m no Francis. Animals scatter at my voice; hawks, bees, everything with wing and muscle. I remember the two girls who split a Misty in the woods behind school, coughing their way through pleasure. Loved, they said, its hungry breath. This secret spot everyone knew and went together to make out, underbrush of crushed cans and pine needles, and above, in the green canopy, smoke or a girl’s lavender perfume, weightless. Holding out my hands, hungry as the ribs of a rowboat, I praise the shores of my own disappointment. I never touched either of them. I sometimes forget the pure pleasure of being wrong. 131 FRAGMENT, A BODY WITHOUT The rib bone we found in the woods belonged to a deer or a bear or a man. Sun- bleached as an upstate acre, its weight less than we would’ve guessed. We carried it out and beside a bowl of oranges it lived on the kitchen table for months; apples replaced oranges, then lemons, then mangos. No blood or fur ever took to bone. Nothing claimed it. A shard like a verb of Greek on papyrus – wants – passed by luck or pride through history , this action without body: a man’s heroic name, a woman left waiting at the docks, a boy running through city streets calling for coins; or none of these. This morning, at the same table where we sat the week before, a friend and I talk about memorizing. I have no talent I say, I’m all pieces, scattered and incomplete. He’s been practicing; he recites the end of Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge,” the solider boy dead and buried: His homely Northern breast and brain Grow to some Southern tree, And strange-eyed constellation reign His stars eternally. Poor Hodge, transformed into earth then root then light, I’ve made you into fragment, a body without its drum, and the sky is full of stars, untouched, unnamed. 132 NOTHING HAS A SHADOW Openness. But that’s what everyone says, driving too fast over L atlands, a landscape that heaps its horizons into more of the same like I’m afraid I haven’t answered the letters you’ve sent or I haven’t loved you well enough to stay. No shadow in certain light, nothing still. One sits down inside to remember a piece of the sky , orange doublewides, and low stone cordilleras. One sits long enough to recall bird eat bird clouds, the scalped formation of rocks, yellow on black on blue, a bruise of highway and its rusticated trucks driving out of town for good. Some say the eye &lls in what’s missing. Some say remember the earth is round. A dog snores in the backseat. A man double-checks a map. In town, in a white room in a white building a woman catalogs an artist’s lifetime of papers, box after box. In archival work a person’s life is described in linear feet, boxes stacked Loor to ceiling: a tower, a minaret, a volcano, a choir, measuring upright what stretches far into the distance, and the distance beyond that. 133 TO SEE STARS IN DA YLIGHT Marry a man with strong hands and move to the desert. Marry a woman with good teeth and buy a house in the woods. Tie a string of lariats from house to sky. Each knot a pearl, a tender, a prayer. Hand over hand like trains rustling the horizon, &nd your way from shelter to responsibility. And back again. And if the stars only appear at night, take comfort in the swagger and sweetness of &elds hatching scheme after scheme. Confess, confess! 134 SOME DAYS I’m here to remember the body’s grace. To pick up a man. Take him home. Tear his clothes off with my teeth. But if you ask I’d lie: I’m here for the light. Maybe something about tall windows, Lorescent green counters, eager dogs fetching in the nearby park that pulls them here, lovely and hip as knives. They order cappuccinos to go. They forget their easy charm. At the register a blind woman asks for the menu to be read aloud, another story without arc or end. Some days I’m a wolf. Other days I’m just a wolf. 135 AND THINKING PINE I drove all night past Arkansas woods. No night without its needle – compass, pine, road and line; invisible arrows of invisible crows nip above the hills. A gold cross in a farmer’s &eld three stories high is quarrelsome against the raise. A black dog of chance lopes through open &elds. Boys race in August heat. This is my little sea and I am its captain, its cook and its crew. I’m the foolish conscript in the galley peeling ten thousand potatoes. I’m drunk with power at the helm. Luck and will, my North stars. I row myself through darkness, an oarsman on an ancient doomed ship. Smash on the shore or tie off at the port of a hundred open bars. I drove all night to tell you I drove all night. Those hours of passing pine and thinking pine. Passing sky and thinking sky. All night so I can’t, not ever, go back. 136 SLEEP OF APPLES In the orchards of another county the afternoon rains have stopped. The aftermath of falling is sleep. Apples dream of branches like lamps dream of hands no way of getting back to the source, to what &lled them, made them bright, fragrant, whole. In another city , my springtime continues. Cherry tree blossoms layer reLecting pools like Sweet-n-Lows stolen and Loating at the bottom of my great aunt’s purse. Imagine a woman restocking empty sugar caddies her hands tired from all the small, nameless thefts. Imagine empty cherry trees re&lled– &rst light, then wind, then shadow. 137 HUNGER – WAS A WA Y 1. WE BREAK into our neighbor’s swimming pool. We sink and sink and sink. Cutting orange tulips with kitchen shears, stem from stem, the water clouds in their new throats, a whitish blur; a blindness. We swim naked and aren’t afraid, no none of us are afraid, not light or depth, we let the shadow of our breath become the stone of our breath. 138 2. A GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S passport, lost then found, then lost. Tailor, handwritten in black ink below the photo, a man with a round face who looks nothing like the men in your family, looks quiet, almost you’d say sad. His two hands, out of the frame, they knew what needles to thread, they knew how to cross-stitch, fabrics by their weight; they knew how to bind and buttonhole and slip and knot. They knew your great-grandmother’s body. I copy from one book to another. Hunger – was a way / Of Persons outside Windows – / The Entering – takes away. I rewrite the words in my hand. I try to rewrite my hands. 139 3. A STOR Y: once in the Russian village during the famine everyone’s teeth turned into the teeth of elks. They &lled their stomachs with leaves and grubs and branches and gnawed white pines to sawdust. A clear cutting. An emptying. Some nights they boiled cricket bones into soup and tipped the clay bowls to their mouths. If hunger feels like a mistake it is not the mistake of calling your wife the wrong name or leaving your umbrella at home, not the mistake of standing on line and forgetting what it is you’re waiting for but a deeply human error; a rage. 140 TWO 141 TRIBUTARIES, OR THE LOS ANGELES RIVER After Loods, after Little Lazaruses of rain rise and speak, after snake and snarl, after houses break from frames and streets turn to lakes of silt and shit and sorry , we wise up. We pour a riverbed of concrete, a shape into steadiness, a cut into time, as if the alchemy of progress is stronger than the habits of remembering: a river touched our attics and waterlines marked our knees; our uncle waded into the rise to save a woman’s life; a goat Loated legs up under the rush; the current took our doors, our dogs, our sidewalks, we found high ground, then higher, then higher. We settle for everyday tributaries of light coming over the mountains, mountains where our deer graze and berries ripen and pines unwind their winter shelters. Small streams of sun submerge each morning room like the breath of those deer on our neck or velvet horns of newness nuzzling our bellies. This is the desire we try to trust. If there’s a river below the stone let the earth keep it. We sleep above the tides. We dream its torrents, its wild overLow , its refusal of bank and sound and limit. We wake up in love. 142 FLOOD How to measure a landscape from within its grid? The world is accordion and unfair. Our houses grow smaller in winter and expand in summer, joints stretched until they sigh and settle; then tighten, wrenched down by invisible tourniquets of cold. My father too grows smaller every year, just as his father did and I will. Bones like lost hours. Scrolls of instruction wrapped too tight to read. In the old world a man measured the earth by his body , which was helpful for knowing how much space was his and how much belonged to God. A cubit for example was the distance from palm to elbow . Arm by arm, a man might know how big a rowboat he’d need in a Lood. The craft grows smaller and smaller each season until it holds no passengers, his palms closed into a ship. 143 PROPER TY L INES Things steal splendor. Are we not those things? Lack to take to lack. A man in glass is a &sh. A woman in glass is a &sh. They swim inelegantly in the panes of my neighbor’s white living rooms. All the secret ways of watching come down to this – I’m not sorry. For the in&delities I practice simply and assuredly: attention to the wrong angers, visions of boys in their blond routes of desire, shoes unlaced as if they might trip at any moment and fall to earth. What quivers of golden arrows they keep locked away! Y esterday , in broad daylight you jumped the fence to &ll the blue bowl on our windowsill with lemons. The woman carrying groceries called out to you: Do you know the woman that owns the tree? No.You should ask for permission before taking them. Look, there are lots of them on the tree. Some are rotting. What you’re doing is stealing. She shifts the brown shopping bag to her other arm. You &ll the basket of your shirt with more than we can use. They &ll the kitchen with their bright heat. They can’t speak and we feed them nothing. 144 WONDER IS A THING TO BE KNOWN IN HIGH DARK SKY We stand in an alfalfa &eld to watch a meteor shower. Stars fall from the sky and no one is worried. “Not again for a hundred years,” someone says of the close enough to hear constellations, the shudder of a planet as it rises above the mountains, the skin-burn of streaking earthgrazers, and the next time these stars tether back to view , as if tied to a great leather string, we’ll all be dead. And not for any human price, any promise, any praise will we see again that blush of galaxy, that vapor ablaze on air, that lightness. We look up, drink longnecks, arc our bodies like wonder is a thing to be known in high dark sky. I imagine a grandfather clock falling a building, shattering on the sidewalk: wood, glass, metal, coil, spring. I lay down on the wet ground. I think of the miracle of blood contained by skin and of being a kid sent out to buy milk, distracted and errant in the aisles of the supermarket and returning home empty handed. To stand at the center of so much and so little: a man in the world. Some nights I wake from fever sleep. I’m in the wrong room, or the wrong body , or both. If there’s a city beyond these walls I don’t live there. 145 SOME DRUGS To the kingdom of being young and small like crawling under the house again, warm dirt, press of humid air, between light and the hundred thousand things of breathing, you follow him. A blue nickel pill in his palm. Silver L ecked like Formica. Here and gone. All night you lie in the backyard, hours stop being hours, clocks misremember being waves, and your body is a river &ghting its own current. Too much, but by now , high as a spring Lood you can’t walk away. You can’t step away from the night, triptych of sky and ground and self. No earthly grammar holds you -- not the hammer your father gave you not the radio of your mother’s voice not lupine across the Cascades not your &st breaking Kevin Fishbine’s nose in the switch-grass &elds behind the houses not your hands raising the sail for the &rst time the small boat swallowed by the blue difference not your body leaping from the iron bridge to the summer high water half clothed in hand-me-down cutoffs your friends rapt and the slow quickness of falling. 146 L ITTLE FIRE Little rambunctious life, not the shh of snow melting but the ahh of boys running across the lake a craze of ice shimmering beneath their feet and depths unavailable in the hurried speed of just getting there – this is what I want from you on days of long walks: the snow falls and sparrows watch other sparrows, their bones are hollow hiding places, their eyes cold caves of shadow, and of their shape in Light I think tongue, arrow, I think a way to hear the stitched seem whole. I hurry home. I want to get undressed and break open the shiver of my chill. Little &re let me in. 147 HOUSE I KEEP In this borrowed house I keep my doors unlocked. A day in the middle of days where if not for worry I’d be alone. I’m cold as vodka. I dress myself back to warmth. Two dogs curl asleep downstairs. One gets up to align an invisible orbit then falls, graceless thud against hardwood. O marriage of longing to action! Of impulse to attention! Of desire to desire! Us circling animals in the circling world. After dark, the snow restarts. Curdled milk. Spring sheep shear. A breaking apart. Soil under ice untilled until spring and small animals leave no trace above snow. A refusal to say anything they don’t mean. Against anything temporary. 148 NEIGHBOR Goes the gossip – before he could &nish their dream, two stories, bay windows, a granite island in the chef ’s kitchen, his wife died. Building stopped. He moved back to town. Disappeared. In the un&nished window I see how they might’ve stood with their backs to the &re looking out to discs of ice repeat across the cove, her hand on the hard chip of vertebrae above his belt, and across their line chokeberries clench like a child’s &st, or a suitor’s apology bouquet. They keep watch: small red eyes hold color all winter. Everyday proof of strength and poison. Take me, don’t take me. Love me, love me not. I make a list to carry, carry it so it’ll be done, done so I can sleep in the order of ful&lled desire. Eggs & milk. Snow tires. Sharpen the chain. I drive into town, past the house; snow collects around the foundation and a little crooked knife of a stream, a cold light, a bare tree I can’t name at his property’s unkempt edges, and whatever in me that might stop is undone by what keeps going. 149 L ITTLE KEY Hopes are shy birds Lying at a great distance, seldom reached by the best of guns, Audubon wrote in his journal thinking not of the hawk or the wren but of course the sparrow. An animal throat untwists the shadow of your name. Song replying to song replying to song. You stand in a clearing beside a frozen lake. Here, years ago, you found a whale’s collarbone washed clean to shore, lightened by hard weather, ounce less ounce, its castle walls cracked and caved and consider this a warning we’re free to ignore about ravishing possession or bodies in time. Think of lemons asleep on a windowsill; think the isthmus of a man’s collarbone. Hope, we say , and mean not bird but his call, echoing hill to tide, the rattle, the relay , the soul’s ready radio. How many calls to count. You could count and never stop. You could try. 150 KNOTS TIED To hold what needs holding: the keep me safe, the don’t rush, don’t stray , a knot for a lover and a knot for brothers, for sheep legs and goat horns, a knot for weather above the ridges, black clouds lashed to the rusted hitch of a rusted out pickup. I think of the man who asked to be tied to the mast. He wants to be the belly button of that boat, its only ear and brightest eye. A coin &xed at the spar. He begs to hear angels, to know what calls from shore, to die, to return. A sea rolls into sea. Knots tied, knots undone. The ship keelhauls a new kind of sorrow. The sound he can’t explain: this but not this, not the shape of an apple but the pit of a peach, the feeling of falling without the ground. But what of the crew? What wonders did they imagine as they waited for the moment to pass? Sparrows swarming above stockyards. Rain against tin roofs. A father’s voice calling us in from the cold. 151 WESTERN L AND A man rides into town. And stays. Learns the language, the manners: put a napkin inside your shirt collar, mutter evening when walking after dark. The train schedule, bell and bleat, hurry and black trundle, the best place to drink with strangers, and where a hangover can be bargained down into tired. He learns that particular gloss of western sky on western land – shadows of cattle like slow circling L ies, yellow grass in yellow light, stillness. His tongue in the wind and he thinks he tastes the laws of night and honey . Mice huddle behind the hot-water heater and he knows too what branches the songbirds favor in the scrub bush. He doesn’t ask why the STOP signs are missing from intersections or who lives in the trailer with the Lorescent crèche. Then, because he is foolish, he looks up the word solitude and is offered solitude of a lighthouse keeper. I am, he knows, no keep. No light, no eye, no safety. Better to be miles from any ocean, any tide, any shore. Better to let passing ships sink. A man rides out of town. He imagines 6ve-hundred miles from every face familiar as the moon. Not the leaving of children or saints, not early Tuesday or lists crossed by purpose. Not so long, goodbye. He rides until the hills Latten into knocked down cubicles, a kind of unfolded horizon that answers every question with silence. But that’s not exactly true. Wind burns his ears. He hears a version of 6re into smoke. Some days he can’t remember his city and it becomes hard as salt. Other days it dissolves like a sugar cube on his tongue. He thinks of the backgammon games played in honor of his absence and the orange-cinnamon rolls at the corner bakery. His sister’s robe waiting behind the bathroom door. The dream of his father’s overcoat and the funerals he’ll miss by years. He thinks he can change his name. He remembers the end of Histories, the command to choose a rugged land over rich plains, freedom over its opposite. I love the smell of the ocean. I love the smell of the sea. 152 THE WAY A MAN The way a man eats an apple to its core. The way he walks into a room. Leans against a doorframe when talking to a stranger. The way a man stands in a group of men considering a machine, a band, a boxer, a star. His silence. The way he checks the deadbolt before bed. How he takes comfort in this action – a man who knows what should be done, and does it. The way he unbuttons his shirt. His pants. The way he pushes his hair back in the shower. With both hands. A glass of water before bed. His body curled in sleep. The way he looks at the woman he loves. The way he looks at the man he loves. The way a man eats an apples to its core. His handshake. His skin in summer. The way a man looks at a horizon line. Hands on the wheel. His belief in the right road. The way a man scrubs his face with soap and hot water. The escape he takes in this. The way the inside of his arm is always tender. The way a man lies to avoid an argument. They way he looks for an argument. How he stands, light caught, in front of the open refrigerator. The way he winces in unexpected pain. The way he turns his in the mirror and checks the jawline he’s just shaved. A mouth of splendid joy . The way he unbuckles his seat belt when parallel parking. The way he nods his head when listening. He opens a newspaper and folds it back and over and under. The way this reminds him of his father. The way a man sings to himself in the car. The way he rises from a &ght. The way a man counts the Lock, counts what he sees, then counts what’s missing. 153 JUDD’S BOXES After a hundred mill aluminum boxes of exact dimensions fabricated at the Lippincott Company of Connecticut transported by six long haul trucks to West Texas and installed in the old artillery shed bright with new windows, one asks where’s the box that’s whole, uncut, constructed without gap or angle, without tabletop raise, picture window, or cut out. A perfect square: missing or unmade. A shape whole enough to hold a squid aquarium, an apothecary’s cabinets of fuchsia formulas, a one-tenth replica of the Forbidden City, a hundred children sleeping, their wisps of night talk, a dog’s fuzzy cornea, a carousel of wooden horses, breathless, a last train’s arriving trundle, a desert landscape where clouds and hills offer an eye confusion – ground or sky , landscape or atmosphere, above or below – and nothing is contained. 154 EACH MAN, A CALLING In each man, a calling. A parade of atoms blowing their stupid little kazoos. We try to love this country more than exile. We stand at the guardrail to hear the tin ring of a highway dividing us and desert. We walk the tracks looking for pennies kids have left on rails. Old alchemy – metal into new metal, power into action, speed into spark – singing. We carry them. Dumb bright. Willing. A shadow ripped from its body . Like pilgrims. Like a government. Like a calling, to be broke and gleam and found. The tracks without us, straight to horizon. We imagine the right way to follow. Out there, cactus is wind combed into Lower and water blooms underground all winter. Out there, we imagine our wilderness: our blood like salt and rough, the tongue of a deer, our two feet and a canteen, a true compass, a map of glass and iron My friend, out there, light falls down the canyon’s throat – a cloud swallowed moon, crushed ice, a lamb over the shoulder, the capsized boat of the heart. 155 ZOETROPE A BLACK RIVER is what I imagine will open in the dream I’m still having. Not awake but awake. The dream does its tiny light show , a zoetrope invisible to the waking. An ongoing happening in my absence. I imagine your mother reading to me. She says everything will be &ne. Everything will be right as snow. Your mother lovely as a tea kettle. 156 IN ONE DREAM a dog on the isthmus of a hill points her face into skunk and future. A &gure like a donkey kicked star on the forehead of a man. I am all inside and forgetting. I think of the emperors who built grand cities with citizen bones, how they left hieroglyphics un&nished to mark the world always, and still, becoming. 157 I THINK: LADLE of the moon, broken bit of the drill, castaway butter dish. I’m trying to &ll one worry with another. A quiz: Would you rather wake up in the body of a polar bear or wear the skin of a lizard? True or False: Gun&re can be heard across town. Yes or No: The cars echo like perfect rapids, one sound clasped to another. This zoetrope of desire, of dream. Zoetrope, literally life turning, isn’t a word in Greek but formed by the collision of need and invention and commerce. Turn. Fragment. Break apart. Repeat. 158 SLEEP ISN'T THE island or the ocean. It isn’t the moon or the dream of the moon. It’s the sky above a shipwreck, stretching blueness with no place to stand. A sky clear and bright: a July heat wave, a bad houseguest, an unsatis&ed lover. Sleep isn’t death. And it is, and it isn’t. Sometimes, pacing, I carry a glass of water &lled to the top. I carry it as if it were a Lashlight in the dark. 159 THREE 160 SAFE HARBOR These, a man might say , are the ships of my youth: Portuguese &shing boats off the coast and the weathered schooners with captains who go by capt’n. Look how many boats can &ll the eye! All those ribs and anchors! All those nails and sails! The boats of morning and the boats of goodbye. A man steps down into a ship, an unsteadiness managed, like hunger or fear, and knows the world is full of so much that is not his. Never will be. Once, I was afraid of heights. I would swallow my breath and climb. From one water tower I could see another. The silent wrap of black letters – I S T O W N – name above what’s happening below . Once, I lived in a beautiful city. My neighbor kept a rowboat in his yard. All night it rocked on its keel, with and against each gust of Paci&c air. A poor weathered thing without a sea. And the boat was lonely too. 161 CAT ASTR OPHE IS ONLY SWEET IN THE DISTANCE Nothing new, just ordinary hurry and, like one martyr said before they arrowed him like a crow, catastrophe is only sweet in the distance. I got my business, and I go about it. I try to forget I’m straight lonely under the moon, forget lemongrass and diesel, a sky purple as a choke and I walk until there’s no city but the one I’m leaving a little more each minute. I forget my skin. My tongue. I forget the name of exotic apples and the varnished skin of ripe persimmons. A man outside the mini-mart lashes his worn sneaker with found string and I forget the simple pain and tiny drama of invention. I turn forget into forge. I burn down the city of my worry to the ground. I go about my business like everything, everything is &ne. 162 EVER YTHING HAS A SHADOW Some are unafraid. They strip down. They climb a rusted ladder three stories to the top of the cooling tower then dive below the lip of the holding tank to Loat on their backs in rainwater and rust, black spots at the center of a black &eld, their bodies like the dazzling effect of staring at the sun. The afternoon shade slips across the vertebrae of a range. Some birds tether their darker brothers to ground and black lizards scurry from danger. The sky is the color of an unripe apricot. The sky is the color of a blue maple. What help is a compass? Light changes without even so much as a handshake. Everything has a shadow in this backlit landscape. Everything has a shadow from the corridors of sky where dust in the teeth grind the day like a clock. Without even so much as a handshake between gentlemen. We are not gentlemen. 163 ARCHIPELAGO Let these things be fates over me; ten hawks moving with the storm. With, and by that I mean they are allied, or aside, or circling at the edge of electrical &elds, caught, or wanting to be, as their barometers of Light disband into chaos, chase, or choice. The sky is an archipelago of birds. Some signs too loud to ignore: Lash, hum, wave, circle. The explanation for their motion I can’t &nd in any book I own. The explanation for their circling is circling. The O of knowing is the same of no. To witness something and have no word to describe it; beast, bird, tree, we are enclosed in your distance, no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. 164 ALL AWAKE On the street a woman threatens to hit the bitch and cocks her arm into a swing. Like a mechanical toy. The eye makes what the mind refuses. Nothing like a mechanical toy. The body is good, continues, and breaks with the serrated edge of the ring she’s turned into a blade. The cops arrive in a noisy blur. The young one asks questions. Asking for it, she says. Minding my own business, she says. He takes their reports, two versions of the same story. We can’t not listen. We can’t not promise to be good. I promise &rst: I will cut off my prideful nose, I’ll melt my tongue’s silver into candelabra. You promise to take us away from here – a train to the deepest countryside and in the morning we’ll hear crows click along the barn's metal roof and the chickens, all awake at once, gather to be fed. You promise repetition will sustain us. The black earth will open into green. 165 HOCKNEY’S POOLS Skin, everywhere. A man alights from crystal water, naked as a leaf. A shadow mistaken for substance. Sunlight! Glass doors! The palms like pilgrim’s hands. There’s no one here but us. Tucked like a handkerchief in the pocket of the hills, this privacy where geckos sun on stones then scare when shadows dash light from day . The water is cool. The body is waiting. Eros is an arrow , and we are its archers bending the bow then following the inevitable Light of its line. For what aches in us we’ve come here. We’re tired of music. Tired of the city where the traf&c hums like birds and the birds hum like traf&c. We hover at the water’s edge like a Lower, waiting to touch, or be touched. A man emerges to sleep all day in the sun. We too want to take off our clothes and like something heavy , like adolescence, like hurry, like a quiver of iron feathers, sink to the bottom of the pool, which is the bottom of the sky , which is the bottom, too, of the eye that sees everywhere itself. 166 THE CLOUDS Little weather in little chest, and you’re the kind of kid who sometimes presses two &ngers to his neck to feel that reckless fact of a pulse. The kind of kid who loses things: shoes, permission slips, friends, fathers, pocketknives. Some mornings, too hot for sleep, you wake early , get dressed, your name stitched into the neck, as if you could forget; the river a mile down the way , and when you submerge your legs to the knees minnows build a reef of your toes, one by one they come, silver-light and quickening, and make of you a object to be needed. Above, the clouds are suburbs of desire. Horses roam blue &elds, bodies multiplying, thunderous and galloping, the earth shakes beneath them. There’s no word for the violence at the margins of this story . The clouds, all swirl and sin, eat each other’s bones. You kick up like a horse, scattering the school; a rage, a wild gesture from somewhere in your half-made chest. There’s no word for it. There are too many words for it. And the &sh return, forgetful. 167 THE SKY WITHOUT MARK No thing as footprints above earth. It’s a tragedy. How luminous the sky would be with a hawk’s wing mark or a &reLy’s humid stain – like a hammer’s careless swing that drives the nail and marks the wood – the impression of permanence pressed across blueness, joining together, at least for a moment, animal and world. Or it’s a blessing. A &sh in a stream rises into light and its green scales gleam. An owl awls the almost dark, shade over shade. We talk, and nothing stays. An evening canoe down marsh, yellow cattail and tide, my paddle a dragonLy wing above the current, and my friend’s father, a know it all in the way of seeing each plant loll its earthly name, an undressing world at this hour, goes on and on. He drinks another beer, spills some on his shirt and laughs. The smallest live creatures scurry , slink and skate across the sky without contrail or mark. Nearly this place owned me. Nearly , and I wanted to be owned like a tree owns some skyline in its breakage. Like goat winds tread wild over switch-grass. Like a summer creek, gold-empty, sweat-ice and clear, comes down from cold hills, turns every stone smooth. 168 MUYBRIDGE’S CLOUDS, 1 & 2 1. His lens opens and sky burns away. No limit, no shade. Just the color of a crater left by footprints in mountain snow or the bright blindness of a just fired gun, the sky in early photographs appears white. In his darkroom, a library of negatives, he matches the right shape for the right sky. Dark labor &lls his frames: the rake of them, the wane and Lock, monger, belt, and coif, the rack and chalk and ward – all the forms like rock, like weight, like menace or consequence. One day imprints the next. Here, a past is no proof. He takes time apart, like a watchmaker, and rewinds the sweep back to what he saw, or thinks he saw, what belongs above cliffs and canyons to mean West or Landscape. I want my own archive of sky. A catalog of change. A new Alexandria of impossible formations: Luffy guillotines, children falling up wells, and Lesh unbroken. I want -- to strip the past back to bone. Back to milk tooth blankness, the white of terror to be one man in one body , white as the truth telling lie, and begin again. We turn from emptiness, that swallowed silence hung above like laundry , and &nd comfort in shadowed riot and beautiful uncertainty. Dangerous weather calls. Hard clouds in the horizon of the photograph approach. A storm to break the glass. 169 2. His lens opens and sky burns away . No limit, no shade. Just the color of a crater left by footprints in mountain snow or the bright blindness of a just &red gun, the sky in early photographs appears white. In his darkroom, a library of negatives, he matches the right shape for the right sky. Dark labor &lls his frames: the rake of them, the wane and Lock, monger, belt, and coif, the rack and chalk and ward – all the forms like rock, like weight, like menace or consequence. One day imprints the next. Here, a past is no proof. He takes time apart, like a watchmaker, and rewinds the sweep back to what he saw, or thinks he saw, what belongs above cliffs and canyons to mean West or Landscape. I want my own archive of sky. A catalog of change. A new Alexandria of impossible formations: Luffy guillotines, children falling up wells, and Lesh, unbroken. I want -- to strip the past back to bone. Back to milk tooth blankness: the white of terror to be one man in one body , white as the truth telling lie, and begin again. We turn from emptiness, that swallowed silence hung above like laundry , and &nd comfort in shadowed riot and beautiful uncertainty. Dangerous weather calls. Hard clouds in the horizon of the photograph approach. A storm to break the glass. 170 AUDUBON’S BIRDS To catch a bird on paper: a bullet. A knife. Wire threads Light from its absence, a frame of metal tricks: I dive, I call, I hunt, I live in the little book of your days. Drawn light on the belly of a wren. Sparrows sing in blue shadow. A pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers turn to each other in almost true escape. No bone, no brain, no heart or blood: only the ravishing departures of what was – like a city, a beautiful city, a beautiful little city where a couple goes to the ancient temple at sunset. They turn prayer wheels and listen to the whirl of asking, that erasure of silence, that nimble circling of one story with another, and then, since they’re not tired, they &nd a bar off the main street to buy rounds and drop coins in the jukebox. Must we tell our lies our and believe them, too? A wing on earth is as beautiful as in sky. A knife can open the dark. An afterlife in the menagerie of taxidermy , in the armatures of iron and clay, in the branches and shoals of suspension, in glue and feather and paint, the voice box swallowed by cotton, and the tiny skull anchored like a tiny ship. A voice so thin it radiates from asshole to beak to wing, calling us – a radio wave, a mirror, a city , a beautiful little city. 171 A L ITTLE JAR I keep a little jar of terrors in my chest. Mason of green coins for a nation wiped from earth. Glass bestiary of unpinned moths. An ocean of undertows. A cage of common sparrows like the ones sold outside temples, small feathered souls, songs for a song, bought and released for luck. Carrying pieces of the city, they come back to be sold. I once hated them, their foolish trust of habit over Light. They climbed into gold and glint and continued to sing. There’s a great sky above a great city . The sea smells like cedar and from above lines of laundry snap with reckless pleasure. Further down a city market snakes in covered alleys. Some days I’m there to buy ripe cherries. The man weighs and ties them in plastic with a simple knot. It’s one motion: gather, &ll, hitch. He never smiles. I pay by weight. I bring them home and you wash them in the sink. And we talk of how we’ll use them. 172 PASSAGE I try to board the train out of Rome but don’t know the word for ticket. I say the one do, uccello. Bird. With bravado to the woman in the booth who clicks her teeth and twirls a &nger in dyed red hair. She points to the sky and shrugs like a lost seagull. To the foot taps of the conductor, I chant its blue vowels. Uccello, uccello. This is a dream after all. Language Lips open its black case, its patchwork attaché, its impossible echo – cello, cello, cello. The double chest of each &gure, animal and made, sings from its emptiness. This I know . Reverberation lashed to sadness, or wonder, and the dream of a train that will take you anywhere. If you could &ll yourself with the right words: number, track, line. If you can pay . If you can say, I want to go down the coast where the sea isn’t the indigo of memory or the magenta of tourist postcards but three quarters white, the haze on its edges unlifted this early , the Lush of sun as the cars rush past into light, light, light. 173 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Poems from this manuscript have appeared in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Provincetown Arts, Southern Review, Bat City Review, Ploughshares, Carolina Quarterly, Ecotone, BOAAT , and ZYZZYVA. 174

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Creator Rivkin, Joshua (author)

Core Title The new old motion: contemporary poetry, nostalgia, and the American West

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 07/09/2020

Defense Date 03/26/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Literature,Literature and Creative Writing,memory studies,nostalgia,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Poetry,Western American Literature

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), St. John, David (committee chair), Deverell, William (committee member)

Creator Email jrivkin@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-267779

Unique identifier UC11281363

Identifier etd-RivkinJosh-4537.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-267779 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-RivkinJosh-4537.pdf

Dmrecord 267779

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Rivkin, Joshua

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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