for Grace
by Bernadette Mayer

for over ten years now
if you can imagine that
confluence of the east and west
I have been wearing pearl river boxer shorts
they are like persian blue irises
no, hyacinths no midnight blue rooms

for eight years, willy-nilly
I’ve been trying to get more
they are 100% cotton

if I were getting them for you
I would not only have them but see
a plethora of wonderful things that day

today we are making maple syrup again
I pray for them

our father who art in heaven
please get me some maple syrup 100% cotton
boxer shorts because of the war amen

***

Evan Kindley Writes:

Bernadette Mayer is usually associated with the second generation of the New York School of Poets, but her work has taken a while to arrive at the state you see it in here. Ironically, it’s only since leaving the city for rural New England that Mayer has begun to write in a recognizably “New York School” style. At first glance, the poem may seem like one more Frank O’Hara imitation: casual, personal, light and small. But where O’Hara’s poems tend to be little hymns to life, “Maple Syrup Sonnet” is all about lack and longing. Where O’Hara would exult in plenty, Mayer writes about feeling squeezed and deprived. One might even say that the third stanza imagines an archetypal O’Hara poem, one of the ones where he’s walking around New York City buying things and recording observations on “a plethora of wonderful things,” only to give them away as if they meant nothing.

In “Maple Syrup Sonnet,” by contrast, the narrator regrets her lack of access to a commodity she once prized. Somehow the idea that she can no longer get the boxer shorts she likes is both funny and poignant, and becomes especially so when she imagines giving them as a gift to a friend. This in turn is relayed into a brief prayer for the soldiers of the Iraq war (the poem was first published in 2005) which, in context, is just one more fact of life the speaker can’t change. In setting up this complex of longings and constraints, desires and realities, Mayer suggests that the act of gift exchange is both a tiny, daily ritual, pregnant with personal meaning, and an economic and social fact, enormous and out of our control.

by Frank Bidart

don’t worry          I know you’re dead
but tonight

turn your face again
toward me

when I hear your voice there is now
no direction in which to turn

I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and

but tonight
turn your face again

toward me

see      upon my shoulders is the yoke
that is not a yoke

don’t worry          I know you’re dead
but tonight

turn your face again

*****

from Desire by Frank Bidart. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1999.

On Tuesday, March 25 at 5:00 p.m., Bidart will be reading from his new collection of poems, Watching the Spring Festival, at Labyrinth Books in Princeton. This event is proudly sponsored by the Bain Swiggett Fund (Princeton University Department of English), Poetry@Princeton, and Labyrinth.

Jeff Dolven Writes:

“The Yoke” sounds like Frank Bidart. Or maybe first, it looks like him, even before you’ve auditioned the words: italics, gaps for pauses, skipped lines, and sharp enjambments all mark the page as his. The reading that that these devices score is both halting and urgent, and it should sound like someone trying hard to understand something difficult, and to make it understood. Bidart’s typographical resourcefulness always seems to be born of a fear that you won’t get what he is saying. (And because the subjects that compel him are often so discomfiting, maybe a fear that you won’t want to get it, that you’ll try not to.)

One way into the poem then is through this typography. It’s clear enough what “The Yoke” is about: wanting to see the face of a dead friend again. But it seems to have two voices, one in italics, one not, both of them revolving the same phrases. Perhaps they capture the longest line’s alternation of sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking: the repeated request, “turn your face again” (toward me, at least at first), can’t be shaken in either state. You can’t wake up from it, or sleep it off. Of perhaps they actually distinguish the words of two different speakers—each thinking that the other is dead? Both dead? And what does “dead” mean here—literally dead; dead to me?

And then there is that curious opening, “don’t worry.” As though the dead might be wearied by our impossible demands to see them again; or pained at how we must be suffering when we ask again and again. The poem’s economy in opening up our confusion in the face of loss, whatever kind of loss this is, wherever it resides, is remarkable.

Against Botticelli

by Robert Hass

1

In the life we lead together every paradise is lost.
Nothing could be easier: summer gathers new leaves
to casual darkness. So few things we need to know.
And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack.
Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty
of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast
in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark.
And the time for cutting furrows and the dance.
Mad seed. Death waits it out. It waits us out,
the sleek incandescent saints, earthly and prayerful.
In our modesty. In our shamefast and steady attention
to the ceremony, its preparation, the formal hovering
of pleasure which falls like the rain we pray not to get
and are glad for and drown in. Or spray of that sea,
irised: otters in the tide lash, in the kelp-drench,
mammal warmth and the inhuman element. Ah, that is the secret.
That she is an otter, that Botticelli saw her so.
That we are not otters and are not in the painting
by Botticelli. We are not even in the painting by Bosch
where the people are standing around looking at the frame
of the Botticelli painting and when Love arrives, they throw up.
Or the Goya painting of the sad ones, angular and shriven,
who watch the Bosch and feel very compassionate
but hurt each other often and inefficiently. We are not in any
painting.
If we do it at all, we will be like the old Russians.
We’ll walk down through scrub oak to the sea
and where the seals lie preening on the beach
we will look at each other steadily
and butcher them and skin them.

2

The myth they chose was the constant lovers.
The theme was richness over time.
It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it
because it requires a long performance
and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts.
It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman
he fucks in the ass underneath the stars
because it is summer and they are full of longing
and sick of birth. They burn coolly
like phosphorus, and the thing need be done
only once. Like the sacking of Troy
it survives in imagination,
in the longing brought perfectly to closing,
the woman’s white hands opening, opening,
and the man churning inside her, thrashing there.
And light travels as if all the stars they were under
exploded centuries ago and they are resting now, glowing.
The woman thinks what she is feeling is like the dark
and utterly complete. The man is past sadness,
though his eyes are wet. He is learning about gratitude,
how final it is, as if the grace in Botticelli’s Primavera ,
the one with sad eyes who represents pleasure,
had a canvas to herself, entirely to herself.

* * *

from Praise, by Robert Hass. New York: Ecco Press 1979.

On February 21, 2008, Robert Hass will deliver the Spencer Trask Lecture at Princeton, cosponsored by the Department of English and the Princeton Environmental Institute. Hass, poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997, will read from his latest collection, Time and Materials.

Anne Cheng writes: “This is the poem I return to when I am in need of resistance, resistance to gravity, to sheer fall, which is strange because the poem is about paradises lost. I think it is not because the poem gives me the redemption of human insight (though it possesses that ineffable wisdom so characteristic of Hass’s poetry) but because it takes me through a mind pressing toward that which has already evaporated, and being in the company of this mind reconciles me to the loneliness of being.

(By the way, it was not until the Monterey Aquarium, years after I puzzled over the image, that I saw Hass’s Botticelli!)”